June 2010 Archives

DayGlo is not just about those funky posters your older siblings used to hang up in their dorm rooms

"BEYOND FLUORESCENT," is how Stephen Jackson, president of US-based paint provider DayGlo, describes the company's new marketing direction. "We're proud of our history, but we wanted to show the fresh and exciting color effects made possible with DayGlo," Jackson said in a press release.

In late-June, with its newly redesigned website, the company launched a new messaging campaign: "Color. Only Better."

At the website, potential customers can utilize the site's interactive elements and the services of DayGlo's Brand Action Team to aid in the design and development a product.

"Computers are so prevalent in the design world" that the company adapted its site to be more interactive and provide better color resolution, said Kevin Sonby, vice president of marketing for DayGlo, in an interview with ICIS.

With "Color. Only Better," the company wants to communicate that it offers a variety of effects and enhancements for paints.

DayGlo paints are so bright because they reflect more light, including the ultraviolet wavelength - which is why the colors were perfect for the "blacklight" posters so popular in the 1970s.

Although DayGlo is transitioning from its glorious - and perhaps notorious - past as color provider for funky and trippy designs on posters, books and clothing, I am glad that Jackson acknowledges that past, even with a simple, yet somewhat exciting statement like "beyond fluorescent."

The company's quality may be its curse, though, if it ever wants to shed its psychedelic legacy: DayGlo is still the primary paint of choice when people make tie-dyed T-shirts.

SHUTTING DOWN
As ICIS Chemical Business transitions towards its new format, this column - like a redundant steam cracker - is being mothballed.

A big thanks to all the ICIS staff that over the years aided and abetted this column, and an extra-special thanks to all the chemical industry personnel who supported it before - by suggesting topics;
during - by being interviewed;
and after - by commenting on and sometimes even praising the results.
My gratitude.

While potential mineral wealth in Afghanistan piques the curiosity of many, bad clichés are revived

YOU JUST can't keep a good hackneyed metaphor down! One of the bees in my bonnet is the lazy overuse of the phrase "the Saudi Arabia of whatever" to indicate a location's untapped wealth or precious resources.

Those resources can be solar - in July 2008, US Senator Harry Reid (Democrat, Nevada) called Nevada "the Saudi Arabia of solar energy;" or wind - before he soured on the topic, oil magnate T. Boone Pickens would say that "the US is the Saudi Arabia of wind power;" or lithium: Whenever the Bolivian government sponsors a press junket for journalists, a few hacks routinely come back and file stories using the phrase "Bolivia is the Saudi Arabia of lithium" - although that title rightfully belongs to Chile, if you want to split hairs about it.

Now the US Army has called Afghanistan "the Saudi Arabia of lithium."

Last week, the Pentagon officially announced that roughly $1 trillion (€810bn) of as-yet untapped mineral resources have been discovered in the war-torn nation. "There is stunning potential here," said General David Petraeus, commander of the US Central Command, in a press conference.

According to The New York Times, the deposits include "huge veins" of iron, copper, cobalt, gold, lithium and others. All in a country that has the lowest cement production in the world.

"This will become the backbone of the Afghan economy," added Jamil Jumriamy, representative of the ministry of mines, at the conference.

While it will take time to see whether these resources cure or cause more problems, there is no reason for the US military to keep alive lame clichés.

The metaphor "the Saudi Arabia of fill-in-the-blank" needs to be retired, and in its place a more mythological locale needs to be used. Some might be tempted to use "Asgard," or "Atlantis," but I lean towards "El Dorado," South America's legendary lost city of gold - as in "Afghanistan is the El Dorado of lithium."

While El Dorado's connotations might not be the best - it was never found after all - it certainly has less active socio-political turmoil associated with it.

Nobody's calling them locusts, okay? They are just grasshoppers--hungry, hungry grasshoppers

The US Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) issued a bulletin in early June warning the Mid- and Southwest States that large grasshopper outbreaks are expected this spring and summer.

"These estimates are based on the unusually high population of adult grasshoppers in these States at the end of the summer of 2009, indicating that a large number of eggs may have been laid," says APHIS in a release.

Since America's native locust, the Rocky Mountain locust, has long gone extinct, this cannot be properly called a locust infestation - thankfully avoiding the theological baggage an Old Testament-style "plague of locusts" brings with it - but the effects could be about the same:
Grasshopper eat about half their bodyweight per day, and if foliage is unavailable, the grasshoppers will eat wood and paint.

According to APHIS, grasshopper outbreaks can destroy 80% of the forage in areas as large as 2,000 square miles.

Last summer, The Wall Street Journal reports, one Wyoming rancher had everything on his 10,000 acres - including his wife's lilac bushes - devoured by a horde of the critters. Without grass, the rancher had to sell his cattle earlier and lighter, and the resulting total profit loss tallied about $30,000 (€25,182).

It is uncertain yet whether this pertains to the grasshoppers' swarming in America, but researchers at UK's University of Cambridge have discovered that when the desert locusts of Africa swarm, even though the bugs' bodies shrink somewhat, their brains grow by 30%, especially the areas for learning and information processing.

Cambridge's scientists say this happens to prevent cannibalism - their bigger brains enable the locusts to identify between friend and food during the high-density mayhem of the swarm - unlike, say, sharks during a feeding frenzy who become so crazed, they attack and eat each other.

Grasshopper swarms like the current one APHIS is warning about are cyclical, building to a peak, then quiet for two or three years after.

Perhaps some insect neurologist will be able to find a way to convince grasshoppers that they themselves are tasty and delicious next time they plan to take the plains.

A philosopher puts into words what the industry has known for a while, and maybe others will listen

NOT THAT BP's pathetic bumbling helps the situation any, but when the petrochemical industry refers to hard-line ecologists as ideologists - people who act as if their beliefs were an orthodox religion - the general public usually scoffs, preferring to believe that the protectors of nature would have nothing other than the noblest of intentions.

Recently, though, I discovered that leftist philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek has, in various forums, called ecology the "new opium for the masses." He says, "Ideology addresses real problems, but mystifies them."

At a lecture in Greece, Žižek noted, "The underlying message of this predominant ecological ideology is... any change can only be a change for the worse."

The philosopher argues against the notion that nature would be a perfect, healthy system if it were not for humans' disrupting influence.

This idea of nature as some pristine ideal will keep us from dealing with the problems at hand. "What is wrong I think is the... principal position... that there is something like 'nature,' which we humans... disturbed," he says.

At another point, Žižek expands on his themes: "While one cannot be sure what the ultimate result of humanity's interventions into the geo-sphere will be, one thing is sure: if humanity were to stop abruptly its immense industrial activity and let nature on Earth take its balanced course, the result would have been a total breakdown, an imaginable catastrophe."

He notes, " 'Nature' on Earth is already to such an extent 'adapted' to human interventions; the human 'pollutions' are already to such an extent included into the shaky and fragile balance of the 'natural' reproduction on Earth, that its cessation would cause a catastrophic imbalance."

Because he is a philosopher and not an engineer or technician, Žižek can only offer a philosophical answer: "Indeed, what we need is ecology without nature: the ultimate obstacle to protecting nature is the very notion of nature we rely on."
Žižek may not have an answer - but so far, neither does anyone else - but perhaps a new way of looking at things is a step in the right direction.

Or at least a fun way to pass the time.