baroque_mongoose

I haven't said a lot about my studies lately because they did get rather messed about. My mother being ill was obviously stressful (from October we didn't know how long she was going to last, but we knew it wouldn't be too long), and of course I wasn't well myself for most of December; so what happened with this module was that I got off to a terrific start, then didn't do much for quite a while because it was so hard to concentrate, then got back into gear and am now motoring along with it. It's really just as well it's not a maths module this time, as those tend to require much more sustained effort, whereas with this one as long as you get the assignments in on time (and I did have to have one extension in February, when the Mum-related stress was particularly bad) you can do everything else whenever you like.

Being back in gear, however, is very satisfying. I have just finished a short course called "Moons of our Solar System", which you can, if you wish, find here: https://www.open.edu/openlearn/science-maths-technology/moons-our-solar-system/content-section-overview?active-tab=description-tab Most of these short OpenLearn courses have been excellent, but this one has been so far the best of a very fine bunch. I have enjoyed it immensely, and if you have any interest at all in planetary moons, including our own Moon, this one is for you. It's free, it's nominally 24 hours (though it probably won't take you as long as that, even though it's quite video-heavy, unless you delve into all the extra bonus material, of which there is a lot), and you get a badge at the end to show that you've passed it. And it is a whole lot of fun.

Obviously, there is a fair bit about our own Moon; after all, so far it's the only moon in the solar system where we've managed to land anyone. But there's plenty about all the others too. Every major moon in the system is covered, along with several of the more interesting minor ones. (Did you know some asteroids have moons? I didn't; but there it was, a photo of the asteroid Ida and its tiny moon Dactyl.) I knew Europa probably had an ocean of liquid water under its frozen crust, but I didn't realise it's not alone in that respect. A number of other moons of Jupiter and Saturn probably also do. I learnt all about tidal heating, which is the reason many of the outer moons aren't totally frozen; it's probably also what powers the huge amount of vulcanism on Io. (You like active volcanoes? Io is your dream destination. It's covered in them.) I also learnt about cryovulcanism, which happens on worlds where the rock is primarily water ice with an admixture of other ices, and the "magma" is mainly liquid water. I learnt about different types of terrain and how they were probably formed.

And then, of course, there's my favourite moon of all. Titan. I just love Titan, so I already knew a fair bit about it, but I still learnt some new things. Titan is one of Saturn's moons, and the only moon in the solar system with a dense atmosphere (indeed, the atmospheric pressure on Titan is about 1.5 times that on Earth). This atmosphere is about 97% nitrogen, but that other 3% mainly consists of hydrocarbons, predominantly methane and ethane, so you have smog, basically. You can't see the surface of Titan through the atmosphere - it took the Cassini spacecraft and the Huygens probe to do that. Titan is so cold that methane (with a bit of ethane) does exactly what water does on Earth; so there are rivers and lakes on Titan, and it rains, and it's even possible there may be lightning. I mean... that's wild. Not only that, but due to Titan's unique combination of dense atmosphere and low gravity, if you wore a suitably insulated bat-suit you could fly there under your own power. What is not to like here?

It's not all text and videos, either, no matter how informative. You can play Moon Trumps, too. (Do not put that in a search engine. You'll just get images of an obnoxious politician superimposed on a lunar background talking about how he wants the Moon, pretty much.) Moon Trumps is a card game devised by the OU; for some reason, the first time it's linked in the course, the link doesn't work, but the second time it does. You play against the computer, though I have to say I'd love a set of actual cards. The way it works is that each card has a photo of a different moon (some well known, some very obscure), together with some data: size (I think in terms of diameter), density, orbital period, and orbital radius. You pick a card at random and then choose one of the data points about your moon; so, if you got our Moon, that's pretty big, so you'd generally be safe selecting the size. If the data point you've chosen is larger than the corresponding one on the card your opponent picked, you win both cards (unless it's orbital period, when the smaller one wins). Otherwise, your opponent wins the cards. It's a good game and you learn quite a lot by playing it.

I reckon today it'll probably be more astronomy (White Dwarfs and Neutron Stars, anyone?). But I suspect that whatever course I do, it'll have a hard time beating that one.

Current Mood: geeky

A-level chemistry was a ton of fun in a bun. I didn't plan to take it any further; what I would really have liked to have got into was particle physics, but I genuinely couldn't see that anyone would ever let me use the extremely expensive equipment that was required for that (expensive stuff was for other people), and so I chose to do a maths degree simply and solely because it didn't need any special equipment. Yes, I had an incredibly low opinion of myself at the time, but don't blame me for that. I'd been taught to have it for my entire childhood.

But the chemistry was interesting and a good diversion, especially since it was regularly enlivened by the misadventures of one of my classmates. His surname was Pringle, and his father apparently wrote occasionally for a well-known BBC TV series; be that as it may, he was ridiculously accident-prone, especially during chemistry lessons. It wasn't that he was stupid. He was just so ham-handed that, in any chemistry lesson, you could pretty much guarantee he'd manage to melt the end off a test tube, explode something, or at the very least get a completely unexpected result from his experiment. To be fair, he actually wasn't the one who managed to spill a beaker of pentane over the lab bench and then accidentally set fire to it, almost taking his eyebrows off in the process; that was another bloke, and it almost certainly was the deciding factor regarding why he got the sixth form prize for maths and I got the corresponding prize for physics and chemistry, when we were both neck and neck in both subject areas right through the sixth form. I'd rather have won the maths prize, since that was what I was going to do the degree in. But hey. Pringle, incidentally, grew so notorious that his name became a verb (as in "oh dear, I'm afraid I rather pringled that one up"). I occasionally wonder idly what happened to him.

Most of our public exams were run by the rather alarmingly named Joint Matriculation Board, which sounded like a piece of equipment used by a particularly over-enthusiastic physio; however, A-level chemistry, for some reason, was Nuffield. And the Nuffield syllabus required that you did a project, which you could choose from a set list (I think there were about half a dozen options). Almost the entire year did food science, because it was, basically, noddy; we'd already covered most of the work in O-level biology lessons (there weren't very many of us in the chemistry group who hadn't got a biology O-level). And I looked at the list and thought "I am not doing food science, because it is, basically, noddy. I should like to do metallurgy, because I have never done any of that and it sounds a whole lot more fun."

I was the one person in the entire year who did metallurgy (or, indeed, anything at all that wasn't Easy Food Science Option). Fortunately, I already had a reputation as an anti-Pringle. I'd never broken or damaged a single piece of lab equipment, I was known to be dexterous and careful, and my experiments worked the vast majority of the time. So they just let me do it unsupervised. I'd arrange to come into the lab during the lunch hour, they'd leave the stuff I needed out for me, and I'd get on with it.

Nobody would ever let sixth-formers do that these days. I doubt they'd even let undergraduates do it. I was making alloys from cadmium and bismuth, polishing the samples down, and studying their crystalline structure under a microscope. Of course, they did have at least some basic regard for safety; the book told you to do your melting in a fume cupboard, which, naturally, I did. And I, being a cautious type, had read up on the metals I was going to be using and discovered that cadmium is bloomin' toxic and you do not want any contact with it at all, so as well as my regular lab coat I also provided myself with a pair of elbow-length industrial-spec rubber gloves, which I wore all the time I was in the lab. I was also extremely careful about how I cleaned up. I wasn't going to expose anyone else to metal dust containing cadmium.

On the whole, I have to say I'm glad that safety measures are a great deal stricter now. Most sixth-formers fall somewhere on a scale between me (ultra-cautious, to the extent of doing my background reading before handling unknown substances) and Pringle (enough said), and I wouldn't want to see most of them handling cadmium.

Nonetheless... I'm still really grateful they let me do it.

My mother wouldn't teach me to cook, because I was a child and would therefore obviously make a mess, which I would equally obviously not be competent to clean up so she would have to do it. This continued to apply all through my teens, regardless of the fact that I objectively didn't make a mess doing other potentially messy things; there wasn't a thing I could do about it. My mother just had a very low view of children and that was how it was, and she didn't appear to be able to differentiate a sixteen-year-old with very obviously excellent fine dexterity from a regular three-year-old. Of course, there was also the fact that teaching children anything at all was a nuisance, and you did it only if you absolutely had to, because that was what schools were for (other than, of course, to get the children out of the way while you did Important Adult Things). But, in any case, I learnt to cook very fast when I got to university, and became pretty good at it, at that.

Although I wasn't allowed to cook, I was fascinated by the processes involved. Cakes, for instance, were quite amazing. You mixed ingredients in a bowl and got a sloppy batter, which you then put in the oven and out came a cake. How on earth did that come about, and how had it been discovered in the first place? I asked my mother, but she had no idea. Then there was meat; I knew it was very difficult to cut raw meat, but once it was cooked you could cut it with a table knife, and those weren't very sharp. Raw potatoes, too, were pretty solid (and apparently poisonous, at that), but once they were cooked they were quite soft, safe to eat, and delicious. Exactly what was going on here?

So when I was eventually told I was going to do something called Domestic Science at school, I got really excited. At last, I thought, I was going to get proper answers to all these questions, since they clearly were scientific ones. Whatever was happening when you cooked food, it wasn't some kind of magic, since it was repeatable and more or less predictable; things might occasionally get slightly burnt, but you still knew that if you put the batter in the oven for a certain time at a certain temperature, you would get a cake and not, for instance, pastry.

Alas, I did not get the answers; for that, it turned out, I had to wait many more years, until I was finally able to get my hands on a copy of Cooking for Geeks by Jeff Potter (published by O'Reilly - it isn't cheap, but I have just managed to replace my former copy with a second-hand one at a much more reasonable price). "Domestic Science", as it turned out, wasn't what it said at all. It was just cooking, and not even very good cooking at that; mostly, to the great disgust of my mother, it involved putting dishes together from pre-packaged ingredients. I recall her being very cross at being asked to provide me with a packet of pre-made puff pastry. She thought the school should be teaching me to make puff pastry myself, despite the fact that a) almost nobody ever does that these days and b) I don't even really like pastry. (I have never made pastry of any sort. Why would I? I can find plenty of other stuff to make that other people like and that I also like.) There wasn't even a little bit of basic theory involved - nothing about why frying seals in flavour and boiling doesn't, for instance, or why steaming is better than boiling in terms of both flavour and nutrition. Nope. It was nothing more than "this week we're going to make X, here is a list of the ingredients you will need, your parents are expected to provide them". It was a tremendous disappointment, and I learnt absolutely nothing from it.

Cooking for Geeks, however, does have all the answers. That tells you exactly what is going on when you make a cake, or when your toast browns, or even why you can cook with liquid nitrogen (not something I am at all inclined to do, but it's still fascinating to read about). It does have recipes, but it's definitely not cooking for vegan geeks, so I need to adapt most of them (and there's nothing at all I can do about the discussion on how to hack the perfect pizza, because I also don't have a conventional oven - I have other pizza hacks, naturally). I don't think it was out when I was ploughing through "Domestic Science", but if it had been, it ought to have been our textbook.

Of course, to make a good cake, you don't have to know how all the processes work; and I made many a good cake before I finally found out. But even so... the science is what I'm here for, OK?