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Everyone who has spent time working on research projects has experienced the excitement, trials, and tribulations of falling down a literature review rabbit hole. Usually, these start in one of two ways. One way is that you start by learning a cool new fact that inspires you to check the bibliography and before you know it you have one or two dozen downloaded papers that have nothing to do with your research topic that you definitely have time to read. The other way, and perhaps more painful way, that this happens is that you come across a reference to a text that might just solve all of your problems if you could only find it. Sometimes these references are hard to find because they were cited incorrectly. Other times it’s because the text is so old that it is hard to find anyone who still has a copy. Sometimes you find the text you’re looking for only to discover that it is written in a language you are unable to read.

I was thinking about these research rabbit holes a lot while reading Agents of Empire, a book that was written because just over twenty years its author Noel Malcolm was reading a late 16th-century book that referenced a treatise by an Albanian author named Antonio Bruni. Not recognizing this name, Malcolm undertook an effort to find this text and eventually found it in the Vatican’s archives. After he had located the text at last he realized that he needed to do more than just transcribe it, he had to figure out who Antonio Bruni was. This kicked off two decades of research that took him all over the Mediterranean. What he found was not enough to reconstruct the life of Antonio Bruni, but Malcolm did succeed in creating a picture of Antonio Bruni’s extended family. A network of individuals who started as local elite in Venetian-controlled Albania and ended up scattered to the wind due to, in part, conflicts between Catholic Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Relatives of Antonio Bruni’s family found themselves in a diverse collection of roles ranging from Arch Bishop to Venetian Diplomat to spy and soldier.

The result is a glimpse at the Mediterranean during the late 16th century when nationality often mattered less than religious affiliation, the Pope still commanded armies, diplomats seemed almost certain to serve multiple masters, and family connections dominated politics. From taking part in the Battle of Lepanto to serving as an advisor to the voivod of Moldavia, members of Antonio Bruni’s family found themselves in positions of responsibility and influence everywhere they went. One of my favorite things about Agents of Empire is that throughout it Noel Malcolm addresses the limitations of the sources available to him and makes clear how much we don’t know about historical figures like these even with access to archives all over the Mediterranean.

For history buffs, this is a must-read. It’s a nice break from great man histories and grand-scale narratives that gives the reader a look at the lives of people who would not seem out of place if they were characters in Game of Thrones.

“Is there a doctor on board?”

This is it. My time to shine. My opportunity to rise to the occasion. What if I get it wrong? What should I do? The imposter syndrome creeps in. Seconds creep by wasted as I hesitate. I have to do this. This is what I’ve been training for. I raise my hand. “I’m a doctor.”

“Please come this way.”

I follow the attendant to the back of the plane. The passengers we walk by are becoming increasingly distraught. Children are crying. Adults are trembling in their seats. No one is willing to look at the poor soul in the last row who is suffering so visibly.

“Can you help them?”

“I’ll do what I can,” I say solemnly as I approach the passenger. They are hunched over and clearly in pain. I kneel beside them. “What seems to be the problem?”

“I…” they pause, the plane has hit a bit of turbulence. I grab the armrest of their seat to steady myself and it’s then that I notice they have a worn-out composition notebook in their lap and the last few inches of a number two pencil held tightly in their sweaty palm. They speak again. “I don’t remember how to calculate a dilution.”

“Oh,” I say relieved. “Just use the formula M₁V₁ = M₂V₂.”

All at once they stop trembling. They look up at me, smiling, tears of joy running down their face. “Yes! Yes! That’s it! Thank you!”

The passengers around us look on in awe as the attendant escorts me back to my seat. The plane erupts into applause. I sit back down and smile as the attendant hands me a complimentary beverage. Finally, all those years of school have paid off.

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I graduated this past weekend! After four years of undergrad and six years of grad school, I finally have my doctorate!

To be precise, I now have a PhD in Chemistry. I defended my dissertation and passed back in March. Once you pass your defense, people like to start calling you “Dr” already but in my experience, it doesn’t feel real until graduation. I’m not sure what will come next, but it feels good to have reached this milestone.

My dissertation was on redox-coupled spin crossover in cobalt coordination complexes. Like most interesting things about transition metals, this process primarily concerns the d-orbitals. Seeing the shape of these orbitals helps us understand much of their behavior.

The names of these orbitals come from their positions relative to the XYZ axes in three-dimensional space. Unlike s- and p-orbitals, the d-orbitals do not play a direct role in sigma bonding but can form pi bonds with suitable ligands. In a lone metal ion, these d-orbitals all have the same energy. Once a ligand, which can be any Lewis base, coordinates to the metal it interacts with the d-orbitals through electrostatic interactions that change their energies relative to each other. These energy differences determine the electronic configurations in these orbitals. In certain first-row transition metals this can lead to either high-spin or low-spin configurations. Spin is a property of electrons and some subatomic particles denoted by upwards and downwards pointing arrows.

This is a fundamental aspect of inorganic chemistry that seems simple on the surface. But like much of science, these seemingly simple concepts conceal much depth. Because d-orbital electrons determine many of the properties of a transition metal complex including magnetic susceptibility and what spectroscopic transitions are possible, the arrangement of electrons into low- and high-spin configurations is something that a great many researchers are interested in, giving rise to the field of spin crossover.

Spin crossover was first discovered in the 1930s and occurs in first-row transition metal complexes with ligands that induce an intermediate splitting between orbitals so that an appropriate stimulus (i.e. heat, light, pressure) can induce a drastic electronic rearrangement in the complex. This can result in changes in color, magnetic properties, and molecular geometry. A lot of the interest in spin-crossover comes from a desire to create molecular sensors and switches, as well as novel display technologies. My research concerned redox-coupled spin crossover, a lesser-studied variant in which adding or removing an electron causes a subsequent rearrangement of the d-orbitals.

That’s not all I did, though. I also got to be a teaching assistant for multiple classes covering topics like epoxy resins, fractional distillation, chromatography, and organic synthesis. I presented my research at a Gordon Conference and had the honor of being invited to speak at the ENY ACS Future Leader’s seminar. I met a lot of talented scientists and made some great friends. I performed with multiple ensembles as part of the Rensselaer Music Association. I got into tabletop gaming first as a player and then as a game master. And the whole time I’ve been serving as an alumni coordinator for my fraternity in Upstate New York.

I’m looking forward to whatever my next adventure will be. In the meantime, I’ll be catching up on my TBR pile, writing more, and shoveling yet more hours into the furnace that is my crippling addiction to real-time strategy games. Feel free to get in touch if you or someone you know is looking to hire a new PhD chemist.

If you’re like me and spent far too much time on the internet, you’ve probably encountered the same question in SFF genre forums repeatedly. Why are so many fantasy works set in a “medieval” world? There are a few answers to this. One is tradition, Tolkien and other giants of the genre grounded their stories in medieval aesthetics. Another is that medieval settings are familiar to fantasy fans. An author doesn’t need to spend time on endless exposition if they can fall back on preexisting ideas already in their readers’ heads.

This is all well and good but inevitably these settings get old. Recent authors like Brian McClellan and Django Wrexler have made gunpowder fantasy popular. It’s fantasy, but with guns. This sub-genre draws on imagery from the Napoleonic Wars and similar periods. Like the medieval era, this period of history looms large in people’s minds. Unfortunately, this jump skips past an entire era of human history between 1400 and 1700 (approximately, I’m not a historian) when gunpowder hadn’t quite achieved supremacy and armored warriors and ranks of pikemen were still common sights on the battlefield.

I’m using pike-and-shot because fantasy books and D&D Campaigns tend to be rather violent, but this new mode of warfare was far from the only thing that changed. It was during this time that modern banking was developed and Europe and the idea of the state first arose. It was also a time of discovery when the scientific method was first conceived and the ideals of the Enlightenment were promulgated. All of these ideas are perfect for a fantasy setting. And to be fair some fantasy IPs do use imagery from this period, Warhammer Fantasy stands out among them. But it still feels that this period has been woefully neglected.

This was a period of immense changes in Europe and the rest of the world. Changes bring conflict and inspire all kinds of questions for a fantasy setting that authors and dungeon masters could seek to answer. What use is a wizard’s fireball when a row of arquebusiers can take out rows of spear-wielding infantry? What will happen when the king’s subjects decide not to pay their taxes until they get the services they are owed? What did that disgruntled priest just nail to the door?

The classical Forgotten Realms settings already verge on the beginnings of an early modern setting so why not move the clock a few years forward?

I really liked this book. It didn’t hook me at first, and I thought it slowed down a bit in the middle, but I’ve always enjoyed Reynolds’ work and John Lee is a great narrator. Ultimately, the ending was fantastic and I think the Goodreads score of 4.2 is completely justified.

House of Suns follows three first-person POVs. Two of these belong to Campion and Purslane, clones of a woman named Abigail Gentian born nearly six million years before when humanity was just starting to explore the galaxy. Since then they and the thousand other clones of Abigail Gentian have crossed the galaxy countless times assisting and observing the many human cultures that have come and gone during that time. The third POV consists of flashbacks from Abigail Gentian’s childhood, memories that all of the clones share. At the beginning of the novel Purslane and Campion are running several decades late for the Gentian Line reunion, an event that happens every quarter million years at which the clones of Gentian Line sync their memories and conduct various pieces of business. At first, this tardiness is a major problem as the two of them have become romantically involved and the implications of them both arriving late together are obvious. As it turns out, their tardiness saves their lives. When they arrive at the reunion and discover that the entire star system has been destroyed in an effort to wipe out all of the Gentian clones. Luckily there are other survivors, and together they have to discover why someone would try to wipe them out aa well as find the collaborator in their midst.

It’s during the investigations and politicking that follow the ambush that the plot slows down a bit. Although we learn a great deal about the characters involved I found some parts of this book drags. The ending however makes it worth it. Reynolds excels at portraying the weirdness of post-human societies and basking in the enormity of the universe. Read this book, or listen to it on Audible like I did, if you want a story that takes place on long time scales (60,000+ years), have a fascination with megastructure concepts, or like to ponder the relationship between memory and identity.

If you played the game like I did you were probably looking forward to the season finale of HBO’s Last of Us adaptation in which Joel tears through a hospital full of fireflies to save Ellie’s life. The internet has been filled with discussions of whether Joel was right to do what he did.

But all these arguments are irrelevant because there is no way that the doctor had IRB approval. I jest, because the fireflies almost certainly don’t have anything like an IRB (Institutional Review Board). What organization gets ahold of the first (as far as we know) person with immunity to cordyceps and decides the best route is to immediately kill them? The doctors could have run blood tests. They could have tried to infect Ellie on purpose to study how her body reacts. They had lots of non-destructive options and the fact that the fireflies wouldn’t question this clearly insane doctor who decided to kill the patient upon first meeting doesn’t bode well for their organization’s survival.

Obviously, writers for both the game and show probably went with this ending because it is the easiest to convey. It would be difficult to convey a long series of boring, uncomfortable, unethical tests. But people make bad decisions all the time so who knows maybe this scenario is more realistic than I’m giving it credit. After all, it wasn’t too long ago that bleeding and leeches were standard practice.

On a related note, why don’t the fireflies try to build their own communities? There’s obviously plenty of room and Tommy’s commune shows that it is possible. With their networks and resources, the fireflies should be able to build and protect at least one commune of their own.

I’ve been on a Max Hasting kick lately. If you’re a history buff, you have probably heard about him. I started with his book on the Korean War, then moved on to Retribution, his book about the end of the war in the pacific. And now I’ve finished his book on Vietnam.

This is another case of a book I first bought in print and never got to until I found it on Audible. The book itself is probably thick enough to stop a bullet, and its contents certainly deliver the tragedy that the title promises. That was largely the problem I had with getting through the physical version, it’s too big to care around in a bag easily and requires a huge time investment.

Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy gives the reader exactly what it promises. Hasting’s knack for description and emphasis on the very human stories of the people who lived through the conflict. Telling the story of a war where many of the participants lost much and in the end found themselves asking what the point of it was.

It’s a good book made even better by the excellent narration provided by Peter Noble. I give it a 5/5.

A very belated movie review.

This movie came out back in 2017 and I’m reviewing it now, why? Because it’s 2021 and I finally got around to watching it. The story is about a man, his wife, and his wife’s land. Also, he killed his wife. Also, it’s based on a 2010 novella by Stephen King.

When I saw the trailer for this I expected a dark supernatural thriller where a man named Wilfred kills his wife. What I got was much more. The movie is spooky, with plenty of horrors, but it might not be supernatural. The movie is dark, sad, and suspenseful. Yet everything Wilfred is subjected to could be either supernatural or natural. All of it could be the doing of a vengeful spirit or just the torment of a guilty conscience. But then, Wilf talks a lot about heaven and hell so maybe it’s a story about divine judgment.

I’d give it a 3.8/5.

It’s a solid movie. It’s the kind of movie that makes you pay attention to it. It’s intense, quiet, has more than its fair share of gruesome, and it’s very very well made. Go give it a watch.