Letters Home: Not His Brother's Keeper

This letter is the first that he wrote to just my grandmother (note the salutation). I'm not quite sure of the significance of that if any, other than to signifiy that the contents were personal and probably shouldn't be conveyed to his younger siblings, especially his younger brother, R.

Apparently, some sort of breakup occurred and his brother's girlfriend wrote to him, asking him something or explaining something to him. The identities of both "K" and "that girl in Milwaukee" are unknown to me. None of them ever married each other or became a couple.

September 12, 1952
Nellingen Casern

Dear Mom,

I guess I owe you about 2 letters so I will get busy and answer tonight. It's been misting and raining for the last week.
Did my drivers licences come yet?
By the way, how much money have I got in the bank now?  Another check should be coming. I still haven't got the cookies from M. [1]

I don't suppose Jr. will be going back to Madison to work. R. should be working down there.

I got a letter from K. the other day. I don't know why she wrote to me. What happened is between her and R. I don't know whether I will answer her letter or not.

I've been writing to that girl in Milwaukee. She would like to go with me when I get back, that is if I want to.  I'm sending some more pictures.

I guess there’s not much to write about this time as we aren't doing anything.

Love,
V.

________
[1]  M is his older sister.

Whiffing Aromaticity

Aromatic chemistry.  The very name suggests something sweet and pleasant smelling. I still recall the distinct aromas of purified benzene, toluene, xylene(s), anisole, phenol, benzaldehyde, benzylchloride, aniline, styrene, and naphthalene. It's been over a decade since I whiffed any of those but I'm certain I could score 100% on a blindfolded aroma test for all of them.

Those names are fascinating--despite the stylized suffixes "ene" and "ol".  Many are old words derived from older languages like Greek, Persian, Arabic and those of other ancient trading cultures.  The root words were probably once familiar to everyday people in those cultures, much like the ancient substance called myrrh.  If there were an aromatic hydrocarbon derived from myrrh, I'm certain that chemists would have called it myrrhene.

Few of the aromatics smell bad.  But then again, I've always thought the smell of gasoline was rather pleasant. But some of them smell better than others, especially benzaldehyde (which smells like almond extract) and anisole (which smells like licorice). Not so with the saturated straight-chain hydrocarbons: methane, ethane, propane, butane, pentane, hexane, etc. The odors of those are much fainter.

Aromaticity has a whole nother meaning in chemistry, but that will have to wait for another time.

Henry Louis Le Chatelier

Henry Louis Le Chatelier (1850-1936) proposed a general principle in chemistry called Le Chatelier's Principle. The concept is easy to grasp because it is so intuitive:

If a chemical system at equilibrium experiences a change in concentration, temperature, volume, or pressure, then the equilibrium shifts to counteract the imposed change and a new equilibrium is established.

 The principle has even broader implications, embodying the pendulum shifts in culture and politics:

Any change in status quo prompts an opposing reaction in the responding system.

Appartement: A New Word For Our Times

appartement.
noun: a real or imagined psychological discomfort caused by the expectation or anticipation of future political or socio-political events.  The term originated with specific reference to November 2010 elections but may also relate to future events (see further below under Extended Meanings).

Etymology
Appartement derives from the French word for apartment, and is preferably given a French pronunciation. The cognate English word apartment conveys the notion of "a set of private rooms in a building entirely of these".  The new word is derived from an older notion of separateness which ultimately manifests as solitary living. A paradox of appartement philosophy is an anti-communal spirit (preferring to abide alone) and this feature distinguishes adherents of appartement philosophy from earlier anti-establishment movements, for example, the hippies.

Extended Meanings
(1) Appartement philosophy began in the early 21st century as an earnest rebellion against what adherents viewed as increasingly materialist, amoral trends within United States social culture. Initially identified with a politically left-leaning philosophy, the appartement movement championed greener living, despite the need for more and more additional single person dwellings.  Appartement philosophy championed cultural diversity, indeed to the point of regarding everything and everybody as equal (but separate).  Adherents of appartement, notably white, young and affluent, actively despised cohabitation with opposite and even same sexed partners, especially if children instead of pets were involved, preferring the solitary "apart" lifestyle.

(2)  Appartement describes the existential angst of living alone in a big city surrounded by relative well being, yet having the feeling that that relative well being may unexpectedly vanish.  As a societal phenomenon, appartement sentiment first emerged as embodying independence and upward financial mobility, particularly amongst youths reaching or exceeding college age.  Appartement philosophy was best exemplified in the halcyon days of condominium speculation in the first decade of the 21st century. 

(3) Appartement sentiment describes the feeling of willful detachment that adherents may feel when contemplating great swaths of fly-over-country where people live in actual family-based units which they consider archaic.

After the November 2010 elections, fictional and real portrayals in novels, films, and television began depicting appartement adherents with growing derision and scorn.  Adherents of appartement began to be seen as an isolated phenomenon.  Paradoxically, as world events incurred to unify the United States, the appartement movement smoothly blended into the fabric of greater American society.

[Added: appartement is exacerbated by modern social networking. To some degree, people "network" at the expense of forming older, more traditional social networks such as neighborhoods]

50 Years Of MyTunes: 1966

Ann Althouse and I agree that 1966 was the best year on record for pop music. Yay! Link

My truncated list for the best of '66:

Rain ~ The Beatles
For What It's Worth ~ The Buffalo Springfield
Eight Miles High ~ The Byrds
Psychotic Reaction ~ Count Five
Good Lovin' ~ Young Rascals
Hey Joe ~ The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Reach Out, I'll Be There ~ The Four Tops
Gimme Some Lovin' ~ The Spencer Davis Group
Ain't Too Proud To Beg ~ The Temptations
Paint It Black ~ The Rolling Stones
You Can't Hurry Love ~ The Supremes
Wild Thing ~ The Troggs
When A Man Loves A Woman ~ Percy Sledge
Summer In The City ~ The Lovin' Spoonful
Sunshine Superman ~ Donovan
Shapes Of Things ~ The Yardbirds

Should there even be a vote?

Tipping Points and Change

Worthwhile change always requires sustained effort. Getting from point A to point B is an uphill slog and has a tipping point--the point where just enough energy and will power is expended to get to point B. The tipping point comes late along the uphill pathway. To illustrate:

Tipping points are important because measured in effort they represent the maximal effort required to get to point B. From the the tipping point it's but a short distance to B, the goal. For example, I don’t decide to lose weight, join a gym and credibly say I’ve changed (psychologically perhaps, but not physically) until I reach that tipping point which is well along towards the goal. Understanding the factors involved in the tipping point could, in theory, lower the barrier to such a change.

Downhill change also has a tipping point, but it lies closer to the starting point A:

Downhill change is "easy" in the sense that not much effort is required to reach the tipping point: gravity, age, chaos and disorder bring us to a point B which is lower than where we started from at point A. In this scheme, "effort" is not negative, but rather represents what it would take to climb backwards from point B to point A. A lifetime of cascading tipping points can ratchet down to a dire circumstance.  Death and decay are the ultimate energetic low points. The only way back out is a sustained uphill effort.

The Hippies: By Hunter S. Thompson

As a youth I found this inspiring:

The British historian Arnold Toynbee, at the age of 78, toured San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district and wrote his impressions for the London Observer. "The leaders of the Establishment," he said, "will be making the mistake of their lives if they discount and ignore the revolt of the hippies and many of the hippies' non hippie contemporaries on the grounds that these are either disgraceful wastrels or traitors, or else just silly kids who are sowing their wild oats."

Toynbee never really endorsed the hippies; he explained his affinity in the longer focus of history. If the human race is to survive, he said, the ethical, moral, and social habits of the world must change: The emphasis must switch from nationalism to mankind. And Toynbee saw in the hippies a hopeful resurgence of the basic humanitarian values that were beginning to seem to him and other long-range thinkers like a tragically lost cause in the war-poisoned atmosphere of the 1960's. He was not quite sure what the hippies really stood for, but since they were against the same things he was against (war, violence, and dehumanized profiteering), he was naturally on their side, and vice versa.

--Hunter S. Thompson, The Hippies (1968)

Now I wonder what I was thinking then.

The Hippies: By Hunter S. Thompson

My parents bought us a set of Collier's Encyclopedia when we were kids.  They may have been conned into it by a door-to-door salesman.  If so, I'm glad they were. I can remember poring through those volumes as a kid, much like I do now with Wikipedia, just randomly looking stuff up.

The Collier's Encyclopedia came with a supplementary annual Yearbook and we got that too, well into the early 1970's. The Yearbooks had feature articles covering the year's previous events. Two articles from those books stand out in my memory: The first was a black and white photograph of Jimi Hendrix (which I had never seen before nor have seen since) in the 1971 (covering the year 1970) volume.  The second was an article from the 1968 volume written by none other than Hunter S. Thompson, covering the Haight-Ashbury scene of that infamous Summer Of Love the previous year.  Now Hunter Thompson ended up doing do some pretty weird things later on but to me, as a kid, he wrote and sounded like everybody else who wrote for an Encyclopedia in 1968:

The best year to be a hippie was 1965, but then there was not much to write about, because not much was happening in public and most of what was happening in private was illegal. The real year of the hippie was 1966, despite the lack of publicity, which in 1967 gave way to a nationwide avalanche in Look, Life, Time, Newsweek, the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Saturday Evening Post, and even the Aspen Illustrated News, which did a special issue on hippies in August of 1967 and made a record sale of all but 6 copies of a 3,500-copy press run. But 1967 was not really a good year to be a hippie. It was a good year for salesmen and exhibitionists who called themselves hippies and gave colorful interviews for the benefit of the mass media, but serious hippies, with nothing to sell, found that they had little to gain and a lot to lose by becoming public figures. Many were harassed and arrested for no other reason than their sudden identification with a so-called cult of sex and drugs. The publicity rumble, which seemed like a joke at first, turned into a menacing landslide. So quite a few people who might have been called the original hippies in 1965 had dropped out of sight by the time hippies became a national fad in 1967.

You can read Thompson's whole essay here (scroll down about a third of the way).

Chemistry Is Like Sex: Coupling Illustrated

G.N. Lewis (I wrote about him back here) was from Berkeley and thus a bit more liberal when defining acids and bases: He gave more general definitions of them than Brønsted and Lowry did. And while more open-minded, Lewis was a bit of a chauvinist when he argued that a base's precious electrons helped "complete the octet" of an acid when they coupled.

Consider the coupling of a simple base, ammonia, with a simple Lewis acid, borane. If you're a jaded chemist who has "seen it all" you might consider just skipping to this link dealing with borane and ammonia making borazane as a hydrogen fuel energy source.

We already "know" what ammonia looks like here--but what about borane?  I wrote a bit about boron the element back here.  Turns out that the word "boron" is etymologically linked to the Arabic tongue as well, via the word borax.

Borane, BH₃, is a natural fit for ammonia's lone pair.  Consider its structure:

BH₃ looks a bit like NH₃ but completely lacks a lone pair.  BH₃ has only six surrounding electrons instead of eight and so is electronically unfulfilled. In a sense, it has a big hole in its middle. In the absence of an available lone pair, BH₃ readily dimerizes in a head-to-tail fashion with another sister BH₃ molecule to form B₂H₆. Here's an illustration of two BH₃'s getting it on together:

When NH₃ and BH₃ prepare to bond, a natural question is where should NH₃ put its lone pair?  BH₃ has what's called a "virtual orbital" (there's nothing virtuous about it).  A virtual orbital is just an empty electron orbital. Another name is a LUMO. Empty orbitals have metes and bounds, despite there being nothing there there. Here's a lurid depiction of borane's virtual orbital:

It's a bit hard to see in the depiction above but all three of borane's tripodal hydrogen limbs are squished flat into a planar configuration between the two swollen globes. The red and blue empty lobes are equivalent in the eyes of ammonia's incoming lone pair: Borane's empty orbital can be approached from above or below.  As the ammonia approaches one side of borane, one empty lobe enlarges to accept the lone pair while the other shrinks. Also, borane's little hydrogen limbs fold back away from the incoming lone pair to accommodate the fit.  The final coupling product looks like this:

BH₃, with the help of ammonia's lone pair, now has an octet of electrons. 

What Do Electrons Look Like?

I've begun to wonder what naked electrons might look like in my advanced middle age. They certainly have shapes and symmetrical features. But are they really invisible? X-rays and other electrons can partially locate them and give us complex maps of their densities.  Here's an unusual depiction of benzene, a six-sided ring of carbon atoms with six hydrogen appendices:

Electron density map of benzene

If pondering what electrons in molecular orbitals look like is weird, consider empty electron orbitals, i.e., virtual orbitals.  Something really bothers me about virtual orbitals: they're not there there. It really is like something that's invisible--like the invisible monster in this Jonny Quest link.

The Basics Of How Chemistry Is Like Sex

Anyone who has cleaned with Windex has whiffed ammonia, a substance with a rich and interesting history that includes its very name: link.  Note that ammonia was once called animal alkali. Muslims-in-science scholars should take note of the origin of the word alkali, but should take care not to get the concept of alkaline bases etymologically confused with that other Arabic word meaning base.

Ammonia gas easily condenses into a liquid when compressed (Albert Einstein and his erstwhile student Leó Szilárd once patented a refrigerator with no moving parts that used ammonia instead of freon). If Szilárd's idea had gone anywhere, he may not have bothered to have conceived the atomic bomb.

Ammonia has been variously depicted as NH₃ or better as :NH₃ or better still with its electron "lone pair" on full display, as:

The lobe-like appendage sticking up is called a "lone pair" because there are two electrons in the orbital and because they're not associated with any atom except nitrogen.  Some depictions of ammonia omit the lone pair but here I prefer the "fig leaf is off" depiction.

Ammonia is perpetually in search of an acid to quench its baser instincts. Given a proton like H⁺, ammonia and the proton instantly couple to make ammonium NH₄⁺ in which all four H's become equivalent. In a real sense, the incoming acid polarizes the other three H's, sucking electrons away from them, making them all more acidic.

Acerbic Wet

The Danes and the Brits pioneered graphic depictions of simple chemical reactivity. Brønsted and Lowry independently shocked early 20th century chemists with their notions of spontaneous self-ionization of water:

Brønsted-Lowry theory explains how even the purest distilled water conducts electricity (which requires something charged). In their scheme, one water acts like a base by accepting a proton, while the other one acts like an acid, donating a proton. The slight but measurable extent of such H-swapping is real enough--a normal glass of water has a measurable concentration of H₃O⁺ of about 10^-7 units or a pH of 7 (pH is like a Richter scale). An equal & countervailing amount of hydroxide, OH^- neutralizes the acid.

Now consider adding anything to that glass of water which increases the amount of H₃O⁺ (but not OH^-).  Such a thing which donates an H⁺ to a neutral water molecule is called an acid in English.  The Germans call them Säure, which is related to our word sour. Svante Arrhenius (the august savant who also thought up AGW), came up with the idea first.

The Red Baron (2010)

What great drama, The Red Baron is.

See it!

Discuss!

Urban Reclamation: Help Wanted-None

click to enlarge

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Cash Cab Fridays

The fall school semester started yesterday and I resumed what we call Cash Cab Friday today.  I drive my two kids to the local middle school along with a neighbor kid in the mornings.  The drive is short--10 minutes tops-- but just long enough to pick their little brains. 

I ask them questions as a group and they have to formulate the answer together just like on the TV show.  Each correct answer is worth a quarter which I pay out in cash. Last year I tried to formulate themes for the inquisitions like math, history, geography, but usually tilted towards things that I think they should know.  I also try to challenge them too with unusual practical things that strike me as interesting.  Believe me, I learn a lot too just formulating the questions in a straight forward way.

Today's questions included:

What are a skunk's two natural means of defense?

Correct answer is of course the odor gland but also the distinct white stripe: no other mammal has this and baby skunks have them at birth.  The stripe is a visual defense cue "hey, leave me alone I'm a skunk." A challenge question was "what is the skunk's natural predator? " The answer is large birds of prey that  mostly lack a sense of smell.

Another question was: "what's the last day of summer called?"  Fall equinox. "What is the significance of the fall equinox?" The answer I was looking for of course was the day on which day and night are equal.  They missed that one. That cued me into a little mini lesson of equinoxes, and solstices. 

Another question was: "name three common household appliances that heat water".  Water heater, stove, microwave were all accepted as answers. Dishwasher was not because it uses household hot water and heats inside to dry.

"Name three common household appliances which heat air." Answers accepted were clothes dryer, dishwasher, hairdryer.

I'm also trying to get them to distinguish between appliances that use electricity and those which use natural gas.

It turns out that I have two budding math geniuses along for the ride.  The neighbor boy, in 7th grade, is skipping 7th grade math and going to 8th grade math. My daughter, just starting 6th grade, pegged the standardized math test last year and so we're hoping she continues her interest.

The Essence of Distillation

Distillation is an ancient art, bequeathed to the Western world by medieval alchemy. If someone were serious about Muslim contributions to science, I suggest starting with the alchemists.

I once wrote the blogger vbspurs a mini-lesson on coffee making using a stovetop espresso maker:

Yes. BTW, the different aesthetic designs of those things actually hide the true inner beauty: upwards steam extraction of oils and essences, a short retort, and then a gentle collection cup, shielded from direct heat. We've own[ed] several designs, but they're really all the same. link

Many substances won't distill and the technique is really only useful for liquids in a chemistry lab or at an oil refinery. I found a totally cool description of how petroleum distillation works here.

The essence of an idea can be distilled from crude thought too. All it takes is a little focused energy--just enough to set it free from context--and a little care in gathering and enjoying it.

Letters Home: "I just got off K.P. What a day for it, on my birthday."

My father quickly settled into the new barracks in Germany. On his birthday he wrote home asking for news. He also described sending gifts home, an adventure, a surprise meeting of an old acquaintance, and a little souvenir that I now have.

August 25, 1952
Nellingen Casern


Dear Mom and Dad and all,


I just got off K.P. What a day for it, on my birthday.

NELLINGEN CASERN is the name of the camp. It's 12 1/2 miles to Stuttgart. Yvonne N. is the girl I got a letter from, Ilene W's cousin. 

What model Ford did R. get? Is the Merc. still running? What did Jr. do with the old '36 Ford pickup? Did R. junk the 'Hot Rod'?

Last Thur. and Fri. about 50 of us drove 2 1/2 ton trucks to another camp near Nurnberg. It's 122 miles from here and it took 2 days to make two trips. One kid wrecked his so they won't let him drive anymore. I think we make another trip tomorrow. 

The second day I was over here I met Marvin W. in the mess hall. He sure was surprised to see me. He's on a track team and has been traveling all over Europe. He said he was going to Finland in Sept. to run. [1]

We saw some pretty country. I've been to town once so far. You can buy anything you want awful cheap. The only catch is it costs a lot to send anything to the States.  It cost one guy $4.80 to send a music box home by airmail. That's more than the music box cost. I bought a stein (or you could call it a beer mug) with a music box in the bottom that plays the 3rd man theme. [2] It's made out of china so it will be hard to send. It looks something like this. [3]

click to enlarge

Payday I will send you a head scarf.  It's got a map of Germany on it hand painted but won't wash out.
I got a letter from M. today too. [4] It took her letter 7 days by 3¢ and yours came in 4 days. How long does it take mine to get there?  You should have gotten two letters from me. One I mailed from France.  I'll send more pictures next letter. 

I can't think of much to say as we don't do too much of anything. 

Send my drivers license over. I will have to have them to get Eucom License's. So far all I got is a permit to drive.   

I might buy a motorcycle in March if I can save $200 from what I don't send home. I should get $50.00 the first. 

This is all for now.
love,
V.

___________________
[1] The 1952 Summer Olympics were in Helsinki.

[2] The theme song from the film The Third Man (1949): link  And here's the Beatles doing the same: link.  The Third Man has the famous scene where Orson Welles says:

You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

I lived in Switzerland for two years and I love Italy so I can relate to that.

[3]  I have that beer stein now.  It looks like this:

It still plays the The Third Man theme. There's a wind-up mechanism with a little lever underneath that turns it on and off when you pick it up and put it down. My mother gave it to me after my father passed away.  There's a little handwritten post-it note inside that my brother discovered the other day when he was visiting and admiring it. The note says "Bruce's". Though it appears to be in my mother's handwriting, I felt like my dad left it in there for me to find after all these years. 

[4] M. is his older sister, who is still living. Two younger sisters and his youngest brother are still alive too.

Deconstructing Karleton Armstrong

Badger Ordnance, target of antiwar aerial bombers in 1969

In the film River's Edge, a former student radical-turned-middle-school-teacher bullies from his pulpit: "We stopped a war, man".   I've been rethinking a nostalgic post I wrote back here last spring about the Sterling Hall bombing in Madison. Not rethinking in the sense of changing my opinion, but rather deepening and wishing to augment what I wrote then. This was prompted by my reading up on the Kent State shootings.

Karleton Armstong, Sterling Hall bomber/ring-leader, has stated that the Kent State shootings were the catalyst which turned him violent later that summer: linkage Fellow bomber David Fine also stated:

Really, after Kent State [in May 1970], I think people's viewpoints really changed. They saw people shot and that sort of upped the ante, or so we thought. That was the real motivating factor.

I dissent from that opinion based on facts:  Kent State occurred in May of 1970, after Armstrong et al. had attempted to bomb Badger Ordnance from a Cessna aircraft on December 31, 1969.  It was that attempted bombing which gave the bunch their name, the New Year's Gang.

Can one argue that the attempted bombing of Badger Ordnance was somehow less violent-that accidental deaths would not have occurred?

It's reasonable that they were thinking that Badger would shut down that New Year's Eve and everybody would be home or out celebrating. But such a place was never empty-empty and someone like a night watchman could have died had their unexploded aerial bomb gone off.  Would Armstrong and Fine have reasoned that such a death was justified? Who knows.

Kent State was a horrific event which needlessly accelerated unrest. But but I'm still not buying Armstrong's motivational reasoning, based on chronological facts.

[added:  My brother reminded me the other day of a story my grandfather passed down through an uncle. My grandfather worked at Badger Ordnance in the 40s and 50s.  At the time there were strict no smoking rules defined according to area (they were handling mostly gunpowder).  Apparently, there was an explosion on site back in the early days, caused by a careless worker who had ignored the rules.  According to urban legend, all they ever found of him were his boots.]

Words about acids, bases, and polarizing forces

The words "acid" and "base" are functional terms, and not labels.  They describe what a substance does, rather than what it is.

~R. von Handler

The quote comes from an undergraduate chemistry textbook.  I assume that von Handler was a German physical chemist, but I've been unable to find anything else about him or his work. Schade.

Von Handler is saying that nominal concepts like acid and base are better understood as the functional concepts acidity and basicity. Some things are better understood by what they do rather than what they are. So to get at what von Handler was trying to say, we just have to think about what acids and bases do and that's easy: they attract opposite polarity and they repel like polarity.  In the natural world acids and bases polarize other molecules using attractive and repulsive forces to hasten change. Back here I wrote:

How nature really works (at a chemical level) is polarization followed by attack followed by depolarization.

Wish I could explain it better because it really is a simple concept.

Wait Wait! Rewind to 1964 Again!

Amazing Journey: The Story of the Who is a wonderful "warts and all" style documentary that came out in 2007. So many "rockumentaries" just rehash the old but this one gives some wonderful insights that I didn't realize:

• offshore pirate radio like Radio Caroline played a huge role in launching the The Who.  State-controlled media, the BBC, actually suppressed things back then (image that).

• Pete Townshend had an epiphany while driving a car and hearing "I Can't Explain" on the radio: he realized: I have a sponsor...I have a patron...this is art!

• By far the best treat was a rare 1964 film of the The Who at the Railway Hotel. Watch it here:

Roger Daltrey was the man!  The Detours/High Numbers were his band at that point in time.  They hadn't written any original material yet and Roger still called the shots more or less (just like Brian Jones did in the Stones at first).  Look at him in 1964.  As my wife remarked, he's the only one of them who could walk around dressed like that right now and still look cool: the sunglasses, the hair, his shirt & white jeans.

I completely agree with her.  The others look like dorks: Entwistle with his vertical striped Kingston Trio shirt; Moon with his horizontal striped shirt looks like a child; Townshend's shirt buttoned up so high it looks like he's ready for church or school.