A Case of the Vapors

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There is an interesting debate happening in the weather and climate modeling wing of the blogosphere. Seems that over at Wattsupwiththat someone has pointed out the significant part water vapor may play as an absorber of solar energy. All you have to do is look at the absorbance spectrum of water vs CO2 and you’ll see that the game is suddenly more complex than the incessant drum beating about CO2 would suggest.

There are a number of good websites on weather and climate out there. Rabett Run seems well centered in terms of the science.  If you are interested in the level of play happening in the real, behind the scenes debate, check out the references to Kirchoff’s law.  Physical meteorology is at the center of the whole debate. Assumptions about the applicability of certain laws, assumptions about the value of key variables, and other details of equation building can drive the nature of the conclusions. Planetary atmospheres are really quite complex!

I think it will be several more solar cycles before the right modeling assumptions shake out.

Are B-Schools Paying Attention to this Fiasco?

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The dam burst of banking disasters and federal bail-outs of firms “too big to fail” has brought to light the fragility of our banking and investments system. Like a tropical depression that forms in the eastern Atlantic ocean and gradually feeds on the warm waters and moist air until it makes landfall as a rampaging storm, the combination of greed, financial deregulation, and enthusiastic liquidity on the part of the Fed has now spun up into a full fledged economic storm.

In an essay posted on CNN.com, Columbia Professor Joseph Stiglitz, among others, points to some causes of the present calamity on the banking and financial businesses. Stiglitz says-

“One can say the Fed failed twice, both as a regulator and in the conduct of monetary policy. Its flood of liquidity (money made available to borrow at low interest rates) and lax regulations led to a housing bubble. When the bubble broke, the excessively leveraged loans made on the basis of overvalued assets went sour.” 

“The new “innovations” simply hid the extent of systemic leverage and made the risks less transparent; it is these innovations that have made this collapse so much more dramatic than earlier financial crises …”

The mess that taxpayers and investors are left with is the result of greed and recklessness on the part of elite “business leaders” in conjunction with Federal officials only too anxious to deregulate and discount. This is not a failure based on physical reality. It is a failure based on greed and poor judgement. It rests on a morally shallow and sadly misguided philosophy that mere acquisition of currency is reason enough for being and is the sole measure of success.

As a start, it is my hope that the Deans and faculty of our business schools can summon some kind of movement to reform their admissions standards and refine their ethics curricula.

Perhaps certain finance practitioners need to be trained and certified in a manner similar to actuarial professionals?  Seems to me that the people who launch financial instrument schemes with the potential to collapse an economy should be at least as well trained in risk management as an actuary.

A firm proposing a financial instrument for sale to the public should be required to prepare a mathematical model with macroeconomic inputs to model the potential for instability. The kind of discipline needed to do this modeling could help people refine the fund structure so it remains manageable in a broader range of economic conditions. This would also provide for a real transparency to regulating agencies and possibly even investors.  But most importantly, if you want to model it, then you have to understand it. And that is part of what has been lacking.

Fast Food Munching Criminals Leave Corrosive Fingerprints

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University of Leicester, UK.  John Bond, a reseacher at the University of Leicester and consultant to the Northamptonshire Police, suggests that criminals who consume fast foods leave fingerprints that are corrosive. Dr. Bond says that enhanced levels of salt in processed foods can lead to sweaty fingerprints that are more corrosive to metals.

Dr Bond said: “On the basis that processed foods tend to be high in salt as a preservative, the body needs to excrete excess salt which comes out as sweat through the pores in our fingers.

“So the sweaty fingerprint impression you leave when you touch a surface will be high in salt if you eat a lot of processed foods -the higher the salt, the better the corrosion of the metal.”

Dr. Bond went on to say that there was an “indirect link” to obesity and the chances of being caught in a crime. Bond says that corrosion due to fingerprints may be helpful in the tracking of terrorists whose bombs are fragmented from the explosion.

My Growing Resentment Towards Norton AntiVirus

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I grow weary of wasting heartbeats while Norton AntiVirus screens every packet of data streaming my way.  There must be a better way. We need a Robin Hood character who can seek out and expose all of these miserable wieners who write malicious code. Their pimpled, smirking faces should be plastered all over the web. We should return to the puritanical method of locking them in stocks in the public square for all to come by and hurl epithets and rotten cabbages at them.

PGM Cu-Ni Strike Near Thunder Bay

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10 September, 2008. Anglo American has acquired a 12 % stake in the Australian mining firm Magma Metals Limited. Magma Metals had previously announced “spectacular” results August 11, 2008, in its exploratory drilling activities in the Current Lake intrusive complex north of Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada.

Magma reports a 2.5 kilometer long strike zone with mineralization varying from 5.6 g/ton to 26.5 g/ton of Pt + Pd from one drill hole. The drilling revealed concentrations as high as several percent of Cu and Ni as well. Magma Metals reports that it has been undergoing a 24,000 meter drilling program to map the Thunder Bay claims.

Destroying Munitions with Solvated Electrons

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Blundering through the patent literature I took a wrong turn and tripped over a patent that claims an interesting use of ammonia solutions of electrons. The patent, US 6080907, is assigned to Teledyne Commodore and teaches a method that uses ammonia as a fluid metal cutting medium for the safe destruction of bombs and the explosives inside. The inventor claims that ammonia is superior to water as a cutting fluid. Apparently Teledyne employs a few chemists because it dawned on someone that ammonia will also dissolve certain metals and provide a means of conveyance for a reducing agent to enter the bomb casing and reduce the nitro groups on the explosives. It is a clever idea. A new use for the Birch reduction.

 I wonder if it is in operation?

The Chemical Entrepreneur. Part 2.

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There are many reasons not to start a business. It’s risky. It inevitably requires many long hours sweating all of the ten thousand details. Building a company from scratch requires wildly diverse skills that are not commonly possessed by a single person. And it usually requires more resources than a typical wage earner can easily muster.

A chemical entrepreneur with an eye on manufacturing faces some unique challenges that, say, a fledgling purveyor of roasted coffee beans could avoid. Most obvious it the issue of a physical plant. Not only must the chemist or engineer have a workable chemical process, but also have a highly specialized facility in which to do the processing. This requires suitably zoned land, local review boards, environmental permits, a local work force, process equipment, a minimum of raw material inventory, and buildings to contain it all.

Then the entrepreneur must provide an infrastructure of chillers, boilers, electrical distribution, liquid nitrogen for inert gas, an analytical facility, an R&D facility, quality control, as well as administration, sales, and technical staff.  There must be a steady stream of cash flow to provide a steady payroll. Taxes must be estimated and paid in advance.

There are many sobering reasons not to go forward with a chemical business plan if one is risk averse or, shall we say, comfortable. Indeed, one of the common character traits of people who are analytically-minded is the tendancy to rattle off all of the reasons why something won’t work. We’ve all experienced this in meetings. A problem arises and meetings are called. After the problem is identified, much of the remaining time is spent in a recital of the additional problems that are expected. Soon, the problem mushrooms into a phantasm with imaginary components of awesome magnitude.

We’re all good at digging up reasons why something won’t work. And chemists suffer no lack of ability here.

But this is where the true entrepreneur stands out from the herd. One mark of a successful entrepreneur is the ability to ignore, or filter out, pessimistic predictions of an outcome. There is a spark within the some people that compels them to go forward. Sometimes it is a special insight. But just as likely the entrepreneur has an inner drive- some might unflatteringly call it “narcissism”- that moves them forward because they are certain of the outcome. It is not uncommon for an entrepreneur to consider him or herself the smartest person in the room.

In Part 3 we’ll look at examples of what kinds of businesses chemical entrepreneurs have started.