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.

The 21st Century. The Century of China or Malthus?

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I’m trying hard not to be gloomy, but I’ve just been over at the The Oil Drum reading a post written by Jeremy Grantham, Chief Investment Officer at GMO Capital. This essay is notable in that it is written by someone in Grantham’s position. What I find so gloomy is the sense that our modern world is like a runaway train in terms of resource consumption.

People have been talking about peak oil and the importance of petroleum in nearly every material aspect of our lives since the Arab oil embaro of the 1970’s.  What free market enthusiasts and libertarians fail to emphasize is that the market is a social phenomenon; it is not physics. It is a phenomenon that is driven by desire.

The market is like a stomach- it has no brain. It only knows that it wants more.

The idea that you remove all elected government oversight and allow this stomach to reign free across the world is just another type of politics. Inevitably and always, money aggregates into the hands of a few percent of the human population and into the wire-transfer hands of synthetic people called corporations.

In a world of increasing scarcity the prospect of reduced consumption confounds political and business practices devoted to growth, since growth typically means increased consumption.

The key psychological barrier is this- How do we feel like we’re improving as we’re making do with less?

As the cost of manufacturing increases due to increased raw material costs, unit prices will rise. The invisible hand of price elasticity of demand will inevitably partition out the elastic from the inelastic goods on the market.  Whole industries relying on discretionary income will feel exposed. 

The challenge for our leaders is to maintain a vibrant economy even though natural resources are becoming ever more scarce. Power is manifested in the allocation of resources. China has pointedly focused on Africa as a source of raw materials for its growing economy.  The act of power is the fact of power. By throwing a lot of money around, and by controlling the flow of resources, China is exercising power. You don’t need to march an army around to demonstrate your power.

China is executing  industrial policy by forging alliances and allocating resources to global sourcing action. The USA dithers with self-destructive party politics, foreign military adventures, and a narcissistic indulgence in “greatness”.  Instead of wearing our hearts on our sleeves, we should roll them up and get to work building a robust and healthy culture.

The Weather

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Just had a dandy hailstorm. The ground is white.  The prairie dogs are nowhere to be seen. Vail Ski Resort, now closed, has had something like 500 inches of snow this season. It is presently snowing from below timberline on up. Down here at 5000 ft we’re getting liquid phase water, except for the hail. Up in the mountains the watersheds are well above average in snowpack.

The snowy season in Colorado has been characterized by westerly flows of moisture that have deposited considerable snow in the mountains, but left us along the Front Range in a moisture shadow. It has been a dry winter here where the Great Plains end and the North American cordillera begins.

Thursday, April 28.  The morning sky is severe clear. Pikes Peak 90 miles to the south sits on the horizon like a jagged dogs molar. Hot air balloons hang silently over the early morning landscape with their rip-stop fabric draped over a bubble of warm air. The mountains gleem white under a fresh coat of snow above timberline. It is a lovely day.

Memo to Aldrich, or ahem, SAFC

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[Note: The rest of you can go about your business. This memo is to whomever at SAFC will listen. If you’re not SAFC, click here or here.]

Dear Aldrich, or shall I say SAFC?

I have a bone to pick wth you. I’ve noticed that the bottles of reagents I have received from you in the last year have been labeled with a newly formatted design. The Aldrich bottles do indeed stand out on the shelf in resplendent red and white as designed. Well done. The bottles function in the manner in which they are intended. Again, well done. All of that is as expected.

What I’m unhappy with is the fact that the labels all seem to lack the molecular weight of the contents. Having grown accustomed to finding the MW on the bottle, I now have to set the bottle down in the lab and reach for the calculator to do it myself.  After decades of using Aldrich products with the MW printed on the bottle, my addled brain now has to unlearn this and do the calculation myself.

So, what caused this? It was not an accident, was it? Were there complaints about printing errors that twittered your legal people?  Were there a series of meetings in which serious senior managers furrowed their brows and intervened over the possibility of liability? Nothing like the mention of liability to get a VP agitated.  Perhaps ink has gotten expensive.  I just don’t understand.

Was it one of us who complained? Was it some white-coated laboratory fussbudget? Did some crabby pisswink from “out there” write a letter and frighten someone in St Louis or Milwaukee? That would be sad.

One more thing. Why does the font size have to be so small on large labels? 

Th’ Gaussling

Lamentations on Metallurgy

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Imagine that you have a big chunk of glass that has blended into it some desirable metal compound. It can be a metal aluminate, silicate, or oxide. Now imagine that there are may be a dozen other metal species in there as well. Some of these metals will have the same oxidation state and similar ionic radii so that rather than having discrete domains of entirely specific composition, you have a dogs lunch of compositions and phases. Now lets say that the metal of interest is measured at the tens to hundreds of ppm.

So, Mr./Ms. chemist, how would you set about retrieving the desired metal from the matrix? I specified glass only to set a reference point with regard to reactivity.  Many ores are full of quartz or amphiboles or micaceous silicates or aluminates that are relatively inert and perhaps refractory. So, if you seek metal M which is dispersed in the matrix, dissolution of that matrix to pull out M is going to be challenging.

Ores that are rich in metal sulfides can be roasted in air to liberate the sulfur as volatile SO2, leaving behind a metal oxide. Metal oxides are often rather soluble in strong acid, so recovery of M as a pregnant liquor is messy but straightforward.  Recovery of metals that are not found as sulfides or oxides can be less than straightforward.

A natural consequence of having an inert, refractory matrix is that the whole thing can’t digested into an aqueous solution phase, with the possible exception of HF treatment.  Only the surface can be attacked and extracted. So, the idea is to increase the surface area. This is commonly done by milling and is called comminution. A rule of thumb is that the milling cost varies linearly with the surface area generated. Milling is commonly a multistage process wherein big chunks are crushed and gradually hammered into small chunks. This is very energy intensive.

There are many ways to recover and transform elemental metals from their ionic form, from electro-winning to chemical reduction. Every element is isolated according to it’s unique chemistry.  Rare earth metals are particularly troublesome owing to the fact that they are very often found together in the ore and most of them have a + 3 charge and are of similar ionic radius. A few stand out as exceptions, like cerium which can take a + 4 charge.

Solvent extraction schemes have been developed to take advantage of differential affinity for certain extractants.  Solvent extraction technology was advanced in the post WW2 atomic age.  Since many rare earths are often associated with uranium and thorium, or vice versa, rare earth extraction technology was developed as a result of U and Th beneficiation.

Helium

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With uptick of natural gas exploration and “recovery” happening, you have to wonder if anyone is bothering to look for helium in it? And I’m referring to the Marcellus shale formation in particular.  Wouldn’t it be nice for some forethought here and try to recover some of the helium that may be lost.  Helium is a non-renewable resource and is critical to many industrial sectors, including superconductor applications.

The US has held helium in reserve since 1925. Helium extraction has been most fruitful from gas wells in the western states. The Helium Privatization Act of 1996 has resulted in the release of the helium reserve to the private sector at a federally mandated price. The FY2011 price is$75.00 per thousand cubic feet.  

According to the BLM, the agency that manages the strategic reserve, their enrichment facility in Amarillo, TX, can produce 6 million cu ft per day of crude helium at ca 80 % purity. The Amarillo plant provides crude He to refiners who polish it to the necessary level of purity for the end user.

The fun never stops

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Saw Bassam Shakashiri do his “Chemistry is Fun” demonstration last night. On the way home in a rain storm my radiator blew out while tooling along the interstate in Denver.  On phase two of the trip with the tow truck driver, I heard his stories of driving a tow truck in Telluride. And his travails with his ex-wife. And why he stopped drinking. And being in traction after a car crash. And about his ex’s brother the cop.

Seems he towed Tom Cruise’s Range Rover and one of Oprah Winfrey’s cars in Telluride. According to the driver, Oprah came running out the door and paid him handsomely to leave the car. Even the fabulously wealthy have to get towed now and then. Heavy is the head that wears the crown.

Pitot Bugs and Power Dives

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Spring 1980.  I arrived at the airport at 6:30 on a calm morning along the front range of Colorado. Judson Flying Service was open for business with a modest fleet of Cessnas. Two 150’s, a fairly new 152, a 172, a 182, and a 210. I had 48 hours of time logged in preparation for my checkride. 

My flight instructor, Fred, had signed me off for the checkride after my successful short and long solo cross country flights. We had practiced a bit on the short and soft field landings. I loved landings. If there is a time that you feel that the machine is an extension of your limbs, it is during the landing phase.

I nearly had to cancel the checkride. I had contracted a bout of conjunctivitis following a visit to the opthamologist. My eyes had cleared up sufficiently so I decided to proceed with the flight test.  Scheduling with the FAA designated examiner was hit and miss so I didn’t want to miss my slot.

The examiner gave me a destination- Yuma, Colorado. My job was to put together a flight plan and call it in the flight service station (FSS). While on the line with the FSS, I got a thorough weather briefing.  I plotted a course based on radio navigation  stations (VORTAC), estimated time enroute and fuel consumption, identified several alternate airports enroute, and collected the various radio frequencies and ground references for dead reckoning.

We were ready. We walked out to the airplane where I did a thorough preflight check and answered questions on aerodynamics. Satisfied, the examiner and I strapped into the Cessna 150 and began the engine startup procedure.  He pulled a few tricks including leaving his belt unconnected and didn’t completely latch his door. Having the door pop open on takeoff is startling for everyone, pilot included.

The 4-cylinder horizontally opposed Lycoming engine lit up after a few turns like it always did. After checking to see that the oil pressure was in the green and that the fuel gauges indicated what we observed by visual inspection, we taxied to the runup area on the taxiway near the start of runway 29.  Pointing the nose toward the approach airspace of 29, we went through the pre-takeoff checklist. Breakers look fine. Radio check. Adjust the mixture. Run the engine up to 1600 rpm and alternately switch off the two magnetos one at a time to look for function and for a worrisome loss in rpms.  Verify that flight controls are operating properly and that the flaps are set to the recommended position.

It’s settled. The machine wants to fly. We’re going aviating.  A serious scan for incoming traffic and, noting none, we radio to what traffic there might be that we intend to depart on runway two-niner and leave the traffic area to the east.

I release the foot brakes and taxi onto the runway. After we turn onto the active runway the throttle goes to the firewall and the engine promptly revs up to full power with that righteous unmuffled roar from the engine. We’re a little on the heavy side with two adult men on board, but N63110 still accelerates smartly down the runway.

As we begin to accelerate with my left hand on the yoke and my right hand on the throttle, I’m busy keeping the nosewheel on the centerline of the runway with the rudder pedals while glancing at the airspeed indicator. The airspeed indicator seemed sluggish. As we get close to what appeared to be rotation speed the airspeed indicator still didn’t register any airspeed.

To actually launch into the air without airspeed indication would be a huge mistake. Not only would it be terribly dangerous, but I would fail the checkride if we survived the ride around the patch and the landing ordeal ahead. So, I pulled back the throttle and applied heavy braking. We taxied off the active and made for the shop.  No available 150’s that morning, so the checkride was canceled.

Turns out that some bugs had nested inside the pitot tube overnight and blocked it. 

Flying very much depends on making sure that the airflow moves over the wings above a minimum velocity and within a range of acceptable angles. Without airspeed readings, the approach to landing would be very sketchy. The landing phase requires that the pilot slows the airplane so that a glide is established to the ground. The glide speed is easily controlled by adjusting the pitch of the airplane. In a normal landing it is nose down. The sketchy part is that the airplane is close to stall speed during this phase and so any kind of loss of controllability or lift near the ground will have dire consequences.

A week later I arrived at the airport at 6:30 on a cool windy morning along the front range. This brisk morning the winds were out of the west at 12 kts gusting to 14-16 kts straight down runway 29 with a broken ceiling at about 9000 ft above sea level, or 4000 ft above the ground. The winds were squirrely for a 150 but not bad enough to cancel.

I repeated the flight planning of a week ago and we walked out to the airplane and strapped in. The FAA examiner had a hood with him for use in simulated instrument conditions. I looked at the hood with some dread. Performance anxiety, really. But I had a fair amount of hood time and had always done fine.

We take off and point the nose to the east and climb to 7500 ft MSL. The winds were strong at altitude and turbulence was making the flight somewhat strenuous. I had precise flying to do with a strong silent-type examiner. After I lock onto the VORTAC and verify the station’s Morse code identifier, the examiner hands me the hood and announces that I just flew into a cloud.

Being prepared for this I put on the hood which resembles a welding helmet except it has a narrow blinders protruding forward to block the view outside the airplane but still allow view of the instruments.  It is used routinely for simulated instrument flying.

I tell the examiner that the flight to our destination is aborted and that we were returning to the airport by doing a 180 degree turn. The idea is to turn around promptly to the reciprocal heading to exit the clouds most expeditiously.

Being a cocky 23 year old male I smartly roll the airplane into a left 45 degree bank and try to intercept the reciprocal heading. While executing this and while fighting turbulence I overshot the heading. So I roll the airplane into a right 45 degree bank and try to intercept it again.  Again I overshot it. By this time some dizziness had set in to complicate my cockpit chores while I try to remember what the desired heading was and get back to my designated altitude.

With the excessively steep turns and the turbulence I had managed to lose control of the aircraft under simulated instrument conditions. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I also had vertigo. As I wrestled with the flood of seemingly contradictory instrument readings, a tumbling gyro, and distracting g-forces I continued to try to wrestle the machine into level flight.

The examiner just sat there. Legally he was just a passenger. I was the pilot in command.

My mind was overloaded with fear. My brain was trying to reconcile the what my inner ear was telling it with what the turn and bank indicator, altimeter, and airspeed indicator were telling me. I had fallen into a classic and fatal combination. It’s called the “graveyard spiral” or the spiraling power dive. I should have done a gentle standard rate turn and avoided the g-forces and higher skill needed to maneuver like that.

When it became obvious that I wasn’t going to recover, the examiner took the yoke and corrected the turn as he told me to take off the hood. As I removed the hood I saw in front of me a great circular corn field with center pivot irrigation slowly wetting down the field. We were perhaps 500 ft above the ground and still in a dive.  

Grateful that the examiner had left something for me to do to save the flight, I retarded the power and carefully pulled out of the dive. The airspeed needle was was adjacent to the red zone.

I climbed back to a cruise altitude and flew back to homebase. The examiner wanted to do some other test items, but I was so humiliated that I wanted to get back on the ground. Once back in the traffic pattern I set up a short soft field approach and executed the best landing I had ever done. The wheels kissed the ground and came to a stop without wasting even a foot of ground.  The pride was wounded but the skills were there.

A week later and after a humbling hour of remedial hood time, I retook the flight test and easily passed it. The same examiner signed my ticket. He never chided me or said anything to humiliate me.  I think he knew that a major life lesson had happened and was glad that it was under supervision. I have never forgotten the corn field that should have had a smoking crater in it on a blustery day in June, 1980. When I close my eyes I can still see it.

Our Family Atheist and the Religious ToE

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So it turns out that I am the family atheist and liberal. The social awkwardness and philosophical incompatibility of this condition was evident the other day in a discussion with a family member that diverged into a shouting match. In fact the immiscibilityof my liberal atheist proclivity with my family’s generally Christian conservative foundation has severed ties with a few family members outright and distanced others. My father, deceased nearly a decade ago, never reconciled with his son’s atheism. In his view, it was a choice inevitably resulting in existential tragedy and damnation into the darkest recesses of infinity.

My wife is a Methodist and our kid is being raised under that umbrella. I have taken the position that I will not indoctrinate my child in the analytical consequences of atheism. Rather, the adoption of a philosophical position on existence is a self-guided adventure everyone is entitled to. Whether one is lead deep into the doctrines of the Abrahamic religions, eastern philosophy, or the uncertain swamp of agnosticism, it is the right of all people to come to their own conclusion on the matter of ones place in the cosmos.

I claim that this is a right.  But many otherwise liberty-loving people disagree.  They view indoctrination into the religious fold as a kind of rescue. It is a dash across the finish line that must to happen well before death to ensure that the soul is channeled into the chute leading to paradise.  Once in this enviable condition, the ethereal community of souls can eternally heap praise upon the diety directly rather than across that impenetrable supernatural discontinuity that is resistant to all but the force of prayer. Or so goes the core theory of the Abrahamic religions as I understand them.

To many religious followers, the very fact that their religion is ancient seems to validate the accuracy and veracity of their ideas. The mere continuity of these doctines seems to confer some hopeful message about the vital truth of the doctine.

But I would counter that what continues over time is not the cosmic accuracy of the idea, but rather the psychological consequences of brain physiology.  Architectural features of the brain and the behavior of neurons therein have produced self-awareness. The self-aware brain enables much possibility for an organism.  An effect of our self-awareness is that we come to experience time.

But the very familiarity of self-awareness of the human brain might lead it to assume or calculate that self-awareness is a common condition in the external world. It seems to easily conclude that the apparent organization of the world was conducted by a central organizing influence- a diety. Moreover, it is not unreasonable for the self-aware brain to assume that it’s own self-awareness is part of a continuum of awareness or consciousness. The notion that self-awareness might extinguish would be inconceivable.

I think what the ancient religious texts and doctrines convey is a kind of familiarity. It is a shared experience of mystery, uncertainty, and fear through the common experience of consciousness. The brains of our ancestors communicated through the agency of language their chronicles of hope and fear to our brains which share the the same strengths and weaknesses.  It is this commonality that rings the bell of truth in our self-awareness. It reinforces the mystical experience as a physiological experience because it is fundamentally that.

What is inevitable about our self-awareness is extrapolation. Religion soon mutates from a personal mystical experience to a theory of physics and politics. This is what I cannot accept- Religion as a political template or as a ToE  (Theory of Everything).

Many people come to value alignment to doctrine as a higher calling than the application of love and charity to their fellows who have lost their way or have experienced bad luck or tragedy. I would offer to the reader that what makes a person liberal is the priority choice of people over the politcal doctrine of social Darwinism.

We in the USA have confused economic theory with reality. Economics and business are a subset of sociology. The alleged congruence of economics to morality or metaphysics is a political theory some people have asserted because it serves their purpose in the allocation of wealth.  It’s a part of their ToE. And I’m here to say that some of us can see what they’re doing.