Author Archives: gaussling

About gaussling

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.

Crazy Time

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Work has been a seamless stretch of insane activity 24/7. An extended manic episode of multi-tasking and over-commitment. Nervously, we juggle chainsaws and flaming bowling balls on deck while the bow submarines into the swells. The gales of fortune tear at the spinnaker as every square foot of canvas strains to pull the ship forward.

Coworkers are mind-numb to the incessant demands of a production schedule that is absolutely fault intolerant. I’ve been on a boat in a storm for a bakers dozen of years. Rogue waves have become the norm. Reach and grasp become disconnected as you struggle to stay on the heaving deck. Yet the captain in the wheelhouse steers the steel boat into the storm again, hoping to drop the net for one more trawl.  We lash ourselves to the mast and hope for the best.

Dearly Departed

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Our next play, Dearly Departed, is in production. I play a character named Royce. This part has some pretty good lines. I’ve always played some fairly minor characters. The trick is to always do your best no matter what the part. A play is an ethereal being that lives for about 2 hours and then folds into a mere memory.

The job world is sort of like that too. You might find yourself in what appears to be a minor part in a large production. You get upstaged and your lines are walked over by the main characters.  But the main characters are carrying larger risk. If they flub their cues or mangle their lines, the effect is commensurately larger. On some projects you definitely don’t want to be the leading character. What is critically important is that you play your part the best way you can, show up for all of the rehearsals, and most importantly, pay close attention to what the other actors are saying and doing now.  The best actors are always in the moment.

Imagine a Better Microsoft

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Imagine this. Imagine having a form of payment that requires the payee to change the manner in which they receive and deposit their payment. Imagine a system in which the currency in circulation is “upgraded” periodically and that within 8 or 10 years, the previous versions are no longer “supported” by the banking system.

Still with me? Let’s continue to imagine.

Now imagine paying Microsoft for their upgraded Office platform with a banking and currency system that changes as described above. Microsoft would have to direct their employees to change out their credit cards, requisition policies, travel policies, and accounting platforms to accomodate external demands just to remain in the game.

Over the last several months I have had to adapt to upgrades to Windows 7 and Office 2007. It is very much like moving the furniture around on a blind person. The features are still there, but access to the various tools and menues are arranged much differently.

So, Microsoft, I have spent considerable time relearning how to use software that I was proficient with in the previous rev. I am not enjoying new capability- only new learning curves. WTF!!!!

Your productivity tools are having a negative effect on my accumulated lifetime productivity.  This is worth something. Where do I send the bill?

Theories X and Y

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Just for grins you should look up the Wikipedia page describing management Theory X and Theory Y. Anything look familiar?? This is what B-School faculty do. Which theory do you think Stalin subscribed to? Which theory does your organization follow?  Hey man. Sign me up for an MBA program.

Of course, these are book end theories. Most organizations are in between somewhere.  One organization up in Ft Collins has a slide for employees to zip to the bottom floor. This is Theory E for Elmo.

Thus Spake George

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Time for some full frontal iconoclasm.

Going over back issues of C&EN I found an article in the Sept 5th, 2011, issue, p. 14, that struck my interest.  Well, interest is the wrong word. The article opens with George Whitesides saying-

As many as 100,000 new jobs for chemists could be created in the next 20 years if the recommendations of an ACS Presidential Task Force on Innovation in the Chemical Enterprise are carried out, according to task force chair George Whitesides, a chemistry professor at Harvard University.

Other illuminati on the task force include the usual band of chem celebrities.

You know, I find this a little irksome. These oligarchs have been exploiting cheap student and post-doc labor for decades for their own professional gain. Now, after the economy is set to crystallize into a new phase, big prizes sitting on the mantle, they are suddenly showing concern for up and coming chemists and the future direction of the profession.

Are they concerned for chemists or is it the continuation of the grant business that they are after? Both are certainly worthy of support. But why do we have a system in place where the boat gets some needed navigation only when the rock stars hold a Farm Aid task force? Duh! Shit man, George and Bobby say we have to do something, so I guess we have to pay attention. These two characters are riding off on their high horses while the rest of us are shoveling out the barn.

These top tier professors sit at the apex of what is in fact an inbred patronage system that is now at risk of coming apart. That’s the issue behind the headlines.

iChallenge

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Here is an iChallenge for the iPeople who are developing the telecommunications wonders we have today. You designers of the Kindle, Nook, iPhone, iPad, iWidget, and all of the variants spreading away from the core technology. I know you are clever and hard working people. There is no doubt.

What about developing or just relocating manufacturing processes that can be run in the USA? Shouldn’t the fabrication technology be lined out and automated to the point where it can be operated nearly anywhere? One of the things that the advance of technology brings is reduced headcount per unit of production.  How do we justify off-shoring manufacturing that is highly automated? What is the advantage if inexpensive labor is not needed? It must be something else.

If taxes are the issue, then let’s look at the numbers. Quit the handwaving. We need a company like Apple to pony up some actual numbers. Make your case like you did in B-school. Manufacturing doesn’t have to start up in the expensive SF Bay area. Plants can be built anywhere the public infrastructure already supplies utilities and transportation.  Could it be that many of the arguments for off-shore manufacturing are related to a deficit in imagination rather than rigorous calculation?

And to the iConsumers out there. By demanding these wonderphones, you are only making the trade deficit worse.  Public corporations are people, or so the thinking goes. What is with these people? Do they not have any sense of loyalty? Are they even trying to manufacture in the USA anymore?

 

Whither Helium?

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A friend from western Pennsylvania was showing me photos from a recent trip to his native land. He was stunned at the extent to which natural gas infrastructure was creeping into the countryside.  Former neighbors and distant cash poor/land rich family members were cashing in the family sod for piles of lucre offered by the gas barons.  All aboard the good ship Marcellus. And if you missed that boat, the USS Utica is right behind it.

So,some of the eastern states are full of gas? It makes one wonder if the gas holds much helium?  Helium is very important as most readers of this blog will know. Helium’s low boiling point makes for a useful low temperature thermostat bath for superconductors. Helium sits within nested Dewars in NMR cryostats, quietly bubbling into the atmosphere, where it begins its random walk to the cold vacuum of space.  In exchange for tipping protons in the rotating frame, we send helium atoms back into the cosmos.

Helium supplies were interrupted recently with the maintenance shutdown of a plant in Wyoming.  This square western state also blows gas. Tremendous amounts of it. The sweetening process for all of this gas produces massive amounts of sulfur byproduct. 

It is not uncommon for Th’ Gaussling to sit at the rail intersection in his Colorado town and count rail cars clacking south in the dark of night, all full of molten sulfur from that other square state.  I have counted as many as 85 cars in one train all stencilled with “Molten Sulfur”.  All headed to, I presume, somewhere near the Gulf coast for, perhaps, sulfuric acid production.

I think we users of helium need to be a bit more vocal, or more curious at least, about the strategic reserves of helium. A lot of technology and sevices rely on it.  Has anyone looked at the Marcellus and Utica reserves for helium??