Category Archives: Current Events

Wherein Th’ Gaussling presumes to take exception

Leave a reply

Some matters to which I wish to take exception.

Cray, the supercomputer company, is selling a desktop unit called the CX1. Their product literature uses the term “personal supercomputing” here and there. Also HPC, high performance computing.  A bit of scouting with Mr Google turns up a price of $25,000 (and up) for one of these units. If I had a CX1 I could finally get those hydrodynamic simulations finished for my cold fusion reactor.

I’ve never been able to refer to a computer as a machine. It’s a circuit. Somehow the flow of a few coulombs of charge across the bandgap and through the microscopic vias of lithographed and ion implanted junctions never qualified in my internal taxonomy as a machine.  Surely there are countless pencil necks and Poindexters out there who will line up to quibble. But, it’s a damned circuit. The cooling fan is a machine. The screws that hold the major components are elementary machines. The Klikkenhooters on the mouse are machine-like I suppose.

My eyes cross every time I hear some silly sod in the IT department solemnly state that they have fixed a problem in some persons “machine”.  Oh, is that true skippy? Chances are that young Edison selected a pull down menu and changed the state of some software variable or swapped out an errant disk drive. Machines make you greasy. You skin your knuckles tightening bolts on them. A Harley-Davidson motorcycle is a machine. A Dell laptop is not.

Fiat Lux

On an altogether different topic, an article entitled the Amoral Manifesto over at Philosophy Now raises some interesting issues regarding the basis of morality. The author is starting to get his arms around the qestion of morality without an absolute cosmic foundation. If you look at the physical universe, one of the first things that sorta jumps out at ya is the fact that everything is floating in space. Maybe we should take that as a kind of metaphor when considering absolutisms. We should learn to get along for its own sake, and not just to please angry, dispeptic spirits.  Not that those jabbering snake handling pentecostals would take any notice …

Speaking of dispeptic, Pastor Wingnut in Florida should consider another alternative to book burning. Simply down load copies of the Quran and repeatedly delete them until he feels that warm flush of righteous satisfaction.*  But I think we all know this wouldn’t have quite the spectacle of an actual public immolation. A book burning isn’t about individual books. It is a form of ceremony.  It is a ritual for all to particpate in and is part of the liturgy of indignation. Producing a show like this is in the skill set of any preacher, actually. They are expected to rouse  the emotions of their flock. It’s their job.  Some of it is quite interesting to watch in terms of the art of persuasion.

The pastor in Florida makes the case for why a great many of us do not want a government based on theological notions of law.  Whose law takes precedence- the Baptists?  Whose voice is speaking to you, really? And did you get all of the details? Exactly what kind of authority does an angry but righteous-in-the-Word mob get to have, anyway? How do bronze-age principles help us determine quotas for banana imports, plumbing codes, and the standards governing interstate trucking? Good gravy, we have to figure these things out ourselves people.

The eternal problem of civilization is to find the balance between high principle and pragmatic practice.  Civilization should be run by the living, not dictated by those who claim to know the intent of the long dead. The dead had their time in the sun. It is the privilege and responsibility of the those living the eternal now to sow the seeds of their fate. Easy retreat to the demon-haunted, authoritarian world of spiritualism is the realm of ignorance and fear. And fearful people are especially prone to being driven like sheep at the convenience of the vain and ruthless. History books are full of examples. So instead of burning the Quran, let’s read a few of the others. Maybe take some notes.

* Thanks to the Daily Kos.

Cogitations on the sunflower

9 Replies

My morning commute through the countryside takes me past more than a few fields of sunflowers. By late July the flowers are out and without exception, all nodding toward the east where a star appears every day. Many of the local farmers have taken to raising sunflowers rather than the usual corn and sugar beets.  I haven’t a clue as to what kind of machinery is used to harvest these things.

One of the local heliotropes

It is uncanny that the entire crop will lock the flowering body orientation in the direction of the sun.  Somehow the direction of the sun at other times of day does not randomize the orientations. If you stand and look at a field of sunflowers, you’ll see outliers in height, but not direction of flower orientation. Or so my experience has been. There has to be some frequency of orientation outliers.

I wonder if there isn’t some growth step in the stem than occurs over a short time span X days into its growth, removing what stem mobility that might exist and locking the flower in place?

Such things make me wonder if our concepts of consciousness, with human consciousness as the benchmark, aren’t a bit too self serving.

Process development and struggle

6 Replies

One of the hazards of having a degree in chemistry is the appealing idea that you can explain everything and predict everything on the basis of textbook notions on solubility, electronegativity, pKa’s, or molecular orbitals. These are important things to be sure. But in the field, the recall of knowledge isn’t always enough. More often than not you have to collect data and generate new knowledge.

Rationale of a result on the basis of hand waving and a few reference points can seem compelling in a meeting or brainstorming with a colleague to understand a problem. But in the end, nothing can top having solid data from well conceived experiments.

My chemical “intuition” have proven wrong enough times now that I am deeply skeptical of it. After prolonged periods of absence from the lab I find myself resorting to a few cherished rules of thumb in trying to predict the outcome or explain the off-normal result of a process.

In chemical process development there is no substitute for running experiments under well controlled conditions and capturing solid results from trustworthy analytical methods. It is hard work. You may have to prepare calibration standards for chromatographic methods rather than the preferred single-transient nmr spectrum  in deuterochloroform.

We’re all tempted to do the convincing quick and dirty single experiment to finesse the endpoint. Certainly time constraints in the manufacturing environnment produce an inexorable tilt towards shortcuts. But in the end, depth of knowledge is only had by hard work and lots of struggle in the lab. The most important part of science seems to be to frame the most insightful questions.The best questions lead to the best experimental results.

Obstreperous Theocracy

1 Reply

So it appears that the US is quietly building up military forces within striking distance of Iran. The island of Diego Garcia (UK) has served as a staging area for standoff weapons. The military-political establishment has been busy with threat analysis and is evidently staging forces to some extent based on their conclusions and evolving policy.

I think there are many credible arguments that rightly assert that Iran is an active threat to what passes for stability in that region. Or at least at the first-order level of political analysis. Iran is plainly an obstreperous theocracy with a particular zeal for the export of its orthodoxy.

As always, the drums begin to beat for war and the business of manufacturing public consent begins in earnest. I’ll go out on a limb and make a gross generalization. All human populations seem to have a fraction, say 1/4 , who are particularly fearful by nature. These are the folks who susbscribe to concrete notions of nationalism, righteousness, and the associated keenness for adherence to orthodox doctrine. These were key proclivities of the US/Soviet cold war era. It is part of a collective consciousness that is especially adept at finding patterns that validate its fundamental fear.

It would seem that we may be in yet another run up to the projection of force on the far side of the world. A good question would be this: Are we addressing the fundamental cause of World-vs-Iran conflict? At minimum we trying to shore up the result of a century of bad western foreign policy.  This region is at the overlap of profound social forces associated with abrupt infusions of petrodollars, reflexive militarism, ethnic antipathy, and religious orthodoxy.

I think that Chomsky has some valid points about the origin of these conflicts. Iran and other groups have used the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a bully pulpit for their own regional ambitions. Obviously there is sincere religious and ethnic outrage over the the Palestinian issue. But a state like Iran is sure to use this conflict to their own political advantage to exercise the projection of power.

The US and other western states have chronically miscalculated the magnitude and direction of regional conflicts.  For instance, would a military strike against Iran be viewed as just an attack on the government of Iran, or as an attack by infidels on Shi ‘ism? Are we prepared for what would follow? I think I can guess the answer.

Andy Grove on Scaleup

5 Replies

Andrew Grove is the former CEO of Intel who was responsible for its transition from memory chip producer to microprocessor producer. According to Wikipedia, Grove is responsible for an increase of 4500 % in Intel’s market capitalization. In his youth he and his family escaped from Budapest, Hungary during the Soviet invasion of 1956. Groves holds a PhD in chemical engineering from UC Berkeley. Grove is now retired and is a senior advisor to Intel.

Grove recently wrote an article for Bloomberg that is quite insightful in its analysis of certain aspects of American corporate culture. In particular, Grove notes the disconnect between US technology startups and the subsequent expansion of business activity leading to job growth. He also notes that startups are failing to scaleup their business activity in the USA. The Silicon Valley job creation machine is powering down.

Grove makes an interesting point here,

A new industry needs an effective ecosystem in which technology knowhow accumulates, experience builds on experience, and close relationships develop between supplier and customer. The U.S. lost its lead in batteries 30 years ago when it stopped making consumer-electronics devices. Whoever made batteries then gained the exposure and relationships needed to learn to supply batteries for the more demanding laptop PC market, and after that, for the even more demanding automobile market. U.S. companies didn’t participate in the first phase and consequently weren’t in the running for all that followed. I doubt they will ever catch up.  Andrew Groves, 2010, Bloomberg.

To build on what Grove is saying, I’ll embellish a bit and add that an industry is actually a network of manufacturers, suppliers, job shops, labor pools, insurers, bankers, and distributors. When deindustrialization occurs, the network of resources collapses. The middle class takes a big hit when a commodity network moves offshore. In the end, the intended market for commodity goods and services- ie., the middle class- is weakened by the very move that was supposed to keep prices down and profits up.

Grove is most concerned with the matter of scaleup. This is the business growth phase that occurs after the entrepreneurship proves its worth in the marketplace. Investors pour money ino large scale operations and staff to get product onto the market. Grove suggests that investment in domestic startups who do not follow on with domestic scaleup are not participating in keeping the magic alive.

Offshore scaleup negatively counteracts the benefit of domestic innovation. In a sense, it is an abdication of the trust given to the entrepreneurs by the citizens who provided the infrastructure to make the innovation possible.

Grove makes a good point in his editorial and I think that the rest of us need to take an active stance to question the facile analysis so often uttered by business leaders when it comes to relocation of business units offshore.  Citizens paid for the infrastructure and a large part of the education that makes our innovative technology possible. There needs to be more public pushback on business leaders and government officials about this topic.

Russia being Russia

2 Replies

It was reported that the Russian Parliament has approved a draft of a law to increase the powers of its FSB, or the remnant of its Soviet era KGB.

The final version is somewhat weakened from its earlier form, which prescribed punishment for individuals who ignored such warnings from the F.S.B. In remarks posted on his party’s Web site this week, Vladimir Vasiliyev, the chairman of the State Duma’s Committee on Security, described the new power as “a preventive conversation” with “someone who is beginning to move toward committing a crime.” (New York Times, July 16, 2010)

Imagine that. A Future Crimes Division.

When asked about the bill by a German reporter during a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday, President Dmitri A. Medvedev said, “what is going on now is the result of my direct instructions,” and that foreign commentators should not concern themselves with it. (New York Times, July 16, 2010)

The police state is back. The Russian gov’t is moving (back) towards policing perceived intent. What a sad day for Russian civilization and the world.  Queen to E5, check.

Viewpoints on American Business

Leave a reply

Over at the Robert Reich blog there is a recent commentary on Chinese currency policy. Reich makes some interesting comments on the Chinese approach to industrialization.

But most fundamentally, China is oriented to production, not consumption. It wants to become the world’s preeminent producer nation. While keeping the yuan artificially low is costly to China — it pushes up the prices of everything China imports — China is willing to bear these costs because its currency policy is really an industrial policy.

We think the basic purpose of an economy is to consume, not to produce. So we only grudgingly support industrial policy. We think of government efforts to rebuild our infrastructure as a “stimulus.” We approve of government investments in basic research and development mainly to make America more secure through advanced military technologies. And we give American companies tax credits for R&D wherever they do it around the world.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that US companies will continue to make big profits from sales in China. China allows big U.S. and foreign companies to sell in China on condition that production takes place in China – often in joint ventures with Chinese companies. It wasn’t American know-how, so it can eventually replace the US firms with China firms.  [Italics by Gaussling]

It seems to me that American policy leaders have no clue whatsoever on how to coexist or compete with China economically. Because of the authoritarianism in contemoporary Chinese culture, they are able to focus their resources on long term goals while we in the USA rely on a kind of economic Darwinism. It seems that we are waiting for the rational forces of the marketplace to take us forward in the economic struggle with China.  In reality, American businesses have no nationality. Their obligation is only to achieve maximum shareholder value, irrespective of parochial concepts of national interest.

Americans like to put on a show of maintaining an orthodox capitalistic stance against a nation state like China. One with a centrally controlled economy.  Unfair currency policy is a foreign policy that China is using to leverage the flow of export dollars their way.  Somehow we are content to play cards with an opponent who has stacked the deck.

It is worth remembering that much of the technology that economically emergent states use to energize their manfacuring sectors was paid for by US citizens over the last 100 years. Electronics , metallurgy, chemistry, aerospace, transportation, automation. The US has made substantial contributions to technologies that are now ubiquitous.

These emergent states have not funded generations of successive invention and improvement to achieve their semiconductor FAB or petrochemical complex. Corporate investors dropped it out of the sky.  This technology that we have been busy exporting has been dearly paid for by generations of hard working citizens here. Yet, through the exercise of advanced business philosophies, this magic of ours has been transplanted off shore to the benefit of a few.

I think there is an assumption that our American democracy is somehow a uniquely robust form of democracy. It is hard to make that argument anymore. A culture that equates money with speech and validates it in the Supreme Court is a culture that accepts the notion that the congress is part of the marketplace of goods and services.

In the face of a shift in the global economic center of gravity, Americans are busy in an orgy of fratricidal disassembly of its institutions. Journalism and independent media come to mind.  The former watchdogs of democracy are now quasi-analytical entertainment divisions of a few major comglomerates.

The market is like a stomach. It has no brain. It only knows that it wants more. I think nations like China know this about us and take full advantage of the fact that we like to wear the badge of orthodox capitalist on our sleeves. In a way we are just country bumpkins who have never traveled out of the county. We’ll be true to our doctrine as we run aground.

I think that, in the end, publically owned corporations will be the death of our economic vitality. Blind reverence for CEO’s who maneuver a dividend no matter what the economic climate force this species of organization to abdicate any sense of national affiliation. It’s been happening for many years. Legions of B-school students study the strategy of Jack Welch and similar ethically agnostic characters who serve the greater good of the corporation.

Instead, legions of B-school students should be trying to figure out how to sustain American manufacturing rather than how to outsource it. These people should not confuse M&A with progress. Making things and offering services that people want is how progress happens. If taxes are too high to sustain business within these borders, then an open effort to bring corporate taxes into line based on mathematically defensable arguments should be made. To work for progress is to be progressive. We need more progressive business people, not more financial wizards. The grownups of America need to step up.

NatGeo King Tut Exhibit- Ho Humtep of the Ballyhoo Dynasty

Leave a reply

Th’ Gaussling went on a minor field trip recently to the local art museum in Denvertown to see the marvels of King Tut. And what a marvel it was … of marketing. It is hard to say that the exhibit met expectations. To be sure, there are some fine artifacts on display.  And it is a splendid example of museum-craft. Notable is the exquisite goldsmithing and scuplture on display. There are decorative articles that resemble a form of gold filigree that are quite impressive for the era. My northern European ancestors were sleeping in hollow logs and howeling at the moon when the Egyptians were doing the work on display.

But at the end of the day, the exhibit is yet another recasting of history in a theatrical form suitable for the attention deficit masses. Case in point:  a video short subject portrays DNA work on a mummy where the scientist assures us that such research is a part of the larger effort to cure disease.  Golly, sounds urgent.

Well, maybe there will be useful findings that contribute to the betterment of human health. But if it doesn’t , is the knowledge useless? I think not. This is the same sort of lame apologia used for jusifying space exploration or studying the frogs of Amazonia. If you are not looking around, you are not going to find new things.

Scientists should stand firm with the conviction that exploration is a net benefit for mankind. We should be more careful that claims of a breakthrough are tempered bya realistic warning about the speed of progress.  We should stop leading people along with false expectations about the fabulous things just around the corner. All progress is the result of prolonged hard work by many people.

Lithium Dreams

Leave a reply

A well written article on the supply situation of lithium can be found at the Daily Kos. There is no point in my adding to it except to say that I second the motion. The USA needs to get serious about forging relationships fostering stable lithium supplies.

Update:  Journalists have only now “uncovered” a 2007 USGS report on the mineral resources of Afganistan.  Prospecting for minerals in Afganistan- there is a plum job for a westerner. Imagine doing anything there? Not least of which, poking around in the countryside attracting IED’s and snipers. Even better, imagine trying to work a deal with the authorities (whatever that means) to obtain mineral rights?  I’ll bet the South Africans are working a deal this very moment. 

When is comes to minerals, China has been building relationships in Africa for a while now. I get the sense that China is centrally focused on manufacturing oriented activity rather than just running finance games of chance. China hasn’t forgotten that infrastructure is built upon access to natural resources and is quietly stitching itself into the supply side of the market. America, with its great hordes of MBA’s and strutting bankers, seems to have an unhealthy fetish for financial gymnastics and celebrity.

American CEO’s of public corporations will tell you that they have a fiduciary responsibilty to maximize shareholder value. Based on the way the rules are written, they are right. The corporate masters of the western world will be replaced if they lose sight of this fact. After all, Rome could have been built in a quarter if they had the right consultants and financing, couldn’t it?

This structural shortsightedness predisposes them to focus on financial instrumentalities that operate on the same short time interval as they do.  You can’t build a factory, grow the business, and earn profit over one or a few quarters. But you can put monies into accounts which promise a return on a quarterly basis beginning the day of the transfer. What if that fiduciary argument could be put to rest? What if a CEO didn’t have to emulate Jack Welch?

The USA needs new thinking on how to operate manufacturing businesses profitably within its borders in a manner that they are not so easily subject to obsolescence by competing foreign operations with a lower tax base and lower labor overhead. Existing theories of city planning, zoning, and suburbia must be reconsidered. 

In a previous posting I recalled the experience of walking through the back streets of Bangkok, Thailand. There I saw endless streets lined with shops that served both a mercantile and residential function. The shopkeepers lived in their shops. They could consolidate their assets and labor to serve the need for shelter and for making their living.

American workers have little opportunity to consolidate their assets in this manner. Their wages must cover rent or a mortgage to provide shelter which cannot be put to work. This severely limits entrepreneurial options, rendering the worker subject to the vagaries of  employment by others. If a US worker loses his/her job, they have little in the way of self-help options for survival because of municipal zoning. If one wanted to sell custom furniture or repair cars, they would have to find a properly zoned space. But this takes resources up front along with licenses, tax ID #’s, insurance, etc., and most US workers are poorly prepared for this eventuality.

Lower pay might be tolerable in the USA if employees could have a lower cost of living. One way to do that is to offer company owned housing for employees. Interest payments on a mortgage or residential rents are a large part of an employees lifetime expenses. If an employee had the option of living in housing provided by his/her employer at a reduced interest rate, part of the savings in living costs would be captured by the company in a correspondingly reduced payroll or a rent arrangement. I get the feeling that large groups of hourly workers out there would give this a try if it were available.

This is not part of the current standard model of US business or of US lifestyle. “Company store” models have been used in the past with less than happy results. But it strikes me that if you want to build a viable textile mill or zinc smelter in the US, for example, a factory with a company dormatory will be needed to make the thing fly.

The reindustrialization of the USA will need this kind of change in lifestyle to bring back low and medium skill industrial jobs. High labor overhead is not stable in a world of low labor and tax rates abroad. The metrics of the American Dream have to be recalibrated to account for competition and the loss of the frontier with its endless resources and space.  

What is most worrisome about the current political and economic epoch is the fragmentation of the middle class. Societies become unstable when large swaths of the the middle class become unemployed and begin to adopt ultra-nationalist sentiments. The Tea Party movement is the result of elements of fascist thinking entering into the dialog. Chomsky has pointed out some parallels found earlier in the 20th century. The current extent and intensity of the certitude of patriotic ideals has been seen before in recent history and with terrible effect. Fascist thinking requires pushback from the center of the bell curve or the xenophobic dread that it spreads may become uncontrollable.

Entrenched maladaptive behaviors displayed by US businesses and government are a real barrier to stability over the long term. We in the USA assert superiority in many areas of activity, but show very little ability to actually adapt to the dynamics of global politics. Mindless adherence to threadbare nationalistic doctrine and tired notions of “greatness'” will not get us out of economic trouble. But an imaginative and adaptive marketplace can help.