ornery_chemist
@ornery_chemist@mander.xyz
- Comment on based on a true story 1 week 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! 1 week 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! 1 week 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! 1 week 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! 1 week ago:
TIL that löschen is also used to mean extinguishing fires. Firefighter support vehicle, I guess?
- Comment on What the hell 2 weeks 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 1 month ago:
one gets silicosis and the other gets siliconetits
- Comment on Problem? 2 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. 2 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 2 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 2 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 2 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 2 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 2 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 2 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 2 months ago:
https://…/epdf/… -> https://…/pdf/…
- Comment on Synthesize deez nutz 2 months 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 3 months 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 4 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. 4 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 4 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!" 4 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!" 4 months ago:
- Comment on "Now everyone will have an easy reference table at hand!" 4 months ago:
Phosphorus, sulfur, …?
- Comment on "Now everyone will have an easy reference table at hand!" 4 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? 5 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 5 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? 5 months ago:
that yellow and that green are problematically close
- Comment on Flowchart for STEM 5 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 5 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.
