This Minnesota Planetarium Video on planetary radio frequency (RF) emissions is well done. Of course, the big conceptual error we tend to make is that these emission sources produce sound. They do not. We hear audio frequency fluctuations extracted from natural RF emissions. (Recall that in space no one can hear you scream.)
I have noticed that my general level of anxiety seems to follow the extent to which I am tuned into the news. The more news I listen to, the greater the stress. Even my beloved NPR is showing chronic toxic effects.
The pace and magnitude of the news cycle seems to be tied to the level of outrageous events. All of the detail and repetition add up to a heightened angst that eventually wears one down.
Someone once defined news as “semi-analytical show business”. It’s a 24/7 circus in High Definition. The whole political system has redesigned itself to synchronize its actions to interfere constructively or destructively (whichever confers benefit) with the news cycle.
I need to get off this merry-go-round.
As a desperate strategy to fight insomnia, Th’ Gaussling often finds himself watching C-Span at 1 AM. Congressional testimony or a televised speech at the International Museum Docent Convention by the Acting Assistant Deputy Undersecretary of the Stratosphere is often enough to initiate somnolence.
But early this morning was different. A panel of FDA administrators were before a House Committee on Commerce Chaired by Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Michigan. At issue was H.R. 4167, the National Uniformity for Food Act. Apparently, the proposed law will remove requirements for certain kinds of food labeling, in particular the presence of certain additives may not be part of manditory labeling.
What has come to light is the industrial practice of exposing meats and fish to an atmosphere of dilute carbon monoxide (CO, ca 0.4 %) in order to maintain a red color in the flesh. Meat naturally turns brown on exposure to air over a short period. Industry has been wrestling with this for a long time, adopting and subsequently abandoning various schemes for maintaining the reassuring red color of meats and certain fish. Carbon monoxide coordinates with iron in haemoglobin to afford a complex that renders the tissues red in color. The FDA defines CO as a fixative in this application, rather than a preservative.
As a result of the use of this scheme, it is possible to keep meats and fish with a saleable red appearance for much longer. This reduces store losses due to the non-marketability of brown meat.
The House Commerce Committee was split down the isle in terms of its concern for this matter. Democratic committee members voiced considerable concern over the subterfuge of artificially reddening meat, allowing unwary consumers to falsely conclude that the meat could be fresher than it really is. Republican members seemed disinterested in the matter and several voiced concern that the FDA should spend it’s time with Salmonella rather than CO. The honorable Republican member from Kentucky tried to suggest that as a “simple country doctor”, he was having trouble understanding the issues and pronouncing the words (Rep. Elmer T. Bonehead, R-KY).
Whereas many of the members soft pedaled their questions, Rep. John Dingell, D-Michigan, offered no quarter to the FDA group. In particular he focused his attention of Director of Food Additive Safety, Laura Tarantino. In earlier testimony, Tarantino was a picture of confidence. Her knowledge of the statutes and the Byzantine procedural details as well as her confidence and instant recall was impressive. However, when Dingell’s time for questions came along, he went after her with rapid fire questions, not allowing time for her to qualify her answers or fend off subtext. “Just answer the question, yes or no”. It was interesting to see. Dingell was obviously disgusted with the FDA. The regulations and protocols that govern FDA movement are very complex and apparently even the administrators have faint grasp on much of it.
Director Tarantino stated that no specific rule-making concerning CO fixatives had been completed because it was still under study. The working assumption was that CO was considered GRAS- Generally Recognized as Safe. These assumptions are often advanced by industry and accepted with scant examination by FDA.
When asked about the general safety of CO in the product, one FDA manager stated that the added CO posed no hazard. I have no reason to doubt this. But the real issue is consumer deception. I think even libertarians would have to agree that without disclosure of food additives, the market cannot rationally award its demand to preferred providers. You can bank on the notion that consumers are particular about meat and freshness. HR 4167 is a step backwards for consumers and we can only hope that good sense prevails in the House.
Another venerable corporate identity has been rendered obsolete. Evonik Industries AG has acquired Degussa to form what they call the Chemicals Business Area. Evonik has interest in energy and real estate as well.
It always surprises me to see a buyout that includes the retirement of an entire corporate identity. It’s the same with Union Carbide or Hoechst AG (now Aventis). There is so much name recognition with company’s like this that I really wonder what the rationale is for the change.
I recall one evening at a bar in Houston we were drinking with some Degussa business develpment guys after a tedious day at a conference. After listening to these German guys griping about American drivers, I took a sip of my gin and tonic and asked the question-
“So, was there a founder named Herr Degussa somewhere, sometime in the past?” They looked at me for a moment and then began to laugh. Turns out that the word Degussa comes from “Deutsch Gold and Silver” in some fashion. Or, so they said.
Best wishes to the good folks at (former) Degussa in their new adventure.
High on the list of exciting professional experiences is the job interview process. I just spent the weekend updating my resume. It is good to do this now and then if for no other reason than it forces you to recall just what the hell you’re good for. As I performed this task, I was flooded with a stream of memories, both good and bad.
I’ve had great interviews, ho-hum interviews, and a few awful experiences. My greatest interviews were from my stint in academia. Of the 7 interviews, I received 5 offers. Not bad for a rythmically disabled Iowegian. But a few years later my smug confidence was to be shaken by an whole body dose of reality.
Academia is not reality, it is a sort of intellectual Hollywood. A la la land of frog princes and preening fussbudgets, special effects and make-believe. It is a pageant of grant-writing rock stars and untenured showboats on parade waving their tail feathers at all who would watch. I who had earlier embraced that world would later be out in the catabatic winds of big time management recruiting.
I won’t write a tedious valentine about my slender portfolio of actual talent. Instead, I’ll tell of an experience with those bottom feeders of the job world- recruiters.
In the frantic world of job placement, there are several kinds of recruiters. There are the recruiters that place at the highest levels of play, and there is everyone else. In my view they are all shady operators. They will drop a line with bait on the end right in front of your face. Poachers they are. They’ll feign an excuse to call you at your office and query for associates –wink wink, nod nod- who may be looking for other work.
You’ll send a resume and there will be some back and forth. The recruiter will get to know you a bit. Then one day you’ll receive an email invitation to interview at their office suite in Watercloset, PA. You’ll fly to Philly, the city of brotherly shove, and navigate your rental car to their office. The waiting room will have that dental office smell that’ll make your flesh crawl and your molars throb.
A smarmy receptionist will hand you off to a smarmy executive recruiting specialist. For me, this is where it all went down the toilet. I sat in an expensive office near the Delaware River while the recruiter reviewed my resume, my buttocks reflexively clenched in the way countless other buttocks have been so clenched in that leather chair while enduring the first 2 hours of detailed questioning- “drilling in” they call it. All the while, she was quietly building a case for yea or nay.
Here is where I went wrong. It was utterly and comically naive. I thought that the recruiters job was to get me an interview for a management slot with an international chemical company. Fancy that! As I was to learn, my assumption was wildly and insanely in error. The recruiters, you see, only get paid when they deliver a candidate who gets hired. So, they prescreen over the telephone and only bring in final candidates for the slot. I was a final candidate for Sales and Marketing Director, but that is still far from the finish line.
As I sat through the meeting, it dawned on me that I was not being coached to give an award winning interview with the unseen client, but rather, I was being slowly skinned alive.
Based on earlier conversations with this recruiter, I thought that they would deliver me to an interview with the company looking to fill the position. Instead, I was brought into the recruiters office for a much closer inspection on behalf of the customer. I was to have my professional colon inspected, so to speak, by these savage HR mercenaries.
After the early morning session with the contact recruiter, a real heavyweight was brought in- a partner of the firm. He was apparently an alumnus of HR at Merck and was accustomed to body slams in Big Pharma. He was a sort of “Refrigerator Perry” in the recruiting world. There were no pleasantries, only an immediate start to some pretty rough play. There was a long succession of close and bluntly skeptical questions about my experience and abilities. The two recruiters did a bit of good cop, bad cop along the way. They were a team and played a disciplined game of question and answer, drilling ever deeper to what they were looking for. The refrigerator lectured me at length like I was some kind of rube from up the holler, giving me the facts of life in Big Business.
I guess I really was a rube from up the holler.
It didn’t take very long for me to see that not only would I not advance forward in this game, but I would have my head lopped off and handed to me on a greasy wooden plate. And that is what happened. After 90 minutes of questions and thinly veiled accusations of weakness, inexperience, and retarded professional development, the Refrigerator stood up and left the room. As the other recruiter fumbled with her notes, I sat there in silence like a stunned carp floating on the lake surface after dynamite fishing. After a moment she suddenly became matronly and bleated out consolation. I was stunned and shocked from the rapid fire rude questions and the careless dissection of my very being. I had never been treated in this manner before, not even in grad school.
After my “case” recruiter made a brief show of effort to salve the wounds, I put my severed head under my arm and was shown the door. It was a long, depressing trip back home. I have had plenty of time to mull it over and can only conclude that I was treated badly. As for the chemical company, I have had the chance to shun them as a supplier in subsequent years. My indulgence in pettiness is one more scar from the experience.
Hmmm. Some early indications of a slowdown are out there in certain commodity markets. Purchasing people getting conservative and skittish with forecasts. When buyers revise their projections downward or say that they’ll ride on their inventory for a while longer, you can bet that rougher sledding is ahead. Just a question of magnitude.
The signs come a day after Bernanke suggested that a slowdown was possible. Cause? Effect? Hard to say.
The picture will begin to resolve over the next few months. The first quarter of the year often sets the pace for the year in markets that I’m familiar with. The chemical manufacturing market is so global and the dollar is so low that it is hard to determine if some of the latest conservative buying behavior is an actual indicator or not of business slowdown. Hmmm.
In the waters that I swim within, the term “Green Chemistry” is often derided as an environmental extremist codeword used by chemical technology Luddites. I’m sure there are anti-chemical purists who view Green Chemistry as a kind of natural alternative to the use of man-made, unnatural substances. Biodiesel is is commonly held as one example of a green alternative.
The merits of Green vs non-Green, or the inherent Greenness of Green technology is a contraversy too large for this blog. Instead, I would rather turn my attention to the merits of Green thinking in chemical process development.
Specialty chemical manufacture begins with relatively simple raw materials and produces more complex and more valuable compounds. Limiting the topic to synthesis as opposed to formulation, specialty chemical manufacture relies on the application of functional group manipulation to achieve an end product with the desired features and connectivity.
In chemical manufacture, there are several general ways to improve process economics. The most general term is process intensification, which describes the overall effect of maximizing the conversion of raw materials into product per volume or per dollar of capital equipment. This can be done by a) running reactions at more concentrated levels, b) the application of heat and pressure, c) the elimination of solvents altogether, d) the use of more reactive species, or e) telescoping.
a) Of the many kinds of reaction optimization schemes that we learn in grad school, perhaps the least explored is space yield improvement. Space yield is just the kg of product obtained per liter of reaction mixture used. In manufacturing, the goal is to maximize the number of kg of product obtained per plant man-hour for a given piece of equipment. Raw material costs are only slightly adjustable, whereas labor hours can often be lowered with the application of better technology. Labor costs are among the highest costs in a plant, so the goal is to produce the most kg of product per man-hour.
Intensification by increasing space yield simply means that a solution reaction is run at the highest reasonable concentration. The benefit is that a reactor is run at the highest mass yield per batch. Since the corresponding increase in labor to run the higher space yield is near zero, the resulting labor costs are spread over a greater quantity of mass- the labor $/kg go down.
b) Most people come out of college with precious little experience or appreciation for the benefits of high temperature and pressure in chemical synthesis. Continuous high temperature short time (HTST) reactions are out there, but require specialized equipment and expertise. Engineers love this kind of processing. For an optimized process, HTST systems have comparitively small reaction zones that are relatively inexpensive and take advantage of the economics of continuous flow chemistry. Good examples are ammonia production or Petroleum refining.
c) The elimination of solvents is a tricky thing. Gas phase chemistry is well known and quite mature technology. It is also amenable to continuous flow processing. Elimination of solvents in condensed phase chemistry is a bit different problem. Solvent molecules are like tiny sand bags in their ability to absorb energy. Neat reactions may be prone to exotherms, so the calorimetry of any given proposed neat reaction needs to be examined carefully.
On the plus side of solventless processing, the space yields are at maximum and reaction rates are not diminished by dilution effects.
d) The use of more reactive materials in a process can have benefits in time savings if a particular step is slow or does not go to completion. If the reactive reagent affects the rate limiting step, then time and yield savings may be had. On the down side, increased reactivity may offer decreased selectivity. Increased hazards will have to be calculated into the value proposition as well.
e) Telescoping refers to the combination of multiple steps in one reactor. In it’s best incarnation, telescoping may afford the direct reaction of a product in the reaction mixture of the previous reaction. The benefit is in the savings of man-hours in vessel cleanout and preparation time, minimized hazwaste, and minimum handling. Another form of telescoping would be that pot residues are left in the vessel and reagents from the next step are charged in without extra transfers and new vessels. This tends to minimize the number of vessels needed for a process and minimizes the opportunity costs of having empty vessels standing by for use.
The goal of green chemistry as I see it is to minimize environmental insult by the reduction of consumables and the discharge of hazardous waste streams from a plant to the outside world of waste treatment. The reduction of consumables like solvents, reagents, or electrical power reduces hazards and pollution up and down the value chain. The reduction of hazardous wastes minimizes the mass that has to be consolidated for eventual incineration or burial.
The reduction of consumables is entirely compatible with the economic goals of business. Process intensification points to the same general direction as the goals of Green Chemistry and should be considered a type of Green activity. If one draws a picture of the ideal state of any chemical manufacturing process, it surely would include intensification with sustainable raw materials and with maximized throughput and minimized risk.
in solidarity with the hollywood writers strike i have decided to halt my use of punctuation and capitalization all day today no dashes commas exclamation points and just forget ellipsis i might even stop using the spell checker though that has hardly stopped me on this blog before im even thinking about adding more dangling participles split infinitives and improper tense wow is this liberating or what i feel like running through the grass naked and singing show tunes well maybe not isnt that against the law gawd what was i thinking what strange kind of madness is this no good can come from this damn those writers i feel violated ellipsis
As a chemical company grows, organizational changes occur that alter the manner in which things are done. Some changes are beneficial while others are detrimental. A beneficial change is one in which the process of order fulfillment improves in efficiency. Order fulfillment is the core activity of any manufacturing business. Improvements that do not affect order fulfillment may be little more than decoration.
A detrimental change is one in which order fulfillment is negatively affected. Any change that reduces the speed or increases the cost of order fulfillment is a detrimental change. Some detrimental changes are unavoidable. Improvements in infrastructure due to growth may lead to detrimental changes. Increased overhead expense due to new warehousing, increased regulatory compliance costs due to crossing a volume threshold, upgrading the pots and pans, or any number of other “improvements” may lead to negative change.
Equipment upgrades can easily lead to unexpected organizational changes. New equipment leads to new procedures and new failure modes. A new piece of equipment integrated into a system can lead to modes of failure and risks that were unanticipated. New equipment can lead to new manpower requirements and new demands on infrastructure. Suddenly, a new piece of equipment can cause the reorganization of activity around it. Machines may be limited in flexibility, but people can change their work habits to accomodate the device.
On a day-to-day level, a company may not sense that it has undergone growth, but in fact it has. The acquisition of new equipment can change the manner in which a company operates over the long term. This is especially true if it increases the capacity of the plant. Equipment upgrades that increase throughput will lead to increased sales and, hopefully, increase profit. Soon, more cash is available for more upgrades.
Where a company can go wrong is the failure to tend to the institutional changes that have to occur with increased growth. A company that grows in the plant but not in the front office (the overhead suite) is one that finds itself slipping behind the power curve. Suddenly, increased volume leads to increased chaos. Unless institutional changes are made, the system may become dangerously unstable despite rising receipts.
Selling goods to Asia can be challenging for westerners. End users of chemicals in Asia often use trading companies to do their buying. Selling to an Asian consumer of chemicals via the usual tools of marketing- cold calls, advertising, etc.- is complicated by the fact that the buyer may not be the end user. A call to an end user, if you can find their identity, may be politely declined. Instead, you might be referred to the allied trading company or just shown the door.
Th’ Gaussling is not an expert in this area of business. But I have more than a passing interest. Under the egg on my face are plenty of black and blue marks from my latest lesson. I should be receiving a certificate for 2 credit hours from the correspondence school of hard knocks.
Outwardly, chemical trading companies often look like end-users of chemical products. If you visit their websites, they’ll promote the manufacturing capacity of their customers and the impressive list of fine chemical products. In reality, they are located in a cramped office suite with fax machines and a server that projects the image onto the internet. Their activity is limited to buying, selling and arranging logistics. Trading companies are part of the social custom of strategic alliances in Japanese business. They may buy and resell with a markup. They may provide contract buying services. There are numerous ways to do the deed.
For a factory, this arrangement allows managers to focus on manufacturing. Since trading companies only get paid if they hand over their deliverables, there is always a productive stress on the procurement people to look after their cadre of customers.
One big problem from the vendors perspective is negotiation. Negotiating with an end-user through an intermediary trading company is complex and time consuming. It’s best to do this face to face. Negotiation over the internet is not the best method. Trust is an issue and one gains trust by direct meetings.
The discussion of technical issues may also proceed through the trading company. This is can be a nightmare. I have wasted far too many precious heartbeats trying to noodle information from the end user through the mouthpiece of the trader. But from their side, this amounts to providing needed service to the customer.
It is difficult for western suppliers to penetrate the mind of customers in the east and discover how to market their wares in that part of the world. The trick for western business development people is to invest time and effort in understanding Asian trading practices. Pick up some books on the topic. Go to trade shows and talk to Asian exhibitors. Read the trade publications. Develop personal relationships. Price wins the day, but trust is part of the calculation.
Lamentations on Chemistry 