GOP setting up for a repeat of 1994

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It is interesting to watch the GOP setting up a 2010 slam dunk like a bunch of beach vollyball players. After the House Dems served the bail-out bill across the political net, the House GOP tapped the ball vertically to give the Senate a chance to scramble under it and slam it in the face of president Obama who’s standing next to the net, doe-eyed with optimism.

While Obama is making nice with the GOP by trying to be cooperative, the House Dems load the bill with goodies like ravenous college students load their scuffed melamine plates at an all-you-can-eat salad bar. To the delight of the GOP, they now have a plausibly deniable excuse for being uncooperative with the Obama administration. And the Housed Dems have served it up on a garnished platter.

The GOP leadership exclaims with alligator tears dripping onto their tailored suits, “How can we possibly accept the imposition of such tremendous debt on future generations of Americans? We believe, like Ronald Reagan, that tax cuts are the best stimulus for America.” Harumph, grunt, snort.

The Dem world view is to embrace new ideas and use government as a lever for doing good. The GOP world view is that government is bad, except for defense of property, and the economic Darwinism of the market should determine how civilization is shaped. Liberals tend to be eclectic and less focused on tangible goals. Conservatives tend to be doctrinaire and acquisitive. Obviously, there are exceptions.

President Obama is foolishly assuming that GOPers are just like Dems at heart. If only they could sup together they could find common ground. What the Obama Dems have failed to grasp is that the GOP wants to annex that common ground for their own new subdivision.

The GOP is plainly setting up for a turnaround in the upcoming 2010 midterm election. They are priming their huddled supporters for a campaign of  Limbaugh bile and Hannity disaffection with the Obama administration, in the same manner that Gingrich did in 1994 to the Clinton Administration by riling up the bible-belt like a nest of hornets.

The truth is that the GOP does not share the aspirations annunciated by the Obama Dems. The GOP leadership are more like Mongolian horsemen and the Dems are like a bunch of sod farmers. The only hope the sod farmers have is that the Mongolians will fall off their horses again.

It’s too painful to watch.

Dark Spot

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Darkness as Metaphor

Darkness as Metaphor

The photo credit goes to Marc Imhoff, Project Scientist for NASA’s Terra satellite, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.  Shown at night are Japan and the Korean Penninsula.

Golly, I wonder what yawning chasm of darkness cries out for light? Hint: It is run by a shrimpy Latter Day Stalinist.

Gold Refining with Borax

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According to the GEUS, the Geological Survey Office of Denmark and Greenland, it is possible to concentrate and isolate gold from the ore using borax and charcoal. This method has the immediate benefit of making mercury “redundant” in gold isolation.

Extraction of gold by amalgamation with mercury is a simple means of producing metallic gold in the field.  After contact with gold enriched ore, mercury is evaporated into the air by direct application of a torch flame to the puddle of metal leaving purified gold metal.

It is thought that there are millions of miners who scratch out a subsistance living working a small patch of ground for gold. It’s called small scale mining. In the course of this activity, environmental contamination can accrue to the immediate area as well as the watershed at large. Sadly, the toxicological insult to the miners from exposure to mercury vapor can be severe.

This method is an inexpensive and simple alternative to the mercury process. Perhaps the chemistry community has something to contribute by way of education or improved methods of extraction.

8/25/10  Update.  I have revisited this post and am compelled to comment further.  While I am unable to offer a good chemical explanation for the effect of borax on gold ore, I can say that the use of borax as a flux  for smelting goes back to the 19th century during the American gold rush period.  The process described in the link appears to be a smelting process for enriched ore containing elemental gold, as opposed to sulfide, or sulphuretted ore. The function of a flux is to modify the flow and phase separation properties of host rock so as to partition away from the gold phase or layer.  In other words, a flux modifieds the slag to help the gold to separate cleanly from the rock.

Lipid Rafts

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This morning I found out what a “lipid raft” is. All of these years I’ve been in the dark about order and disorder in cell membranes. I didn’t learn about this through any sort of noble quest; I was merely curious about a movie.

Molecular Movies is a website containing links to a marvelous set of animations about cells and molecules. I enthusiastically recommend that the reader visit this site. The movie mentioning lipid rafts is in “The Inner Life of the Cell“.

Make or Buy? Gaussling’s 11th Epistle to the Bohemians.

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The most important reaction in chemistry is the one in which you transform chemicals into money. Some chemicals convert into a lot of money per kg, others not so much. The kind of money you want to focus on is profit. Just turning cash over at cost wears thin rapidly and is hazardous to your career. At the end of the day, after you’ve paid the raw mat vendors, payroll, and the feds, you want to have a steaming heap of luchre left over as profit.

At some point in the game, everyone in fine chemical manufacturing realizes that you can’t make everything in-house. There are good reasons to consider making as many intermediates as you can. When you buy an intermediate, the vendors price (cost + profit) becomes the cost you plug into the economics. Optimally, you might be able to make the material cheaper than buying it … eventually. But some raw materials are deceptively simple looking. A company can rack up a lot of brain damage and wasted time trying to make certain kinds of materials outside of your skill set.

We used to joke that at some point in process development, you have to shoot the chemist and get on with scale-up. Often, the decision to make-or-buy an intermediate gets to the table only after you try to make it. In process development, it is important to identify the make-or-buy decisions as early as possible. This can save valuable time. While you may end up spending more per unit mass for the material, not having to make it is equivalent to opening up extra capacity in your facility. Ideally, your want precious reactor/equipment hours spent on the highest value added steps. With each successive step, the value of the intermediate becomes greater.

If your make-or-buy decision revolves around a known item of commerce, then the economics and scheduling is relatively easy. You will have to settle on specifications, delivery schedule, shipment details, and pricing. If the material is not TSCA listed, then you will have to get the vendor moving early on a filing with the EPA, if they are in the USA. If you intend to import a non-TSCA listed fine chemical, not for pharma, ag, food, or other covered use, then the importer of record is responsible for the TSCA paperwork. This can take a few months of lead time.

But if the compound is novel and/or proprietary, then it is instantly much more complex. Not only do you have  to deal with the EPA on TSCA filing, but you have to find a vendor who is willing and able to ramp up a new process. They will need specs, projected delivery information, an agreeable price, and quite possibly a lined-out process and analytical methods. If the vendor has available capacity, this might happen as quickly as 3-4 months. More likely than not, this can take 6-9 months.

If your raw material is part of a critical technology or major account, then you may have to consider dual sourcing. If one plant goes down or the quality or delivery drifts beyond what is acceptable, then you still have one facility that can deliver. And, if you have two vendors, you can start a dandy little bidding war between them for your business. Many companies require their purchasing managers to qualify two vendors for crucial materials. You can argue that you should always have two vendors, but many times the amount of business the material feeds into is too small to bother with.

Chemical manufacturing is much more than reaction chemistry. A chemist in manufacturing can find him/herself involved in many kinds of work.   Regulations, chemistry, process safety, engineering, packaging issues, IP, marketing, and process economics add up to the knowledge set that a chemist needs to acquire while heading up the career ladder.

What?

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A business acquaintance recently said that his 10 year old son wanted to be an entertainment industry lawyer. What the …? Young Poindexter will be going to beach parties with busty young starlets when I’m in the old folks home with moss growing on my north side. Sigh.

Buddy Holly

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I was a grubby little 18 month old Iowa farm toddler, eating dirt and tripping over cow pies when Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper augered into a frozen cornfield near Clear Lake, in northern Iowa. The date was February 3rd, 1959.

The pilot, 21 year old Roger Peterson, took off at 1 AM in light snow flying a 1947 Beechcraft Bonanza. A few minutes later, the aircraft impacted the ground at high speed a few miles from the airport, killing all aboard.  Tommy Allsup and Waylon Jennings, Holly’s backup musicians, were supposed to be on board the plane with Holly. But at the last minute they were pursuaded to give up their seats.

Last night, on the 50th anniversary of the untimely death of Buddy Holly, we went to a dinner theater production of the Buddy Holly Story. It turned out to be quite entertaining. I say “turned out” because in truth I’m not much of a 50’s music fan. Being a serial doofus in the area of music, I didn’t realize that Holly was such a prolific song writer. Wasn’t paying attention.

On a side note, a Beechcraft Bonanza has been flown underneath the Eiffel Tower. It is hard to imagine that permission was given, much less, an insurance policy.

Bye Bye JOC

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I’ve decided that I’m going to let my subscription to Journal of Organic Chemistry lapse. It’s getting too expensive and they’re accumulating in my house at an alarming rate. The spouse unit is beginning to dig in her heels. My kid thinks it’s normal to have chemistry journals and molecular models all over the house.

Instead, I’ve subscribed to Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries. Much of my time is taken up with process safety and reactive hazards these days, so I may as well accept the transition. I’ll probably subscribe to OPR&D as well. It feels strange, though. I’ve had a JOC subscription since  my junior year in college in ’82/’83.  Carrying around stacks of journals is like carrying around blocks of wood. And, after a while the collection gets a little … odd.

It’s the Schist and a Lot More

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The Front Range of Colorado is roughly comprised of those mountains that can be seen from the eastern plains. There is no precise definition that I am aware of, so this will have to do. 

Superficially, these mountains run north/south and appear to be organized into ranges, which are really just a series of roughly parallel ridge structures punctuated with the occasional high points that are refered to as peaks. The origin and orientation of these ranges is defined by the orientation of faults and with the effect of eons of erosion to form river channels. Erosion has the effect of removing the weakest materials and leaving behind the most resistant rock structures.

The present epoch of the Rocky Mountains are the result of the Laramide Orogeny, the most recent period of mountain building thought to have begun 70-80 million years ago in the late Cretaceous period. The cause of this mountain building episode is attributed to a shallow angle of subduction of the Kula and Farallon plates below the western margin of the North American plate.

Geologists propose that the shallow subducting slab of ocean bottom applied a drag on the root of overlying continental lithosphere. These forces lead to the broad belt of disturbance to the overlying rock leading to the formation of the Rocky Mountains.

As mountian building proceeded, overlying sedimentary formations were bent and fractured along the margins of the upward moving rock. Today these sedimentary formations are visible in the form of ridges of protruding lamanellar sandstone, mudstone, and shales whose surface planes sit at a high angle  relative to the horizon. The uppermost sedimentary formations are exposed further east in the plains, and as one moves a few miles closer to the mountains, the deeper and correspondingly older sedimentary formations are exposed. These parallel ridges of exposed, upthrusted sedimentary formations are collectively referred to as “foothills”.

Along much of the northern Colorado front range, the westernmost sedimentary formation that abutts the metamorphic rock is called the Fountain formation. Adjacent to this upthrust of metamorphic rock is a layer of disturbed Fountain formation that has been drug upwards to a near vertical orientation. If you have been to Boulder, Colorado, and have seen the Flatirons, you have seen the Fountain formation. Red Rocks Amphitheater and the Garden of the Gods are also part of the Fountain formation.

Here is my question- Somewhere, there should be an interface (I think geologists call it an unconformity) between the metamorphic and sedimentary formations. Where can it be inspected? A road cut or riverbed?

So, it turns out that Th’ Gaussling’s brother owns a spread that is comprised of Fountan formation sandstone. He has a mountain. And down from this mountain and into his yard come elk, deer, mountain lions, bear, and rattle snakes. One of his house cats, in fact, was last seen in the jaws of a cannibalistic mountain lion trotting off to a quiet spot to munch this fresh, tender kitty morsel.

To satisfy my curiosity about this interface, Th’ Gaussling was out in the brush scrambling over snow covered rocks, cactus, and yucca looking at examples of the Fountain formation and, nearby, a formation comprised of schist and gneiss. Not surprisingly, I did not find it in a single outing. But I was close- it’s buried in deep rubble, no doubt. The hunt continues.

Year of the Ox, 2009

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According to high placed sources, 2009 is the Chinese year of the Ox. Hmmm.  If you wanted to buy an Ox, where would you go? What does one look for in an ox? If an excellent ox was standing next to a bad ox, how would you know?  Besides having tails suitable for stew, what else is tasty about the ox? Oxburgers?

An ox is a compact beast of burden- a sort of bulldozer on the hoof. Why didn’t Budweiser choose oxen to pull their famed lager wagon? If oxen were good enough for the Mormon trail and Paul Bunyan, why not for beer distribution? I’m gonna go have a beer and think about it.