fun

Proton Bank In Crisis: Fate of Mechanisms Uncertain

April 1, 2013

NICOSIA, Cyprus – The banking crisis in Cyprus deepened over the weekend, as the Proton Bank, a lender with 31 branches in Greece and Cyprus, announced that it was on the brink of insolvency. After poring over the bank’s ledgers this weekend, European regulators concluded that the bank’s accounts are hopelessly out of balance. Exasperated [...]

Tagged as: fun

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Putting Acidity In Perspective

January 25, 2013

[Source: xkcd hat tip to Mike Evans @mevans86 for finding this] One concept that always seems to have a hard time getting through is that of pKa. No matter how many times I nag students to “know their pKas” or tell them that the “pKa table is your friend” or compare it to a table [...]

Tagged as: acidity, basicity, fun, pka

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A Friday SN1 Haiku

October 26, 2012

Loyal reader Dave sent this in via the comments, and I thought it deserved a wider distribution: ————— Some of my students challenged me to do the upcoming class in haiku. Since a fractional distillation lab is pretty dull to supervise after everyone is up and running, I put the introduction to SN1 in haiku [...]

Tagged as: fun, substitution

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Organic Chemistry Is Shit

November 18, 2011

I’m going to forego Reagent Friday today to talk about something important. Some days you might feel like you can’t escape organic chemistry. You leave the lecture hall and have to study but you wonder if this subject will ever go away. It is driving you insane and you need to make your true feelings [...]

Tagged as: fun, natural products, off topic, poo, weird analogies

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“Compare Organic Chemistry To A Movie…”

October 19, 2011

Love this quote, from Organic Chemistry 1 as a Second Language by David R. Klein (fuller review to come) on organic chemistry and memorization. You probably know at least one person who has seen one movie more than five times and can quote every line by heart. How can this person do that? It’s not because [...]

Tagged as: analogies, electron flow, fun, ochem as a second language, study tips

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Blog Carnival: What the Cope Rearrangement Taught Me About Chemistry

September 26, 2011

Note: to celebrate the International Year of Chemistry 2011, there’s a blog carnival going on. This is my contribution. If you can’t follow the structural details, hopefully the story tells itself without the pictures. You can find the other entries by searching the #chemcarnival hashtag on Twitter – JAA One day in the mid 1990′s [...]

Tagged as: awesomeness, cope rearrangement, fun, Leo Paquette, self-indulgence, self-promotion

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Steric Hindrance is Like a Fat Goalie

July 18, 2011

Sportswriter Todd Gallagher asked a question that every hockey fan has probably asked at one point. “Could a morbidly obese goaltender succeed in the NHL?” As he relates in “Andy Roddick Beat Me With a Frying Pan“, he talked Washington Capitals owner Ted Leonisis into letting him run an experiment. He hired Trevor, a local [...]

Tagged as: fun, leaving groups, nucleophiles, nucleophilic substitution, silly analogies, sn1, SN2, steric hindrance

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I’ll Miss Org Prep Daily

July 6, 2011

I keep telling certain people that the “Master” in “Master Organic Chemistry” is a verb, not a noun. I’m not , God forbid, a “Master of Organic Chemistry”: Mastery is a journey, not necessarily a destination. That goes for me just as much as anyone who is studying organic chemistry for the first time. There’s [...]

Tagged as: blogging, explosions, fun, resources, stories

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Class exercise: Come up with a synthesis for this illegal drug

June 7, 2011

A while ago I got the following letter from a concerned parent (lightly edited for length). I was shocked when my daughter came home from organic chemistry lecture the other day and lamented that her organic chemistry instructor had on a quiz, the following question: Synthesize methamphetamine from pseudoephedrine in six steps. I understand that [...]

Tagged as: controversy, dark arts of chemistry, drugs, fun, meth, synthesis, teaching

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On SN1/SN2/E1/E2 and NCAA Basketball

April 7, 2011

That title seems random. What similarities are there between evaluating reactions in organic chemistry and betting on college basketball? Ridiculous question. None at all, right? Bear with me. I’d argue that one thing these two activities have in common is a thought process. In each case, the person evaluating SN1/SN2/E1/E2 and a bettor have to [...]

Tagged as: complexity, elimination, fun, gambling, multivariable, sn1, SN2, substitution, weirdness

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