ornery_chemist
@ornery_chemist@mander.xyz
- Comment on Problem? 1 week 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. 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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 3 weeks ago:
New strategy to prevent global warming: just freeze all of the CO2 out of the air!
- Comment on Drink it, I dare ya 4 weeks 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 4 weeks 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 4 weeks ago:
https://…/epdf/… -> https://…/pdf/…
- Comment on Synthesize deez nutz 4 weeks ago:
Synthesis: everything happens except what you want. And then the 26h/day tryhard at <random other institution> in <random other country> publishes the molecule with the exact same route. The problem? Your hands suck. Git gud scrub.
- Comment on Academic writing 1 month ago:
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.
- Comment on Ooops 2 months ago:
It happens in industry, too, and often it’s even the stakeholders’ fault :) I’ve still got so many reports to write…
- Comment on Me et al. 2 months ago:
Papers!
(jk my company mandates it after unilaterally deciding to stop paying for endnote and forbids other software im miserable send help)
- Comment on Bread 2 months ago:
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.
- Comment on "Now everyone will have an easy reference table at hand!" 2 months ago:
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
- Comment on "Now everyone will have an easy reference table at hand!" 2 months ago:
- Comment on "Now everyone will have an easy reference table at hand!" 2 months ago:
Phosphorus, sulfur, …?
- Comment on "Now everyone will have an easy reference table at hand!" 2 months ago:
Most chem PhDs I 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.
- Comment on Do you agree with my unpopular opinion about height in fencing? 3 months ago:
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.
- Comment on me_irl 3 months ago:
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.
- Comment on Chemists of Lemmy, how accurate is this likability table? 3 months ago:
that yellow and that green are problematically close
- Comment on Flowchart for STEM 3 months ago:
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 :)
- Comment on Flowchart for STEM 3 months ago:
Aqua regia ain’t no piranha, and also ain’t the most concerning thing in my post lol.
Ah bromime. 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.
- Comment on Flowchart for STEM 3 months ago:
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 the it depending on the metal, but often not. At some point the cost, effort, and danger is supposed to outweigh just binning the lot and buying new tubes, but my PI was allergic to buying new things.
- Comment on Flowchart for STEM 3 months ago:
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 because 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).
- Comment on Part of this complete breakfast! 4 months ago:
That’s some expensive cereal…
- Comment on Based 4 months ago:
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 😳👉👈…?
- Comment on Cursed wretched marketing 4 months ago:
Do I need see the color because I’m protan or what? Does that even make sense for optical illusions?
- Comment on we don't talk about powerpoint 5 months ago:
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.
- Comment on we don't talk about powerpoint 5 months ago:
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.
