First, the ccelebrity death of the week is James Van Allen, discoverer of the Van Allen radiation belts. The only celebrity you can hope for as a scientist is to have something important named for you, but I am assured he discovered a lot of other important astronomical stuff.
As for the week, it was a typical one. I had one quick fun question to answer and too many meetings to go to. One of which was irritating because we replowed the entire ground of stuff I had thought we'd had good agreement on during a telecon the day before.
While I am on the subject of work, I should mention that the interview I had a few weeks back did result in an offer, but I am going to stick with the new job at my current company. The offer wasn't high enough to compensate for the way benefits packages have changed over the past 20 something years. It was good to explore other options, but I think I've made a good decision, both from the tangible perspective and from the standpoint of finding the right growth and challenges.
The main thing I wanted to write about this week is triggered by the terrorism arrests and the resulting air travel chaos. I'm going to stay away from England for the foreseeable future, as the notion of not being allowed to take even a paperback book on board is too too much. Not that I had any plans to go to England. But the whole situation does mean I will have to check luggage for anything more than quickie one night trips, where I am willing to brush my teeth without toothpaste. I pride myself on being low maintenance, but there is justso low I can go.
Which got me to thinking about what the essentials I do travel with are. My toiletries bag is really pretty simple. At home, I use an electric toothbrush, but that's too bulky for travel. The travel toothbrushes, though, inevitably have bristles that are too hard. So I have an orange case which holds my toothbrush and proxobrush (for cleaning between the teeth, thus avoiding the gum problems that plague the rest of my family). Then there is toothpaste and dental floss. By the way, dental floss is also really useful for repairing tears in aging backpacks and I kept my day pack alive for a couple of months that way. A folding brush and comb combination is all I need for my hair. I have nail clippers, an emery board, a pair of tweezers, and a disposable razor, too. A ziploc bag of Q-tips is handy for more things than you can imagine. My real essential item is sunscreen. The Australians make the best sunscreen in the world, but it's kind of a long trip there to buy it, so I inevitably have to settle for the highest SPF stuff I can find at the local drugstore. There's a chapstick in my bag, too, but that's mostly to deal with Colorado dryness and I could really live without it pretty much anywhere else..
The two items I take for real travel (vs. business trips where I'm always within reach of running water and provided amenities) are packs of towelettes (e.g. Wet Ones) and a small bottle of liquid castile soap. Dr. Bronner's may have weird religious stuff on the label, but it is great stuff. You can use it as soap, shampoo, and detergent and it even smells nice. I currently have the peppermint scented one, but the almond is pretty decent, too.
Listing all this sounds like a lot, but it still seems to be less than what anybody else I know takes with them. What a pain to have to check my bag for the sake of my toothpaste and sunscreen.
By the way, I have a mildly amusing anecdote regarding the risk of liquid explosives. The specific concern is harmless substances being mixed on board to make a bomb. Well, back in my senior year of college, I had to do an undergraduate thesis and I was working on a project that had to do with modeling the dynamics of iodine clocks. These are interesting chemical reactions and provide a nice visual illustration of non-linear dynamics. Basically, you can get the reaction going and the fluctuating amount of iodine in the solution can be made visible with ordinary starch, so you can get the mix oscillating between yellow and blue. So my professor was going off to a conference and was going to demonstrate this and I mixed up the components for him. He had a little box with three test tubes (one with liquid starch and two with the chemicals) and I had carefully labeled the test tubes. And I provided a card that said "mix the contents of tubes A and B. To start reaction, add tube C." It didn't occur to either of us until after he was back that even then airport security might have looked askance at that.
Copyright 2006 Miriam H. Nadel