As pointed out by an anonymous reader, more retractions are shaking the chemistry world. These are for papers by Prof. Sames at Columbia about Ru-catalyzed C-H activation. Check out these blogs for more details:
blog.tenderbutton.com
paulbracher.com
Note added on March 16: Now it’s also in the New York Times
Chili’s World, by my friend Santiago Casares, is now in its fourth season! Don’t miss the adventures of Chili, the shy penguin looking for love, Lenny, the lemming with philosophical issues, Mac the cat, and Alice! Here’s one of my favorites so far:
As reported in La Jornada, two Mexican scientists retracted three articles published in Journal of Organic Chemistry, Tetrahedron, and Tetrahedron Letters after finding that the results were irreproducible. The principal investigator is Prof. Eusebio Juaristi, a very well-respected chemist. It should be pointed out that this is being reported over a year after the initial retraction, so one can’t say that the scientists didn’t admit that there was something wrong with the results in a timely fashion. Making this the main front-page story in a national newspaper is an exaggeration in my opinion, especially giving it a conspiracy-theory title, but we all know that some newspapers like to dramatize things a bit…
My brother sent me these links:
Fuck Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades. The Onion, 2004-02-18.
Gillette ups the ante, unveils 5-blade razor. Reuters, 2005-09-14.
A couple of weeks ago I saw this book from 1687 in Beinecke library (sorry for the blurry picture). The text in the title page reminds me of the “for dummies” books, except that it is more verbose and polite:
HODDER’s ARITHMETICK:
Or, that Necessary Art
Made most eaſie
Being explained in a way familiar to the Capacity of any that deſire to learn in a little time.
I haven’t posted in a while…
This is the most remarkable criticism I’ve seen for the latest Kansas board of education decision regarding “intelligent design": Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New ‘Intelligent Falling’ Theory
Who would have imagined it? The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community.
Today I saw a fire extinguisher that had the equivalent of this NFPA diamond:
This is a standard code to tell firefighters about the risks of specific substances. The areas covered are health hazards, flammability, and reactivity.
Now, what is ironic is that, when fighting a fire, the last thing I would worry about is the hazardous (?) substances contained in the fire extinguiser itself (and I would certainly not expect them to be flammable!). But don’t worry, the 1/0/0 diamond above means “may cause irritation", and is the same as the one assigned to substances such as sodium chloride. So, in the end, this is almost like looking at the nutritional information label on a water bottle…
Disclaimer: fire extinguishers can be hardazous if misused–always use the appropriate fire extinguiser according to the fire source and conditions! (And while we are at it, don’t try this at home, eat fruits and vegetables, and talk to your doctor.)
Yes, that’s right, thanks to the Moronic UK Justice System when it comes to Computer Security.
Coming up next: man gets convicted of trying to rotate the knob of a locked door by using his hand…
If any Scholar shall be absent from any lecture, recitation, disputation, or other classical exercise duly appointed, he may be fined three cents.
If any Scholar shall play at hand or foot-ball in the College-yard, or throw any thing against the College-buildings or fence, by which they may be in danger of damage, he shall be fined eight cents.
If any Scholar shall frequently neglect the public exercises of religion and instruction, or if he shall spend the hours of study in idleness and manifest a prevailing inclination to wickedness and a dissolute behaviour, or if he entices others from their studies and draws them into bad practices, he shall be dismissed from the College, or rusticated for a year and put back into the next Class.
Laws of Yale College, 1795
(Taken from the cover of the 2003-2004 regulations.)
It is often said that general chemistry students tend to have trouble with the proper use of significant figures. However, it turns out that they are in good company–quantum chemists have been doing the same mistake for years (and yes, I’m one of them!).
This article discusses the problem:
Uncertainties in Scaling Factors for ab Initio Vibrational Frequencies
Karl K. Irikura, Russell D. Johnson III, and Raghu N. Kacker
J. Phys. Chem. A; 2005; 109 pp 8430 - 8437;
http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/jp052793n
As you may know (if you do quantum chemistry), the vibrational frequencies from ab initio calculations are systematically wrong, so they are often fudged by multiplying them by a “scaling factor". This factor is usually reported with four figures (something like 0.8982).
The authors of this article estimated the uncertainty of the scaling factor itself, and concluded:
The uncertainties presented in Table 1 reveal that the scaling factors are accurate to only two significant figures. The common practice of reporting four significant figures overstates the precision of vibrational scaling factors.
Figure 2 is especially revealing. It also shows that the basis set hardly affects the scaling factor, once the error bars are taken into consideration.
So, if this article is right, it turns out that generations of quantum chemists are sometimes no better than undergrads when it comes to reporting their results with “honest” precision!
Ok, this is not really news, and I’m not even sure if it’s true, but it sounds all too plausible. Coca-Cola had a campaign in 2001 for teaching restaurants how not to give (free) tap water to consumers. While it is obviously in the best interest of both the Coca-Cola company and the restaurant to sell as many drinks as possible, the weasel language is what makes it funny:
Water. It’s necessary to sustain life, but to many Casual Dining restaurant chains it contributes to a dull dining experience for the customer. Many customers choose tap water not because they enjoy it, but because it is what they always have drunk in the past. In response, some restaurant chains are implementing programs to help train crews to sell alternative choices to tap water, like soft drinks and noncarbonated beverages, with the goal of increasing overall guest satisfaction. Because of its own successful campaign against water, the Olive Garden has recently sent a powerful message to the entire restaurant industry — less water and more beverage choices mean happier customers.
See the screenshots from Coca-Cola’s website. It seems they took the page down after getting too much attention, so I can’t verify their accuracy.
…you start writing “two” instead of “too". I’ve been making that kind of silly mistake more often lately.
I learned English mostly by reading and writing, so I suspect that I thought of words as sequences of letters. Since “two” and “too” are different sequences with different meanings, I could never confuse them. But they sound the same, so now, after speaking English for a few years, I must be thinking of words a bit more phonetically, because I’m starting to make some of the strange mistakes that the native speakers make.
I just hope that I never write “principle” when I mean “principal", because if that happens, I’ll eat my hat!
Today, which is Labor Day in the U.S., we ran the 2005 New Haven 5K Road Race. I did 28:54 net time, and Fabiola did 29:28. This is pretty similar (or even greater) to the time we made in previous races; we’ll have to train more if we want to improve our time. ;-)
You have to see it to believe it: http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2005/09/satanic-tomato.asp.
Episode IV (or currently about half of it), as animated ASCII, via telnet:
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
Added: originally available as a Java applet, at http://www.asciimation.co.nz/.
Take a look at this comic strip: http://www.ozyandmillie.org/2005/om20050823.html
This week we went tubing to Satan’s Kingdom State Recreation Area. What an odd name! It sounds like the perfect setting for the next Stephen King novel, but it’s actually pretty nice.
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