Someone finally found a use for Tumblr for something other than 4chan pictures and fucking hipsters (and their puppies). Rejoice in SCIENCE!
Someone finally made a TOC ROFL to document all those stupid, awful, and awesomely bad graphical abstracts that show, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that chemists don’t care whether you understand what they’re doing.
If you’re not following @FakeScience on Twitter, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Their Tumblrphotoblogphotoblag blagopicsblagoblag whatever is brilliant, too.
That’s all I got. If there are other science-y Tumblrers out there, holla.
By popular demand[1], I’ve posted the slides from my ACS talk on Sunday. I like to think it was more interesting in person, but it’s here for posterity’s sake (plus I take a seriously minimalist approach to powerpoint presentations). Thanks to everyone who came and participated in the lively discussion that followed!
There was also a pharma blogging panel (featuring Derek Lowe) on Tuesday which I didn’t go to, but it was liveblogged at The Haystack.
It’s late August and the leaves haven’t begun to turn, but there’s a different feeling in the air, one of foreboding. The population is rapidly increasing, the town filling with lost, young people looking for a home; my favorite lunch places have longer lines; the collective IQ of the environs is dropping; the smell of Axe body spray and bad decisions becomes increasingly pungent.
The undergrads must be coming back soon. Sigh.
While I’m none too happy about this, I have other things to blog about. I’ll be at ACS in Boston next week, giving a talk about chemistry blogging. While one can debate the whether this is a good idea or not, if you’re around on Sunday, do feel free to show up.
Next, the Nobel Foundation is doing their “Ask a Nobel Laureate” program this year with Sir Harry Kroto, one of the chemists who won in 1996 for the discovery of fullerenes. So if you have a carbon science question, ask!
Just a heads up that I’ll be in Boston this Thursday-Sunday for the ACS Organic Division GRS. If you’re going, come say hi. I’ll have a poster with science on it on Friday.
Less likely given our readership, but I’ll also be at the American Crystallographic Association’s Chicago meeting July 24-29. Again, come say hi if you’re going. The plenary lecture will be given by last year’s Chemistry Nobel Prize winners, all of whom happen to be crystallographers.
See the cute little devices below? These are my first OFETs! That means I’m learning my way around a completely different type of device. And that doesn’t happen overnight. Nonono. That takes time and patience and a lot of fuckups. I’m lucky in that I’m already intimately familiar with spincasting and that our probe station* is pretty user-friendly.
Something interesting I noticed when I pulled the camera out: without the flash on, all you can see is the shiny blue of the SiO2 on Si substrate…the lovely organic film on top of it GLOWS LIKE CRAZY under camera flash, though!
My first impressions of OFET work? I like them. They’re shiny!
…so here is another. In situ fullerene formation from a flake of graphene! It’s uncertain whether this is the mechanism for fullerene formation in conventional production methods, but clearly it works in the TEM! The paper is brief and interesting. Go read it, y’all.
You don’t want to see my inner environmentalist start ranting about the giant oil spill in the Gulf. My ranting tends to fall into the tl;dr category, so I am remaining (angrily) quiet.[1]
However, seeing people try to develop solutions to this mess makes me a little less angry. Case in point:
Score another for science, y’all.
[1] …on the blog. This is why I also refrain from written commentary about coalminingaccidents.[2]
[2] Scroll to “1990″ on the third page linked. (RIP, Uncle Mark.)
