Alex Speed

Can I just do a new policy? When Multi-Factor-Authentication logs me out in the middle of my work, that means I'm done for the day.

Pictures of Mac finder, and Mail.

Corporate wants you to find the difference between the two pictures.

On the left, appearance of "Mail" when all my mailboxes are signed in and functioning normally. On the right, the appearance of "Mail" when MFA from my workplace has signed me out of my e-mail without warning, for several hours.

Aryne Generation from Aryl Halides Via Photothermal Red-Light Activation Multistep synthetic methods requiring harsh conditions and poor atom economy are central to the generation of aryne precursors. The Kobayashi method remains the standard for aryne generation, and newe...

pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

As a former benzyne aficionado (it's been a while since we did a benzyne reaction in my lab), this is a really really neat development:

of who is working on what, and where the field is going. So just a bit funny to find a case where it missed something in the wild!
I'm also delirious from medicine for whatever is making my joints ache, so take this all with a grain of salt!
(3/3)

some of the exact compounds we had made before. I got in a huff that we had not been cited, only to find our paper was right there as reference #1. But I guess for some reason that never showed up in Google scholar's citations of the paper. Don't laugh, it's a useful way to keep track (2/n)

Funny circle of chasing references. I saw a neat paper, that would have been an elegant solution to something we were doing 6 years ago. In that paper, they had a reference to the closest thing to what we tried, so out of curiosity, I clicked it.
In that paper, which I had not seen before, were(1/n)

Yup, IMHO computers have basically turned into the Red Queen's race.... constantly have to be updating and upgrading to keep the same functionality I had 20 years ago. What platform to you use instead of Office? Unfortunately with chemistry software, I'm deeply embedded in it....

Yup, they're basically getting an interest-free loan with what they're doing. And ultimately if anything causes a loss for them, they just increase rates. I think if Tim Houston could actually bring them to heel, he'd get more popular with people who are currently ambivalent about him.

Last day of class. And now my joints really ache.

I just find it so disingenuous that all of their "estimated" billing seems through the roof. Like they already have the most sweetheart deal some corporation could possibly get, clearly have incompetent data management, and on top of that, they're inflicting all this angst by over billing.

to my own work. And as we saw recently, that access can be turned off very easily by the admin, if they want. Especially since the default setting is not to save the files locally! I'm not even going to start on where the data might be located, etc.... (3/3)

as you point out, I can't work, or save my work if some software is glitching. I agree with the need for security, it would be very bad if some third party could access my files related to teaching and research without knowing.... but often I am the party who is being denied access (2/n)

The whole reason I moved to the cloud was so that I would not be dependent on a physical device. Now, I'm dependent again on my phone, which can be lost, or lose charge, or not have a signal. The biggest problem is how everything has moved to being subscription-based, and sometimes (1/n)

No, Hantzsch ester!

In reading this title, I first thought the grievance was going to be about excessive use of multi-factor-authentication (which interrupts my workflow and thought processes far too much). But that's really bad, being required to have that kind of software.

SF6 chemistry is hot this month. 🔥🔥

3 kg would terrify me. Funny, the Sandmeyer is a classic reaction I love to teach, but only have ever done once, as a student. I did also make mesityl hydrazine by reducing the intermediate, which was a clean reaction, but messy work-up.
This is a neat development!

Flask with a yellow solid in it, being held by a blue gloved hand.

Did a new to me reaction, and it's kind of neat how I combined 3 liquids and a solvent, and got this nice yellow powder out at the end!

I buy diabetic crew socks in packs of 6 from Amazon. No elastic, but they are long, and stay up nicely. Depending on how you feel about Amazon, the price point is usually better than the big pharmacies.

was complaining that the spectrometer would not lock, and there was something wrong with the rotavap, because he could not pull the solvent off to recover his sample. (2/2)

Worked in a lab once where a grad student suspected that somebody was stealing his deuterated chloroform, rather than ordering their own bottle. He replaced the chloroform with some other solvent (I don't recall what) that was very high-boiling. Soon enough, one of the fellow grad students (1/n)

the body actively absorbs, while B does not really resemble any bulk mineral used in nutrition, so we just don't effectively absorb it? (3/3)

that Be is toxic because we encounter so little of it, that living systems have never really developed a strategy to deal with it, and when it gets in the "wrong places" it throws things off. But you could make the same argument about boron. Is it because Be resembles minerals like Mg, which (2/n)

A question I could not answer in class: Boron and beryllium are both rare in the universe, and small elements that like to bond with a lot of things. Why is beryllium so toxic relative to boron? (Or alternatively, why is boron so relatively non-toxic). I made the explanation (1/n)

Was certainly a disaster when it happened. I attached a video in the other reply of this thread of the vials in action!

Here's a video of the vials rotating:

One of the labs at Harvard used to put "Radioactive" stickers on a bunch of their equipment, even though AFAIK they did not work with any radioactive isotopes, with the idea it would deter theft (ie stuff like balances and rotavaps being stolen happened).

One of the craziest things I had happen: The fan for the freezer in my glovebox went on the fritz, and started oscillating my whole glovebox. The vials on one of the shelves must have had that resonant frequency, and all started spinning around in a circle against each other. Labels all rubbed off.

because they were sent the wrong enantiomer of something, from the chiral pool. They assumed the other enantiomer just didn't exist commercially, so didn't think that could be a possibility, but it's not really my story to tell, so I won't go publicly into more detail than that. (3/3)

Eventually somebody suggested they measure the e.r. of the Mosher acid they were using for e.r. determination, and it turned out it had an enantiomer ratio in the mid 90s! There's another incident where a bunch of people were barking up the wrong tree for a long time (2/n)