If Hemingway were a Chemist ...

So, from the shadows of self imposed exile the sleeping chembloggers of the early 2000's awaken and realize that the intertubes are dangerously low on chem research gossip, Nobel prize in Biology speculations and inter vs intra chemistry department politics (with cathartic posts made and then unmade). Even Homebrew has lifted his head from his desk and contributed if only to say "meh".

The chembloggers all seem to recently have had a weird nerdgasm about energetic materials, even the redoubtable Gandalf of the chemblogosphere, Lowe the Grey, greatest of all chembloggersTM, has made mention about a specific researcher.

Friends, I got my first job as a summer research assistant because a graduate student sheared the ends of his fingers off when a 10 mg sample of tellurium azide exploded inside a metal can reaction vessel. They needed "fresh fingers". We changed to large volume, glass reaction vessels so that the lower bursting pressure of glass would fail at lower energies and bagged the X-ray structure of that sucker. We routinely made and worked with gram quantities of pure S4N4 the true "left hand of Satan". To prepare it for chemistry we had to grind crystals of the stuff into a powder (if it wasn't kinda "crackly" it wasn't pure enough).

There is a reason why some reagents and some chemical reactions have not been reported yet. When it comes to some binary and trinary combinations of elements the path to the chemistry textbooks is very ... Darwinian. And let's face it boys and girls, the true measure of success in chemistry is not measured in prizes. True impact is when your research makes them change the content of the second year sub-discipline textbooks. If the teaching community believes that your research has to be mentioned to second year chemistry students then you have made an impact. Anything else just says that you have enough friends to throw a party.

When Thomas Klapotke joined our lab he was making piano stool metal carbonyl complexes in beakers on the benchtop. We taught him how to make and handle energetic materials. In fact, he watched over our shoulders while we did it. He was amazing to work with. He would work a full day in the lab and then put in at least a six hour shift on his own research (which I helped him with from time to time). That way, when he finished his post-doc with us he had three papers under his own name, on his own research, ready to submit. But don't think that he was all work. He arrived in North America and looked at the local cars then decided that he would have his own car shipped from Germany rather than ride was was available here. I remember reading the German on the side of his tires "these winter tires are not recommended for speeds above 180 km/hr."

Now to be fair to our little branch of Main Group Chemistry, the prevailing attitude towards lab accidents had a Hemingway / Nietzsche flair to them. I mean when you are working with explosives and elemental fluorine confidence mixed with fatalism is the only worldview that allows you to slip on your codpiece in the morning and face your supervisor.

Our conferences were always dodgy when it came to first time, face to face meetings. Handshakes were fumbled because of missing fingers (you ever shake the hand of someone missing a thumb?). I remember a conference in Banff where a bunch of Old School Main Group Chemists re-enacted the scene from "Jaws" where they compared scars from chemical explosions. The winner would have to be a chemist from Germany who must have had the skin flayed his arm and the scar tissue went on, and on, and on ...

Therefore it was not astonishing that a few years after he left us Thomas sent us a letter with some enclosed photos. I will let his wry comment close this post.

Back to the Future

In celebration of the return of ChemBark and Propter Doc I must pop up this tiny offering on my series on chemistry used to sell things. I see Future Shop in Canada is trying to convince people to buy flat screen TVs with images of chemistry.

It is a bit confused, but internally correct. There are two balanced chemical reactions listed one of the reaction of nitric acid with copper and the second appears to be an acid with carbonic acid. There is a dilution calculation and a freezing point depression calculation, a correct statement of the molar mass of hexachloroethane and parts of a larger organic molecule. As far as I can see the individual bits are correct.

Chemistry doesn't need to be cool when it functions iconically as something within the practical world of the general population that is "useful" but also advanced and capable of creating a better future. In reality that is all that advertising really sells ... a better future if you buy what we are selling. Chemistry doesn't need to be understood when it delivers a meta-narrative of progress.

I see that when they needed something to symbolize the quality of the image and technology they did not go to biology (too low and muddy) or physics (too arid and mathematical).

Chemistry sells. Now if we could just get a commemorative posting from HomeBrew we could rock out like it was 2005 all over again.

Gateway Thoughts on Science

I can remember reading science books when I was in elementary school and thinking that the more science a person knew the more answers that you could give to interesting questions. What I noticed was that it was not the Trivial Pursuit questions that interested me (although I got the biggest pay back from teachers for just knowing stuff that blew them away). The questions that I liked knowing the answers for were things like why clouds are flat on the bottom and why is space black if it is filled with light.

That said it, is the stereotype circus science that seems to always be the "gateway thought" (sort of like marijuana being thought of as the gateway drug (when in my opinion it is alcohol (or caffeine))). It is important however for us in Science to remember that there has to be something that grabs children and makes them re-think becoming a fireman as a career. In chemistry it is the inevitable "Magic Show" (shudder) with faux wizards, bangs and flashes that seem to get that first response. In a horrible way it would be like a model for Christianity where you would use televangelists to do children outreach. In fact, I do a school outreach presentation entitled "Not a Magic Show" where I do the regular stuff but underpinning it all is a grade appropriate explanation for what the students are seeing. I even have a logo.

But still ...

I think XKCD caught a shadow of this idea in their most recent strip (as a disclaimer I will note that XKCD is an "adult" webcomic that explores modern life from a engineering / science perspective and veers sometimes into NSFW).

Click on image to embiggen

I guess what I am trying to say is that sometimes the complete mis-understanding of what Science actually is may be our best way of promoting it to children. But then again that is a model that works for religion, politics and relationships. Does all of life have to be the Dance of the Seven Veils?

The Stupid It Burns

This image was drawn by Ahren Paulson and picked up by Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy . This image deserves more circulation in the science / chemistry blogosphere and its own acronym ... TSIB (The Stupid It Burns). This would have helped Kyle at The Chem Blog in his discussions on the pseudoscience techno-babble surrounding "organic salt".

Speaking of TSIB I find it ironic that one of the most common sources of TSIB is the advertizing section of Popular Science. As just a quick example we have the good people who have this ad...and they provide this helpful table ... TSIB people, TSIB.

I Can See Clearly Now the Snow Has Gone ...

The storm largely passed in the night and I was able to swamp my way into Liberal University and this is the view out the Liberal Lab Window this morning. Pretty, but getting pretty old. There is enough heat to the ground and the Sun now that this should all be a passing bad memory within a couple of days.

For me this is the last week of classes. I have been getting frantic emails from the students, especially the marginal ones, asking Me (!) what lab reports they haven't submitted and what the late penalties would be for late work. This is my own fault since my late penalties bottom out at 45% and that means anything submitted late retains some value until the end of semester. And some of them need the marks.

I also have some students that have gotten some quack MD to back date medical excuses for when the students were sick earlier in the semester. This means that I will either have to set the labs that they missed for them this week or come up with an equivalent replacement. Two weeks, one fortnight, 13 sleeps and the madness will be over.

Then I have to get ready for my Science Camp for Homeschooled High School students in early May. Win!

Greetings of the Day

Hello everyone, we had 30 cm snow last night and have 20 cm more coming today. At least we had a week of warmer weather to cut down on the accumulated snow and ice. The old farmers said that a spring snow was "the poor man's fertilizer". But still, it is hard to celebrate the day when you have to shovel your driveway.

This is what Liberal House looks like today.

Anyway, life goes on so as a shout out to Homebrew I give you the ... ETHER BUNNY!

So now we will know ...

We are all pretty much aware of the the study relating airplane contrail clouds to global warming and the way that the study was advanced by the clear skies following the 9-11 attacks and the grounding of all aircraft over the continental United States (LINK). It was a dreadful cost to reveal the truth about a link that would not have been revealed in any other way. Of course there are those that dispute the correlation (LINK).

A recent column in the Globe and Mail got me thinking in the same direction (LINK). In the column it was pointed out that the world econopalypse was going to accomplish what no manner of evangelical environmental preaching had failed to do. With the collapse of the world economy the entire world will reduce, re-use and recycle out of necessity. The generation of green house gases linked to industrial activity will also be dramatically reduced.

My question is if we are going to be able to use this dreadful window of opportunity to both measure and test the accuracy of our climate models. I have been looking to see if anyone is thinking this way but am not seeing it. Of course, it all depends on how deep and long this financial crisis lasts but more than any other factor it will cause the world to do exactly what Gore and the environmental catastrophists have been saying we need to do. I can only hope that we will never have this chance again.