Category Archives: Random thoughts
On my view about CONACyT’s funding scheme
In science one thing is true and universal: We need funding. Here in Mexico the main source of funding comes from the National Council for Science and Technology (Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología, CONACyT) which is an institution that depends directly from the federal government. Over the years different policies have prevailed and right now we are not looking into a good future. I wont go into all the alleged corruption or about the prevailing notion of favoritism within the institution’s scheme for funding research. I just want to write about the process of projects evaluation and what I think are its great shortcomings.
So first, as in any other part of the world, it all begins with a proposal being submitted for evaluation. In this particular case there is a specific application for “Young Researchers”, that is people who are newcomers to any scientific institution in the country, who are in need for a large amount of resources in order to get their own labs going. The notion of an “associate researcher” is not well understood, I think. After the submission is complete and the paperwork validated, the proposal is sent to a few other researchers in the field who either accept or decline to review the project and then are asked concise questions about the originality and relevance of the project; its feasibility; the proponent’s profile about how well suited he or she is to deliver what is being promised, and finally they are asked to evaluate how well justified is the requested budget. The reviewers then turn their comments, and rankings, to CONACyT in which a committee gathers all the data and ranks all the projects. Those projects with the higher ranking get their funding with, maybe, minor adjustments in order to stretch the reach of funding to as many projects as possible. Some other criteria are used, for example researchers at institutions with small budgets have increased chances of being funded than those on a large institution. It is a matter of balance: giving the money to those who need it but that at the same time will sure do more (and better) with it.
So far it all sounds pretty good and fair to me! except there is a problem: Reviewers don’t always do their job properly and sometimes you get to read comments such as
the proponent has no experience in graduating students
well, thats why I clicked the “Young Researcher” button. Some other pearls of wisdom include
the proponent didn’t take into consideration the latest publications in the field he is trying to study
and then he/she enlists references with publication dates posterior to the date of the proposal’s submission! Sometimes our proposals may not be thoroughly well read (or, lets admit, written) and reviewers give you a bad review for omitting things that you indeed covered. But once you get a bad review (from an anonymous peer) there is no turning around, you only find out what they wrote once you have been declined the grant.
My little suggestion: Let the review process be questioned, just once per reviewer and without the possibility of modifying the proposal. That is, once a reviewer emits his or her comments then I could get to read them and address their concerns in a single letter. If I can prove them something so evident as a conflicting set of dates between missing references and the proposal submission’s, then they would have to change their ranking, but without giving me the chance to modify the project anymore as to fit their comments. The process would take longer, maybe, but it already takes more than half a year! a few more months could be worthy if a more fair ranking is obtained.
Science needs funding; not all the scientific proposals deserve funding, true.
Stop SOPA
As a scientist I believe the free share of information (which is not the same as to say of property) should prevail throughout the vastness of this global tool we have available. I’ve worked for private companies and I do believe in their right to keeping private the information they have invested in. But with SOPA there is an issue with freedom of speech and nobody wants to have their accounts monitored by a government, any government. Please read “1984″ by George Orwell to have a better understanding of how false security and safety is not worthy of a captive society under surveillance.
You have all gained something by the free share of knowledge in this blog, as I’ve had from other online resources such as the CCL. If SOPA is passed, then I, we, may not be able to provide help with the use of commercial software such as Gaussian, for instance, and the progress of science would be directly hurt.
I do not endorse piracy. Private companies are entitled to profit as a return of their investments. But laws such as SOPA would only hurt those trying to make the most out of the largest communication media ever created in the history of mankind, while doing little to protect investors and developers. Many are the examples of developments arising from public effort: Wikipedia; Linux; OpenGL; The GNUproject. Open share of ideas have brought this and many other resources which ultimately result in the development of science and technology. Please read this article (in Spanish) by Dr. Alejandro Pisanty, a former teacher of mine at the Chemistry School. He was the head of the Academic Computing Services at UNAM, and one of the founders of the Computational Chemistry List (CCL); He most definitely knows a thing or two about information technologies.
It should be clear that the openness of the Internet has clear advantages as seen a year ago when the people from Tunisia got organized online and got rid of a dictatorship. Control of communication is a common treat of fascist and authoritative regimes. Information set them free.
Please rate/like/comment this post if you are also against SOPA and for the freedom
of speech over the Internet.
http://sopastrike.com/strike/
On science, sci-fi, fantasy and something called real life
Gina, my girlfriend, is a successful business woman who runs her own company, which implies she has to be pragmatic in order for her business to succeed efficiently. She takes care -probably a lot- of what she says, so for instance she would never say something is awful but rather not nice. Definition through complementarity seems to be the norm in the business world in order to be as likable as possible and thus never driving potential customers away. We scientists on the other hand say things the way they are and hence we are taken by arrogant most of the time. And we are arrogant because we like things right. Even if we understand what you mean with an ill posed sentence, we’ll point out the implications of posing it in a wrong way or just blatantly correct your phrase. We deal with understanding and modifying our surrounding world -the real world, our real world- and, above all things, we love being right! Thus we leave little room for wrong when it comes to other people.
But there is another striking difference between our worlds, one that during this holiday season led our friends (actually my girlfriend’s circle of which I’m now a part) to manufacture and give me this t-shirt as a holiday present:
"Live long and prosper" (BTW I also got a fancy bottle of wine, thanks Poncho!)
Yes. I’m a chemist, I have a PhD and work at a university doing research; that is enough to qualify for The Big Bang Theory cast, right? and if all resemblance is transitive then I for sure spend my Wednesday evenings at a local comic book store, right? Well, wrong! (ha! I loved that one!) But to be completely honest accurate, I do enjoy science fiction a lot. I like the classics such as Asimov and Bradbury as well as Lem and Vonegut. When it comes to cinema I consider myself a huge fan; I prefer Star Wars over Star Trek (if pressed) but particularly enjoyed the latest Star Trek installment more than any of the ones in the new SW trilogy, except maybe for “Revenge of the Sith“. When it comes to fantasy I prefer movies than literature; I’ve never read LOTR and I don’t think I will, but I’m about to re-read The Hobbit during the holidays (I need my leisure reading during the next two weeks).
Back to my pragmatic girlfriend. She doesn’t like sci-fi or fantasy; “fakey” she calls them. For her, achieving suspension of disbelief is nearly impossible and that has made me reflect on where this cliché of us liking sci-fi and fantasy so much comes from.
Science fiction is very appealing to us because allows us to set our imaginations wild and dream about what we could achieve in the future with our own work in terms of technology development (Does Gina dream about building a corporate empire? I’ll ask her tonight). Some of these achievements would involve the verification of wacky scientific theories (think about warp speed in Star Trek and how it implies that speeds faster than light are achievable via the Alcubierre metric in this instance) or the advent of a new set of them. Despite the popular belief, those in the science business have to be very creative people; we cannot simply spend the rest of our careers doing what others have already achieved (although there is an increasing number of people trying) so we all try to stay on the cutting edge even if that only generates a million different cutting edges, some of which become sharper than others. We have to be imaginative, believers of the unbelievable, for only this way we can come up with the technology that eventually makes current sci-fi look fakey. The real world of stock exchange, bills, mergers, negotiations and taxes is very elusive to most of us if not just down boring. The really remarkable thing between us is that both our worlds are able to coexist, and even more so, we support each other in our careers through success and failure, despite the fact we often don’t understand what is going on.
I will continue being the geek within her -now our- circle of friends; I will embrace it and own it. Gina on the other hand will continue being the business woman among my circle of friends from grad school; she will have to keep on nodding when we talk about academia and sci-fi; when we complain about the scarcity of liquid Nitrogen in our labs or we get excited about a new computing cluster with an increasing number of Xeon processors. It’s just a lot of real fun to merge these two real worlds.
Happy holidays, blogosphere! Live long and prosper.
2011 – International Year of Chemistry www.chemistry2011.orgPS To wrap things up this year, I’d like to thank to everyone who has liked, shared, commented, followed and subscribed. I want to wish you all a very happy new year! See you all in the future
The (not so) Schön controversy
This title may sound like the one of an episode of the famous geeky sitcom The Big Bang Theory but it is not; it is in fact a far more interesting albeit less fun debate. First of all I want to make clear this post isn’t an attempt to further bash Dr. Schön err I mean Mr. Schön (sorry, I couldn’t help it) but the entire debate raises some interesting questions, specially those regarding the recent outcome of the controversy as well as the forthcoming aftermath, that are worth asking and of course, with some luck, answering.
A little background first: Jan Hendrik Schön (Germany, 1970) got a PhD in physics at the prestigious Konstanz University in his homeland; after that he got a job as a researcher at the even more prestigious Bell Laboratories located in New Jersey USA, where he made groundbreaking discoveries on conductivity, superconductivity, organic conductors and semiconductors. Ironically enough, his conduct was his doom (Sorry again, I couldn’t help this one either. ) Between 2001 and 2002 he published more than 60 scientific papers on these topics, 15 or so of which were published in Science and Nature. Similarities in the graphs led to other scientists to believe the data could have been manipulated which turned out to be the case! Little by little, both journals Science and Nature, as well as other important journals like Physical Review and Applied Physics Letters withdrew some of his papers; others remain under further investigation for their possible withdrawal. Dr. Jan Schön eventually had to come clean and confess his lack of scientific rigor and misbehavior. This and him being fired from Bell Labs could have been the end of the story but in no way was near it. In 2004 the University of Konstanz decided to withdraw his PhD degree to which Dr. Schön appealed on the grounds that his thesis work was performed without any data manipulation or any other sort of ethical misconduct on his part; finally today after seven years of back and forth lawsuits and appeals the state court ruled against him and the university stripped him from his degree. Dr. Schön is now Mr. Schön. Further details (since this post does not intend to be a repository of others nor to just inform you about the entire gossip) can be found in this Wikipedia article.
So what is this post about then? First of all I’d like to address the obvious questions: Was the University of Konstanz right or wrong about withdrawing his degree? Did they go too far? What are the implications for other scientists? There is still controversy among the scientific community about whether or not the University had any right to do it on the grounds of scientific misconduct on work that they did not fund nor had to do anything with. The matter is fairly obvious, the University of Konstanz does not want to be affiliated with Schön on any level since it will indirectly hurt their reputation. But is someone really thinking that this university is to blame? I hardly think so. Therefore on that side they could have let him keep his degree but on the other side one may postulate that credibility must be sustained throughout our careers just in the same way as MD’s can have their licenses revoked under malpractice. Granted, MD’s get stripped only from the right to legally exercise medicine not from their degree, meaning that in some cases they may recover that legal right instead of having to go to school all over again, although in the harshest cases this wouldn’t help either.
Definitely his conduct deserved strong actions from his employers and the scientific community, in the end almost 30 papers in very prestigious journals had to be withdrawn! He was trying to take the scientific community for a spin! And this is another thing I’m baffled about. Didn’t he ever think that such claims, such amazing claims, would attract the interest of a large number of the most prominent scientists working in the field of conductivity? As if there weren’t billions of dollars invested in those topics worldwide! If he was breaking new ground in organic superconductivity by proving some theoretical predictions, he would have gotten a Nobel prize for sure and that would have attracted a lot more people in trying to reproduce his findings in order to make their own little contributions therefrom. In fact this actually happened! Many laboratories throughout the world claimed to have failed in reproducing his results. I can only imagine those teams feeling frustrated for not being able to get the same numbers/trends in their experiments and clearly getting less and less frustrated when they found out they were not alone and that the number of their companions was growing larger. Had he published his results in some obscure, dubious-quality journal probably nobody would have ever found out, but then Lucent Technologies, the profitable company that runs Bell Labs would have not been happy in funding his research. This in turn raises yet other questions: How come nobody at Bell Labs was able to tell his results were all made up or even just tempered with? Private companies are not run as academic labs, publication of findings go through a lengthier process than in academia, which is normal since private research centers invest a lot of money in developing technologies which will generate enough profit to keep the company running and researching for as long as possible. They also have strict policies about data-recording and experiment-tracking procedures which apply to every researcher in the company; they are not subject to interpretation or to desire, they have to be followed to keep track of all the expensive research done within. The second question I got from this paragraph is about other frauds done in lesser journals which may go unnoticed because the work itself simply goes unnoticed by its own lack of merit. And from this, yet another question is raised and linked to another ongoing controversy: What is the future of peer-reviewing in journal publications? Surely no referee would have tried to reproduce his experiments and I’m sure a large number of data was requested by Nature and Science in order to deem the papers worth of being published (was his answer to this request “No problem!“?) Referees this quality were blindsided by reputations, Schön’s and Bell Lab’s; only until the final users (the readers) noticed similarities between data sets, and noise, in different experiments that the fraud rose to the surface, but noticing those similarities should have been the work of the referees! in fact that is their job! Aren’t they accountable by omission too?
This controversy is not a first, nor will it be the last. The most famous controversy of data tempering that comes to mind right now is the infamous experiment, or more accurately the infamous data selection in Robert Millikan’s experiment for measuring the charge of the electron. In this experiment only the “nicest” data points were used and although inclusion of the entire data set would have not affected the final value of the charge obtained, the statistical error would be increased to 2% instead of 0.5% as he presented it to the scientific community; a much “nicer” error. Of course I’m not trying to compare both cases which are completely apart; selecting data is not as serious as data manufacturing, but they are both just as unethical. Should have Millikan been stripped from his PhD degree and/or his Nobel Prize?
Mexico is not immune to this controversies either. In 2006 three papers authored by the famous Mexican Professor Eusebio Juaristi and his student Omar Muñoz-Muñiz in 2003, had to be withdrawn also on the grounds of irreproducibility from the Journal of Organic Chemistry, Tetrahedron and Tetrahedron Letters. There were serious errors in those papers which led to believe the student had incurred in scientific misconduct but apparently they managed to prove they were simply honest mistakes. Was Muñoz-Muñiz denied his PhD degree? No. In fact he now works as a researcher at Universidad Veracruzana in Mexico. Not a bad gig. I understand he had some problems getting into the National Researchers System which gathers us all researchers in Mexico as an independent entity at the same time that it collects data about the research done in the country. Data seems to be today’s secret word kids! Once again the whole ordeal could have been dealt with if a proper peer reviewing process had been carried out from the very start.
The conclusions: Ethical work, ethical reviews. Is it really that hard?
2011, International Year of Chemistry www.chemistry2011.org“The Learn’d Astronomer” by Walt Whitman (ca. 1900)
Walt Whitman
When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
-Walt Whitman-
Science and awe go hand in hand. The more we learn; the more we know, the more in awe we grow. To learn is to discover, and to discover is to be reborn; for the fact of stumbling upon something new refreshes our capacity of being surprised and amazed like when we were little kids. This year is the International Year of Chemistry, so it is a perfect time for telling people who are not scientists to regard science as the human activity of the “awe”. Nowadays, and in some regards, it requires to be a “learn’d scientist” in order to be awed by a new discovery, but every single living scientist on the planet today was once awed, whether by nature or by a passionate teacher in a classroom. So let us remember what it was like to be awed and lets all look at nature with youthful eyes willing to unravel its secrets instead of taking them for granted.
In order to be a learned astronomer one must first gaze at the stars in awe and wonder…
2011, International Year of Chemistry
The Chuck Norris of chemistry
It is widely known by now, the existence of a list called “The Chuck Norris facts” in which macho attributes of this eighties redneck action hero are exacerbated for the sake of humor. The list includes such amusing facts like:
- “Chuck Norris doesn’t eat honey, he chews bees”
- “When Chuck Norris does a pushup, he’s pushing the Earth down”
- “Chuck Norris counted to infinity; twice!”
- “There is no evolution, only a list of creatures Chuck Norris allows to live”
This last one is funny also because Chuck Norris is a Born-Again-Christian who doesn’t believe in evolution. The list is very funny although the original site has become plagued of not so good ones thanks to uninspired people with web access.
A not so old list, and definitely funnier for us people in the science business, is “The Carl Friederich Gauss list of facts“, which includes gems like:
- “Gauss can divide by zero” (funny although a bit obvious, right? well this is warm up)
- “Gauss didn’t discover the normal distribution, nature conformed to his will”
- “Gauss can write an irrational number as the ratio of two integers”
- “Gauss doesn’t look for roots of equations, they come to him”
- “Gauss knows the topological difference between a doughnut and a coffee mug”
- “Parallel lines meet where Gauss tells them to”.
All these facts imply one thing: impossibilities being allowed to one paradigmatic character for humor’s sake. What could be considered an impossibility in chemistry by now and who could be the one to bear Norris’ fame? Who could be deemed as the Chuck Norris of chemistry?
The impossibility of synthesizing noble gas compounds comes to my mind as the historical impossibility in modern chemistry most imprinted in chemists minds since its written in Pauling’s textbook and is supported by Lewis’ theory; yet Bartlett achieved their synthesis during the 60′s! Chemistry is a science which generates it’s own study matter and as such, impossibilities become challenges. What are the current challenges in chemistry? what is the direction our science is taking or even worse that it should be taking?
So here is my first attempt at emulating the list of facts in the chemistry field and my chosen one is Roald Hoffmann!
- Roald Hoffmann can make a C atom hybridize d orbitals into its valence shell
- Roald Hoffmann drinks AlLiH4 aqueous cocktails
- Roald Hoffmann can stabilize a tertiary carbanion and a primary carbocation
- Roald Hoffmann can analytically solve the Schrödinger equation for H2 and beyond (of course)
- Roald Hoffmann denatures a protein by looking at it and refolds it at will
- Roald Hoffmann always gets a 100% yield
- Le’Chatellier’s principle first asks for Hoffmann’s permission
- Roald Hoffmann once broke the Periodic Table with a roundhouse kick
- Roald Hoffmann can make a molecule stop vibrating at absolute zero; it’s called fear!
- Born-Oppenheimer’s approximation is a consequence of nuclei being too frightened to move in the presence of Roald Hoffmann. Electrons? they are just trying to escape
- Roald Hoffmann’s blood is a stronger acid than SbF5
A pretty lame attempt I admit. Who is your favorite chemist in history and why? Try to come up with your own Chuck Norris of Chemistry list and we’ll share it here in this site.
As usual thanks for reading (yeah! the whole three of you)
It’s that time of the year again… The Nobel Prizes
Around early October the scientific community -or at least part of it- starts getting excited about what could be considered the most prestigious award a scientist could ever achieve: The Nobel Prize.
The three categories that interest me the most are: Chemistry, Physics and Literature. I’m not saying I don’t care for the other three (well, maybe the one in economy is way out of my league to grasp) but these three are the ones that always arouse my curiosity. This year laureates have really had me excited! For starters, in chronological order of announcement, Geim and Novoselov seem to be quite younger than the average recipient (52 and 36 years old, respectively). But so is the field for what they got it since the first paper these two scientists from the University of Manchester published on the topic is only about six years old. Discovery of Graphene and most importantly the characterization and understanding of its properties is one of the most promising areas in materials sciences since graphene exhibits very interesting electronic as well as structural behaviors. Nobel prizes are always controversial, but we have to admit that although graphite has been around us for ages, these two England-based Russian scientist have kicked off a promising area of science that will no doubt contribute to further technological developments we can only begin to imagine.
On the other hand, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Heck, Negishi and Suzuki for their work on Pd (palladium) catalyzed coupling reactions. What I liked the most about this prize is that a few years ago I published alongside Dr. David Morales-Morales from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, a paper in J. Molecular Cat. A., in which we performed a systematic study of a phosphane-free Heck reaction for a series of Pd catalysts with the general formula [ArFNH]PdCl2 (ArFNH = Fluorinated or polyfluorinated aniline). In this paper theoretical calculations were used to assess the relationship between the substitution pattern in fluorinated anilines upon the catalyst’s eficiency, a sort of small quantum-QSAR. Another thing that got me (and a bunch of other chemists) excited was the fact that this year the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to people working in old fashioned synthetic chemistry, so to speak. Recently a long list of researchers working on the field of BIO-chemistry were awarded the prestigious prize, which comes to no surprise since the development of the Human Genome Project has, and will continue to have, a huge impact in biotechnology. Be that as it may, good for Heck, Suzuki and Negishi and the Pd-catalyzed-carbon-carbon-bond-forming-reactions!
About my initial remark: For reasons I don’t know (I wont subscribe to any of the existing urban-legend-level hypothesis) there is no Nobel Prize in Mathematics, although a lot of mathematicians have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economical Sciences. For mathematicians the Fields Medal would be the equivalent of a Nobel Prize. However, the Fields Medal is only awarded every four years. Four years ago, this captivating character named Grigori “Grisha” Perelman was awarded the Fields Medal for solving what the Clay Institute in Massachusetts deemed one of the problems of the millennium: The Poincare Conjecture. What is so noteworthy is that Grisha (diminutive for Grigori in Russian) rejected the medal as well as the million dollars awarded by the Clay Institute for solving it. He also rejected a position at Princeton University. His lack of faith in any institution was also reflected in his work, since he did not publish his solution to Poincare’s conjecture in any peer reviewed journal but instead uploaded it on-line and alerted some notorious mathematicians he had worked with in the past about it. Secluded in his St. Petersburg apartment, this remarkable fourty year old, Rasputin-looking-genius, mathematician keeps rejecting not only all fame, money and glory but human contact altogether. It is said that at some point Sir Isaac Newton did the same thing. I guess great minds do think alike.
How much do theoretical chemists make?
I usually read the whole info on the Statistics page that WordPress provides to this blog in order to know how many visitors drop by during the week; what other sites are sending me some traffic, if any, or what searches are readers performing which leads them to my blog. Last week I found this post title as one of the Google searches that ultimately made someone find my blog. Of course the combination of the words “theoretical” and “chemists” is what made this blog appear in the results since that is the main topic of it. I found it very curious and funny so I decided to write about it.
I found it funny because this means there is someone worried about making a career choice that might not be the most beneficial in economical terms. I understand the searcher was probably playing and didn’t really mean to find some information about how much do we make but maybe he or her also thought it was worth the shot. Now for the answer to this day’s topic: We don’t do bad at all! It’s true! A chemist, a researcher, any scientist, has a strong motivation towards doing academic research in which it is widely known that not too much money is available if you compare it with the earnings of an MBA working at a big corporation. However a more than decent lifestyle is quite achievable. Of course it varies from one country to another and from one institution to the next, but in more or less developed countries a comfortable lifestyle is the norm. If you are attracted to theoretical chemistry and you have strong computational skills as well as an inclination towards solving problems and not only just posing them, then you can make a lot of money; and I do mean a LOT! Chemical companies are becoming aware of the benefits of having simulations run over their processes at various levels. They realize this is a cost effective as well as an environmentally friendly approach. Software companies which develop all the programs I use on a daily basis need not only people who can program but who also understand the underlying physicochemical and mathematical principles behind each calculation. Pharmaceutical companies have exploited computational chemistry to the point where it has become a standard tool in their research and product development (QSAR for instance). Having worked on both sides now (private and academic research) I can tell you there are as many opportunities of making money in computational chemistry as in any other branch of science but sometimes you have to convince people that what you do is important and valuable. This is called “selling”; only that you are not selling a product, you are selling your ideas for posing new thought schemes or your skills to solve ongoing problems.
As any other job being a computational or theoretical chemist has its caveats; for instance in academics salaries are lower than they are in the industry and finding sources of funding can be a rather time consuming task, not to mention all the bureaucracy you have to endure the entire time. Doing research for a private company has no problems finding funds, resources are available in short time, there is less bureaucracy but in exchange for all that you have to sell your projects to the company, making them attractive for them to fund or you wont have a green light; your creativity has to be oriented towards the company needs, which is not bad at all! There are many challenges in industry as well as in academics.
And as in any other job, through effort comes excellence and through excellence come success and rewards; whether economical or otherwise. If you want to be a computational chemist and drive a Porsche, you can do it! you just have to push yourself to be the best so you can have an opportunity at the best academic or industrial facilities in which at some point your skills will become appreciated and rewarded.
Now, for the closing thought. To young students out there: I cannot stress enough how important it is to work on something that captivates your passion and imagination -whether you get paid a little or a lot- because you have to wake up every single day of the next fifty years of your life to do it for most of the duration of each day! No salary can compensate the opposite, trust me.
UPDATE (Feb 01 2011) I stumbled upon this article at academics.com related to this post’s topic albeit in a more general way to other branches of chemistry.
Starting a new job! CCIQS-UNAM
After months of waiting I am now oficially hired as an associate researcher at the Chemistry Institute from the National Autonomous University of Mexico! Actually I will form part of the new Joint Center for Research in Sustainable Chemistry located outside the city of Toluca in Mexico. This new job comes as a great career opportunity in which long term perspectives are high. For the time being, the scope of my research will remain to be electonic structure analysis, intermolecular interaction description and dynamics of molecular recognition in calixarene systems as molecular carriers for biologically active compounds.
In the mean time I will come up with some other topic I can tackle regarding sustainable chemistry as it is the intention of this center. Needless to point out the importance of research in such problems and the promising research perspectives in this area.
I am excited to have access (however limited) to UNAM’s supercomputing facilities which for a while used to be within the famous top 500 list. I will also have to recruit students, get resources for them, train them and direct their works along with all the bureaucratic hassle this new position implies. This is indeed a very exciting challenge! I am also excited and eager to work with some of my former grad-school colleagues who are now accomplished scientists. This is one of those moments in life when you know things are changing for the better, falling into place; not just another job.
So it seems this blog will continue its journey which more than a year ago began in Cluj-Napoca, traveled to Pécs and is now located in Mexico City, onto the high and cold city of Toluca. May the research be good and results abundant!
Thanks for reading!
Baseball
Way off topic post that I began writing around the last World Series in October 2009.
‘Why do you like it?‘ is the most recurrent question I get from my European friends and most in Mexico. The easy and short answer is because my dad got me into it since he likes it too. But what makes me keep on liking it? In few words I like it because it is complex. I realize other sports may be even more complicated, like cricket for instance, but I wasn’t in touch with them while growing up. The interest in Baseball within my family dates back all the way to my great grandfather who played semi-pro ball in the western town of Guadalajara. My dad played in the major amateur league in Mexico and I had a short and pitiful career in little league.
Baseball has many rules and exceptions according to context. The best example is the strikeout: everyone knows it’s three strikes and you’re out! but this is only true if the catcher gets the third strike in his glove, otherwise the runner might get on base while the strikeout still counts for the pitchers record. You have to really be into baseball to know what a ‘fielder’s choice’ is and why is it different from a normal base hit.
It is a weird sport: The weight of the ball is calibrated; there are rigid standards for the bats manufacturing; the shape and size of each base is regulated and the distance between the edge of one and the edge of the next one is 90 feet, no more no less. However, the dimensions of the outfield vary from one ballpark to other and basically no ballpark is symmetrical! Some have tall fences like Fenway in Boston or even an uneven field like Busch Stadium in St. Louis which has a small slope by center field! From the most common sports I think baseball is the only one in which the shape and dimensions of the ‘off-limits’ grounds affect the development of a match: A fly ball on foul territory can still be caught by a fielder to put the batter out; now, if this happens in Oakland Alameda County Coliseum the batter has lower probabilities of staying alive than in Yankee stadium or in Wrigley Field, since the space between the foul line and the stands in these last two stadiums is much smaller. Therefore there are some stadiums in which batting averages drop as a consequence of foul batting. In turn these stadiums offer a better chance for pitchers.
Another thing I like about baseball, is the fact that it is more unpredictable than other sports like soccer, in which a 2 or 3 goals difference is basically insurmountable! aside from historical reasons this is why the World Series is played to win four out of seven games, in which sweeps are rare. Also as opposed to soccer, the leading team can’t fold back and play only defense; they have to keep on pitching to their adversaries!
I admit that baseball is more slow paced than many other sports but I find that thrilling. Every sport has its fans and supporters, I just happen to love baseball and I will keep on
