The Mountain and the Tree

I had a choice of two icons for this post, both very appropriate in different ways. One is one of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, and of course he's seen as the embodiment of the crossover between the two. The other, which is of course at the top of this post, is a terrella - a spherical magnet, a little Earth - used by William Gilberd in his research into magnetism. They're both my own photography, and being in the presence of these artifacts - in the V&A and the Science Museum respectively - was a wonderful feeling.

Part of the reason I decided not to use the da Vinci icon was because the need for a crossover at all is a modern illusion. Art, as in artisan and artificial, has only recently acquired the airy & impractical ivory tower connotations it has today. In previous centuries, the artist was a tradesman, or at best a professional, on a conceptual level with a plasterer or a chemist rather than with a prince of the Church or of the counting-house, and their labours were devoted towards distinct objects rather than concepts or creations.
( As so often happens... )

This Guardian article by Sarah Boseley talks about new government proposals to ensure that official advisors and ministers "agree on a position", and why scientists aren't having any of it.

To add to it: it's a one-way relationship. Science informs policy, not the other way around. Trying to do it both ways risks getting into a feedback loop, where the scientists end up telling the ministers something very close to what they already know, and confirming their prejudices.

Insisting on agreement also makes the Minister look both weak and dishonest - if he has the courage of his convictions, he shouldn't be afraid to disagree. It's not as though all scientists agree with one another, and they're rarely afraid to say so.

Besides... they're advisors. If you always agree with your advisors, people will start wondering whether you actually do anything yourself - or whether there's any point in them, and if they're being brave enough.

So there's been a huge mess on; you probably all know about it by now. Bunch of unethical corporate cowboys, gang of lawyers, Byzantine (not to say Kafkaesque) legal proceedings obsessed with letter rather than spirit, left-wing newspaper fighting back by sticking to the letter of Parliamentary procedure and making the spirit do triple reverse somersaults.

Not my field, so I'm not going to comment further on that, but I have just read the Minton Report (PDF link) and have some comments to make about the chemistry involved.

Most of them are unrepeatable, but can be summarized as "they did WHAT? WHY? What the BLOODY HELL did they think they were doing?"

In short, they found a nice-looking process to refine their partially treated crude, decided that using an actual chemical plant and some sensible procedures was too much like work, churned all the stuff together in the hold of a ship, and then slung in some more caustic soda for good measure, presumably on the age-old pharmaceutical principle of "well, if a little bit is good for you, a lot must be much better, right?"^[1]. After that, they separated out the bit they wanted^[2] and threw away the rest.

"The rest" in this case consisted of a total of about 285 metric tons of foul water, naphtha, caustic soda, and mercaptans. Mercaptans, also known as thiols, are the foulest-smelling substances known to humanity. One afternoon at Cranfield, I accidentally let about 10 cc of a harmless mercaptan loose from the fume cupboard (I'd been working with them too long, and couldn't smell them any more) and the entire School of Engineering spontaneously evacuated itself. It took me half an hour and a lot of waving the MSDS around to convince the builders working on the outside of the building that it was safe to go back to work.

When I say "harmless", I mean that it wasn't toxic, and that in those concentrations all it did was smell bad - we didn't get anyone choking and coughing, vomiting, or crying uncontrollably. That was mostly because it was a nice clear summer's day, with a good strong breeze, and it dispersed quickly. Most mercaptans will do all that, and are poisonous too; the ones released at Abidjan were. Oh, and there's another problem, too; when exposed to acid, mercaptans turn into hydrogen sulphide. H₂S isn't just the smell of rotten eggs; it's corrosive and highly toxic. UK Occupational Health guidelines allow exposure to 10 parts per million H₂S for 15 minutes. If the concentration goes over above about 20 ppm, it stops being possible to smell it, which means you breathe a lot more of it. The Minton report goes into a lot of detail on the dangers of these compounds, and the only other thing I'll highlight from there is that the waste dump is extremely environmentally damaging as well as toxic. Burning and salting the fields does not even make the list in comparison.

And they dumped this crap right there. If you're keen on the letter of regulations, it's possible to make an argument that what they did was not illegal yet; on the other hand, that's missing the point rather. It's also possible (and wearisomely inevitable) to make the eternal "That was the blokes we hired - nuffink to do with us, guv" argument, but I do hope none of my readers will insult our collective intelligence by doing that.

Trafigura have stated in several places since then that standard handling and disposal practices were followed. This is what we technically call "an outright lie". It may be standard if you happen to be a cowboy with neither common sense nor empathy; it may be possible to argue that that sort of slapdash unconcern comes as standard in the business; it does nobody any credit to do so.

---

[1] It isn't. It made the reaction less efficient and more wasteful, and made it produce a much higher proportion of more toxic volatiles in the waste.
[2] Which still contained plenty of mercaptans. This procedure doesn't even get more than half of them out.

It turns out that the best thing for my (usually rather unpleasant) travel sickness is milkshake. McDonald's thick milkshakes particularly, but others will do, and "Primo Coffee" (if I'm remembering the name right - found one at a random service station) does one which is rather tastier. Five hours on a coach is still not fun, but at least I met a couple of other London fans on the way up.

The Midland Hotel is lovely - delightful Victorian interiors, comfortable quiet rooms, friendly staff, and very functional showers. Not staying in the con hotel was a bit of a pain, but on the plus side it meant I got a decent amount of sleep and could get up in the mornings. The Midland coffee, incidentally, is shite, but the breakfast is otherwise v. good.
( Friday - recreating history, and larping )( Saturday )( Sunday - paperblogging a steampunk panel )( Monday - upcoming book rec, realistic fantasy, trithemy )

I don't have time to do a proper post in honour of Ada Lovelace Day (celebrating female scientists) but I wanted to link to the Wikipedia article about her.

Inventor of the colour gauge for measuring film thicknesses, of the Langmuir-Blodgett film (and the trough to deposit them), and of invisible glass.

Oh, and see here for Agnes Pockels' contribution. Irving Langmuir got a Nobel Prize for building on the work she began as an independent scientist.

The Royal Society have alerted me to The Tragedy of Thomas Hobbes - a "dark Enlightenment comedy". It's on at Wilton's Music Hall (near Aldgate) from 12th November to 6th December - there's an audio described performance on the 6th of December, but no closed-caption or signed performances.

Anyone interested in joining me to see this? Tickets are £20, £15 concession.

The Royal Society have an event on the 24th of November all about this play, with the author (Adriano Shaplin) in conversation with Simon Schaffer. I'm elsewhere that day, sadly, or I'd so be there.

A couple of retired nuclear safety officers are suing CERN in a Hawaiian district court, claiming that the possibility of producing small black holes or clumps of strange matter are all too real and may destroy the Earth in pursuit of scientific knowledge. How I wish this was an April Fool story, but it's all too real.

Really, this kind of fuckwittery is ridiculous. In order to be scared of nano-black-holes, you need to believe that Hawking radiation isn't going to happen - otherwise, any black hole with less mass than the Earth will evaporate within a second or so. And these experiments take place, for fairly obvious reasons, in hard vacuum.

Something similar goes for strange matter - it can't eat and convert normal matter, at least without being specifically made to.

A couple of articles, from the Observer and the Guardian, caught my eye. Then they proceeded to induce alternating fits of incredulous laughter and steam coming out of the ears.
( Read more... )

Oh, dear. People are still talking about space elevators? The state of science teaching these days... (sparked off by comments to this post by Charlie Stross)

( why not )
( a better idea )

The Royal Society have thrown their archives open to world + dog online, as The Register says. They're available here. [Edited: This offer is only open till December 2006, so getcher history of science while you can.]

This is, pretty much, the entire history of science in the UK for hundreds of years.

I can't hope to pick the best for you, but here's a small sample of interesting things I found looking through.

( From Volume 1, 1665-1666: )