Hipsters are pretty easy targets for poking fun, but this vid I saw at boingboing is is just too well done to pass up.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Saturday, September 4, 2010
ACS goodness
Jim will like this one.
I was at the ACS this last week, and saw a few nice typos. First off I'll admit that my boss' presentation had one in it that I apparently missed when I proofread it, but small typos in talks are hardly an issue. As long as they don't interfere with the big picture or fuck up the talk they are gone so fast that most people will never notice them. I think the only reason I noticed the one in his talk was due to my familiarity with the talk.
I'm not going to cover all of them, I don't remember them and it would be even more boring than my usual posts, but I though I might cover some fun ones.
One rather nice girl was showing a pretty good chunk of work on a poster, and I was taking my time to try to read it all. I stumbled a bit when I got to this over an arrow:
I had to think for a second as to what it was, even though I knew exactly what it was for. I asked why she had written out the structure, and she replied to remove confusion for non-synthetic chemists and undergrads. I thought that was particularly odd, since i would think that it was significantly more confusing than putting the name of the reaction or listing the ingredients. I expect she was trying to clarify the reaction more than just writing "Swern", but there is more than one way to make the reagent she had, in fact. It seems obvious to me that if you are trying to clarify it, the reagent list is the way to go.
She wasn't too pleased when I pointed out she was missing the counter ion, and was even less pleased when I pointed out that in two other places on the poster she had written "Swern" over arrows.
Only a few posters later I saw a neat reaction, with a witches brew of reagents. It caught my eye for a few reasons: I have tried things like it before with little luck, and the prior poster girl and I had a nice conversation about it and her successes. This new poster had a deprotonation alpha to an alkene with a Schlosser's base like mixture (aka superbase, LICKOR, and others, KO-t-Bu/nBuLi). The thing that caught my eye was that this particular mix had no nBuLi. When I asked her, pointedly, if the reaction went without butyllithium, and she replied "Yes! ... NO!", and looked at her poster to see what was going on.
In that case I can't really blame her, it was most likely an honest mistake, and there were definitely a lot of thing going on on her poster, so one small detail would be easily lost in the mix. The thing about this one that surprised me was that the two hour poster session was within 15 minutes of being over, and no one had noticed it and mentioned it. It seems that any decent looking girl with a poster that has any reasonable amount of work can slide by just a tad easier than a dude in the same circumstance when she's surrounded by drunk nerds.
Earlier in the week I had a conversation with a friend, this ACS meeting being his first, about how the men hung around the girls at posters like vultures. He laughed when I called it a time honored tradition, he thought I was joking.
I was at the ACS this last week, and saw a few nice typos. First off I'll admit that my boss' presentation had one in it that I apparently missed when I proofread it, but small typos in talks are hardly an issue. As long as they don't interfere with the big picture or fuck up the talk they are gone so fast that most people will never notice them. I think the only reason I noticed the one in his talk was due to my familiarity with the talk.
I'm not going to cover all of them, I don't remember them and it would be even more boring than my usual posts, but I though I might cover some fun ones.
One rather nice girl was showing a pretty good chunk of work on a poster, and I was taking my time to try to read it all. I stumbled a bit when I got to this over an arrow:
I had to think for a second as to what it was, even though I knew exactly what it was for. I asked why she had written out the structure, and she replied to remove confusion for non-synthetic chemists and undergrads. I thought that was particularly odd, since i would think that it was significantly more confusing than putting the name of the reaction or listing the ingredients. I expect she was trying to clarify the reaction more than just writing "Swern", but there is more than one way to make the reagent she had, in fact. It seems obvious to me that if you are trying to clarify it, the reagent list is the way to go.
She wasn't too pleased when I pointed out she was missing the counter ion, and was even less pleased when I pointed out that in two other places on the poster she had written "Swern" over arrows.
Only a few posters later I saw a neat reaction, with a witches brew of reagents. It caught my eye for a few reasons: I have tried things like it before with little luck, and the prior poster girl and I had a nice conversation about it and her successes. This new poster had a deprotonation alpha to an alkene with a Schlosser's base like mixture (aka superbase, LICKOR, and others, KO-t-Bu/nBuLi). The thing that caught my eye was that this particular mix had no nBuLi. When I asked her, pointedly, if the reaction went without butyllithium, and she replied "Yes! ... NO!", and looked at her poster to see what was going on.
In that case I can't really blame her, it was most likely an honest mistake, and there were definitely a lot of thing going on on her poster, so one small detail would be easily lost in the mix. The thing about this one that surprised me was that the two hour poster session was within 15 minutes of being over, and no one had noticed it and mentioned it. It seems that any decent looking girl with a poster that has any reasonable amount of work can slide by just a tad easier than a dude in the same circumstance when she's surrounded by drunk nerds.
Earlier in the week I had a conversation with a friend, this ACS meeting being his first, about how the men hung around the girls at posters like vultures. He laughed when I called it a time honored tradition, he thought I was joking.
Friday, September 3, 2010
konami code
JACS-beta has a new feature to try out, that is kinda weak to begin with, but better yet you need to use the Konami code to try it! They even give the code for you to try!
I've been sort of fond of the set up that the ACS journals have been using to show the titles and graphical abstracts of journals, and I suppose it's good that they are continually trying to improve it. However making it into a cascade of tiles that are smaller than in current use, that then blow up to boxes that are larger, seems like an odd solution. I may not like it, but that could be due to the fact that I like the status quo, in this case.
New features notwithstanding, what's the point of using the Konami code to roll out the beta? Using a "secret code" and publishing it widely? It's like a lame attempt to get geek cred with a crowd split between the so dated and lost they won't get the reference, and the crowd that is so tech savvy they will immediately dismiss it as a poor attempt at looking "cool". I doubt the narrow cross section between those two factions represents a significant enough demographic to warrant this particular stunt. It seems to me a second, mirrored, page, or a simple on/off button would have done the trick.
I haven't tested it, but it wouldn't surprise me if the wonderful new grid view takes a reasonable amount of front side resources, thus putting the kung-fu grip (in the bad way) on smaller institution's older computers.
Update:
This fellow is claiming to be the one who is behind the JACS beta Konami code.
I've been sort of fond of the set up that the ACS journals have been using to show the titles and graphical abstracts of journals, and I suppose it's good that they are continually trying to improve it. However making it into a cascade of tiles that are smaller than in current use, that then blow up to boxes that are larger, seems like an odd solution. I may not like it, but that could be due to the fact that I like the status quo, in this case.
New features notwithstanding, what's the point of using the Konami code to roll out the beta? Using a "secret code" and publishing it widely? It's like a lame attempt to get geek cred with a crowd split between the so dated and lost they won't get the reference, and the crowd that is so tech savvy they will immediately dismiss it as a poor attempt at looking "cool". I doubt the narrow cross section between those two factions represents a significant enough demographic to warrant this particular stunt. It seems to me a second, mirrored, page, or a simple on/off button would have done the trick.
I haven't tested it, but it wouldn't surprise me if the wonderful new grid view takes a reasonable amount of front side resources, thus putting the kung-fu grip (in the bad way) on smaller institution's older computers.
Update:
This fellow is claiming to be the one who is behind the JACS beta Konami code.
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