Monthly Archives: July 2013

Fun Science: The Element Lithium

Lithium is the third element on the periodic table, after hydrogen and helium. It is the lightest metal, and you probably use it every day. The batteries in your phones and laptops and most rechargeable batteries you use are lithium ion batteries.

Lithium is used in batteries because it has the highest electrochemical potential of any element. It is so high that it will split water into hydrogen and oxygen (and violently!). This means there is a lot of energy available to exploit. This is also why laptop batteries can sometimes explode; the batteries are sealed very tightly, but if the seal is broken, air and water vapor will come in contact with the lithium and this is unsafe. 10-15 years ago, there weren’t as many lithium batteries in use, but now they are everywhere. Science has made great strides in improving the configurations of the batteries to give more energy, such as increasing the surface area of the lithium portion. Each time you cycle your battery, the lithium undergoes an electrochemical reaction on the draining and again on the charging of the battery. This is also why batteries become shorter lived over time; the high surface areas of new batteries aren’t thermodynamically favorable, and the lithium will become lower surface area with time. Less available surface area means less available energy.

Lithium ion (Li+) has another, very different use. It is used as a mood stabilizer. It is particularly useful at combatting mania. The linked wikipedia page contains its fascinating medical history. It was first used in the 1870’s as a mood stabilizer. Eventually LiCl was marketed as an alternative to table salt (NaCl), to avoid high blood pressure, and its mood properties were forgotten. Early versions of 7 Up contained lithium. Excessive lithium use was found to be deadly, and it was banned as an additive in the 1940s. Then in Australia, it was again discovered to have mood-stabilizing properties. Its therapeutic dose is quite close to its toxic dose, which is maybe why it took a while to gain approval in the US. Studies suggest that water supplies containing lithium may promote longevity and reduce the occurrence of suicide.

Lithium salts also have another really nifty use: cleansing the air in spaceships and submarines. Not only does human breathing consume oxygen; it also produces carbon dioxide, which is toxic when present in high amounts. Several lithium salts can remove carbon dioxide from the air. One even adds oxygen to the air when it removes carbon dioxide.

Elemental lithium is highly reactive, and is a member of the alkali metal group (all of whom react very impressively with water). Below is a video of lithium reacting with water. It bursts into bright red flame:

Another video shows more lithium action:

The people who made the second video have a great youtube channel with videos about all the elements done in a university laboratory environment. Most of them have good footage of reactions as well. I just spent an hour watching their videos, they are very entertaining for people with little knowledge, or a lot. If you have a little time to kill, the videos of sodium and potassium are also good, flammable fun.

Writing children’s books

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This summer I am taking a class about writing children’s books. I became interested in writing children’s books because I really love writing with illustrations. Before this summer, I hadn’t had the opportunity to just sit down and discuss for hours at a time what the children’s market demands. I probably had wrongly assumed it was pretty easy to write a children’s book, because they are pretty simple books and I think a lot of the books on the market are simplistic and unattractive.

Indeed, it is easy to write a book for children, but it’s a lot harder to sell one. Children’s books have structure I wasn’t aware of (most of them are exactly 32 pages, example), and there is a ton of competition. In 200 words, it’s harder to stand out than in 10,000. An interesting guide-book we have looked at in class is “Writing Picture Books” by Ann Whitford Paul. Her book goes over all the steps necessary to prepare a manuscript for a children’s picture book. We have done some exercises in our class like writing a young child’s concept book or rewriting a fairy tale, both of which have been fun exercises. I still have a little trouble writing as simply as is required for such ages, but we always have something to improve.

I think writing for children can also be of interest to people only interested in writing for adults. Children’s demands aren’t that different from those of adults– snappy language, quick action, relatable characters. In kids books, the author must try to have scenes with visualizable illustrations, and adults like to have mental images of what they read as well. Kids books are often under 1000 words, so they are a very doable exercise length. If you’re interested, I recommend giving it a try. At worse, you’ll just have some fun and feel a bit childish! =)

thecast 30

Photography in the American West

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This week I visited Moab, Utah. I stand-up (and fall-down) paddled on the Colorado River during a thunderstorm, I hiked in Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, and I stargazed. Most of all, I ravenously took pictures.

Delicate Arch from across a gorge in Arches National Park

Landscape Arch in Arches National Park

Mesa Arch in Canyonlands National Park

Green River overlook in Canyonlands National Park

Milky Way over the red rocks in the Colorado River valley

The Colorado River valley

Park Avenue in Arches National Park

The Gossips in Arches National Park

Arches National Park

Book review: Beggars in Spain (Nancy Kress 1993)

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There are no spoilers in this review beyond what you’d find in the first few chapters or the cover blurb.

Rating: 4/5

“Beggars in Spain” is a science fiction novel written in 1993; it was nominated for the top two awards in the field, the Hugo and the Nebula, though it didn’t win either. (“Red Mars” by Kim Stanley Robinson won both; it is one of the most detailed hard sf books I’ve read.) “Beggars in Spain” is one of those sf books that can be summarized by a what-if– what-if some people didn’t have to sleep at all? How would society react? What kinds of advantages would they have? How would it affect the personality of such a person?

The novel opens with a wealthy man wishing to procure advantageous genetic alterations for his to-be-conceived child in 2008. Though it is still rare, he wants his child to be sleepless. The children who have the trait have proven to be much smarter and always cheerful. Another child is conceived accidentally who is not sleepless (as a small nitpick, the science in this bit seemed fishy, but I am not familiar with what was known in 1993). Leisha is the sleepless daughter, Alice is the sleeper daughter.

Leisha is of course beautiful and brilliant. Much of the novel rotates around how she relates to sleeper people. The characters in the book didn’t always work for me; Leisha is always cheerful as a sleeper, but this is hard to relate to, and hard to imagine how it would even work. Also there is an injection of almost libertarian politics that I wasn’t sure what I thought of. The politics aren’t preachy and are presented as Leisha’s world-view rather than the author’s. I liked the first half of the novel immensely. I didn’t dislike the second half, but I found it less exciting and engaging. One consistently strong point of this book was the writing: I sometimes have to labor through harder science fiction books, which must belabor the description of complicated mechanical things. This book just flew for me, while still attacking the central question of science fiction: what would happen to people if? So if you are a fan of hard sf and only hard sf, it probably isn’t for you.

“Beggars in Spain” was also one of the most female-dominated sf books I’ve read. Most of the principal characters are female. The book is feminist without caring about it or focusing on it; these characters could just as easily be male but they simply aren’t. It’s feminist not in the sense of women’s rights, but simply having women as protagonists and examining their relationships. I’ve read umpteen scifi books with barely a woman on the pages, so this was a welcome change of pace. Nancy Kress is also one of the few premier female names in science fiction, so it also seemed appropriate.

Overall, I found “Beggars in Spain” a very worthy read. It raised a lot of thoughtful questions that even a week after finishing the book, I find myself thinking about. It never came together in a “wow” moment, as a few sf books do for me, but it was pleasant and easy to read, which is not always the rule in sf. This was the first work I’ve read by Nancy Kress, and based on this book, I want to read more from her.

Editing

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Editing is a word I hate. I’m one of those people that always wants to be on to a new project. Bigger, better, and newer. Realistically, nothing I write is publishable after only the first draft, and this is true for most people.

Perhaps part of my dread of editing is that I’ve read very little advice on how to go about doing it. I try to write what I write as best as I can the first time, but then what? But it’s something I have to learn to do, so I am forcing myself to learn. Here are three of my approaches, and some links to some sights that have more experience than I do.

1. Maybe leave that small error in there on the first draft, if you are debating it. It helps you get through the writing faster the first time. I find it helpful to have a toe-hold of some error you know you want to fix, and then move into the manuscript from there. I sometimes feel the urge to make the first draft as perfect as possible, but I think for me, it’s actually better to leave it rough. This also makes it easier to take a machete to it where needed, since there’s less sense of loss.

2. Leave it the hell alone after the first draft. This is two-part in motivation. One, I love it too much initially, and it guts me to rip it apart immediately. And two, I’m more likely to overlook awkward phrasings or logical leaps if it’s still too fresh in my mind. For both parts, it needs some time to gain some other-ness.

3. Work top to bottom. Does the character change behavior inexplicably? Is there a beginning, middle, and end? Big, basic stuff. Then I think about things like pacing, and then about specific sentences.

Some links that helped me think about my approach to editing:

Eight tips for self-editing
Ten editing tips
An interview with an editor about weaknesses in manuscript

So happy editing? It’s a miserable process for me, but it makes the fun bits worthwhile. In every worthy endeavor, there are parts that are inevitably less than thrilling, but we keep going. I welcome any suggestions from others, too, since I am learning always.

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Vironevaeh

Sci-fi, art, science, and writing

Monthly Archives: July 2013

Fun Science: The Element Lithium

Writing children’s books

Photography in the American West

Book review: Beggars in Spain (Nancy Kress 1993)

Editing

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