Robert Baden-Powell. Ernest Thompson Seton. Daniel Carter Beard. James E. West. William D. Boyce. These names are all over the history of the Boy Scout movement in the United States. Councils and awards are named after these men. They are the beginning of the Boy Scouts of America. The history of Scouting has many stories, from the “beginnings” of the Scouting Movement with Sir Robert Baden Powell to the unknown scout that helped William Boyce in the fog of London that resulted in Boy Scouts being brought to the United States. Not surprisingly, when someone looks into it, not only are these stories not entirely true, but some probably didn’t happen at all.

Seton wanted to bring boys out of cities and modern life and teach them woodcraft and Native American customs. Beard wanted to inspire the work ethic and Americanism of the pioneers as they pushed forward under Manifest Destiny. Baden Powell wanted to teach the boys to be productive and useful men in society, with skills developed in small groups.

While The Scouting Party documents the various goals of Scouting as seen by these three juggernaut personalities, a reoccurring theme in the correspondence is the controversy over who deserved credit for Boy Scouts. Drawing from the contemporary communications between the parties, the dispute between the three is handled from the objective view of history. The Scouting Party may even be the book that Daniel Beard was hoping for when he wrote to James West late in life:

“I would like to see a real, unbiased history of the evolution and growth of the Movement itself, written by some outside party. Such a history is bound to be written sooner or later, by someone who will not be influenced by the personal claims of Ernest Thompson, Baden-Powell, or Dan Beard. This will probably be done when you and I have the grass growing over our coverlid, and when we cannot make much of a kick, so why worry?”

Fantastically researched, the references used throughout the book appeal to my need for knowing sources for the claims and conclusions put forth in the book. The quotes from contemporary sources help the reader to understand the mindset of each participant, and gain insight into the environment where the Boy Scouts of America was forged.

The roles of James West and William Boyce are also covered in The Scouting Party, as a supplement to the struggle for credit involving Beard, Seton and Baden Powell. West’s management as the Chief Scout Executive put the BSA on a solid footing as the fledgling organization gained traction in the United States. His leadership was instrumental in the early success and stability of the BSA. The role of William Boyce seems more distant, apart from his part in bringing Baden-Powell’s Scouting Movement to the U.S., he financed much of the early days of the BSA. Not to make light of anyone’s contribution to what must have been a monumental task, the dedication to helping American boys grow to be great men was substantial in all that helped create the Boy Scouts of America.

By the end of the book I felt I had gained much in understanding how all of these men, these names that permeate Scouting, all added their own personalities to the organization that has helped millions of young men in this country. I wholeheartedly recommend it for reading, and I look forward to reading some of the other titles by David C. Scott and Brendan Murphy.

If you would like more information, Clarke Green has an interview with David C. Scott on his Scoutmaster Podcast #20.

Spinal Tap Engineering.

Today’s XKCD made me laugh out loud. Some problems are marketing and sales problems, not engineering problems.

Spinal Tap Engineering (Click to see original)

Units of measure are sooooo unnecessary.

For the Thanksgiving feast this year I was responsible for the turkey, so I had the opportunity to brine a turkey again.

Turkey. Representative of typical results.

This is where we start to run in to problems with the assumption that osmotic pressure is the mechanism behind turkey brining. We know from the brine recipe that there is about 1/2 cup of salt per gallon of water, which results in a 1.12 M solution. For comparison, physiological saline (0.9% NaCl) has a molarity of 0.156 M. If we assume turkeys have the same salt concentration as people, that leaves a difference between the brine and the turkey meat of 0.964 M. The big problem here is the direction of the offset. The higher concentration is in the brine, not the turkey meat. The pressure is in the wrong direction to force more H₂0 into the meat.

It turns out I’m not the first to ponder this question, and there is an alternate hypothesis.

The real answer has to do with the shape of proteins. In their natural state, the muscle cells are tightly bound within their protein sheaths—this doesn’t leave much room for excess water to collect in the meat.

But as anyone who has ever made sausages or cured meats knows, salt has a powerful effect on muscles. A 6% solution of salt will effectively denature (read: unravel) the proteins that make up the sheath around the muscle bundles. In this loosened, denatured state, you can now fit more water into those muscles than in their natural state. Even better, the denatured proteins in the sheaths contract far less as they cook, therefore squeezing out much less moisture.

So it turns out that denaturing proteins has a much bigger role in the effect of brining turkey than osmotic pressure.

I don’t think the knowledge will help you make a better turkey next year, but if you need something new to talk about at the Thanksgiving table, it might due the trick. If the guests fall asleep you can always blame the tryptophan.

A little bit of applied mathematics for your next “number of M&M’s in the jar” contest.

From Make

Things that bother me about some of my favorite TV shows all wrapped up in a four frames from PhD Comics

The first rule of street-fighting mathematics is…

The first rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club

Math is always portrayed as exacting and calculating, but there is a great need for those that deal with numbers on a regular basis to also have a sense for approximate answers. Throughout engineering school it is often referred to as “back of the envelope” calculation. Quick and dirty approximation that gives a sense of the exact answer.

A colleague pointed me to a class called “Street-Fighting Mathematics” over on the MIT Open Course Ware site. MIT OCW is a site with lecture notes, readings, exams and videos from quite a few classes. Now you have no excuse for sitting around doing nothing on a Friday night! Street-fighting Mathematics is taught by Sanjoy Mahajan, and it looks pretty well put together.

The course description reads:

This course teaches the art of guessing results and solving problems without doing a proof or an exact calculation. Techniques include extreme-cases reasoning, dimensional analysis, successive approximation, discretization, generalization, and pictorial analysis. Applications include mental calculation, solid geometry, musical intervals, logarithms, integration, infinite series, solitaire, and differential equations. (No epsilons or deltas are harmed by taking this course.)

Seems to be the thing everybody should review every once in a while. Here is your first assignment, now get to work!

I see that a book based on the Last Lecture of Randy Pausch was released a while ago.

While it something that I would not mind reading some day, I really only mention it so that I can link to the YouTube video of the lecture Pausch gave for the Last Lecture “Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”. Watch the whole thing, you will be a better person for it. The insights and clarity are not often available like this.

Last week, in addition to being introduced to the Miracle of Science Bar and Grill*, I had the opportunity to attend the professional short course from MIT’s Edgerton Center, High-Speed Imaging for Motion Analysis: Systems and Techniques.

Below are a few of the images captured during the course, during the bullet lab. It consisted of taking still images with a 500 nanosecond strobe of (what else?) .22 bullets going through things. These were taken in a dark room with the camera shutter open, and a microphone trigger for the strobe. I re-hosted these and others in the general photography section of this site and in addition you can find them on the Edgerton Center Site, along with others from previous years.

The course was great, split about 50-50 between lectures and laboratory work, starting with the basics of high speed photography and touching on some of the most advanced technologies that are just being released commercially. In the four days of the class we covered a wide range of useful topics:

• Camera and Setting Selection
• Lighting
• Lens Selection
• Laser Illumination
• Schlieren Imaging
• Motion Analysis Software

The 32+ course attendees were split into four groups and assigned a rather tongue in cheek project to be presented at the dinner the final evening of the course. This was a competition between teams, with prizes for the team with the “best” presentation. The point was to demonstrate some of the principles that were learned in the class, but also included points awarded for originality and entertainment. I won’t divulge details of what happened, but these were some of the funniest presentations I have ever seen. For some reason there were quite a few high speed video clips of people being hit in the head with things (including hot dogs and balls of clay). My group didn’t win the competition, but I must admit that the team that won earned every bit of it.

So many thanks to Dr. Jim Bales for the great course and the chance to have a little fun while we were at it!

* The Miracle of Science is a bar and grill about 3 blocks from MIT. Very much a tech college decor, the menu is nicely done as a periodic table on a chalkboard (I had the Rony Burger, chemical symbol “Rb”), and the bar and tables are the black lab surfaces that we all remember from chemistry lab.

As mentioned in the Cliff’s notes version regarding April, I spent a few days in Munich last month. It was part of the 10th International Conference on Hyperthermic Oncology. The trip was quick (yay for direct flights), and unfortunately the family didn’t get to join me. I did get to present a poster of one of the measurement tools we are using in my dissertation research, so that was a plus.

The conference venue was a hospital that was located about six or seven kilometers from the hotel, so I quickly learned the layout of the subway system in order to get back and forth each day. The hotel was close to the center of town, so there was a chance to see the Rathaus and wander around downtown each night.

One slow afternoon, I made it to the Deutsches Museum, by far the best science and industry museum I have ever been to. I could have spent days there.

After the conference was over, I spent my last afternoon in Munich vistitng the Olympic Park, and seeing where baby BMWs are made.

It was a nice trip, I really enjoyed Munich. Next time I’ll have to bring the family and spend some extra time.