Diary of a Mad Scientist

I just got back from a two-week trip to teach two classes, with some bumming around in between. As usual, I walked my house and my heart just melts-I haven’t devoted any blog time in awhile to the house, but it is just a spectacular place to live, and being there makes me regularly feel awash with ecstasy. It’s the best group household I"ve ever lived in.

I flew out two weeks ago to teach a class in Salt Lake City which Graydon had set up. We actually scheduled two separate classes rather than the usual two-day weekend, partially so as not to interfere with Graydon’s Sunday church activities, and because of avoiding Sunday we didn’t have two full days to teach since most students couldnt’ take a Friday off. Friday evening was an equipment building session, and Saturday was a daytime homebrewing class in which I tried to squeeze in everything I normally do in 1 1/2 days. People came from really far away for these classes. I guess I haven’t done as many of them out West as I have in the East side of the country.

One guy flew in from New Zealand (yes, just to come to the class). I’ve had Canadians come to the classes in the US before, but never someone who’s had sat on a plane
for days and days (or whatever it takes to get here from there).

The facility was an amazing prop building warehouse belonging to the Utah Opera. The set crew were working in one of the other warehouse rooms on Saturday, and it looked like they had the dream job. They were workign their magic in an incredible shop full of wood tools and a small metal working shop. It made me happy to see well-funded artists doing amazing things with tools (there were a few props laying around, and it’s amazing what set builders can do to transform a little bit of plaster and kitty litter and paint into something that looks exactly like a rock wall from a distance. The building was about four stories tall, which was all an undivided single story with the ceiling four stories above you and a huge, sparkly clean gantry crane way up there. It made for interesting acoustics. One of the guys from the Utah Biodiesel Coop works at the Opera and helped arrange this shop access originally.

Anyway, we got access to the space about two hours before the 5:30 class. The first thing we did was make giant signs that said “stay away". Actually they said “doors open at 5:15,” we plastered them on all the doors so as to chase the early birds away. This was kind of good, because the early birds started showing up right about two hours prior to the class, right on cue. I could see them stumbling out of their trucks, coffee cup in hand, carrying stacks of paper that they printed off the Internet.

I don’t know what the deal is, but at every one of my classes, about 5% of the students show up 2-3 hours early, and then want to hang around. This includes classes that start at 9:30 in the morning-there are always several overly caffeinated, chatty, middle-aged men circling the place like sharks at 7 a.m. wanting desperately to know what you do with the glycerin and have we heard about the credit card reactor (is it an old age and insomnia thing?). Lately I’ve started sending out e-mails that included “don’t be super early", but people seem to be ignoring that. Note to self: next e-mail for a 9:30 class will say “don’t be any earlier than 9:15″.

It seems that if one of my hosts happens to be there (which usually means they’re setting up the facilities for the class), the guy with the coffee cup zeroes in on the host and corners him. For some reason the earlybird often comes prepared with a copy of Mike Briggs’ algae paper printed from the Internet. I shudder to think about what Mike himself gets to deal with.

My hosts are usually way too friendly to tell the guy with a coffee cup to leave them alone (even though they are busy setting up for class, a fact that’s usually lost on the early guy). I usually have to play “rescue the nice guy” and chase the Caffeinated Ones away. This reminds me of growing up in an apartment building- the gossipy neighbor lady across the hallway would always find an excuse to get my mom over there and trap her for an hour talking her head off- after a while, my mom and I worked out a plan- after 10 minutes if she didnt extricate herself, I would go over to the gossipy neighbors and claim that there was a phone call for mom. It became a lot more difficult to play this game after our phone got disconnected.

Anyway, for this class they were three of us setting up-me, Graydon, and Terry Reist, who flew out there from California and has offered to be one of my interns, and who started the internship by coming to help with the class (which was hugely appreciated). We had a sort of strategy huddle where I tipped them off to the impending arrival of the inevitable early birds; this meant that when the earlybird showed up on cue 10 minutes later, Graydon and Terry were pretty good at extricating themselves. Closing and locking the doors helped too.

Graydon had provided processor kits for that Friday equipment class, which meant that there was a huge line of them, neatly lined up with people’s names on them. He also had a table in the back with a lot of other gizmos that he sells. As people started arriving, he said, “watch these 56-year-old men giggle like babies when they see all the stuff". Which is basically what happened in a few cases.

I’ve started providing a table of snack food at classes, which I think makes sitting through the lectures will bit more fun. College professors should do that. There’s nothing wrong with munching a celery stick while contemplating molarity and normality. This particular class was an evening session that ran through dinnertime, so the food breaks gave it kind of an informal feel to parts of it that I always like about the Friday evening classes. Graydon co-taught, which was, as usual with my co-teachers, perfect fun - tag-teaming the information.

We stayed there until about 1030 in the evening, finishing up some of the more stubborn reactors. Most people stayed at the same hotel, which Graydon had thoughtfully found for us, which means that when I stumbled down to the hotel’s continental breakfast at 7 in the morning there were random conversations about diesel cogeneration and oil sources floating in from opposite sides of the lobby and for once I wasn’t imagining it.

Saturday’s class went by in a long blur. It was the homebrewing/chemistry class, and almost everybody had gone to the equipment class the day before. Frankly, I don’t remember all that much about it because it was absolutely exhausting.

It’s useful to do these classes in a two-day session, because sometimes it takes about a day for some of the concepts to really sink in for those who have not been in school in quite a while, so Day 2 is usually a lot easier than Day 1. I think that the work that goes into teaching these classes is only about 1/3 lecture, and the other 2/3 is all about trying to track who is understanding what, and more important, who is not understanding what, and why they are not understanding it. It feels to me like teaching is all about tracking 30+ people’s brain processes very intently for eight hours at a time, and a my job is to shepherd the ideas around when they’re having trouble finding their way. I remember almost losing my voice couple times, at which point it was really helpful having Graydon there to toss the class to.

Again I met several people who were farmers and were beginning to work on biodiesel systems for their land. The ones that were particularly of interest to me were some folks from Oregon whose economics were just shoving them into becoming organic farmers. Basically, the cost of fertilizer had gone so skyhigh, that they were kinda being forced to go into biodynamic farming with its heavy composting and other soil building techniques.

That class ended in late afternoon, and after everybody had finally left, Graydon and I must’ve looked absolutely exhausted. There was a point at which he was laying on the floor, moaning, and I was in the other corner having a really hard time getting out of my chair to go pack up after the class. It was pathetic. Sometimes, I really wish I just had a couch during or after these classes. I swear, I could lecture quite well from a couch.

Ive continued teaching all over the place - phew! it’s intense. In Febuary and March I was gone almost every weekend. Every class sells out, and that was in mid-winter before the gas prices rose again. I keep pretending that I"ll slow down and go to only teaching one class a month, but I"m now finding myself responding to all the “do you ever teach in ____(insert name of small town here)” emails with a “no, but if you find me a location to rent I"d be glad to organize a class". It seems now that it doesnt matter where I go, people are interested in biodiesel and therefore the classes sell out, so teaching in the middle of nowhere seems just as interesting as teaching in a city.

Incidentally John Bush of Boulderbiodiesel.com is a great workshop teacher also (he cotaught the Denver class) and he’s looking for jobs teaching biodiesel workshops this summer. I highly recommend hiring him. He’ll go to places that I won’t (like Canada, which I dont’ feel like messing with) and he’s less busy than I. At the Denver class there were times when I sat back and let him answer the audience questions, and marveled at how identical the answers he gave were to what I would have said. He really knows the chemistry and engineering end of it better than most homebrewers.

You can find him through john@boulderbiodiesel.com and pitch your teaching/consulting proposals to him.

I recently started adding weekday classes to accommodate the overflow from the sold out weekend ones. I’m squeezing the chemistry instruction/practice into one day, taking out the equipment class portion altogether, and removing the 2+ hours of ‘basics’ info that we normally discuss in class (ie cold weather problems, why use biodiesel, filter changes and rubber/plastic degradation emissions, feedstock crops, etc) .

We did one of these the Monday after Easter at Ron Cascio’s fantastic house in Paradise (otherwise known as Berlin, Maryland, an idyllic little 200+ year old small town on the Eastern Shore). We added the class two weeks before and it was full to the gills also. A huge contingent of people who didnt’ seem at all similar to each other but somehow knew each other drove up from a farming community in Virginia and smartalecked each other into learning titration.

I added another one of these to my Lee, New Hampshire class- here’s a shameless ad:

class: may 19th 10-5, $60
to sign up, go to www.girlmark.com/tour2006.html
Mike Briggs and Dorn Cox of the Oyster River Biofuels Initiative, a really impressive co-op/educational group near Dover, are promising to co-teach (or at least to be there). It should be fun. This is your chance to see the reactor that Mike talks about on biodieselnow, and support their coop’s educational work.

In other news,

-I’ve been working with Graydon Blair and John Bush and several other people on organizing the biodiesel co-op conference in mid July. The web site is www.b100.org. The conference is in Golden, which is near Denver, at Colorado School of Mines, July 14-16.

-I finally went to the doctor again about whatever the hell’s killing me. Which is probably Lyme disease, since I had it about seven years ago, and got extremely sick a year and half later, and still test positive for. The doctor is someone from the biodiesel community, who found me through Yokayo Biofuels (I think he’s on their board?). When I got to the doctor’s office’ parking lot, I could tell which one was the biofueling doctor’s car cause it was a 1980s Mercedes with something leaking out from underneath, just like all of ours. And that wasn’t even his SVO vehicle.

I got a pretty intense round of prescription drugs for Lyme, as well as for some of its other effects. I’m taking four drugs, of which three cause nausea as a side effect, fun stuff. I don’t know how long it takes for the classic Lyme die-off reaction to start happening when you treat with antibiotics, but something’s making me pretty miserable right now also. I also asked for a prescription for Provigil, which is a ‘wakefullness promoter’ that’s helping me squeeze more than my usual 12 waking hours out of a day. For the last 8 months, I’ve been uncontrollably falling over like a rock at 5 p.m., and would spend the next several hours either sleeping till 10 pm or fighting it with caffeine, which of course would wreak havoc with my sleep pattern later.

Provigil is fantastically expensive, somewhat of a scary unknown (they don’t know why it works) and the effect still feels like several of the things that I don’t like about caffeine- it seems to me that it’s even easier to get distracted while on it (someone was joking that one “needs to get pointed in the right direction” prior to taking a drug like this if you’re going to do work involving concentration- interestingly, some patients report the exact opposite effect- intensified concentration), but right at the moment it works a lot better than the caffeine did at managing the inexplicable ‘falling over’ effect without as many side effects. I found that 50 mg is a dose I dont notice as jitteriness or unnatural talkativeness, but works well to make me functional through the Lyme brainfog.

It’s FAR easier to get to sleep when needed on this stuff than on caffeine- if I remember at 10 pm that I need to start being tired, the wakefullness vanishes like a light switch getting turned off.

Well obviously it’s been forever since I’ve posted anything to the blog. I had quite a saga with torn ligaments in my right hand, something that started back in September, and has been bothering me ever since. Spent some time a cast, and spent some time trying not to use the computer at all, which is incredibly difficult for me. Spent quite a bit of time freaking out thinking that I was going to have to get surgery. Eek.

Today I made somewhat of a stride forward in the GC saga.

We picked up the machines in December, we being me and Concrete Community College (and also Piedmont biofuels, to whom I shipped one). The school and I got one each. There are also several parts machines, which we’ve been vigorously stripping and trading off for the parts we actually need. gas chromatographs are set up for different kinds of tests, with differing kinds of equipment. My impression is that the setup that we use for biodiesel is fairly rare in the world of GC testing. So here’s what has happened so far:

we picked up the gas chromatographs with mostly wrong detectors and completely wrong injectors for $1000 each. (We knew exactly what we are getting, and the chances of finding one of these with the correct injector for biodiesel are quite slim) The base units that we’ve purchased are 1980s HP 5980’s. There were actually two FID detectors on one of the machines, so me and the college each got one. The chemist at the college who’s spearheading this project has managed to trade away the ECD detectors that came with their unit (nice, radioactive, expensive), so we managed to get rid of something that we didn’t need and couldn’t afford to run, and in trade, picked up two cool-on-column injectors- those are worth about $1500 each, and you need them for the biodiesel analysis. THey’ve got a little heater that looks like a micro-VegTherm attached for the temperature changes that are needed in the analysis.

Then the saga with the school started. They’re quite poorly funded. They have the usual multilayered financial bureaucracy of a public institution. They agreed to pay for some of the equipment needed to set up their own machine (I’m paying for mine, with some help from donations). Then they took many, many, many months to put in the order for parts that they agreed to pay for. It’s taken several months to get a 20 amp outlet put in, and, in the end, they only gave us one and we needed two, so now we have to wait for a second to appear, sometime… Months ago, they green-lighted ordering the regulators for the ultrapure gases for the machine, and something got very screwy with that also so they’re not here yet either. At any rate, I’m buying my own regulators so that we can charge ahead.

Today, however, we cleaned the machines fully and actually started installing stuff, now that we have electricity to run at least one machine with. I started taking pictures, although all of these parts are also very well documented at the Agilent web site (don’t ask me questions about these machines, I really dont know enough to answer them). We’ve managed to acquire a fantastic haul of stuff in this process- I was originally slightly concerned about it, as the school was buying its machines sight unseen and the lab I purchased from unloaded five machines on me (three working, two not)- but when I showed up at the school with a vanload of dusty machines, oily power cords, ancient computers, and random parts, it was obvious that the organic chemistry instructors appreciate ’salvage’ just as much as I do. Out of this deal, the school’s machine will have two different detectors and injectors to play with, and the machines are replacing some even older gas chromatographs they had, which were not really adequate for the experiments they wanted to do in the chem classes.

Apparently one of the things they’ll be doing in Organic Chem class is fatty acid analysis using GC, something that’s quite interesting to me for various biodiesel experiments.