-The Freebie-
Geoff Dolbear’s Freebie Newsletter
Online Edition
- Issue 45. Jan. 2K2 -
Sauce for the Garden
Sauce for the Gander?
This story has a delicious twist. Recall that many companies monitor the detailed computer and web activities of their employees to make sure nobody does anything nasty on company time. Federal courts have repeatedly upheld the rights of companies to do this. Now it turns out that the agency that oversees federal courts has been monitoring the computer activities of Federal Judges and their staff people. Surprising as it might seem the Judges find this an invasion of privacy. Will their outrage result in a change of regulations? The jury is still out. For more details, go to the small business computing magazine web site at http://www.sbcmag.net/texis/scripts/vnews/newspaper/+/ART/2001/11/02/3bd282d19.
Differences Explained
If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. That’s the difference between a dog and a man.
Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson
A Sage Observation
It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Willson
There’s a great old story about good news and bad news that finishes, "The bad news is all we have to eat this winter is buffalo chips, but the good news is we have lots of buffalo chips." Change the subject to coal, and your understand the case with the US. Coal is generally high in sulfur and costly to desulfurize and it creates lots of greenhouse CO2 when it burns. On the other hand, we have lots of coal. Somebody 30 years ago said the US is the Saudi Arabia of coal, a statement that we forget at our peril.
As an example of the major coal regions in the lower 48, look at the map on the USGS web site (http://energy.usgs.gov/factsheets/nca/2.html). The US has more coal than shown in this map, especially in Alaska (http://energy.er.usgs.gov/products/databases/USCoal/figure3.htm.). While much of Alaska’s coal is in the arctic north, coal in the area around Anchorage is accessible and being mined. The US also has coal that is not economically recoverable, so it is not included in the USGS maps.
As might be expected, Canada also has large coal resources (http://www.coal.ca/coalmap.htm.) Much of it is in Alberta and the Mountains of British Columbia, essentially an extension of the resource in Montana and North Dakota. More Canadian coal is found on the other end of the country in the Maritime provinces.
Since early 1998, I have been deeply involved with development of a new technology for removing sulfur compounds from diesel fuel. My client in this project is an innovative Alaskan refining company called Petro Star. The process, called CED, has low capital costs, a boon for small refiners. It also has the potential of dovetailing into hydrogenation processes used by larger refiners.
The basic ideas behind the process came from the people at Petro Star. Several of us here in California, working under the G.E. Dolbear & Associates banner, had the challenge (and fun!) of turning the ideas into a process. In this work I was joined by chemical engineers Ebbe Skov and Peter Nick and chemists Zoltan Mester and John Cihonski (see http:/www.gedolbear.com for information on these consultants.) Much of this work has been described in technical papers presented in the last couple of years. I can provide copies on request. Several patents have been filed on the work, with two already issued.
During 2001, the work moved into the next stage of maturity, pilot testing and demonstration. The US Department of Energy is picking up much of the cost, and the work we were doing in California has been taken over by Petro Star’s new partner in the work, German chemical company Degussa. Degussa became involved as a world leader in the manufacture and use of hydrogen peroxide, which the new process will consume. The Degussa team will build and operate a "flange-to-flange" pilot plant at their works in Alabama.
Initial pilot-scale tests of the various process steps went very well, confirming the detailed process flow scheme that our engineers put together in 2000. As is invariably the case in such tests, a couple of unexpected things came up (that’s why we do pilot scale tests), and the Degussa team appears well on the way to solving them. We wish them well.
Recent articles in Nels Winkless’ superb on-line newsletter The ABQ Correspondent (http://www.swcp.com/correspo/correspo.htm) discussed the concept of Brainiacs and Predators. The idea here is that the world includes folks who develop useful new ideas (brainiacs he calls them) and other folks who take ownership of those ideas (predators).
Many of us who spent a big part of our careers in R&D have observed this taking place inside companies. The first case I encountered surrounded invention of a breakthrough process for fabricating thin films out of an insoluble and non-melting polyimide polymer. (This was about 1960.) The inventor learned to make the film out of a soluble precursor polymer and convert it into the final product, called Kapton. An aggressive supervisor harassed the inventor to the point of an emotional breakdown; the inventor got a job elsewhere to protect his health, and the supervisor assumed "ownership" of the technology. He used the "Royal We" to describe the development work and I assumed that he was the inventor until the older fellows explained the situation to me.
I have seen several more such instances since, and heard of many others. Most of these stories are impossible to check, since the kinds of folks who steal credit for the work of others are bright enough to shred the evidence and remove outspoken witnesses from the scene.
A more recent example involves development of a catalyst treating process. The inventor dropped his life savings into making it work, and then formed a company with two partners to commercialize it. Once the company was up and running, the partners drove out the inventor and took over.
The fast moving world of high-tech is rife with such stories, many of them more gruesome than this. Perhaps the best known, and certainly the best documented, is Apple’s pinching the graphical user interface from Xerox, only to have it copied by Microsoft as Windows. If you look up Chutzpah in the dictionary, you may find reference to Apple’s suing Microsoft over this.
This year I acquired one of those slick little Palm Pilot pocket computers. Mine is the simplest kind, with a black and white screen, and no wireless connections to the web or cell phone network. It operates about 3 months on two penlight batteries. If you have one of these, you know how useful it is; if you don’t, you ought to look into it. I was convinced to get mine when my Alaska associate Mike Travis did a hard sell (well, it was as close as Mike comes to a hard sell) on how useful his turned out to be.
This note is not an attempt to sell Palm Pilots. It is about a book about the Palm Pilot. Anyone using one will tell you that the Palm software and hardware are pretty much intuitive, and a novice user can do a lot without reading the instructions. So, imagine my surprise in a bookstore when I encountered Palm Pilot, The Ultimate Guide (David Pogue, O’Reilly pub; http://www.oreilly.com). I pulled the book off the shelf and read a paragraph at random. It contained a trick with the Palm that I had not suspected even existed! A few pages later I found another valuable suggestion. That sold me, and I put my $29.95 down for a copy. The book has been worth every penny, since there is much about the Palm that is poorly referenced or completely ignored in the instructions that come with it.
I took the book upstairs to the coffee shop above the store, where I discovered that it includes a CD-ROM of add-on software, hundreds of programs covering every area from utilities to spreadsheets to games. All are described in one of the book’s appendices. Some of these are programs are freeware, some are shareware, and all are also available on the web in updated versions. The CD versions can be loaded and tried out before searching down the recent versions for loading.
Installing add-on software on the Palm is a cinch; the operating system will do it automatically when you are synchronizing the files with the desktop computer as a backup. My first add-on was suggested by Travis, an RPN calculator that works like my old HP and does financial calculations as well. It’s on the CD, of course
Contact:
G.E. Dolbear and Associates, Inc. 23050 Aspen Knoll Drive Diamond Bar,
CA 91765-2545 909-861-8934 (fax)909-861-5983
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