05.29.10
Cause for Concern
I cannot think of very many wholesome uses for this device.
04.07.10
Opiates, Opioids and Freebases
Morphine is a painkiller derived from the poppy plant. The naturally derived form of morphine from the poppy plant is what defines it as an opiate. For the last 200 years morphine has been used as one of the most effective painkillers we know of, interacting directly with the central nervous systems pain receptors.
03.14.10
Captain Brew Beer’d
I started my first batch of beer last night with a recently acquired home brew set-up. It took about 3 hours start to finish, and the end product one month from now, will be 5 gallons of chocolate porter. It came from a basic starter recipe the guy at the brew shop recommended to me. Here’s the rundown of the process in the manner to which my organic chemistry class has made me accustomed.
03.11.10
IMFs, Phase Transition and Frozen Tequila Shots
Several years ago, on a hot humid summer day in Portland OR, me and a friend were at a grocery store, and the dry ice freezer caught my eye. Kind of an impulse buy, I have to admit, I asked the cashier for a pound. They wrapped it up in paper and sent me on my way. Once we got home we unwrapped it, and for a while we were not quite sure what we were going to do with it. As the dry ice sublimated I noticed that it would sink, and kind of hover along the table top. This got me wondering.
02.18.10
Phlogiston and Caloric Theory
Sometimes it’s easy to forget how humiliatingly invalid our theories can prove to be, even if they do seem to explain what we observe with a certain amount of reliability. Not more than 300 years ago, the common consensus to explain combustion went something like this. Everything that is capable of burning, can do so because it has been endowed with a certain amount of an invisible, massless, colorless, odorless substance called Phlogiston. As the substance burns it releases it’s phlogiston into the air. Once that happens, the air becomes saturated with this phlogiston, and can hold no more, then there is sort of an equilibrium of phlogiston between the burning object and the air, then the object stops burning.
02.09.10
Hadrons, Isotopes, Beta-Decay
In my last quarter of the General Chemistry sequence we started examining something called beta-decay. It presented the possibility of essentially changing one atom into another, say start with silicon and end up with phosphorus.
This has to do with the interplay of what makes up all atoms, like everyone learned in high school, we have protons(+) and neutrons(0) in the nucleus, and a bunch of electrons(-) swarming around them. The number of protons in an atom determines the identity of the atom and are balanced by the number of electrons swarming around the atom. The neutron has no charge, so this does very little in the atom other than determine how heavy it is.
You can add and subtract neutrons from the nucleus without changing the identity of the atom. When you do this you get what are called isotopes. Each atom has a stable number of these neutrons, and when you find isotopes that are not stable, they stabilize by undergoing beta decay.
