ChemBark

It’s déjà vu all over again. Today’s edition of What’s Wrong with this Picture? comes to us courtesy of a concerned reader who discovered this grotesque conference room at Iowa State University:

If I were Ben or Gail Plummer, I’d be furious. These structures are a hot mess. Texas carbons, irregular bond angles…yuck.

Remember the new undergraduate labs at Georgia Tech? It seems interior decoration with nonsensical chemical structures is really catching on.

If you encounter chemical nonsense you’d like to share, please send it in. Blog editors are standing by.

A concerned labmate brought my attention to a chemical abomination on last week’s episode of the increasingly unpopular television show House, M.D.

Thanks to a very special friend of mine, we can all enjoy video footage of what Hollywood writers believe constitutes a realistic demonstration for a high school chemistry class:

Marvelous, isn’t it? Notice how the teacher isn’t wearing a single piece of personal protective equipment—no gloves, no goggles, no lab coat—whilst working in front of a poster that reads “LAB SAFETY RULES”.

Who knows what this demonstration was supposed to be, but the last time I checked, HF wasn’t combustible. In fact, its NFPA 704 flammability rating is zero. Oh well, I doubt the flame coming out of the Bunsen burner is real anyway, seeing as how the dude just picked up the metal with his bare hands. The limp gas line and the fact that the blue flame doesn’t deflect upward when it is tilted are also nice pieces of laziness on the part of the production staff.

If you plan to replicate this experiment at home, I suggest that you work with hydrofluoric acid in plastic containers instead of glass ones. HF is a great etchant for glass and many other materials that contain silicon. Furthermore, if you have an accident and get HF on your skin or in your lungs, you are going to be in a world of hurt. That stuff is nasty and goes right for the calcium in your body. In the event of an accident, you should apply calcium gluconate gel to the affected areas of your skin and seek medical attention immediately. Preferably, not from Dr. Gregory House.

It always surprises me how companies will happily spend thousands of dollars to run printed ads with inventories of chemical structures. These structures are unsearchable by computer, and is there anyone out there who thumbs through science magazines on the lookout for fine chemicals?

“Wow! That 1-bromo-3-methylbutane looks fantastic. I’m calling these guys right away!”

Maybe such a response has occurred once or twice in the past decade, but this approach seems like a shot in the dark. I imagine most people who find themselves in need of 1-bromo-3-methylbutane turn to the catalog of their favorite vendor, the Available Chemicals Directory, or Google.

While the following ad certainly fits the profile (C&EN, 1/23/2012, p. 31), it bothered me for a different reason:

I can’t understand why you would go through the trouble of paying thousands of dollars to run an ad and not bother to proofread the thing. Let’s start from the bottom right corner and move clockwise, shall we?

1. Coumarin. Great. I have no problems here.

2. O-Anisaldehyde. This is a rather common error in style, but it is still an error. If the “O” is meant to signify “ortho,” then it should be written as a lowercase letter, even if it begins a sentence. It should also be italicized. A capital “O” written like that in a name usually signifies substitution on oxygen.

3. 2-Hydroxy-benzaldehyde. There are two problems here. First, you don’t need a hyphen after “Hydroxy.” Second, if you are going to use common names like o-anisaldehyde, then why not call salicylaldehyde by its common name? Alternately, you could have called the previous compound “2-methoxybenzaldehyde.” Basically, why not be consistent?

4. 5-Helo-salicylic aldehyde. <Facepalm> Now I guess it’s OK to use a common name? More importantly, what the hell is a “helo” group? The period after the “Cl” is also a nice touch.

Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. If I were in the advertising department at GPhS, I’d take $200 from the budget to buy a copy of the ACS Style Guide and pay for an eye exam.

When the quality of your advertisements is this poor, do you think people might question the quality of your other products?

Just a thought.

It’s time for another edition of WWWTP?, which in this case, could just as easily stand for “What’s Wrong with these People?”

This image was kindly forwarded to ChemBark by a concerned reader and patron of Phenomenex. The company ships their products in these sexually suggestive cardboard boxes. The innuendo would make sense and qualify as mildly clever double entendre if the company dealt with genomics, but Phenomenex sells chromatography supplies. I guess someone thought they had a good idea and decided to roll with it:

Inside the box, a colorful brochure contained less disguised innuendo: the words “unzip me” and what appears to be anthropomorphic female genitalia with legs and a cane. Closer inspection of the Phenomenex Web site reveals that these characters are based on an astonishingly yonic logo for Kinetex (R), the company’s core-shell adsorbent materials for chromatography. Hmmm.

I feel it necessary to warn any of you who might be (i) charged with purchasing HPLC supplies and (ii) perverted, that I hear the customer service at Phenomenex is awful.

Today’s What’s Wrong with this Picture? comes from the University of Ottawa Gazette (via Barney, via Inside Higher Ed, via the Ottawa Citizen). Derek also posted about it yesterday, and commenter CMCguy from that thread did some fabulous Internet sleuthing.

Image from University of Ottawa Gazette

That picture is part of a recruitment campaign for the university, and if those are the molecules they are targeting for study, you can count me out. While you don’t need me to point out the numerous errors in formatting, the messed-up superscripts, the missing hydrogens, and the generally ridiculous reactive species present, the graphics artist certainly could have used the help. And that is what is truly disturbing…the graphics artist did have this help.

David Bryce, an associate professor of chemistry at Ottawa, told the Gazette that the ad was rubbish back in October:

There is a real problem with your current ads featuring students. There are numerous errors in the chemical formulas and structures. This is actually an embarrassment when trying to recruit students to science, engineering, and medicine. Who proof-read these ads?

Jerry Jones, the manager of the university’s Creative and Advertising Services & External Relations, responded:

Thanks David.

We are aware that the formulas do not accurately depict chemical formulae and structures. Although we started out with actual ones provided to us from a researcher, we had to modify in order to make them work in terms of good design and effectiveness in conveying the concept of research.

It would have been nice if we could have retained the formulae as is, but we really had little choice.

Outside of the fact of the formulae, what do you think of the ads as a whole? In your view, do they evoke the concept of research? What about international?

Let me know, and thanks for the feedback.

Simply incredible…”yeah, we know the molecules are nonsense, but they look better, and that’s what’s important.” Seems like the communications directorate could use a lesson about protecting one’s brand. At a research institution dedicated to seeking knowledge and teaching it to future generations, one would hope veracity would trump style.

I guess it doesn’t.

On a recent cross-country flight, I happened upon this advertisement on page 125 of the Holiday 2011 edition of SkyMall:

As if it wasn’t bad enough that some despicable marketing hacks re-branded the term “organic“, now “Buckyballs” has been pilfered from the world of chemistry. Sadly, a Google search of the term returns the toys before the molecules. I don’t understand what, exactly, is so “bucky” about these balls. I also don’t understand how you could get away with trademarking that name, which has famously referred to C₆₀ and friends since the 1980s.

I hope these toy makers get lumps of coal in their stockings this Christmas.