October, you are no more the harbinger of Autumn The green elm with the one great bough of gold came in late August – the yellowing of drought stealing the march on your glorious displays and dooming those boughs to die with your first frost for those burned leaves made no antifreeze for the tree to suck back in before the leaves their final purpose fulfilled into the grass slip[ped] one by one… And too came branches near breaking with berries their colour near drowning out the last green leaves turning the trees a brown when seen from afar another false Autumnal hue and a feast too early for the migrant birds which land in October they will find the berries gone over, their bounty wasted and now the land is draped in true October colours we may be lulled into thinking the season too runs true but like those birds in coming hunger mired will Harebell and snowdrop, at their season due, awake to the unseasonal “beast from the East” or interminable drought or rain or heat? October you are not the only month no longer acting true to expectations – all is climate changed…
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Dora in Poetics invites us to trip the October Light Fantastic and although that beautiful display has begun, it is not the whole story this year, and indeed, for coming years, and I find I cannot celebrate with unalloyed pleasure…
In the beginning, there was just gas hydrogen drifting in nebulous clouds assuming fantastic shapes within which gravity began to group the atoms into clumps flocculating into formless blobs that swarm and meld together until the weakest of fundamental forces is magnified by unimaginable volumes temperature rising with such pressure that eventually combustion spontaneously ignites the first generation of stars
A star is a balancing act between the explosive force of the burn versus the constant collapsing pull of gravity but fire consumes the star and gravity always wins and the star is blown to bits to dust in fact – stardust brings new elements to the feast for the greedy, next generation growing in the nursery of new nebulae
The new stars have more complex deaths with a series of alternating explosions and collapses each one concentrating and crushing new elements into existence before blasting them into ever more varied stardust which will one day make the flesh and bones of a big-brained hominid who will gaze back through generations of galaxies let alone stars – back towards where it all began…
Is there anyone who does not love the display of Autumn colours that nature puts on each year if you live in the latitudes where deciduous trees flourish? A love that is, tempered by the knowledge of the meaning which this colourful transformation signals – the end of Summer and the advent of Winter – only young children are blissfully unaware of the message and thoughtlessly kick their way through the ever-deepening piles of fallen leaves. The change begins on the edge of some leaves on a certain side of some trees and gradually creeps across the entire tree, to be joined at differing rates and with subtly different palettes by other species until whole stands of woodland are ablaze save for the odd patch of evergreens. But this extravagant show, which has us humans travelling to see its most spectacular examples, is not some random quirk of nature, but a necessary part of the plant’s process – one without which the trees would not survive the coming cold of Winter. The green, chlorophyll-filled engine of energy conversion which is a leaf, exchanging liquid food from the tree and using sunlight to power the tree, now switches its production to producing a kind of anti-freeze which the tree reabsorbs into its twigs, branches and trunk to protect itself against frost damage. Once each leaf has done its job, sucked dry by its parent, it shrivels and falls to the ground where it will rot down and feed the tree through its roots and complete the cycle of its life but the byproduct of its transformation in Autumn is a breathtaking, spectacular, partial rainbow from yellow to rich reds…
The dual theme of my A to Z Challenge this year is the world of Commodities and Poetry Forms so the juxtaposition of these two themes may throw up some strange poems – could be a Heroic Ode to Heating Oil or will it merit a Haiku or a Haibun – whichever, I will be endeavouring to bring you interesting facts about commodities that may change the way you think about the stuff we variously depend on…
By commodity I mean certain items that are of both sufficient value/volume to be traded in special markets and are generally volatile enough to attract traders in “Futures” which are a way of hedging bets in the trading world of stocks, shares and commodities.
The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!
Worldwide trade in Vanadium 2022 was $38970 million and growing…
When starting to research each of the commodities in this A-Z Challenge, I have only had some preconceived idea of the stories or interesting facts about a few of the items – for the most part – a trip to Wikipedia is good starting point or seeking the answer to the above question on World Trading – but with Vanadium, I have been faced with a wall of chemistry. yes there is a discovery timeline – of course there is – and there is a naming story involving an ancient goddess but more than any other element, my overwhelming first impression is that we are going to have to talk some chemistry…
The first discovery in the Vanadium story was in Mexico, in 1801 Andrés Manuel del Río extracted the element from a sample of Mexican “brown lead” ore, later named vanadinite. So like the “bad copper ore” in Nickel and the ouro podre, ‘worthless gold,’ we encountered in Palladium, the Vanadium story starts off being an impurity or mistaken identity in the mining of some other substance. Because the salts of Vanadium displayed so many different colours, del Rio initially named the substance panchromium (Greek: παγχρώμιο “all colours” but later renamed it erythronium (Greek: ερυθρός “red”) because most of the salts turned red upon heating. Swedish chemist Nils Gabriel Sefström rediscovered the element in a new oxide he found while working with iron ores. Later that year, Friedrich Wöhler confirmed that this element was identical to that found by del Río and he called the element vanadium after Old Norse Vanadís (another name for the Norse Vanir goddess Freyja, whose attributes include beauty and fertility and from whom we get Friday and less salubriously – frigging!).
Below is a science experiment demonstrating the reason for the many colours of different chemical states of Vanadium plus if this guy does not look like the original mad scientist I don’t know who would…
Of all the hard commodity metals we have encountered, Vanadium, though rarely occurring as a native metal, has one of the most varied occurrences being present in about 65 different minerals and so it has many and varied methods of extraction. More chemistry required. As well as ores such as patrónite and Vanadinite, Uranium ores such as carnotite, vanadium can be found in bauxite and deposits of crude oil, coal, oil shale, and tar sands, in sea water and in volcanic mineral springs. You can read more about the technical aspects of Vanadium here.
When such oil products are burned, traces of vanadium may cause corrosion in engines and boilers.[62] An estimated 110,000 tons of vanadium per year are released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels
Once again, we find a metal which has become vital as an alloy ingredient – about 85% of it is used in ferrovanadium or as a steel additive where it significantly increases the strength of the steel making it suitable for many tools as well as specialist engineering applications like the turbine blades in jet engines (mixed with Aluminium and Titanium) and closer to home, if you can afford dental implants – you may have some in your mouth. Vanadium is used as a catalyst in the production of Sulphuric Acid and thence in many industrial chemical processes whilst the vanadium redox battery is a vital part of grid energy storage and may be important in the development of future battery technologies.
With the cosmic abundance of vanadium being around 0.0001%, it is hardly surprising that this chemical of complex possibilities has found its role in living creatures – more in marine environments than on land – but even on land vanadium occurs in some fungi including the iconic Fly Agaric.
The jury is out as to the utility or otherwise, of Vanadium in the human body – deficiency in rats has been linked to poor growth and some inconclusive experiments suggest it might help with type 2 diabetes, but neither minimum recommended doses of Vanadium as a supplement nor its threshold as a poison have been properly established. Another reflection of the complex chemistry of Vanadium…
As a trading commodity, Vanadium may be less than $Billion which is small compared to some of the commodities we have looked at, but it is a very vital ingredient in the modern world and a little of it goes a long way. But as the quote below shows – looked at in geopolitical terms – two of the top producer countries are problematic to Western interests – especially in the light of sanctions against Putin’s Russia and America’s problems squaring up to China, so these potential instabilities stoke the kind of opportunities that markets like to speculate on…
Vanadium is mined mostly in China, South Africa and eastern Russia. In 2022 these three countries mined more than 96% of the 100,000 tons of produced vanadium, with China providing 70%
And so to today’s poem which as we are at “V” – is a Verbless Poem.
The poets.org, has this to say about Verbless Poetry in turn a quote from the definition by Edward Hirsch in his A Poet’s Glossary:- Poems without verbs. On one hand, the verbless poem can create a static quality, a sense of the arrested moment, which is why it has appealed to poets who write haiku and other types of imagist poems. […] On the other hand, the verbless construction can give, as the linguist Otto Jespersen points out in “The Role of the Verb (1911),” “a very definite impression of motion.” That’s why verbless constructions especially appealed to the futurists, such as F. T. Marinetti (1876–1944), who eliminated verbs in order to create a sense of telegraphic communication in a furiously changing world. – Seems an appropriate form for Vanadium…
Vanadium – a Verbless Poem
From a multitude of sources through a cascade of chemical processes to a plethora of purposes vital to our modern world Vanadium our alloy ally…
The dual theme of my A to Z Challenge this year is the world of Commodities and Poetry Forms so the juxtaposition of these two themes may throw up some strange poems – could be a Heroic Ode to Heating Oil or will it merit a Haiku or a Haibun – whichever, I will be endeavouring to bring you interesting facts about commodities that may change the way you think about the stuff we variously depend on…
By commodity I mean certain items that are of both sufficient value/volume to be traded in special markets and are generally volatile enough to attract traders in “Futures” which are a way of hedging bets in the trading world of stocks, shares and commodities.
The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!
Worldwide Trade in Palladium in 2022 – $29.4 Billion
To be a Commodity, a substance has to be both important and tradeable on a sufficiently large scale and so most of the commodities are easily recognisable items such as iron, cocoa and orange juice – but in Palladium, we come to an element, for such it is, that most people will, if they even know the name, have no idea as to what it is or why it is sufficiently important as to be a tradeable commodity. Yet if you drive a car with a catalytic converter, are fond of white gold or are diabetic and use testing strips, you are (like rats) closer than you know to a small amount of Palladium.
You may not have heard of Palladium, but its sibling is Platinum and grouped together in the Periodic Table, the members of the Platinum Family (platinoids, platinides, platidises, platinum group, platinum metals, platinum family or platinum-group elements) consist of ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium, and platinum. As is often the case with elements found close together in the Periodic Table, they have similar properties – their main characteristic has determined their greatest utility – they have many catalytic properties and so the major driver of Palladium as a commodity is the demand for Catalytic Converters in car exhaust systems. Incidentally, palladium recycles well and so there is a trade in used catalytic converters which sadly also drives the theft of them too…
As early as 1700, miners in Brazil were aware of a metal they called ouro podre, ‘worthless gold,’ this demonstrates that alloys can occur in nature – and ouro podre is a native alloy of palladium and gold and today, Palladium is one of the metals alloyed with gold to make “white” gold for those who don’t want the gold colour but want jewellery that is stronger and less tarnishing than silver. However, these native metal sources are not where Palladium is commercially extracted from – the ores are limited to four main sites in the world and 37% of the Palladium sold comes from Russia. So once again, Putin’s unwarranted war on Ukraine and the sanctions that followed it, have been a major lever in the trading prices of Palladium just as we have noted they were in oil and gas prices. Incidentally, every commodity has a Trading Identity Number and for Palladium it is HS Code 71102900.
Lastly, Palladium was named by its discoverer (as an element) William Hyde Wollaston in 1802 after the asteroid 2 Pallas, which had been discovered two months earlier. The nymph Pallas was killed by her childhood friend – Athena – daughter of Zeus who – seeing Athena and Pallas sparring, wanted Athena to win and distracted Pallas who was then accidentally impaled by Athena’s spear and Athena was thenceforth known as Athena Pallas. As recompense for killing her friend, she created a STATUE that looked like Pallas and she named it the Palladium which was later housed in the city of Troy. Pallas Athena had many responsibilities as Goddess of War, Wisdom and Health which is a rather mixed job description…
Athena and Pallas sparring whilst Zeus watches from the sidelines – in the style of Titian generated by Midjourney
And so to the “P” poem for today. I had a choice of a Pantoum – a form with a lot of repeating lines giving an incantatory feel which didn’t feel right and so I am going to go with another poetry movement, this one before the Second World War. The Pylon Poets made reference to, if not celebrating, modern technology – taking their name from a poem by Stephen Spender called The Pylons. Other Pylon Poets included W. H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis and Louis MacNeice. Most famously was perhaps W.H. Auden’s Night Mail which was also made into the soundtrack to a short film. I have chosen the Duplex form which is one of my favourites for the way each couplet passes a theme on to the next one creating a great sense of progress.
Palladium
Palladium which celebrates poor Pallas Was first a statue made by her killer
The wooden statue was protector of Troy A job not done so well so history tells
Her story languished for many decades Later her name graced a minor planet
When telescopes revealed the heavens Then science paid yet another tribute
When Wollaston found another element With minor use named for a minor body
But now we crave the miner’s hard-won produce for catalysis, jewellery and more
At last we found purposes for “useless gold” Palladium which celebrates poor Pallas
The dual theme of my A to Z Challenge this year is the world of Commodities and Poetry Forms so the juxtaposition of these two themes may throw up some strange poems – could be a Heroic Ode to Heating Oil or will it merit a Haiku or a Haibun – whichever, I will be endeavouring to bring you interesting facts about commodities that may change the way you think about the stuff we variously depend on…
By commodity I mean certain items that are of both sufficient value/volume to be traded in special markets and are generally volatile enough to attract traders in “Futures” which are a way of hedging bets in the trading world of stocks, shares and commodities.
The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!
25% of the yield of a barrel of Crude Oil is Heating Oil and the Crude Oil Market reached a value of US $ 1424.38 Bn. in 2022 so $356.09
I mentioned Bitumen amongst nearly-rans for “B” commodities and we just covered Gasoline and we now come to another derivative of Crude Oil – Heating Oil – all four of these substances can be traded as commodities and they all have their niche roles in trading portfolios – Heating Oil, for example, is a product subject to seasonal demand – alternating depending on which hemisphere you are in. Heating oil is actually kerosene or paraffin and these terms are often used interchangeably but I will be returning to Kerosene under K and in any case, Heating Oil is traded as a distinct “futures” product. But what I want to talk about today, is the process by which the three derivatives are extracted, simultaneously, from crude oil – Fractional Distillation.
Some of you may remember this from school days though I am not sure whether it would have been taught in Geography or Chemistry classes – but the diagram below is one of those “once learned never forgotten” things – a piece of magic at the heart of the 20th Century industrial age. Elegantly simple in principle, probably a fiendishly tricky piece of engineering in practice, a Fractional Distillation Tower is what you see in oil refineries and crude oil, once heated to the point of becoming a vapour, enters the tower at the bottom and as the various components rise and cool at different points in the tower, they condense and are drawn off separately. The most volatile reach the top of the tower – Butane and Propane whilst the heaviest and thickest remain at the bottom of the tower – such as Bitumen or Asphalt.
Although this particular diagram doesn’t show it and most of the items appear to be fuels, there are also substances like Naptha which go on to be used in other industrial processes – Naptha is a very volatile solvent. Other industries also use hydro-carbons to make plastics with the addition of certain other chemicals and all of these things, fuels, solvents and plastics can be seen to be releasing stored “fossil” carbon into the Earth’s atmosphere causing global warming or in the case of plastics contributing a material which will not breakdown easily in the environment and which is slowly poisoning the food chain…
There is no choice about what components come out of a fractional distillation tower except in as much as different sources of crude oil do contain slightly different proportions of hydrocarbon fractions. It makes one think what might happen if we ever do get near the “bottom of the oil barrel” – we might have weaned ourselves off petrol and diesel vehicles but we might still need some plastics or we might still need bitumen for building roads for electric cars and yet whenever you distil crude oil – you get a whole selection of products, whether you want or need them all, or not…
A Haiku
And so to the poem which today is a Haiku. And yes, in my Theme Reveal, I promised a Heroic Ode and that would be a difficult one to write about Heating Oil although some might consider a Haiku about Heating Oil equally challenging – however the Haiku is an extremely popular poetry form these days having spread far beyond its native Japan and Heroic Odes are decidedly out of fashion, so I decided to meet the challenge of writing about Heating Oil with a Haiku… Infamously, the Punk poet John Cooper Clarke wrote:-
To write a poem in seventeen syllables is very diffic…
But the haiku demands more than seventeen syllables, the syllables need to be distributed 5-7-5 and the theme of a Haiku should be related to nature and also “focus on a brief moment in time; a use of provocative, colourful images; an ability to be read in one breath; and a sense of sudden enlightenment.” You may say, with some justification that Heating Oil is not a very promising subject for such a philosophical, traditional, and compact form – but I have done my best…
Heating Oil – A Haiku
Autumn advances We dip the heating oil tank Dark smell of Winter
Halfway between Charmouth and Lyme Regis the tumbled rocks from the crumbling cliffs above bring to a close the beach that you follow eyes down searching from Charmouth they mark the point beyond which you will be cut off by a rising tide and face a choice between pressing on to Lyme Regis or struggling back over the hump of sticky Liassic blue-grey clay and braving falling rocks to regain the beach.
Though we did not know it as such back then this is the so-called Jurassic Coast one of them at least because the rocks curve up through the country like a spine with scoliosis to emerge again in Yorkshire with its counterclaim to tourists seeking fossils and imagining a dinosaur-infested past.
But Charmouth was made famous for fossils by Mary Anning, a glorious amateur who walked this beach every day especially after winter storms threw down hidden treasures from the cliffs. Mary found the first complete Ichthyosaur and too, found fame clawing it from begrudging academics of the day.
But back to the rocks midway along the route from tiny Charmouth to bustling Lyme Regis once graced by royalty. These rocks entrap in sheltered pockets miraculous casts of eons dead shells the gold of iron pyrites fools gold gleaming in the dross of sand and tiny pebbles
Find them if you can before the next storm crashes into the rocks and sweeps the treasure out to sea.
It was my mother on childhood holidays eschewing the search for larger, showier fossils despite the joy of splitting rocks thwacking them just so with her specially purchased geologist’s hammer she settled down to search among the rocks and finding the tiny, perfect overlooked treasures.
The last time I went there seeking out this secret trove hoping against hope that I remembered still where X marked the spot this secret trove which most people pass by in their search for bigger things I was summoned away for half-an-hour whilst a scene for “Ammonite” about the life of Mary Anning was filmed a few feet from my treasure seeking and when, months later I watched the finished film I recognised my absent self just out of shot.
I have been on that beach my whole life just out of shot in my mind’s eye a treasured memory of times past fossilised in fools gold.
My AI muse Misky, recently made a post entitled Barglefloop and I quote her “barglefloop, means to mess with words in your AI prompt in order to confuse it, to turn nouns into verbs, to make single words compound, etc.” It occurred to me to experiment by adding the same prompt to Midjourney as Misky had used and see if the AI came back with the same images as she got – it did not! Here are the first four I got using the prompt “Barglefloop“
Where Misky’s images tended towards Hieronymous Bosch – mine were Harry Potter meets Lord of the Rings Rivertown. Below is the fourth image enlarged to show the level of detail the AI has put in…
But what does this tell us about the way Midjourney works – that Barglefloop is nonsense and so the AI creates whatever it wants to – let off the leash so to speak? I decided to add some more nonsense “barglefloop female foxing blithy toves” – Foxing – as a noun gone verb, and “slithy toves” from Lewis Carrol’s Jabberwocky (’twas brillig and the slithy toves…). This time the AI seized on the only bit of the prompt that made sense Fox and gave me four fox pictures, ignoring the rest of the senseless prompt – so Midjourney, whilst known to hallucinate as much as the next AI was not so desperate to act freely – released by nonsense…
Cute but no cigar for Midjourney so now I went for all the nonsense, none of the foxing around “barglefloop blithy toves” and now we get something quite nightmarish in a Snarky/Jabberwocky Carrollian sort of way, with perhaps a hint of Bosch…
So lastly I decided to miss out the Barglefloop and just retain the Lewis Carrol words “twas brillig and the blithy toves” and now we can see an Alice in Wonderland flavour to the images – particularly the top two…
Lastly, I asked for variations on the bottom right image – a rather mad-looking figure with a slightly Victorian flavour…
Does this tell us much about the way the “mind” of an AI works – I will let you be the judge – and stay away from hookah-smoking caterpillars seated on toadstools – my advice…
If you have been following this blog’s A2Z Challenge then you will know that I have been trying to finish a novel, “Train Wreck”, and publishing a chapter below each post – at least until day 15 when I ran out of completed chapters – there is another one in progress – but if you have been following the novel and would like to receive the balance of the chapters – let me know in a comment. Meanwhile, if you imagined Xenobiology to be the study of aliens – think again…
When researching the V post on diseases in space, I imagined that Xenobiology would be the subject to mine for information, the word Xeno being from the Greek Zenosmeaning Stranger/Alien– but no – that was Astrobiology. Xenobiology has very down to earth goals trying to solve issues of disease right here on Earth – albeit in a very strange way.
Earth life uses the genetic code based on DNA and RNA – nucleic acids that carry information to let us construct our bodies (but also diseases and viruses!). Xenobiology attempts to use nucleic acid analogues, expanded genetic code and non-proteinogenic amino acids. Wait! This sounds like GM – Genetic Modification which some people think is A Very Bad Thing! Well yes and no! The modification of genetic action of cells is so radical that it may include substituting an entirely synthetic genetic mechanism and the aim of that is to make conventional GM safer.
One of the great fears about GM is the “horizontal gene transfer” and its possible effects on humans and the environment. Xenobiology aims to firewall genetic changes by replacing the whole or parts of the genetic mechanism. If you love geeky stuff, go read the Wikipedia article or if you want the layman’s version try this.
In fact, Xenobiology might be a tool in Astrobiology since it sheds light on quite other ways in which life could be structured on alien worlds, but you only have to look to the deepest oceans on Earth to find such alien life chemistry. Down there in the total dark, exist microbes that use chemosynthesis based on hydrogen sulphide instead of the carbon dioxide of photosynthesis – something quite unimagined until their quite recent discovery. If such different life chemistry is possible, why not different gene chemistry?
I don’t pretend to understand Xenobiology but I see that it is a fascinating branch of science and I have given you a signpost if you want to go there…
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