Archive for the 'Quick Hits' Category

Happy Veterans’ Day, Gentlepersons.  Here are some items for your consumption:

– I recently registered for the Spring ACS National Meeting in New Orleans.  My talk will probably be the worst disaster to hit the city since…uhhh…nevermind.  In all seriousness, I look forward to the four days of wall-to-wall chemistry, since I really didn’t get the chance to consume that much in Boston.  It will also be interesting to see what’s going on with the reconstruction efforts following Katrina.  I assume that all of the debaucherous elements of the city will have been restored by April.  Is anyone else going?

–  The Crimson got to this story about a month late.  Someone’s moving to MIT…or not (?)  I really don’t get why there is any confusion here; the people being quoted are seemingly the ones who should know exactly what’s going on.

–  Later this week, Prof. Dr. E.J. Corey will sell and sign copies of his newest book in Harvard’s historic chemistry library.  I wonder if he’ll take personal requests.  “Professor Corey, could you please make this one out to ‘the greatest chemist of all time’?  Thanks.”

–  Retread has passed along the next installment of his Rip Van Winkle series, and I shall post it in short order.

Thanks for reading,
Rudy Paul 

• The ACS announced this week that Gabor Somorjai is the 2008 Priestley Medalist. The award is well deserved, but I was kind of surprised to see two surface scientists get it back-to-back. Since this year’s Nobel Committee for Chemistry seems stacked towards the physical side of the field, will 2007 be the year the surface crowd hits paydirt?
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• The Class of 2007 graduated from Harvard this week and left its report card for each “concentration” (that’s Hahvahd speak for “major”). The CCB department had a poor showing: Chemistry placed in the bottom half of the table with 3.69/5.00 (20th of 31) and Biochemical Sciences fared even worse (3.27, 27th). Earth and Planetary Sciences (5.00) earned a spot in the Champions’ League by topping the table, while Biology (3.06) finished dead last and faces relegation.
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• Dr. Free-Ride (who was extensively quoted in a recent issue of C&EN) at Adventures in Ethics and Science has an interesting pair of posts about the consequences of graduate students’ blowing the whistle on fraudulent research. Post #1 is based on a news story in Science about probable scientific misconduct by a geneticist at Wisconsin. Post #2 is Dr. Free-Ride’s analysis of the current system. Both posts are good reads—read post #2 even if you don’t give a lick about scientific misconduct.

• Remember that rhodamine spill in our lab? The bill for the clean up came to a whopping $2436.
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• Question for the synthetic chemists: if you measure a yield of 98.5%, do you report it as 98% or 99% in the substrate table? And by “do you” I don’t mean “does one”, I mean “do you” .
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• I like it when C&EN plays around with its cover.  The March 12th cover is particularly cool, because the change is so subtle you probably missed it. If you look closely, the title lettering is transparent, so the red you’re seeing is from the Chinese flag. I think the only other time they’ve strayed from their new redesign was with the cerulean 2006 Pharma Review cover.
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• Finally, can you think of any chemical feuds other than those listed below? The first group contains “academic” debates, while the second group contains “ethical” disputes. The names below sometimes just refer to the “face” associated with each side; they aren’t all one-on-one conflicts.

………………Nonclassical Carbocations (Brown vs. Winstein)
………………Nanotechnology (Whitesides vs. Drexler)
………………Origin of Life (Miller vs. Wächtershäuser)

………………Woodward-Hoffmann Rules^* (Corey vs. Woodward)
………………Nonlinear Effects in Asymmetric Catalysis (Córdova vs. Blackmond)

* Note the error in the caption to the first photo.