Passion Projects for Smart People

Turn Your Intellectual Pursuits into Fun, Profit and Recognition

Michael R. Wing

• Publisher: Quill Driver Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781610353229
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

1

Have Projects

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

The people in this book have projects which are long-term, creative, and original: things nobody has done before. They think about their projects often, even when they’re not working on them, and that adds meaning to their lives and gives them satisfaction. The French have a related concept—“le jardin secret” (the secret garden)—that most often describes an extramarital affair. This book is not about how to do that. Still, having an absorbing but part-time project to occupy your waking thoughts is sort of like having a romantic affair. To live like these people do, you need at least one ongoing project.

Where does the inspiration for an original project come from? Louis Pasteur once said that chance favors the prepared mind. You need experience. My best ideas come to me on a long vigorous hike, or while traveling to a new place, or otherwise doing something a bit outside of my comfort zone. They are stimulated by conversations with creative people. They are often syntheses of two or more ideas, observations, or problems that previously appeared to be unrelated. They arise from projects I am already doing. The ideas do not come to me during my daily work/life routine, so I have to get outside of that framework. It can help to keep a notebook or the electronic equivalent; you will find yourself running for it because all the good stuff will occur to you when you don’t have it on your person. Here are some stories about projects we do at my school that illustrate the apparently random way that chance can favor the prepared mind:

A horticulture project

All schools have an occasional speaker from the outside world. It pays to invite the speaker to lunch afterwards. My school was visited by an expert on Mars, Dr. Pascal Lee of the Mars Institute, who showed us slides of his research camp on Devon Island, in Canada’s high Arctic. He goes there because the landforms and climate make it similar to the Red Planet. He loves it, and seeing his presentation made us want to go there too. In an unguarded moment during lunch, Dr. Lee invited us to get involved. I started to try to think of a Mars-colony type of high school project to build there: A greenhouse? (They already have one.) A composting toilet? An Arctic chicken coop?

Our slender budget wasn’t going to get anyone from my school to Devon Island anyway, since the cost of transporting one person there and back with supplies is in the low five figures. I kept in touch with Dr. Lee but felt stymied. (Since then I have made the trip twice, once catching a free training flight with the New York Air National Guard that Pascal arranged and once on a National Geographic Society Waitt grant that I obtained by myself.)

A year after Dr. Lee’s visit I was touring the Galapagos as part of a study tour for teachers (the Toyota International Teacher Program) and saw a demonstration farm run by Carlos Zapata on Isla Santa Cruz. It bothered Mr. Zapata that as the population of the islands grew, all the food was imported. Most of the islands’ area is national park, but the remaining bit has fertile volcanic soils, adequate rain, and can grow anything. He built the farm to produce local vegetables and to show that his island can live sustainably. Seeing his farm reminded me of Devon Island, and of some other remote scientific field stations I knew about. I remembered having hiked past the University of California’s White Mountain Research Station at an elevation of 12,500 feet on the California/Nevada border and I thought: “We’ll grow food there. It’s cheaper to get to than Devon Island, and almost as cold.” I am sure I would never have had the idea if I hadn’t seen Mr. Zapata’s farm, if I hadn’t previously hiked in the White Mountains, and if Dr. Lee had not come to our school.

The management of the White Mountain Research Station gave me the go-ahead the same day I pitched my idea to them. They have always been helpful and accommodating to us, and this is a lesson I have learned about research institutions: They want to help schools. They just don’t know how. When a secondary school teacher approaches a university, government lab, museum, or other non-school institution with a specific request, the answer is often “yes.”

Sir Francis Drake High School’s alpine cold frame at the University of California’s White Mountain Research Station (elevation of 12,470'). It is the highest garden in North America. Photo by Michael Wing.

Our school’s parent fund gave several thousand dollars to pursue this unusual idea. My principal was supportive. A group of students and I built a four-foot by eight-foot cold frame (a miniature greenhouse) during the winter at school, and we installed it on the mountain the following summer. Over the years we added an automatic hydraulic ventilation system, and solar-powered electrical and irrigation systems. My science department colleague Cooper Clark and I have led more than a dozen trips to the White Mountains since then, bringing over fifty students, parents, and teachers from our school. Most of those students and parents have participated in multiple trips over several years. The project attracted $20,000 in corporate grants from outside the school. We have successfully grown radishes, potatoes, salad greens, winter wheat, garlic, and herbs. We plant in the spring, harvest in the fall, and the system automatically looks after itself the rest of the time. For seven years it was the highest altitude garden in America. We took it down recently.

When we travel to the White Mountains we sleep and eat at the University of California’s Crooked Creek facility, a big, comfortable lodge at ten thousand feet with a caretaker and cook. This place isn’t open to the public. It’s for graduate students and professors while they’re in the mountains doing research. We’re the only high school that uses the facility, mainly because we’re the only high school that has asked.

Maybe we grew the most expensive radishes in the world, but our purpose was educational and experimental. Most of the students involved in the project have gone on to study science or engineering in college. One of them is now getting her Ph.D. in geophysics at Stanford. The local newspaper, the Marin Independent Journal, wrote a front-page article about us. The project gave me credibility when I applied for programs and grants. The point of this story is not that other people should build gardens on mountaintops. The point is that novel projects can pay off unexpectedly, and that collaboration with others and the synthesis of unrelated ideas and experiences lead to novel projects.

The project did not result in a paper in a scientific journal. It was an amateur engineering project, not a proper science experiment. The plants grew well but we didn’t have good control over the temperature and humidity in the growth chambers because we weren’t there most of the time. There were way too many variables and too many unexpected setbacks, like the time we had a hard frost in early August that burst a valve, or the time a marmot got in. We started to look around on White Mountain Peak for a way to do some real science, and that wasn’t hard to find.

A trees project

Near the research station are two groves of bristlecone pines, which are known for being the oldest trees in the world. They are famous from postcards and Sierra Club calendar illustrations because of their stark beauty. They live higher than other trees, at elevations of nine to eleven thousand feet. On mature trees much of the trunk is bare, and the exposed wood gets sandblasted to a light brown color by windblown ice crystals. Some trees are mostly dead, with just a thin strip of living bark connecting the roots to a single dark green branch. We always pay several visits to these groves whenever we go to the White Mountains.

Spiral grain detail in bristlecone pines (Pinus longaeva) in California’s White Mountains. Photo by Michael Wing.

The grain in the wood is not straight. Some trees twist like corkscrews, and we noticed that the spiral grain (in the language of forestry) can be either right-handed or left-handed. However, most of the time the grain has gentle curves but does not spiral strongly. We asked an expert on bristlecone pines why they twist, and she told us no one knows. This surprised us, so we read up on the arcane subject of spiral grain in conifers, which isn’t limited to bristlecone pines. Most of the articles we read were written by forestry professionals, for whom spiral grain is a nuisance. It makes the timber less valuable.

We learned there are a number of schools of thought on the origin of spiral grain. Prevailing winds, the Coriolis effect, and the movement of the sun across the sky have all been invoked. Perhaps spiral grain helps distribute water evenly between the tree’s roots and the crown, or perhaps it strengthens the trunk against breakage. Some have proposed that spiral grain relieves growth stresses in the bark caused by cell division. Or, maybe it’s “just” genetics; like handedness in humans.

A lot of the explanations we read didn’t address the left- vs. right-handed question, and some were not consistent with our observation that left-handed trees are more common than right-handed ones. We realized that we had an opportunity to test some of these hypotheses in the field, especially the ones that invoked environmental conditions. We made a big data table in Excel. Over the course of two years we measured ten parameters on each of six hundred trees in two distinct groves. We had to give each team of students a right-handed wine corkscrew to carry so they could distinguish between left-handed and right-handed trees, because the thin air at 11,000 feet makes it difficult to think straight. The results were clear: The proportion of left-handed, right-handed, and “straight” trees is exactly the same in every part of every grove we looked at, and not at all correlated with elevation, exposure, tree size, slope angle, or anything else. Maybe it’s just genetics.

Some of my students submitted this work at our local science fair, and it got favorable attention from the judges. The student who did the statistics on this project went on to the regional and state science fairs and won a special prize at the California State Fair: the Mu Alpha Theta Award for the “most challenging, thorough and creative investigation of a problem involving mathematics accessible to a high school student.” Since some of the academic papers I had read to get started were published in the Springer-Verlag journal Trees: Structure and Function, we wrote up our results in their format and submitted it. They published it! (Wing M.R., Knowles A.J., Melbostad S.R., and Jones A.K., [2014]; “Spiral grain in bristlecone pines (Pinus longaeva) exhibits no correlation with environmental factors.” Trees: Structure and Function Volume 28, Number 2, pages 487–491.) Not bad, since none of us had ever studied trees before and we had no outside help from any tree expert. We had found some low-hanging fruit (an unresolved question) and we picked it. But this could not have happened if we hadn’t already been doing an unrelated project, our garden, in the White Mountains.

This project is finished, but we still like to visit the bristlecone pines. The first-year female cones of this species are dark purple on most trees but on some trees they are yellow-green. “A genetic variation” is the customary explanation. That’s all anybody knows about it. No one appears to have measured the ratio of purple to green. Does it vary from place to place? We still have our global positioning system receivers, clipboards, and willing students. We’re planning another big survey.

A microbiology project

We call a third project we’re doing in the White Mountains our artificial hypoliths project. This one started when a few years ago I signed up for a NASA professional development program for teachers and graduate students called Spaceward Bound. A planetary scientist, Dr. Chris McKay, took us into the Mojave Desert to show us how communities of bacteria and algae survive this environment, hidden under rocks and salt crusts, and even inside of them. He is interested in this topic because he helps NASA decide where on Mars to look for hidden forms of life.

I met Chris McKay and learned about his program through a series of lucky accidents. Pascal Lee mentioned his name to me so I made an appointment to discuss the high altitude garden. It was in the early stages of the project, and I was still figuring out what direction to take it. On the day of the appointment, he wasn’t in his office at the NASA Ames Research Center. Some kind of complicated emergency had come up. I wasn’t the only person looking for him; as I stood outside the open door of his office, every few minutes somebody would come down the hall, look through the doorway, and say, “Where’s Chris?” “I don’t know” I would say, as if I belonged there. There was a poster on the wall about a trip to Axel Heiberg Island, in the high Arctic. It looked like one of the participants was a middle school teacher. In the conference room next door several people were having a heated discussion about how to configure a spectrometer that was going to Mars. I eavesdropped, and I actually understood some of what they were saying. An officer of the Mars Society came in to look for Chris. I told her who I was and why I was waiting. “Oh,” she said, “Chris should take you on one of his expeditions.” That got my attention—he takes teachers on expeditions? I left that day still not having met Chris, but with the name of the person who coordinated the program. I also had a long talk with one of his colleagues about why there are so few organic molecules in Martian soil.

In the Mojave, we would pick up small quartz rocks from the desert floor and turn them over. A green film of cyanobacteria would cover the underside. Here were bacteria you could actually see! As a high school teacher that fact, that you could see the bacteria without a microscope, impressed me. The colonized rocks are called “hypoliths,” which means “under rocks” in Greek. Cyanobacteria like living under translucent rocks because there they are protected from drying out from the harsh ultraviolet rays of the sun and from temperature extremes. The rocks act like greenhouse windows, letting through a little sunlight and trapping a little moisture so the microorganisms can do photosynthesis. Back in the White Mountains on one of our trips, I saw that the dry alpine meadows above our research station also have hypoliths.

I decided we would grow our own hypoliths to see how long it takes for the green film to form. I bought some 2 inch square kitchen tiles in three different materials; glass, white marble, and travertine. Since it was for a school project, the tile store sold them to me at cost. The glass tiles transmit over 50 percent of the sunlight that hits their upper surfaces, the marble tiles transmit 5 percent, and the travertine tiles are totally opaque. In the classroom I had students lightly sand their surfaces to remove the polish and engrave their names on the tiles. Chris McKay was going to Namibia, and he invited me along! I placed sixty tiles in the Namib Desert. I even had a student make a ceramic plaque in the school’s pottery studio that says “Do Not Disturb—Experiment in Progress.”

In the years since then, I or one of my students or school colleagues or NASA colleagues have placed similar arrays of tiles in the White Mountains, the Mojave Desert, the United Arab Emirates, Svalbard, Australia, India, Chile, and on Devon and Cornwallis Islands in Canada’s high Arctic. Each of these locations already has natural hypoliths growing there, and I have since been back (or at least have a plan to get back) to all of them, except the set in the United Arab Emirates, to give them a checkup. Their undersides are starting to get colonized, but they are not bright green yet. This takes lon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: The Intoxicating Scent of Bengay
• Chapter 1: Have Projects
• Chapter 2: Have Affiliations and Collaborate
• Chapter 3: Apply for Things
• Chapter 4: Travel with Purpose
• Chapter 5: Teach and Mentor
• Chapter 6: Do Citizen Science
• Chapter 7: Publish Your Work
• Chapter 8: Achieve Creative Flow
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index