Do Us All A Favre And Just Play Football

I ran across some residual resentment in Wisconsin amongst the locals. Some folks are still upset that Brett Favre signed with the Minnesota Vikings for $25MM. Others just see his choice as a love of football and all that lovely green stuff. In any case his first season with the Vikings is sure to be a stepwise, uphill slog. Certain relatives are relishing the thought of Favre facing a Green Bay defensive team no longer obliged to go easy on him in practice. Even I can't wait to see that game.

This scene is actually pretty typical of the good natured humor that I encountered:



Note that the target mechanism of the dunking tank is hidden, strategically located right behind the number 4 on that purple jersey. There was no shortage of takers at that booth (photo from the Sun Prairie Sweet Corn Festival)

Sink the Bismark

click on the photo to enlarge your appetite.

The chocolate bismark is a species of Berliner doughnut, available in certain locations throughout southern Wisconsin, for example, here.

I have fond memories of the bismark. As a boy of 13, I delivered the morning Wisconsin State Journal newspaper. One of my customers was a now defunct "micro-bakery," run by an old Bavarian woman. Each morning around 6 o'clock when I stopped by to deliver the news, she would treat me to a freshly baked chocolate bismark. They were especially tasty and appreciated in the dead of winter.

Real chocolate bismarks are becoming hard to find, having been displaced by custard-filled species, and also by bismarks prepared with a lighter-colored dough. I googled around looking for a photo of the real thing, but to no avail. The photo above is the real deal from my trip back. Accept no substitutes.

Greetings From Wisconsin

I'll be in Wisconsin for the next several days, visiting family but also looking for the perfect chocolate bismarck, drinking the occasional pop (as long as there's some brandy in it), and drinking water from bubblers.

Lithium: Part 2/3

Link

(bummer about the link)

Lithium (1/3)

The other day at Costco I noticed one of those bilingual signs: “Batteries/Piles.” The Spanish word pila echoes the historical origin of batteries (cf. the obvious name from the photo above). In the year 1800, Alessandro Volta (the guy the Chevy Volt is indirectly named after) invented what became known as the voltaic pile, thus enabling the first systematic studies of how electricity interacts with matter.

Sir Humphry Davy seized upon the idea of electrolyzing dry molten salts and metal oxides with voltaic pile electrodes (the two wire thingies in the photo above). Davy prepared several elements for the first time, producing blobs of highly reactive metals at one wire when he electrolyzed molten natrium and kalium salts. Davy gave the new metals “ium” names derived from their material origins: sodium from caustic soda and potassium from potash. Davy was so persuasive, and his demonstrations so dramatic, that he successfully renamed the elements: natrium became sodium and kalium became potassium. Today, only the Germans use the older names, though they do survive in the modern chemical symbols, Na and K.

Lithium was discovered in mineral ore samples in 1817. Its discover, J. A. Arfvedson, thought it appropriate to name the new element after the Greek word lithos = stone [cf. lithosphere], to distinguish it from the chemically similar elements sodium and potassium, both of which had been first found in sea and land plant ashes. A year later Sir Humphry prep'd lithium metal by electrolyzing molten lithium oxide.

Metallic lithium is the lightest of metals, so light that it floats on oil; it would float on water too if it didn’t spontaneously react and produce combustible hydrogen gas: see link. The brilliant red color briefly seen in that video comes from gaseous lithium atoms “cooling” in the outer reaches of the flame by giving up red photons. Today lithium salts are used in pyrotechnics to give brilliant red colors.

Lithium sits near the extreme upper left corner of the Periodic Table, directly beneath hydrogen.* Lithium follows helium in sequential order, but the two elements couldn’t be more different. Explaining why helium and the other noble gases are so chemically stable requires a plunge into quantum mechanics (at least at the level of an elementary text book); suffice it to say that when moving from helium to lithium, the third electron that elemental lithium requires cannot share the same space as its first two electrons and must be held at a greater distance, i.e., be more weakly bound. The third electron is said to be a valence electron. The concept of valency comes from a Latin word meaning "combining power of an element" and refers to an element’s ability to gain, lose or share electrons.

Lithium doffs its third electron with ease, becoming lithium ion (Li⁺) and by so doing regains the magic electronic configuration of helium. By analogy, Na⁺ has the magic noble gas configuration of neon, and K⁺ has the noble gas configuration of argon.

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*Hydrogen is not an alkali metal however it is classed in Group I, the western edge of the Periodic Table. Hydrogen shares some chemical properties with lithium and the other alkali metals, namely the oxidation state of +1. On the other hand, hydrogen also can also be a hydride, having pseudo-halide properties.

The Hammer of the Buzz

I've just been getting around to listening to Mothership, yet another Led Zeppelin compilation produced by Jimmy Page to milk the legend. What is new on this otherwise predictable rehash is a nice remastering of the drum track: mainly the enhanced sound of John Bonham's drumming.

Others have described Bonham's style as his special "groove." Yes he had that, but there was something more about his drumming style. Bonham owes some of his sound to Carmine Appice, who introduced Bonham to Ludwig drums during Zeppelin's first American tour (Geez, I wonder if Trooper York knew the Appice family?-Brooklyn, boomer, Italian American?). I also think there's a noticeable difference in drum "sound" between their first album and Led Zeppelin II. The very first song on their first album, Good Times, Bad Times, features those shin-cramping bass drum triplets that marked Bonham's style. Later, he perfected a more fluid, all around triplets sound as demonstrated here by Appice (if the videos won't play for you it may be because they are Quicktime ".mov" videos. You can download quicktime here (thanks Jason!).

Bonham had a certain precision and economy to his style--almost approaching perfection in the sense that one could not easily imagine doing it better. His exquisite, almost metronomic timekeeping was due to his use of his left foot high-hatting between and during breaks, a technique borrowed from earlier drum legends. You can see it in this demo.

Whenever Bonham's right stick came off the high hat during a beat, his left foot would kick in to keep the same rhythm: this style is very obvious in for example this version of Whole Lotta Love. If you still can't view the videos, just crank up your own version of Whole Lotta Love and listen closely to the middle "trippy" part and the remainder of the song until the break. Bonham is left foot high-hatting throughout his turns around the cymbals and tom toms: zsip-zsip-zsip-zsip-zsip-zsip-zsip-zsip-zsip....

I learned these things as a teen (way before Internet tutorials) when I played drums as part of my misspent youth. I used to listen for hours on end to their songs, trying to copy and learn his style. My friends and I even had a little high school garage (basement) band in the mid-70's: we called ourselves "Buzz Hammer."

John Bonham has been dead almost 30 years--can you believe it?

A Few Words About Neutrons And Isotopes*

I learned this today from Wiki:

The term isotope was coined in 1913 by Margaret Todd, a Scottish doctor, during a conversation with Frederick Soddy. Soddy, a chemist at Glasgow University, explained that it appeared from his investigations as if several elements occupied each position in the periodic table. Todd suggested the Greek term meaning "at the same place" as a suitable name. Soddy adopted the term and went on to win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1921 for his work on radioactive substances.

The concept of isotopes confounded the builders of the Periodic Table in Soddy's time. Things got even worse after J. J. Thompson showed that he could resolve purified neon into neon of two different masses, Ne-20 and Ne-22. It took the birth of quantum mechanics and Chadwick's neutron to put things back together again.

Today we know with confidence that different isotopes of the same element differ in number of neutrons within their atomic nuclei. Neutrons add heft and stability (or instability) to atomic nuclei, without changing the "place" of the element at the table; in other words, what fixes an element's place is the number of protons in its nucleus, not the sum of its protons and neutrons. Thus the concept "at the same place" makes perfect sense for different atomic mass versions of the same element. All naturally occurring elements have isotopes, for example, hydrogen, which has three isotopes so important that they're given quasi-chemical symbols of their own: H, D, and T, corresponding to protium, deuterium, and tritium, having 0, 1, and 2 neutrons respectively.

Our government (and others) have long been in the business of separating isotopes: uranium-235 was the fission fuel for the first atomic bomb, and plutonium-239 was the fission fuel for the second one. The first hydrogen bomb (code-named Ivy Mike) used liquefied deuterium-tritium gas as fusion fuel, i.e., hydrogen molecules consisting of the two heavier isotopes of hydrogen. Ivy Mike weighed around 62 tons, the bulk of which was dedicated to cooling the liquefied fusion fuel. Practical weaponization of the H-bomb was not achieved until lithium deuteride (which doesn't require cryogenics) became the fusion fuel of choice.

Iran is actively pursuing uranium isotope enrichment, ostensibly to collect enough U-235 for either peaceful electrical power generation or for a fission weapon. Less talked about is the concomitant accumulation of so-called depleted uranium (DU) which is the non-radioactive U-238 “waste” obtained during enrichment. DU is both an effective tank armor and a lethal component of bullets or rounds. While travelling at high velocity, DU or DU-coated shells burn into uranium oxide, literally forming a burning projectile. DU weapons and armor were fielded with spectacular results by the US in the First Gulf War: Iraqi tank shells literally bounced off the Abrams tanks equipped with DU armor. You can bet the Iranians were watching that with keen interest.

Isotopes also have many, many peaceful uses: think of radiochemical uses in medicine and biology and their use in determining the geologic age of materials (radiocarbon dating). Stable isotopes like deuterium and carbon-13 also find broad use as detectable labels which can also be introduced into controlled experiments and followed where they go and don't go. Moreover, subtle effects on the rates (speed) of chemical reactions gives insight into how the reactions proceed.

I once worked around neutrons as part of a scientific collaboration. Our endeavors were peaceful, despite occurring in part at Los Alamos National Laboratory. While determining the molecular structure of a certain substance, we needed the help of neutrons to locate hydrogen atoms using a technique called neutron diffraction which uses beams of free neutrons. To make a long story short, we solved the structure, but I went on to show how one could get the same essential information using more conventional instruments, but that’s another story. And that's the closest I ever want to get to loose neutrons.

*My creds include working with neutrons and co-writing a book chapter on isotopes in chemistry.

It was all just Rocket Science!

This weekend commemorates the historic trip to the moon by the heroic Apollo 11 astronauts 40 years ago. Let's also pause to remember the passion and drive of the men who designed and built the vehicles that put them there, in particular Dr. Wernher von Braun, designated rocket visionary.

Let's pause and also give thought to the victims of the German V-2 rocket program and to the slaves who died making those rockets under appalling conditions (The V in V-2 stands for Vergeltungswaffe = vengeance weapon). And spare a thought for cranky old Robert Goddard, our own homegrown rocket hero, who at least appeared on a stamp:

I am unconvinced by allegations that the Germans stole secrets from Goddard, having read the account of the V-2 program in Michael Neufeld's excellent The Rocket and the Reich. Neufeld, no fawning acolyte of von Braun, correctly points out that the Germans merely used Goddard's published ideas. In science and technology, success builds upon free and open communication.

The Smithsonian in DC has (or used to have) a collection of scale model rockets lined up side by side, showing the historical progression of rocket design. The models may have even been owned by von Braun himself (first photo above). I don't recall exactly where the collection begins and ends, however, a V-2 rocket stands in the lineup. What struck me then was that there were two V-2's next to each other in the collection: a German one and a V-2 that had been rebranded with American insignia.

Soviet advances in the spring of 1945 halted the V-2 program at Peenemünde. Von Braun and his team relocated to a safer location in the Bavarian Alps while the Third Reich collapsed. On May 2, 1945, with Hitler already dead and Berlin under Soviet control, von Braun surrendered to the Americans. He said later:

We knew that we had created a new means of warfare, and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision more than anything else. We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through, and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible could such an assurance to the world be best secured.

Von Braun and his team, criminally liable in some eyes for the V-2 rocket attacks on European capitals, were given a second chance. Goddard had died in August of 1945 and America needed rocket science. And did we ever get some. Von Braun first headed a secret team located outside of El Paso, TX, where under a sort of house arrest, he and his team reassembed captured V-2 rockets. In 1950, von Braun led the Army's rocket development program team that resulted in the Redstone, the rocket used for the first nuclear ballistic missile. Von Braun and his German wife became naturalized American citizens in 1955.

Von Braun's career really took off after the Soviets launched Sputnik. He was appointed director of the newly created George Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The ballistic missile team, still including many of the old school Peenemünder, all now worked for NASA. And they succeeded splendidly.

My own recollections of the Apollo heydays are still pretty clear. I recall as a boy visiting the Kennedy Space Center in the summer of 1968 on a family vacation to Florida. The giant Saturn V rocket used to launch Apollo 7 was then under construction inside the massive Vehicle Assembly Building . My dad took super 8 mm film of this which I have to just dropped off to convert to digital format. I recall that hot and sweaty Wisconsin day a year later when the moon-landing happened. Relatives were visiting and we cousins had been playing tackle football in the backyard all day. The grown-ups called us inside to watch the historic landing on TV in the cool of the basement.

I also recall seeing von Braun on TV with Walter Cronkite. My memory is fuzzy exactly when that was, but surely it must have been between Apollo missions or perhaps during the long flight time of one of the historic moon missions; von Braun would have been too preoccupied during the take-off and landing phases of each mission to be chatting it up with the avuncular Walter. I do wish I could find that clip on Youtube. Maybe it will turn up as part of a Walter Cronkite retrospective.

Added: Hector at Kiarian Lunch wonders if we will ever go back.

Added much later: Lou Minati linked some really cool old Apollo 11 footage Link

He Watches Over Us

First a few words about spectroscopy. That link has a cool animation of what looks like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon album cover where a prism splits a beam of white light into the colors of the rainbow--the spectrum (pl = spectra) of white light.
Early chemists used colored lines in spectra for the identification of materials when placed in flames.* The flame spectra of individual elements lack the full spectrum of the sun, and more or less resemble a bar code, that is, the spectra have one or several discrete lines separated by spaces. The discrete lines are a “fingerprint” or spectroscopic signature, unique for each element. With that brief introduction, we go back in time to 1868:

On 18 August 1868, a total eclipse of the sun was visible in India, and a number of scientists went there to make observations of the solar prominences. One who examined photographs of the spectra was Joseph Norman Lockyer (1836-1920) who although a civil servant at the War Office had already in his spare time done valuable work in astronomical spectroscopy.
Lockyer was particularly interested in a so called D3 line in the yellow region of solar spectra that had been obtained during the eclipse in India. It was known that the well-known sodium D line was in fact two lines close together, called the D1 and D2 lines. The D3 line could not be obtained from any substance in the laboratory, and Lockyer boldly suggested that it was caused by a new element, found in the sun but apparently not on earth. He gave this new element the name helium, from the Greek helios, the sun.
~The World Of Physical Chemistry, Keith J. Laidler

Lockyer’s hypothesis illustrates one of two ways to advance a theory in science: The first is to amass so much data that the subsequent explanation almost sounds obvious; the second is to boldly assert something with little or no support, and await experimental confirmation.

Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe after hydrogen. Where it does occur naturally on earth, it originates from the radioactive decay of heavier elements. The bulk of our domestic helium supply comes from deposits underground found with gas and oil. Helium is a non-renewable resource: even if made synthetically using radio-decay processes, the supply could not meet demand: link. We recognize helium's use in filling balloons but it is also used in welding and to replace nitrogen in synthetic breathing gas for deep-water diving because its lower solubility in blood minimizes occurrence of the often fatal "bends." However, its greatest use is in liquefied form to cool instruments and for cryogenic research. I used to use lots of it to cool the NMR supercon magnets found associated with nearly every modern chemistry lab.

Helium sits atop the northeast corner of the Periodic Table. From that vantage point, it is possible to look downwards through the eastern border of the chart all the way to the bottom. The elements directly beneath He are the so-called noble or inert elements on account of their general failure to interact chemically with other elements. The other related elements were all given Greek names: Neon (new), Argon (inert) Krypton (hidden), Xenon (strange), and Radon (named after radium but with its suffix changed to conform to the others). The discovery of the noble elements at first confounded the construction of the table--was there another family further to the right? But it was eventually recognized that the noble gas family perfected an understanding of the physical nature of the elements (more on that when we get to Lithium next).

So how many helium balloons would it take to lift a man? Mythbusters apparently did this experiment (I didn’t see it) with helium weather balloons and used about 45 of them, and their balloons were 2.5 meters diameter. I once tried to fill one of those inflatable love dolls (a gag gift) with helium to get it to float for a Halloween party- it didn't work. :(
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*Robert Bunsen was a 19th century German chemist interested in the flame emission spectra of the elements--guess what he invented?

H Is For Humble Hydrogen

The sun consumes about a half billion tons of hydrogen every second, fusing mass into helium and radiating the excess as energy. We just sit back on sunny days and bask in the afterglow of the nuclear holocaust at a very safe distance, thinking nothing of it. Our nonchalance towards any solar dimming is justified by considering that the sun should last another 5 billion years or so.

Hydrogen fuel cells (chemical, not nuclear) are already used in spacecraft, and modern rocket engines burn liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. But back on earth, there is talk of using hydrogen as an energy source to replace hydrocarbon fuels. Hydrogen gas burns cleanly, as the very name reminds us: hydrogen = water generating; the catch is that hydrogen gas has to be made because little is found naturally on earth.

By far the cheapest way to make hydrogen gas is from natural gas, CH₄, using a process that co-produces CO₂ (the carbon atom has to go somewhere). But another little appreciated fact is that a big consumer of hydrogen gas is the fertilizer industry—hydrogen is used to make ammonia from nitrogen—and another big user is the food industry—it is used it to hydrogenate vegetable oils. Any large-scale diversion of existing hydrogen to transportation fuels will ultimately raise the price of food via the costs of ammonia fertilizer and food processing costs. Sound familiar?

What’s really needed is a new and different way to cheaply make hydrogen gas—something like the efficient photolysis of water or the electrolysis of water using electricity from nuclear power plants. Both technologies exist, but they are economic nonstarters. For my money, I’d rather see cars run on methane, rather than going through the additional process hoops of converting the methane to hydrogen gas. A similar argument holds for bio-fuels, which I will discuss when I get to carbon and oxygen.

Hydrogen is the most promiscuous chemical element, pair bonding with nearly every element and even forming special bonding threesomes called hydrogen bonds. Hydrogen bonds are the principle force binding the two strands of DNA together. Arguably, hydrogen bonds are present at the conception of human life: when the two single strands of DNA, one from the mother, one from the father, join for the first time, those strands are united by about 3 billion hydrogen bonds. Each one is worth a small amount, but together, summed over the entire double helix, amounts to a formidable binding glue.

The themes of family and weak and strong chemical forces reminds me of some lines from the David Lynch movie “The Straight Story." Richard Farnsworth says (while demonstrating with sticks):

When my kids were young I played a game with them. I'd give each of them a stick. One for each of 'em, and I'd tell them to break it. They'd do that easy. Then I'd tell them to make one bundle of all the sticks and try to break that. And course they couldn't. I used to say that was family, that bundle.

Elemental Musings

The other day, my son asked me what makes fireworks different colors. "It's the elements" I explained: "different chemical elements in fireworks give different colors when they burn." Fortunately, I remembered* a couple of examples: red (strontium), blue (copper), and green (barium). Because he has a periodic table on his wall, those names were at least familiar to him.

I googled up a cool spiral version of the Periodic Table of the Elements (the original is here. I like this chart because the spiral line tracks the series of the known elements, ranging from 1 to about 107 (there are actually now 118 elements). Also, the radial arrangement indicates some of the “rhyming” between related elements (so-called periodicity).



Mentally uncoil the spiral and imagine a number line beginning with 1 (hydrogen), continuing with 2 (helium), then 3 (lithium), etc., and ending at 118. This is the alphabet of matter--just as 26 characters are the alphabet of our language. But just as the alphabet alone cannot capture the compositional richness of language--words, sentences, paragraphs, and books--the elements alone cannot capture the richness of the physical world. And yet the table of elements is still a marvel to contemplate.

*Added: a website link that tells you how to color flames with common household materials: Link.

Father and Son

Hollywood Homeschooling

I've begun something I'm dubbing "Hollywood Homeschooling." The idea involves influencing my 10 year old son's weekend movie viewing choices (he only watches TV on weekends, and prefers to read during the week). And don't think I'm encouraging couch potato habits- he does have sports activities.

We don't have expanded cable, which seems to have swallowed up most of the movies I saw as a kid. However, Netflix offers many of them for rent. I've been picking one movie a week, and so far he has been very receptive.

Movies watched so far:

The Great Escape (1963)
The Guns Of Navarone (1961)

Movies in queue:

The Bridge On The River Kwai (1957)
Where Eagles Dare (1968)
The Dirty Dozen (1967)
Zulu (1964
The Blue Max (1966) BTW, can anybody recommend a good DVD educational series on WW I?

You can tell I have a little theme going, and I'm reaching back into my memory, recalling what I watched in TV reruns when I was that old.

Which movies do you remember watching as a kid?

Tourette's Euchre

We love the card game of euchre around my neighborhood. The game has declined in popularity in the United States since the 19th century, when it was widely regarded as the national card game (according to Wikipedia).

Everybody I know who plays euchre is from a Midwestern state like Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa or Michigan. Also, the game is considered a bit déclassé, which IMO is all the more reason to like it.

We call it Tourette's euchre because we like to swear a lot during games. We play against the neighbor couple, who are both younger and better looking than we are. Sometimes, we swap partners, or play boys against girls. The jokes and innuendo would make even Trooper York blush. Of course, everything is on the up and up, because we really do respect each other's boundaries.

Trannys Scare Me

So the entire transmission of my car needs to be replaced. I'm without a car in southern California until Friday! I used to DIY a lot of car maintenance (I once rebuilt a Ford Big Block V-8), but transmissions always intimidated me. As for getting around, there are alternatives: today I jumped on my bike and pedaled to the commuter train station (they have special places for bikes on the train). Then I pedaled to work from the train station.

Biking and taking the train doesn't save any time, but it sure saves aggravation. I’m thinking of parking the car for a while when I get it back.

The View From My Throne

Coming Soon!