Notices by SellaTheChemist (sellathechemist@mastodon.social)

I’m not old enough, but I remember a leader announcing “Peace in our time.” It was not to be. My parents, their siblings and my grandparents survived it all and there are still pockmarks on some wells of where they lived. But there are now stumbling stones on the pavement outside their houses to remember some who suffered fates worse than death.

Am trying to recover from what I think is an almost unheard of domestic emergency. On Thursday evening I spotted that my heating system was leaking water and the pressure was falling steadily.
Uncertain I turned off my heat pump and tried to contact my installers who originally made a series of pretty major blunders on installation.
Next day, with water still streaming out of the pipework gently, I finally made contact with them. No one was available for a week. 1/n.

@GottaLaff And meanwhile there’s this. Because we know that it will work, right?

@deadlyvices @botvolution Was this the making of the extruded carbon turd. I think glasses would probably be wise, but esp an apron. While testing the turd with a student, I splashed a couple of drops of conc nitric that promptly chewed my jeans. I was wearing a lab coat at the time that makes it all the more galling. Ironically I’d just shown the student that a drop on the hand is big deal if you have running water to hand (so to speak). #riskassessment

@botvolution It's a reduced titanocene. You mix two spatula tips of red titanocene dichloride with one spatula tip of zinc in dry toluene under nitrogen. You then stir it for a day or so and the solution gradually goes green as the zinc dissolves, throwing its two electrons at two titaniums. The result is a beautiful deep green trimetallic complex that is very sensitive indeed. You put a spot down and wait for the solvent to evaporate. If it stays green you're set! If it discolours… #sigh

#Glovebox purged with 100 bar (7 m3 of nitrogen). Now the catalyst is heating up waiting for its nitrogen/hydrogen feed to reduce it down and activate it. We might have a working box by morning.

And then the shite jihad will begin. Time to clear out a lot of ancient samples and abandoned schlenks. There's a fair bit of rather manky white phosphorus and alkali metal in there so there may be some fun to be had…  #chemistry #academiclife

After multiple vicissitudes the correct replacement circuit breaker for my #glovebox has finally arrived. When it was installed, the blower that runs the recirculation in my glove box came back to life. 🍾🍾🍾 So now I need to purge the box with a cylinder of nitrogen and regenerate the catalyst which I have completely replaced. It's been a 2 ½ month emotional roller coaster. Fingers crossed we'll have the atmosphere down around 5 ppm O2 before the end of the week. #chemistry #academiclife

Saturday. My glove box remains dead after a mysterious cockup while I was on holiday that caused one glove to be torn and the catalyst to sinter into multicoloured lumps. It doesn't get much worse than that!

But after several abortive attempts to fix things, I woke up at 02;30 in a cold sweat about it. And then a possible solution dawned. So, back to the lab to try it out.
That glovebox has run for 30 years on the same catalyst. I'd hate to lose it. #chemistry #InInsomniaConsilio

And so my glove is is undead!! Atmosphere well below 5 ppm of oxygen. Now the cleanup begins.

The spots are a very sensitive organometallic compound used as an indicator. Green is good. Orange is baaaaaad. #chemistry #academiclife

#GloveBox Saga. So the regeneration cycle is on for the catalyst on my #glovebox. Because I'm out of town I've got a couple of students primed to take photographs of solenoid valves to see whether the lights go on in the right order and whether when VRE opens the gas actually flow. If the light is on but gas doesn't flow then it's back to ordering another replacement part. How many weeks might that take? #sigh #chemistry #academiclife

I return to my #glovebox to discover that the catalyst heated but the gas did not flow through at all - the flow rate seemed correctly set at the start. Does this mean that there's a deeper problem still lurking?

A whole day wasted. I'll have to try again tomorrow. Fingers crossed.

@quinn Always talk. Had lunch with a bunch of elderly climate deniers yesterday. Lot of talk. Food too.

@quinn Indeed. You might also check if they’re from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and perhaps Moldova as well while you’re at it. And then stfu.

@ianRobinson The last couple of weeks - it''s towards the back in teh Educayshon news. Or the High Principals column.
If I remember correctly its along the inner margin on a right hand page. #psychogeography #reading.

Question for UK academics: does anyone have a photo of the recent Private Eye column "High Principals" or "Educayshon News" about the SEAtS app? There's a lot of discussion about it and I've lost my copy of #PrivateEye

If there are any chemists or medical imaging people around here, you migth want to read this… Trigger warning: you may need a spare set of undergarments by the time you get to Para 44. https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/113217968407664714

The word "seems" is doing a lot of work here, warding off the lawyers.

Oh. Just heard a new version of the old malapropism on the radio. "There are people who mitigate between… " So there are three words to be muddled: militate, mitigate and mediate. Does anyone have any others to add to this list?

@rmathematicus Are you telling me that people "meditate against oppression…"?

@cbarbermd Unless you are over 60 in which case in the UK you don’t pay for prescribed drugs at all.