That's not a hand, THIS is a hand

Back when I meet the family, I got my grandfather to compare hands with me.

For my height, I have unusually long arms (a complaint I have heard in training) and... clownish - scary! :( - is a word used to describe my hands and feet.

So I wanted to show-off my grandfather's hands, pictured left.

His wrist is waaaay thicker than mine (mine are 18.5 cm in circumference) and his pinky is the same thickness as my thumb (mine is 2.1 cm in diameter).

I remember a little story my Uncle Niall told me. He introduced Jimmy (grandfather) to mercy. The then teenage Niall was best in his class at it. He felt rather cocky going up against Jimmy, while explaining the rules to him. Without fanfair, Jimmy squeezed his hands until Niall said,"Mercy!"

I suppose that is what a life of farm work and labouring gifts one with though.

I have found a guru

Walking to college this morning I was thinking about the Zen koan dealing with non-attachment. I started thinking that being attached to something strongly [maybe solely] related to how much one worries about said thing. I mentioned it to Brian when I got into the office:

Mairtin: it occured to me this morning

zen preaches the idea of non-attachment

Brian: ...naturally

Mairtin: and I had not thought of it before but worrying about something is nearly the definition of attachment

..

it sounded more profound in my head

Brian: LOL

{...}

Brian: [nods sagely, and looks on peacefully]

Mairtin: the corrollory is you never hear of zen millionaire hermits or CEOs...

Brian: true, but a zen man cares not for these things, i am content with a sunset or the sound of the wind

The man blew my mind with his response. Worthy words indeed

I wonder did this ever happen to Indie...

Myself and Brian arrived in Zurich without ado. In short order, we were settled into our seats on the train, gazing out the window at sun-kissed locals frolicking in Zurich lake.

To pass the time, I opened my laptop to work on my hitherto incomplete presentation ["very little left to do," he promised].

I plug in my portable hard-drive. Said hard-drive whined like the little buzz-saw that couldn't, ultimately rattling to a halt. My Mac kindly supplied that the drive could not be mounted... even after turning it off and back on again.

In college, I heard many, many, many people emphasise the importance of back-ups of back-ups of back-ups. I am certain, I have pontificated about it too. For reasons unknown,* I neglected to create even the first back-up in the redundancy chain.

I took stock of what I had to work with, since I imagine myself a "cool customer" not given to panic.

Problem Statement

1. I had no presentation or presentation content on my person
   
2. It was Sunday, my presentation due 10am on Wednesday

Solution

1. Mark had a week-old draft
   
2. Unprocessed data were in Ireland and Barbara was a call away
3. The software I needed for processing the data was available at the conference
   

I gave Mark a text to check if he still had it. I called Barbara to apprise her of the situation and her impending role in it. Bless their cotton socks, they came through for me. Particularly Barbara since she had to follow my directions to find files scattered across 4 computers in various folders.

In my free time I was able to complete the presentation. The nicest nuts-and-bolts thing I learned was that Quicktime Pro. can convert a set of images to a movie. I finished the presentation with about 6 hours to spare.** I grabbed some shut-eye. Before going down to breakfast, I did a bit of meditation to ravel my frayed mind.



All in all, I was very pleased with my performance. I consider it my best work since the end of the Fas Science Challenge.

In the past few years, I did not give enough thought to presenting my work, it suffered for my dalliance, I think. But Brian said this one was the first time he understood what was going on in a crystallization slideshow. Boo Yeah!

In summary

1. It is good practice to make back-ups of back-ups of back-ups
2. It is good practice to check if a external hard-drive works after being dropped
3. It is good practice to solve problems instead of worrying about them
   

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*I have no idea whatsoever as to why I did not have copies scattered all over the place. I would idly think,"I better copy that onto my laptop since I will be using it to present" - "yeah, you really should do that." Without result. If the incident were a film, there would have been a dramatic flashback to Saturday night. To the moment the hard-drive fumbled from my grasp after I unplugged it from my computer with the latest slides. At the time I stared at it for a moment, prehaps to allow the audience of the Mairtin Show to appreciate its significance. - Admittedly my cognitive biase weighs heavily on the recollection, and it always sounds good to say,"Deep-down-inside, some part of me knew things were going to get hairy."

**My memory of anything beyond the slides is very fuzzy for closing moments of completing the presentation

beige alert - 1

A question long asked....

I'm off the Switzerland tomorrow. Maybe I will be able to answer it.

Seeing as I won't know where I stand with them the trip could be as eventful as the Moroccan Saga... or not.

Stay tuned, same chem time, same chem channel [maybe]...

- I think it is safe to say that there is no new content up there, so much for production values.

How do I sleep at night? ["on top of a pile of money with many beautiful ladies"]

There I go again... I wonder can I blame the recession.

Even better: I can claim that it is a challenge to find the quotes and whatnot.

[originally the few lines above were laden, overloaded even, with links: Soundbites and video clips.]

A Zen-master says "ummmm"

For the past few months- since Morocco, in February- I have been meditating for 30-40 minutes daily. Nothing huge-mongous. I know people that do a good deal more, better. Nonetheless, I find it enjoyable. Sustaining, even.

Sometimes my mind feels cluttered or fragmented. After standing still for a while, thinking about standing still- or puzzling over thinking about not thinking- things feel simpler, more harmonious.

On the back of this "meditation stuff", I've begun reading Zen Flesh, Zen Bones [on-line here]. This bad boy inspires a similar sense of inner-calm. My favourite koans* are: Great Wave, Kasan Sweat and Every-Minute Zen.

In the same vein/vane- my epiphany for the week is "becoming one with the universe" is not necessarily a high-faluting-put-me-up-on-that-there-pedestal-there-and-bask-baskgodamnit-in-my-ugh-Oneness, but simply reacting without hesitation to stimulus or situation, [which in hindsight happens to be the correct action/the path of least resistance]. My favourite example of this not being the case:

I am getting ready to order food at the deli-counter- I know exactly what I want. When the person on the other side asks, I respond with "ummmm."

:|

Figuring out this sublime way of thinking leads to the lessons garnered in my chosen koans, I think- I hazard.

Imagine:

Presentations**- no umming or ahing, just measured comfortable speech with just enough thought and just enough action;

Self defence, watch and act- no worrying, no second guessing;

And dancing salsa, just burning up the dancefloor.


I think that is what Zen is. Sometimes at least. Other times I think the guys that came up with these koans were poker-faced jokers. Whichever way it goes, I nod off on this note:

Lisa: Bart, I have a riddle for you. What's the sound of one hand clapping?
Bart: Piece of cake.
(Bart opens and closes his right fist quickly, making a sound.)
Lisa: No, Bart. It's a 3000-year-old riddle with no answer. It's supposed to clear your mind of conscious thought.
Bart: No answer? Lisa, listen up.
(Bart quickly opens and closes his fist again.)***

*There are other koans concerned with about nonattachment... but I don't care for them.

** I am off to Switzerland on Sunday for the 16th Mettler Toledo User's Conference, presenting on "Eliminating Micronisation Using Fine Particle Crystallization"

Suck it up

It has been a while since I droned out some back of the envelope calculations, I'm sure my devoted readers - I hesitate to call them fans - are in need of a fix.

It all started with a stroll...

Twas a sedate day today. I strolled in to college to do some experiments for the forthcoming conference. On my way, I chanced upon a chap hosing-down a tall petrol station sign. Initially, I was rather concerned because the water was sprinkling onto the foot path and I was not prepared to contend in a wet t-shirt contest.

As I worried over this, a woman approached the "splash zone." The chap was the considerate sort and pointed the hose stream onto the Station's courtyard. I started thinking about calculating the water pressure and velocity, given the angle, initial elevation and distance travelled by the jet.

I expected it to be somewhat tricky to do in my head. As luck would have it, I noticed the man was spraying almost to vertical. I eyeballed a stagnation height for the stream and used the Bernoulli equation to get the initial velocity as u_i = [2gh]^1/2).^a Since my calculation skill(z) are poor, I took some shortcuts and got 10.9 m/s (h = 6 m, g = 9.81 m/s² actually gives 10.85 m/s). Hand-in-hand with this was the pressure of the water coming out of the hose, ~0.6 bar (gauge).^b

Once I had a value for the pressure, I was rather disappointed in the pressure head, since I was expecting over a 1 bar (gauge). The Dublin City Council state they "aim to maintain a pressure of at least 12m [slightly less than 1.2 bar (gauge)] in the water-main network at anytime of the day. It will fluctuate as a result of varying demand." The water was coming from a connection to the water mains, it was a dodgy connection ("Cowboys Ted!") with water gushing out of its sides. If it was the same as the water arriving in the hose then every thing finishes up nicely. Otherwise DCC let me down in this instance. :'(
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My musings occupied me until I reached the UCD campus.

Therein, I found myself admiring the manifold greens of the landscape. Since hydrostatics had been on my mind, I was impressed that the trees can draw water up to their topmost branches without any drama- they feckers just stand there! I had some trouble remembering what physical actions they were exploiting to get this done. Osmosis and osmotic pressure stuck in my head. Boy-howdie! that was only half the story! [I understand that enthusiasm can be infectious... for my sake lets hope so]

Osmosis gets the ball rolling in the tree roots. It is the diffusion of molecules across a permeable membrane, specifically a solvent is transferred from a solvent rich side to a solvent poor side^e [or whatever satisfies the Gibbs equation (ΔG=ΔH-TΔS)^f for the system].

The water in the soil passes through the permeable roots cells and is then drawn up the xylem to the leaves. The water is pushed and pulled up the tree. The pressure induced by increased water content in the roots serves to push it upwards.

Since the xylem are thin tubes, the viscous forces and surface tension make the water streams difficult to break. Water evaporates from the leaves, which serves to draw the water upwards, and the capillary action prevents the streams from being broken [- more or less].^g

Well, I don't know about you guys, but I certainly learned something today - even when i get out more, I need to get out more.

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^a I neglected the effect air has on the water stream, I thought it reasonable since air has a density of about 1/1000 and would do little to reduce the momentum of the stream.<sup>c

b</sup> I can only comment on the velocity and pressure on the atmospheric side of the system because I did not know how much energy is lost due to friction in the pipe, joints, elbows and going through the orifice.<sup>d

c</sup> I confidently confirm this is an acceptable assumption

^d Yes. It sounds disgusting... while on the topic of disgusting sounding engineering terms, a piece used to join sections of piping is known as a flange. Not a topic that can be broached with a straight face by undergraduate and childish engineers
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^e Similar processes happen in your kidneys [both real and artificial ones], it is how salt water fish die in fresh water and it can be crystallization technique.

^f I was first exposed to that innocuous equation when I was preparing for the International Chemistry Olympiad in 2002 while in DCU. It has 4 variables and 1 multiplication. Simple.

Nevertheless, I had tremendous difficulty remembering it then.

Luckily I got a second run at it in College in first year Chemistry and Engineering thermodynamics. By the time it came at me in second year Thermodynamics, I had a handle on it. It is a useful principle. If ΔG <0>g The link I gave for osmosis, unfortunately bland-looking basic text, goes through the pitfalls of some asssumptions laid out above, out of lazi- ugh... I mean - as a test I have given a crude description of the mechanisms involved. I hope to encourage "you kids" to read up and show me how "cool" you are by knowing more than I do about this stuff.