ornery_chemist

@ornery_chemist@mander.xyz

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What strategy would you use to estimate the number of hazelnuts⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Roughly a truncated cone with diameters ~7 nuts and ~9 nuts, and the cup is ~12 nuts high (quite hard to tell due perspective and nits of different sizes). Throw in an extra layer to account for the heap at the top (which is a dome, but the dome is taller than 1 hazelnut, so treating it as a shorter layer should give some error cancellation) to give a height of 13. The volume using the formula for a truncated cone of those dimensions is ~657 cubic hazelnut diameters. Random sphere packing is 64% (though wall effects should decrease this number) giving a total of 420 nuts (nice).

  Answer

  This ends up being about 5% lower than the true answer. I’m surprised it’s that close. The underestimate makes sense given the wall effects I mentioned, but the error bars on my eyeballed measurements are surely higher.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YOLO⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What’s the point of math if you can’t verify it empirically?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨🤡 We've all been played for fools. 🤡⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah shit are you me a few years in the future? Currently in the corporate phase, only, instead of my PhD convincing people that I know what I’m talking about, I get told to pound sand and, for everything I do, every slight change I make, consult our minored-in-chemistry EHS focal points whose only hands-on lab experience is neutralizing bicarb with food-grade acetic acid solutions inside a molded clay vessel.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YAYAYA CONGRATS!!!!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The woman is covered in 3 different kinds of power series that certain kinds of scientists (presumably personified here by the man) love to swap in for more complicated terms by waving their hands and chanting “first order”. Truncated series give fugly equations a more tractable form by applying certain assumptions (e.g., x is very small, x is very large, or x is fuck-it-we-ball).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨gotta blast!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The current administration has removed all genders from science, so quantum tense verb stems are now uninflected, sorry.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Zotero is still better.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Meanwhile, my advisor: you will buy endnote and you will like it because that’s what I use.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨why can't you be more like him⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  OSHA

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hope you like math⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah, just look at the folks over in HR. Irrational fucks to a person.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨if H₂O is so great why isn’t there H₂O₂⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  catalase

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨salty child⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re missing the fuckton of heat that is generated during neutralization. I’ve had a few lab volcanoes because of it (LOC due to the low-boiling organics flashing boiling).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It’s the little things⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes and no. No surface tension implies vanishing intermolecular forces, so the liquid would not be cohesive and would expand in all directions to the volume of the room… which is pretty much the definition of a gas. Not quite though: supercritical fluids also do this as long as temperature and pressure remain high enough, and are indeed useful in niche applications industrially.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨y tho⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Those flasks can actually be really nice compared to normal RBFs for real reasons and not just memes. They are a lot easier to e.g. pipette out of because the taper gives small volumes of liquid more height than a typical round bottom, so less material is lost as skin on the glass. “Just use a smaller container”, you say, and yes, do so if you start with a small volume. But a lot of times in organic chemistry, you need to isolate the compound from solution by evaporating the solvent. Depending on the concentration, the volume can start large and end much smaller. These flasks can help recover a larger amount of precious material.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can anyone do the maths?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Just think about all the shit you had to do to get from then to now, and then imagine that you have to do all of it all over again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When you work for a company owned by a A..hole⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Pretty sure I just got ~anti-bribery~ ethics and compliance training that said no one in my company is allowed to accept such gifts lol

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wheee⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Completely rewrite the curriculum and problem sets for my advisor’s grad-level course for flipped-classroom virtual teaching as opposed to in-person lectures. It was the pits for many reasons, not the least of which was that his attitude became “everyone is at home doing nothing, so I can ramble into a recording for 3 h instead of giving 1 h lectures and we can have a full problem set every week instead of 4 in a semester and the scheduled class time is now a problem session amd to answer students’ questions :)”.

  And a fuckton of DFT calculations, so honestly, fair.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wheee⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  And calculating far too many digits of π

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Let's gooooooooo!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  -onium is usually an extra group/proton (carbonium, oxonium, bromonium…). HO+ isn’t too hard to approximate–just take a hydroperoxide or peroxyacid and add strong acid :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Let's gooooooooo!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Hydroxyl hydride feels wrong given that hydride is H-. So what’s a good name for HO+…? Oxenium hydride? Hydrenium hydride? (comparing carbonium (CR4H+) vs carbenium (CR3+))

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Let's gooooooooo!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think oxenium hydride would be more appropriate than hydroxyl taking into account the polarity of the two fragments (HO+ and H-), though AFAIK there is no standardized name for HO+.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨when you work in an interdisciplinary institution:⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Computer scientists? Sure, maybe. But all four of us will join together to resent the engineers for designing systems around extrapolated power law fits and lack of rigor (and totally not because they are higher paid or anything).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dots!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Some Pu solutions for your viewing pleasure:

  Image

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dots!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  just take a cheese grater to it to make smaller pieces smh

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mood.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Not when your advisor converts it back to docx before sending you comments.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨But I am mighty!!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not sure I’d call US sunscreens way worse (they are still very effective at blocking UVB, just not UVA as effectively), but there are definitely better options abroad. There definitely aren’t many options; that’s part of why Hawaii banning two common sunscreen ingredients for marine toxicity reasons was such a big deal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Add it to the pile of reasons to hate 'em⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Back on my did there was an element called unununium until some nuclear scientists bismuth-munching paper-pushers with nickel allergies decided in 2004 that they liked Röntgen more than Regirock.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨SUNS OUT GUNS OUT⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know much about this, but I can’t help but think that “complete” and “consistent” are doing a lot more work in that sentence than my current understanding of the terms would lead me to believe.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For those who did a search only to get back pages of less-than-useless SEO slop that just recites the number line, here is something that better describes some of the grammatical insanity.

  also, czterydzieści cztery is imo one of the less pronounceable words (well, two of them) in Polish.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don't ask for more pixels⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure, there may be a maximal element, but not necessarily a maximum (there might be multiple people of equal and maximal gayness, not just one person).

  Also, not relevent to the logic here per se, but last time this went around the conclusion was that a spectrum implies a total order, not just partial.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨(・・;φ⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I know that this is partially a joke, but I was trying to figure out what kind of lab would be done to produce chloroform that would be appropriate for students (recent OSHA crackdown on chloromethanes notwithstanding)… haloform reaction I suppose? Is that a common teaching lab experiment?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Marshmallow Test⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  My mom took my little brother to participate in a child psych study like this when he was a toddler (mom had some ties to the university). It was a very similar experiment with skittles as the prize. My brother sat staring glumly at the candy the whole time. The test administrator was increasingly enthusastic with praise after each round right up until the end when she congratulated him and said that he could have the whole bag. He said “no thanks” and ran back to mom crying because he was told there would be candy but they only had skittles, which he very much did not like (and for that matter still doesn’t). The administrator was apparently embarrassed and told my mom that she thought that all kids liked skittles…