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.

Texas Justice. Fishing Crimes.

Leave a reply

You know, I really do like Texans. I lived there for a few years and I think I have an accurate sense of the place.  But Texans are Texans. It really is “like a whole ‘nother country” sometimes.

The Texas legislature recently passed the Fish Fraud law which specifically addresses the problem of fraud at fishing tournaments. The bill passed the house 142 to 4 and the senate 30 to 1 and awaits signing by the governor.  The bill provides penalties for fraud starting at a Class A Misdemeanor for the first offense to a third degree Felony for fishing crimes involving greater than $10,000 in prize money.  

According to the article, game wardens and prosecutors approached Representative Dan Flynn about  a fish fraud incident at Lake Ray Hubbard east of Dallas in October of 2009. Rep Flynn jumped on this outrage and brought the beady eye of scrutiny to bear on those dark hearted anglers who dare to flim-flam fishing tournaments. Case in point:  A semi-pro angler forced a 1 pound weight into a 9.5 lb bass, misrepresenting the weight of the fish and thus defrauding the tournament organizers. 

Without the benefit of a Fish Fraud law, the crooked angler got 15 days in jail, 5 years of probation, and loss of his fishing license for the duration of his probation.

It certainly seems to me like Texas Justice was swift and unblinking in this case without a special law on the books. The miscreant who perpetrated this act was nabbed by the local constable and thrown behind bars.

Ever wonder why there are so many laws on the books? This is an example of how it happens. Somebody games the system and legislators rush in to pack legislative caulking into a perceived hole in the wall. The Texas legislature has felonized yet somethng else. 

Are we really better off with an ever expanding definition of felonious acts?  The fisherman’s wickedness is plain for all to see. But does this one case merit the enactment of yet one more piece of legislation?  If you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Maybe it’s best if we take some time off from inventing new laws and look at what we’ve wrought?

Albemarle enters lithium market

Leave a reply

Here is one I didn’t see coming.  Albemarle has announced that it will be entering the lithium carbonate market.  In case you didn’t know, Albemarle has been a leader in bromine and brominated flame retardants for some time.  Economically speaking, if you want to be a bromine specialist or brominator at the commodity scale you should probably be basic in bromine. That is, you get your bromine feedstocks from underground or the Dead Sea.

Everybody likes the benefits of flame retardants but nobody likes to pay much for it, so manufacturing has to be large scale to keep the retardant prices down. The way you do that is to pull bromide from the ground, often as a brine, and oxidize the bromide to bromine and isolate it from your process stream. Albemarle has recent US patent applications for the nth iteration of their technology: see US 2010/0047155 A1.

A quick perusal of Albemarle patents failed to turn up any US patents or published applications indicating that they had been working on this. This press release must have been given special consideration in view of anticipated demand for their lithium. 

Since Albemarle is already tooled up for brine work it is not such a stretch to see that they are piloting lithium extraction from their process streams. According to Specialty Chemicals, a chemical trade publication, the Albemarle brines contain 100-300 ppm of Li and sources say that they are using an exchange resin for the isolation. While the brines at it’s Magnolia, Arkansas, facility are a little on the lean side in lithium, the fact is that they are already set up for brine processing. A large chunk of capital costs for recovery have already been put in place for the bromine operation. So, it’s a matter of setting up a Li extraction train to intercept the brine stream somewhere in the Br process.

Setting up ancillary process trains like this to recover other values is not at all uncommon. According to the Specialty Chemicals article, Albemarle expects to be producing lithium carbonate in 2013.

The USGS publishes annual reviews on the global stockpile situation with economically important minerals, lithium included.  A prominent source of lithium in the US is the Tin-Spodumene belt at King’s Mountain District, NC. Spodumene, LiAlSi2O6, is the principal mineral variety at Kings Mountain.  Chemetall Foote, a subsidiary of Rockwood Holdings, now operates at Kings Mountain, NC, in Nevada, and  Salar de Atacama in Chile.

According to Virginia Heffernan at the website Mining Markets, the cost of spodumene processing to afford lithium carbonate is quite high, $5500 per tonne of Li2CO3. Acid roasting is used to process the ore to liberate the lithium.

According to the article at Mining Markets the three major players in global lithium are Chile’s Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile (30 %), Chemetall (28 %), and FMC (19%).

Global warming talk

7 Replies

Our local ACS section meeting tonight featured two speakers with opposite views on anthropogenic global warming (AGW).  One was a senior scientist from CIRES and the other was a retired physics prof from UCONN. 

The physicist did what physics profs like to do which is to say, reduce the problem to constituent elements. To make a long story short, the physicist tried to demonstrate that CO2 levels are the result of warming, not the cause.  He applied Henry’s law and did a lot of handwaving and criticism of climate science and modeling as well as some old fashioned back of the envelope calculations. It was a rather good demonstration of the climate deniers art.

The CIRES guy’s talk was really quite comprehensive and tied in observations from a wide variety of types of experiments to support the notion that CO2 has rapidly ramped up coincident with the industrial revolution- say the last 200 years or so. What was most persuasive to me were the isotopic data showing the deficit of C13 in the recent CO2 buildup. This data suggests that the accumulated atmospheric CO2 levels are measurably tipped towards biomass or fossil fuel origin rather than of inorganic origin.

As near as I can tell, much of the audience of chemists seemed to incline towards the climate denier. A vocal few were certainly skeptical of the data in the sense that the limits of the instrumentation had to be accounted for. But this was the normal skepticism one sees chemists display everywhere. I’ve done it myself.

Obviously, I’m not a climate scientist and would never be confused with one. I’ve been on the fence about AGW until tonight. I think I’m tipping slightly towards AGW now based on the isotopic findings. 

What I saw tonight was more like the parable of the three blind men and the elephant. The AGW denying physicist and more than a few in the audience understood at least part of the data and concepts. And from the area of expertise they held, felt they had a unique perspective on the problem. I gathered this from the nature of the questions asked.  

This is emblematic of the situation and in a similar vein to creationist “science”.  Creationism has all kinds of problems as a model of reality.  But what I often observe in its adherents is a limited knowledge of the theory they are trying to defeat.  In fact, I would offer that creationists comprise a kind of scholarly archtype. Creationists have the answer already and spend their time collecting data in support of it. This is characteristic of people who read devotionally rather than analytically.

I think learned people can fall into a kind of intellectual cul-de-sac from which many never escape. A lot of AGW deniers spend their time trying to debunk the IPCC data rather than performing experiments to achieve greater clarity.  AGW deniers are certainly well represented with conservative affiliation.

I was accosted by a coworker the other day who was so disgusted by my liberal ways and neutral attitude towards AGW that he couldn’t be bothered to expend the energy to fully dress me down for it. It just wasn’t worth the effort, apparently. Thanks friend. Where are all of these liberals the conservatives keep bitching about? I’m not seeing them.

Well Endowed Chair

Leave a reply

The camel’s nose has been snuffling under the tent at Florida State University.  According to Kris Hundley at tampabay.com, Charles G. Koch pledged $1.5 million a few years ago to support faculty in the economics department.  Not unusual at first glance. But what Koch was able to wangle out of the Dean was the right to screen the faculty he is supporting. They want profs cut from a certain cloth. Of course everybody wants that, but the Koch’s are able to write the checks.

You see, Mr. Koch is very smart.  He knows that to properly manage staff, you have to hire well, write their job description, have them agree to goals, and then follow up with annual evaluations. That’s how they do it in business. Why shouldn’t you expect the same from the academy? It’s about inputs and outputs. And the outputs should always be more valuable than the inputs.  You drop a wad of cash on FSU, you expect a return.

I’m sure Dean Rasmussen is very satisfied with this arrangement. I’m sure that he looks very savvy for making this deal. He said that they are now able to offer 8 more classes because of this.  Deans are a very special kind of academic animal. They are nearly always former profs who caught the allure of administration.  They keep their association with their department, but climb the spiral staircase into the stratosphere of Old Main.   From their lofty perch they herd the frequently squabbling but always loquacious cats through the annual cycles of academic life.  Something happens to people once they become a dean, and it’s not always good. All of a sudden student teaching evaluations become insightful and important.

 As Gaye Tuchman explains in Wannabe U (2009), a case study in the sorrows of academic corporatization, deans, provosts and presidents are no longer professors who cycle through administrative duties and then return to teaching and research. Instead, they have become a separate stratum of managerial careerists, jumping from job to job and organization to organization like any other executive: isolated from the faculty and its values, loyal to an ethos of short-term expansion, and trading in the business blather of measurability, revenue streams, mission statements and the like. They do not have the long-term health of their institutions at heart. They want to pump up the stock price (i.e., U.S. News and World Report ranking) and move on to the next fat post.    William Deresiewicz, The Nation, May 23, 2011 Edition.

The Koch’s are engaged in a kind of social reconstruction through the formation of institutions, the backing of political movements, and now penetration of the academic veil. They have the resources and the self-assurance that comes from being highly successful businessmen.  They are very acquisitive fellows- a natural attribute of wealthy industrialists. 

Their corporate cosmology defines a universe of transaction possibilities.  All the world is a market and greater market share is the raison d’etre.  I’m sure that when the Koch brothers look out the window, they see a landscape of markets and a sky full of profit potential.  People like me see rooftops and air handling units. 

In a market-based society, the only real opposition I can apply to the Koch’s is to quit buying Brawny paper towels, Dixi Cups, or Stainmaster carpeting. The average indivdual’s power in the real marketplace is approximately zero.  Self-determination in the marketplace  is proportional to your wealth.  No wonder the Koch’s and their ilk want to see less gov’t and more market. They get to be in charge.

Notes from the South Pole

Leave a reply

A friend is a winter-over staff member this season at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole station. The station is accessable by air only for part of the year.  The last flight left more than a month ago or so. This is her second tour at the south pole.  The elevation there is at 2835 meters above sea level, so not only is the cold due to the low sun angle, but also due to altitude.

Life here at Pole is quite the experience. Today’s winds are up around 20 knots and that knocks visibility down to about nothing. The snow is so dry and icy, any winds kick it up like a sand storm. So no outside treks for yours truly today. In fact, I only make it outside maybe twice or three times a week. If auroras are dancing, I’ll suit up and make the effort because standing under the amazing manifestation of solar winds is just breathtaking.  –South Pole Susan 5/8/11

My friend said that her colleague, Marco Polie, is still skiing every day, but lately it’s too extreme even for him with wind chill temps down to -130 F and zero visibility.  Getting lost in a whiteout would be tragic.

People used to joke that the only difference between going to sea and going to jail is the added risk of drowning. Sounds like a similar thing could be said about wintering at the pole.

Powder Puff Derby

Leave a reply

A distant memory comes to mind about my mother this Mother’s Day. We were sitting high in the south stands of the Dayton Speedway in Dayton, Iowa.  It was ~1962. The speedway was a modestly sized oval dirt track. My aunts were screaming “C’mon Ruthie! Faster!”  I was five and mildly apprehensive about the whole thing.  It was all so very loud.

Down on the track was a snarling pack of cars driving too closely and at speeds plainly too fast for the size of the oval. They were all trying to get ahead of one another. The cars in the lead had caught up with the cars in back so it was hard to see who was winning. They just kept grinding away around that loop.

Alarmingly, my mother was on that track driving a stock car. Our cousin, Dick, had provided the car. He was a Dodge dealer in our home town nearby and had the resources to dabble in stock car racing. This variety of racing was called a “Powder Puff Derby”. Mom was driving a robins egg blue Chevy with the pink letters PU2 painted on the doors. Mom normally drove at two speeds- fast and stop. She had the need for speed and racing was a natural impulse for her.

Later in the day we drove home with a trophy. It wasn’t first place, but it was a trophy.  Mom was energized by the whole experience but quite exhausted. When we got home we did what people often did on a late summer afternoon- we cut open a watermelon out in the yard and stood there in the shade slurping the juicy melon out of the rind and spitting the seeds long distance under the swaying branches of an elm tree in the summer breeze. 

If I concentrate I can still hear the clatter of the hogs lifting and dropping the metal lids of the feeder in the hog house and the earthy, organic smells of the farm. It was a long time ago in a very different world.

Gravity Probe B Results

Leave a reply

NASA has just announced the results from its Gravity Probe B mission.  The mission found data that support the hypothesized phenomena of frame dragging.  This effect is the result of vortex-like distortion of space-time around the earth resulting from the earths rotation. The earth distorts space-time owing to its mass and this effect is further shaped by the earth’s rotation.  The effect of this is minute.

Scientists and engineers assembled 4 ultra-precise niobium coated spheres which when spun individually in a hard vacuum and at liquid helium temperatures, produced a highly stable superconducting gyroscope. This superconducting gyroscope produces a weak magnetic field which can be monitored with a SQUID.  Wobble induced by frame dragging would be detected as changes in the alignment of the gyro’s magnetic axis relative to a star in the background. 

All of this is super precise work and a great deal of credit goes to the all those involved.  It is an amazing experiment. It is a true wonder.

Reading, searching, researching, and writing. My life as a chemist.

Leave a reply

It turns out that I like Russian fiction. On a lark I picked up a collection of short stories by Nikolai Gogol on Amazon (ISBN 978-0-14-044907-5). It was worthwhile. 

Actually, it wasn’t such a lark. I was looking for a copy of Diary of a Madman.  The idea was to find a cutting for an audition, in case such an opportunity arose.  Gogol’s Diary of a Madman and The Government Inspector have been performed for generations and, as usual, I’m the last of my age cohort to read it.

I spend my days supervising chemical research, doing reactive hazard studies and IP analysis. From the job description point of view, I’m a walking, jabbering freak. How the hell am I going to get a job elsewhere with a resume like that? HR will look at it and, failing to find an exact match in their organization, toss it into the discard folder.  I don’t fear chemicals, but I do fear HR.  HR is the bane of our profession.

Back to the day job, these areas are basically writing activities and occur at a desk. It has occured to me that working at a desk is more dangerous than working with chemicals.  You soon get fat(ter) and stressed. It’s not good. 

It is funny how job descriptions differ. Many colleagues have jobs where they execute some task by bringing something into a predetermined structure. By that I mean, an analyst performs a standard procedure or the QA manager documents data for a product cert. An accountant performs procedures in the general ledger according to rules. Their work is reasonably well defined and they know when they are done.

Not a single thing I do is amenable to this kind of structured performance.  The chemistry stuff is experimental and involves sorting out what the hell happened. That’s just the nature of applied scientific investigation.

The IP work involves searching for information. If you find a relevant patent, well, you might be near the endpoint. Lucky day. But if you don’t find claims on a composition or a process, it’s a negative result. You have to ask if your search strategy was adequate. Anyone who has used a search engine knows what I mean. Sometimes, you don’t pick the best search terms and you come up with junk. Eventually you blunder into the right term and find the mother lode.

Sometimes an information search becomes dendritic. You find yourself bobbing along in the brackish waters of the “merely interesting”. So, you back up and revise the search terms.  Doing an IP search for an exact composition in CAS is very straightforward. A structure search or a CASRN search is very reliable and fast.

Much time can be wasted with patents that use compositions or processes but do not claim them. In particular I mean patents that mention compounds in the description (or specification) but do not claim them in the claim section.  A great many patents may be served up in the list of hits in this way. How you deal with this depends on what you want and what kind of search tool you’re using.

If you are interested in a class of compositions or the range of technology that might be out there, this is a kind of search that is more dendritic and subject to stranding in cul de sacs. If you do not use Chemical Abstracts Service in some way, your options become restricted.  There are many IP services that tap the various patent offices around the world. Some seem to have their own databases. Many seem to focus solely on searching the patent data through clever use of search terms or the patent classification system. For prior art searching, this is inadequate. For the most part, only CAS can provide reliable hits if a compound was reported in Acta Retracta by Professor van Wingenheuk in 1907.

After a day of reading abstracts and patents, it’s nice to read something well written and get lost in it for a little while. Patents are not written to be easily understood. They are often masterful in their obfuscation. I often admire the conciseness with which many are written. But in the end, they are all disclosures written grudgingly and with the intent to obscure.

US Caps Bin Laden

Leave a reply

Even though I’ve become a bit of a peacenik I have to say that my reaction to the news of the death of Bin Laden is the same as everyone elses. Killing is a nasty business at its best, but at some point the herd has to cull some of its most dangerous members.  

It sounds like this fairly selective takedown was the result of good police work rather than, say, dropping 500 lb laser-guided bombs and letting God sort them out. I hope this lesson isn’t lost on the next few presidents or their secretaries of defense. The US had time on its side and seems to have used it well.