Two Dishes But To One Table

It Pays to be Ethical

There's an organization, Ethisphere,  that rates companies for ethical behavior.  Their site claims that ethical companies outperform the market average:

I ran across it while we were considering options for what bank to do business with.  The Ethisphere people endorse only "Old National Bank" of Evansville, Indiana, among US Banks as rating ethically high.  ONB's banking website had zero listings for interest rates so we are holding off on further investigations of that particular bank.

What Do We In Detroit Know About Luxury?

I'm still enough choked up about last year's Chrysler Super Bowl Commercial that I made an MP3 file of it to listen to on my iPod.

The city in the commercial is not quite demographically right:  mostly white, a few Aftrican Americans, but in a pleasant nod to one group of people, an Arab seems to be in the background of an ice skating shot.

There are plenty of scenes in the commercial to put a lump in a Detroiter's throat.  For his part, the spokesman, Eminem, looks a little grizzled and overly hard in this still, getting out of the Chrysler, but in motion for the video it works fine.  The article in the business section of the New York Times made it sound like Em was a tough sell for the Chrysler CEO to propose to his board of directors so he didn't tell them until just a few days before shooting!

If you want to listen to the commercial, here is the MP3 file I made, free to you to stream or download and save:

 

Chrysler_eminem

Work for Cello: "Polish It"

If you need some sheet music for conch shells you might try looking around at the New York Public Library John Cage shrine:

Adults Might Not Understand Bullying Very Well

Roger Ebert describes a scene in the documentary Bully:

"There's only one bully actually identified in the film. A clueless teacher has pulled together two kids who got in a fight and insists they shake hands. One kid is as friendly as an insurance salesman and sticks out his paw with a friendly smile.
The other kid refuses. The teacher sends the friendly kid away and lectures the other one. Of course it's the “nice kid” who is the bully. He probably gets away with more stuff than a con man."  (Roger Ebert's review of Bully)

I have been a cluesless teacher myself. 

I was a teacher who was on guard for some cartoon of a sluggo type fellow, taking a youngster's lunch money: 

 

 

 

That's completely unrealistic and misguided. In reality, the cruelty of students that has gone on under my nose is probably more like this girl with the cell phone.

 

 

I don't think I'm the only clueless adult, because when I searched at Google Images just now I saw a pretty heavy bias towards depicting bullies as  overt, buffoonish stereotypes of Butch from the Our Gang movies.   There were few image depictions of the opportunistic clique leaders, the abusive class clowns, that get insufficent scrutiny from teachers.

I'm going to the library now to see if  I can find Barbara Coloroso's The Bully, The Bullied, and The Bystander , a book that even has Jiu-Jitsu instructions listed in the table of contents, but also has a large section assessing the people who stand by during bullying, and the people who don't recognize bullying when they see it.

 

Synthetic Sugar Chemistry and the Mark of the Masked Zorro

There's a 3 minute video where a 300 student organic chemistry lecture is interrupted by an elaborately rehearsed student sword fight.    I was rooting of course for the chemistry teacher, who, at the end, not missing a beat,  has the presence of mind to step back in and make Zorro's signature "Z" into a Beta-saccharide.  Video here.   

Recruiting Women to Computing

Harvey Mudd College in California turned around their undergrad courses and succesfully created a pipeline to pull female undergrads into being computer programmers. They remade Intro to Programming from the least popular freshman course to the MOST popular freshman course with these curricular changes:

1. They replaced Java language with the much more intuitive Python language.
2. They  changed the examples and exercises to things the students found relevant.
3. Finally, the course name was changed from Intro to Programming to Problem Solving with Machines.

More at the New York Times Science Times.

 

Review: The Inferno by Dante, a Maundy Thursday performance.

There was a three hour long dramatic reading last night sponsored by The Poets Corner at Saint John the Divine in Manhattan.  They read from The Inferno, by Dante.(16 Cantos, 4 in the original Italian).   Each canto had two readers.  There seemed to be over 400 people in the audience.

 Fans entering for the poetry reading were confused and quickly hushed  when we realized our entrance for the 9pm Inferno performance was intruding on a still ongoing church service.   St Johns was in near darkness following the stripping of the author and extinguishing of sacrament candles.  We filed in as the parishioners filed out, a cloud of incense filling the air.

 It started at 9pm and I only made it to the midpoint at 10:30 before begging off.  Meg did it without coffee but I drank a 16 oz at 7pm and another at 8pm to brace myself for the 32 readers, approaching the lectern one at a time, in the largest stone space in New York, or perhaps America.   

 The variety of delivery styles kept things lively, even when I occasionally lost the plot of the narrative.  [I have no idea what Beatrice  did on Dante's behalf, for example.  Nor am I sure of the actions of Adam, Moses, and Elijah, who, shockingly, were conceived of by Dante to dwell in the second circle of hell, with the rest of the unbaptized (!!!)]

 Being New York the readers were all academics and professional actors.  There was much to like in their varied delivery.   I liked readers that used hand gestures.  I liked readers that had memorized their entire portion and needed no cue.   I liked that some had obvious Shakesperean chops while others, equally effective, read Dante like they were onstage at The Moth.   I even liked the one terrible reader because it made me  fantasize that maybe someday I could get up there to sling a verse or two.

 I kept track of my six favorite readers at last Nights 'Inferno'

            
James A Kowalski            Doug  Anderson               Jean Hollander                   Lorna Blake 

and David Landon      &             Daniel Hoffman (no pics found)

There Is Something New Under the Sun

I think I had an original idea.   

But how to capitalize on this new concept?

Cooking With Hexagons, circa 1997

Dr Rajanbabu, my mentor at Ohio State is doing well.  I see he got a second publication into SCIENCE. 

For an organic chemist, Science or Nature are the non plus ultra place to publsh.   Getting research into that journal twice in a lifetime is an accomplishment.  

Dr. Rajanbabu's site still has a link to the molecule that bedeviled me in Columbus Ohio.  Everything in the picture below I accomplished between 1996 to 1998.  This is me cooking with chemicals:

Each of those arrows, a, b, c, and d, represents several weeks (for a slowpoke like me) of finding the method in the published literature, trying to tweek the conditions, doing it wrong, going back and re-doing it, getting it clean enough to make an NMR spectrum, and then going back and repeating it.   It was slow work, not entirely pleasant or interesting although it looks blithe and innocent in the above diagram.   There are many personal memories crammed into every letter, every detail of the above figure has significance for me the cook:

• NaH is a grey powder that smokes upon exposure to air.  It's that reactive.
• CCl4 is a proven carcinogen that noone else in the lab ever went near
• MeI is a beautiful little elegant way to add a carbon atom to a nucleophile and it came in a nice tiny brown glass bottle.  The iodine atom made the small bottle surprisingly heavy.
• that little part on step b that says hv   stands for "light".  I have vivid memory of junk picking a dirty white plastic reading lamp from behind the undergrad apartments and just runing that step of the recipe with a regular 100 watt bulb, not even ultraviolet light.
• all of those steps that say "90%" or higher would have been 60% or less in my hands.  They had one of the post-doctoral fellows run the reaction in skillfull hands to create those glowing yields of 90% throughput at each step.

Long Distance Runaround

The Bad Plus make their twice-a-year homestand, this time at The Blue Note.  Two shows a night for the week of April24 - 29. 

Last time through they had a vocalist in tow.   Wendy Lewis changed up the all-dude, no words aesthetic, providing many surprising, often languid, sometimes ironic, always respectful interpretations of FM rock staples, filtered through a stand up bass, capricious drums, and time shifting piano.  Highlights of that show were LOng Distance Runaround (a Yes cover) and Lithium (Kurt Cobain on half-speed). 

This time through it's back to just the guys.  I think Meg is good for coming to one show with me.  I'll try to find a friend for the other.  If you're reading this and going to be in New York that week drop me a line!

Last year around this time I came close to riding a bus to Toronto to catch TB+ so I am greatly relieved and taking advantage of one of my last chances to see them in New York before I move to Wisconsin.

If you don't know them and want to stream some Bad Plus at Last.fm , iTunes preview, or Grooveshark, try Physical Cities, Lithium, or Silence is the Reason!