I spent a while punching author names from Photonics West 2010 into google today. I soon realized that I was likely not alone in this pursuit and would be well advised to update this website to be relevant to the new potential visitors here over the course of the next week.

If you are in San Francisco, and attending the conference, and have found this page, I’d like to invite you to attend my talk on Thursday at 11:20 in room 234 (Mezzanine). My talk is entitled “Photonic Crystal Switching by the electrophoretic movement of dye ions” and is part of the session on “Novel effects and Applications in Photonic Crystal Structures” within the “Photonic and Phononic Crystal Materials and Devices IX“. Relevant information is on pages 238-240 of the Technical Program.

Now that I’ve located all this spatially, temporally, and categorically I’d probably be wise to briefly outline the paper:

ABSTRACT: Glancing angle deposition (GLAD) facilitates the fabrication of nanostructured thin films with varying density, using a motion control algorithm governing substrate movements during film growth, which engineerings the film structure. Film architectures for specific optical applications including photonic crystals are easily produced with GLAD. A challenge in the photonic crystal field has been the realization of in-situ control of optical characteristics. We have demonstrated partial control of stopband optical characteristics using an electric field in a GLAD 1D photonic crystal by the electrophoretic movement of absorbing dye ions.

Authors: Joshua D. Krabbe, Univ. of Alberta (Canada); Michael J. Brett, Univ. of Alberta (Canada) and National Institute for Nanotechnology (Canada)

With a bit more elaboration:

The basic premise of this work is that the movement of absorbing dye ions into and out of a porous photonic crystal yields a means by which the optical properties of the stopband of the photonic crystal may be modified. The device structure (shown below) is probed for reflectance optical properties from the top surface within the operating region (delimited by dashed lines). The photonic crystal is deposited on a transparent conducting oxide film and when the sandwich structure is completed with an identical counter electrode the device becomes electrically addressable. A dissociating dye (Methylene Blue) is used and when a positive voltage (top with respect to bottom) is applied the cations of the dye (absorbing species) are driven out of the photonic crystal. Reversal of the voltage attracts these cations and absorbing dye species accumulate in the photonic crystal.

Note: this image is (very!) not to scale.

As you likely have already anticipated, the presence of absorbing species within the photonic crystal has an inhibiting effect on the reflectance. Changing the dye concentration affects the probability of photon-dye interaction. The response of reflectance properties with addressing voltage, and an examination of the time response of optical properties to electrical switching of the device will be presented; along with an elaboration of the GLAD technique used to fabricate the porous photonic crystal that forms the basis of the device.

If you can’t attend, the proceedings will be published in 2-4 weeks.

I was tempted to just post some photos and let them tell the story, but that made me feel like I was shortchanging such a fantastic trip, so I’ll have to tell the stories as well.

The first is the mid-night arrival of part of our skiing crew. My cell phone rang a few minutes before 4 am and I was up out of bed to let in a Lesley and Pat who had spent the night driving Highway 2 in less than ideal conditions to accommodate a late night flight into Edmonton International. I was excited to get out of the house and go right then instead of heading back to bed, but sleep definitely was on the menu for the wearied travelers. Waking up at what would normally be a very lazy hour the next morning we loaded up and set out for the trailhead after a dose of caffeine and a few bites of breakfast. I can’t speak from personal experience but it seemed like enough sleep was had during those short hours by my skiing comrades to recharge adequately for a day in the mountains. Either that, or there was significant horsepower being absorbed by osmosis from the beautiful surroundings that we were skiing through. Considering the number of disclaimers placed that they had few skills and little prior experience they were quick on the uptake. Pat started out as a rather shaky kneed skier but gathered his wits about him quite quickly. Luckily though, I was the one carrying a dozen eggs.

We made good time along the trail, not because we were traveling exceedingly fast but mostly just due to the fact that we weren’t taking very long of breaks. That and a little bit of not wanting to be going “too slow” while leading the group meant that whoever was up front was huffing along and then the others didn’t want to let them get out of our sights. Then whomever else took over felt the need to keep up the pace, the problematic pattern perpetuated itself and subsequently some solid skiing ensued. We’d made a good choice with the waxes and no-one struggled much which was a huge bonus for the morale. Additionally we were left some encouragement in the snowbanks along the way by our friends who were up the trail by a few hours.

Our arrival at the cabin was earlier than anticipated and we had nearly caught the other 7 members of our group who were just taking off their boots when we pulled up. It was about this time that we unloaded food onto the table from our respective bags and realized the magnitude of the task at hand. It was going to be quite a feat to even eat half of the food we’d brought in.

The menu for the trip wasn’t meager pickings for (at least) seven reasons.

1. Carrying good food makes it easier to rationalize why you have a heavy pack. If it’s full of stuff you only marginally want to eat it could lead to complaining. If it’s all gourmet, there is less opportunity to bemoan sore shoulders and an aching back.
2. No-one has ever developed scurvy in two days but we certainly didn’t want to risk it. Better bring some fresh vegetables for our omellettes to ensure we don’t develop anything like that. We were bringing along a med-student but not a real doctor to diagnose and treat big problems like scurvy, better to rather play it safe than sorry!
3. Pat needed to be fed, and everyone knows that he can really pack it away when he decides to.
4. Olives, figs and wine were good enough for all those Roman emperors so they’re good enough for us too. And if Marcus Aurelius would have known to have stuffed his olives with Camembert I’m sure he would have been all over that too.
5. I’d heard concerns about Oatmeal being too boring, so the obvious solution would be to bring it up a notch with cranberries and orange zest.
6. Good chocolate keeps the ladies happy – fact!
7. This was New Years and we were supposed to be celebrating!

Our stay was two nights and our intermediary day was spent on a day-excursion from the hut up towards Assiniboine Pass. The attempt would end at 2:30 when we had to make the prudent choice to turn around instead of pushing onwards to see what we may or may not be able to see from the pass proper. The day ski had us enjoying a fine balance of gently falling snowflakes and sufficient visibility to enjoy the surrounding vistas. If it had been any more clear, the beauty and vastness of the entire valley at once could have been too overwhelming for us; and like I said, we only had a med-student along and not a doctor to perform a potentially necessary resuscitation. There was also a moose spotted along the trail, it had a beard but was definitely still female.

Following our excursion we cooked up some fine tomato lentil curry on rice with a side of garlic butter mashed potatoes and gravy for dinner. After giving our stomachs a lengthy 4 minutes to digest the meal we pulled out the figs, olives, chocolate, crackers & Camembert, cookies and pistachios and got into the port. There was a short debate as to which time zone we planned to celebrate new years in. A long and tiring day of skiing by some parties had them voting to even celebrate on a half hour increment representative of Newfoundland. The suggestion was quickly overruled and Dave set an emergency alarm in case we all somehow managed to fall asleep before midnight, to wake us up at ten to twelve. A few games of speed scrabble ensued, amazingly everyone was able to win a round, some Garden Beans were grown, traded and harvested. There were some stories recounted and then, sooner than anyone would have guessed, there was an alarm going off and the countdown had begun towards the beginning of 2010.

The masses bundled up in multi-coloured down jackets, fleece pants, mitts, toquies and hut booties and then headed outdoors to ring in the New Year from the boundless serenity of the creekbed instead of the cramped quarters of the cabin. Predictably some hilarity ensued, and upon return to the cabin we headed out to kick off the new year with a short ski through the night under a full moon.

The next morning we were treated to a few patches of blue sky, an excellent breakfast of cheese and chive eggs on english muffins with cranberry orange oatmeal, and we were off. Once rolling we were rather quiet as a group. I’m not certain on the reasons why. Perhaps people were exhausted from a few long days in the outdoors without much sleep, maybe they were mad about someone absentmindedly dripping paraffin on the red bean crop, perchance they were concentrating too hard on not falling over to have a conversation, or possibly they were just sick of being with one another. My guess is that is was none of these: we were too captivated by the beams of sunshine coming down through the forest, too busy relishing the glimpses of mountaintops peaking through the gaps amongst the trees, and finding ourselves entranced by the swishing sound of our skis along the tracks pressed into the snow. It was a contented silence. In the week since, that’s one bit of the trip that I’ve been consistently revisting in my mind. The closest thing to contented silence I’ve had since being back in the city was scrubbing the kitchen floor with my head in front of a dishwasher that was loud enough to drown out the rest of the sounds in the house. Obviously it’s almost time to get out of town again!

The ski out was fantastically exciting and we made good time down much of the descent towards the cars. The mile-long-hill was almost as much fun on the way up as it was on the way down two days earlier and soon enough we were standing in the parking lot making comments about not really wanting to be done yet.

By day 3 the shaky kneed Pat was still a rather shaky kneed skier but he was a heck of a lot more confident and quick as evidenced by the following video footage of the weekend. (Lesley’s out front in Pink, Pat’s just in front of me). Clip 1 is from the tail end of Day 2 and Clip 2 is from early on Day 3.

My full gallery of my backcountry trips over the Christmas break is here and Dave’s Flickr set of the trip is here.

10 years isn’t all that long, but it can change a lot of things. The whole world seems to be recounting the last decade, and while this period of time doesn’t delimit any certain and distinctive portion of my life, it’s the period of time that is being discussed right now by a few people. I suppose there’s a lot of ways to recall ten years, but recounting a few things seems appropriate. Best or worst – this list is neither. Perhaps most influential is more appropriate. The last ten years covers a pretty broad range of ages for me, 10 years to be exact, so there’s some maturing that occurred along the way in here. Some of this stuff is “coming-of-age” realizations, but that’s an aspect of life, so they count just like the others.

I started writing this bit earlier last week but had to postpone posting it until I could flesh out a few paragraphs after a fantastic ski trip. So it’s not in time for the 2010 list making that happened last week, but I don’t think that really matters. Readers who were going to read it will likely read it anyways, that’s what readers do – by definition.

1. We’re greedy, selfish, love prejudice and are still somewhat racist – perhaps that’s not the most politically correct means by which to kick off a review of the decade, but the specifics making me note this fall chronologically near the beginning of the 200Xs for myself. Spending a year away from Canada in 2000-2001 highlighted the fact that typically we like ourselves a lot and we don’t like other people all that much. My own experience was probably magnified by being in my early teens at the time, the age that’s arguably got the meanest peers of any age for everyone. My own situation as the foreign kid made that all the trickier. I was the only boy in the grade with long hair I was the only one with an accent. I was one of a few from the village three towns down the road from school. I was too tall. I was damn good at maths. I had the wrong shoes for with the school uniform. I didn’t get the right food packed in my lunch (Mom fixed that one quickly though). I fit no molds and while the prejudices I experienced were rather tame compared with the ethnic cleansing experienced by many people groups around the globe they were certainly noticeable to a wee little GCSE student.
   Oh well, back to Canada in the summer of 2001 I’d escape being the subject of these prejudices, and that should hopefully reduce the amount of tension I felt surrounding this issue. But boom, September 2001 rolls around. Maybe I’m more aware now, or just older, or it’s more extreme than it has been before, but there’s racist commentary all over the place. Everyone Arab is suddenly a terrorist. How did that work? Maybe I needed to have experienced prejudices from the being-dealt end before I had reason to feel uncomfortable finding myself at the dealing-out end. Not a lot has changed by the end of the decade, nearly every media outlet I’m influenced was spewing reports about the climate change summit in Copenhagen. None of it made me happy. There’s an entire global community trying to sit around a pie, and debating how to slice up that pie, and every single nation at the table needs to have an above average slice. All the big polluters want some version of a cap and trade system, yet no system based on cap and trade knows how to distribute the quota. From what I understand, the quota distribution system has basically been proven by economists to not work in the long run. Unfortunately that’s the system the big players are pushing for because they know that if they can weasel their way into an unfair share of the global quota for emissions then while the whole world has to tighten their belts they will have to tighten their belts the least. Alberta will profit from this, I know it, and it makes me sick.
   Intentionally trying to deny developing nations an equal shot at using the planet’s resources is just as self-serving as a game called: “Make a flamethrower out of an aerosol deodorant can and try to light the Canadian kid’s hair of fire in the locker room at school.” Maybe it’s because once we’re grown up we find bigger and more complicated words to use to mean the same thing as ‘bullying’.
2. It was this decade that I made a realization world conflict was current. I distinctly remember watching the BBC news in the living room at our home on School Lane, Staveley Cumbria UK. There was footage from what I only remember was some Serbian conflict in Macedonia sometime in the spring of 2001. There was house to house and street to street armed conflict being shown between people who looked too much like me. I remember being somewhat shocked, sure there were wars going on, but from what I understood, Canada, America and Europe had their shit together we were too intelligent, too highly developed, and too “good” (whatever that means) to rely on anything but diplomacy to set things straight in the world. Canada’s army was for sending on peacekeeping missions with the UN, and that was something that should be highly respected. We were so well advanced in my mind, and we should be proud of it. Our soldiers went to Honduras to help out after hurricanes, or to help dig people out of the rubble after big earthquakes, no soldier that I identified with ever did anything that I didn’t think was good. Wars, genocide and armed conflict happened in places like Rwanda or Chechnya, Israel sometimes bombed what I understood to be “the bad guys” in Lebanon. These weren’t people like me. It’s not like I was out of the loop on the whole Kosovo conflict during the late 90s, but up until this point in life I don’t think I’d realized that this wasn’t too foreign. Perhaps, just because they were fighting, they weren’t at all like me. Perhaps it was the fact that I was now in Europe and the footage was from that afternoon and being shown hours later on the same continent. I remember this distinctly to be a perspective changing occasion, my reality was not as peaceful as I thought it was. People just like me fight, and kill each other. Whoa, what an eye opener for a random weekday afternoon.
   This only happened mere months before September 11, 2001 and mere months after that Canada was off an fighting in a war in Afghanistan. These events weren’t such a hard pill to swallow after the TV broadcast that spring, I seemed to know by then that the world was less at peace than I might have imagined earlier.
3. Pope John Paul II died in April 2005. The world paused for a while it seemed, this man had done so much for humanity during his life that absolutely the entire world took note when he passed on. I didn’t know a whole lot about the man, probably average for the average person outside of the Catholic church, but the way things seemed to pause worldwide when he passed away grabbed my attention. It seemed that the whole world converged on Vatican City to pay their respects to this man who had played such an important role in the history of the world. This fascination by the general public meant that I also started to learn about the Catholic church, and when the media died down I kept on going. This would lead initially to just paying attention, but later beginning to attend weekly mass, reading a few excellent books and taking elective courses through the Catholic college on campus. Pope John Paul II’s death was actually rather immaterial to myself but this set in motion a significant change in perspective and appreciation for differing views and values within the ecumenical church.
4. Perhaps this is the only thing on the list that occurred at a certain time and made the impact right away. Most of the others were events that occurred over months, or catalysts for perspective changes that occurred over the course of years. This happened over the course of maybe 20 minutes one Friday evening in front of the TV in the basement. Bono was giving a speech at the federal Liberal Party convention. It was the night where Paul Martin was taking over leadership from Jean Chretien. Bono took the stage and made a strong case for the power of our nation to do good in the world. He suggested that this period of history would be remembered for three things, the internet, the war on terror, and the lack of the first world’s involvement in the affliction plaguing the continent of Africa. That being a combination economic suppression through debt and exploitation as well as AIDS destroying entire generations of lives. It was a combination of compelling statistics as well as sincere human to human communication. The case was made in my mind for two things; first that there were real things that could be done on a super huge scale to make amends for some of the problems facing different areas on the planet. That if federal governments around the world decided to make it a priority to improve aspects of the global community thing would actually change for the better. Second, he changed how I thought about how I could view my government. If I believed that the potential existed to make positive change in the world, then I should be considering which federal party campaigning to form a government was going to behave most appropriately in that global community, not just for what they could provide me. I was for the first time thinking as a resident of planet earth, rather than as a resident of the overprivileged nation of Canada. I recall the speech relatively frequently when thinking about global issues and definitely every time I’ve been able to cast a ballot since then. If you want to read it, someone graciously typed out the Full Speech and posted it online.
5. It was about mid-decade that Canada changed the legislation governing same sex marriage. This, according to my understanding, was the turning point for gay rights in our country. It seemed that over the course of the previous few years there was an ever increasing frustration with the issue swirling around in the public media, and within different circles of conversation that I participated in. Following approximately 2005, when the same-sex marriage legislation battle came to a close within Canada, there has been a chance for the whole country to calm down and catch it’s breath. I’m certain that this has been for the better. All of the slippery slope arguments that had been made over the course of the previous years failed to hold any water. Religious officials had maintained their right to treat marriage as their traditions saw fit, no-one was trying to marry their pets, and no-one was force-feeding our children messages about their sexual orientation. Society had unambiguously improved, freedom had been granted to a slice of the population without taking anything away from the rest of it. Hallelujah! My own experience relating to the actual issue however, was rather unattached. I didn’t write any letters or join any protests, but I was content to see things change, with me on the sidelines.
   A year later, I was confronted face to face by someone I really respected about almost everything. How could I say I was going to vote for the Liberal party in the 2006 federal election when they had legalized same sex marriage? I was caught totally off guard by that statement. I remember anticipating that the discussion of who we would be voting for in the 2006 election was going to be about something like healthcare, or environmental issues, or the gun registry, or dealing with fallout from the sponsorship scandal, or a fiscal imbalance between the federal and provincial governments… One of those issues that the media kept pushing. Nope, I was mistaken, the question went something like this: If I agreed that biblical teaching was that the God-designed plan for relationships and families was between a man and a woman, how could I support any federal party that would permit otherwise? I distinctly remember having to pause and collect my thoughts for a bit. Well, the fact of the matter was that I wasn’t opposed to that. Actually, I was in support of it. The presence of committed relationships between people of all orientations was undeniable, and it wasn’t going to change because someone else was going to label it as sinful. What good was it going to do in the world to prevent some people from participating in a social structure that was largely run by the government, the insurance guys, and the tax-man?
   The discussion turned into a great one, ideas flowed about our largely undeveloped ability to listen to the needs of other people rather than decide what their needs were. The problem solving strategies that we’d been force fed through school and then university, more often than we’d like to admit were trying to cram round plugs into square holes. If there was a bit more listening and less strategical approaches taken in real life we’d soon realize that our plans for others’ issues had our own fingerprints all over them. Our home-grown solutions unfortunately don’t start out custom designed for other situations. In the subsequent months there was a lot of good that came out of what started as a really tense situation. A ton of trust was developed because, as I recall it, we were actually listening to each other once in a while.
6. Lance Armstrong won his 7th consecutive Tour de France during the summer of 2005. I spent that month of July generally in recovery mode from spending May and June sick in bed. The result was a lot of TV watching, and a new found love for the sport of bike racing. It was a realization for me that I was far more interested in this sport than most others, there seemed to be very little luck in the game, there was skill, effort, fitness, and strategy, and ultimately the best guys seemed to be able to win but they had to try amazingly hard to do it. There was something beautiful about a sport where you could earn fitness by putting in the hard work and quantitatively get better at things. That summer was the catalyst for me heading off to do all sorts of things in the world of endurance sports: learn how to swim, do my first triathlon, bike across an entire continent, run my first marathon, actually win a race. and get myself sufficiently enamored with long distance triathlon to sign up for Ironman. If we’re looking for life-changing and not just mind-changing events this one is it, since that Tour de France I’ve found hundreds of hours each year to put into this endurance sports campaign. As a totally unexpected bonus I’ve made some of the best friends of my life as a result.
7. I changed how I thought about food during this decade. Heading off to University required that I was going to be the person choosing what I would eat every day for breakfast lunch and dinner. I did a decent job right from the start, and got a lot better in the years that followed. Whether that was initiated by seeing the whole world go crazy about the Atkins diet in the few years prior, or due to the hilarity of “Supersize Me”, or just because I didn’t know any better than to eat relatively healthy, I ate better food than 99% of the world living in residence. There was a basic realization that the world chooses to feed itself very poorly sometime in the first half of the decade. During the second half of the decade things changed again, there is a difference between not eating poorly and eating well. Making that change takes some time and some effort but the decision to do so occurred based on conversations with real people who had their heads on straight. My friend Tulani had completely quit eating sugar and I tried that for about two months, before gradually becoming more lax on that front. A family friend, John, was eating strictly according to the direction of a naturopath, nothing processed and huge categories of the supermarket put “on hold” until he developed “better blood”. Neither appeared to be missing out on anything, it was just a decision, and their enjoyment of life and food had improved as a result. A simple realization really: I could choose to eat what I wanted, and I was in complete control of how I was going to decide what I wanted. Rather abruptly I pretty much didn’t want all sorts of things.
8. Friends ended in the spring of 2004. This is, I think, somewhat tied to a realization that occurred when Justin Timberlake tore off part of Janet Jackson’s top in front of all of America at the Superbowl the previous winter. The relationship between society and men and women is far from perfect. Friends wasn’t a show serving up sexist messages, but it wasn’t doing it quite right. If it weren’t for Sarah Jessica Parker being on the TV at the same time and being the go to example of liberated sexuality, perhaps Rachel Green, Monica Geller, or Phoebe Buffay (unlikely) would have been developed into that character. When the second half of the superbowl party turned into a discussion of whether or not the “wardrobe malfunction” was supposed to have happened or not, it wasn’t a marker of emancipation. It was an indication that things weren’t right, despite the fact that people were now suggesting that they were. Sure, women had rights like men but we’re far from having arrived at a solution, or destination. Somehow the end of Friends, made this especially noticeable to me. The fact that the feel good ending to the show is Ross and Rachel back together and Monica and Chandler heading to the suburbs with the twins was kind of a sick joke.
   In theory there’s freedom and equality but in reality in my perception this has just been replaced by almost equally un-beneficial expectations that we just hold in our heads. The issue of women’s rights has migrated from one that existed on paper for one sex to one that exists in the mind of society and afflicts both genders. As of 2004 when Friends came to a close we were far from success. Later in the decade there was an election in America where Hillary Clinton and Tina Fey, err… Sarah Palin, played large roles. Was anything better? Things seemed to be regressing more than they were progressing on this front through the last decade if you ask me.
9. My federal government admits fault with regard to their dealings with the residential schools. This is something that I’d been learning about over the course of a few previous years. Until I had spent a fair amount of time learning and discussing I was almost completely certain that this was not my issue. Despite the severity of the issue or the magnitude of the problem, I was most certainly not involved. Until I started to learn from people instead of books. Suddenly the issue was my issue, but the avenues to do things still seem distant and obscure. I identified with the damage caused and sometimes I think that’s all that anyone hopes from me, to listen, share the pain and to agree that what happened is wrong. When the apology was made in 2008 by the federal government I was lucky to be spending the week with friends, native and white, who also could pause and reflect on the significance of it. Not a lot changed that day, but witnessing the official statement seemed important to me. It was hopefully the beginning of a new renewal and at the time, I remember feeling a sentiment of great hope in so many conversations. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission might have gotten off to a rocky start but I’m certainly rooting for it to be able to overcome those obstacles and make a firm record in history on the second attempt.
10. Quantum mechanics soaked up my life for the better part of two semesters of university. What I at first thought was the pinnacle of my education was nothing more than an ivory tower rather detached from the world. By the time I was part-way through my final year of undergrad I could speak differential equations like the best of them. I had knew the normalization constants for dozens of probability wavefunctions off the top of my head and could basically guess at the forms for most others with an uncanny chance of success. I had started to develop intuition with regards to diagonalizing the matrices necessary to make eigenstates of an interaction matrix orthogonal. I had developed skills that even I myself deemed useless. I didn’t have a huge issue with it at the time, it’s not like I suddenly wanted to un-learn these things. It did cause me to back up however, I wanted to decide which skillsets I was going to develop as a part of my education. Quantum mechanics no longer made the cut. It’s no wonder that Engineering Management and my Christian Theology courses were my most appreciated the next semester. I was basically refusing to become a maven of mathematics, a prima donna of process control feedback or an exemplar of electronic wavefunctions. I was done with learning things to score well on tests. I was only going to train my brain to do things that I knew were useful. Now you could start debating with me the merits of training a brain to focus on putting out the most even wattage on a bicycle over the course of 5, 6, 7 or 8 hours, but that’s besides the point.