When I was a kid the Christmas season began on Christmas Eve and ended on the Feast of the Epiphany. That would be January the 6th, or the nearest Sunday thereto. The Feast of the Epiphany celebrates the Coming of the Wise Men, aka The Magi. We put up our tree on Christmas Eve, and set out the Nativity Scene as well, and took everything down two weeks later on the Epiphany.

The Gospels don’t specify where or when the Magi visited the Holy Infant. Matthew’s account mentions Herod, and his desire to find “the newborn king.” The Magi, it seems, were wise enough to get out of town after their visit to Bethlehem, leaving bloodthirsty Herod in the dark. There’s a ton of legend and history wrapped up in the story of the mysterious visitors from The East who followed a wandering star.

But now it’s January the 7th so that means all is done and the Holidays are over. I assume the Three Fellows got back to the Orient in one piece. In our case, we took down our meager Xmas effort:

Yep, I found this box of stuff at Mom’s. It’s the original family Nativity Scene. Except of course for the three pieces that don’t belong (see if you can pick them out). We’ll be farming those out to the the thrift shop. But the original pieces, Mary and Joseph and the manger, the angels, the shepherds and their animals, and the three Wise Men, are battered but still intact. St. Joseph originally had a shepherd’s staff, which is weird considering he was a carpenter, but no matter. I substituted the hideous pipe cleaner last year and this year I replaced it with a nicer-looking piece of wire. His head had to be glued back on after years in the box, but he recovered nicely.

I mentioned the thrift shop. I’m a big fan of thrift shops. They are great places for books and CDs. Yes, I still use CDs. The so-called “secondary market” is a great place for bargains. I once found a 100% wool suit (dark navy, chalk stripe, double-breasted, peak lapel) for ten bucks! It fit perfectly. Of course I look like a character from a pulp novel, but that comes in handy some of the time.

The US holiday spending binge of the last two months will top one trillion dollars for the first time ever. That’s a lot of stuff! There was plenty of help, too. Good Housekeeping, Forbes, Country Living, ad nauseum, had stuff-buying guides for the perplexed. The Magi brought the young Holy Family gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Gold makes a great gift, if you can afford it. But I’m not so sure about frankincense (Boswellia tree resin) and myrrh (Commiphora tree resin) these days.

We were lucky this holiday season to get a couple of great visits from friends. That’s the best gift of all.

We all know chlorine (Cl) from swimming pools. The smell associated with such places is actually a chlorine compound called chloramine (NH₂Cl) which is a result of chlorine reacting with amino acids (in human hair, skin, sweat, etc.).

Although in pure gaseous form chlorine is both corrosive and toxic, it is essential to life. Chlorine compounds and ions are part of numerous biological processes. The most obvious one is the role of salt (sodium chloride, NaCl) and its ions in physiology. The hydrochloric acid (HCl) in our gastric juices that helps us digest proteins is another example.

At home we all know about bleach which is also a chlorine compound (sodium hypochlorite, NaOCl). We all know not to mix bleach with other household chemicals as both acids (like vinegar) and ammonia products will react with it to release chlorine gas. At least I hope we know this!

Chlorine is obviously used to disinfect municipal water supplies. This has been a great boon to civilization. We take for granted in this country our access to nearly unlimited supplies of safe drinking water. It’s not that way in a lot of places!

Chlorine is essential to the production of plastics, particularly polyvinyl chlorides. These are everywhere. Finding substitutes for plastics is no easy task. But we’ll have to figure out ways to make renewable and/or recyclable plastics. We can’t keep piling up old plastics in our landfills. Or garbage-patching our oceans, polluting our rivers, or contaminating our aquifers, either. Chlorine is necessary for chlorofluorocarbons, chemicals of great utility but with huge environmental impacts (like ozone depletion). The regulating of such CFCs was a proof that good things can happen on a global scale. If only we could do more of that.

You can get a pretty good idea about the wealth and standard of living of a country by looking at its consumption of chlorine. A good proxy is hydrogen chloride (HCl)*, a gas used industrially to produce hydrochloric acid. Hydrochloric acid is used in countless syntheses of other compounds and is critical to any industrial economy.

Chlorine gas (Cl₂) is made from the electrolysis of brines. Caustic soda (sodium hydroxide, NaOH) and hydrogen gas (H₂) are the (valuable) by-products. Statista tells me the worldwide production of chlorine in 2022 was 97 million tonnes.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!! May 2026 be healthy and prosperous for you and yours.

*Although the same formula is used for the gas (HCl) as for the acid (HCl), the acid is actually a liquid solution. The gas is bubbled through water to produce the liquid acid. Chemists typically specify the concentration of an HCl solution,for example, 1.0M HCl (“one molar”) is a common laboratory reagent.

Did you know that if your name is Jordan and you live in South Carolina that you are likely to be a robber or to commit a robbery in the future? It’s all true! If you don’t believe me, check out The Journal of Sociolinguistic Criminology:

I love how “statistical robustness” demands attention! Obviously it’s all jive. The fellow behind it is named Tyler Vigen and he has a website called Spurious Scholar devoted to this nonsense. There’s also a part called Spurious Correlations which has stuff like this:

Back in the ancient past when I was a science teacher I used to have Mr. O’Connor’s Three Laws of Science. I figured that if Newton had his Three Laws of Motion then I could have my three things, too. Anyway, Law #1 was all measurements are uncertain. Law #2 was correlation does not necessarily imply causality. And Law #3 was science is a description of nature and not an explanation.

I thought they were equally important. But I’ve found over the years that #2 is the most routinely violated. People love correlations! Who needs causal mechanisms when all you need is happenstance?

This Tyler Vigen chap is having fun with computer tools. He uses databases and a large language model. He “dredges” the data for correlations, and as he has tons of data, he gets lots of correlations. Then he has the LLM (a type of AI) write the paper. Hilarious! It all looks and sounds real until you actually read the stuff. Vigen does all the math, the statistical analysis, which gives the illusion of heft. It’s a spoof on researchers who rely too much on mathematical models and not enough on common sense. Note that the names of the researchers on the bogus papers spell out CHAT GPT with their first initials.

I’m reminded of a funny bit from another sorta-famous internet nerd (Randall Munroe of xkcd):

OK, I know it’s geek humor! But geeks like to laugh on Christmas Eve, too. Anyway, the comic is spot-on about the sports media landscape. Since it’s the holi-daze, you will be subjected to too much sports. Keep that mute button close by.

Happy Christmas and Merry Everything to all!

A chemist doesn’t count one, two, three, four, . . .

A chemist counts hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, . . .

To see why, take a look at the periodic table:

Chemistry says the world is built one proton at a time.

Element number one has, you guessed it, ONE proton. That’s what makes it hydrogen. If there were two protons in the nucleus, it would be helium. If there were three—lithium.

And so on.

Hydrogen is the stuff of the universe. From what we (that is, our instruments) can see, hydrogen is the most abundant of all the elements. In stars, hydrogen nuclei fuse together to make helium. That process is called thermonuclear fusion because it releases energy. It’s the fuel that the sun burns to give us warmth and light and all the other radiant energy it puts out.

Not satisfied with fission bombs, the people who designed our Doomsday weapons came up with hydrogen or thermonuclear bombs. These are way bigger and way better. We’ve managed to harness fission energy for domestic purposes. Harnessing the power of the sun in a controlled fusion reaction remains elusive. It’s probably a pipe dream, anyway. They’ll get the reaction going but it will take so much energy to contain it that the costs will be prohibitive.

ITER in France is the biggest test of fusion power right now. And they do a lot of research at our own Lawrence Livermore Lab as well.

Hydrogen has an isotope called deuterium. Normally a hydrogen atom has only a single proton in the nucleus. Deuterium has a neutron (along with the one proton) in its nucleus. This makes it heavier and when it combines with oxygen to make water you get “heavy water.” Heavy water can act as a moderator in a fission reactor. The Nazis occupied Norway in WWII and wanted the heavy water produced from the Vemork hydroelectric plant for their atomic research. The facilities were the target of multiple Allied bombing and sabotage efforts. Norwegian commandos also sank the ships carrying the product back to Germany! Vemork is a museum today. The story was fictionalized in the 1965 film The Heroes of Telemark with Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris.

You can readily produce hydrogen in the lab by reacting dilute acids with metals. Zinc and hydrochloric acid (aka muriatic acid) work particularly well. Hydrogen is quite flammable, so be careful. The Hindenburg was filled with hydrogen (it exploded in 1937). It would have been better off with helium but the United States had outlawed the export of helium in 1925. It seems we’d cornered the market on helium, having developed a process for extracting it from hydrocarbons. That forced every other nation to use hydrogen for blimps and dirigibles and such.

I tried to join a mariachi band. They figured out pretty quickly that I couldn’t sing, play an instrument, or speak Spanish, so that was it for me. They were nice about it.

This group was a little unusual in that they had just the one trumpet player. Usually there are two or three. But he carried the whole load just fine. Of course they were right on top of us! That was fun. They were very lively and entertaining. I love the exuberance of mariachi music. And when they do those plaintive ballads of love and loss you can really feel it in the singing. Great stuff.

We are in front of the famous church in the center of the city: Parroquia San Miguel Arcángel. Apparently this world-famous Baroque cathedral-like building doesn’t rate “cathedral” status. It’s a mere “parish.” Something or other with the Catholic hierarchy, I think. Regardless, it’s a spectacular structure and it seems like everyone takes a selfie in front of the place at some point. You can see Michael the Archangel slaying a demon in the center-right of the frame, just above the guitarists.

Click on the link I shared above to see an aerial view of downtown San Miguel de Allende. (It’s worth it, I promise!)

Traveling is a great experience. I really like going to new places and seeing how other folks live. I don’t expect places to be better or worse than what I know, just different. México is certainly different! I would enjoy myself a lot more if I could speak Spanish. I like to do simple things like hang out in the park and eat local food and whatnot. That sort of thing invariably leads to meeting people and talking. Having a better grasp of the local lingo would be nice.

As I get older I find that travel is much harder on me physically than when I was younger. It takes me longer to recover when I get home. I live in a very interesting place so I don’t have to travel to a foreign country to have an adventure. In fact, you can have adventure without leaving home! It’s all a matter of attitude. But wherever you go, be there. Don’t bring home with you—make where you are your temporary home.

*The phrase “when in Rome, do as the Romans do” is attributed to St. Ambrose in the 4th century AD. It’s abridged from “when you’re in Rome, then live in Roman fashion; when you’re elsewhere, then live as they live there” (Sī fuerīs Rōmae, Rōmānō vīvitō mōre; sī fuerīs alibī, vīvitō sīcut ibī).

This was the staircase I had to navigate each day. The steps were concrete, and slippery, and the rail didn’t come all the way up to the top or down to the bottom. And the very first step (under the grip tape) had only about a three inch rise and I stumbled on it more than once.

Traveling presents one with all sorts of challenges. Mostly I had an easy time of things on my journey to San Miguel de Allende. But I’m getting older and I feel the impacts a lot more than I did when I was younger!

Flying, for instance. It really beats me up these days. The elevation changes and the pressure changes in the cabin mess with my sinuses. I spend most of my time on a plane chewing gum, working my jaw, and popping my ears. It takes days for me to recover after flying.

I can’t stand being confined in a metal tube. That’s the other thing. The physical discomfort is nothing compared to the anxiety. I can handle about two hours and after that I get restless and irritated. I want to get up and run around. I’ve never been claustrophobic but big ol’ jet airliners don’t feel so big when you are stuffed into them with a few hundred other folks.

This trip reminded me how much I hate flying. Oh, I can sit by a window and take in the fabulous views. I’m like a little kid when it comes to that stuff. But that’s not enough. All the rest of the experience sucks. Airports ought to be wonderful places but they’re just really fancy hell-holes. About the only thing you can do is sit at a bar and drink.

When I think about traveling in the future I think about boats. And trains. And buses. Stuff like that. It’s going to be hard to get to South America or somesuch place without flying, but I’m motivated to figure it out. I can do a short hop. The flight to LA is only two hours, for example, and it’s a pretty pleasant trip. I can manage that sort of thing. But across the continent? Over an ocean? Forget about it. My body can’t take it. And I’ll have a bad attitude, and you can’t have a bad attitude when you travel.

There’s always the other option: staying home. Costs a lot less. Smaller environmental footprint. Easier on the body. For most of human history people went no further than a day’s walk, or maybe two, from the place they were born. People routinely walked 20-25 miles in a day so a two-day journey could take you pretty far, but exotic, far-off locales remained exotic and far away. A big city a hundred miles away was just as far as another country a thousand miles away. Today one can get halfway across the world in half a day. Jet travel became affordable for regular folks by the 1970s and that was fifty years ago. Cruising along at a brisk 500 knots, five miles above the earth, unimaginable not that long ago, is just another routine event in a modern person’s life.

Everyone who served us food in San Miguel de Allende presented it with buen provecho on their lips. It’s much like “bon appetit” and means, loosely, “may you have a good meal.”

Taco stands are a Mexican staple and I can’t get enough tacos in my life so my trip to San Miguel worked out great. And yes, the tacos were good. Very good. The fellow in the photo was also a tourist from the States. He liked the tacos but skipped the hot sauce. Naturally I slathered it on and was rewarded with a burning mouth. ¡Buen provecho!

The highlight was cabeza or cow cheek tacos. That stand was a little out of the tourist area and served locals and workers on their lunch breaks. The big mercado was overflowing with food places and you could get local items like corn fungus (huitlacoche) as a filling. One of the popular treats from a street vendor was elote or corn-on-the-cob on a stick, smeared with mayonnaise and chili powder. Delicious, but a bit of a mess.

There were all sort of exotic fruits and vegetables available, maybe next time I’ll learn what they are and how to eat them.

One of the things you see all over San Miguel de Allende are stellated dodecahedra.

A dodecahedron is a 12-sided solid. The twelve faces of a regular dodecahedron are all regular pentagons (equal length sides, equal angles).

If you put a pentagonal pyramid on each of those faces, that is, use each pentagon as a base for a five-sided figure, you get a small (or “the first”) stellated dodecahedron.

According to Wolfram Alpha this figure first appeared in 1430 in a mosaic by Paolo Uccello. It’s on the floor of St. Mark’s in Venice:

In San Miguel you see it in street art, like the above metal sculpture that was on a corner near where I was staying. It’s also featured in tourist trinkets and souvenirs. Here’s a shop with such items (you can see me in the mirror):

Note the cobblestone street reflected below me!

This picture is from just outside the church at Atotonilco. My contact on the ground in SMdA tells me the 12 points on the star represent the 12 months of the year, and the star is a symbol of peace and unity.

The stellated dodecahedron is featured in “sacred geometry.” This New Age stuff goes back to the Greeks as the dodecahedron was one of Plato’s fundamental figures (the so-called Platonic solids).

Whatever your religious bent, you’ll probably find compatriots in San Miguel. México is a Catholic country (I saw people routinely cross themselves when they walked in front of a church) but it’s also a 21st-century place. There are all kinds! San Miguel attracts a lot of outsiders and oddballs and the modern spiritualist would probably find the vibe to their liking.

I like how this particular design seems to cross the cultural barriers. It’s certainly got its Catholic bona fides, being featured in the Basilica Cattedrale Patriarcale di San Marco, after all. (That’s “St. Mark’s” in Italian.)

And yet the hippies, the tourists, the ex-pats, and the residents have all adopted it as a symbol of the city. It’s hard to argue with peace and unity.

I was almost named for the Patron Saint of Travelers. But the Irish have a well-known habit of turning long names into nicknames and diminutives (Chris, Chrissy, Christy, etc.) and my Mom didn’t like that. So my Dad came up with Mark (from St. Mark the Evangelist, he of the gospels) and they stuck “Christopher” in the middle.

The picture is from the church at Atotonilco, a village a dozen kilometers west of San Miguel de Allende. Officially it is the Santuario de Jesús Nazareno de Atotonilco and it is still a functioning church as well as a tourist destination. The interior artwork, which includes frescoes, murals, oil paintings, statuary, woodwork, gilding, and you-name-it, is from the 17th and 18th centuries and is a high point of Mexican Baroque. It’s impossible to capture the grandeur and garishness of the scene by photography. You really have to see it for yourself!

I’m a Catholic school kid and a former altar boy so religious art is old hat for me. But the stuff at Atotonilco is so over-the-top that I was overwhelmed. The sincerity of the work is palpable—you really feel the faith that sustained the artists and artisans who crafted this sprawling masterpiece.

I particularly liked the peculiar Latin twist on the Catholic iconography. The famous scene on Calvary with Jesus crucified between the two thieves (Luke 23:32) is altered. Traditionally, one thief is a mere burglar, the other a cruel robber. The Mexicans felt that a violent criminal should not share the site with the Savior and his cross is moved to another area of the altar and so there are only two crosses on display. And the Roman soldier who pierces Jesus’ side with his lance (John 19:34) is instead a caballero in full conquistador garb.

St. Christopher medallions have been worn by the faithful for centuries. Invoking San Cristóbal’s grace and protection at the start of a journey or upon arrival at your destination was supposed to ward off things like the plague as well protect you against highwaymen and other dangers.

Tom Waits summoned up the saint in his tune “Hang On St. Christopher” from Frank’s Wild Years (1987):

Hang on St. Christopher, now don’t let me go
Get to me Reno, got to bring it in low
Put my baby on the flat car, got to burn down the caboose
Get ’em all jacked up on whiskey, then we’ll turn the mad dog loose
Hang on St. Christopher on the passenger side
Open it up, tonight the devil can ride
Oh yeah, oh yeah

México is a mountainous place. I spent a week in the city of San Miguel de Allende, which is in the state of Guanajuato, and its 6700′ elevation (2042 m) had me out of breath the entire time.

The view above is from just a few miles east of the city center, on the walk back from the botanical garden (El Charco del Ingenio). And yes, it’s cobblestones the entire way.

This region of the country is known as the Bajio which strangely enough means “lowlands.” As you can see there are high mountains surrounding the broad plains the people inhabit. Thus, lowlands. The Bajio was the economic and cultural center of colonial México and gave birth to the country’s independence movement. Places like San Miguel de Allende and Santiago de Querétaro (the nearest airport) are sort of equivalent to our own revolutionary Boston and Philadelphia. Much of the modern Mexican economy is centered in the region as well as the traditional industries of agriculture and mining. México produces about one-fourth of the world’s silver.

San Miguel de Allende is named for a priest (Franciscan friar Juan de San Miguel) and a patriot (captain-turned-general Ignacio Allende y Unzaga). It’s a UNESCO World Heritage site and a popular tourist destination for Mexicans as well as international visitors.

I was there just after the Day of the Dead festivities which drew 100,000 people. It was still a busy time in the city but the big rush was over. I hear from my contact on the ground that the last of the tourists have left and the Plaza Centro is quiet. When I was in town at least three mariachi bands roamed the place nightly competing for listeners! This really is the off-season.

A large number of ex-pats from the States and other places inhabit San Miguel. It’s been famed as an art colony since before World War II and its allure is still strong. Nonetheless it is also a real Mexican city with schoolkids, senior citizens, taxicabs, commuter buses, shops, and businesses and all the things that make an entire community.

It’s a very interesting place to visit and I’ll have more on that in my next post.