Oh, to be a Japanese nerd in the early '80s. . .

Back in the early eighties, Gainax-- the Japanese animation studio that would eventually produce Neon Genesis Evangelion, among many other famous anime-- produced opening animations for Japan's Daicon (lit. Big Con) science fiction convention. Having discovered these animations on YouTube more or less by accident about ten minutes ago, I must now share them with you because they are awesome.

Here's the first animated short, from Daicon III. The animation is a bit rough, but it shows the starship Enterprise getting blown up by a schoolgirl, so I have to include it.



Gainax's animation for Daicon IV is a significant improvement over Daicon III. The animation is smoother and. . . well, just watch (it really starts to get good at the 2:00 mark).



Note: the next part of the Sailor Moon script will be taking place at a science fiction convention, so consider this a warning.

He says the sun came out last night. He says it sang to him.

In a world where disco never died. . .
One man. . . will put the hose on Disco Inferno.
James Franco stars in . . . Dyskopia.

Yeah. . . I've been waiting for any excuse to use that pun. Anyway, here's Disco Close Encounters. Wait 'till the very end!



Why people ever believed that you can dance to John Williams, I will never know.

UPDATE: And who's the evil ruler of Dyskopia? John Travolta, of course! "When you were learning how to spell your name, I was being trained. . . TO CONQUER GALAXIES!"

I Used to Do Something That Was Almost Like A Real Job. . .

Image of Jeremy taken shortly after his thesis defence.

So, it finally happened. My paper, "Quantum tunneling and reflection of a molecule with a single bound state," has been published in Physical Review A. I promised in a previous post that I would write a summary of paper. So, with reading week quickly evaporating away, about eighty physics assignments yet to be marked, and a Japanese midterm on Monday, I thought I should get on that.

The approach I decided to take was a basic parsing/elaboration of the abstract, since that's the only part of the paper available to read on the internet without having to pay a fee. The abstract, by definition, pretty much lays out the content of the paper anyway, so with a bit of explanation you should be able to get the jist of what we, i.e. myself, Danielle Kerbrat, and my supervising prof Dr. Mark Shegelski, discovered and published. I'm going to assume that anyone who reads this has about high-school level science education, which means I'll have a lot of explaining to do.

Abstract:

In this article, we present the results of studies on the quantum mechanical tunneling and reflection of a diatomic, homonuclear molecule with a single bound state incident upon a potential barrier.

Hoo-boy. Where to start?

The "diatmoic, homonuclear molecule" is basically a pair of identical particles that interact with and, loosely speaking, "attach" to one another by means of an attractive force. Usually, the particles in question are atoms. However, our formulation is general enough to be applied to any pair of "attached" particles, such as Cooper pairs and excitons. These examples appear later in the abstract, so I'll explain what they mean later on.

When the atoms are attached to each other, we say that the molecule is in "bound state." When they aren't, we say they're in an "unbound state." To be in a "bound state," the atoms in the molecule must have lower total energy than two free atoms. To understand what that means, imagine a you're in a region that's entirely flat except for a small, bowl-shaped valley. If you're in the valley, you have to expend energy in order to get out of the valley. If you don't have enough energy to climb out of the valley, you're stuck-- "bound" to the valley. Another way of thinking about this is that, if you're standing in the valley, you have less energy than if you're standing in the flat plain. When two atoms are "attached" to each other in a molecule, what's really happening is that the force they exert on one-another creates a sort of potential energy "valley," whereas two free atoms are in a potential energy state more akin to standing in the flat region outside of the valley.

So what does it mean for a molecule to have a "single bound state?" In order to understand the behaviour of small objects, like atoms, molecules, electrons, etc. we had to discover a whole new set of physicals laws, which we call quantum mechanics. The problem with quantum mechanics is, well, it's weird. One of the implications of quantum mechanics is that, if two atoms are bound in a molecule, then they can only occupy certain energy levels-- we say that the energy levels are "quantized," hence "quantum mechanics." Think back to the valley for a minute. You could stand at the very bottom of the valley, or half-way up the valley, or two-thirds of the way up, or one-quarter, or any other place you like. With any given height up the valley, there is a corresponding potential energy level. In other words, the laws of physics do not restrict you to one or another given energy level in the valley. However, if the valley were like a molecule, you could only occupy certain specific energy levels. You could, say, be at the very bottom, or half way up, or two-thirds of the way up, but you could not be at any other altitude. When you're standing at one of the permitted altitudes, you could be said to be in one of the given "bound states" of the valley. Likewise, the atoms in the molecule can only exist in certain bound states. What these states are depends on the kind of molecules we're considering. For our paper, we consider a molecule whose parameters are such that there is only one bound state. If we go back to the example of the valley, that would mean that we can only stand at the very bottom of the valley-- no other altitude is permitted. One more thing that I may as well mention now is that the title of the paper mentions that we're considering a "weakly bound" molecule. This is akin to a very shallow valley. The implications of weak binding will be made more clear later on, so I'll leave it for now.

The other important thing mentioned in the above excerpt is the idea of "quantum tunneling." Purge your mind of the valley, for now I'm going to ask you to imagine you're riding a bike toward a hill. I'm also going to ask you to imagine, for the sake of argument, that once you start climbing the hill you stop pedalling you bike. If you were going fast enough before you started climbing, then you'll have enough kinetic energy to coast over the top of the hill and reach the other side. If not, you'll come to a stop before the crest of the hill and begin rolling back down. This makes sense, so of course quantum mechanics has to find some way screw it up. The way it does this is through the phenomenon of quantum tunneling (since my paper was published in an American journal, I will continue to spell it as "tunneling," and not "tunnelling").

What I'm about to tell you is strange, but since I'll have to discuss it eventually, and since it does have bearing on the explanation of quantum tunneling, I figure I may as well get it out of the way now. Do you remember in science class when you were taught that light behaves as a wave? Do you also remember hearing somewhere or reading somewhere that light is composed of particles called photons? Did you ever step back and wonder why scientists just can't seem to make up their bloody minds on the issue? Is light a wave or a series of particles? It must be one or the other, it can't be both. Well, according to quantum mechanics, light is both a wave and a series of particles. . . and so is everything else! Electrons, protons, atoms, molecules, your computer, you yourself. . . all waves. "But waves of what?," you might ask. Probability. Basically, the wave part of a given object, be it a photon, electron, atom, or molecule, determines the probability of observing that object at a given place (it also gives the probability of the object having a given momentum, but that's a whole other story). I'm oversimplifying a bit, but at any position where there's a crest in the wave, the probability of observing a particle at that position is high; wherever there's a trough, the probability is low.

This complicates the study of physics at the microscopic level quite a bit. Since the days of Newton, physics has always used particles to understand the laws of motion, with the implicit assumption that we can always take a measurement or make an observation and determine where the particle is at any given time. Additionally, if we know exactly where a particle is, what its speed and direction of motion is, and all of the forces acting on it are, it was assumed that the laws of physics could be used to predict its position and velocity at any time, past, present, or future. It was assumed, in other words, that the laws of physics act in a deterministic way. Quantum mechanics, however, says that, if we think in terms of particles, the laws of physics must probabilistic. But this means that we cannot use physical laws to make any solid predictions about the behaviour of a given object, rendering those physical laws next to useless. However, it turns out that if we think instead in terms the probability waves mentioned earlier, we have a lot more luck. Unlike particles, probability waves do behave deterministically. Understanding just how these waves behave allows physicists to make some very interesting, very counter-intuitive predictions.

In the macroscopic world that we all live in, this doesn't really amount to much. Even though there is a probability wave associated with each of us, the probability of any of us being exactly where we are is 100%. At the microscopic level, however, this becomes much more pronounced. One example of how much more pronounced it is quantum tunneling. Recall the proverbial hill I discussed earlier. The microscopic equivalent to the hill is something called a "potential barrier." Imagine some microscopic particle approaching a potential barrier with some given kinetic energy. If it behaved the same way as the bike climbing the hill, then the particle would definitely pass if it had high enough kinetic energy, and would definitely not pass if it didn't. But, you'll recall, nothing is "definite" as far as particles are concerned, and in order to make predictions we have to think in terms of the wave, or "wave function" in physicist parlance, associated with the particle. It turns out that, no matter what the energy of the incoming particle, a chunk of the wave will always manage to travel past the barrier. What this means is that, no matter what the energy of the incoming particle, there is some probability that the particle will be observed on the other side of the barrier. This is like the bicycle appearing on the other side of the hill even though it was only going fast enough to make it half way up-- the only way this could happen is if the bicycle travelled through a tunnel in the hill. Hence, "quantum tunneling." Make no mistake, though, the particle didn't "dig" its way through the potential barrier. Rather, the laws of quantum mechanics allowed the particle to travel through the barrier as though it were not there at all.

If we're only considering a single particle incident upon a given barrier, then it's relatively easy to calculate the wave function and thus find the probability of tunneling. However, when we start to consider more complex objects like, say, a diatomic homonuclear molecule, things get very ugly. Instead of one particle, we now have to consider two, which means we have to consider the object as having size and being spread out in space. Moreover, these two particle are being affected not only by the potential barrier but by the force attracting them to each other. This attractive force creates a "potential well"-- the microscopic equivalent to the metaphorical valley-- which must be taken into account as well. Recall also that the molecule can exist in any one of a number of bound or unbound states. As a result the molecule can undergo changes of state upon interacting with the potential barrier. These factors complicate things so much that the tunneling of molecules wasn't seriously investigated until 1994. Quantum tunneling of single particles, on the other hand, has been investigated since the 1920's.

From the next part of the abstract:

In the first study, we investigate the tunneling of a molecule using a time-dependent formulation. The molecular wave function is modeled as a Gaussian wave packet, and its propagation is calculated numerically using Crank-Nicholson integration.

(Our paper is actually a combination of two different studies. We had initially intended to publish two papers, but due to various circumstances we decided to publish both studies in a single paper.)

In quantum mechanics, you can look at things in either a "time-independent" way or a "time-dependent" way. For the purposes of describing the results in the paper, the difference between the two formulations is as outlined as follows.

In studies of quantum tunneling, we're usually interested in calculating the probability that a given object will be observed ahead of the barrier-- "probability of tunneling"-- or behind the barrier-- "probability of reflection". The time-independent formulation is very useful for calculating these probabilities, but it's not useful for describing what happens to the molecule as it's tunneling through the barrier. In order to study this, the so-called "tunneling dynamics," you need to use a "time-dependent" formulation. The problem is that this is quite a bit harder to do than using a time-independent formulation. For that reason, every study (that we're aware of) in molecular tunneling that came before this paper used a time-independent formulation. In other words, to my and my co-authors' knowledge, this paper is the first to use a time-dependent formulation to investigate the tunneling of molecules, making me and my co-authors the world's foremost experts in time-dependent molecular tunneling!

What's that, Alexandre Bilodeau? You're the first Canadian to win gold at the Winter Olympics on home soil? Big whoop.

Anyway. With a time-dependent formulation, we basically created a computer simulation of the molecule's wave function and calculated how the wave function behaves as it interacts with a potential barrier. That, in a nutshell, is what all that talk about "Gaussian wave packets" and "Crank-Nicholson integration" is referring to. It was a very difficult calculation. Like all previous work done at UNBC on molecular tunneling, we had to use the university's supercomputer in order to run the simulations. So what do we have to show for it?

We found that the molecule could take one of multiple paths once it begins to interact with the barrier. For one, it could reflect. Basically, the molecule hits the barrier, temporarily breaks apart (i.e. transitions to an unbound state), recombines, and bounces back from the barrier. This isn't really a surprising result. But a couple of the other paths it could take are surprising.

From the abstract:

It is found that a molecule may transition between the bound state and an unbound state numerous times during the process of reflection from or transmission past the barrier.

This means that, if the molecule follows a path such that it does tunnel through the barrier, it will break apart and recombine some number of times before it passes the barrier. The reason we think this happens is summarized, in highly simplified fashion, as follows. We chose to use a very thin potential barrier called a delta barrier. In time-independent studies, this barrier provided results that captured many of the features of tunneling when more realistic barriers were used. We think that when the molecule hits the delta barrier, there's a chance that one of the molecules passes the barrier, but the other is reflected by it, and hence the molecule breaks up. However, there is still an attractive force drawing the molecules toward each other, so the atom that passed the barrier may be drawn back toward the atom that remained behind the barrier and eventually recombine with it.

This leads into another surprising result, one that is not considered in time-independent studies:

It is also found that, in addition to reflecting and transmitting, the molecule may also temporarily straddle the potential barrier in an unbound state.

In other words, the molecule, upon contacting the barrier, stays near the barrier for a relatively long time. This is what happens when the scenario described in the last paragraph occurs repeatedly, only without the molecule recombining and entering into a bound state. Straddling, as we called it, does not occur for a molecule in the bound state. In order for a molecule to break up, it needs energy. This energy comes from the initial kinetic energy of the molecule. Straddling occurs when the energy needed to break up the molecule is nearly the same as the kinetic energy of the molecule, so that when the molecule breaks up, the atoms don't have very much kinetic energy left. Again, this is a bit of an oversimplification, but it captures the main physical features of what's going on.

In the second study, we consider the case of a molecule incident in the bound state upon a step potential with energy less than the step. We show that in the limit where the binding energy e0 approaches zero and the step potential V0 goes to infinity, the molecule cannot remain in a bound state if the center of mass gets closer to the step than an arbitrarily large distance x0 which increases as the magnitude of e0 decreases, as V0 increases, or both. We also show that, for e0→0- and V0→∞, if the molecule is incident in the bound state, it is reflected in the bound state with probability equal to unity, when the center of mass reaches the reflection distance x0. We verify that the unbound states exhibit the expected physical behavior. We discuss some surprising results.

The second study, unlike the first, was entirely analytical, i.e. pen and paper mathematics, with no computers needed. What we considered was the case of a molecule that was extremely weakly bound incident upon a "hard wall" potential barrier, that is a potential barrier that was very long and very high. The binding energy is the term e0 referred to above; the term V0 refers to the energy "height" of the potential barrier. We considered this case, initially, as a simple test of our calculations. It turned out that this "simple" case was actually very hard, and yielded very counter intuitive results, as I'll explain below.

Intuitively, what we expected to happen for the weakly bound molecule to come close to the barrier and break up, with the atoms reflected away from the wall. What we found instead is that there is a distance, x0, from the wall within which the molecule cannot remain in the bound state. The distance x0 grows larger the more weakly bound the molecule is. Furthermore, we found that the probability of the molecule being reflected in the bound state approaches 100% in the case of extremely weak binding and extremely large potential barrier height. Taken together, this means that a weakly bound molecule, coming towards the hard wall potential barrier from a very long ways away, comes to a within a distance x0 from the barrier, and is then reflected away from the wall in the bound state. To get a bit of an idea of how weird this is, imagine throwing a brittle champagne at a brick wall. You'd expect it to hit the wall and shatter, with shards of glass boucing back. If the glass behaved like a weakly bound molecule, what would happen instead is that the glass comes within 50 feet of the wall and bounces back, intact. A champagne glass is more than a little bit different from a diatomic, homonuclear molecule, I know, but you get the idea.

Connections between our results and investigations done in cold atoms, excitons, Cooper pairs, and Rydberg atoms are discussed.

Apart from the sheer difficulty of the calculations, another problem with the study of molecular tunneling is in connecting it to real world applications. Direct experimental applications don't yet exist. However, connections can be drawn to many real world systems. Rydberg atoms, for instance, can be modelled pair of weakly bound particles, i.e. a very high energy electon and an atomic nucleus + lower energy electons. Rydberg atoms can also combine to form very weakly bound molecules. Collisions of Rydberg atoms with the surfaces of certain materials has been investigated. This scenario is akin to a weakly bound molecule incident upon a hard wall.

The tunneling of other composite particle objects, like excitons and Cooper pairs, can also be studied and are a subject of research interest. Cooper pairs are basically bound pairs of electrons which exist inside superconductors, and are indeed what make supercondutivity possible. Excitons are weird things that form inside of semiconductors and other materials. Basically, when an electron in such a material becomes excited, i.e. gains energy (by means of a photon collision, for example), it leaves an "electron hole," or absence, in whatever state it used to be it. This "hole," weirdly enough, behaves like another particle, and what's more, it can become bound the excited electron, forming an electon-hole "molecule" known as an exciton.

So, there you have it. I've summarized my crowning acheivement as a physicist, and with that out of the way, I'll get back to work on what really matters-- Sailor Moon: The Movie!

If THIS doesn't convince Hollywood that I'm the man to write Sailor Moon. . .

Since August, I've been working on submitting a manuscript to the scientific journal Physical Review A. The work presented therein is an extension of my master's thesis work. This morning I received notification that the manuscript has been accepted for publication. There are still a few steps to go through, and I don't know yet when it'll be published. I'll keep you guys updated. Maybe in a future post, I can give the title, author list, abstract and a layman's summary of the results. Until then, it's time to celebrate.

My Calling Has at Last Found Me.

What did I think life was?

What was that I, in my naiveté, once called my dreams?

Physics? Teaching in Japan? Mastery of Tae Kwon Do? Writing the Sailor Moon live action movie starring Abigail Breslin in the lead role?

What a fool I was. Fortunately, a good, wise soul has shown me the way.

From this day fourth, I shall not rest or waver until I, Jeremy K., have become. . . THE BURGER KING TM!

So. . . yeah. I went to Burger King for lunch, and as I'm entering the restaurant, I hear slovenly cries from behind about someone, who I later realized was me, being "pretty keen!"

Entering the line to order, I am approached by the fellow I heard earlier. Clearly drunk out of his gord, he tells me "Aw man, it's the Burger King!"

I realized ignoring him might be a bad idea, so I turned briefly to him and said "Yup."

"Naw, naw, really, I'm-- I'm serious, your the Burger King."

"Cool."

"Naw, man, I like saw you from behind, and-- I was like. . . 'man, it's the Burger King!'"

"Uh huh."

"No, man, you should. . . you should. . . really, like, consider it, man. You like. . "

The man slapped his hands together back to palm.

"Like, fifty grand, man. Fifty grand or that job. I'm serious! You should--"

"Yes, ma'am, I'm ready to order!"

The man then allegedly slapped another customer (I'm not really sure about this, as I tried my damnedest to avoid eye contact with him), which prompted the manager to ask him to leave, upon threat of RCMP intervention.

This was the latest, and greatest, in a long line of misadventures at Prince George's shitty, shitty. . . shitty Burger King. But, it's our city's only source of Whoppers, so what are you gonna do? Besides go to Fatburger, that is?

Gordon Ramsay Can Cook a Mean Lobster Spaghetti. . .

. . . but can he cook LIFE ITSELF?

Via Pharyngula, famous chef Julia Child cooks up a primordial soup.



Mmm mmm good.

A Bonus:

Funk Railroad to the Stars

Hi everyone.

Between finishing up a couple of scientific publications, figuring out just how make money and get to Japan, and writing a very long post on my American adventures, I've not had a lot of time to post onto my blog. I might bring Wednesday Wire back this week, but I'm not sure yet.

Until I finish up my post on the USA, here are a few videos showcasing the latest of my weekly obsessions: 1970's outer space TV show themes.

Following the success of Star Wars, a lot of space-themed TV shows began to air. The most well-known of these is the original Battlestar Galactica, which was a perfectly fine piece of camp until Ronald Moore decided to ruin it by making it all good and relevant (or so goes the consensus view-- I never got into it myself). But there were others-- many others-- and unlike BSG, they wisely eschewed the sweeping, timeless, and dull orchestral approach to theme music taken by John Williams and instead fully embraced the cosmic power of Disco.

For example, take the theme to Space: 1999, the other of the more well-known Star Wars TV knock-offs which premiered in the UK in 1975:


The TV adaptation of Logan's Run seemed to want it both ways. It takes a standard (though 70's style) orchestral theme and infuses it with disco elements (e.g. the synth siren at the beginning):



Next is Space Academy, a show about a group of "young people [gathered] from the farthest reaches of all the known world" and sent into outer space:

Judging from the opening credits, in the future "all the known world" has been mostly destroyed by nuclear war, with only nothern Minnesota surviving (I assume that the black and asian kids are, like "Peepo", cute robots). One commentor at Youtube decried the fact that Johnathan Harris is starring in this trash. Damn right! He should only work in classy shows, like Lost in Space!

Thus far, I've shown you some fairly disco-licious fare. However, all of it pales next to QUARK, a short lived 70's space satire. This is pure, concentrated 70's right here. The mere sight of this may cause you to sponaneously grow a Barry Gibb beard. Your pants will shrink after you hear but a few bars of its theme. And the sight of not one, but two identical Farrah Fawcett clones will induce a John Travolta dance spasm so severe you may not be able to walk for a whole month.

You've been warned:



I'll see you in September.

"But wait!" you say. "How can you omit Disco Star Wars?"

The answer is, "easily." I already posted Disco Star Wars once on this blog. But, if you really want a discofied sci-fi theme, check out the re-scored end credits of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The disco adventure is just beginning!

The Must See Movie of the Summer!

Movies have not been good to me this summer. The last movie I saw in a theatre was Terminator: Salvation, which I liked but everyone else hated. The last movie I saw before that was Star Trek, which I hated but everyone else loved. So while I've been questioning my own taste in movies, as well as the tastes of those around me, I've been avoiding trips to the cinema. (My thesis also had more than a little to do with that, but that's another story).

I thought I was through with summer movies. . . until I saw the trailer posted below. I knew that there was a movie about to be released by the producers of Independence Day based on the 2012 disater myth, but I had no interest in seeing it, mainly because, well, it's a disaster movie from the producers of Independence Day. But having seen this trailer, I'm now convinced that it may just worth seeing after all. . .



P.S. Seriously, though, I am looking forward to District 9. I just hope they don't fuck up the story and ideas with excessive, pointless action.

Wednesday Wire

The very first scene of the very first episode of The Wire. Because I don't just watch PGSM.

Lab. . . again.

I've got a troofer!

No, not a 9/11 troofer. This one believes that the moon landing was a hoax. He came in, announced that the moon landing was the greatest hoax in history, and showed me footage of the moon landing that contain brief flashes of light, apparently evidence of wires attached to the astronauts in order to make it look like they're in weak gravity.

He also showed me the footage of the "waving American flag," and asked me how that's possible. Rather then explain that the flag only waved when the astronauts twisted the flag pole while putting it into place, and that the flag's ruffled appearance in other photos was deliberate, I just shrugged and said "I dunno."

"How you not know?" He's Chinese. "You have physics degree!"

I briefly mentioned the whole "ruffled appearance" thing. Then he showed me more video "evidence," this time of astronauts who look like they're suspended from wires:

Oh well. At least he gave me something to blog about.

For those interested in reality.

I'm Starting to Notice a Theme. . .

Two nuclear-powered submarines from Britain and France, both carrying nuclear missiles, collided deep under the Atlantic Ocean earlier this month, authorities are now acknowledging.

Miyuu Afterwards, or, YOU USED TO BE SAILOR MOON, GODDAMMIT!!!

Click here. You'll find a video. Don't worry, it won't take too much of your time.

Did you notice the tiny woman on the left about ten seconds in? You know, the one showing off the latest in Japanese corporate homogenization, performing a modeling task one or two small steps above that of your typical Sears mannequin?

Look at it again, if you missed it.

You'd never guess that woman used to be Sailor Moon. You know, one of the most popular Japanese heros of all time.

And now she's pitching suits.

Okay, okay, you're thinking "It's not that bad." (Or "Christ, here he goes with Miyuu Fucking Sawai again. Get a girlfriend, you fucking loser.") It's certainly not the lowest to which Miyuu Sawai has ever stooped. I already showed you the PGSM toy commercials, but even that's not so bad, she was the star of her own TV show at the time.

But the next thing I'm going to show you. . . there's just no excuse.

Just in case it doesn't show, here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar7ZRoeYJKY

This commercial, first aired in 2007, did indeed star the one and only Homer Simpson. . . in Miyuu Sawai's mouth. The saddest thing is that as weird as this commercial is, it doesn't even have the benefit of being that unique, Japanese sort of weird. It's a bland, commercialist, acultural, boring kind of weird.

But it's not even the corporate aspect that bugs me. I mean, there are plenty of successful actors who do commercials. Like this one:

Denny Crane.

Sure, the Commodore Vic-20 has "a real computer keyboard," but that's not what made it "The Wonder Computer of the 1980s" TM.

No, it was William Shatner. By mere whim, Shatner took some hunk of ugly plastic with a five kilobyte memory and declared that for the remainder of an entire decade, no other computer shall surpass it Wonder-ness. He made the Vic-20.

And that's the difference. The Vic-20 commercial was really an advertisement not of a computer, but of the awesomeness that is Shatner. It's really his way of saying "I made it."

On the other hand, Sawai's commercials seem like a retreat back to anonymity. In both cases she's secondary to the product. The suit commercial's focus is on the spokeswoman, who in turn is directing the viewer's attention not to Sawai but to her clothes. The donut commercial features an extreme close-up of Sawai's visage, and even then, even then, she's upstaged by a freakin' cartoon. IN HER OWN MOUTH!

The weird thing is, before a couple of days ago, I thought I had made peace with donut commercial. The year 2008 was relatively good for Sawai. She landed a small roll in the film Shaolin Girl, a Japanese pseudo-sequel to Shaolin Soccer. She also co-hosted an educational series for NHK called "French TV" (at least I think that's how it translates), which as its name suggests is focused on teaching French to Japanese speakers. I would have loved to have found some clips from the show, but so far I've not had any luck.

On top of this, she did a few TV guest roles. My favourite out of all of these-- and the one for which it was easiest to get clips-- was her appearance as a bicycle delivery girl on the series Tomika Hero Rescue Force, a show that manages to make PGSM look subtle and restrained by comparison.

The episode was uploaded in three parts; I've put up the second part below. The best scene starts at about seven minutes in.

For whatever reason, that scene always reminds me this classic movie moment:

While some people-- those lacking vision-- would call that bike leap scene moronic, you can't deny that it's a huge step up from smuggling an amorphous pirated copy of The Simpson's Movie inside one's mouth. And you can't deny that that clothing ad was a step down. Unless you're talking in terms of good taste, in which case, why are you reading this blog?

I don't know quite how to close this entry in any logical way, so I'll just conclude with another reference to Yor: The Hunter from the Future.

Next Week?

Hi A.J.

I'm going to be pretty busy next week-- I have to attend a committee meeting and give my final presentation for my Octave course. But Friday night or Saturday should be good.

Would it be cool if Naomi came as well?


Oh. . . and for you other people reading this (and A.J. as well):

YOR!

(It's over twenty minutes long, but its worth it!)

Tycho Crater Imaged

Remember Selene/Kayuga, that probe Japan sent into lunar orbit? Well, using photographs and altitude measurements taken by the probe, scientists at the Japanese Space Agency have constructed a 3D map of the lunar crater Tycho.

Click here for a video. It's a big file, but it's worth it.

(Thanks Bad Astronomy)

Guess Where I'm Writing From!

Give up?

My Lab!

Yay!

Details.

I'm currently in room 8-229 of UNBC, and I'm teaching the second experiment out of eight in the Physics 101 lab curriculum. I began writing at approximately 12:30, and won't be out of here until just before 2:30.

What am I teaching? Standing waves in a tube. Basically, we just put a speaker at the end of a long tube, connect it to a function generator to control the frequency and amplitude, and run a microphone down the tube in order to determine (a) the resonance frequencies at which standing waves form, and (b) the nodes and anti-nodes of said waves. Measuring the speed of sound fits in there as well. None of this really matters. The important thing is that you can make cool videogame and old-timey radio sounds with the speaker/function generator apparatus.

Two students just came up to me to get their data tables signed. It's a new anti-plagiarism measure. I told them that they have to re-write their data in pen before I would sign it. They were not happy, and I don't blame them.

It's cool that Christine set up a computer right at the desk. If she didn't, this blog entry would never be. I also checked my UNBC email before writing this entry, which reminded me why I so so so so so so so hate to use UNBC email.

12:40.

If someone raised their hand right now I wouldn't even know it. That's a cool feeling.

More students came to get their forms signed. Here comes one now! Alright!

These labs really are exhausting. I only really "work" for half an hour during the actual period, in which I give the pre-lab lecture. This is actually the worst part of it. I've gotten a bit better at these lectures, in that I don't feel quite as horrible doing it as I used to, yet I still get the distinct impression that my students consider me a horrible horrible tool. And their right.

They're right.

Sorry.

A couple of students have left. Fine by me, as long as they got all their data. I figure if they really want to crap out and leave early, that's fine. If it turns out to be a mistake for them to leave, they'll pay for it in their marks. If not, why be a douche and make them stay?

12:45.

I missed a seminar being given today by Dr. Shegelski, my grad supervisor. He was talking about research in molecular tunneling in which I was involved. "Involved" meaning that I was standing in the same general place that awesome research by Jeff and Hal was being done and getting paid for it all the same.

I missed it because I had to come here and do stupid prep for the stupid lab. That's the other exhausting thing about these labs. I usually come into the lab room about an hour and a half in advance to make sure that I'm really truly prepped for the experiment at hand. And even then, my preparation is still often grossly incomplete.

They're really piling on to me now. I just signed four data tables, and two are on the way.

12:55. I'm glad I had deluxe breakfast at A&W. There are many reasons for this, one involving the drive in teller girl at McDonalds. Ask my mom about that sometime.

Two students seem to be absolutely captivated by a poster of spectra for various elements. Leni just left. She thought I didn't know her, just because I acted like I didn't know her. I get nervous in these labs! Sue me.

I'm just realizing how abstract my blog labels are becoming. For this post, I've already attached labels like "Just Another Fist," "No One Can Hear You Scream,"-- two more data tables signed-- and "There Can Be Only One." Maybe I'll make up another tag of two. I'll have to give it some thought though. There's abstract and then there's just dumb.

1:03. I have no labs next week. For that, I'll attach the "Circular Celebrations" label.

I came to the lab rooms earlier in the week. The rooms that I teach in are on the second floor of the Teaching Lab building, with big windows that face toward the east. The mountains are blocked by haze today, as they often are, but when I came earlier in the week, on one of those days when it turned to biting cold, the sky was so clear that I could see the Rockys fifty or a hundred kilometers away. There weren't any students when I came in that time. If there were, I would have begun the lecture by just showing them the view, letting them soak it in for a minute or two, because they would likely never see that kind of view again.

Created new label-- "The View From Where I Am."

I've got the stupid live action Sailor Moon theme stuck in my head. I thought it might be a good idea for one of the hosts of a late night show going without writers, like Conan O'Brien or Colbert, to digitally insert themselves into episodes of the series, reciting actual dialogue from the show in really pathetic Japanese. Just imagine Conan as Mamoru-- I don't care if you don't know what I'm talking about!-- in a really big ugly Beatles wig hair cut that seems to be all the rage in Japan. Hilarious. And the best part: it's all legit! (it's Writers Guild of AMERICA. Suck it, union lawyers!)

If I started playing an episode of Sailor Moon right now, would anyone in the lab watch? Probably not.

Added label "Miyuu Sawai."



And with that, I bid you adieu.

UPDATE: Added label "Wow".

My Story

Naomi said:

Blog more you swine!

So I will.

I haven't posted in a while, partly because Christmas, partly because I'm still a little embarrassed about LOLWorf, and partly because I've spent the last month and a half roughly writing a short story. So, now that I'm getting back into the groove of school, I thought I'd put my time to its most productive possible use: showing you an excerpt of said short story.

Naomi, my mom, and Josh Sandu have all seen early drafts of the story. However, the excerpt below is something totally new, so hopefully they'll enjoy it as much as you will!

. . . :|

Just read it. And ignore the fact that one of the characters is named Josh. It means nothing.


Excerpt from "Achilles":

Josh. She met him at Pandora's Box a month before. It was a June the 16th party(the owner was of Irish descent, and considered himself a literature aficionado) but she didn't know this. She just knew that it was a party. A few people dressed in old black suits and dresses, and a couple of people went up onto the bar's small front stage, carrying thick tattered tomes with ugly covers from which they recited lines like "loth to irk in Horne's hall hat holding the seeker stood." But like Megan, most were there just to be there, for fun, and would have been there no matter whose day it was.

But Josh?

"Vain patience to heap and hoard," he said. "Time would surely scatter all. A hoard heaped by the roadside plundered passed-- uh, passing on. Sorry. Uh, their eyes knew years-- knew the years wandering and patient knew the dishonours of the flesh."

He would glance up from his book every moment or so, trying to catch brief sight of the tall limping girl at the bar.

"Who has not? Stephen said. Whaddaya mean? Deasy asked. He came forward a pace and stood by the table. His underjaw fell sideways open uncertainty-- uh, uncertainly. Fuck. Uh. . ."

Few noticed him fumble, and those who did didn't care to react.

"Is the old isdom-- uh, wisdom. . . Is this old wisdom? He want to hear from me." And with dramatic pause, he came to the part he had been waiting to speak.

"History," Josh said, "is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake."

He finished his set quickly and unceremoniously, stepping down and going toward the bar and its limping girl, Megan.

"The rusty boot," he said.

Megan turned to Josh, who was looking at her foot.

"What?" she said.

"I said, the rusty boot. It's okay. Don't worry about it."

"Were you just up there?"

"Yeah. I'm Josh."

"Megan."

She shook his hand. Her friends had left her sitting at the bar, and though wary, she welcomed his company.

"I never caught what everyone was reading," Megan said.

"This," Josh said, holding up his book. "Ulysses. Best book ever written. It all takes place on the sixteenth of June, so every year people get together to celebrate it."

"Do you go to university?"

"Yeah."

"English major?"

"No. Business."

They continued to talk. No-one bothered to go offstage after Josh's recital, and even those in costume had partly disrobed, abandoning the act. Megan had eaten earlier that evening, but she was getting hungry again, so the two ordered meals and took a seat at a nearby table.

"So you're a runner?" Josh said.

"Yeah. Well, track and field in general."

"My brother was into sports. Competing, I mean. I hope you don't mind me asking , but was it a sports injury that gave you than limp?"

"Oh, this? No. Well, not really. It was a javelin, actually. I was at a practice, this was in spring, and a javelin flew right into my heel. It severed the tendon, and I had to get surgery to fix it."

"So it was a sports injury."

"No. If someone from the other team threw it, it would be a sports injury. This was just bad luck."

"Look, Megan, you're at a Bloomsday party. This is the wrong place to be arguing semantics," he said with a chuckle.

Their food arrived at the table. Megan ordered fried, and Josh ordered vegetarian lasagna. They were finished quickly, and just as quickly ordered drinks to wash the taste out of their mouths. They talked about insignificant things, long enough for Megan's friends to return and wish her goodnight, and for Josh's friends to return and join the two. During her conversation about being a runner, she was reminded of something she thought would be a good story. She had been running since before she could remember. Her mother had told her that when she, Megan, was little, she had no fear of going anywhere on those little legs, which her mother called Megan's "Arnold Schwartzenegger Legs." That was the story. She wanted to tell it to Josh, but didn't. She didn't tell it anyone, partly because she didn't remember until the wrong moments, but also because she never felt it appropriate to do so. As the night wore on and he talked with his friends, she felt a dull sort of regret over not telling him, and waited for another chance.

"You know it was based of a Greek legend, right?" Josh said. "The Odyssey, right? But where's the odyssey here? Where's the adventure? Like, what I mean is, you know, every adventure, every adventure was exotic, every adventure, like, it was a new land with something wondrous, something you've never seen. Like magic, gods, whirlpools, you know, monsters. Right? But here's this book with a guy buying a fucking. . . bar of soap, right?"

Josh laughed at his own words. His friend joined him.

"So where's the adventure? he said, and then with a deep, sudden seriousness in his voice, "Style. Style! That's the key. You can't have adventure in Dublin, I mean that's why he left!You can;t do it. You have to internalize the adventure. That's what it's all about. Stream of consciousness, the adventure within. The sexual adventure, man, everything. And he always does it in a different way, a new island. That's what the adventure really was, you know, that's all you could have."

"Tell that to Hemingway," one of his friends said, to which everyone chuckled.

Josh had an angular face which he always wore with a subtle half-smirk. As the night went on, Megan found his smirk more and more appealing, and when the bar fianlly closed she still wanted to be with him. So, after all of Josh's friends said their goodbyes, she was still beside him, limping along as he walked out the door.

"Well, Megan," Josh said once they were both outside, "it was a pleasure."

"You're not saying goodbye, are you? Leaving me all alone on cold Pandora avenue?"

He looked toward a streetsign.

"So that's why they named it Pandora's Box. I never put that together."

She laughed at Josh, and they both went along the sidewalk, south from Pandora Avenue toward the ocean but still far enough from it not to see it. He noticed Megan's limp again.

"Javelin, huh?" he asked.

"Huh? Oh, yeah." he said.

"Should you be walking?"

"Hasn't hurt me so far."

"Well, your limp begs to differ."

"It was a lot worse before," she said. "Don't worry, I'm a big girl."

Josh heart beat a little faster after hearing that. He pretended not to know why.

"You know, I can take you home, if you really are worried about being alone. You should see my ride. It's the lasted, imported, German bus pass."

Megan chuckled at that. Josh was pleased.

"But seriously," he said. "Just say the word."

"No. I'm not going home. Not yet."

"Why not?"

She realized she missed another opportunity to tell the Arnold Schwartzenegger Legs story again. It didn't worry her as much this time. She would find her opportunity. She start with that and maybe begin a whole list of stories with a running theme, like how she ran circles around the bored kids forced to attend her mother funeral when she was six years old, or how is was more of the same when her father remarried two years later, and maybe then she'd tell him about the ruckus she raised in the halls of Royal Jubilee while her sister, Helen, was being born.

"I don't live on my own," she said. "My dad lives with me, and he's been kind of unbearable recently."

Maybe its not a genetic thing, she thought, about the running. After all, Helen's mother had no relation to Megan whatsoever, and she ran all the way to Ontario, with Helen right behind her.

"He's going, I mean, we're both going through a rough time right now. My stepmon left him a couple of months ago with my half-sister. Took her to, uh, London. Yeah, London, Ontario. I always wanna say Paris, but it's London."

Josh slowly came to a halt. Megan didn't really notice this as she was talking.

"He's sick too. Diabetic. He's been diabetic since before I was born, but it's gotten worse. he's just. . . well, anyway."

She finally notice that she wasn;t limping anymore.

"End of the line," Josh said, pointing to the apratment building nearby.

"You live here?" Megan said. "That's convinient."

"Well, I guess I'll just. . ." he paused long enough so as not to give himself away. "Do you want to come in?"

It had been since the night before, when she walked out on her father engulfed in one of his moods, that she had been out of her house. The idea of rest sent a wave of warm fatique through her, as if in preparation. She knew what was coming, of course, she wasn't stupid. But she didn't mind it. She figured it was about time.

"Yes. I'd like that," she said.

With that, she followed him into the building.

And you, Peter, she thought with the corn thawing under her ankle, wouldn't you like to know what Josh did to me?

-----------

So there you are! It still needs work, and in its final form this part of the story will certainly be very different, but its a start. I think the biggest change that needs to be made is when Josh is talking Ulysses to his friends. I'll either scrap that or heavily modify it. But there will be little changes all over as well.

It'll probably be a long time before its ready to be published. If you're interested, I'll let everyone know how its progressing.

LOLworf

I had kind of a stupid idea today that I thought I'd share. It's called LOLworf:



I thought it would be hilarious. It is hilarious, in theory at least. Undistputably. Just imagine Michael Dorn actually saying "I CAN HAS BLUDWEIN!!11!!1," in earnest, exactly as written.

Unfortunately, they weren't as easy to make as I though they would be. For one, there weren't many images of Worf on the web that were easily LOLifiable. Second, the only way I had to modify the few good pictures I did find was by using Microsoft Paint, which leaves an amateurish white box around the added text-- an ugly blemish on what otherwise is pure comedy gold.

Anyway, here are my other LOLworfs.

The Greatest Political Ad Your Sorry Asses Will EVAR See!

. . . which isn't saying much, I'll admit. Still, this ad from Republican Mike Huckabee beats Hillary Clinton's pathetic Sopranos parody by a long shot.

Chuck Norris' endorsements of Democratic presidential candidates cure cancer. Too bad he's. . . oh, never mind!

Meet The New Boss. . . Same as the Old Boss. . .

. . . which in this case is a good thing. Two teams of scientists have discovered a way to convert skin cells into stem cells. Scientists have been trying to conduct research on stem cells for years, in spite of opposition from the U.S. Government, which has refused to provide federal funding due to political pandering to the religious right objections over the use of human embryos, which are killed during extraction. This new method of stem cell production should hopefully overcome the ethical barriers traditionally associated with stem cell research. From msn.ca:

Laboratory teams on two continents report success in a pair of landmark papers released Tuesday. It's a neck-and-neck finish to a race that made headlines five months ago, when scientists announced that the feat had been accomplished in mice.

The "direct reprogramming" technique avoids the swarm of ethical, political and practical obstacles that have stymied attempts to produce human stem cells by cloning embryos.

Scientists familiar with the work said scientific questions remain and that it's still important to pursue the cloning strategy, but that the new work is a major coup.

"This work represents a tremendous scientific milestone - the biological equivalent of the Wright Brothers' first airplane," said Dr. Robert Lanza, chief science officer of Advanced Cell Technology, which has been trying to extract stem cells from cloned human embryos.

"It's a bit like learning how to turn lead into gold," said Lanza, while cautioning that the work is far from providing medical payoffs.

"It's a huge deal," agreed Rudolf Jaenisch, a prominent stem cell scientist at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass. "You have the proof of principle that you can do it."

The White House lauded the papers, saying such research is what President Bush was advocating when he twice vetoed legislation to pave the way for taxpayer-funded embryo research.

There is a catch with the new technique. At this point, it requires disrupting the DNA of the skin cells, which creates the potential for developing cancer. So it would be unacceptable for the most touted use of embryonic cells: creating transplant tissue that in theory could be used to treat diseases like diabetes, Parkinson's, and spinal cord injury.

But the DNA disruption is just a byproduct of the technique, and experts said they believe it can be avoided.

The new work is being published online by two journals, Cell and Science. The Cell paper is from a team led by Dr. Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University; the Science paper is from a team led by Junying Yu, working in the lab of in stem-cell pioneer James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Both reported creating cells that behaved like stem cells in a series of lab tests.

Thomson, 48, made headlines in 1998 when he announced that his team had isolated human embryonic stem cells.

Yamanaka gained scientific notice in 2006 by reporting that direct reprogramming in mice had produced cells resembling embryonic stem cells, although with significant differences. In June, his group and two others announced they'd created mouse cells that were virtually indistinguishable from stem cells.

For the new work, the two men chose different cell types from a tissue supplier. Yamanaka reprogrammed skin cells from the face of an unidentified 36-year-old woman, and Thomson's team worked with foreskin cells from a newborn. Thomson, who was working his way from embryonic to fetal to adult cells, said he's still analyzing his results with adult cells.

Both labs did basically the same thing. Each used viruses to ferry four genes into the skin cells. These particular genes were known to turn other genes on and off, but just how they produced cells that mimic embryonic stem cells is a mystery.

"People didn't know it would be this easy," Thomson said. "Thousands of labs in the United States can do this, basically tomorrow."

The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which holds three patents for Thomson's work, is applying for patents involving his new research, a spokeswoman said. Two of the four genes he used were different from Yamanaka's recipe.

Scientists prize embryonic stem cells because they can turn into virtually any kind of cell in the body. The cloning approach - which has worked so far only in mice and monkeys - should be able to produce stem cells that genetically match the person who donates body cells for cloning.

That means tissue made from the cells should be transplantable into that person without fear of rejection. Scientists emphasize that any such payoff would be well in the future, and that the more immediate medical benefits would come from basic research in the lab.

In fact, many scientists say the cloning technique has proven too expensive and cumbersome in its current form to produce stem cells routinely for transplants.

The new work shows that the direct reprogramming technique can also produce versatile cells that are genetically matched to a person. But it avoids several problems that have bedevilled the cloning approach.

For one thing, it doesn't require a supply of unfertilized human eggs, which are hard to obtain for research and subjects the women donating them to a surgical procedure. Using eggs also raises the ethical questions of whether women should be paid for them.

In cloning, those eggs are used to make embryos from which stem cells are harvested. But that destroys the embryos, which has led to political opposition from U.S. President George W. Bush, the Roman Catholic church and others.

Those were "show-stopping ethical problems," said Laurie Zoloth, director of Northwestern University's Center for Bioethics, Science and Society.

The new work, she said, "redefines the ethical terrain."

Richard Doerflinger, deputy director of pro-life activities for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, called the new work "a very significant breakthrough in finding morally unproblematic alternatives to cloning. ... I think this is something that would be readily acceptable to Catholics."

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said the new method does not cross what Bush considers an "ethical line." And Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, a staunch opponent of publicly funded embryonic stem cell research, said it should nullify the debate.

Another advantage of direct reprogramming is that it would qualify for federal research funding, unlike projects that seek to extract stem cells from human embryos, noted Doug Melton, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.

Still, scientific questions remain about the cells produced by direct reprogramming, called "iPS" cells. One is how the cells compare to embryonic stem cells in their behaviour and potential. Yamanaka said his work detected differences in gene activity.

If they're different, iPS cells might prove better for some scientific uses and cloned stem cells preferable for other uses. Scientists want to study the roots of genetic disease and screen potential drug treatments in their laboratories, for example.

Scottish researcher Ian Wilmut, famous for his role in cloning Dolly the sheep a decade ago, told London's Daily Telegraph that he is giving up the cloning approach to produce stem cells and plans to pursue direct reprogramming instead.

Other scientists said it's too early for the field to follow Wilmut's lead. Cloning embryos to produce stem cells remains too valuable as a research tool, Jaenisch said.

Dr. George Daley of the Harvard institute, who said his own lab has also achieved direct reprogramming of human cells, said it's not clear how long it will take to get around the cancer risk problem. Nor is it clear just how direct reprogramming works, or whether that approach mimics what happens in cloning, he noted.

So the cloning approach still has much to offer, he said.

Daley, who's president of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, said his lab is pursuing both strategies.

"We'll see, ultimately, which one works and which one is more practical."

When I learned that one of the two teams that made the discovery was Japanese, being the lovely little cynic that I am, I started to wonder whether this was part of Japan's "scientific whaling."

People Listen to Me. . .

Last Thursday (November 15th, 2007) I responded to a post by ScienceBlogger Jonah Lehrer about "science criticism":

*Why don't we have science critics? We have music critics and literary critics and dance critics and architecture critics...Wouldn't it be great to also have knowledgeable people point out the flaws and achievements of the latest scientific papers? And yes, I did write an article on this idea a few years ago in Seed, although it seems to have been lost by Google.

To which I responded rather hastily:

We do. It's called peer review.

Imagine my horror when, the next day, I find that Mr. Lehrer has devoted a whole bloody post to my comment:

In response to my call for science critics, a position analogous to a music critic or art critic except that they review the latest science papers, a commenter wrote the following:

"Why don't we have science critics?"
We do. It's called peer review.

My response is that peer review is necessary but not sufficient. (I've discussed the limitations of the peer review process before.) As every scientist knows, lots of crap gets published in journals. (In fact, it's possible that most published research findings are false. ) The job of a science critic, like all critics, would consist of two separate parts: 1) criticize what deserves criticism and 2) praise what deserves praise. Here's what I wrote about science critics way back in the spring of 2004 in Seed:

I believe we need to treat science like culture. We should interrogate and question our science no less than we judge our art. What we need are figures outside of the scientific process to remind us that science is a process, that the data might mean this, or that. What we need are critics of science.
Why does the phrase "critics of science" sound so strange? Why can't our newspapers have, right next to the review of the philharmonic, a thousand opinionated words about molecular biology? Just as there are souls who know Bach better than Bach himself and yet choose to sit in the audience, to listen to the orchestra from the plush velvet chair, so we need figures who know science inside and out and yet choose to site on the sidelines. Modern science is a specialized body of knowledge; an archipelago of disciplines, with each island dominated by its own codes and coasts. Our critics would have to master that island biogeography. In other words, our science critics would have to really know what they were talking about.

Karl Popper, an eminent defender of science, argued for just such a figure: "It is imperative that we give up the idea of ultimate sources of knowledge, and admit that all knowledge is human; that it is mixed with our errors, our prejudices, our dreams, and our hopes; that all we can do is to grope for truth even though it is beyond our reach. There is no authority beyond the reach of criticism."

I know, kids. . . I'm scared too.