A favorite chemistry poem

I think I saw this poem on a lab door a couple decades ago in graduate school and finally found it again today.  It is a parody of 'Twas the Night Before Christmas" and is credited to John F. Hansen of the St. Louis section of the American Chemical Society in 1978.

‘Twas the night to make crystals, and all through the ‘hood,
Compounds were reacting as I’d hoped that they would.
The hood door I’d closed with the greatest of care,
To keep noxious vapors from fouling the air.

The reflux condenser was hooked to the tap,
And the high vacuum pump had a freshly filled trap.
I patiently waited to finish my task,
While boiling chips merrily danced in the flask.

Then from the pump there arose such a clatter,
That I sprang from my chair to see what was the matter.
Away to the fume hood! Up with the door!
And half of my product foamed out on the floor.

Then what to my watering eyes should appear,
But a viscous black oil which had once been so clear.
I turned the pump off in a terrible rush,
And the oil that sucked back filled the line up with mush.

The ether boiled out of the flask with a splash,
And hitting the mantle, went up with a flash!
My nose turned quite ruddy, my eyebrows went bare,
The blast had singed off nearly half of my hair.

I shut the hood door with a violent wrench,
As acid burned holes in the floor and the bench.
I flushed it with water, and to my dismay,
Found sodium hydride had spilled into the fray.

And then the fire got way out of hand,
I managed to quench it with buckets of sand.
With aqueous base I diluted the crud,
Then shoveled up seven big buckets of mud.

I extracted the slurry again and again
With ether and then with dichloromethane.
Chormatographic techniques were applied
Several times ’til the product was purified.

I finally viewed with a satisfied smile,
One half a gram in a shiny new vial.
I mailed the yield report to my boss,
Ninety percent (allowing for loss).

“Good work,” said the boss in the answering mail,
“Use same condition on a preparative scale.”

Orange Peel Attack on Plastic Knife

A transparent plastic knife (I think comprised of polystyrene) shows sign of attack from the oil in the peel of an orange. This is a simple way to show a nonpolar solid partially solubilized by a nonpolar solvent.

Cereal Clusters

My younger daughter started finding clusters in her chocolate-flavored puffy round cereal today.  We did not keep rigorous records, but as the picture suggests the dimers were more common than the trimers, which were in turn more common than the tetramer (this tetrahedron was the only one we saw).  This brings to mind some different ideas.  For example it might make a good science fair project to survey the cluster populations and show that the bigger the cluster, the more rare it becomes.  This in turn leads me to think about probabilities of bimolecular and termolecular collisions in kinetics and wonder if some connection can be made to these clusters.  Well, at the very least, the clusters remind me of groups of hybridized orbitals associated with an atom.  The dimers remind me of two sp hybridized orbitals, the trimers remind me of three sp2 hybridized orbitals, and the tetramers remind me of four sp3 hybidized orbitals.

LED emission spectra

A student gave me a decoration that contains red, green, and blue LEDs that light up apparently randomly alone and together.  I used an Ocean Optics USB2000 spectrometer with a fiber optic sensor to study the glow.  The Overture software that I used has this cute feature that overlays colors on the visble light spectra.  The emissions from each color of LED (red ~650 nm, green ~515 nm, and blue ~465nm) are quite clear in these spectra.

The Pie in Pyrex

I was reading an article in the Fall2012/Winter2013 issue of "Chemical Heritage" (R. Blaszczyk, Cooking with Glass) about Pyrex bakeware.  Apparently when Corning developed borosilicate ovenware, the first dish produced was a pie plate.  The names considered for the glass were thus Pie-Rite or Py-Right, but then it was changed to Pyrex in 1915 (to rhyme with Nonex, another brand of Corning glass).  Seems appropriate to mention pie on Thanksgiving!  Hope yours is good.

Starch-containing packing peanuts

Adding water to starch-based packing peanuts begins to dissolve them (conventional polystyrene peanuts are not soluble in water).  If just a LITLLE water is added to the peanuts, only their edges dissolve and they beome sticky.  The sticky peanuts can be then stacked into larger structures.  Colored versions of these sorts of packing peanuts are marketed as "Nuudles".  This demonstration illustrates concepts of like dissolves like, solvent welding, and recyclability of these starch-containing polymers.

Hydrogen Balloon Fail

I was doing a demo show yesterday, and when my helper attempted to detonate a balloon containing hydrogen and oxygen gas with a lit candle on a stick, the ballon simply popped rather than detonating.  This has happened a handful of time, typically with pure hydrogen in the balloons rather than a hydrogen-oxygen mix.  What I think is happening is that when the candle flame approaches the balloon too slowly, its heat weakens the balloon and causes it to fail.  The gases are then released in such a way that they do not detonate in contact with the frame.