Plan B Forum

Lord Dampnut and his Court.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/12/politics/ ... index.html

It's theater. He is acting like a president and having a cabinet meeting. All of them in turn suck up and do their best impressions of competent people and repeat a campaign slogan or two. He thinks by doing this he will look like a real president. The degree of sucking up is amazing for a group of people who have been working together for weeks.

It is eerie seeing such a concentrated group of ass-kissers in one room. Not a leader in the bunch.


yrs,
rubato

Wonkette's headline on this story:

I Had Never Thought I’d Actually SEE A Blow Job In The White House

(So..."Good Hands"??? Hand job?...or blow job?)

This reminded me of a ‘leadership course’ I was on a few years ago. There were six of us plus the company president. He asked us to think of a leader and describe that person and his/her attributes to the group in turn. As I was sitting to his left and he started on the right I would be last. I selected three names: Ernest Shackleton; Jack Aubrey (fictional hero of Patrick O’Brians’s Aubrey Maturin series and the movie ‘Master and Commander’); and my first lab boss who in 1966 let a 17-year-old technician play with his gas chromatograph mass spectrometer when there were about two of these instruments in the world. (I expect rube to be impressed by this as he knows what a GCMS is. The rest of you - yes, that was cool.) Anyway while I was busy formulating my thoughts the person to his right started extolling the qualification of, yes, the company president as a leader. Well he was a known suck-up so what the hell. Next, we heard the merits of the company’s Sales Director. By the time third in line was talking up the CIO I was getting seriously worried. Did I mishear the instructions and would have to quickly think of a leader within the company? Luckily Cheri (fourth in line) started taking about her mother, so I breathed a sigh of relief.

Number 5 reverted to pattern (the CEO IIRC) but I stuck with my group. This may be coincidence, but those four are still with the company: Cheri and I were 'let go' within a year or so.

Your two were the lucky ones if that's what it took to get ahead.

And the GC MS in 66 must have been pretty cool--I think they had just introduced quadrapole instruments then, but was yours quadrapole or TOF? I worked for a company who had an interest in a small MS company that was doing some pretty amazing things with it, and one of the principals went back to the 50s with working on these instruments and methods; he was a smart and fascinating guy.

gas chromatograph mass spectrometer

Does that thing come turbo-charged?

Wow in '66 that was a new and exciting thing, and difficult to tune. By the 80s-90s they were like toasters. I used them quite a bit in designing new molecules in the 90's and 2000's. We got some lovely structural information about a T8 hydrido-methyl siloxane ploymeer and even confirmed that we could use t-butyl groups to substitute for methyls which would act as good leaving groups during cure.



yrs,
rubato


It may be a couple more than 2:

By 1966 Finnigan and collaborator Mike Uthe's EAI division had sold over 500 quadrupole residual gas-analyzer instruments.[5]

But that is still a very small number of a very new thing.

We could make this a separate topic. But for now, the MS units Finnegan was selling in the sixties for gas detection were quadrupole MS only and were not GCMS. The MS we used (I was working with RPW Scott as an intern, essentially) was an AEI MS9 which was magnetic sector. I forget the GC - probably Pye Unicam 104. The trick then was slowing down the GC (packed column of course) in order to give the MS enough time to do say 25 to 200 amu which probably took about 10 minutes - nowadays it's milliseconds. I by no means am saying I was one of the people perfecting what we all now take for granted, but I was there when others did. I sat next to Bob Finnegan at a conference maybe 15 years ago: I wish I had discussed those days with him. An opportunity missed. Quads were a huge advance over the old mag sector and TOF.

Magnetic sector? I didn't know they went that far back. That must have been cutting edge.

According to wiki they were quadrupole:

The first on-line coupling of gas chromatography to a mass spectrometer was reported in 1959.[2][3][4] The development of affordable and miniaturized computers has helped in the simplification of the use of this instrument, as well as allowed great improvements in the amount of time it takes to analyze a sample. In 1964, Electronic Associates, Inc. (EAI), a leading U.S. supplier of analog computers, began development of a computer controlled quadrupole mass spectrometer under the direction of Robert E. Finnigan.[5] By 1966 Finnigan and collaborator Mike Uthe's EAI division had sold over 500 quadrupole residual gas-analyzer instruments.[5] In 1967, Finnigan left EAI to form the Finnigan Instrument Corporation along with Roger Sant, T. Z. Chou, Michael Story, and William Fies.[6] In early 1968, they delivered the first prototype quadrupole GC/MS instruments to Stanford and Purdue University.[5] When Finnigan Instrument Corporation was acquired by Thermo Instrument Systems (later Thermo Fisher Scientific) in 1990, it was considered "the world's leading manufacturer of mass spectrometers".[7]