Giselle

December 15 was the birthday of my older daughter Giselle. She died of a brain tumor four years ago, leaving a husband and daughters aged three and 16 months. I miss her, and want to say a bit about her.

Giselle was always fair of complexion, with dark hair (eventually - she was blond as a toddler) and big blue-grey eyes, which she learned to use very early. One of her first friends was Jason Johnston, who lived across the street. From the time they were about two years old, she could get him to do anything she wanted, just by batting her eyes and threatening a little cry - and she knew it.

When she was about eight, Giselle started to play soccer - and I became the coach. Though she was always one of the smallest members on the team, Giselle was a good player, quick with her feet and always thinking strategically.

In school, Giselle learned to play the violin. At first she used the family-heritage violin made by my great-uncle, who handed it down. As it happens, I started violin before I ever played piano, but Giselle quickly played better than I ever did. In fact, she somehow bypassed that horrible squeaky phase that I never seemed to get out of. As she got to be a teenager, she joined the Bartlesville Strolling Strings, run by Barbara Wallace, who quickly became one of the more important people in her life.

Music was always important to Giselle. Besides violin, she played piano and had a beautiful, clear soprano voice, without the whiny breathiness that some high school girls develop. She was chosen to represent Bartlesville in All-District choirs and All-District orchestras while in high school. Her signature song was "His Hands," about the Savior. Here is a tape of her singing.

Giselle always got good grades, partially because of good native intelligence, but also because of her willingness to work hard to learn. One night during her senior year in high school, Giselle came to me in tears and said, "Dad, I've been trying really hard to get scholarships for college, but it just hasn't worked; I'm so sorry." I sympathized, of course, and said that she was still going to college anyway, and that everything would work out for the best. The next day, I got a phone call at work informing me that Giselle had won one of the four-year Phillips employee dependents' scholarships that would pay for her entire college tuition!

She spent two years at Ricks College, the LDS junior college in Rexburg, ID, (it's now called BYU-Idaho) then finished up her BA in Elementary Education at Pittsburg State, KS. She and her sister Krista were roommates at Ricks and at Pitt State, after having shared a room their whole lives at home. They never had better friends than each other.

At Pitt State, Giselle met Hyriam Fleming in choir. Hyriam is a big, tall (6'4") man with a gentle way. He also has a degree in chemistry and plays jazz. I have always felt immensely flattered that Giselle was attracted to a chemist/musician like me, even if that was not the attraction! They soon started seeing a lot more of each other. Eventually, Hyriam joined the LDS Church, and they were married in the LDS Temple in St. Louis, MO. Two girls, Livia and McKenna, followed in due time.

For several years, Hyriam taught chemistry and physics in the little town of Sublette, KS, population about 1500. Sublette's only distinction is that it is the county seat of the flattest county in Kansas! But it was a good home for them for several years.

Giselle was unable to get a job as an elementary education teacher in Sublette, but was recruited to teach Special Education in a multi-county consortium. To retain her position, she had to have a master's degree - and the consortium paid for her to get it! She received her M.A. cum laude from Emporia State University.

Eventually, though, they decided that teaching was not a great way to raise a family, so Hyriam went back to school, enrolling in the pharmacy program at Kansas University in Lawrence. They bought a little house in Eudora, KS, just a few miles from Lawrence, and Giselle got a job teaching Special Ed in the elementary school walking distance from their home.

In the fall of 2004, Giselle had several severe headaches that over-the-counter medications just didn't seem to deal with. Finally, one afternoon in October, the headache was so severe that Hyriam took her to the emergency room at the hospital in Lawrence. They basically took one look at her and sent them to Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, where tests confirmed that Giselle had a brain tumor. The diagnosis was astrocytoma, grade III or IV. According to one source,

"the highest grade (IV), also known as glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), is the most common primary CNS malignancy and second most frequent brain tumor. Despite the comparatively low incidence of astrocytomas to other human cancers, the higher grades (III & IV) represent disparate mortality rates. Median survival of GBM victims who forgo treatment is approximately 90 days, and even with aggressive surgical, radio- and chemo-therapies is only extended to about twelve months, while long term survival (at least five years) falls under 3%."

It was determined that Giselle had a tumor roughly the size of a lemon, slightly above and forward of her right ear. Since astrocytomas are derived from star-shaped cells (hence the astro- part of the name), the surgeons hoped they would be able to remove all the tentacles.

Giselle and Hyriam approached this grim prognosis with faith and hope. Since it was nearly Halloween, they did all the things that families with young children do on Halloween - but they also made sure to have a family portrait taken. Halloween was a Saturday; on Monday, Giselle went into the hospital and had surgery on Tuesday.

Initially, the surgery seemed to have gone very well. Unfortunately, the surgeons were not able to remove all the tendrils of the tumor for fear of damaging her brain. Giselle was feeling pretty good, to the point that she was reading stories to her girls and looking forward to getting home again. On Wednesday and Thursday, though, things turned very bad indeed. It was later determined that swelling in her brain stem left Giselle without brain function, and she died Thursday morning, just after Vickie and I arrived from Salt Lake. Before her operation, we had wanted to come to Kansas to be near, but Giselle called and asked me not to come until afterward, because she did not want to deal with the problems that my former wife would cause if we were there. I cannot now and probably will never be able to forgive Robyn for that.

Since my father is a mortician, I learned as a teenager how to apply makeup; at that point it was mostly for Halloween and stage use, of course. But how many men can say that their father taught them how to do makeup? Anyway, I had the privilege of applying the makeup to Giselle's body prior to the viewing and funeral. It's not morbid at all, and in fact having Hyriam ask me to do that is one of the greatest honors I've ever received.

Giselle was buried in Eudora, KS, on - as is proper for Kansas - a windswept hill overlooking a pretty meadow bordered by a little stream. She left Hyriam with two little girls, Livia, age three, and McKenna, sixteen months.

Life continues: after some very difficult time as a single father (which he did very well at, though hairdos were always a trial) Hyriam has happily remarried, and his wife Sunny has become a wonderful mother to the girls. They now live in Riverton, UT, just about 15 miles from Vickie and me.

The girls recognize Giselle mainly from pictures; Livia remembers Giselle only slightly, and McKenna not at all. They have started to call Sunny "Mommy," which is good, because Sunny will be the only mother they will know for most of their lives. But Giselle lives on in our memories. We all miss her, now and always.

Thanksgiving odyssey

Vickie and I took a whole week away from normal life to go South for Thanksgiving week. We started with a drive through the Kolob Canyon area of Zion National Park, and hiked out to an amazing viewpoint. Kolob Canyon actually serves as the terminus for three hiking trails; we went on the shortest, and started out on another of them before it got too dark.



We then went into St. George, where we stayed for a couple days with my Uncle Vern and Aunt Bonnie. They are wonderful people with great senses of humor and the ability to completely enjoy the present. We spent a whole day with them in the other part of Zion National Park, exploring Zion's Canyon, and hiking the River Walk, up to the Weeping Rock, and up to the Emerald Pools. Considering how recently Vickie has been back to having two functional knees, it was a terrific day. She really hikes well, and we're enjoying getting out and around.

After we left, them we drove on to Phoenix, where Vickie's son Adam and his family live in the suburb of Chandler. On the way, we stopped and bought some cheese from the polygamist community of Colorado City, then visited Pipe Spring National Monument, a place that few people know about. In the 1870's Brigham Young sent a 'cattle mission' down there to manage the cattle that had been given the Church as tithing in kind. They ensured that there would be few problems with the Indians by building a fort on top of the only springs in a huge area - all in all, not a very nice thing to do.

The Piutes in the area already had enough problems: they were continually raided by stronger tribes, the Utes and Navajos, who stole women and children and sold them to the Spanish as slaves. Between 1750 and 1900, the tribal population declined from about 7,000 to 76! It was particularly interesting because our guide was a Piute Indian, who told us about the hardships of his ancestors in this area. Pipe Spring is really a place to see if you ever have the chance.
We finally made it to Phoenix (actually Chandler) and had a great time with grandkids. In addition to the Thanksgiving feast, we got to watch Lizzie at her riding lessons (she was very frustrated because her horse wasn't active enough...), go meet Vickie's college roommate Adrian Shelton and her husband at their house in Tuscson, help Adam replace the rocks that had comprised their front yard with real grass, and see the Chandler Children's Choir (which Aimee founded and leads) in concert. We also got in some swimming and a pie party where playing and singing was competing pretty hard with the pies. Here are some pictures:



















Finally, here's a video clip of the Chandler Children's Choir for your edification and delight:

Major surgery for my piano

I've played piano since I was about ten years old. Because my great-grandfather's brother was a violinist and actually made his own violin (which is still in the family), my parents got me started on violin when I was eight. It was a disaster! In my entire career (and I use the term with some reservations) as a violinist, I rose to the exalted position of next-to-last-chair second violin in the Wasatch Junior High School eighth-grade orchestra. So when I started piano and was given the choice to practice piano or violin, there was really no decision to be made. Besides, piano came very easily: I tore through about three years' worth of beginner books in my first six months, and quickly got to the point where I enjoyed playing the thing.

Fast-forward a few years. My mother found out that the Salt Lake School District was closing South High School and would be auctioning off the contents, including the 6'3" Baldwin grand piano from the stage in the auditorium. She called me (by this time I was out of grad school and living in Oklahoma) and asked if I would like her to bid on it for me. Well, I had no idea whether the thing was any good; given the abuse that school instruments take, it could have been a real wreck.

I called Ed Fernley, my old piano teacher's widower, who is a tuner/technician and asked him to run down and take a look at it for me, which he graciously did. He told me that if I didn't want the piano, he would bid on it for himself. That decided it. In the end, Mom got the piano for a bid of $3100 - on a piano that probably would have sold for $16,000 in the regular market! The only problem was that the lid looked like kids had been dancing on it; given its location in a high school, that's probably exactly what happened.

The piano was shipped to Oklahoma and then to a fellow I found who would refinish the case. It turned out that the piano hit Tulsa (where the refinisher was) on the same day that Jonathan was born. My wife was seriously worried as to which baby I would visit first! (Demonstrating at least a little sense, my first visit was to the hospital.)

When the refinisher stripped the ebony paint off the piano, he discovered that the paint had been applied over mahogany veneer! We decided to just refinish the veneer with a walnut stain; the red of the mahogany would give a very warm tone, which in fact it did. The only problem was around the edges, where the veneer had not been applied since the piano was to be painted. We decided to repaint the edges, some of the trim pieces, and the music desk in ebony. The result is a strikingly-beautiful one-of-a-kind instrument.

Fast-forward again: the piano and I are back in Salt Lake. I'm noticing that the piano sounds a bit dull, and that the action is sluggish and uneven. Then I read an article suggesting that the solution to this problem is to restring the piano, something you're supposed to do every fifty years or so. There is a reference book called the Pierce Piano Atlas; it gives the manufacturer and date of manufacture for every grand piano made in the US by serial number. According to Pierce, my piano was manufactured in 1954, and it's now 2008 - time to restring!

We decide to do more than restring the piano, since the metal plate and trusses that support the string tension are getting pretty ugly, and the sounding board is almost impossibly dirty. After talking with a technician from the local Steinway dealer, he says that he knows someone who will refinish all the metal, plus the sounding board while the strings are on order. Terrific!

Thus, the day before we leave for our trip to Scotland last summer, my piano disappears into the depths of a Steinway truck to be disassembled, refinished, and put back together, destined to reappear in pristine condition when we get home. At least that's the theory. There's an old aphorism that says: "In theory, theory and practice are identical; in practice, they aren't." So true. In the event, though the piano was supposed to be done the end of June, it took until mid-October before everything was done. Let me explain why.

For a guitarist or violinist, changing strings is pretty easy: you remove the old strings by turning the tuning pins with your hand, then put the new ones on, tighten them up to tune, and you're done. For a piano, it's a bit different. To begin with, there is usually more than one string per note; the exact number depends on the brand, quality, and size of the piano. On mine, the lowest eight notes have only one string, the next fifteen have two, and the other 53 have three strings per note. That's a total of 197 strings! And they are not awfully flexible: these things are (naturally) piano wire, made of an alloy designed for toughness. Moreover, the lowest 23 strings (the singles and doubles) have to be custom made for a given type of instrument. Typically the technician will remove the old strings and send them off to the string factory for duplication - you just can't run down to the piano store and get them.

While the strings were on order, the metal frame and sounding board were supposed to be getting refinished. In reality, they were waiting in the shop for their turn with the refinisher. We didn't get the piano put back together and back in our living room until the first part of September! However, it was worth the wait, because here are the results:

The refinished plate and sounding board are absolutely beautiful. The new strings also included new chrome plated pins, replacing old ugly black carbon steel pins.

A word about tuning pins on pianos: you don't turn them by hand. In fact, it takes a special tool called a tuning hammer (though you don't hammer with it), and new pins are always about 0.001" larger in diameter than the old ones, so that they will hold securely in their resting place, the pin block.

Besides the new strings, a restringing job also requires changing the damper felts, the felts that keep each string from sounding unless you have either the key or the sustain pedal down. It turns out that the old felts have grooves where the strings have been, and there is no way to guarantee that the new strings will be in exactly the same place as the old ones!

Finally, there is one more long and arduous task that we had done when the piano was re-strung; it is called regulation. Regulation has absolutely nothing to do with the strings, and can be done whenever needed. Regulating a piano's action it is the job of making sure that each key operates exactly the same as all the others. Each key must throw the hammer at the string at precisely the same point in its travel, with precisely the same force on the part of the pianist, with precisely the same amount of hammer rebound before it is caught and held, with precisely the same ability to quickly repeat the strike if necessary, and on and on.

Piano actions are amazing pieces of mechanical ingenuity and precision manufacture. A grand piano action has about 32 parts for each key, plus about eight more parts for each damper. Altogether, a piano action contains over 3500 parts! These parts determine such things as how fast notes can be repeated, how much finger pressure is necessary to make the hammer strike the string, how far down each key can travel, and a number of other things that define the piano's playing characteristics. Here's a diagram for a typical grand piano action:

Notice that the key itself does not ever touch the hammer. Instead, when the pianist pushes on the end of the key (out of the diagram to the right) the key raises the wippen (part #30) which pushes up the jack (part #1), which raises the hammer shank and tosses the hammer (part #25) into the strings. The hammer bounces back and the hammer's tail is caught and held by the back check (part #26); if it were not thus captured, the hammer would just keep bouncing against the string - and you can imagine how that would sound (sort of like a mandolin, actually.) The other parts make sure that all those things happen perfectly, every time, and that all 88 keys perform exactly alike. And all this has to hold up to the brutal treatment given to the action by pianists!

You're probably getting tired of reading this, so let me get right to the conclusion: after new strings and refinishing the metal parts and the soundboard, the piano looks new and beautiful. That's great, but it doesn't address what pianos are really for - to be played. After new strings and a very extensive regulation of the action, my piano plays and sounds like a new instrument - it's amazing! It's cleaner, purer, brighter, more flexible, more responsive, (I'm running out of praises here), than any piano I've played in a long, long time. And it's sitting in my living room just waiting for me to come caress its fake-ivory keys!

Actually, it's better than new, because most new pianos are not regulated to the degree that mine has been. Am I happy - you bet! Well, the happiness is somewhat tempered by the fact that I can hear not only the beauty of the music but also my mistakes more clearly than before. Still, it's like going out in the garage to take the cover off an old car that's been sitting out there for years. You always thought it was an old Chevy, but with the cover off you discover a classic Ferrari. That's how I feel. Now I need to go practice...

Playing Gilbert and Sullivan

On Saturday, I'm playing for a Holladay Arts Council production of Gilbert and Sullivan's Yeomen of the Guard. I was called in less than two weeks ago because their previous accompanist decided that the score was too difficult. Its difficulties come in that many of the patter songs are fast - very fast. Otherwise, it's not too bad. Yeomen is considered by some to have the best music of any of the G&S operettas. It is clearly the most thoughtful, since it does not have a particularly happy ending. It is seldom staged, mostly because making the Beefeater costumes is so expensive! Here's a link to the Wikipedia article, if you're interested.

The setting of Yeomen is the Tower of London in Shakespearean times. The plot concerns Colonel Fairfax, a gentleman, soldier and scientist, who has been sentenced to be beheaded in an hour on a false charge of sorcery. To avoid leaving his estate to his accuser (a cousin), and with the help of the Lieutenant of the Tower, Fairfax secretly marries Elsie Maynard, a strolling singer. The bride agrees to be blindfolded during the ceremony and expects to be a well-paid widow in an hour. With the help of the Meryll family, Fairfax escapes, throwing the Tower into confusion and the astonished Elsie (and her mentor, the jester Jack Point, who loves her) into despair. But Fairfax, disguised as Leonard Meryll, woos Elsie, and after a number of plot complications are worked out, she falls in love with Fairfax and leaves Jack Point broken-hearted.

If you're in Salt Lake on Saturday the 15th, come see it at 7:00 pm at the Holladay City complex, on 23rd East just south of 45th South. The price is right (it's free) and should be fun.

On elections

Well, the election is over - now the hard work begins. I'm glad that Obama won, because I think our country needs what he brings to the office. What's that? Here's what I like about his approach:

• A personality that does not take offense easily
• Determination to work collaboratively with others, rather than going it alone
• Compassion for those who are disadvantaged, coupled with respect for achievement
• Willingness to work with and respect those who hold opinions different from his own
• An orientation toward people, rather than institutions
• The capability to organize well - shown brilliantly by the campaign
• The ability to make others excited about his ideas - LEADERSHIP!!

That said, I was very impressed with McCain's concession speech. It exuded class and good sense. It's too bad that so much of his campaign showed a far less attractive part of his personality. Overall, the man is a fine person and a great American - but would not have made a good president, based on some of the choices he permitted his campaign staff to make.

Incidentally, I've been amused by the pointed Republican reminders that good government includes both parties, and that cooperation is better than partisanship. Where was that attitude when the Bush Administration decided that only Republican ideas and programs were worthy of consideration? Now that the shoe is on the other foot, it's proving to be a bit uncomfortable...

Here in Utah, the Democrats have made some gains, especially in Salt Lake County. Outside of Salt Lake County, Utah is still basically a one-party state. However, a couple of the most divisive legislators lost their positions, so we have real hopes that someday legislation will be debated openly in the legislature instead of being decided behind the closed doors of the Republican Caucus. By the way, I happily voted a mixed ticket - I have never voted a straight party ticket and probably never will, since good people can be found in both parties.

Finally, I'm proud to be an American. The country has shown once more that massive changes in the balance of power can be accomplished without resorting to violence, and that the ballot really is more powerful than the bullet. Sure, we have our problems, but the country is fundamentally in good hands because the people - all the people, of whatever party - have agreed to work together for the good of all of us.

On plastics and chemometrics

I just got back from three days in beautiful downtown Houston, attending a meeting of licensees of ChevronPhillips Chemical's polyethylene plastic process. Every two years, they all get together to discuss common problems and to hear about all the latest research results from ChevronPhillips. A little background: polyethylene is the plastic used to make milk bottles (and a lot of other things), and ChevronPhillips, a 50/50 joint venture of ChevronTexaco and ConocoPhillips, is one of the world's largest producers of the stuff.

One of my consulting jobs is basically to install an on-line monitoring system for a new polyethylene plant that CPChem is licensing to another company. This system uses a process called Raman spectroscopy. Basically, in Raman spectroscopy you shine a laser light on the material of interest. Most of the light just bounces off, but a small percentage (maybe one photon in a million) interacts with the material by being absorbed for a few nanoseconds, then is re-emitted (scattered) at a different frequency than it came in at. The difference in frequency corresponds to characteristic vibrations of the atom-to-atom bonds in the molecules. The spectrometer captures those scattered photons and displays their frequencies and the intensity of each frequency. What I do is analyze that data to figure out what's really happening to the molecule.

Sometimes the analysis is pretty easy. For example, with the polyethylene process, you can see the starting materials at the beginning of the reaction, then watch the signal for the finished plastic grow in and the starting materials diminish as the reaction proceeds. This is a particularly handy thing to be able to do, since the reaction is done inside big metal tubes; without something on-line in real time like Raman, you can only analyze what you have at the beginning and end of the reaction. Alternatively, you can take samples out of the reactor and analyze them, but that can be difficult to do, and the analyses are often slow (up to a couple hours), while Raman analysis takes only about 90 seconds. The difference between on-line analysis and conventional analysis has been likened to the difference between a biopsy and an autopsy.

One of the really interesting things that can be done with Raman and some other types of spectroscopy is to determine properties for which the instrument does not receive any signals! I know that sounds a little strange, but let me give an example. If you take a Raman or infrared spectrum of gasoline, it's possible to see peaks that represent different chemical groups that make up the chemical compounds of which gasoline is made: aromatics, paraffins, olefins, and so on. However, there are some properties you'd like to know that are only indirectly related to those compounds. For example, the octane number of gasoline is crucial; octane measures the tendency of gasoline to 'knock,' and is used to differentiate different grades at the service station. Unfortunately, though the octane number of a gasoline sample obviously depends on the components used to make up that gasoline sample, there are no peaks that by themselves give the octane number. Octane can be determined in the laboratory using an engine that compares a given gasoline to two reference compounds. The analysis is difficult, requiring highly-trained technicians, and takes about two hours.

What can be done with that problem is a very elegant mathematical process that falls in the area where chemistry and statistics overlap, an area called chemometrics. To determine octane where no octane peaks are present, one first obtains a bunch of samples (20-50 for gasoline) of gasolines with different octane numbers. The spectra of those gasolines and the corresponding octane numbers are entered into a mathematical matrix, which is then manipulated by a chemometrics computer program (with a little help from me, the operator!) The result is an equation, called the correlation vector, that relates the height of each point in the spectrum to the octane of the gasoline. The correlation vector is simply a series of numbers, one number for each point in the spectrum. To get the octane number of an unknown gasoline, you simply run the spectrum and get the height of the response at each point. You then multiply each height by the correlation vector number for that point on the spectrum and add up all of these products; the result is the predicted octane number.

With polyethylene, one property of importance is the density of the plastic. Different uses for polyethylene require polymers of differing density, so it's important to know that number. During polymer synthesis, the producer wants to make the required material, so it's important for him to know quickly if he's making the right material or if the process is having problems. Raman spectroscopy coupled with chemometrics allows prediction of polymer density while the polymer is still being made, even though (as for gasoline octane) there is no single peak in the Raman spectrum that gives the density. It's also possible to determine the viscosity of the melted polymer before it's ever melted using Raman spectroscopy.

I'm working on a variety of these things for the new plant. By the way, ChevronPhillips has patent coverage on some of these processes, so much of what I'm doing is only possible because it's for a CPChem licensee. In fact, I couldn't even talk about some of these things if they hadn't already been published in the open literature.

Back to Houston. I got to spend several days listening to people talk about problems with pumps, replacing little parts of this and that, problems with how to prevent important holes from getting plugged up, and how to keep important walls from getting holes in them. And then we got to hear about Raman process monitoring!

I was very pleased about the positive reaction to a colleague's paper on the subject, and am even more pleased that the future may bring more opportunities for me to work in the area.

Even though I'm officially retired, there are so many fun and interesting things to do, how could I possibly just sit around or play golf?

What's the title picture?

Somebody asked me about the picture at the top of my blog. It's a photo I took from the Hayden Peak Overlook on the Mirror Lake Road in the Uinta (pronounced you-IN-ta) Mountains of NE Utah. The big craggy mountain is Hayden Peak, 12,479' high. It's named after Ferdinand Hayden, who did a very early geological survey of the Uintas in about 1870. In the foreground is Moosehorn Lake, about 7.2 acres, and very high - 10,380'! If you're lucky, you can catch rainbow or albino trout in the lake.

The High Uintas constitute one of my favorite places in the world. Just going up there for a few hours lowers my blood pressure about ten points, and is enough to make the world look and feel better, no matter what's going on. There are literally thousands of lakes in the area, and a lot of hikes to get to them. Look, for example, at http://www.go-utah.com/Uinta-Mountains/Hiking/

I talked on a plane ride today with a woman from Omaha who had thought that all of Utah was a flat, dry desert. The Uintas are my answer to people who think that way!

Great fall places

Just thought I'd post a couple pictures of places close around Salt Lake that Vickie and I have seen in the autumn. Enjoy!

Voting, etc.

Vickie and I went over to the Holladay City hall and voted early on Thursday. According to the poll workers there, nearly 7,000 people will have voted at that one site before Election Day. It's terrific to see that so many people are being energized by this year's campaigns.

In order to vote intelligently, I read McCain's Faith of My Fathers and Obama's The Audacity of Hope to get a feel for each man. Having done so, I voted for Obama. Obama's life is a true American success story, and the man himself shows a rare combination of high intelligence, superb education, careful thoughtfulness, and a true dedication to public service. I am also impressed that he has taught constitutional law: the Bush Administration has done more to damage the Constitution than any administration in recent history. The invasion (on very shaky pretenses) of Iraq and the subsequent abandonment of the strictures of the Geneva Convention for anyone suspected of being a terrorist are appalling! The Bush policies have alienated our traditional allies around the world, and have greatly tarnished the shining image of America as a nation devoted to truth rather than just to power.

McCain is a genuine war hero, but seems to be a flawed politician. Though he professes that he is not George Bush, McCain has consistently voted for Bush's misguided policies, placing ideology above pragmatism. Moreover, he is famous for having a very hot temper that has often gotten him into trouble. One of the things I like about Barak Obama is that he is very slow to come to a boil - and he seems to use that time for thinking about solutions to problems, rather than just having knee-jerk reactions to them.

I have always though of myself as a moderate. When I lived in Oklahoma, I was active in Republican party politics. But I've noticed that the Republican party has moved significantly to the right, while I've moved slightly to the left. The result is that I now consider myself a Democrat, though still a moderate.

As a Mormon, I've tried to take seriously the teachings of the Savior. I find the Sermon on the Mount a good (if difficult to apply consistently) guide to Christian living. The Republican platform seems to be mostly about right-wing ideology, while the Democrats talk a lot more about helping people other than the wealthy. I find that the Democrats' positions more closely mirror King Benjamin's position (for the non-LDS, Benjamin is quoted in the Book of Mormon) equating service to others with service of God. I'm a little disappointed that so many of my LDS brothers and sisters are taken in by the far-right cant of the Evangelicals (who really don't like Mormons, anyway!)

Summing up, I voted for Obama and sincerely hope that his election will bring a rebirth of true American spirit in the years to come.

Trip to Pittsburgh

I just got back from a business trip to Pittsburgh, PA. Pittsburgh is a fascinating city, dating from Colonial days. Established as a trading post by the French, it was the object of an abortive drive by the British. George Washington first established his reputation as a soldier when he took over the expedition after the British commander was killed. Because Washington did not understand French and his translator(?) wasn't much better, he actually signed a document admitting that he assassinated the French ambassador to the Indian tribes in French America, and thereby provided the French with justification to start what became known as the French and Indian War.

The British and Colonials eventually prevailed, of course, and the future site of Pittsburgh was called Fort Pitt, after Britain's Foreign Secretary, George Pitt. In later years, Pittsburgh became the center of the US steel and coal industries, with a reputation of a gritty, dirty, blue-collar industrial town.

These days, even after the decline of the coal and steel industries, Pittsburgh is in something of a renaissance. The old HJ Heinz ketchup factory has been converted into a bunch of trendy and expensive loft condos, for example. The smoky, gritty reputation is outdated, too: Pittsburgh now bills itself as 'America's Most Liveable City.' The city is built on a series of rather steep hills, with valleys in between, so the impression is not of a large single city, but of a series of interconnected neighborhoods.

Driving into town from the airport, one does not see the city at all until after passing through a long tunnel through one of the hills. Upon emerging from the tunnel, this is what you see:


Actually, you end up on the bridge on the lower right of this picture, but it's still a pretty spectacular introduction to the city.

As far as the business purpose, it was a good trip. We met with a company involved in supercritical extraction, a key component of our plan for biofuels production from algae, and believe that the meeting's outcome was satisfactory for everybody. To look at our algae business, check our web site, www.greenfireenergy.com.

What am I doing?

Having never before blogged, it may be time to start. So henceforth, you'll get the somewhat dubious benefit of my occasional wisdom, relatively constant blather, and somewhat rare wit. On we go!