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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • I know of a manager who unironically believes this for internal corporate technical reports (ours are academic style and more rigorous and formal than they need be…). It’s not quite to this extent, but I’ve overheard conversations where the manager apparently can’t fathom why their subordinates are incapable of double digits over a year.





  • 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.






  • ornery_chemist@mander.xyztoScience Memes@mander.xyzy tho
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    9 months ago

    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.







  • ornery_chemist@mander.xyztoScience Memes@mander.xyz(・・;φ
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    11 months ago

    I know that this is partially a joke, but I was trying to figure out what kind of lab would be done to produce chloroform that would be appropriate for students (recent OSHA crackdown on chloromethanes notwithstanding)… haloform reaction I suppose? Is that a common teaching lab experiment?


  • My mom took my little brother to participate in a child psych study like this when he was a toddler (mom had some ties to the university). It was a very similar experiment with skittles as the prize. My brother sat staring glumly at the candy the whole time. The test administrator was increasingly enthusastic with praise after each round right up until the end when she congratulated him and said that he could have the whole bag. He said “no thanks” and ran back to mom crying because he was told there would be candy but they only had skittles, which he very much did not like (and for that matter still doesn’t). The administrator was apparently embarrassed and told my mom that she thought that all kids liked skittles…


  • According to my buddy who worked for Dow, part of these “savings” apparently was taking a hatchet to their R&D segment with a bunch of spray-and-pray layoffs (apparently a common happening these days). I realize Dow is mostly commodity chemicals these days which is much more preservative in nature than other segments of the chemical industry, but even so it sounds like they are killing any hope of competing with new technologies and moving to the “squeeze as much as possible out before it goes tits up” stage.