End of Blogging

Dear All,

I have decided that I will soon stop blogging indefinitely. Though I have many conflicting emotions about this decision, I'm certain that it is right.

Over the past couple months, I have lived at three different locations. The most recent has been different, in that I have not had internet access while I was there. As a result, I have not been doing the things that I used to while at home, such as lurking around facebook, reading my webcomics, and even checking email. Of course, most of my posts have been the result of an excess of time on my hands while at home, but this option has not presented itself for the past week and a half. Though it was at first an inconvenice, I have found that not having a computer at home has made life in general considerably more peaceful. I have little to do at home other than practice guitar and read books, and spending time on both has been rewarding, much more so than the time I was spending online. When I move into a new place in a week, I plan on keeping my computer off and eventually selling it.

So the decision to stop blogging was not made by itself, but it was really a side effect of my decision to make my home life more peaceful. I will miss blogging, because of how much I enjoy the creative process and the instant feedback from my occasional readers. It does seem counter-intuitive even to me that I, as an engineer, would seek to reduce the amount of technology in my life, though I do like the idea of keeping work at work and away from my time off. I will consider starting again when I have my own office next year with a work computer, but I'm not sure that I will really want to write while I am at work. I still intend to keep a journal, so that I do not completely lose creative writing in my life. Again, I will miss this, but I will be spending my time on things that I feel are more rewarding and fulfilling. To everyone who read my work over the past 3 years, I thank you for your time and interest.

Camo

It was a cold spring day in the city of Madison. The snow had just melted for the first time that year, and the bikers were getting back on the road after a winter-long hiatus. The remaining cold of the season meant little within the large, warm lecture hall at 1415 Engineering Dr, however. Prof Dumesic, the school's catalysis expert, had just finished his presentation on the conversion of biomass to fuels using inorganic heterogeneous catalysts. This seemed strange to me, as I was in the beginning on a semester-long project to design a chemical plant to produce a gasoline replacement using a microbe that had not previously been used industrially. I decided to chat with him after his presentation, and the chill of the weather suddenly seemed close again. I did not know that morning that his words would echo in my head throughout the duration of the semester as I worked my senior design project, eventually helping to push me away from my desires to work on producing biofuels from microbes. Prof Dumesic gave me the very sound chemical engineering reasons why biofuels from microbes are bound for failure, and my data collection and calculations over the coming semester would bear them out perfectly.

By the end of my weekend visiting the University of Wisconsin, I knew I would be spending the next few years of my life there, despite the somewhat awkward encounter with prof Dumesic. Similarly, life in Madison is getting off to a rocky start. Today I tried really hard to work on homework with some of the other first year grad students, but I just couldn't do it for some reason. I get really distracted when TV's are on, and it could be that I couldn't focus because of the football games that were on all afternoon. Still, I have trouble working on homework when it isn't due for a few days. It has always seemed so inefficient anyway, because you don't get the benefit of the lectures that are scheduled during the next few days.

Working on the condo situation has been very distracting as well. I have been spending half of my afternoons writing contracts, reviewing paperwork, signing for loans, and going to inspections. Things may settle down at the end of the week, but it is too soon to tell. There always seems to be one more thing to do. Then I work on homework during the evenings, which is something I learned to avoid over the last year. I will be able to devote all of the day to class after the month is over, and I look forward to this eagerly.

Perhaps the most rocky part has been choosing an advisor, though I'm getting closer every day. It has been a very interesting process, in that I am probably not going to work for the advisor who initially attracted me to this school. After talking to prof Dumesic, I did get an opportunity on my visit weekend to talk to prof Pfleger, the expert on biofuels from microbes in the department. Though my work on my senior design project discouraged me from pursuing his research, I still have kept in touch and went to a couple of his lab group meetings. As much as I want to be interested, I think that performing in excruciating detail the chemical engineering calculations of a biofuel plant has ruined any desire I had to do the work that I originally thought I would be doing in grad school.

Now I am considering a few diverse projects. I might work on a process design project that has the potential to improve both the efficiency of the design process and the chemical plants that would be designed. This is the most traditional chemical engineering project I'm looking at, and it would be purely computational. In the computational field, I am also considering working on models for the cell that would describe how the metabolism works and how it could be modified to produce useful chemicals. I could actually be in the lab as well, working on these fun things called liquid crystals. One thing that we might be able to do with them is detect proteins and toxins without the very time consuming and complex tests that are currently used. I could also use the principles of chemical engineering to design better bandages. The last project I could be working on is top secret! No papers have been published yet (hence the secrecy), but success could make studying certain diseases much easier.

So it has been an interesting process. I have gotten to learn about some of the cutting edge chemical engineering research that I did not even know existed, and some of it has been surprisingly exciting. I have also gotten to examine my own values and learn about what I think makes work that is worth doing. One thing that really sticks out to me is that I am truly an engineer at heart. I decided not to pursue prof Pfleger's research because I realized that it was not practical, and I am being drawn to projects that have very tangible applications in the chemical industry and other areas. I've also realized how much I value a supportive advisor. I've ruled out a few professors because I didn't get the impression that they care about their students that much.

So that is all for today. I realized a few days ago that I owe a few people some articles, and I hope next time to discuss some of the chemical aspects of hair removal. I also want to start doing interviews with other chemical engineers about their current work. Until next time, go Badgers!

Pros and Cons of Going Back to School

I'm reasonably settled in Madison now, as much as I can be in a temporary place with all of my stuff still in the storage unit thing. I'm not yet ready to write a coherent post about my life here so far, but I wanted to give some brief thoughts about school so far. So here are some of the pros and cons of being back in school.

Pro: Free food (yay for new school year events!)
Con: Going out to eat every other night when there isn't free food is hard on the bank account

Pro: Being at a Big 10 school with lots of people and lots of girls
Con: Being stuck in the engineering building most of the time with the standard proportion of girls

Pro: Learning about fun things like molecular dynamics simulation and DNA transcription
Con: Waking up early and getting no afternoon nap

Pro: Meeting some of the most influential researchers in chemical engineering
Con: Trying to convince one of them that they want to be my PhD advisor
Extra Con: Reading dozens of their papers and grant proposals to know what they are studying

Pro: Really good cheese
Con: Really bad beer (sure, there are microbreweries, but all everyone wants is Miller Light and PBR!)

Pro: Lakes
Con: No mountains

Pro: Incredibly advanced labs with every toy one could ever want and more...
Con: In an extremely old building that reminds me of my old middle school

Pro: More bike lanes and bikers...
Con: But still nearly getting hit more often than in Denver

Pro: Friendly students all around campus...
Con: Who you will probably never meet again

Pro: Slowly becoming an expert in my field...
Con: Over the next 5.5 years.

New post this weekend, I hope.

Personal Update

I've been in Madison for a week now. Classes haven't yet started, but I have already been to an orientation and other department events, and I also received my first check from the department. Getting paid to take classes this semester sounds great, but I also have to put some significant effort into finding an academic advisor. I don't know yet what I will be studying, but during the first three days this week I will be attending presentations from each faculty member about their research projects. After that, I will make appointments with the ones who have research that interests me and learn more about their research and their styles as advisors. Then I get to give my top three choices and hope for the best.

So this is how I get to pick the advisor I will work under and the field I will study for the next five years. It seems a lot more dramatic when written like that. Prof Abbott here gave some good advice for those of us who had worries about landing in the "wrong" place for our time here. He said that those people who are successful and well known appear to have one thing in common. It isn't that they all stumbled into the right, cutting-edge, sexy frontier (though that probably helped many of them). Prof Abbott said that the successful people have in common is that they took the work they had and did very well with it. I think I believe him, if only because his advice matches with my life so far. I came to Mines as a inconspicuous student who hadn't taken any AP courses or done anything fancy like that. While some of the people around me were taking physics II, I was reviewing precalculus and writing fractions like 3 and 1/7 because I was always told that writing 22/7 was "improper."

I'm pretty marginal starting out as a student here, too. I still feel very lucky that I even got in here. So many of the things that they are doing here in the chemical engineering department still make my head spin on a regular basis. I'm often in rooms with half a dozen professors who have papers that have been cited a few hundred times. If I am to be granted a PhD by the members of this department, then I will have to prove in my five years here that I am capable of producing work on their level. I have some work to do. I have heard so many stories from my "peers" of the work they have already done during their undergraduate work, and I feel behind before the gun has even gone off.

Yet I know that somehow I can do it, and that I will do well at it. My time at Mines transformed me into something completely different than the person I was when I first set foot in Golden, and I believe that something even better will happen here. I sacrificed so much to come here, and I will not let that sacrifice be in vain, especially not because of my fears of failure and the unknown. I have seen again and again that my own physical and mental limitations are no limits at all. Nothing on earth will stop me, and only heaven can get in my way, if it is revealed that I was gravely mistaken and that it was not in the Creator's plan for me to be here in this time. I believe, as I was told before I left for here, that there is something big ahead for me.

Foods that aren't Food

Apparently my last note on food wasn't so well received, which admittedly did come as a surprise. Who doesn't like food? Anyway, I've decided to beat a seemingly dead horse, in hopes that it might come back to life. We'll see how it goes.

Today's note concerns materials that people routinely put in their mouths, chew, and swallow, but as we will see, they probably shouldn't be classified as food because of nutritional reasons. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed researching for it.

1. Hot Dogs

I hate to be trite, but picking on hot dogs is the first logical choice. Most have heard the horror stories of the many inedible bits of animals that go into these much maligned ballpark snacks, but hopefully I can convince you that the accepted and reported processes of hot dog manufacturing do not provide material that should be eaten.

The practice of mechanically separating leftover soft tissue from bone began in the 1960s in the poultry industry. After common cuts of meat such as breasts in poultry and steaks in beef are removed by the typical processes, high velocity jets of air are blown over the leftovers to remove any remaining soft tissue. This soft tissue, resembling mince meat, is added to hot dogs, though there are limits on the proportion of this "mechanically separated meat" that can be used to make a hot dog. In the UK, the material costs 90% less than real meat, so its inclusion in hot dogs to the legal limit is all but guaranteed. In the US the situation in similar.

What is this mystery soft tissue substance? In short, it is all that is left over after any real meat has been removed. This includes the tendons, which connect bone to muscle; ligaments, which connect bone to bone; cartilage, which smoothens the contacts between bones to make joints; fat; and most disturbingly of all, nerve tissue. Nerve tissue is the reason that the USDA and the equivalent organization in the UK have banned the use of mechanically separated meat from cattle in food products, for fear that bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease) may be spread to humans in the spinal tissue. Disgusted yet? I surely do not need to add that hot dogs inevitably contain high proportions of salt, nitrates, and fat. In any case, hot dogs contain a variety of materials that you would throw away after eating your t-bone steak or pork chop, and other materials that you would not even have the misfortune of encountering.

2. Celery

Though it distinguishes itself from hot dogs in being healthy (or at least not detrimental to health), celery is very securely in the "not food" group. A stalk of celery contains 6 Calories. To put this number in perspective, imagine eating a stick of celery. Don't imagine any ranch dressing or ants on a log. Just regular, green celery.

Bite, chew, feel the stringy bits getting caught in the teeth, the water squeezing out and washing around the mouth. Chew more, chew 32 times, swallow, bite again, ect. Pretty boring, right?

Now imagine eating 332 more stalks of celery. Twenty-nine pounds of celery later, the few nutrients in each stalk would provide you with the recommended 2000 Calories the "average" person requires (whomever that actually is). Imagining the consumption in celery of the 2500 or 3000 Calories required by many normal people is less of an exercise in imagination and more of a nightmare.

To complicate matters, celery also contains a relatively large amount of fiber. Eating the aforementioned 333 celery stalks would provide 8.5 times the recommended daily amount of fiber. Holy enema Batman! The common belief is that attempting to digest the fiber in celery requires more energy than the small amounts of energy that the protein and sugar in celery provide, though I can't seem to find any credible reference to back this up. I would tend to believe it, though. In any case, because of its negligible dietary value, celery is clearly not a real food. Similar arguments can be made about many other vegetables, especially iceberg lettuce.

3. Cotton Candy

Did you know that my great great aunt invented the Cotten Candy machine? As often happens with my family name, the machine's name has been misspelled for decades.

Cotten candy is created in a device that heats flavored, colored sugar in a small cup. The cup also rotates rapidly, and the walls of the cup have slits that allow melted sugar to be expelled in tiny filaments. These filaments very quickly crystallize when they touch the colder air, and the solid filaments are collected and formed into the ball of cotton candy.

I wouldn't recommend this since it would totally ruin the experience of cotton candy, but compressing cotton candy can give a surprisingly small ball of sugar compared to the fluffy precursor. A typical serving has so little substance that it contains only 100 Calories! Now imagine eating 20 servings of cotton candy. Though it is truly a wonderful thought, by about the 10th piece you would most likely discover the other reason cotton candy could be outside of the classification of food. The simple sugars in cotton candy are not the best means to provide the body with the steady stream of energy that it needs throughout the day.

4. Chewing gum

If you ever started drooling while looking at car tires, or if your stomach started growling last time you saw a latex glove, then chewing gum is the thing for you! The chewy part of gum actually does contain either a type of latex or a type of butyl rubber similar to the rubber in car tires. So why would anyone put such things in the mouth? It stumps me, since I never chew gum. Gum may or may not contain a handful of calories in the form of simple sugar depending on how it is sweetened. However, the chewing of gum does consume energy, and findings recently reported in the New England Journal of Medicine show that gum can burn as many as 70 Calories an hour. So chewing gum every waking hour could help you use 1000 extra Calories a day, which I may have to do during the long winters here in Wisconsin to keep the pounds off from all the extra cheese and beer. Having gum in my mouth that often sounds disgusting though, and there is a good chance such prodigious chewing would cause stomach problems. In any case, any "food" that will make you lose weight should probably not be classified as food at all.

Brief Update

Like so many of my projects, this one is getting of to a shaky start. I've been spending so much of my time trying to get things in order for my move to Madison that I haven't had time for much else. Still, I'm not sure where all the time is going. I've wasted so much trying to sell the car, find a temporary place to live, and get financing for a condo in Madison. I really hope the car sells, because I need the money for the down payment. I've been living at some friends' house for the past week and a half, and it has been interesting to say the least. I think the adjustment has made it hard to focus and do everything that I have to do. I don't want to leave, and it has been so hard to find the motivation to accomplish everything I need to do before leaving. Still, I know that I am supposed to be in Madison, and in a few short days I will be there, ready or not. I will write more when I get somewhat settled there and find myself in a writing mood.

The Production of Worcestershire Sauce: An Overview

As promised, I will be writing today about the production of Worcestershire Sauce. I will give you a brief history, a description of the ingredients, and a summary of how some of them are made. I hope this is an enjoyable process for us all.

In his book on the sauce, Brian Keogh writes that Worcestershire sauce was first "synthesized" by two chemists, John Wheeley Lea and William Henry Perkins of Worcester, England. The Brits have a funny way of adding "shire" to the end of names. I'm not much for history, but I will note that Heinz (of ketchup fame) bought the rights to Worcestershire sauce in 2005 and now distributes it with the words, "The Original Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce" on the bottle. I stumbled upon a bottle recently that must have been from before the Heinz takeover: it reads "The Original & Genuine Lea & Perkins."

Today a bottle of the sauce lists these ingredients: vinegar, molasses, high fructose corn syrup, anchovies, water, onions, salt, garlic, tamarind concentrate, cloves, natural flavorings, and chili pepper extract. The bottle that I referenced earlier lists mostly the same ingredients, but differs in containing hydrolyzed soy protein and eschalots and lacking cloves and chili pepper extract. It is pretty clear that Heinz is not selling "The Original Lea & Perkins," but it would be naive to expect anything different.

Vinegar is a good place to start, as it is the primary ingredient (other than water). Vinegar is a particularly interesting product from an engineering standpoint, as it requires three steps of biological growth during production, each of which must be carefully controlled to achieve the desired results. Typical malt vinegar is actually produced in a manner similar to the production of beer. Barley is first malted, which involves moistening the barley in large troughs and heating the environment. Moistening causes the barley (the seeds of the barley plant) to sprout, growing little shoots from the body of the grains. To provide energy for this process, enzymes in the grains break down stored starch into simple sugars such as maltose. The hope of life for the little barley grains does not last long, however; for all its efforts, the brewer will heat and kill the grains when they have broken down enough starch into sugar. The dry heat roasts the barley, and the degree of roasting determines many characteristics of the brew. As the sugars caramelize, more roasting generally corresponds to a darker beer, and a wide variety of flavors can be created in the roasting process alone.

Next comes the filtering process. Water is used to remove the new sugars from the barley, and filters retain the solids of the grains. The resulting solution contains sugars and proteins from the barley. The sugar water is then given to yeast, much like the yeast used to rise bread, and the microbes convert the sugar into ethanol, the common alcohol that makes my whiskey so wonderful. Humans and other multicellular organisms convert sugar into carbon dioxide that leaves the body through breathing. All of the carbon that is present in sugar reacts to form carbon dioxide. This is a very useful reaction for us, since carbon dioxide contains a lot less energy than sugar. Recall that energy is never created or destroyed, so the difference in chemical energy shows up elsewhere. Through the reactions of metabolism, body can convert the chemical energy in to all sorts of forms: most of it is turned into heat energy that warms the body or simply floats off; some of it goes to repairing and generating cells and tissue; and a little of it goes to mechanical energy like running, jumping, and playing. Yeast, it seems, is not quite as lucky. Instead of turning all of the carbon in sugar into carbon dioxide, some of it stays in the form of ethanol. Since ethanol has more chemical energy than carbon dioxide, less energy is available to yeast for every sugar molecule it can get a hold of. One advantage is that yeast does not require nearly as much oxygen as multicellular organisms, allowing it to live in a greater variety of environments.

Energy aside, yeast does turn sugar into ethanol and carbon dioxide. In the brewing of beer, this would be the end of the story. The beer would be bottled and shipped. However, in making vinegar, the ethanol is delivered to another set of organisms called acetogenic bacteria. Don't let the name fool you; acetogenic bacteria make acetic acid as a result of their form of metabolism, using the carbon from ethanol in this case. If yeast were unfortunate because of their way of making a living, these bacteria are even more so. Acetogenesis produces even less energy than fermentation, but fortunately the energy needs of bacteria are even less than those of yeast. Acetic acid gives vinegar its sour flavor, and the host of other compounds such as carmelized sugar produced in the brewing process give malt vinegar its other flavors.

I want to elucidate another very important ingredient of Worcestershire Sauce, one that finds its way into a multitude of other foods. Surely if you are fastidious and obsessive like me, you have noticed the "natural flavors" phrase tacked onto the end of a great many ingredient lists. My limited knowledge of the food and chemical industries has shown me how misleading this phrase can be. Any flavoring that comes from a biological source can be called a natural flavoring. This is in contrast to artificial flavorings that are synthesized through controlled reactions and use other chemicals as starting materials. I have actually had the opportunity on two occasions to synthesize the artificial banana flavoring found most obviously in banana Runts candy, and the second time I was able to walk out of the laboratory with a vial of the stuff for my friends to see (or rather smell). If the chemical synthesis of flavorings sounds unappealing, believe me that the methods of producing natural flavors are no better. In completely unnatural processes, solvents that are often dangerous or unhealthy are used to extract flavorings , and these must be removed properly for the "natural flavoring" to be fit for consumption. A prime analog is the removal of caffeine to produce decaf coffee. The solvent that is often used, dichloromethane, falls into the class of chemicals called halocarbons that gained so much notoriety for destroying the ozone layer. Furthermore, edible solvents can cause problems as well during extraction. If ethanol were used to remove flavors from fruits with seeds such as apples or peaches, it is very likely that cyanide, a potent poison, would be extracted along with the flavors. I certainly hope that food producers would have more sense than this, however. I hope I haven't scared you with any of this information, but I did want to dispel any illusion that natural flavors are somehow safer than their artificial counterparts.

So there you have it. I have told you a little about Worcestershire Sauce, and some of the steps that go into making it. I realize that I have left many steps and much subtlety out of the brewing process, but that discussion goes way beyond this note. Information about the other ingredients is easy to come by with a quick internet search, and I chose the ingredients I did because I feel I have an extended knowledge of them. Next week, tune in for an overview of the current scientific research in chemical engineering departments. I know you can't wait for that one!