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$$ Pump Kit

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I was a little surprised at the pump head rebuild kits for my two chemical metering pumps in the lab. They were $662 each. I don’t know what I was expecting given the small size of the pump heads. It just seems like a lot of money. These are ProMinent pumps and have always given good service. I guess I am not calibrated correctly.

The metering pumps feed a Mettler-Toledo instrument, so I should be used to expensive parts. Everything from Mettler seems to be priced in multiples of $2500 and is shipped on a crippled barge from Europe. Just kidding. Mettler makes good equipment but they are a bit on the slow side.

Again, #45 Blows a Gasket About the Pulitzer

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Warning. What follows has political content that may offend some readers.

The former president, that is #45, has been busy venting gas about how his demand that the Pulitzer Prize board withdraw two 2018 prizes has been denied. One, to the Washington Post for investigative reporting and the other to The New York Times for public service . This pathetic man, the anointed savior of evangelical MAGA Republicans and the Lord High Magistrate of what is right for the MAGA way of life, openly and strenuously defecates on anyone who annoys or contradicts him. You might think that such a man of demonstrated low ethical and moral character would be immediately dismissed by conservative Americans. You know, the people who feel that they are the keepers of what’s good and right about America. As we all know, this hasn’t happened. He is still believed by a great many to be the right guy to “drain the swamp” in Washington, DC. It seems that no disgrace can bump him off this pedestal or repel his followers.

I describe myself as a pragmatic liberal. I accept the reality and value to a fair extent of capitalist markets and the need to reasonably control the reach of government. However I do believe in the value of a united America where citizens can trust that large scale and international issues can be handled by the federal government.

What a shame it is that the US is burdened with #45 and his MAGA cultists in a time of serious global tension posed by two authoritarian regimes aiming to knock us down more than a few notches. They assault the country daily with attacks over the internet. China’s respect for American intellectual property is and has always been nil. Since the 1970’s, China has been sending students and scientists to the US for an education in science and engineering. They returned to their country to help build the technological powerhouse that they now are. It has successfully rallied it’s population with many years of scornful propaganda against the US and liberal democracy. So far, China has been successful in it’s plan to economically dominate much of Africa and it’s mineral resources. It is flexing it’s muscles in the South China Sea and aggressively menacing Taiwan as it applies economic pressure on Australia to accept it’s dominating presence in the region.

Russia, as the free world knows, has invaded Ukraine on laughably fictitious grounds and is pummeling the country to rubble with constant artillery fire. Russia is fighting a war of extermination as it wantonly rapes and murders innocent civilians. The homicidal Putin has dug himself in with a wall around himself that seems impregnable to an internal rebellion. He is a psychopath with nuclear weapons and an army who is bent on shaping his part of the world into the Mother Russia he imagines it once was.

All of this and more is happening in the world around us. The world order that the US has come to structure itself around is coming apart. All the while, America is preoccupied with a circular firing squad of squabbling over religious and political abstractions. Our two-party system limps along with one party rotting to the bone. The American Republican party has morphed into a 2-headed monster thanks to #45 and his unrelenting incitement of the lunatic fringe and those left behind by technological and economic progress.

The American experiment with fascism is accelerating as ultraconservatives buckle their seatbelts in political positions ranging from school boards and county representatives to state houses and the US congress. America’s vast political middle ground trends towards lazy disinterest with a long record of low voter turnout. The ultra-right knows and relies on the laziness of the left and center.

Ultraconservative evangelical preachers have been on the airwaves for decades pushing their twisted theory of the universe. Their rhetorical skills are considerable. The brick and mortar preachers are now teaching followers that the end is near and #45 has been sent by God to smooth the way for the prophesied apocalypse set to begin in Israel.

Somebody once said, “when fascism comes to America, it will be draped in a flag and carrying a cross.” It’s beginning to look that way.

The Id, Ego, Super-Ego, and the Stupid

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I thought I’d add a new component to Freud’s structural model of the psyche. That would be the Stupid. It sits apart from the Id in that it can be at play in both the conscious and the unconscious mind. Unlike the Id, the Stupid can be both subconscious and premeditated. It can slip out as an urgent flash from the lizard brain and fly past the ego into full view. Freud felt that the role of the ego was to mediate between the Id and reality. Sometimes, thoughts can overwhelm the mind’s layers of protection. The Stupid can display itself in its full regalia abruptly or after much rumination. It begins with a swirl of feelings that erupt into a kind of psychic solar flare that blasts out into the world for all to see. For a glorious moment it provides a pulse of gratification that seems “Oh, So Right”. But being the Stupid, it can promptly collapse under the weight of it’s own, well, stupidity, or it can float around out there and mingle with the thoughts of others for a long period of time. Even find it’s way into print for all eternity like this post.

Of course, the previous paragraph, while having an appealing ring to it, is total fiction.

My interest is in rehabilitating the word “stupid” in my own mind. I have always avoided using the word because I believed it was meant to accuse someone of being mentally deficient and therefore slanderous. It is widely felt that even if well founded, its use is rude. I had a midwestern Lutheran upbringing and so rude was something that you just don’t do.

I’ve been struggling to find a word that describes a person who harbors Republican evangelical, fascist or totalitarian fantasies, but who may appear and function normally. They seem to be everywhere. While I would like to include those who attempt a gibbering explanation of a libertarian utopia, I’m as yet undecided. A wave of the hand and dismissal with a bell curve argument isn’t enough. Is this cognitive elitism? Yeah, pretty much.

Mental deficiency is only one of several meanings of the word stupid. Google defines stupid as “having or showing a great lack of intelligence or common sense.” Excoriating someone for being mentally deficient or lacking in intelligence is mean spirited and is to be avoided in a civilized world.

The question of how common is common sense is a matter of debate. At its base, common sense would be a grasp or recognition of something that most would agree should be obvious to everyone. But, it seems to me that common sense is something that is learned over time and experience. You couldn’t just pop out of the womb and instinctively know that safety glasses should be worn when handling chemicals. People will vary widely in their inventory of common sense notions. Maybe common sense cannot be a universal package of instinct. Maybe the very idea of common sense rests on feet of clay. That it is just a rhetorical slight-of-hand used to make a hasty judgement and win the argument.

According to Wiktionary, stupid can also mean “exhibiting the quality of having been done by someone lacking in intelligence”. “Exhibiting the quality” is not the same as being fundamentally unintelligent, is it? It’s just the appearance of unintelligent. I think I’ll run with that.

I’ll have to come clean. I have shown a good deal of exhibiting the quality of stupidity in the past by my previous unfortunate choices. No, seriously, it is true. But that doesn’t disqualify me from recognizing it elsewhere. I know what I’m looking for.

Kissinger: Status Quo Ante for Ukraine

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Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, aged 99, has released a new book recently titled “Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy” and as a result has been on the interview circuit. A review of his life can be found on Wikipedia. An interesting interview was reported on Spiegel International recently. I was alive when Kissinger was doing shuttle diplomacy in Viet Nam and when he and Nixon went to China for the summit with Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong in 1972. Nixon’s trip to China was a very big event then.

Right at the start of the interview, Spiegel asked Kissinger about a comment he is alleged to have said at the recent Davos conference. Kissinger was quick to correct the report.

Der Spiegel: “… Is this what you had in mind with your recent statement at the World Economic Forum in Davos, when you suggested that Ukraine accept a temporary division of the country, developing one part into a pro-Western, democratic and economically strong nation while waiting for history to reunite the country as a whole?”

Kissinger: “What I said is this: To end this war, the best dividing line would be the status quo ante, which means 93 percent of the country. That’s quite a different thing. If one identifies the status quo ante as the objective, that would mean that aggression has not succeeded. The issue, then, is a ceasefire along the February 24 line of contact. The territory still controlled by Russia, which makes up about 2.5 percent of Ukrainian territory in the Donbas as well as the Crimean Peninsula, would then be part of a general negotiation.”

Kissinger goes on the comment on China and Taiwan. He suggests that while the US is involved with Russian aggression indirectly, a Chinese attack on Taiwan would be full scale and put the US and China in direct conflict.

Kissinger believes in the support given to Ukraine by NATO to defeat Russian aggression. He goes on to emphasize that Europe needs to find a working relationship with Russia irrespective of the outcome of the Russian-Ukrainian war. He says-

 “… the relationship of Russia to Europe needs to be addressed, namely the question as to whether it is a part of European history, or a permanent opponent based on other territories. That will become a main issue. And it is one that is independent of the conclusion of the war in Ukraine …”.

This kind of strategic thinking is in the realm of statesmanship.

Georgia Guidestones

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Somebody set off a bomb at the Guidestones in Georgia causing serious damage to the monument. Georgia GOP primary candidate Kandiss Taylor had urged the destruction of the “Satanic Guidestones”. And somebody done went and did it. The writing on the Guidestones said-

“Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature; Guide reproduction wisely, improving fitness and diversity; Unite humanity with a living new language; Rule passion, faith, tradition, and all things with tempered reason; Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts; Let all nations rule internally, resolving external disputes in a world court; Avoid petty laws and useless officials; Balance personal rights with social duties; Prize truth, beauty, love … seeking harmony with the infinite; Be not a cancer on earth — leave room for nature — leave room for nature.”

It’s pretty radical. Imagine promoting the idea of fair laws and just courts. Or seeking harmony. All without the mention of a deity and supernatural dominion. Obviously, this absence of religious underpinning automatically infers the foul deeds of Old Nick, the Prince of Darkness, or Mephistopheles. Mercy sakes alive! Planting a monument that offers secular suggestions of living a good life for its own sake. It was a scandal.

The only friction spot I can see is the suggestion of a maximum world population of 500 million. I think most biologists would agree with this, but it ain’t gonna happen. Imagine trying to suggest to folks to be smarter about reproduction. Overpopulation is happening and only famine, disease, or nuclear world war will slow it down.

There are easily enough folks around who indulge their Iron Age beliefs strongly enough to produce someone who could construct an effective bomb and use it. I’m sure somebody up in the holler was dancing a jig afterwards.

Results Back From Hayabusa2 Mission to Ryugu

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A research article in the 9 June 2022 issue of Science reports analytical results from the samples returned from the Hayabusa2 mission to the asteroid Ryugu. Kudos to Science for making the article available for free. The craft rendezvoused with the asteroid 27 June 2018 and returned 2 samples with a successful landing in Australia on 6 December 2020. The authors report that they were allotted ~125 mg and used 95 mg of sample for the work in the article.

The article, by over 140 coauthors, is a densely written chemical/mineral/isotopic abundance paper for specialists in cosmochemistry (which is definitely not me). The article concludes that the samples resemble C1 Chondrites absent “sulfates, ferrihydrite, and interlayer water”. According to the article, C1 Chondrites bear a close resemblance in elemental composition to the solar photosphere.

On the Slow Progression to Fascism

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Caution. Political sentiment expressed below. Brittle folk may want to shuffle on by.

I’ve been trying and failing badly to keep my political thoughts out of this blog. I’m a left-of-center atheist white male scientist affiliated with neither political party. But things are happening in the USA. Bad things. I have come to believe they are indicators of a darker, non-democratic future. A slide away from democracy is a far too important a problem to leave to “others”.

For generations scientists have come to believe that the scientific establishment is and should remain a kind of a neutral cultural subset in the manner of Switzerland. But right now there are people aiming and succeeding to take power in the USA in order to dismantle and restructure what has been a fruitful civilization to satisfy their evangelical iron age religious urgings and their desire for some kind of ultraconservative Shangri-La where corporations rule and every teacher is a qualified sniper. While I exaggerate a little, progress is nonetheless being made.

Scientists can bring their quantitative analysis skills, their powers of persuasion and ability to find and use sources of credible information to the table. The ability to synthesize solutions to problems is another important skill that needs to be out and about. Scientists need to come out into the open a bit more.

A blog that I have long frequented but have never shared publicly is the Daily Kos. It is a popular progressive site consisting of staff writers and many guest contributors. Just as even I have to admit that occasionally a Republican writer has produced some valuable analysis and insight into things, I’ll propose the same about a progressive writer. That writer today is Thomas Hartman who is a progressive talk show host and NY Times best selling author. Recently he posted an article titled “What Would an American Fascist State Look Like?”.

I won’t waste time and bandwidth on a review of the piece, but briefly he articulates very clearly what it might look like to be in a state that is sliding into fascism and cites examples of common strong-man behavior. Now is not the time to begin to worry about a transition to a fascist state. The time to begin was 2016. We’re already behind.

As I stand here looking right then left, I see one political party that has made its intentions known regarding its determined path towards a Christo-fascist state. The other dithers and self-immolates into a dumpster fire with no strong leaders, lazy voters and ambitious ideals far too early for the present culture.

Liquid Gallium-Platinum Catalyst

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An interesting article has just come out on a liquid metal platinum/gallium solution catalyst composition showing substantially greater activity. The article reference is: Rahim, M.A., Tang, J., Christofferson, A.J. et al. Low-temperature liquid platinum catalyst. Nat. Chem. (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41557-022-00965-6. The publisher charges for a download of the article. I didn’t shell out $32 for a copy so all I’ve seen is the abstract.

Being in chemical manufacturing, I can say that Platinum Group Metal (PGM) catalysts can represent a significant raw material cost in manufacturing even though it is used in “catalytic quantities”. Low catalyst loading is always desirable because of cost, but the trade-off is longer reaction time and/or higher pressure and temperature. Production scale high pressure vessels may not be available at organizations that do little high pressure work. At some point catalyst cost savings are canceled out by extended production time or more severe conditions. Fishing out catalyst from filter cake and preparing it for reuse can be time consuming and costly and may not be worthwhile.

Some PGM catalysts can even ignite a combustible atmosphere and also provide a dust hazard to workers. Extra handling is problematic. Most bulk suppliers take PGM waste back from their customers for recycle.

What has captured everyone’s attention about this gallium/platinum composition is the enhanced reaction rates reported for the electrochemical oxidation of methanol. Rahim et al. report a rate enhancement of “three orders of magnitude” over solid platinum catalysts at temperatures between 318 – 343 Kelvin.

The authors state that the Ga/Pt liquid catalyst mixture contains atomically dispersed Pt atoms within the gallium matrix. The mixture is prepared by simply contacting solid platinum pellets with liquid gallium to make a solution. Ideally, solid catalyst particles should be as small as possible to minimize the unfavorable surface to volume ratio. Solid platinum or other PGM catalysts are only active at the surface. The Pt/Ga mixture provides highly active atomic platinum at the liquid surface where presumably the chemistry happens.

In my experience with gallium, I’ve noticed that the metal will wet some surfaces like glass and plastic. Perhaps the gallium film on glass I saw is only an oxide layer- I don’t know. But it would seem that maximizing the availability of platinum atoms over a larger surface would be a good next step for even better efficiency.

Oh Marjorie, What Next?

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Warning. If you don’t like liberal political content, then it’s probably best to move along.

Marjorie Taylor Greene was taken to task on her earlier statements suggesting that dark Jewish interests were involved in corruption at PG&E and certain California wildfires. In November 2018, she went on a Twitter diatribe about wildfires in California and how it appeared to some that “lasers or blue beams of light” caused the fires. Earlier in the tweet, Greene said that a PG&E board member was also vice chairman of Rothschilds, Inc., an international investment banking firm, and had provided funding to Gov. Jerry Brown. Brown, she claims, signed a bill that allowed PG&E to pass it’s costs from the fires along to the customers. She claims later that she didn’t know that using the word “Rothschilds” was an anti-semitic dog whistle. There may be elements of truth imbedded in her brain dump of words.

Then Greene strings the “analysis” along to PG&E’s connection to Solaren and space-based solar energy generators. She speculates that the orbital solar energy generator may have mistakenly beamed energy onto California and started the wildfires.

This is a good example of how conspiracy theories get started. There is some foundational truth in her words. PG&E had agreed to purchase energy from the startup Solaren as early as 2009. And Solaren did have technology for the beaming of RF energy from space. However, the story goes non-linear when anecdotal information arises claiming that “lasers or blue beams of light” are seen coinciding with forest fires where inference transmogrified into cause. Greene does not overtly state that energy from space in fact caused the fires. A knot of brain cells somewhere tells her to be careful with that. Greene only has to raise the question to imply it.

This is exactly what Fox News people like Carlson and Hannity do. They misdirect by claiming that they were “only asking the question.” In fact they are asking leading questions. A leading question is one that prompts a desired answer. It is a very effective tool in grooming anger, fear and suspicion in the population as well as bringing profitable ad revenue to Fox. For people who enjoy being lead into the dark side, saying that they are being bamboozled won’t matter. This dark art would not have been unknown to propagandists like Joseph Goebbels.

The question for the rest of us is this- How do we discourage unfounded conspiracy mania in political discourse? Continuous education? Loud denials with stamping of the feet? My feeling is that it only begins early with better secular K-12 education that sharpens analytical skills in young people. But that is the easy part. The harder part would be increasing economic opportunity for a middle class life and affordable housing. If life is a constant struggle to make ends meet, if you have little or no discretionary income, or if you have a go-nowhere job, then anger and despair with “the deep state” will be a constant companion and discolor your outlook. My guess is that most MAGA adults are refractory to persuasion and are likely to live out their lives with their misguided Trump fantasies.

Silent, democracy-minded people out there can help by speaking up and voting, to begin with. False and misleading assertions should not go unanswered. Advertisers who pay for the broadcasting of inciteful and malignant content should be shunned on the large scale. People like Australian Rupert Murdoch must be held accountable for the purposeful and profitable content that damages American culture. True damage to America does not require the breaking of laws. It only requires the loss of faith in democracy.

Russia’s Dark Future

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For you Russophiles out there, Nina L. Khrushcheva, great-grand daughter of Nikita Khrushchev, has written a short essay on how Putin’s war might play out. In an earlier essay, she asks the question-

“Stalinism didn’t die until Stalin did. The same was true of Maoism. Will it be true of Putinism as well?“

Like others, Khrushcheva makes a case for Putin’s desire to establish an “Orthodox Christian kingdom of Rus”. These are interesting but very dangerous times.