Things overheard at the airport (IAH)

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Things overheard in the C concourse at IAH-
Yeah, I did a loan for this morning news anchor. He only made like a hundred twenty thousand.”
There was a burly guy pacing around waving his hands while he was loudly conversing on his cell phone-
“If you can get him instead of paying Moss 7 million, why not do it? ” … “The Lions were counting on him. I guess he’s not going anywhere. ” … “He was pretty happy in Minnesota until Culpepper got to him.” … “He’s the only left tackle in free agency this year.” … “If it comes to payin Randy Moss or …  Mendenhall looks pretty good. I think you have a good chance to get Turner.” … “Didn’t we draft him?”

 

 

Astronomers Vote for Revised Unit of Humility

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28 July, 2008. Malibu, California.  The annual Astronomers League meeting ended Sunday with a vote to ratify a new definition of Humility that will be sent to SI, or Système Infernal, for a vote by the international body. The annual gathering of astronomers in Malibu is a week of splashing in the surf by day and bowling and darts by night.

In recent years there has been a dispute as to the actual definition of the Sagan, a unit of professional humility. Some astronomers had claimed that it is measured on a linear scale while others have insisted upon a base 10 logarithmic scale. 

A plenary meeting of delegates from around the world deliberated on this matter during the week and voted by a slim majority to define the scaling of the Sagan as logarithmic. Dr. Skip Thurne, Official Parliamentarian and Grand Nite Astronomer said “We feel it is appropriate to define this most important measure of professional respect and humility for the cosmos based upon an exponential measure. The unbounded wonders of the universe are so vast, and we humans are so infinitesmally small, that an exponential scale signifying our insignificance is most meaningful.”

Mathematicians Discover New Digit

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26 July, 2008. Sznorkl, Hungary. Officials at the Hungarian Institute of Advanced Enumeration revealed today that a new digit has been discovered. Director of the Institute Prof. Edvard Glomjardocz and expeditionary mathematician Stanislas Malu announced that the new digit would be named “számjegy” and would remain where it was found, between digits 7 and 8.  A Roman character representing the new digit has not been decided upon as of this date.

“The impact of this discovery is only just beginning to dawn on the science and mathematics community” Dr. Malu said. “Of course, many tools in our daily world will have to change. We’ll need to devise new keypads for cell phones, calculators, and computers. Rulers and speedometers for our automobiles will have to be modified as well” Malu said.  “We’re going to have to recalculate pi in base 11. This will keep us busy for a while,” he added with an impish grin. 

“Counting with our fingers will no longer work,” Malu cautioned, “but mathematicians have never liked that habit anyway.”

The news was not uniformly welcomed, however. Wolf Farkas, President of Bandwidth at Intel was troubled by the development. “As of this time we are not sure of what this means for our binary and hexadecimal logic operations. If we have to retool, this will get very expensive. Investors are going to take it in the shorts,” Farkas warned. “We’ll have to see how this plays out.”

Stock prices jumped at the news, however. Those with the most to gain from this discovery are manufacturers of tape measures, calculators , and computer keyboards. Both Wal-Mart and Home Depot stocks jumped 6 % in anticipation of upcoming rush to upgrade. Landfill operators and trash haulers expressed concern, though. Lars Erickson, Director of Plastic Waste at Rubbish Management Systems said “Somebody is going to have to pick all of those little calculators out of the trash.”

Scientists in Search of Disease for New Cure

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25 July, 2008. Drainsville, Ohio.  Scientists at the Institute for Chronic Insolence at The Ohio Philistine University published a landmark paper in the upcoming August 1, 2008 issue of Science. The paper reportedly reveals a series of drugs thought to be active against an as yet unknown condition.

Dr. Anandathujana McDivitt, research director of the Petulance and Peevishness Therapeutics Division and coauthor of the paper, explained to the press on Thursday that the new agents have many built-in features that should make them active against something. “These new drugs have as many as twelve pharmacophores each. For heavens sake, they should inhibit or activate something. Early indications suggest that chronic chafing may be treatable with the new medicines,” McDivitt stated. But she cautioned that they are looking for “more interesting diseases” to treat with their new medicine.

Dr. McDivitt said that collaboration with some of the major pharmaceutical houses has revitalized their interest in a treatment for petulance and peevishness.

Gas Coalification Plant to Open in 3Q2012

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22 July, 2008. Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.  Officials from Saudi Acidic Industries and Aniline de Rhone et Compagnie de Toasteur met in Riyadh for a signing ceremony marking the start of a new joint venture between the two companies. The new entity is to be called Groupe du Damné, or simply GD.

The new JV will be the first to commercialize gas coalification, or the conversion of LNG and syngas to coal. The technology package is under license from Sasshole PetroZoot Ltd., based in Johannesburg, South Africa. GD headquarters will be located in Lyon, France.

Development of a coalification miniplant unit for the capture of stranded gas on ocean platforms is under way. GD has also disclosed that a new asphaltene process using coalification-related technology is underway to meet the increasing demand for pot bottoms and tar.  GD Asphaltenes expects to have several licenses signed by 2Q2010.

A Few Thoughts on Organizations and Systems

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Being over the hump and into the 2nd half of my chemistry career, I find that more and more of my time is spent dealing with systems issues. Not fighting existing systems. Synthesizing new ones. One of the things I have come to appreciate is the value and necessity of at least some level of bureaucratic structure as an organization grows. Really, it has been an awakening.

My current project involves receiving and organizing a massive stream of diverse information. It is a taxonomic nightmare. How does one organize critical and confidential information in such a manner that it can be accessed for future reference? It is more than a matter of profligate use of file folders. I have drawers and drawers of file folders with commercial and scientific information in them, but I have lost track of what I already have. What has to shake out of my current task is a bureaucratic mechanism.

I have come to be viewed as a “resource”. This is a euphamism for “keeper of obscure information”, or more to the point, “he who knows where the bodies are buried”.

Getting back to the matter of systems generation, a problem organizations may develop is one in which valuable, painful, and expensive lessons get lost over a relatively short interval. People naturally like to get on with things. Problems in the past are just that- in the past. We overcame a challenge and now we are on to bigger things. But what folks underestimate is that past problems are often the result of habits of thought and poor adaptation to change.

It is easy to get bewildered in a conceptual space where there are no sharp edges or crisp boundaries. In the chemical business world, you find that the crowd naturally divides into science/technical people and business people. There are always a few cross-over people (freaks like myself) who defy tidy categorization.  But for the most part, when the tray stops shaking, the people settle into particular positions.

Business-types like to deal in the binary world of yes and no. Science-types accept that this is possible only from a great distance from the problem.  Business-types use the tool and toss it when done. Science-types can become enchanted with the tool and will try to make it better.

One of the tricks to system development in an organization is to define what constitutes a normal condition. Once this is defined, an off-normal condition can be recognized and SOP’s can be written to deal with it. As a psycholgical precaution, this is where you begin to get insights into the deep-seated insecurities of your colleages. Many long-time acquaintances can reveal control-freak behaviour or authority issues.  The generation and implementation of systems in an organization always involves greater control and loss of degrees of freedom for individuals. People will see this coming and things may get contentious.

As more people become involved in any endeavor, complexity inevitably arises as failure modes are uncovered and people learn to game the system. Good leadership can go a long way towards helping people keep perspective as things become more complex.

Water Vapor Identified as Major Greenhouse Gas

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23 July, 2008. NCAR, Boulder, Colorado.  Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) announced today at a press conference that a major greenhouse gas has been identified. Dr. Simon Sayes, Director of the Stratosphere and co-chairman of the Vice President’s Office on Gases, Vapors, and Mists, stated before an international press corps that a previously ignored component of the atmosphere apparently absorbed a “… whole bunch of solar energy”.

“While we were preoccupied with anthropogenic CO2, we failed to consider the effects of water vapor in the atmosphere,” said Dr. Sayes. As Director of the Stratosphere, Dr. Sayes has regulatory enforcement responsibility in matters pertaining to that lofty body of air above the jetstream. Because water is also a combustion product, Dr. Sayes suggests that a switch to hydrogen and ethanol fuels would only exacerbate the problem of global warming.

“We have no enforcement plans finalized yet. However, we are investigating the use of dessicator packs to be fitted onto commercial aircraft,” stated Brian Cohen, Tropospheric Liason to the Office of the Stratosphere. “There has been some initial pushback by the airlines” Cohen added, “but we believe that the problem can be surmounted with a suitable tax package and passenger fees.”

Carbonated Beverages as Greenhouse Gas Source

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18 July, 2008. The Hague, Netherlands.  Discussions are underway concerning a new proposal to ban carbonated beverages due to mounting evidence of their combined contribution to the global greenhouse gas inventory. The startling new proposal submitted by Olivier Lawrentz, the President of Tudaloo, an island-state in the French Wayward Islands.  The document was submitted to the Ad Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP) just prior to Fridays deadline for the 2009 conference in the Slobovian capital of Nyeznok.

President Lawrentz stated in his address that the carbonated beverage ban proposal is meant to address the cumulative atmospheric effects of efforvescence in all manner of beverages- beer, champagne, sparkling water, and soft drinks.  “It is a simple matter of math, no? How much CO2 are we putting into the air because we demand a fizzy drink with our frittes?” asked Lawrentz, president of an island with an average elevation of 1 foot.

The reaction around the world was swift and highly critical. Arlene Kelpwalker, CEO of Cola Industries International, a softdrink trade group, stated that her member companies were shocked and disappointed at the news. “Flat sodas are not going to go down well with the public, if you’ll pardon the pun,” Kelpwalker joked.

Most telling was a press release by the Belgian beverage giant OnBev, who would only disclose that they were in discussions with the American security firm Darkwater. When pressed for more information, a spokesman for OnBev said cryptically that their response to this move by Tudaloo would be soon be apparent.

Organic and Inorganic Carbon??

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Thanks to a friend in Grand Rapids, I was linked to a blog hosted by the NY Times called Tierneylab.com.  The writer of the post was sounding off about a pet peeve relating to the use of the term “Organic”.  It seems that there is some confusion as to the use of the adjective organic in relation to certain carbon-containing substances. Tempest in a teapot, you ask? Let the chemistry community decide.

The problem begins to show itself when astronomers and planetary scientists start describing carbon containing materials found in planetary exploration as organic.  Back on earth, the word organic is burdened with both common and scientific usage. So, when descriptions of organic materials found on other worlds begin to arise in discourse, the intent of the usage becomes unclear.

For instance, it could suggest to people that such discovered materials were put in place by some kind of life form. It could suggest to nondiscriminating audiences that the presence of carbon implies life, past, present, or future. Or it might well suggest to higher level audiences that biology-ready raw materials are in place.

The scientists working with the Phoenix Lander have an interesting analytical chore in front of them. Using a robotic platform on Mars, they want to distinguish the presence of organic vs inorganic carbon. What is meant by organic and inorganic is less than clear. But it seems that organic refers to something other than CO2 and carbonate.

In the relatively few journal articles I’ve seen relating to this, the authors are not always precise about the kinds of molecules they are referring to as organic. Irrespective of what is said in the articles, when this work gets to a public forum, the meaning behind the word organic becomes even less clear.   

The TierneyLab post does bring up an interesting question about what is necessary for a substance to be considered organic.  Do graphite, diamond, Buckyball, or soot forms of carbon qualify as organic? What about CO2, CS2, carbonates, CO, HCN, or calcium carbide? Does it make more sense to refer to organic and inorganic carbon, where inorganic carbon is defined as … well, what? 

Seriously, what would it be? CO2? Carbon dioxide is incorporated into glucose by plants and this seems quite organic.  Carbonate? This anion is used to balance our blood pH. Our own metabolic CO2 helps to provide carbonate. This product of metabolism should qualify as organic. CO? Well, Carbon monoxide undergoes Fischer-Tropsch reactions to produce aldehydes. This seems very organic as well. Perhaps the target is a substance with C-H bonds?

There is nothing inherently biological about the C-H bond. The Saturnian moon Titan is blanketed with a thick layer of CH4 (methane) and it seems unlikely that it is of biological origin. Indeed, hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe and carbon the 4th. That hydrogen and carbon atoms could find each other to form trace methane in a proto solar system isn’t too much of a stretch.

Organic and Inorganic Carbon.  How about we just leave it all as organic? 

Here is what I think. It does matter if a scientist or writer is using language in an imprecise way. If writing or speech implies, for instance, that Mars is rich in life giving organic nutrients when in fact Martian organic matter is really carbonate and CO2, then I believe the language must be altered to reflect that condition. A writer should not leave an impression of past or incipient planetary fecundity when in fact the planet may be an inert ball of metal silicates dusted with a bit of carbonate when the 6 torr CO2 atmosphere kicks up a breeze.

California to Decriminalize LSD

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San Francisco, California. 11 July, 2008. In a landmark decision, the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of decriminalizing the psychedelic drug LSD.  The divided court ruled 4 to 3 in favor of striking down as unconstitutional the 48 year old statute banning recreational use of the substance.

Supporters and opponents alike held a contentious vigil outside the Earl Warren Building in San Francisco friday afternoon. The long anticipated Ergotte-v-State of California case has been a lightning rod for criticism and praise around the nation.

Dr. Besnik Keukomber, Chiquita Professor of Economics and Olfactory Studies at Pultroon College in Guapo, AZ, stated in an interview with CNN reporter Robert Stiphey that “This change is welcome in some large market sectors. LSD prices have been distorted by the unfortunate statutory freeze rendering the product illegal. The action of the court has put the supply of this product back on a rational economic basis. We are concerned, however, on the negative effect it will have on sellers of the LSD once the price drops.”

Pilsner Pharma Group stocks rose 5 % today on news that the pharmaceutical giant would start construction on a lysergamide processing facility in Quasimont, California. “We have been anticipating this for quite some time” stated CEO Hedrick van Preener.

Harriott Hotel Group announced that they will offer Psychedelic Suites in flagship hotels in selected California cities. Guests will have the opportunity to relax in the safety and comfort of a plushly padded suite and experience the pleasure of a supervised psychedelic experience. For the safety of the guests, psychedelic suite balconies have been replaced with a computer animated view courtesy of Industrial Light and Magic.  The initial floor of Psychedelic Suites will open at the Marquis in Los Angeles in Late 2010.

Not all are pleased, however.  Ephraim “Scarface” Erdstein, a South Bend, IN, drug kingpin operating out of a laundromat storefront said through his attorney that he plans on waging an appeal to the US Supreme Court in an effort to support prices by halting this unfortunate trend toward legalization. 

Roland Basbo, spokesman for “Tatoo Nation”, the national Tatoo Parlor trade association, expressed concern for declining business. Basbo said “We believe that as the demographics of LSD users moves upscale, the demand for body art will see a modest decline. We’ve noticed that boomers are freaked out by skin art in the middle of an acid trip”.