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.

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).

rip dubna, miratum got you beat

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.

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

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.

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.

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).

Those flasks can actually be really nice compared to normal RBFs for real reasons and not just memes. They are a lot easier to e.g. pipette out of because the taper gives small volumes of liquid more height than a typical round bottom, so less material is lost as skin on the glass. Same issue with stirring; it’s a lot easier to get better stirring when the liquid actually covers the stirbar. “Just use a smaller container”, you say, and yes, do so if you start with a small volume. But a lot of times in organic chemistry, you need to isolate the compound from solution by evaporating the solvent. Depending on the concentration, the volume can start large and end much smaller. These flasks can help recover a larger amount of precious material.

Completely rewrite the curriculum and problem sets for my advisor’s grad-level course for flipped-classroom virtual teaching as opposed to in-person lectures. It was the pits for many reasons, not the least of which was that his attitude became “everyone is at home doing nothing, so I can ramble into a recording for 3 h instead of giving 1 h lectures and we can have a full problem set every week instead of 4 in a semester and the scheduled class time is now a problem session amd to answer students’ questions :)”.

And a fuckton of DFT calculations, so honestly, fair.

And calculating far too many digits of π by hand

-onium is usually an extra group/proton (carbonium, oxonium, bromonium…). HO+ isn’t too hard to approximate–just take a hydroperoxide or peroxyacid and add strong acid like with piranha :)

Hydroxyl hydride feels wrong given that hydride is H-. So what’s a good name for HO+…? Oxenium hydride? Hydrenium hydride? (comparing carbonium (CR4H+) vs carbenium (CR3+) and oxonium/hydronium (H3O+))

I think oxenium hydride would be more appropriate than hydroxyl taking into account the polarity of the two fragments (HO+ and H-), though AFAIK there is no standardized name for HO+.