When I was in high school, one of the extracurricular academic competitions was at a local college. I had time to kill and was browsing through the campus bookstore. They had a rack of 8.5x11 laminated "cheat sheets" of chemistry, physics, geometry that these remind me of. They were pretty cheap, and the nerd that I am spent my lunch money on buying a set of these. At first, I wasn't even taking classes for the subject matter, but I knew that I would be and I wasn't sure if I'd be back to this store. After taking the appropriate classes, they were very useful.
Gallery – Making Molecules
21–30 of 39 posts
Re: Gallery – Making Molecules
#22I think I actually paid money for similar printed handouts. I think it was for SAT/ACT concepts or some college course. How naive I was back then.
Back then for me was well before the internet, so these kinds of things were pure gold. Now, if you can't find it in a quick web search, it's probably not important
Re: Gallery – Making Molecules
#23In the one in the third column of the second row, "Drawing Molecules" [1], the second box shows how to go from a structural representation to a skeletal diagram. The third step of that is to remove all C-H bonds, removing both the H and the bond. But in the example given it retains a C-H bond. Why is that? [1] https://static1.squarespace.com/static/62185f3b81809a6fd03dd...
I would think it's because it's part of the aldehyde functional group.
Re: Gallery – Making Molecules
#24My 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 paren…
My aunt is a medical illustrator but had to give up the career for lack of work years ago
Re: Gallery – Making Molecules
#25Maybe these are beautiful, but whoever made them is blatantly not a professional graphic designer or typographer. From a graphic design POV, it's hard to justify rating these higher than 8/10.
Re: Gallery – Making Molecules
#26Maybe these are beautiful, but whoever made them is blatantly not a professional graphic designer or typographer. From a graphic design POV, it's hard to justify rating these higher than 8/10.
Why not explain that POV?
Re: Gallery – Making Molecules
#27Out 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…
90% 0f that stuff is second nature if you've gotten a PhD.
Asymmetric boration would need a red for me, but I'd just Google it and look for an undergrad .edu explainer and sample 3-4 answers
If it's more esoteric, I'd just search through a couple of papers. There's usually a paper.
If it's some specific number, pubChem or chemSpider usually have what I'm looking for.
Honestly, I probably look stuff up on Wikipedia as much as anywhere else. They usually have plenty of basic physical properties for common chemicals. And a useful svg structure that's easily stealable for a presentation....
Re: Gallery – Making Molecules
#28Maybe these are beautiful, but whoever made them is blatantly not a professional graphic designer or typographer. From a graphic design POV, it's hard to justify rating these higher than 8/10.
Why not explain that POV?
Not a garphic designer, but someone who is anal about graphics in papers.
I don't want to detract from how great this is!
But, if you want to be anal about graphics... There are a lot of little mistakes that could be improved on.
The text isn't justified and sort of meanders left and right.
Nothing is quite correctly centered.
Little bugs like stray lines (in the middle top one, TLC).
Capitalization is really inconsistent.
Sometimes there are paragraphs, sometimes there are separate sentences. Sometimes there are sentence fragments.
Some of the graphics don't follow standards for contrast, like the 2nd from the top middle, black on blue is very hard to read for someone with a low vision. Then there's light blue on white.
The spacing is really inconsistent horizontally. There's pretty uniform space on the left (usually) but on the right it's clear things just end when they do sort of squeezed in. Sometimes it's the other way around and the left is squeezed in.
Some of the fonts are basically impossible for me to read, never mind someone with dyslexia. Look at this one, 2nd page, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/62185f3b81809a6fd03dd...
Sometimes arrows are thick and black, sometimes they're hollow, sometimes they're much thicker and red.
That's just a few. Still awesome though!
Re: Gallery – Making Molecules
#29I think I actually paid money for similar printed handouts. I think it was for SAT/ACT concepts or some college course. How naive I was back then.
But they probably didn't have ads on them.
Re: Gallery – Making Molecules
#30In the one in the third column of the second row, "Drawing Molecules" [1], the second box shows how to go from a structural representation to a skeletal diagram. The third step of that is to remove all C-H bonds, removing both the H and the bond. But in the example given it retains a C-H bond. Why is that? [1] https://static1.squarespace.com/static/62185f3b81809a6fd03dd...
That C-H bond is part of an aldehyde functional group, normally those hydrogens are not removed (I think because it helps for pattern matching the functional group)
Usually it’s just hydrogens on hydrocarbon chain backbone or aromatic rings that are deleted
Functional group sheet: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/62185f3b81809a6fd03dd...