In the course of preparing a literature meeting on post-Hartree–Fock computational methods last year, I found myself wishing that there was a quick and simple way to illustrate the relative error of different approximations on some familiar model reactions, like a "report card" for different levels of theory.

You are a scientist, not a lab monkey. You ought not to view your degree as “six years of hard labor in the chemistry mines.” Always make time to go to interesting seminars, talk with other people about their research, and read the literature. Otherwise, what’s the point of being a scientist? Only one person is really looking out for your best interests: you.

The concept of p K _a is introduced so early in the organic chemistry curriculum that it’s easy to overlook what a remarkable idea it is. Briefly, for the non-chemists reading this: p K* _a is defined as the negative base-10 logarithm of the acidity constant of a given acid H–A:* p K _a := -log ₁₀ ([HA]/[A-][H+]) Unlike pH, which describes the acidity of a bulk solution,

An (in)famous code challenge in computer graphics is to write a complete ray tracer small enough to fit onto a business card. I've really enjoyed reading through some of the submissions over the years (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4), and I've wondered what a chemistry-specific equivalent might be.

As an undergraduate student in the sciences at MIT, contempt for management consulting was commonplace. Consulting was the path for people who had ambition devoid of any real interests, the “sellout road” where you made endless Powerpoints instead of providing any tangible improvement to the world. In contrast, going to graduate school was a choice that showed commitment and integrity.

Much ink has been spilled on whether scientific progress is slowing down or not (e.g.). I don’t want to wade into that debate today—instead, I want to argue that, regardless of the rate of new discoveries, acquiring scientific data is easier now than it ever has been. There are a lot of ways one could try to defend this point;

A technique that I’ve seen employed more and more in computational papers over the past few years is to calculate Boltzmann-weighted averages of some property over a conformational ensemble. This is potentially very useful because most complex molecules exist in a plethora of conformations, and so just considering the lowest energy conformer might be totally irrelevant.

TW: sarcasm. Today, most research is done by academic labs funded mainly by the government. Many articles have been written on the shortcomings with academic research: Sam Rodriques recently had a nice post about how academia is ultimately an educational institution, and how this limits the quality of academic research. (It’s worth a read;

This thesis, from Christian Sailer at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, is one of the most exciting studies I’ve read this year. Sailer and coworkers are able to generate benzhydryl carbocations from photolysis of the corresponding phosphonium salts, and can monitor their formation and lifetime via femtosecond transient absorption spectroscopy.

Who is Peter Thiel? Tyler Cowen calls him one of the most important public intellectuals of our era. Bloomberg called him responsible for the ideology of Silicon Valley “more than any other living Silicon Valley investor or entrepreneur.” Depending on who you ask, he’s either a shadowy plutocratic genius or a visionary forward-thinking genius: but everyone seems to at least agree that he’s a genius.