Haiku for Mendeleev #005 — Boron

the orbital splits
three-leggèd hatchling seeks bond
heat-defying grip

Haiku for Mendeleev #004 — Beryllium

peacock eye of jinn
in the eternal city
no more deadly dust

Haiku for Mendeleev #003 — Lithium

a lightness of stone
small cells powering machines
firstborn of metals

Haiku for Mendeleev #002 — Helium

two of everything
alpha in the burning sun
lightness all alone

Haiku for Mendeleev #001 — Hydrogen

in the darkness, light
on the face of the water
the spirit of god

Smallest System

I remember being interrogated by an old family friend and former babysitter. This eminent professor of the dark arts asked me, "Why is hydrogen so important for our entire discipline?"

At that time, I had no idea, so I blathered on for a while.

Eventually, he got frustrated enough to say this: "Because it's the simplest atom. Just one proton and one electron."

And thus did the young man of three decades gone become the old man of today.

Water

Consider the molecules in a glass of water.

Randomly, some will diffuse upward, some downward. But this mobility is not equal; a molecule that reaches the top may escape into a more rarified state, escape the surly bonds of hydrogen bonding and be one with the upper air. Indeed, what holds most molecules of water back is other molecules of water.

Now consider this statement.

"The progress of the lowest 90% of the population is far lower than that of the highest 1% of the population."

There is nothing new under the sun. How can it be otherwise?

Well, yes, there are alternatives. If your glass of water is a glass of steam, then most of the molecules are in random motion and will soon escape the glass. Some will hit a glass wall and condense, having lost sufficient energy or been sufficiently attracted to the glass or other molecules of water. If your glass of water is a glass of ice, nobody goes anywhere.

But a glass of water is normally taken to be just that — a glass, with liquid water in it.

Elementary People 006: Carbon

Carbon atoms are born free, but everywhere, they are in chains — without which life would not exist. Carbon is the most important child of stellar fusion, the biggest landmark on the way to the dusty death of stars, from hydrogen to fusion-stable iron.

Carbon is the greatest social networker among the elements. Small and attractive, it forms strong bonds with co-workers. It is also more able to form attachments in different directions than most such atoms. Combining these two traits leads to a plethora of strong attachments, parts of networks that endure.

And carbon is relatively inert, tough, neutral. Whether a girl's best friend or not, carbon is reliable in its many forms, immune to caustic retort or acidic corrosion, only vulnerable to high-temperature flaming in the presence of oxygen and other oxidants.

Carbon is the spine of the CHON-SP group, those stalwarts of biological chemistry. Without carbon, they wouldn't know where to hang out; and without carbon, there'd be nothing to do once they got there.

Chalcogens, Pnictogens

A pnictogen is an element from Group V of the Periodic Table; a chalcogen is one from Group VI. The etymology fascinates. 'Chalcogen' comes from Greek chalkos, which means 'copper'; 'pnictogen' comes from Greek ta pnikta, which means 'those which are choked'.

Why so odd? Well, to a metallurgist, many of the copper ores are compounds of copper and oxygen or sulfur; copper finds many ways to bond with the chalcogens. Pnictogens include nitrogen and phosphorus — elements which, in their molecular forms, either smother by substitution of oxygen or by combination with oxygen.

Vegetable Origin

I often wander around supermarkets looking at product labels. They tell me a lot about how things are sold, and for what most recent and vacuous of reasons.

On this particular day, I was looking a product which claimed to contain only ingredients of vegetable origin. These ingredients included potassium hydroxide (aka 'caustic potash'), polystyrene, and a host of other unlikely substances.

A brief pause for thought, and I realised the claim was perfectly true — all hydrocarbons (many plastics, petroleum, natural gas and so on) are of plant origin. So too are mineral compounds that can be derived from plant ash — sodium and potassium carbonate, bromide salts. And of course, many poisons and harmful and/or addictive drugs.

Indeed, to see a sign saying 'organic', 'of plant origin' or any other sign like that often merely tells the reader that the company producing the stuff is either deluded or thinks you can be too. I had a quick look, and I think that only about 10% of the labels I saw were helpful, healthful and honest.

Impurities (Part 2)

From the universal to the purely (or impurely) human, last post. And here, if humanity is what humanity eats, then we must look at the ingredients of our food.

We've all been taught that major food groups are carbohydrates, fats and proteins. These are no idle assignments, but chemical divisions — carbohydrates, literally carbon-with-water, are sugars and their polymers such as starches; fats are the esters of glycerol, a substance that can add up to three long chains of carbonaceous substance, forming triglycerides; proteins are polymers made by stringing together large numbers of amino acids. Carbohydrates are fuel; fats are complex materials that serve to insulate and protect (and in extremis, be broken down to make more fuel); proteins are the building blocks of most of our working parts.

For bone and our electromechanical systems, we need inorganics with our organics. Mineral matter, the kind of stuff that the crematorium attendant sweeps out into an urn after the black grease of our passing has tainted the air. Without the minerals, we'd be goo, and rather insensate goo at that.

Yes, we are impurities in water, but the water would not have form without the stuff we use to shape it. Our impurities are to water as the structure of a building is to the air and light within it.

And that brings me to the issue of food safety. Food is mostly safe, and in the cases when it is not, we have only ourselves to blame. But the human body and its main metabolic organs — mostly the liver and kidneys — are able to clear most of the unwanted chemicals. The rest, presumably, consists of wanted chemicals.

Of all the carbohydrates, glucose is most prized. Without it, nothing works, since our bodies are designed to store and burn glucose. Of all the fats, animal fats are most prized, since our bodies are most equipped to move it around — after all, our own fat -is- animal fat. And of all the proteins, animal proteins are most prized, for the same reasons. We do not have the mainly-vegetable-diet construction of the ruminants; we can't digest fibre and we find it hard to extract value from plants.

However, the detractors are right to say we should cut down on animal-based food, simply because we eat too much of it. A steak should last for weeks; we shouldn't be eating a steak a week (or worse). Fat is good, but not more than a heavy spoonful a day or so. And if we aren't labourers on a farm or athletes in the Olympics, we don't need 5000-10000 kcal a day. We can get by on 1500 or so.

What I find amusing is the desire to have impure food instead of pure — sea salt instead of pure sodium chloride, honey instead of pure glucose, organic vegetables instead of those grown on ammonium nitrate and carefully-calibrated mineral content. Like the making of steel, pure foods ensure no unpleasant surprises compared to what is expected: no pollen-induced asthmatic attacks, no haemolytic attacks from allergy to added Vitamin K, no bone fractures from drinking too much added calcium and not having enough sunlight and fat.

Not that I mind impure food, perish the thought. It tastes better, even if it's not necessarily healthier.

Impurities (Part 1)

An impurity is a minority ingredient that which makes something less than pure. I look out into the universe, and realise that matter is the great impurity in energy, and energy the great impurity in the void. In matter, all else is impurity in a sea of hydrogen, the heavier elements like grit in an oyster which must be carefully nacred and sealed away.

And then there are humans, the impurity in the organic scum upon the face of the earth. Humans, who like all other life here are mainly water with impurities. For what else to call organisms that are 70% water and 30% other substances (including substances from which more water can be extracted)?

Word of the Day: Lachrymatory

As an adjective, it means 'tear-inducing', 'of or related to tears' (i.e. something to do with crying). As a noun, it means a small vessel designed to keep human tears (like a reliquary).

My first encounter with the lachrymose was my exposure to 2-bromobenzyl bromide. This substance is a real tear-jerker. It is a simple lachrymator, a starter component for the making of "tear gases" of various kinds. I was using gloves and goggles, I had been pretty careful — or so I thought. A droplet of the stuff got somewhere near my eyes, and I was out in the corridor crying a river.

The word 'lachrymatory' and other related words (like the more common 'lachrymose', meaning 'weepy') have their basis in the Latin lacrima, a sort of bastardised offspring of the Greek dakryma, which means 'tear'  (cf. δακρυσμένος, tearful). This accounts for the transcription and subsequent alternative spellings beginning with lacryma-.

What is really interesting to me as an amateur linguist is the change from d- to l- when going from Greek to Latin. The same fate was suffered by daphne, the Greek word for the Latin lavrus, or laurel tree. It is, however, a different change (with a different significance) from the one when d- compounds (dextro) in organic chemistry are changed to l- compounds (laevo).

How Labless Defines Me

Teaching chemistry without a lab is a pain. Yes, I do tutor students in that subject, but most of the time, these tutorials aren't carried out in any place remotely usable as a lab. I miss my labs.

The thing is that the chemistry lab is a place of professional, personal, public and priestly functions, just as any other dedicated human space is. Professionally, it is where chemistry teachers, lab technicians or technical officers work; personally, it is redolent with familiar smells, contains the experiences that remind one of discovery and scientific achievement; publicly it is the domain where students come to learn something about the substances of this world and their interactions; hierophantically, it is where the holy mysteries of alchemy are illuminated through rites and rituals that go back to Hermes Trismegistos.

All these things were part of my identity as an Adept of the Hermetic Arts. Now, without a lab, I am reduced in power and identity; I am no longer so much an alchemist; I am less, in one way, than I was before.

And so, I must turn to cooking, where the Great Art gives way to the Great Craft, and the alembic gives way to the saucepan.

Silly Food Ideas

I first studied food chemistry in detail when I was a third-year undergraduate. This created a foundation from which I developed a certain perspective on food claims, based on chemical analysis.

I'm just going to take a quick look at some food decisions people are passionate about:

1. honey vs refined sugar
   
2. sea salt vs industrial salt
   
3. 'organic' food vs normal food
   
4. 'processed' food vs raw food
   
5. monosodium glutamate vs 'natural' flavours
   

I am going to spend the rest of this post discussing the science behind making a rational choice to eat any of these things or not. Honey is a vastly favoured food, and quite often, it is spoken of in the same breath as 'royal jelly'. The ideas here are that a) honey is a natural sugar, and that b) stuff the queen bee feeds to baby bees to make them grow large fast will work for humans too. I think it's nonsense to say that honey is 'better' than refined sugar in any significant biochemical way.

Essentially, honey is about 80% sugar — mostly fructose (fruit sugar, about 40%), glucose (30%), maltose and sucrose. The rest is mostly water. If you ate 100 grams of sugar, you'd receive perhaps 1-3% of your daily requirement of some vitamins (e.g., for vitamin B2, you'd have to eat 3 kg to meet your daily requirement). As a sweetener, honey is approximately as sweet as table sugar. I must admit however that honey tastes a lot nicer. It is the one area in which I'd say honey is genuinely 'better'. It's good for baking too; being already a sugar syrup, it's easier to use than refined sugar or even castor sugar.

But honey can be worse. Since honey production is carried out by the random acts of insects, honey is never of a uniform composition. Sometimes, it contains allergens from pollen that some people are allergic to; sometimes, it can even contain the spores of nasty pathogens. It is basically impure sugar, and it has been marketed as if that impurity is a beneficial thing. Consider this: if pure water was analogous to pure sugar, would you drink water that was the colour of honey?

The same situation is true for sea salt. Sea salt is tastier than industrial salt or pure salt, sodium chloride. That's because it contains impurities, especially potassium salts. Potassium ions are the main reason why sea salt tastes different. For example, potassium bromide can taste sweet, salty or bitter at different concentrations; sodium chloride and bromide just taste salty at all concentrations.

However, potassium ions are what we call 'antagonistic' to sodium ions. This can be good or bad. Athletes consume potassium to relax muscles and prevent cramps; the bananas that tennis players snack on between sets are high in potassium — but the levels present in sea salt are much higher than those in bananas. Potassium salts have such a well-known relaxing effect that large doses of potassium bromide have long been used to make humans sleepy and susceptible to control. It's a good thing to read more about it.

'Organic' food is an interesting term. I don't like that term, since all the food I eat is organic (carbon-based) except perhaps mineral salts and water. People who eat 'organic' food normally mean that it's food grown with natural animal faeces instead of pure salts such as ammonium nitrate. Of course, the good part is that some 'organic' foods eschew the use of artificial insecticides in their making, which is certainly a healthy thing. I have nothing much else against 'organic' food except that I'd prefer they called it 'food grown without whatever chemicals it was grown without, and using natural faeces only'. Sometimes, 'normal' food is normal.

Which brings me to this odd idea about 'processed' food. I think humans process their food a lot, compared to other animals. We are the only species that regularly subjects food to thermal shock, charring, denaturing and tool-based mechanical alteration. Why should that be? Shouldn't food fit for all the other species on this planet be fit for us too? Maybe the raw food advocates have a point.

But can you imagine not eating processed food? No cereals, no bread, no baked goods. No cooked eggs, no steamed fish, no grilled meat. No blanched vegetables, no jams, no butter. No milk unless you get it straight from an 'organic' cow. No wine, no beer, no salted dishes. No ground pepper, no cheese, no olive oil. Haha, no thanks.

And yet, some people like to add processed flavours to their food; things like cinnamon, vanilla and umami. All these require processing (often heating and/or extraction with alcohol) to bring out the taste. Which brings me to that contentious last item.

Why are people against MSG? Some people claim to be sensitive to it with resultant bad symptoms of all kinds, but we haven't actually been able to reproduce this effect. Natural MSG occurs whenever salt encounters proteins; glutamic acid is a common amino acid present in most protein sources. Let's be clear about this: without glutamate, the brain CANNOT WORK. It is the most abundant triggering (excitatory) neurotransmitter chemical in your nervous system. And MSG is the sodium salt of glutamic acid.

At that point, some people come up to me and say, "Yeah, but sodium is bad." Sodium is bad?? No, sodium is essential. You can't think or move without sodium ions. And your body contains a bit less than 1000 mg for every kilogram of your body weight; if you weigh 60 kg, you probably have 55,000 mg of sodium in there. You need to maintain this with about 1500 mg of sodium intake a day.

So what's bad about MSG? Is it the glutamate? Is it the sodium? Can't be either. The only thing bad is consuming too much of it, just as it would be bad to drink too much water or eat too much salt or beef. It would be fatal to eat nothing but lettuce, for example. The key is moderation. I'll be honest with you. If you eat large tennis-ball sized lumps of MSG every day, you might get very sick. Then again, I can think of many other food substances of which this might be true too.

I can only believe that bad PR skills have led us to this point. The reason why MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) is called that in hospitals but called 'Nuclear Magnetic Resonance' (NMR) in chemistry labs is that nobody wants to imagine being 'nuked' even though the 'nuclear' in NMR has nothing to do with radioactivity. MSG just sounds too much like a 'chemical', by which humans mean something awful and artificial, like plastic.

If we had stuck to calling MSG 'umami' from the beginning, everyone would have lauded it as an exotic oriental ingredient. But it was not to be.

All food is made of chemicals, and all cooking is chemistry. It is good for students to study food chemistry, so that all the nonsense that they read in advertisements and on boxes and labels can be purged, filtered, eliminated. Then there'll be fewer silly food ideas to go around.

Unnatural Things (Part III)

It was back in January and, before that, December, that I last pondered the odd divide between what humans think of as 'natural' and 'unnatural'. This round was triggered by a brief conversation yesterday about 'organic' food.

I think humans are bonkers about food. We're the only species that routinely subjects food to unnatural thermal processing. No other animal species boils, roasts, bakes or chars their food except by accident. There must be something wrong with that. It's terribly unnatural.

The same thing goes for mechanical processing. We beat our food, churn it, mash it, blend it, slice it up with precision-designed metal tools, mix it up and stretch it out, dice and slice it, roll it up, arrange it for display.

We apply odd chemical and biological processes to our food: we salt, emulsify, combine, agglutinate, caramelize (as in subject to Maillard browning deliberately, in order to produce what some of us call carcinogens), hydrolyse, ferment. We do things of awkward and toxic nature, such as deliberately getting bacteria to infect our dairy products, and call it 'natural'.

I think that foodwise, we are the most unnatural species on the planet. And if people are talking about 'organic' food, that's seriously wrong. What foods are 'inorganic'? Only common salt, water, and other mineral substances like ferrous sulphate. What foods are natural? Maybe only stuff that grows in remote regions where human manipulation has not directly occurred.

Yes, humans are an unnatural lot, who have this daft yearning for a 'natural' that they can never possess.

Gorgon

I'm looking at the report on Barrow Island, Australia. They've got a saltwater reservoir 2.3 km underneath it, into which they're injecting 3.3 megatonnes of carbon dioxide per year in an attempt to sequester the stuff and reduce global warming. This sequestration experiment is called Gorgon, after the Greek mythological entities who could turn humans to crystalline calcium carbonate statues.

3.3 megatonnes is a lot. it's 3.3 million million grams. 3,300,000,000,000 g of carbon dioxide. If that much carbon dioxide escapes, it will form a bubble with a volume of 1.8 billion cubic metres at room temperature and pressure. The land area of Australia is about 8000 billion square metres. That's great, because it means that if Barrow Island goes off after one year, it will only cover Australia to a depth of 0.225 centimetres. No big deal.

Atlantis, on the other hand, would be overwhelmed. At only about 0.7 billion square metres, we'd be covered to a depth of more than 250 centimetres in carbon dioxide. Most of us would be dead.

This is all crazy reasoning, actually. What is more likely is that the dense bubble of 1.8 billion cubic metres would move bloblike, shoved around by the winds, randomly killing people by asphyxiation. Who would it kill? I don't know; maybe people running the Gorgon Gas Project.

What's that, you ask? Haha, well it's funny, but carbon sequestration tends to coexist with petrochemical plants. The Gorgon Gas Project is designed to produce 1.1 billion billion cubic metres of natural gas a year. That's a billion times larger than the carbon dioxide annual input.

Amazing, those Aussies. You should go look at their top-secret wind turbines in the desert too.

Entropy in Real Life House Clearance

There are many things that students of chemistry learn about entropy. One of the more famous equations is the Gibbs Free Energy Equation: ∆G=∆H - T∆S. Essentially, this says that things are more likely to happen when you don't have to put effort into them and you just let them degenerate.

This applies to house clearing and spring cleaning too. If you just keep records of how much mail is received by a single (especially, academic) household, you will realise that in a finite time, the house will be full of old mail.

This mail of course has an expiry date; special offers and coupons run out, magazine subscriptions expire, magazines themselves are no longer current. But if the household does not acknowledge these sensible boundary conditions, the mail accumulates, becoming more and more useless and taking up more and more space.

It is a spontaneous accumulation of stuff within the little universe of the home. But it isn't actually a good example of entropy because the system isn't closed. There are, after all, garbage collectors and offspring who will help get rid of stuff. There are rag-and-bone men, there are house-cleaning services. For a little outlay, which is not quite the same as energy, you can get it all cleaned up for you.

What is more worrying, I think, is the idea of entopy. I define 'entopy' as running out of space before you run out of anything else. The state of ultimate or relative entopy can be called 'entopia', I suppose.

Impure

We are almost completely water; we are walking swamps. 80% of the human body is water and the rest is stuff. There are metal ions and proteins and fats and complex little molecules that are deadly in their own little ways. There are giant molecules trying to hold the whole mad show together. Somehow, we have integrity; somehow that integrity relies on impurity.

We are impure water, and we are the highest order of all creation.

Phosphate Thoughts

There are very few drinks with phosphoric acid in them. For a start, it looks intimidating as a chemical component of any mixture, let alone a drink consumed daily by millions around the world. Yet that's what you get when you drink Coke™.

I've always enjoyed a good Coke™. Over the last few years, in my studies on human consciousness, I keep coming across papers on how hypophosphatemia (the state of not having enough phosphate ions in your bloodstream) perturbs your consciousness. Apparently it makes you less clever and more sluggish if you haven't enough of it; one source refers to the condition with words like 'stupor' and 'comatose'.

Some people say that drinking the brown stuff helps to neutralise the Chinese Restaurant Syndrome that some people suffer after taking too much MSG. I can believe that, to some extent. I'd just like to point out the glutamate is essential for brain function too; I suppose you need to balance glucose with glutamate and phosphate and... ha, who ever said consciousness was an easy thing to discuss?

What makes Coke™ a clear winner, however, is that it's a caffeine, glucose, AND phosphate source. In the old days, it had coca extract (ahem) as well. That one factor alone made it the Red Bull™ of its day, and it still would out-bull the Red one if it was allowed to have that edge.

One last thought. Phosphate rock is the major source of phosphate in the world today. I wonder if anyone knows where the largest source of phosphate is located? Scientific American says that China has reserves of 4.1 million metric tonnes of the stuff, which is impressive as an absolute number but not so impressive considering China's land area. China is 2nd. South Africa is 3rd, with 1.5 million tonnes; the USA is 4th, with 1.2 million tonnes.

Clear and amazing winner, however, is... [drumroll] ... Morocco. The North African state seems to be a major bird migration stopover or something. Morocco has 5.7 million tonnes of the stuff! Maybe I should reconsider my investment strategy, considering that the world supply of phosphate is projected to last at most 90 years more, and that the price of phosphate rock per ton has risen from US$21.38 in 1993 to about US$40 in 2007 to a mindboggling US$113 last year.

Meet Morocco, the new Saudi Arabia of North Africa. They've got at least US$640 million in condensed bird droppings. What a way to stir the consciousness!