I VANT TO EAT YOUR BRAAAAAINZ.... wait, wrong monster

[exsequar]

Today was quite the day!

For starters, I GOT TURNED INTO A ZOMBIE!!! :O

Then, I ate ROB and turned him into a ZOMBIE TOO!!! (Rob the Zombie! Har har! I have to go make fun of him for that...)

It's actually a lot more fun being the zombie because you're IT! You don't have to be paranoid anymore, you just get to ATTACK. And mere humans tremble at the sight of you! It's hilariously fabulous. My favorite incident of the game today was when I was in the dining hall and I saw my friend Ben Berg walking past the window - and he was still a human! So I LEAPT out of my chair, RACED out the front door and CHASED him all the way down past the length of D-hall. We stopped, he turned and we circled each other for a minute before he threw a marshmallow and I was hit, dammit! Heehee. It was hilarious. Apparently my desire for BRAAAAAINZ motivated me cause Rob and Michelle said I ran super fast, aha! And all of DHall was watching! I made a spectacle of myself! Heee. So, so much fun.

I also had a Stat test which went really well; got a Physics test back which did NOT go so well, dammit; found my lost cell phone, yay; and had organic chem lab, in which my first try at the experiment failed miserably (I got charred little pieces of graphite instead of my product, hexaphenylbenzene) so I had to start again and ended up staying a half hour late, making lab a total of 4.5 hours. Then I had kickboxing and have now arrived at home, exhausted. Luckily I don't have much work to do really, so I plan to go take a shower and then collapse into bed and mainline some Farscape! \o/

ETA: I forgot to mention that I got my Stat paper back! The one where I used the Stargate Atlantis example, only without names! My teacher wrote "Sounds like a movie script" "Nice." and at the end "I enjoyed your example." And I got a 99 on the damn thing! \o/ Victory! Hee.

Comments

[hebrew-hernia.livejournal.com]

YAY! VICTORY FOR SGA! I'm sorry that orgo lab was lame. I had chem lab yesterday and let me tell you about how doing a dilution when you have no idea how to use a pipet? Not so much with the fun. My lab partner and I made it work, though. We did like an hour and a half of work preparing these solutions for a five-minute spectroscopy lab. *anger* And hey, graphite! It's something to write with! How exactly does one go about synthesizing hexaphenylbenzene? I'm actually curious. (And I'm trying to figure out what hexaphenylbenzene is, based on the organic unit we did over Christmas, because I am a geek.)

OH! And my IRL friend also named Anne will be visiting F&M on Friday! Apparently they offered her a ton of money (not surprising, she's our valedictorian and she's wicked at the French Horn and she has a wonderful singing voice and she wants to be a bio major and go on to vet school; she is seriously a college's wet dream). And she likes Supernatural! I suppose I should warn her about the zombies...

[exsequar.livejournal.com]

Funny story about using a pipet - I had to use pipets every day several times for my internship last summer, and one of the things I had to use it for was measuring the drug I was administering to blood vessels. Eventually I found out I had been using the pipet wrong! I'd been pressing the thing down too far before I pulled liquid up, so I was administering way too high doses *facepalm* That drug was EXPENSIVE, too! Oy vey. It did lead to some really interesting unexpected results though, so it wasn't all bad! And I am a total expert at pipets now, hee.

Well, hexaphenylbenzene is a benzene ring (also known as an aromatic ring - six carbons in a ring with three pi bonds alternating) with six other benzene rings sticking off it, one from each carbon. It's a big compound! Synthesizing that was actually the second step in our three step synthesis. I'll give a very simplified explanation. We started with benzil and 1,3-diphenylacetone (if you want to see the structures for those, look them up at chemfinder.com) and put them in a basic solution and heated it to perform a double aldol reaction, the product of which was tetraphenylcyclopentadienone (um, that one's hard to explain, and I donno if you'll find it online). Then we took that product (a sparkly, powdery purple crystal) and mixed it with diphenylacetylene (two carbons triple bonded together and with a benzene ring on each end), then heated the test tube with a bunsen burner until the whole thing melted and eventually all the purple color went away and there was some light brown seen. Then we mixed that with diphenyl ether, then toluene, and got a light brown powder (looks exactly like sand) which we isolated by vacuum filtration and then dried in an oven. It was this second synthesis that I messed up - I overheated the tube and ended up decomposing everything instead of catalyzing the reaction. Oops! But it worked fine the second time.

Errr sorry to ramble on so long! If you have any questions, just ask :)

Oh hey cool! If she wants to maybe meet me or something, you could give her my cell number, 203-581-1681 :) Too bad I won't be here next year, if she comes here - it'd be cool to have another Supernatural fangirl around!

[hebrew-hernia.livejournal.com]

Okay, I'm not sure I understand exactly how you were using the pipet wrong, but the too-high-doses thing is kind of hilarious.

That's what I THOUGHT! But then I started thinking about this project I did where I built a big TNT molecule and started confusing myself about the difference between benzene and toluene but the point was that my original instinct was right.

And that sounds insanely cool. My chem teacher LOVES chemfinder.com (and I was actually just on there the other day looking up stuff for a lab writeup). I could probably tell you what tetraphenylcyclopentadienone was if I had ever bothered to learn about ketones and aldehydes. Actually, let me guess: It's a five-carbon ring with a benzene attached at four of the five points and a functional group on the fifth. I think that's too simple to be right, but.

Also, vacuum filtration is fun.

And it's lame that you overheated it and decomposed everything, but that sounds like an easy mistake to make. And yesterday doing the dilutions, I put in too much water in one and we had to start over, so my partner and I agreed that I would do the pipetting and she would do the distilled-water-adding. And we got an eyedropper instead of trying to use the squirt bottle to add a single drop of water to the flask, which would have been a smart thing to do in the first place. *grin*

I really love chem lab. Except the part where I have to make up a bunch of data charts now and all I want to do is read fanfiction.

[exsequar.livejournal.com]

Aha, good on you! And that's almost what tetraphenyl... etc is, but there are two double bonds in the five carbon ring (that's what the "dien" part means) and the functional group is a double-bonded oxygen, which is a ketone functional group when it's got carbons on both sides of it, hence the "one" :)

Yeah, there were about 5 other people who had to redo their experiment too, so I didn't feel like too much of an idiot. I think the problem was that we got such a tiny yield from the first synthesis that there was very little material and it was really easy to burn.

Chem lab is lots of fun when it's not frustrating the hell out of me :) But writing lab reports can take forEVER, meep. I totally hear ya there.

[hebrew-hernia.livejournal.com]

Oh, duh. Di. En(e). See, I knew that. I had fun with the orgo unit (minus functional groups). It was like putting together puzzles.

I feel so GOOD now. I'm remembering organic chem and my data tables are all created and neat-- I ran out of space in my old lab book so I just started a new one, and it's all nice and shiny and not all wrinkly from being splattered with water/sulfuric acid/silver chloride solution/etc and I'm writing really neat and wow, I am just a little bit OCD, aren't I? *grin*