Gifts from the glaze bucket

My home pottery studio is on a screened-in porch, so anything that can be negatively affected by freezing temperatures--e.g. wax, bagged clay, glazes--usually gets moved to the basement by early November. Sometimes even the basement isn't warm enough to prevent problems like the one presented below: crystals that precipitate out of glazes, particularly glazes that contain lithium carbonate. Given all of the ingredients sharing this particular glaze bucket, I can't say for sure what lithium compound stars in the videos, but it sure is purty.



One more quick video, because the crystal shown therein is so perfect:

For the love of all that is good in the world, just use "we"

It's been a while since I've written anything about prose style, but I'm in the midst of providing feedback to a bunch of student science writers, and I feel compelled to speak up on behalf of beleaguered readers of English-language science writing. Yes, I'm talking to you, you more experienced, published science-writing professionals: set a good example for the grad students.

Just use we.

We.

And put it at the front of the sentence, so you can put a verb right after it.

We examine X.

We consider X.

We investigate X.

X can be simple; X can be complex. With "we [verb]" in front of it, X can throw pretty much anything at readers, and readers generally will handle X without getting annoyed. Or at least, without getting as annoyed as they would were X standing in front of a supremely boring passive-voice verb that doesn't show up until a mile further down the sentence road.

Generally, when I read students' science writing, I don't have to know much about the science to detect whether the prose makes sense. Sometimes, to tell whether my confusion is with the prose or my lack of scientific knowledge, I'll look up a term or phrase to see how more experienced authors use it.

Today, I Googled one such phrase. This led me several articles confirming the phrase's existence. One such article included this sentence:

Prospective applications of targeted compounds derived from display libraries in the discovery of targeted drugs and gene therapy vectors are discussed.

Dear readers, be honest: did you read the entire sentence from beginning to end? If so, did you understand it? If so, did you enjoy it?

Please, people, give in to temptation. I promise it's OK: use "we."

We discuss.

We discuss prospective applications of targeted compounds derived from display libraries in the discovery of targeted drugs and gene therapy vectors.

Readers might not adore the revision, but they won't want to bang their heads against a wall after reading it. Or at least they won't want to bang their heads quite so hard.

This has been a public service announcement. Feel free to complain in the comments.

Salt garden update

By day 5, our salt garden had started sending satellite crystals across the kitchen counter.

We could see evidence of the green, blue, and yellow food coloring, but no red.

By day 7, there was as much crystal growth outside the bowl as in it. The blooms were turning dingy grey and starting to crumble, so we rinsed out the sponges and called it a wash (ba-da-bum).

Liquid bluing

Yowza, this has been a busy, busy summer, and I'm way behind on blogging. I have much to write about, but will begin with the most current event: E and I are growing a salt garden.

When I was 12, I had a homework assignment to design and carry out my own science experiment. In browsing books for ideas, I came across instructions for a salt garden, with a recipe for a liquid concoction that, when spooned over cut-up sponges, would bloom into puffs of salt crystals. The recipe called specifically for non-iodized salt. Since most readily-available table salt by then was iodized, a person really had to go out of his or her way to find the non-iodized variety, so I assumed there was a reason the recipe called for it. My experiment involved growing two salt gardens--one iodized and one non-iodized--whereby I discovered that non-iodized salt made no difference except for the challenge of finding a supermarket that carried it.

The even bigger challenge of that experiment involved obtaining another vital ingredient: liquid bluing. Liquid bluing is a colloidal suspension of blue iron powder (ferric hexacyanoferrate) in water, and it was already a rarity in 1979. When I finally tracked some down at a tiny, dimly lit, locally-owned grocery store across town, I became a hoarder: I needed a mere four tablespoons, but I bought two 8-oz. bottles, figuring I might never again have access to this relic of olden-days laundry whitening.

Over the intervening 33 years, every time I moved, I took my two precious bottles of liquid bluing with me, from Urbana to Tucson to Corvallis to Madison to Lawrence and finally to Durham. In Durham, the bottles remained undisturbed for twelve years in a plastic bag in a storage cabinet, until, during a recent cleaning frenzy, I rediscovered them and decided I had guarded them carefully for long enough. It was time to play.

E and I accumulated the other ingredients and on Sunday afternoon, we mixed everything together and started our garden.

Here's what it looked like on Sunday:

And here's what it looked like this morning:

Notice the crystals hanging over the edge of the bowl. They completed their escape this afternoon, and I expect to find them making their way off the countertop later this week.

Happily, we still have nearly two bottles of bluing left, so E can share this experience with his own kid(s) 33 years from now (by which time he will also be conducting an experiment on the stability of ferric hexacyanoferrate suspensions).

Here's the recipe:

4 T salt
4 T liquid bluing
4 T H2O
1 T ammonia

Mix together and distribute over cut up pieces of sponge. For colored crystals, dribble drops of food coloring on the sponges before adding the salt solution.