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ornery_chemist

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ornery_chemist ,

inhales

Complex 1a was prepared according to well-known synthetic procedures. The reduction potential of the complex was increased due to the nephelauxetic expansion of the occupied FMOs induced by photolytic epimerization of the auxiliary tetrahydrophosphazolidine sulfide ligand to enable a strongly σ-donating dihaptic coordination mode.

translation: we made molecule 1a, we shouldn’t need to tell you how, it’s obvious, lmao, git gud. the molecule became less likely to gain extra electrons because shining light on it made one of its weird-ass totally-not-bullshit parts wiggle around a bit so that it could bind more strongly to the metal atom through two of its own adjacent atoms, making the metal atom’s relevant electrons floofier.

ornery_chemist ,

In grocery stores in many parts of the US at least, it is extremely hard not to find bread in plastic bags. Even the one of 3 near me that has its own bakery puts the bread in a plastic bag, and then in another bag that is paper with a plastic “window”, and the paper part has a PE wax lining for god knows what reason.

ornery_chemist ,

Papers!

(jk my company mandates it after unilaterally deciding to stop paying for endnote and forbids other software im miserable send help)

ornery_chemist ,

It happens in industry, too, but often it’s even the stakeholders’ fault :) I’ve still got so many reports to write…

ornery_chemist ,

Hot take: calories are the more intuitive energy unit. “How much energy it takes to heat 1 mL aka 1 g water 1°C” is more relatable than “how much energy it takes to move a 1 kg mass 1 m while accelerating that mass at 1 m/s/s”.

kcal = Cal is silly though

Side note: I know that the heating water thing is problematic because it depends on T, P, and purity (yay thermo), which is why these days cal is defines in terms of J. That does not change my opinion.

ornery_chemist , (edited )

Most chem PhDs don’t even know the whole thing lol. We had to memorize just the symbols in high school, but positions weren’t required. In my grad-level inorg course, the first test was a blank table that we had to fill in, but even then the f-block and transactinides were not required.

ornery_chemist ,

Phosphorus, sulfur, …?

ornery_chemist ,

https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/1112386f-e49a-4513-8256-a803fa68b41b.jpeg

ornery_chemist ,

But… but… muh thulium…

jk all lanthanides are the same don’t @ me physicists

also Ce(IV) catalyst stans

also also total synthesis tryhards who think SmI2 is ever the right call

ornery_chemist ,

Mitochondrion

ornery_chemist ,

I mean… just rotate it 90 degrees ((()))

ornery_chemist ,

Oh, I’m sure this’ll end well.

/s

ornery_chemist ,

Best I can tell from quick internet searches: Old English: wīfmann/menn (“female person/s”). The w rounded the following vowel giving a wo- pronunciation, which for some reason (umlaut?) stuck for the singular but not the plural. The spelling of the plural changed to match that of the singular in spite of the pronunciation.

  • Everything here carries the caveat “in some dialects, …” because English
ornery_chemist ,

Corpse, Corps, Horse, and Worse

I will keep you, Susy, busy,

Make your head with heat grow dizzy;

Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear;

Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.

banger poem

ornery_chemist ,

Nah, reach is a huge advantage. I’m not sure how rapier fencing differs from regulation sabre/epée/foil, but here’s my 2 cents from that perspective:

Smaller people are not, as a rule, substantially quicker than larger. If you see any difference in your experience, it’s likely a selection bias (shorter people have to be quicker to compete at the same level). The shorter person must enter the strike range of the taller person before the taller person comes within theirs and must be significantly quicker or more skilled to overcome that dead space. If the taller person can maintain a proper distance, gg. Taller people can also lunge farther, giving a wider active range.

Targeting is a smaller issue than you make it out to be; footwork and maintaining balance, which reposition the core, are at least as important as leaning to dodge, and advantage the taller person (longer legs = more movement range). If the taller person is coming from above as you say, they can just continue their slash (sabre) downward toward that less mobile core, or squat a bit deeper if the arc won’t reach. If instead you were referring to a poke, they’re either already targeting the torso anyway (foil) or whatever body part is most easily reachable (epée; still often torso, but cheeky wrist/arm strikes can be something of an equalizer here), and anyway they are already striking at a range that the shorter person cannot, making a successful counterattack more difficult.

Besides reach, a height difference is brutal when it comes to sabre fencing; the shorter person is restricted to targeting arms and torso (can’t reach the head easily), so the taller person can anticipate strikes from fewer angles. The taller person can come from any direction and has gravity on their side for own overhead strikes. Those suck to defend against.

ornery_chemist ,

Or when you ask for feedback on the structure and what to include before you polish a bunch of stuff that would be cut or rewritten, only to be returned a half-finished low-effort style (“grammar”) nit-pick of a draft with increasingly angry comments about repeated “errors”, culminating with swearing at you, how dare you waste his time, how dare you not read his Grammar_Lesson.docx (God help you, you did) and submit a draft that doesn’t follow its rules (it was largely compliant), you’re a native English speaker anyhow and should know better, and what the fuck is compound 12a, you didn’t define it anywhere but keep referring to it (it was defined in-text in the previous paragraph and in the figure above it), fix it all and the rest of the doc before you bother him again.

ornery_chemist ,

Good article, reactive web design notwithstanding (stop. breaking. my. scrolling). I’m not surprised that obtaining the chemicals was that easy, even accounting for the mislabeling and fake products. A lot of these chemicals are pretty simple and have pretty general use cases in the fine chemicals space. Hell, I had occasion to use (2-bromoethyl)benzene, aniline, and propionyl chlorde in school for making random precursors and ligands, albeit separately. I wonder if they are at all harder to procure nowadays because of the fentanyl epidemic.

Edit: checked some of my old work, didn’t actually use (2-bromoethyl)benzene but did make a related compound as an intermediate for ligand synthesis using a very satisfying Appel reaction.

ornery_chemist ,

that yellow and that green are problematically close

ornery_chemist , (edited )

Like, so what if we store our tBuLi with other low-flash point flammables? And pyrophoric oxidizers? In the same bin? That’s stuck in a block of ice in the 30-year-old freezer because it hasn’t ever been de-iced?

What if the power goes out for a long period of time and the tBuLi goes for a swim? Or we say you have to de-ice the freezer?

Haha sounds crazy. And, I wouldn’t have to do the shitty quench before disposal. Or work on that project anymore.

Because you’re injured or because PI fires you?

Haha, yeah :)

:|

:)

:|

Oh, while you’re here, does this still smell like DCM? I can’t tell if I rotavapped it all off and the NMR tubes all need aqua regia (sorry my b).

ornery_chemist , (edited )

That’s just bad management / just put it on high vacuum

Yes. The whole thing is satirizing the “Safety -> Against” bit. Each piece, though exaggerated for effect, has a basis in something I’ve seen over the years.

Regarding NMR tubes though, the answer in my old group was precious metal complexes, which have a tendency to mirror out once they’ve done their bit. Or just existed for too long; a lot of them were touchy. The mirror tends to resist solvents and scrubbing. Nitric acid alone sometimes was enough to remove it depending on the metal, but often not. At some point the cost, effort, and danger are all supposed to outweigh just binning the lot and buying new tubes, but my PI was allergic to buying new things.

ornery_chemist , (edited )

Aqua regia ain’t no piranha, and also ain’t the most concerning thing in my post lol.

Ah bromine. Super dense, low MW, and low bp, all making dosing accurate amounts a heroic feat. If you store your bromine cold, you can precool the pipette by sucking up and spitting out a few times before transfering, which helps cut down the vapor.

ornery_chemist ,

Depends what is meant by green. Acetone is decent for health and safety (flammability notwithstanding) but is produced from petrochemicals and tied to the production of phenol (petroleum -> benzene and propane (or natural gas -> propane), propane -> propylene, benzene + propylene -> cumene, cumene + O2 -> phenol + acetone). Not much chlorophyll involved. Also has somewhere between a moderate to obscene CO2 burden depending on how you draw that box in and around the oil industry, but so do most commodity chemicals.

I for one haven’t used heavy metal catalysts in a year

Maybe not directly, but a lot of commodity chemicals rely on some truly vile metal mixtures for catalysis :)

ornery_chemist ,

That’s some expensive cereal…

ornery_chemist , (edited )

Do I not see the color because I’m protan or what? Does that even make sense for optical illusions?

ornery_chemist ,

I was just looking at a 1950s paper at work about how some nutjob made a poly(alkene peroxide) (styrene, I think?), isolated the fucker, and lit it on fire just to see what would happen. those were the days. Nowadays some lawyer with a chemistry minor decides that our hand sanitizer bottles need big red PEROXIDE FORMER labels and 1-year expiration dates (true story, though no longer the case). Now, I’m not saying that we should be allowed to make polyperoxides for the express purpose of lighting them on fire… unless 😳👉👈…?

ornery_chemist ,

So could we produce a surface tension-free water?

Homie dats a gas. Or supercritical fluid, which actually is indeed used for “washing” (SC CO2 is used to decaffeinate coffee). However, like others said, surface tension /= cleaning ability. Part of what soap does is increase the effective solubility of things that are not normally soluble.

ornery_chemist ,

I mean, it’s okay… I feel like I run into inconveniences in MSO every day. Off the top of my head (solutions welcome):

  • Absurd startup times for opening documents. Worse if there isn’t an instance of the app already open. Part of the blame goes to my company’s antivirus software, but Excel and PowerPoint are easily my slowest-starting apps, and Word is the runner-up. All UI animations are also stupidly slow, though I think that was a design choice.
  • A pasted graphic goes to the center of the slide in ppt regardless of the current zoom or view. Annoying for making large posters, exacerbated by delayed rendering of lots of graphics.
  • Likewise, zooming occurs relative to slide’s center, not the current zoomed view or from the mouse pointer.
  • No easily accessibly horizontal scroll outside of using a touchpad (i.e., scrollbar only). Tilting the mouse wheel (if I even have access to such a mouse) either doesn’t work or only slightly nudges the view. Also makes posters tedious in combination with pasting issue. Something like shift+mousewheel would be nice.
  • Dragging a scroll bar does not update the view until you release it.
  • Sometimes the amount of space between a bullet point and text in a PPT text box changes when all others are remain the same. Possibly a skill issue related to styles. Still frustrating.
  • Dragging objects autoaligns them to seemingly everything except what I want it to. I now run with snapping turned off.
  • Pasting charts between documents changes to destination formatting/styling by default.
  • Pasting text from external sources keeps formatting by default. Never have I ever wanted to copy a web page’s or email’s font, color, and size into my own docs. I could have sworn that there were also circumstances where ctrl+alt+v doesn’t work properly, but I can’t seem to remember/reproduce that at the moment.
  • Dates in Excel. It’s a meme, but also true.
  • Excel seems to have a “root” window (the doc opened first), and it does not play nice with virtual desktops. If you try to open a spreadsheet from Windows Explorer or some other app (e.g. web browser) on VD B while the root window is on VD A, you are forcibly switched to VD A, where the doc actually opens (after a complimentary delay, of course). Then I have to find the freaking window in Task View and move it back to VD B. There is a reason I wasn’t adding more windows to VD A to begin with. Incidentally Word and other MSO apps do not have this issue for some reason.
  • If one doc window freezes/stops responding, they all do.
  • Aligning things in Word
  • A few common color palettes are not colorblind-friendly.
ornery_chemist ,

Do you have an alternative to suggest?

For the general user? Not really, I’m just venting :) I have the unsubstantiated, possibly irrational belief that MSO UX ought to be far more polished after having existed for so long. Like you said, most of my frustrations have workarounds, even if they are buried or tedious (though the tedium is part of my contention).

For making slides or posters, someone in school recommended to lay out a poster or each slide completely in ChemDraw (basically a specialized, widely used vector-based WYSIWYG editor for organic chemistry) and paste the lot onto a PPT slide. That works reasonably well and makes everything have a consistent look, especially since most slides of mine contain chemdraws of molecules anyway. ChemDraw does have its own warts and somewhat limited functionality beyond drawing molecules and text. Also, since like 2019 the rendering and UI have gotten so much slower. For posters and basic diagraming, I currently use Inkscape, pasting things as needed. Inkscape also has its quirks, but its interface is so much more powerful and the UI so much more responsive than either ChemDraw or PPT that it is the clear winner for me. Though, it is also not winning any startup races.

For Excel, you’re unfortunately correct; there is no suitable WYSIWYG spreadsheet replacement. While I can do essentially all of the typical numerical hacking I do in Excel with (IMO) a better experience in LibreOffice Calc, it falls down when I need to show it to someone else. The charting in Calc is lackluster, and it doesn’t play nice with Office file formats. Also, my workplace (though not me personally) makes heavy use of Excel UI + VBA + fortran (!) DLLs for reactor modeling…

LO Writer is probably the closest to Word in usability, but compatibility with Word files is still subpar, mostly to do with styling and formatting. Both are bloated for probably 50% of my use (e.g., writing up informal procedures or meeting minutes). Wordpad (RIP) is nice in that regard.

it used to be a direct menu item but now it is quite buried…

My colleague swears that UI in MSO before Office 2007 was so much better, but I can’t comment much on that.

ornery_chemist ,

I don’t use gVim, but for work stuff that I don’t have to share (mosly just notes), I use markdown in Obsidian w/ vi mode :) It’s not FOSS and Electron is bloat, but it is really slick, and my boss approved expensing the $50 seat license for business. I might check out logseq in the future, but Obsidian was a lot more mature back when I was looking around. My only beef is that Markdown doesn’t natively support sub/superscripts, which are kinda important for chemistry. Most editors implement extensions, but they’re not always portable.

ornery_chemist ,

The sheets themselves are usually unproblematic, but the charts often don’t render properly when viewed in MSO. This is relevant because the other party usually does not have LO installed.

ornery_chemist ,

Correct. The article in question reports that boiling specifically hard water results in the coprecipitation of some portion of the microplastics with calcium carbonate. The precipitate then settles out, and the depleted bulk solution can be decanted to separate it from the MPs.

ornery_chemist , (edited )

I mean, sure, things like that are super dangerous, but at least they’re obviously, flashily dangerous and for that reason have a lot more attention paid to them. The real nasties are arguably the ones that aren’t so flashy but are much more common amd don’t have immediate effects. Formaldehyde and benzene will give you cancer, and acrylate monomers will make it so you one day wake up allergic to the modern world.

ornery_chemist ,

So you’re saying that you don’t like relighting the thermal oxidizer for the formaldehyde stream that went out due to spillover from another process, with an emergency flare? Got it.

ornery_chemist ,

TIL that influenza virions can be stick-shaped.

ornery_chemist ,

This post made me go try something in clojure again and man I forgot just how fucking good the language is. Everything fits together so nicely.

ornery_chemist , (edited )

Counterpoint: advisor said no.

“Just use Word, everyone else does. I have never heard of this latex thing, so must be just some trendy useless overengineered software that does Word’s job but worse. Word can track changes just fine, and you can leave comments.” proceeds to strikethrough, highlight, and inline comment everything instead of using either of those features “I want to read what you wrote, not fight technology” proceeds to email you three separate times after forgetting to attach v28 about how a graphic looks wrong because Word ate it

ornery_chemist , (edited )

Dude was shall we say, hands on about certain things. My dissertation is still embargoed because he is paranoid about being scooped. Joke’s on him, everything that hasn’t been published is not exciting enough to meet his own metric for publishability.

ornery_chemist ,

Preaching to the choir. “But Box already supports ‘versioning’, why use a confusing hacker tool instead?”

ornery_chemist ,

A fine assumption given what I wrote. Unfortunately, we did both depending on what he felt like at the time. Yes, for the same doc.

ornery_chemist ,

This is exactly it. My advisor wanted a word doc to edit, not a PDF. I wasn’t quite snooty enough to think that he should learn latex. Though, if he ever took the time to learn (what time?), I’m sure the writing process would be unbearable for other reasons not entirely related.

ornery_chemist ,

Man, fuck hetcat. You put extremely rare metals on special rocks in a very particular way just to burn something juuuuuust the right amount. Or un-burn it, I suppose. How does it work? Well, oxygen adatoms react with the substrate bound to a metal nanoparticle on its 10(-67) face following a formation of an oxygen vacancy-- jk, jk, it’s actually all happening at a tellurium defect in your special rocks, you silly goose. Oh wait, nvm, it’s actually iron contamination from manufacturing defects in the walls of your vessel. Git gud. Oh wait nvm it is actually catalyzed by your precious metal, but that metal needs to be slightly poisoned by lead and nickel from the radioactive decay of trace thorium from the welds and cobalt-60 in the steel, respectively. How could you have forgotten?

“But it works in my reactor!”

ornery_chemist ,

proper alchemy

ornery_chemist , (edited )

To add, labcoats don’t just mitigate splash hazards. When walking around lab and working at the bench, you can brush up againt all kinds of surfaces that, despite people’s best efforts (or less-than-best if in school), may not be perfectly clean. The coat guards against contamination of your skin, yes, but also of your other clothing, which may transfer the contamination to skin, eyes, or mouth by inadvertent contact later. I’ve got a sweater with a lovely nitric acid stain (read: a small charred hole) from such a scenario, though that was partially due to a poor coat fit.

Also, I see you premeds. Button up your damn labcoats and do not leave the lab with them on. This ain’t TV.

ornery_chemist ,

swish-swish-swish pfshhht, swish-swish-swish pft, swish-swish-swish pt

ornery_chemist , (edited )

My take-home was $1700-2100/mo after taxes and fees depending on whether I was teaching that semester (teaching paid less). We were paid just above minimum wage (at the time $15.50/h, CA MW = $15/h) on the basis of 8 h/day, 5 days/wk, 52 wks/y (lmao). Rent split 4 ways was $1500 ~$1200 per person, and that was the lowest of anyone I knew. UC Berkeley PhD 2022.

Edit: Checked my admission letter, turns out it was actually $15.50/h. Also got decent health insurance, at least until UCPath fucked it up. Livin’ the high life.

ornery_chemist ,

Fact: 90% of science is made with quartz

… accurate

ornery_chemist ,

…and then we take the partial derivative of the log of this infinite sum wrt molar volume to find that–

  • Why?

Why what?

  • helplessly gestures at the whiteboard

Oh, yeah, it’s so the math works out later! Anyway, for small Θ, the derivative has a nice closed form that we can Tailor expand in f-

ornery_chemist , (edited )

Phonetic transcription using vaguely English conventions 'cause my IPA keyboard broke:

Bezvzglendnih Gzhegoazh Bzhenchish-chickyeveech virrooshiw zeh Sh-chebzheshinna pshess Shimmahnkofsh-chizneh do Psh-chinnih. Ee hoach nyerahz zalehvawa go zhooch, nyepomnih nastempstf znalazu ostatechnye sh-chensh-che vzh-dzh-bleh trahvih.

Notes:, merged ś/sz, ź/ż/rz; tried to keep readings of a, e, and y somewhat similar to the vowels in father, dell, and ick by doubling the following consonants or ending open syllables with h.

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