Category Archives: Science

There Be Dragons!

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There is a theory brewing that the ignorant wielding of statistics-based risk management is deep at the heart of the current financial panic. Nassim Nicholas Taleb is quite outspoken in this matter. He goes on at length about the inadequacies of statistical methods for financial risk management.

NY Times writer Joe Nocera [link may require free subscription] echoes this sentiment- but in greater breadth- in a recent article in the NYT. Nocera focuses on Value at Risk- VaR.  Since my statistics training is limited, the reader will have to draw their own conclusions on the merits of this methodology.

Taleb warned about “Black Swans” a while back in a book by that title.  A man not overly burdened with modesty, Taleb has transcended to the status of an Illuminati due to his prescience on the blindness of statistics-based financial risk management in predicting low frequency catastrophic events, or Black Swans.

Perhaps the old cartographic flourish “There Be Dragons!” should be updated to “There Be Black Swans!”

Flux-O-Links

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The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission website offers a downloadable set of documents pertaining to Fire Dynamics along with a few spreadsheets and loads of worked problems. The set of documents is quite well done in my estimation and is entirely suitable for we industrial chemists. My operating principle is that it never hurts to keep learning about fire phenomena when you work around flammable materials.

Gotten a little rusty in your welding theory?

An affordable spectrum analyzer is just what a fellow needs for the radio observatory.

Need pure Astatine, see p 19.  Light up the accelerator and dial up the proton current.

Empty Seat on the Carbon Bandwagon

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Sometimes it is best to simply shut up and link to a superior post. This is such a time. In a recent posting, one writer, Harold Ambler, comes out against Al Gore in the global warming debate. While I am skeptical about his assertions on the effect of the solar flux on the earths geomagnetic dynamo, I think Ambler otherwise brings together quite a few good points I have seen elsewhere.

The ticket to my seat on the carbon bandwagon will soon post on Ebay.

Nernstian Sunrise in the Cryosphere

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WAWAwawa ..wawa..wawawa..waawaa..waaawaaa..wa..wa……wa……….wa.

The thermometer read -20 F this morning. It hasn’t been that cold for a few years.  As I sat in the Jeep listening to my battery die hard, my mind wandered fondly to the green meadows of P-Chem and the Nernst equation. This equation sets forth the relationship between temperature and cell potential.  The University of Arizona has this fantastic Nernst simulator (web version) that lets you dial in temperature and immediately see the effect on the voltage of the electrochemical cell.  It is plain to see that as the temperature drops, the EMF drops as well.

Knowing that nature wouldn’t let me summon sufficient wattage from my battery, I went back inside and switched on CNN.  After seeing multiple replays of an indignant journalist hurling a pair of shoes at our president, I was treated to an ad by the Central Intelligence Agency- the CIA. Yeah, the CIA is advertising on CNN!  Take a minute to get your arms around that.

Strangely, uncharacteristically perhaps, I experienced a synergistic swelling of sympathy after seeing the shots of Bush II being assaulted by Iraqi footwear followed by the patriotic CIA ad. For a moment- just a sparkle in time- a quorum of voices in my head agreed that somebody should kick that journalist’s ass. Bush II may be a buffoon, but he is OUR buffoon and nobody should treat him like that. There- I said it.

Aqueous Enceladus

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With the revelation that streams of water ejected from the Saturnian moon Enceladus may arise from subsurface liquid water, the space science crowd is abuzz with excitement about the possibility of life on this frosted novelty moon. It seems to me that if there is aqueous life under the surface of Enceladus, then some of it should have been blown ejected above the surface by these geysers. In fact, a few of the hapless critters may be lying about on the surface this very moment wearing an expression of shock and dismay on their frozen xenomorphic faces. How embarrassing for them.

The three cosmic damp spots- Earth, Europa, and Enceladus. I wonder how long it will take for a lander proposal to get serious evaluation? Life on Enceladus is as likely to resemble a microbial mat as anything.  A lander would have to consider microscopic examination of samples.

Upslope

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We had an upslope storm come and go here in Colorado. It left solid phase hydroxylic acid all over the place. Fortunately, my Jeep has a special traction setting for that situation.

State officials have attempted to deal with it by using Group 1 and Group 2 metal halides as well as diaminocarbonyl to affect the colligative properties of the hydroxylic acid crystals.  This leads to an increase in the friction coefficient of the asphaltene and hydrated calcium oxide conglomerates used by motorists.

Weighty Cogitations on Borohydride

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I have been making a conscious effort to find ways to use borohydride compounds rather than just default to the mighty gray sledge hammer- LAH. There are numerous reports of diverse and wonderful means of activating borohydride to reduce the more refractory functional groups. Recently I prepared and used Zn(BH4)2 on a new substrate. Initially, it appears to work poorly. The grey wall cake seems to contain metallic zinc. If preferences mattered, I’d prefer see electrons reducing my substrate rather than Zn (II) to Zn.

You can’t always get what you want.     M. Jagger

Failing to Ask Better Questions

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We may be entering a time of greater economic hardship than many have known in their lives. The great age of mass consumption, non-returnables, and disposable goods may have peaked.  Boarding the Hummer or the Escalade to drive 5 miles to buy cigarettes and a Big Gulp may be a thing of the past for a greater number of citizens. Americans will have to adopt a lifestyle much more akin to Europe or Japan- reduced living space and reduced (kg of crap)/(person year), reduced portion sizes, more walking, local shopping, and increased use of rail transportation.

The Oil Shock of Summer 2008 snagged the suspenders of this nation of hydrocarbon addicts, sending us reeling into the election/market crash machinery like a drunken farmer pulled into the thresher. Out the back end of this nightmare comes the bloody oat chaff to hint that something horrific happened. Reality strikes, then … silence.

In spite of the plurality of media outlet channels into our collective consciousness, few infotainers are drilling into the core of the problem. The pace and timing of commercial media sets the rhythm of infotainment metered to the masses. Photogenic talking heads selected for their appeal read predigested content for broadcast to attention deficit channel surfers. People dulled by the sheer magnitude of content-dilute information streams and dazzled by the production value of infotainment are compelled to switch on HBO and hide from the world.

Here is what we must do. We must see to it that better questions are being investigated. Instead of asking about the replacement for gasoline, we must ask for a frank disclosure on the sustainability of high consumption. Instead of asking for better or hybrid automobiles, we must frame questions around the concept of a mass transportation network. How can we get intercity rail up and running? How can the Detroit automobile manufactures be cajoled into entering the rail infrastructure business? Where is the hydrogen going to come from to fuel the hydrogen economy? Does it make sense to consume energy to generate hydrogen and then turn around and burn it for propulsion?

The best answers come from the best questions.

The Cost of Scientific Information. Who Pays and Who Gets Paid?

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For anyone outside of academia who has not actually received an invoice from Chemical Abstracts for literature retrieval services, let me assure you that literature searches will cost you real money.

CAS has weighted the basic search operations and defined them in a menu of task equivalents. When you subscribe, you purchase a bundle of tasks. Tasks can be used like a chit- they can be applied for a variety of search operations. Some search operations are assigned a higher value than others. Obviously, a group of big wheels at CAS sat down in a room and hammered out what they perceive the value of a given operation to be.

At this point, it is useful to remind folks that price is not properly based on cost, it is based on what the customer is willing to pay. CAS has an army of clerks punching abstracts into the database, so they do have some real overhead. While CAS honchos are mindful of paying the overhead, they are also trying to find a pricepoint for their information services. On this I do sympathize with them.

However, where I part ways with this organization relates to the monopolistic arrangement they have with information paid for by citizens of this country. The major pipelines of chemical research information seem to plumb directly into CAS and the ACS.  Research that does not get published by the ACS goes to a variety of private publishing houses. The common thread is the transfer of copyright to the publishing house. By turning over the copyright of publically funded research to these organizations, the public relenquishes the right to free access to results it has paid for.

In a very real way, the published results of our university research complex represents national treasure. What do we do with it? We hand it over to publishing organizations who print it in exchange for the copyright. In this way, we can keep paying for access indefinitely.

In fact, lets highlight some of the features of this transfer of wealth and the cost to society of scientific literature-

  1. Citizens and corporations pay taxes to support the various funding agencies like NSF, NIH, DoE, DoT, DoD, etc., as well as provide private grants.
  2. Funding agencies award grants to institutions and researchers to pay for the conduct of research.
  3. Researchers take a combination of funds and pay for stipends, fellowships, materials, and overhead to support the people who do research.
  4. Research is performed and results are communicated as publications.
  5. Researchers sign over the copyright to their work in exchange for publication.
  6. Publishers such as the ACS, Wiley, Elsevier, etc., then hold a copyright on the content in perpetuity.
  7. For the rest of time, the citizenry who paid for the results have to pay a fee to get a copy of the paper, or travel to the nearest University library and hope that the publication isn’t in deep archival storage and unavailable that day.
  8. Thanks to the Bayh-Dole Act, institutions can patent the results of federally funded work. This means that the hopeful citizens of the USA are barred from the practice of the art they paid for. In fact, they have to work out a license agreement which will include a royalty (with audit trail) and probably a hefty upfront, non-refundable, fee to get the ball rolling.
  9. Despite this royalties cash stream that universities have access to, tuition and fees continue to rise well above inflation.
  10. If you are a chemical scholar out of the cover of academic discounting, you face the full brunt of literature search costs yourself. A monograph or book on any given chemistry topic could easily cost $10,000 in non-academic SciFinder charges (ie., $68 per reaction search). A typical technical book may provide an author $3,000 to $10,000 in royalties over 5 years.

Well, you say, the benefit is to society as a whole. The science we pay for goes into society where, like an incoming tide, lifts all boats.

Nonesense! This tide lifts the good ship Elsevier and the USS Chemical Abstracts. It helps large universities get larger. The generation of information has become a cash cow for a handful of organizations who are subject to precious little scrutiny by those who freely supply the scientific content that keeps the system going.