great title

This article fell into my inbox via ISI alert:

A density functional theory study of the ‘mythic’ Lindlar hydrogenation catalyst

Really caught my eye, although I didn't read it.

Rochelle's salt

When using aluminum reagents such as LAH, DIBAL, or AlCl₃, it's common to have problems with emulsions in the workup. The simplest and most straightforward solutions to garner homogeneous solutions is to use aqueous mineral acids, but that's not always an option. If, like my last several projects, the substrates are alkaloids you can lose product to the aqueous layer, and acid labile groups can be chipped off. There are a number of ways around this, and one of the most popular and effective non-acid workups is aqueous Rochelle's salt.

Those of you that have used Rochelle's salt in work ups know that sometimes it works a treat, and other not too well. lately I noticed something in my experiments, and wanted to see if you guys have had similar experiences or knew of proper documentation.

When I would work up an AlCl₃ reaction, sometimes it clarified, and sometimes not. The Ph went up to almost neutral from the tartrate, but not strongly basic (Ph 8-10) like I would prefer for best recovery of my amine. After some poorer than expected yields I added saturated aqueous ammonia (ammonia water, NH₄OH) to the stirring workup mixtures. Typically the layers would split immediately, and my recoveries went way up.

It was both surprising and pleasantly welcome.

porchetta

I've been too busy to post anything in a while, but some friends and I took some time off yesterday evening too cook and hang out.

Last week, I stumbled on to Gianni TV, and watched his cooking videos one of which has a great looking porchetta. Oddly I had been thinking for a while I wanted to make a braciole or pinwheel steaks, so this really motivated me to cook it. As it happened whole pork loins were also on sale for really cheap at a store near my house, so that was the clincher.

I roll cut the loin.


As it happened there was fresh sage and rosemary in my landlords garden, so in it went with garlic after a quick chop.


I spread it out evenly, and added fresh cracked pepper. I've made butterflied pork loin stuffed with sauteed onions and swiss before, and thought it was great, so I added it to this one as well.


After rolling and tying, it was rubbed with olive oil, covered with pepper and salt, put on a bed of the same herbs, and a bit of wine and water was added.


It was cooked in two stages. At 350 till it was done, rested till the internal temp was coming back down, and at 500 until nicely browned and crispy.

Resting after stage one, don't the silicone ties look like earthworms?

And that's when the camera battery died. It came out tasty, I added more wine and reduced the drippings to make a jus, and we had some turnips and carrots with it. Overall it was pretty bad ass.

art in science

I saw this hanging in a friend's lab in my building; he said it came from one of the custodial staff a while back.


It's a pencil drawing, with the expected smudges from age, and it's really, really well done. I think it's wild that a custodian would have such impressive skills, want to draw a lab apparatus, and then donate the product!

shit like this amazes me

I didn't look to see if there was an easier way to do this or not, but it would surprise me if there weren't. Look at the transformation from 5 (the first compound) to 13, near the end.

Org. Let. ASAP

They turned a compound with a 3-carbon chain with 2 oxygenated centers into a compound with 5 skeletal carbons and 4 oxygenated centers in 13 steps. 13 steps!! They even used a chiral auxiliary to re-set the only chiral center in the starting material, making the choice of using it questionable.

The longest linear sequence is 24 steps, not including the 12 step synthesis of the other half of the target. In the end making it the crude equivalent of 1 step per member of the macrolactam, ouch.

what? I don't get it

I have a New Yorker daily cartoon desk calendar. It was a gift last xmas, and sometimes it's nice to start the day with a cute or funny cartoon. Unfortunately the New Yorker is a poor resource for this. I often wonder why people would read that particular rag, and after having the cartoons, I wonder even further. Some don't even make sense:


There were definitely some good ones in there, but by and large they were weak or poor. I would have expected the calendar to be a showcase, a sort of best of, but I certainly hope it isn't, now that I've seen the dismal quality of the humor. It's almost as bad as the typical syndicated newspaper cartoon, except these guys have more time to write and, presumably, should have done a better job.

One of the few saving graces was a blog article, retelling another blog article, on boing boing earlier this that saved a good quarter of the cartoons (more than half were beyond saving). Simply replace the caption with "Christ, what an asshole!", and magically the humor is repaired.

hipsters

Hipsters are pretty easy targets for poking fun, but this vid I saw at boingboing is is just too well done to pass up.