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300: the film
So I'm watching the film 300. I've taken the precaution of reading up on the wikipedia entries for the battle of Thermopylae, Sparta, King Leonidas and the agoge. Naively I believed that all of the stupid things in the film would be identifiable only after reading these articles. My issues with 300:
-the colour palette - seriously what? I'm pretty ( Read more... ) -
Evolving standards
So I have a car. It's not actually my car; my parents let me drive it, mostly because they don't want to. It's a car with personality, it's over twenty years old and it has a couple of minor flaws ( Read more... ) -
Pride: a learning curve
Okay, so my colleagues don't have the highest opinion of my manual dexterity. That kind of thing is pretty inevitable when you have a tendency to look up and greet people as they enter the lab and then, like an over eager puppy with a very long tail, immediately break something. There is only moderately incessant mocking, which, don't get me wrong ( Read more... ) -
Inefficiency
You know the feeling, like the whole world is trying as hard as it can to make your life as difficult as possible? Well I normally get this feeling sporadically at work but I recently had the most spectacular run of it. You see I was trying to do a relatively simple experiment, it needed to be heated for one hour, rotovapped then heated for four ( Read more... ) -
Stuff keeps happening
Well, I haven't posted for a while. There are a number of reasons why this could be but the main one is really that I have become simply so fantastic at my job that I haven't screwed up and so have learnt nothing. Kinda. But see, I was thinking about this and there's no reason why I can't post simply because nothing's exploded. What kind of crazy ( Read more... ) -
Getting to know my colleagues
So things have been a bit quiet on the chemistry front at the moment and I've mostly been trying to get our HPLC (google it if you really want to know) to work instead of doing reactions. There is a reason for this and that reason is that apparently small scale production takes precedence over R&D. IKR. Anyway, blah blah blah, order to fill etc ( Read more... ) -
Quirks
I'm not a very experienced chemist. This is probably obvious. As a result I don't have the mental encyclopdia of chemicals that more experienced chemists do. This leads to incidents, like the pyridine one or the hydrochloric acid one, where I get to add to my mental encyclopedia, normally in bright red bold with several underlines ( Read more... ) -
Dropping things
Just don't ( Read more... ) -
The art of being fallible
Is it just me or are my titles getting more pretentious with every post? I don't know if you're a chemist (to be fair, given that I'm my most faithful reader, you're probably a chemist) but even if you're not the phrase 'concentrated hydrochloric acid' still probably sets off some alarm bells. It certainly did for me at first. However, I never ( Read more... ) -
Thinking ahead
So you're in a rush. There's a reaction coming off in half an hour which you want purified by the end of the day, washing up is piling up on every available surface. Your boss has just informed you (surprise!) that he wants to send off samples by the end of the week. You're following a scheme given in an article and all it says is to charge the ( Read more... )