Uncategorized
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Pictorial Guide to Interpreting Infrared Spectra
Having taught spectroscopy for several years, I find that students commonly have a hard time prioritizing IR bands in their spectra interpretation. After several false starts and long years of procrastination, here’s a pictorial guide that I hope would be clear, accurate, and helpful for learning to interpret IR spectra. If you wish to use…
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ChemDoodles, ISISDraw, BKChem, MarvinBeans, ChemSketch, ChemDraw…
There’s at least a dozen chemical structure editors running under different kinds of licenses and platform, and (ugh) none of them are truly satisfactory. The latest one I’ve checked out is ChemDoodle, which is somewhat new and have some good things going on. The existing reviews on the Net dates to 2004/5, so a fresh…
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Web Adventures: evaluating what to learn
The past few weeks I’ve been greatly distracted while writing. Trying to build a supporting app for my dissertation and the inertia kick from chemdoodle web components brought me to learning Java / JavaScript. I’ve known for sometime that I need to learn web-dev for OpenChemArt (amongst other things), but haven’t put serious thoughts into…
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Back to the Butterfly
Backstory: five years ago I signed myself up for a SCUBA diving course. At the first class there is a swim test: 200m, and treading water for 10min. I splashed and gurgled my way through the swim, then sank and drowned. Twice, and barely survived on the third trial. “That’s awful, dude”, I said to…
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Thesis Woes
This is a doubly rare post — a personal post, and an emo one for that. The thesis is sitting between 930 to 1030 pages in the past month and I dread looking at it. It’s never going to be as good as it should be, and I feel sick about it. (And I feel…
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How NOT to swim distance butterfly?
Since promising Cindy to teach her how to swim a long and efficient butterfly, I’ve been watching swimmers of various fluency at my pool (not very hard – swimming fly attracts butterfly like daffodils 🙂 ) as well as videos of exceptional swimmers like Misty Hyman and Mike Phelps online. I’ve since learnt that it’s…
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Anonymous vs the “Patriots”
Visualizing the damage done in the so-called “first world information war“* up to Dec 10, with each unit representing one hour of downtime. The data was extracted from PandaLabs’ blog. Downtime on the top is largely from Anon‘s** Operation: Payback (and is investigated by US-DOJ and an arrest in the Netherlands); downtime to Wikileaks was…
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Detailed Watercolor Worldmap
This is a high resolution digital watercolor map of the world that can be printed in sizes up to 9×6 feet. The details at full size is shown below. The raw image is ~500Mb in size, and will be hosted here (uploading… it’s been uploading for the last 3h) You can click on the image…