Past of the Signs

I'm going to take a moment to break away from the past and talk about the future for a little bit. I'm probably not going to continue this particular blog into the next semester. It's been fun to write, but also occasionally frustrating and tedious. There's certainly plenty of material still remaining that could potentially be covered, but I feel that the items that most interest me, which inspired all of this in the first place, are ones that I have already written about.

Well...there's one more item that strikes me as exceptionally important for this blog.

(compliments of The Pennsylvania State University)

The signs dotted around Penn State campus explain many details of the university's history, but there's one thing in particular that they don't say very much about: themselves. Who made them and set them up, and why? Well, if you look at some of the example signs here which I didn't devote whole posts to, you'll notice that the bottom of each sign says "Penn State Alumni Association". Mystery solved.

...no, I'm not ending the post there. That would be a little funny, but it wouldn't reach the word quota.

The Penn State Alumni Association is an organization of Penn State graduates dedicated to staying connected to the university and to each other, while preserving its history and legacy for future students. They began the historical marker project in the spring of 1990 with ten signs, in order to remind students, teachers, visitors, and random passersby of the rich history of Penn. The hope was that by installing these signs at locations where pedestrians might see and read them, they would be able to learn a little bit more about the university on whose campus they walked, and even if they ignored the actual words on the sign, the general idea of Penn State having an important legacy would be communicated at least. 

To this day, the Penn State Alumni Association funds and maintains the sign project. As of 2011, the association reported that sixty signs had been put up on the University Park campus. The program has expanded to other Penn State campuses as well, with sixteen signs at nine locations outside of the main campus. In addition, the association occasionally puts up new signs as well. In fact, they are taking suggestions for new signs to write and put up, so if there is a particular historical location in Penn State which you think deserves this token of commemoration, you can read submission guidelines and find an e-mail address here. 

So, have the signs accomplished their mission? It's hard to say. From the comments on this blog, it seems that many students are aware of the existence of the historical markers, but not nearly so many have actually taken the time to read through them and research the subjects on their own time. As far as educating random pedestrians, the signs have done little, at least for students in this section of CAS137H.

I do think that, while most viewers ignore the facts on the signs, the mere presence of the signs does have some effect on how people see Penn State. The simple fact that there are historical events to put up signs about, and that some people did take the time to put up those signs, instills a sense of accomplishment, that Penn State has done significant things to affect the world other than just eating up millions of tuition dollars. While this may not be a conscious thought upon looking at the signs, it is possible that people who notice the signs dotted around the campus come away with that feeling of being part of something important. 

Even if there really is no significant effect for most people, I think that the effort put into the historical marker project shows that people really do care about Penn State's history, and perhaps the markers have brought other people to enjoy this legacy as well. And, if absolutely nothing else, these signs have given me something worth writing about for a few months, which in turn has hopefully given you something worth reading about.

Is a calorimeter for a cow called a "coworimeter"? Probably not

"CALOIMETER: Designed and first operated in 1902 by pioneer animal nutritionist Henry Armsby, the calorimeter was housed in this specially constructed building and monitored an animal's metabolism to determine the net energy value of food - the portion of food energy that an animal used to produce milk or meat. It attracted worldwide scientific interest and helped to develop feeds of higher nutritional value."

If you've taken chemistry classes in high school or college, you may already be familiar with the basic concept of the calorimeter, a device used to measure heat in a reaction. You may have even made one yourself in class using a paper cup. 

The calorimeter here is not the paper cup kind, unless you happen to have been using paper cups big enough to hold an entire cow.

Back in the 1800s, while agriculture was still a direct part of most people's lives, it had not been scientifically perfected. Nobody really knew how animals' bodies worked, so when it came to feeding livestock most farmers just fed whatever they happened to have for them and hope for the best. Henry Armsby sought to use the power of science to analyze animals' nutrition and figure out how best to feed them so that they would be as healthy as possible, and therefore give as much high-quality meat as possible. This is why he came to Penn State and built a giant calorimeter large enough to hold a cow, so that the cow could be put inside and the heat it gave off through metabolism measured, since, after all, any energy going into producing heat was energy not being used to grow.

(compliments of Penn State University)

That's the basic principle behind the Armsby calorimeter, and when written that way the process sounds sort of ridiculous. Ultimately, Armsby's colleagues and successors concluded that judging the nutritive value of different animal feeds as originally intended was not very useful because of a large number of confounding factors. However, the calorimeter was still very useful in making discoveries about the metabolism of animals and how they derived energy from food. And not only was it a great scientific advance, it also helped to draw new students and experts in agricultural science, revitalizing Penn State's dying AgSci department. The surprise success of the calorimeter was such that it was modified multiple times over the following decades in order to perform experiments on more types of animals, including humans in the 1950s. The calorimeter still exists at Penn State today, and while it is not used for actual experiments so much any more, it is preserved for its educational and historic value.

And where would you go to see this calorimeter? Why, to the Calorimeter Museum, of course!

This is a real sign on a real building just off of Curtin Road, near the Forum building. I have not had the opportunity to go inside and check it out, but it is definitely possible for you to pay a visit and find out more about the science behind the Armsby calorimeter than I could ever tell you.

Alternatively, maybe you really don't care much about this device. (I know that I would rather avoid any chemistry-related subject if at all reasonable.) However, even if you don't want to have anything to do with the calorimeter, the calorimeter probably has plenty to do with you. For this calorimeter was one early and influential attempt at using scientific principles to experiment on living organisms to improve their resource yields. This is important because the use of science to improve agriculture is still going on today, and is in fact the cause of one of the world's current great controversies: the use of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. Today, could such a use of the calorimeter be seen as cruel or dangerous? Even if not, the impact of experiments such as the Armsby calorimeter was a step towards the use of science that is so hotly debated now.