Cave portrait of Th’ Gaussling. Pretty much says it all.
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All Rights Reserved. Copyright 2008.
Paleochemist
2 Replies
Poorer Living from Better Things
I’m not an apologist for the chemical industry. Chemical industry has a checkered past in many ways. The pesticide, petrochemicals, and mining industries have left a deep and abiding foul taste in the mouths of many communities. In a previous era, heavy industry has fouled rivers, lakes, air, and ground water. It has lead to illness, death, and loss of livelihood to many people.
But in the modern era much of this wanton issuance of hazardous industrial material into the air and waters has been halted or greatly diminished. At least for the US, Canada, and the EU. And it is not because industry suddenly found religion. The “regulatory environment” became so compelling a liability cost factor that industry set its mind to engineering plants into compliance.
I would make the observation that today, the major chemical health issues before us are not quite as much about bulk environmental pollution by waste products. Rather, I would offer that the most important matter may have to do with the chronic exposure of consumers to various levels of manufactured products. High energy density foods, particularly, high fructose corn sweeteners; veterinary antibiotic residues, endocrine disrupters, smoking, highly potent pharmaceuticals, and volatiles from polymers and adhesives to name just a few.
Modern life has come to require the consumption of many things. A modern nation must have a thriving chemical industry to sustain its need for manufactured materials. It is quite difficult and isolating to live a life free of paint and plastics or diesel and drugs. Choosing paper over plastic at the supermarket requires a difficult calculation of comparative environmental insults. Pulp manufacture vs polymer manufacture- which is the least evil? I don’t know.
Our lives have transitioned from convenience to wretched excess. Our industry has given us an irresistable selection of facile ways to accomplish excess consumption. Individualized portions meter out aliquots of tasty morsels that our cortisol-stressed brains cry out for. These same portions are conveniently dispensed in petroleum- or natural gas-derived packages within packages within packages. These resource depleting disposable nested packages are delivered to our local market in diesel burning behemoths because some pencil-necked cube monkey decided that rotund Americans needed yet one more permutation of high fructose corn syrup saturated, palm oil softened, sodium salt crusted, azo dye pigmented, extruded grain product on Wal-Mart shelves.
Enough already.
All Rights Reserved. Copyright 2008.
Tornado Dreams
This afternoon over lunch hour at the plant I stepped outside and saw a rotating wall cloud just a few miles west. It is unusual for tornadoes to form this close to the mountains. I’ll admit that I was disappointed to not witness an actual funnel.
At about the same time 15 miles NW near my home, a funnel cloud was spotted. From that location, my daughter reported that fellow middle school students were huddled under their desks for an hour waiting for the storm to pass. Another 15 miles north, my wife was busy herding elementary school students under their desks in what they call the “squat and scream” position. Sadly, a nearby town suffered a strike by a tornado that resulted in one fatality and a bunch of heavily damaged homes.
Imagine if the area that comprises what we refer to as the Middle East was an area that suffered tornado activity. That would be the area from Lebanon to Iran to Egypt. It is fun to speculate how the Abrahamic religions might be filled with parables and stories detailing the wrath of God through the agency of a tornado.
Perhaps the exodus of the Israelites might have been aided by the thrashing of Pharaoh with a tornado rather than drowning as the parting seas collapsed. Or colorful tornado-related dream accounts of the end times in the New Testament’s Electric Koolaid Acid Trip of the Book of Revelations.
After the excitement it was back to business. Work is a seemingly endless carnival of intractable problems and sticky layers of nuance.
All Rights Reserved. Copyright 2008.
Synthetic Chicken- Regular or Extra Crispy?
While the rest of us were wasting our time sleeping or soaking in the spa, our ambitious food scientists have been steadily beavering away on the cultivation of chicken tissues. The goal is toward the mass production of chicken-like food. Poulterer and Kentucky Colonel Harlan Sanders will be transformed into tissue farmer Dr. Sanders in a lab coat and goggles.
The mass production of tissue cultivated meats won’t happen anytime soon. However, it is something that is being investigated by serious workers in the field.
I have to admit that my unquestioning embrace of Progress is weakening. Nonetheless, interesting things are happening. Consider the work of Vladimir Mironov, Director of the MUSC Bioprinting Center at the Medical School, University of South Carolina in Charleston. In an effort to get around the engineering problem relating to the construction of 3-D structured tissues, the idea of layering cells by ink-jet deposition was developed.
Who knows where this is going? Mironov’s technology will be very expensive initially, so its application to the production of $4.59 pork tenderloin sandwiches at the local diner is some distance into the future. More likely than not, it will be used for the cultivation of designer transplant organs.
Eventually, some company with deep pockets will attempt to market engineered meats. I would venture to say that the marketing problem is nearly as big as the technology challenge. Wide acceptance into the marketplace will take a while. I wonder how the first ad campaign will take shape? PETA approved Beef-Like Steak Food. Marbling and tenderizing is already engineered into the “cut”. Marketing may eventually be its undoing.
Synthetic chicken fried steak with mashed potatoes and synthetic gravy. Genetically modified Roundup Ready corn on the cob boiled in reverse-osmosis purified water. HEPA filtered air in a kitchen cleaned with anti-microbial soaps. Mouths freshly gargled with hydrogen peroxide and bellies full of nutritional supplements. Lordy. Where are we going with this?
All Rights Reserved. Copyright 2008.
Blog TV
Wow. It has finally happened. Bloggers now have a medium for split-screen video streaming in Blogging heads.tv.
Good heavens. I don’t think I am ready for this. I’ll have to get a bow tie …
Neutron Lethargy- This Weeks Obscure Dimensionless Quantity
Good morning boys and girls. In keeping with Th’ Gausslings weakness (sickness??) for odd and specialized information, a quantity known mainly to nuclear reactor operators and other nukkenvolk is trotted out.
Neutron lethargy, or logarithmic energy decrement, u, is a dimensionless logarithm of the ratio of the energy of source neutrons to the energy of neutrons after a collision: u = ln(Eo/E), or, u2-u1 = ln(E1/E2). So, if you plot a curve of E vs u (E = Eo*exp(-u)), you see an exponential decay of energy per unit collision showing that the greatest delta E’s of energy result from the early collisions.
Basically, it shows that in order to obtain thermal neutrons from fission decay neutrons, you have to contain them so that they can rattle around and dump energy before they fly out of the area of interest. As to the number of collisions that are needed? Well, that is a different issue.
Source- Glasstone & Edlund, The Elements of Nuclear Reactor Theory, Van Nostrand, 1952, p 146.
[Note: It happens that of the 1300 or so posts I have written, this is the most popular. Who knew? But there are at present much more informative links out there.
>>> Obsolete links deleted. Sorry. <<<
Neutron Fluence Measurements, http://www.iaea.org/inis/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/34/065/34065175.pdf
Vatican Astronomer Approves Belief in Aliens
Vatican Astronomer, Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, stated in an interview that, essentially, belief in aliens was not incompatible with Catholic Doctrine.
“How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?” Funes said. “Just as we consider earthly creatures as ‘a brother,’ and ‘sister,’ why should we not talk about an ‘extraterrestrial brother’? It would still be part of creation.”
In the interview by the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Funes said that such a notion “doesn’t contradict our faith” because aliens would still be God’s creatures. Ruling out the existence of aliens would be like “putting limits” on God’s creative freedom, he said.
This is quite a thing to hear from the Vatican. Rev. Funes stated that he felt that the big bang theory seemed quite reasonable to him, provided that the universe was an act of creation rather than chance. The Vatican has come a long way from the trial of Galileo, resulting in what John Paul II called a “tragic mutual incomprehension.”
Photo pilfered from Collegehumor.com.
Spacely Sprockets
A commentor recently pointed out that Th’ Gaussling was sounding off in a nationalist/socialist way. While I’m pretty sure I’m not a socialist, I must admit that I’m on a nationalistic bender at the moment. And by nationalistic, don’t think for minute that I get weepy and sentimental over Kenny Rogers flag waving ballads. I don’t.
But I do believe that, in the short and bloody history of humanity, this North American culture of ours has produced or advanced some truly amazing things. Like space exploration and antibiotics. Airplanes, transistors, synthetic chemistry, and cinema. We’ve had some low points as well. But in spite of our war-like behavior, much good has come from our industriousness.
And, I am anxious to keep it much of it running. There is no return to a pastoral life in the Shire. We are electric hominids whether we like it or not. The very existence of life itself leads to disorder. Highly ordered organisms that we are, we create vast amounts of disorder to energize life and hold our molecules together in cellular membranes. Practically by definition, we cannot help but leave a carbon footprint. The trick is to avoid adding carbon faster than the cycle can accomodate.
It is plain as day that the USA is trending in a bad economic direction. I’m not talking about economic indicators or some political movement. I’m talking about our business culture. I believe that our manner of doing business has gone astray. We have come to value the wrong people and unhealthy organizational behavior. We have come to admire those who appear to generate wealth by the manipulation of financial contrivances and accounting machinations. Strangely, the notion of manufacturing as a desirable activity has become nearly obsolete.
We don’t need Grand Theft Auto IV or Microsoft Vista or better cell phone gimmicks. We don’t need more gadgets to give neurotic, hyperactive, workaholics 2X better web connectivity. Somehow, we have become intoxicated with computer technology to the point where we feel we need to fill terabytes of disk space with junk data rather than going outside and planting a garden or talking to the neighbor.
The greedheads in banking, finance, and real estate have helped to construct a business finance machine that few understand. Greed as a virtue is the norm. The right to petition congress has come to mean a docking port for electronic funds transfer to the military-industrial complex. If gaming the system is possible, then it is manditory.
We don’t have to abandon the basic principles of laissez faire markets. Markets work. Even the Chinese communists realize this. But we don’t have to shut our brains off either.
We do need a comprehensive mass transit network covering most of the continent. We need better ways to generate and transfer electric power. We need to find ways to make sure that people in Honduras have clean drinking water.
We don’t need a better version of Excel or SAP. We need Spacely Sprockets. We need people to continue to go into the trades and build things. We need welders and electricians and machinists, millwrights and longshoremen. This country needs to get back to the fundamentals of manufacturing tangible products.
Aviation Deathmatch- Boeing vs Airbus vs PR of China
China has announced that it will enter into the passenger jet manufacturing business. China Commercial Aircraft is expected to produce 150-passenger aircraft by 2020.
This is a big deal. And a big time challenge to the primacy of the US aviation industry. China’s aim is to achieve self-sufficiency in all high tech sectors. If it were just that, it would be less threatening. But what it really means is global market domination, not just self-sufficiency. This is just competition, but how it plays out for the US will depend on how US industry acts to hold on to its marketshare beginning right now.
The USA retains talent and ability in the entertainment and aviation industries. I believe that US influence of the petrochemical industry is in decline, due in part to the rise of nationalized oil companies in much of the oil producing world. It looks as if our aviation industry will feel competition by a nationalized aircraft manufacturer as well.
The rise of Chinese competition in the marketplace in inevitable. What the west must come to grips with is the inherent leverage that China has with its low wage labor force and the ability to channel resources into projects of national pride such as this.
China will also have the benefit of a century of jet engine and aeronautical research paid for by other nations. I imagine that more than a few of its engineers will have western universities listed on their resumes. Can’t do much about this either. But we in the west can use this example to strengthen our resolve to not go the way of tired and anemic empires.
Thus Begins Cold War II
Russia celebrated a holiday recently with a large scale military parade on Red Square. Just like the bad old days. Putins sock puppet, President Dmitri Medvedev, smiled while Putin stood stern-faced at his side at the annual Parade of Hardware. Insiders claim that Russia’s effort to modernize its military forces is anemic and plagued with corruption. Putin and followers are plainly appealing to that voice in the Russian soul that longs for strongman leadership.
China, on the other hand, is quietly constructing a secret underground nuclear submarine base on Hainan. Hmmm. A secret underground lair. Sounds like Dr. No. I doubt there are miniskirted nubiles with machine guns. Bummer.
Whereas Russia is fighting infrastructural inertia in its return to the platform, China is methodically ramping up its military with an economy flush with cash. With funding from its exports of Wal-Mart inventory and other Cheap Plastic Crap (CPC) marketed through its many outlets in the USA, China is moving closer to a blue water Navy and an SSBN fleet.
In the next 20 years, we are likely to see China flexing its muscle by positioning naval (carrier ?) groups and hints of Chinese submarine fleets prowling the continental shelves of the world. Just like us.
While the USA shadow boxes with multiple terrorist threats around the world, China plods forward minding its own business and funding its own growth.
Four US presidential terms were squandered following the fall of the Soviet Union- 2 x Clinton and 2 x Bush. US efforts to engage Russia in economic cooperation were weak at best. The highlight was perhaps the downgrading of Soviet era nuclear materials. Instead of building friendships and trade cooperation, US presidents were distracted by faulty nation building exercises and dubious foreign adventures. Mikhail Gorbachev himself recently lamented that “… every US president has to have a war…”.
US government needs to spend a 4 year term focused inwards. We must address US infrastructure as eagerly and aggressively as we land troops on the sandy reaches of the earth. The US needs an upgrade in electrical power distribution, bridges, its rail “system”, and its ports.
Collectively, we must find ways to keep factories and businesses in the USA. We need to reconsider the structure of the Code of Federal Regulations. Our regulatory structure is now so complex and extensive that we face the real risk of killing innovation. Our tax code is too complex and too burdensome on citizens and businesses. The government is funding far too many activities.
In short, the USA must get back to basics. The country is in a existential crisis and we need to get grounded again. We need fewer rules in our lives, not more. We need fewer people telling us how to live an authentic life. More of us need to spend a bit more time in the pursuit of happiness.
Lamentations on Chemistry 