Category Archives: CounterCurrent

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.

Texican on the move

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So Tejas governor Rick Perry is going to throw his hat into the ring for the republican nomination. Really, people?  Are you kidding me? A smarmy, neo-confederate, evangelical Texican praying for a resolution to the debt crisis? I have no doubt that Jesus Christ himself would tell us in lilting Aramaic to pull our thumbs out of our asses and reach for a settlement, not stand around in a stadium groveling for forgiveness of our sins with outstretched arms. Fix the bloody thing and save your wishes prayers for grandma’s recovery from hip surgery.

Christians should be grateful for the concept of sin. The whole religion is built on it. Sin is the denominator of Christianity- if it collapses to zero the whole religion becomes undefined. Without sin, our cherished fraternal hatreds would resolve to mere anthropology and lose that zesty cosmic fizz that we so enjoy.

Thursday links

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Do the Math has a zesty essay on the physical limits to economic and technological growth.  Rabid libertarians and free market triumphalists may need a maintenance shot of Viagra after reading this. I’m just sayin’ …

Have you noticed that numerous states with conservative governments (especially Ohio and Wisconsin) are on strikingly similar trajectories? You can thank ALEC for that. I think that the authorship of legislation should be transparent. On any given bill, the sponsors should be able to cough up the names of those who wrote the code.

Have you read any of Pliny’s Natural History?  Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD) was an amazing fellow. He was a Roman polymath who commanded military regiments yet found time to chronicle an encyclopedic collection of writings on life as a Roman. His Natural History is a detailed recollection of customs, medicaments, natural history and metallurgy. I’ve been reading his chapter on metallurgy in the 1855 translation by Bostock and Riley.  Pliny died in the eruption of Mt Vesuvius in 79 AD. His body was found covered in pumice. Had the Romans known how to sail up wind, he would have survived.

David Ogilvy, founder of Ogilvy and Mather, was a master of advertising. This link is a distillation of his thinking on the enterprise of advertising.

Before I pass from this earth I want to take a tour of Iceland.

Kunstler is the Master

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James Howard Kunstler is the master. There comes a time when one must step back and acknowledge your betters. This is such a time for Th’ Gaussling.

Europe is arguably worse off money-wise, more broke, flimsier, crapped out, crippled, and paralyzed. Sad, because in outward appearance Europe  is – how shall I put this? – better turned out than America. Europe is a fit, silver-haired gentleman in a sleek Italian suit and a pair of Michael Toschi swing lace wingtips, holding a serious-looking Chiarugi leather briefcase. America is pear-shaped blob of semi-formed male flesh, in ankle-length cargo shorts, a black T-shirt featuring skull motifs, tattoos randomly assigned (as if by lottery) to visible flesh, a Sluggo buzz-cut, and a low-rider sports cap designed to make your head look flat. In other words, he lacks a certain savoir-faire compared to his European cousin. But both are broke. Neither has any idea what he will do next – though, for the American, it will probably involve the ingestion of melted cheese or drugs (or both). When the European collapses, a certain air of delicacy will attend his demise; the expired American will go up in flames in a trailer and they’ll have to sort out his remains from the melted goop of his dwelling-place with a front-end loader.

A Fine Caloric

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I’m getting to know the RTCal software that animates my RC1.  Thinking about reactions in terms of their enthalpy profile continues to provide deeper insights for an organikker like me.  It is yet another indication that P-Chem is the central pillar of the central science.  

Our culture is driven foreward by exothermicity. We energize the machines of progress and of war by harnessing the exothermic drivers, be they nuclear or chemical.  

Our exothermic sun pumps a global weather machine that provides the motive force to spin the wind turbines to energize our iPads. The sun evaporates water for it’s eventual depostion at high gravitational potential for the release of hydroelectrically accelerated electrons.  Hydroelectric power is an expression of stellar nuclear exothermicity.

The thermal web of our world is an eternal equilibrium of latent and sensible heat flows.  Water’s latent heat of condensation helps to ramp up thunderstorm formation with the result of flowers and high fructose corn syrup and tornados.  The metabolic heat of formation of water and CO2 warms our bodies and provides animation for our desires and our many methods of locomotion.   Dancing and laughter and lust thrive because of exothermicity.

Our lives are spent in the semi-fluid atomic matrix of our bodies while a continual stream of energy flows through them, energizing  metabolism through the magic of ATP and then diffusing into the surroundings.  This energy has resulted in the universe becoming self-aware through the sentience of material beings.

Eventually, because of the disorder accumulated by the large number of exothermic transformations inherent to continuous metabolism, our legs will stiffen and our jaws will lock shut in death as the stream of energy ceases to issue from us. The transience of sentience is rooted in thermodynamics.  How this can be is still quite mysterious.

Borders Books to close its doors this week.

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The Borders books chain is set to liquidate, possibly this Friday according to this link. But, like the elk with a broken leg, if the grizzlies don’t get it, the winter surely will. According to reports, the firm was beset with poor management, superior competition, a paradigm shift in buying behavior, and a crummy overall economic picture. The creditors- publishers to a large extent- must be satisfied.

As a frequent patron of Amazon, I hold some personal responsibility for this. I did enjoy browsing in the local store. I bought my issues of Nuts and Volts, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Kitplanes. But in the end, Amazon had the selection I wanted to spend money on. Obscure print-on-demand books from the 19th century. Not your basic consumer fare at a Borders.

For we browsers of the world, this is a definite loss. Of course, the lesson for browsers is to actually buy something while in the store. That way they can keep the doors open. Or so I’ve heard.