The world will never run out of tar as long as I am in the lab. I’ve recently uncovered a few novel preparations of black tar. Let’s see, where should we publish? JACS? Angewandte Chemie? Nature? Hmmm. Journal of Poor Results?
If you spend enough time in a circus, eventually you will become one of the clowns.
Th’ Gaussling
It seems that no matter where you go, where there is settlement- houses, businesses, etc.- there is “stuff”. By “stuff” I refer to manufactured goods. How much more stuff can we keep accumulating? How many more packages, widgets, gadgets, doo-dads, and bits & bobs can we continue to accumulate on the surface of our world? Lets dispense with the formalities and just call it what it is- crap.
Our factories are banging out container ships of crap as fast as they can manage. Satellite repeaters overhead strain under the load of electronic transfer of funds across the world. The oceans are churned into a lather by container ships steaming across the ocean sea to deliver the containerized crap to anxious dock workers who off-load it as fast as possible.
To see the extent of the madness, all you have to do is to browse in the Official Gazette of the patent office. Clever citizens are inventing new kinds of crap to deal with the unexpected problems with the older crap. Our hardware stores are full of such inventions.
At home we tried to institute the Principle of Conservation of Crap wherein for every 100 lbs of crap we brought home, 100 lbs of crap had to go … elsewhere. It failed. Johnnie on the Spot missed the bus.
Th’ Gaussling is lamenting the situation only because I am acutely afflicted with the accumulation of technical crap. Decades of chemical journals, magazines, several metric tons of books, NMR spectra from grad school, and tons of files of photocopies representing whole forests felled for the satisfaction of my pathological need to accumulate information. The whole thing is twisted. Think of the forest creatures, man.
Yet, I can’t bring myself to pitch that folder of Grignard mechanism papers or back issues of J. Med. Chem. Maybe there should be detox centers where information addicts can go to get their lives back.
On occasion I have the chance to do what I really dig- running some new chemistry with the stereo cranked up high. It can be Joe Green (Verde), Stevie Ray Vaughn, Eric Clapton, or Prairie Home Companion- I don’t care. Th’ Gaussling does love the blues. Opera, surprisingly, is a recent taste.
One circumstance when I can’t listen to tunes is when I’m reading patents- I need all of the focus I can get. I do have an unhealthy interest in patents and patent law. If you are so afflicted, I would recommend visiting the websites of a few law schools like George Mason University Law School. I would also highly recommend the website Patently-O. The size of the patent law business is amazing. And make no mistake, it is a business.
Anyway, back to the lab. I spent today doing what turned out to be a fairly tight fractional distillation. Of course, this gave me an excuse to do GCMS. I love to work out fragmentation patterns in a pathetic effort to understand the side products. A long time ago I invested in McLafferty’s book on mass spec and it was a good investment. A large number of folks place heavy reliance on the mass spec library on the computer. If you’re bringing new materials to market, this resource may be of little value.
After a day of watching product drip, drip, drip, I am decompressing with a glass of Old Chubb. Pretty good stuff.
Lordy. Another angry, gun totin’ male out capping random Colorado citizens, this time in church. Sounds like testosterone poisoning. We really need to re-examine how we raise males in our society because something continues to be dreadfully wrong.
Evidently, kids learn about nature from the Natural Geographic Channel, but curiously, they don’t learn violence from the rest of television culture. Hmmm. I guess ideation of violence just glances off kids like scrambled eggs off a teflon pan.
Sarcasm aside, who really knows what the causality behind this event was? But surely immersion in a culture that idealizes the drama of violence can’t help. This was a final showdown. Isn’t that how many if not most action/adventure movies end? Desired outcome through superior firepower. What is imitating what?
Collectively, we seem unwilling to address the matter of how young men might be influenced to choose away from violent resolution of conflict.
Every day there seems to be another example of how our disfunctional society is tightening the spiral to chaos. The recent footage of a citizen getting tased by a patrolman in Utah is just the latest log on the fire. In the footage, the trooper stops a driver who then stridently disputes the signage and proclaims his innocence.
He refuses to sign the ticket and is then told to get out of the car by the patrolman. As directed, he walks to the spot where the patrolman asks him to stand. Foolishly, he persists on debating with the patrolman. The patrolman pulls his taser gun and warns the driver to stop and turn around (presumably for a target on the belly). As the driver walks away, the patrolman fires the taser and drops the driver to the ground.
What is troublesome to me is that the patrolman was not being physically threatened by the driver, only ignored. The only apparent risk to the patrolman up to that point was the possibility that the driver would take some time to answer to the patrolmans request.
I think the driver did not know what kind of peril he was edging towards while attempting to use his “rhetorical skills” to persuade the trooper.
Could it be that the trooper used the taser as a matter of convenience rather than self defense?
Some will advance the argument that troopers are asked to risk their lives daily by pulling over potentially dangerous citizens. They should have this kind of latitude in their judgement calls. But I would say that electrocuting citizens because they are annoying is not a valid response.
What has happened in law enforcement the last decade is the institution of a more militaristic police presence in the USA. SWAT teams, tasers, armored vehicles, and aggressive tactics all aimed at putting down troublesome citizens.
The whole criminal justice system is out of control. Our failed drug policies and overcrowded prisons are completely ignored by legislators. US drug law only seems to create scarcity and high prices for illicit drugs. It would seem that our puritanical War on Drugs only benefits special interest manufacturers of police equipment, security companies, and private prisons.
Our prisons have had scant success with rehabilitation and only serve as a brutish, anti-civilizing crime practicum for prisoners. Prisoners are stigmatized with a felony record and consequently barred from most gainful occupations in the US. Why are we dismayed with high recidivism?
Many of my fellow citizens have a mean and brutish side that is not much changed from the days of westward expansion, the Klan, and the Indian wars. Unfortunately, we have a federal administration that is sympathetic to American exceptionalism and manifest destiny through superior firepower.
We Americans are pretty damned good at demolition. But when it comes to the careful assembly of civilization, we’re bloody cavemen. We confuse the advance of civilization with tax law or better law enforcement. Building a more comprehensive police state is not progress. It is consolidation of power by paranoid groups who are intolerent of the inherent disorder of pluralist populations.
According to the November 26, 2007 C&EN, Merck has for a second time engaged the Indian firm NPIL to develop cancer drugs for two targets that they have disclosed. Merck will have the option to buy rights to the compounds, providing they successfully get through Phase IIa of clinical trials. The article discloses that Eli Lilly has made a similar agreement.
It is disappointing to see companys like Merck and Lilly outsourcing their R&D. I do not intend to besmirch NPIL. They have obviously crossed a threshold in their own R&D activity that meets the standard of major league pharma. But I do believe that Merck and Lilly deserve some scolding for outsourcing R&D.
R&D is one of the remaining activities for which the US maintains a bit of an edge. It is our magic. To accelerate the development of R&D expertise in India is to act against our self interest as a country. India will eventually develop this capability on their own- why help? Drug discovery is an art that should be jealously guarded by a company. To farm it out to a hard working developing country with lower overhead rates is ultimately foolhardy. Even though some particular art is protected, this activity is always stimulates a company.
Lucky India. They get to exploit advanced technology without having to have paid for 100 years of R&D. Instead of having to pay to develop synthetic chemistry, they can plug and chug with a newly educated populace and access to the literature.
And who paid for the universities and the NIH post-doctoral fellowships and the research assistantships for grad students who developed and published the technology and who became the scientists whom Merck hired? Take a guess.
Investors may reap near term gains and Merck may get a better market foothold in India. Some executives will look like bloody geniuses. The presidents and CEO will prattle on over brunch about bringing home shareholder value. But when R&D goes the way of garment manufacture and automobiles, these “heroes” will be retired to their gated community in Palm Springs. In the end, they have eroded the competitiveness of the USA in an aggressive and contentious market.
Thumbs down to Merck and Lilly.
I was enjoying my morning shot of Pomegranate juice when I saw something sad on Reuters. There is secessionist talk again in Serbia. The drums are beating in the distance.
BELGRADE, Nov 19 (Reuters) – Serbia is warning the West ahead of a new round of talks on its breakaway Kosovo province that a declaration of independence by the Albanian majority would lead to new secessionist moves in the Balkans.
“If the independence of Kosovo is recognised, it would not be the final stage of the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia, but the first stage of new disintegration and secession in the Balkans,” Serbia’s Kosovo minister, Slobodan Samardzic, said.
You see, I thought that the Balkans had already … Balkanized. I wonder what the Russians will do? Putin seems kind of frisky lately.
Ethnic identity is a kind of hallucinogen. Unrestrained self-medication leads to exaggerated claims of merit and delusions of manifest destiny. When taken with a dose of religious or economic idealism, the patient may present with paroxysms of fascist ideation.
[Note: this is a revision of another posting]
I have noticed that my general level of anxiety seems to follow the extent to which I am tuned into the news. The more news I listen to, the greater the stress. Even my beloved NPR is showing chronic toxic effects.
The pace and magnitude of the news cycle seems to be tied to the level of outrageous events. All of the detail and repetition add up to a heightened angst that eventually wears one down.
Someone once defined news as “semi-analytical show business”. It’s a 24/7 circus in High Definition. The whole political system has redesigned itself to synchronize its actions to interfere constructively or destructively (whichever confers benefit) with the news cycle.
I need to get off this merry-go-round.
As a desperate strategy to fight insomnia, Th’ Gaussling often finds himself watching C-Span at 1 AM. Congressional testimony or a televised speech at the International Museum Docent Convention by the Acting Assistant Deputy Undersecretary of the Stratosphere is often enough to initiate somnolence.
But early this morning was different. A panel of FDA administrators were before a House Committee on Commerce Chaired by Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Michigan. At issue was H.R. 4167, the National Uniformity for Food Act. Apparently, the proposed law will remove requirements for certain kinds of food labeling, in particular the presence of certain additives may not be part of manditory labeling.
What has come to light is the industrial practice of exposing meats and fish to an atmosphere of dilute carbon monoxide (CO, ca 0.4 %) in order to maintain a red color in the flesh. Meat naturally turns brown on exposure to air over a short period. Industry has been wrestling with this for a long time, adopting and subsequently abandoning various schemes for maintaining the reassuring red color of meats and certain fish. Carbon monoxide coordinates with iron in haemoglobin to afford a complex that renders the tissues red in color. The FDA defines CO as a fixative in this application, rather than a preservative.
As a result of the use of this scheme, it is possible to keep meats and fish with a saleable red appearance for much longer. This reduces store losses due to the non-marketability of brown meat.
The House Commerce Committee was split down the isle in terms of its concern for this matter. Democratic committee members voiced considerable concern over the subterfuge of artificially reddening meat, allowing unwary consumers to falsely conclude that the meat could be fresher than it really is. Republican members seemed disinterested in the matter and several voiced concern that the FDA should spend it’s time with Salmonella rather than CO. The honorable Republican member from Kentucky tried to suggest that as a “simple country doctor”, he was having trouble understanding the issues and pronouncing the words (Rep. Elmer T. Bonehead, R-KY).
Whereas many of the members soft pedaled their questions, Rep. John Dingell, D-Michigan, offered no quarter to the FDA group. In particular he focused his attention of Director of Food Additive Safety, Laura Tarantino. In earlier testimony, Tarantino was a picture of confidence. Her knowledge of the statutes and the Byzantine procedural details as well as her confidence and instant recall was impressive. However, when Dingell’s time for questions came along, he went after her with rapid fire questions, not allowing time for her to qualify her answers or fend off subtext. “Just answer the question, yes or no”. It was interesting to see. Dingell was obviously disgusted with the FDA. The regulations and protocols that govern FDA movement are very complex and apparently even the administrators have faint grasp on much of it.
Director Tarantino stated that no specific rule-making concerning CO fixatives had been completed because it was still under study. The working assumption was that CO was considered GRAS- Generally Recognized as Safe. These assumptions are often advanced by industry and accepted with scant examination by FDA.
When asked about the general safety of CO in the product, one FDA manager stated that the added CO posed no hazard. I have no reason to doubt this. But the real issue is consumer deception. I think even libertarians would have to agree that without disclosure of food additives, the market cannot rationally award its demand to preferred providers. You can bank on the notion that consumers are particular about meat and freshness. HR 4167 is a step backwards for consumers and we can only hope that good sense prevails in the House.
Lamentations on Chemistry 