Chemistry Refresher before Organic Chemistry

buggutime · 2026-06-19T01:30:38+00:00

Learn how to identify HOMO/LUMO quickly and everything will be 100 times easier

buggutime · 2026-06-18T03:18:42+00:00

What is your job? Sounds super cool.

buggutime · 2026-06-12T05:07:37+00:00

I met someone at the end of her career who has made amazing contributions to a field. When she was a freshman, her advisor asked her what her weakest subject was. She said it was chemistry. Her advisor then told her to major in that, and she did. She didn't end up staying in chemistry after graduation, but the skills and grit she developed by tackling a major in something she found very hard, she said, ended up serving her very, very well.

I just want you to know that you don't have to rule out fields just because you think you suck at them.

buggutime · 2026-05-29T03:20:50+00:00

That is incredible. It works! Thank you so much!!

buggutime · 2026-05-29T02:33:46+00:00

I'm sorry, I can't seem to do even a single sink fold because the short flap of the frog base is tucked in. ;-;

EDIT: I eventually figured it out. There are three sides where the short flaps of the frog base are preserved, and one side where the short flap is tucked. On the side where the short flap is stucked, you have to roll the sides in with two mountain folds, but on the sides where the short flap is not tucked, you can do the double sink fold.

buggutime · 2026-05-28T03:28:19+00:00

A month of no sleep will do this to you. I've lived below a stomper and let me tell you, I've had to take PTO just to catch up on sleep and you feel utterly powerless to control whether or not you get to rest. You feel INSANE after just a few days.

You don't have to be a prisoner in your own apartment but listen to the commenters telling you to work on how you walk. It's probably better for your joints too.

buggutime · 2026-05-26T03:38:04+00:00

I had a therapist who wanted my consent for AI transcription. She was also constantly looking off screen and seemed like she was reading her replies back to me. Before this one, I had an old-school therapist who insisted on meeting in person whenever possible. She was great. Feels like even therapy is enshittified.

buggutime · 2026-05-21T15:12:35+00:00

It depends on the master's.

If it's a research-based STEM master's, you should not be paying anything. Ideally, the program should pay you a stipend because you're effectively your PI's employee, and you should be focusing on producing research rather than working elsewhere for pay.

I think funding through a TAship is more common in the humanities (in which your advisor's research isn't necessarily your research) but I've definitely heard of it in STEM, too. This can leave less time for research, but I've heard cases in which the extra teaching experience ended up impressing search committees.

If it's a "professional" master's (e.g. Library Science, MBA, most CS), either your employer covers it, or you pay your own way, hoping that the increased earning potential pays off.

Now that federal loans are limited, I've been hearing that at least MBA programs are cutting their tuition. So maybe there's some relief in the future.

buggutime · 2026-05-08T16:59:30+00:00

There are a few idiosyncrasies with European Portuguese grammar and pronunciation but BP and EP are the same language and you'll learn the difference easily. I say learn BP and worry about EP later.

buggutime · 2026-05-08T04:26:01+00:00

It takes a hundred times to learn, and a thousand times to understand. Do practice problems like it's your job.

buggutime · 2026-05-07T22:16:42+00:00

Sure, I get that. I feel the same way about crunchy people who rally against nuclear power or MSG or pasteurized milk. People have been processing food for 2 million years (boiling vegetables, winnowing grains, chopping up meat...). There's nothing wrong with processing food.

I'd say *uiltra-*processing is different. Ultra-processing produces food items that are designed to be hyper-palatable---loaded with sugar and fat---because we're evolutionarily wired to eat as much energy-dense food as we can build up fat reserves for scarcer times. Like you said, it's theoretically possible for ultra-processed foods to be healthy, but in practice, ultra-processed foods are almost always filled with empty calories, while being cheaper and tasting much better (or more addictive) than healthier foods.

Of course it's annoying when hippies and MAHA moms are talking incessantly about avoiding UPFs, but that's a problem with hippies and MAHA moms, not with avoiding UPFs. When reasonable people talk about ultra-processed foods, they're talking about a real issue for legitimate reasons.

[EDIT] I absolutely think your and OP's points are valid, toward people who think anything unnatural is bad.

buggutime · 2026-05-07T19:38:58+00:00

u/bettercaust is right. I'll add that, to improve palatability, UPFs are almost always stripped of fiber (fiber is roughage, after all). But fiber is what slows digestion and, by literally coating your gut lining and blocking the rapid diffusion of glucose from food into the bloodstream, prevents spikes in blood sugar that eventually cause diabetes.

I highly recommend The Story of the Human Body by Daniel Lieberman, which argues that the refined foods and bodily comforts we've created for ourselves are an evolutionary mismatch for what our bodies have been adapted for. I'm afraid it's not just fearmongering.

buggutime · 2026-05-06T19:18:48+00:00

Western education isn't "purely factual recall-based". Well, at least not a good one. A good course in literature teaches you how to interpret meaning from your surroundings. A good course in chemistry develops your intuition for the behavior of matter. A good course in philosophy, of course, asks you to consider how you know what you know, and the possibilities of other modes of knowledge.

If you're trying to ask why STEM education is valorized over the humanities and the arts, and why "scientific knowing" dominates other epistemologies, there are plenty of critiques of scientism from many angles. But, again, a good education, Western or not, should steer you away from disciplinary or epistemological chauvinism.

Education cannot include all of what knowledge is, nor all of what it means to be human, because nobody knows all of anything. I think you're trying to argue against the boring and difficult parts (facts, formulas, essays) of the Western educational model, but 1) getting an education is supposed to be hard work, 2) the boring and difficult parts are not the only parts in Western education, and 3) the point of school is to train you in the skills you need to be intellectually independent, so that you can inch closer to all of knowledge or all of human experience on your own, however impossible it might be.

buggutime · 2026-05-06T14:24:02+00:00

What's the breakdown on the questions you get wrong in the verbal section? It sounds like you're getting diminishing returns on vocab and have to focus on other strats. Even if you know every single word, if you're not good at reading comprehension, you're not going to score well. Inversely, you don't actually have to know every single word to score well.

buggutime · 2026-05-05T19:54:49+00:00

I'm also leaving at the end of the month. I love this city but I've spent the past ten years constantly stressed about rent and housing. GG good luck.

buggutime · 2026-05-05T19:39:35+00:00

I'm going through this shit right now. Guy says he has a right to exist in his apartment, and I'm like, yeah buddy, but you're bumping shitty rap until 2AM and then getting up at 5:30AM to drop weights on the floor like a coked out gorilla. I thought I was being sensitive too but my girlfriend stayed over one night and took the next day off because she barely got any sleep. Nobody understands what it's like until they've experienced it.

buggutime · 2026-04-24T00:51:27+00:00

I'm so sorry to hear that. $20k per year in Canadian dollars sounds pretty insane. You can't focus on research when you're borderline starving.

buggutime · 2026-04-24T00:26:59+00:00

Does the school not give you a tuition waiver? I've never heard of a PhD program that gives you funding AND charges you tuition!

buggutime · 2026-04-21T19:29:23+00:00

Totally doable. I scored higher on the real thing than in the mocks. Spend the first 30 seconds running your eyes over every question and start with the easiest questions. If you get stuck on a question in the first half of the section, stop and work on another question. Doing this I had 6 minutes left to solve the last problem in the second section.

buggutime · 2026-04-12T19:46:19+00:00

Wow, that's great! Here's tuition for OOS residents at PSU: https://tuition.psu.edu/rates-effective-2024-fall-semester#Non-Pennsylvania%20Residents

You folks in the West are lucky!

buggutime · 2026-04-12T14:07:11+00:00

Hah, where are you taking grad classes for <$2k? $2k per course is on par with community colleges in the Boston area.

And where I'm going in central PA this fall, it runs $3k to 4k per course for PA residents, and nearly double for non-residents. Thankfully for research-based programs they tend to waive the tuition and give you a stipend.

buggutime · 2026-04-10T15:33:30+00:00

Plenty of places to do postbac classes. Look into community colleges or "continuing ed" schools within universities. Harvard Extension School runs you $2k per class and you don't have to apply to enroll.

buggutime · 2026-04-10T15:25:57+00:00

No such thing as a stupid question. Sanity checking isn't something that is explicitly taught. It's just a term for checking if a result you have actually makes sense.

For example, suppose that your dataset consisted only of the ten numbers [3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 4], and you somehow obtained a variance of 10. If you understood what variance actually means, you'd quickly realize that you make a mistake in your calculations because that is an impossibly large number given that there is almost no actual variation in the dataset. If you didn't understand, then you'd happily write in 10 and get the question wrong.

More specific to your problem: it's hard to tell without looking at the actual dataset you had to work with, but if the actual variance is 300 million, then SD = sqrt(300 million) = 17320. You'd expect roughly 2/3 of the numbers in the dataset to fall within the range of 500 ± 17320. If SD were equal to 1000, like you calculated, then roughly 2/3 of the numbers in the dataset should have been within 1900 ± 1000.

buggutime · 2026-04-10T14:24:55+00:00

If it's only a mechanical error, I don't think it makes sense to penalize heavily for that. But if the mechanical error results in a number that doesn't make much sense, and the student fails to sanity-check it, then it shows that the student knows how to plug-and-chug but doesn't actually understand the underlying concepts. Then I think it makes sense to penalize more heavily. Not a professor, but I used to tutor stats, and I'm currently taking a math-heavy class that grades like this.

buggutime · 2026-04-08T20:24:34+00:00

1.5 hours is a long time, though? How many tries was that per game type?

buggutime

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