Joseph Tibbs, 2019 NIST Research Intern

Biography

SPS Chapter: University of Northern Iowa

I grew up on a farm in rural Iowa, but I knew from a young age that I wanted to become a scientist. Now I’m a Junior Physics and Biochemistry major at the University of Northern Iowa. I joke that my double major means that I love science but could never decide on a discipline; while that’s not far from the truth, it really means I love understanding the physics of biochemical systems. Bouncing between the Physics and Chemistry buildings on campus means that I tend to look at problems with a broad, interdisciplinary perspective, and I’ve had experience everywhere from pure computational research to human cell culture. I’ve mainly done work with simulations of biological systems and data analysis for biophysics experiments. Two summers ago, I worked on microscope image processing, which turned into a project in software development, which eventually became a partnership expanding the theory behind existing protein-binding experiments. During last summer’s internship, I edited the code of a cytoskeleton simulation to run more efficiently, then took a sharp turn upon returning to my home university by testing drugs on human pancreatic cancer. But everywhere I go, I find that the principles of Physics and Biochemistry support and complement each other in new and surprising ways. All of this varied research might seem to point in no particular direction, but I do have a plan--or at least a thing like a plan, but with some room for flexibility. When I graduate next spring, I’ll go on to a PhD program in either Biomedical Engineering or Biophysics. My path likely includes academic research, and becoming a professor has lately been one of my contingency dreams.

When I’m not doing science, I’m working at the tutoring center on campus, playing the carillon or the piano, or practicing my ballroom dancing. I love to read, both the centuries-old classics and the webcomic published yesterday.

Internship

Host: National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

Project

Abstract

Semiconductor device features are becoming ever more microscopic, and methods must be developed for detecting and characterizing defects in the chips before they are sent to consumers. Some promising methods for Back End Of Line (BEOL) testing involve scanning probe microscopes, which use micromachined tips for very high resolution topological measurement. However, by sensing electrostatic force at the microscale, these same probes can be used to detect things under the surface of the sample. In this project, we focused on how electric fields from buried metal lines can impact the motion of a voltage-biased tip. These techniques, referred to here as Remote Bias Electrostatic Force Microscopy (RB-EFM) still need to be characterized for their precision and accuracy, for example by determining the way in which tip geometry can impact results. By measuring tip response on standard samples, we compared the results with computational models and used them to develop theory which supports the experimental results.

Final Presentation

Internship Blog

Week One: A Great Start

Before this week, I never knew how exciting it would be to live in the middle of Washington D.C. with a group of highly-motivated physics majors. Then again, I probably could have guessed it would be pretty good—but even so, any expectations I had were shattered. We arrived at Shenkman Hall (home sweet home for the next ten weeks) on the day before Memorial Day, and found ourselves meeting new friends from across the country. Already, we’ve shared some interesting (and fun) times, like kayaking on the Potomac, building dry spaghetti-and-marshmallow towers, and exploring the metro system.

I have to say, moving here from my rural Iowa background was a bit of a transition, but I have enjoyed every minute of it^[1]. Being in the middle of the city seems to invite with it countless possibilities; we’ve already talked about shows at the Kennedy Center, fireworks on the mall, days at the Smithsonian museums, and many other plans. In the last week, we’ve only begun to tap the potential of the culture and history all around us. On Memorial Day, a few of us took a long walk around the Mall, White House, and MLK Memorial. Despite the over eight miles we trekked, it seemed there was always more to see. In the attached pictures, you can see us at the modern art museum, at Jazz in the Park at the sculpture garden, and enjoying the Mall.

But we’ve also taken time to simply get to know each other. Each of us is bringing something unique and special to this gathering. I’ve enjoyed getting the chance to chat one-on-one with almost everyone here, at one time or another. We may all be united by our love of physics, but the diversity of perspectives here is nevertheless broad. I’ve already joked that each of us represents the concept of “Physics &". Physics and computer science; physics and education; physics and biology; physics and policy. Our respective internships reflect this variety.

Speaking of the internship, I suppose I should describe mine. As the NIST intern, I’m one of many undergraduate researchers flocking to the National Institute of Standards and Technology for some summer experience. Nicholas, one of the policy interns here (and my roommate), and I are pictured in front of the old gate to NIST. Although I toured NIST on Tuesday, my advisor, Mr. Joseph Kopanski, was at a conference for this past week. As a result, I got to spend a few days reading up on the literature relevant to my project and chatting about it with someone who happens to have interned at NIST on a very similar project about fifteen years ago: none other than the director of SPS, the illustrious Dr. Brad Conrad^[a]. I could write a lot more about how much I enjoyed working with Brad, but for brevity’s sake I’ll just say it was an experience I won’t soon forget.

This group of students is one which I have no doubt I’ll enjoy getting to know, and I can’t wait to experience this unbelievable summer with them. I say “unbelievable” in the sincerest sense: I have to remind myself once in a while that, yes, I am in fact spending a summer of paid living in the nation’s capital, working at one of the nation’s premier laboratory campuses. I’ll be meeting so many incredible people, in my work and outside of it.

And the summer has only just begun.

Week Two: Introductions

They say time flies when you’re having fun. Even at this early point of the summer, I’m afraid that if I blink, I’ll miss the rest of it—week two felt, if anything, faster than the first. Maybe it’s because this week I got to start working at NIST on my research project. Or perhaps because there was so much going on each day. But mostly I think it’s because nothing makes a person so aware of the passage of time as the realization that it is limited. Still, nostalgia and goodbyes belong to blog post number ten^[2]; I’d rather focus on the new people I met.

For example, I got to meet my research advisor at NIST: Joseph (Joe) Kopanski^[b], a physicist who specializes in measuring and imaging the truly tiny. I got to work with him in the lab on the Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) which he uses to examine devices such as silicon chips at minute scales. The AFM works essentially by “feeling” a surface: a very sensitive probe reacts to the tiny forces generated as it is dragged across a surface. By applying electrical signals to the probe or the sample, additional forces dependent on the material properties of the sample can be resolved at the nanoscale. All of this means that scanning probe microscopy is a very powerful tool—if it can be calibrated correctly. And that’s part of my job this summer: using experimental techniques and computational modeling to examine the precise response of different AFM probes to a special test sample developed and fabricated at NIST. The data has the potential to refine existing models and make better quantitative measurements, and defect detection, of things like the silicon chips in your computer.

In the photo gallery is the first AFM image I have ever taken. The image represents a topographical map of an area only ten microns square. If you’re reading this on a computer screen, one pixel of the display would comfortably fit one hundred actual-size AFM images. An average cell of your body would fill the entire field of view of the microscope. The point is, this stuff is tiny. I’m excited to continue experimenting with this advanced piece of equipment, and I’m especially interested in using computational modeling to build a 3D, working model of the electronic system under study. That said, I’ve got a lot of work to do in the next eight weeks. Yet another reason to feel time flying by!

As cool as microscopy is, the most important thing this week from work was another introduction. What I didn’t expect is that the man I met would sit down and talk with me for over an hour. Dr. John Kasianowicz was his name, and he works with one of the scientists in my lab (hence his presence there on that day). He was the first one to write a paper about the potential of nanopores to allow the rapid sequencing of DNA. In the intervening two decades, that technology has indeed expanded to be one of the most important and versatile metrological tools in the study of DNA and other biopolymers. But our conversation didn’t focus on his work—he made sure it focused on my career. He gave sound advice, and expressed interest in my future as a scientist. In other words, he fulfilled the role of a mentor within the first minutes of our acquaintance. So despite all of the advice he gave me, perhaps the greatest takeaway from that conversation was his example: take time to be a mentor.

It seems I’ve already filled a page of twelve-point text, and I haven’t even had a chance to tell about all the fun things we did as a group this week. To fully describe them would easily take another page, and I’m sure the other blogs can give you a better idea of the cool stuff we did. But I’d be happy to give a breathless, run-on sentence full of some phrases that you won’t have any context for! Without further ado:

We had Taco Tuesday adventures, made Captain Cookie midnight runs, met Gus three times, put Eric in a tree, watched a Pride parade from the sixth story, stacked feet, saw planes, heard some jazz, got CPR trained on the street, bought some goat cheese (more on that next week), met the Father of the Internet, watched the Parent Trap, played with light (literally), played German, spoke German, learned about tea, did crosswords, watched baseball, respected the spectrum, survived without water for three days, and, most importantly, asked the question: Who but W. B. Mason?

I told you time was flying. Perhaps now you’ll understand why.

Here’s looking forward to another crazy, wonderful, wonder-filled week.

Week Three: Some Assembly Required

If I seem a bit on edge, it’s because we just heated oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit (or 477.6 K, for those of you with a thing for scientific units) and discovered that the plastic on certain objects does in fact begin to decompose at elevated temperatures. It’s a long story. Suffice it to say that we will go to great lengths to have a homemade pizza night (and that we’ll be looking for a different metal object to cover in tin foil and place in our oven. Maybe a pizza pan this time).

Before I get too distracted by talking about our continuing adventures, I’d better tell about my work week. I’m already waist-deep in data to analyze in MATLAB, but that’s a good problem to have: you never know what trends you’ll find, or what the physical interpretation of those trends can tell you. All of this data is coming from COMSOL, which is a very powerful computational tool for physics. It’s a coupled partial differential equation finite-element solver. That’s a mouthful, but it means it has the beautiful ability to reproduce reality given only the equations that are supposed to govern it. Of course, you still have to tell the program what your system looks like. You have to build it in three dimensions, assign materials and voltages to each domain, give them roles to play in the unfolding physics drama. There’s a certain amount of nuance to how you put it all together that I’m still just beginning to learn. But that’s the fun of learning, I suppose, and putting things together really was the theme of this week.

For example, I also got to play around with the microscope some more. On the one hand, I don’t really mean “playing”, since this advanced instrument is not a toy (and also wildly expensive). On the other hand, my mentor and I are going, you might say, off the map. This microscope technique requires different hardware, different inputs, than anything people have tried before to get a calibration signal^[c]. There is no instruction manual. We’re going to be doing a lot of troubleshooting, testing, and, naturally, assembling.

Some really incredible events and outings once again took place this week, and I wish I could describe them all but then we’d have not so much a blog post as a novella. I’d like to highlight one though, for particularly matching this week’s theme: the orchestral performance we attended last night^[4]. An orchestra itself is, clearly, a great example of an assemblage: many individuals combine to make unified, complex art. This orchestra played four works by modern composers (one of whom was present at the event), but they finished it with Gershwin’s Concerto in F. A concerto is, at its heart, a competition between a soloist and the rest of the orchestra. The soloist (here, the piano) explores themes with virtuosic skill and great versatility; the orchestra as a whole responds, playing to its natural advantages of complexity (and sheer volume) of sound. The two combatants go back and forth, often playing with each other—over each other—in an attempt to outshine. So, you might ask, who has the advantage? Is it the collective or the individual? In my opinion, the true winner is discovered when the two come together for a great denouement at the end of the piece: their talents complement each other, and they accomplish what neither could alone.

If you’ll allow me to get philosophical for a moment, I’d like to take a look at the word I’ve been using throughout this week’s blog post: assembly. When you assemble something, the result is a collection of parts. They are combined, in a way, but can also be taken apart again. It’s reversible. In the end, the parts work together to perform a function none of them could do on their own—like the microscope or the orchestra. But when you synthesize something, whether it’s a chemical compound or a collection of ideas, the components are not just put together but changed in the process, unified in a way which defies simple dismantling. Molecules rearrange to create new functional groups. Ideas deepen and broaden as connections are made.

People change to fit together in ways they never thought possible.

Here at SPS, we haven’t just been brought together to mesh like clockwork, aligning comfortably to slots we have been accustomed to occupy. We’re here to change, and to change each other. So, as much as I love to say the phrase “Avengers: Assemble” whenever we meet by the elevators to go out together, I think we’re doing something much more than merely convening. We’re shaping each other, this summer.

And I can’t wait to see how much greater the whole is than the sum of its parts.

Joseph

P.S. Oh, I almost forgot--I promised I’d tell you about the goat cheese from last week. Well, I bought it because last Tuesday was our Mac and Cheese Cook-off night; Samantha, Nicholas and I went head-to-head with our own unique takes on a classic dish. A fun and cheesy time was had by all! It is left as an exercise for the reader to determine whether cooking is an example of assembly or synthesis.

Week Four: Beneath the Surface

They say not to judge a book by its cover. But what about a pizza by its cheese or a silicon chip by its top layer? This week was full of things hidden (but still important!) underneath the surface.

To start with the most relevant example of this, we need to take a quick look at a concept known to scientists and musicians alike: resonance. It’s the phenomenon that happens, in general, when an oscillating driving force matches the “natural” frequency of an oscillator. Just think of a child on a swing: you push them at a regular frequency because you know that’s the best way to increase their momentum. The same process of frequency matching happens in musical instruments, powerful lasers, glow-in-the-dark chemicals, and the electric circuits which make your radio antenna work.

In the Atomic Force Microscope, the probe tip is vibrating near the surface at (or around) its resonant frequency. But imagine now that some external force starts to act on the probe. To go back to the earlier analogy, it’s as though the child you’re pushing suddenly got heavier, or the swing lengthened. Your pushes are no longer perfectly timed, assuming you keep the same frequency of driving force. The electronics of the AFM measure this shift, and translate it into an electrical signal. When the AFM is measuring topography, this signal translates into bumps and valleys of the surface the tip is moving over. But in the type of AFM we’re working to develop, other forces between tip and sample allow details beneath the surface to be resolved. This is dependent on using an electrical signal to bias the tip and sample, creating an electrostatic force (like the one that sticks balloons to your hair or Styrofoam to your hands). So even though the top of our silicon chips might be perfectly flat, the wires beneath the surface are visible and clear (and abrupt) shifts in resonant frequency.

But you didn’t come here just to read about resonance (even though, if you ask any Organic Chemistry student, they’ll tell you that everything is about resonance). We also took time to have some fun this week. Wednesday night was community food night, and Bells did a great job making a pizza crust from scratch. We made vegetable pizza, two chicken-bacon-ranch pizzas, and a garlic cheese pizza^[3]. I might have been a bit overzealous with the cheese application–but I won’t apologize for my Chicago-style leanings. It just made it difficult to tell what the rest of the toppings were; too bad there’s not an AFM probe for determining sub-cheese layers.

As you’ll probably read in some other posts, we got the chance to participate in a big science outreach event here on Saturday: Astronomy on the Mall. All kinds of scientific and public groups with an interest in space science were lining a major thoroughfare of the National Mall, presenting outreach activities and demonstrations (including some high-powered telescopes) to the general public. NASA shirts abounded, stardust glinted in the evening’s light, and the globe we stand upon rotated until our neighborhood star was out of sight. Jupiter shone brightly for all to see, and the assembled crowds could even glimpse the Galilean moons through one of the telescopes.

We at SPS’s tables had our own demonstrations going on, simple things that educators can create at low cost. Things like a spandex sheet stretched over a large hoop, with a weight in the middle, demonstrating the deformation of spacetime caused by gravity. By rolling small marbles around the indentation in the sheet, we showed how massive objects pull small objects into orbit around them. Kids and adults alike enjoyed giving our “planets” a whirl (or two, or three, or half an hour’s worth). Others around me demonstrated the composition of the universe with beads, stars’ life cycles with balloons and aluminium foil, and sound waves with a Slinky.

But the greatest adventure was yet to come! June 22^nd was a special day for the Smithsonian museum; on “Solstice Saturday”, the already amazing (free) museums were open until midnight. After dropping off all our demo supplies, the group had a decision to make. We had a glorious two-hour window in which we could visit the widely-advertised dinosaur exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, with the added bonus of the evening hour adding a seemingly magical, after-hours kind of thrill. Or we could go find ice cream. Now, I’m not saying the people who used those two hours to get ice cream made a sub-optimal decision. I’m just saying they chose not to be a part of Team Dinosaur. So. But those of us who did go had a wonderful time exploring the exhibit (and realizing that the Museum as a whole is truly massive and would take days to fully appreciate). And it tied in nicely with this week’s theme: scientists only know things about dinosaurs by examining their bones. In terms of fossils, it really is what’s on the inside that counts. After the museum, the two groups met up again in good old Room 211 for a documentary screening which was both thought-provoking and enjoyable. And they say nerds don’t know how to have fun.

This last paragraph is back by popular demand: the breathless, context-less run-on evoking images both fanciful and frightening. Enjoy!

In the past week, we: completed crosswords, made contact with “mayonnaise” (with the help of a man on the metro), learned of the secret subway (something else beneath the surface!), got serenaded by trumpets, ate banana bread amid cries of “scalene triangle”, chose cake over death, put SOCKS in socks, planned a heist, learned that laser gyroscopes are, illogically, extremely accurate, boomwhacked, SAILed, played with spacetime, learned that Diversity is the Spice of Life, decomposed a lizard, ate cake in a church basement, learned that too many cooks spoil the broth, got the second degree, and, as always, gave thumbs up for science.

On the face of it, this is just another summer. Just another internship. But look a little deeper, and you’ll find a wealth of opportunity and excitement.

Here’s to a future of hidden possibilities made real.

Joseph

Week Five: Theory Never Matches Experiment

The title of this blog post probably set racing the hearts of any physicists reading it, and possibly put a smug smile on the face of any engineers. The theorist and experimentalist are often seen as opposing forces in science: one’s work approximates what the other’s proclaims. But which one does which job depends on whom you ask. Do the equations theorists come up with approximate the reality which experiments can measure? Or do experiments imperfectly reflect the ideal models put forth by theorists?

I got the chance to experience both sides of that this week: after some successful AFM imaging, the data showed that the technique works in the way we expected. To help explain just what was going on, I also simulated the operation of the AFM using the computational modeling software I’ve described in the past; the most recent and most accurate iteration of the simulations this week provided a graph of predicted voltage response. When I called up the graph on MATLAB, I had to check my code to make sure I hadn’t just plotted the experimental data instead because, to a rough visual approximation, the two were indistinguishable. Now, though this was exciting, it’s not exactly groundbreaking: we’re dealing with some very well-known properties of capacitance and potential difference. But it’s still significant because it means the technique we’re developing can supply predictable, and hopefully reproducible, results.

Some really fun things happened this week that I’d love to expand on: we went to a science trivia night hosted by some co-workers of Sammi at a local restaurant (with an excellent Taco Tuesday). The ten of us sat at one long table, but ended up splitting into two teams. There would be fifteen short-answer questions throughout the night, with bonus points awarded for the funniest (incorrect) answer. We also got to name our teams; I was flattered to be the namesake for ours: Tibbs Free Energy. For those of you who haven’t taken thermodynamics, Josiah Willard Gibbs was an incredible physicist who came up with a concept of free energy which was, eventually, named after him. The questions were difficult, but our team answered enough of them correctly to end the first phase tied for first. I would like to credit that success to my sister, without whose help I never would have known the name of the mission which sent the animals called Tardigrades (or water bears) into space.

But then came the second phase: the engineering challenge^[d]. We had to use six uncooked pieces of spaghetti (I don’t think it was whole wheat), a plastic spoon, a popsicle stick, a dixie cup, and about four inches of duct tape to hold five marbles as high off the table as we could. Using the spoon and stick as a load-bearing beam and the spaghettis as a stabilizing tripod, we made a structure which was (if I may say) the most stable of the assembled contraptions: we not only put the marbles into the cup, but filled it with water as well (making what was possibly the strangest mixed drink consumed that night). Unfortunately, ours was not the tallest (who knew that a science trivia night would be populated by so many engineering-minded folks?) and we did not take home the trivia win. But, we all agreed that we’d return for a rematch this week, especially upon hearing the theme: quantum physics. They won’t know what hit ‘em.

Wednesday, we enjoyed the Congressional baseball game for charity. This was an event I’d never heard of before coming to D.C., and now I wish I had: members of congress form two baseball teams (Democrats vs. Republicans, as per tradition) and play a nine-inning baseball game in the Washington Nationals Stadium. Exhibiting there were companies, advocacy groups, and (our favorite table to get swag from) NASA. I had heard that the Democratic team had won nine of the ten previous games; that got me wondering if political affiliation could possibly be correlated with baseball ability. It didn’t seem to make sense in theory, but as the blue team racked up the points on Wednesday, I couldn’t help but wonder if controlled experiments would support such a relationship. When all was said and done, I decided to dig deeper, and go to the most comprehensive storehouse of sports knowledge I know of: Wikipedia. And there I found something which was highly satisfying, not to mention surprising. To the best of historical knowledge, the 85-game series is now tied between the two teams: 42 wins to Democrats; 42 to Republicans; and one tie game, in 1983.

Cooking adventures continued this week, with breakfast foods accompanying a lively debate-watch party^[5] and Bells’ delicious meat pies accompanying a different (but more appropriate, thematically) watch party on Saturday. But rather than try to shoehorn some kind of theory-experiment duality into these anecdotes, I’m going to switch gears and discuss a different theme which was present this week, even if I was afraid to acknowledge it. Yes, the end of this week, the fifth, marked the moment equidistant from the start and the end of this internship.

The halfway point.

Our lives are a set, or perhaps a series, of halves. The horizon bisects the visual plane into earth and sky, and the temporal plane into day and night. Not everything can be divided so cleanly in two: nature and nurture, theory and experiment, science and art. These things blur the lines. But if a midpoint does exist, it’s almost always special. The vertex of a parabola is the apex of flight. The center of gravity is the point that moves independently of any rotational torque on the object. And the midpoint of an internship is a good time to look back and reflect. It’s an apex in its own way: once it passes, the end will rush nearer faster each day. Like Zeno’s Arrow, the halfway points will begin to fly by, each one dividing the remaining time into smaller and smaller increments. Theory says an infinity of such increments will pass. Experience tells me that they won’t amount to any more time than if I had chosen to simply enjoy the remaining weeks day by day.

I don’t know what I expected from this summer—what I theorized. But I know that trying to predict what will happen is an exercise in chaos theory and futility; it’s only a distraction from finding out the empirical way. In other words, life is an experiment. So, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to experience what—I hope—may be the better half. No matter what happens though, I know the five weeks I’ve had so far halve been some of the best of my life.

And no, I’m not sorry.

Joseph Tibbs

Week Six: Carefully Cluttered

Some would say my desk is a mess. It has objects strewn across it, seemingly at random. Well, not just seemingly—I’ll admit that their placement is actually random. But they all have a meaning, a significance, a reason for being. Well, except that toothbrush. I have no emotional connection with my toothbrush.

Anyway.

First is my notebook. It’s gotten a few more notes in it this week, as measurements continued in earnest on the buried line structures. I did some rearranging of connections on the microscope to let it take more data, and the results have been coming in faster than I can analyze them. I’m working on writing a formal, theoretical treatment of why the simulations are matching the experimental data, and why my methods of analysis are working, but it got delayed a bit after I spent about a day spinning my wheels on a side project. The problem was that I was trying to solve what I thought was a linear algebra problem, but which turned out to be a non-linear problem with no solution. Or, rather, an infinite number of equally-plausible solutions. Hopefully this setback doesn’t turn out to be a dead-end, and we can still learn something from these results.

On the notebook sits the purple mechanical pencil I’ve carried with me for three years. It’s the pencil I’ve used to write in a leather-bound journal given to me by a certain inspiring English teacher upon my high school graduation. Believe me when I say that the journal has gotten a lot of use since my arrival in Washington D.C. I don’t record our adventures in it nearly as often as I should, but it, and these blog posts, will help me to recapture the feeling of being blissfully adrift in our nation’s capital.

Speaking of the capital—or perhaps the capitol—most of the objects on my desk currently are there because of what we did on July 4^th. Gia, our resident “hilltern”, got access to the staff seating to watch what has, for me and my family, always been an Independence Day tradition: the Capitol Fourth. This concert always airs on PBS sometime before the evening fireworks start back in Iowa, and we usually tried to catch at least part of it at home. This year, I didn’t just watch it; we lived it. From the steps of the U.S. Capitol building, I and nine other interns watched such artists as Carole King, Lindsey Stirling, and Elmo (yes, the Muppet) perform for the entire nation in a star-spangled spectacle. And oh, how much better it was in real life. The Yankee Doodles were Dandier; the purple mountains were more majestic; the cannons fired during the 1812 Overture vibrated me to my core. It was a wonderful day, notwithstanding the rainy wait we had before the concert started (hence, on my desk, the deformed paperboard box holding granola bars, the water-damaged copy of The Wind in the Willows, and the poncho drying out on my dresser).

Another object within the clutter is the small, rigid plastic figurine of the my second-favorite animal-themed superhero: Spider-Man. I got “Lil Spidey” (as he is affectionately called) on Tuesday at the opening night showing of Spider-Man: Far From Home. It was fully worth the watch, even if it did end up being a long night (not least because the movie started at 11:30). But it was for good reason we chose such a late showtime: if you recall from last week, the Tuesday Science Trivia theme was going to be Quantum Mechanics, and we couldn’t miss that! Although that particular section of questions didn’t go as well as we physicists thought it might, and even though the engineering challenge (to make ice cream) resulted largely in the production of sweet soup, a good time was had by all—and the first place prize that night was taken by one of our intern teams! After leaving The Big Board (excellent tacos again, by the way), some of us took a more scenic route home. Along the way, we helped a lost driver, got up close and personal with the Supreme Court building, and witnessed a proposal on the East plaza of the Capitol building.

As that sentence demonstrates, this week was a good example of the way I follow the advice of someone who, as anyone who knows me for long will tell you, I admire greatly. Randall Munroe said, in part: “Take wrong turns. Talk to strangers. Open unmarked doors. Do things without always knowing how they’ll turn out.” He’s saying that not everything has to be planned; for the curious, discoveries are everywhere. Those are the journeys that don’t need a map to the dragon’s cave, the adventures that don’t need a cape and mask, the stories that are told rather than read about. Seeking out the unknown, and planning not to participate in things but to do stuff, is my idea of an interesting life.

Maybe that’s also why my blog posts always end up coming out so disorganized. Like my desk, and perhaps my mind, they contain a clutter of different things. All of them are important—not urgent, necessarily, or weighty—but significant. And here I am trying to sort through the mess to give you a picture of what has happened here each week. But it’s impossible, like trying to fit this desk’s worth of stuff into a pencil case (or even a duffle bag). The best I can do is pick through and share a few of my favorite pieces of bric-a-brac as my eye alights on them. Maybe the rest of it will eventually get swept away into the dustbin of half-forgotten memory. Or, perhaps, I’ll commit it to the attic and cardboard boxes of my journal, to be pulled out and rummaged through on a rainy evening long in the future.

But no matter what happens to it eventually, for now the clutter remains, to remind me of what has been, and what is. And if my life can remain as carefully cluttered as my desk, I have no doubt there are many further adventures in store.

Here’s to making up the future as we go,

Joseph Tibbs

P.S. For those of you keeping track, we’ve managed to have one community meal each week. This week’s was a little more spontaneous but much appreciated: on Thursday, Nolan came up with the idea of a cookout, and two hours later we had a spread prepared which would make any American proud: burgers, hot dogs, macaroni salad, chips and dip, corn on the cob, beans, and watermelon.

Week Seven: Running Joke

This week (well, Saturday specifically) I decided to scratch something off the D.C. bucket list: running on the Mall. Lots of the other interns seem to enjoy getting out and jogging now and again, but I hadn’t tried it here. Now, I can’t actually remember the last time I decided to run for the sake of running (as opposed to trying to catch the metro) but I hadn’t been out of the apartment all day and the humid, sunny day was calling to me. I put on my least nerdy t-shirt—I’d hate to get my Pi shirt all sweaty—and went for it, like some kind of street-wise Hercules-in-training.

I have to say, it was kind of exhilarating. As I descended the hill outside of Shenkman, I saw the landscape opening up, with the Lincoln Memorial before me and the Washington Monument peeking around the corner. With David Garrett’s “Cry Me a River” in my brain (I didn’t have earbuds, it was just stuck in my head) I passed by such landmarks as the Institute of Peace, National Academy of Sciences, World War II Memorial, and the Ranger Station (?). I said hello to some ducks, and on the way back I took a minute to rest next to the larger-than-life bronze statue of Albert Einstein.

But the rest of the journey back wasn’t so easy. It turns out climbing up a hill is considerably harder than running down it, especially when the two activities are at the end and beginning of a journey, respectively. Walking up the hill did give me some time to pause and reflect on my experiences here, though. As the end of this internship approaches, is it more like the downhill sprint or the uphill slog?

Work this week certainly felt like an uphill battle. Minor setbacks continue to dog the task I was placed at NIST to do, making it feel like every step forward is two steps back. Some of the modeling work is bearing fruit, but our physical circuits might not carry the voltage they need to in order to be visible on the microscope.

However, when I’m being honest, I know that these last three weeks will feel like flying toward a finish line that none of us quite want to cross. We’ll be busy wrapping things up, getting ready to present the hard-earned results and conclusions of our internships^[6], getting ready to bid D.C.—and each other—a farewell for now. But those are sentiments for week ten’s blog. If running has taught me anything (other than the pain of sore thighs) it’s that you should enjoy where you are, because you won’t be there long.

At the end of the run, I was definitely no longer running. As I said, I’m not used to long-distance jogging. But I did bring my phone along for the ride, so naturally it recorded my route, pace, distance, and calories burned. The last time I ran seriously was in middle school track, and I was a little disappointed to note that I would, in my current state, be completely left in the dust of a fourteen-year-old me. But maybe that’s okay. We don’t always achieve what we want first time around, and learning from our shortcomings is one of the best ways to improve. Even if I don’t accomplish all I set out to in this internship, I’m confident that the experience has brought me closer to my goals--or at least closer to understanding my goals. And besides: you don’t have to be the fastest to finish the race.

It seems I’ve once again run out of space to do justice to the many things we did this week—and it certainly was a busy one! We had two tours this week: one of Capitol Hill, led by Gia, and one of the Goddard Space Flight Center, led by the NASA boys. Both of those were incredibly full days, with full evenings and more days in between. There simply is no other solution but to once again resort to a massively run-on and unreasonably protracted sentence full of clauses that won’t make sense even to people who were there for the events they describe. But it’s fun to write. So.

This week, we fostered a relationship with Dr. Bill Foster, stuck a sticky note to an already overflowing wall, escaped a room, built a cantilever which just managed to hold out until the end of the night, found a Cathedral, sat on Einstein’s lap, dipped our feet into history, began a quest, had a picnic with Brad (and the rest!), learned Wonderwall, failed to learn Small World after all, watched the full moon’s reflection, bought (or borrowed or stole) Sapiens, spun a superconducting magnet, weathered a flood, ate at a tavern, defeated five wolves and came out fresh from the fight, found some tardigrades at NASA, visited the monuments—at night^[7], and saved Matt Damon.

I don’t know if I’ll get around to running again this summer^[e]. But it did provide a nice extended metaphor for this week’s blog. Who knows, maybe this week will provide more opportunities for new experiences. Actually, I’m sure it will. The other weeks certainly haven’t failed there.

Here’s to the next new experience—and I’m sure it’s gotta be soon in this larger-than-life city.

Joseph Tibbs

P.S. The Community Dinner this week was probably the SPS picnic on Thursday, but we did get a few takers on a last-minute personal pizza night on Friday. Using the naan I bought for pizza crusts, I just made a flatbread sandwich filled with peppers and chicken, and I couldn’t help thinking of the song by Bonnie Tyler made so famous in the movie Shrek 2—you know, “I Need a Gyro”.

I’m still not sorry.

Week Eight: Story Time

“Tell me a story.” This is the prompt of children the world over. Be that as it may, we never outgrow our desire for a well-spun tale. Long or short, light or serious, humanity has always held a special place for the sagas, fables, and legends which build culture from the ground up. And no one has more control over the direction of a culture than those who tell its stories.

“But Joseph,” you say (go ahead and say it out loud right now, it’s fine), “you’re a research scientist. In Physics. What stories can you tell?” Sure, I’m not a science journalist like Jerry. I’m not researching the history of the discovery of black holes like Cate. I’m not even researching rheologists or women in science and how we can make their stories known. No, I’m just measuring things. There’s nothing glamorous about it, and my hours in front of the microscope are not exactly amenable to a Hollywood plot.

But it does have its challenges. Challenges which can be overcome, sometimes in surprising ways. The triumphs of battles won are set against the failures of broken instrumentation and damaged samples. Side plots of theory and simulation interweave with experiment, and the careful reader begins to notice the connections. Research includes the classic Mentor archetype—in this case, literally. And research might not have an end, but then again neither do the best stories: the true ones. And maybe that’s a good thing; as Meg has taught us (for those keeping up with her blog), the most engaging stories are the ones told in the present tense^[f]. And in research, you can still get closure and a sense of finality when the paper is written, the result is shared, the technology is produced to benefit humanity.

I’m focusing on stories this week because, for one, we learned about scientific storytelling from the publishers and editors at The Optical Society during a tour there on Friday. They are responsible for nineteen publications, ranging from the highly technical to the general and popular. In the talks we heard, the speakers stressed the ability of scientists to present their work in a way which makes it feel relevant, engaging, and relatable—all elements of a good story.

I also visited a few locations this week which hold some of our Nation’s stories—The Library of Congress^[8] and the Newseum, which is a museum dedicated to the history of journalism, free speech, the first amendment, and the American voice. Within those edifices (with architecture old and new) were exhibits dedicated to keeping record, not just of human knowledge, but of all aspects of human experience.

We found more than a few scientific stories during the tour of NIST that I and fellow intern Nicholas led on Tuesday. Walking through the NIST museum, we saw pieces of the WTC, the first Neon lights, and an entire room dedicated to a man with exactly 400 patents to his name. But the research labs we visited had stories to tell, too—like how they succeeded in measuring Planck’s constant to eight decimal places. To give it some perspective on that level of precision, that’s like taking everyone in America and putting them in one big crowd, and asking an observer to tell exactly how many people there are. We also got the chance to walk into what is, possibly, the quietest place on earth: an anechoic chamber built to block all external sound and deaden all the sound inside it. It’s so quiet, the noise level registers as a negative number of decibels. It was highly disconcerting to realize that, when none of us spoke, the loudest things each of us could possibly hear was our own heartbeats, and only because those vibrations traveled to our ears directly through our bodies. Needless to say, those minutes may have been the most surreal of this internship.

This week, we got to re-live one of the greatest stories ever told: the Apollo 11 Moon landing. A reenactment, with life-size rocket projected onto the Washington Monument, drew crowds of over 50,000 at multiple showings. I’ve never seen the Mall so packed. Ice cream, and a viewing of the stellar documentary “Apollo 11" (which uses only original, if restored, footage and audio) completed the night beautifully.

But as cool as science stories are, the best stories will always come from people. Take the man from Morocco I met today as I dangled my feet in the National Sculpture Park fountain to get some relief from the incredible heat (feels just like Iowa, only more asphalt). He’s here with 14,500 others from across the world to participate in the World Scout Jamboree. As a former Boy Scout, I’ve enjoyed seeing the neckerchiefs decorated with a multitude of colors, the badges and backpacks proclaiming countless countries of origin, and the crowds of young people crowding the metros with dozens of spoken languages. He only spoke Arab, French, and broken English. As my French is only good enough to recognize the occasional word (like figuring out he worked for a law firm back in Morocco), we ended up passing his phone between us. Google Translate took our spoken words, turned them into text in real time, and translated them for the other to hear. This is just one example of how the world is getting smaller. As the Newseum noted, the events and issues of the world have become accessible to us no matter where we are, and the people a continent away can tell stories just as compelling and relevant as your own neighbors.

Being here in D.C., I’ve heard (and witnessed) many things would make good stories. Just look at the photos I’m including this week. Or, take for instance something that happened a few weeks ago: A car stopping suddenly at a red light was struck by the vehicle behind it. Instead of the angry tirade I expected to hear from either vehicle, the drivers got out, inspected the cars, found no damage, shook hands, and resolved the conflict before the light changed back to green. I was stunned by the humanity, unexpected as it is to anyone who’s spent much time in or near the typical D.C. traffic. That’s just one example. I’ve heard stories from co-worker Donald about some wild times in Grad school, been regaled with tales of Kayla’s fight with winter weather, and watched Jerry spin a riveting campaign (which is still unfolding) at the sessions of D&D I’ve been lucky enough to sit in on.

My point is that everyone has a story to tell. And at this point on the page, I’ve written enough words that this post could qualify for most short story competitions (it’s even too long for some of them). So I’ll leave you with one final thought, for all you scientists, engineers, or just curious people:

If you’ve questioned how things work, what makes our world tick, you’ve experienced the same kind of excitement that a child feels as their favorite story reaches a climax. What happens next, you ask--or perhaps, what happens if. Everything we learn about the world adds one more chapter to an unfolding story of the best kind.

What part of it will you tell?

Week Nine: Wave Function

Let’s take the Fourier transform of this summer.

For those of you who haven’t gone down the rabbit hole of physics or math far enough to know what that is, let me just say it’s a way to separate a signal into the components that make it up based on their frequency and how strong each one is (its amplitude).

The highest frequency, in the hundreds of kilohertz, is the AC voltage signal which makes the metal lines of my samples visible to the microscope. Below that, around 80 kHz, is the resonant frequency of my .3 N/m cantilever, scanning over the surface and interacting with the tiny static forces that alter the phase of its vibration. The complex electronics directing it operate at a few kilohertz, with feedback loops driving positioning systems with nanometer precision. Moving way down the spectrum, there’s a blip of noise at 60 Hz caused by the frequency of the wall outlet’s power. Things really start to slow down now: every line takes five seconds to scan (0.2 Hz), each scan takes about five minutes (3 mHz), and a full data set is more like an hour (280 µHz).

Zoom way out; make the scale logarithmic. Twice a day (23 µHz) I ride the metro, usually with Nicholas Stubblefield; we do the crossword most days, especially now that we don’t have many left. Every day (11 µHz), I wake up; I load the dishwasher; I shave. I do the things which are literally quotidian, but doing them in our nation’s capital makes them special, somehow. Once per week (1.6 µHz), I come up with another idea for a blog post and find myself sitting right here. And, barely visible at the far left of the spectrum, once per year (31 nHz) I have a birthday.

But some things don’t show up as neatly on the transform’s axis. How do I quantify the frequency of Terry’s SpongeBob references? Or Nicholas’s use of the word “swell”? Or Nolan’s page turns as he works his way through yet another book? These are the little things that get lost in the noise of the baseline of the signal; as with all data processing, sometimes it can be hard to separate the meaningful from the artificial, and yet I can’t help but think that it’s the little things I’ll miss most.^[9]

But one very important thing which happened this week was in no way small: the Atlantic Ocean. You’ll forgive a Midwesterner’s misunderstanding of coastal geography, but I thought that as soon as you were on “the East Coast” you were practically at the ocean. Although a five-hour car ride (thank you for driving, Nolan) soon proved me wrong, the five of us who went unanimously agreed that it was worth it as soon as the first waves hit us. For context, I have never been in the ocean when there were any waves to speak of. The sheltered nook of Long Island Sound where I went last year was as flat as my homeland of the Great Plains. These waves, on the other hand, were rolling hills of green, mountain ranges topped with a snow-cap of breaking foam. They were gentle rollers, easily lifting me and setting me down—until I got too close to shore, when a particularly large wave might drive me to my knees in the sand, my world suddenly a blur of bubbles and rushing current. It was exhilarating. Bookend this experience by a road trip with four amazing people, and the result is a perfect day.

Sinusoids, or what most people just call waves, are everywhere around us. The ancients saw waves in the ocean, and sound has been made by waves on a string since the earliest days of music. Photons in the form of radio waves connected people across the nation and the world—first over the AM frequencies, later over Wi-Fi. Sensitive instruments now measure gravitational waves. Where will waves take us next as scientists? But more importantly, where will waves take me? Let me explain.

In one of my favorite books, a character describes the course of her life in a way which I think I’m beginning to relate to—and not just because of my ocean adventures. She says that it’s like facing waves on a stormy sea; each one arrives, tall and imposing, threatening to break upon her. She knows that, even with all her strength, she might not be enough to fully control what happens to her. And yet, she says that is the delight of swimming. I see the future rolling toward me in a similar way. Right now, I’m rushing down the crest of the wave that was this summer; its peak separates me from the seas behind me, and who I was before. In the choppy waters ahead are little challenges, the daily component of this wave spectrum—but some of the waves that are to come are tall enough I can see them a mile off. Does that scare me? I guess I’m still answering that question. But when I look at what I’ve gone through already, I have to agree with the Lady from the book: perhaps the excitement of the unknown is a part of life.

And perhaps the pursuit of the unknown is what this summer has helped me embrace.

Week Ten: Notes, Errata, and Miscellany

Welcome to the appendices. The endnotes. The things that most people don’t read when they finish a book, because the story is over, and they’re ready to move on. But this summer was more than just a story which I experienced, chronicled, and finished neatly with “and they’ll all live happily ever after”. It’s just one chapter in a much larger work. Despite that, here I’ve compiled a few notes, corrections, and random reflections. Each of the notes links back to one of my previous blog postings, where I’ve added an appropriate superscript reference, but they also stand alone as a look back on what happened this summer, so don’t feel the need to re-read all of my posts just to understand this one. The errata are the things I didn’t quite get right the first time around (as so often happens). And the miscellany are things that don’t seem to fit anywhere else. If you don’t want an extended walk down memory lane, just scroll to the very bottom, where you’ll find a final example of my now storied story-telling style.

Thank you for taking this journey with me over the last ten weeks. I hope it’s been as fun to read these as it’s been to write them.

Notes:

1. On the first blog post, I included a shout-out to my “rural Iowa background”. Now that I’m back in Iowa on the farm I call my home, I come to reflect again that, no matter how long I spend away from it, coming back always makes me feel as though I never left. The corn is tall, the kittens are playing, and the same sun that shone so brightly on the streets of D.C. lights the dusty gravel roads of my childhood homestead. But it also reminds me that, as long as I’m with people who matter to me, anywhere and everywhere can be home.

2. Week two’s blog was already worried about time flying, but I stopped myself from getting too worked up over it yet, and said that nostalgia and goodbyes were for the tenth week’s post. Well, here we are. My goodbyes have been said—to my fellow interns, to my mentors, to the wonderful leaders of the SPS intern program. And nostalgia for this summer will remain with me for the rest of my life . But I’m not sad. Because I know that, far apart as we may be, we’ll see each other again. And in the meantime, the modern wonders of technology are there to connect us.

3. If you noticed a trend in my posts, it was that every week there was some food event going on, eventually dubbed the “community dinner”. Working at NIST, I didn’t get to see most of the other interns during the week. However, taking one night out each week to plan, prepare, and eat food together was the perfect way to bring everyone together for a little bit of fun between each weekend. There was a community dinner in the final week—it was a potluck as suggested by Gia, who made an excellent stir-fry with her extra shrimp and a communally collected batch of vegetables reminiscent of the old stone soup story. Hearkening back to a different community dinner, we watched part of the Democratic Debate that night, but eventually we took time to hold a ceremony of our own.

4. A love of music united us this summer, and our interests and experiences ranged widely, from Week Three’s orchestra concert to the fast-talking lines of Hamilton songs during Karaoke nights. If you click on some of the links earlier in this final post, you’ll find a few songs I love (and that seemed relevant, topically). Gia, the person who suggested the potluck dinner, got us involved in a potluck of a different sort: we contributed songs to a collective playlist. Not only that, but we made a game of guessing which song was submitted by each intern. The prize for the most accurate guesser, which went to none other than my very own roommate Nicholas Stubblefield, was an artistically rendered Certificate of Excellence in Things That Don’t Really Matter, which was presented in the ceremony described in the next note.

5. I loved getting to watch the debate(s) with a group of such interesting, politically-minded individuals. It allowed me to see both sides: the gravity of the issues being discussed, and the levity of some of the circumstances the debate created between candidates. On the last Wednesday, during the potluck, we also watched a part of the debate. But we weren’t really into it, interested as we were in making the most of the remaining time we had with each other. At the end of that night, once almost all of us had assembled, was the time for awards and revelations: our personal farewell ceremony. One by one, the songs in the playlist were aired, and after some guessing, the owner of the song was revealed. They shared their least favorite and fondest memories of the summer, and were finally awarded a paper plate adorned with a specially-chosen accolade, designed and masterminded by Cate. It was all in good fun, and though it wasn’t exactly the Oscars, everyone enjoyed their moment in the spotlight.

6. The final presentations at the symposium were bittersweet: we had the opportunity to share the work we had done over the last ten weeks, and everyone was impressed by the variety and depth of topics covered. Each presenter showed their unique strengths, and gave the audience a picture of just how impactful this internship program was for us, career-wise. But I think what came through to the audience even more strongly was the bond we had with each other. The intern presenter often elicited laughs from the rest of us, or gave specific mentions to members in the group. Speaking up there was like talking to a group of friends—because no matter how many CEO’s or Nobel Laureates were in the crowd, at the very front were the sixteen people we’d grown most close to over the last ten weeks.

7. I never did describe what it was like to see the monuments late at night with a group of friends. I don’t think I can, honestly, or at least not in a way which would do it justice. Especially not after the final night we all spent in DC together, which contained some trivia (thanks to Jackie), some good food (thanks to Cate) and a late-night stroll on the National Mall. Although sitting behind the Lincoln Memorial, dangling my feet in the WWII Memorial fountain, and watching Jerry and Eric get a little too adventurous was all well and good, what mattered most was the conversations we had. The little things, reassuring each other that no matter what happened, this summer would still matter. That we wouldn’t forget.

8. Thursday night concluded with a quiet movie showing—most of us were busy packing or preparing for the presentations the next day, but we couldn’t resist the chance to have one more film shown in room 211. Our choice? National Treasure. First, because we had learned firsthand all about the case where the Declaration of Independence is kept—because it was designed and built at NIST. Second, because all of the locations we saw in the film’s DC setting were places that at least one of us had been. Various of the interns filtered through the room during the showing, but for the last 45 minutes or so, all that were left were the dream team of my fellow apartment-mates. It was fitting, I think, to sit in the dark with these three wonderful guys and watch Nicholas Cage find gold and silver of incalculable worth. Because the four of us knew that we had discovered a treasure of a different type, but one just as invaluable.

9. Without a doubt, I will miss the other interns. Our goodbyes , strung as they were throughout Friday night and Saturday morning, were all heartfelt. My final words to Nicholas were, to quote his beloved phrase, “Have a swell one.” And so, to all the interns who may be reading this, I hope you too are having a swell one in the weeks (or months, or years—whenever you may be reading this) after the internship. Keep in touch; I’m always just an josephltibbs [at] gmail.com (email) away.

Errata:

a. The first correction: Brad Conrad isn’t “Illustrious”. I think referring to him that way gives the impression of a pretension that is so far from the truth as to be insulting. The second correction: I failed to tell you why he is such an inspiring individual. There’s a particular type of person who is truly excited to help others. Someone who is genuinely enthusiastic about the good they can do, and about living their life to make an impact. Brad is one of those. And he does it so well because he’s humble about it—but not the awkward, smarmy humility of someone who denies their own achievements. No, Brad is just humble enough to listen, and to notice others before himself. Over the rest of the summer, he was a true inspiration, and I would just like to say here that I appreciated everything he did for us.

b. Joe Kopanski was my mentor this summer, but I only mentioned him once, in week two. Don’t let that fool you—my second mistake was not taking more time to thank him for all he did. He’s the director of the nanoscale imaging group, which means he has multiple labs (with associated PI’s, grad students, and even interns) which answer to him. And yet, he took time out to sit with me downstairs in the lab, sometimes for hours, when the machine wasn’t working the way we thought it should. More than that, he trusted me enough to work on it even when he wasn’t there. He gave me independence and the opportunity to explore ideas I was interested in. And that is the environment in which I work best. In the end, he became a mentor who I felt I could look up to and who I truly appreciated during, and after, the summer.

c. Remote Bias Electrostatic Force Microscopy was not an idea I came up with—don’t get the wrong impression here. It was something a postdoc from last summer was experimenting with, and he got enough results and data to make graphs and the beginnings of a paper. However, when he left for the greener pastures of a semiconductor manufacturer in Colorado, he left very few notes on what he did to achieve those results. So it was back to the drawing board in some ways, but I think I exaggerated the novelty of the technique back in week three’s blog post.

d. If I could go back and do it all again, one error I’d like to correct was the way I always dominated (and not always in the good way) the engineering challenge at trivia nights. I took ownership of the materials, the design process, and the building, every week we were at The Big Board. Looking back, I realize it was supposed to be a team effort. I eventually received my comeuppance for that in the final week: the aluminum boat idea I had was excellent in theory, but fell apart in practice. Literally. In blowing it across the tub of water, my first breath on it was too forceful, and the whole thing collapsed into a sodden lump of foil. Bells, on the other hand, who built a boat for fun, used similar principles but an idea I had dismissed—and her boat had the fastest time of anyone’s. Lest you think that our final night at The Big Board was a total loss, fear not: through the formation of a Megateam^®, our collective science knowledge was enough to answer 14 of the 15 trivia questions correctly, and my complete failure at the engineering challenge didn’t matter a bit. We still won. And, since I’ve been doing thank-you’s here in this section, I’d like to acknowledge one Eric F, bartender and purveyor of the finest tacos, and also the guy who deals so patiently with the batch of nerds who wash up on his doorstep every Tuesday night. We made sure to thank him that night, and since we’d kind of become regulars there, he said he would be sad to see us go. As our prize, instead of the usual $25 gift card, he asked if we would like some swag. The answer was a unanimous yes. So I am now the proud owner of a frisbee advertising a brewery. I couldn’t imagine a more fun souvenir.

e. I most certainly did not. Go running again, that is. Sorry, Week Seven Joseph.

f. Another note is in order to thank my fellow interns for the delightful blog posts they put out. I think the experience of reading others’ posts showed us the variety of our experiences, allowed us to appreciate what we had been given, and brought us closer together. I’ll miss getting to read the updates from everyone, but hey—I guess that’s what Facebook is for.

Miscellany:

Siamese are a breed of cat, but I learned this week that their distinctive color patterning is due to genetics which can also pop up, rather unexpectedly, in a population of barn cats. The coloring we all associate with Siamese is called, among cat (and rabbit) experts, “pointed”, meaning that dark fur is found on the ears, paws, tail, and face of the cats. On our farm, we’ve had a few pointed cats, and the most recent one is a kitten named Gale (after a King of Narnia). I’d never given much thought to the coloration before, but something my sister said recently as we were checking on little Gale and his sibling made me ask her about it. For context, my sister loves genetics and she loves cats; knowing everything there is to know about why they are the way they are is her passion. So although it was no surprise that she knew these things, the facts themselves surprised me very much:

Siamese cats are albino, by definition. They lack pigment in places normal cats would have it. For that reason, any type of cat coloration you see has a “Siamese” or pointed version, where the cat will be white all over their body but have points of their particular color and pattern on their extremities. So tabby, calico, or “yellow” (called red in the genetics literature) points are all possible. Our Gale is just an ordinary gray on his ears, paws, and face. But I learned that he was born pure white. Maybe that doesn’t seem odd—after all, human eye color and hair color change as they grow through babyhood. But I learned that it’s not so simple.

The albinism of the Siamese is temperature-dependent. Pigment is deposited in fur which is below a certain threshold temperature. That’s why the extremities of the cat, like their big, thin ears, are colored. It’s why they’re born all-white—the inside of their mother was very warm indeed. It’s why they will have eyes that glow red in reflected light for the rest of their life—they don’t have any pigment inside their eyes to block the natural red of the blood vessels behind. If you shave a portion of a pointed cat’s fur, the skin there will be cold and the fur will grow back with pigment. A creative cat owner with a small trimmer could stencil dark fur onto their cat in the shape of anything. My recommendation would be to give them a large “π”, so you could joke that they’re a Pi-amese.

Where am I going with all of this? Am I going to somehow relate cat coat genetics back to the transition from this summer to “normal life”? Is there a larger metaphor here about the unexpectedness of life’s complexity? Am I going to pull out a paragraph of my typical philosophical ramblings and suddenly the rationale will be clear?

No. I just wanted to share something cool I learned.

Because something which this summer taught me—amidst the things I learned from my new friends and the skills I gained on the job—was that I love getting people excited about science. About things that are unexpected but beautiful in the world around us. Call it some kind of vicarious curiosity on my part. And so I just wanted to share this wonderful bit of cat trivia with you for its own sake.

As much as I’ve written, I feel there is still more to tell. Which is why I’m going to stop myself here and tell as much as I can in the form of (you guessed it): a gratuitously incomprehensible run-on sentence!

In the last week, we: sang like no one was watching, didn’t waste our shot, drank too much iced tea, spiked some ice cream, found some bespoke tacos, got our feet wet, slid onto history, 30-rocked, ate everything in the house, drank dragon yum-yum, folded pyramids of thanks, stole the Declaration of Independence, shouted at some ducks, hugged a column, looked at the stars, rewrote the stars, infected an insect, won some Light trivia, signed bucket hats, got some personalized books, put zucchini and bananas in (separate) bread products, theorized an anti-physicist named Mbundu, got Eric’s t-shirt wet, bought a pineapple (and put it on pizza), parkoured, donated some black beans, made a time capsule, hugged, group hugged, hugged again, promised to keep in touch, parted ways, and most importantly, 1, 2, 3:

SQUAT.