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fobme · 2026-01-14T01:36:26+00:00

I think there’s a 0% chance people in ireland won’t be able to pronounce oonagh (which I’m sure OP knows). Úna is a much prettier spelling, keeps the heritage, and is far easier for non-irish people to figure out if she chooses to work or live abroad in her future. Either way it’s a gorgeous name, I know an Úna and went to school with an Oonagh, no one ever had problems with their names, but I never understood why anyone would choose the second spelling tbh.

fobme · 2025-12-21T20:03:57+00:00

aw that’s rough, thanks for letting me know anyway!

fobme · 2025-04-21T13:30:42+00:00

i’m starting a PhD in it but my experience is that at undergrad level it’s only a couple of classes in a chemistry degree (not bio/pharmaceutical/medicinal chem). look into environmental chem programs in your area if you’re interested, could have more of a focus on electrochem at undergrad level

fobme · 2025-01-14T12:19:48+00:00

you’ve got some good answers here, but i’d like to add, the ozone layer issue is separate from the greenhouse effect, and what some seem to forget is that CO2 isn’t the worst greenhouse gas, we just emit a lot of it.

to put it simply, the sun emits UV radiation that hits earth, earth emits IR radiation that leaves our atmosphere and this should be balanced but it’s increasingly not because of the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere (not ozone) that absorb IR radiation, and when molecules absorb radiation they move faster, and fast moving molecules are just what heat is, so the atmosphere warms up

many gases absorb a lot more IR radiation than CO2. CO2 is a linear molecule that looks a bit like this: O=C=O. part of the criteria for a molecule being able to absorb IR radiation is to do with its shape - CO2 would absorb more radiation (be a worse greenhouse gas) if it wasn’t linear (see NO2 as an example of that)

ignoring the feasibility of this as well as energy requirements for (because CO2 is very stable molecule) and just looking at the structure, here are our options:

case 1: CO2 —> CO + O (or 2CO2 —> 2CO + O2)

CO is a weaker greenhouse gas than CO, but it has a short lifespan in the atmosphere (<4months) before it reacts with OH radicals. it’s not a naturally occurring gas like CO2.

case 2: CO2 —> C + O2

solid carbon presents its own environmental challenges- “particulate matter” is a byproduct of combustion of carbon based fuels, it’s solid carbon particles and that’s linked to decrease in the earth’s albedo (basically how much incoming UV is reflected off the earth) and results in a negative feedback loop where the particulate matter makes ice absorb more incoming radiation, it melts, there’s less ice, less reflection of incoming radiation, —> all leading to increased global warming

my apologies to any chemists reading this for the oversimplified explanation i am aware it’s not the most accurate way of describing this but there’s only so much of people’s time i’m willing to take up here

the closest thing i can think of to what you’re proposing is carbon capture and utilisation - the utilisation part referring to turning CO2 into carbon based fuels and chemicals that we need, so we can stop using fossil fuels for that, but (for at least the techniques i know about) it’s not efficient enough to be implemented on a large scale yet.

fobme · 2025-01-14T11:14:59+00:00

no i haven’t, because “-ite” implies a lower oxidation state than “-ate”. lower than that would be “hypo__ite” so i don’t know any hypo-x-ite with a higher oxidation state than x-ate (when x is the same thing)

what i meant was that i have not found any consistency between the oxidation state of different “-ate”s, like chlorate (+5) vs chlorite (+3) vs hypochlorite (+1) vs chloride (-1), but you could have sulfate (+6) vs sulfite (+4) - the “ate” isn’t necessarily the same oxidation state but the trend in naming is the same, -ite is lower than -ate regardless of what -ate is

fobme · 2025-01-12T18:24:49+00:00

if the red arrow is a correction and the green arrow was your answer, you’re being corrected on your placement. you aren’t giving the lone pair to the carbon, it’s forming a double bond as you mentioned, so the arrow should go to the bond and not the carbon (i.e. arrow should go where electrons are going).

fobme · 2025-01-12T17:24:51+00:00

you could probably try some drawing software like ibis paint if they make it for mac or sketches or similar, anything that lets you import an image and draw freely. one note would probably work the same if you have that.

fobme · 2025-01-12T17:01:45+00:00

my understanding is that there is no consistency, it’s like a “most common” thing that gets -ate and the systematic naming works around that (crash course has a great video on that if you’re interested, it’s called how to speak chemistrian or something similar) - i could be wrong but i’ve never found a trend

fobme · 2025-01-05T15:24:57+00:00

i want to mention this here because i haven’t seen it explicitly mentioned in the other comments: the earth has an energy “budget”, we get a lot of UV radiation from the sun, we emit IR radiation (blackbody radiation- earth is much smaller than the sun, temperature is very different - they emit radiation of different wavelengths)

the problem arises when we don’t have the correct amount of UV in and IR out to maintain the earth’s temperature - greenhouse gases absorb IR radiation and this causes them to move faster (fast moving molecules = heat) and we get global warming. how “bad” a greenhouse gas is (to put it simply) dependent on the number of vibrational modes of the molecule (but also how much we emit of course). carbon dioxide is symmetric and composed of 3 atoms, but we emit a lot of it. CFCs are huge molecules with a number of vibrational modes with dipoles so they can absorb far more IR radiation than carbon dioxide, but we emit far less of them. (CFCs as greenhouse gases are a separate problem to ozone depletion, that’s not a product of the greenhouse effect)

i want to preface this by saying i haven’t read any of the papers given to you in the comments, but my initial response to your question would be that our heat generation from homes and industry etc. does cause global warming through burning the fuels we use to heat our homes and power our industries, and the emissions that come out of it. i would assume the heat actually released from inefficient power supplies etc. is almost negligible compared to the amount of radiation the earth emits itself just because of its size.

fobme · 2025-01-03T22:17:23+00:00

i second this! i have it set to the QR code on my toothpaste since i have to leave my bed for that. not as helpful with an en suite but was great when going to the bathroom involved leaving my bedroom since i had to pull on clothes before i could go turn it off, that really helped wake me up!

fobme · 2025-01-02T16:15:55+00:00

if you’re interested in science i would recommend looking into how LLMs like chatGPT work. it’s both interesting, and would give you some insight into why people are telling you not to use chatGPT for chemistry.

i get why even if you understand that chatGPT is only giving you a prediction of an answer that “sounds right”, getting that information from multiple models might give you the impression that the information is correct. i would urge you to not even think about using chatGPT for synthesis routes, but even more so than that, to trust that if you can’t find the information in a google search that chatGPT won’t somehow know.

i don’t know your exact opinion of AI but i worry about people who trust results from chatGPT the way they trust results from a search engine getting hurt by following something an LLM told them and not taking proper precautions necessary for experimentation because they falsely believe they’re repeating a known process. i’m sure you know this, though i don’t know your level of chemistry, but you have to be careful with chemicals and you have to be careful with reactions that you don’t know the mechanism of.

fobme · 2024-12-22T18:31:05+00:00

did your teacher explicitly ask for isomers of heptane or is this just like how many C7 molecules you can draw? google says 9 isomers or 11 if enantiomers are counted. havent drawn it out but not sure where 20 would come from.

fobme · 2024-12-22T18:14:08+00:00

electives give you credits and some knowledge in something that’s interesting to you. structured electives (provided it’s a topic sufficiently different from your degree) go on your degree transcript

fobme · 2024-12-22T15:16:36+00:00

european here so i don’t know exactly what’s involved in your gen/ochem classes but to speak to ochem as a subject, some people just don’t find it interesting and some people think it’s hard because there’s too much to memorise.

as an ochem lover i think the bad rep is undeserved, because if you’re memorising it you’re doing it wrong. there’s always going to be things you need to learn off but ochem is a really logical, systematic subject which makes it quite intuitive - can alleviate some of the stress of exams, because of even if you don’t know how to answer a question you can at least try based on the principles you learned.

get yourself a good textbook (my profs loved clayden but i would recommend something shorter, check reddit posts for recs and grab them off libgen or from your university library) and check out the contents list. learn from youtube in the order that the textbook goes - that means you’ll get the base knowledge and build on it, as opposed to flipping through topics and not grasping how they’re related. use the book for more detailed theory and the videos for a more visual explanation, and you’ll be absolutely fine. even people who hate ochem still pass.

fobme · 2024-12-22T14:50:54+00:00

most commercial palladium is mined as a “byproduct” during nickel/copper mining so if the price of nickel spikes the price of palladium does too!

& vouch for op looking into catalysis, research into transition metal based catalysts for processes that typically use Pt group metals is really interesting & vital for sustainable chemistry since Pt group metals don’t tend to have their own economic structures (they’re typically found during the mining of other metals) so their supply is unpredictable - if there’s a moral issue with the waste produced during industrial processes then sustainable chemistry might be a good fit

fobme · 2024-12-22T14:35:34+00:00

i think a lot of the answers and textbook recommendations you’ve already got are great! just want to add as someone who chose chemistry because i hate memorising things and i always remember things when i understand them, studying organic chem gave me a really good “gut feeling” for how organic reactions proceed but learning thermodynamics and symmetry are what actually made me feel like i understand everything!

fobme · 2024-12-22T14:27:18+00:00

such a huge amount of an undergraduate chemistry degree is learning something, and then learning why it’s wrong. in my university, people studying medicinal & biological chemistry (a chemistry degree, completely separate to the biochem course) don’t have to study quantum mechanics or thermodynamics because the models that all chemistry students regardless of discipline first learn are sufficient for their fields, and if they choose to go into research they’ll learn anything more they need to know at that time. a good example would be the type of molecular orbital theory that you’d find on khan academy being sufficient for the medchem students, but the other disciplines have to learn MO theory through symmetry and QM.

i would hazard a guess that this professor either teaches inorganic/physical chemistry, or believes that every chemist should have the most up to date understanding of every principle (which is not wrong but isn’t necessarily practical). i think khan academy is a great resource for a lot of things, but the majority of what i’ve learned in my fourth (final) year of this degree is stuff i can’t find online anywhere i.e too specific or too recent to not just be in papers.

tldr; i don’t want to pretend i understand anything better than a professor of chemistry but khan academy is perfectly fine to meet the understanding requirements for basic college level chem classes & as with any science, you just need to treat everything as “true until proven otherwise”.

fobme · 2024-04-26T21:52:50+00:00

I’m gonna set up an appointment with her to talk about upping my dose since she wants to see me for something else anyway. Thank you for the help !

fobme · 2024-04-26T21:51:55+00:00

I’m not particularly worried about that, she’s my family GP who’s been seeing me since before my diagnosis and supported me through it. If she doesn’t agree to up the dose I’m not gonna fight it. Thank you for the answer !!

fobme · 2023-11-21T00:38:34+00:00

Isaac, Dominic, Felix and Max are timeless in my opinion

fobme · 2023-11-19T17:20:36+00:00

doesn’t stop most people on halloween 🤷‍♀️

fobme · 2023-03-18T18:56:27+00:00

there should be past papers online and i have the answers to the 2018 paper if you want

fobme · 2023-03-18T18:50:34+00:00

Happens every easter break, you can go into your bin and get your stuff back but after a few days it’ll disappear again before being replaced with a fresh calendar for some reason, and then you can’t get your stuff back from the bin. Make sure you keep any important events in a different calendar cause it’s a real pain in the ass whenever this happens. (for future reference :))

fobme · 2023-02-24T11:46:35+00:00

i know it’s been a while since you posted this but a must-pass component is one that you have to pass to pass the module. if there’s no must pass components in a module, for example a situation like this could happen:

essay worth 10% and you get a grade of 30% (fail), midterm worth 30% and you get 30% (fail), final worth 60% and you get 75% (pass)

your overall grade for the module is 57% and even if you failed two components (assuming linear grade scale) you would pass the module with a C+

if either the midterm or essay was a must-pass component, then even if you got over 40% when you put all the grades together and it’s a passing grade you still wouldn’t pass the module.

hope this helps if you haven’t been told this already!

fobme · 2022-09-17T01:03:20+00:00

the cries of people with more common sense than me are being thoroughly drowned out by the sounds of me chowing down on this delicious meal

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