Category Archives: CounterCurrent

Euphemisms and similes to avoid in 2012

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I propose a 20 year ban on the following overused and often mangled euphemisms and similes-

Rocket scientist–  “it doesn’t take rocket scientist to …”.  This one is really tiresome. I propose that it be banned indefinitely and that repeat offenders be tatooed with some humiliating symbol on their noses.

Holy Grail–  “… It’s like the Holy Grail of …”.  This was overused centuries ago and abusers should be called down on the carpet forcefully and publically. A good swatting with a rolled newspaper may be called for.

American taxpayers–  “… The American taxpayers are tired of …”.  You mean, American citizens. To play to the taxpayer’s emotional conflicts over taxes is a ham fisted rhetorical manipulation that bypasses the greater good of citizenship and responsible stewardship over our civilization. I am a citizen who pays taxes and I insist on being addressed as a citizen.

Perhaps the dear readers have even better examples of rhetorical ditties that should be retired.

 

Process development with calorimetry

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I’ve turned my attention to reaction calorimetry recently. A reaction calorimeter (i.e.,  Mettler-Toledo RC1) is an apparatus so constructed as to allow the reaction of chemical substances with the benefit of measuring the heat flux evolved. Reaction masses may absorb heat energy from the surroundings (endothermic) or may evolve heat energy into the surroundings (exothermic).

Calorimetry has been around for a very long time. What is relatively recent is the development of instrumentation, sensor, and automation packages that are sufficiently user friendly that RC can be plausibly used by people like me: chemists who are assigned to implement a technique new to the organization.  What I mean by “user friendly” is not this: an instrument that requires the full time attention of a specialist to operate and maintain it.

A user friendly instrument is one engineered and automated to the extent that as many adjustments as possible are performed by the automation and that the resulting sysem is robust enough that operational errors and conflicting settings are flagged prior to commencing a run.  A dandy graphic user interface is nice too. Click and drag has become a normal expectation of users.

An instrument that can be operated on demand by existing staff is an instrument that nullifies the need for specialists. Not good for the employment of chemists, but normal in the eternal march of progress. My impression is that RC is largely performed by dedicated staff in safety departments. What the MT RC1 facilitates is the possibility for R&D groups to absorb this function and bring the chemists closer to the thermal reality of their processes. Administratively, it might make more sense for an outside group to do focus on process safety, however.

In industrial chemical manufacture the imperative is the same as for other capitalistic ventures- manufacture the goods with minimal cost inputs to provide acceptable quality. Reactions that are highly exothermic or are prone to initiation difficulties are reactions that may pose operational hazards stemming from the release of hazardous energy.  A highly exothermic reaction that initiates with difficulty- or at temperatures that shrink the margin of safe control- is a reaction that should be closely studied by RC, ARC, and DSC.

It is generally desirable for a reaction to initiate and propagate under positive administrative and engineeering controls. Obviously, it is desirable for a reaction to be halted by the application of such controls. Halting or slowing a reaction by adjustment of feed rate or temperature is a common approach.  For second order reactions, the careful metering of one reactant to the other (semi-batch) is the most common approach to control of heat evolution.

For first order reactions, control of heat evolution is had by control of the concentration of unreacted compound or by brute force management of heating and cooling.

Safe operation of chemical processing is about controlling the accumulated energy in the reactor. The accumulated energy is the result of accumulated unreacted compounds. Some reactions can be safely conducted in batch form, meaning that all of the reactants are charged to the reactor at once. At t=0, the accumulation of energy is 100 %. A reliable and properly designed heat exchange system is required for safe operation (see CSB report on T2). In light of T2, a backup cooling system or properly designed venting is advised.

The issue I take with the designers of the process performed at T2 is this: They chose to concentrate the accumulated energy by running the reaction as a batch process. This is a philosphical choice. The reaction could have been run as a semibatch process by feeding the MeCp to the Na with a condenser on the vessel. Control of the exotherm could have been had by control of the feed rate and clever use of the evaporative endotherm. A properly sized vent with rupture disc should always be used. These are three layers of protection. 

Instead, they chose on a batchwise process relying on a now obviously inadequate pressure relief system, and the proper functioning of water to the jacket.

No doubt the operators of the facility were under price and schedule pressure. The MeCp manganese carbonyl compound they were making is an anti-knock additive for automotive fuels and therefore a commodity product. I have no doubt at all that their margins may have been thin and that resources may not have been there to properly engineer the process. This process has “expedient” written all over it in my view.

Reactions that have a latent period prior to noticeable reaction are especially tricky. Often such reactions can be rendered more reliable by operation at higher temperatures. Running exothermic reactions at elevated temperatures is somewhat counter-intuitive, but the issue of accumulation may be solved.  

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by Th’ Gaussling are his own and do not necessarily represent those of employers past or present (or future).

Power Generation with Mercury Turbine

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The South Meadow generating station was operated by the Hartford Electric Company in Hartford, CT. The unit described in the 1931 Pop Sci article used 90 tons of mercury in the boiler. The article states that the South Meadow generator produced as much as 143 kWh from 100 lbs of coal, as opposed to an average of 59 kWh from conventional coal fired plants and 112 kWh from exceptionally efficient coal fired plants. The article describes an incident at the plant where a breech of containment from an explosion in the mercury vapor system occurred, releasing mercury and exposing workers to mercury vapor.

The Schiller Mercury Power Station in Portsmouth, NH, is described in this link.

The Chinese dig in.

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Here is a choice tidbit from the Washington Post. The Chinese, it seems, have been constructing a tunnels which some believe are meant to contain (possibly) strategic nuclear weapons and large numbers of people.

What China is actually up to and what it means for the control of nuclear proliferation is unclear. Generally, when a country builds fortifications like this alleged underground capacity, it is for a reason. They wish to be perceived as an irresistable force or an immovable object.

It is also worth considering that a massive, opaque, underground fortification with ICBM capacity is a step change away from the 20th century-style logic of Mutual Assured Destruction. MAD, as it was called, relied on opponents coming to the conclusion that there would be no winners in a nuclear exchange. If this structure is a fact, then it could mean that China means to survive nuclear war. The logic of MAD was based on holding the respective civilian populations hostage.  As crazy as that sounds, it worked.

One of the criticisms of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI or Star Wars) of the 1980’s was that it undercut the balance imposed by MAD. In the end, the USSR collapsed at a time and circumstance that not even the CIA was able to forecast. The biggest threat that SDI posed to the Soviets was the inevitability of yet another crippling arms buildup.

A hardened and opaque Chinese missile capability will not go unnoticed by hawks in western governments. This development, real or not, may kick the mania for weaponization of space up a notch or two and tip the guns-or-butter equilibrium even further from butter.

To we Americans, like others throughout history, the impulse to devise new weapons is irresistable. We’ll throw hundreds of billions of dollars of national treasure at the arms and aerospace complex to come up with zesty new engines of war and call it just.  Yet we are unable to justify upgrading infrastructure or a plan to sustain an egalitarian society.

What the US needs to do at this point is to begin intense high level talks with the Chinese to bring strategic armament issues onto the table, if they have not already begun to do so.  China has built a friendly and industrious looking store front. But inside is a tightly wound and ambitious party-controlled military apparatus that is anxious to test its mettle against the US.

If Americans continue to parade around spouting this directionless free market blather instead of devising a more coherent national plan for thriving in the century of China, we will become the next fallen empire. Privatization is decentralization. Even businesses know that market share is not gained by fragmenting command and control. If the Chinese whip us, it will be for this reason.

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.