It happens in industry, too, but often it’s even the stakeholders’ fault :) I’ve still got so many reports to write…

Papers!

(jk my company mandates it after unilaterally deciding to stop paying for endnote and forbids other software im miserable send help)

In grocery stores in many parts of the US at least, it is extremely hard not to find bread in plastic bags. Even the one of 3 near me that has its own bakery puts the bread in a plastic bag, and then in another bag that is paper with a plastic “window”, and the paper part has a PE wax lining for god knows what reason.

something to do with liquid nitrogen? /s

A French-American guy (grew up in US) in my school described an encounter at a zoo when he was a young. Apparently, he ran up to the exhibit and shouted, “look! it’s a daddy fuck and a mommy fuck with a baby fuck!”, much to the chagrin of his parents.

Hot take: calories are the more intuitive energy unit. “How much energy it takes to heat 1 mL aka 1 g water 1°C” is more relatable than “how much energy it takes to move a 1 kg mass 1 m while accelerating that mass at 1 m/s/s”.

kcal = Cal is silly though

Side note: I know that the heating water thing is problematic because it depends on T, P, and purity (yay thermo), which is why these days cal is defines in terms of J. That does not change my opinion.

But… but… muh thulium…

jk all lanthanides are the same don’t @ me physicists

also Ce(IV) catalyst stans

also also total synthesis tryhards who think SmI2 is ever the right call

Phosphorus, sulfur, …?

Most chem PhDs don’t even know the whole thing lol. We had to memorize just the symbols in high school, but positions weren’t required. In my grad-level inorg course, the first test was a blank table that we had to fill in, but even then the f-block and transactinides were not required.

Mitochondrion

Oh, I’m sure this’ll end well.

/s

Corpse, Corps, Horse, and Worse

I will keep you, Susy, busy,

Make your head with heat grow dizzy;

Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear;

Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.

banger poem

Best I can tell from quick internet searches: Old English: wīfmann/menn (“female person/s”). The w rounded the following vowel giving a wo- pronunciation, which for some reason (umlaut?) stuck for the singular but not the plural. The spelling of the plural changed to match that of the singular in spite of the pronunciation.

* Everything here carries the caveat “in some dialects, …” because English

Nah, reach is a huge advantage. I’m not sure how rapier fencing differs from regulation sabre/epée/foil, but here’s my 2 cents from that perspective:

Smaller people are not, as a rule, substantially quicker than larger. If you see any difference in your experience, it’s likely a selection bias (shorter people have to be quicker to compete at the same level). The shorter person must enter the strike range of the taller person before the taller person comes within theirs and must be significantly quicker or more skilled to overcome that dead space. If the taller person can maintain a proper distance, gg. Taller people can also lunge farther, giving a wider active range.

Targeting is a smaller issue than you make it out to be; footwork and maintaining balance, which reposition the core, are at least as important as leaning to dodge, and advantage the taller person (longer legs = more movement range). If the taller person is coming from above as you say, they can just continue their slash (sabre) downward toward that less mobile core, or squat a bit deeper if the arc won’t reach. If instead you were referring to a poke, they’re either already targeting the torso anyway (foil) or whatever body part is most easily reachable (epée; still often torso, but cheeky wrist/arm strikes can be something of an equalizer here), and anyway they are already striking at a range that the shorter person cannot, making a successful counterattack more difficult.

Besides reach, a height difference is brutal when it comes to sabre fencing; the shorter person is restricted to targeting arms and torso (can’t reach the head easily), so the taller person can anticipate strikes from fewer angles. The taller person can come from any direction and has gravity on their side for own overhead strikes. Those suck to defend against.

Or when you ask for feedback on the structure and what to include before you polish a bunch of stuff that would be cut or rewritten, only to be returned a half-finished low-effort style (“grammar”) nit-pick of a draft with increasingly angry comments about repeated “errors”, culminating with swearing at you, how dare you waste his time, how dare you not read his Grammar_Lesson.docx (God help you, you did) and submit a draft that doesn’t follow its rules (it was largely compliant), you’re a native English speaker anyhow and should know better, and what the fuck is compound 12a, you didn’t define it anywhere but keep referring to it (it was defined in-text in the previous paragraph and in the figure above it), fix it all and the rest of the doc before you bother him again.

that yellow and that green are problematically close

Good article, reactive web design notwithstanding (stop. breaking. my. scrolling). I’m not surprised that obtaining the chemicals was that easy, even accounting for the mislabeling and fake products. A lot of these chemicals are pretty simple and have pretty general use cases in the fine chemicals space. Hell, I had occasion to use (2-bromoethyl)benzene, aniline, and propionyl chlorde in school for making random precursors and ligands, albeit separately. I wonder if they are at all harder to procure nowadays because of the fentanyl epidemic.

Edit: checked some of my old work, didn’t actually use (2-bromoethyl)benzene but did make a related compound as an intermediate for ligand synthesis using a very satisfying Appel reaction.

Depends what is meant by green. Acetone is decent for health and safety (flammability notwithstanding) but is produced from petrochemicals and tied to the production of phenol (petroleum -> benzene and propane (or natural gas -> propane), propane -> propylene, benzene + propylene -> cumene, cumene + O2 -> phenol + acetone). Not much chlorophyll involved. Also has somewhere between a moderate to obscene CO2 burden depending on how you draw that box in and around the oil industry, but so do most commodity chemicals.

I for one haven’t used heavy metal catalysts in a year

Maybe not directly, but a lot of commodity chemicals rely on some truly vile metal mixtures for catalysis :)

Aqua regia ain’t no piranha, and also ain’t the most concerning thing in my post lol.

Ah bromime. Super dense, low MW, and low bp, all making dosing accurate amounts a heroic feat. If you store your bromine cold, you can precool the pipette by sucking up and spitting out a few times before transfering, which helps cut down the vapor.