Next Week in The Negev

Not much to talk about this week--we've been doing the usual morning Belmonte and afternoon mentoring labs. Except Monday, because we had no good lab access and we couldn't use the TEM. So we just played around with dry ice and liquid nitrogen and eggs in HCl. Water: denser than oil; ethanol: less dense. But miscible in all ratios, which means that there is some ratio of water-to-ethanol that allows non-polar oil bubbles to simply hover in the middle. Then when some transition metal ions are injected into the bubbles (i.e.: injecting water into oil), the now-green bubbles sink to the bottom of the beaker. Finally, though, they pop and the green diffuses and the oil rises to the middle again.

And next year in Jerusalem.

Photos from Legacy Keshet 2006

Here are the links to six albums containing photos to which I believe I have a right. The first five are mine, the sixth is the Legacy blog. Everyone else on the trip has photos as well, but I'll only share those in certain cases.

• Legacy א, June 25 - July 4: Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, Old City, Hebrew U, Tzfat, Mayan Baruch, Mapal Devora




• Legacy ב, July 4 - July 16: Gamla, Rosh HaNikrah, Haifa, Atlit, Har Herzl, Hebrew U, Sdeh Boker hike, Kiryat Gat, Mayor's office
  
• Legacy ג, July 18 - July 25: Hebrew U, Israel Museum, Yad VaShem, Weizmann Institute, Machtesh Ramon, Zin desert




• Legacy ד, July 25 - August 1: Zin desert, Ein Avdat, Eilat water, Eilat desert, Masada, Ein Gedi, Hebrew U




• Legacy ה, August 3 - August 7 (+24): Old City, Hebrew U, Kardo marketplace, banquet dinner, Ben-Gurion Airport, Hartsfield-Jackson Airport (+Warren Dunes, MI)




• http://lhiys.typepad.com/ -- all along the left side are the albums
  
  dsc00291.html
  dsc00292.html
  p1010082.html
  p1010083.html
  p1010046.html
  p1010094.html --Rosh haNikrah, not somewhere we can go now
  _mg_7968_060714.html
  _mg_7998_060714.html
  all sorts of Gideon Klionsky photos--this line was inserted for search purposes

Ten days late

They keep asking to make sure everyone is OK with the new "situation" in Israel. I think it's doing more harm than good. It's the same issue we uncovered in Dom Casmurro. Every time the guy tells you he's telling the truth, you become incrementally less sure that he's a reliable narrator until by the end you have no idea what to believe. So our morning physics stuff was cut short today to have an hourlong discussion that can't have helped relieve the "stress" in the group, which was the reason for the discussion in the first place.

Maybe I'm taking this a little far because on a personal level, I'm not worried at all. We're in Jerusalem, and next week we're going to the Negev for a few days and then down to Eilat. But on the other hand, nothing was ever supposed to hit Tzfat or Haifa, and until last week those were also among the safest cities in Israel. But on the first hand, I realize that there are some kids in the group and also some parents who are much more worried than I or mine, and I'd rather spend some group time being able to clarify the current situation than having the worried people worry themselves to death.

This weekend was quite an experience. Friday morning we went to Hazon Yeshaya (http://hazonyeshaya.org) where we did a few hours volunteering putting together bags of food.

Shabbos we spent in Yerucham. I won't go into the creation of or the concept behind these Negev development towns (intended to settle the desert and other sparsely-populated regions of Israel) because you can get at least a little of that on wikipedia or google. Our first introduction to Shabbos there was with the "shabbos whistle" that hums for about 30 seconds per go a few times about an hour before candle-lighting time. After shul (a slightly confusing adventure that mixed Nusach Ashkenaz and Sephard with a kid reading Pitom Ktoret in its entirety) we headed back for a no-complaints dinner. Then a group of two dozen Bnei Akiva kids, most of whom we'd seen in the shul, came over and we finally got our introduction to Israelis our own age. Splitting up by mentor group (n=3), we rotated around the room talking to two or three at a time, nominally answering the guiding questions but mostly not. Most of them were slightly younger than our group yet somehow looked a few years older. I also finally got my question answered: a decent chunk of those I asked think that the American Hebrew accent is "chamud". Speaking of that, since Dima and Laura both are half-decent conversationally, we pretty muich avoided English during the two hours of this activity. Sleep at 12:30 was very welcome, though some didn't take advantage and talked with them some more in the hallways--really loudly.

We went to another shul for Shabbos morning. It was set up like a Sephardi shul with the bimah in the center, but didn't have the elaborate Torah holder that the shul in Tzfat had. The Torah was nusach Ash., the Haftarah nusach Seph. And in line with neither one, the service ended at...10:30 AM. Absurd. There was a dvar torah afterwards (a practice which should be adopted by all synagogues everywhere, thus allowing those who wish to leave to leave) about the role of chance across the Tanach. I never thought I'd hear about chaos theory in a dvar in Israel, but hey, always expect the unexpected!

For lunch we were broken upo roughtly by Hebrew level, meaning I was with Abolafia and Aaron. We went to Adi's house (she was the most motormouthy of all the Hebrew motormouths we met Friday night) and she had a few friends over whom we also met the day before. It was good food, a perfect setting with the cute 4-year-old brother who was never quiet...all sorts of things I'm horribly used to but don't get any exposure to anymore. We spoke no more than a few sentences of English the entire time we were there, including a discussion of one-year-after-disengagement and the current Hizbullah situation. When we said that every place they'd hit was a place we were, Chayim told us jokingly to get the hell out of his house. (Yes, true: they hit Tzfat, Rosh Pina, Rosh haNikrah, Achziv, the north border, Haifa, Tveriah. But, and from here comes the title of the post, they were ten days after we were there. We think they found a map of the Legacy trip online but somehow got lost between the Gregorian and Julian calendars and were off by ten days.) It was also quite hot in Yerucham.

I'll finish up with a Jewish geography story, though the picture will have to wait. On Sunday we stopped in Kiryat Gat to meet with more Israelis and started off with stupid eight-year-old games to not-really meet the other groups. But then when the organized stuff stopped and after they had said that their youth center was contributed by the Chicago Federation, I asked who know about the Chicago connection. Turns out Ilil (אילאיל) stayed over at the Ceteras house last year. So hi to Ellen from her. I have a picture. But I'm getting kicked off, so good night from the Holy Land.

First week in July

We spent Friday June 30 driving up to the Golan heights. We spent the early afternoon at Tzippori, which was a vital trade spot on the round-the-Mediterranean routes. It was a thriving Roman city and became one of the first melting pots even before the destruction of the Second Temple. Digs have revealed dozens of...mikvahs. Which is strange considering that there are a few in Chicago, a few in New York, a few in Jerusalem. So either everyone went all the time, or the women were afraid to walk around town at night, or, as one person put it, "They were getting it on a lot." Or, and this one makes the most sense, Tzippori was a place with a huge population of Kohanim. Since rules of טמא and טהור were still in play, Kohanim were constantly required to go to the baths.

Tzippori has a famous ancient synagogue with a mosaic that retells several stories from the bible and, interestingly, has a zodiac centered around Apollo in the middle of the floor. Explanation is that after Constantine, paganism wasn't a threat and this was a way of showing that. Still seems kind of shaky because Judaism was never a universal religion. The grander mosaic there, though, is the one of Dionysus and Herakles.

Before we hit Tzfat we stopped for lunch on the southern shores of the Kinneret. Israelis in their natural state: sitting in a circle in lawnchairs in the lake...and smoking.

Science in the Holy Land

Start with these, because I like to kill birds with stones.

• http://brandeis.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2002405&l=6ae39&id=1139280396
• http://brandeis.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2002437&l=ef4b7&id=1139280396

My mentor is named David Eisenberg. He's a pyromaniacal Ukranian living somewhere in Shomron who's doing grad work at Hebrew U. The goal is to find a way to get nanorods to attach to a polymer base in the desired fingerprint pattern to make some better lensing apparati.

We we 20 nanometer cadmium selenide rods with different ligands (polar and non-polar) and different solvents and strengths. They are supposed to align on either the PS or the PMMA part of PS-b-PMMA, 0r polystyrene-block-poly(methyl methacrylate), which looks like this: repeated a whole bunch of times. Each section (the PS is on the left, the PMMA on the right) is 20-25 nanometers wide. Depending on the polarity of the ligands attached to the nanorods, the rods will be attracted either to the hyrdophobic PS or the not-water-hating PMMA. So we have a whole list of variables: concentration, solvent nature, length of time drying, etc.

The solutions dilutions have obviously been the easiest part to master. There's some simple equipment that it would have been nice to have used back at school (such as the 100-1000 µl pipet adjusted with a thumbscrew) but it's not too hard to figure out. My specialty has been cutting the silicon wafer on which the PS-b-PMMA makes the top layer with a diamond knife. My two lab mates have had their turns floating the post-nanorod wafers into hydrofluoric acid and have both failed; I think my turn to fail is tomorrow. There are a lot of places that the procedure can fail and so far we've gotten caught in most of them. Having two or three perfect out of a day of 15 is good, and having only 3 or 4 wafers flip over at some point in the process is also good. One of the 12 we finished yesterday didn't separate from the wafer and sunk in the HF. Another flipped so many times; a third floated on its drop instead of the drop drying on the wafer. And these things are so small that it hurts the back. But it's a fairly good environment (especially after we stole speakers from the lab and played walla, Israel's less-specific version of pandora).

What I just described is the mentoring program. We're in the lab from about 2-6 every afternoon we're here. In the mornings we do the Belmonte program, which (I think) is geared specifically towards pre-college kids. We started with quite boring simple labs (dilute titrations, absorption calibrations) but they're working to make them more up to our level. We did one comparing hookah and cigarette smoke. The only thing to know is that the SO2 levels are higher in hookah smoke. Our explanation is that we used a quick-light charcoal that contained a lot of sulfur. My opinions weren't changed by the lab, but then again my opinions are what the lab was intended to demonstrate. Neither is clean. The only problem is that they have a hard time defining hookah as unclean when they compare it against cigarettes.

More updates. Really needing help on the titles here

I don't think this day-by-day update trick is going to work out at all. That leaves me with a tough job because I want to say everything. For instance, there's the matter of plumbing. As Jonah wrote, "Water is the essence of life. Remember that when in a country whose water supply is controlled by its enemies." In Israel, the toilets have two flushers. Sometimes one is big and the other is small. Sometimes the two are black and white. In extremely fortunate bathrooming events one can find yellow and brown flushers. That's always exciting. Showers are also fun: at the hotel we stayed at for one night in Jerusalem there were three knobs in the shower. I didn't want to waste so much time playing with the three. Suffice it to say that each one could change both the volume and the temperature. It's not that turning the third would turn off the other two. I managed to find some combination that worked but there were series of screams from other rooms. It was quite clear who had managed only the hot and who only the cold.

After a weeklong trip in the North

Purpose: to recap the last week
Hypothesis: it can be done but either I'll a) never leave or b) do a quick job
Materials: computer, internet connection, keyboard, journal, memory, camera
Procedure: recall events of the past week
Data:

Wednesday, June 28
--
We listened to the presentations of the 10 grad students for whom the 30 of us will be working this summer. I ranked my choices and cam out with my first; David Eisenberg (see previous about about his former job, teaching chem on EIE) is working to make nanorods line up in a predicted way in order to create miniscule circuits from the "bottom-up" instead of from the "top down". He wasn't here today [the present today, July 6] so we were doing some more background research.

On this day [time is confusing--I mean the 28th now] we played around with liquid nitrogen and made instant ice cream out of chocolate-flavored cream. We also did some lab playing-around, consisting of melting long pipets and blowing glass into fun little bubbly shapes. I'll keep the real things until they break in transit, but I do have photos.

Off to the Kennedy memorial thing here, which precipitated my not-so-unexpected, "[deleted], there are so many dead Kennedys!" As to the question of why there is a Kennedy memorial in Israel? Well, obviously: after the Mossad killed him, they brought him back here to be buried. We then did a nice BBQ to which I invited Rafi, who couldn't come because he was busy beating Tel Aviv in the championship game. Food overlooking seven nearly-collinear mosques in...some part of Israel near Jerusalem. Then a quick campfire and a story told by Yigal about one of his army buddies. Yigal, by the way, is Yigal Zamir--יגאל זמיר. Change that first syllable a little bit...but he says no one ever really joked with him about his name.

Thursday, June 29
--
Some intro physics labs including a really pointless (it seems) but fun-to-watch experiment. Imagine a meter-long flute with small holes every centimeter or so. The tube is attached to a gas tank so there are a hundred little flames when the gas is turned on and the match struck. Now imagine a speaker placed at the opposite end of the tube. Sound = pressure wave, so pressure in the tube varies according to the pitch. More gas? More flame. Less? Less. Sinuous.

Glossing past the box of rugelach left in the middle of the hallway so that someone would eat the pastries and the continuance of ripe apricots and unripe plums, the rest of the day was spent packing for the trip up through the North. Between packing in the afternoon and packing at night, though, was Michael Oren's speech. Twice in two foreign cities, and from what I recall, the speech wasn't the same as the one he gave at Brandeis in April. This time he went for the "3000 years of Jewish history in 30 minutes" (he was 28 seconds under). Defines Zionism as "responsibility", stating that maybe when Jordan, Syria, (the Palestinians?) take responsibility for their actions they will turn into viable countries. As for Walt/Mearsheimer: "Only a nincompoop would publish something like that." If you need to get him a present by some chance, get him some Israeli rock music.