This north facing photo was taken in October of ’06 on the summit of Pikes Peak, above Colorado Springs, CO. It shows the rather abrupt terminus of the cog rail line.
End of the Road
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Monthly Archives: February 2008
USA 193
There has been considerable buzz lately that the launch and deployment of USA 193 has somehow gone terribly wrong. Reports say that the package failed to deploy properly and it is presently in a rapidly decaying orbit that will bring it back into the atmosphere for an uncontrolled re-entry.
A credible source from our base in Shangrila tells Th’ Gaussling that something will re-enter the atmosphere soon, but it won’t be USA 193. A decaying satellite of some sort is coming down and certain parties are anxious to blast it to pieces. This episode may be just a bit of sleight of hand to confuse intelligence gathering organizations as to what is really up there. A three card Monte, but with rockets.
There may be some real worry about tell-tale bits of apparatus landing in an unfriendly state. There may be worry about fuel vessels landing intact and providing a toxic hazard at the impact site. The (methyl)hydrazine in the fuel cell may be frozen and consequently the fuel cell may not absorb heat fast enough in short re-entry time to flash off and disperse the fuel. Re-entry doesn’t char everything to cinders.
A missile intercept with the satellite may be a preventative measure, an exercise for missileers, a counterintelligence exercise, or it may be a signal to a few frisky states out there who doubt our capability and resolve. Let’s hope we’re spared the embarrassment of a miss.
On Marketing Chemicals
If you are a marketing person in the chemical industry, the question of how-to and how-much is never far from your mind. I’m not talking about selling pesticides or drain cleaner to consumers. I’m referring to B2B chemical sales. Feedstocks, reagents, catalysts, additives, etc.
Management never likes to pay much for advertising and will always be skeptical of the value of ads. Yet, deep within that black heart most managers know that some advertising is necessary.
Sales to the public is demand that can be fairly easily measured. Sales in the public domain are open and lots of nifty and informative stats and trends can be compiled to help plot marketing strategy.
By contrast, sales of products that are not out in the open, or products that are part of a proprietary process leading to another kind of product are things that are somewhat problematic to understand. Products that are uncommon or are unique to a few limited circumstances are not products that you necessarily want to promote in the mass media.
If a company makes a bracket that is used to hold a fuel flow sensor on a 1998 Buick, chances are that the product will be useless for just about every other application. But many components on that same Buick are of a general nature and may be found on many kinds of cars.
In chemical marketing, many products are of a general nature and many are highly specific. The marketing approach for highly specialized products is necessarily more focused than that for chemicals of a more general utility. A specialized product requires that marketing people be like a Dachshund- these dogs were bred to go into burrow hole to pull out the critter that lives in there. Marketing specialty chemicals requires the same sort of proclivity.
Where do I find information about who uses what? I search patents, SciFinder (to see who is publishing with what materials), Google, and I talk to people about what they are looking for. Purchasing people always have a list of troublesome products. Your company should have a decent customer list to draw upon.
Another approach is to do a patent search starting with a particular company AND a key word. While there is absolutely no assurance that the company is actually practicing the art that they patented, it is possible to collect a list of companies that have used your product at one time.
Finally, there is the Johnny Appleseed approach. You simple plant literature at every fertile site you can find, and you do it several times with multiple media. Brochures, emails, cold calls, websites, conferences, and technical literature. “Technology Push” is hard work. Especially if the economy has taken a dive. It can take 3 months to 3 years for a potential customer to give you a call when they finally decide to make a query.
The marketing of obscure products is spotty business and hazardous to your wallet if you are on commission. The best circumstance is to have a portfolio of products, or a catalog. If your collection is good enough, something will always be in demand.
Scalia On Torture
2/12/08. Let me paraphrase what I just heard Justice Antonin Scalia say on NPR. In a replayed BBC interview, he said that he didn’t see anything in the constitution that prohibits the use of torture to get information. On the other hand, he said that the use of torture as punishment would be unconstitutional.
This is the first time I have heard this particular bit of analysis. That is the tack you’d expect him to make. A few colleagues and I had the opportunity to sit and have coffee with Scalia some years ago when he was on our campus. I left the gathering with the impression that he is a very formidable character. Defending a case in front of him would be nerve wracking.
It is worth remembering that the Supreme Court’s job is to deliberate and rule on matters of interpretation of the constitution. I would offer that the comments of a justice of SCOTUS are not to be taken as promulgation of moral authority, but rather as constitutional scholarship.
Highly civilized countries like Switzerland, The Netherlands, or Sweden have surely wrestled with the calculus of this matter. I wonder what they have concluded as to the merits of torture. Maybe they are less squeemish about it than we are.
Addendum 2/13/08: If you think about what torture really is, it is hard to come to the conclusion that Scalia is offering. Interrogation torture is a circumstance wherein a person is detained and put under the requirement to disclose information. To qualify as torture, as opposed to simple questioning, the detainee must be subject to a negative outcome. I think in the normal use of the term, merely serving time in confinement isn’t ordinarily considered torture. The customary understanding of the term includes negative treatment that produces stress, dread fear, pain and discomfort, or injury.
You could argue that infliction of negative treatment as a result of detainee non-compliance is a form of punishment. Infliction of negative treatment in anticipation of non-compliance would be cruelty. To put it another way, if the infliction of pain and suffering is not a result of non-compliance, then it must be cruelty. If it is a result of non-compliance, then it it must be considered punishment.
I’ll have to disagree with Scalia’s assertion. I cannot escape the conclusion that the application of torture in questioning is either punishment or mere cruelty and therefore unconstitutional.
The notion that our form of “negative treatment” isn’t really torture is fatuous and should be abandoned. If we want to allow our elected government to torture people, then we should amend the constitution in the customary fashion to make allowances for this action. My guess is that most thinking adults will not gladly endorse a constitutional right to torture.
Droppin’ your pants for chemistry
In my career in the fabulous world of industrial chemistry, I have had to drop my pants exactly twice in the cause of business. The first and best time was in Japan. We had just been to the science city of Tsukuba near Tokyo. After driving all day in Tokyo traffic and shuffling around at business meetings in comically small sandals, we finally ended up at what I thought was a restaurant. Glad to get out of the car, I followed my running host through the rain and into a stone building out in the countryside. But instead of walking into a dining area, we walked straight in to a locker room!
I was about to protest that I didn’t have a swim suit when it dawned on me that birthday suits were the standard dress wherever we were going. Hmmm. Lordy, I wonder if this is co-ed? Gaijin anatomy would be the featured attraction this evening.
We padded out, barefoot and naked, into a covered outdoor area and straight into the heated pool. It was delightful. We soaked for 45 minutes and talked about business and life in Japan. All too soon, we got out, showered, dressed, and entered the dining area.
We took our positions on the cushions on the floor by the table and were treated to an incredible meal of exotic food and drink. It was highly civilized, relaxing, and memorable experience.
The next experience is the one time I had to go home without my pants. Some years ago I was making about a kg of some material in a 12 L flask. The reaction proceded normally and all was well until I tried to disassemble the apparatus in preparation for a filtration. The flask slipped from the clamp due to the considerable weight of the halide and dropped a few inches onto the benchtop. The flask broke, discharging the contents onto the hood benchtop. I can’t say what was in the mixture, but I can say that the solvent and residual halogen were absolutely the least of my worries.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that this was beyond my ability to safely handle without a Hazmo suit and supplied air. Somehow, in the course of this, I got a smudge of reaction mixture on my pants. The safety manager looked at me and ordered me to remove the contaminated pants, which I did.
So there I was, standing in my boxer shorts- the ones with the orange and green watermelon print- while the safety manager was standing there shaking his head laughing. He threw a tyvek bunny suit at me and walked out.
We discontinued the reaction after that event. The hazards were just too edgy, even for me.
Latest Additions to the Gaussling Library
In an effort to rescue books from the pulping cycle, several new additions to the Gaussling Library have been made.
Hey Rube, Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness, Hunter S. Thompson, 2004, Simon & Schuster ISBN 0-684-87319-2.
Comments: HST in his later years. Toggles between professional football and professional politics- two savage blood sports.
The Road to Reality, A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe, Roger Penrose, 2004, Vintage Books, ISBN 978-0-679-77631-4.
Comments: Holy Moses! I hope to glean a few crumbs of insight into my pathetic Homo Chemicus brain.
Lanthanide and Actinide Chemistry, Simon Cotton, 2006, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0-470-01006-1.
Comments: Contains something that doesn’t seem to be taught anymore- descriptive inorganic chemistry!
Areas of My Expertise, John Hodgeman, 2005, E.P. Dutton, ISBN 0-525-94908-9.
Comments: An “encyclopedic” download from the authors brain. Here is a selection from the listing of our 51 states-
“Louisiana. Nickname: “The Emeril State”; Motto: “Bam!” Notes: New Orleans was the first city to offer indoor absinthe faucets, and indeed has always played a cosmopolitan and libertine ragtime beneath America’s generally dull Sousa march of rural piety … For while the state had been purchased by the US as part of the Louisiana Purchase of 1802, the city itself was, for obscure reasons, placed in escrow, where it remains today, technically under the jurisdiction of Gibraltar…”
On Running a Plant
Here is a collection of thoughts on running a chemical plant, listed in no particular order.
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Always have some extra production capacity. Don’t be tempted to book every hour of plant time with processes.
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It’s easier to get purchase orders than you think. Corollary: It is easier to overbook a plant than you think.
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Hire the smartest, hardest working people you can afford.
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Never do R&D in the plant. Consider using laboratories for that.
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You will eventually have an incident or an accident. Make sure the HAZWOPER people drill every now and then.
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Beware the rag layer. It will confuse the operators.
- Hot filter cakes can ruin your whole day.
- Somebody sit and think about how failures might be expected to propagate during an incident.
- Don’t be an asshole.
- Watch out for reactions with initiation lag times. They’ll getcha. Stored energy is scary.
- Try to get the supplier to send dry, clean solvents. Purifying solvents is always a money losing operation. The same is true for all starting materials.
- To the greatest extent possible, try to move solutions around rather than solids. Solids handling is always more difficult.
- Think about where that butyllithium solution is going to go if there is a spill.
- Try to decide early on how you would like the next disaster to unfold. This is true for all hazardous operations- plant operations, highway driving, or marriage.
I’m sure there are many more good suggestions from Bloggerspace.
C6D6
Crap. I nearly had a heart attack the other day. Absentmindedly, I burned an NMR in CDCl3 instead of C6D6. The shifts were all cattywompus. The atropisomerism I was expecting from the amide was nearly non-existent in deuterochloroform and my aromatic peaks were all flibbertygibbet. Cripes! This was no good at all!
So, I went to a nearby diner and thought about it over a plate of hashbrowns with onions, jalapenos, and cheese. While gnawing on the breath-busting composition, the problem of solvents dawned on me like an ice cream headache. Doh!!
Romney Fires Ejection Seat
Just when I was getting used to the possibility of an epic Mormon Migration to the District of Columbia, Mitt Romney bails from the flaming cockpit of his campaign. At least for the next cycle, we will not see young missionaries in white shirt and tie parking their bicycles at the State Department or the CIA. That Ambassador-at-Large slot for Marie Osmond will have to wait and purveyors of caffeine and intoxicating liquors can rest at ease tonight. No temple garments hanging on the line back behind the White House either.
Utah is occupied by wholesome folk with a really odd theory of the universe. Eventually their time to decorate the Lincoln bedroom will come, but not in 2009.
Sentition and the Phenomenous Object
In his Seed article Questioning Consciousness, author Nicholas Humphrey asserts that if we are to understand the phenomenon of consciousness, we must begin to formulate better questions. Humphrey has written on the problem of consciousness and has been be promoting some new vocabulary and arguments to address this challenge.
The basic question that people have struggled with is this: How does the brain elicit consciousness? Obviously, this is a very hard question to answer. It requires the brain to reason about its own function and within the very constraints of those brain functions.
Naturally people want to find a mechanistic picture and the notion that the brain is a processing system that accepts inputs and delivers outputs is normal. But outputs to what? Well, your consciousness- your eternal, first person, live on the scene, internal-telecast of stimulus and response.
Humphrey defines “Sentition” as real world brain activity. Presumably this includes the sum of electrical and chemical activity that operates within the brain’s distinctive architecture. Humphrey goes on to define more language to describe our perception of sentition-
The real-world brain activity is the activity that I call “sentition.” In response to sensory stimulation, we react with an evolutionarily ancient form of internalized bodily expression (something like an inner grimace or smile). We then experience this as sensation when we form an inner picture—by monitoring the command signals—of just what we are doing.
Sentition has been subtly shaped in the course of evolution so as to instill our picture of it with those added dimensions of phenomenality. Sentition has, in short, become what I call a “phenomenous object”—defined as “something that when monitored by introspection seems to have phenomenal properties.”
While it may seem trivial, the definition of appropriate terms to describe key attributes of consciousness is critical to how we think about it. New terms may be better as they are not burdened with common usage that distract from the problem.
This article in Seed is not a seminal work. It is a short essay on consciousness and an introduction to some interesting ideas for hackers like myself who realize that the field is very significant. I believe that a comprehensive theory of consciousness is as important as the ToE the physicists are looking for- Theory of Everything.
Lamentations on Chemistry 