It’s not that the predictions are wrong or anything, it’s just that they typically go something like “teehee this will be interesting” because caution is for the crayon-eaters in EHS.

I suppose that makes LANL and co. gender R&D labs. Explore the frontiers!

Ugh I had an older colleague, a PhD organic chemist, who was absolutely convinced that soy would make me (m) infertile. I ordered tofu once when out to lunch and he would not stop warning me to “be careful” and to be mindful of starting a family and “you know those studies.” When I mentioned that the consensus was at best inconclusive and most likely there is no such link, he said that no, “they” definitely showed that excess soy is bad and that he worried about my reproductive health. Like dude even if eating tofu did cause reproductive health issues, mine is none of your goddamn business. On the other hand, the same guy is also convinced that BPA (another estrogen mimic used esp. in certain plastics) concerns are a total hoax because “they did bad science because their sample containers had BPA in them and it leached into the urine samples giving false positive.” Also something about the only evidence of it binding like estrogen was that someone glanced at a crystal structure and halfassedly thought it looked like it might fit and rolled with it for career reasons. Like, I don’t know, man, maybe a couple studies used containers made with BPA, but most probably didn’t. I haven’t read them, but I know you didn’t, either. Also, you’re literally a petrochemist, you know BPA is mostly used in polycarbonates, and lab plastics, especially for analytical work, are mostly polypropylene or polyethylene designed to avoid exactly this kind of leaching. Honestly.

Tbf sometimes it’s hard even for organic chemists because the authors will just put an abbreviation of a non-standard variation of the name of some named reaction over the reaction arrow and then proceed to draw the product in a completely different conformation from the starting material, leaving you trying to work out which carbon is which in the world’s most annoying game of spot-the-difference (or in many cases spot-the-similarity).

Maybe incorrect rebracketing? It’s supposed to be be-inhalten, not bein-halten. Otherwise maybe a writing style thing…

Ya but the moon covers at best only about 10 ppm of the sky’s area so given a random direction within the hemisphere defined by the sky in which the moon is visible and traveling in a straight line you have a roughly 99.9990% chance of missing so that’s understandable really.

I mean, sure, the choice of the “nice” numbers here is eccentric, but this is essentially the way math is taught nowadays. Only, instead of making 8 in this special case, the goal is usually to make 10 + leftovers because adding to 10 is always easy.

Here’s my (upper midwest) spicy mental math take: it should be big-endian and solved with backtracking for ripple carry/borrow. None of this starting-from-the-1’s-place-and-successively-incorporating-higher-order-digits nonsense. Extended carry/borrow is rare, and if you start with the most significant digits and give up/get bored part way through, the intermediate answer is in the ballpark of the real answer.

Me: you’ve been in the freezer for hours now, please freeze Supercooled water: how bout nah

Roughly a truncated cone with diameters ~7 nuts and ~9 nuts, and the cup is ~12 nuts high (loose guesses, it is hard to tell due perspective and nuts of different sizes). Throw in an extra layer to account for the heap at the top (which is a dome taller than 1 hazelnut, but treating it as a shorter but full layer should give some error cancellation) to give a height of 13. The volume of a truncated cone of those dimensions is ~657 cubic hazelnut diameters. Random sphere packing is 64% space-efficient (though wall effects should decrease this number) giving a total of 420 nuts (nice).

Multiple edits for clarity and typos.

What’s the point of math if you can’t verify it empirically?

Ah shit are you me a few years in the future? Currently in the corporate phase, only, instead of my PhD convincing people that I know what I’m talking about, I get told to pound sand and, for everything I do, every slight change I make, consult our minored-in-chemistry EHS focal points whose only hands-on lab experience is neutralizing bicarb with food-grade acetic acid solutions inside a molded clay vessel. And, for “reactive chemistry” concerns, consult the ChemE “expert” in another time zone who can’t read even structures of organic molecules.

EDIT: actually in retrospect I don’t believe that they have done even the bicarb thing because it involves gas evolution, which is a big no-no.

The woman is covered in 3 different kinds of power series (all Taylor, but one is general and the other two are specific to 1/(1-x) and ln x, respectively) that certain kinds of scientists (presumably personified here by the man) love to swap in for more complicated terms by waving their hands and chanting “first order”. Truncated series give fugly equations a more tractable form by applying certain assumptions (e.g., x is very small, x is very large, or x is fuck-it-we-ball).

EDIT: nvm apparently this is a pop culture reference.

to management: Gonna give me $100K for a new GCMS compatible with a shiny new win11 workstation that MS will obsolete in a year or two? How about paying for a new license (subscription!) and a marked up PC and a technician visit to recalibrate everything for the $2MM NMR spectrometer? And then have IT come in to install their mandatory security software that bricks the instrument anyway? No? Then enough griping about your compliance numbers. If it bothers you that much, pitch a proper ask for capital to the business and get IT to allow us to just airgap the sucker instead of trying to debug some corporate security vendor’s rootkit.

The current administration has removed all genders from science, so all verb stems are now uninflected in the quantum tense, sorry.

Meanwhile, my advisor: you will buy endnote and you will like it because that’s what I use.

Honestly, searching for decent medical info with search engines is a pain in the ass these days. And no, don’t start with that AI chatbot nonsense with me. I end up adding -healthline -verywellhealth -medicalnewstoday and a bunch of others that I’m forgetting to the query just to have a chance at a non-paywall, non-slop site. Typically the crap drowns out the likes of basic overviews like Mayo and Cleveland Clinics, which even 10 years ago tended to rank quite high on the results pages.

OSHA. Not supposed to touch what I make.

Nah, just look at the folks over in HR. Irrational fucks to a person. Though I suppose all that means is that there are some irrational elements in the set, not necessarily that it’s isomorphic to the field of complex numbers. So can we diagonalize fuckery somehow…?

catalase

You’re missing the fuckton of heat that is generated during neutralization. I’ve had a few lab volcanoes because of it (LOC due to the low-boiling organics flash boiling).