Random drunk post

Sometimes (read, every time i go to the Student’s Union) I wonder why is SU still standing. I mean really, with the amount of cheese they put on, they should be already ate by mice. Especially, remembering that SU is presently just an overgrown tent. And, I suppose Wednesdays are always a special case anyway. Score! – here you can get drunk with the cheapest purple ever and then “enjoy” the crappiest music you’ve ever heard. Every time I go, I promise myself it’s the last time – and then I go again anyway (read, PhD’s life is so sad you have to use every occasion you have to get drunk).

So - what is the “Score!”? – you may ask. Well, every Wednesday  in the Student Union (read, Temporary Entertainment Structure aka. TES aka. Big Tent on a Field) all the sports clubs have an occasion to bond, get drunk and throw up in a spirit of competition (which club will pass out first). The Circles start at 6pm with an happy hour until 7-7.30pm (Purple just £1, but only max. 3 pints per person). So until 8pm everybody is already reasonably intoxicated and lots of people is already far beyond being reasonable. Music doesn’t start until 9pm, which is a good thing, ‘cause at this time you don’t really care anymore. But if you came to the Score! for the music and you’re a fan of Dr. Alban, Las Ketchup, Aqua and Britney Spears that’s the time for you. I’m really not picky when it comes to club music, especially if I’m drunk, but please, have mercy! But… that’s still not the end. If you have survived the happy hour and then two hour of cheesy music, at 11pm SU have another treat for you. Live band! Wow! Today it was S Club 3 (what?! – S Club 3? – I mean, there was S Club 7 in the 90’s, but S Club 3?). Well, if you haven’t heard, after having few No. 1 (whatever) hits in 1999 band has broken apart one by one (I suppose it was S Club 6 for a while, then S Club 5, etc.) Well, after 10 years (gosh, I still can’t believe it’s 2009) it’s only S Club 3 left, meaning that last three members (losers) of the band just couldn’t find anything better to do than to sing to a band of drunk jocks (and cheerleaders) at random student clubs.

What happened next I can’t tell you – because after two songs I couldn’t stand it any longer and I left. Obviously I haven’t drunk enough today (fact I’m writing this and my spelling is actually not that bad, confirms this).

What I can tell you for sure; I’m definitely not going to the next score!

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cause I have a surgery on Thurs :D

Little Asia – Rotavap incident

On popular demand, continuation of my “Little Asia” series (all the publishers wishing to acquire rights for screening purposes are welcome to contact me).

Few weeks ago our department was suffering from dry ice shortage. For three days we were forced to use normal ice and tap water for cooling. That includes rotary evaporators, usually filled with dry ice/acetone.

For those unaware – rotary evaporators are used for removing excess of solvent (water or more likely organic solvents). Most of the rotavaps are cooled using water, but water cooling isn’t really enough to condense low boiling solvents, like DCM or diethyl ether under reduced pressure. That’s why in our lab we’re using cold traps (see picture) filled with cooling mixure. Usually it’s acetone/dry ice, which has a constant temperature of -78°C, or water/ice mixture (0°C).

So for three days cold traps were filled with water/ice. It’s quite obvious that before filling them with with dry ice you have to empty them first, or at least it’s obvious to everyone who has even a little reason.

On the glorious day when our department was finally supplied with dry ice I’ve spotted L. happily filling the cold trap. Perturbed with a vague premonition of danger I’ve asked him what he’s doing.

- Have you emptied the water first?

- What?

- There was water in the trap, have you emptied it first?

- I didn’t know water there.

- There was no dry ice for three day – so we were using water/ice. And there is a post-it note on it saying “water/ice”

- Oh.

- You have to empty it otherwise freezing water will crack the condenser.

- Yes, yes. (Standing there and staring at me with a blank expression on his face)

- You have to do it NOW!

- Yes, yes (Still standing there)

- So why aren’t you doing it? (Lost my nerves – took out the freezing cold trap and  showed it to his hands) You have to do it now and don’t put the dry ice from it in the sink or it will crack the pipes.

Another blank expression – so I took a large beaker from the cupboard and put it in front of him. He turned the trap upside down – but the water already froze. I just told him that he had to get it out and I didn’t really care how and I left. Suppose he managed to get it all out cause the trap survived. Which is pity in a way, because we’d have one more excuse to get rid of him. Really, he’s supposed to be a PhD student, I always assumed that you have to be at least a little bit smart to do that. Obviously I was wrong…

Best wishes

Hope all the readers (all 3 of you) had a great Christmas and a wonderful New Year’s party.

Still in the Christmas mood – My research group in The Ultimate Disco Performance

Christmas SALES and credit crunch

I went to do some shopping today. I had some things I needed to buy and as I got paid earlier – some additional cash to spend. To my surprise I came home almost empty handed (if you know me even a little bit, you know that it’s rather shocking). It seem that credit crunch hit the shop owners more than I thought. Sales this year are much smaller that last year. Most of the things are discounted only a little (or at least, most of the things I wanted to buy). Seriously, discount from £59.99 to £55.99 is not really worth standing in a queue. And you could see the results in most of the shops. Queues to the tills were rather short, most of the people were just browsing, or buying just one thing. Most of the shops weren’t much busier than on normal Saturday. Usually during the Sales time shops are packed, people are loaded with shopping, four shopping bags in each hand and some more shopping stuffed under their arms (that’s often me :D). Today I haven’t seen a single person like that. Some shops didn’t really bother discounting their stuff, they just put the Sale banners up and left the same prices. Only Next seem to have a usual “Everything must go” sale, but even there I didn’t have to queue. Which is a good thing, cuz stuff I bought wasn’t on Sale anyways.

The only thing that stopped that day from being a complete disaster, was my visit in the bookshop (looking for the non-existing discounts – uuuh, 75% off “Aunt Marge’s Cooking Book” how exciting – none of the interesting stuff was discounted though). There, in the middle of the Sci-Fi section, next to “The Asbo Fairy Tales” I’ve found diet book - “I can make you thin”. Putting in SF section isn’t probably the best advertisement, but at least won’t give anyone any delusions.

Little Asia - Crystallisation gambit

If you read my previous post, you know that we have been blessed with two new PhD students this year. One of them – C. doesn’t seem to have any idea about chemistry. At first we’ve thought that maybe it’s the cultural difference and the difficulty in adaptation to the new environment (or at least I thought so, some other members are much less tolerant). But then the crystallisation incident happened and no one had any doubt anymore. C. hasn’t got a clue.

Let’s start from the beginning; The first reaction C. performed was reduction of D-phylglycine to get aminoalcohol. This is a routine reaction in our group, the prep is very easy and has been performed multiple times. Our postdoc L. helped C. to set up the reaction (haven’t seen that, but I suspect that L. set up the reaction for her). Obtained product, if you’re doing it on a small scale, is a white solid, easily recrystallised from hot toluene. At this step L. had already enough (pretty sure I’ve seen steam coming from her ears) and left C. to finish on her own. You think how difficult that can be, crystallisation is something you do in primary school, with kitchen salt. You dissolve it in hot solvent, wait until it cools down and voila… But… it seems that in Malaysia crystallisation is performed in slightly different (possibly revolutionary) way.

Malaysian recrystallisation procedure.

• 1 Round Bottom Flask with your product
• 1 Beaker (larger than the RBF)
• Ice (Dry Ice if necessary)

Place your RBF upside down inside the beaker (your solid shouldn’t fall out – it’s held in there by Malaysian voodoo). Fill the beaker with ice and stare at it for an hour. If your solid is not recrystallising, try topping up the beaker with dry ice.

I’m afraid I don’t know what happens next, because at this stage our supervisor came and showed C. how to do the  recrystallisation in the usual way (read recrystallised her product for her). I’m actually really upset, ‘cause this way he deprived us a chance to learn something new.

Stay tuned for the next episode.

Little Asia

Someone told me I should start writing down all the amusing little stories about my lab, to keep the for the generations to come. So I decided to do so, starting today.

Let’s start from the beginning, this October our group suddenly got much bigger. We got two new PhD students, three new MChems and an exchange student from Singapore. Theoretically, they should have all  started work in October (except the exchange student, she started a little bit earlier). In reality, we haven’t really seen them that much ‘cause apparently they all had more important stuff to do then their degrees. The exchange student, let’s call her Y., showed up for few hours on the first day and then she took the next day off to do some shopping. Apparently she had some serious purchases planned, because we haven’t seen her for the next five weeks. Our new PhD students, L. from China and C. from Malaysia (however in the beginning we were convinced she’s from Thailand) started right away. First week they had to attend all the stupid introductory training and seminars that all the starting PhD students have to in the beginning (me and S. (other PhD that started the same time as me) skipped most of those, under an excuse that we’ve already done most of them before (S. did her undergrad degree here and I was here three years ago as an exchange student)). Then, in the second week of the term, all the Graduate School courses have started. And those two apparently took an ambition to participate in all of them; Women empowerment in PhD, Self Motivation, Creative Nose Picking and other crap like that. In the spare time they started “working” in the lab. Subsequently we have discovered some surprising facts about them. We’ve already knew that L. knowledge of English is somewhat limited, however we haven’t suspected how much. Basically, most of the time he wasn’t able to understand what we were saying to him, however we haven’t discovered that right away, because when you talk to him, he always nods and says “Yes, yes”. But after few times someone told him to do something and the he did something completely different, we started to suspect that “Yes, yes” might actually mean “I have no idea what you just said to me, you capitalistic pig”. So the next conversation looked something like that:

-So you know what to do?

–Yes, yes.

-Are you lying to me?

-Yes, yes.

-You have no idea what I’ve just said.

-Yes, yes.

Problem with L. is that he doesn’t really ask questions. He does things wrong way (which can be very dangerous in chemistry lab) and even if you tell him the right way, he’ll either not understand you or ignore you, ‘cause he knows better anyways…

Gosh, it’s 3am – I’ll continue on some other day.

The Bond Ultimatum

Last week I went to see the new Bond movie, or should I say "Bond" movie. There's not much of James Bond left in "Bond" movies anymore.

I preferred the old James Bond movies, with a fancy gadgets and evil villains trying to kill our hero in elaborate and ineffective ways. It was supposed to be trash, and that was it's charm. That's why it survived so many years and sequels.

This one, I'm afraid doesn't have any James Bond spirit left. The lead character is played by Daniel Craig (again, to my surprise) great actor maybe, but not a James Bond. He's lacking the class, charm and pretty much everything that Bond is supposed to be. All of that is replaced by thug's face, muscles and lots of testosterone. Really, Daniel Craig would be a great Bond opponent, but is a miserable Bond.

The evil character is equally lame. Does he try to take over the Earth, does he have a secret lair, or a space station, or at least a submarine? NO. He's a business man trying to take over Bolivian water industry. Ooooh, it's so EVIL!

If they called this movie Marry Poppins 003 - it wouldn't make any difference. They even cut the Bond Theme out (almost, there were some miserable attempts to link the soundtrack with the theme, but they were rather failed), why? They obviously try to change the JB image, but why just not to change the name too and make a different movie? Why try to spoil something that was an icon for the last 55 years?

Additionally, what's with the Bourne plagiarism? - some of the scenes from the Quantum of Solace were almost unchanged versions of action scenes from Bourne Ultimatum. They obviously tried to top the Bourne Trilogy - pity (?) that they failed miserably...

So... if your looking for a classic James Bond - that movie is not for you. If you however, want to see action scenes from the Bourne Ultimatum again (and again), with Daniel Craig's face pasted in - that's just the thing for you. And if you're not interested in the weak back story - don't worry - you can sleep through most of the movie without loosing the plot. At least I did...