I like the seatbelt analogy better than the old-timey one I thought of at first: surgeons are gentlemen, and gentlemen’s hands are always clean, ergo surgeons need not wash their hands. Maybe I’m jaded, but my perception of the diehard no-gloves camp is one of arrogant exceptionalism.

Mostly disagree with your new dept here. It’s true that, if everyone had perfect technique, perfect eyes, perfect sense of touch, perfect decision making, and perfect reaction speed, PPE would be a lot less important. But people don’t, and reducing chemical exposure purely to a skill issue is nonsensical and hubristic. Accidents happen, and by definition there is always some unknown component of R&D that might manifest as splashes, loss of containment, etc, which gloves (and labcoats and goggles) may protect against. Furthermore, it’s not just about one person’s skills; without gloves, one must rely on labmates’ collective hygiene and that there are no spilled residues on the outsides of the chemical containers.

To the point that gloves are ineffective: then the wrong gloves are being used. Glove manufacturers provide compatibilty charts, and SDSs give glove recommendations for more niche chemicals. Nitrile has okay enough compatibility to be the default, but chemical labs should stock other commonly needed kinds.

To the point that gloves reduce one’s sense of touch, I think the decrease is minimal for standard-issue nitrile, though agree for thicker varieties like butyl which reduce dexterity.

To the point that gloves prevent one from noticing chemical exposure, again I disagree. Splash contact for solvents on gloves is pretty noticeable, though different from uncovered skin, and I find it much easier to see chemical residues against the clean monochrome of the gloves. As you mentioned, contaminated gloves should be removed ASAP to guard against breakthrough; without gloves, there is no breakthrough period, just immediate contamination of the skin.

Finally, gloves may protect you from chemicals, but they also protect the samples from you. Skin oils or microorganisms can cause issues, though I have found this more problematic for bio than chemistry.

It’s not that the predictions are wrong or anything, it’s just that they typically go something like “teehee this will be interesting” because caution is for the crayon-eaters in EHS.

Tbf sometimes it’s hard even for organic chemists because the authors will just put an abbreviation of a non-standard variation of the name of some named reaction over the reaction arrow and then proceed to draw the product in a completely different conformation from the starting material, leaving you trying to work out which carbon is which in the world’s most annoying game of spot-the-difference (or in many cases spot-the-similarity).

Maybe incorrect rebracketing? It’s supposed to be be-inhalten, not bein-halten. Otherwise maybe a writing style thing…

rip dubna, miratum got you beat

Ya but the moon covers at best only about 10 ppm of the sky’s area so given a random direction within the hemisphere defined by the sky in which the moon is visible and traveling in a straight line you have a roughly 99.9990% chance of missing so that’s understandable really.

to management: Gonna give me $100K for a new GCMS compatible with a shiny new win11 workstation that MS will obsolete in a year or two? How about paying for a new license (subscription!) and a marked up PC and a technician visit to recalibrate everything for the $2MM NMR spectrometer? And then have IT come in to install their mandatory security software that bricks the instrument anyway? No? Then enough griping about your compliance numbers. If it bothers you that much, pitch a proper ask for capital to the business and get IT to allow us to just airgap the sucker instead of trying to debug some corporate security vendor’s rootkit.

Meanwhile, my advisor: you will buy endnote and you will like it because that’s what I use.

OSHA. Not supposed to touch what I make.

Nah, just look at the folks over in HR. Irrational fucks to a person. Though I suppose all that means is that there are some irrational elements in the set, not necessarily that it’s isomorphic to the field of complex numbers. So can we diagonalize fuckery somehow…?

catalase

You’re missing the fuckton of heat that is generated during neutralization. I’ve had a few lab volcanoes because of it (LOC due to the low-boiling organics flash boiling).

Those flasks can actually be really nice compared to normal RBFs for real reasons and not just memes. They are a lot easier to e.g. pipette out of because the taper gives small volumes of liquid more height than a typical round bottom, so less material is lost as skin on the glass. Same issue with stirring; it’s a lot easier to get better stirring when the liquid actually covers the stirbar. “Just use a smaller container”, you say, and yes, do so if you start with a small volume. But a lot of times in organic chemistry, you need to isolate the compound from solution by evaporating the solvent. Depending on the concentration, the volume can start large and end much smaller. These flasks can help recover a larger amount of precious material.

The local reenactors’ reading out the Grievances this year certainly hits a bit different.

Completely rewrite the curriculum and problem sets for my advisor’s grad-level course for flipped-classroom virtual teaching as opposed to in-person lectures. It was the pits for many reasons, not the least of which was that his attitude became “everyone is at home doing nothing, so I can ramble into a recording for 3 h instead of giving 1 h lectures and we can have a full problem set every week instead of 4 in a semester and the scheduled class time is now a problem session amd to answer students’ questions :)”.

And a fuckton of DFT calculations, so honestly, fair.

And calculating far too many digits of π by hand

-onium is usually an extra group/proton (carbonium, oxonium, bromonium…). HO+ isn’t too hard to approximate–just take a hydroperoxide or peroxyacid and add strong acid like with piranha :)

Hydroxyl hydride feels wrong given that hydride is H-. So what’s a good name for HO+…? Oxenium hydride? Hydrenium hydride? (comparing carbonium (CR4H+) vs carbenium (CR3+) and oxonium/hydronium (H3O+))

I think oxenium hydride would be more appropriate than hydroxyl taking into account the polarity of the two fragments (HO+ and H-), though AFAIK there is no standardized name for HO+.