An interesting thing happened last week that has me thinking about loyalty conflicts. I tend to think I’m a pretty loyal person. When I mentally “mark” someone as a friend, they get my loyalty and support in spades until we fall apart in some manner (and sometimes, even after). That, to me, is the core difference between a friend and a casual or “friendly” acquaintance. For one I reserve my strong emotions and my energy. The other gets very, very little. Last Tuesday, I went home with Luke to chill before the weekly Thorn meeting. (This way, I would only have to arrange a ride home.) So Luke and I…

I had two, possibly three, babies yesterday. I ran a photolysis experiment on the sulfamethoxazole with titanium dioxide for six hours and ran samples from various time points on the HPLC. The tentative results? Fifty-three percent degradation from a lamp we thought put out no UV light (and thus shouldn’t have been able to drive a reaction much at all). There were two definite products formed, although we haven’t identified them yet, and we may have to do a bit of tinkering to get good isolation of these since they’re very polar. These are my babies. The first comes off the column just before two minutes, and the second after…