(Untitled)

[birchswinger3]

They just mulched all along the walkway down to the music hall. It's the earth-smell mingled with the smell of this old soap my mom used to keep under the sink, Lily of the Valley maybe, back when that cabinet was to me absolutely mysterious and feminine and grown up. Everything today calls out spring

Comments

[foxfour]

delphi was called the omphalos of the world. bellybuttons are a common theme?

[birchswinger3]

hehe, aw. well they're the cutest part of the body! or maybe navel-fetishism and the personality traits common among rulers/city-namers are genetically linked! mwahaha

[gcousin]

really? wouldn't you need to break the bonds in the molecules to make them convert to their mirror image? (my orgo is bad, but all I know is you have an sp3 hybridized molecule, you switch the sidegoups to get the mirror image)

[birchswinger3]

these ones are sp2's with 3 sidegroups, and since they're planar i think simple rotation suffices to have trigonal planar mirror images superimposable upon each other.
but now my mind's going fuzzy because we've also talked about lots of molecules that are interconvertible under 'normal conditions' simply because there is such a ridiculously tiny energy barrier required breaking and re-forming of bonds, so at room temperature it's inconsequential.
gahh, my orgo is terrible, especially after no sleeps and too much class; this could be totally wrong. our professor says this is possible, despite my fuzziness on the exact 'why' piece! :D

[wanderingsphinx]

What an interesting thought...

Did your class learn why we have those particular isomers? (In AP Bio we mentioned the electron spin, magnetic field/lightning, and meteor hypotheses, but I don't recall there being a definite answer.)

[birchswinger3]

we didn't even get to talk about they different theories of why we've evolved to only use those particular isomers yeah, i'm curious too... m, interesting... tell me about those three you discussed in bio~!

:P

[wanderingsphinx]

I'm fuzzy on the first :), but it says that electrons released in beta decay are polarized because they are mediated by the weak nuclear force (Google helped me on this one). The others suggest that a super-strong magnetic field was created by lightning in the prebiotic soup or that our amino acids came from a meteor (like Murchison) that passed through polarized light in space.

[birchswinger3]

interesting! :)