The National Youth Science Camp

This month, the National Youth Science Camp (NYSC) took place for the fifty-seventh time. The camp is a remarkable institution that, in my view, remains too poorly known and too little appreciated. I attended in 1977, and my blogging about it more than 40 years later should give you some idea of the regard in which I hold it.

The Road to NYSC

My involvement with the camp began in 1976 with a remark by Dorothy Cunningham, a senior at my high school. She told me she'd been chosen as one of the top two graduating science students in the state and that as a result, she'd be attending a science camp in West Virginia all expenses paid. At least that's what I think she told me. We're going back over four decades here, and I didn't take notes. The gist of what I'm telling you is correct. The details may not be.

One point I know I got right was the all expenses paid part. That's not something I'd forget. At 17, my reaction was "Free vacation? Sign me up!" I suspect I was also thinking, "If she can do it, I can, too!" Ah, the brash ego of youth. Dorothy graduated number one in her class. I was a good student, but when I finished high school a year later, it wasn't me at the tip of the academic iceberg.

Fortunately, I didn't know that, and even had I, the brash ego of youth would probably have disregarded it. (Sometimes ego works in your favor.) I let my biology teacher know that I wanted to be considered for the following summer's NYSC, and he helped me do whatever had to be done to apply.

There was paperwork. I don't remember any, but there must have been. An application form, if nothing else. During my senior year in high school, paperwork was pretty much a leitmotif. Paperwork for college applications. Paperwork for scholarship applications. Paperwork for college admissions exams. This was the 1970s. None of this online nonsense. Paperwork meant paper.

At the time, I was under the impression that each state chose the top boy and the top girl in science in that year's high school graduating class, so when I was chosen for the camp, I was able to internally gloat that I was the best male high school senior in science in the state of Oregon. Take that, Dorothy, Cunningham--I'm as good as you!

I probably wasn't. Setting aside that she topped her class, and I didn't, she would have had to overcome the obstacles to scientific success that young women faced at that time. I was spared such obstacles, and in fact I didn't even recognize their existence until decades later. Kudos, Dorothy.

West Virginia offered two camp positions to the governor of each state, and different states selected their delegates in different ways. In 1977, some states, such as Oregon, chose one girl and one boy, but not all states did this. (Whether Oregon did it by happenstance or as a matter of policy, I don't know.) Probably no state made an attempt to identify the "best" graduating high school science students. The only state in which I was one of the two best science-oriented high school graduates was my state of mind.

That kind of realization is what happens when the brash ego of youth morphs into the weary realism of middle age.

Given fifty states and two free passes to the NYSC for each state, West Virginia was ponying up for 100 free vacations for science-oriented high schoolers, 98 of whom were not from West Virginia. And all expenses paid meant all expenses paid. Regardless of whether you lived in next-door Ohio or in far-off Alaska, West Virginia flew you to camp and flew you back home afterwards. That was a big deal in 1977. The air travel industry hadn't been deregulated, so flying wasn't cheap. To this day, I look back on West Virginia's program as an astonishing largesse.

What motivated such generosity? For that matter, what motivated the camp in the first place?

It was a state pride thing. 1963 marked 100 years of West Virginia statehood, and a big celebration was organized. The overriding theme was science (thank you, space race), and when the original goal of luring the annual Boy Scouts jamboree to the state proved untenable, West Virginia created its own jamboree-like event: a three-week camp experience combining science-oriented presentations, outdoor activities, and a brief trip to Washington, DC, for a shot of politics (e.g., a luncheon with US senators) and a dollop of sightseeing.

The camp went so well in 1963, the state decided to make it an annual event. It's been held almost every summer since, the lone exception being 1983, when primary funding was shifting from the state to a nonprofit set up for the purpose.

NYSC 1977

On one of my first days at camp, one of the other boys remarked that he had performed the Millikan experiment in high school. I was stunned. The kid had measured the charge on an electron while a teenager! There was no way I could compete with that. I was out of my league. Way out of my league. One of the top Oregon high school seniors in science be damned, I was lucky to be breathing the same air as this guy.

I eventually came to understand that the league we found ourselves in had a broader range of skills and experiences than I had expected. I fit in fine. 100 freshly-minted high school graduates from all the United States yields a wider variety of teenagers than you might suppose. Or at least than I had supposed. The more people you meet from different backgrounds, the more you recognize how much people's lives vary, even in groups as seemingly homogeneous as American high schoolers. The NYSC nudged me down the road of recognition that the more you learn, the more you appreciate how much you don't know. That realization is useful in science, but it's useful in life, too.

Most days at camp followed a routine. We awoke to a recording of The Rhododendron Song, which until I wrote this blog post I assumed was the state song of West Virginia. It's not. It's not even a state song. (They have four.) Instead, it's a well-known West Virginia camp song, provenance unknown. Both the song's tune and its initial words are as indelibly etched in my brain as if they'd been burned there with a branding iron:

I want to wake up in the morning where the rhododendrons grow...

It's a fitting song for a state where the rhododendron is the state flower.

After rising to the Rhododendron Song and scarfing down breakfast, the day's events began. The NYSC being a science camp, there was a calculated mix of science-oriented activities and camp-oriented ones. An important part of the science program was presentations by outside speakers, and what looks to me now like an exhausting series of topics probably looked to me then like one nifty treat after another. Space exploration, atomic energy, mining, immunology, entomology, genetics, satellite imagery...you can hit a lot of topics in three weeks.

Two presentations stand out in my memory. The most important was

"A Study of Forest Fires Utilizing Computer Modeling Techniques" by Steve Kessel. 

I liked fire as much as any other stereotypical teenage boy, but that wasn't what got my attention. It was the computer modeling.

In 1977, not many people (and certainly not many young people) had experience using computers. Personal computers didn't really exist yet. The Apple II didn't go on sale until the month the 1977 NYSC took place, and the IBM PC was still four years in the future. Computers at this time were big, expensive machines cloistered in special machine rooms. They had staffs to look after them. You saw computers in movies and on TV, but not in real life.

I was an exception. Thanks to  the foresight, initiative, and dedication of Kathy Reed, my mathematics teacher in seventh and eighth grade, I had programming experience that preceded the science camp by several years. I had never considered using computers to model things like wildfire behavior in forest ecosystems, but Steve Kessel's talk planted a seed in my mind that never went away. It germinated after I finished my bachelor's degree in biology and was pursuing a master's in computer science. The result--directly traceable to Steve's talk at the 1977 NYSC--was software that modeled behavior of a particular virus, Bacteriophage Lambda. (Details here, if you must know.)

The second presentation whose influence outlasted my time at camp was quite different. From what I understand, it was an attempt on the part of the camp's organizers to stir the pot a bit:

"The Scientific Case for Creation" by Gary Parker.

The stirring didn't have the effect they'd hoped for (it generated little discussion amongst the campers), but I was intrigued. I wasn't a creationist then, and I'm not a creationist now, but I felt that part of the scientific method was looking at evidence in different ways, and the creationist way of looking at the evidence for evolution was certainly different. Over the next couple of years, I read some creationist publications, and I spent time trying to determine whether speciation had ever been observed to take place. I ultimately lost interest in creationist challenges to the observations underpinning evolutionary theory, but I still think that applying a skeptical eye to accepted wisdom is an important component of the scientific toolbox.

Not all presentations were by outside experts. Some campers gave short seminars of their own. One was entitled "Helium-Neon Laser Caused Photo-oxidation in Isolated Mesophyll Chloroplast of C3 and C4 Plants," which I'm sure intimidated me as much then as it does now. Even I gave a talk. I could no more compete with helium-neon lasers as with the Millikan experiment, but the seminars didn't have to be technical, and I had bragging rights to something rather exotic by the standards of the time: I'd spent time in Iceland. The previous summer I'd been an exchange student to that country, so I offered a little travelogue called "Iceland on 973 Kronur a day."

The National Youth Science Camp put science front and center, but the camp part was an equally important component of the experience. There was plenty of hiking and backpacking and gathering 'round the campfire at night, but I'd done those things with my family, so they didn't make a huge impression on me. What did were the things I'd never tried before and might never have tried at all had it not been for the NYSC.

One was rock climbing, which I discovered requires a lot more hand and wrist exertion than I had imagined. I haven't found the need to do any rock climbing since, but my tiny exposure to it in West Virginia at least gave me a better appreciation for the enormity of Alex Honnold's accomplishment in Free Solo.

Many outdoorsy activities, including rock climbing, were conducted in small groups. You don't take a hundred inexperienced teens, at least some of whom think they're invulnerable (thank you, brash ego of youth), rope them up, and turn them loose on sheer rock walls en masse. Instead, you take a few to scale cliff faces, and you divide the others into different groups, thus affording them the opportunity to test their invulnerability in other ways.

Spelunking was such a way. I was excited as we donned our caving suits and put on our headlamps. What would we see?, I wondered, as we slipped into the earth. What I most vividly remember is what we didn't see. Some distance into the cave, our guide had us  extinguish our head lamps so we would know what true darkness--the absolute absence of light--was like. You don't forget your first encounter with utter blackness. At least I haven't. I don't know if this kind of experience is still possible, given the panoply of devices with glowing LEDs I'm sure campers carry with them these days, but it made a lasting impression on me.

Wriggling about underground was not my thing. It was interesting to do once, but it's dirty, cold, and physically demanding, and, based on my single experience with it, most of what's underground is brown or grey and just not that exciting to look at. However, I wouldn't have those impressions had I not given it a try at the NYSC. I'm grateful that I was able to.

Whitewater kayaking, on the other hand (another first for me), was fabulous fun. You don't so much sit in a whitewater kayak as wear it. It responds to every move of your body. I loved it. I also loved that before they'd allow you to get more than a few feet from shore in completely calm waters, you had to prove that you could get out of the kayak if it overturned. Proof involved pulling off the spray skirt and doing a somersault out of the kayak while upside down and under water. I left camp determined to whitewater kayak again. I never did, though in recent years I've done a little flatwater kayaking. It's not the same. I still hold out hope that I might revisit whitewater kayaking, but being now in my 60s instead of my teens, I'd probably shoot for water a little less white. I don't feel quite as invulnerable as I used to.

Beyond scientific presentations and outdoor activities, the NYSC also featured excursions to places such as the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Washington, DC, and the site of the civil war Battle of Camp Allegheny. I'll spare you the details. By now, I hope you understand why I believe the camp is a unique undertaking.

NYSC 2020

This year's camp was virtual. SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) made on-site activities like spelunking, white water kayaking, visiting Washington, and waking up to the Rhododendron Song impossible. However, it didn't prevent the camp from offering an online-based program of lectures, directed studies, and interactive seminars on a raft of topics, including missions to mars, paleontology, colorectal surgery, electric vehicles, radio astronomy, 3D printing, machine learning, sleep, tapirs, and COVID-19, COVID-19, COVID-19. It made me wish I was 18 all over again, though perhaps this time with slightly less raging hormones.

The International Youth Science Camp

At some point, the National Youth Science Camp went international. It's had delegates from foreign countries since at least 1988, and in the ensuing thirty-plus years, over 400 campers from more than two dozen countries have taken part in and contributed to the NYSC experience. If contemporary camps have an impact on today's delegates akin to that of 1977's on me, the ripples emanating from West Virginia's 1963 centennial splash will continue to propagate for many, many years.

Blog problem should be fixed now

If you tried to access my blog post last week about how electric cars are currently luxury vehicles, you may have had the page hang trying to access alexgorbatchev.com. The problem should be fixed now. I used to rely on some scripts at that site to format code on my blog, but I have now eliminated the dependency.

I apologize for the accessibility hiccup.

Electric cars are currently luxury goods :-(

Unusual circumstances led me to buy three cars in the past 12 months. I've been interested in buying an electric vehicle (EV), so in each case, I figured it was my chance to take the plunge. Alas, I ended up with three ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicles. The types of cars I wanted either didn't exist as EVs or they cost so much more than their ICE equivalents, I couldn't justify the extra expense.
 

This was a great disappointment to me. I understood that EVs would involve some sacrifices in cost, range, and amenities, but EVs are an established and growing market with models from over a half dozen serious manufacturers. I expected the EV-ICE gap to be reasonably small. I found that it's not.

Let's run through the details.

Car 1: The Compact SUV

Last year, my wife and I decided to replace our 2010 Subaru Forester with a new compact SUV. Compact SUVs are part of the largest segment of the US automobile market, compact crossovers. In 2019, more than forty models competed for market share. If you wanted an EV, however, you had only one option: the Jaguar I-Pace.

There may have been hybrids to choose from. I don't know. I rule those out on principle. I think it's silly to build a car with two means of generating power. So much more to maintain. So much more to break down. A hybrid's not an EV. It's an ICE car with an electric subsystem desperately chanting, "I think I can!" I'm not on board.

So...the Jaguar I-Pace. MSRP starts at about $70,000. In my state, government incentives knock $10,000 off that, but even if you could knuckle a dealer down another 15%, you'd still be looking at an entry point of some $51,000. Perhaps that's not unreasonable for a luxury SUV, but we weren't looking for a luxury car. We were looking for a car.

We ultimately bought a Nissan Rogue. It satisfied our two primary requirements (all-wheel drive (AWD) and a moonroof), and during our search, it looked likely that we could get it within our informal budget of $30,000. In the end, we paid less than $28,000.

The Rogue runs on gas. Upgrading from gas to electrons would have cost at least $23,000.

EV fans point out that EVs have lower maintenance and fuel costs, but those factors don't come close to covering a $23,000 up-front difference. Some claim that EVs tend to hold their value better than ICEs, but (1) nobody knows what resale values for today's EVs will be in the future and (2) my wife and I tend to keep our cars at least a decade. Actual purchase price means much more to us than theoretical resale value.

Earlier this year, another EV entered the compact SUV arena: Tesla's Model Y. From a financial perspective, the Model Y is the I-Pace all over again. The AWD Model Y starts at about $52,000 after taxes, fees, and government incentives. That's $24,000 beyond what we paid for the Rogue. Had the Model Y been available when we were shopping, we'd still have ended up with the Rogue.

Whether I-Pace or Model Y, moving from a gas-based powertrain to a battery-based one would have cost tens of thousands of dollars--a price premium of over 80%.

I thought a lot about how much of a premium I was willing to pay to shift from gas to electricity. I finally decided it was about 25%. I want to buy an EV, but I don't want to go broke doing it. Given that the Rogue ran around $28,000, that means my budget for a comparable EV would have been about $35,000. Both the I-Pace and the Model Y (had it been available) would have been at least $17,000 over budget. That's a lot of money. And neither car offered a moonroof.

Car 2: The Little Convertible

After nearly 30 years of listening to me whine about having a convertible, my wife told me to shut up and buy one. Talk had always been of a Miata, but when opportunity knocked, I looked forward to investigating my electric options. There weren't any. Smart's Fortwo convertible had been discontinued in North America a few months before I went shopping, and its laughable 57 mile range ruled it out, anyway.

In desperation, I looked into used Tesla roadsters. That car is more targa than convertible, but I figured I might be able to live with that. In 2019, Tesla roadsters were at least seven years old and started around 50 grand. New Miatas were easily had for well under 30. 'Nuff said.

Car 3: The Used Subcompact Hatchback

My wife recently decided we needed a little hatchback runabout. The car would get only occasional use, and never for long trips. Its range when fully fueled needed to be only 130 miles. "A perfect case for a used subcompact EV like a Leaf!" I thought. With a ceiling of 50,000 miles on the car and a budget of $10,000, I figured we'd have lots of choices.

We had zero choices. There are plenty of Leafs available, but when you throw in the constraint that the rated range has to be at least 130 miles, everything goes away. Leafs up through 2017 are rated at only 107 miles, and newer used Leafs start north of $17,000. Looking beyond Leafs doesn't help. Fiat 500es can be found for under $10,000, but the range is only 84 miles. Used Chevy Bolts have more than enough range, but they start at $19,000. We found nothing that came close to the range and price we were looking for.

We ultimately ended up with a Chevy Spark. Four years old, 25,000 miles, under $9000. Runs on gas, but range is 315 miles. If there's an EV that approaches those stats, I'd love to know about it.

EVs are currently luxury goods

For people with a luxury brand budget, my 25% premium for an EV may put them in a place where there are choices. For people like me who generally shop mid-trim non-luxury brands and want a comparable EV for no more than about 25% more than an ICE vehicle, those choices are absent.

Even the off-menu $35,000 Tesla Model 3 fails the test. Stripped to its essence, the Model 3 is a compact sedan that happens to be electric. The Toyota Corolla is also a compact sedan, but it runs on gas. MSRP for the bottom-end Corolla is $19,600. At $35,000, the most affordable Model 3 demands a 79% premium over the Corolla. (It also requires that you live with half the range: 220 miles for the Tesla, 435 for the Toyota.) There's a reason why Consumer Reports categorizes the Model 3 as a luxury compact car, while the Corolla  is simply a compact car.

To my dismay, nothing I've read suggests that in the next couple of years, EVs will make the transition from luxury items to mainstream consumer goods.  It's a disheartening conclusion. I'd be delighted to be proven wrong.