Powder Puff Derby

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A distant memory comes to mind about my mother this Mother’s Day. We were sitting high in the south stands of the Dayton Speedway in Dayton, Iowa.  It was ~1962. The speedway was a modestly sized oval dirt track. My aunts were screaming “C’mon Ruthie! Faster!”  I was five and mildly apprehensive about the whole thing.  It was all so very loud.

Down on the track was a snarling pack of cars driving too closely and at speeds plainly too fast for the size of the oval. They were all trying to get ahead of one another. The cars in the lead had caught up with the cars in back so it was hard to see who was winning. They just kept grinding away around that loop.

Alarmingly, my mother was on that track driving a stock car. Our cousin, Dick, had provided the car. He was a Dodge dealer in our home town nearby and had the resources to dabble in stock car racing. This variety of racing was called a “Powder Puff Derby”. Mom was driving a robins egg blue Chevy with the pink letters PU2 painted on the doors. Mom normally drove at two speeds- fast and stop. She had the need for speed and racing was a natural impulse for her.

Later in the day we drove home with a trophy. It wasn’t first place, but it was a trophy.  Mom was energized by the whole experience but quite exhausted. When we got home we did what people often did on a late summer afternoon- we cut open a watermelon out in the yard and stood there in the shade slurping the juicy melon out of the rind and spitting the seeds long distance under the swaying branches of an elm tree in the summer breeze. 

If I concentrate I can still hear the clatter of the hogs lifting and dropping the metal lids of the feeder in the hog house and the earthy, organic smells of the farm. It was a long time ago in a very different world.

Gravity Probe B Results

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NASA has just announced the results from its Gravity Probe B mission.  The mission found data that support the hypothesized phenomena of frame dragging.  This effect is the result of vortex-like distortion of space-time around the earth resulting from the earths rotation. The earth distorts space-time owing to its mass and this effect is further shaped by the earth’s rotation.  The effect of this is minute.

Scientists and engineers assembled 4 ultra-precise niobium coated spheres which when spun individually in a hard vacuum and at liquid helium temperatures, produced a highly stable superconducting gyroscope. This superconducting gyroscope produces a weak magnetic field which can be monitored with a SQUID.  Wobble induced by frame dragging would be detected as changes in the alignment of the gyro’s magnetic axis relative to a star in the background. 

All of this is super precise work and a great deal of credit goes to the all those involved.  It is an amazing experiment. It is a true wonder.

Reading, searching, researching, and writing. My life as a chemist.

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It turns out that I like Russian fiction. On a lark I picked up a collection of short stories by Nikolai Gogol on Amazon (ISBN 978-0-14-044907-5). It was worthwhile. 

Actually, it wasn’t such a lark. I was looking for a copy of Diary of a Madman.  The idea was to find a cutting for an audition, in case such an opportunity arose.  Gogol’s Diary of a Madman and The Government Inspector have been performed for generations and, as usual, I’m the last of my age cohort to read it.

I spend my days supervising chemical research, doing reactive hazard studies and IP analysis. From the job description point of view, I’m a walking, jabbering freak. How the hell am I going to get a job elsewhere with a resume like that? HR will look at it and, failing to find an exact match in their organization, toss it into the discard folder.  I don’t fear chemicals, but I do fear HR.  HR is the bane of our profession.

Back to the day job, these areas are basically writing activities and occur at a desk. It has occured to me that working at a desk is more dangerous than working with chemicals.  You soon get fat(ter) and stressed. It’s not good. 

It is funny how job descriptions differ. Many colleagues have jobs where they execute some task by bringing something into a predetermined structure. By that I mean, an analyst performs a standard procedure or the QA manager documents data for a product cert. An accountant performs procedures in the general ledger according to rules. Their work is reasonably well defined and they know when they are done.

Not a single thing I do is amenable to this kind of structured performance.  The chemistry stuff is experimental and involves sorting out what the hell happened. That’s just the nature of applied scientific investigation.

The IP work involves searching for information. If you find a relevant patent, well, you might be near the endpoint. Lucky day. But if you don’t find claims on a composition or a process, it’s a negative result. You have to ask if your search strategy was adequate. Anyone who has used a search engine knows what I mean. Sometimes, you don’t pick the best search terms and you come up with junk. Eventually you blunder into the right term and find the mother lode.

Sometimes an information search becomes dendritic. You find yourself bobbing along in the brackish waters of the “merely interesting”. So, you back up and revise the search terms.  Doing an IP search for an exact composition in CAS is very straightforward. A structure search or a CASRN search is very reliable and fast.

Much time can be wasted with patents that use compositions or processes but do not claim them. In particular I mean patents that mention compounds in the description (or specification) but do not claim them in the claim section.  A great many patents may be served up in the list of hits in this way. How you deal with this depends on what you want and what kind of search tool you’re using.

If you are interested in a class of compositions or the range of technology that might be out there, this is a kind of search that is more dendritic and subject to stranding in cul de sacs. If you do not use Chemical Abstracts Service in some way, your options become restricted.  There are many IP services that tap the various patent offices around the world. Some seem to have their own databases. Many seem to focus solely on searching the patent data through clever use of search terms or the patent classification system. For prior art searching, this is inadequate. For the most part, only CAS can provide reliable hits if a compound was reported in Acta Retracta by Professor van Wingenheuk in 1907.

After a day of reading abstracts and patents, it’s nice to read something well written and get lost in it for a little while. Patents are not written to be easily understood. They are often masterful in their obfuscation. I often admire the conciseness with which many are written. But in the end, they are all disclosures written grudgingly and with the intent to obscure.

US Caps Bin Laden

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Even though I’ve become a bit of a peacenik I have to say that my reaction to the news of the death of Bin Laden is the same as everyone elses. Killing is a nasty business at its best, but at some point the herd has to cull some of its most dangerous members.  

It sounds like this fairly selective takedown was the result of good police work rather than, say, dropping 500 lb laser-guided bombs and letting God sort them out. I hope this lesson isn’t lost on the next few presidents or their secretaries of defense. The US had time on its side and seems to have used it well.

The 21st Century. The Century of China or Malthus?

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I’m trying hard not to be gloomy, but I’ve just been over at the The Oil Drum reading a post written by Jeremy Grantham, Chief Investment Officer at GMO Capital. This essay is notable in that it is written by someone in Grantham’s position. What I find so gloomy is the sense that our modern world is like a runaway train in terms of resource consumption.

People have been talking about peak oil and the importance of petroleum in nearly every material aspect of our lives since the Arab oil embaro of the 1970’s.  What free market enthusiasts and libertarians fail to emphasize is that the market is a social phenomenon; it is not physics. It is a phenomenon that is driven by desire.

The market is like a stomach- it has no brain. It only knows that it wants more.

The idea that you remove all elected government oversight and allow this stomach to reign free across the world is just another type of politics. Inevitably and always, money aggregates into the hands of a few percent of the human population and into the wire-transfer hands of synthetic people called corporations.

In a world of increasing scarcity the prospect of reduced consumption confounds political and business practices devoted to growth, since growth typically means increased consumption.

The key psychological barrier is this- How do we feel like we’re improving as we’re making do with less?

As the cost of manufacturing increases due to increased raw material costs, unit prices will rise. The invisible hand of price elasticity of demand will inevitably partition out the elastic from the inelastic goods on the market.  Whole industries relying on discretionary income will feel exposed. 

The challenge for our leaders is to maintain a vibrant economy even though natural resources are becoming ever more scarce. Power is manifested in the allocation of resources. China has pointedly focused on Africa as a source of raw materials for its growing economy.  The act of power is the fact of power. By throwing a lot of money around, and by controlling the flow of resources, China is exercising power. You don’t need to march an army around to demonstrate your power.

China is executing  industrial policy by forging alliances and allocating resources to global sourcing action. The USA dithers with self-destructive party politics, foreign military adventures, and a narcissistic indulgence in “greatness”.  Instead of wearing our hearts on our sleeves, we should roll them up and get to work building a robust and healthy culture.

The Weather

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Just had a dandy hailstorm. The ground is white.  The prairie dogs are nowhere to be seen. Vail Ski Resort, now closed, has had something like 500 inches of snow this season. It is presently snowing from below timberline on up. Down here at 5000 ft we’re getting liquid phase water, except for the hail. Up in the mountains the watersheds are well above average in snowpack.

The snowy season in Colorado has been characterized by westerly flows of moisture that have deposited considerable snow in the mountains, but left us along the Front Range in a moisture shadow. It has been a dry winter here where the Great Plains end and the North American cordillera begins.

Thursday, April 28.  The morning sky is severe clear. Pikes Peak 90 miles to the south sits on the horizon like a jagged dogs molar. Hot air balloons hang silently over the early morning landscape with their rip-stop fabric draped over a bubble of warm air. The mountains gleem white under a fresh coat of snow above timberline. It is a lovely day.

Memo to Aldrich, or ahem, SAFC

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[Note: The rest of you can go about your business. This memo is to whomever at SAFC will listen. If you’re not SAFC, click here or here.]

Dear Aldrich, or shall I say SAFC?

I have a bone to pick wth you. I’ve noticed that the bottles of reagents I have received from you in the last year have been labeled with a newly formatted design. The Aldrich bottles do indeed stand out on the shelf in resplendent red and white as designed. Well done. The bottles function in the manner in which they are intended. Again, well done. All of that is as expected.

What I’m unhappy with is the fact that the labels all seem to lack the molecular weight of the contents. Having grown accustomed to finding the MW on the bottle, I now have to set the bottle down in the lab and reach for the calculator to do it myself.  After decades of using Aldrich products with the MW printed on the bottle, my addled brain now has to unlearn this and do the calculation myself.

So, what caused this? It was not an accident, was it? Were there complaints about printing errors that twittered your legal people?  Were there a series of meetings in which serious senior managers furrowed their brows and intervened over the possibility of liability? Nothing like the mention of liability to get a VP agitated.  Perhaps ink has gotten expensive.  I just don’t understand.

Was it one of us who complained? Was it some white-coated laboratory fussbudget? Did some crabby pisswink from “out there” write a letter and frighten someone in St Louis or Milwaukee? That would be sad.

One more thing. Why does the font size have to be so small on large labels? 

Th’ Gaussling

Lamentations on Metallurgy

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Imagine that you have a big chunk of glass that has blended into it some desirable metal compound. It can be a metal aluminate, silicate, or oxide. Now imagine that there are may be a dozen other metal species in there as well. Some of these metals will have the same oxidation state and similar ionic radii so that rather than having discrete domains of entirely specific composition, you have a dogs lunch of compositions and phases. Now lets say that the metal of interest is measured at the tens to hundreds of ppm.

So, Mr./Ms. chemist, how would you set about retrieving the desired metal from the matrix? I specified glass only to set a reference point with regard to reactivity.  Many ores are full of quartz or amphiboles or micaceous silicates or aluminates that are relatively inert and perhaps refractory. So, if you seek metal M which is dispersed in the matrix, dissolution of that matrix to pull out M is going to be challenging.

Ores that are rich in metal sulfides can be roasted in air to liberate the sulfur as volatile SO2, leaving behind a metal oxide. Metal oxides are often rather soluble in strong acid, so recovery of M as a pregnant liquor is messy but straightforward.  Recovery of metals that are not found as sulfides or oxides can be less than straightforward.

A natural consequence of having an inert, refractory matrix is that the whole thing can’t digested into an aqueous solution phase, with the possible exception of HF treatment.  Only the surface can be attacked and extracted. So, the idea is to increase the surface area. This is commonly done by milling and is called comminution. A rule of thumb is that the milling cost varies linearly with the surface area generated. Milling is commonly a multistage process wherein big chunks are crushed and gradually hammered into small chunks. This is very energy intensive.

There are many ways to recover and transform elemental metals from their ionic form, from electro-winning to chemical reduction. Every element is isolated according to it’s unique chemistry.  Rare earth metals are particularly troublesome owing to the fact that they are very often found together in the ore and most of them have a + 3 charge and are of similar ionic radius. A few stand out as exceptions, like cerium which can take a + 4 charge.

Solvent extraction schemes have been developed to take advantage of differential affinity for certain extractants.  Solvent extraction technology was advanced in the post WW2 atomic age.  Since many rare earths are often associated with uranium and thorium, or vice versa, rare earth extraction technology was developed as a result of U and Th beneficiation.