WTF

Why did the government think they could do something about a child trapped in a balloon except wait for it to fall out of the sky? I mean do something other than shoot the balloon down.

I Don't Know Where To Begin With How Wrong This Picture Is

This picture makes Baby Linus Pauling weep. It's kind of like making Baby Jesus weep except that Linus Pauling wasn't made up. OK, I believe Jesus was a real person but I'm not so certain about that walking on water and infinite catering myth.

The picture is from the TV drama show Eleventh Hour which I haven't watched and probably won't if they can't get their sophomore year organic chemistry straight.

Starting from the top left and reading clockwise, let's analyze this molecule. The two H3C groups are acceptable. They are commonly know as methyl groups and they would hang off that single carbon like that. I'm fine with the carbon with two single bonds to the aforementioned methyl groups. I'm fine that it then has a double bond. I'm not fine with where the double bonds lead to. L is not an abbreviation on the periodic table so I'm thinking that's a capital I. Iodine would have only one bond. It certainly would not have 5 bonds. The carbon just below the iodine should have four bonds not one.
I'm comfortable with everything else until you get to the OH group with a double bond to the second to last carbon. The carbon has four bonds as expected. The oxygen however has three bonds where two would be expected.

Boron (B) should have 3 bonds or be part of a 6 bond co-ordination complex. Either way, it's wrong here. The O has two bonds but then that last carbon is missing either a bond or another hydrogen.

The only excuse for this would be if it's a description of a transition state for a very complex reaction. Otherwise this is just fucked up. Since I don't watch crappy TV which is basically any TV that pauses for a commercial break I haven't seen the full episode and have no idea what's going on in this picture. If I'm wrong in my critique here, let me know.

What's Wrong With Education In America Part 2: College

True story time. I once took an analytical chemistry class at Salem State. There were 24 students in the class. Ten were chemistry students the rest were from the bio department. One of the labs we did was to detect chlorine in various aqueous samples. One way was with a special electrode and a pH meter. The other way was through gas chromatography and mass spectrometry. It was in the fall semester and I got an A in the class.

One fine spring day I was sitting around the Chemistry Society office. It was a little closet off the Bio Society office. One of the bio majors who had just taken the class with me came into the chem society office to get help on a project he was doing for a bio class. He wanted to know how he could measure the amount of chlorine in pond water.

Having an audience of chem nerds I started fucking with him. I was thinking he'd recognize that I was fucking with him. I told him he should get some sodium metal and throw it in the pond. Then he should evaporate the water off and the sodium chloride would crystalize like when a tide pool at the beach evaporates in the sun. He could weigh the salt and then use the atomic mass to figure out how much chlorine there was.

He goes off looking for sodium and comes back an hour later to call me an asshole. What I told him was, from an engineering standpoint, a very valid way to solve his problem. From a scientific and environmental standpoint it was fucked up. Unfortunately it took his bio professor to point out to him how he had been had. I reminded him that we did the lab twice with two different ways of detecting chlorine. We could also have used Atomic Absorption and UV/Vis techniques but the easiest way to answer his question would be to go two blocks off campus to that pet store and spend five bucks on aquarium test strips. All you have to do is dunk them in and then look at the color.

Describe What's Going On In This Picture And Win A Prize

The picture is from the white board in my classroom during a test review. It's a pictorial representation of one of the test questions. Guess what the question was asking and I'll give you a prize. I'll give you a hint, there's a transporter beam involved.

I'm Torn Between Titles For This One

I want to call it "I'll Give Up My Laser When They Pry It From My Cold Dead Hands" but "My Laser Has Killed Fewer People Than Ted Kennedy's Car" is too tempting to pass up. It's a slippery slope between banning toys that the cat loves and trying to stop Scaramanga and Doctor Evil from building a Chinese Death Ray on the moon and ransoming the Earth for One Million Dollars.

My Windmill Has Killed Fewer People Than Ted Kennedy's Car

Sometimes I forget why I do this. The Commonwealth very desperately needs this electricity. This is particularly important since we no longer have Salem Power online. They're trying to turn it back on but my clean car is proof enough of the filth they spew. I don't expect them to be online for long.

That means we really need more windmills. It's too bad Salem Power is so screwed right now. Too bad for Salem more so. They generate most of the city's operating revenue. With tax receipts falling everywhere and Salem's budget crisis I expect tough times for the city. Maybe this is too little too late.

I really do hope Salem keeps the teachers. I hate to think they're all coming after my job. Especially since we're looking at cash flow problems of our own. I have no idea how much money I can expect to replenish glassware that just didn't stand up to the 15 year olds the town hired to move us last year. We have dozens of expensive items that the movers trashed kicking around the building with no hope of repair or replacement. It's too bad. I hate having to buy things twice but we need these things. Especially the glassware. Prices for specialty glass have shot through the roof since the DEA and Homeland Security have effectively criminalized beakers.

I still have some hope though. No Child Left Behind hasn't totally snuffed out critical thinking. One of my students, during the midyear exams, pointed out that the periodic table she was looking at spelled sulfur wrong. I pointed out that there is the American english spelling and the English english spelling. She was looking at the British spelling which IUPAC has declared to be the wrong spelling.

The periodic table in question was given to the school by The United States Marine Corp. Along with 500 foam fingers, the "we're #1" kind.

Fuck Ted Kennedy!

Financial Planning

No for those of you who expected a picture of shotguns and canned beans, you'll be surprised to find I'm very upbeat about the prospects of my financial portfolio.

Why you might ask? Because I just blew out of any American Equities we had left. I am going into Canadian Mines and something I like to call a BRIC.

"It's not whether you're right or wrong that's important, but how much money you make when you're right and how much you lose when you're wrong." - George Soros

This website is not giving unsolicited financial advice. Past performance is no indication of future profits.

Who am I kidding. I'm fucking right all the time. Just ask my cousin Danny how much he wishes he had bought more RNAI when I put him in at a buck. Then ask him if he wishes he didn't start taking profit at $7. I believe Merck bought it at $13.

I like JAN.V MJO.V GXM.V KBGCF.PK and RIO. None of them are dollar backed.

Most of them are sources of indium, selenium and gallium. More importantly. None of them have any worrisome exposure to Central & Western Africa or the risk that such ventures currently enjoy. Demand for In, Se and Ga is about to shoot through every light fixture on Earth as people wake up to the magical wonders of LEDs and Solar Cells. Either one is a hot market place right now and those stocks are all over valued but not the mining stocks. Mines that will supply the raw materials of either one of those technologies will be even more lucrative if both technologies take off. I may actually live to see retirement instead of dropping dead from a Monday morning heart attack.

Brave New World

According to this the mainstream media is still under the impression that we're under no threat from deadly small pox because there are only two sources in the world that are closely guarded.

Which is more dangerous? Conspiracy theories on the internet or staggering ignorance within the so called credible journalism found in the mainstream media?

One doctor has shown that it is a trivial matter to synthesize nearly extinct viral particles from nucleotides sitting in a jar on the benchtop. Another has shown us how easy it is to increase the lethality of such a pathogen.

It's a good thing we don't sell do it yourself DNA fabrication kits to any asshole with a credit card.

Try Try Again

Lisa and I had no luck with our latest round of baby making.

Genius

There is a new cat litter box on the market that I'm very tempted to try. As you may know, I'm a big fan of robot slaves that do my bidding. Visitors to my house seldom leave without seeing the robot claw machine that cleans Barney's cat box. This morning I saw the ad on TV for the Cat Genie and immediately checked out the website. I'm very curious to see how the Cat Genie works, if at all. Then on the website I see this picture. Something about the look on the cats face makes me laugh.

Smart Girls

Winnie Cooper from "The Wonder Years"

Blossom from "Blossom"

I was going to do a story about child actresses who don't end up in porn but then I ran accros this post.

I'm not going to go into how fucked up this guy is in assuming that IVF isn't Gods will. Perhaps the Grand Architect of the Universe has decided that it's time for mankind to use the gift of his science to solve infertility. It's no matter that no one knows how many embryos fertalize naturally and fail to implant compared to those embryos that are counted in the lab.

If I knew how hard it would be to have children I would have started much earlier in life. The overwhelming message from the media is to have an education and career in place and start a family later in life. For many women who buy into that message they find out the painfully hard way that it's too late to have a family.

Our culture infantalizes our children until well into their most fertile time frame. No beer for a teenager who just held his buddy in his arms while he dies in the dusty streets of Kandahar. That boy is a MAN. He deserves a beer more then I do and a job where he can support a family when he marries his high school sweetheart. Instead he has to wait until he's 21 for that beer. His girlfriend is going to college because she knows she'll have to get a job that pays more then minimum wage just to keep the family afloat. There's no time for her to have babies. It will be years before her boyfriend is home and finished college. It will be years before that couple can afford to have children. Hopefully she'll still be fertile when her college loans are paid off.

Update

No one came up with squeaky voiced zombies demanding brains but one kid did list "World Domination" for the secret formula for Coca-Cola.

OK, Here's One More

The first question of a 4 question final exam for my Freshmen Physics class.

What did we study all year and what did you learn? Please give specific examples.

Final Exam Time

Real questions from my chemistry final exam. Can you answer them?

____________________________________________!


What is the formula for heavy water?

A number without ______ is _______.

Zombies have no body temperature and are cold blooded. Their temperature is whatever the ambient temperature is. Imagine you have a Star Trek transporter and beam 100 zombies into an airtight container full of helium. Would the temperature in the container rise or fall? Explain why.

____ _____ __________-___________

And my favorite:

What is the secret formula for Coca-Cola?

I Feel So Much Safer

Yesterday I went to Target. I bought 36 explosive devices and a video game. The teenage girl at the cash register very politely asked me to see my drivers license. As I handed it to her she said it was to buy the video game.

I'm just glad that this turned out to be a non-issue.

BTW can anyone guess why I labled this post "School Shootings?"

Look At That

Another place where guns aren't allowed and the government has a heavily armed presence and the police still failed to protect innocent civilians.

And again, why April?

Irony

So things that give me the jittery shakes can protect me from getting "the shakes."