Teaching College Chemistry in the Internet Age

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It has been 10 years since I was an Asst. Prof. of Chemistry.  My jump to the dark side (business) has largely disconnected me from the latest trends in chemical education. Much has changed in regard to information technology.  Students now show up in class with laptop computers and cell phones. They didn’t 10 years ago.

I do have a question in regard to the Internet and how it may add or subtract from use of the literature.   Are students referencing web sites in lab writeups or papers? How does that work? Just what kind of legitimacy does the internet enjoy today as a “reference”?  How has the internet affected how we archive information? 

And just how do you handle the matter of students and their cell phones?  Calls and text messaging could be pretty disruptive to the classroom.

Atlas Experiment at CERN

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At the CERN facility in Geneva, Switzerland, a mammoth detector array is being built to detect events resulting from proton-proton collisions.  It is called Atlas.  There is an impressive collection of public outreach web sites to afford some background to the interested viewer.  The Atlas project has produced some swell animation too. 

I think these physicists have done a first-rate job of trying to make their work comprehensible to the public.  I wonder if we chemists have made a comparable effort in our endeavors? But maybe there are not comparable projects in chemistry.  Whereas there are 1800 physicists working on Atlas, where are there comparable numbers working in unison in chemistry?  Answered my own question.

Encounter with Asteroid 2006 VV2

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An asteroid said to be approximately 1 mile in diameter will have a near encounter with the Earth at 11 pm Pacific Daylight time today, Saturday, 31 March.  The rock will pass within 3,900,000 kilometers of our planet.  The asteroid is passing south against the backdrop of the constellation Leo this very moment.  It is predicted to be 10th magnitude and will require a 6 inch telescope or greater to see. Its proximity to a nearly full moon will not help the seeing. This NASA JPL link will allow you to generate an ephemeris.  Spaceweather.com has a stereogram of the object passing the galaxy M81.

For tickets to this momentous event, send $20 cash to Gaussling.google.internet. Operators are standing by.

Katzenklavier

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There are many amazing but obscure characters in history. One of them is the German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680). Wikipedia has a nice writeup on this guy.  Kircher was one of these intellectually insatiable fellows whose curiosity knew few boundaries.  While chemistry or alchemy was not a mania of his, he did publish works on geology, Egyptology, and music theory. Among many other acomplishments, he was an early proponent of hygienic practices to prevent the spread of infectious disease.

Curiously, Kirchner set forth what must have been an improved version of the Katzenklavier, or a Cat Piano.  This lamentable instrument was described as early as 1549.  Thankfully, he doesn’t appear to have actually built a working model. The cat piano was an apparatus wherein an “octave of cats” were selected by the timbre of their meow. They were thus arranged in a mechanical contrivance that would hammer or pull their tails to elicit a painful, though harmonious, yowl when the “artist” pressed a key. 

Kids, don’t try this at home.  It is an oddment that should remain in the remote past.  Though I am a cat fancier and the thing is obviously cruel, I can’t help but snicker a little at the thought of it. It is just so … Monty Python.

Hu- The Human Element

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We’ve all seen the ad on television with it’s folksy music and mosaic of compelling images while the voice-over waxes philosophic about the “Human Element”. It is a very well done piece of public relations art.  The theme is that the practice of chemistry is ultimately about serving people.  I’m inclined to agree, though the ad does gloss over the imbalance between service to the stakeholders and the shareholders.  But that is the general state of affairs with the whole of the corporate world.  We’re all stakeholders, but only a few are actual shareholders.

Few people outside our field associate chemistry with the term “high technology”.  That is commonly reserved for medicine, electronics, and aerospace.  Just look at any news outlet or magazine. If it ain’t happenin’ in space or in the hospital or it doesn’t involve TV or cell phones, it is too boring for words. 

But in fact, chemistry deserves to be in that elite group as well.  We chemists know that the ballyhoo about advances in medicine typically resolve to advances in the chemical sciences.  It’s the same for electronics and even aerospace because they rely heavily on the material sciences. OK, so our chosen field is not the object of admiration. We’re probably better off for it.

It is an understatement to say that the human element is important.  My observation is that resolving issues with the other elements is almost always easier than issues relating to this one element- Hu.  Using it to titrate buy-in, cooperation, or just help often requires the most subtle interactions and the results can be spectacularly non-linear. 

Sometimes Hu is refractory, other times it is pyrophoric.  It can be most agreeable, or not.  I still do not understand it very well.  But I’ll keep trying. 

Yves Rossy and his flying wing

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So, there is this Swiss fellow named Ives Rossy who has developed a strap-on wing assembly complete with a small turbine engine.  His flight profile goes like this- He launches from a high wing single engine aircraft (a Pilatus) at altitude.  As he drops, he deploys the folded wingtips and achieves a stable glide. I can’t tell from the video, but I suspect that he starts his engine prior to leaving the plane.  Once he has his glide established he throttles up the engine and begins powered flight.  Clearly he is maintaining level powered flight and even appears to climb.  This is no mere glider. He ends his flight at altitude near the intended touchdown point and deploys a paraglider-type chute and lands by parachute. 

This is nothing short of amazing.  There are other video’s showing different flights and a few details of the wing.  As flying folk know, when you go aviatin’ you are actually flying the wing. Passengers may focus on the fuselage, but the pilot is busy up front making sure the airstream is moving over the wing properly. However, the fuselage is not just a cargo space or place to sit and leer at the stewtrons while munching pretzels.  Significantly, it connects the empannage, or tail assembly to the wing. 

The job of the empannage is to hold the vertical and horizontal stabilizers in place.  The horizontal stabilizer and its articulated control surface called the “elevator” is a concession to an unfortunate aspect of wing behavior.  A “normal” wing (i.e., a Clark Y) is just an oddly shaped truss built to develop a pressure imbalance in an airstream.  This imbalance gives rise to lift which counteracts the force of gravity.  But a normal cross section wing will also develop a pitching moment, or the tendency for the trailing edge to pitch upwards and the leading edge pitches downwards about the center of lift.  The job of the horizontal stabilizer downstream of the wing is to counteract this downward pitching moment. 

One of the critical design features of the flying wing was to counteract this downward pitching behavior.  One way to do it is to shape the trailing edge of the wing upwards to cause the airflow to impart some counteracting downward force on the downstream side of the wing.  So, if you look at the details of Rossy’s wing, you’ll see this upward curving lip on the trailing edge.  He is a clever boy.

My hat is off to this guy. Yves, my next glass of Fat Tire is in your honor!

Chemical Business Development People

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Any chemical manufacturing business has a sales group.  Sales people will sell existing products, that is, products for which the manufacturing facility already has a process.  It is relatively straightforward to sell existing products.

If your company is so disposed, the sales group might also market its ability to take on new projects.  To sell this kind of capability you need a special kind of sales person.  Many companies call such sales people “Business Development” managers. Such people almost always have a strong technical background and a desire to interact with customers. 

A business development manager is a special kind of animal.  In addition to their technical ability they must have a wide range of general business skills.  Such a person must have a thorough grasp of all phases of manufacturing- R&D, pilot plant, semi-works, and production.  This intimate understanding of manufacturing is not limited to just the technical aspects of making a proposed material to specifications.  There is raw material sourcing to be done as well as the generation of an economic model of the proposed process.  And, before you can even offer a product you have to do your due diligence in the intellectual property arena. 

The business development person must somehow mesh the customers price and delivery requirements with the company production timeline. For the development of a new product,  a company needs a process that operates at scale.  To get a scaled-up process, it has to have a process validated at the pilot plant scale.  To get a pilot scale process, the company needs its process bench chemists to pony up a process that is cost efficient and safe. 

The practice of business development will involve math.  Costing and pricing are two economic activities that will put you in contact with accounting and with upper management.  This is where the job can become highly stressful.  Your company will probably have costing numbers that are reasonably accurate.  I say probably because there is some philosophy involved. 

Your accountants will use GAAP- Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.  I’m not an accountant and I have no aspirations to be one.  All I can say is that the allocation of costs to a given product, at least in a multipurpose facility, will involve some assumptions about how to partition resource costs to any given process.  The previous sentence can be the source of incredible confusion for companies.  The method by which costs are allocated can lead to numbers that are unrealistic on either the high or low side.  Overly low numbers can lead to pricing that is too low to sustain the operation.  Overly high numbers can lead you to offer quotations that are not competitive. Both circumstances are not desirable.

A business development person must be intimately familiar with all phases of manufacture.  Fundamentally, business development people are show horses.  They represent their company on site and at meetings and conferences off-site.  A business development person must have excellent communication skills, be an effective public speaker, and be in command of details in diverse fields.  And, it really helps if you have some savoir-faire.   Personal skills like the ability to listen, to carefully drill into customers and competitors for specific details without being rude or creepy.  It helps to be able to dress well, understand decorum, and display good manners.  It is better to be sincere and risk being taken advantage of on occasion than be cagey and deceptive. This kind of thing does really matter. 

Many chemists out there who have yet to hatch from the academic and post-doc world may not have heard of this job description. Other manufacturing arenas may use engineers in this capacity. In the chemical manufacturing field, chemists can step into this type of activity and be in the center of the activity and at the edge of technology all at once. Having done it, I can only encourage fellow chemists to consider it as a career path. 

Colloidal Porcine Lipids with Capsaicin-Lambda Max 550 nm

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As a gastronaut, I have been in pursuit of the perfect chili verde for quite some time.  Fundamentally, chili verde is a type of gravy: a dispersion of lipid phase (preferably pork lipids), a dispersant (starches), an aqueous phase, phytochemicals (capsaicin, cumin extracts, etc), pork, and assorted plant tissues.  It is called green chili mostly because it is not red.  That is, it lacks red chili’s.  It is more or less green by default owing to the minor jalapeno or other chili components. 

Chili verde can be consumed as a soup with or without tortillas. It is also a wonderful sauce to drown a burrito or other variations of foods wrapped in tortillas.  When used as a sauce the rheology is quite inportant.  The chili verde must flow readily, but it must also coat the burrito or enchilada in a fashion so as to form a layer substantial enough to impart flavor and release enough heat to melt any cheese that might be applied. 

I’m an experimental gastronomer, not a theorist.  Much can be said about what constitutes authentic Mexican food.  I happen to prefer what tastes best, not what is stringently authentic.  When we use the word “authentic”, what do we really mean anyway?   Mexican food is now a kind of gastronomic diaspora- it has been dispersed in all directions (well, except for Europe) and is evolving.

Here is the latest revision– To a large stock pot is added 454 g of pork sausage or diced pork.  As the pork is browning, one half of a medium onion is diced and added to the browning meat.  Several cloves of minced garlic are added to the mix.  After the meat is browned, 6 cups of water is added and the mixture is heated to a gentle boil.  To the vessel is added 1 tsp of NaCl (or to taste), 1 finely diced jalapeno pepper, 1/3 cup diced Anaheim pepper, 1 tablespoon of cumin, 1 teaspoon of ground chili pepper, 1/4 cup corn meal, and one finely diced tomatillo.  The mixture is allowed to simmer for 30 minutes.  To a cup with 1/4 cup of warm water is added 2 tablespoons of corn or arrow root starch and the solids vigorously dispersed in the water (no lumps).  The starch slurry is added to the pot and the resulting mixture is simmered at low heat for 10 minutes to afford a mixture that should have the consistency of a gravy. Beware-  it is possible to overheat the composition and wreck the dispersion. 

Comment on the above lot:  Pretty good, I’d give it a 9 out of 10. Perhaps a bit more cumin.  Actually, a fresh salsa with cilantro & jalapeno would do the job on a burrito.

In a later post I will discuss fabrication techniques related to the burrito. For now, bon appetit!

Isotope Mojo Blues

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Near as I can tell, there is some kind of demand in the marketplace for all of the elements from 1 through 92, with the exceptions of Pm, At, and Rn, I suppose. It is hard to gauge the trade in actinides since precious little gets outside the realm of government regulatory frameworks. Clearly there is demand for certain isotopes of Th, U, and Pu.  But the nuclear regulatory people keep a tight reign on that stuff.

I remember a pottery class I took some years back in a nearby town. I was snooping through the pottery stockroom looking for glazes and what did I find? I found a sizeable quantity of Thorium nitrate.  These hapless middle-aged, post-hippy era, meadow muffin starving artisans running the co-op clearly had no idea that they had an actinide a nuclear-age artifact in their midst. Obviously, it had been secured for colored glaze applications.  I warned them about it but was met with the cow-in-the-headlights-look. I call it the “bovine stare”.  So, I brought a GM survey meter the next week and opened up the jar with a few of them standing there. As the clicks ramped up from the beta’s and as I switched the attenuation to keep the needle on scale, I thought I heard the unmistakeable faint slapping sound of multiple sphincters slamming shut.

The first question was “Would I like to have it?”.  Pppffffttttt!  “Hell no!” says I.  Nuclear cooties. Jesus H. Crimony!!  I did a careful survey with the GM counter and found that the surrounding area was clean. The material (early 1960’s vintage by the looks of the label) had hardly been used, so I was confident that contamination was not too bad, if indeed there was any. There may have been alpha emitters but this counter wouldn’t pick them up.  I gave some names of hazardous waste vendors and a stern warning not to drop it or spill it.  That’s the last I heard of it.

I remember a seminar in grad school when a visiting rock star from ETH gave an organic seminar detailing the use of Li-6 in NMR studies.  The fellow lamented in his fastidious German/Swiss accent that it was difficult to get Li-6.  He also said that for a time much of the refined Lithium in the market place was depleted of Li-6.  It would be interesting to hear someone comment on the accuracy of this. 

Bush Administration’s Soldiers of Fortune

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Lordy.  The very notion that our federal executive branch is managing a contractor army to promulgate its policies, apparently outside of the oversight of the legislative branch, is the kind of revelation that takes your breath away.  

The presence and extent of mercenaries, or commercial warriers, has been popping up in the news lately.  This video is given by Jeremy Scahill, an investigative reporter at The Nation.  The Bush II administration has placed soldiers of fortune in Iraq (and elsewhere?) whose fundamental operating sensibilities may be rooted in their company Articles of Incorporation rather than the ideals of a nation state.  On a recent edition of Fresh Air, Terry Gross interviewed Scahill and he recounted some chilling observations related to the emergence of the private army business.

No doubt, the DoD has a thousand page contract and hard drives full of MIL-Spec terms and conditions that a contractor must abide by.  But the contractors are well paid for their trouble. 

What the people of the United States lose, apparently, is accountability.  One of the reasons a nation state has a military is to promulgate foreign policy.  The checks and balances and the separation of powers provided for in the US Constitution assure that power is shared and that there is accountability by each of the branches. However, what we have here is a circumstance whereby one branch of government has war-zone contractors obligated to the DoD, which is under control of the Executive Branch.  Exactly what is their status in regard to congressional oversight?

Let me clarify my point. It isn’t clear that there is anything inherently wrong with the US government hiring militarized contractors.  However, everything is wrong when we hire military contractors who are hidden from, or are not subject to our system of checks and balances.  It is doubly true when we ask these people to expend ammunition on our behalf.

What US law covers the conduct of US military contractors in a foreign conflict? What is their status if they are captured?  Would they be non-military combatants and be disqualified from international law covering the humane treatment of prisoners of war? Would other nations treat them like we treat the detainees at Gitmo- i.e., criminals with no rights or due process? 

What rights here at home do these folks have in comparison to US military veterans?  Do not the people of the US owe some debt of gratitude for their sacrifice? I think so.  Will Haliburton or Blackwater see to their medical needs in 20 years? Good questions.  The federal government, for all of its flaws, does have resources that function over multi-decade timeframes.