Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Second rate reporter says what?

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

“That’s what the insurrection act is for!”

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

We still have time to mess this up!

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

If you are in line to indict donald trump, stay in line.

Take your GOP plan out of the witness protection program.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

You are here: Home / Balloon Juice / Commentary / Culture as a Hedge Against This Soul-Sucking Political Miasma We're Living In / The Kids Are All Right–MIT Science Writers Edition

The Kids Are All Right–MIT Science Writers Edition

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Got some stuff I’ve been meaning to share from the students in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing–the joint in which I do much of my teaching.

As part of the core curriculum in that masters program, there’s a one-semester class on making science documentaries that I teach.  There are a couple of reasons why we require them to devote 1/8 of their coursework at the ‘Tute to developing skills in a medium which they as writers and reporters may not see as their first love.

There’s the pragmatic justification: a science writer who can tell a potential reporter that they can handle a camera and Adobe Premiere has a leg up over an applicant who can’t, and some of our alumni have indeed found that video has become a bigger part of their working life than they anticipated.

Then there’s a more abstract argument for the class: it’s a class in documentary production–which means that it asks the students not just to come up with an idea for a film and put it together with tools we provide, but to organize  all of the elements that go into creating a finished video that can be released to a general audience. That is: I emphasize that the creative process for filmmakers has two facets.  There’s coming up with and executing the ideas; and there’s assembling the resources to do all that–time, equipment, money, materials and so on.  If you don’t have the cash or the days or whatever to get some brilliant notion into the camera, then you have to be clever in matching your vision to your logistics–or at least that’s what I hope the students figure out.

And finally, there’s the reason closest to my heart: working in the documentary medium makes you–has made me–a better writer.  Film/video is a relentlessly unforgiving medium. You can only tell what you can create images and a soundscape to convey.  Throat clearing, any delay in getting to the point of a shot, a scene, a sequence, is immediately apparent to viewers and will in short order cause attention to flag.  The amount of story and feeling that can be conveyed without exposition through shot making and the artful use of sound is amazing–and there are analogues in prose to be found.  I find my film making muscle memory kicks in most when I’m moving from a first draft to the revision of a book or long piece–and it’s been invaluable to me.

The Kids Are All Right--MIT Science Writers Edition

So that’s why we ask our students in the GPSW to give over their time and energy to a medium most of them  are unfamiliar with when the semester begins.  What is so gratifying to me as their instructor is how well almost all of them take to it, both the technical craft bits and the habits of mind. Every year we get fascinating glimpses of some aspect of the scientific enterprise; there’s sometimes some pain involved in the journey, but even if they take the long road home, it seems always to come out alright on the night. (Mix metaphors much?)

Anyway, that’s all background to what follows below: short documentaries from two teams in the MIT GPSW class of ’23.  Both of them depart from the most common formula for these films, that of following an idea or experiment through a lab. Instead they focus in different ways on the human experience of a place like MIT–and especially what it means to be someone other than white-male-avatar of  science.  They both required a lot of time and thought and so many edit room hours to arrive at the stories the students wanted to tell, and I couldn’t be prouder of both teams and their work.

So–enough preamble.  Take a look.  If nothing else, it ain’t doom; it ain’t GOP fecklessness or TFG evil.  It’s just–and this is so much more than enough–talented and focused young people figuring out their world, both in front of and behind the camera.

 

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That’s all from me. The thread, as ever, is as open as Winnie the Pooh’s heart.

Image: Pieter Claesz, Still life with a skull and a writing quill, 1628

Reader Interactions

59Comments

  1. 1.

    Kelly

    Science open thread question for the physics folks. Is the LK-99 room temperature superconductor buzzing around the internet for real? Kinda appeared out of nowhere.

  3. 3.

    Old School

    Winnie the Pooh?  The horror movie character?

    Can you say what grades these films received?

  4. 4.

    Jerzy Russian

    @Kelly:   This is a big deal if true.  As far as I can tell (after a cursory search) this announcement has not been published in any reputable peer-reviewed journals.  If it works, then it should not be hard for other labs to make this material and confirm its electrical properties.  If no one else can reproduce this, then it will be of little use.

  5. 5.

    VOR

    @Kelly: Current superconductors either need at least liquid nitrogen temps (-70C) or incredible pressure to operate. Or both. Per Wikipedia the record at standard atmospheric pressure is -135C.

    A room temperature and ambient pressure superconductor is sort of a Holy Grail type of goal. This means there are many teams around the world attempting to create such a thing.

    The caution around the Korean team is that their paper has not yet passed peer review. Nobody has duplicated their results yet. That doesn’t mean they are wrong, just that nobody has proved them right yet.

  6. 6.

    Tom Levenson

    @Old School:

     Can you say what grades these films received?

    Nope. That’s the students’ business.

    No one saw a need to seek a change, however.

  7. 7.

    theturtlemoves

    Haven’t watched the second one yet.  First one was great.  The project lead there might be from my original neck of the woods as Oglala Lakota, since that’d possibly be Pine Ridge and western SD.  Plus, rockets are cool and I used to be a tech writer (now developer / consultant).  Thanks for sharing your students’ work.

  8. 8.

    Jerzy Russian

    @VOR:   Also, too:  my (limited) understanding is that these ceramic “high temperature” superconducting materials cannot support a very large electrical current, which would potentially limit applications.  That said, if this new stuff is really superconducting at room temperature, then people will find uses for it, regardless of the limits.

  9. 9.

    Jerzy Russian

    @Tom Levenson:

     

    Nope. That’s the students’ business.

    Yes, the last thing you want to do is to go blabbing on the internet about confidential student records.

  10. 10.

    MattF

    @Kelly: The gold standard for proving you’ve got superconductivity is the ‘Meissner effect’— when a material becomes superconducting it expels all internal magnetic fields. It’s somewhere between difficult and impossible to demonstrate this happening to a tiny sample of a substance that’s being subjected to enormous pressures inside a diamond anvil, but it’s the one thing that will convince everyone. And it’s the one thing that has not been seen. So, as of right now, the verdict on these materials is ‘Not Proven’.

  13. 13.

    Ken

    @Kelly: Derek Lowe has a post on the superconductor news, with links to the rXiv preprints. As noted above, it’s not been published in a peer-reviewed journal yet. However Derek notes that the process isn’t difficult, and expects that multiple labs are trying to reproduce it and will have results in a couple days.

    BTW he also links to one of his earlier posts, about a couple of similar superconductor claims that were retracted after they couldn’t be reproduced

    EDIT: Must… type… faster!

  14. 14.

    NotMax

    Slight warning on the first video, especially for anyone wearing headphones or earbuds — there are spots where the audio is cranked up to ear/speaker blasting level.

  15. 15.

    zhena gogolia

    We just watched the first one — fantastic! Will watch the other one later.

  17. 17.

    dmsilev

    @Kelly: Almost definitely not. I took a look at their data; it’s awful.

    If you want to read their actual paper, skipping the press releases, it’s here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12008

    I will note just a couple of issues: despite the text claiming otherwise, there is no clear evidence of flux expulsion in Fig 1d, just some weak diamagnetism which looks nothing like the Meisner Effect. Secondly, a thermodynamic transition like superconductivity should ring clear as a bell in heat capacity measurements, yet their data of that (Fig 4b) shows absolutely no evidence of a phase transition near 380 K.

  18. 18.

    Baud

    I’m morally opposed to overachievers but I appreciate the message you and the videos are seeking to convey.

  19. 19.

    Kelly

    @dmsilev: Looked at the paper and could see I have absolutely no background to judge it. Thanks! I was hoping you’d weigh in.

  20. 20.

    dmsilev

    @Kelly: The real question will be do the results reproduce. That was the problem with the claim of room-temperature superconductivity in the hydride materials back in March; many groups tried, but nobody saw the same thing.

    The preprint I linked to is formatted for submission to Nature; some peer reviewers will be having a go at it.

  21. 21.

    Tom Levenson

    @Baud: As someone who could not have attended the university in which I now teach, think of my problems with overachievers…

    The students here are just great. A joy.

  22. 22.

    NotMax

    FYI zombie alert.

    As global temperatures rise, fires are also spreading farther north and into the Arctic. These fires aren’t just burning in trees and grasses. New research on the exceptional Arctic fire seasons of 2019 and 2020 points to fires moving into the ground as well.

    These underground fires are known as “zombie fires,” and there are a number of reasons to worry about the trend.

    First, as the organic-rich Arctic soils dry up because of changing climate conditions, they can burn slowly and release vast amounts of smoke into the atmosphere.

    Second, soil fires that spread underground are harder for firefighters to tame and extinguish, thus demanding more resources for longer periods of time. Firefighters in Alberta, Canada, where carbon-rich peatlands are common, have been dealing with fires smoldering to depths dozens of feet underground in 2023. Because peat fires can make the ground unstable, using heavy equipment to excavate the fire areas also becomes risky.

    Finally, these soil fires don’t die easily. Recent research finds that Arctic soil fires can smolder through the winter and reignite during early spring when temperatures rise, hence the nickname “zombie fires.”

    Wildfires have been a natural part of northern forest and tundra ecosystems for thousand of years. However, the severity, frequency and types of wildfires in northern and Arctic regions have changed in recent decades. Source

  23. 23.

    dmsilev

    I should add, there are some puzzling gaps in the data that the authors present, data which their equipment is definitely capable of gathering. They should be showing magnetization vs. temperature in significant magnetic fields, not just the 10 Oe shown. Similarly, they should be showing resistance vs. temperature in field, and possibly resistance vs. field at fixed temperature. They are claiming that the transition temperature is near or above the 400 K upper limit of their equipment, and the most straightforward way to still probe a putative superconducting transition is to suppress it with a magnetic field. Do that for a series of different fields to define a curve,; you can then do some fairly straightforward extrapolations to zero field to get the “true” transition temperature.

  24. 24.

    Kelly

    Wildfire persisting underground is a problem even in the lower 48 states. It’s much  smaller scale, isolated roots. I’ve seen smoke rising through a couple feet of snow 5 months after after the 2020 Beachie Fire. Forest Service went after them in the spring.

  27. 27.

    Warren Senders

    I’m with you on the power of documentary film-making. I got hired two years ago to make a series of educational videos about my musical specialty (Hindustani khyal singing); I finished the material earlier this year, and I learned sooooo much about the music I’ve been doing for 45 years. It’s had an immediate impact on my teaching and my performance.

  28. 28.

    Another Scott

    @dmsilev: Thanks.

    A comment in German pointed to on Lowe’s article makes similar points.  (Let Google translate it.)

    My personal assumption is that the authors measured an insulator, so no current flowed and therefore no voltage occurred (4-point measurement). Then it looks like a superconductor. But if you then turn up the current (i.e. the applied voltage), breakdowns may occur and a current begins to flow. That would explain the sharp increase.

    “Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.” That isn’t here, yet.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  32. 32.

    Jay

    @NotMax:

    doesn’t require peaty soils for zombie fires. The Central Interior has seen a lot of them recently, where a burn pile fired up in January and 3 feet of snow, (clearing brush and windfalls), pops up in the spring.

    Worse yet, these fires tend to sterilize the soil, burning out all organic matter and organism’s, to the point that nothing can grow for years upon years. And of course, with no root fibers, organics to absorb moisture, spring melt and spring rains cause landslides.

  33. 33.

    eversor

    @dmsilev:

    I think there are both masters of their craft, students of it, and yet those who remain both.  Nolan, and the main actors, seem to be the both type.  They are always amazing and yet always improving.

  35. 35.

    West of the Rockies

    I thought very seriously about applying for your program about 15 years ago.  Teaching collegiate comp and lit seemed less important than perhaps trying to help make the public recognize climate change.

    But I was already in my early 40s and had a young kid in school on the west coast.  Had to continue to have an income…

    Your program looks most excellent,  Tom!  You’re doing important work.

  36. 36.

    dmsilev

    @Another Scott: Thinking about it further, the diamagnetism presented in Figure 1 doesn’t seem right for superconductivity; it’s much too small. Their graph lists M as being roughly -7e-4 emu/g. While they don’t give the mass density of the material and I’m not bored enough to try to calculate it from the composition and lattice cell parameters, most solids are ballpark 10 g/cm^3, so that gives -0.007 emu/cm^3. Full flux expulsion would be -1/(4*pi), about -0.08. So, at best, a bit under ten percent of the volume would be superconducting. Fine so far as it goes, it’s hardly unusual for materials to be multiphase or for superconductivity to exist only on the surfaces of grains or so forth, but the problem is that they’re claiming that a large enough volume fraction superconducts that you can use a magnet to levitate the material, which typically needs Meissner fractions of well over a half.

    Again, we’ll see. But at least with the data shown so far, there are definitely things to be concerned about.

  37. 37.

    frosty

    If nothing else, it ain’t doom; it ain’t GOP fecklessness or TFG evil.

    So that means it must be Musk. It’s not Musk??? Pout//

    Thanks for something different. The same things the audiences for Barbenheimer have been telling Hollywood, I gather.

  38. 38.

    MattF

    @dmsilev: Well, I finally looked at the Derek Lowe post, and what they’re claiming would indeed be a BFD. If true. Note, in any case, that carrying a lot of field energy would be a bottom-line requirement for major engineering relevance.

  41. 41.

    Kristine

    Thanks for posting the videos, Tom. They were great.

    I envy those kids. They are going to do so many great things.

    I felt a connection–admittedly slight–to the rocket video because I live across the border from Carthage College and have used their library in years past.

  42. 42.

    Roger Moore

    @Kelly: ​
     

    Is the LK-99 room temperature superconductor buzzing around the internet for real?

    We’ll know pretty soon. When the liquid nitrogen temperature superconductors first came out, they seemed too good to be true, but people were able to follow the recipe and make their own in short order. If nobody but the originator can make these RT superconductors work, it’s most likely a mistake or even a fraud. If other people can do it, you’ll know it’s for real.

  43. 43.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Kelly:Wildfire persisting underground is a problem even in the lower 48 states. It’s much smaller scale, isolated roots.

     

    4 words: Abandoned coal mines burning.

    And they have no way of extinguishing them.

  44. 44.

    Roger Moore

    @Jerzy Russian:

    Also, too: my (limited) understanding is that these ceramic “high temperature” superconducting materials cannot support a very large electrical current, which would potentially limit applications.

    They’re also likely to figure out how to improve it, too.  From a pretty cursory read of the preprint, the authors have a sensible theory about why their stuff works.  If their theory is correct, there should be a lot of room to engineer improved versions.

    The same basic thing happened with the perovskite superconductors when they first came out.  The first versions operated at higher temperatures than anything seen before, but they weren’t actually able to function up to liquid nitrogen temperature.  But once they were published, other labs were able to quickly iterate the basic concept and improve it a lot- higher temperatures and higher currents- within the span of a few months.

  45. 45.

    NotMax

    Repeating for those who may have missed it and might be interested, Edward R. Murrow speaks with Oppenheimer. Originally broadcast January 1955.

  48. 48.

    Geminid

    @OzarkHillbilly: It’s possible that some day direct air capture of carbon dioxide will be economical. Then maybe they could set up a direct air capture plant next to a burning coal mine and pump it full of CO2. Maybe the federal government enhance the per-ton tax Q45 tax credit already on the books for CO2 disposed of in this way.

    That reminds me. Last year Occidental Petroleum was making big talk about a big DAC plant they were going to build on a site in the Permian Basin. The idea was to collect the Q45 tax credit while pumping CO2 into the ground and producing “carbon neutral” oil. Evidently oil producers have been doing this for years because the carbon dioxide makes the oil flow more easily.

    I need to see if Occidental is following through on this project.

  50. 50.

    Ruckus

    Tom, very, very nice and very, very good.

    Both of those videos were spectacular. Thank you for making my day.

  53. 53.

    Torrey

    Thank you for posting those videos. Both are truly wonderful. I particularly enjoyed the second one, since I could see a very clear series of benefits to be derived from the study. I appreciated the concluding point that the object wasn’t just to make incarceration safer. Exceptional work on both projects.

  54. 54.

    Doug

    That is: I emphasize that the creative process for filmmakers has two facets. There’s coming up with and executing the ideas; and there’s assembling the resources to do all that–time, equipment, money, materials and so on.

    Christo was known to say that the whole process of his mega-projects — planning, getting permission, all of the bureaucratic hoop-jumping — was a part of the art.

  56. 56.

    Jess

    This is great! I’m working on developing an interdisciplinary sustainability studies program for my university, and connecting documentary film and sustainability issues is one of my goals. I would love to follow up with you to discuss what you’re doing in more depth, if you’re willing.

  57. 57.

    Jess

    @Doug: Yes! I didn’t much appreciate his and Jeanne-Claude’s projects until I understood this aspect of it. Now I think their work is brilliant.

  58. 58.

    AM in NC

    Thanks for sharing these videos!  After so much media about people at their worst, it’s nice to see smart, engaged people doing things that turn them on and are helpful. Go “kids”! And go the teachers of those kids!

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