Lunar Eclipse

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For those of us on the wrong side of the earth for todays lunar eclipse, NASA’s JPL offers the next best thing. A solar system simulator.  You’ll have to monkey with the settings. I’d recommend using the extra brightness if you view the earth from the moon for a Terran eclipse. The view from the moon is visually more interesting, I think. This simulator is a very useful tool for exploring the solar system. Enjoy!

Tom, founder and drive system engineer, at the LTO 18″ telescope. [Photo from starkids.org]

One of the coolest things I have ever witnessed happened during a lunar eclipse a few years ago. We had the observatory open during the event with the 18″ Cassegrain pointed at the moons limb. As you watched a star along the edge of the moon, you could see the moon moving against the background of stars, eventually occulting the star in the period of a few minutes. Of course, you don’t have to wait for an eclipse to do this, but there it was that night, the celestial clockwork in motion before your eyes.

[Thanks to Les for the JPL link!]

The Ethanolic Dark Age. 27 CFR Part 19. Distilled Spirits.

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Should there be any lingering doubt about our Puritanical Heritage, all a person has to do is to scan 27 CFR, parts 1-31 to view our statutory fretting about ethanol. This is the code that covers the production and sale of alcohol.  Part 19 is particularly interesting since it pertains to distilled spirit production and the documentation requirements therein. 

It is a funny thing. The more regulation that I come into contact with, the more libertarian I become.  Righteous persons might say that gangsterism that arose over liquor in the prohibition days clearly demonstrates how an underground laissez faire production and distribution economy can arise under poor enforcement conditions.  I would counter that gangster control of liquor arose quite naturally from the substantial profits from high demand for forbidden intoxicants. It is in the nature of puritans to deny access to natural urges.

One of the unfortunate consequences of this requlatory fixation on ethanol (EtOH) is evident in chemical processing.  Purified EtOH is highly taxed and regulated with licensure requirements. Denatured EtOH is available, but is contaminated with additives that may be deleterious to the reaction conditions or could leave undesirable residues.  The result is that manufacturers use methanol in place of EtOH. Methanol is inexpensive and is unregulated for coolant, solvent, or reagent use, but it does have the downside of being more toxic than EtOH. 

The result is that process chemists may engineer around the need for ethanol in favor of methanol. Absolute or 95 % ethanol for processing carries the penalty of added documentation and expense that few have an interest in. In effect, because of regulations and taxes, chemical workers are exposed to methanol rather than the less toxic ethanol.  Using ethanol vs hydrocarbon-derived alcohols carries a benefit of being faintly greener owing to the renewability of ethanol.

Speaking of intoxicants, at a recent street festival I happened to try a New Belgium brand of beer called Mothership Wit.  As I tipped it back, the FortJazz band was belting out a brassy Zoot Suit Boogie. It was dusk, 75 degrees, still air, under a cloudless sky.  Ordinarily I’m not a big fan of wheat beers.  But this had a fruity finish that was remniscent of juicy fruit gum. The orange peel and the coriander somehow conspire to produce this subtle effect.  I rather enjoyed the Mothership Wit and the music. It was a grand time.

Wake up chemists! The DHS is on the Case.

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While American chemists have been busy going about their lives, making and analyzing molecules, the legislative and executive branches of the government have also been busy making things more complex for the chemical industry. Procedures, protocols, rules, guidelines, and consequences for inaction have been drawn up for our “safety” by the Department of Homeland Security, DHS. Even the American Chemistry Council (ACC) has bought into the changes.

I remember as an adolescent boy in the 70’s daydreaming with friends about how much trouble we could cause society.  We would scheme about how easy it would be to crash the power grid or interefere with traffic or a hundred other things that would amuse idle teenagers.  These were mischievious thought experiments that we would titter about, but would have never actually done.  Some fellows discovered marshal arts and others developed a fascination with weapons and personal protection. 

For a few of these fellows, the teenage obsession with weapons and security has grown into an adult paranoid lifestyle whose world view features a threat environment squirming with risks. To be sure, there are risks. But the 9/11 attack and chronic Islamic terrorism have stimulated the fight or flight bundle of neurons in the brainstem and they are firing alert signals everywhere.  It is worth noting that some of this threat is push-back stimulated by a century of unintelligent foreign policy by petroleum importing states.

Some of these righteous-yet-paranoid youth have grown up and gone into government.  The politics of fear mongering is everywhere. Security at all costs. Monitor telecommunications. Control everything. Worry about everything.  Restrictions on liberty are always justified because we are trying to protect liberty. We’re the good guys, right?

<<< Sigh >>>

One of the most intellectually challenging things for humans to do is to quantitate and plan for risk. Few people walking around on earth have a true grip on what probability really means, and only a few of those folks have an idea of how to devise plans based on it. Good data is scarce so planners have to make assumptions.  Most people, when faced with a perceived risk, will assume and plan for the worst. It seems defensible.  After all, isn’t the satisfaction of the complete excision of risk worth any price?

A more mature and nuanced view must balance risk with the cost to liberty and make choices about what kinds of failures are acceptable. But this is the choke point. It is difficult to come to agreement on acceptable risk in a democracy because votes have no logic test. For the chemical industry, it would appear that choices are being made for us by someone else.  Chemical incidents have a fair likelihood of exiting the perimeter of a plant, so the authorities naturally become involved. This is not unreasonable.

What is unreasonable in my view is the newly enacted statutory control of useful or even critical industrial substances.  The military considers chemical weapons to be largely ineffective owing to the point source nature of the release and unpredictable factors such as wind direction and speed. Somehow we’re worked ourselves into a lather over imagined improvised terrorist chemical calamities at US manufacturing facilities. 

US chemical industry should audit for weaknesses in security. But the path we’re on with the security state imposition of controls on materials is a bad trend and is likely to harm an industry that is already in a precarious competitive position.

[Disclaimer: Opinions expressed here are solely those of this writer and do not represent opinions and policies of any organization the writer may be associated with.]

Solar Perplexus- Is the Sun Electrically Neutral?

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I wonder to what extent a star can accumulate an electrical charge?  Nuclear transformations conserve charge, so electrical neutrality should be preserved in nuclear chemistry. But what about CME’s– Coronal Mass Ejections or other energetic bursts of plasma from the sun?  Are such mass ejections electrically neutral? Do the processes that accelerate solar protons provide a mechanism that includes an equivalent number of electrons? Are electrons swept along with the proton burst like lepton groupies?

If the sun is 1.4E6 km in diameter, then it is about 4.7 light seconds in diameter, using the vacuum velocity of light in the estimation (this may not be the velocity to use). It seems that an electrical imbalance could occur on one side of the sun and be “unnoticed” by the rest of the star for a fairly long period of time.

The magnetic processes that eject mass from the sun perform work on the solar plasma by accelerating some of it from the sun into space.  My question is this, is it possible that charge separation can occur as well. If mass-flows are directed (or partitioned) according to charge and occur by confinement or acceleration in pinched magnetic fields (like in a cyclotron or a Tokamak), then it seems plausible that ejected particles streams could be charge imbalanced on a local scale. On a broad enough scale, the charge would be balanced, of course. 

Here are the questions that follow:  How much charge imbalance could a star accumulate and how would it get back into equilibrium?

Comments?  Pure Bullshit? Partial Bullshit?

On Importing Chemicals

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Th’ Gaussling has previously written on issues related to doing business with China.  The business climate in China resembles a gold rush in some ways. It is a Chinese Klondike bursting with optimism and strutting confidence.  Rather than streams full of gold nuggets, however, China’s hinterlands provide a bountiful stream of entry-level labor anxious for a chance for the good life in the city.

But just like other gold rush periods, a very few strike a rich vein, a larger minority make their fortunes on the miners, and the majority making up the big bulge in the bell curve labor like mules to energize production. Inevitably, some move from rural poor to urban poor. 

You can feel the glow of optimism radiating from the Asian land mass when you go shopping for products on the internet or at trade shows.  Entering a CASRN into Google will often bring back a collection of sites, often enough one in particular comes up first.  Chemexper is a site that presents a large list of suppliers for many compounds. However, the list is notably lacking in US suppliers, favoring those in Europe and Asia.  When sourcing non-commodity, specialty chemicals it is useful to have foreign supplier resources handy.

I’m not biased to foreign suppliers. I am admittedly biased toward US suppliers. However, sometimes entry to a piece of business requires rock bottom raw mat pricing, even in the specialty chemical market. You have to do what you have to do.  But to help maintain a strong US manufacturing base, US companies individually have to be competitive and strong.  If the US has trouble competing on the raw materials end, then it has no choice but to excel on the back end of the chain where the final assembly occurs.  It is not uncommon for specialty chemical companies to source outside the US to find bulk raw mats that domestic suppliers don’t want to offer at less-than-railcar levels.

We’re all familiar with Aldrich, Alfa Aesar, GFS, Strem, etc.  Sometimes you can justify going to a catalog company for bulk raw material or reagent.  But very often in scale-up the economics favor direct supply from the manufacturer.  While R&D level sourcing can almost always be done from US vendors, bulk supply is increasingly an international game [remember, Th’ Gaussling refers to the specialty chemical market]. International sourcing is an acquired skill.

Importers of chemicals must be wary of many pitfalls awaiting them. There are regulatory concerns and among them  TSCA is a big one.  Before you import a chemical, be sure to understand the TSCA ramifications.  However, TSCA is just the tip of the iceberg.

It pays to seek general business advice on this kind of activity.  If one has designs on a long term supply relationship, there is no substitute for a visit to the suppliers facility.  Reputable foreign manufacturers are there for the long term business and want a relationship with their customers. 

Google McGoogle

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I cannot account for why I never looked previously, but there are web resources that explain how Google does its job and how to make better use of it.  Doh!!  Even if you aren’t involved in marketing and have nothing to sell, it makes sense to have a better knowledge of how this system works.

If you are involved in selling things, eventually you have to turn to the internet and view your ranking on the various search engines.  Google uses some kind of black magic to rank websites.  While the details may be proprietary, many of the general principles are out in the open. One of the criteria is the extent of interconnectedness the site has with other sites.  Sites that are linked to by many other sites will be ranked higher than those with fewer links, all else being the same. Clues to the ranking mechanisms are revealed in the Google patent appln link here. 

Th’ Gaussling is not so bored with life yet that this patent appln is high on the reading list. But digital savants and code monkeys out there may dig reading this stuff.

Booyah

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It is worth reading the latest essay in New York Magazine by Jim “Mad Money” Cramer on the sub-prime lending crisis. No booyah’s or sound effects in this article.  I hear some commentators going on about this circumstance as a normal equilibration of the economy. But after reading Cramer’s editorial it is hard to believe this is just a “correction”.   Sounds like a train wreck.

It is hard to fathom how the massive upset in the mortgage market will play out for those of us engaged in chemical manufacturing. Anything that depresses home construction and mortgage lending is sure to slow down orders for raw materials in some fashion.  The rat is moving through the snake. This disturbance could eventually effect those remote from the mortgage business. 

Cramer is clearly an expert of some sort in the finance field. But it is good to remember that it was finance experts who fabricated the house of cards that got them (us) into this problem in the first place. This supprts my theory that we have too many MBA’s in the world.

Markush Claim Reform

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The USPTO is proposing changes in the rules related to the practice of writing “Markush” claims. Markush claims are used heavily in chemical patent applications and allow applicants to claim vast arrays of chemical species by way of composition of matter or by association with a claimed process. The Markush claim makes use of generic formulae that represent the substance of interest as well as a class of equivalent entities.  It is not difficult to specify features of a simple formula that claim many hundreds or thousands of chemical species. 

The PTO admits that it is overwhelmed with the workload associated with these large collections of substances.  I have no doubt that this is true. Patent prosecution requires a search of the prior art for the novelty requirement. A Markush space filled with a large number of compounds slows down the workflow.  

I would hope that the congress and the PTO consider the cost to the public in performing due diligence as well.  I wonder if our cheminformatics friends can find a way to map the space defined by a Markush claim. This would make a due diligence exercise more cost effective and reliable.

Colorado History- Gold and Tuberculosis

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Recently Th’ Gaussling & family spent some time at a mineral spa in Idaho Springs, CO. Having been to a number of mineral springs in the West, I have some sense of what is reasonable and ordinary.  All hot spring operators preach or otherwise encourage the benefits of soaking in a hot mineral bath. Mud treatments and massage are lucrative extras offered by proprietors of mineral springs.  Sadly, by constitution Th’ Gaussling is refractory to the mystical enchantments of this hot saline jive (wisdom or weakness?). I really need to see a mechanism.

Hot springs are egalitarian destinations where the young and old, rail-thin and morbidly obese, tatoo’d and blank skinned can comingle in the hydrothermal aqua from the plutonic realm. 

This particular hot spring was a hotel-pool establishment that had seen better times, but the proprietors were managing growth by adding cabins and a ribs catering operation.  We enjoyed our stay there and will probably return.

My only critical comment is that the water was not particularly loaded with minerals and didn’t favor the bather with even a whiff of sulfur.  A hydrothermal pool without the primordial tang of sulfur is but half of the experience. 

We visited the Phoenix Mine, which is a shoestring gold mining operation a few miles west of Idaho Springs.  If you want to understand Colorado, you have to come to grips with mining. It is one of the two great enthusiasms that lead the settlement wave in Colorado in the mid 1800’s- gold / silver and sanitariums (tuberculosis).  

Much of the activity stemming from the gold rush of 1859 occured along what is now the I-70 mountain corridor.  The discovery of placer deposits of gold and silver quickly lead to hard rock mining activity in the many canyons connecting with Clear Creek.  Placer gold was also found in streams in what is now the Denver Metro area and Cripple Creek.

The recovery of gold from stream sediment (placer gold) is called prospecting.  Hacking it out of hardrock is called mining.  The recovery of placer gold uses somewhat different technology from hardrock mining. Placer gold is isolated by direct settling of the higher density metal from a slurry of gravel and sand. The prospector uses a pan, sluice, rocker, or trommel. The owner of this particular mine has several miles of stream that you can pan from to get the experience of seeing placer gold first hand.  It is hard work and seems to appeal to people who like to gamble.

The tour guide stated that the Phoenix mine operation is centered on a sandstone vein containing 6-15 troy oz of gold per ton (the number varied considerably during the tour so it is hard to tell what it actually is).  But what is interesting is that the vein is a sandstone matrix varying from a few inches to 4 ft thick with a large variety of metals- Au, Ag, Cu, Pb, and Zn.  Glinting xtal faces could be seen as well as green Cu salts in the “Resurrection” vein.  As you walk through the mine it can be seen quite plainly.  The miners just follow the vein where ever it goes.

This is a type of mining that targets a highly concentrated vein, so the amount of mass that has to be processed is relatively small as these things go. This is in contrast to very large ore bodies that contain highly dilute levels of gold value. Such operations require large scale equipment for beneficiation and produce vast quantities of tailings. The operators of the Phoenix mine limit their beneficiation to milling and frothing. Concentrates are sent to Canada for the final recovery and refining. The guide was reluctant to say it, but my guess is that they ship out drums of liquid concentrate.

The other great enthusiasm for Colorado in the 19th century was for the convalescence of patients afflicted with consumption, later called tuberculosis. The thin dry air and the sunny climate was thought to be beneficial for consumption patients. Throughout history, hot springs have attracted the afflicted and the infirm.  The abundance of hot springs in Colorado attracted spa operators who catered to tourists.  The railroad provided the means of transportation for patients to arrive from distant quarters for their convalescence.  

Colorado Springs was an early destination for consumption patients as was Glennwood Springs. The ill-tempered old west figure Doc Holliday died from a long bout with consumption and is buried somewhere under a subdivision in Glennwood Springs, his marker sits on a hilltop cemetery above town.