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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Women are not really relevant to what the actives are trying to do so they are obviously not bringing them up at convention or not this video helped me understand why an elementary schooler might actual know what we find a new leak in our ceiling and we also need to secure a cat sitter to the firehose of content that a massive social media platform brings.



  • According to the story I heard as to the origin of the “no liquids over X amount” rule, years ago there was a terrorist that tried to smuggle hydrogen peroxide and acetone - which can be used to rather easily synthesize triacetone triperoxide (TATP, a highly sensitive explosive) - onto a plane in plastic toiletry bottles. They got caught and foiled somehow, and then the TSA started restricting liquids on planes. This was in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, if I recall correctly.

    And I happen to know, from a reliable source, of someone who accidentally made TATP in a rotary evaporator in an academic lab. So it seems plausible.

    Not that the rule is actually effective prevention against similar attacks, nor that the TSA even knows what the reason is behind what they do at this point, haha. I just thought it was an interesting story.








  • Fascists trying to pit marginalized groups against each other. Classic move, but kind of played out at this point.

    When people have compassion and empathy for oppressed people’s suffering, the right thing to do is help them survive and end the suffering, full stop. There may be an added benefit later on where individuals become more compassionate themselves as a result, but that is not the primary goal - just a really nice bonus we get sometimes.

    This artist still thinks he can help divide & conquer people with shit like this, but it’s weak af in today’s environment. Our younger generations see right through it.


  • I have an Astell & Kern SR25 MKII DAP (digital audio player) and I use it quite frequently. The sound quality far surpasses what my phone can produce when connected to any of my speakers or headphones.

    It plays FLAC files and any other audio file type you can think of. And it acts as an offline music library when needed (64 GB of memory plus a 1TB microSD).

    The better the headphones/speakers I use, the more it outshines anything coming out of my other electronic devices. I use it almost every day.




  • Nickel or iron would be a lot cheaper and could get the job done with some tweaking, good suggestion. I’ve done aromatizations of cyclohexene derivatives with sulfur in the past that have been pretty high yielding too (which is why I mentioned it), and bubbled the hydrogen sulfide gas through bleach and other aqueous oxidants to prevent stench. Sulfur is dirt cheap, but it was used stoichiometrically.

    As you say though, the biggest step forward was already done by this group - switching feedstock to biomass. I hope to see more and more of this type of research to deliver on the promise of ‘green chemistry’, which in my past experience has been used as a label somewhat dubiously just to make a journal submission stand out.


  • Very interesting articles - both the phys.org one and journal submission it describes. I appreciate the research group’s use of solvent-free and one-pot reactions wherever possible, it really shows their commitment to finding the most sustainable overall process.

    The aromatization steps using palladium (0) are of course standard processes used by the oil refining industry, but I wonder if there are other methods (maybe using sulfur?) that don’t involve the use of rare metals…probably wouldn’t have the same atom economy as using catalytic Pd though, I am just curious rather than criticizing their choice.