Emily's Thesis Presentation

Emily presented her senior thesis today at Middlebury College: "Investigating the effects of the gcrR gene product on Streptococcus mutans biofilm architecture." Mom and I attended, along with about 40 other people. Emily did a great job! She even had her own cheering section (her lab partners) who stood up at the end with signs that spelled out E-M-I-L-Y and included this:

Here is a 5,000X scanning electron microscope photo of some of those Streptococcus mutans that Emily cultured:

Streptococcus mutans is a bacteria involved in tooth decay. Individual colonies on your teeth grow into a biofilm. Emily's research looked at a gene involved in the formation of the biofilm. I'll leave further explanation to Emily in the comments if she wishes. Emily's advisor is Dr. Grace Spatafora, who has done considerable research on S. mutans.

Click here for this spring's list of senior thesis presentation titles in the biology department at Middlebury College (7 MB .doc file).

Congratulations, Emily! Well done! Good luck with the remaining parts of your senior thesis.

April Snow Storm

We are having a rare late spring snow storm. Here is our back deck this morning. There is 12 inches of snow on the ground, and it is still snowing lightly. It is wet, heavy snow. The temperature is 31 degrees F.

Two other late spring snow storms stand out in my memory.

One snowstorm was April 16-17, 1983, and I camped out in it. Here is the entry from my hiking journal: "Sterling Mtn., G alone, overnight. On snowshoes. Up LT. Stayed at GMC lean-to. 16" snow overnight. Down lift line. After mountain closed for skiing."

The other snowstorm was in May, on Mother's Day Weekend, sometime in the 1990s. We were in Ottawa visiting friends that weekend. While I didn't camp out in this snowstorm, one of my co-workers did. We drove home from Ottawa on Sunday through a very snowy northern New York. I later found out that one of my co-workers who lives in that part of northern New York was on a Boy Scout camporee that weekend just across the border in southern Quebec. When she woke up Sunday morning in her tent, she wondered why it was so quiet. It was because everything was covered in snow!

UPDATE 5/10/10: Nancy and I were in Maine for a long weekend, so we missed it, but there was snow on the ground at our house for Mother's Day (yesterday)! When we got home this afternoon, there was just a trace of snow in the shadows. It was completely gone within an hour. Our neighbor said there was snow on the ground for about 24 hours, from late Saturday afternoon to late Sunday afternoon. No significant accumulation, just enough to make the ground white. There was no snow where we were in Maine (Orono). Just a cold rain.

Talk at Middlebury College

I had the pleasure of speaking to the Student Investment Committee at Middlebury College on April 14. I gave a talk titled the 5 C's of Credit, but I also talked about Yankee Farm Credit, the Farm Credit System, GSEs, mathematical risk models and employment opportunities in Farm Credit. The talk was at the invitation of Dr. Scott Pardee, the faculty advisor of the SIC. And it all happened because of Congcong.

Last Christmas Congcong was telling me about a paper that she had written for an economics class. The paper was about how over-reliance on mathematical models had contributed to the financial crisis of 2008. That is a topic that interests me. Indeed, I had blogged about it last September, and I had mentioned one of Congcong's references in this post (the article by Felix Salmon in Wired Magazine).

Well, one thing led to another. I contacted Congcong's professor (Dr. Pardee) out of curiosity, and it eventually led to an invitation to give this talk. There were about 25 students at the talk. Before the talk, we went out to dinner at Fire & Ice. There were two professors (Dr. Pardee and Dr. Steve Pecsok) and I think nine students at dinner, plus me. The entire evening was a lot of fun. Thank you, Congcong! (And thank you, Dr. Pardee.)

The photo is an apple tree in full bloom in front of Painter Hall, a few hours before my talk.

Meteorologists vs. Climatologists

A reasonably balanced New York Times article:

Among Weathercasters, Doubt on Warming

Greece's Financial Problems

Click here for an interesting discussion of Greece's financial problems.

Reminds me of the lyrics in the "Fear the Boom and Bust" rap video in the post below. Hayek: "Then all that we're left with is debt."

Also reminds me of the book that Laura read in one of her classes last year: Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation, by Edward Chancellor. I referred to this book in my talk at Yankee Farm Credit's annual meetings a year ago. That book was written in 2000, long before our current economic problems, but maybe that theme isn't worn out yet!

Individuals, financial institutions and countries should all beware of excessive leverage.

Fear the Boom and Bust

A super rap video about the famous economists John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich A. Hayek:



Or click here.

It is amusing that the video has Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in the drawer of the hotel bedside stand where one usually finds a Gideon Bible. The video does not mention any of Hayek's writings, but a good place to start is The Road to Serfdom. It's a good read.

Interestingly, Keynes never won the Nobel prize for economics. Hayek won it in 1974.

Here's a blog post about the making of the video: The Story Behind the Hayek-Keynes Rap Video.

UPDATE 2/18/10: The Hayek-Keynes rap video has been viewed more than 777,000 times on YouTube. Related items: 1) Read the lyrics, download the song and find links to more info on Keynes and Hayek. 2) Instapundit interviews economist Russ Roberts, who created the video. 3) The Road to Serfdom is selling briskly.

UPDATE 2/21/10: This was so good, that I put it on my work blog, too: Keynes vs. Hayek - The Rap Version.

The Oldest College Building

Painter Hall at Middlebury College...

...is the "oldest extant college building in Vermont":

It was built in 1800 and Froze to Death.

1800 and Froze to Death

We sometimes think we have strange weather now, but it is nothing compared to 1816, also known as 1800 and Froze to Death and the Year Without Summer.

There were widespread winter conditions for several days in June across New England. Cabot, Vermont, reported a foot of snow. Cold waves returned in July and August. Most of Vermont suffered killing frosts in every month of the year, devastating crops. The total corn crop for New England was estimated to be 10% of normal. In a time when transportation options were limited, this led to widespread famine.

Abnormally cold weather was also reported in Europe, China and India—basically everywhere that humans were keeping records at the time.

The cause is thought to have been a series of volcanic eruptions beginning in 1812 and culminating with the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815. It may also be relevant that the cold weather occurred during a period of low sunspot activity known as the Dalton Minimum.

For more information check out the excellent articles on The Weather Doctor and Wikipedia.

As mentioned in earlier posts, I have lately been enjoying books by C.A. Stephens with Pager. In 1908 C.A. Stephens wrote "1800 and Froze to Death" but, alas, this story is not in either of the books that we purchased for Pager.

Winter!

Our backyard after the big storm last weekend:

Burlington had the largest ever recorded snowfall for a single storm, with over 32" of snow. We had somewhat less here in Jeffersonville, and it was light, fluffy snow so it settled quickly. It has snowed a little more almost every day for the past week, but still mostly light, fluffy stuff. We presently have about 16" on the ground, and it's -4 F this morning.

Secrets of Staying Married

From Woman's Day magazine.

Uh, no, in case you are wondering, I'm not a regular reader of Woman's Day magazine. I found this from reading Instapundit, who blogs about a wide variety of topics (as does his wife).

A Beautiful Mind

The award-winning movie A Beautiful Mind is about the life of Dr. John Nash, a mathematician who won the 1994 Nobel prize in economics for his work in game theory. The movie is about Dr. Nash's struggle with mental illness (paranoid schizophrenia). It is also a love story between Dr. Nash and his wife Alicia.

It's a wonderful movie, very moving. I recommend it. But do not think that it is all literally true. Differences between the movie and reality are discussed here. For example, the movie highlights the love between Dr. Nash and his wife as the one steady thing in his life, neglecting to mention that they were divorced from 1963 to 2001, when they remarried.

While the movie leaves out some important facts, such as the divorce, it invents others. For example, the two most moving scenes in the movie—the pen ceremony tradition at Princeton and Dr. Nash's speech at the Nobel prize ceremony—are both fictitious, completely fabricated by Hollywood (see this link).

Dr. Nash won the Nobel prize in 1994 for work done in 1950-1953, before he was married to Alicia in 1957, before the onset of his schizophrenia in 1959 (later in life than depicted in the movie), and even before the Nobel prize in economics was established in 1968. Dr. Nash shared the Nobel prize with Dr. John Harsanyi and Dr. Reinhard Selten, who did work in the 1960s that built on Dr. Nash's earlier work. Click here for a good, brief discussion of their various works that led to the prize.

The Nobel Prize web site is a wonderful source of information about Nobel Prize winners. For Dr. Nash they have the following resources:

Autobiography
Prize Seminar (good discussion of the math)
2004 Interview (discusses the movie, among other things)
Photo Gallery
Other Resources

The autobiography is fascinating. A piece of trivia from it: he had a choice of attending graduate school at either Harvard or Princeton. He chose Princeton because "the Princeton fellowship was somewhat more generous since I had not actually won the Putnam competition." (Several top scorers in the Putnam competition win a monetary prize, but only one winner is awarded a scholarship for graduate studies at Harvard, the alma mater of William Lowell Putnam.)

UPDATE 9/26/10: I found this cartoon about Nash and Feynman amusing (source):

It's funnier if you've watched the movie A Beautiful Mind and if you know a little about Richard Feynman.

First Molecular Transistor

This is cool: First Functional Molecular Transistor Comes Alive. It uses a benzene molecule.