ornery_chemist

joined 2 years ago
[–] ornery_chemist@mander.xyz 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

and get rid of my one kitchen crutch? absolutely not

[–] ornery_chemist@mander.xyz 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Sure, there may be a maximal element, but not necessarily a maximum (there might be multiple people of equal and maximal gayness, not just one person).

Also, not relevent to the logic here per se, but last time this went around the conclusion was that a spectrum implies a total order, not just partial.

[–] ornery_chemist@mander.xyz 12 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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...

[–] ornery_chemist@mander.xyz 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Tips on containers that won't splode in the freezer with soups, sauces, etc?

[–] ornery_chemist@mander.xyz 1 points 1 week 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?

[–] ornery_chemist@mander.xyz 4 points 1 week ago

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....

[–] ornery_chemist@mander.xyz 14 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

^dontthinkaboutitdontthinkaboutitdontthinkaboutit^

[–] ornery_chemist@mander.xyz 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I realize (and you mentioned) that sugar is not a well defined term, but calling degradation products of ethanol in gas "sugars" is still a bit of a stretch. Ethanol by itself usually forms some combination of acetaldehyde, acetic acid, 2-carbon peroxides, and CO2 (i.e. not sugars) upon autoxidation, though those species can react with other components of gasoline to form the precipitated "gum". The structure of gum in the literature is pretty hand-wavy (high MW materials kinda just be like that sometimes) but tends to be much more more oxygen-deficient than conventional "sugars" (polysaccharides) even for ethanol blends and contains a wider variety of substructures. Though, I have seen some papers talking about certain microbes that can ferment the ethanol in gasoline, possibly via sugars, but I don't think that's the common degradarion pathway for a mower.

[–] ornery_chemist@mander.xyz 9 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[–] ornery_chemist@mander.xyz 8 points 3 weeks ago

On the other hand having a manager willing to yell at/stonewall the MBAs when they ~~deliberately lie about~~ misinterpret your recommendations and timelines is a godsend.

[–] ornery_chemist@mander.xyz 3 points 3 weeks ago

Rent. Probably could buy if I got my shit together, but I'm skeptical that my employer won't go down the toilet in the next few years with the "pricing pressures" and the fact that they just laid off like 60% of their non-preservative R&D staff.

[–] ornery_chemist@mander.xyz 9 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

A bunch of electrons? Nah F only ever wants just one more than its natural allotment. But it is extremely, violently jealous of that electron.

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