Spent some time today fixing my Simple Asides plugin for the latest version of Wordpress, 2.0.4. It seems like there were some changes in the way that the functions of my plugin were called by wordpress. Therefore, I had to move a few variables around. The code is still pretty ugly and unelegant though.
Download/upgrade the plugin on the Simple Asides page. Sorry it took so long to fix.
I’m somewhat 6-7 weeks into my SURF (summer undergraduate research fellowship) at the University of Pennsylvania (although I got the SURF from Caltech) so I figured I should post something.
The project I’m working on is slightly different than from my project proposal that I posted a few months ago. Essentially, I’m more focused on making porphyrin for conducting polymers now instead of for supercapacitors. In short, a conductive polymer is like a wire but made with organic elements (like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen atoms) instead of with metals (like copper, silver, iron, although a little bit of metal can be added). Conductive polymers are cool because they can be used to create molecular electronics (imagine wire being constructed piece by piece on a computer chip), organic electronics (such as OLEDs), supercapacitors, and generally cheaper electronics.
However, a problem that they suffer from is that their conductivities are not very high. For instance, the electrical conductivity of copper is 59.6*10^6 S-m^-1 whereas polyacetylene, a conducting polymer, has a conductivity of around 10^-7 S-m^-1 which is like 18 orders of magnitude smaller. However, a better comparison would be with silicon (which conducting polymers have a good chance of replacing) which has a conductivity of around 10^-5 S-m^-1 (I’m not too sure on this number so don’t quote me on this).
Porphyrin can be made into conductive polymers (although we are working with oligmers, really short polymers with only a few units length), and recent research (by my mentor Paul and the group) has shown that it has the potential to have conductivities at or even better than amorpous silicon!
My project consists of working with a certain class of porphyrin and synthesizing a new variant of them. This new variant will have a flatter chemical structure that will allow the porphyrin oligmers to pack more closely to each other. When they are closer to each other, then they can interact with each other better (pi-pi bonding is increased) and pass electrons (and holes) more effectively.
Well, at least that’s what my mentor and I think so far. I’m still in the process of making the porphyrin. The synthesis process is proving to be really tedious since it has around 12-15 steps which, after each step, requires one or more purification processes (mostly column chromatography). In total, I have over 24-28 steps to complete. Each step takes around a whole day so this is pretty much why I’m still in the synthesis process.
The yield is also very low (around 15-20%). The amount of material I’m currently working with is about 1 gram (I started with around 4.5g). Probably by the end of the all the steps, I’ll end up with maybe 0.2 grams of porphyrin. But those 0.2 grams are the result of over 6 weeks of labor and hundreds of dollars of materials. This is partially the reason why my mentor in recent days keeps reminding me to guard these samples (not fully synthesized yet though, but very close) with my life. Although he’s kind of joking, pretty much, if I screw up (which I’m very prone to do), I should just like give up and go into computer science or something.
The idea of manipulating matter at will (aka. Chemistry) is tremendously awesome, but it can be so tedious at times. For instance, if one comes up with an idea in chemistry, it might take weeks just to test it. That’s too long! I’m used to the computer science method is programming things at once and making modifications on the fly—instant feedback.
I actually started writing this post last week or so and didn’t get around to finishing it. Today, my mentor (he helps me do a lot of synthesis work) are almost close to completion. We have two and three these new porphyrin variants connected. Our goal is to make a pentamer (five connected porphyrins). The next reaction should give us a pentamer. After purifications and such, we should have the final product by the end of this week.
If you want to know how far behind I am in posting stuff, just continue reading and be like: “Wow, this is pretty far behind!”
Before I moved out in June, I managed to borrow a digital camera from a neighbor and take a few pictures of my room. I was going to post this in June, but you know, that deal with time…
In Avery, everyone has this cool whiteboard on their door. I usually have more interesting things on my board like quotes and images, but since it was finals week, my roommate and I kept a “emancipation” list to mark off when we would be free. The left side is my list. My roommate is insane and does tons of things. We also use the whiteboards to leave messages for other people, or we just vandalize other people’s whiteboards for fun.
This is my side of the room (the left side). It’s more of less like this despite that I’ve started packing things a little. Looking at dorm pictures of people from other colleges, I’ve always been struck by how sparse my room is. I’ve always thought this was because I’m from out of state, and didn’t like the hassle of shipping stuff around. However, a lot of other people’s rooms at Caltech is pretty spartan too. So I think this is kind of representative of how scientists (or just Caltech Avery undergrads) live.
A close up of my desk. There, you can see my voluminous textbook collection and my slick computer setup.
A close up of the other half of my room (the dressers and the stuff on them to the right of my guitar are my roommate’s). The greenish guitar is a normal Jay Turser JT300 Strat which I got for really cheap since I couldn’t lug my super-cool Fender Fat Strat over. Some binders, food bits, and stuff can be seen. Sometimes I attempt to make chinese food, but I don’t really have the ingredients for them, and the supermarket is about a 17 minute way away.
Maybe I’ll write about my chemistry work next…
I’m back from the small trip to Vietnam. Overall, it was a little exhausting since the country is still in a developmental/modernizational phase making it something like a “second world” country (even though there is not really a established definition of “second world”). I’ve been deprived of computers and the internet for the whole time so I’m kind of glad to be back.
Oh yeah! I sucessfully completed the first year of Caltech RPG. I gained enough experience points to gain level +1 to sophomore. Also, I managed to defeat all of the final bosses although here was the quick description of the battles:
Me vs. Mu 26 Essay and “Quiz”: This was a very time consuming fight, but fairly easy. It’s like arm wrestling a hundred elementary school kids in a row: time consuming, but not exhausting.
Me vs. Ch 14: The fight was bare knuckle and lasted for 4 hours straight until the judges finally rang the bell and gave the fight to me.
Me vs. Ph 1c: I’d like to quote a senior here, but the quote is probably not appropriate to post. In short, I was pwned and I barely managed to scrape together enough points to “pass” the boss. I don’t think I actually defeated him though.
Me vs. Ma 1c: I walked into the fight really confiedent since Ma 1c’s earlier henceman, the Ma 1c midterm, was easy. However, this Ma 1c boss threw a lot of tricky techniques at me and got me into some situations I couldn’t solve. Therefore, I had to concede some defeats, but overall, I managed to defeat it. It was a pretty ugly fight though.
Me vs. Bi 1: I spent almost a day preparing for this encounter by reading and memorizing scrolls and books. The fight was not very stressful. Bi 1 damaged me a little, but I was able to cast a weak form of: Recall Lv. 1 to carry me through.
I’m coming home on Saturday. Unfortunately, I have to leave again for something in a few days after that. However, I hope to meet with a couple of friends from back home and discuss some plans and projects.
So I was procrastinating today… (you know where this is going)
Two things:
1. Soundboard - a device or a program that can play short audio clips sampled from pre-existing audio. This is usually a collection of clips from an actors voice. For instance, the kid in Home Alone used soundboards to play tricks on adults. A great collection of soundboards can be found at eBaums World or Soundboards.com.
2. Skype - a free internet telephony (VOIP) program which has recently made their SkypeOut service free until the end of this year (meaning that you can call US/Canada landlines without charge).
Combine #1 and #2 to call phones with skype and have fun surprising the victim with the soundboard. However, the problem is getting the soundboard to output to the input of Skype. To do this, open up the volume control and select the recording control (Options->Properties). Then after you call the person using Skype, you have to check the box under Wave Out Mix (or something similarly named) and make sure you drag the volume for it down or else the volume will be distorted and too loud. Remember, you have to check the Wave Out Mix after you make the call since Skype defaults to the Microphone checkbox. If you forget this step, the receiver on the other end won’t hear anything.
Have fun!