Here is a link to the cartoon strip Bob the Angry Flower. I like the one about Schrodingers Fridge. I was tempted to post a copy, but I didn’t want to rile the Copyright Gods.
Friday Fun- Bob the Angry Flower.
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BASF Offers to Buy Ciba
According to the on-line publication Chemical Engineering, German chemical giant BASF has made an offer to buy Ciba Holdings AG, headquartered in Basel, Switzerland. In the public takeover, BASF has offered CHF 50.00 for each nominal share of Ciba stock. The agreed upon price represents a 32 % premium above the Sept. 12, 2008, closing price. The acquisition will help BASF strengthen its hold on specialty chemicals, particularly in the area of coatings.
A Case of the Vapors
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?
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
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.
New Industrial Hazard
A word to the wise. Don’t get dry ice powder wedged under your fingernails. It really hurts.
Huh? … What?? … Gloves, you say?? Pfffttt!! Gloves are for bedwetters and management idlers.
CERN Muon Detector Incident
September 15, 2008, Geneva, Switzerland. Authorities at the CERN Large Hadron Collider in Geneva have set up temporary headquarters in Lyon, France, as an incident at the Muon Detector continues to unfold. Footage from two facility webcams tell the grim story.
(Thanks to Les for this link- Th’ Gaussling)My Growing Resentment Towards Norton AntiVirus
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
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
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?
Lamentations on Chemistry 
