35th Parallel

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Th’ Gaussling and family have dropped down to a fault zone near the 35th parallel for some much needed vacation time.  The happiest place on earth is located here. It is a confederation of attractions called Disneyland and California Adventure.  By day we stand in line and by night we watch a fireworks display featuring incendiary flares in brilliant pastel.  Clever monkeys, these Disney pyros.  A delay time of 1-2 seconds between flare and concussion gives an indication of the proximity of the conflagration to our room.  All is well.

EAA Fly-in at Vance Brand

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Last Saturday the local chapter of the EAA held a fly-in at Vance Brand Airport in Longmont, Colorado.  We got there late, so we missed most of the show. Did see some good aerobatics though.  This is the airport where yours truly learned to fly.

On the tie-down ramp at Vance Brand, June 25, 2011.

 What is most interesting about attending an EAA fly-in is the variety of airplanes that are on display.  But the show was a bit lean this year. Only one warbird was there. Usually there is more action with the relics.

Vance Brand used to have excellent air shows, but A**en built a pharmaceutical plant adjacent to the airport and caused the airspace to be unsuitable for aerial displays.  To add insult to injury, certain products were black boxed a few years back with the result that good people have been let go and much of the production hit the skids. So, what was a rich culture of aviation at this field has been chased away by a marginal pharma plant that can’t seem to either thrive or shut down. It’s pathetic, but it’s what happens when you build a business plan on technology that is as complex as what they were trying to do. Pharma companies- never in doubt but frequently wrong.

Travel-Aire

Patent links

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The blog Patently-O is a worthwhile site to visit periodically.  That is if you’re interested in the arcane cosm of patents like I am. The fellow who writes the blog is Dennis Crouch, Asst Prof. at the University of Missouri School of Law. The post on USPTO guidelines on obviousness is particularly interesting.  I find this to be the most vexing part of patent law. 

EDTexweblog documents patent litigation in the East Texas district. I especially like the litigation haiku.  Reference and comparison is made to Vogon poetry.

Anything Under the Sun, by Russ Krajek, is another useful site to visit if you want to glean useful tidbits on patent practice.  These sites are maintained by people interested in their field and are happy to share insights with others.

Thoughts on Process Development. Outsourcing.

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I have not put pen to paper (Okay. Fingers to keys) on process development lately. I can’t discuss much in the way of specifics. But there are some generalizations that can be put on the table for discussion.

When should you outsource a raw material? Depends. Does the process for the raw material match your skill set? Namely, does it require, say, bromination of an olefin or an aromatic ring? This can be deceptively troublesome. It is easy to scribble down a reaction mechanism for a bromination. It can seem like a no-brainer to say “yeah, we can do that”. Same is true for a Sandmeyer or a Friedel-Crafts reaction or some oxidation reaction for instance.

You may not do much of a particular kind of transformation or handle certain reagents enough to have an institutional expertise to safely handle some materials. You may have safety kingpins who will nix some reagents because they don’t like the looks of the MSDS.  Or, your pots and pans may be booked well into the future and you have no opportunity to make the raw material.

The trouble with outsourcing a raw material is that the supplier’s price is your cost which must be passed along to your customer. You may or may not have the margin to play with to do much outsourcing.  If you suddenly need to outsource a raw material, you will have to find a shop that will make the stuff.  Preliminaries include doing a secrecy agreement, a disclosure of the desired material, and possibly disclosing a technology package.  After the disclosures it might transpire that the vendor isn’t interested, they can’t do the job in the desired time frame, or they want too high of a price. Lots of things can go wrong.  Meanwhile, you’re relentlessly screaming down the timeline towards you’re own delivery date. You should be planning your outsourcing 6 to 12 months in advance. Or even 18 months.  Outsourcing always involves the discovery of new failure modes.

Let’s say that they agree to work up a quote. There is the matter of specifications. They’ll need to know some specifications even before they quote a price.  What kind of purity are you needing? Be reasonable now. There is what you want and what you can get by with. OK, you can live with “97 % purity”. What does that mean? Does it include solvent residuals? What about color and haze or mesh size and appearance? If it comes in at 96.8 %, are you sure you want to reject it?  If it can be easily reworked, and you have the time to spare, rejecting the material might be the best choice. But if they are late and you are late, you may have to take the material on waiver.

Apart from the mere chemistry is the matter of TSCA regulations and/or import restrictions. Will your vendor have to file for an LVE (low volume exemption) or is the material already on TSCA?  An LVE will take time even if everything goes well. Need to put these regulatory filings into the timeline.  Want to import bulk Hazardous When Wet materials? Plan on a boat ride across the ocean.

Asking a company to develop a new product for you requires good communication, person to person relationships, and lots of patience.  Your custom vendor may be smaller than you are and may have considerable resources tied up in your order. They’re taking some risks as well. Shoot for win-win.

Salmagundi

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The world wide web is a never ending source of wonderment … for the curious.  It’s just email for everyone else.

A 3-D priniting device has been demonstrated using concentrated sunlight to fuse sand into sintered glass structures. In the Sahara. Where there is a lot of sand and sunlight, naturally.

Think you understand why the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991?  Think it was the dynamic duo of Ronnie Reagan, Maggie Thatcher, and their SDI that done em’ in? Well, these two characters had a part in it certainly. But the USSR was at the peak of its power by that time.  And they knew that SDI was decades from implementation. What was the real reason that the powerful and influential USSR collapsed? The article in the July/August issue of Foreign Policy by Aron Leon gives some interesting insights into that period of history,

Malcom Gladwell on spaghetti sauce.

Whither tellurium?

The Onion Wins Pulitzer Prize

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The Pulitzer Board today announced that Bob Loblaw, associate editor at The Onion, has been awarded the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Faux News. Loblaw was recognized for his groundbreaking 300 word essay on faux journalistic integrity in virtual political news reporting. Loblaw’s knack for news aggregation from the internets has encouraged editors throughout the web to extract and publish virtual news.

The Publisher, Editorial Board, and staff of Lamentations on Chemistry wish to congratulate Bob Loblaw and The Onion on this prestigious award.

Retro NMR

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We received our picoSpin 45 MHz NMR last week. It’s the size of a toaster and sits on the benchtop next to the computer. We brought in a bunch of chemists to see a demonstration. Most of them were fresh PhD’s on their first job out of grad school. I think they were non-plussed. What on God’s green earth would someone accustomed to using 300-500 MHz NMR want with a low field FT instrument like this?

Let me say that I am a fan of this thing and the company. Yes, it is retro in some ways. It lacks the sensitivity and features many of us are used to. However, it is an FT instrument and can be used to examine a great many substances. In a high field instrument, it seems like everything  is a doublet of doublets. Not in this instrument. For routine analysis of reaction completion, for instance, you may already know the spectrum of your product or starting materials. One or two reasonably isolated diagnostic peaks is all you need to gauge the state of your reaction. You almost never need coupling constants and fancy 2-D spectra at this point. Often, high resolution amounts to excess capacity. And you can have picoSpin in the lab with you. No need to trudge to the NMR room for a routine spectrum. Oh yes, it’s $20,000 for the unit.

We have a high field instrument, but not at my location. Between the GCMS and the picoSpin, I have a good bit of analytical capability.  What I like about this is that the picoSpin offers a lot of analysis per dollar. Of course a high field instrument offers superior capability. But the fact is that most instrumentation on the market today provides considerable excess capacity. For instance, how much of the capability of Microsoft Excel or Word do you actually use? Perhaps 10 %?  I’d offer that a large fraction of the total dollar amount spent on scientific instrumentation worldwide amounts to excess capacity.  People are easily dazzled by the possibilites in a list of features. Sales people know this and actually depend on it.

So, I’m exploring how this miniature marvel can be integrated into daily use in a chemical manufacturing plant. Chemists are a stubborn lot and it may be that I can’t crack this nut. We’ll see.

Screenplay

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A friend wrote a screenplay called the” Hermit Kingdom” and a group of us did a public reading of it at the Bas Blue theatre in Ft Collins last night. It is based on the 1871 American Expedition to Korea. It was quite enjoyable to read this and then indulge in a bit of analysis. There were 47 characters involved in many layers of story. 

We’ve done this a few times now with new plays and screenplays. It is interesting to see how these things are written.  Actors and directors get a lot of credit in plays and film, but only after the writers have conceived it and put it in print.

Snow

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Wow. The mountains of the Colorado Front Range got a fresh coat of snow last night. Looks like it extends below timberline.   The winter wheat harvest will happen in a few weeks.  By mid-July we will be into the monsoon season here.  That is when pacific moisture brings a bit of rain and moderates temperatures for a few weeks. By August it’s hot and dry like everywhere else.

I had the occasion to go to a barbeque at the farm of a local Coors barley farmer saturday evening.  He has been featured in numerous Coors ads on TV, in part because his family has been growing Coors barley for 52 years, but also because he provides a very striking persona for television.  From the collectors items on display, he is very much an admirer of John Wayne and John Deere.

AF447 Accident information is beginning to reveal the event

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The French air safety authority, the BEA, is beginning to put together the picture of what happened to AF447 enroute from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.  Key parts of the wreckage have been found, including the flight data recorder.  The BEA website contains links directing the reader to a more detailed view of many aspects of the investigation.

What has been so unnerving about this particular crash is the lack of detailed understanding of how it initiated and propagated. We know how it terminated.  In particular, the flight is an example of in-flight loss of control of the aircraft.  By all accounts, the airplane was in good working order and well equipped for transoceanic flight.  It had a crew that, by prevailing standards, was well qualified to operate the aircraft. How could there possibly be a loss of control that could confound this well equipped machine with expereienced crew?

The aircraft had more than one crew on board as well as a highly automated flight control system comprised of advanced navigation and communications, auto pilot, and auto throttle systems with the usual redundancies.  Yet with all of the human resources and automation, and with a century of aircraft design knowledge behind it, this passenger aircraft managed to take an excursion into uncontrolled flight and impact the ocean.

The BEA has disclosed a timeline of events in the cockpit as well as a description of the flight attitude of the aircraft.  What I find interesting are the control inputs made by the PF (pilot flying). In the face of indications of a stall, the PF primarily tried to pull the nose up.  This is the wrong control input for a stalled airplane. What makes the incident worthy of note is the interaction of the crew with the automation and sensors.  Aviation Week and Space Technology has a good article worth reading on this very topic.