1/11/2007

Alright...Show yourselves!

According to The Disgruntled Chemist, it's delurking week! I'll go with that. Who reads this? What do you think of it? Open thread time!!

12 comments:

Ψ*Ψ said...

I'll start. It's nice when Excimer posts things here, because then I can be lazy :)

Excimer said...

I agree. Excimer's posts are frequently amazing, witty, poignant and down-to-earth. He also smells nice and likes children. His favorite kind of bagel is the Cinnamon Crunch bagel from Panera Bread.

Ψ*Ψ said...

The cinnamon crunch bagels are pretty good, yeah. I still prefer the dutch apple & raisin, though, with coffee from somewhere else that is not Panera.

Chemgeek said...

I am NOT half (or any other proportion) of CBC. I read this blog because blogs are awesome and I like this one. However, I'm disappointed I didn't get even close to the mystery compound. Oh well. I did recognize that it was extensively conjugated.

I am a chemist. I teach chemistry to college students. I also brew beer. Face it, brewing beer is chemistry. I have a blog here. It's new, so be gentle.

I teach in a very small department. I am the organic/biochemistry part and my colleague is the inorganic/p-chem part. I love to read blogs (especially ones about carbon) because it gives me a chance to have casual "discussions" with other chemists.

That's why I'm here.

Oh yeah, I also like football, baseball, protein-carbohydrate interactions. porphyrins, cooking, dendrimers, Netflix, and honey crisp apples

Ψ*Ψ said...

Your blog includes lots of beer, so I think everyone will be gentle! (Especially if you send them beer.)
Sounds like a very tiny department! Is the rest of the school small also?

Chemgeek said...

yup, small school. 600 students. But, 8 chem majors graduating this Spring.

I already give too much beer away. I need to find friends who are cool but don't like beer.

Anonymous said...

One of my 3 roommates, an organic chemist, has been brewing at home. (Most of the time his stuff was very drinkable and we had parties all the time. I was helping him with stuff like bottling etc, it was not that much work actually).

He stored the stuff in boxes in a closet. Once it just happened that we left too little headspace when bottling the young beer - or maybe he added too much glucose for the in-bottle carbonation. When you have box of overpressurized beer bottles and when one bottle explodes it can set a chain reaction.... The whole box was lost. It was not a real bang, more like a crusching glass and a hiss. We were sitting in the kitchen and playing cards and suddenly this funny noise and a golden lake seeping under the kichen door...

After we cleaned up the mess, there was the problem of what to do with the unexploded rest of the batch - we had two more boxes of equaly over-pressured bottles. So we put on goggles and very gingerly transfered the bottles into a freezer, to reduce the pressure. Then we called bunch of other people and explained that we had this emergency and a large quatity of good beer needs to be consumed right away.

It turned out that this over-carbonated IPA from freezer was one of the best beers I ever had.

Russ said...

I drop by this, and a lot of other organic chemistry blogs every once in a while. I a new faculty member (synthetic organic, medicinal, bioorganic) at a University in Canada.

I experimented with fermentation and even distillation while I was an undergrad, with a couple of amusing stories like milkshake's, but perhaps I'll save those for some other time...

Cheers!

MJenks said...

I stop by once or twice a day, mostly to make it look like I'm looking up stuff relevent to work. Plus, my blog gets read from here every so often.

I once had two bottles of raspberry wheat from a brewpub in Indiana detonate. Fortunately, I wasn't in the room when it happened, but there were glass shards laying a good 12 feet away from "ground zero". I've since been a little more anal about keeping my cellar stock at a proper lower temperature.

Anonymous said...

I'm always happy to find more chemists blogging. Science blogs seems to be biology heavy.

I'm a food chemist. I can rarely eat my results, but my lab smells nice most of the time as I like to react amino acids and glucose together. This reaction makes great aromas and colors.

MJenks said...

I'd blog more about my chemistry experiences, but since I'm in industry I can't really tell in any sort of detail about the cool shit I make on a daily basis. It all has to be hazy and fuzzy so that I don't let even the slightest whiff of confidentiality leak out. Occasionally I'll post something, but it's not what drives my blog.

But, like labcat, I enjoy seeing a growing momentum toward chemistry-based blogs

Ψ*Ψ said...

Wish my reactions smelled nice! More frequently, I smell thiols, which are not the same as fragrant, no matter how much I love garlic. Ether is the nicest-smelling thing here :)