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…

So Jenn, the silly woman who doesn’t understand the depth of my music addiction, gets wind that I like music with a Middle Eastern flare. So she says, “Well, I’ve got a CD you’d like,” and goes on to tell me the band is French/Turkish and plays an interesting instrument I’ve never heard of [by name] in my life. And then she slips me the CD, and my weekend is gone. The band is Duoud. Here is the first minute (which ends rather abruptly–I couldn’t set the duration of the fade out in Audacity, so I didn’t use one) of the seventh ninth track off their CD Wild Serenade, “Berlin…

Sulfamethoxazole. Pronounced “sulfa-methox-sizzle”. For rizzle. Say that shit three times fast. It’s a sulfa drug that’s beginning to live in water at low concentrations, and we’re testing its degradation in a TiO2 or TiON suspension. It’s also damned insoluble in water, and I’ve gone through three volumetrics to get a stock solution containing only 0.1000 grams of this stuff.

We have two lamps. These two lamps are crucial to the semiconductors project, in which we are testing how TiON will photochemically react to degrade several pollutants in water. Now, I don’t know the technical names for these lamps, but I think one is a mercury arc lamp. It shall be known as the Trash Can Lamp, because the merry-go-round reactor is set up in a trash can with a felt covering to keep out other light. It (theoretically) has a strong ultraviolet (UV) output. Our second lamp shall be called the Little Lamp. Its output is mostly in the visual spectrum, and we suspect very little hits the UV…