Out of Spec

Rosalee's Saga, part 1

This summer, I scraped and saved and worked very hard in order to be able to purchase a car. I saved all of my spring paychecks, babysat like crazy, worked for my dad at every available opportunity. I had a bonus on my side to purchasing a car. My oldest sister works at a car dealership. I only had one place to look! This made the car search much easier. I went through a process to purchase a car that they call the "wholesale sheet."

The wholesale sheet is the clearance rack for the car dealership. The place where my sister Janet works sells mostly new cars, and they take older cars on trade-in. Sometimes they can sell these older cars to other customers, but this doesn't always happen. Every Thursday the dealership produces what's called a "wholesale sheet," the used cars that have been sitting on the lot for entirely too long. The wholesale sheet, however, is not available to the average consumer. The dealership sells these wholesale cars to other dealerships--local used car outlets. So a used car dealer gets the wholesale sheet, buys cars off of it, and then mark it up the standard amount. Used car lots resell these "wholesale" cars for slightly below the Kelley Blue Book value, the average consumer thinks he's getting a good deal, and the used car lot makes out like a bandit. I basically skipped the middle man. When people ask me how much I paid for it, then hear it broke town, they aren't surprised because I got the car for quite a low cost. But then, they don't understand how I purchased it.

For the last weeks of July and the beginning of August, my sister kept her eyes out for a mid-sized car, automatic transmission, and within my price range. We thought we struck gold whenever I bid on (the wholesale sheet is a bidding system--used car dealer against used car dealer--but employees are able to bid, too) a 1997 Kia Sephia with less than 60K miles. I won the car, and I was pretty happy. I finally had a car. My sister was being nice whenever she sent it to the service department to get it checked out--but alas, her niceness, though fortuitous, was the death knell for the Kia. It had a blown head gasket. Back to the drawing board.

The semester was drawing closer. It was the second week of August, and I wanted a car badly. My sister spied a 1997 Ford Contour on the wholesale sheet. How fortuitous, I thought! I learned on a 1998 Ford Contour (practically identical) that was my mother's car. I bid and won. I was ecstatic. The following selection is cut/pasted from my online journal (of the livejournal persuasion), dated August 11:

My 1997 Ford Contour may have 98K miles on it, but its paint (Toreador red) and dark grey interior are in excellent condition. The motor sounds fantastic, and it runs like a dream. It has an April inspection (complete with emissions inspection), power doors, and air bags. The cup holders may be broken [editor's note: cupholders weren't actually broken... I was just an idiot and didn't know how to use them], but the car came equipped with a Pioneer CD player. It rides smoothly and handles cleanly. It even has cruise control.

I loved that car. I named it Rosalee.

She Blinded Me with Science, Part 2

First, let’s summarize the first half of the experiment, just so you know where I’m picking this up from. Neurospora is an orange mold that grows on liquid media. The most important chemical in this ingredient is the sugar, which is sucrose. The mold breaks down sucrose into its two parts, glucose and fructose. The mold eats the glucose first, and then the fructose second. Sucrose, glucose, and fructose are all able to rotate plane-polarized light. Light can be selected that only travels at one specific angle, and when the light passes through a solution containing sucrose, glucose, and/or fructose, the angle changes. Are you with me so far?

The next section of this experiment is some analytical chemistry, and some math. There are two ways to describe how a chemical rotates plane-polarized light. The first number is the specific (or standard) rotation, a number that is used mostly for math purposes. The second number is the observed rotation. The observed rotation is determined by the concentration of the solution. In a more concentrated solution, the observed rotation will be closer in value to the standard rotation. For you people that like to see the math, here’s the equation I work with:

observed rotation = standard rotation x concentration x path length
The observed rotation and standard rotation I have already discussed. The concentration used for this experiment is grams per milliliter (a terrible unit). Path length is in decimeters (another terrible unit). Don’t worry about the path length at all. For my experiment, the path length is one, so it doesn’t affect the equation at all. At all. Really. So don’t worry about it.

The three specific rotations come from a book. One of the chemist’s favorite reference books is called The Merck Index. It has tons upon tons of useful information about nearly any chemical you can think of, and many that would never cross your mind. The Merck Index gives the following values of specific rotation (in degrees): sucrose, +66.5; glucose, +52.7; fructose, -92. The next question you may be asking me is, why is fructose negative? Well, even though I don’t know why, I can explain the difference between the negative and positive numbers. A positive specific rotation means that the solution rotates plane polarized light in a clockwise direction; a negative specific rotation, counterclockwise.

So sucrose has an optical rotation of +66.5. As it gets broken down, it is converted into glucose and fructose. When chemicals are in solution together, their optical rotations sort of “add together.” As sucrose “disappears” and glucose and fructose become the only sugars in solution, the optical rotation of the solution becomes increasingly negative. How do I know this? (+52.7) + (-92) = negative number. Better yet, after the mold breaks down the sucrose, it is eating the glucose. When there’s no glucose at all, the only thing left is fructose, and the optical rotation has to be negative.

In my previous entry, I said that Neurospora eats the glucose first, then switches to fructose. The steak and brussel sprouts analogy? Yeah. So let’s for the sake of this experiment say the steak is positive and the brussel sprouts are negative. As you eat the stake, your plate of food becomes more negative. As you eat the brussel sprouts… you approach zero. The plate is zero. When there’s no food left, the optical rotation is zero. The data I have collected show that the optical rotation becomes increasingly negative, and then returns positive again.

So now there’s a small chance you’re asking, so what do you use to obtain your data? Well, there’s this wonderful instrument called an automatic digital polarimeter. The words “automatic” and “digital” you should know. Polarimeter is new. A polarimeter is the instrument that passes the light through the sample and records the angle change. This instrument is where path length comes into play, but all of the cells (the chambers where you put your solution) are one decimeter long. So path length still doesn’t matter.

So, to summarize the entire experiment. Neurospora breaks down sucrose into glucose and fructose using an enzyme called invertase. It eats the glucose after breaking down the sucrose. As the glucose supply diminishes, the mold switches to the fructose. I know all of these things because of how the optical rotation changes over time.

Change in optical rotation over time! I forgot to explain that. So I prepare my media (recipe appears in my research blog) first. Secondly, I inoculate that media. Inoculate is a fancy term that describes putting some of the mold into the media so the mold can grow. Every 24 hours, I take out some of the media and record its optical rotation. Really simple, huh?

So I apologize for those of you who thought this was too simple, too hard, or too detailed. If there are any questions, please please please, leave a comment, and I’ll explain as best I can. You know what they say. If you have a question, there’s a good chance that someone else has the same question.

~Stephanie

She Blinded Me with Science, Part 1

When I talk about my research, I’m surprised by a few things. 1) How many people actually care to hear about it 2) how many people enjoy trying to understand it 3) the number of people who get severely offended when I explain it simplistically. While people enjoy coming back with the phrase, “I’m not stupid, you know,” what they don’t realize is the fact that I describe my experiment for those people who know absolutely nothing about chemistry. The topic itself is slightly complicated, so I try to make it as comprehensive as possible. The following entry is to describe my experiment in terms that everyone can understand, without having any scientific background whatsoever. Please do not be offended if this is too simplistic. I am merely trying to make it cohesive and accessible to everyone.

Let’s start with the easiest thing to understand. I am studying the organism Neurospora crassa, an orange mold. I’m not going to call it Neurospora for the rest of this explanation, mostly because I don’t feel like writing the italics html, so I’m going to refer to it mostly as just “mold” for the rest of the document. This mold is easy to grow, and it grows quite quickly. It can grow on solid media (called agar) or liquid media. For my experiment, I am growing mold in liquid media. “Media” is just a fancy term for “food,” so it eats and grows in this liquid.

The media that the mold grows on is mostly water and a few other chemicals. The media is mostly inorganic--compounds that don’t have carbon, such as calcium chloride. A more tangible example is probably sodium chloride, or table salt. Salt is inorganic. Sugar (sucrose), on the other hand, is organic. But I’ve gotten off subject. The media is some inorganic compounds, a very small amount of a vitamin (biotin…not that important), and a primary food source. This primary food source is a carbohydrate. Thanks to Dr. Atkins, everyone has an idea about what a carbohydrate is. In Neurospora media, the carbohydrate is sucrose.

So this mold is sitting in water, eating some sugar, some salt, and some vitamins. As the mold eats, it gets bigger, and it depletes the nutrients from its surroundings. The primary food source of Neurospora is the carbohydrate source, the sucrose. Over time, the amount of sucrose gets smaller and smaller because the mold is eating it. My experiment is focusing on the sucrose, and how the mold is using it.

Sucrose is a disaccharide, which means it really consists of two sugars (di-two, saccharide-sugar). You’ve probably heard of these two sugars before, too. They’re called glucose and fructose. Glucose and fructose are chemically bonded together in sucrose. Before the mold can digest the sucrose, it has to break it down first. Sucrose is too big for the mold to eat. Neurospora uses an enzyme (called invertase) to break the bond between the glucose and the fructose. I am working on figuring out how exactly the mold breaks down and eats the sucrose. My current data suggest that the following things happen: 1) Mold breaks down sucrose into glucose and fructose 2) mold eats glucose preferentially 3) once the glucose supply is low, the mold switches to fructose (rather than starving to death). Here’s how I’d explain it. There’s a plate in front of you, and it has steak and brussel sprouts. Now, I’m no vegetarian, so I go for the steak first. After the steak is gone, though, you’re still hungry. Rather than let food go to waste, simply because it’s not your favorite, you eat the brussel sprouts anyway. I think that’s what Neurospora is doing.

How did I arrive at this conclusion, this three-step method for sugar digestion? This is where the science gets kind of tricky. The next part of the experiment, the chemistry part (the other part was biology, really), with a little bit of physics intertwined, might be a little difficult to follow. But maybe not. Try it out.

Light. Amazing thing, isn’t it? Flick a switch, there’s light in your room. The sun gives us light; the moon radiates the sun’s light. Light acts as both a particle and a wave, but don’t worry about the particle part for the sake of this experiment. So, you have a bundle of light waves, and they’re coming towards you. Light waves can travel in all directions, in three hundred and sixty degrees, up and down, left and right, crooked, sideways, and crossways. Light is so special, however, that you can pick one angle, one specific angle, and have light travel at just that one angle. So picture just one light wave, traveling at one specific angle, going only in one direction. I hope I haven’t lost you so far. The physics is the difficult part.

Light waves that travel at one specific angle are called plane polarized, meaning that they travel in a one-dimensional plane. Remember the x-y scale from algebra? Draw a wave going across that, and that’s sort of what it would look like. Certain chemicals have this special property where they can rotate plane-polarized light. Light starts out traveling at, say, zero degrees. Just one plane. This light passes through a chemical, and then, suddenly, the light isn’t traveling at zero degrees anymore. Maybe it’s one degree, or negative one degree. The chemical made the light change angles. Not all chemicals do this. Determining which chemicals do is some advanced organic chemistry, and I refuse to get into that with someone unless a) I can draw pictures and b) they are really, really interested—and most people don’t care that much. Some chemicals make light change angles. Sugars are some of those chemicals.

She Blinded Me with Science, Part 2, will discuss optical rotation—the ability of sugars to rotate plane polarized light. I’m certain that for some of you this pair of entries will be mind numbing, so I won’t be offended if you don’t read them. However, I’m trying to share some chemistry with those of you who are interested. I hope I haven’t made it too simple, and I hope I have described the complicated things well. Part 2 will be posted sometime soon.

~Stephanie

I heart Eighties Music

I just thought I'd insert a little blurb about the greatest musical decade ever, the eighties. Sure you may laugh at me, and feel free to disagree with me, but songs like these have staying power. Of course many of the good songs from the eighties were one-hit wonders, but that just makes it all the more alluring, and all the less gulity whenever you burn the songs on CD.

So whenever I got my car (gee, I never even thought about writing an entry about my car...), it had a CD player in it. I was so overjoyed, and I knew that I needed CDs to keep in my car, so the first thing I did was burn some. The most important one of all was the 80s mix CD, to which I am currently listening (since it has no car in which to live... more on that later). It has songs by classic eighties one-hit-wonders such as Nena (99 Luft Baloons), Aha (Take On Me), and Men Without Hats (Safety Dance). Currently filtering through my crappy laptop speakers is Kiss by Prince.

My favorite eighties song of all time is also a one-hit-wonder, Come On Eileen by Dexy's Midnight Runners, and, according to VH1, is in the top five of best one-hit-wonder songs of all time. I Irish jig from beginning to end of this lovely song, and every time I hear it it puts a smile to my face. My love for Celtic music and Flogging Molly is probably also strongly rooted in this fantastic eighties tune.

Even though I was only a kid during the eighties, not even old enough to be considered a pre-teen, the music is some of the best out there. The CD has just switched tracks to 867-5309 (Jenny). It's so popular that there are at least three eighties cover bands local to my area. One band I go to see semiregularly--Velveeta. They do cheesy eighties. Hairforce One does eighties hair metal. Lastly, Atomic Blonde does a lot of eighties chick rock. I love these bands, because they always play songs that I can sing along with. Therein is true happiness--singing along with a song.

While The Matrix (song switch... Everybody Wang Chung tonight!) at Station Square in Pittsburgh may be a low-grade, fairly trashy dance club with rarely a gentleman, I give them props for catering to my needs. The Matrix has four dance rooms--Salsa, Techno, Hip Hop (blah), and Eighties. There's nothing more refreshing than watching late-twenties guys do the Thriller dance, even if they're still losers. This is my favorite room of the entire club by far, because people aren't sleezy, the music isn't sucky, and the floor isn't crowded. And I can sing along with 9 out of 10 songs that they play. It's just fantastic, really.

I was born in the eighties, therefore I am a child of the eighties. Every time I hear an eighties song on the radio, I turn it up really loud (Owner of a lonely heart). Sure, this may classify me in the "loser" category, but I will walk like an Egyptian with the best of them!

~Stephanie

Trying to Graduate (no time to blog)

It's interesting when I talk to people lately, because sometimes whenever they ask me what I have to do on any given day, I tell them that I'm "trying to graduate on time." While I haven't blogged extensively since the first of the month, I would like to justify this lack of blogation through my extensive work on my Senior Thesis project, aka two of the last thirteen credits that decides whether or not I graduate in the spring.

As you may have noticed, there's a link on the left to "my senior research thesis." I decided to do my research work in blog form, because the format really lends itself well to a sort of research notebook. While I don't have time to describe it in depth, I think I may post a new entry with some details in laymen's terms regarding what's going on with it, so that people may be interested in learning more about it.

Anything to teach people about science!
~Stephanie

My Space?

So I had a friend invite me to this weird website, www.myspace.com, and I haven't exactly figured it out yet. It's like yahoo personals meets livejournal meets two or three other strange websites, blend until smooth, and bake at 350 degrees for thirty minutes (cool before serving). You invite your friends, and your friends invite their friends, and then you can find friends, and I just don't even know what else.

So I got a phone call at 12:30 AM, which was last night after I had gone to bed, from a friend just to call and chat. And then he tells me that I'm getting an invitation to this website. I'm like okay, so what. I like meeting new people, so I figured, sure. I actually got out of bed, turned my computer back on, and went to this website to check it out. I cannot even fathom all of the things that are on it! This is the most extensive people-meeting-people website ever created.

Not only can you search for "single males" aged "18-24" who are looking for "friendships" in My Space's friends search section, you can find out about all of the jazz bands that play within a hundred miles of your zip code, write a blog for all of your friends to see, comment on other people's blogs, pictures, webpages, everything... There's instant messaging, groups, message boards, bulletin boards... it's entirely ungainly.

So rather than subscribe to four or five different websites for all of your internet needs, just join My Space. Add me as a friend, if you want. It may be mindless, but at least it's fun.

~Stephanie

True Love

When true love strikes you, sometimes you just know it. You think about him almost constantly. You have tons of pictures of him. You want to show him off to all of your friends. There's that special feeling when he sits next to you. He's always happy to see you. He's such an important part of your life that you think about him every day. Here's a picture of the love of my life.

This is Simon. He's a four year-old black lab/golden retriever mix. He is the most wonderful, devoted guy, and he's very special to me. My life with Simon began quite spontaneously. The year is 2001. My brother, his wife, and their dog moved out of town, so I didn't have Murphy (my brother's lab mix) to go visit. My dad was adamant against pets for some odd reason. When my brother wanted a dog, Dad said "no," but he brought Murphy home anyway. When Dad saw how cute she was, though, my dad finally consented. When my sister wanted a cat, dad said "no," but she brought Max home anyway. My dad is alergic to cats, so Max had to go away. Mike and Murphy had moved out when Mike and his wife got a place together. My parents missed Murphy like crazy. Theresa moved out to be with her husband. So with just my parents and I, the place was kind of empty.

I was a senior in high school, living alone with my parents, becaues all of my siblings had finally moved out. February of my senior year, my sister-in-law, Tina, was working as a secretary at a local doctor's office. A woman in her office mentioned her golden retriever having a puppy. The woman's husband and children wanted rid of the puppy, because they had two full-grown dogs already. Tina told me about it, and I was anxious. One cold February day, my parents and I hopped in the car and drove out to the woman's house. It was supposed to be "just to look." Well, one look at the puppy, and we couldn't resist. He came home with us that night.

This was a Friday evening. I stayed awake for awhile, thinking and thinking about what to name the cute little guy. I wanted to name him "Kismet," but everyone hated that but me. After tossing around a few names, I suggested "Otis." That went over pretty well, and we all went to bed. I, however, was not settled on this name. I went to a forensics (speech league) meet the next day, and was gone from 5:00 AM until ten or eleven that night. Throughout the course of the day, I thought and thought about what to name him. Finally, I decided on Simon. When I got back from the speech league meet, my family had been calling him Otis all day! I didn't know what to do. Finally, I talked them all out of that horrible name, and he's been Simon ever since.

I trained Simon all myself. Since I was young while my brother was training his dog, I remembered a lot of the things he did to house-train Murphy. Simon's training went quite smoothly. He had a few annoying habits, however, which took awhile for us to get rid of. His favorite things were eating tissues and socks. These are puppy things, of course, but they had to be enforced as wrong behavior early on. We also occasionally caught him in the act of eating other things he wasn't supposed to.

One famous story about Simon's notorious cast-iron stomach occurred during these formative puppy years. My boyfriend at the time (now ex) and I were watching Animal Planet in my living room--a show called "Emergency Vets." A black lab puppy was having emergency surgery to remove blockage in its stomach. The doctor pulled out a sock. Looking over at Simon, sure enough, a sock was sticking out of his mouth. I knew this was a habit I had to break him of early on. Luckily, he only eats food (for the most part) anymore... and the occasional tissue, for some inexplicable reason. He only rarely eats food off of the table, and he's eaten a few things if they've been left on the very edge where they're just too tempting for him to pass up.

My dog is so well-behaved. My parents don't want me to take him with me when I move out. They keep rationalizing it. "Oh, you'll be going to graduate school. You'll be too busy for a pet. By the time you get through with graduate school, Simon will be too old to move" et cetera et cetera. They don't like the idea of me bringing Simon to grad school with me. He's such a good dog, though. He's very intelligent as well. His favorite words include walk, leash, ride, and treat. He also knows the words brush and bath. I think he may know field and car, but I'm not certain. Sometimes, if he feels like it, he can identify people. "Where's Steph?" my mom will say, and Simon will come trotting to me. One of the greatest moments was when my family and I were sitting in my living room. Simon was bugging my mother, so she said to him, "You know Simon, if you want your ball, it's back the hallway." Simon walked away, then reappeared moments later holding his ball. My cousin started laughing and couldn't stop. I just shrugged. "That's my dog."

It's obvious that I love my dog, too. I ask about him every time I call home. Just stepping into my room people realize what he means to me. I have a bunch of photos. A few of my nephews, one of my parents, some friends photos... and seven pictures of my dog. Sometimes I don't know what I would do without him. I'll be heartbroken if my parents won't let me take him with me.

Well, I wrote my introductory paragraph of this blog entry to make you think I was talking about a human guy. While I haven't found that guy that I can love as much as my dog, you had better believe that he ought to love my dog before he tries to love me. I will probably have a dog all of the years of my life after this one, but Simon will always be my first true love... of the canine persuasion.