ornery_chemist
@ornery_chemist@mander.xyz
- Comment on Definitely didn't waste half an hour making this 4 days ago:
I got one because I was intrigued by its lead rotation, but I found that it really didn’t rotate the lead enough while I wrote. I kept having to rotate the barrel manually to keep a thin line like I do for every other mechanical pencil, and then would get annoyed every time the clip came around to brush my hand. I’ve been wondering if I’m doing something wrong, or if Japanese just uses more shorter strokes. Do you also like it when writing English?
- Comment on What are some slow acting poisons? 5 days ago:
Arsenic is a classic murder poison. It’s been known since anciemt times, though possibly unsuited to your onset requirement. Acute poisoning by ingestion is generally within a few hours, but if your character sustains lower doses over time, you could probably draw out the timeline to whatever you wanted. It would be obvious that the character is unwell during this time, but the symptoms aren’t super specific and could be confused with e.g. food poisoning.
Or just invent a mushroom like others said. The toxins are diverse enough that I doubt anyone would be too upset if you tuned it exactly to your timeline and desired symptoms.
- Comment on What are some slow acting poisons? 5 days ago:
Cyanide poisoning is famously pretty fast though…
- Comment on Acetone: A Thread 6 days ago:
If those undergrads could figure out how to turn acetone into TNT…
Amateurs. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetone_peroxide
- Comment on Acetone: A Thread 1 week ago:
EHS would raise hell if they caught us putting waste solvent in anything but a hazardous waste container…
- Comment on "You should probably just throw it away" 1 week ago:
What a coincidende, the end of my support for windows is also approaching.
jk I srubbed that shit from my personal devices years ago after graduating.
- Comment on i'm gonna need directions 5 weeks ago:
Hey look, it’s a kürzlich aufgebaute vom Aufbauprinzip verbaute Bau
- Comment on The Periodic Table according to astronomers 1 month ago:
The intended joke is that hypervalent iodine compounds like Dess-Martin periodinane different oxidation states like you often see for transition metals. As an example, the mechanism usually drawn for oxidations by DMP is similar to those drawn for, e.g., PCC/Jones reagent, where the electrons removed from the substrate is “banked” at the metal center. Obviously, redox chemistry is not at all limited to transition metals, but I am often surprised at iodine’s propensity to engage in it. A lot of research over the past decade or two has also developed redox catalysis with these reagents, reactivity which is commonly (though again not always) the purview of transition metals.
- Comment on The Periodic Table according to astronomers 1 month ago:
Iodine is a transition metal I will die on this hill.
- Comment on ocan't 1 month ago:
δ 8.52 - 0.9 ppm (m, 56 H). e z
- Comment on Unionized 1 month ago:
What about ChemE then? They’re both.
- Comment on USA Question | How much is a dozen large eggs near you? 1 month ago:
$6.49 from Giant near Philly today
- Comment on Sadge 1 month ago:
And yet the f block is missing entirely. Oh, the sacrifices we make!
- Comment on Sadge 1 month ago:
6th period onward looks a little funny…
- Comment on based on a true story 2 months ago:
Me last night making weird noises while reading Wikipedia and trying to figure out Tamil pronunciation. It says intervocalic ற is trilled and ர is tapped but that’s definitely not what I heard in the yt video I had just watched…
Also ழ. Also ந ஞ ன ண ங (5 n sounds!?!)
- Comment on Learning a new language is easy! 2 months ago:
I think the biggest difficulty when starting out is that you don’t know common endings and syllable structure, and so it can be hard to parse where the morphological boundaries lie. It’s much easier once you understand those, though you will still find instances where two components are combined in an unintuitive (for the learner) way, particularly if the translation maps to a (apparently) indivisible root in the learner’s language.
- Comment on Learning a new language is easy! 2 months ago:
I’ve played around with changing Windows system languages before and was indeed thrown off by the slew of Gruppenrichtlinienbearbeitungsprogramm-type calques. Glad to know that Germans also find this offputting ;)
- Comment on Learning a new language is easy! 2 months ago:
Löschen can also mean to offload cargo from a ship…
I did not know this one either, and it seems even more different from delete/erase/extinguish. I had to look this up; wiktionary says that the unloading sense is actually from a different root (MND lössen, cognate with “los”), which may have changed due to association with the “erasure” sense, particularly in the context of erasure from ship inventories and logbooks.
Also, thank you for the context. This kind of detail tends to be extremely difficult to search for.
- Comment on Learning a new language is easy! 2 months ago:
TIL that löschen is also used to mean extinguishing fires. Firefighter support vehicle, I guess?
- Comment on What the hell 2 months ago:
GFP is often combined with other genes of interest in biotech to provide an easy way to check whether the genes of interest are successfully incorporated/active. Glowy cells = successful, dark = unsuccessful/inactive. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reporter_gene
- Comment on Precision takes time 4 months ago:
one gets silicosis and the other gets siliconetits
- Comment on Problem? 4 months ago:
Goos rule of thumb: if someone else hasn’t solved the problem yet, it’s more complicated than you’re assuming. If the problem is worth solving, other people smarter than you have almost certainly attempted the easy “solutions” already, and they were inadequate to solve the problem. Heck, even if it’s not worth solving, there’s a non-zero chance that some pre-Reagan weirdos took a crack at it with bonus mercury and thallium compounds for the lulz and published it all in a vague 200-word comm in a now-defunct journal.
- Comment on This feels wrong. I love it. 4 months ago:
Isn’t the squaring actually multiplication by the complex conjugate when working in the complex plane? i.e., √((1 - 0 i) (1 + 0 i) + (0 - i) (0 + i)) = √(1 + - i^2^) = √(1 + 1) = √2. I could be totally off base here and could be confusing with something else…
- Comment on Yep, it's me 4 months ago:
I so badly want to be as smart and articulate as Feynman when ever I grow up.
- Comment on I hate that that happens 4 months ago:
dass das das das dass da ersetzen kann ist falsch
translation: that “das” can replace “dass” there is wrong.
same shit different barbarians
- Comment on Ah yes, regression 5 months ago:
This relation between temperature and resistivity can be shown to be exponential in certain temperature regimes by waving your hands and chanting “to first order.”
for some reason this is the line that got me
- Comment on Half as Hot 5 months ago:
New strategy to prevent global warming: just freeze all of the CO2 out of the air!
- Comment on Drink it, I dare ya 5 months ago:
Alternatively for a full octet on every atom, oxiryne, which does not exist and does not have a wiki page. It’s basically acetylene with its arms chopped off and the stumps dislocated, bent back, and stapled together with an oxygen atom.
- Comment on Publishers Always Innovating 5 months ago:
Fair, but certain corporate-mandated client-side PDF viewers are… bloatier. Though, I do like not having another window to manage when I open in browser, particularly when doing web searches. It pairs well with tab grouping extensions, and I generally don’t use markup, so no loss for me there.
- Comment on Publishers Always Innovating 5 months ago:
https://…/epdf/… -> https://…/pdf/…