The New AME Website

My oldest daughter, Kirsten, decided that it would be good for Anderson Materials Evaluation, Inc. to have a more up-to-date website.  She and her friend Ike transferred much of the content of our old website into the new format, which has a much more apparent navigation system and allows the reader to see much more readily how much information is available on our website.  At my request, she chose a system which would make it much easier for me to update and to add to the website.  Consequently, it is now published in WordPress.  The AME website address is still www.andersonmaterials.com

I have added to the content considerably already.  More additions will be coming over the next few months with some regularity.  There are presently 75 webpages and documents describing the work and capabilities of our laboratory.

Suggestions on additions or comments on the present content are most welcome.  I want to comment that illustrative examples are not necessarily indicative of the range of materials problems we work on due to the need to keep our customer's proprietary information strictly confidential.  As a result, some illustrative examples of the information provided by an analytical technique were performed by us on our own materials rather than on a customer's materials.  Many examples on natural mined minerals and on gemstones are present simply because they give away no information belonging to our customers.  The information is simply that of the geology of the Earth, which is complex and does provide interesting analytical challenges for such techniques as x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS / ESCA).  While we do periodically analyze minerals, we do not do such analyses in the proportion in which they appear on the website.

Where an illustration uses a material which was analyzed for a customer, we do not name the customer or the application in most cases.  In many cases, we actually share very little about the material and how it was processed.  The information revealed in the illustration is actually minimal, but indicative of at least some characterization capability at AME or of the types of problems we investigate here.  There is no case in which customer proprietary information is given up.  Whether we sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement with a customer or not, we make every effort to protect the intellectual property of our customers.

Charles R. Anderson, Ph. D.

Somebody Else Built My Business!

Speaking in Roanoke, Virginia on Friday, Obama said:

If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.  Somebody else made that happen.

Obama also said:

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

 If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

My response:

Somebody else invested the start-up money to buy laboratory equipment.  Somebody else had an income of only $10,000 in all of year 1.  Somebody else paid for a high deductible health plan for myself, my wife, and my three daughters.  Somebody else worked 80-hour weeks.  Somebody else acted as an unpaid tax collector for the federal, state, and local governments.  Somebody else paid real estate taxes and personal property taxes on my laboratory facility and equipment.  Somebody else trained employee after employee.  Somebody else developed thousands of customized materials analysis plans to solve my customers materials problems.  Somebody else slept on a cot into the night to be around to start up one more analysis or two through the night.  Somebody else worked many a 36-hour stretch straight through to meet a deadline.  Somebody else wrote thousands of analytical reports.

Somebody else paid my employees and only took their own pay when income was sufficient to provide it.  Somebody else guaranteed the laboratory lease.  Somebody else took the risk of being sent to jail for the possible violation of some one of thousands of regulations that cannot all be known and understood by any small business owner.  Someone else had to fire the occasional mistaken hire who could not perform his job.  Someone else went with less than a week of vacation time year after year after year.  Someone else worked weekend and holiday after weekend and holiday.

I sure am grateful to that Somebldy Else, even if I was mistaken in thinking it was me.  Now that I know otherwise, I am asking that Somebody Else to step forward and be acknowledged.

But, one thing I am really certain about is this:  I do not owe governments a penny more than they have already received from me and my business.  The first 30% of their spending used on legitimate government functions was worth my while paying, but the remainder was a giant rip-off.  Any penny more that I give government today is money they use to make my life and my family's lives just that much harder.  Much of that money is actually spent to violate more and more of our sovereign individual rights.

It is a good thing that Obama is so blatantly stating what this upcoming election is really about.  He is right that his vision of how our society and our government should operate is very different from that of those of his opposition who believe in the American Principle of a very limited, constitutional government whose only legitimate function is the protection of individual rights.

Those of us who believe in the American Principle readily acknowledge that we owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to those Americans who came before us and gave us a government that was at one time limited in scope and largely protective of individual liberty.  We are also grateful for those many productive Americans who made our society wealthy, robust, innovative, founded on mutual trust, reasonably benevolent, and comparatively independent-minded.  We have long had a society that expected Americans to be self-managers of their own lives and to live their lives responsibly.  There are tremendous benefits to all of us from this.  This is a society in which people have largely been able to reap many benefits from their accomplishments and productive work, while providing rich benefits to all of the rest of us in our society.

Our society has largely been based on a robust and rich private sector in which individuals were free to choose their own values and to associate freely with others of their own choice to pursue those values.  We have been a trader society which operates on the principle of voluntary exchanges of ideas, goods, and services.  I, for instance, could not operate without the many vendors who make and supply replacement parts for my laboratory equipment.  I am very grateful to them for offering me that critical service.  But, I also pay them well for providing that equipment and the replacement parts.  My customers pay for my services because I identity the causes of their materials problems and can often suggest how they can prevent the problem.  They are able to make more money because of the service I provide them.  But, our largely private sector society of free trade and associations provides the very mechanisms that allow us to acknowledge in appropriate ways the debts we have to others who supply us with valuable ideas, goods, and services.

Obama wants to eliminate this voluntary trade and association.  He wants to kill the very mechanisms we have for acknowledging the value of the ideas, goods, and services that others in our society offer us.  He wants hordes of government central planners to choose our values for us and impose them upon us using the full force of government.  He says that because we have reaped some benefits from others and from having government, that we owe it to government to build it up even more.  Many things are beneficial at the appropriate level and harmful at higher levels.  This Obama prescription is the equivalent of the argument that if taking one aspirin for a headache is good, then taking 100 aspirins for that headache is better.  Or if drinking 8 ounces of water now is good, then pouring 10 gallons of water down your throat now is better.  This is shear sophistry.  It is wifty logic.

I see that the spell checker does not recognize wifty.  OK, Obama has a great propensity for ditzy logic, which unfortunately works for many Americans today.  Apparently, that is the outcome of government-run schools that want to produce suitable, compliant subjects for a socialist government.  The biggest ditz of them all, the perfect product of this educational system promoting socialism, is Obama.  He sure managed to make this small business owner angry.

Upgraded SEM/EDX System

We recently replaced our Topcon SM-300 SEM/EDX system with a Topcon ABT-32 SEM/EDX system with an Evex EDX and imaging computer program.  Our present system is shown below:

We have realized a number of improvements as a result.  Among these are:

• Image digitization at 256 x 256, 512 x 512, 1024 x 1024, 2048 x 2048, 4096 x 4096, and 8192 x 8192 pixels.  The old system only digitized SEM secondary electron (SED) and backscatter (BSD) images at 1024 x 1024 pixels.  Most of our SED and BSD images will now be taken at higher pixel resolution, while 512 x 512 is often the best resolution for EDX elemental mapping, since the x-ray emission volume beneath the surface is much larger than the surface beam entrance cross section.  EDX samples about 1 to 2 micrometers deep into a sample and the emission volume is about 1 micrometer wide, so the resolution is much lower in EDX mode than in SED mode.
• We can now map up to 8 elements at one time in the EDX mapping mode, or while making line scans.  We were previously only able to perform the mapping of one element at time.  This greatly reduces the time it takes to produce a map of several elements.  We can now easily color code each characteristic x-ray emission map and combine them in various ways, including as superpositions on a SED surface topography image.
• The EDX energy dispersive detector is on the same side of the chamber that the secondary electron detector is on, which means both modes image the sample optimally without having to rotate the sample with respect to the incoming electron beam as we had to do on the SM-300 system.  Electron beam shadowing effects are now similar in both the SED and EDX images.
• The EDX x-ray count rates are slightly higher with the new detector, especially at the lower mass element end of the spectrum.  We are getting a slightly higher energy resolution also with this detector.
• The new Robinson Back Scatter detector has a slightly higher count rate than our previous detector did.  The back-scatter detector allows one to see higher mass element concentration areas as slightly brighter than lower mass elements.  Because one is only detecting high energy electrons from the sample, the volume emitting the signal is substantially deeper into the sample than in a SED image.  The resolution is somewhat less in the BSD mode than in the SED mode due to sub-surface spreading of the electron beam before many of the high energy electrons are back-scattered. 
• SED images can generally be made at higher resolution than on the SM-300 system. The resolution specification is 5 nm.  The SM-300 had a specification of 4 nm, but this was impractical because achieving that resolution required such small apertures in the electron beam column that they quickly became dirty with carbon accumulations.  For practical use, we therefore had to replace the really small apertures with larger apertures and our resolution was degraded to about 7 nm.   The ABT-32 system is based on a very different aperture geometry which allows larger apertures placed differently.  Practical operation at up to 40,000 times magnification is now reasonable.
• All the data is acquired with one computer now, rather than one for SED and BSD images and another for EDX analysis.  Export of data and images into reports is also more easily accomplished now.
• The sample chamber is slightly larger now than it was in the SM-300, though that was also a large chamber.
• We have a wider variety of sample holders and clamps.
• The belt sample manipulation controls are tighter on this system.  Those on the SM-300 had more hysteresis than one would like.

Dr. Lorrie A. Krebs and Dr. Kevin A. Wepasnick are the primary SEM/EDX users and both of them are very much enjoying using the improved system.  Please feel free to talk to them directly about any SEM/EDX analysis projects you may have.

NACE Interview with Lorrie A. Krebs, Ph.D.

NACE, the National Association of Corrosion Engineers, conducted a series of interviews with prominent NACE members who participated in the Corrosion 2011 Conference about how NACE membership had affected and enriched their careers.  Lorrie A. Krebs, Ph.D., Vice President, Senior Scientist, and co-owner of Anderson Materials Evaluation, Inc. was selected for one of these NACE interviews.

Lorrie served as the Chairman of the Annual Program Conference Committee for Corrosion 2011.  She will be performing the same job at the upcoming Corrosion 2012 at Salt Lake City, Utah from 11-15 March 2012.  She tried to wiggle out of the interview, but NACE was insistent, so here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=s-BMntzIlFg

How Wonderful it is to be a Scientist!

The reality in which we live is full of beauty and wonder, but there is much more beauty and wonder if one knows enough science to appreciate many aspects of that beauty.  Knowing science, we can better appreciate the many ways that something might be different than it is.  We can better appreciate what is beautiful in its simplicity and what is beautiful in its complexity.

When I was a senior at Brown University working on my senior thesis on metals with defect structures in them, I had a discussion with a nice and very intelligent particle physicist who had taught me the introductory physics course for physics majors.  Half the freshmen physics majors were no longer physics majors by the time that course was over, but it was not because the professor was a poor teacher.  He was demanding.  Now when I told him about my project though, he was appalled and said that I was doing dirty engineering.  He told me that the beauty of physics was in simplicity.  I adamantly argued back that while simplicity was indeed often beautiful, so was complexity.  Complexity in materials allowed us to tune materials in many ways to get the properties we wanted for many purposes.  It was beautiful in that it made materials much more individualistic and gave us as molders of their properties much more power.  Of course this complexity could tax our brains, but was it not wonderful to be so challenged?  Wasn't there beauty in something that required us to be the most we could be mentally?  He was not convinced.

Years later, the work of physicists on amorphous materials came to be widely recognized as important physics, including a Nobel Prize award, and I hoped that my old professor had taken note of this.  Still later, there was a great deal of excitement in chaos theory and it was recognized that even relatively simple systems could behave in very complex ways.  Again, I wondered if my professor had taken note.

About seven years ago, I and a friend who is also a materials physicist, had a discussion about space and time.  It turns out that we each had already arrived at the conclusion that space and time were not likely continuous  as assumed.  We each thought that there were units of space volume and of time that were discrete in keeping with discrete packets of energy and matter in physics.  It is interesting to note that the director of the Fermilab Particle Astrophysics Center near Batavia, Illinois thinks this may be the case now also.  He is conducting experiments on the noise that would arise as a result to test this hypothesis now.  Physics itself and the universe it describes is just wonderfully complex and amazing because of this.

I have had an interest in the science of climate and the hypothesis that man-made emissions of infra-red absorbing and emitting gases such as carbon dioxide might have catastrophic effects on the climate for many years now.  The Earth's climate is wonderfully and beautifully complex.  It's understanding is in no way settled science, despite the many ridiculous claims that it is.  As with so many other manifestations of science and physics, we have many very essential and basic questions to answer yet.  We actually know little about how additions of carbon dioxide will affect the climate.  I have argued that there is good reason to believe the effect is much smaller than many alarmists would have us believe.  This is not to say that the effects of carbon dioxide are unimportant, but that part emitted by man is not nearly as important as has been claimed by many.  The dominant effects upon climate are very much those of nature alone.  This at least is my prediction based on my understanding of the essential physics.  But, I am very sure we will be able to watch many really beautiful insights into the climate develop as we continue to pursue our understanding of the physics of the climate.

We see many instances of beautiful physics in the materials we analyze in our laboratory for our clients.  These materials can be amazingly complex as we unravel their compositions and properties.  It is a most beautiful job to be a scientist earning a living by investigating the properties and wonders of materials.  We get to work on many of tens of thousands of types of materials processed in tens of thousands of ways and used for thousands of applications in tens of thousands of environments.  There is wonderful beauty in these materials and challenge after challenge in learning to appreciate it.