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?