That’s a fancy garden centre! Besides the wildlife of course.

It gets worse the closer you look

Only on pare-substituted borates bearing ligand L groups instead of R-groups. And using a serif font in a chemdraw to add insult to injury (yes, potentially contentious, but I’m a stalwart fan of Arial/Helvetica inline drawings… or comic sans if I’m feeling chaotic evil)

The more you look the worse it gets!

The IUPAC name is aluminium(III) difluorido glyphuloshite.

And saying “organic chemistry” is shorter than saying “structure and reactivity of carbon-based molecules, but not necessarily all carbon based molecules, mostly those that have C-H bonds”

Because it’s all chemistry, just different angles of looking at the science of atoms, whether bonded to other atoms or alone. Even biology that deals with molecules is called molecular biology but has big overlap with biochemistry.

I work with one!

It was -15 C today (I know, nothing compared to prairie winters) and I saw students walking around campus wearing pajama bottoms and slippers.

What is life? Baby don’t hurt me. Great article, and sorry, I couldn’t resist.

Kinetics and mechanism of the ring-opening copolymerization of CO2 and propylene oxide on a two-dimensional Co-Ni double metal cyanide complex The use of CO2 as building block in organic chemistry is compelling due to its availability, cost-effectiveness, and potential to mitigate emissions w…

Great news ahead of Christmas! Our coauthored paper with collaborators in Bilbao has been accepted for publication in Applied Catalysis. Excellent work by Guillermo Penche Hernando helped by Cyler Vos www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Very festive!

It’s always fun to embiggen one’s vocabulary

Portugal Cove Rd and Rennie's Mill Rd between Bannerman Park and First Ave is a downhill/uphill skating rink. Witnessing cars skidding going up and down, blocking traffic and nearly colliding. Easy to tell who's not on winter tires. Salt truck just came by but is now stuck in the traffic as well.

Sam McGee for sure, but also this one: “In this zoo are beasts which
like some truths, are far too true
(clawing ones, and fire-breathers and flesh-rakers like piranhas
and those that crush the bones to chalk
and those that bare their red teeth in the night)” Gwendolyn MacKewen.

All look good except for the ampule of reagent he prepared two weeks ago and was clean by NMR then. Finds the ampule contents were 50% reagent 50% toluene. Suspects coworker stole some reagent and replaced the volume with solvent like a teenager stealing dad’s liquor topping up the bottle with water

A grad school incident: coworker purifies a pesky, moisture sensitive liquid reagent used for a ligand synthesis. Stores it in an ampule. Later makes the ligand as he did many times before. Yield is crap and nmr is a disaster. Repeats. Same. Starts second guessing his technique. NMR of reagents…

We get common solvents filled from drums in stores. Students got hexanes refilled. Used some to rinse Na from oil. Noticed Na was floating and fizzing. Got it TF out of there. Density of “hexanes” seemed high. Turns out they were given dichloromethane instead. Whoops!

I’m a big fan of traditional Christmas gifts

Battle for the Sun rounds out my top 4. Bright Lights is a great track. Surprisingly peppy for them.

My top 3: Without You I’m Nothing; Meds; Sleeping with Ghosts (deluxe 2 disc edition with their cover of running up that hill)

May you be accepted with minor revisions!

I’m currently craving a single plum, floating in perfume, served in a man’s hat, while a menacing clown lurks outside my house and a man in black suit dances to Stealers Wheel with a straight razor.

What underlies all this is an attack on critical thinking and acceptance of statements (ie the solutions manual) without verification of something that sounds wrong. I have great respect for teachers but we also have to have to humility to admit when something sounds off.

We are definitely living in the weirdest timeline

a man with a beard says fire everything we 've go ALT: a man with a beard says fire everything we 've go

Back to back homers on the first two at bats? I’d say so!

a pikachu holding a magnifying glass with the words that 's a twist that 's very twisty ALT: a pikachu holding a magnifying glass with the words that 's a twist that 's very twisty

Watched the lead bounce back and forth until I felt like I was watching a tennis match (albeit with hot chocolate and Amarula... out of Baileys). Went to bed. Woke up. New majority government.

Enjoying a lunch of French Canadian tourtiere when I found some souvenir @acs.org LA local section Tabasco in my drawer from the NOLA National Meeting. A perfect pairing! Laissez les bon temps rouler!

Wizard frog casts “vicious mockery”