Blog Archives
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 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!
Prof. Dr. Ioan Silaghi-Dumitrescu (1950-2009)
Yesterday, on December 25th prof. Silaghi passed away. He leaves us all, his students, co-workers, friends and relatives with a deep hole in our hearts. We all witnessed what a hard year he had in terms of health and we are solely comforted by the thought of him not suffering anymore. I hereby send my condolences to his wife, children and grand children hoping they find comfort and peace. I guess I could write about the director of the faculty of chemistry; about my boss; about my co-advisor during my grad student years but instead I want to write about the man and friend who in no little way touched and changed my life.
I met Ioan in 2002 during his last visit to the Chemistry Institute at UNAM in Mexico City when he came along his wife, Prof. Dr. Luminita Silaghi-Dumitrescu, to give an introductory course on molecular modelling. For a long time, he had been close to Dr. Raymundo Cea-Olivares, director of the institute, who at the time was also my advisor in my first year in grad-school; back then I was intending to work in the realm of inorganic chemistry and although I was becoming increasingly interested in theoretical chemistry, Ioan’s lectures were partially responsible for me changing my main research topic. It wasn’t only until 2005 that I had the opportunity to go and work with him for 6 months at Babes-Bolyai in Romania. Although his schedule was usually tight he always found time to talk, however briefly, with his students. He was always present at his students’ birthday parties, ready to sing ‘La Multi Ani’ or to tell us all a new joke. A youthful and warm man, Ioan also found time that summer to help me out with my immigration problems. A couple of years later he fought and won a huge battle against cancer; apparently it came back, this time for good.
After I left he offered me a postdoc position which I kept postponing until last year when I finally took it and although we didn’t see eye-to-eye on some things, I’m glad I took this position and was able to work with him once again. He always believed in me and my work, and for that I will always be most grateful to him. I will miss one of my mentors, a dear friend, a truely warm and loving man. May he rest in peace.
La revedere Ioan, ne vedem dincolo o zi.
-
- Ioan Silaghi Dumitrescu and I (2005)
-
- Ioan Silaghi-Dumitrescu and his wife Luminita in their summer cabin (2005)
Wrapping it up!
This year went by in a heartbeat. A lot of things happened and some nice research was performed. I especially enjoyed the summer in Hungary and working at Pecsi Tudomanyegyetem. Now the year is coming to an end and so is my contract as a scientific researcher at the Babes-Bolyai University, unfortunately the lack of further funding prevents me from extending my stay here for another year (damn crisis!), so now I’m in search of a new job whether it is in academia or in the industry, the important thing for it is to be challenging and interesting, also well payed, of course. I’m keeping my options open and I already have some which I will look into very carefully. I’m not going to jinx them by posting them here 
Even though the year and my contract are almost finished I’m far from being free of work. I’m currently working on the final details of a couple of papers concerning this year’s work; next week (1st December) I travel to Skopje, Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia, to lead a workshop for undergrads on computational chemistry; finally, on the last day of my stay in Romania I will give a small lecture for masters students on Molecular Dynamics. Aside from all that we have to count the numerous good-bye visits to friends and colleagues.
Romania is a beautiful country with a rich cultural heritage. Unfortunately there are still a lot of struggles within the ruling forces hindering the progress of the country as a whole. Romania has been a constant presence in my life for a few years now since I came here as an graduate student for a research stay in 2005. I encourage everybody to put this country in your future tourism list and take the Transylvanian tour as I call it (Bucharest-Sinaia-Brasov-Sibiu-Sighisoara-Cluj Napoca); for those interested in skiing there are marvelous stations in Poiana Brasov and in Straja near Petrosani. Here’s to my second home, my heart remains in Transylvania, multumesc Ardeal!
Changes are always thrilling, lets see what the future has for us in the short term. In the mean time I want to wish everybody to have happy winter holidays and enjoy them with your loved ones.
Peace
Wheel? I think knot!
Once again an awful title. This post follows my previous one on graphs and chemistry, and it addresses an old idea which I have shared in the past with many patient people willing to listen to my ramblings.
It is a common conception/place to state that the wheel was the invention that made mankind spring from its more hominid ancestors into the incipient species that would eventually become homo sapiens; that it was the wheel, like no other prehistoric invention or discovery, what made mankind to rise from its primitive stage. I’ve always believed that even if the wheel was fundamental in the development of mankind, man first had to build tools to make wheels out of something; otherwise they would have been just a good theoretical conception.
But even despite the fact that building tools was in itself a pretty damn good start, I strongly believe that mankind’s first groundbreaking invention were knots. For even a wheel was a bit useless until it was tied to something. From my perspective, the invention of the wheel was an event bound to happen since there are many round shaped things in nature: from the sun and the moon to some fruits and our own eyes. Achieving the mental maturity of taking a string (or a resembling equivalent of those days) and tie it, whether around itself or to something, was, in my opinion, the moment in which the opposable thumbs of mankind realized they could transform it’s surroundings. Furthermore, at that stage the mental maturity achieved made it possible for man to remember how to do it over again in a consistent way.
The book ’2001 – a space odissey’ by A. C. Clarke, describes this process in the first chapter when a group of hominids bumps into the famous monolith. Their leader (i think his name was moonlight), under the spell of this strangely straight and flat thing takes two pieces of grass and ties them together without knowing or understanding what he is doing. I was pleased to read that I was not alone in that thought.
The concept of a knot keeps on amazing me given their variety and the different purposes they serve according to their properties. These were known to ancient sailors who have elevated the task of knot-making to a practical art form. The mathematical background behind them has served to lay one of today’s most fundamental (and controversial) theories about the composition of matter: string theory. Next time when you make the knot of your necktie think about this tedious, obnoxious little habit was based on something groundbreaking that truly makes us stand out from the rest of the species in the animal kingdom.
