Yep, sorry for going between terms. Also, if the confusion stems from just calling it “alcohol” at one point, I was using the word in the more general chemical sense (molecules containing a C-OH group), a class to which isopropanol and ethanol belong.

No dunking, and make sure what you’re buying is mostly alcohol (> 95%) and not water/alcohol mixtures often used for disinfection. Using in combination with e.g., a toothbrush is probably your best bet. IPA (and acetone) can strip some adhesives and cause certain kinds of electrical insulation to swell or dissolve, so a targeted approach is better. IPA is flammable (though less so than acetone), so be careful/well ventilated when allowing parts to dry, and ensure parts are fully dried before reconnecting to power.

IPA itself is only about twice as toxic as ethanol and certainly less problematic by inhalation than tar in the long run. I wouldn’t bother with a mask mostly because it won’t do shit unless it’s a cartridge respirator. However, IPA can sometimes facilitate skin absorption. IDK specifically about tar buildup but recommend wearing gloves (disposable nitrile is fine).

Do not power law fit your process data for predictive models. No. Stop. Put the keyboard down. Your model will almost certainly fail to extrapolate beyond the training range. Instead, think for at least two seconds about the chemistry and the process, maybe review your kinetics textbook, and only then may you fit to a physics-based model for which you will determine proper statistical significance. Poor fit? Too bad, revise your assumptions or reconsider whether your “data” are really just noise.

Always run qNMR with an internal standard if you are using it to determine purity. And, as a corollary, do not ignore unidentified peaks. Yes, even if it “has always been that way”.

DOE models almost certainly tell you less than you think they do, especially when cross-terms are involved, or when the effects are categorical, or when running a fractional factorial design…

I suppose that makes LANL and co. gender R&D labs. Explore the frontiers!

Ugh I had an older colleague, a PhD organic chemist, who was absolutely convinced that soy would make me (m) infertile. I ordered tofu once when out to lunch and he would not stop warning me to “be careful” and to be mindful of starting a family and “you know those studies.” When I mentioned that the consensus was at best inconclusive and most likely there is no such link, he said that no, “they” definitely showed that excess soy is bad and that he worried about my reproductive health. Like dude even if eating tofu did cause reproductive health issues, mine is none of your goddamn business. On the other hand, the same guy is also convinced that BPA (another estrogen mimic used esp. in certain plastics) concerns are a total hoax because “they did bad science because their sample containers had BPA in them and it leached into the urine samples giving false positive.” Also something about the only evidence of it binding like estrogen was that someone glanced at a crystal structure and halfassedly thought it looked like it might fit and rolled with it for career reasons. Like, I don’t know, man, maybe a couple studies used containers made with BPA, but most probably didn’t. I haven’t read them, but I know you didn’t, either. Also, you’re literally a petrochemist, you know BPA is mostly used in polycarbonates, and lab plastics, especially for analytical work, are mostly polypropylene or polyethylene designed to avoid exactly this kind of leaching. Honestly.

The local reenactors’ reading out the Grievances this year certainly hits a bit different.

Just think about all the shit you had to do to get from then to now, and then imagine that you have to do all of it all over again.

Yes, looks like I was misremembering some numbers like I mentioned elsewhere.

Hmm for some reason the numbers 1600 and 2000 W were rattling around my head for US and Europe respectively. I know most US appliances don’t like to pull the full 15 A because that’s when the breaker trips, but that would scale roughly the same for Europe so the power ratio should still be as you describe. I guess I either was misremembering or got the EU number from an abnormally low-current circuit.

I forgot TC did a video on this. I’ll have to watch when I have the time.

Something something typical US circuits can deliver less power than typical Euro circuits. Not a lot less though. Turns out it depends, but the power rating in the EU is in theory usually about 2x that of US circuits, assuming similar current draws.

I used to own a $15 plastic electric kettle, but it died after a year or two. When I went to target to get a new (hopefully better) one, I realized I could instead buy a plug-in induction plate on sale for $50, and a plain stainless steel kettle that somehow cost only $1.50 (less than the shitty bread that I was also buying? how?). The induction plate was honestly one of the best purchases I’ve made in a long time. Sure, I have to wear earplugs to tolerate the high-pitched scream that the frequency driver makes, but it boils water just as well as an electric kettle and is also soooo much nicer to cook on than the resistive curlicue burners that came with my apartment.

Back in my day there was an element called unununium until some nuclear scientists bismuth-munching paper-pushers with nickel allergies decided in 2004 that they liked Röntgen more than Regirock.

And before anyone checks, R/S were released in 2002 in Japan and 2003 internationally.

and get rid of my one kitchen crutch? absolutely not

For those who did a search only to get back pages of less-than-useless SEO slop that just recites the number line, here is something that better describes some of the grammatical insanity.

also, czterydzieści cztery is imo one of the less pronounceable words (well, two of them) in Polish.

Yes, on the rare occasion I cook meat. Too unpracticed otherwise. I originally got one because I’m colorblind and was scared of undercooking red meat and tired of eating leather. As a bonus, I used it to get the temperature right when I got into fancier teas and inadvertently trained myself to judge the temperature of water pouring into my mug by the sound it makes within a couple °C, which is kinda neat. Now, if I could figure out how to do something similar so I stop overcooking food, that’d be grand…

I realize (and you mentioned) that sugar is not a well defined term, but calling degradation products of ethanol in gas “sugars” is still a bit of a stretch. Ethanol by itself usually forms some combination of acetaldehyde, acetic acid, 2-carbon peroxides, and CO2 (i.e. not sugars) upon autoxidation, though those species can react with other components of gasoline to form the precipitated “gum”. The structure of gum in the literature is pretty hand-wavy (high MW materials kinda just be like that sometimes) but tends to be much more more oxygen-deficient than conventional “sugars” (polysaccharides) even for ethanol blends and contains a wider variety of substructures. Though, I have seen some papers talking about certain microbes that can ferment the ethanol in gasoline, possibly via sugars, but I don’t think that’s the common degradarion pathway for a mower.

Off during the day and between 17 and 20 °C when sleeping depending on the season.

Apparently this particular catalyst is pitched as an H2 evolution catalyst by oxidizing alcohols… can anyone with access to the article tell me where that energy comes from (thermo- or electrocatalytic)? IIRC alcohol dehydrogenation is endothermic by like 15-20 kcal/mol. A 1->2 reaction has an entropy change of ~30 eu, so quick math and dirty looks from p-chemists gives an operating temperature somewhere around 300 °C. That’s quite a bit better than conventional crackers but still requires significant thermal encouragement…

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raises hand since when does a spectrum not imply a total order?

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