Category Archives: CounterCurrent

A Collection of Links

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Some interesting links on Th’ Gaussling’s Favorites List-

Many moons ago, as a 9th grader, I built an atomic cloud chamber. I fabricated a galvanized sheet metal reservoir for dry ice and methanol and attached a chamber on the top made from the top of a metal Folgers coffee can. The can had a plexiglass viewing window and three curved plexiglass windows on the side for illumination. The plans were from C.L. Stong’s column “The Amateur Scientist” in Scientific American.

Going into 10th grade I managed to borrow a Polonium-210 source from the physics teacher. It was just a needle with a small spot of radioisotope on one side and a cork on the other. I never did see any activity from the source, but I did see a few stray vapor trails from background radiation. Turns out that the source had a short half life and was long dead.

One of the more interesting websites is United Nuclear.  They sell various nuclear related items, ball mills, as well as NdFeB super magnets. Most notably, they sell a cloud chamber that looks quite well designed. They also sell sources.

The best place to buy electronic cables is MonoPrice.  A USB cord selling for $30 at Best Buy will go for just a  few dollars at MonoPrice.  Same story with HDMI cables.

If you love to listen to speakers talk about exciting ideas and technology, then TED is the place to go.

The MetaFilter community weblog is a treasure trove of unusual links dredged up by many contributors. The site is updated continuously.

Patently-O is a consistently well produced weblog on patent law and worth visiting now and then. 

An excellent aggregator of earth science related news is Geology.com. They are reasonably good at finding rare earth element related news.

Benchtop ESR Spectrometer, Rare Earths, and Global Politics

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A company called Active Spectrum is marketing a benchtop ESR unit called the Micro-ESR that performs electron spin resonance measurements. The site says that the system operates at 3.4 and 9.6 GHz and has sub-micromolar sensitivity.  It’s pretty amazing, really.

I don’t know for a fact but the easy guess is that this ESR instrument and the picoSpin NMR spectrometer are based on some kind of rare earth magnet technology. Both instruments use very small cross section sample space, presumably to accomodate a design scheme to bring magnetic field lines together as closely as possible in the probe giving a useful field strength without a big electromagnet.

A quick patent search fails to turn up patents based on some obvious key words. I’ll have to spend some time looking more intently.

Now that I’ve got you hanging on to the rotating frame, lets tip you over with this.  China’s new policy of restricting rare earth element (REE) export as well as the recent announcement that it would be inposing fairly stiff tariffs means that wonders like these two magnet-based technologies are going to feel a pinch in raw material supply and competition real soon. The aggregate demand picture for REE’s will exceed supply by 2014 or so.  Market purists will nod knowingly and chant their homily on the rational allocation of goods by the market. 

But to what extent is China part of a rational market? China, Inc., really consists of a highly nationalized array of business fronts that are backed to the hilt by the Chinese government by internally favorable regulations on ownership and local sourcing. Don’t forget that Chinese currency is shielded from valuation excursions. 

To a large extent, China is leveraging technology developed in Japan and the west with metal resources highly concentrated within its borders to apply a pincer attack on the market place. China has industrial policy that it is steadfastly acting to strengthen its manufacturing base while the USA has an emphasis on aligning its citizens to be more receptive to consumption.

Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a country that tried harder to make its manufacturing industry more robust rather than the present fascination with finance and the well being of financiers?  Wouldn’t it be nice if westerners transferred a bit less of our magic to countries who will turn it into a stick to beat us over the head with? 

It is going to take a lot more than glib talk about the free market to deal with China and the growing influence of nationalized companies around the world.

A willing suspension of belief. Anatomy of a liberal.

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I keep getting emails from conservative friends and acquaintances who are obsessed by what they call political correctness. In these emails, some kind of sarcastic parody is made regarding an alleged trend to ban the use of the phrase “Merry Christmas”.  Neoconservatives latch onto this like barnacles on the bottom of a tramp steamer. Inside their pointy heads they imagine that a cabal of liberals are scheming to take their guns and their religion from them.

If other liberals are like me (an admitted dissident), then not only do we not want to deprive them of  their damned firearms and bibles, but we want to put as many miles between us as possible. At least out of shooting range.

Christmas has a secular component and practice that even a bitter, crusty, non-religious liberal like myself can feel comfortable with. But as far as possible insensitivity to Jews and Muslims, well the decendents of Abraham will have to work that out amongst themselves.

In my limited sphere I don’t know of a single liberal who is trying to replace “Merry Christmas” with “Happy Holidays”. Only conservatives carp about this.  It’s a red herring promulgated by that famous yapping vaudevillian cur himself, Rush whatshisname, in the name of ratings.

——————

I’m moved to comment on what makes some people liberal.  A recent article in Slate was written by a conservative, Daniel Sarewitz, who seems to be genuinely perplexed at the apparent trend of scientists, or at least academics, to be liberal. It is though he is talking about a smallpox epidemic.  While I have no idea as to the C/L ratio of scientists and academics, I can say that from my perch on a small and obscure branch of the tree of science, liberals like myself are rather scarce.

Indeed, most of the industrial chemists I am in contact with are libertarians or evangelical conservatives or plain vanilla orthodox conservatives. So, from my limited data set,  Sarewitz’s complaint appears specious.

He probably refers to the life and eco-sciences, earth science, astronomy, big-time-physics, etc. I suspect that the balance is different in these fields.

But why would scientists trend towards a liberal viewpoint?  I have some ideas. First, the scientific approach to the world relies heavily on study and measurement.  Scientists tend to study analytically or, to use another term, critically. Critical study of the physical world requires a willing suspension of belief.  A scientist must keep a loose grip on beliefs because experimental results frequently force one to re-examine fundamental assumptions.  Fame and glory in science goes to those who tip over the apple cart of concepts with contrary results.  All scientists are excited at the prospect of looking at something in a new way.

I would offer that one attribute of a liberal person is the ability and willingness to reexamine ones fundamental assumptions. A corollary to this is that liberals are eager to acquire a new perspective on things in general. It is simply an artifact of curiosity.

Conservatives whom I know also appreciate study and measurement. But I think there is more of a trend towards devotional study rather than critical study. It’s about a greater knowledge of doctrine or greater fidelity with a catechism of policies.

Religionists upset with the notion of the separation of church and state often assert their right to be heard and to express their religiosity in public spaces.  Some liberals might take this as a simple matter of freedom of speech. And if that is all the religionists want, that would be fine. But if you look closely, they don’t want simple speech, they want to hold services in public spaces. They want to bring the civil sphere into alignment with their doctrine.

Religious services are about the veneration of the sacred. But “sacred” means that which is beyond question or understanding.  In a real sense, holding something sacred is to set apart a concept or doctrine from critical analysis. Religionists are not interested in a public critical analysis of their precepts. They are only interested in broader devotional covereage.

A liberal person is compelled to do critical analysis.  The very notion of sacredness is antithetical to one who seeks analytical truth. The policy that some concepts are beyond analysis is simply a form of thought control and is more suited to the Iron Age than the present.

For a good many people, college is a time and a place for intellectual experimentation and openness.  The university is an institution where critical analysis of the great world systems takes place.  The active examination of our world is the realm of the progressive.  Progressives push the boundaries of knowledge irrespective of where it might lead. Sometimes our analyses reflect well on our human or national institutions and sometimes it does not. But knowledge hidden is knowledge abused. That universities are loaded with liberals is a natural outcome of the shared intellectual adventure students are taking.

Merry Christmas from your liberal friend,

Th’ Gaussling

American Plutocrats and Commoners

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It is really interesting how American commoners can support a political party that obviously serves interests of the top money earners and wealthy elites in this country. Perhaps they are waiting for some scraps to fall off the table? Or some of that lucre to dribble down their way in the form of a fabulous $9.00/hr retail job?   But, “commoners”?  What does that mean?

I figure that since the country seems bent on heading in the direction of a 19th Century-style society of stratified income classes, we may as well dust off the Victorian terminology and talk about how life is going to be. 

Power is the ability to allocate resources. As more and more resources come under the control of a wealthy minority, government seems to align itself increasingly to a small pool of influential and wealthy elite.  With the election of the upcoming congressional class, it is very clear that wealthy corporations and individuals are getting what they paid for-  statutory favors and influence in the deconstruction of the federal system of government. It is no coincidence that politicians from southern states, where an upswing in antebellum sentiment is afoot, are especially keen on the topic of states rights and other confederate sympathies.  Old antipathy is being dusted off and tried on for size.

Since SCOTUS has affirmed that money equals speech in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission, and that corporate funding of broadcasts cannot be limited under the First Amendment, anonymous streams of cash from conservative donors have flooded the 2010 election.  Such is the power of persuasion made by big money that a class of deconstructionists has been elected to the next session of congress.

Americans commoners have a fetish about the ways of the megawealthy.  Dial up CNBC sometime when Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are interviewed at one of the Ivy League B-Schools. Watch all of the gaga-eyed MBA students as they hang on every utterance proffered by these two American Plutocrats. It is a form of rapture. The students and faculty are under a kind of enchantment. But this is no different from the country at large. Watch how commoners behave around Donald Trump, or Oprah for that matter.

One of the things that will have to change in the near future is a rewrite of the local zoning codes pertaining to shanty towns and squatting.  As the population grows, as raw material scarcity increases, and as wealth continues to shift toward the wealthy side of the bell curve, more and more people will find themselves unable to house themselves. Increasingly we see a housing system heavily relying on credit and background checks, high rents, and the need to commute in America’s now balky system of suburbs.  The suburb system places a great distance between work centers and living centers, making transportation problematic for our up-and-coming dirt poor class.

As the population of dirt poor and destitute rises due to deindustrialization and dissolution of social safety nets (say, by 2030), all flexibility in the system will begin to play out and people will find themselves living in shanties and refrigerator boxes. They’ll become squatters. The local constables will have to deal with them because municipalities will refuse to compromise property values and will shun the homeless.

Let’s see.  What will the growing class of homeless do with their time? Write poems about the joys of laissez faire orthodoxy? I think that somebody will put together an appealing manifesto on insurrection.

Maybe our own village idiot, Glenn Beck, is right. Maybe there is a revolution underway. But I don’t think it is the one he is expecting.

Patent holiday

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It’s been days since I’ve shaved. I’ve spent 3 solid days over the Thanksgiving holiday hunkered down in my office studying patents and following threads through the IP swamps of Mordor.  A friend has engaged me to do some consulting and needs an IP map of a particular realm of industrial chemistry. I have no confidentiality overlap with this area of technology so I agreed. It sounded so easy when I said yes and estimated my fee. Now that I have blown well past anything I could ever hope to recover in terms of billable hours, I’m still blasting and hand shoveling muck from the pit of my own making.

His company is currently putting a plant in the ground to produce a well known commodity and the question foremost in their minds is- what added value beyond [—] does the product have?

I’m reasonably good at diving down the rabbit hole in the patent world and finding what I need to know. But the current project has forced me to press into use more USPTO resources since I don’t have a personal SciFinder account for this work. Especially useful has been the classification system.  Patent lawyers will scoff at my swoon over this and flash their Esquire stinkeye since they are all too familiar with it. But chances are they don’t use SciFinder like chemists do.

SciFinder’s ability to find patent families from a structure or CASRN input is phenomenal. Even from within Markush claims.   I’ve had one search with combined SciFinder/USPTO resources compared with legal specialists using their own search tools. My search was just as exhaustive as theirs. Yes, SciFinder has flaws. And not finding claims is like a negative experiment.  But it is a very good tool for combing the ground.

Part of my approach stems from my natural inclination to browse. I drive people nuts when I go to a store with them because I will thoroughly examine the contents of the store for interesting items.  I drive the merchants nuts because my browsing rarely results in a sale.  (Notice that the theme is that I drive people nuts.)

Once you find a lead patent it is important to search the classification as well as cited patents. It is a simple matter to do a search by classification and dredge up hits. Once the fish are on board, it is about sorting the results and casting the trash fish back in the water. 

Google Patents is an excellent resource and I heartily recommend it. It retrieves pdf’s of the entire patent document as well as providing links to patents cited and those patents citing the patent of interest. It also links to the the classification site at the USPTO. A simple click of the mouse in the USPTO site pulls up a search of all of the patents under that classification.

On occasion, Google patents will not retrieve a particular patent or application. This seems to happen with very newly issued patents and applications in general. For this circumstance I use pat2pdf.org.  You might have to monkey with the formatting of the application number string, but it almost always returns the document eventually.

OK. It’s fine to be able to retrieve a bunch of patent numbers and pdf’s. But soon one becomes overwhelmed by the large amount of highly dense data that has been recovered.  In my surveys, I use a form meant to collect key information, but sized in a manner so as to limit the amount of detail I can write down. Feel free to use this form or modify it as you please.

Patent Summary Blank Form

At some point it becomes useful to use Excel to develop a matrix of patent information. In particular, one can retrieve a list of patents from the PTO and cut and paste them into Excel. They’ll paste as hotlinks, so all you have to do is to right click on the cell and select the unlink option. Tedious but effective.

I have developed an Access database to store patent information and other IP office actions and produce reports for due diligence studies. This is very handy, but eventually you become enslaved by upkeep as is true with all database tools.

Am I suggesting that one does his own lawyering? Not at all.  But if you’re in high tech manufacturing, one must be very careful to avoid infringement. It it crucial that a few technical people in the organization be familiar with the patent picture.  It is far better to avoid infringement in the first place than to have to find a way out of it.

The best way to use a patent attorney is to be informed in all interactions with them.  While they can often noodle through a problem presented to them by napkin scribblings and hand waving, it is best for the client to be knowledgeable about the patent landscape and to help the attorney to focus on the key legal issues. Good lawyering happens when the attorney clearly understands the nuances of the problem and can act accordingly. Having a list of prior art or other IP facts will save you billable hours in the form of research and needless office actions.

Your attorney is an officer of the court and has a legal obligation to honesty and fidelity to the system.  Being well informed in advance and working cooperatively with a patent attorney will go a long way to staying out of litigation.

The other good reason for closely studying the patent literature is to find what some call the “white space”.  This is the negative space around the claimed art that is not claimed and is likely to be free to practice or fertile enough to file a application on. If you Google “patent white space” you’ll find that this is a cottage industry.  A study of white space may provide insight into maneuvering room around a patent.

The tell-off

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One of the tricks screen writers and playwrights use to pull you into the finale of a story is the tell-off.  You know what I’m talking about. It is the monolog or the heavily one-sided dialog where one party reads the riot act to the other.  The best tell-offs are dispensed with some verbal whup-ass and topped with liberal dollup of comeuppance on a big honkin’ slice of just deserts. My Gawd, it’s some kinda good!

In the play I was in recently, my character was told off or shouted down by three other characters. The tell-off and a chase scene are the staples of American theatre and cinema.

Here is a link to an editorial addressed to the president of SUNY Albany, found in the journal Genome Biology. So, president Gerrge M. Philip has been told-off in no uncertain terms.  Now, somebody in a red Fez has to chase him through a seedy bazaar in Marrakech with goats and chickens scattering everywhere for the total dramatic effect.  It’s the natural order of things.

Th’ Gaussling’s Epistle to the Phosita’s. PTO is Hiring

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Got an email from a  friend who is a patent examiner. I thought I’d pass the rumor that the US Patent and Trademark Office is planning to hire 1000 more examiners in the coming months, 100 of which will be in the chemical field.  The USPTO website seems rather perky as well.  I can’t verify the accuracy of the number of hires planned- it’s just what my examiner friend said.

The good news is that it is a job with benefits. The bad news is that you have to live in the DC area, study patent applications all day, and haggle with endothermic patent attorneys.  For an interesting view of life as an examiner, read the blog Just a Patent Examiner.  Remember, Einstein was a patent examiner. Hmmm …. I wonder if he understood novelty?

My friend said that the goal is to fill the slots before the hoard of angry Tea Party Pissants take over the house next year.  (Well, ok. He said republicans. I made up the part about Tea Party Pissants)

I can’t bring myself to apply.

I wonder if an examiner must have more than ordinary skill in the art? An Über-Phosita.

Terrorists Successful. Americans Terrified.

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While the underwear and shoe bombers may have been unsuccessful in their attempts to bring down a jetliner in flight, they were successful in inducing other manifestations of terror.  The US has been installing whole body scanners capable of penetrating clothing so that nameless and faceless citizens employed by TSA or whomever may inspect our body topography.  In addition to this radiological peepshow during check-in at the airport, TSA security has been authorized to pat down our private parts.   

Cause:  Two imbeciles board airplanes and attempt to initiate their explosives. They failed.  Effect:  The USA, the most powerful military-industrial complex for maybe hundreds of parsecs in all directions, is so freaked out by the presence of a mouse on the kitchen floor that it contrives to supply absolute security.  History is full of many examples of foolish attempts by states to provide absolute security.  The impulse to attain absolute security becomes the lever by which authoritarian states pry liberty from the hands of its people. 

The members of the booboisie who promulgate this foolish notion are not automatically bad people. As viewed from lunar orbit, their intentions are superficially honorable. The gaping flaw is that they accept the premise that trading in the protection against unreasonable search and seizure for what can only be a miniscule uptick in security, is a fair trade. 

It is most assuredly not a fair trade, but it seems to have already been made for us. I strenuously object.

Update:  A friend advises that there are already countermeasures available f0r the scanners.  I would recommend a screen printed lead-based paint with an appropriately artful design that would hide, or perhaps exaggerate the body part to be shielded. Alternatively, a witty slogan may be printed.  Perhaps we can source the lead-based paint in China?

Not-so-brave new world

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A blog called The Legal Satyricon has an excellent essay on the demise of Senator Russ Feingold. I am compelled to chime in and second the motion. Feingold understands the social equilibrium principle of civil liberty. But a growing population of voters apparently do not.  Feingold’s opposition to the Patriot Act was truly an act of integrity.  He understood the ratchet-like progression of governmental power and saw the Patriot Act, a piece of legislation that seemingly appeared overnight, for what it was. An overreach into the lives of American citizens. An overreach that involves weapons, surveillance, and more rigid control over citizens.

But fearful citizens wielding felt tip markers filled in the ballot bubble for the other candidate and Feingold is out. The fearful imagine they are for basic virtues like liberty, but in fact they pull the covers up to their eyes and vote away civil liberties.

Fear of terrorism is fear of an idea. The “War on Terror” is a blindingly stupid and misleading slogan. This kind of sloganeering betrays a basic educational deficit on the part of elected officials. The same applies to the “War on Drugs”. 

Al Qaeda and the extremisms born of Islamic fever are actions based on a philosophy. There are no armies to fight. There are no uniforms and no enemy insignia’s to put the cross-hairs on.  Only the civilian believers in a notion carry this fight forward.  You can’t hope to win a war on an idea by military invasion.  The War in Afganistan is a bug hunt.  As soon as the lights go off, the bugs come back out. The Soviets discovered this the hard way.

Al Qaeda, then based in Afganistan, slams civilian jets into architectual symbols of American power.  The US responds by lavishing massive invasion forces upon Iraq and sending modest forces to Afganistan.  America’s leaders, lead by that vacuous symbol of virtue, George Bush II, seemed bent on knocking somebody down .  So we went and knocked somebody down. 

We tipped the hornets nest of Iraq and unleashed a pornographic orgy of fratricide. Perhaps the tragedy of Iraq’s expression of rage was inevitable no matter how its evolution played out.  Political outrage fueled by inconceivable injustices and inhumanity brought into sharp focus by Iron age religious doctrines lead to a suicidal conflagration of Iraqi society.  In truth, as a Russian colleague once suggested while we sat in my living room drinking vodka and watching Gulf War 1 unfold on CNN, westerners have no business meddling  in that part of the world because we do not understand it. Its history and rythms are alien to us.  He was right. Meanwhile, Afganistan continues to produce most of the worlds morphine which, when acetylated, gives heroin.

America’s ability to project power is a wondrous thing to behold. We are genuinely good at it. Ask us to solve the problem of poverty or drug abuse and we’ll come up with some rheumatoidal public apparatus to throw money at some of it while the smug and secure bitch about socialism.

But ask us to deliver a missile payload of high explosives into a window from 12 thousand miles away, we’ll spare no expense and put the best minds on it.  We’ll put DARPA on the trail and devise new materials and electronics. Hell, we’ll even put up satellites just so’s we can watch a million dollar explosion on TV.  At least a part of the tragedy of 9/11 is the unleashing of our reflex to make war.  There is a dubious future in armed conflict and we should hold elected officials more accountable when they make war in our name.

Th’ Gaussling’s 14th Epistle to the Bohemians. Enjoy the Ineffable.

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Here is a great title for a post- “Effing the Ineffable“.  I wish I’d thought of it.  The author, Roger Scruton, a philosopher, attempts to circumscribe the indescribable and unquantifiable by revealing those who have tried to describe the ineffable. His conclusion is to relent and accept it.  

Having a brain and sensing the external world means that our sensory apparatus and our internal private monolog are interpreting a continuous stream of perceptual input whose format is based on the constraints of molecules and molecular orbitals. Is it possible that this organic object- the brain- is capable of  a broad enough spectrum of perception that it can understand its place in the universe?

I too am tempted to eff the ineffable. Like my philosophical predecessors, I want to describe that world beyond the window, even though I know that it cannot be described but only revealed. I am not alone in thinking that world to be real and important. But there are many who dismiss it as an unscientific fiction. And people of this scientistic cast of mind are disagreeable to me. Their nerdish conviction that facts alone can signify, and that the “transcendental” and the eternal are nothing but words, mark them out as incomplete. There is an aspect of the human condition that is denied to them. –Roger Scruton

Scientists are reductionists by nature. Scientists naturally seek an irreducible representation of a phenomenon and attempt to describe it symbolically. The symbols may be words or mathematical constructs (what ever it takes to get through peer review).

I think where scientists are not so welcome is in the aesthetic domain of the human experience.  Perhaps our place in the universe is simply to be the conduit through which the broader universe is self-aware. We sentient beings should enjoy that role and have some fun with it.