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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • No dunking, and make sure what you’re buying is mostly alcohol (> 95%) and not water/alcohol mixtures often used for disinfection. Using in combination with e.g., a toothbrush is probably your best bet. IPA (and acetone) can strip some adhesives and cause certain kinds of electrical insulation to swell or dissolve, so a targeted approach is better. IPA is flammable (though less so than acetone), so be careful/well ventilated when allowing parts to dry, and ensure parts are fully dried before reconnecting to power.

    IPA itself is only about twice as toxic as ethanol and certainly less problematic by inhalation than tar in the long run. I wouldn’t bother with a mask mostly because it won’t do shit unless it’s a cartridge respirator. However, IPA can sometimes facilitate skin absorption. IDK specifically about tar buildup but recommend wearing gloves (disposable nitrile is fine).


  • … this sounds absurd to me, at least as stated wrt the enzymes “dissolving” the floaters. Your body does not like foreign proteases floating around. I am also skeptical that the enzymes would survive denaturing and pepsin et al. in the stomach and duodenum (empty stomach or not), get absorbed intact, and somehow not get inactivated by the immune system (again, rogue protease = bad). Not to say that your floaters weren’t reduced (though the brain sometimes will just learn to ignore them) or even that the supplement wasn’t responsible via metabolites. Just, action of an intact enzyme itself seems unlikely. Corrections welcome; I’m going off my gut here and am not a biologist.


  • Do not power law fit your process data for predictive models. No. Stop. Put the keyboard down. Your model will almost certainly fail to extrapolate beyond the training range. Instead, think for at least two seconds about the chemistry and the process, maybe review your kinetics textbook, and only then may you fit to a physics-based model for which you will determine proper statistical significance. Poor fit? Too bad, revise your assumptions or reconsider whether your “data” are really just noise.

    Always run qNMR with an internal standard if you are using it to determine purity. And, as a corollary, do not ignore unidentified peaks. Yes, even if it “has always been that way”.

    DOE models almost certainly tell you less than you think they do, especially when cross-terms are involved, or when the effects are categorical, or when running a fractional factorial design…


  • ornery_chemist@mander.xyztome_irl@lemmy.worldme_irl
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    2 months ago

    It’s not necessarily the cleanest reaction, but yes. That said, if you’re thinking of its Hollywood use case as a quick knockout agent, it’s not very effective for that purpose. It’s not non-hazardous, though; exposure for several minutes can cause dizziness and fainting, and prolonged storage can lead to phosgene formation through autoxidation.


  • 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.


  • 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.

    Answer

    This ends up being about 5% lower than the true answer. I’m surprised it’s that close. This is in the opposite direction from what I expected given wall effects (which would decrease the real number relative to my estimate). Perturbing one of the base diameters by 1 nut causes a swing of ~50, so measurement error is quite important.


  • 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.


  • Yes and no. No surface tension implies vanishing intermolecular forces, so the liquid would not be cohesive and would expand in all directions to the volume of the room… which is pretty much the definition of a gas. Not quite though: supercritical fluids also do this as long as temperature and pressure remain high enough, and are indeed useful in niche applications industrially.




  • I’m not sure I’d call US sunscreens way worse (they are still very effective at blocking UVB, just not UVA as effectively), but there are definitely better options abroad. There definitely aren’t many options; that’s part of why Hawaii banning two common sunscreen ingredients for marine toxicity reasons was such a big deal.


  • Not saying that it’s necessarily a bad option, but my biggest issue with delta chat is that it does not offer forward secrecy (if a user’s private key is compromised, past messages can be revealed); Signal does. Delta no question beats signal in decentralization, though email is less decentralized than it seems–how many people do you know who still use gmail? Delta also inherently leaks metadata on whom you’re communicating with to the email host (that’s just imap/smtp). Signal can mitigate this somewhat with Sealed Sender (which gives one-way anonymity), though it can be broken with statistical analysis, and signal metadata is more identifying due to requiring a phone number.




  • ornery_chemist@mander.xyztoMemes@sopuli.xyzWhy
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    9 months ago

    For those who did a search only to get back pages of less-than-useless SEO slop that just recites the number line, here is something that better describes some of the grammatical insanity.

    also, czterydzieści cztery is imo one of the less pronounceable words (well, two of them) in Polish.



  • Yes, on the rare occasion I cook meat. Too unpracticed otherwise. I originally got one because I’m colorblind and was scared of undercooking red meat and tired of eating leather. As a bonus, I used it to get the temperature right when I got into fancier teas and inadvertently trained myself to judge the temperature of water pouring into my mug by the sound it makes within a couple °C, which is kinda neat. Now, if I could figure out how to do something similar so I stop overcooking food, that’d be grand…