week 13 links

Just a few thoughts on the links -- first, the phrase "computational quantum chemistry" is one I'd never heard before -- wow. And it was interesting to have chemistry described as linking biology and physics. I guess I am actually still figuring out what chemistry is! In the second link I really want to say a big AMEN to their goal of "fostering the development of an informed and environmentally aware public" -- can I get a "Hallelulia"? And their theme of Earth systems and resources. The third link was cool because I realize that our course has been decidedly "constructivist" -- having us integrate the material into our already constructed, (but hopefully always changing) world view. Cool, Larry! I just wish we had a lab -- you know we all really wanted to blow stuff up.

week 13, Memory and magic

The article on memory reinforces to me the need for many colors of pens and highlighters in school. Like the infant interested in the blue square for a while and then the red square, I am more interested in my notes if they are in pretty colors. And varying between index cards and charts to get the information to look different while I study it! Whatever it takes to get that extra brain loop in the hippocampus! As for magic, or illusion, I think politicians must be taking lessons from illusionists these days, they sure know how to get people not noticing things. It reminds me of this one part of the film "What the @#*!! do we know?" -- they say that we get something like 10 million bits of information per second but we can only be conscious of about 2000. So there is just TONS of stuff going on that we don't notice. And the biggest factor in which things we notice is familiarity. So we keep creating our world in the image of how it's been. But if we can gradually shift which things we are perceiving, then our world changes. So, the blog assignment says "how might you view things differently now?" Well, if I go to an illusionist's show, I'm just going to let them misdirect my attention because I think it's fun to play along and be amazed, but other than that I'd like to be seeing through the illusion, or at least expecting what I'd prefer to see.

week 13 "to live is to know"

Well, being as this is final exam week, I'm thinking that if "to live is to know" then I shouldn't have to study I should just live and I'll know all the answers, right? So I don't think it works that way, unfortunately. But in the sense of the Ancient Chinese Saying "When I hear, I forget/When I see, I remember/ When I do, I understand" I could imagine doing and living as close to the same thing, and that doing something, ie living it, is what brings true understanding. That's why we do so many clinic hours, so that we are doing/living Oriental Medicine, thus hopefully developing true understanding. At any rate, I like "to live is to know" better than "I think therefore I am." The latter making it all dependent on thought is kind of scary, since thought is so capricious, and I certainly think that we can "be" on a deeper level than thought -- go beyond the intellect to a purer state of being. The phrase "to live is to know" allows for that deeper state of being, and ultimately true knowledge probably arises from that state -- I hope to experience that.

week 12, spike's gallery

WOW, this was super gorgeous. Isn't life beautiful? I just wished I knew what some of those things were, but they sure were cool to look at.

By the way, did you all read that article in last week's packet about sleeping pill users and binge eating??? Truly startling! I think of Ambien as fairly harmless, but my goodness. Definitely better to treat people's yin deficiency or blood deficiency instead!!!

week 12, cells

These links are pretty cool -- I really liked the pictures, and they were quite informative too. I was surprised at the animal cells -- I didn't know we didn't have cell walls, and yet our cells are hairy! (well, they have cilia.) I was really fascinated to read about archeans, which I hadn't heard of. They live in boiling water, super salty pools, sulphur spewing volcanic vents, acidic water and deep in Antarctic ice. Strange choices, but I guess there isn't room for all of us to live in Northern California, so it's good we have different preferences! The picture of a virus freaked me out. It looks like a malignant robot. Yikes. And I had forgotten that they are not technically alive and only can do things that look like living when they're in a host organism. Altogether an icky concept. Eerie how they look like something other than Mother Nature made them. Where do they come from??

The cell tour was kind of cool, except that it didn't explain anything.

week 12 living diversity

The environment around my house has a fair diversity of species. Pine trees, manzanita trees, ferns, dogwood trees, redbud, and poison oak are what's growing naturally, then there's apple trees, blackberry bushes, jasmine, geraniums, mint, chives, oleander, roses, grass, maple trees, all kinds of different things in my neighbor's garden, but not too obvious at this time of year. Definitely predominated by pine trees -- they have a knack for limiting what else grows, as they acidify the soil. Then there humans, cats, dogs, goats, sheep, horses, chickens, mice, lots of birds -- doves, blue jays, flickers, something with small white feathers.... coyotes, wild turkeys, deer, mountain lions. I haven't seen a mountain lion in a long time, but I'm pretty sure they're still around. And I don't see the coyotes but I see their poop. Not a whole lot of insects around these colder days, but there are spiders. Oh, and I've been seeing some wildly huge mushrooms lately. And a lone wasp, looking cold and out of place.

week 12, the ethics of gene therapy

I really don't feel like I know enough about this to have a respected opinion, but I'm basically pretty sqeamish about healing modalities that are dependent on killing something else. Who are we to decide that we're more important than the mice? Although if it's something that was dead anyway I feel better about it. A yoga teacher who I've really appreciated through the years has a knee problem that people have recommended he take shark cartilege for, but he's a staunch vegan and would rather live with the pain than kill sharks, and while I personally just might take the shark cartilege if it were me, I really admire his sticking to his principles. And even if gene therapy is going to save countless lives, it begs the question -- do we really want to save those lives? The planet is overpopulated as it is, what is so bad about people dying? And of course we are attached to each other, and don't want someone we love to die, but how far are we going to go to keep them from dying? And then, at some point, they are going to die anyway. Conversely, we are killing things all the time, by living, we're eating other organisms, we're stepping on them, we're chopping them down to make furniture out of them...I'm not going to be like the people of a religion in India, I forgot the name right now, who wear scarves over their mouths so they won't breathe in bugs and thus, kill the bugs, and they sweep in front themselves as they walk so they won't step on a bug -- you could drive yourself crazy trying not to harm anyone. So I don't know where to draw the line.

week 12, animations

Well, I'm frustrated with computers -- I think that everything will be easy if I do my chem homework away from home with high speed internet, but here I am in the school library and the animations need a software update to play, and neither the librarian nor I have the password or whatever it takes to update something. Boo Hoo! I want to see the animations!

week 12, definitions of the chemistry of life

I read through quite a few of these links and was liking how my increased understanding of what biochemistry is was giving me a nice feeling of integration. In the past I've thought of chemistry as mildly interesting, in that you can make things that explode or make pretty colors, or grow crystals, etc., but not something that I could get really personally involved in. But these links on biochemistry got me really interested, because of my dawning awareness that this is part of healing work. Looking at living systems at the molecular level, researching diseases and trying to find cures, looking at the biochemistry of viruses, describing the molecular basis of living systems... I was thinking "OOOOH, I GET it -- now I understand why we have to study Chemistry!!!" I'm feeling like chemistry just became part of me, not this thing that some other people, who are not like me, do. Then I got to the link that says "Biochemistry is the study of molecules (e.g. proteins) in the absence of the rest of the organism." and I thought "OOOOOH, THAT's why I wasn't previously interested in chemistry!" This is how I've always seen it -- very reductionistic, just seeing the protein, and not the organism as a whole. If I look at the protein, or whatever molecule, as part of a living being, and I'm looking into it in order to try to find a way to heal this living being of a disease, then I'm way interested! And the first several links were encouraging to me, that many biochemists are looking at their work that way. I hope that biochemists are able to keep sight on the big picture, and not just muck around with their tiny little pieces of someone. This reminds me of a book I read as a kid, by Madeleine L'Engle, where the characters were somehow inside the mitochondria of their friend, who was sick, trying to heal him. That's how I'd like to envision a biochemist working on a piece of DNA or enzyme.

week 9-10, general chemistry: balancing equations tutorial

I couldn't get this link to work, it just loaded a blank space where the tutorial should have been. : ( Gosh, high speed doesn't solve everything, huh?

week 9-10, chembalancer

This was fun, I like the interactive sites. I did some from the "learning" section and some from the "review" section, and then I did the first few of the brain boggler questions and got them right! Yay! And I liked the little bits of information about the elements and molecules in the equations, for example it was nice to learn that acid rain has decreased due to better industrial pollution controls. I couldn't get the element quiz to work though -- no questions came up.

week 9-10 semiconductor of the week

Wow, I am fascinated to learn about silicon. And really impressed with how the course material is all coming together, building on the previous weeks! Learning about electron orbitals is really coming in handy to understand how a semi-conductor works. So, Silicon has 4 electrons in it's outer orbital, allowing them to form nice crystals -- 4 electrons form perfect covalent bonds with 4 neighboring atoms, creating a lattice. so there are no free electrons to conduct electrical current, making a silicon crystal an insulator rather than a conductor. Metals tend to be good conductors of electricity because they have free electrons moving easily between atoms and electricity involves the flow of electrons. Silicon crystals look metallic but they aren't. BUT then we can "dope" the silicon -- mix in a small amount of an impurity. In N-type doping they mix in an element with 5 outer electrons so that one has nothing to bond with and moves around -- thus conducting electricity, and in P-type doping they mix in an element with 3 outer electrons so there are holes in the silicon lattice, and the holes conduct electricity. And then the real fun begins when you put some N-type lattice together with some P-type lattice. So, silicon can be an insulator and a conductor -- thus the name semi-conductor. I'm getting an appreciation for science in that things actually make sense. Like N-type doping is called that because of the Negative charge and P-type for the Positive charge, and semi-conductors are just what the name implies, they sort of conduct and sort of don't. How refreshing in an often confusing world.

This was also pretty cool to me because I just finished reading a science fiction book where there were these groups of psychic people who would join minds in a circle to do stronger psychic work, and they used these lattices to amplify the power of their minds, and the lattices sound similar to silicon lattices. Knowing something about science enhances my enjoyment of science fiction, and reading science fiction enhances my enjoyment of science!

week 8--color of minerals/luminescence

Interesting that almost any element can be responsible for any color -- I guess we see this in the spectra of gas discharges link too -- all the elements are making a full spectrum. (I guess that's the point of that link -- I admit I was a little puzzled as to what exactly it was demonstrating, but what I got from it was that all these elements were making a full spectrum.) I was also interested to know that Manganese is what gives the pink to rhodochrosite, one of my favorite stones. I feel like chemistry is really a good thing for all those questions that little kids ask, like why is the sky blue, why is that stone pink -- there should be chemistry classses in pre-school, that's when we're all really interested in that stuff, before someone who doesn't know the answer tells us it's just that way and we accept that and lose our curiosity.

I really liked the link on luminescence, as I love glowey things. So now I know that the glow sticks that I weave into my braids at Burning Man are glowing due to chemiluminescence -- the energy for the light is supplied by chemical reactions. I am curious about what the chemical reaction is though. When I was a kid I used to think those glow sticks must be radioactive or something -- they just seemed unhealthy! Now I know they are unhealthy for the environment, as they only last one night and then get thrown out, so I'm trying to get more battery powered glowey things. I wonder if I could make my own glowsticks in my kitchen, along with bombs and fuel cells?? I'd really like to figure out how to do bioluminescence, like fireflies. That would be much more environmentally friendly. The link didn't mention glow in the dark algae -- I love that. I remember walking with someone on a beach at night near the waterline, and our footsteps glowed, as we were uncovering the phosphorescent algae in the sand.

I get it that incandescent lights are really ineffecient, but seeing as the light of the sun is incandescent, it makes sense that we like that kind of light better than others, like fluorescents. It would be nice if someone would figure out a light that is energy efficient but also is similar to sunlight.

I was also struck to discover that TV, neon and lightening are all the same kind of light -- electroluminescence. Quite a feeling difference between them!

I'm terribly disappointed that the movies on color elements in a flame didn't play for me. Here I am paying for high speed internet and they didn't play! : ( The pictures were nice, but I really wanted to see the movies. I assume they look a bit like fireworks....

week 8- colors of foods in my kitchen

Lately I've been obsessed with orange and yellow food, no doubt due to my overworked spleen. So, there are orange yams and yellow squash, also lots of green, with kale and chard. Oh, and more orange from carrots. In my freezer I have blackberries, for the purple end of the spectrum, and I've got tomatoe sauce for the other end of the rainbow. Then there's lots of white -- rice, oats, quinoa, amaranth, pasta. Oh -- yet more orange -- oranges, and some more red from apples. Orange, green and white are definitely the predominant colors.

week 8 alkali earth metal of the week

I chose Lithium as my alkali earth metal of the week, because it is in the mineral water of my beloved Harbin Hot Springs and keeps us happy there -- you probably all know about Lithium being used to treat bipolar disorder, and that in the Old Days, people sent their crazy relatives to spas for a a couple months. They'd get all evened out there, due to the Lithium in the mineral water, but then they'd go home and get all manic or depressed again. Now some of us are smart enough to MOVE TO the spa and live there happily. But all of this is the lithium on, Li+. Lithium in it's elemental form is a soft alkali metal, silver-white in color. It's the lightest metal, the least dense solid element. It's highly reactive, as alkali earth metals tend to be. It corrodes quickly in moist air, forming a black tarnish, so it is normally stored under a cover of oil. There is a theory that it is one of the elements synthesized in the "Big Bang." Trace amounts of it are found in the ocean and in some organisms. Besides being used as a mood stabilizer, it's also used in heat resistant glass and ceramics, and in aircraft -- it has a high strength to weight ratio. And of course in Lithium batteries. On a darker note, splitting Lithium atoms was the first man-made nuclear reaction and lithium deuteride serves as the fusion fuel in staged thermo-nuclear weapons. Hmm. I'd rather they didn't do that with it.

weeks 6 and 7: alchemy -- science, magic, art-- or all three?

Well, I have heard "magic" defined as "science we don't understand yet." And I'd say Alchemy fits that pretty well. Especially as I was reading that first link -- maybe I'm just wigging out on the hot cocoa I just drank and my brain isn't functioning as well as it could, but it seemed pretty dense. Sorry I think I'm getting to be a whiner about these websites -- I only like the interactive ones, they have to have pretty colors and nice graphics and things to click on, otherwise I accuse them of being dry and dense. But one thing that I did get from it was the symbolism of lead and gold, and it also went into the whole mystery of cinnabar in a more complete way than I'd been getting from our history class. I'm thinking the external alchemy is a combination of science, magic, art and just plain weirdness, whereas the internal alchemy is science and art, with a little magic. I'm glad to see the symbolism of the metals, as that makes me think that the whole external alchemy weirdness may have been a screen for the internal alchemy wisdom. People drinking poisonous metals in an effort to live forever just doesn't sit well with me.

weeks 6 and 7: electrochemistry science toys!

Whoo hoo! These are so cool. Remind me to do these when I have kids again. I'm especially enthusiastic about the hot dog cooker. And the bomb. I loved the story about the TV host having the water shoot all over his face. All these have ingredient lists that are not just what I have around the house though, and of course I'm not even in my house, I'm on high speed internet in Borders, so I'm not going to try them just yet. I think I need kids in the house to motivate me to assemble the materials. I wish we had a lab so we could do them in class!!! One thing I might do at home would be to melt silver and mold it into something cute -- that one didn't seem too complicated. I am wondering about the wisdom of teaching foster kids how to make a bomb though -- foster parents have to lock up all the cleaning supplies exactly for the reason of not having the kids use them to blow things up, so I'm imagining the social worker on her weekly home visit when the kid says "we made a bomb! It was so cool!" I remember making an oven in Girl Scouts out of a cardboard box, aluminum foil, wire hangers and a candle. I was pretty excited about it -- way more satisfying than the Betty Crocker mini oven.

weeks 6 and 7: Halogen of the week

My Halogen of the Week is Astatine. I picked it because I had never heard of it. It's number is 85, it's abbreviation is At. It's weight is 210, in parentheses, and I don't know what that's about. It's solid at 298 degrees Kelvin, metallic in color and classified as semi-metallic. But before you start feeling friendly about it, I should tell you that it's radioactive, essentially unavailable in nature and made only in nuclear reactors. It's longest lived isotope has a half-life of only 8.3 hours. It has about 20 isotopes and they are all radioactive. And possibly it accumulates in the thyroid like iodine. Sounds fairly horrifying, and it just goes to show you that you can't just walk up and make friends with an element just because it's in the periodic table. Best to google it first before you give out your phone number. The odd thing is that the website I went to had a picture of a rock with Astatine in it -- I have no idea how that happened.

Dihydrogen Monoxide

Wow, did you guys read this link? Pretty scary stuff that's getting LEGALLY dumped into the ocean or streams or lakes. EEW! Is there a group with an email petition to our congress people or something?

week 5 -- what is a mole?

OK, first I can't help venting a wee bit -- I am in San Ramon, in civilization, thinking I can get caught up on my chemistry homework on high speed internet, and first it was quite a project just to find a place to do it, now here I am, having signed up for a day of t-mobile for $10, but I'm in a cafe where the electrical outlets are 15 feet up the wall, so I have to try to finish while my battery lasts, and I just had this thing going on where nothing was loading, it was slower than my dial up at home but I can't vaccuum the living room while I wait! WTF????

Thanks for listening. Alright then, what exactly is a Mole? Well I think that website got me a little confused. I had thought this Mole stuff to be quite straightforward, it's an Avogadro's number of molecules, right? But this link was going on about Gram Molecular Weight, which is the molecular weight of a gas expressed in grams, and a gram molecular weight of any substance contains Avogadro's number of molecules. So, I think that a "gram molecule" is the same as a mole. I'm a little foggy about what is different about gases than everything else. I guess it's that the molar volume of gases is always the same. Anyway, I'm sticking with what I think I understood before, that you take the molecular weight of an element and multiply it by Avogadro's number, and that's how many molecules you have in that many grams....oh, dear, I'm feeling a little lost on this now. I know I understood it in class though. I'm going to stroll through everyone else's blog on this one and see if the fog clears.

week 5 -- Avogadro's Hypothesis

Well, I got all the multiple choice questions on this link correct, which was gratifying. Interesting the people who come up with some brilliant thing and die before it's recognized, like Avogadro, and Zhang Zhong Jing, whose book wasn't popular until 1000 years after his death, but whose name we have to know for our exams 2000 years later! It really says something about having faith to pursue your dreams regardless of public opinion. I guess during Avogadro's life, people thought John Dalton was pretty hot, and now we're like "who? Oh, the guy that thought water was one part oxygen and one part hydrogen?" while chemists are drinking toasts to Avogadro annually.

Inert Gas of the Week

Helium is my inert gas of the week. It is abbreviated He, it has 2 electrons, and it's mass is 4.002602. This is really weird -- it's melting point is <-272.2 C and it's boiling point is -268.93 C. It has the lowest melting point of any element! It's used in cryogenic research because it's boiling point is close to absolute zero. It is the only liquid that cannot be solidified by lowering the temperature -- it remains liquid to absolute zero at ordinary pressure but will solidify by increasing the pressure. How bizarre, huh? It is used to cool nuclear reactors, in MRI's, and of course, my favorite, in balloons, among other things. It is named for the sun, from the Greek "helios". Some person named Janssen first obtained evidence of helium during a solar eclipse in 1868, when he detected a new line in the solar spectrum. Except for Hydrogen, it is the most abundant element in the Universe!! It has been detected spectroscopically in great abundance, especially in the hotter stars. (I like the hot stars.) Here on Earth, it is extracted from natural gas, mostly here in the US. The cost of helium fell from $2500 per cubic foot in 1915 to 1.5 cents per cubic foot in 1940. Wow, did anyone have a lot invested in the helium market back then??

Interesting use of carbon

Hi, I just had to share this with you all -- I stumbled onto it this morning. There is a company that creates diamonds from a lock of hair or cremation remains of people, for their loved ones. "The LifeGem ® is a certified, high-quality diamond created from the carbon of your loved one as a memorial to their unique life." The carbon just keeps on going around in different forms...I wonder what Primo Levi would think of this? The website is lifegem.com if you want to check it out.

Review of links on Green Chemistry

Well, my review of the first link re: the sustainability of Asia Pacific economic growth is that it took a half hour to download (but ok, I needed to do laundry and vacuum anyway) and then I discovered I needed to download iwork software in order to read it. So I was pretty put off by that, and I wasn't about to download the software because my laundry and hoovering were already done! So, that link gets low marks due to inaccessability.

Then I tried the Green Chemistry in your Classroom, and that one loaded fine, but it didn't say anything. I'm wondering what are running clock and alarm reactions, and which is greener and why? Nothing was explained.

So, at least the Atom Economy link was instructive. And accessible. I learned how to calculate the mass of a compound, and how to calculate theoretical yield, and atom economy. Although I'm still wondering how you figure out the actual yield. Do you have to just try the process and then weigh what you get at the end?

Atom Economy

Atom Economy

I was excited to find a practical application for knowing the mass of an element! I like things to be practical. So I saw how calculating the mass of benzene and of phenol, then allows you to figure out the percentage yield, and also the percentage atom economy. I was interested to read the part about how yield is only part of the story, that you also have to take into account the reactants, and what is left over from them that then might have to get thrown away somewhere. When I was in the little window about figuring out the yield, before reading the other part, I was confused, thinking "ok, I see how they calculated the mass of benzene, and I see how they calculated the mass of phenol, but what about these other things in here? Well, part of it is water, but what about the sodium-sulphur-oxygen thingie in the middle, what's that and what happens with it? Why aren't we calculating its mass too?" And then I read the other part, called "the problem with yield" which was saying exactly that, and I find it really disturbing that this is a new idea, the concept of setting up your chemistry to not make so much waste that you then have to dispose of, when I, not really knowing jack about chemistry, looked at this equation and said "yeah, but what do we do with this other stuff??" Wouldn't you think that actual chemists would have asked that too, at least a hundred years ago? I'm pretty sure we're talking about a lot of people who were smarter than me...

But in the "better late than never" category, it is encouraging to see that ibuprofen is now being produced with an atom economy close to twice what it used to be. It seems to me that the companies making stuff should have their chemists calculating yield and atom economy, to find the best process, and then NOT use a "deliberate excess of reactants" which the web site says that many processes do.

I shouldn't be so harsh, I know I'm not as efficient and economical as I could be either....yes, I put trash out at the curb every week...

Catalyst of the Week

Catalyst of the Week

I need a catalyst for my internet connection, but
failing that, my catalyst of the week is Platinum.
It's a transition metal, atomic number 78, abbreviated
Pt. It's name comes from the Spanish word for silver,
platina. It is sometimes found in deposits of
gold-bearing sands, even around here, in the western
US -- possibly even in Nevada City, where I used to
live, which is an old gold mining town. It's a soft,
dense, ductile metal that is very resistant to
corrosion, used to make jewelry, wire, electrical
contacts and laboratory vessels, and also to coat
missile nose cones, jet engine fuel nozzles and other
devices that must operate reliably for long periods of
time at high temperatures. Platinum resistance wires
are used in high temperature electric furnaces. It's
melting point is 3215.1 degrees F. (Must be that
extra .1 degree that makes it so useful in furnaces,
huh? : ) )

All this, and it is also widely used as a catalyst.
It will convert methyl alcohol vapors (CH4O -- how do
you get the keyboard to write the 4 in that down low?)
into formaldehyde (CH2O) on contact, glowing red hot
in the process. This effect is used to make small
hand warmers. And I love those things. They're these
little packets, and you shake them and they get warm
and last for hours. Absolutely delightful.

It's also used in cataytic converters, combining
carbon monoxide and unburned fuel from a car's exhaust
with oxygen from the air, forming carbon dioxide and
water vapor. And platinum is used as a catalyst in
fuel cells that combine hydrogen and oxygen to produce
electricity and water.

Pretty AND practical!

The Molecular Structures of Different Forms of Carbon

The Molecular Structures of Different Forms of Carbon

Well, I have to say I am pretty fascinated with the
different structures of carbon. All these years I
have known that we are "carbon life forms" because I
watched Star Trek as a child, but I didn't actually
know anything about it. So diamonds, (my birthstone,
by the way, and a good way of getting my attention on
chemistry) are made of carbon too -- carbon atoms
covalently bonded in a kind of diamond shaped
structure. It's a little hard to see in the black and
white picture in our handout, I bet there is a nice
3-D color depiction of it on the internet somewhere,
but I'm afraid I'm way too frustrated with the
internet at this moment to try to find one. But it
looks like 2 diamond shapes intersecting, one vertical
and one horizontal, making a 3-D diamond. Which makes
me wonder, are diamonds, the stone, named for this
shape or is the shape named for the stone, and how did
whoever was naming them know way back then that
diamond stones have a diamond shaped molecular
structure?? That fascinates me, like the compound
responsible for the scent of roses having a similar
name to the compound in chocolate and in our brains
when we're in love. It makes it seem like chemistry
is really a very intuitive science.

Anyway, silicon and germanium also have this
structure, but people probably weren't so familiar
with those back when diamonds were getting their name.
Graphite, on the other hand, is also carbon atoms,
covalently bonded, but in a plane so they stack up and
slip over each other, instead of being hard like a
diamond, graphite is soft and slippery. If you look
at just one plane of the diamond structure though, it
does look similar to the graphite, with balls some of
which have 6 lines going off them -- is that
"hexagonal symmetry"? But the diamond has these
straight lines running all the way through it in
several directions, and the graphite makes these happy
little sun shapes without the lines connecting between
the atoms into straight lines. When using stones for
energetic purposes, diamonds are considered a very
powerful energy conductor, and these straight lines in
the molecular structure seem to support that idea.

The buckyballs are really a fascinating idea, I'm
curious what this is like as a substance? I mean when
you get a bunch of them together, so you can see them
without a microscope, then what is it like? And how
do the spheres connect with each other? Or do they?
Maybe you can only have one bucky ball, and just
admire it in the microscope. Looking at the structure
of diamond and graphite, there are little lines at the
edges, just waiting to bond with other carbon atoms in
the same way, but the bucky ball looks quite self
contained. The Fullerene looks like it could keep
having more added and get big enough to see though.

I seem to have a lot more questions than answers in
this assignment, but here's one more -- I'm wondering
what carbon's molecular structure looks like in our bodies.

review of atomic properties menu link

Well. This link is definitely a good resource for reviewing all the stuff we learned in class about orbital filling and such. But it is deadly boring. I slogged through quite a lot of it because I thought I needed the review, but gosh, it sure made me realize that I am up too late and it's time to go to bed....(yawn).

Ozone discussion

I asked my father his thoughts about ozone, and he was aware of the aerosol spray issue, and that people can get sunburned more easily due to depletion of the ozone layer. My impression was that he had the understanding of ozone that was common about 15 or so years ago, in spite of reading the news way more than I do. I am really puzzled how he has managed to not know more about this. It seems to illustrate the general denial that has been widespread about this issue, which I HOPE people are finally getting over. I also think that in the fairly conservative area of New York where he lives, people just don't talk about ozone, whereas it's a much hotter topic in northern CA.

quiz results from week one assignment

So, I'm catching up on past stuff -- I'd had this great idea that I'd do my Chemistry homework before class in the mornings, as I get there early to beat some of the traffic, but wasn't able to get online, so hear I am on my dial-up connection at home. So, the quiz -- I got most of it right, except I was thinking that dissolving sugar in water was a chemical change because I was imagining the water molecules bonding with the sugar molecules, but when I saw the answer that it's a physical change because you can evaporate the water and get the sugar back, I thought, oh, well of course, what was I thinking? And the other one I got wrong was that I was thinking steel was a pure substance, when it is in fact a mixture of iron and carbon, and I thought well, I should have known that, because I come from a steel mill town, and if it were a pure substance it wouldn't have to be milled, now would it, and all those steel workers would have been out of a job even before the mills closed.

My favorite part of the website with the quiz was seeing that phenylethanol is the name of a chemical compound that gives a rose it's smell, and that phenylethylamine is the name of a chemical compound that our brains produce when we are in love and it is also found in chocolate. The two names are so similar I imagine there must be something chemically similar between them, and that makes me think that the rose being a symbol of love must have it's basis in chemistry! And that people started making that connection without any knowledge of chemistry, just by feeling the similarity somehow.

Chemical Bonding website review

Anthony Carpi's article was a nice review of our class material -- no moving pictures or anything flashy, but he got my attention by pointing out that sodium, a metal that produces flames when it contacts water (how can I get some of this? Cool!)combines with chlorine gas, which was used as a weapon in World War 1, to form the nice, safe compound of sodium chloride, table salt. This really illustrated to me the idea that elements are highly reactive if they have those lonely electrons on the outside and then when they're bonded they are more stable. Kind of sounds like the delusion women get that if they can marry that unstable, reactive man, he'll become a nice stable husband and father....may work for table salt but I don't think it works with humans.

Transition Metal of the Week

Well I had a transition metal as my element of the week before, but I had to pick a different one to keep things interesting. So it's Cobalt. Number 27, abbreviated "Co" and the origin of the name is the German "Kobalt" meaning evil spirit. I thought that was very chinese medicin-ey! Cobalt is quite special, as it is one of three elements that produce a magnetic field. It's uses are magnets, ceramics and special glasses. And I got a nice definition of a transition metal -- they have valence electrons present in more than one shell so they can exhibit several common oxidation states. I'm thinking the oxidation states are why cobalt makes pretty colors in ceramics and glass? Because supposedly it is clear, but of course we all think of it as a gorgeous blue. If anyone knows if this is due to oxidation, please let me know.

Element of the week

So what the heck, Titanium can be my element of the week. It has 22 protons, and thus 22 electrons, it's atomic mass is 47.867 -- let's just call it 48, shall we? And it's solid at room temperature, which is good for those folks with titanium knees and titanium bikes. It's a transition metal, and I confess that I don't know what that means. Anyone want to enlighten me on that? And it's abbreviation is Ti.

periodic tables

I checked out the memory and the game websites, and I got a perfect score on Proton Don's game!! Whoo hoo! (of course, I set it to the easiest level -- I'm not that confident.) I really liked the memory one, they really have good mnemonic devices to remember the numbers and the elements, like titanium is #22, you remember this because the titanic had 2200 passengers. Oddly, I didn't know, or care, how many passengers the titanic had, but now I remember the number of Titanum AND the number of passengers on the Titanic. Strange, huh?