mississippichem

If you consistently put in good work, you should be fine. However, you must be quick to recognize when something is hard because you're missing a more fundamental skill. For example, you might find that some of your chemistry problems are hard because you have trouble with some of the math. Don't just study harder on chemistry: find a tutor or a book to help you with the math, so you can succeed with the chemistry.

This is great advice for all science students. It is important to note that a good understanding of basic physics will also come to one's aid in the study of chemistry. Don't get me wrong, the ability to solve trajectory problems will not directly help one do chemistry. But in the end, chemistry is what you get when you take all of physics as an axiom and apply it to the interactions between atoms. More physics and math is always good for a budding chemist. Always.

Quite a few people don't recognize this, and so they just try to memorize ways of solving problems, instead of learning their missing skill. They end up struggling through classes.

Memorization: the number one route to death by a thousand cuts. Memorization displays its weakness when one sees a problem where the fundamental conditions of the problem are different but the guiding principle is the same. Those who have true understanding are not shaken by these problems but enlightened. Those who rely on memory begin to get flustered at this point.

Memorization has its place in chemistry (stuff like memorizing polyatmoic ions and such), but it is no substitute for a real understanding of the subject. Memorization is necessary but not sufficient.

Colleges always have a pile of opportunities to get help: study groups, tutors, TAs, office hours, and so on. Make use of some of them. (Study groups are good; you get to screw around while pretending you're doing work.)

Indeed. Also make friends with upperclassmen undergrads and grad students. They can be powerful allies.

OP,

I'm sure you'll do fine if you are willing to work and learn to love the subject. You appear to have both of these qualities as you care enough to ask strangers for advice.

Good Luck

EDIT: English

So, if the arms of the probe is close enough of each surface molecules, the UV irradiation will bind them together covalently.

Would you mind explaining this part in a bit more detail? Photodissociation followed by a bond forming event can be some difficult to chemistry to make happen predictably. The nature of the photodissociation will be highly dependent on the reactivity of the molecule and the immediate neighborhood of functionality present. For example, the presence of a nearby phosphorus atom (nearby to your photo-labile group) will make this difficult.

Could you perhaps provide an explicit pair of molecules as an example?

I didn't watch the video so forgive me if this has been addressed there.

But a God, First Force, Deity, whatever you want to call it, is by definition a metaphysical being, that is a being not bound by the laws of physics.

And so far there have been zero agreed upon examples of metaphysical beings existing. Provide one verifiable example of anything violating the principles of physics. I'll accept absolutely any example as long as we can agree that it actually happened (the event must be objectively verified, think courtroom evidence).

I've made this challenge way too many times on the internet. I've yet to even see a valiant attempt.

Since it appears to me that physical matter cannot be responsible for its own genesis...

I'm sorry but that has absolutely no basis in reality. It is merely baseless opinion. In addition, I don't think many make the claim that matter can "be responsible for it's own genesis". Many atheist just asset that a universe might be able to exist without a real causal agent, especially an anthropomorphic causal agent with a beard who disapproves of our sex lives and doesn't like us to eat fish on Friday.

then something other than a physical object must have produced it. There is nothing either hypocritical or broken about that line of thought.

The premise is broken so the conclusions that follow are unlikely to be valid.

No matter how much literary meandering we do by redefining things as metaphysical or claiming that they exist because they exist as beliefs in peoples' heads, the fact still remains that there is absolutely ZERO objective evidence of the existence of any deity.

All of the evidence presented in favor of the existence of a deity in this thread has either been false or can be applied to the existence of any mythical being or un-falsifiable notion.

I hesitate to call anyone broken, because let's face it, we've all believed in some form of nonsense at one point. However I can, with confidence, state that the system of logic that humans use to justify the existence of the non-existent is beyond broken to say the least. It is a classic example of a conclusion looking for supporting evidence, or even worse...a conclusion still trying to define it's own hypothesis in post.

Anyone who uses faith to justify their belief should be subjected to a trial by jury were they are given guilty verdict based on faith alone.

Faith: not good enough for courts, not good enough for science, not even good enough for casual conversation...It does just fine to prove the existence of that which clearly does not exist. That, readers of SFN, is broken.

It was funny, I lawled. I just assumed the cartoon was meant to initiate some deeper conversation, it is in the ed. section and not the lounge! Nobody beat me up now k . . . .

I won't beat you up...for now .

Xitten,

I agree that there are a lot of ways to make a career in technical fields. But I wasn't really trying to make a sociopolitical statement. I was just making a casual statement in the spirit of the OP's cartoon.

My advice, get yourself on a plumbers or a builders course. Far better job prospects and security.

Highly educated types sometimes look down on tradespeople for being uneducated or unintelligent. A plumber has already bought two cars and paid off a house by the time a scientist gets an entry level PhD position. Who's really the smart one?

So organic farming produces skinny police officers? ( I just couldn't help myself...)

You should see what it does to the firemen...

i think organic is a much over used buzzword, dog shit is organic but i don't want it on my food.

 

Should certain pesticides not be used or at least be regulated? yes i think we can agree on that but as someone who grew up on a farm that used pesticides on a limited basis and artificial fertilizer not at all I can tell you it is very labor intensive and prone to iffy results.

 

As for things like mad cow, it's lack of regulation and basically stupid things like the processed flesh of sick animals being used as feed to vegetarian animals not organic vs inorganic. in the US at one time dead animals off the side of roads was ground up and fed to our food animals. This is simply asking for problems, at some point some sort of risk vs cost has to be figured out. Both in how we raise our food and how we regulate that process, using meaningless buzz words like organic and inorganic to influence people in ways that have little basis is reality will hurt us all.

Agreed. I most certainly think that pesticide usage should be regulated. I just think that (as I read that you do as well) those regulations should be based on hard science instead of mass hysteria and misplaced panic. If we regulate correctly, with the input of relevant experts, we can ensure that no good pesticide technologies are overlooked for irrational fear, and that no dangerous pesticide technologies reach the market.

Of course one can always make the argument that some bad ones will always slip through the regulatory or laboratory cracks. They have and will continue to. But that's just the nature of human progress. Had we not gone to space for fear of astronaut deaths...well we wouldn't have gone to space, and that sucks. Had we not tried new drugs for fear of patient death we wouldn't be in as good of health as we are now.

The scientific process is such that over large timescales superior methods will become more used provided that the economics of the situation allow.

missippichem from your name I guess you are in the US which has long generated a significantly larger beef production than the UK, the country to which I referred in this instance.

 

Intensive farming allowed a greater cattle population per acre than the land itself would sustain, with additional food being supplied from elsewhere. Cattle are herbivores but were fed on diet increasingly including animal 'residue'.

Two effects flowed from this.

 

Firstly BSE took hold in some of the cattle population.

Secondly a variation of the disease spread to some humans associated with these cattle who then died a horrible death.

 

No organic beef cattle contracted BSE and no workers on organic farms contracted CJD.

 

Eventually the UK government had to slaughter and burn the carcasses of pretty well every beef cow in Britain and import clean replacement yearlings.

All were slaughtered, whether they had the disease or not.

 

That included the cows from blameless organic farms who did not practice this method of feeding.

 

The taxpayer also had to compensate the owners of all these cows, many farmers nevertheless went bust.

The export and home sale of UK beef was banned for several years.

 

Finally new regulations were introducted outlawing these feeds.

studiot,

Thanks for engaging me on this. This is a topic that I enjoy debating because it's a relevant societal issue where ideology will only have minimal interference and one where there is a lot of room for give and take from both sides, i.e. there is no dichotomy.

I accept your example as a demonstration of how modern farming has some shortcomings. However, I think that the answer to these is to be found in more advanced biotechnology, my reasoning being that we cannot go back to the levels of production from the past as there are simply more people in the world now. Pandora is out of the box.

In the USA and Argentina where they have large wide open ranges and relatively natural feeding regimes they did not experience this problem.

I agree that this may be evidence supporting your assertion but I disagree that the feedstock being natural has anything to do with it. The outbreak of BSE is a great example of what happens when food science is not done well or rigorously enough. Those farmers were using a food source for their cattle that came with a high contamination risk for prions. They did not carry out the necessary purification/cleansing steps (which IIRC for prion eradication calls for quite extreme conditions) and that risk was realized as an outbreak. Technology has provided solutions to almost every agricultural problem in the past, why will it not in the future?

Now I don't fully support organic methods since they include disallowing modern vetinary treatment (drugs) of sick animals.

Agreed.

Let me also add that I am sorry if anyone felt personally attacked by my comment it was not meant that way. It is a shame that it was not seen for what it was - a wry observation about the similarity of the initial responses. It was meant to evoke a wry chuckle, not merit the furore that ensued. A chuckle of the sort I would give if someone said to me "engineers are all the same the tell us the project will cost £1billiion and £2billion later they still haven't finished.

 

go well

Hey no problem. Sometimes gestures and intricacies of conversation are not well conveyed in text. No harm no foul. I'm just glad things worked out.

As regards to the defensiveness of some to my comment about chemists, I thought it a bit odd that their response was the same as our glorious politicians through most of the Salmonella, CJD, BSE, foot and mouth and other crises viz 'everything in the techno garden is lovely and the only viable economic method'

How does that invalidate any statement made in this thread? The fact that a politician said it does not make it wrong.

Show how organic farming can be a viable method. Yes modern methods have had some slips with disease outbreak. How many disease outbreaks might there have ben without rigorous chemical and biological quality control?

As a taxpayer who has been footing the bill for this 'economic method of beef farming by totally destroying a country's beef population' I feel I have a right to question this.

You do have a right to question it. I'm not questioning your right to question. Please explain how any country's beef population was destroyed by modern methods.

We are only having a discussion/debate that is typical of this forum. I don't think anyone's arguments have been disingenuous so can we please continue on and debate these points.

If my argument has not been in good faith please point that out and we can reconcile.

True, but science works in a similar way. The main axiom being that your observations are what you measure of reality. The structure of religion can still be built upon logical steps.

Noah can't fit that many animals on a boat ---> god can do anything ---> god can fit that many animals on a boat.

 

 

It's unlikely that the specific religion like Christianity would have survived this long if it was as illogical as you make it out to be.

It's more likely that it's been abused and altered over the years.

That part that I've bolded undoubtedly leads to contradictions. It is easy to draw conclusions from axioms, the question is always whether or not an axiom is valid.

Why would a god who could do anything even need a boat? Why would he need a flood to wipe out the wicked people he created? While I'm at it, why did he create the people with the capacity to be evil if his intent was to later wipe them out (remember that Yahweh is omniscient, so he can never be surprised)?

It's sort of like asking "what happens to an object when it accelerates past the speed of light?". The axiom that objects with sub-luminal velocity can accelerate past c is a broken one. Any conclusion drawn from the broke axiom is fruit from the poison tree (Genesis allusion not intended).

With a broken axiom you can justify just about anything.

Seems to me that the answers here have been rather one sided and (no disrespect) from chemists whose interest should be declared.

If we extend this argument to it's logical conclusion then expertise will become synonymous with corruption or bias. Does that then make someone with no science education the most qualified to conduct science?

Seems to me that the answers here have been rather one sided from chemists whose expertise should be declared.

Whatever the benefits of organophosphorus animal dips there is a definite recorded increase in medical conditions (some very serious) amongst farmers and farmworkers who use them over organic farms where they are not allowed.

Some of my recent projects at work have involved the detection of organophosphorus in aerosols by novel photochemical methods. I'm more than aware of the safety issues inherent in the handling of these reagents so I would be glad to see any further information you could provide concerning organophosphorus chemistry and agricultural workers' health.

As regards to the debate on which method is better, I don't see that it need be one or the other. Surely the logically correct way is to choose what is most appropriate from both camps?

There is nothing "wrong" with organic agriculture per se. However, I posit that upon a detailed cost benefit analysis one will find that the problems caused by organic farming methods (lack of quality control, increased ecological destruction, increased food price, decreased food availability to third world nations, unnecessary societal chemophobia, reinforcement of the broken notion of "natural") far outweigh the benefits, if any, that can be obtained from such a practice.

I also just don't see how changing our successful modern methods to something that might be recognizable to a fifteenth century subsistence farmer can be considered progress. Even if you can attribute x number of deaths a year to synthetic pesticides you can look through history and attribute xⁿ deaths to starvation, contamination of foods by microbes, and general poor nutrition that was the result of a lack of variety in diets (GM foods, pesticides, and factory farms allow us to enjoy a plethora of plant foods year round).

I think many who advocate for organic farming methods are complaining about the small inadequacies of the problem solution while neglecting the fact that without said solution, far more troublesome problems would arise.

I quite often snap my pencils... oh the hazards of doing maths.

Well you have to deal with the hazards imposed on you by physicists. Every time a theoretical physicist evaluates a non-existent path integral a mathematician loses his soul. You do mathematical physics, so you probably have very little soul left at this point .

 

Organic farming is far from being a solution to anything. In fact, it takes a few leaps backwards from where modern farming is in almost every sense. Primarily, it comes down to the fact that it can't cope with supply and demand (and any attempts to do so would require additional land) and the fact that natural alternatives are dangerous (see Horza2002's first post in the above thread).

Exactly. In addition, if one is a true environmentalist then they must not support organic farming as it increases the amount of land needed to farm x-amount of cops. So the intent is to be nicer to humans and the environment but it ends up having the opposite effect. It increases the chance of a human ingesting infectious pathogens and increases the amount of forest and animal habit we must destroy in order to feed ourselves.

IMO the whole premise of organic farming is based on the false notion that natural=good and synthetic=bad. This is demonstrably false, hydrogen cyanide is produced in nature and is 100% natural...it will kill you. We can make glucose in a lab, and if it is purified properly it will be harmless.

Not to mention that if every farm switched over to "organic" methods today the world hunger problem would be magnified significantly as the net weight of cops produced on the Earth per year would drop significantly and food prices would skyrocket.

For instance, some organic farmers refer to BS like homeopathy or biodynamics

 

Can you recommend good books and online articles that I should read before I go?

+1 for calling homeopathy BS. Welcome to SFN! You already fit in just fine.

Is it safe to suck this gas in? I hear that it's supposed to make your voice deeper temporarily, now I really want to try it.

I've seen it done in YouTube videos and it appears to be a fairly common classroom demonstration used teach something about physical properties of gases. That said, I'm always hesitant to tell people to put chemicals in their mouths. There is an asphyxiation risk if you don't have access to fresh air, of course.

You should also be careful with gas regulators. I recommend that if you do this, you fill a balloon first. Putting your mouth around the output of a pressurized gas cylinder is asking for injury.

Also, SF₆ appears to be quite an expensive gas and its preparation from elementss involves F₂ gas which is just about as nasty as they come. If you can get your hands on some SF₆ I think it is safe to try just make sure you use common sense and have a friend present. Do not try to synthesize SF₆!

I thought it might be entertaining to start a thread where members can share stories of lab or industry experiments gone wrong. I'm posting this in the lounge because I didn't want to limit the discussion to chemistry (physicists, engineers, and biologists causes havoc too sometimes). Feel free to share something from personal experience or any interesting stories you find on the internet. Garage science stories are welcome as well, in which case we won't tell your mother.

It's only fair that I start

1) I once tried to pressurize an activated alumina column that I was using to purify a simple mixture. Everything was going fine until suddenly the gas adaptor shot away from the column with an impressive velocity, eventually finding itself in a somewhat elastic collision with a wall (it didn't break, don't ask, I don't know).

2)I was leaning out a frit that had been used to purify a mixture of various azo-dyes. I was running a vacuum and slowly letting nitric acid slip through the frit. At one point a lot of brown NO₂ gas started to emanate from the frit. I slammed the fume hood shut and had to wait that one out. In retrospect nitric acid was an incredibly poor choice of cleaning reagent for cleaning a frit soiled with those particular chemicals.

3) A labmate of mine once conjured a pretty epic fireball during a catalyzed hydrogenation reaction (you're not an organic chemist until you've seen this ).

You have no idea of the kind of spin money spent here to conflate the term "socialist" with "communist". You might have some idea of the kind of spin money spent here in the past to conflate "communist" with "red-eyed, baby-eating demon".

Funny how all our major miltary alliances like NATO are with "socialists". So Americans in general may have a distaste for socialism but our foreign policy says different.

-electron configurations

-periodic table trends

-drawing/understanding chemical structures

-qualitative understanding of simple chemical thermodynamics/kinetics/equilibrium (general chemistry level)

If it exists it's a cupride

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IUPAC_nomenclature_of_inorganic_chemistry_2005

That's interesting and surprising.

Do you think that suggests that there are actual copper anions in the lattice? Or is that just a naming convention based on electonegativity?

Hi everyone! I am an English learner and I would like to know how do people name intermetallic compounds. For example, Mg₂Si is "magnesium silicide". Then what is the name of AlCu? How to add "-ide" to copper?

Neither the Al or Cu will actually form an anion so no atom gets the "-ide" designation. This is an alloy, and technically you could change it's identity by varying the amounts of each metal in the alloy so you can't really treat it as a distinct molecule or stoichiometric salt.

Ethanoic acic has a dissociation constant of 1.85 x 10^-5 at 25C.

If 25 cm^3 of 0.1M ethanoic acid solution is mixed with 12.5cm^3 sodium hydroxide solutionm, what is the pH of the resulting solution?

Alright so what's the definition of pH? I'm sure you know that there is a [H⁺] term in there somewhere. If [H⁺] equals some value for the ethanoic acid solution, what will adding sodium hydroxide (remember it's a strong base) do to that value?

Now tie that in to the definition of dissociation constant.

As just about everyone else has pointed out, in real life my speech contains more slang and is less formal.

However, I'm still an asshole in real life and even nerdier than my forum persona.

I stream three shows when they are showing . . . House because the men are sexy--even the short guy ain't so bad, Walking Dead again because the men are sexy and zombies are cool--they killed the sexiest man on the show though, and Eureka which is airing again for a final season--the Canadian who plays Zane, Niall Matter, is just damn hot! In terms of content, the themes in all of them are probably the least important to the quality of the shows. They tend to keep me interested because of the relationships and the humour that each character brings to the show. Thematics are important I guess, because otherwise I would be watching soap operas and I don't readily identify with the environments presented by this category of show.

The Walking Dead: best show on TV. It's the only one I care to watch! I like how "movie like" it is. The production quality is superb and the actors are great IMO.

Moved to Speculations

cofu,

Please post original research and non-mainstream ideas in the speculations forum. Also, your response from the SFN community might be better if you detailed what it is you want to discuss rather than simply linking to an outside site.

We are not a publishing house but we'll be glad to discuss your work with you.

Moved to speculations.

Wacko, please post any non-mainstream science topics in the speculations forum. This smells a bit like religion though. If the thread takes that course, it will be moved to religion. Please say so if that is your intent.

-Using observation of controlled scenarios to invalidate or support hypothesized models of how the universe works.

-Using logic and mathematics to interpret these results in a way that minimizes subjectivity.

-Philosophy that observable phenomena can be explained.