grolby

Sucks man. Probably good to take a bit of break after GMSR! I know it's been a frustrating year.

grolby

Homeownership excitement today was wondering why it sounded like water was running despite nothing being on. So we checked the basement. Oh, **** - water absolutely spraying down from somewhere, several inches on the floor in parts of the back room and laundry area. Shut off the main supply and investigated. I turned on the lights in the back room,and the switches were dripping wet as were the electrical runs to the lamps themselves. So that was a horrifying moment. Fortunately it was fine, obviously, since I'm typing this and not dead.

Turned out to be a pressure relief valve at the ball valve going out to the back spigot. It was spraying backwards into the basement. No idea why that would let go. But happily it's on the other side of the ball valve from the city supply, so I was able to turn the spigot valve and then restore water to the house, and it is gloriously leak-free. As floods go, it was small and there wasn't much down there of value to be damaged (my bikes are there, but hanging on the wall, and a little water won't hurt them). Pretty much just my wife's treadmill got a little rained on, so we'll take a few days to dry it out and hopefully it will be fine.

So we're okay, but sheesh, what an evening. We've borrowed a wet vac from a friend, and that's pretty much our plan for tonight.

himespau 

My students are apparently getting into fights online because I (and the textbook I use - as well as most biology textbooks) define ionic bonds one way and their chemistry professor (and the textbook he wrote and gives to them for free) defines them another way.

On the one hand, I think it's great that they care that much (I wish I could say they care that much about the subject rather than just about being right), but, on the other hand, I didn't want to spend time on my holiday weekend mediating fights and trying to explain once again (I thought I'd already done a good enough job on multiple occasions in class, but I guess not), that science is messy and done by a bunch of prickly people with massive egos, facts aren't handed down from the heavens in the form of an inerrant textbook (inspired or written by some science deity), and different disciplines can have different meanings for the same words.

I guess that's what happens when you teach 350 mostly pre-med first semester freshmen who were all in the top few % of their class and all think they know more than everyone else because they're used to being the smartest person they know. They're all used to being the biggest fish in ponds not much bigger than mud puddles (those from bigger ponds are at better schools), and they've just been dropped off in the ocean (albeit a small, backwater bay) and have yet to figure out that they're just minnows. Something we all go through at some point (well most of us anyway).

Enthalpic

Ionic bonds have a significant amount of covalent character.

himespau 

As far as I can tell, to a chemist, the important bit of ionic bonds is the complete transfer of an electron, which takes a lot of energy, so it's a high energy bond, but to a molecular biologist, the important bit is the attraction between two oppositely charged ions, which is easily dissolved by water, so it's a low energy bond (stronger than hydrogen bonding, but significantly more dynamic than a covalent bond - which is important in cellular processes, otherwise I would have skipped the whole topic to avoid this). I went over the difference in how fields define it in class how they shouldn't be surprised if I say one thing and their chemistry prof says another, but it's fun to be petty and pick on someone to jump on. Then I get called in to be a referee when things get personal and people start flagging each other. I was a site moderator once for a little-used volleyball forum as it was slowly dying; moderating isn't something I want to do again.

gsteinb

Oh, you don't say? I think bikeforums may be looking.

Grumpy McTrumpy

it happens at all levels. Don't take life too seriously.

gsteinb

hmmm

We all know how hard individuals need to work in order to excel in the sport. In fact, as has been pointed out here numerous times, it takes a lot of effort to just suck at this sport. It can be very frustrating when ones best efforts in a race are hampered by events and actions beyond what they bring to the situation. But of course there's little glory or reward for officiating. There probably isn't even much for promoting. We're all fallible, imperfect, creatures, and mistakes sometimes happen. And sometimes situations are so complex and dynamic it might be hard to make anyone happy at all, and even if there is a way it's often only revealed through hindsight. When the situation involves crashes or compounding crashes I think we all need to understand that it's best to err on the side of caution. Not to forget that in our litigious society it isn't hard to posit a situation where situations grow worse and folks are sued over it.

dz_nuzz

Delegating a 3 minute gap to all but 6 riders seems to be the opposite of "erring on the side of caution".

longe

There's always 'cross!

himespau 

beer hand ups and tutus take your mind off decisions made by officials you don't agree with?

grolby

Costumes aren't how we do cyclocross in the Northeast. It's taken just as seriously as road racing. Except with more heckling, and fewer people feel guilty about drinking beer during the season.

dz_nuzz

Probably the reason why I don't race cross (often). When I am finished with road I want a break from the stress, going hard, and targeted training. I like to decompress with long rides in cool weather with apples and hot chocolate.

revchuck 

That does sound like a plan!

grolby

Yeah, and now that Canton is off the calendar, where's the race where you can unleash the POWAH??

Enthalpic

Just remind them that once you add water and warm to 37C it's not really an ionic bond, it is a electrostatic attraction between two solvated ions. Water is powerful. Point them to ion exchange chromatography literature.

shovelhd

I guess you weren't at Gloucester last year

echappist

oh how i hate using that word. Much prefer using electrostatic interaction as suggested above. If Coulombic interaction per se can describe the interaction well, i don't consider it as a bond. Obviously once you talk about solvation in a polar solvent you have dipole interactions and hydrogen bonding issues as well, but what holds together a salt crystal is not bonding...

on a separate note, what are your policies/takes for authorship in the following situations: for providing the idea to at least some of the research, but not actually conducting the experiment (e.g.what a graduating student suggests bu doesnt actually do), vs conducting the experiment only (say technicians within the lab).

grolby

Heh well okay, there are people wearing costumes. But that's coupled with very hard, very competitive racing. It's a nice mix.

cmh

Cracked a crankarm? Wow. Sounds like something that coil only happen to Doge's kid.

shovelhd

I know that, man. I am going to miss the UCI races this year. Hopefully next year I'll be good enough to work them.

spdntrxi

yeah I guess I can contribute to the broken bike parts thread now... but I'd rather it not be the case.

himespau 

Ooh, I like calling it an electrostatic attraction instead. If only the textbooks we teach out of made that distinction the whole mess would just go way. I try calling it a charge/charge attraction, but they don't listen to me. I will update my slides for next semester to substituted electrostatic attraction for ionic bond and see if that cuts back on the confusion.

As far as authorship goes, I've had lots of issues with that. In my area, all the labs I've been in (I've only had my own for 2 years and no anchor author pubs yet - no start up and only undergrads until I can get my first grant make going slow even though people are breathing down my neck for publications) you pretty much have to do something experimentally to get your name on the author line - most of the time. When I was doing a NMR structure of a protein one grad student who helped me prepare samples and ran the machine for me because I didn't know how to set it up got an authorship and I had to threaten going to an ombudsman with one of my postdoc mentors who I'd left on bad terms with after he tried having someone repeat all the experiments that lead to my figures (even though I'd made a crucial discovery and generated key mutants and sequenced their genomes) because he wanted to remove my name from a paper.

It's tough, in grad school and postdocs, I was sort of the idea man in lab meetings who would suggest new experiments/ways of testing things/ways to frame results for everyone else (and occasionally ran some modelling on my own time to verify what people hypothesized at their request) and I think got an acknowledgement in a paper once and no authorships. That was just kind of my role and I know one post doc mentor (the one who I left acrimoniously from) kept me on longer than either of us had intended specifically because that was my skillset more than my hands. And as a committee member now, I know that's part of my job without expectation of authorship. But that's my specific field which is a lot of straight up running of protein/DNA gels and making mutants and repeating. My wife is big into genomics and she gets a fair number of authorships just for spending half a day analyzing someone's data, and I do know of some fields where looking at a dataset, offering a new way to analyze it and suggesting new algorithms to query the data is considered substantial intellectual contribution and/or data analysis and rewarded with an authorship (and other people for who it isn't). I don't know whether it's a lab specific thing or a field specific thing, but it's a giant pain in the ass to navigate. One paper I was on, we paid a guy to analyze some data for us (he was part of a core facility), but that analysis became important to the paper so he got an authorship too, and other times someone didn't for what I felt was a similar contribution. I'm still trying to feel my way through all that.

mike868y

I think the highlight of GMSR for me was watching one of the CCAP riders finish the road race on Sunday. His dad is one of the guys who got me into riding and I've known the kid since he was 6 or so and his longest ride before the race was only like 30 something miles. That didn't stop him from doing the full 65 mile RR course at GMSR including riding to the top of app gap (with a massive smile on his face). Junior cycling is pretty rad.

echappist

thanks for the explanation. certainly clarifies things a bit.