SCALES #31: root systems
Hello!
I've been working on getting everything, including some new-and-improved instrumentation, set up for another round of levitated droplet experiments. The repaired pump is reinstalled, I have a plan for feedback control of the droplet height, and we have an enclosure design for yet another style of droplet trap.
One thing I've been struggling with is designing experiments intended to study droplets that are mixtures of organic molecules and inorganic salts. The more I've sat at my desk, looking at the literature and running rough model predictions, the more I've recognized all the ways, even if the instrumentation is working perfectly, the experiment could fail if poorly designed.
I've found there's a particular sinking feeling in science of getting equipment working perfectly, flipping the switch, and … seeing nothing happen. After some puzzled troubleshooting, I'll slowly realize everything is working—the problem is even though everything is working, nothing happens because that's what should happen,given how the experiment is set up: the solution is too dilute, or the laser isn't powerful enough, or the droplet is way too large, or one of any number of other parameters isn't right.
For these inorganic/organic mixtures, their interaction strength could be too weak, the components could crystallize if the air is too dry ("effloresce" in the lingo), they could separate into different phases (à la oil and water), the noise in our system could drown out the signal, we could not be measuring the experimental conditions (droplet size, water content) well enough to explain what's going on. And though it's helpful to try to predict these things, at a certain point it's better to stop grinding out the predictions at the desk and instead start grinding it out empirically in lab—choosing between these two strategies is something I always find hard to balance.
I also wonder how my experience with this extends out of lab, to how I understand the world. After seeing the process happen over and over in lab, I think I've developed a certain comfort with the idea that a system, a plan, a situation can be set up perfectly except for one detail and the result isn't an outcome that isn't quite right, but rather one that is totally derailed.
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Reading list
"A sociocultural history of the line". I'm always inspired by how, in Keiles' writing, smart insights are coupled to a goofy joy in the possibilities of language: "(I’ll call those normal lines “normal lines.”)". It reminds me of the opportunities for fun and play I sought out in writing in high school, and to some extent in college—something I want to get back to exploring more.
I had never heard about influential radio storyteller Joe Frank before reading this recent Slate profile, put together right before his death (h/t "Hot Pod"). The mime-on-the-radio story!
Novelty reproduction cities in China have gotten more interesting now that they're a little more lived in: "In Thames Town, where British pubs and wine stores had once far outnumbered Chinese restaurants, couples and families now perused pu’er tea shops, slurped down noodles, and lined up for bubble tea, or Baskin-Robbins." (On-point comparison to replica architecture in the US, too—here in Boston, something outrageous like the Gardner is now part of the fabric of the city.)
"After I read this sentence many times in a row, smiling every time, eventually its structure detached from its words: "At X and on Y, I Z as if not-Z". That formula got stuck in my head like a little musical phrase. I started to fill it in with other words."
Roberta Smith reviews neuroanatomy drawings by Santiago Ramón y Cajal. A scientific illustration/art criticism crossover that actually works! "These small works evoke enough things you already know — landscape, weather systems, trees, marine life — that they bring you back around to reality, implying the multiple purposes if not universality of certain natural structures. Root systems, functioning in different ways, are found in trees, turnips and the pyramidal neuron, which Cajal called “the noble and enigmatic cell of thought.”"
An attempted only-one-album-a-week-in-2017 stunt quickly unravels and reaches some more interesting places: "My arrogance was not in believing I was immune to the way our relationship to music has been irrevocably altered by technology and the occult market forces that engender it, but that I somehow possessed the ability to transcend it by making myself immune."
Newsletter news: "Not Doomed Yet" is dead. Long live "Rob's Words"!
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Good week for podcasts
A recent Poem Talk on excerpts from M. NourbeSe Philip's "Zong!" was particularly good: unpacking an avant-garde reckoning with selfhood, language, race, historical memory.
Proof of the "need to talk about more" Death, Sex & Money tagline's truth is my stress response when listening to the podcast's current series on class and money in the US.
Babes of Science is back! With a story produced in collaboration with the Chemical Heritage Foundation, about Katherine Jones, Viscountess Ranelagh, her involvement in the intellectual circles of 17th-century Europe, and her close collaborative scientific relationship with her brother, Robert Boyle.
I always enjoy the radio/podcast interviews of Longform, and the recent interview of (Oberlin alum!) Zoe Chace was great. (If anyone knows of a podcast with interviews that similarly combine detailed discussions of craft with frank discussions of career trajectories, except for science, let me know!)
Michigan Public Radio's That's What They Say segments are perfect little 4-minute insights into particular language questions. I was delighted to learn how "edict"/"indict"/"verdict" tell a story about a Renaissance obsession with Latinized spelling and how the spoken word reacted to those changes.
Listened to my first In Our Time, on the 1565 Siege of Malta, and I think Sarah Larson captured its strange, Melvyn Bragg-driven charm perfectly in a recent New Yorker piece.
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Unit of the day
The foot-candle is "the amount of illumination the inside surface of a one-foot-radius sphere would be receiving if there were a uniform point source of one candela in the exact center of the sphere".
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Melting Charles textures.
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—Adam