pumpkin carving

The holiday season is right around the corner, and I went to the first party of the year the other day; a pumpkin carving party. Because the party was more of a party, and the carving was just an excuse to get together, I showed up with no real plan of what to carve.  After we were there for a while a few people decided to do a Breaking Bad theme group, and I offered to make this beauty.

chemistry in action!

Humorously enough, the other people, who were biologists, had to keep asking me what the drawing was, always with the caveat "does it make me a bad scientist, that I don't know what that is?".

No, not knowing what a stick figure from another science is doesn't make you a bad scientist.  Being a biologist makes you a bad scientist.

The "real" carving took place on the other side of the pumpkin, a pretty awesome raven by the wife, with an oral detail added later by a friend.  We happened to be in Baltimore at the time, so a methamphetamine/raven combo seemed appropriate.

caw, caw ... bleaargh

Here's an action shot of the final triumvirate, and some of the other pumpkins.

The incredible pumpkin on the right that one of the other party goers made was accidentally dropped and broken earlier in the day, but you can't even tell after the emergency repair job.

C&EN

I'm an ACS member, and I get weekly copies of C&EN that I read on my phone during my commute.  I greatly preferred reading them in paper form, but times change and we sometimes have to change with them, albeit under duress.

When I read the articles on my phone, using their terrible app for android, the pictures' alternate text (at least that's what I assume it is) shows up below the picture.  Way back when, in the early days of the internet, the alternate text was to be used to describe a picture if it wouldn't load, or some other issue arose.  Almost immediately it got used for other purposes, or completely ignored.  In some cases the alternate text is used to add to the image (i.e. in XKCD an additional joke or comment is displayed in the alternate text), or in some cases it is a remnant of the description of the image left by the image providing company.

Typically I could give a shit about that sort of thing but this one showed up a few weeks back

with the text:  "beaker full of cash"

I realize I'm a picky bastard, and it makes sense that the person working at the photography website that presumable housed this stock image may or may not know the difference between a beaker and a flask, but I fully expect a trade journal that would like to think of itself as one of the preeminent in the world, in the field of chemistry no less, would proofread some of their shit a little better.