A mote in the eye of Schrodingers Cat

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I have made some adjustments to the blogroll. It turns out that physicists, to a greater extent than chemists, have taken up the craft of blogging.  Why chemists seem less inclined to blog remains unclear.  This tendency is seen on the shelves of book stores as well.  Whereas, bookstore science shelves are clogged with treatises on Quantum _____ (fill in the blank), works on chemistry are often limited to chemical dictionaries or Schaums Outlines.  Here in Colorado, where the per capita college education is reasonably high, in certain counties at least, urban bookstores may have chemistry titles that go ever so slightly beyond the study guides and dictionaries. 

It seems to me that many of the popular quantum mechanics books on the market are peddling to people looking for a mystical experience.  Fred Alan Wolf and a few others have made a career of feeding this need.  I recall the quote by Niels Bohr-

“‘There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.“. 

 Bohr and Einstein

But I’ve ventured out on a limb. I am but a lowly synthetic organic chemist, a plebian scribbler in the scientific pecking order, who has not used a Hamiltonian operator or a Kroniker delta since grad school. My fragmented knowledge of quantum mechanical formalism is but a mote in the eye of Schrodingers cat.

Note: I’ve deleted The Volokh Conspiracy from the blogroll. They have developed an unfortunate neocon twitch that I find distasteful. 

S. 3930: Always certain but frequently wrong.

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For those who may scoff at the possibility of the DoJ or other agencies abusing secrecy in the courts, have a look at this disturbing story.

http://balkin.blogspot.com/#116119665216036725

The author of this is now a law school prof. It is a chilling account of gaming the system to intimidate opposing attorneys in litigation involving evidence designated as secret. Tamanaha makes the following point-

“A thread that runs through this story is that the government actors involved were not necessarily bad people—they were simply doing what they thought was necessary to defend their country, and they used this end to justify their extreme conduct. That’s the problem. When combined with power and with an unwavering conviction in the correctness of one’s conduct, this mindset—which the Bush Administration oozes—can lead to terrible abuses.”

After you have digested this tale, think about the general case. Granting the executive branch the authority to take actions that are not subject to checks and balances, i.e., rendition, is a step in the direction of autocracy. Our elected legislative branch has abdicated their responsibility to apply checks and balances. It is an astounding development. What is to prevent other nations from adopting the same posture? Pull a suspect out of line at customs at the airport and call them an enemy combatant. Now they have no right of habeas corpus. No court can demand that the person be accounted for. They have no right to inspect the evidence used against them. They quietly go to an undisclosed location. Is this America we are talking about? It is now, thanks to the US Senate.

All of this is being administered by people who are cut from a certain kind of cloth. I know a few of them and they tend to be the bane of my life. They are always certain in their judgements. But when they finally cycle out of your life, you see that they were just as prone to error as anyone. There has to be some metaphor for this, some mythic character or an archetype who exemplifies this flaw.

Fabulous 2-Methyltetrahydrofuran

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Some predict a bright future for 2-methyltetrahydrofuran.  At least one company is patenting MeTHF products.  For process chemists, MeTHF offers at least one advantage over THF, i.e., MeTHF is immiscible with water.  Well, mostly.  Your water phase is going to have some MeTHF in it and some water in the MeTHF phase.  You don’t have to salt up your water to get a phase boundary or worse, do a solvent exchange for an extraction. An aqueous quench of a MeTHF reaction mixture should phase separate with the aqueous wash and allow aqueous extraction. This is certainly convenient for the chemist, but at a price. 

Last time I looked, MeTHF is about twice as expensive as THF. For small scale bench work, the cost differential isn’t too onerous. If you’re talking about filling a 5,000 liter reactor with it, the costs do add up.  So, a defensible process improvement/change would have to yield at least the differential solvent cost and probably another 10-25 % to justify the cost of process validation and change management. 

Some process changes will require customer approval and product validation on their side.  Then, they’ll want a price concession for all of the trouble you put them through. So a switch to MeTHF over, say, THF will have to yield some bottom-line value to the manufacturer and the customer. It is always better to fold in your innovations before you submit your process to the plant people.  

The other issue with MeTHF has to do with it’s chirality.  For instance, MeTHF-metal complexes will be solvated by either or both enantiomers. The presence of diastereomeric complexes will only complicate in-process NMR checks of such processes.  Though certainly not a show-stopper, it is a complication that the analytical crew will have to contend with.

Romans, Greeks, and HR 5695

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Congress inched us further along toward the security state with the passage of the HR 5695, the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Act (Lungren, R-Calif) (source- the “Capitol Connection”). Though the bill was supposedly watered down, it still provides DHS with latitude to impose regulations.

Nobody wants an act of terror involving a chemical facility. Obviously. But we must be careful not to dismantle the chemical industry with hand-waving mandates that will choke innovation and US competitiveness. I predict that the only people who will benefit from this law are the security consultants who will peddle their PowerPoint deliverables to frightened management MBA’s like flu shots to the Wal-Mart elderly. Maybe Halliburton is in this business already? Ya Think?

We Americans need to ask ourselves- do we want to be like the Romans or the Greeks? Both are extinct cultures, so perhaps it is a funny comparison (or prescient). Do we spend our resources to advance the cause of empire or enlightenment? Do we automatically relent to incursions into our civil liberties because the Executive Branch says that it is required for them to do their job? When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I’m guessing that once you experience the thrill of commanding the most advanced forces in the history of the world, you are a changed person. It must influence your perception of conflict. I know it would for me. The fact of power is the act of power.

Stalin’s little buddy, that Gilligan of the communist world, Kim Jung Il, has the power thing figured out. Wave it around & watch everybody scatter. Nobody has to know that your nuke was a dud. Strut around like a rooster and state your case. He must watch the poker channel.

Here is a threat for you. What about the opium crop in Afganistan? You know, if Monsanto had made bigger contributions to the RNC, they’d be shipping tankers of Roundup(R) to Afganistan right now for the “War on the Poppy”! Somebody wasn’t thinkin’.

And, what about Afganistan? Weren’t we on a bug-hunt to find that Saudi guy, what’s his name, O’Laden? No, Bin Laden. C’mon, George, keep your eye on the ball. Good lord.

(*End Rant*)

Reply from Senator Salazar

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Recently, I wrote a letter to Senator Salazar, (D)-Colorado, to voice my dismay at his Yea vote for S. 3930.  Below is the reply.  It took 10-14 days to send the reply, suggesting that perhaps an actual person read it- some staffer, no doubt. It was addressed to my proper name, but for the blog I changed it to Gaussling.

Dear Gaussling[name changed to protect the innocent- Ed.]:

Thank you for contacting me regarding the detainment and treatment of prisoners captured by the U.S. in the war on terror. As you know, the Senate recently dealt with these issues during its consideration of S. 3930, the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

I voted for this legislation because I believe we need to jumpstart the process to determine the guilt or innocence of hundreds of people the Bush Administration has held in captivity and in limbo for years. Some of these individuals are guilty; others may not be. But until now, no process has been in place to move forward with these prisoners.

I fought the Bush Administration’s proposal to abandon the Geneva Convention and allow torture of persons in captivity. I joined with Democratic and Republican Senators to ensure that the final bill preserved the Geneva Convention and barred torture. The final bill also requires evidence to be shared with defendants so they have the ability to defend themselves and bars the use of any evidence obtained by torture.

The final bill has its faults. It does not include the right of habeas corpus for these prisoners. I fought to include the provisions of habeas corpus,and the Bush Administration and Republican leadership resisted these efforts. I will continue to fight so that these prisoners may petition the courts.

Finally, I voted for a Congressional review of the entire system within five years. This effort was defeated by the Republican leadership. Please be assured, though, that I will work with my colleagues to ensure that thorough oversight and a meaningful review of this legislation occurs.

Again, thank you for writing.

Sincerely,

Ken Salazar
United States Senator

Politics is about compromise.  Sen. Salazar’s motivation was to get something moving. I’m not privy to the details, so it is hazardous to second guess.  Still, I wish that the Democrats could have mustered more of a unified vote. Dems today seem to be just a tossed salad of left-leaning ideologies whose unifying trait is that they are not Republicans.

And speaking of Dems, the article in the current Atlantic about Hillary Clinton is very interesting and worth the time to read. 

Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds

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The news of North Korea’s announcement of the detonation of their first nuclear weapon is reverberating around the world.  It is certainly an unwelcome development if true.  Now the question is, can that junior varsity Stalinist Kim Jong Il resist the temptation to use it in a warshot? Or, sell copies to a growing list of unwholesome groups bent on the delivery of radioactive hellfire to the infidel crusaders?  What may actually be worse than having one go off in the US is our possible response and the cascade of events that follow.  What would we actually do? Whose home soil would we vitrify in our wrath? Whom would we smite? I fear that our reply would have an Old Testament ring to it. 

 I’m reminded of the famous quote by J. Robert Oppenheimer-

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that one way or another.

I vaguely remember talk of the nuclear genie when I was a skinny Iowa farm boy in the 1960’s.  Knowledgeable people assured that once the nuclear genie was out of the bottle there was no putting him back in.  North Korea and Iran remind us that the nuclear genie is still out of the bottle.  And while we worry less about a barrage of ICBMs flying over the north polar cap towards us, or Warsaw Pact forces storming into western Europe, we are stirred out of our slumber by third or fourth tier states cobbling together a fission apparatus. 

An hour and a half drive from where I am typing this can be found missile silo’s.  Deep underground in undisclosed locations Air Force Missileers monitor the status of their squadron of missiles while maintaining readiness.  Kim Jong Il’s shenanigans have brought back an immediacy to the matter.

 Mushroom Cloud

Kim is aware that the fact of power is the act of power. And swinging around a nuclear bomb is definitely an act of power.  The real danger of a North Korean Bomb isn’t just in the immediate threat to possible victims. The larger threat lies in how the existying nuclear powers respond.  Once a North Korean nuclear bomb is triggered in anger, restraint will fly out the window. It would be a difficult time for the North Koreans and whomever bought their bomb.

Why Teach Science?

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Here is the text of a comment I made over at the Volokh Conspiracy. I have pasted it here so I don’t forget it.  OK, so there is a little bit of vanity here. But I do want to build on this theme. The context of this comment pertained to the teaching of science and the influence of proponents of Intelligent Design.

In the end, we who teach want students to be able to use their brains. We want them to be able to construct or use a theory to make predictions about the observable universe and then devise experiments to test their hypotheses. We want them to design positive experiments rather than negative experiments. We want them to use language and math to express what they are thinking. We want students to be comfortable using a working hypothesis while they are working on a problem, just as long as they remember that it is just that- a working model.

We want students to learn to follow the evidence and draw a conclusion rather that start with a conclusion and cherry-pick the data to be consistent with preconceptions. The glory in science is to be able to tip over the established order in favor of new insights and understanding based on data. In the end, scientific methodology is about intellectual honesty and accountability.

All measurement involves error which causes a certain amount of uncertainty in a result. You don’t have to invoke Heisenberg to consider uncertainty. A result is only as good as your worst data. This leads to my final point.

A sign of good training or instinct in science is the ability to be sceptical or at least a bit hesitant about your conclusions. Hesitant in the sense that your conclusion is to be considered within a set boundary conditions.

A scientific outlook has served me well in general. At least so far. The world would be much more complex if I had to invoke a miracle every time something odd happened.

As is common at this site, a cluster of blood-sucking fuss budgets are haggling over minutae.  I’ll bet not a damned one of them ever had to make sense out of a mass spectrum or isolate a new substance and prove it.

Civis Romanus Sum

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I am a Roman Citizen- Civis Romanus Sum. A friend sent along a link to a NYTimes article by Robert Harris, drawing certain parallels between the attack on the Roman port of Ostia in 68 BC and the 9/11 attack-

“The incident, dramatic though it was, has not attracted much attention from modern historians. But history is mutable. An event that was merely a footnote five years ago has now, in our post-9/11 world, assumed a fresh and ominous significance. For in the panicky aftermath of the attack, the Roman people made decisions that set them on the path to the destruction of their Constitution, their democracy and their liberty. One cannot help wondering if history is repeating itself.

Consider the parallels. The perpetrators of this spectacular assault were not in the pay of any foreign power: no nation would have dared to attack Rome so provocatively. They were, rather, the disaffected of the earth: “The ruined men of all nations,” in the words of the great 19th-century German historian Theodor Mommsen, “a piratical state with a peculiar esprit de corps.”

The article goes on to detail how 38 year-old Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (Pompey) contrived to obtain unprecedented and unchecked authority over the military and the treasury.  Harris goes on to describe what happened-

“By the oldest trick in the political book — the whipping up of a panic, in which any dissenting voice could be dismissed as “soft” or even “traitorous” — powers had been ceded by the people that would never be returned. Pompey stayed in the Middle East for six years, establishing puppet regimes throughout the region, and turning himself into the richest man in the empire.”

I don’t want to put too fine a point on the comparison, but the action by Pompey is considered by some to be the end of the Roman republic.  Harris goes on to say- 

“In truth, however, the Lex Gabinia was the beginning of the end of the Roman republic. It set a precedent. Less than a decade later, Julius Caesar — the only man, according to Plutarch, who spoke out in favor of Pompey’s special command during the Senate debate — was awarded similar, extended military sovereignty in Gaul. Previously, the state, through the Senate, largely had direction of its armed forces; now the armed forces began to assume direction of the state.

It also brought a flood of money into an electoral system that had been designed for a simpler, non-imperial era. Caesar, like Pompey, with all the resources of Gaul at his disposal, became immensely wealthy, and used his treasure to fund his own political faction. Henceforth, the result of elections was determined largely by which candidate had the most money to bribe the electorate. In 49 B.C., the system collapsed completely, Caesar crossed the Rubicon — and the rest, as they say, is ancient history.”

History does not repeat itself, but particular scenarios seem to recur.  Power, once granted to a leader, is seldom returned to those who abandoned it.  US Senate bill 3930 sets a bad precedent for our republic. I believe that too much authority is granted to the executive branch in the bill. Something as fundamental as habeas corpus should be treated like national treasure. 

S. 3930, CYA, and the security state

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If you visit the blogs of thinking people, you cannot help but notice the repressed political frustration of liberal-minded folk.  Over at Cosmic Variance, Mark comments on the appalling status of S. 3930.  Decide for yourself. Have a look at Section VII of the Military Commissions Act of 2006. 

    (a) In General- Section 2241 of title 28, United States Code, is amended by striking both the subsection (e) added by section 1005(e)(1) of Public Law 109-148 (119 Stat. 2742) and the subsection (e) added by added by section 1405(e)(1) of Public Law 109-163 (119 Stat. 3477) and inserting the following new subsection (e):
    `(e)(1) No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the United States who has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination. [Bold typeface by Gaussling]
    `(2) Except as provided in paragraphs (2) and (3) of section 1005(e) of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (10 U.S.C. 801 note), no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider any other action against the United States or its agents relating to any aspect of the detention, transfer, treatment, trial, or conditions of confinement of an alien who is or was detained by the United States and has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.’.
    (b) Effective Date- The amendment made by subsection (a) shall take effect on the date of the enactment of this Act, and shall apply to all cases, without exception, pending on or after the date of the enactment of this Act which relate to any aspect of the detention, transfer, treatment, trial, or conditions of detention of an alien detained by the United States since September 11, 2001. [Italics by Gaussling]
    In particular, note the words that I have italicized at the end.  Basically, the sponsors  of Senate Bill S. 3930 are shoveling dirt over what may be a portfolio of sins or crimes committed by the Bush Administration back to September 11, 2001. If you aren’t outraged, you’re not paying attention.
    This is not the America that I have pledged allegance to these many years.  This is some new country that I do not understand.  A corner stone of our American civilization is Habeas Corpus.  A writ of habeas corpus is issued by a judge and requires that the state produce a detained person and justify the detainment of that person.  Look at section in bold, the proposed new subsection (e)(1).  This statute will bar any court or judge from issuing a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of an alien detainee.  The other population barred from habeas corpus in this country are barnyard animals. 

    We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —

    All right, this is just the declaration of independence. It does not enjoy any statutory weight.  The executive & judicial branches aren’t obligated to promulgate its principles. But Americans do look to this document for guidance in directing the moral rudder of our country. These words do set forth guiding principles for the governance of our country, but they do not provide for statutory bite.
    So we cannot look to the Declaration for any statutory safe harbor in regard to  “inalienable rights”.

    The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.

    However, it pertains to US citizens and contains the “Invasion” exception.  These constraints no doubt serve as the rationale for the acceptability of this bill. Listening on NPR, I have heard an interview of a senator stating that he considers the 9/11 attack to be an invasion and how that meets the constitutional criterion for the denial of habeas corpus to enemy combatants.
    How did the conservative party, a group that makes every effort to venerate themselves as the party of “values”, come to propose statutory backing to the notion that there are people who are unworthy or unqualified to enjoy certain inalienable rights that are ordinary to US citizens? How can the conservatives justify the loss of habeas corpus rights by an individual who is being held by the state?
    One of the rhetorical tools in common use is demonization. A hallmark of conservative mentality is the ability to partition people into the worthy and the unworthy, the saved and the unsaved, the good guys and the bad guys.  George Bush has framed our conflict with terrorists as a battle between good and evil. When your opponent is defined on a moral plane with the dark forces of evil, it is easier to justify all sorts of responses that we would ordinarily shun. Such as locking them up and throwing away the key. 
    Obviously, terrorists are criminals. And obviously they need to be incarcerated when convicted of their crimes.
    If America is to retain its status as the shining example of how to conduct civilization, then we must speak out against the official dehumanizing of any person. Terrorists may be savage, murderous, and reprehensible, but the manner in which we treat such persons ultimately defines who we are.  If the notion is that we Americans are possessing of inalienable rights, then it has to apply to everyone.