Gaussling is a senior scientist in the chemical business. He occasionally breaks glassware, spreads confusion and has been known to generate new forms of hazardous waste. Gaussling also digs aerospace, geology, and community theatre.
I was a little surprised at the pump head rebuild kits for my two chemical metering pumps in the lab. They were $662 each. I don’t know what I was expecting given the small size of the pump heads. It just seems like a lot of money. These are ProMinent pumps and have always given good service. I guess I am not calibrated correctly.
The metering pumps feed a Mettler-Toledo instrument, so I should be used to expensive parts. Everything from Mettler seems to be priced in multiples of $2500 and is shipped on a crippled barge from Europe. Just kidding. Mettler makes good equipment but they are a bit on the slow side.
Warning. What follows has political content that may offend some readers.
The former president, that is #45, has been busy venting gas about how his demand that the Pulitzer Prize board withdraw two 2018 prizes has been denied. One, to the Washington Post for investigative reporting and the other to The New York Times for public service . This pathetic man, the anointed savior of evangelical MAGA Republicans and the Lord High Magistrate of what is right for the MAGA way of life, openly and strenuously defecates on anyone who annoys or contradicts him. You might think that such a man of demonstrated low ethical and moral character would be immediately dismissed by conservative Americans. You know, the people who feel that they are the keepers of what’s good and right about America. As we all know, this hasn’t happened. He is still believed by a great many to be the right guy to “drain the swamp” in Washington, DC. It seems that no disgrace can bump him off this pedestal or repel his followers.
I describe myself as a pragmatic liberal. I accept the reality and value to a fair extent of capitalist markets and the need to reasonably control the reach of government. However I do believe in the value of a united America where citizens can trust that large scale and international issues can be handled by the federal government.
What a shame it is that the US is burdened with #45 and his MAGA cultists in a time of serious global tension posed by two authoritarian regimes aiming to knock us down more than a few notches. They assault the country daily with attacks over the internet. China’s respect for American intellectual property is and has always been nil. Since the 1970’s, China has been sending students and scientists to the US for an education in science and engineering. They returned to their country to help build the technological powerhouse that they now are. It has successfully rallied it’s population with many years of scornful propaganda against the US and liberal democracy. So far, China has been successful in it’s plan to economically dominate much of Africa and it’s mineral resources. It is flexing it’s muscles in the South China Sea and aggressively menacing Taiwan as it applies economic pressure on Australia to accept it’s dominating presence in the region.
Russia, as the free world knows, has invaded Ukraine on laughably fictitious grounds and is pummeling the country to rubble with constant artillery fire. Russia is fighting a war of extermination as it wantonly rapes and murders innocent civilians. The homicidal Putin has dug himself in with a wall around himself that seems impregnable to an internal rebellion. He is a psychopath with nuclear weapons and an army who is bent on shaping his part of the world into the Mother Russia he imagines it once was.
All of this and more is happening in the world around us. The world order that the US has come to structure itself around is coming apart. All the while, America is preoccupied with a circular firing squad of squabbling over religious and political abstractions. Our two-party system limps along with one party rotting to the bone. The American Republican party has morphed into a 2-headed monster thanks to #45 and his unrelenting incitement of the lunatic fringe and those left behind by technological and economic progress.
The American experiment with fascism is accelerating as ultraconservatives buckle their seatbelts in political positions ranging from school boards and county representatives to state houses and the US congress. America’s vast political middle ground trends towards lazy disinterest with a long record of low voter turnout. The ultra-right knows and relies on the laziness of the left and center.
Ultraconservative evangelical preachers have been on the airwaves for decades pushing their twisted theory of the universe. Their rhetorical skills are considerable. The brick and mortar preachers are now teaching followers that the end is near and #45 has been sent by God to smooth the way for the prophesied apocalypse set to begin in Israel.
Somebody once said, “when fascism comes to America, it will be draped in a flag and carrying a cross.” It’s beginning to look that way.
I thought I’d add a new component to Freud’s structural model of the psyche. That would be the Stupid. It sits apart from the Id in that it can be at play in both the conscious and the unconscious mind. Unlike the Id, the Stupid can be both subconscious and premeditated. It can slip out as an urgent flash from the lizard brain and fly past the ego into full view. Freud felt that the role of the ego was to mediate between the Id and reality. Sometimes, thoughts can overwhelm the mind’s layers of protection. The Stupid can display itself in its full regalia abruptly or after much rumination. It begins with a swirl of feelings that erupt into a kind of psychic solar flare that blasts out into the world for all to see. For a glorious moment it provides a pulse of gratification that seems “Oh, So Right”. But being the Stupid, it can promptly collapse under the weight of it’s own, well, stupidity, or it can float around out there and mingle with the thoughts of others for a long period of time. Even find it’s way into print for all eternity like this post.
Of course, the previous paragraph, while having an appealing ring to it, is total fiction.
My interest is in rehabilitating the word “stupid” in my own mind. I have always avoided using the word because I believed it was meant to accuse someone of being mentally deficient and therefore slanderous. It is widely felt that even if well founded, its use is rude. I had a midwestern Lutheran upbringing and so rude was something that you just don’t do.
I’ve been struggling to find a word that describes a person who harbors Republican evangelical, fascist or totalitarian fantasies, but who may appear and function normally. They seem to be everywhere. While I would like to include those who attempt a gibbering explanation of a libertarian utopia, I’m as yet undecided. A wave of the hand and dismissal with a bell curve argument isn’t enough. Is this cognitive elitism? Yeah, pretty much.
Mental deficiency is only one of several meanings of the word stupid. Google defines stupid as “having or showing a great lack of intelligence or common sense.” Excoriating someone for being mentally deficient or lacking in intelligence is mean spirited and is to be avoided in a civilized world.
The question of how common is common sense is a matter of debate. At its base, common sense would be a grasp or recognition of something that most would agree should be obvious to everyone. But, it seems to me that common sense is something that is learned over time and experience. You couldn’t just pop out of the womb and instinctively know that safety glasses should be worn when handling chemicals. People will vary widely in their inventory of common sense notions. Maybe common sense cannot be a universal package of instinct. Maybe the very idea of common sense rests on feet of clay. That it is just a rhetorical slight-of-hand used to make a hasty judgement and win the argument.
According to Wiktionary, stupid can also mean “exhibiting the quality of having been done by someone lacking in intelligence”. “Exhibiting the quality” is not the same as being fundamentally unintelligent, is it? It’s just the appearance of unintelligent. I think I’ll run with that.
I’ll have to come clean. I have shown a good deal of exhibiting the quality of stupidity in the past by my previous unfortunate choices. No, seriously, it is true. But that doesn’t disqualify me from recognizing it elsewhere. I know what I’m looking for.
Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, aged 99, has released a new book recently titled “Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy” and as a result has been on the interview circuit. A review of his life can be found on Wikipedia. An interesting interview was reported on Spiegel International recently. I was alive when Kissinger was doing shuttle diplomacy in Viet Nam and when he and Nixon went to China for the summit with Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong in 1972. Nixon’s trip to China was a very big event then.
Right at the start of the interview, Spiegel asked Kissinger about a comment he is alleged to have said at the recent Davos conference. Kissinger was quick to correct the report.
DerSpiegel: “… Is this what you had in mind with your recent statement at the World Economic Forum in Davos, when you suggested that Ukraine accept a temporary division of the country, developing one part into a pro-Western, democratic and economically strong nation while waiting for history to reunite the country as a whole?”
Kissinger: “What I said is this: To end this war, the best dividing line would be the status quo ante, which means 93 percent of the country. That’s quite a different thing. If one identifies the status quo ante as the objective, that would mean that aggression has not succeeded. The issue, then, is a ceasefire along the February 24 line of contact. The territory still controlled by Russia, which makes up about 2.5 percent of Ukrainian territory in the Donbas as well as the Crimean Peninsula, would then be part of a general negotiation.”
Kissinger goes on the comment on China and Taiwan. He suggests that while the US is involved with Russian aggression indirectly, a Chinese attack on Taiwan would be full scale and put the US and China in direct conflict.
Kissinger believes in the support given to Ukraine by NATO to defeat Russian aggression. He goes on to emphasize that Europe needs to find a working relationship with Russia irrespective of the outcome of the Russian-Ukrainian war. He says-
“… the relationship of Russia to Europe needs to be addressed, namely the question as to whether it is a part of European history, or a permanent opponent based on other territories. That will become a main issue. And it is one that is independent of the conclusion of the war in Ukraine …”.
This kind of strategic thinking is in the realm of statesmanship.
Somebody set off a bomb at the Guidestones in Georgia causing serious damage to the monument. Georgia GOP primary candidate Kandiss Taylor had urged the destruction of the “Satanic Guidestones”. And somebody done went and did it. The writing on the Guidestones said-
“Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature; Guide reproduction wisely, improving fitness and diversity; Unite humanity with a living new language; Rule passion, faith, tradition, and all things with tempered reason; Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts; Let all nations rule internally, resolving external disputes in a world court; Avoid petty laws and useless officials; Balance personal rights with social duties; Prize truth, beauty, love … seeking harmony with the infinite; Be not a cancer on earth — leave room for nature — leave room for nature.”
It’s pretty radical. Imagine promoting the idea of fair laws and just courts. Or seeking harmony. All without the mention of a deity and supernatural dominion. Obviously, this absence of religious underpinning automatically infers the foul deeds of Old Nick, the Prince of Darkness, or Mephistopheles. Mercy sakes alive! Planting a monument that offers secular suggestions of living a good life for its own sake. It was a scandal.
The only friction spot I can see is the suggestion of a maximum world population of 500 million. I think most biologists would agree with this, but it ain’t gonna happen. Imagine trying to suggest to folks to be smarter about reproduction. Overpopulation is happening and only famine, disease, or nuclear world war will slow it down.
There are easily enough folks around who indulge their Iron Age beliefs strongly enough to produce someone who could construct an effective bomb and use it. I’m sure somebody up in the holler was dancing a jig afterwards.
An interesting question and answer piece has come out signed by Mykhailo Zahorodnii, Ukrainska Pravda. Zhyttia, titled (by Yahoo) “The atrocities committed by the Russians are their reaction to the fact they are nobody in their own country“. It is not a dispassionate bit of analysis by a senior historian, but rather by an experienced reporter from Ukraine. Yes, it is anti-Russian. It does not attempt to convey sympathy or fairness towards the Russian people. But, as one-sided as it is, I think that many valuable insights are made into the consequences of Russian history and also its politics over the last 30 years.
“And it [the Russian army] is doing the same thing to Ukraine as to Syria. That is, it is technically possible to turn every Ukrainian city into Aleppo. There are orders, there is no honour, there is no dignity, there are no human values.”
If Ukraine is to lose the war, then Russia should be made to pay dearly for it. However, Putin has stated Russian nuclear doctrine- they will only use nuclear weapons if the survival of the state is threatened. This is widely held to be true. The big question is, who decides what the existential threat to the state looks like? Putin decides, of course. This is why the US and Europe must avoid a ham-fisted foreign policy with Russia. The Russian president is a belligerent madman in charge of a nuclear state and whose fantasies about Russian manifest destiny are his guide. Tensions with Russia are here to stay for many years. Putin supported Trump for a reason. Trump “respected” Putin for unknown reasons. We need to keep American madman and rogue narcissist Trump and his ilk far away from foreign policy.
The town of Uravan, Colorado, shows up on maps and road signs. You might think it is a physical town. It sits north of Naturita (pronounced natter reeta), CO, on Hwy 141 about 15 miles up the narrow San Miguel River valley. If you look at it’s Wikipedia page, you’ll see a picture of a bare area of ground. Today all that remains at the surface is a ball field and picnic tables. Every bit of the town and the mill has been demolished, shredded and buried within the confines of a Superfund site. Even contaminated bulldozer blades were buried on-site. Also remaining is a Umetco commercial building. Umetco, a Dow Chemical subsidiary, was responsible for managing the reclamation of the site which lasted from 1987 to 2007.
Main uranium deposits in the US (DoE Office of Legacy Management, 2015)
The local topography consists of sandstone canyons and mesas. The map below (north is up) shows a large area of land west of the valley mill site and up above on Club Mesa. This is the location of buried mill tailings and other contaminated materials. The major radiological contaminant is Radium-226 and its daughter products. Radium is a common and troublesome constituent in uranium-bearing ore.
As an aside, I would recommend taking Colorado Hwy 141 from Naturita north through Gateway enroute to Grand Junction if you’re in the area. Truthfully, Uravan isn’t along the route to somewhere most people would want to go except for locals. This stretch of road is called the Unaweep-Tabeguache Scenic Byway and is absolutely gorgeous. Just like in nearby Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, red sandstone is the dominant country rock in that part of the Colorado Plateau. You’ll drive through breathtaking canyons of red sandstone along the Dolores River, south of Gateway.
During its post-WWII heyday, the company town of Uravan, CO, was one of a number of thriving yellowcake boomtowns in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. Overall, there were over 900 uranium mines in operation. The name “Uravan” comes from the URAnium-VANadium ore that was processed there. Uravan was one cog in a large wheel of uranium production first for the Manhattan Project then for the Atomic Energy Commission..
Uravan produced concentrate which was was trucked to Grand Junction, CO, to the Climax Uranium Mill for further processing. Activity at the Climax site began in 1943 for uranium procurement and processing of vanadium mill tailings for uranium.
An excellent timeline of uranium history in western Colorado can be found at the Museums of Western Colorado web site.
The earliest mining activity at what became Uravan was for radium recovery beginning in 1912 and falling off by 1923. By 1935 the mill was expanded for vanadium recovery and from 1940 to 1984 the mill was used to process uranium and vanadium.
The predominant ore that was processed at Uravan was Carnotite with a nominal composition of K2(UO2)2(VO4)2·3H2O with variable waters of hydration. Elemental uranium is a dense silvery metal that oxidizes in air, reacts with water and dissolves in oxidizing acids. It has two important oxidation states: the +4 uranous oxidation state which is green and the +6 uranyl oxidation state, UO22+, which is yellow. The uranous form is found in the UO2 mineral Uraninite and the uranium silicate Coffinite. The uranyl vanadate form is found with potassium cation in Carnotite, with cesium in Margaritasite, and with calcium in Tyuyamunite.
Uranium-vanadium rich sandstone is found in Club Mesa to the west and just above the town of Uravan. This occurrance is part of the larger Uravan Mineral Belt which encompasses local commercial grade uranium ore. The mesa covers 6 sq miles and is bounded by the San Miguel River, the Dolores River, Saucer Basin and Hieroglyphic Canyon. According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the average grade of the ore ranged from 0.25 to1.5 % U3O8 and 1.5 to 5.0 % V2O5 (ref 1).
From an extensive drilling study by the USGS, the Salt Wash member of the Morrison formation sandstone of the late Jurassic age was found to be the host for most of the commercial-grade (in 1957) uranium-vanadium in the Club Mesa area.
Beginning in 1936, the mill site was owned by US Vanadium Corporation and built up to process vanadium ore. An entire town was constructed on site to accommodate workers. It also produced a uranium oxide side-stream as a yellow pigment. Then along came the nuclear age.
References
(1) Results of US Geological Survey Exploration for Uranium-Vanadium Deposits in the Club Mesa Area, Uravan District, Montrose County, Colorado, Boardman, Litsey, and Bowers, May, 1957, Trace Elements Memorandum Report 979.
So, it turns out that I did time in Texas- 22 months to be exact. As a postdoc in a large central Texas city with the initials S.A. The natives were friendly, if not a little obsessed with the daily level of the Edwards Aquafer. If you absolutely have to live in Texas, SA is a decent choice. I do have to fault them on their choice of US Rep. Louie Gomert. An actual gibbering dunce if there ever was one. Imagine what kind of people were passed over in making that choice? But I digress.
On to the point. The Texas State Board of Educators recently made the news regarding their decision NOT to replace the word “slavery” with “involuntary relocation”. Evidently this antiseptic language was floated by a curriculum study group. The board, to their credit, unanimously directed the work group to revisit the language. Astute choice, folks.
According to the article in the San Antonio Current, GOP lawmakers (are there any other kind in Tejas?) are trying to shield students from discomfort in the classroom as with the mercurial issue of Critical Race Theory. Previously, in 2015, headlines were made when it was discovered that enslaved Africans brought to the US by the slave trade were described as “workers” in a social studies textbook. Sanitizing language on slavery is the first step to eliminating its tragic history altogether.
A research article in the 9 June 2022 issue of Science reports analytical results from the samples returned from the Hayabusa2 mission to the asteroid Ryugu. Kudos to Science for making the article available for free. The craft rendezvoused with the asteroid 27 June 2018 and returned 2 samples with a successful landing in Australia on 6 December 2020. The authors report that they were allotted ~125 mg and used 95 mg of sample for the work in the article.
The article, by over 140 coauthors, is a densely written chemical/mineral/isotopic abundance paper for specialists in cosmochemistry (which is definitely not me). The article concludes that the samples resemble C1 Chondrites absent “sulfates, ferrihydrite, and interlayer water”. According to the article, C1 Chondrites bear a close resemblance in elemental composition to the solar photosphere.
Antimony, Sb, is an obscure metalloid that rarely gets much notice outside of a few highly specialized areas of technology. The element is most often found in the mineral Stibnite, Sb2S3. Antimony is a pnictogen found in Group 5 between arsenic and bismuth in the p-block of the periodic table. Crustal abundance is 0.2 to 0.5 ppm according to Wikipedia, making it several times more abundant than silver. It has many interesting properties and uses which will be left to the reader to discover. Interestingly, there is a rare allotrope of antimony that is explosive when scratched. Luckily, this is unusual.
In a May 6, 2021, article in Forbes, writer David Blackmon cites the many uses of antimony and where it occurs in greatest natural abundance. As it turns out, the US is not one of those locations where it is found in great abundance. China has the largest abundance of antimony- greater than half of the known reserves in the world, with Russia coming in second. At present, the US imports 100 % of this key strategic material. Blackmon writes-
“Antimony is a strategic critical mineral that is used in all manner of military applications, including the manufacture of armor piercing bullets, night vision goggles, infrared sensors, precision optics, laser sighting, explosive formulations, hardened lead for bullets and shrapnel, ammunition primers, tracer ammunition, nuclear weapons and production, tritium production, flares, military clothing, and communication equipment. It is the key element in the creation of tungsten steel and the hardening of lead bullets, two of its most crucial applications during WWII.“
According to Blackmon, China currently supplies 80 % of the world’s antimony and also imports ore from other nations for refining. Here is the kicker- China may soon run short of the element. Running short of antimony doesn’t just mean that prices will rise in short supply. It could also mean that China may stop exporting much of its refined antimony in favor of internal consumption to produce goods up the value chain. China tried to do this with rare earth elements already. A country rich in strategic minerals and a sophisticated manufacturing base is a country that can wield significant power over the rest of the world. In the US, antimony is considered critical to economic and national security.
The US has had only one mining district that produced significant antimony. That would be the Stibnite mine in the Stibnite Mining District near Yellow Pine, Idaho. Mining activity stopped in the mid-1990s. The district, like most of Idaho, sits atop the granite Idaho Batholith. Volcanic activity in the past forced hot water through cracks and fissures in the rock, dissolving soluble minerals, moving mineral rich hydrothermal fluids that, when cooled, precipitated as mineral veins in the granite. Antimony minerals are often associated with another Group 5 element, arsenic, in the form of minerals like realgar and orpiment.
The Stibnite mine began as a gold mine in 1938 during the Idaho gold rush. Throughout WWII, the stibnite mine produced 40 % of the antimony and tungsten needed by the US. Tungsten, or wolfram, appears as the tungstate salt with a metal cation like iron, calcium or manganese paired with a WO4 oxoanion. The hydrothermal fluid partitions minerals in a rock formation into concentrated zones through selective solubility. This process is responsible for the formation of veins in solid rock.
Oh look. I’ve driven off into the weeds again rambling on about minerals.
Lamentations on Chemistry 