Mixing and Unmixing

Leave a reply

Today was take-your-kid-to-work-day.  In honor of this we put on a chemistry show in one of the labs.  Burned some Mg ribbon, shrunk some balloons in LN2, blew up some balloons with dry ice, reduced iodine with ascorbic acid, and we unmixed some NaCl and carbon black. 

One of the barriers to teaching chemistry is a level of physical abstraction that is hard to get around.  It is hard to get around trivial explanations when the audience is not ready to discuss electrons.  Many of the really insightful concepts in chemistry are inherently abstract and age inappropriate for the younger crowd, so to compensate, chemistry demonstrations are often heavy in the whizbang components.  That’s fine.  It should be fun and visually appealing, especially for K-6. 

I like to do mixing and unmixing because it demonstrates something about materials handling.  It also represents an activity that occupies much of our time.  Separation science is not commonly called “unmixing”, but for chemistry demonstrations it causes kids to ponder the problem for a bit.  They all have experience in mixing things- we talk about that.  Then I ask the question “What if I asked you to unmix that KoolAid”?  A few of the more worldly ones might suggest boiling off the water.  But most kids seem to be stumped- they will admit that they would have never considered the possibility of unmixing. 

So we dissolve some NaCl in water and make a solution.  The use of a magnetic stirrer and stirbar makes way for a minor diversion with magnets and iron filings. Then we blend in a bit of carbon black. Using a Buchner Filter, filter paper, and Celite, we do the vacuum filtration, showing the remains of the carbon in the Celite.  The filtrate is then treated with some “Anti-Solvent” like acetone and the salt comes crashing out. 

Yeah, I know. It is pretty tame.  But it can be done cheaply in 45 minutes and the kids can see their parents actually doing something. 

Jane Goodall

2 Replies

Went to a public lecture by Jane Goodall last night. The arena was packed.  She and members of her institute have found a type of formula for combining conservation and economic growth.  At some point she realized that you can’t sell conservation in a vacuum.  People who live near fragile preserves like Gombe have to make a living.  They need food and firewood. 

Human population pressures also threaten the shrinking wildlife preserves all over the world and in Africa in particular. One way to encourage lower population growth is to look after public health and, in particular, the welfare of women. They’ve noticed that families naturally tend to have fewer babies when infant mortality rates lower. Lower mortality rates can be achieved through the application of very fundamental improvements in hygiene and health care.

One of the critical approaches they are taking in Africa is to improve the life of women through micro loans.  This has proven effective in many other parts of the world and Goodall reports it is having a beneficial effect in Africa as well.

As I sat and listened to the lecture, I was overcome with the futility of our ever increasing consumerism.  Take our collective response to the increasing scarcity of petroleum.   The big ideas seem to involve finding new ways to sustain high consumption- e.g., the replacement of petroleum with ethanol or hydrogen.  The idea that we might have to throttle back our per capita consumption of stuff extracted from the ground is ignored.

Well, of course the national stage isn’t filled with people promoting reduced consumption.  There is no money in reducing demand. Who wants to hear that? 

Minimally, the USA must go the way of Europe in terms of lower average consumption.  Higher population density combined with higher priced energy will lead to more modest consumption of goods due to lifestyles adjusting to scarcity. 

Intermission

Leave a reply

I’m up to my gills in really fascinating stuff at the day job, but none of it can be blogged.  Pity.  So I have to blog about silly links and make fun of POTUS.  I hope the reader will pardon this intermission.  Here is a platitude shamelessly lifted from Making Light–

“The whole point of society is to be less unforgiving than nature.”  

Amen, brother.

Bush II. Sphericated or Flaticular?

2 Replies

Here along the front range of the Rocky Mountains we have a few alternative newspapers available- you know, the kind not owned by Rupert Murdoch. They tend to be a bit Bohemian and consequently are shunned by righteous Dittoheads. Other parts of the country have them as well- college towns mostly. They cater to those of us who aren’t afraid to be known as liberals.  These papers run a syndicated cartoon called This Modern World by a guy known as Tom Tomorrow. 

Because of copyright issues, I’ll have to link to the site rather than paste an image.   

Happy 100th Birthday Albert Hoffmann!!

2 Replies

Albert Hoffmann, the discoverer of LSD, turned 100 years old this year on Juanary 11th.  Happy Birthday, Albert!  Scienceblogs.com relates the story of Hoffmann’s first deliberate LSD trip on April 19th, 1943.  You might recall that Hoffmann was the Sandoz chemist who stumbled upon the psychotropic activity of lysergic acid diethylamide.  

Just this last week, the medical journal The Lancet called for an end to the “demonization” of psychedelic drugs, according to Guardian Unlimited.  The motivation behind the editorial in the Lancet was to urge a loosening of taboo’s connected with the use of psychedelic compounds.  The widespread criminalization of psychedelics has made research with these interesting molecules quite problematic. 

Perhaps the day will come when such materials are decriminalized and it will be possible to visit a psychedelic spa where one could go to have a safe dosage administered by qualified staff.  But it wouldn’t be all fun and games, though.  While the euphoric experience can be prolonged and profoundly vivid, there is a dark side.  An account of the experience of the psychiatrist Werner Stoll is described in Chapter 4 of Hoffmanns book “LSD. My Problem Child”.

Hoffmann and Sandoz would watch their discovery move from a psychiatric adjunct to a full fledged inebriant adopted by a counter culture movement.  In his book, Hoffmann laments-

    This joy at having fathered LSD was tarnished after more than ten years of uninterrupted scientific research and medicinal use when LSD was swept up in the huge wave of an inebriant mania that began to spread over the Western world, above all the United States, at the end of the 1950s. It was strange how rapidly LSD adopted its new role as inebriant and, for a time, became the number-one inebriating drug, at least as far as publicity was concerned. The more its use as an inebriant was disseminated, bringing an upsurge in the number of untoward incidents caused by careless, medically unsupervised use, the more LSD became a problem child for me and for the Sandoz firm.

    It was obvious that a substance with such fantastic effects on mental perception and on the experience of the outer and inner world would also arouse interest outside medical science, but I had not expected that LSD, with its unfathomably uncanny, profound effects, so unlike the character of a recreational drug, would ever find worldwide use as an inebriant. I had expected curiosity and interest on the part of artists outside of medicine-performers, painters, and writers-but not among people in general. After the scientific publications around the turn of the century on mescaline-which, as already mentioned, evokes psychic effects quite like those of LSD-the use of this compound remained confined to medicine and to experiments within artistic and literary circles. I had expected the same fate for LSD. And indeed, the first non-medicinal self-experiments with LSD were carried out by writers, painters, musicians, and other intellectuals.

Today, psychedelic substances are considered to be drugs of abuse and their use will lead to a long stay at the Gray Bar Hotel. Our Puritanical heritage seems everlasting. But rather than wallow in pity for my unenlightened brothers and sisters, I look forward to a brighter future where one could sit in a licensed psychotropic suite and explore the deepest recesses of consciousness brought out in full non-linear display, say, while listening to music. Everybody associates acid rock with LSD. That’s too easy. I’ve often wondered what it’d be like to listen to Leon Redbone in an altered state of consciousness.  Kinda curious about what a baritone sax does to a brain on acid.  Or David Bowie- Major Tom.  I’m showing my age. 

Along Came ChemSpider

6 Replies

There is a new resource out there called ChemSpider.  In the few searches I’ve had a chance to do, it seems to be pretty efficient at separating a lot of the wheat from the chaff that you’d get just using Google.  It would be interesting to hear what others think of it.  According to the informative FAQ page, ChemSpider is a highly specialized chemistry search engine.  And, did I mention it’s free?  Yeah baby.

To begin you enter a name, CASRN, tradename, synonym or SMILES. This generates a report of hits. Click on an ID number or a structure and another page brings up hotlinks to various resources on the web. Click on the Data Sources link and another page will come up with a variety of data sources and their unique external ID numbers. Click on the molecular formula link and it pops off a Google search of the formula.

Obviously, this isn’t the same as a SciFinder search- you don’t get access to journal downloads and article bibliographies.  It connects you to a variety of public access sites that appear to be data repositories and collections of commercial suppliers.  But it is a real improvement over a raw Google search.  You don’t get the rats nest of links to publishers (i.e., Wiley, Elsevier, etc), expired colloquium notices, or literature citations from curriculum vitae on faculty websites.  

It will convert names to structures and, using ACD/Labs software, generate calculated physical properties.  I would be hesitant to enter the identities of confidential materials just yet. I do not know if they compile entries into a database or not.  I’m not convinced that I would enter a sensitive confidential material on it until I had a chat with an attorney about the question of disclosure.

All in all, it seems to be a useful tool for web searches.  I have only scratched the surface of what this thing will do.  Give it a try and see what you think.

First Class Tickets to Stockholm

Leave a reply

The buzz has begun for the 2007 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.  Over at ChemBark a list of fields and potential awardees is presented.  Odds are offered.  It is interesting to ponder.  In case you were wondering, the identities of the awards committee for 2007 is actually published.

When the committee calls for my opinion, I’ll have to set ’em straight.  First I’ll scold a bit about the snub of some early workers in asymmetic synthesis and how they were overlooked in 2001. People like Henri Kagan for C2 symmetric ligands among other things and Kurt Mislow for basic contributions to stereochemistry.  The guys who won in 2001 were deserving, but the omission of Kagan and Mislow is a shame.

I would like to see some organometallikkers like Suzuki, Heck, and Sonogashira get the recognition for their contributions to coupling chemistry, but I’m not sure it is a Nobel Prize body work.  I would prefer to see Bergman , Whitesides , or Harry Gray get the trip to Sweden for their fundamental contributions to organometallic and bioinorganic mechanism work. 

There is my free advice to the commitee.

Chemical Plant Production Managers

9 Replies

I have known a few plant production managers at several facilities in my career and they seem to share particular attributes. No doubt they fall into a particular Myers-Briggs type.  I can say without a doubt that I am personally disqualified from such activity because I tend to be more of the absentminded professor type.   It takes a certain breed of cat to manage any kind of production facility.  Indeed, your average construction site superintendant is probably better suited to manage a chemical plant than is a chemist. 

Well, OK. That was a bit harsh.  Many chemists could do it if they had to. But if you owned a chemical company and were looking for a new plant manager, you’d probably find that the pool of candidates didn’t include many chemists. There, that is more polite.  Chemists are often tweakers by nature and a chemical plant is not a place for experiments. Plant managers live by the production schedule. They are both masters of and slaves to this schedule.  Their whole careers are about the coordination of material flows- the arrival of raw materials, processing, and the logistics of shipping.

A chemical plant is a big machine through which flows a large stream of money.  Money flows in one side of this machine and out the other side.  Jets of cash flow outward to payroll and raw material vendors. The production manager never forgets that the inflowing stream must always be bigger than the outflowing stream.  Customers insist on just-in-time delivery of products, but they also want 60 days net with a lot of other strings.  The relationship between the controller and the plant manager may be chronically strained.

People who run production plants are really engineers, irrespective of whether or not they hold a diploma in engineering.  Scientists find the thread between cause and effect.  Engineers take that thread and figure out how to use it for fun and profit. Sure, some scientists have engineering sense and some engineers have scientific sense.  But a plant manager is all about running the plant at full speed. When they make tweaks, it is usually on the engineering side.  Usually they are loath to alter chemistry.

In the Navy they have a saying- Fight the Ship.  Use every part of the boat to your advantage.  Slap ’em with the rudder if it comes to that.  A good production manager is crafty, thrifty, and when needed, a brutal task master.  He knows his crew and can and will push them to the edge when needed. 

A really smart plant manager will find and keep the best maintenance people he/she can find.  In fact, a savvy plant manager will always vote to throw a chemist overboard rather than let a maintenance person go.  One of the least acknowledged groups at a chemical plant is the maintenance crew.  To keep the plant up and running you need the skill sets of plumbers, welders, pipefitters, machinists, electricians, iron workers, carpenters, tinners, and a bunch of general handymen and gofers.  Usually you hire people with multiple skill sets.

The best plant managers are steely-eyed SOB’s who speak softly and command respect and maybe a little fear. A plant manager must be able to work effectively with arrogant executives, stubborn accountants, egghead scientists, angry admin staff, defensive production people, and sly construction contractors.  The people skills are as important as the technical skills.

If I were going to hire people for key management positions in a plant, I would hire people from the nuclear Navy. As a group, they have already been screened for many attributes useful to a chemical plant. They tend to be high achievers, have good quantitative skills, have been highly trained for work in hazardous environments, and they understand the importance of following protocol.

Wear the Fox Hat

Leave a reply

Ever been to the Royal Burgh of Auchtermuchty? Neither have I.  It’s north of Edinburgh on the A91 on the way to St. Andrews, between the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Tay.  According to Undiscovered Scotland, the name comes from the Scottish Gaelic phrase uachdar muc garadh, meaning “upper pig enclosure”. 

Hey, I really dig Scotland. 

Here is a grab bag of surprise links.  X  Y  Z.  

Yet another mass shooting in our USA

10 Replies

The news of the mass shooting at Virginia Tech just seems to get worse as the day wears on.  There aren’t words to describe it. 

After the grisly scene in Blacksburg is cleaned up and the bodies are buried, we’ll once again switch on the TV and watch programming glamorizing gun-toting tough guys and violence. Not a night goes by on television where some plot isn’t based on the menacing of women by crazed or angry men, most with guns.  Some people will solve problems with guns and others will cause problems with guns.  The message is that guns bring satisfaction and command respect. Just look at the very title of the series The Sopranos and listen to the lyrics.  “Woke up this mornin’ and got myself a gun …”

Maybe there is no causal connection between entertainment and what this shooter did.  But I cannot help but believe that the more or less constant exposure to violence in our entertainment doesn’t dull our sensibilities and lower our threshold for what constitutes acceptable behaviour.  Regardless, we have to start somewhere and cleaning up our tastes in entertainment is relatively painless.  We need to create less demand for this crude stuff.

Obviously, the shooter is responsible for the murders, not the inanimate steel mechanism.  But the common fascination we have with the gun and it’s stylized, even mythical, application means that this mechanical device has some kind of hold on us.  Its ease of use and its ability to deliver death from a great distance makes it possible for anyone to deem themselves a “warrier” for a few minutes.

We are horrified by such violence when it is real. But we entertain ourselves with painstakingly elaborate dramatizations of it.  We are gratified to watch fictional characters engage in gunplay with bad guys.  We cheer as fictional cops rough up suspects because, as we all know, bad guys really shouldn’t have rights. 

There is no mysterious or complex phenomenon to sort out here. Our American culture has a form of fragmented personality disorder with respect to gun violence.  I don’t know if it’ll do a damned bit of good, but we need to come down from the saturation level of violence in our entertainment and recreation. The first thing we must do is to remove a bit of the glamor of gunplay. 

We don’t have to give up our guns.  But we do need to develop a new viewpoint or an advanced ethos about them. We need new icons and archetypes.  It is time to retire CSI and The Sopranos as popular iconography.  We must find better ways to fulfill our self image and need for power besides being handy with a gun.  How do other societies do it?  Any suggestions??

Here is an interesting link to a rebuttal in the Daily Kos written by someone said to be from VT.