Another great one is Compound Interest.
https://www.compoundchem.com/infographics/
Gallery – Making Molecules
11–20 of 39 posts
Re: Gallery – Making Molecules
#12Out of curiosity, what do professional chemists refer to when they need a quick reference for something like this? Is it all in their heads by that point, or is there special software that they use every day (some sort of knowledge base type thing...?) or how does it all work? As a software dev I think I take it for granted that I can look up anything I need to in a second or two. How does it work for other professio…
Most of what's in these handouts, and much, much else, is just in their heads--at least the part that's relevant to their field, obviously an organic chemist is going to have slightly different things memorized than a geochemist. For things that you have to look up, for decades the first thing you reach for would be the CRC Handbook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRC_Handbook_of_Chemistry_and_... although it's on the web now https://hbcp.chemnetbase.com/contents/ContentsSearch.xhtml?d... as well as other reference materials.
Re: Gallery – Making Molecules
#13Out of curiosity, what do professional chemists refer to when they need a quick reference for something like this? Is it all in their heads by that point, or is there special software that they use every day (some sort of knowledge base type thing...?) or how does it all work? As a software dev I think I take it for granted that I can look up anything I need to in a second or two. How does it work for other professio…
MOSTLY UNINFORMED OPINION
A lot of special knowledge is also available within seconds on the internet, but you (solardev) don't know where. Part of being in the bubble is that you know where to find things that are in the bubble.
For an example that comes easily to my mind, a while ago there was an HN thread where someone asked what made a cross-language dictionary (e.g. English-Japanese) good or bad, and I responded with a link to FrameNet ( https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/ ) and the observation that I'd like dictionaries to include information about how to supply relevant semantic roles to the word you're looking up, which they almost never do.
There's nothing stopping anyone else from looking up FrameNet and seeing what it's about. (Though academic papers on frame semantics might be less accessible.) The obstacle is in knowing that it's there in the first place.
Re: Gallery – Making Molecules
#14Out of curiosity, what do professional chemists refer to when they need a quick reference for something like this? Is it all in their heads by that point, or is there special software that they use every day (some sort of knowledge base type thing...?) or how does it all work? As a software dev I think I take it for granted that I can look up anything I need to in a second or two. How does it work for other professio…
Not a professional chemist (by any stretch of the imagination), but for several of these, it's as much in their heads as "what are the keywords in C?" is for C programmers. For at least some of these well, too, software exists already to do things like draw molecules [1]. Databases also exist to do things like find known properties (spectra, physical properties like melting point) for known chemicals.
[1] I guarantee every molecule drawn on the page was drawn with ChemDraw or similar tool.
Re: Gallery – Making Molecules
#15My brief extension course introduction to chem and mol bio gave me an enormous appreciation for chemistry illustrations. Molecular Biology of the Cell is one of the best textbooks ever written.
They really are something, right? My boyfriend had/has an open offer to jump into a career in scientific illustration if he wants to (but he's in love with his museum job). His neighbor has been doing it for decades and her work has been in many of the mass-produced scientific textbooks used at the high-school and college level - it was really cool to see some of her actual sketches and prints when visiting his parents a few years ago
Re: Gallery – Making Molecules
#16I got super confused by the "Page 47" logo. Is it the publisher? Sounds like a pretty poor choice: color me dumb but I did look for page 46 and 48...
A google search leads me to think Page 47 is a reference to the National Treasure franchise https://nationaltreasure.fandom.com/wiki/Page_47
Re: Gallery – Making Molecules
#17Out of curiosity, what do professional chemists refer to when they need a quick reference for something like this? Is it all in their heads by that point, or is there special software that they use every day (some sort of knowledge base type thing...?) or how does it all work? As a software dev I think I take it for granted that I can look up anything I need to in a second or two. How does it work for other professio…
You develop an intuition and general understanding. It’s like a carpenter sees a chair and can understand how it was built. He doesn’t have to remember every combination of pieces. With chemistry it’s the same. You just see it.
Re: Gallery – Making Molecules
#18I find this a little hilarious and probably sorely needed as someone who was handed what the instructor literally referred to as the "art of the clides" (the heading "Chart of the Nuclides" having been cut off via photocopier margins), in what turned out to practically be a graduate-level physics course at a nominally undergraduate institution.
Re: Gallery – Making Molecules
#19Out of curiosity, what do professional chemists refer to when they need a quick reference for something like this? Is it all in their heads by that point, or is there special software that they use every day (some sort of knowledge base type thing...?) or how does it all work? As a software dev I think I take it for granted that I can look up anything I need to in a second or two. How does it work for other professio…
I am a professional chemist (Ph.D.). After a time, one gets a chemical intuition (as I've heard it called). There are just things that you know or you know where to look and how to filter irrelevant information.
All of that depends on your training and experience. I am not particularly strong in the organic department; however, I am quite expert in areas of physical, aqueous, and computational chemistry. I'm also a geochemist, and have significant lab experience in mostly analytical chemistry. Needless to say, I'm a decent programmer, know a bunch of lab stuff, am quote proficient in linear algebra, and so on. Those main and ancillary skills together give me a pretty good idea of what's going on without having to consult any references.
Resources that I use daily: PubChem, ACS journals, my textbooks, visualization tools, and some software if I'm targeting a certain outcome. IUPAC for naming organics (rarely for me).
Also, I answer questions on the Chemistry Stack Exchange site (not so much these days) which requires a decent amount of digging in order to answer coherently.
Re: Gallery – Making Molecules
#20Out of curiosity, what do professional chemists refer to when they need a quick reference for something like this? Is it all in their heads by that point, or is there special software that they use every day (some sort of knowledge base type thing...?) or how does it all work? As a software dev I think I take it for granted that I can look up anything I need to in a second or two. How does it work for other professio…
Learning is always more important than knowing