Chemists have a sense of humor

Science is a human endeavor, and so humor tends to be intertwined amongst the seriousness. This webpage with various silly-named compounds is a prime example. I might buy the book for my desk to keep me smiling throughout the day.

It's that time of the year again

The IgNobles have been posted. This year's chemistry recipients are a joint effort on arguing whether Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola are good spermicides. It seems like the verdict is still out (pro, con).

But those are old references. Anyone have any new ones?

The chemists need a big toy, too

What with the opening of the LHC and the test runs on the "Squirrel Smasher", I do believe us chemists are left with nothing to smash together at ridiculous velocities.

Any suggestions? We need to smash something before we are left with nothing to smash together.

Biochemistry shouldn't be this fun

It is a cardinal rule written somewhere that biochemistry needs to be designed to suck the last bit of liveliness from any budding scientist.

How can biochemistry succeed in such a goal when it produces such a fun video game? I mean, that's not fair. Not only are you having fun, but you're learning the amino acid groups.

I think I need to write Congress.

I really shouldn't be laughing...

...at this PhD comic, because to do so means I understand it.

LOLgoogle cache

Google cache pulls through. Quickly, before their spiders cache the fixed version, go gander at the most glorious mistake in website design found this week.

Green Shit

This post is for my organic buddies and their recent adventure with colorful things.

Behold, the formation of green shit upon the introduction of UV light[1]:



Photochromism for the win!

[1] I am not clever enough to have come up with the name of this compound. Instead, I derived it from the YouTube page.

[Hat tip: The Sceptical Chymist]

Choose Your Words Carefully

Yet again, I'm the last person to discover the day's internet humor. No biggie, since it's still very funny.

The American Family Association's news outlet, OneNewsNow, has a nifty auto-replacement script that changes the word "gay" found in Associated Press streams to "homosexual". I guess it's all part of the delusion of believing sexual orientation and attraction to be directed only toward the opposite sex and believing it is the individual's behavior and choice to participate in same-sex relationships.

Whatever the reason, what happens when someone's name is Gay? Well, this is what happens:

If you read the original AP article and imagine the word 'homosexual' being replaced with 'gay' (or if you lack imagination, copy and paste into word and run find/replace), you'll find some very humorous and nearly scandalous phrases. Go on and search for 'Tyson Homosexual' on the site, and be entertained during your mid-afternoon break.

This is Quite Foul

I don't know where it's from, but it certainly is quite foul (and funny).

Finishing Up My Thesis

I'm finishing polishing my thesis (which is due by 4:30pm today), and I feel like this image empowers me.



Now where can I get a kitty who is good with theoretical chemistry and chemical physics? I want one! Now!

PhD Comics Sums Up My Life

I don't know how many times my professor has walked in on me dinking around on the internet after I had submitted a job to the supercomputer or did a happy dance for a working algorithm. So, I enjoyed this PhD comic much:

Who Did It?

Who did it? What sophomore or junior put acetone dichloromethane in the plastic cuvette? Seriosuly. Rawr!

*UPDATE*

One of the lurkers on this blog from my school has confessed to being the culprit. I shouldn't have been so hasty with my generalization that it was an undergraduate. It was a grad student! Curse you for melting all the cuvettes. Revenge will be mine!

Moar Expelled lulz!

This time, from Skeptic magazine's Michael Shermer:

It was with some irony for me, then, that I saw Ben Stein’s anti-evolution documentary film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, opens with the actor, game show host and speech writer for Richard Nixon addressing a packed audience of adoring students at Pepperdine University, apparently falling for the same trap I did.

Actually they didn’t. The biology professors at Pepperdine assure me that their mostly Christian students fully accept the theory of evolution. So who were these people embracing Stein’s screed against science? Extras. According to Lee Kats, Associate Provost for Research and Chair of Natural Science at Pepperdine, “the production company paid for the use of the facility just as all other companies do that film on our campus” but that “the company was nervous that they would not have enough people in the audience so they brought in extras. Members of the audience had to sign in and the staff member reports that no more than two to three Pepperdine students were in attendance. Mr. Stein’s lecture on that topic was not an event sponsored by the university.” And this is one of the least dishonest parts of the film.

I wish I had known this before going to the movie. It would have added more enjoyment for the ending scene.

**SPOILER**

The ending shows Stein at the podium which he was at the beginning giving a "heartfelt" speech about freedom. His speech is intertwined with video from Reagan concerning the fall of the Berlin wall. The Reagan references simply explode at this point.

If American commercials were this entertaining

If American commercials were this entertaining, I would watch more TV.

Expelled Lulz, Again

So, a couple of friends of mine and I went and saw Ben Stein's movie Expelled. Imagine Al Gore's documentary merged with Michael Moore's having butt sex with Ronald Reagan. That pretty much sums up the quality of the editing.

There are enough cut scenes to soviet bloc Germany and references to the Berlin wall to make the film very boring. Combine that with Stein's monotone voice and a random segment of him getting lost in Seattle, and the movie ends up being a snore.

Luckily, there are interviews that do instigate "teh lulz" from my friends. The one which made me nearly laugh out loud was the interview with Caroline Crocker, former George Mason instructor of cell biology. She claimed she was "disciplined" for having a couple slides about intelligent design. Much to the discredit of the movie, they never explained that her job was a non-tenure track instructor position. They also do not mention that she had joint positions at GMU and Northern Virginia Community College. they do not mention that it was her students that complained about the instruction material and how it did not relate to the scope of the course. They did not explain that her position as a contingent faculty member is dependent on (1) student reviews from course evaluations and (2) staffing needs.

The entire movie is based on this tactic of not going deeply into the matter of each person who was "expelled". For a movie that begins with the premise of freedom of inquiry, it seems to me that inquiry ended only at the point where they could build their case and not at the deep heart of the matter for each individual.

Another "lulz" moment was when Stein said he sought out top scientists to discuss this topic with, and the first person of a long string of one-liners from various scholars was Daniel Dennet. Now, I like Dennet. I would not call him a scientist: his main profession is philosophy of the mind. And he has written a good book about evolution. But he's still not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination, and he readily admits it at public appearances I've seen of him. So I chuckled to myself in my seat.

The last "lulzy" moment I'm going to bring up is an interview Stein had with a professor of the history of biology. [1] It was part of the movie which showed that atheists in the biological sciences justify their atheism with their knowledge of evolutionary biology. PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins were featured in this segment. The professor of history in biology was as well. The professor gave a spiel about how evolutionary biology removes god, purpose, and free will. I couldn't resist but laugh very hard in the theater that my friend clasped my mouth to shut me up. Daniel Dennet has written extensively on the view that determinism and free will are not incompatible. His presence in the movie and the movie's attempt to drive home that evolutionary biology necessitates the end of free will was too much irony. Too much.

And the last relic is my friend's response to the molecular biology video ripped from Harvard's XVIO. During the video, I was chuckling due to the cheesy 2D-1/2 graphics on the screen. But when the clip was over, my friend yelled at the top of his lungs "EPIC FAIL!" 'Twas funny.

If you haven't seen the movie yet but are going to, please do me a favor. Can you count the Reagan references throughout the movie? Reagan pictures are like an Easter egg throughout the entire film. That's a new game now.

The only thing I got out of the film was that I wanted a pull-out back scratcher like Stein had in one of the clips. That's basically it for this weird conglomeration of soviet bloc Germany, chopped interviews, and Ben Stein getting lost in various cities.

----------------------
[1] I unfortunately do not remember his name.

Give her the Shock(er) Absorber

The burning question of why women wear sports bras has finally been answered for those of us who prefer to learn visually. This website will show you the awesome power athletic activity has on boobs.

Do FF+G on extreme activity level. It really looks like to me that the nipples would cut the girl's elbow in two. Maybe it's just me.

This is me right now

Yeah, my hair is in a very confirmationally irregular poisition as well and tends to stay that way all day.

Windooze Music to the max!

Pure badassery.

Influenza? Spam Email? What de Jevu!

You go to visit a graduate program and what do they give you in return? The flu.[1] Second time this semester, which translates into two different strands. Man, I love that thing called evolution. Buggard viruses get the best lot of biology: they do no metabolism yet reap the benefit of being able to multiply abundantly in their hosts.

So I've previously commented on some funny spam. Now for a not-so-funny spam. Unfortunately, some people may actually fall for it. It's a phishing attempt, and it's very easy to see why it's a phishing attempt.

Take a gander at the following communication from "services@irs.gov":

After the last annual calculations of your fiscal activity we have determined that you are eligible to receive a tax refund of $2839,49. Please submit the tax refund request and allow us 3-9 days in order to process it.

A refund can be delayed for a variety of reasons. For example submitting invalid records or applying after the deadline.

To access your tax refund, please click here [LINK REMOVED].

Best Regards,
Tax Refund Deparment
Internal Revenue Service

© Copyright 2008, Internal Revenue Service U.S.A. All rights reserved.

Okay, I know I haven't been doing taxes for very long, but when did I ever fill out a request form to get the money the government owed me? Never? That's what I thought.

But that wasn't the most blatant errors I noticed. How about who in the United States uses commas as the decimal notation? No one. That is common in non-English speaking countries. The decimal comma is common in Europe and Africa; not in America. So strike one.

Strike two: I know our governmental employees may not be the best at all times, but who would misspell department?

Just for lagniappe, I don't think the IRS can hold copyrights due to it being a government agency. Though I might be wrong here since the flu may be acting with my brain.

Now, if someone does have over $2K and wants to give it to me, leave me your name, number, and mother's maiden name in my email :-)

Bitch took my drink

I'm on the last leg of my graduate school visitations here in Boulder, CO, so-named "P.Chem Mecca". It's very nice here. Beautiful landscape, beautiful lasers, beautiful city, beautiful lasers, beautiful people, beautiful lasers. Did I mention lasers enough times?

I can see why ultrafast laser spectroscopy would be big in Boulder. The high is dry. That's key. Nothing is more annoying than to get moisture in your vacuum chamber and gunk up your signal.

There are good theorists here, too, and the ample number of spectroscopists keep the theorists dealing with quantum problems more so than statistical thermodynamics. I now have the tough decision between CU-Boulder, UIUC, and Johns Hopkins since each have their own unique strengths and weaknesses.

So, what's the weakness of Boulder and why the title of my post? Everyone knows the main reason to go on graduate school visits is booze yourself up with strangers and talk solid science while inebriated. That's no secret. And when the night is still young and the professors are all nestled in their beds with visions of psi-squareds and lasers dancing in their head, the graduate students take the visitors out to town on the department dime. That's no secret either.

What pissed me off last night was finding out that either Colorado or Boulder itself has a rule about licenses and age verification. Apparently, bars cannot accept licenses that are expired on the front but have a sticker on the back. It probably deals with the ease of creating fake IDs in this manner, but I call bullshit.

So i was at the bar last night, and the first server came by checking IDs and gave me a frosted glass. So I poured myself a beer from the pitcher and chatted about science with those near me. Maybe 15 minutes later, another server comes by to check IDs and give stamps out. She saw the expiration date, told me about the (idiotic) law, and bitch took my drink. She then proceeded to hover around the area the rest of the night to make sure I didn't sneak a drink.

So, needless to say, this was the first night of a visit that I was sober. YARG! Being sober sucks. Hopefully, maybe, I'll be able to make up with Bacchus today and enjoy the sweet lager that was denied to me last night by a less obnoxious server? We will see.