Posts Tagged ‘City: London’

The dark satanic mills (of the industrial revolution?)

Sunday, March 18th, 2018

Around the time of the 2012 olympic games, the main site for which was Stratford in east London, I heard a fascinating talk about the “remediation” of the site from the pollution caused by its industrial chemical heritage. Here I visit another, arguably much more famous and indeed older industrial site.

The remediation of Stratford involved the removal, cleaning and returning of a vast amount of topsoil, something which was not cheap to do. About 190 miles west of Stratford lies what is called the lower Swansea (Abertawe) valley, through which the river Tawe runs. The remediation has taken 50 years or more using far less money than at the Stratford site. It is famous as being the world’s largest copper smelting area during the industrial revolution, using copper ore from Cornwall and coal from Welsh coalfields. An unfortunate by-product of using Cornish ore was that it contained large amounts of sulfur in the form of copper sulfide, which was liberated in the form of sulfurous and sulfuric acids. I remember hearing in the talk mentioned above that the acid rain produced from the smelting killed almost all plant life and trees in the locality. Unsurprisingly, the life expectancy amongst the workers was also low. Over the 200 or so years of smelting, what little plant life that did survive apparently developed an extraordinary tolerance to copper in the soil and no doubt the flora is nowadays of much interest for that reason to molecular biologists.

Well, nowadays it is certainly a green and pleasant land, but in the past it is tempting to associate it with the dark satanic mills of William Blake’s poem Jerusalem. To give a tiniest flavour of what the valley might have looked like, here is a photograph, with the river Tawe in the foreground. Apparently there were 100s of such chimneys along the valley. It has certainly changed now, and the walk along the river valley is very pleasant indeed!

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London: set to become a National Park City in 2019.

Friday, February 9th, 2018

Last year, I showed photos of wildflower meadows in west London close to where we live, evolving as the seasons changed. Today we hear the announcement that London itself is set be declared the world’s first National Park City in 2019.

What is a park city you may ask? It draws on the principles of National Parks such as the Peak District, the New Forest, or the South Downs in the UK, but in a city setting. It encourages people to explore how to improve life across the city, such as more time spent in nature outdoors and indeed visiting wild flower meadows! Meanwhile, spread the word.

As for those meadows, the “topping up” of last year’s seeding will start in March of 2018, and the area is set to expand substantially; it is pretty bare at the moment. When I get the list of expanded or new meadows, I will post here. Meanwhile I note that last year’s seeding of Cosmos produced a spectacular display which lasted at least three months. I cannot help but note that one of the main attractions at the RHS (Royal Horticultural Society) flower show at Chatsworth this year is the creation of a field of 12,000 Cosmos bipinnatus ‘Razzmatazz’, a river of flowers, outside the iconic Chatsworth House. This (IMHO) will be hard pressed to match that of west London last year!

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Twenty one years of chemistry-related Java apps: RIP Java?

Saturday, June 10th, 2017

In an earlier post, I lamented the modern difficulties in running old instances of Jmol, an example of an application program written in the Java programming language. When I wrote that, I had quite forgotten a treasure trove of links to old Java that I had collected in 1996-7 and then abandoned. Here I browse through a few of the things I found.

The collection is at DOI: 10.14469/hpc/2657. Here I track down how some of them are doing 20+ years on.

  1. Formula-To-Mass-To-Formula (f2m2f), which was started in August 1996 and was written by Guillaume Cottenceau, a french undergraduate student visiting London and who wanted to learn to program. I suggested he try Java, and as I recollect sent him out to the business park west of London where Sun Microsystems had an office to learn how to do so (they had only released the development kit a few months earlier!). The applet he wrote still works (being unsigned, you have to jump through a few hoops to allow it to run (but be quick, not many browsers will still let you do so!). The applet also has a benchmark feature. Running the heavy bench now takes ~ 0.4s on a laptop.  I cannot be sure,  but I seem to remember that this one took ~20 seconds back in 1997. 
  2. Guillaume then returned to Paris to finish the above off, but also managed to find the time a year later to produce Jspec, a visualiser for NMR and MS. Darek Bogdal was visiting from Poland in August 1997(8?) and he incorporated these tools into a general spectral display and problem solving resource, which also still mostly works (with no curation!). The bit that does not work depended on the Chime plugin, now long gone and of course replaced in large measure by Jmol and now JSmol. 
  3. Here is an equation setter. The original site has long gone, but I had copied the classes over and it also (mostly) works!
  4. This dates from 1997 by Wyn Locke and Alan Tongue and uses JavaScript plus the spectral viewer to communicate with Chime. All done much better by many others since of course.

That said, many of the other links at DOI: 10.14469/hpc/2657 no longer work. In truth I am slightly surprised a few still do! 

Quite possibly these screen shots may be the only visual images that can be created in the very near future, as all but very specialised web browsers drop “plug-in” (aka Java) support. So perhaps it will be RIP Java, at least for the in-browser frame mode (but certainly not for the stand-alone application mode).

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A nice example of open data (in London).

Sunday, March 5th, 2017

Living in London, travelling using public transport is often the best way to get around. Before setting out on a journey one checks the status of the network. Doing so today I came across this page: our open data from Transport for London. 

  1. I learnt that by making TFL travel data openly available, some 11,000 developers (sic!) have registered for access, out of which some 600 travel apps have emerged.
  2. The data is in XML, which makes it readily inter-operable.[1]
  3. This encourages crowd-sourced innovation.
  4. They have taken the trouble to produce an API (application programmable interface) which allows rich access to the data and information about e.g. AccidentStats, AirQuality, BikePoint, Journey, Line, Mode, Occupancy, Place, Road, Search, StopPointVehicle.

Chemists could learn some lessons here! Of course, there are quite a few chemical databases with APIs that are examples of open data, but the “ESI” (electronic supporting information) sources which almost all published articles rely upon to disseminate data are clearly struggling to cope. Take for example this recent article[2], where much of the data has been dropped into the inevitable PDF “coffin” and which is a breathtaking 907 pages long. To give the authors their due, they also provide 20 CIF files which ARE good sources of data. Rarely commented on, but clearly missing from the information associated with this (indeed most) articles is the metadata about the data. Thus the metadata for these CIF files amounts to just e.g. 229. To find out the context, one has to scour the article (or the 907 pages of the ESI) to identify compound 229 (I strongly suspect it’s a molecule because of the implied semantics of the term, not because its been explicitly declared). You will not find the metadata at e.g. data.datacite.org which is one open aggregator and global search engine based on deposited metadata.

I have commented elsewhere on this blog that other types of data could also be enhanced in the manner that CIF crystallographic files represent. For example the Mpublish NMR project,‡ examples of which are shown here, and for which typical data AND its metadata can be seen at DOI: 10.14469/hpc/1053. I fancy that if this method had been adopted,[2] those 907 pages might have shrunk somewhat, although of course not entirely. But my hope is that gradually the innovative chemistry community will find ways of exhuming more and more data from the PDF coffin and in the process reducing the paginated lengths of the PDF-based ESI further, perchance eventually even to zero?

If you are yourself preparing an article and sweating over the ESI at this very moment, do please take a look at the Mpublish method and how perhaps it can help make your NMR data at least more useful to others.

‡I understand an article describing this project is in preparation. If you cannot wait, this recent application of the Mpublish project has some details.[3]

References

  1. P. Murray-Rust, and H.S. Rzepa, "Chemical Markup, XML, and the Worldwide Web. 1. Basic Principles", Journal of Chemical Information and Computer Sciences, vol. 39, pp. 928-942, 1999. https://doi.org/10.1021/ci990052b
  2. J.M. Lopchuk, K. Fjelbye, Y. Kawamata, L.R. Malins, C. Pan, R. Gianatassio, J. Wang, L. Prieto, J. Bradow, T.A. Brandt, M.R. Collins, J. Elleraas, J. Ewanicki, W. Farrell, O.O. Fadeyi, G.M. Gallego, J.J. Mousseau, R. Oliver, N.W. Sach, J.K. Smith, J.E. Spangler, H. Zhu, J. Zhu, and P.S. Baran, "Strain-Release Heteroatom Functionalization: Development, Scope, and Stereospecificity", Journal of the American Chemical Society, vol. 139, pp. 3209-3226, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1021/jacs.6b13229
  3. M.J. Harvey, A. McLean, and H.S. Rzepa, "A metadata-driven approach to data repository design", Journal of Cheminformatics, vol. 9, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13321-017-0190-6

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Revisiting (and maintaining) a twenty year old web page. Mauveine: The First Industrial Organic Fine-Chemical.

Thursday, February 2nd, 2017

Almost exactly 20 years ago, I started what can be regarded as the precursor to this blog. As part of a celebration of this anniversary, I revisited the page to see whether any of it had withstood the test of time. Here I recount what I discovered.

The site itself is at www.ch.ic.ac.uk/motm/perkin.html  and has the title “Mauveine: The First Industrial Organic Fine-Chemical” It was an application of an earlier experiment[1] to which we gave the title “Hyperactive Molecules and the World-Wide-Web Information System“. The term hyperactive was supposed to be a play on hyperlinking to the active 3D models of molecules built using their 3D coordinates. The word has another, more negative, association with food additives such as tartrazine – which can induce hyperactivity in children – and we soon discontinued the association. This page was cast as a story about a molecule local to me in two contexts; the first being that the discoverer of mauveine, W. H. Perkin, had been a student at what is now the chemistry department at Imperial College. The second was the realization that where we lived in west London was just down the road from Perkin’s manufacturing factory. Armed with (one of the first) digital cameras, a Kodak DC25, I took some pictures of the location and added them later to the web page. The page also included two sets of 3D coordinates for mauveine itself and alizarin, another dyestuff associated with the factory. These were “activated” using HTML to make use of the then very new Chime browser plugin; hence the term hyperactive molecule.

This first effort, written in December 1995, soon needed revision in several ways. I note that I had maintained the site in 1998, 2001, 2004 and 2006. This took the form of three postscripts to add further chemical context and more recent developments and in replacing the original Chime code for Java code to support the new Jmol software (Chime itself had been discontinued, probably around 2001 or possibly 2004). With the passage of a further ten years, I now noticed that the hyperactive molecules were no longer working; the original Jmol applet was no longer considered secure by modern browsers and hence deactivated. So I replaced this old code with the latest version (14.7.5 as JmolAppletSigned.jar) and this simple fix has restored the functionality. The coordinates themselves were invoked using the HTML applet tag, which amazingly still works (the applet tag had replaced an earlier one, which I think might have been embed?).  A modern invocation would be by using e.g. the JSmol Javascript based tool and so perhaps at some stage this code will indeed need further revision when the Java-based applet is permanently disabled.

You may also notice that the 3D coordinates are obtained from an XML document, where they are encoded using CML (chemical markup language[2]), which is another expression from the family that HTML itself comes from. That form may well last rather longer than earlier formats – still commonly used now – such as .pdb or .mol (for an MDL molfile). 

Less successful was the attempt to include buttons which could be used to annotate the structures with highlights. These buttons no longer work and will have to be entirely replaced in the future at some stage.

The final part of the maintenance (which I had probably also done with the earlier versions) was to re-validate the HTML code. Checking that a web page has valid HTML was always a behind-the-scenes activity which I remember doing when constructing the ECTOC conferences also back in 1995 and doing so probably does prolong the longevity of a web page. This requires “tools-of-the-trade” and I use now (and indeed did also back in 1995 or so) an industrial strength HTML editor called BBedit. To this is added an HTML validation tool, the installation of which is described at https://wiki.ch.ic.ac.uk/wiki/index.php?title=It:html5 I re-ran this again† and so this 2017 version should be valid for a little while longer at least. The page itself now has not just a URL but a persistent version called a DOI (digital object identifier), which is 10.14469/hpc/2133[3]. In theory at least, even if the web server hosting the page itself becomes defunct, the page could – if moved – be found simply from its DOI. The present URL-based hyperlink of course is tied to the server and would not work if the server stopped serving.

To complete this revisitation, I can add here a recent result‡. Back in 1995, I had obtained the 3D coordinates of mauveine using molecular modelling software (MOPAC) together with a 2D structure drawing package (ChemDraw) because no crystal structure was available. Well, in 2015 such structures were finally published.[4] Twenty years on from the original “hyperactive” models, their crystal structures can be obtained from their assigned DOI, much in the same manner as is done for journal articles: Try DOI: 10.5517/CC1JLGK4[5] or DOI: 10.5517/CC1JLGL5[6].

At some stage, web archaeology might become a fashionable pursuit. Twenty year old Web pages are actually not that common and it would be of interest to chart their gradual decay as security becomes more important and standards evolve and mature. One might hope that at the age of 100, they could still be readable (or certainly rescuable). During this period, the technology used to display 3D models within a web page has certainly changed considerably and may well still do so in the future. Perhaps I will revisit this page in 2037 to see how things have changed!

†The old code can still be seen at www.ch.ic.ac.uk/motm/perkin-old.html

‡It should really be postscript 4.

References

  1. O. Casher, G.K. Chandramohan, M.J. Hargreaves, C. Leach, P. Murray-Rust, H.S. Rzepa, R. Sayle, and B.J. Whitaker, "Hyperactive molecules and the World-Wide-Web information system", Journal of the Chemical Society, Perkin Transactions 2, pp. 7, 1995. https://doi.org/10.1039/p29950000007
  2. P. Murray-Rust, and H.S. Rzepa, "Chemical Markup, XML, and the Worldwide Web. 1. Basic Principles", Journal of Chemical Information and Computer Sciences, vol. 39, pp. 928-942, 1999. https://doi.org/10.1021/ci990052b
  3. H. Rzepa, "Molecule of the month: Mauveine.", Imperial College London, 2017. https://doi.org/10.14469/hpc/2133
  4. M.J. Plater, W.T.A. Harrison, and H.S. Rzepa, "Syntheses and Structures of Pseudo-Mauveine Picrate and 3-Phenylamino-5-(2-Methylphenyl)-7-Amino-8-Methylphenazinium Picrate Ethanol Mono-Solvate: The First Crystal Structures of a Mauveine Chromophore and a Synthetic Derivative", Journal of Chemical Research, vol. 39, pp. 711-718, 2015. https://doi.org/10.3184/174751915x14474318419130
  5. Plater, M. John., Harrison, William T. A.., and Rzepa, Henry S.., "CCDC 1417926: Experimental Crystal Structure Determination", 2016. https://doi.org/10.5517/cc1jlgk4
  6. Plater, M. John., Harrison, William T. A.., and Rzepa, Henry S.., "CCDC 1417927: Experimental Crystal Structure Determination", 2016. https://doi.org/10.5517/cc1jlgl5

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