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  • 180 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • ornery_chemisttoScience MemesProblem?
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    15 days ago

    Good rule of thumb: if someone else hasn’t solved the problem yet, it’s more complicated than you’re assuming. If the problem is worth solving, other people smarter than you have almost certainly attempted the easy “solutions” already, and they were inadequate to solve the problem. Heck, even if it’s not worth solving, there’s a non-zero chance that some pre-Reagan weirdos took a crack at it with bonus mercury and thallium compounds for the lulz and published it all in a vague 200-word comm in a now-defunct journal.


  • ornery_chemisttoScience MemesThis feels wrong. I love it.
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    22 days ago

    Isn’t the squaring actually multiplication by the complex conjugate when working in the complex plane? i.e., √((1 - 0 i) (1 + 0 i) + (0 - i) (0 + i)) = √(1 + - i2) = √(1 + 1) = √2. I could be totally off base here and could be confusing with something else…




  • In fluent speech, the conjunction (the first “that”) is unstressed, and as a result some speakers reduce the vowel a bit toward schwa. However, if you told those speakers to carefully pronounce each word, I bet they would pronounce the conjunction and the pronoun the exact same same. A more common example of this kind of reduction is the word “to”, which is almost always reduced to /tə/ ([tə] ~ [tʊ] ~ [ɾə] depending on dialect and surrounding words) in everyday speech when unstressed.

    Fun fact, you can reduce just about every unstressed vowel in English to schwa (if it’s not already a schwa) and still be largely understood.






  • ornery_chemisttoAtheist Memes@lemmy.worldEat lead
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    27 days ago

    That’s not the gotcha OOP seems to think it is. If the world was magicked into existence by a supreme being 4000 years ago, there’s no reason it couldn’t have been magicked into existence with heavy elements having decayed by an arbitrary amount or with Pb by itself. 'Tis the problem with invoking appeals to magic. And anyway a quick look on wiki says that primordial Pb was mostly created by neutron capture of lighter elements, not radioactove decay of heavier ones, so the mere existence of Pb proves nothing wrt the timeline of U decay anyway… but at that point if you’re bringing nucleosynthesis into it, you may as well point to anything higher than lithium or even atoms as a concept as “proof” rather than picking anything as exotic as uranium decay.


  • ornery_chemisttoScience MemesDrink it, I dare ya
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    1 month ago

    Alternatively for a full octet on every atom, oxiryne, which does not exist and does not have a wiki page. It’s basically acetylene with its arms chopped off and the stumps dislocated, bent back, and stapled together with an oxygen atom.


  • ornery_chemisttoScience MemesPublishers Always Innovating
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    1 month ago

    Fair, but certain corporate-mandated client-side PDF viewers are… bloatier. Though, I do like not having another window to manage when I open in browser, particularly when doing web searches. It pairs well with tab grouping extensions, and I generally don’t use markup, so no loss for me there.




  • ornery_chemisttoScience MemesSynthesize deez nutz
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    1 month ago

    Synthesis: everything happens except what you want. And then the 26h/day tryhard at <random other institution> in <random other country> publishes the molecule with the exact same route. The difference? Your hands suck. Git gud scrub.


  • Yeah. The magnet quench flash boils a bunch of helium which is itself expensive, and presents a nice asphyxiation hazard as well. And then, assuming the quench damaged nothing, you have to set up the magnet again by getting the coils back down to superconducting temperatures… to get there, you end up boiling off a lot more helium. And then you have have to bring an engineer in to get the electrons spinning through the coil again and wait for the wobbles in the current to stabilize.

    Or so I think. I work with NMR spectrometers and not MRIs, but it’s essentially the same technology.