Mitch Garcia is the man!

Congratulations to Mitch Garcia of the Chemistry Blog, for helping discover a new element in the periodic table!

His group just published a paper in PRL confirming independently the existence of element 114.
Which is so incredibly badass.

I am basking in the glow of being Facebook friends with someone who has helped discover a real life element. Basking I tells you!

Let's hope Mitch can help them come up with a more creative name for the element than "Chemistry Blog."

Scigen

This is complete genius:

Some folks at MIT have whipped up a bit of code and a database of computer science topics, phrases, and graphs, and developed a quick paper generator. The paper will make no sense at all, of course, but it is quick. And what they’ve found is that making no sense isn’t as much of a handicap as you might think when it comes to some conferences and some journals.

The database, which focuses on computing science literature, called Scigen, gave me a really nice article entitled "Evaluating Spreadsheets and 802.11B Using FetisGrame".

The creators have successfully submitted these nonsense papers to conferences and journals. hah!

(via In The Pipeline)

the chemistry of cheese

Update (3/17/09): it turns out that I am completely unoriginal. Also that Mitch from the Chem Blog apparently is an even bigger dork, because he's posted a whole 'nother 19 pick up lines as well. I beg poorly thought out ignorance for the lack of recognition?

Here's a golden pickup line to try on a chemist:

"If I were a chemist, I would rearrange the periodic table to put Uranium and Iodine together!"

Note: if it does work and you wind up falling in love and having children, all I ask for is that you give them the middle name "Feynman."

reblogging, this time from mitch et. al

Azmanam over at Chem Blog[1] deserves the gold star of science for their ongoing series of organic chemistry demos. Azmanam picks demos that are visually awesome, easy and quick to do, and in general fairly safe.

This week it's the reduction of a silver(I) complex to form colloidal silver coating a round-bottom flask. Which is totally how mirrors used to be made. I am so using this for Christmas presents!

Azmanam, your name is crazy, but your posts are spiffy. Keep up the great work!

[1] For serious, having 2 blogs named "Chem Blog" (from Mitch Garcia and the blogger emeritus Kyle Finchsigmate is a lil' too confusing. And the names are both drier than an unpacked column. Blog war, anyone?