Monthly Archives: January 2015

The Buried Rainbow

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The Buried Rainbow

His mind is a graveyard of memories
of young and beautiful faces,
utopian dreams,
transformative art
unseen in this island world of blind cyclopses
bumbling into each other with hurtling ambition
in the shadowed canyon bottoms.
He tosses pearls of protein, lipids and carbohydrates
on the frozen ground, and they erupt
as fluttering clouds of rock doves
rising into the clear air
to wheel about the shafts of light
streaming onto the canyon walls,
and carrying his gaze up into
the buried rainbow of an undiscovered country,
where fields of energy emanate
from fingertips of generosity
to unfurl a mesh of loving care
that cradles a race of poets.

25 January 2015

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DEP Micro-device 2D Electric Field

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I used to have the ambition of being an “artistic scientist,” a physicist and engineer aiming to produce scientific findings that were both useful and elegant, and which I would present in as beautiful a manner as I was able. The type of beauty I sought is a combination of logical simplicity, mathematical elegance, some range and depth of insight provided by the ideas, all communicated with visual and literary crispness in my written reports and other presentations.

I achieved this ideal, to my own satisfaction at least, a few times during my scientific career. One of those proud achievements is my model of the electric field in dielectrophoretic (DEP) micro-devices.

My original report “The 2D Electric Field Above A Planar Sequence Of Independent Strip Electrodes” is available below (a link to a PDF file). The report is dated 4 October 1999, and lists two authors; the second author is the patron who paid my salary during the months I worked on this project.

This paper was sent to a journal and subsequently published, but with egregious errors introduced by the journal’s editors, who “simplified” my math for publishing convenience. Months after I pointed this out to them, they issued an errata. The combination of the published paper and the errata (showing correct formulas) did not include many of the illustrations I had produced for my original report (Version 1), and which I think would help anyone actually thinking of using my mathematical model of DEP electrostatics.

So, this blog entry is similar to the case of a former artist who pulls out an obscure and favorite painting of theirs from storage in an attic or basement, dusts it off, and hangs it up on the wall so he can look at it again, and remember how good it felt to make.

A second report (an excerpt in PDF form) describes how use of the electrostatic model could assist in the development of DEP micro-devices (which are used in DNA sequencing technology).

DEP Device Diagram

DEP Device Diagram

DEP 2D Math Beauty

DEP 2D Math Beauty

DEP 2D Model Version-1

DEP 2D Model & micro-devices

Enjoy!

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Footprints In The River, Handprints On The Sky

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Footprints In The River, Handprints On The Sky

My life is as dewdrops on a lotus leaf
spread above the quiet of Walden Pond,
disappearing slowly, inexorably, in the warmth of the sun
birthing an unending present – my unknowable future;
evaporating my sufferings
into the buzz of hummingbird wings
and the laughter of children playing,
no different today than in the days of Pericles and Gautama,
and certainly no different in those days to come
when my forgotten name will be half as old as theirs.
The American Ryokan, the Japanese Thoreau,
how glad I am of their gifts,
examples of living by principle –
content, enlightened, generous, humane, calm, funny,
engaging me with their words
the way their living engaged their neighbors,
waking so many from torpid lives of expediency
by the sheer force of example –
without exhortation,
their tangible traces, now, pure art.
And when I am gone what will be my legacy?:
the impish glee of a child laughing on the swings,
hands furrowing the warmth of the sand,
plunging through sweet air reaching for the higher bar,
watching ripples of light on the water.

24 November 2002