Nanotechnology

SUNY at Albany hosts the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering, a center, perhaps the center, of nano tech research in the US today. It has collaborative arrangements with 250 companies at work in the field, including IBM, Toshiba, Samsung, Novellus Systems, TI, and DuPont, just for starters.

The October 2011 issue of ENTREPRENEUR MAGAZINE credits Alain Kaloyeras, whose many titles include that of Chief Executive of aforesaid College. The magazine portrays him as the academic entrepreneur who built this program, and tells us a bit about how he has done it, a story that beings in 1988, when he was a "newly minted Ph.D. in condensed matter physics," and had to decide wherther to take a jub with SUNY, at that time not an impressive physics-and-engineering place.

(Jason Daley gets the byline on the story, part of a broader feature called Gurus & Grads. )

Here is Kaloyeras' page, at www.albany.edu

Although I'm hopelessly out of my depth in matters of high science, this has never stopped me from expressing opinions,as you can see here, for example, or here, or here, where I linked nanotechnology to my own personal "cosmological heresy."

It is possible that sentient beings play a part in the big picture of the cosmos.  Consider these points:

1) the great advantage of the Big Bang theory over any effort to revive the Steady State theory is that the former seems directly consistent with the 2d law of thermodynamics.  Everything has to be running down to a heat death, and the Big Bang and consequent expansion gives us a vivid mechanism for this.

2) Maxwell, in his thought experimemt of a little demon that redirects molecules, was hypothesizing a way to beat the Second Law.

3) Nanotechnology sounds a lot like the creation of Maxwellian demons as a reality.

There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch

The title phrase of this blog entry is often abbreviatred TANSTAAFL in libertarian circles. Those aren't initials, buddy. That's an acronym, pronounced "tan-staff-ill."

Anyway, it is a profound truth. I was once arguing about health care policy with a Canadian who was trying to instruct the ignorant Yankee on this subject. She said that of course health care in Canada isn't a free lunch. It does get paid for obviously -- doctors don't work for free -- hospitals don't construct themselves. So since there is no such thing as a "free lunch" anyway, there is nothing to be concerned about. Right?

I told her that she had entirely misunderstood the significance of TANSTAAFL. The point isn't "the free lunch is like Big Foot. Big Foot doesn't exist, so he won't come and hurt you." The significance of TANSTAFFL is a warning, not a bit of re-assurance.

The warning is precisely that some people sometimes deceive themselves into believing that they see a free lunch, or that they see Big Foot for that matter. The coddling of such deceptions can do real harm. The danger is not Big Foot but the delusion.

Anyway, this column in the Chicago Sun Times Monday made much the same point using that Independence weekend favorite beverage -- lemonade. When that old symbol of childish enthusiasm and entrepreneurship, the lemonade stand, is turned into a lesson that good (material) things are "free," things are in a sorry state indeed.

Last weekend

I don' usually add to this blog on a Tuesday, but this week I'll give you an expanded schedule, in order to celebrate the fulfillment of one of my New Years' resolutions for 2008 -- I had said that I would watch an opera at the Met while wearing a tuxedo. Check.

There was much else to my weekend in Manhattan too. There was the Frick collection, for example. Let me start with that.

Who was Henry Clay Frick? He was the enterprising fellow who in 1871 created the Frick Coke Company. It consisted of a beehive oven that turned coal into the coke used in turn to produce steel. Years later Frick entered into a partnership with Andrew Carnegie, because Carnegie needed a secure supply of coke for his expanding steel manufacturing empire.

The business history of that time is fascinating, but let us return to his eye for art, which would seem to have been superb.

The Frick Collection, somewhat (though it appears only sporadically) updated by his heirs remains HQ-ed where he wanted it to be, and is filled with a variety of works in many media from many countries and periods, including great works from the Italian renaissance up to those of the impressionists and post-impressionists of his own era.

One of the first paintings we saw when we walked into the place was, as it happens, a Dutch baroque work, a Vermeer that I have described on this blog before.

The painting I have in mind is "Officer and Laughing Girl" and I first encountered a reproduction thereof as the cover art for a book, Vermeer's Hat, which I read earlier this year.

I found the painting quite compelling, even as cover art, chiefly because of the map. Behind the man and woman seated at a table, and just above their heads from our perspective, there is a large wall map. I stared at that for an hour the first time I saw the book, trying to figure out what part of the world the map depicts.

Eventually, I got it. Part of the problem is that the orientation of the map treats WEST as "up." We are so accustomed in the early 21st century to seeing the north edge of a map as up that this is literally disorientating. Dis-occidentalating too.

The other problem is that Vermeer has painted the land as blue and the water as brown, rather than the reverse.

Once a viewer has made both of these adjustments, he can see that this is a map of Holland.

So I knew of this painting, and had even discussed it recently with the friend who was my companion as we walked into the Frick building. (She had used it to tweak me about my literalness, "are painters allowed to do that???") But I had no idea of its provenance, and was delighted to see it.

Indeed, nearly too delighted. I was excitedly pointing out the features of the painting that fascinate me and, in my absorption in the moment, my pointing finger must have gotten a bit too close to the painting. Some sort of alarm went off and a security guard asked me -- nicely but firmly -- to step back.

I hope the readers of this blog enjoy the painting too. And not just in the tiny pixellated form above. Get thee to Manhattan.

Still here? Okay. Anyway, I'll say something more about the Frick tomorrow and then on Thursday and Friday turn to the other elements of my trip. Including the aforementioned opera.