Category Archives: CounterCurrent

Rare Earth Boom

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There is a rare earth exploration boom in progress at the present time. This boom is in response to the policy shift of the Chinese government toward greatly reduced export of crude rare earth feedstocks. This political phenomenon is the result of the grand geological lottery that has deposited mineral wealth around the world.

Billions of years ago the geological processes in play were causing the partitioning of the elements into minerals that afforded local concentrations of groups of elements. Over geological time magma rose and cooled, sequentially crystallizing out minerals that by virtue of the principles of chemistry, laid down zones of enrichment. Recrystallization, extraction, ion metathesis, hydrolysis, melting point depression, attrition, processing of melts, degassing- all processes recognizable to the chemist. These processes are responsible for the formation of mineral species as well as their transport and alteration.

But the earth is never finished processing its mineral horde. Land masses are subject to upheaval and erosion, geochemical synthesis and decomposition.  Any given formation at any given time is an overprinting of frozen events separated in time.

Large zones of continent may be subject to forces that cause it to break in networks of fractures. The forces may be in the nature of shear where fracture faces slide past one another. Other forces may lead to an upthrust of rock on the continental scale leading to mountain building.  The shear and bending applies forces that exceed the tensile strength of the rock, leading to fracturing. Over time these fractures may serve as channels for hydrothermal flows.

Hot, pressurized water over long periods will dissolve susceptible minerals in the rock faces and transport solutes and suspended solids throughout the fracture network. Established mineral species yield to the solvent effects of water and slough off part or all of their constituents. In doing so, the minerals are taken apart into anions and cations that will eventually reassemble elsewhere into different mineral species. Over time these fracture networks will fill with solids and self-seal. They are called veins.

Water is not innocent in its behavior. Water’s ever eager oxygen atom binds to oxophilic metals and metalloids, taking them down to the energy bargain basement of oxide or oxyanion formation.  Water with dissolved acids can digest whole formations leading to cavernous voids in susceptible rock.

Over time, geological processes have left formations of elements in bodies of economically viable concentrations called ore bodies.  In the case of rare earth ore bodies, these elements are found concentrated in veins and breccias, pegmatites, or dispersed at more dilute levels in many other kinds of minerals.  It is a truism that the lanthanide set of the rare earths are all commonly found in the same formation, but emphasizing the lights (LREE) or heavies (HREE).  Scandium and yttrium are the Group III elements grouped with the 15 lanthanides to form the rare earths. While yttrium is often found with the lanthanides, scandium is often scarce in deposits otherwise rich in the other rare earths (REE’s). It is not uncommon for REE deposits to contain significant levels of zirconium, hafnium, tantalum, niobium, thorium, and uranium.

China does not seek to deprive the world of products using REE’s. It has taken the position that the REE exports will be in the form of finished consumer products. The policy of China is that it will manage the output of rare earth-based products in a highly value added good as a means to extract the most value from it.  China’s market has a central nervous system that has devised manufacturing policy. It is much like an octopus. In the US, the prevailing wisdom is that the market should seek it’s own equilibrium without government interference. Our system is a distributed in the manner of a coral reef.

Today, mining exploration firms principally from Canada, Australia, and South Africa are exploring Africa, Australia, and the Americas for deposits of REE’s- and finding them.  In my survey of the field, it would seem that the US is poorly represented in the roster of rare earth exploration firms.

War Bonds? Doh!!

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So, when we invaded Afganistan and Iraq, why didn’t we finance it with a bond drive à la WWII?  Civilian citizens could’ve invested in some real sense in the action and much of the US debt might have been owed to … well … us.  Instead, national treasure is owed to foreign states and anyone else who buys treasury notes.

Am I wrong here? If we’re going to send young men and women off to fight and die on foreign soil for some shared benefit, why wouldn’t we want to invest in it ourselves? Isn’t that the right thing to do?

Instead, we allowed China and others to invest in our foreign adventures and earn some interest in doing so. Citizens get to pay off the cost plus interest. I guess that the interest would’ve been owed anyway, but the money would be in US circulation.

Instead of paying for our own wars, we borrowed the money and had a real estate mortgage calamity bubble instead.

I recall that someone asked President Bush II about this early on and his recommendation was to “go shopping”. The subtext was that they had it all under control.

I have to be missing some key concept, right?

How can reasonably smart people be- collectively anyway- so wrong? Clearly, their ideas and policies are corrupt or faulty.  Parties and their members adopt policies and platforms that are either unsustainable or willfully apply an imbalance of favor.

The party system is corrupt to it’s core and must be taken down. Social networking may be the lightning bolt to do the job.

Th’ Gausslings 15th Epistle to the Bohemians. The career arc.

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My working life has been extremely stressful for as long as I can remember. A mirthess steampunk factory of angst and unworkable puzzles against a backdrop of uncollegial passive-aggression. But like most sciency mid-career people, I wear golden handcuffs that hold me back from making a clean break.  After years of manning the bilge pumps to keep the place working at maximum capacity, people get tired and inflexible. Minor infractions of protocol project to large images of disrespect and imagined malfeasances that burn into the internal viewing screen of our minds.

I write this blog in part as a means of passing along things I’ve gleaned over time from circumstances and people.  Today I have peers who are VP’s of research at some major corporations. Because of the sort of place I chose to align with, my progress will not keep up with these friends. This is the result of the deal I made with the devil years ago. That deal was the result of chosing a location over an organization. The folly of this is now only too apparent and must serve as an example to be passed along.

It is ever so important to be choosy about with whom you sign on and even more important, who you choose to spend your best years with. It is easily possible to commit to corporate beings who demand 110 %, but fail to reciprocate the dedication.  Power is in the ability to commit resources. In the business world all manner of things, brilliant or outrageous, are justified by the intonement of the words “business is business”. In the minds of many, this mantra justifies all.

I’m always amazed at how easy it is to don the corporate armor and strut around like a peacock.  I did a bit of it myself for a short period after I became a sales manager. But after a month reality threw a bucket of cold water on that fantasy when I realized that power is truly in the hands of people who sign the checks. It always has been. Sales people are a particular breed selected from the herd at large for their goal oriented drive and constant urge to prove themselves. 

The chemical business is conservative and socially constipated for the most part. It is nothing like the Silicon Valley paradigm where production is presented as a form of play time.  I’m sure it really isn’t, but it is a great recruitment meme. 

In business, there are wagon drivers and there are scouts. I’ve come to realize that I am a scout. I love riding into the brush looking for a path. Others are better adapted at coaxing the oxen to pull the wagons. 

Business isn’t quite the meritocracy that it is often projected to be. Business demands the adoption of certain kinds of behaviors around the alpha dogs.  People land in positions of leadership for all kinds of reasons and sometimes under the most unlikely circumstances.  Helpful attributes include singlemindedness, focus on the bare essentials of moneymaking, an engaging personality, and a knack for landing on your feet. Aggressive behavior and a bit of psychopathic ambition are helpful.

The fact of power is the act of power.  People early in their careers should strive to understand how power is accumulated and used. Even if you are disinclined to swing the stick around, it helps to understand it.

Get your resumes out

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Get your resumes out and polish ’em up. NASA is lookin’ fer Astronauts. And while you’re at it, take some time to polish up that laconic, aw shucks, Stanford PhD’d toothy grin of yours ’cause it’s show time!  Tell ’em about how you’d like nothing more than to strap a solid fuel booster to your ass and light that candle.

Trouble is, we don’t have any hardware to fly. No matter. Just tell ’em Летите я к луне!

Mr. Thiel Speaks

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When you look for science news at news aggegation sites like Google News or popular publications like, well, any given magazine or newspaper, or (yawn) any given non-fiction television program, what you are likely to find are fluff pieces on topics related to medicine, automobiles, and telecommunications. To people in the news business, scientific progress means new kinds of medicines, better cars, and the latest (n+1)G cell phone or iPad.

It is possible for even successful people to apply pop-culture metrics to economic theory. For instance, the founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel, has written an essay for The National Review in which he questions the motives of scientists as well as their ability to maintain the growth of scientific progress.

The state of true science is the key to knowing whether something is truly rotten in the United States. But any such assessment encounters an immediate and almost insuperable challenge. Who can speak about the true health of the ever-expanding universe of human knowledge, given how complex, esoteric, and specialized the many scientific and technological fields have become? When any given field takes half a lifetime of study to master, who can compare and contrast and properly weight the rate of progress in nanotechnology and cryptography and superstring theory and 610 other disciplines? Indeed, how do we even know whether the so-called scientists are not just lawmakers and politicians in disguise (italics mine), as some conservatives suspect in fields as disparate as climate change, evolutionary biology, and embryonic-stem-cell research, and as I have come to suspect in almost all fields?

The article goes on to paint a picture of failure on the part of the scientific community for not coming up with a Moore’s law style of continuous bounty for the consumer.

Here is where I greatly disagree with Thiel. He cites the stagnation of wages as an indicator of economic progress which, in turn, is an indicator of tepid technological progress.

Let us now try to tackle this very thorny measurement problem from a very different angle. If meaningful scientific and technological progress occurs, then we reasonably would expect greater economic prosperity (though this may be offset by other factors). And also in reverse: If economic gains, as measured by certain key indicators, have been limited or nonexistent, then perhaps so has scientific and technological progress. Therefore, to the extent that economic growth is easier to quantify than scientific or technological progress, economic numbers will contain indirect but important clues to our larger investigation.

… Taken at face value, the economic numbers suggest that the notion of breathtaking and across-the-board progress is far from the mark. If one believes the economic data, then one must reject the optimism of the scientific establishment (italics mine).  Peter Thiel, National Review.

This is where Thiel drives into the weeds. He conflates stagnant wages in the post Viet Nam era with a failure of science and technology to produce the kinds of advances he would recognize as worthy.

What is lost on Thiel is the fact that stagnant wages are a kind of benefit to employers and investors as the result of technology. Over this so-called period of stagnation in wages is a complementary increase in productivity. If anything the improvements in technology unseen by Thiel and his ilk have been applied to render human labor obsolete, thereby sustaining profits. China hasn’t gotten all American jobs. Machines have taken over much ot it.

The fact that Thiel scans the horizon from his perch and fails to see this is indicative of a kind of blindness of prosperity. In his world, technology is the internet. Apparently, people like Thiel only register scientific progress as a stream of shiny new consumer electronics, supersonic transport, or brain transplants. The advances in science and technology from the last 20 years are everywhere, not necessarily just in internet technology, cell phones, and Viagra.

Semiconductor technology is now well below the micron scale and heading to the tens of nanometers.  Bits of data are heading toward tens to hundreds of electrons per bit.  Lithographic fabrication at this scale allows for rules of thumb like Moore’s Law.  Growth in component density can multiply parabolically or more as greater  acreage of chip surface is consumed in 3 dimensions. Many doublings are possible in this domain.

But parabolic growth in aircraft or land vehicle speed is limited by other physics. A dynamic range of only a few factors of ten in vehicle speed are economically feasible.  Fossil fuels are fantastically well suited for use in transportation owing to their high energy density, low cost per kiloJoule, and ability to flow through pipes. Fundamentally new forms of energy storage are hard to find and are expensive.  All energy usage is consumption.  Science can only go so far in facilitating better forms of consumption for the profligate.  Doing work against gravity also consumes lots of energy, so the world of George Jetson never became feasible.

Ordinary automobiles that comprise a part of the stagnancy that Thiel bemoans are coated in highly advanced polymer coatings made from specialty monomers, catalysts, and initiators. The polymeric mechanical assemblies are highly engineered as well as is the robotic assembly of the vehicle. The implementation of automation in the manufacture of plain old cars is just a part of the overall issue of low job growth. In this case, technological advancement => stagnant growth in wages and employment.

What is evil?

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One of the things that neuroscience is doing today is the mechanistic examination of many conditions that we previously assumed to exist. Like the matter of evil. This concept is deeply embedded into culture and most of us are born, live, and die in a world where we assume there is a real metaphysical condition called “evil”. Well, except for some carpet walkers in the philosphy department who have actually thought about the problem for a while.

Ron Rosenbaum at Slate has written an interesting article on the question of evil in the age of neuroscience.  One thing the concept of evil does is let we mortals off the hook in a sense for responsibility for our misdeeds. If people commit atrocities and holocausts because of the intervention of supernatural forces, then individuals and groups are never really the original cause. Humans would only be guilty of propagating meanness or atrocities rather than being the true author. Seems very convenient.

People naturally saddle up on the notion that the world is a battleground between good and evil.  We think in terms of conquest when opposite forces are perceived. Good and evil constitute a natural dualism for ape brains that seem constructed to find patterns.

Since we started remembering the thoughts behind our thick brows thousands of generations ago, we have been anthropomorphizing our world into a haunt of bipedal spirits who, even in the spirit world, have gender identity and appendages for locomotion. The notion that evil may be manifested in a character isn’t much of a stretch for our brains- maybe it is an inevitability.

What I like about the work described in the Rosenbaum article is that it forces us to reconsider what it means to be “evil”.  Are evil deeds really the expression of some deep malevolence from the underworld? Or, is evil a particular assemblage of thought patterns and a lack of barriers in behavior? Evil is not a philosophy, to be sure, but it can manifest from a brain that is substantially normal in many respects.

Even though evil may be just the work product of highly focused psychopathy, it still serves as a useful descriptor for the outcome of despicable behavior.  No matter what you call it, it is 100 % human.

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.