Alex Speed

‘Anxious and angry:’ Advocates share impact of budget cut to N.S. caregiver benefit - Halifax Examiner “When caregivers struggle or burn out, the impact ripples outward, increasing pressure on home care, hospitals, and long-term care."

‘Anxious and angry:’ Advocates share impact of budget cut to N.S. caregiver benefit www.halifaxexaminer.ca/province-hou...

A group for dementia patients is shutting down in Liverpool - here’s why that has some experts concerned | CBC News An adult day program in Liverpool that provides care for seniors with dementia and frailty is shutting in May after losing all of its funding in the recent provincial budget. Doctors and advocacy grou...

For various reasons, I'm familiar with this program... a particularly cruel cut.
www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

One of the most important solvents in my group. I'm chaotic, so use ACN, MeCN, and CH3CN.

Doesn't feel right to me. I've been searching defunct jello products, and can't find anything that fits... possible it was a different brand.

Who remembers a green jello flavour from the 1980s that was not lime? It was clear, so not pistachio pudding. I suddenly had a craving for it, but don't know what it was!!!! Not as tart as lime. Not apple either.

When my grandmother was sick once, I bought her a crown of thorns, and it grew to be about 6 feet tall.... sadly it was lost at some point due to an unfortunate circumstance. I've had quite a few since then. The mother plant looks very very ragged.... don't have a good photo of it here at work.

Photo of plants in a window, a globular flower with many small white and red flowers, and a thorny plant with pink flowers.

My less fancy hoya and euphorbia also flowering in my office right now!

go deeper into the UV, with a catalyst that would normally work with blue light? It's not a great concept from efficiency of photon energy, but is there a downside to catalyst performance? (2/2)

Curious how bad having the "wrong" wavelength of light, in the more energetic direction is, in a photochemical reaction? In a lot of reactions, with blue LEDs you're not hitting the maximum absorption of the system which falls into the UV, but more a shoulder. What happens instead if you (1/n)

Yeah, not looking forward to my walk to class.....

At tonight's African Nova Scotian Heritage Month Gala at the Halifax Convention Centre Tim Houston was LOUDLY and justly BOOOOED.

🎥: @seblabelle.bsky.social

#Halifax #HaliSky #NovaScotia

Shot of weather forecast, showing a temperature swing from +4 C to -14 C overnight.

My reaction this morning.... "it's warm, maybe spring is coming... let's check the weather...... Oh...."

Woken up by a very loud fog-horn this morning!

I had a funny dream, that I accomplished everything I wanted to do in chemistry, and applied to a physics PhD program, with the idea I would prove I could get a first-author paper in my PhD.

Still have a lot of things I want to accomplish in chemistry in real life!

This is super-helpful to think about!

I was social at the end of a not so great week, and I guess that was the medicine I needed. Still stunned over so many funding cuts to things that are important to so many people around me.

Sorry to hear this. It's been an awful week for many people and programs in my circles.....

ROFL!!! Never heard that one before!

Sadly I have no photos of owls as payment.

Yes, very true. I've truncated the screenshot, but it was in a broader context of making chiral amino alcohols from chiral amino acids, so it fails the context test.

I guess my main concern as an educator is if students who are just learning, start seeing things like this, it's not good.

The only thing that saves me is I am hyper-organized, with folders upon folders organizing everything. So I can find the e-mail or file in a folder that has the pertinent concept. It's 2026. We should not be going backwards in terms of searching ability with all the computing power we have.

Why has the search function become next to useless on my e-mail, and it's always asking for multi-factor authentication now?
I'll either look for a keyword for an e-mail and get "0 results"... even if its *right there* in my inbox, or I'll get 8000 hits. no in-between.

Lightbulb glowing with a flower inside, green leaves and purple flowers.

I've always coveted one of these. Never won an e-bay bid for a real Aerolux, so this is the next best thing!

See, this is why AI enshittifies things.

Hahaha, rofl

Highlight note in mouseover of highlighted text "phenylglycine" showing the structure of N-phenyl-glycine.

If I said "phenylglycine", would you think this is what I was referring to?

Several vials illuminated by a LED, glowing red, blue, yellow, greenish, and darker blue.

Inadvertently almost made a rainbow while screening photocatalysts:

Ironically I tried to make LaI2 once, without doing any prior reading. I'd tried a SmI2 reduction, it didn't work super cleanly, and I was just of the mind.... maybe I'll try another metal. I cut the La up with a hacksaw. It only ever made a brown slurry with I2.

Haha, yes trust but verify. I was reading on electrides, and had never heard of that one before!

Fun chemistry trivia question. What is the oxidation state of Ce in CeI2 ?

14 lines in the box

18 rows in the box, according to NSERC's website.