How to almost get beaten up at McDonalds

I really need to learn to keep my mouth shut – although I have to say, I don’t regret this latest near-death experience.

I was second in line at a McDonalds the other day when the gent in front of me became very short with the lady behind the counter. English was clearly not her first language and he applied the well understood phenomenon that if a language barrier is keeping someone from understanding you, yelling the phrase louder will help the situation. After completely loosing his cool and using a few profanities, one of the other clerks explained in Spanish what the fellow wanted and the very embarrassed lady went off to make it. He then turned to me and the following conversation ensued:

Impatient, Impolite, Bastard: Can you believe this f**king s**t!
Nicholas: How’s your Spanish?
IIB: What?
N: How well do you speak Spanish?
IIB: I don’t speak Spanish.
N: (smirking) Well – then it looks like she’s got you beaten.
IIB: (Growing upset) This is America – we speak English here!
N: Where does it say that?
IIB: Where does it say what!?
N: Where does it say that in America, we speak English?
IIB: In the f**king constitution!
N: Really? Which article?
IIB: I don’t f**king know!
N: Right – see, I’ll make you a deal. If you can point to the place in the constitution, or for that matter any other federal document which declares English to be the national language of America…I’ll buy your lunch.
IIB: Go f**k yourself.
N: I’ll do my best – your hamburger is here – Vaya con Dios.

It’s just a matter of time until one of these lands me in the emergency room, isn’t it?

Manipulation and organic chemistry

Look at the figure above - both are pictures of bromo-chloro-flouro methane (a carbon atom connected to a hydrogen atom, a bromine atom, a chlorine atom and a flourine atom). However, these two atoms are not the same - the order in which the atoms are connected to the carbon are different. We call two molecules like this enantiomers and in order to name the molecules, we have to mentally rotate the atom such that the carbon is in the front and the hydrogen is in the back. We then rank the other three atoms in order of atomic weight and draw a circular arrow from the heaviest to the lightest. If this arrow goes clockwise, it is named (R) bromo-chloro-fluoromethane and if it goes counterclockwise, it is named (S) bromo-chloro-fluoromethane.

There is a point to this - I promise...

Last Sunday at my MCAT prep course, our instructor (an MD named Marisa) was reviewing enantiomer nomenclature with us and had this to say:

Marisa: Before taking the MCAT, you all need to make sure that you feel comfortable mentally rotating the figures in order to name the enantiomers correctly. Statistically speaking, men are better at manipulating three dimensional images in their heads.

All the men in the class smile and celebrate

Marisa: Of course, statistically speaking, women are better at manipulating men into manipulating three dimensional images in their heads.

I love my MCAT teacher :-)

'Tis the season...

What I did this past weekend:




This was an outdoor demonstration - performances begin this weekend and continue through December - I love Nutcracker season!

Assumptions

My favorite professor during undergraduate was Kathleen Howell. She was a brilliant orbital mechanicist and a great teacher – but what I particularly liked about her was the way she began each course. She spent the first day of every semester explaining the history of orbital mechanics and the lesson we should all take from it.

The ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus was among the first to formulate a theory of the geometry of planetary motion in the 3rd century B.C.E. We know very little about Hipparchus as most of his papers were destroyed, but we do know that he proposed a geocentric universe which was endorsed by Aristotle. Aristotle believed that all planets and the sun circled the earth in perfect circles. This made sense – after all, from our vantage point, the sun, the moon and all the stars revolve around us and surely, they must travel in circles. However, observations did not match the theory – something wasn’t quite right.

In C.E. 150, the Greek scientist Ptolemy published The Almagest in which he outlined his theory of planetary motion which has come to be known as the Ptolemaic system. His work was based on that of both Hipparchus and Aristotle, but introduced a new idea to account for deviations from observations – the epicycle. Ptolemy expanded Aristotle’s theory by explaining that planets traveled on small circles (epicycles) which were superimposed on their larger orbital circles. In addition, these bodies orbited a common point called an ‘equant’ which could lay outside the sphere of the earth. The result would be imperfect planetary motion. Despite years of efforts to calculate the number and characteristics of these epicycles, the method never adequately explained observations.

Over the course of the next thirteen hundred years, the idea of a geocentric universe slowly fell out of favor as more evidence to support a heliocentric universe emerged. In the early sixteenth century, a Prussian astronomer named Nicolaus Copernicus formulated and wrote his theory of a heliocentric universe, eventually allowing it to be published in 1543, the year that he died. Copernicus was the first to develop significant support for a theory which placed the sun at the center of the universe with planets again laying on epicycles – circles upon circles. Galileo’s endorsement of the Copernican model added even more weight to the idea that the earth was not in fact the center of the universe! The battle lines were drawn – the Ptolemaic system which placed the earth at the center of circular orbits vs. the Copernican system with the sun at the center of…you guess it – circular orbits. Neither one explained observations no matter how many epicycles you used, yet the fight raged on.

It was around this time that a Danish nobleman named Tycho Brahe decided to answer the question once and for all – was the earth the center of circular planetary motion, or was the sun? He spent his life making painstakingly accurate measurements of celestial positions, managing only to show that no known combination of circles could account for observations. When Brahe died in 1601, his German assistant, Johannes Kepler inherited the data and continued the necessary observations. It took eight years of pouring over the data for Kepler to finally put it all together.

Over seventeen hundred years had been spent arguing two systems, neither of which explained observable data. One group challenged the idea of the sun being the center of the universe while the other challenged the earth, but nobody thought to challenge the fundamental assumption behind both theories – that orbits were circular. In 1609, Kepler published Astronomia Nova in which his first two laws of planetary motion were detailed. The sun was the center of the solar system, he argued, but planets did not travel in circles - they traveled in ellipses. In 1631, using his three newly formulated laws or orbital motion (his third law was published in 1619), Kepler became the first scientist to accurately predict a transit of Venus across the sun (an event which happens only four times every 243 years).

Although he was not able to explain why planets travel in ellipses (that would take Isaac Newton’s laws of motion formulated some 78 years later), Kepler was able to break a 1700 year gap in progress by doing the one thing nobody else thought to do – consider the possibility that the initial assumption is flawed.

What strikes me about this story is not how long a battle raged over a flawed assumption but how little we have learned from history. We live in a world in which countless groups of people spend their lives debating, damning and killing each other over ancient ideals they are certain to be true, given one crucial assumption. How many of them have ever bothered to check it?

Midterm elections, shmidte...no that's too long

Tuesday is election day for all representatives and a third of the senate. Having heard absolutely nothing about the candidates running for representative of my district, I sat down tonight to find out a bit about them so I can perform my civic duty. First off, it took me about half an hour to figure out which district I live in - I finally found a handy little tool on the Texas Legislature website where you can type in your address and it tells you your district. Turns out I live in district 7 where the Republican incumbent John Culberson is running against Democrat Jim Henley and Libertarian Drew Parks.

When I choose a candidate, there are a few issues on which my vote hinges - abortion and same-sex marriage to name a couple. I will not vote for a candidate who is anti-choice or anti-same-sex marriages. So I figured the first thing I would do was find each candidate's stance on these issues and go from there. I was determined to get their stances from their election websites to ensure I was reading what they really felt. I figured this would take all of five minutes...boy was I wrong!

Neither Culberson nor Henley listed their stances on these issues in easy to find locations on their websites. In fact, it took almost an hour of digging to find where they stand on these. It suddenly hit me that by listing your stance on a divisive issue where it's easy to find, you can lose an awful lot of votes. However, wouldn't that be more honest?

Turns out Culberson is anti-choice and anti-same-sex marriage, Henley is pro-choice but I couldn't find his stance on same-sex marriage. Parks is a nut-case - supports eliminating federally funded welfare, all support of international organizations (U.N., NATO), federal funding for abortions and a slew of other things he deems to be "excess expenditure." However, he put it all out there in an easy to find spot on his website! I suppose having no chance of winning an election makes it easier to be brutally honest. Despite the fact that I disagree with most of his stances, I like that kind of politics.

So at the end of the day, I'll be voting Democrat but wishing the Republicans and Democrats both took a page from the Libertarian campaign book.

Politics shmolitics

The Republican party must have some of the most brilliant strategists to ever walk the earth. They have managed to adjust the political scene in this country such that if you aren’t Christian, you are wrong, if you aren’t supportive of the war-du-jour, you are un-American, and if you oppose any action labeled ‘anti-terror’, then you are obviously an Al-Qaeda operative. And here is the part that absolutely astounds me – people bought it! America bought it hook, line and sinker because it is so much easier to blindly follow than to think for yourself. So now, in order to have a fighting chance, a politician, even an intelligent, well intentioned one, has to form themselves to this model of a ‘true American’ who can’t say anything less than praising about the church or our military endeavors lest they be burned at the political stake. We can’t actually be that easy to manipulate, can we?

I am perhaps the most liberal (not progressive – I’m liberal and proud of it) person I know. I believe our taxes should be doubled and education and retirement made a federally funded absolute; I am for free and unfettered access to abortions; I believe all religious endorsements should be removed from federally funded programs including schools, money and congress ; I believe the second amendment should be enforced as it was written: the military needs guns – you don’t; I believe the fight to legalize gay marriage is equivalent to the civil rights movement of the sixties and fifty years from now, we will look back on those who opposed it with shame; I believe the assumption that your brand of government must be the best one out there and should be imposed on those who don’t have it represents the height of hypocrisy; I believe all drugs should be legalized and regulated like alcohol – the government should not be in the business of keeping adults from doing stupid things to themselves unless you want to outlaw fatty foods and cigarettes as well; I believe the idea that a 3600 year old book should form the basis for government because some people have faith but no proof that it is divinely inspired is no less ludicrous than the idea of a government based on the works of Charles Dickens. I believe all these things not because someone told me to or because I read it in a book but because I am intelligent enough to form my own opinions and come to my own conclusions – and so is everyone else out there. Why don’t they? Take care to note I am not suggesting only Republicans blindly follow their party wherever it goes – most Democrats do it too.

Politics is the art of convincing people you’re right without telling them they’re wrong. I would make a horrible politician – not because I tell people they’re wrong (I do, but I’m working on that) but because I’m not certain I’m right. I think I’m right, but I would never stand up and suggest that what I believe must be the absolute truth…absolute truths have a funny way of changing*. So why are our politicians so afraid of standing up and saying “I think this is the way it should be, and my opponent believes differently, so I’ll tell you why I prefer mine and they’ll tell you why they prefer theirs and you can make up your minds by listening to us.” Wouldn’t that be wonderful – instead of “you should vote for me because my opponent beats puppies” politics, we could have “you should vote for me because of my ideas” politics. At the end of the day, we are all on the same side, right?

My name is Nicholas Saadah, and I approved this blog entry.

*see: any history book