Category Archives: television

EDDS chelation for electroless coating, solar cells and soil remediation

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Among the products our company sells is a non-toxic chelating agent, EDDS (ethylenediamine-disuccinic acid), typically sold as a purified salt in ammonia solution, see here. The main use of EDDS is to stabilize heavy metal ions in solution. We use it, for example, as an aide in electroless Palladium coating, to stabilize palladium ions, helping us produce a smaller grain, more continuous coat. The structure, shown below, is similar to that of EDTA (ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid), and the behavior is similar too. EDDS is more stabilizing in the presence of the other ions and we like that it is non-toxic.

Structure of EDDS, it binds metals by way of four OH groups. While each binding is weak, the total is strong.

The popular literature use for chelating agents like this is as a treatment for heavy metal poisoning by lead, arsenic, cadmium, nickel or copper. The TV series “House” featured patients with all these metal-poisoning problems, problems. Chelation treatment was important in Flint Michigan, 2015 when thousands got low-level lead poisoning and legionaries disease after the water department put insufficient phosphate and hypochlorite into the water and lead leached from pipes. Typically, EDTA is used for humans here, while EDDS is used by farmers and ranchers to treat animals. EDDS is less toxic, and removes fewer essential light minerals: magnesium, calcium, and zinc, so I’d think it would be better for humans too.

Effect of 300ppm SX-E in DI water, compared to standard DI water and acid wash. The biggest difference is with copper.

Our EDDS has been used to make cleaning solutions for silicon wafers, Sunsonix SXE, for example. Sunsonix SXE behaves as a soap, removing Fe, Cr, Ni, and Cu from solar cells, see reproduced figures at right. These metals will diffuse into surface of a silicon wafer, forming defects that absorb light and decrease solar cell performance by an average of 0.28%, see below.

Solar cell efficiency improvement with EDDS washing from a baseline of 16%. Occasionally 1.65% improvement was seen, but 0.28% on average

This is, based on a baseline efficiency of 16%. For more details see “Surface Contamination Removal from Si PV Substrates Using a Biodegradable Chelating Agent and Detection of Cleaning Endpoints Using UV/VIS Spectroscopy” ECS Transactions, 41 (5) 295-302 (2011). See also this article in Wikipedia.

This is the normal treatment regime for solar cells

At a different pH, EDDS and EDTH are used in remediation of metal-contaminated soils, see here. This can be done ex-situ, with the soil taken out to an external site and then washed. Alternately, for less contaminated soils, remediation can be done in-situ with the chelating wash applied to the soil. Plants, like vetiver grass (Chrysopogon zizanioides) then extract the heavy metals, concentrating them in their leaves. EDDS is more suitable for this as it is biodegradable and shows a high extraction efficiency in mineral rich soils, see here for comparison to EDTA.

Moving to another area of extraction. It seems that EDDS or EDTA solutions can be used to profitably extract rare earth metals, perhaps sending them to plants before final concentration. A standard methods of rare earth extraction uses chlorine and high temperatures. Alternate methods use ion-exchange extraction of liquid-liquid extraction. I suspect that chelation treatment might turn out to be more effective and cheaper. The price of rare earths has risen in recent years as China restricts sales so that the need for a new source has become a national priority.

Robert Buxbaum, January 13, 2026

Korean movies and music; my thoughts on why they do so well

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A Korean animated movie, K-Pop Demon Hunters, KPDH, just broke all-time record for most watched movie in the History of Netflix. It’s only 92 days old, and not a big-budget film with massive marketing, but it’s had over 314 million views so far, appearing on the most-watched list in 32 countries. Some Chinese movies have had more views, but these tend to be specific to China, with limited appeal elsewhere. KPDH has three songs in the Billboard 100 too, including golden at no.1, see official music video, 352M views for the music video. The last movie to have three songs in the Billboard top 100 was Saturday Night Fever, some 45 years ago. Other top Korean groups include Stray Kids, BTS, and Black Pink, they’ve had multiple #1 songs world wide of the last five years, and fill 50,000 seat stadiums regularly with seats going for $150. Here are Black Pink, filling a 50,000 seat stadium in Paris. If you read the US press, you’d hardly know these groups exist. BTS had a big hit during Covid called, “Permission to Dance,” a positive song during that grim period, danced e.g at the UN. Listeners noticed, the press did not. I think the press finds Koreans “anodyne”, that is, insipid.

Top movies of the last 20 weeks include two Korean offerings, Squid Game and K-Pop Demon Hunters

One thing that turns off the US press, is that Korean songsters and movies are less sexual, and less politically moralizing. The top Oscar awards go to political movies. At the Emmies, this year, we were told, “F*ck ICE, Free Palestine.” Similarly, Green Day, Eminem, and other western bands lead chants of F*ck Trump. The press takes this moralizing as intellectual, but I find it cheap and suspect it turns off many potential fans.

Director of Star Wars, Kennedy, promoting diversity.

A favorite moralizing of US movies is to show women who don’t need or want men. Frozen was like that, as was Encanto, Last Dragon, Moana… Star Wars was a top franchise that Disney made more feminist, writing basically every man as bad. Women were good, powerful, and inherently talented. Rey a main new character, grabs a light saber with no background or training, and uses it like an expert. It turns off men, then women stayed away too.

End kiss of Pirates of Penzance, the pirate prince and the major general’s daughter

We like to show black actors in white rolls too, though not white actors in black rolls. Hamilton was successful, and had black actors playing in every positive roll, white actors playing evil idiots. It was done again with 1776, less successfully. All the founding fathers are cast as women; Jefferson is black, bisexual, and pregnant. There’s a message somewhere. The upcoming movie about King Gustaf of Sweden has a dark-skinned actor playing the king. Why? We had a dark- skinned daughter of the major general, who bends the pirate over to kiss him, a dark skinned Snow White with most of the Dwarves normal height, a female She-Hulk, stronger than the original, who lectures the original (and us) about anger. Apparently, the idea is to highlight the difficulties powerful women face. Korean shows have casts that make sense to the plot, and no gratuitous reversals or sex. Did Oppenheimer need the many sex scenes? Did the suicidal love interest have to be written stronger than the main character?

Then there are the sequels: the Marvel universe includes 37 interconnected movies, Star Wars, 19, Batman 13. To get the full story, you have to see them all. So far, in 2025, only two of the major funded movies were original (one was Korean, Mikey 17). The others are all reboots or sequels with recycled plots and ever-bigger explosions. It all works until it doesn’t, then they make a reboot. Law and Order, 26 years old with 500 episodes.

Scene from Crash Landing on You. These two are in serious trouble.

Korean entertainment has series too, but much shorter and with fewer explosions. A TV series will have only 16-24 episodes and I’ve yet to see one with a mass-murderer. The Squid game, has had 13 episodes over 3 seasons. Some deaths, but not wholesale. A longer series, “Crash Landing on You,” 24. In it, a successful South Korean executive (female) is blown across the border to North Korea into the arms of a handsome, North Korean. No deaths. They could have gone on for years, but didn’t. People rewatch the original.

Other countries movies moralize too, like ours do, but they tend to be patriotic moralization, and anti gratuitous violence, not violent, anti-patriotic as in the US. Chinese TV shows present Chinese politicians as honest, they have praise for the Chinese schools and infrastructure, and regular invocations to respect the police. India moralization is similar, but more towards family order. Korean messages are in-between, with some crooked politicians, some violence, people with mental or emotional problems who evolve.

Robert Buxbaum, September 17, 2025. The industry has pushed back against criticism of their wokeness, claiming that the only folks turned off are the toxic fans: white, MAGA men, mostly, who hate diversity. They claim to be happy when such fans stay home and watch KPDH, or go buy $150 tickets to see Koreans sing in Korean.

Golfball dimples on a car for improved mpg.

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The Mythbusters dimpled Taurus, and a diagram meant to show how drag is reduced. On a golf ball, at low NRE, vortex separation is moved back to 110°, the mechanism on a car is different, I suspect.

The dimples on a golf ball reduce air-drag resistance, so why don’t we put dimples on planes or cars? Perhaps because it’s ugly, or that cars are much bigger and than golf-balls, so we expect the effect of skin effects to be smaller. Finally, a Reynolds number analysis suggests that dimples on cars should increase drag, not reduce it.

In 2009, the Mythbusters decided to test the conjecture. Hosts Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage ran careful gas usage tests on a Ford Taurus that was first covered with smooth clay. They drove the car repeatedly (5X) on a track at 65 mph (about 100 km/h), and measured “slightly over 26 mpg,” 9.047 l/100km, a respectable value. They then carved dimples into the clay to simulate the surface of a golf ball. See picture at right, and put the removed clay into the trunk so there would be no decrease in weight.

Underneath a Porche GT4, smallish dimples.

They then drove the dimpled car over the same course, five times as before at exactly 65 mph, and found the car got 14% more mpg, 29.6 mpg, or 7.946 l/100 km. See video excerpt here. They considered it their most surprising Mythbuster episode.

As it happens, dimples had been put on some production cars, even before the episode. They are just located underneath where most people don’t see them. The VW “Golf” had dimples even before the episode, and the Porsche Cayman GT4 does today, see picture above left, but most experiments find little or nothing. Car dimples are typically smaller than those used on Mythbusters, so that may be an explanation. Dimples have been found to help on soccer balls (the stitching acts as the dimples), and bicycle wheels (less advantage).

PHYSICS OF FLUIDS 18, 041702 (2006) Mechanism of drag reduction by dimples on a sphere, Jin Choi, Woo-Pyung Jeon, and Haecheon Choia.

The graph at right shows the source of confusion for cars and the great advantage for golf balls. It’s a plot of the drag coefficient for smooth and dimpled golf balls, as a function of the Reynolds Number, where NRE = Vdρ/µ. In this formula, V is velocity, d is the diameter of the car, ball or whatever, ρ is the density of the fluid, and µ is viscosity. NRE can be thought of as the ratio of the inertial to viscous forces acting on the object. It’s a way of describing the combined effects of speed and size for different objects in motion.

We see, above, that dimples reduce golf-ball drag by more than 50%, but only at speeds/ Reynolds numbers that are much lower than for normal cars, NRE between about 4×104 and 3.5×105, as are typical of golf balls during play. A typical car at 65mph will have a NRE.CAR = 3×106, suggesting that there should be no advantage for dimples, or possibility a disadvantage, that dimples should increase drag. A side note one sees, above, is that it is only the dimples on the front of the golf-ball that reduce drag: other dimples do nothing. If one were to add dimples to high-speed trains and airplanes I’d suggest them only on the front, so far I have not seen them.

I think that the Mythbusters did a good job with their experiments, and find their 14% improvement significant. So why do so few other cars see and advantage. One thought I had was to note that the Ford Taurus is a remarkably round car, providing ample space for front dimples to help, most cars today are more angular. I also note that the production cars have smaller dimples, as on the Porsche, above. Then again, the Mythbusters folks may have made some non-obvious experimental error.

Robert Buxbaum, January 4, 2024. An important side issue in this is that Google’s AI was awful, a handicap in researching this article. It lies continuously and convincingly, and did so here. I’d asked it for the year of the episode, and the AI lied, and said 2012. I asked for the type of car, the AI said an SUV, and it gave a misdescription of the tests. Lying AIs appear as villains in science fiction, e.g. HAL of 2001 A Space Odyssey, now in real life.

Birth dearth in China => collapse? war?

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China passed us in life-expectancy in 2022, and also in fertility, going the other way. In China lifespan at birth increased to 77.3 years. In the US it dropped an additional 0.9 years, to 76.8. US lifespans suffered from continuing COVID and an increase in accidents, heart disease, suicide, drugs, and alcohol abuse. Black men were hit particularly hard, so that today, a black man in the US has the same life expectancy as he would in Rwanda. China seems to have avoided this, but should expect problems due to declining fertility and birth rates.

China passed us in life expectancy in 2022.

Fertility rates will eventually burden the US too, as US fertility is only slightly greater than in China, 1.78 children per woman, lifetime, compared to 1.702 in China. But China has far fewer people of childbearing ages, relatively, and only 47% are women. Three decades of one child policy resulted in few young adults and a tendency to abort girls. Currently, the birthrate in China is barely more than half ours: 6.77 per 1000, compared to 12.01 per 1000. And the proportion of the aged keeps rising. China will soon face a severe shortage of care-givers, and an excess of housing.

Years of low birthrate preceded the “Lost decades” of financial crisis in Japan and the USSR. Between 1990 and 2011, business stagnated and house prices dropped. China faces the same; few workers and more need for care: it’s not a good recipe.

Beginning about 1991, Japan saw a major financial collapse with banks failing, and home values falling. China seems over-due.

Few children also signals a psychic lack of confidence in the country, and suggests that, going forward, there will be a lack of something to work for. Already Chinese citizens don’t trust the state to allow them to raise healthy children. They have stopped getting married, especially in the cities, and look more to have fun.

Affluent women claim they can’t find a good man to marry: one who’s manly, who will love them, and who will reliably raise their standard of life. Women seem less picky in China’s rural areas, or perhaps they find better men there. However it goes, urban women get married late and have few children, both in China and here. China produces great, sappy, soap operas though: a country girl or secretary in a high-power job meets a manly, urban manager who lovers her intensely. A fine example is “The Eternal Love” (watch it here). It involves time travel, and a noble romance from the past. Japan produced similar fiction before the crisis. And a crisis seems to be coming.

While Japan and Korea responded quietly to crisis and “the lost decades,” allowing banks to fail and home values to fall, Russia’s response was more violent. It went to war with Chechnya, then with Belarus and Ukraine, and now with NATO. I fear that China will go to war too — with Taiwan, Japan, and the US. It’s a scary thought; China is a much tougher enemy than Russia. There is already trouble brewing over new islands that they are building.

Robert Buxbaum January 25, 2023. If you want to see a Korean soap opera on the Secretary – manager theme, watch: “What’s wrong with Secretary Kim”. (I credit my wife with the research here.) I suspect that Americans too would like sappy shows like this.