Picture of a whiteboard with a Friedel-Crafts acylation, benzyne reaction, Clemmensen reduction, Sandmeyer reaction, and Hantzsch pyridine synthesis.
Looks like somebody was studying for my exam. They have neater boardwork than me!
A TV showing a picture of a row of coffins with three helmets on top.... if you have a gut feeling something is off, trust it!
Revisiting some fun childhood TV memories, randomly rediscovered the Ray Bradbury Theatre:
Man Who Threw Molotov Cocktail At Sam Altman’s Home Claims He Was Following ChatGPT Recipe For Risotto
Man Who Threw Molotov Cocktail At Sam Altman’s Home Claims He Was Following ChatGPT Recipe For Risotto theonion.com/man-who-threw-molotov-co...
NYT spelling bee rejecting TURGOR
My hopes for a neat word wilted:
2 Kessel LEDs pointing at a 2 vials, which are fluorescing green, and maxing out the camera. There's a fan behind them.
Zapping something with a lot of photons!
It took me an embarrassingly long time to get "Absorber of UV light" on the NYT crossword.
Now I'm sitting in my office all teary-eyed. Watching the distance record for the moon mission!
For 5 of the 12 people who walked on the moon, that was their first, and for 4 of them, only spaceflight. And if you really get into the weeds, for Shepard (5th to walk on the moon) it was his first spaceflight longer than 16 minutes.(2/2)
I've seen a few comments on Jeremy Hansen being a rookie astronaut, and how unusual that is for a flight to the moon. In fact, as a Apollo history buff, that was not unusual. Of all the Apollo missions, 10 and 11 were the only ones where the entire crew had flown in space before. (1/2)
Close-up of Hoya flower, a cluster of pink star-shaped flowers with 5 points with a deeper pink centre.
Picture of 3 flower clusters on hoya, not yet open.
My office Hoya has 14 umbels that are flowering or about to flower! That might be a new record for me!
NYT spelling bee rejecting alkane
Grr:
Very cool. I did not catch this was a night side image, but should have by the fact the stars are visible ;) Very different photographic technologies and sensitivity compared to the Apollo missions!
I'd estimate I write over 1000 words every day, between e-mail, social media, other work, and my writing for fun. I love writing, so one thing I've been very resistant to doing is ever using an AI writing tool.
The Artemis astronauts are already further from the Earth than anyone has been in my lifetime! As an Apollo buff, so cool to listen to them.
Google scholar screenshot of "Diazaphospholene precatalysts for imine and conjugate reductions", with citation number 100, and publication year 2017.
Sweet, first time I've had a paper pass 100 citations!
"Pare-substituted" showing a tetravalent bromine.
Spotted while reading a review.
No, because the search will then work if we have to do it in front of somebody else!
Yes, I am well aware of the enshittification..... I'll search for an e-mail that's *right there* in my inbox, and it will fail to find it, or it will return 1000 hits, in no relevant order. I have resorted to having many many folders, folders for each colleague, task, etc.
Interesting.... there was a date error in it (it was regarding my exam on the "19th", which is a Sunday), so maybe they did that. But it was all within 30 seconds. Got the e-mail, clicked on the link (it was an internal link, so I wasn't phished), and then went to archive the e-mail, and poof, gone!
I'm losing my mind: received an e-mail regarding some course stuff for booking final exam, acted on it, and now the e-mail has disappeared, and I can't find it anywhere (ie not in trash, archive, etc). Are disappearing e-mails a thing? Did I imagine the e-mail?
Picture of a sensitive plant in a white bowl, next to a computer monitor on a desk.
Picture of a sensitive plant, flowering, with pink flowers, on a desk.
I had a delightful two hour trip down memory lane going through old photos to find these!
Picture of a computer screen with a HPLC trace. A peak with 500 mAu is just coming off, none of the other peaks are higher than 75 mAu.
Here's a day that sticks with me. It was a sweltering, miserably hot day in the lab. Also the first e.r. > 90:10 we ever saw from DAP chemistry. I was sitting watching the peaks come off. The minor enantiomer elutes first, and when I saw the second peak go up and up was a very good moment!
I had a sensitive plant in my office. Made a great conversation piece, but was a casualty of a lax watering schedule, coupled with overzealous building heating. I've struggled to get more recent ones to stay alive.
Dreaming of trains... here's a shot from northern New Brunswick when I took the Via 14 last summer!
Both from Betamax King! ..... Now I have a new rabbit hole to go down.....
I'll confess I just used AI to run a search for me based on my recollection of it, and it found it..... I guess I may not have taken away so much from the ad, given the waste that AI represents!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bkto...
I assume some environmental message. I'm pretty sure it's real (ie I didn't make it up), but I may have misinterpreted it, so am misremembering it, or it could have just been some brief or niche ad that happened to stick with me, but was otherwise ephemeral. So many ads from that time must be lost.
You're the second person who has recommended N.K. Jemisin to me in the past couple of months, so I'll definitely put her high on my list!
There's an ad of a similar vintage I remember where it's polluted, and somebody puts coins in a kiosk to get a breath of fresh air from a mask. It doesn't work. They walk off, and the camera zooms in to show a frog hiding in the mask (and presumably breathing the air). I'd love to find that clip!
I read in the evenings to relax.
Feel like a re-read, but not sure what to tackle?
His Dark Materials
I-Robot short stories
the Algebraist
Three Body
Lord Valentine's Castle
Something else?
I recently re-read Asimov's Robot books, Octavia Butler's Parable books, and Swiss Family Robinson.
