Some classic chemistry references like _Beilstein_ and _Gmelin_ were published in German for some time after English became the dominant language for scientific publication. It wasn't unreasonable to expect organic chemists in the 1970s-1990s to learn a fair bit of German.

Ph. D. (chem) in 1997.

There was no language requirement, though one of the doctoral programs I applied to in 1992 (not the one I ultimately chose) recommended that chemistry Ph. D. students learn some German.

Yep, that's right, I remember that title now. I'll have to see if I still have it after a number of moves.

This reminds me of a silly (vaguely XKCD-adjacent) book I once had. It described the two species "Diplocephalus" (a sauropod dinosaur with two heads and no tail) and "Diplocaudus" (two tails, no head) and added the observation: "these two species are inevitably found together in fossil beds."

Wow, xmas morning wind gusts up to 114 mph on Mount Hamilton, east of San Jose. Damaged the Lick Observatory. 🔭 🧪 bsky.app/profile/look...

Don’t fake a disability. But much more important: don’t assume someone else is faking because they don’t look like your stereotype of what someone with a disability looks like. And don’t assume their abilities are the same every day (or even every hour). Disabled people are not the problems here. 😒

Darth Maul's Bat

That's pretty scary (especially in a glass ball), but even scarier would be something like trimethylborane, with its NFPA "Fire Diamond" on the ball as well.

It's not *every* day (well, not for most of us) that we work with things with the Fire Diamond Trifecta. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimeth...

This.

I would pick (a) because I like the look of it, but I've never actually written the whole thing out. eV for the win.

Of the 3 full spellings, I slightly prefer (b), just because weirdo compound units feel like they ought to be compound nouns and abide by the same rules. E.g. in US customary units (shudder), there is a similarly cursed unit that in English is a "foot-pound", not a "foot pound" or a "footpound".

Okay, Bluesky poll time!

The proper spelling of this energy unity is:
○ Electron volt
○ Electron-volt
○ Electronvolt
○ All these spellings are okay
○ This is a made-up unit. Physicists can GTFO

114 votes · 23 hours left

It's pronounced "electron volt" but spelled "eV". At least, I rarely had to spell it out when I encountered it.

Recovering physical chemist here, so there aren't a whole lot. The only one I remember doing with certainty was Grignard. Though I suspect second-semester undergraduate organic lab included 2 or 3 of the others as part of something bigger.

Honorable mention: the "cut and weigh" method of numerical integration of chemical data plots. This was already relegated to a backup mode by the time I got to college, but still taught as an easy way to get a reasonable estimate of the area under a curve. math.stackexchange.com/questions/39...

Fixing errors on typed pages (mostly White-Out; sometimes, typewriters with a white "eraser" ribbon that let you backspace, "untype" the bad character, then type the correct one).

I'm too young to really remember the oldest-school form, ultra-hard erasers that could erase the typed letter.

I’m going to *need* the entire Totalbottl to cleanse my long-term memory and get rid of this particular memory.

A story old as time (well, old as software development as a career). This ain't my first hype rodeo. Consider this 45-year-old cover image, from a long-defunct computer magazine in the UK. The article that inspired the cover art discusses "The Last One", which is worth reading about on Wikipedia.