Category Archives: CounterCurrent

Stupid Tricks with LN2

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One of my favorite tricks with liquid nitrogen (LN2) was to pour some onto a chalk tray at the bottom of a chalk board. The skittering, madly boiling liquid would entrain the chalk dust from the tray and transport it to the end where it would plummet to the floor making that wonderful muffled popping sound. The chalk dust would be splatted onto the floor where it would lie as a thin, mysterious white cake. I suspect the janitors were rather less delighted by this than I was.

Today’s youthful chemists, these tender shoots, probably think that dry erase white boards have been around since the time of the pilgrims. That’s OK.  I’ll not speak of squealing chalk, long leatherbound erasers, and chalk dessicated hands. The use of blackboards and chalk will remain our little secret.

Business and Government

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There is a common conceit out there that business people are in possession of some kind of skill set that makes them uniquely suited to occupy congressional and executive seats in government.  While business folk have organizational experience in general, it is hard to reconcile why the citizens of the USA would want the autocratic style of business lorded over them. Business serves the interest of shareholders primarily and stakeholders a distant second. Government serves at the interest and pleasure of citizens.

The imperative of business is to grow for the profit of the shareholders. Given this basic reality, I fail to see why a businesslike template should be applied to governance. We do not want government to grow for it’s own sake. 

Business, in principle at least, has better command and control feedback. Or so goes the thinking.  Have you ever tried to get an answer or some kind of satisfactory resolution to a problem from a very large company? As an individual with average cash resources, your singular pull is usually not very large.  If we are going to let market forces have control of national and state governance in the manner conceived by hard-right political candidates, what of the individual?

The marketplace is a kind of 24/7 professional wrestling match. It is a Darwinistic contest of the strong vs the weak. Do we really want to be governed by this kind of system? Do we really want every single aspect of our lives to be a dog-eat-dog competition? I thought the purpose of civilization was to buffer some the harshness out of our lives.  Do the proponents of 100 % laissez-faire really want the system to snuff out the weak and those of lesser means?  That would be those who occupy the opposite side of the bell curve from those of means.

The notion that we should let market forces freely influence governance is popular among those of means.  The privatization of government services will immediately benefit those who are already flush with resources. Because only those with current resources will be able to step into such a position.  It would represent a transfer of power to those who already hold commercial power. Power is in the ability to allocate resources.

Why low and medium income republicans favor privatization of government services is a complete mystery. The loss of control over the influences in their lives to unrestrained market forces is contrary to the common self-perception of rugged individualism.  Money and power tend to accumulate into the hands of a few. Examples are all over the place.  This is the lesson from the age of monarchy and of robber barons. 

Privatization in and of itself is not the answer. It is just another type of concentration of power that favors corporations and individuals who already have the resources to buy a seat at the table. Why would citizens of ordinary means want this? 

Well, they wouldn’t want this ordinarily. But if you create a stampede of frightened citizens, it is possible for a small group of highly motivated demagogues to steer a frightened herd in whatever direction they want. This is precisely what is happening today.  The overthrow of the prevalent system by such means has many examples on history.  Just look around.  The manufacture of consent is a thriving business.

A most unlikely question

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Saw Apollo 18 at the cineplex last night. It is filmed in a rough documentary style with “recovered” footage. My recommendation? It’s worth seeing on a big screen. Probably not a good date flick, though.  But that depends on your date.

While at a brew pub in Denver Friday night, I was summoned to a table of 20-something ladies who were obviously celebrating a girls-night-out before a wedding.  The bride-to-be, decorated with a pink faux veil, gestured for me to come answer a question. I walked over and bent down to hear her. It was then that she looked me in the eye and asked a question that most fellows rarely ever hear: “Can I pat your booty?” she said.  I looked at the table of a dozen well coiffed lovelies watching me for some sign of a reaction.  The guest of honor had a list of items in her hand that she needed to check off.  Seeing this, and noting the urgency with which she needed to complete the task, I grinned and “relented”.  At least she asked first. So I stood up, turned around and bent over a few degrees in supplication, and received the pat. With my brief role completed, I turned back around and bid them a farewell. Moments later I found my dinner party and sat down with them, satisfied that I had just participated in an important cultural rite of passage.  Hours later the wife unit assured me that this happened only because I appeared harmless. So it goes.

Eat Venter’s Dust

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I gave a talk in a morning I&EC session last thursday at the Denver ACS National meeting. During an interlude provided by a no-show speaker, a member of the audience began to quiz down a hapless speaker who earlier presented on the filtration of plasmids. The gentleman’s concern was this- We are continuing to develop conventional processing technology while fellows like Craig Venter are devising step-change techniques for genomic analysis and synthesis. People like Venter have their names mentioned in the same sentence with “synthetic biology”.  Why do we bother with the more primitive methods of research when the real action is with folks like Venter?

The inquisitive fellow was asking a rhetorical question to all of us. But the point he skipped over was the matter of intellectual property. He kept asking why don’t “we” just switch the paradigm right now and use such technology? Why continue with highly manual R&D?  The problem with his question was in the assumption that Venter’s technology was something that “WE” have access to. Venter’s technology does not automatically translate into a community tool. It is more like an item of commerce. In reality, this will likely represent a major uptick in productivity to the financial benefit of the intellectual property owners and licensees and their stockholders.

How the scientific workforce will fare is a different matter. Increased productivity usually means reduced labor per unit of output. I suspect that Venter’s technology represents a higher entry barrier to those who want to be in the market.  It may be that the outcome will be a broader range of diagnostic and treatment services available to a shrinking pool of insured people able to afford it.

Is this as good as it gets?

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I’ve had this notion (a conceit, really) that as someone from industry, I should reach out to my colleagues in academia in order to bring some awareness of how chemistry is conducted out in the world.  After many, many conversations, an accumulating pile of work in ACS activities, and a few visits to schools, what I’ve found is not what I expected. I expected a bit more curiosity about how commerce works and perhaps what life is like in a chemical plant. I really thought that my academic associates might be intrigued by the wonders of the global chemical manufacturing complex and product process development.

What I’m finding is more along the lines of polite disinterest. I’ve sensed this all along, but I’d been trying to sustain the hope that if only I could use the right words, I might elicit some interest in how manufacturing works; that I could strike some kind of spark.  But what I’ve found is just how insular the magisterium of academia really is. The walls of the fortress are very thick. We have our curricula firmly in place on the three pillars of chemstry- theory, synthesis, and analysis. In truth, textbooks often set the structure of courses.  A four year ACS certified curriculum cannot spare any room for alternative models like applied science. I certainly cannot begrudge folks for structuring around that reality.

It could easily be argued that the other magisteria of industry and government are the same way.  Well, except for one niggling detail. Academia supplies educated people to the other great domains comprising society.  We seem to be left with the standard academic image of what a chemical scientist should look like going deeply into the next 50 years. Professors are scholars and they produce what they best understand- more scholars in their own image.  This is only natural. I’ve done a bit of it myself.

Here is my sweeping claim (imagine the air overhead roiled with waving hands)-  on a numbers basis, most chemists aren’t that interested in synthesis as they come out of a BA/BS program. That is my conclusion based on interviewing fresh graduates. I’ve interviewed BA/BS chemists who have had undergraduate research experience in nanomaterials and AFM, but could not draw a reaction showing the formation of ethyl acetate.  As a former organic prof, I find that particularly alarming. This is one of the main keepsakes from a year of sophomore organic chemistry.  The good news is that the errant graduate can usually be coached into remembering the chemistry.

To a large extent, industry is concerned with making stuff.  So perhaps it is only natural that most academic chemists (in my sample set) aren’t that keen on anything greater than a superficial view of the manufacturing world. I understand this and acknowledge reality. But it is a shame that institutional inertia is so large in magnitude in this and all endeavors.  Chemical industry really needs young innovators who are willing to start up manufacturing in North America. We could screen such folks and steer them to MIT, but that is lame. Why let MIT have all the fun and the royalties?  We need startups with cutting edge technology, but we also need companies who are able to make fine chemical items of commerce. Have you tried to find a brominator in the USA lately?

The gap between academia and industry is mainly cultural. But it is a big gap, it may not be surmountable, and I’m not sure that the parties want to mix. I’ll keep trying.

Confessions of a Country Boy

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After much thought I have decided to come clean on the matter of the supposed inherent goodness of growing up rural. I was born to Iowa corn and hog farmers in the late 1950’s.  This business of supposing that growing up on a farm magically confers a kind of wholesomeness is based on some faulty assumptions:  1) Farms are wholesome environments untread upon by people corrupted by the incessant Bacchanalian orgy of wanton excess found in the city. This is plainly wrong. Farms and farmers are just isolated. Modern conveniences get to farms later because of the isolation. Farmers are exposed to pathogens and insecticides in the course of their work. They often get mangled in unspeakable ways by their equipment. Farmers would party like brain-damaged test monkeys with everyone else if it wasn’t such a long ride into town.

Misperception 2) Growing up on a farm brings one into better harmony with nature.  This is wrong as well.  Farming is about the conquest of nature. Farmers know alot about nature, but take it from me, people who plow the ground, churn in soil amendments, and neutron bomb the insect population are not nature lovers. They are nature conquerors.  Farming is about return on investment. Just watch Ag PhD if you don’t believe me. Hey, I watch this show- it’s pretty interesting.

Misperception 3) Growing up on a farm is peaceful and soothes the soul. Well, it seems outwardly peaceful. This is true. And that can soothe the soul. But consider that the prolonged lack of intellectual stimulation has a dulling and isolating effect that prevents people from finding a whole spread of achievement that is possible in the modern world.

Misperception 4) rural life is good because people know each other. You know the guy who owns the CO-OP and the family who sells the home grown eggs. Folks pull together when times are tough.  Well, maybe. The Gaussian distribution of saints and knuckleheads applies everywhere. In a rural community you just know the saints and knuckleheads who farm. Farms have produced Ed Gein and Dwight Eisenhower. Less pathologically, people in rural communities are just as frequently unhappy with their lives as those in the city.  It’s faulty thinking to conclude that the farming or rural life imbues some special merit to a person.  As always, your life story is about what you put into it. I would offer that rural life is less than good because people know each other.

The notion that a politician with a rural history, or one displaying an outward appearance, is invested with a more nuanced sensibility than some city slicker is also faulty thinking.  You can manipulate people with the “aw shucks, ma’am” act as effectively as with the tools of a cosmopolitan confidence man.  In fact, the country boy approach may be more persuasive.

Bleaches and in-process checks of the enlightenment

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In his 1736 publication Smegmatalogia, or the Art of Making Potashes and Soap, and Bleaching of Linens, James Dunbar describes a process for the preparation of potash.  The intended user of the process was the common Scottish farmer. Dunbar was anxious to imbue the common Scot with the ability to “bleach” his own linens.  It is important to realize that the meaning of the word bleach in the early 18th century is different from contemporary use.  The modern use comprises notions of decolorization through oxidation of color bodies to produce a white appearance.  The 18th century concept involves the apparent cleansing and subsequent lightening of a fabric.

The book begins by detailing the preparation of a solution or extract from ashes called Lee.  To obtain this solution, the “Country-Man” would carefully collect Scottish vegetables such as the wood of oak, ash, beech, “thorns”, juniper trees, and “whins”. Suitable herbs included fern, breckens (or brackens), wormwood, thistles, stinking weed, and hemlock. 

Dunbar is careful to instruct that the vegetation should be burned in the shelter of a house but in such a way as to avoid burning down the house. The purpose of burning the vegatation in a shelter is to avoid having rainwater come into contact with the ashes.  My interpretation of this is that runoff carries away soluble potash.

The ashes are placed in a container and covered with water. The ashes are soaked in water until such time that the Lee “carries an egg on its surface”.  What Dunbar is telling us is that the extraction of the ashes needs to go until the worker obtains in the solution a particular specific gravity- this is a specification. There is some minimum specific gravity of the Lee that will float an egg.  And the higher the specific gravity, the more volume of the egg rises from surface of the Lee. The specification herein is required for the next operation.  In order to carry out a successful saponification of tallow, the Lee solution must be sufficiently concentrated. 

Dunbar then describes steps where the Lee is combined with the ashes of ash, beech, or fern followed by boiling the water off to afford “thickens of pottage“.  The residue is shaped into balls which are then calcined in a fire to afford a substance that may be stored in a dry container for the purpose of making soap. 

The discovery of chlorine in 1774 by Scheele and the subsequent of discovery of chlorine bleaching by Berthollet gave us our modern conceptual notion of bleach and bleaching. The develoment of bleaching powder was made by Scottish chemist Charles Tennant who took a patent in 1799.  Tennant’s associate, Charles MacIntosh, is thought to be a contributor to this invention.  Bleaching liquors and powders soon became an important raw material for the bleaching of paper and fabric.

The procedure described by Dunbar is a chemical process.  It tells the user when the extraction is complete, qualitatively at least, by a folksy means of specific gravity determination. This is really very clever- it uses a common object to do the test and the result is readily apparent.  Bleaching in the early 18th century involved the use of soaps and of urine treatment and bleaching fields- a far cry from what we now think of as bleaching.

Unfortunate trigonometry and dynamic blind spots.

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Near miss on the highway last night. I averted a high speed T-bone impact by a meter or two as Music from the Hearts of Space played on the radio. Good gravy- I was crashing to space music.  My Cherokee is quite stable in an emergency braking maneuver moving straight forward. But if swerving is required, then vehicle sway begins to couple into the steering. Never thought of this control problem before.

Imagine you are sitting at a stop sign waiting to turn left onto a 4 lane highway. To your left is a deceleration lane for traffic moving left to right.  Now, imagine your line of sight as a line extending from your eyes across your left shoulder and into the distance.  Got that?

Now, imagine a car in the deceleration lane on your left slowing to make a right turn at your intersection. A line can be drawn from your eyes to that car. As the car moves toward you, the line extending from your eyes to that car sweeps clockwise across the landscape. Still with me?

Now consider this.  There exists a third vehicle (me) moving from left to right exactly along your line of sight, but behind and eclipsed by the vehicle in the turn lane. As the turn lane vehicle slows down in preparation for a turn, the third vehicle is at a distance and speed such that it continues to remain along the sight line yet remain eclipsed by the turning vehicle.  As the turning vehicle approaches, it’s angular size increases, obstructing even more space behind it.

That is the condition I was in last night. The perversity of trigonometry allows for a set of velocities and alignments that presents a dynamic obstruction of view to evolve.  If the driver at the stop sign grows impatient and attempts to cross the two lanes of traffic before the vehicle in the turn lane completes the turn, he is doing so on the assumption that the blind space is clear. Last night I was in that blind space while an impatient driver pulled in front of me. 

As the driver pulled out, he saw me and hesitated in my (right) lane, causing me to apply heavy braking and to swerve around his rear and away from oncoming traffic. Fortunately for all of us, he stepped on the gas and got out of the way. With the sway of my vehicle with the maneuvering loads, I was on the verge of a loss of control and may have hit him anyway. 

It is interesting how a steady state cruise along the highway can evolve into a complex set of events in just seconds.  In fact, I had anticipated this problem of visibility as I approached the intersection. I disengaged the cruise control and began to decelerate when I saw that the waiting vehicle could not see me. I now think that my deceleration kept me in the blind spot even longer, aggravating and tightening the coupling of the event.  I was barely able to avoid this failure mode even though I was aware of it.  That is scary.

Windows 7 and Office 2007. Grrrr.

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Th’ Gaussling was upgraded to Windows 7 and Windows Office 2007 recently. I wish I could report that it has gone smoothly, but it has not.  Like millions of others I have been using the Office suite of software for a long while. The latest upgrade seems to have made a largish stepchange in alteration of features in Word, Excel, Access, etc.  While it is plain even to a caveman like me that the upgrades are generally for the better, I am having a bit of difficulty absorbing the changes and altering my keyboard habits.

It may not be that functions have come and gone, but rather it is that the access or arrangement of the functions have been “improved”.  Just this morning I was unable to plot a graph from a table of data as I had done a thousand times before. The manner in which curve data and axes are defined has been re-jiggered and re-rigged so that I have to do it differently now. It is very much like a different piece of software.

It is hard to say anything defensibly negative about these changes because I can see how it might be viewed as an improvement. 

 But it is an improvement of the sort when you rearrange the furniture in a blind persons house. Yes, the couch and end tables are in a better place, but somebody is going to bang up their shins and maybe fall on their face trying to figure it out.

The gift that Microsoft has given American business is the means for the elimination of administrative assistants.  Today, it could be argued that everyone can do their own correspondence, writing, and ciphers in the same or less time than it takes to supervise the execution of the work by an admin. 

What has resulted from this benefit bestowed upon us by the geniuses at Microsoft is that we must all strive to keep up with a never ending parade of features and software upgrades, online access and passwords. In my immediate area I now have 6 computers driving different pieces of apparatus with multiple software packages across a network and into the clouds.  At home I have two more computers to maintain and internet banking to keep up with.  My freaking computers really don’t belong to me- they all talk to the clouds on their own schedule and have routines that they do for Gawd knows what purpose.  I don’t think this is too unusual.

It’s getting to be too much for a caveman like me.  I have the urge to spear some cloven hooved beast and roast its flesh on a big fire and feast under the moonlight amidst the smoke and grunts of satisfaction of my hairy cohorts with thick eye brows. This is something that Microsoft has yet to provide for me.

Play it forward. Science as an extended subsidy.

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I search chemical abstracts nearly every day. What occurs to me is that this vast treasure of knowledge is substantially the result of tax revenue channeled into scientific research by numerous technologically advanced societies. While at the time of any given publication, the value might seem minimal. But over time people like me, people in applied industrial science, consume this treasure for the purpose of generating new goods and services. Rather than reinvent the wheel, we consult the subsidized results of other workers in the field. Subsidies of the past play forward to subsidies of the future. If we can’t lift an exact procedure from the scientific literature, then often we can apply new substrates to known transformation. 

In a very real sense, a resource like Chemical Abstracts is an engine of ingenuity. It’s content provides the means to innovation by outright disclosure or by sparking the imagination.  This work is enabled by government organizations funding people and institutions for the purpose of placing technology into the public domain.

While industrial or private organizations have the ability to generate a knowledge base as substantial and as in-depth, the fact is that the imperatives of private business are not in the direction of public disclosure. The imperative of the private sector is to channel wealth to the ownership. The free exchange of knowledge, in the context of business, is discouraged in that it amounts to the free distribution of cash. 

I hear people saying or implying that all things government are bad and that the private sector is inherently “more efficient” and therefore more meritorious.  What we have gotten from government subsidized science is an everlasting fountain of knowledge available to all to put into practice for whatever lawful purpose they can envision. 

An efficient life seems like a puritanical and regimented life.  And the application of efficiency will always fall under the control of the dominant social order. Is this really so desirable?  

Intellectual property has two sides. On one side, the generators of intellectual property can have the right to a timed monopoly on their art via patents. On the opposite side, the public treasury releases national treasure in order to educate the citizens who then generate proprietary art that is withheld from public use.  This amounts to a subsidy of the private sector.  It is a subsidy that sees little acknowledgement in the politics of today.  But such a thing has actually worked well for generations.  

What we are seeing in contemporary politics is the attempt to vilify and deconstruct government. But government has been central to the technological and consequently the economic expansion in the post WWII era.  The mechanism of collecting resources and focusing them on the solution of certain kinds of problems cannot be matched by the private sector. How would you operate the Centers for Disease Control on a greed based system like capitalism? 

Libertarians are always acknowledging the fundamental nature of greed and how it can be channeled into the efficient use of goods and services. I don’t disagree. What I take issue with is that greed must then be acknowledged as the dominant and true influencing force in society. We cannot allow this to be true. We must make provisions for tight control of greed. It is a useful but savage animal. 

In my view, the generation of knowledge and expertise is time and resource consuming. In order to have a particular amount of practical expertise on any given thing, you have to turn over a great many stones and learn an amount of art that is in large excess of the problem of the day. This actually applies to a definition of expertise- the ability to deal with problems that at first seem to be bigger than you can get your arms around. Expertise brings knowledge in the form of facts and problem solving skills. In order to attain expertise you have to absorb to information that at the moment seems superfluous.  In the end, the expert has a grasp of the length and breadth of a topic in excess to any given problem.

Our national system of scientific discovery and information abstracting serves to provide the reservoir of information that serves users into the future.  This information forms the basis of economic growth well into the future. As we go forward with the seemingly inevitable deconstruction of government, let us not forget what government has given us.