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,

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.

I’ve been pretty critical of peer review in the past, arguing that it doesn’t accomplish much, contributes to status quo bias, etc.

I first encountered organic chemistry on Wikipedia, my freshman year of high school.

I started this blog one year ago today, with a post on site-selective glycosylation.

Not Boring recently published a panegyric about Varda, a startup that’s trying to create “space factories making drugs in orbit.” When I first read this description, alarm bells went off in my head—why would anyone try to make drugs in space?

(with apologies to Maimonides and Nozick) Screening on only one substrate before assessing the substrate scope. This is the “ordinary means” in methods development. Screening on one substrate, but choosing a substrate that worked poorly in a previous study (e.g.). This can be thought of as serial multi-substrate screening, where each substrate is a separate project, but the body of work achieves greater generality over time.

Much ink has been spilled on whether scientific progress is slowing down or not (e.g.).

Recently, I wrote about how scientists could stand to learn a lot from the tech industry.

Previously, I wrote about various potential future roles for journals. Several of the scenarios I discussed involved journals taking a much bigger role as editors and custodians of science, using their power to shape the way that science is conducted and exerting control over the scientific process.

Who was Richard Hamming, and why should you read his book? If you’ve taken computer science courses or messed around enough with scipy , you might recognize his name in a few different places—Hamming error-correction codes, the Hamming window function, the Hamming distance, the Hamming bound, etc. I had heard of some of these concepts, but didn’t know anything concrete about him before I started reading this book.