Faking Bad

I'm trying an experiment: I have an improved product and want to market it via the Internet.  Don't laugh until you hear me out.

My "product" is something I formulated for making fake spills. I developed a recipe for faking most any clear or colored liquid and semi-solid. The materials are a polymeric plastic and a secret coloring method.

The Gatsby

Aviation Cocktail

IPA

Das Lagerbier

Ice Bucket Challenge

Melting Cubism

Scotch with Rocks

Lemon Twist Martini  (frosted)

Gin & Tonic

Classic Martini

In vino vas is das?

Pogue Mahone!

Another Margarita

Bloody Mary

Margarita Time!

Heuvos (sunny side up)

Heuvos (raw)

What The Future Sounds Like

Who, What And Where Are California's Economic Conservatives?

An old reference from the 1960's gives a concise analysis of the mechanics of one-party politics in Jim Crow South:

A politics that lacks coherence, i.e. that is insufficiently structured to give voters a meaningful choice or to impose responsibility to voters both when campaigning and when in office, tends to impede the formation of aggressive popular majorities and to play into the hands of the adherents of the status quo. Consequently the principle beneficiaries of southern one-partyism have been those groups and interests which are cohesive, alert, informed, well-organized, well-financed and capable of effective action, and which have a tangible material stake in government policies to impel them to political activity. The adverse effects of the one party structure on state politics, in short, have been borne most heavily by the disadvantaged elements of the population, by "have not" persons who score low on the characteristics just cited. It is well to remember, in connection with subsequent analysis in this paper, that economic conservatives have a considerable stake in maintaining politics at a low level of clarity and coherence.

Sindler, Allan P. "The South In Political Transition." in The South In Continuity And Change, edited by John C. McKinney and Edgar T. Thompson, Duke University Press (1965), p. 302.

Sindler's analysis dates from 1964, but relates to any one-party political state like Mexico, Cuba, or Venezuela. Sindler's message is that two-party competition is good in politics. Note especially the term "economic conservatives" which back then meant—and still does mean—vested interests; there is an alliance between political power and economic power.

Apply Sindler's analysis to modern day California politics. Who are the modern day "have nots" in California and who are the modern day "economic conservatives"?

The "have nots" are still the traditional minorities, but now also includes the young, and single-parent families, etc. They are the so-called low information voters in modern political parlance. And they were largely Obama voters in the last election. A growing class of "have nots" is anyone caught out without a job or a decent pension.

Who are the modern day "economic conservatives"? Nationally, we know who they are--"evil republicans" like Mitt Romney.  But who are they in California, where one-partyism is even more entrenched than ever? Are they just the wealthiest Californians--the ones with the greatest economic stake in the state?  The same ones vilified in the last election? Yes and no. According to Sindler's analysis of one-partyism, economic interests align with political power. It boggles my mind that "economic conservatives"—those in favor of the status quo—are the Bay Area and Hollywood moneyed elite, even though they fit the description of being aligned with the one-party political class.

Another choice for "economic conservatives" are the California State Employee Unions members--the teachers, firefighters, prison guards, University employees and the coterie of supporting administrators spread liberally throughout the State and clustered in Sacramento. Their political influence is gaining in strength--they are the real vested interests here. And they are conservative in the sense of being opposed to change in the status quo.

Rhodium and I had a thing going on once...

...stumped?

It's a coaster I made from a ceramic tile blank--painted, glazed, and kiln-fired.

Fight Liberal Fascism!

Ouroboros For Our Times

Frederick Soddy was fascinated with circles but also with alchemy; he related circles to his discovery of the natural transmutation of elements. Link

Through alchemy, Soddy became familiar with Οὐροβόρος ouroboros, the mythological symbol of the serpent eating its own tail. Ouroboros was also August Kekulé's inspiration for the structure of benzene, a generation before Soddy:

I may have been thinking similar thoughts when I tried to describe the circularity of political extremes and the chemical elements here. Whatever. Consider the following sketch an explicit update--ouroboros for our times--showing the demographic bulge of wealth and talent that must somehow transfer to the next generation (I should make it into an animated flip book).

Ouroboros For Our Times (click to enlarge)
Ball Point Pen on 8 1/2" x 11" white copier paper

A New Periodic Paradigm

Before vanishing from the blogosphere, commenter Ritmo wrote back here:

I remember coming up with an improved periodic table while daydreaming during the inorganic chemistry course I took in college. When we were learning about d and f orbitals it occurred to me that a 2-dimensional table is flawed. Ultimately it should loop around as a cylinder, with the lanthanides and actinides poking out in a raised, textural format. For the life of me I can't remember how I worked it out in perfect detail, but it avoided the unnecessary breaks between groups I and II and reflected the fact that s and p orbitals underlie any expanded orbitals. Putting the transition metals smack dab in the middle of the non-metals and group II just didn't make any sense. And starting over again between the noble gases and group I instead of looping them around to the next orbital seemed an arbitrary convention, like hitting the return key or banging whatever that part was named on a typewriter as you finished a line and needed to move on to the next.

That is absolutely brilliant. It's like a revelation or a prophecy. It's not 100% original, but then few insights are. I will say more about that later. This revelation vexed me off and on for some time and I tried to sketch it until I realized that I needed to sit down like Richard Dreyfuss did in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and build the vision:

So sitting at the kitchen table, I started playing around with a flat periodic table, cutting it up and rearranging and I came up with this:

Cylindrical Periodic Table

Cylindrical Periodic Table

I'll be writing lots more on this in future posts. Lots more!

Chemical Gnomonclature*

Scotoma is the technical term for the blind spot in our field of vision. Our brains interpolate the missing data so we don't perceive a black spot, but in fact we have two scotomas, caused by the lack of retinal cells where the optic nerve joins the retina (see link).

The Periodic Table is a reticulated array of data. In the mid 1930's, element 43 was still conspicuously lacking. Dmitri Mendeleev, that great Russian seer of visions and father of the Periodic Table, foresaw its existence and called it eka-manganese, meaning "one-after-manganese." Here's what the family of transition metals looked like in the mid 1930's:

Chemists sought eka-manganese unsuccessfully for 75 years after Mendeleev's prediction: their efforts are nicely summarized by van der Krogt. Of the fruitless efforts, those of Noddack et al. came closest, and they proposed the name masurium in 1925. Several Periodic Tables from that era even included Ma beneath manganese.

Unequivocal proof for element 43 appeared in 1937, after an Italian team led by Emilio G. Segrè  isolated it from radioactive samples of next door molybdenum which had been bombarded with deuterium nuclei at Berkeley. They named the new element technetium from the Greek τεχνητος, meaning artificial.
______________
*Gnomonclature is an homage to James Joyce who invented a literary device called gnomon to accentuate character or story element.  In the words of his character Stephen in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

Absence is the highest form of presence.

The absence of eka-manganese drove generations of chemists to search for it because it was there--somewhere.

Happy St. Patrick's Day, Trooper York!

My gift to Trooper York

From Old World Wisconsin, a book published in 1944 which chronicles the ethnic influences within Wisconsin:

The Irish are good story tellers (shanachies), and few other nationalities can approach them for quick repartee. This may account for the success achieved by Irish attorneys as jury advocates. Simple incidents in life and apposite figures of speech embellish conversations. But the deferential manner of statement accounts for much of the enthralling attention the Irish command. 

Further:

An imaginativeness in thought inclines the Irish to satirize people with characteristic names:

'A nickname fitting better than the name their mother gave'

One fellow suspected of stealing fowls was facetiously called 'Turkey Jim'; the engineer on a threshing rig who seldom washed for meals was 'blackie'; three Irishmen with the same surname were distinguished as 'Big Mike', 'Little Mike', and 'Black Mike', Jerry O'Leary, who lived on the stony ridge, became 'Hog-back Jerry'; Peter Goggins, the saloon keeper, was called 'Whiskey Goggins'; two Norwegians because of their distinctive occupations and physical characteristics were 'Skunk Foot Ole' and 'Big Foot Ole'; the diminutive man who officiously served mass when the altar boys were absent was 'Priestine' Murphy; the paunchy bartender was 'Bullfrog Joe'; the cross old codger laborer was 'Sealion Burke,' and every lad with red hair acquired 'Red' as an added surname. 

Portrait of an Autist

Click to enlarge

Ball Point Pen and Coloured Pencil on 8 1/2" x 11" white copier paper

Doodle du jour

I doodled this today during a meeting (unrelated to this):

Click to enlarge

What am I getting at?

Newlands' Law of Octaves



John Newlands was a 19th century chemist, inglese italianato, and an avid musician. He was among the first to see underlying rhyme and reason in the matter of the elements—even before Mendeleev did. But he mistook his insight as a fundamental harmony like the one between musical notes and for this he was rebuffed by his peers at the time.

Newlands arranged the then known elements in order of increasing atomic weight. He noticed that the eighth element (fluorine) resembled the first one (hydrogen), and that the ninth element (Na) resembled the second one (Li), and so forth. His observation that every eighth element had similar properties led him to compare his "chemical octaves" with musical octaves, and he called it his law of octaves. The first two octaves of elements behaved:

Do    Re    Mi    Fa    So    La    Ti     Do 
H      Li     Be     B      C      N      O     F
F      Na    Mg   Al     Si     P       S     Cl

One obvious problem with Newlands' octaves is that he left no room for the noble gases (which hadn't been discovered yet). So what Newlands described was not a law of octaves but rather a law of "nonaves":

Another problem with Newlands' scheme was that he tried to fit elements beyond chlorine into his scheme, including some known transition metals and he made some real errors. But give the man some credit.  Like Theo Boehm tweeted to me:

Well, Newland was on to *something* Just that musical analogy didn't quite make it. Tricky to work music into other areas! link