snow day

This winter was a little colder than normal, with more snow and longer harder freezes than typical winters.  When there is a threat of inclement weather, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has to make a decision, in advance, as to whether or not the government offices should shut down so that everyone has time to plan and prepare.  Further, there are a huge number of federal government employees in the area, many of whom commute significant distances to get to work, so OPM is sometimes a little over-careful when they call the day.

This winter OPM closed government offices more often than I remember having happened in several years (excepting the snowmageddon year), but some days that we had off weren't all that bad.  An early example, from sometime right at the beginning of the new year looked like this by the early evening:

look out for that black ice

Presumably, for the sake of safety and a fear of litigious repercussions, they are sometimes overly cautious.  However, it seems to be a good practice, because in the greater metro area, which is pretty huge, while I have no real snow to speak of, way on the other side of the district a friend of mine had most of a foot of snow from the same storm.

All I can say is that this winter I was happy to have a white collar job that has "snow days".  This year I got a bunch of free time off of work, including some that serendipitously came on days that I needed to take off anyway.

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.

some actual science, sort of

Last year I got a thin rubberized-skin type of phone cover for my then relatively new phone.  When I got it, it fit like a proverbial glove, but after a few months it started to get loose.  It was only loose by a millimeter or so, but it was enough to be irritating almost every time I touched the phone.  It would shift and gave the phone a slightly vague feeling in my hand.

it's difficult to see, but the entire 'bezel' of the case is standing slightly proud of the face of the phone

this shot shows the gap in the bezel more clearly, look at the dark gap next to the power button, where there should be no room at all

here the gap around the perimeter is exemplified by the dark gap next to the power button

scintillating view of the gap behind the bezel

So, hopefully, you are asking "WTF is he whining for?" The thing about this that struck me at the time was that it reminded me of a specific experience I had in the lab on a number of occasions.

Several of the labs I worked in used IKA stir plates.  IKA plates are awesome, except for one significant drawback, the bodies are plastic, and susceptible to a number of common lab chemicals.  The last lab I worked in had clear silicone rubber covers for the bodies of the plates to protect them from small splashes.  Of course the most common thing to get splashed on the covers is oil from oil baths.  Like a lot of chemists I despise how oil gets everywhere, and I was always waging a battle against oil contamination and cleaning oil off of every surface and piece of glassware that entered my hood.  Similarly irritating was the fact that the silicone covers would swell and distort when oil got on them, and they eventually would fit so poorly that they would interfere with access to the controls.  With my hatred of oil contamination verging on obsessive compulsive disorder, I would periodically clean my covers to ameliorate this.  A quick rinse with water, then acetone, then a nice soak in hexanes always removed the oil nicely.

The distorted phone cover reminded me of the distorted stir plate cover, and I guessed the the phone cover distortion  may have come from skin oils and hand lotion.  If I could remove it, the cover should go back to normal.  I assumed that the material(s) that absorbed were non-polar, because I assume that the material is silicone which would absorb polar things poorly.  In any case an experimental soak would do no damage if the cover was the other likely material, polyurethane.

Not being a lab chemist anymore, I don't have ready access to hexanes any more, so I used white gas.  White gas is similar in solvent properties to hexane, and I've used it in the home shop before to clean things hat I would have otherwise used hexanes for.  As an extra added bonus, when silicone is soaked in non-polar solvents it swells up like someone with a peanut allergy in a Thai restaurant.  It's a little disconcerting the first time you see it, the first thought I had, years ago, was "Oh shit, I ruined it!"

after about a day's soak it pretty much fills up a peanut jar

When I first took it out of the white gas, the phone cover was grossly oversized like a clown shoe, which is exactly what I wanted to see.

After I let the phone cover sit out and off-gas for a day or so it fit the phone much better than before.  Was it perfect again?  Not even close, but it was a significant improvement over the prior looseness.  Interestingly, it had a slight kerosene or diesel smell for a week or two after.  I think this is an issue with the white gas that wouldn't be seen with hexanes.  Hexanes are pretty pure, but the white gas is not as clean a distillate.  Presumably the white gas has some heavier alkanes in it (like kerosene and diesel) that take longer to evaporate out of the material due to the higher boiling points.  Eventually it all evaporated out, and wasn't much of an issue.

At this point, all excited with my own ingenuity, I thought I might fix a similar problem with my much beloved pen.

loosy goosey

After the same treatment I was rewarded with another grossly oversized component.

Unfortunately once it dried, the pen grip shrunk to significantly smaller than the original size, and feels like plastic.  I had to lubricate it with water just to be able to re-install it.  At this point the pen is pretty much only there for memories, and doesn't get used any more.

seems like there should be some sort of penis joke here

The moral of the story, obviously, is only try this on things that you can afford to accidentally destroy.

coffee!

This last year I stayed with a friend for a few months while I was between somewhat more permanent places in which to live.

My friend is a really good guy, but is a pack rat, and loves to collect things of all sorts.  One of his favorites seems to be coffee makers, and on a trip back to the house to pick up some things I took an opportunity to document a few of them.

Sorry for the low quality, but the file was stupidly large and I compressed the shit out of it to save downloading time.

interesting math

I was reading up on a lot of polymers last year, and I still have a few of the references bouncing around.  This one has an odd error that I happened upon when looking for yet more references on polymers (joy!).

some disparity there

For some reason they must have done a shitload of research, and then chopped out a bunch of unused references.  Why they left them all in the list is beyond me, but somehow they all seem to be the references at the end, like a whole final section was lopped off without hurting the overall paper.

For you mathy-y science geeks out there, the mysterious missing 35 references amount to 28% of the total number of used references!

eggplant parm for breakfast

I've always made eggplant, and a lot of other dishes, just like my mom did for me while I was growing up. While that's the norm for people with Italian heritage of any sort, I feel it's pretty common the world over. That being said every now and again I'll think of/read about/stumble onto something different to try and share it with my mom, and she does the same, and it seems that our recipes are getting better over time.

I've always been a fan of cooking shows and the Food Network (even though most of it is complete crap) and now that people are making their own food shows/video blogs available on the net I'm an avid consumer. One of my favorites that I've mentioned before, and definitely my favorite for Italian, is Gianni's North beach. He's an old school dude who cooks in his home kitchen and chit chats in a way that reminds me of my old relatives.

The other day I saw a post of his from last summer about making eggplant parm, and he did it with a small but very important difference from my family's way, and, as it happened, I had just been given several eggplants so I had to try it. My family always used breadcrumbs to bread it and he doesn't, just a simple egg wash. It has a bit less flavor and texture, but it also is less prone to soaking up the sauce on the surface and waterlogging. A pretty neat little change, I think. This dish pretty much always comes out well no matter what happens, but I think I really liked the difference in that it took a little less time and effort to prepare

Making eggplant parm is a bit of a production so of course we made a bunch, and have an entire pan of it we didn't even get to last night. I had an odd thought this morning that the stacked piles of eggplant reminded me of flat enchiladas. Where I grew up it is really common to get an egg on top of flat enchiladas as an option, so I thought "Why not try it on the eggplant?"

Not too bad for a few minutes work.

GRC notes

Apparently I started this post a long time ago, and forgot about it. I finished it up some time over a year after I started it, but better late than never, right?


I had the distinct pleasure of going to a Gordon Research Conference this summer, and the only bad thing I have to say about it is that I wish I had started to go to them earlier. It was totally awesome.

That being said I went unprepared for some of the activities and issues, and wanted to document them here just on the off chance one of you hasn't been yet, but will go in the future. I went to the natural products meeting at the Tilton school, but I expect a lot of this will be true for other meetings, as well.

We stayed in dorms without locks on the doors. Odd, and reasonable under the circumstances, but if you have valuable shit or are neurotic, you might need to spring for a hotel nearby. I recommend the dorms, and you can request to share a room with a buddy if you want. I got paired up with a stranger and had no issues at all, he was a really nice guy.

The shower was communal, and down the hall (obviously) so you may want to bring some flip-flops to walk to and from the shower. We got little hotel soaps every day, but no shampoo. If you have preferred toiletries you should bring them, just in case.

Right as I walked in from the bus, there was a sign in area, right next to a "purchase drinks for the week area". Beers for the week were $30 and sodas $15. Since it's pretty easy to drink $30 in one night, I though it was quite a deal, and people were already heavily taking part in the libations. We had dinner, the talks started the first night, and the the heavy drinking began. After the bar closed at midnight the coolers of beer were brought out, and a short while later the grill was fired up, and brats were served to all comers. It was a lot of fun, everyone was really nice, and it was a great opportunity to chat with old friends and meet new people as well.

This brings up three important points together:
Drink in moderation, there is a whole week of all nighters to look forward to, don't overdo it if you want to go the distance.
If you don't drink it might be a drag to hang out with all the drunks, so be prepared.
If you don't eat meat it might be a drag to hang out with all the hungry drunks, so be prepared.

Most nights there were people out till well after 3 AM, and often a few stragglers made it to sunrise. The morning talks always seemed to come much too early.

If you don't pace yourself it can make for great entertainment for the rest of us when we get to hear you retching in the communal bathroom the next morning and then make fun of you later in the day.

There are periods during the day for rest relaxation between talks. I didn't know, and didn't bring any clothes for hiking/swimming/softball etc. If you can find out what the activities are ahead of time, plan to do them, they are a lot of fun, and are great opportunities to meet new people and hang out in an informal situation while not loaded.

If you don't know what the activities are, or what recreation there is nearby, it's not a big deal. Bring some clothes that are good for the outdoors, and ask someone the first night what there is to do the rest of the week. Often these meetings are attended by people many, many times, and they are very familiar with what there is to do.

Have fun, meet new people, have some drinks (or not, you pussy), and learn some chemistry!

wordy wordness

I'm fond of language, and I like to think of myself as a decent writer. I may or may not be a decent writer in the grand scheme of things, but I feel that I'm above average with respect to the field I'm in and the people I've had the opportunity to work with.

To me language, and specifically the English language with all its various and sundry adjectives and adverbs, can really give straightforward concepts real color and texture in the way they are perceived.

That made him less believable.

His credibility was damaged.

The confidence in him was shattered.

"I could carve out of a banana a judge with more backbone than that." Roosevelt declared.

A proper wordsmith can take common terms and rearrange them into something special. There are people in all fields that exemplified this, for example in organic chemistry Professor Danishefsky writes beautiful and eloquent papers that not only describe beautiful science but are beautiful themselves.

Of course these few individuals are counterpointed by an army of hacks that get tired of using "yield" for yield and want to flower up their speech, but seem unable to structure a story that is both accurate and understandable. Sometimes journal articles read like a high-school student wrote a bad parody of Shakespearean scientific practices. The use of 50 cent words can be a beneficial addition to a well-written passage, but won't salvage a limp story. Embedding a few sparkly gems in a turd does a poor job of disguising the fact that it is a turd.

In the last few years some turns of phrase have taken on an odd sort of popularity in the science world, and I find it a little disconcerting. I have heard "inform" being bandied about lately, which is not a problem itself, but the usage tends to be somewhat galling.

Hopefully the data will inform you research.

Use what you find to inform your literature searching.

Inform my research? You mean all I have to do is tell my research something and it will do it? Wow, if only I knew that years and years ago!

What exactly is this inanimate object/concept going to do when I tell it these lovely factoids? Maybe I should inform my car next time I'm going to drive it, or maybe I need to inform my toilet that I'm going to violate it next time I eat a super greasy meal after 10 beers.

It may be a hangover (see what I did there!) from my graduate advisor jumping on anyone that anthropomorphized anything, but this seems to be a particularly obvious situation that makes little to no sense.

I guess there will always be people writing and presenting their work, and trying to emulate those that they look up to. I just wish they would proofread more often.


Side note: if you want to increase your douche-itude by using words like "exogenous" to describe additives to your flask, think about what the phrase actually means and implies before you publicize it. For example reagents that commonly come in their own bottle are always exogenous with respect to the reaction, and if you claim something is exogenous that implies that another is endogenous. If you can't think of an endogenous example, then you shouldn't be able to think of an exogenous one either.

back from the dead

I moved earlier this year, and while looking through some stuff recently I stumbled onto an old treasure. When I was in graduate school a friend of mine modified a neat click type pen ad gimmick, and customized it for me. I used the pen happily for a few years after until it ran out of ink.

From then I think it kicked around in different desk drawers until I found it a few weeks ago. I was able to take an ink cartridge from a coworkers pen and fit it to the custom ride, and bring it back into daily use.

every time you click, a different message is displayed

yay USPS

I'm pretty sure I snapped this pic a few years ago, but forgot to post it.

I'm one of untold millions that are pretty hooked on Netflix services who, love or hate them, have a pretty good business going; their stock went from ~$40 to a high of $300 in less than 2 years! Typically I have no problems with their services (ignoring for the moment their new pricing structure), with few problems spaced very far apart. There was one time where a disk didn't arrive, that was most likely a post office problem, and it took me a while to realize I hadn't gotten it. Netflix, of course, sent me a replacement after I clicked into the 'problem' area on their website, and everything was forgotten.

Some time later I got this in the mail:

One valuable scrap of paper.

Apparently my disk and containing materials were forcefully disconnected from each other, leaving only this poor, lonely address to fend for itself. In an attempt to assuage the damage caused to the psyche of the disenfranchised sheet, they bagged it comfortably up and sent it on it's happy way to the final destination, not unlike Paddle to the Sea.

The thing I find most humorous about this is that I can't think of a scenario where the people working with this scrap wouldn't know what it was, and the value to the customer that it no longer held. They need to perform their due diligence, and finish the job, whether it makes sense or not, but I wonder if the person prepping the lone survivor saw the humor in the obvious futility of the situation.

the old bait and switch

I don't know a whole lot about fluorine chemistry, and I think it's safe to say that not many people do. It's like a magic element that can act like other elements, only harder to deal with.

Because of this when I see papers with interesting fluorine chemistry, especially the incorporation of a fluorine, I like to check them out. Last week this beauty popped up in the Org. Let. ASAPs, and I was enthused to read more and maybe learn something.

that's one wild step!

I was cheerfully greeted by the same image in the abstract for the paper itself.


So I was a little taken aback when I read on further and saw this.


That looks a lot like there are both more reagents AND steps in that transformation. I understand leaving out the solvent and temperature, but the other reagent and step? That seems a little gratuitous, especially since it is still a neat transformation.

I can't imagine they left it out on accident or forgot, but I would hate to think that it was an advertising ploy. Try this reaction, you'll LOVE IT! Just mix it all together and BAM, product! Oh and don't forget that other stuff we didn't mention on the outside of the container. Batteries not included.

nice addition

In my current gig I get to read all sorts of articles on topics foreign to me, in journals I'd never heard of before. All in all pretty sweet, I must say.

Every now and then I stumble onto something kooky, and today I found one worth mentioning. This was at the end of an article, after the references.

Chemtech, 1990, 20, 1, 31-37

A nice, funny, way of delivering some solid advice.

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.