Respite

So I finally get a break from the madness that is school and here I am once again, being overly-ambitious, interning away my winter. Do people ever learn?

It's a little lonely here: I've found myself on facebook a little too much, looking at the profiles of people I wouldn't otherwise even think about had I been back in Singapore. I've been wondering what and how they are doing, how much they have changed, and what it'll be like when I finally return.

Of course, more than that, I miss the love of my life, who's elseplace and doesn't have skype. I realize how much easier being in a long-distance relationship is compared to 10 years ago, but also how hard it is.

I've also discovered the faux-satisfying allure of American cable TV. Fortunately—for me, as well as the other couch potatoes—the every-minute ads will frustrate anyone enough for them to get up, walk around, and avoid having their skin fusing into the couch.

I've been wondering if this is the way working life is going to be, your mind periodically occupied with a dozen and one things, rarely having the time to just do nothing, before being caught up in a whirl of activity again. Given the somewhat low odds of moving up in an "industry" that has a notoriously flat corporate structure, you're unlikely to be promoted too much, ending up drawing a salary that's a comfortable middle-class consolation that prevents the 99% from revolting—or not, at least not anymore.

But then Monday comes, and I'm drawn to the fringe of our "collective knowledge". I creep up to that strange unpredictable place, caught up in child-like awe as I peer over the edge. Deep breath.

My name is Kenneth and I am an addict.

Those who kindly reprove thy faults

“Think not those faithful who praise all thy words and actions; but those who kindly reprove thy faults.”
~ Socrates

Rant: what are you thinking?

This may come as a surprise to you but there are actually a good number of people who are interested in your class and the subject matter we are discussing. Perhaps this interest is not exhibited in the manner you would hope: being excited about the fortnightly quizzes before any real lectures, reading over 100 pages of mostly irrelevant nonsense for those quizzes, and then eagerly applying that befuddled knowledge haphazardly to mundane problems of little future impact; nevertheless, the lack of such "ardent fervor" does not preclude genuine interest.

I wonder if you realize the huge disconnect between what you say your intentions are and how you are going about to achieve them. You exude a sense of approachability but you're not willing to commit to your answers when we do ask you questions. You deliberately apply tricky wording on recall tests, including triple negatives and vague questions, and you allow only team appeals? Clearly, you're hoping for some self-censorship to work its magic so that you don't have to deal with the issue of unfair testing. Again, the guise of making the test work for the student just doesn't cut it; perhaps I might believe the story better if the questions were direct and not unintentionally unclear.

You claim you want to guide us, Professor Guru, instead of just feeding us material, but if you've actually thought about your material carefully, you would appreciate how unclear it might be to someone beginning in your subject. Frankly the most interesting and high-impact research is surrounding these controversies; that you just gloss over—"problematize", as some other careless academics would term it— them glibly just shows how lowly you think of us. It's already 5th week and we are still talking about that absurd final paper that we have to write before learning anything more than what's on Wikipedia page titled *******.

That you would refuse to lecture but spend an entire class period talking about archaic rules on how to write a paper really, really disgusts me. Read any news article. Does every paragraph have a topic sentence? Is there ONE and only one thesis statement? Do all the topic sentences lead up to the thesis? Your "it depends" answer to some of the questions show you clearly believe otherwise.

But you still had to give us that list, didn't you? Once again, your strict adherence to the safe, tried-and-tested, by-popular-definition, common-ground nonsense that you have been sell is just getting exasperating.

Seriously, what are you thinking? This class is quickly becoming a futile independent study project that meets way too often for the miserable amount of work that gets done.

Peptide Chemists

Peptide chemists usually come from the eupeptic end of the scale of human felicity, but anyone who performs the deprotection of a benzyl ester with 33% hydrogen bromide in acetic acid could be accused of brutality. That peptides survive is more a tribute to the molecules than the chemists who make them.

~Protecting Groups (Foundations of Org. Chem.), by Phillip Kocienski.

Ouch

Today I lacerated myself by simultaneously crushing the end of a borosilicate glass pipette and jamming it into my right thumb. This is the first time I've been cut this way, after a total of almost a full year in lab doing Chemistry. I've heard that it happens fairly commonly with NMR tubes, but damn I've never heard about the *back* of pipette tips.

Glass is a very temperamental beast: smooth, elegant, and lustrous--even sexy--when intact, but when broken... If you've seen / handled borosilicate before you'll know that it's a real b*tch when it shatters. The shards are uneven and slivers go everywhere. Think beer bottle, only 100 times worse.

So another battle scar to my collection! Let me break down the extent of the cut. The approximately inch-long slice is about 3 mm deep, enough to warrant stitches (except I'm too lazy, healthcare in America costs too damn much, and there'll be too much downtime). The pink patch (about 5mm X 15mm) is where the epidermis was entirely stripped off, creating a little flap-like pocket. Fortunately for me, there weren't any shards that decided to make this space their permanent new home. I'm not sure whether to be proud or ashamed to say I played doctor, nicking it off partially with a pair of soap-washed shears in the lab, only to completely remove it with a nail-clipper back at home. K's makeshift bandage was also great at stopping the bleeding, but eventually kept slipping off.

There is a strange way in which pain (and possibly blood) makes you feel a lot more alive than thinking about death. Recently, I've been reading and thinking about Mortality Salience, a concept in existential psychology. The simplest idea is that all of psychology--identity, personality, happiness--blossoms out of the human fear of death. In the immortal words of one of its foremost proponents, Irvin Yalom, "Although the physicality of death destroys man, the idea of death saves him." There have been a number of experiments where dental pain (or thoughts of it) has been used as a control condition, versus the mortality salience manipulation: making the participant think in detail about death. Other manipulations, like making the participant consider his "creatureliness" are also successful in evoke mortality salience (MS) effects like a participant's increased affirmation of societal standards.

The curious thing is that I, and I suppose many other people must too, associate death with pain. Yet pain, or the thought of it, does not evoke any MS effects. Could it be then that pain--physical or otherwise, as romanticized by the poets and boybands alike--is one of the things that let's us know we are alive? Perhaps pain is essential for our understanding of happiness, the sensation of relief, the distinctiveness of pleasure. Perhaps now and then, a little self-sought discomfort might clear one's mind, as effectively as exercise?

In any case, a word of advice if you're self-inflicting: submerging your hands in bucket of ice works perfectly well; really, there's no need for broken glass.

Does anyone else notice the uncanny resemblance?

Chemistry Blues

This post is dedicated to all those who doing research, especially chemistry, and especially if you answer an unfortunate or sheepish 'yes' to any of these:

• Ever tried to remove DMF by washing with water, but that last bit just wouldn't go away?
• Ever tried to re-dissolve something in the solvent you'd extracted with and not have anything go in? Did you then wonder where all your product went, extract the aqueous layer with a different solvent and get crap?
• Ever dissolve your compound in one solvent and obtain a yellow oil, but get some purple liquid with another? Repeatedly?
• Ever run one of those columns where all 7 spots come out in the same tube?
• OR nothing came out at all?
• Ever get those inexplicable singlets in your NMR that integrate to almost 1 but are definitely not what you put in or a common solvent impurity?
• Ever had a column blow up when you gently pressurized it with N2? Was it loud?
• Ever had one of those mixtures that no solvent system would resolve? Ever decided to just wing it then and go for 10% EA/hexanes and collect teenie fractions?
• Ever run a perfectly-packed column and get shitty separation, only to see your neighbor's TLC plates with nice single spots in a row despite a nasty cracked column?
• Ever run TLC and get one spot, only to run prep TLC and get 7 bands?
• Ever sneezed and knocked over your product flask?
• Ever transferred your over-night reaction mixture to the separatory funnel, only to be informed by the gushing liquid and growing splotch on the fume-hood floor that you forgot to close the stopcock?
• Ever filtered something and got a suspension?

...

Ever feel the overwhelming urge to put together such a list of your own after insurmountable frustration?

Cheers! Hang in there, tomorrow will be better. Otherwise scrap that reaction. Better living through chemistry :D