Category Archives: CounterCurrent

Global warming talk

7 Replies

Our local ACS section meeting tonight featured two speakers with opposite views on anthropogenic global warming (AGW).  One was a senior scientist from CIRES and the other was a retired physics prof from UCONN. 

The physicist did what physics profs like to do which is to say, reduce the problem to constituent elements. To make a long story short, the physicist tried to demonstrate that CO2 levels are the result of warming, not the cause.  He applied Henry’s law and did a lot of handwaving and criticism of climate science and modeling as well as some old fashioned back of the envelope calculations. It was a rather good demonstration of the climate deniers art.

The CIRES guy’s talk was really quite comprehensive and tied in observations from a wide variety of types of experiments to support the notion that CO2 has rapidly ramped up coincident with the industrial revolution- say the last 200 years or so. What was most persuasive to me were the isotopic data showing the deficit of C13 in the recent CO2 buildup. This data suggests that the accumulated atmospheric CO2 levels are measurably tipped towards biomass or fossil fuel origin rather than of inorganic origin.

As near as I can tell, much of the audience of chemists seemed to incline towards the climate denier. A vocal few were certainly skeptical of the data in the sense that the limits of the instrumentation had to be accounted for. But this was the normal skepticism one sees chemists display everywhere. I’ve done it myself.

Obviously, I’m not a climate scientist and would never be confused with one. I’ve been on the fence about AGW until tonight. I think I’m tipping slightly towards AGW now based on the isotopic findings. 

What I saw tonight was more like the parable of the three blind men and the elephant. The AGW denying physicist and more than a few in the audience understood at least part of the data and concepts. And from the area of expertise they held, felt they had a unique perspective on the problem. I gathered this from the nature of the questions asked.  

This is emblematic of the situation and in a similar vein to creationist “science”.  Creationism has all kinds of problems as a model of reality.  But what I often observe in its adherents is a limited knowledge of the theory they are trying to defeat.  In fact, I would offer that creationists comprise a kind of scholarly archtype. Creationists have the answer already and spend their time collecting data in support of it. This is characteristic of people who read devotionally rather than analytically.

I think learned people can fall into a kind of intellectual cul-de-sac from which many never escape. A lot of AGW deniers spend their time trying to debunk the IPCC data rather than performing experiments to achieve greater clarity.  AGW deniers are certainly well represented with conservative affiliation.

I was accosted by a coworker the other day who was so disgusted by my liberal ways and neutral attitude towards AGW that he couldn’t be bothered to expend the energy to fully dress me down for it. It just wasn’t worth the effort, apparently. Thanks friend. Where are all of these liberals the conservatives keep bitching about? I’m not seeing them.

Well Endowed Chair

Leave a reply

The camel’s nose has been snuffling under the tent at Florida State University.  According to Kris Hundley at tampabay.com, Charles G. Koch pledged $1.5 million a few years ago to support faculty in the economics department.  Not unusual at first glance. But what Koch was able to wangle out of the Dean was the right to screen the faculty he is supporting. They want profs cut from a certain cloth. Of course everybody wants that, but the Koch’s are able to write the checks.

You see, Mr. Koch is very smart.  He knows that to properly manage staff, you have to hire well, write their job description, have them agree to goals, and then follow up with annual evaluations. That’s how they do it in business. Why shouldn’t you expect the same from the academy? It’s about inputs and outputs. And the outputs should always be more valuable than the inputs.  You drop a wad of cash on FSU, you expect a return.

I’m sure Dean Rasmussen is very satisfied with this arrangement. I’m sure that he looks very savvy for making this deal. He said that they are now able to offer 8 more classes because of this.  Deans are a very special kind of academic animal. They are nearly always former profs who caught the allure of administration.  They keep their association with their department, but climb the spiral staircase into the stratosphere of Old Main.   From their lofty perch they herd the frequently squabbling but always loquacious cats through the annual cycles of academic life.  Something happens to people once they become a dean, and it’s not always good. All of a sudden student teaching evaluations become insightful and important.

 As Gaye Tuchman explains in Wannabe U (2009), a case study in the sorrows of academic corporatization, deans, provosts and presidents are no longer professors who cycle through administrative duties and then return to teaching and research. Instead, they have become a separate stratum of managerial careerists, jumping from job to job and organization to organization like any other executive: isolated from the faculty and its values, loyal to an ethos of short-term expansion, and trading in the business blather of measurability, revenue streams, mission statements and the like. They do not have the long-term health of their institutions at heart. They want to pump up the stock price (i.e., U.S. News and World Report ranking) and move on to the next fat post.    William Deresiewicz, The Nation, May 23, 2011 Edition.

The Koch’s are engaged in a kind of social reconstruction through the formation of institutions, the backing of political movements, and now penetration of the academic veil. They have the resources and the self-assurance that comes from being highly successful businessmen.  They are very acquisitive fellows- a natural attribute of wealthy industrialists. 

Their corporate cosmology defines a universe of transaction possibilities.  All the world is a market and greater market share is the raison d’etre.  I’m sure that when the Koch brothers look out the window, they see a landscape of markets and a sky full of profit potential.  People like me see rooftops and air handling units. 

In a market-based society, the only real opposition I can apply to the Koch’s is to quit buying Brawny paper towels, Dixi Cups, or Stainmaster carpeting. The average indivdual’s power in the real marketplace is approximately zero.  Self-determination in the marketplace  is proportional to your wealth.  No wonder the Koch’s and their ilk want to see less gov’t and more market. They get to be in charge.

Notes from the South Pole

Leave a reply

A friend is a winter-over staff member this season at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole station. The station is accessable by air only for part of the year.  The last flight left more than a month ago or so. This is her second tour at the south pole.  The elevation there is at 2835 meters above sea level, so not only is the cold due to the low sun angle, but also due to altitude.

Life here at Pole is quite the experience. Today’s winds are up around 20 knots and that knocks visibility down to about nothing. The snow is so dry and icy, any winds kick it up like a sand storm. So no outside treks for yours truly today. In fact, I only make it outside maybe twice or three times a week. If auroras are dancing, I’ll suit up and make the effort because standing under the amazing manifestation of solar winds is just breathtaking.  –South Pole Susan 5/8/11

My friend said that her colleague, Marco Polie, is still skiing every day, but lately it’s too extreme even for him with wind chill temps down to -130 F and zero visibility.  Getting lost in a whiteout would be tragic.

People used to joke that the only difference between going to sea and going to jail is the added risk of drowning. Sounds like a similar thing could be said about wintering at the pole.

Reading, searching, researching, and writing. My life as a chemist.

Leave a reply

It turns out that I like Russian fiction. On a lark I picked up a collection of short stories by Nikolai Gogol on Amazon (ISBN 978-0-14-044907-5). It was worthwhile. 

Actually, it wasn’t such a lark. I was looking for a copy of Diary of a Madman.  The idea was to find a cutting for an audition, in case such an opportunity arose.  Gogol’s Diary of a Madman and The Government Inspector have been performed for generations and, as usual, I’m the last of my age cohort to read it.

I spend my days supervising chemical research, doing reactive hazard studies and IP analysis. From the job description point of view, I’m a walking, jabbering freak. How the hell am I going to get a job elsewhere with a resume like that? HR will look at it and, failing to find an exact match in their organization, toss it into the discard folder.  I don’t fear chemicals, but I do fear HR.  HR is the bane of our profession.

Back to the day job, these areas are basically writing activities and occur at a desk. It has occured to me that working at a desk is more dangerous than working with chemicals.  You soon get fat(ter) and stressed. It’s not good. 

It is funny how job descriptions differ. Many colleagues have jobs where they execute some task by bringing something into a predetermined structure. By that I mean, an analyst performs a standard procedure or the QA manager documents data for a product cert. An accountant performs procedures in the general ledger according to rules. Their work is reasonably well defined and they know when they are done.

Not a single thing I do is amenable to this kind of structured performance.  The chemistry stuff is experimental and involves sorting out what the hell happened. That’s just the nature of applied scientific investigation.

The IP work involves searching for information. If you find a relevant patent, well, you might be near the endpoint. Lucky day. But if you don’t find claims on a composition or a process, it’s a negative result. You have to ask if your search strategy was adequate. Anyone who has used a search engine knows what I mean. Sometimes, you don’t pick the best search terms and you come up with junk. Eventually you blunder into the right term and find the mother lode.

Sometimes an information search becomes dendritic. You find yourself bobbing along in the brackish waters of the “merely interesting”. So, you back up and revise the search terms.  Doing an IP search for an exact composition in CAS is very straightforward. A structure search or a CASRN search is very reliable and fast.

Much time can be wasted with patents that use compositions or processes but do not claim them. In particular I mean patents that mention compounds in the description (or specification) but do not claim them in the claim section.  A great many patents may be served up in the list of hits in this way. How you deal with this depends on what you want and what kind of search tool you’re using.

If you are interested in a class of compositions or the range of technology that might be out there, this is a kind of search that is more dendritic and subject to stranding in cul de sacs. If you do not use Chemical Abstracts Service in some way, your options become restricted.  There are many IP services that tap the various patent offices around the world. Some seem to have their own databases. Many seem to focus solely on searching the patent data through clever use of search terms or the patent classification system. For prior art searching, this is inadequate. For the most part, only CAS can provide reliable hits if a compound was reported in Acta Retracta by Professor van Wingenheuk in 1907.

After a day of reading abstracts and patents, it’s nice to read something well written and get lost in it for a little while. Patents are not written to be easily understood. They are often masterful in their obfuscation. I often admire the conciseness with which many are written. But in the end, they are all disclosures written grudgingly and with the intent to obscure.

The 21st Century. The Century of China or Malthus?

Leave a reply

I’m trying hard not to be gloomy, but I’ve just been over at the The Oil Drum reading a post written by Jeremy Grantham, Chief Investment Officer at GMO Capital. This essay is notable in that it is written by someone in Grantham’s position. What I find so gloomy is the sense that our modern world is like a runaway train in terms of resource consumption.

People have been talking about peak oil and the importance of petroleum in nearly every material aspect of our lives since the Arab oil embaro of the 1970’s.  What free market enthusiasts and libertarians fail to emphasize is that the market is a social phenomenon; it is not physics. It is a phenomenon that is driven by desire.

The market is like a stomach- it has no brain. It only knows that it wants more.

The idea that you remove all elected government oversight and allow this stomach to reign free across the world is just another type of politics. Inevitably and always, money aggregates into the hands of a few percent of the human population and into the wire-transfer hands of synthetic people called corporations.

In a world of increasing scarcity the prospect of reduced consumption confounds political and business practices devoted to growth, since growth typically means increased consumption.

The key psychological barrier is this- How do we feel like we’re improving as we’re making do with less?

As the cost of manufacturing increases due to increased raw material costs, unit prices will rise. The invisible hand of price elasticity of demand will inevitably partition out the elastic from the inelastic goods on the market.  Whole industries relying on discretionary income will feel exposed. 

The challenge for our leaders is to maintain a vibrant economy even though natural resources are becoming ever more scarce. Power is manifested in the allocation of resources. China has pointedly focused on Africa as a source of raw materials for its growing economy.  The act of power is the fact of power. By throwing a lot of money around, and by controlling the flow of resources, China is exercising power. You don’t need to march an army around to demonstrate your power.

China is executing  industrial policy by forging alliances and allocating resources to global sourcing action. The USA dithers with self-destructive party politics, foreign military adventures, and a narcissistic indulgence in “greatness”.  Instead of wearing our hearts on our sleeves, we should roll them up and get to work building a robust and healthy culture.

Memo to Aldrich, or ahem, SAFC

6 Replies

[Note: The rest of you can go about your business. This memo is to whomever at SAFC will listen. If you’re not SAFC, click here or here.]

Dear Aldrich, or shall I say SAFC?

I have a bone to pick wth you. I’ve noticed that the bottles of reagents I have received from you in the last year have been labeled with a newly formatted design. The Aldrich bottles do indeed stand out on the shelf in resplendent red and white as designed. Well done. The bottles function in the manner in which they are intended. Again, well done. All of that is as expected.

What I’m unhappy with is the fact that the labels all seem to lack the molecular weight of the contents. Having grown accustomed to finding the MW on the bottle, I now have to set the bottle down in the lab and reach for the calculator to do it myself.  After decades of using Aldrich products with the MW printed on the bottle, my addled brain now has to unlearn this and do the calculation myself.

So, what caused this? It was not an accident, was it? Were there complaints about printing errors that twittered your legal people?  Were there a series of meetings in which serious senior managers furrowed their brows and intervened over the possibility of liability? Nothing like the mention of liability to get a VP agitated.  Perhaps ink has gotten expensive.  I just don’t understand.

Was it one of us who complained? Was it some white-coated laboratory fussbudget? Did some crabby pisswink from “out there” write a letter and frighten someone in St Louis or Milwaukee? That would be sad.

One more thing. Why does the font size have to be so small on large labels? 

Th’ Gaussling

Pitot Bugs and Power Dives

1 Reply

Spring 1980.  I arrived at the airport at 6:30 on a calm morning along the front range of Colorado. Judson Flying Service was open for business with a modest fleet of Cessnas. Two 150’s, a fairly new 152, a 172, a 182, and a 210. I had 48 hours of time logged in preparation for my checkride. 

My flight instructor, Fred, had signed me off for the checkride after my successful short and long solo cross country flights. We had practiced a bit on the short and soft field landings. I loved landings. If there is a time that you feel that the machine is an extension of your limbs, it is during the landing phase.

I nearly had to cancel the checkride. I had contracted a bout of conjunctivitis following a visit to the opthamologist. My eyes had cleared up sufficiently so I decided to proceed with the flight test.  Scheduling with the FAA designated examiner was hit and miss so I didn’t want to miss my slot.

The examiner gave me a destination- Yuma, Colorado. My job was to put together a flight plan and call it in the flight service station (FSS). While on the line with the FSS, I got a thorough weather briefing.  I plotted a course based on radio navigation  stations (VORTAC), estimated time enroute and fuel consumption, identified several alternate airports enroute, and collected the various radio frequencies and ground references for dead reckoning.

We were ready. We walked out to the airplane where I did a thorough preflight check and answered questions on aerodynamics. Satisfied, the examiner and I strapped into the Cessna 150 and began the engine startup procedure.  He pulled a few tricks including leaving his belt unconnected and didn’t completely latch his door. Having the door pop open on takeoff is startling for everyone, pilot included.

The 4-cylinder horizontally opposed Lycoming engine lit up after a few turns like it always did. After checking to see that the oil pressure was in the green and that the fuel gauges indicated what we observed by visual inspection, we taxied to the runup area on the taxiway near the start of runway 29.  Pointing the nose toward the approach airspace of 29, we went through the pre-takeoff checklist. Breakers look fine. Radio check. Adjust the mixture. Run the engine up to 1600 rpm and alternately switch off the two magnetos one at a time to look for function and for a worrisome loss in rpms.  Verify that flight controls are operating properly and that the flaps are set to the recommended position.

It’s settled. The machine wants to fly. We’re going aviating.  A serious scan for incoming traffic and, noting none, we radio to what traffic there might be that we intend to depart on runway two-niner and leave the traffic area to the east.

I release the foot brakes and taxi onto the runway. After we turn onto the active runway the throttle goes to the firewall and the engine promptly revs up to full power with that righteous unmuffled roar from the engine. We’re a little on the heavy side with two adult men on board, but N63110 still accelerates smartly down the runway.

As we begin to accelerate with my left hand on the yoke and my right hand on the throttle, I’m busy keeping the nosewheel on the centerline of the runway with the rudder pedals while glancing at the airspeed indicator. The airspeed indicator seemed sluggish. As we get close to what appeared to be rotation speed the airspeed indicator still didn’t register any airspeed.

To actually launch into the air without airspeed indication would be a huge mistake. Not only would it be terribly dangerous, but I would fail the checkride if we survived the ride around the patch and the landing ordeal ahead. So, I pulled back the throttle and applied heavy braking. We taxied off the active and made for the shop.  No available 150’s that morning, so the checkride was canceled.

Turns out that some bugs had nested inside the pitot tube overnight and blocked it. 

Flying very much depends on making sure that the airflow moves over the wings above a minimum velocity and within a range of acceptable angles. Without airspeed readings, the approach to landing would be very sketchy. The landing phase requires that the pilot slows the airplane so that a glide is established to the ground. The glide speed is easily controlled by adjusting the pitch of the airplane. In a normal landing it is nose down. The sketchy part is that the airplane is close to stall speed during this phase and so any kind of loss of controllability or lift near the ground will have dire consequences.

A week later I arrived at the airport at 6:30 on a cool windy morning along the front range. This brisk morning the winds were out of the west at 12 kts gusting to 14-16 kts straight down runway 29 with a broken ceiling at about 9000 ft above sea level, or 4000 ft above the ground. The winds were squirrely for a 150 but not bad enough to cancel.

I repeated the flight planning of a week ago and we walked out to the airplane and strapped in. The FAA examiner had a hood with him for use in simulated instrument conditions. I looked at the hood with some dread. Performance anxiety, really. But I had a fair amount of hood time and had always done fine.

We take off and point the nose to the east and climb to 7500 ft MSL. The winds were strong at altitude and turbulence was making the flight somewhat strenuous. I had precise flying to do with a strong silent-type examiner. After I lock onto the VORTAC and verify the station’s Morse code identifier, the examiner hands me the hood and announces that I just flew into a cloud.

Being prepared for this I put on the hood which resembles a welding helmet except it has a narrow blinders protruding forward to block the view outside the airplane but still allow view of the instruments.  It is used routinely for simulated instrument flying.

I tell the examiner that the flight to our destination is aborted and that we were returning to the airport by doing a 180 degree turn. The idea is to turn around promptly to the reciprocal heading to exit the clouds most expeditiously.

Being a cocky 23 year old male I smartly roll the airplane into a left 45 degree bank and try to intercept the reciprocal heading. While executing this and while fighting turbulence I overshot the heading. So I roll the airplane into a right 45 degree bank and try to intercept it again.  Again I overshot it. By this time some dizziness had set in to complicate my cockpit chores while I try to remember what the desired heading was and get back to my designated altitude.

With the excessively steep turns and the turbulence I had managed to lose control of the aircraft under simulated instrument conditions. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I also had vertigo. As I wrestled with the flood of seemingly contradictory instrument readings, a tumbling gyro, and distracting g-forces I continued to try to wrestle the machine into level flight.

The examiner just sat there. Legally he was just a passenger. I was the pilot in command.

My mind was overloaded with fear. My brain was trying to reconcile the what my inner ear was telling it with what the turn and bank indicator, altimeter, and airspeed indicator were telling me. I had fallen into a classic and fatal combination. It’s called the “graveyard spiral” or the spiraling power dive. I should have done a gentle standard rate turn and avoided the g-forces and higher skill needed to maneuver like that.

When it became obvious that I wasn’t going to recover, the examiner took the yoke and corrected the turn as he told me to take off the hood. As I removed the hood I saw in front of me a great circular corn field with center pivot irrigation slowly wetting down the field. We were perhaps 500 ft above the ground and still in a dive.  

Grateful that the examiner had left something for me to do to save the flight, I retarded the power and carefully pulled out of the dive. The airspeed needle was was adjacent to the red zone.

I climbed back to a cruise altitude and flew back to homebase. The examiner wanted to do some other test items, but I was so humiliated that I wanted to get back on the ground. Once back in the traffic pattern I set up a short soft field approach and executed the best landing I had ever done. The wheels kissed the ground and came to a stop without wasting even a foot of ground.  The pride was wounded but the skills were there.

A week later and after a humbling hour of remedial hood time, I retook the flight test and easily passed it. The same examiner signed my ticket. He never chided me or said anything to humiliate me.  I think he knew that a major life lesson had happened and was glad that it was under supervision. I have never forgotten the corn field that should have had a smoking crater in it on a blustery day in June, 1980. When I close my eyes I can still see it.

Our Family Atheist and the Religious ToE

5 Replies

So it turns out that I am the family atheist and liberal. The social awkwardness and philosophical incompatibility of this condition was evident the other day in a discussion with a family member that diverged into a shouting match. In fact the immiscibilityof my liberal atheist proclivity with my family’s generally Christian conservative foundation has severed ties with a few family members outright and distanced others. My father, deceased nearly a decade ago, never reconciled with his son’s atheism. In his view, it was a choice inevitably resulting in existential tragedy and damnation into the darkest recesses of infinity.

My wife is a Methodist and our kid is being raised under that umbrella. I have taken the position that I will not indoctrinate my child in the analytical consequences of atheism. Rather, the adoption of a philosophical position on existence is a self-guided adventure everyone is entitled to. Whether one is lead deep into the doctrines of the Abrahamic religions, eastern philosophy, or the uncertain swamp of agnosticism, it is the right of all people to come to their own conclusion on the matter of ones place in the cosmos.

I claim that this is a right.  But many otherwise liberty-loving people disagree.  They view indoctrination into the religious fold as a kind of rescue. It is a dash across the finish line that must to happen well before death to ensure that the soul is channeled into the chute leading to paradise.  Once in this enviable condition, the ethereal community of souls can eternally heap praise upon the diety directly rather than across that impenetrable supernatural discontinuity that is resistant to all but the force of prayer. Or so goes the core theory of the Abrahamic religions as I understand them.

To many religious followers, the very fact that their religion is ancient seems to validate the accuracy and veracity of their ideas. The mere continuity of these doctines seems to confer some hopeful message about the vital truth of the doctine.

But I would counter that what continues over time is not the cosmic accuracy of the idea, but rather the psychological consequences of brain physiology.  Architectural features of the brain and the behavior of neurons therein have produced self-awareness. The self-aware brain enables much possibility for an organism.  An effect of our self-awareness is that we come to experience time.

But the very familiarity of self-awareness of the human brain might lead it to assume or calculate that self-awareness is a common condition in the external world. It seems to easily conclude that the apparent organization of the world was conducted by a central organizing influence- a diety. Moreover, it is not unreasonable for the self-aware brain to assume that it’s own self-awareness is part of a continuum of awareness or consciousness. The notion that self-awareness might extinguish would be inconceivable.

I think what the ancient religious texts and doctrines convey is a kind of familiarity. It is a shared experience of mystery, uncertainty, and fear through the common experience of consciousness. The brains of our ancestors communicated through the agency of language their chronicles of hope and fear to our brains which share the the same strengths and weaknesses.  It is this commonality that rings the bell of truth in our self-awareness. It reinforces the mystical experience as a physiological experience because it is fundamentally that.

What is inevitable about our self-awareness is extrapolation. Religion soon mutates from a personal mystical experience to a theory of physics and politics. This is what I cannot accept- Religion as a political template or as a ToE  (Theory of Everything).

Many people come to value alignment to doctrine as a higher calling than the application of love and charity to their fellows who have lost their way or have experienced bad luck or tragedy. I would offer to the reader that what makes a person liberal is the priority choice of people over the politcal doctrine of social Darwinism.

We in the USA have confused economic theory with reality. Economics and business are a subset of sociology. The alleged congruence of economics to morality or metaphysics is a political theory some people have asserted because it serves their purpose in the allocation of wealth.  It’s a part of their ToE. And I’m here to say that some of us can see what they’re doing.

A Homily on Extractive Metallurgy

4 Replies

In the last 6 months I have learned a bit of what extractive metallurgy is about. One of my projects involves isolating an element from an ore where the desired element is one of many minor constitutents. What is important here is the term “minor constituents”.  When the desired element is a minor constituent, then one necessarily faces the prospect of processing large quantities of mass.

Processing large quantities of mass requires that the material and energy inputs used in the process must be very inexpensive. Except for gold, you have to start thinking of heat as a kind of reagent that can be applied to make things happen. The lucky circumstance with gold is its affinity for cyanide in an oxygenated aqueous environment.

It is a very interesting and worthy challenge to start with rock and contrive to remove purified products from it. Half of the fun is working with the engineers and metallurgists. They have a very different perspective of industry than a stiff like me who has always relied on Aldrich for “raw materials”. I have had to recalibrate a bit. You don’t meet people like this at ACS meetings.

I have spent more than a little time digging into extractive metallurgy from the 19th century.  A good deal of fairly sophisticated technology was worked out long ago for many metals on the periodic table.  Mostly, what has changed between the metallurgy of yesteryear and today is that we now consider fairly low grade ore as economically viable. 

The tailings of yesterday will become the ore of tomorrow. It just depends on the value.  When you drive around the gold and silver mining districts in the Colorado Mineral Belt, the tailings that you see from the road have most likely been worked over at least once.