I have told my story before, I think, but it is perhaps interesting to tell here for its differences with this story.

We were in the last stages of putting together the SI data for a fully written paper that would later become, after new data was obtained, a terrific JACS comm.

https://twitter.com/mvugt/status/1738918862685425960

On a Tuesday I was checking through the data and I saw a problem - one experimental result subtly did not make sense. To digress, it was isotope effect data and at one minor position where I was expecting an isotope effect, there wasn't one in the data.

Argh, this again. Sorry. To understand what is going on here and the actual nature of the question, it really helps to first figure out the pKa of dilute 18OH2 in regular water. Spoiler: it is unambiguously and without choice 15.7. Follow along.

https://twitter.com/J_A_C_S/status/1619296735490183169

For every acid in the universe except water, we can the define the Ka in terms of a ratio of activities that in dilute solution is arbitrarily well approximated by
Ka = [A-][H3O+]/[HA]
If we were figuring out the pKa of any other acid, we would just figure out the

I would like to weigh in on this a bit. Upfront, Mait is long-time friend, and I have used his textbook for teaching chemistry majors three times, twice in the early 2000s then again in 2012-2013. I did switch away from it after that, not because I did not like the book but

https://twitter.com/Chemjobber/status/1576976872294223873

because I wanted a better complete system including online work, and I judged that a competitor gave me that.
I think of Mait's book as the most physically truthful and purely readable of the texts that that I have used. Mait is a physical organic chemist like me, and it shows.

“Scientific progress is slowing.” - an apparently inebriated Rudy Giuliani

news.uchicago.edu/scientific-pro… God I hate this nonsense with such passion.

Mankind just pulled off the development of not just one but multiple Covid vaccines in unexpected and recently unimaginably fast time, saving millions of lives, but we hear scientific progress is slowing.

Compare:
A. Atoms overlap orbitals to form bonds.
B. Et ne nos inducas in tentationem sed libera nos a malo.
One is word salad taught mainly by people who don't understand either the words or idea to others who won't either but recite it back anyway.
The other is Pater Noster. Ok, I am going to try to explain all of chemistry in a short thread on twitter. It will be oversimplified, ahistorical, and wrong in interesting ways, but I like it. Don't hate - you can still confuse students will the details later.

True story: As an undergrad I spent a summer in a lab where on day 1 I was told about one of the graduate students’ fantasy plans to violently murder our PI. This was discussed openly during the afternoon homemade gin martinis, the get-stoned and eat burnt chicken parties, and the fancy steak-tartare gatherings for the future Nobel prize winner who worked upstairs. All of the male grad students contributed to the plans, along with the PIs secretary. A particularly favorite plan was to firebomb the PI’s office, which was in a corner with only one exit.

An idea we need to get across to the public is that there is no such thing as an irreplaceable genius. The jobs and trainees and grant money will go to other spectacular scientists, who will do great work, without the sexual harassment. Genius is a dime-a-dozen. I have published collaborative papers with two Nobel prize winners, would call a couple of others friends, and have known quite a few. They are mostly great people, bright _and_ kind, but you would not be able to pick them out from a thousand others I know.

Question: how well is my Blade Runner - Tears in Rain quote going to play for a South Korean seminar crowd?

Yea, I am used to half blank stares whenever I reference old pop culture - I mainly just try make myself laugh - but still. There is this.

Heavy sigh.

Ok, I was for a year the chair of our local ACS section. Cotton was holding an international conference at A&M, and we had the initiative to give money to the conference in exchange for the conference letting local students attend for a nominal charge instead of

https://twitter.com/DrBoyd_Chemist/status/1508465881462018052

the full conference cost. I negotiated exactly this.
A couple of weeks before the conference it came to light that students could not get a reduced price. The conference had set it up so that students had to write an essay to get the reduced price, and even that was limited

The best case for tenure at universities is a conservative one.
By conservative I mean the traditional conservative Kabuki that might have been respectable had it ever really existed, as opposed to 2022 nihilism except urine vodka lattes and performative assholery conservative.

https://twitter.com/PatrickSvitek/status/1496498208658407426

Hold on, I am trying to win minds and hearts here. Obviously.

I wrote this thread a long time ago but decided not to put it up. Today, because of other things on twitter that you will recognize, I have dusted it off. It is a little raw. I would like to spend a few minutes unofficially praising and providing my personal view of the background for my university’s workshops promoting diversity and excellence in recruiting faculty. So many people seem clueless about this.

Debated on sharing this, but there is a broader part of the story that seems worth considering.

We took pretty careful precautions all along until one thing recently. We did not become hermits but we kept our distance and did all the little stuff, with no bars, no restaurants, no groups, no close face-to-face even with masks. There were family connections that were potential problems but everyone involved was being careful themselves. And considering ourselves in a somewhat elevated risk category (for one thing I’m 61), we had the kids (12 and 5)

On voter fraud, pseudoscience, and haunted houses.

A huge number of people very firmly believe that Biden is stealing the election and that there has been massive voter fraud. You may not see it if you don’t visit the darker areas of social media, but it’s astounding. (picture credit Susanna Duncombe, 1725-1812)

I see it in relatives and people I know who I thought had more sense. We should try to understand why, what an argument with them is like, and, with Thanksgiving coming, what to do.

A sad story, then some possibly timely lessons for young scientists.

A long time ago now, I caught that a student had faked data. This was in the late stages of manuscript preparation, with a draft in hand, and I caught it on a Tuesday. It was undeniable, but still the student initially tried to deny it. (A key data analysis process we use allows the exact reproduction of numerical results. I strongly recommend this when possible. I caught that some numbers had been changed by exactly 10.00 or exactly 15.00.)

Let me try to explain this to my grandma.
Me: You know about atoms, right.
Grandma: Yea, I think so, but I died 50 years ago, so go slow.

pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ja… M: Atoms have nuclei and electrons. We worry about where the nuclei are, because the electrons just sort of follow them around.
G: Got it. This is easy.
M: We are made up of molecules. Molecules are groups of atoms connected in a specific way.
G: Like a group of friends.

Order, chaos, bah. This is chemistry, in fact it is my entropy and free energy lecture. We teach both so badly that most chemists, for God’s sake, understand neither. I use analogies like this, or a simple marble shaker, to show the ideas. Let’s go.

https://twitter.com/page_eco/status/1234047673100976128

The shaking rate is important, let’s name it T.
The average height of the mass of the nails seems important, let’s give it a name, I dunno, H. The H started high and went lower, but with greater T or lighter nails or less gravity it could have gone up.

Ok, so I have now gone through two MOOC courses on climate change, the older David Archer Coursera course and Michael Mann edX course, and I have some recommendations for my fellow non-climate scientists. First, absolutely do take a course. Yea, I know, our own areas of science are enough of a struggle, and we are each unlikely to become climate activists. This is, however, the preeminent scientific moral issue of our time, and it is not going away in your lifetime.

Interesting thread/comments, but I think it misses something important. It is of course true that science criticisms should be professional and not cruel.

But the very worst, most devastating criticism is the one that no one tells you about.

I have so many stories. 1/n

https://twitter.com/jenheemstra/status/1143824625895452672

At a long prior version of the GRC I’m at now, I recall sitting in the rental car of an old friend and famous chemist, drinking beer, while he alternately expressed his pain and sadness and the hurtful effects of his NIH grant being turned down. This was not because of any flaw

1. Ok, this is the thread to end all threads, or possibly my career. I am about to trash a new paper in @sciencemagazine, its editors, its reviewers, C&E News, others who stated or wrote adoring commentaries, anyone who looked at the paper or its commentaries without seeing 2. anything wrong, the often sloppy thinking of organic chemists and the increasingly irresponsible way we teach new ones. I will however try my best not to trash the authors themselves. When I was an editor, I rejected without review a paper by an NAS member that had

Working my way through faculty applications one again, and I am afraid I have to do this with a bottle of wine, because it is the only way I can keep from screaming. There are so many great people in the pile, people who dedicated all of their twenties and often half of their thirties to science, at poverty wages, when I know that very few of them will get an academic job, because there is so damn many of them. Science is eating its young. Chemistry being better than many other areas is still not good enough. They deserve better. They deserve

Dear Fellow Profs.

We need to talk. Your lectures are clear and eloquent, you use the latest classroom innovations, and you care about your students.

But your exams suck. This undermines everything else you do.

(tl,dr: collect and use data, test achievement) One sees endless cutesy questions that are essentially pure “IQ” tests, essay questions that measure bullshitting ability, word questions that test mind reading, multiple choice questions that assess testing strategy. (Is dimensional analysis really all you wanted to test?)