Overheard at work

Among the many places I work, I am occasionally in R&D test kitchens.  They're pretty cool actually.  These people can come up with anything and have very well stocked kitchens to do it with.  But anyway, standing around tasting things all day apparently makes you a little punchy.

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"It's kind of chewy."

"Yeah, you have to hold it in your mouth for a while, like for an hour."

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"It's a good source of calcium."

"It's also a good source of butt fat."

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"Did you taste that bean thing the other day."

"It was awful.  It was like beans cooked with grass clippings."

"All I could think of was dirt.  It really smelled like dirt when I microwaved it."

"It tasted like a funeral for your pet."

[I can't say as I understand that last part.]

Aloha

Since I don't have the internet, you get a delayed action blog post. Actually, I do sort of have the internet. The hotel finally installed wireless internet, but in an evil twist, you have to pay separately for it, far too much, in my opinion. So delayed it is.

1/21/08: I made it to Hawaii today. The flight from Portland was fine, and a good day to leave too. It was somewhere near freezing when I left and the temperature was set to drop throughout the day, including freakishly low wind chills.

I unintentionally spent the day as a guide. My coworker hadn't flown in quite some time, so I got to shepherd him through the vagaries of self-check kiosks and post-9/11 security. Then I spent the flight to Honolulu with a woman who claimed it was her first real flight, whatever that means. At the least, it means that she didn't understand much about airplanes or what the beeps meant, what the flight attendants were talking about, or how to work her seatbelt. She was quite friendly though, and although she didn't let me sleep or read, she was pleasant enough to talk to and the conversation helped pass the time. (For the record, she was older than my folks. Don't get any ideas.) Then on the flight to Kona, I sat next to a guy who had never been to Hawaii before and was fascinated by Diamond Head, the various islands, the sparsity of those islands, and the volcanoes. He sounded extremely Japanese, but he said he was from Las Vegas. He is a sushi chef and is moving to Kona for three months to help a friend of his open a restaurant.

Plus, we saw whales from the plane. I always heard they were big, but they looked like ants to me.

James and I went to a second floor open-air bar called Lulu's for dinner. Rick and I had gone there last year, and we had added a dollar to the collection of signed bills stapled to the walls and ceilings. I distinctly remember standing on the bar (overlooking the street) to reach the ceiling to staple it up (they didn't mind), but we couldn't find it anywhere. Oh, well.

1/22/08: Despite being in Hawaii, today was mainly boring, what with all the working and such. Saw some lava. The weather was fine, I guess, but we were inside for most of it.

I did learn more about the big ocean water pipe I found last year. I found someone who could give me a more complete description of what they are doing there. It turns out they have several big pipes bringing up seawater for different uses. They do grow the Maine lobsters, but they also grow several other things, including shellfish, algae, and seahorses, 'cuz hey, we need more seahorses. The factory bottling expensive Japanese health water is still there and actually has its own pipe, and is currently the only use of the water that is really making money. I also found out about another use of the water. The water from 3000 feet down comes up about 40 degrees. They also have a pipe that brings water from about 70 feet down which runs around 75 degrees. Somehow they harness the temperature differential to make energy. I have no idea how much of that energy is used to pump water 3000 feet up the side of an underwater volcano. I assume there must be some extra, or they wouldn't bother doing it, but nobody I worked with knew much about it.

Other than that, it was pretty much just working. I did see a gecko and some mongooses (mongeese?), but no whales today.

1/23/08: We finished work in Kona this morning. Kona has the traffic problems of a much larger place. The problem is that, for some reason, they seem to lack any traffic planning. Everything is build as cul-de-sacs or neighborhoods built off the one main road through the area. This means that everyone in the area has to use that one road to get anywhere else. The state is widening a portion of it, but the never ending construction is actually causing even more trouble for the time being. I'm not sure how the locals deal with it.

We drove across the island to Hilo this afternoon and into the Hilo rain. It isn't always raining in Hilo (We had great weather last year.) but it's more likely here than in Kona. We got settled in and ate dinner at a place that seemed to be filled only with locals. I like that.

1/24/08: I'm on the internet for real this time. I had to break down and pay so I could get plane tickets. So while, I'm here, I'll check in with the world.

Today was a long day. Better weather though. Sunny most of the day. Among other things, I visited the volcano today, although I was working and never actually saw it. I did find that the eruption has changed significantly since last year. At that time, the lava was flowing entirely through a tube and exiting underwater, making lots of steam, but not being directly visible. However, in the meantime, there was an earthquake that collapsed the tube and the lava started flowing above ground again, but in a different area. Unfortunately, however, I will only be able to see this lava if I learn how to fly. It is in the middle of previous lava flows, which are much too dangerous to walk on. This is the same unstable new ground that collapsed to cause the earthquake.

Before I headed up that way, the radio stations kept playing civil defense messages, a sort of non-emergency emergency broadcast. It was detailing the lava flows that are potentially endangering a particular neighborhood. It kept saying that only residents are allowed in the neighborhood and that all remaining residents have been informed. However, at the volcano, I found out that the neighborhood was completely surrounded by miles of lava something like 20 years ago. "All remaining residents" turns out to be one apparently very stubborn guy. He used to have to walk to and from his house, but apparently he recently got some sort of ATV that can get over much of the lava.

On a low note, my entire trip so far has been marred by a cold. I kind of thought/hoped that warm moist air might help, but no luck. Too bad.

We're off to Honolulu tomorrow for another long week. Talk to you there.

Mass Metrology: A small taste of Dave's job

From time to time, I hear, "So what exactly do you do anyway?" For some reason, metrology and calibration are unusual concepts for most people. My sister heard metrology, and wondered why I wanted to be a weatherman. The details of what I do really don't matter that much to most people. The world keeps on ticking as long as people like me are out doing our thing. Yeah, Dave, but what is your "thing"?

Don't worry if your eyes glaze over while reading this and you don't finish. I'm sure you'll be in the majority. I just present it in case anyone is interested in the arcane science of what I do.

I'm a small part of a large system linking measurement devices all over the world back to standard measurements somewhere. That's metrology, or the sturdy of precision measurements. Calibration is just the comparison of one measurement device back to something that is traceable through an unbroken chain of comparisons to one of those standards. Most measurements in this country are traced back to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a part of the Commerce Department. NIST laboratories maintain the U.S. national standard for thousands of things. Some are basic measurements like the second or the meter and some are more obscure such as standard Columbia River beach sand or whatever.

I'm more concerned with the basic measurements. NIST has extensive experimental apparatus that can determine with a great deal of precision exactly how long a meter is using light speed and how long a second is using atomic fluctuations. Most basic units are defined this way. There is an accepted standard that the distance light travels in a certain fraction of a second equals one meter. Everybody agrees on that definition, so anyone can find the meter depending only the ability to isolate the fraction of a second and measure how far the light went.

It used to be that all measurements were based on artifacts, or specific things that defined a yard or a foot or what ever. In the beginning, the myth goes that a yard was the distance between the king's thumb and his nose. Someone decided that something more specific might be useful since different places had different kings, so he decided to use a particular stick that was about the right length. He then could make copies of that stick and pass them around so everybody was using the same yard. However, over time, this method begins to fail as the specific artifacts are used and damaged. You end up with a bunch of sticks that are something like a yard, but none of them are exact anymore and none of them completely agree with each other, which kind of defeats the purpose. So over the years, most units have been defined in terms of physical properties of certain materials, properties that will theoretically never change. Therefore everyone who can set up experiments to measure those properties can recreate the units as precisely as they can measure them.

The sole exception to this method is mass. Up until around 1800, the kilogram was defined as the mass of one cubic decimeter of water. A cubic decimeter was used instead of a liter because length is a base unit, while volume is derived based on length. However, since water can change due to temperature and pressure, a better method was needed. Again, like the stick, someone made a prototype kilogram, which was from that point considered the de facto definition of a kilogram. However, nobody has yet come up with a proper physical property measurement for mass to replace this old method of measurement.


The current, most exact kilogram was made in the 1880's, as were the various copies of it scattered around the world. The primary kilogram prototype (pictured above, inside concentric bell jars) is in France and the U.S. top kilogram (pictured below) is at NIST. The primary kilogram is kept sealed and locked in a vault almost all of the time. It is brought out once in a great while (maybe once every decade or two) for comparison with the various national standards. Other than that, it never gets touched. The U.S. national kilogram is then compared occasionally by NIST against several copies they use for checks against other weights. My company has a master set of weights that are sent to NIST every five years for comparison against that second tier of weights. Those are then compared against our other weights once a year and against another set that is used for customer weight calibrations. I then take my weights and calibrate balances and scales used in the world. We even work on other metrology balances that are used for further weight checks. The idea is to handle the sets closer to NIST as little as possible in order to keep them from changing too much between calibrations. There is a certain amount of uncertainty in each comparison, which increases for each step away from the prototype. If your weights change beyond that uncertainty, then you throw the work you've been doing into question. That's bad.


To put the precision into context, I have Class 1 weights (the best available) ranging from 20 kilograms (about 45 lb.) down to 1 milligram (a tiny piece of foil you would overlook if you didn't know about it). For the smaller of these weights, say below about 200 grams, I know the exact weight down 8 digits beyond the decimal point, with the uncertainty (different for each one) showing up in the 5th or 6th place. This means that I know the values of my weights to at least 7 significant figures. This is important since the best balance (precision scale) I work with has 20,000,000 divisions (2 grams to 0.1 micrograms, or 0.0000001 grams). For reference, the main prototype is known to about 10 significant figures.

The problem with all this is that the prototype kilograms are suffering the same fate as the sticks, despite all the care put into their handling. The main prototype has lost approximately 30 micrograms over the last century. That means that if you assume that it was once 1.000000000 kilogram when it was made, it is now 0.999999970 kilogram. Seems pretty insignificant doesn't it? It is, for now at least. There are almost no instruments in the world good enough to see that difference. However, the kilograms will get worse and instruments will get better, especially as we continue to try and probe further into the atom and deeper into space. Eventually, this definition will fail to be good enough.

So what to do about it? There are two options that scientists are pursuing right now.

The first is basically making a better kilogram prototype. A group of Australian scientists is working on just that. They are trying to make a perfect sphere of silicon (pictured below) that is exactly one kilogram. The atomic weight of silicon is known quite well as is it's crystalline structure. It's quite possible to grow a very large perfect crystal of silicon. That's how computer chips are made. Then you apply a little math. You can figure out how many atoms of silicon you need to make a kilogram based on its atomic weight, and knowing the crystalline structure, you can figure out how big a sphere needs to be to contain the proper number of atoms. The hard part is now to make a perfectly round sphere of exactly the right diameter (using length, which is known very well). By the time they are done with this thing, it will essentially be the roundest thing ever made. This is basically just making another prototype, which will have the same issues as the current one. Unlike the current one, however, someone in the future can do the same thing again and come up with an identical, or maybe even better version, limited only by measurement and machining capability.


The second option is the watt balance. It is designed to use electrical properties, which are known very well, to determine the mass of an oscillating body. The math is very intensive. This type of device exists. NIST is working very hard on this method of mass determination. In the long run, something like this will likely take the place of having an artifact that must be compared back to. However, for the moment the uncertainty of doing it this way is still higher than using the current shrinking French kilogram.

Most of this is mainly academic. We are many centuries away from these variations causing the common man any trouble. A half a pound of deli ham and a gallon of gas will still be the same things as far as you will be able to tell. This becomes a problem only at the edge of research and possibly into some VERY exacting manufacturing, although I can't think of an example. Nothing you could afford anyway.

There. I obviously find this interesting, and I assume that if you made it this far, it must at least hold passing amusement for you. Let me know if I left anything too muddy or if something doesn't make sense.

Fun Bottled Water Fact

I happened to be working at an environmental lab today. This place performs all sorts of analytical tests on all kinds of things -- mainly soil and water samples. They look for basics like sediments and microbes and more obscure things like dissolved organics and metals. They have a very extensive lab and one of their most basic necessities is very pure water for testing purposes. It wouldn't do much good to use water with dissolved iron or whatever in it during a test for trace amounts of iron. To that end, they have a very nice, and very expensive, water deionization (DI) system.

Knowing all this, I was completely taken aback when I saw one of the technicians filling sample containers from an Evian water bottle. She saw my look and explained that their DI system was down, but that for most of their tests, Evian was the purest thing they could buy. "It doesn't have anything in it. Nothing we'd be looking for anyway."

This would seems like a glowing recommendation for Evian. "It's so pure, you can use it for lab tests." But you have to understand that the dissolved metals that the lab would be concerned about are the same "minerals" that are touted in bottled water marketing, including Evian's website. That means that you are basically getting very clean water, or the same thing that you would get by extensive filtering or distilling. The fact that it's filtered through an Alpine glacier field in France doesn't really matter.

Personally, I've never been a fan of Evian; I've always considered it pretty bland. It turns out I might have been right. The same minerals that apparently aren't in it are the same ones that give water it's taste, and are even added by many other brands specifically for that taste. I've always felt somewhat morally superior to Evian drinkers ("naive" spelled backwards and all that), mostly because I just like to be difficult. This just serves to embolden my holier-than-thou attitude. Just what I needed. I should be a real joy at parties now.

Missing in Action

Well, Missing in Idaho anyway. I apparently haven't been in a blogging mood lately. I tend to get out of touch when I'm travelling for work. I get some news and such, but my only real connection to anything else is Franny. Outside of her (and by extension, the Mizz), I don't really deal with the rest of the world much. Odd, since I have more free (stir crazy) time out here than I do at home, so I can't say I've been too busy.

I'm in Pocatello (still). We've been here since Friday night. We had Sunday off, but that's it. Other than that, it's been pretty busy days.

We actually had a pretty rough day Monday. We went to Soda Springs, Idaho, which is a little town not on the way to anywhere. From what I hear, at the time when Brigham Young founded the town in it's current location, there were a number of geysers in the valley that had coated the area in mineral deposits. So of course we built a dam and made a lake over the geysers. Now the best they have is the only man-made geyser in the world. Building a hotel, they dug in the wrong spot and found the aquifer that fed the old geysers, which started leaking or geysing or whatever. They decided to attach a bunch of plumbing and regulate it, so now they have their own old faithful. All the excitement of a small town fountain mixed with the slight smell of rotten eggs. Cool.

They also have, and actually are proud of, a slag heap. For those who don't know, slag is the leftover stuff from smelting ore into metal, in this case, into phosphorus. And a heap is a big pile. In this case, a REALLY big pile. Anyway, the slag comes out of the furnace REALLY hot, and when they pour it on the heap at night, it supposedly looks like lava flowing down the sides. This was mentioned to me several times that day, so either it's REALLY cool looking, or they REALLY don't have much to do there. From the looks of the town, I'm guessing the later.

I actually worked at the phosphorus plant with the slag heap. Apparently they make the purest elemental phosphorus in the country. It's used in all sorts of things: food, fertilizer and weed killer (go figure), toothpaste, etc. Plus it's insanely reactive in air and melts at around 100 degrees, both of which make it interesting to handle. It's kept under water at all times, as it bursts into flame when it touches air. Nice stuff. But, mix some other chemicals with it and it whitens your teeth or grows your potatoes.

(start complaining) Anyway, this place made for the rough day. When we first got in town and contacted them, they said that we'd have to wait until later because their power was going to be cut off for a couple hours. I went to help our other guy work on some stuff elsewhere, when I got a call that the power wasn't going to be cut off after all, so come on over and get started. Needless to say, after an hour of safety video and discussion and stuff, the power went off. I was resigned to having to make the trek back some evening to finish, but the other guy got so delayed working on his stuff that we were still in town when the power came back on. By this time, it was too late to do anything back in Pocatello, so my partner waited in the van while I went in and calibrated for two hours plus. He hadn't done the safety stuff earlier, so he was out of luck. Longer work for me and boredom for him. Everybody wins. Anyway, we rolled back into our hotel at 8:30 that evening after leaving at 7:00. And by the end, we had barely managed to do work that should have taken one person a normal day to finish. Good times. (end complaining)

Other than that, it's been long days, but not near as annoying. One of our customers even gave us cake today. It was their September company birthday party, and they weren't taking "no" for an answer. Since they had triple chocolate something cake, I wasn't giving "no" for an answer. Everybody wins.

More-Ida

Well, I'm back working in Idaho again. More of the same stuff from last year. First, it was Boise for a couple days. Now we're in Twin Falls, and tomorrow it's on to Pocatello and the rest of the eastern end of the state. Colleges, food processing plants (cheese, sugar beet, potato, etc.), government labs, and all sort of other fun places. The theory is that we'll work straight through as quick as we can manage and be home next Friday. That'll probably mean late days and working through the weekend.

However, if I can get home Friday, then on Saturday, Franny and I and the Mizz can turn around and hit the road again to see my folks new house on Whidby Island. I need to see it before they remove too much of the 70's from it. Plus I hear the view is awesome.

I happened to notice a weird story in the Oregonian the other day. The main bridge coming into Twin Falls over the Snake River Canyon made the news. Some genius was parachuting off it when a gust of wind caught his chute and gently snagged him on the bridge. By gently, of course, I mean he broke his leg, ankle, and arm and dangled in the breeze for two hours. I'm not sure jumping off bridges is such a great plan. I'll try and avoid it myself.

Where the heck has Dave been lately anyway?

I've been told by my reader that I have to blog something. I suppose it has been a while. I guess I just haven't been in the mood lately, but here goes...

I've been working on the Oregon Coast this week. If you have to travel for work, you could do worse. Most of the work this week is between Tillamook and Seaside, but I also had to make a run down to Newport. The weather's been on and off, but hey, it's Oregon.

Most of the work out here is at wastewater plants, but I worked at the Tillamook County Creamery the other day. It a dairy that makes awesome cheese and ice cream. I'm not sure how far away you can get it, but it's good stuff. Whenever I work there I have to check out the visitor area. It was raining which means the place was crawling with tourists, so I didn't bother to wait for the free samples. I did however need to check out the viewing area. There is a whole section overlooking the packaging floor where you can watch industrial stuff happen. I always love watching assembly line processes. In this area, 50 lb. blocks of fresh cheese come in one end, get cut to the right size, and packaged before rolling out the other end on conveyor belts. Just listening to the other watchers, it's amazing to me how little people understand machine-looking things. I admit that I might be more technically trained than the average Joe, but it's very comical listening to people guessing what various machines and workers are doing. I feel bad for the folks working on the floor down there too. Not only are they working a boring-ass production job wearing all white uniforms and hair nets, but every tourist in Oregon is watching them do it. Somebody next to me sang the Oompa Loompa song.

This morning I met a couple lab cats. Lab kittens actually. I almost stepped on one of them sitting in the doorway of the first lab of the day. Apparently, their mother was killed by a raccoon and one of the guys bottle-fed 5 kittens until they could eat. 2 of them now live there. They were a little cautious of me at first, but pretty quickly they decided it would be fun to play on my feet and equipment for the rest of the time I was there. I tried to grab a picture of them on my phone, but like toddlers, they didn't sit still for long.

I have been staying in Garibaldi for the last couple days. There's not much going on in Garibaldi. It's the main port/marina for Tillamook Bay, but there's not much more to it than that. The marina was about 1/3 commercial fishing boats, 1/3 charter fishing boats, and 1/3 personal boats that looked very small for the ocean, especially next to the other 2/3. There's a lumber mill here too, but not much else.

I ate at the Pirate's Cove, which is supposed to be the best restaurant in town. There are only like 2 or 3 other places anyway, so there's not much competition. The food was decent and it had a nice view of the bay, but that's about it. The service was slow and the atmosphere sucked. The Pirate's Cove sounds like it should be cool, but don't be fooled. It was vaguely nautical, but only with the kind of seashell cutesy crap that your grandmother might keep around (not YOUR grandmother, of course, but you know the kind of stuff I mean). Basically, I spent half as much and had a better time eating a burger at a local fisherman's dive bar across the street from the hotel the other night.

The bread was really good at the Pirate's Cove though and I ate WAY too much of it. Dummy.

I'll be finishing up out here tomorrow and heading back home for the weekend. Good thing too, 'cuz I miss Franny and the Mizz, and as he can now tell me on the phone, he misses me too. I don't know if he knows what it means, but he knows to tell me it on the phone anyway. I'll take it.

It's been a busy week

I haven't posted much of substance lately, as I haven't felt like I had two consecutive minutes to do it with. Probably not true, but we've been busy lately.

Last week we painted two walls. One bright blue monstrosity in the Mizz's bathroom. He was very excited, since "blue" is one of his stronger words. Franny was excited too, since it meant she could get rid of the Hawaii shower curtain and replace it with the fish one and then get out all the other new decorative and functional fish stuff that Target forced on her. I personally liked the old shower curtain better, but it definitely doesn't go with the blue.

The other wall was in the living room and was a far more extensive project. Not the painting specifically, but the picking of the color. And the wall. We'd been tossing color ideas around for a while, but we finally settled on a tan/taupe/sand/dirt color that seemed to go well with the trim and with the black tree sculpture over the fireplace. So, while I was gone in Bend, I got a call, "Guess what the Mizz and I just did. There's paint on the wall." When I got home, I found that this meant two swaths of paint beside one of the posters we have. It wasn't a very representative idea of what it would really look like, so the poster came down and it widened into a three foot square. Needless to say, after much wrangling, we decided that it really wasn't the color we were after. Or the right wall. So there's now a patch of not-quite-the-right white that will eventually have to be dealt with. But in the end, we decided on a sage color and a whole different and much larger wall. I spent three nights painting and edging and 2nd coating and such, but in the end, it came out great.

I got to remember again that I hate edging. It's not that I'm terrible at it. I usually end up with a better job than lots of others I've seen. The problem is that I am a perfectionist about stuff like that, and I don't have the skill to do it as well as I think it should be done. This is mainly only a problem while I am doing it; after the fact it usually seems fine. But it makes for a very irritating experience.

I also found that I'm very impressed with Sherwin-Williams paints. Their Duration line of paint (top of the line) was on sale, and now I know that I will probably buy it again even if I have to pay full price. It went on very smoothly with almost no splattering, was very easy to clean up, and has a much better than normal container with a handle and pour-spout. They also did a great job of matching the color we had chosen from the Home Depot paint chips.

I also clipped the Mizz's hair one evening. I say clipped since cut would imply a thorough job. Mostly, I cut off the curls/rat tail from the back and over his ears, although I though the latter was going to get me divorced. I left a little more over the ears to placate the wife, but I had to get some of it off so he didn't look like a Kewpie Doll. Between the Mizz's distress and the Mama's distress, I did the most complete job I could in two minutes with maybe 8 or 10 cuts. I think he came out okay though.

Saturday, I finished the garden digging that I started a couple weeks ago. We also planted a bunch of flowers and a couple tomato plants. So far the only thing coming out of the garden has been sprouts from the squash seeds in the composter. A couple years ago, we tossed in a few decorative gourds that we no longer wanted. From what I hear, everybody knows you don't put squash seeds in the composter. That wasn't true then, but it sure is now. Small composters rarely get hot enough to destroy those tough little suckers. Anyway, those are the only real sprouts that seem to be doing very well. I'm ripping them out and hoping the other tiny little things I'm seeing are flowers and not weeds.

Also on Saturday, we invited some friends over for a Memorial Day weekend cookout/potluck. Unlike my usual burger and dog thing, I made Lemon-Rosemary Chicken Skewers from a recipe Franny found. I followed the preparation/marinating directions, but I grilled instead of baked. And since we cooked after everyone was there, we skipped the dipping sauce part. By all accounts, they were excellent. Franny also found some cool flat skewers. They are thin strips of bamboo maybe 1/4" wide with one pointed end. I'm not sure whether it made much difference for the chicken since that sticks pretty quickly, but it was awesome for grilling the vegetable slices. No more rolling around and only cooking one side. Everything turns just like you want. Good find, Franny.

Sunday, Franny and I got to go out. Without the Mizz. We left him with a sitter to go to a friend's sushi party. Lucky for me, there was stir-fry beef too. It was actually a surprise birthday party for her too, and we took a couple cakes that I made. Nothing fancy, just from the box, although I did mix Bailey's into the frosting on one of them. Mmmm. I wasn't impressed with my rushed decorating, but nobody else seemed to mind. The only reason I got to make the cakes was that Gina is the baker and her boyfriend was having trouble finding any of her friends that knew how to make a cake. Since I can follow directions, that apparently makes me the most capable. Kinda sad.

Monday was much more relaxed, what with all the Mango-tinis at the party. We did make it out to visit some friend and the other little Mizz. I don't get to see my Mizz interacting with other kids all that often, and it's fun to see them play together even if neither one of them quite understands what the other is trying to do all the time. It was especially cute watching our Mizz push the other one around in a wagon. Each of them seemed pretty happy with his part of the deal.

Back to work has actually seemed like kind of a break, although with a bit of driving. For the last three days, I've been travelling up and down the Columbia Gorge working at an aluminum plant, a couple wastewater plants, a water plant, a brewery (smelled great), and a couple other labs. It's been a beautiful couple days for that trip. The aluminum plant is actually kind of interesting, as it's the only one left in the Northwest that's doing much. They are actually only melting down scrap aluminum and recycling it, but at least that's something. There used to be something like 20 aluminum plants in the Northwest mainly due to the cheap hydropower we used to have. However with the power crunch a few years ago (thanks again, Enron), the days of cheap electricity are gone, and so too the aluminum industry in this country. We can no longer compete with developing countries with little or no environmental and labor regulations.

Sorry. Not trying to start a rant there. Not in the mood today. You see, I got an unplanned massage this evening. Franny had one scheduled, but ended up with plans that were going to end too late. So, rather than deal with a cancellation, I took advantage of it. After driving 600 miles in the last three days, it was welcome, and now I feel great. Thanks again, Franny.

Melamine everywhere

I'm sure everyone has heard about the melamine contamination in pet foods. Mostly just the dog and cat foods have made the headlines, but the contaminated wheat gluten got in lots of other animal feed too. Last week, I was working at a US Fish & Wildlife research fish hatchery and they were in the process of investigating a die-off of some of their juvenile trout. They were concerned because there was nothing they could find about the water or any microbiological issue, but they were loosing fish at a fast enough rate that it might jeopardize their ability to continue the study long enough to get results, which means wasting grant money and not getting it again. Anyway, they were just looking into the possibility that they might have some melamine contamination. According to this article, they were probably right. They do get some of their food from Bio-Oregon, which is listed in the article. Incidentally, I work there every summer too.

The thing that gets me about this melamine thing is how far it got before it was caught even though it clearly has widespread health effects. The problem is an over dependence on China as a supplier for everything: a) because they have as much manpower as we want them to throw at anything, and b) because they are willing to make everything very cheaply. This is fine for a lot of things, but cheap food ingredients are not necessarily the best choice.

The melamine was used because it fools a test for protein, but is much cheaper than actually fortifying the food for real. The normal test for protein in food is a determination of the amount of nitrogen in the food. Melamine has a lot of nitrogen, but unless further testing is done, it just raises the overall result of the nitrogen test, which is taken as higher protein content. Now, the companies involved are no longer in business, but it has been pointed out that this is a widespread practice well known in the industry in China.

So now we've discovered another test to run on foods from China, and I'm afraid that we'll pat ourselves on the back for solving this particular problem and then go back about our business of buying basic food ingredients from the lowest bidder. But how many other kinds of routine deception are happening, in China or elsewhere? If they are not an immediate health issue, would we even know? What if some petroleum byproduct happens to be a good looking substitute for vitamin C or something? What if it accumulates in people and causes birth defects or whatever? The problem is that we are getting our most basic needs filled by the lowest bidder and until something happens, we have no idea at all. Just look at the ingredient list on just about anything you eat. Chances are, unless it says nothing but "apple," there is probably something on it you can't identify. Guar gum, or soy lecithin, or some chemical you can't even pronounce that is added to keep the guar gum from sticking to the soy lecithin while your frozen whatever is shipped to your grocery store. Even the things you do understand (this case was wheat gluten) have unknown origins.

The problem is that we like to pretend that we are at the top of the world food chain, that we have the safest and best of everything, and that all the food companies have our best interests at heart. In real life, we are incredibly dependent on the rest of the world for our food supply, we have food that is safe until we find melamine or e-coli or whatever, and food companies want to avoid contamination only because it causes lawsuits and hurts shareholder value. We love to have anything we want, anytime we want, and as cheaply as possible, and in order to do that we have to keep pretending.

The alternative is making all this stuff ourselves. We have the capacity to do a lot of that, but right now, our main ability seems to be growing freaking corn. So we use it for everything we can imagine: plain corn, corn meal, corn starch, corn oil, animal feed, and high fructose corn syrup. These days we even use it as a fuel and for other industrial compounds. Aside from plain corn, most of these uses are better served by other items, i.e. sugar instead of corn syrup, but we are in a good climate region for corn, so we subsidize the hell out of it, put tariffs on the competing products, pour on gobs of fertilizer and grow as much corn as we possibly can. This is great for products that can be made out of corn, but for many other things, we now have to look elsewhere, and that is what makes us vulnerable.

The irony is that we are one of the most efficient food producers in the world. By sheer volume or total calories or whatever, we make far more than we need. But we've concentrated it into a few basic products (corn, wheat, potatoes, a few other basics), but for most other things, we have to buy from the rest of the world. We grow a lot of other things, but not in the volumes we need. We import meat, fruit, vegetables, and lots of basic ingredients from all over the world, and that puts us at risk for unscrupulous companies or even entire industries taking advantage of any cost-saving shortcuts they can think of.

As a country, we have to change our attitudes about what is worth paying for. There are many reasons I can think of for eating locally produced foods, but this may top the list.

Sorry for the rant.

But not really.

Update from the Islands

I wanted to pass along an update about my trip. I'm a few days behind on this. Oh, well. Don't start this unless you have some time. I went a little Tutu.

Flew to San Francisco, flew to Honolulu, flew to Kona. Aloha Airlines is awesome. They put us on an earlier flight to Kona without even blinking. The Kona airport is a very cool little island airport. Mostly open air with only roofed waiting areas. The only walls were to separate secure areas from heathens. There was a statue of a couple of island women holding leis or whatever. I remember that statue from when we lived in Hawaii, but I can't for the life of me remember whether I was actually there or just saw it on a postcard or something. It was a long time ago.

Kona was pretty cool, although touristy. They also had a ridiculous amount of traffic for a place that didn't appear to have anywhere to go. We tried to go to Southern Most Point after work one day, but we didn't get very far before we just gave up.

One morning eating breakfast at the Lava Cafe, we happened to see a bunch of humback whales playing around, spouting and breaching and such. My first humback whales, and at breakfast no less.

I couldn't believe one of the places I worked. There is a four foot diameter pipe running about 3000 feet deep into the ocean, bringing up exteremely cold seawater. They use it to grow things like lobsters and oysters and such that normally live in much colder areas. Pretty cool idea. That place I could believe, but apparently they have some extra water. So, another company takes that water, desalinates it, puts it in bottles, and ships it to Japan. Apparently the Japanese do not have so much in the way of truth-in-advertising, and they sell this stuff for something like $7 as health water. As one woman put it, in Japan they have a plant that takes water from 1000 feet down, so our water is about three times as pure. I'm in the wrong business.

The place we stayed in Kona reminded me of our house when we lived in Hawaii. Cinderblock walls, louvered windows, and no insulation between rooms. The landscaping was nice though. It claimed to be the only hotel chain in the world owned and operated by a Hawaiian family.

The trip across the Big Island was interesting. Oahu has the H1, H2, and H3 -- full-on interstate highways (yes, on an island). The Big Island has a curvy two-lane road full of potholes. Nice views of the volcanos though.

I liked Hilo. It was not very touristy, more of a regular city full of regular people doing regular things, but with a Hawaiian flavor.

We got to work at the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Very cool. On the way up, we drove through the vog -- volcanic fog. It was actually a pretty obnoxious odor, but you don't get to do that every day. After we got done working, we wandered through the park and went to see the lava. We saw where the lava crossed the road and got to climb across it for a while. We could see in the distance where it was flowing into the ocean out of the lava tubes, but we didn't have time to go out to it. Maybe next time.

Flew to Honolulu, early again, and we've been there ever since. Too many tourists for my taste and it costs too much to eat, but still beautiful stuff to see. No good Waikiki sunsets yet -- too cloudy. Work's winding down. Good thing too; it's time to go home. I miss Franny and the Mizz.