¹³ C NMR is, generally speaking, a huge waste of time. This isn’t meant to be an attack on carbon NMR as a scientific tool; it’s an excellent technique, and gives structural information that no other methods can. Rather, I take issue with the requirement that the identity of every published compound be verified with a ¹³ C NMR spectrum. Very few ¹³ C NMR experiments yield unanticipated results.

One of the more thought-provoking pieces I read last year was Alex Danco’s post “Why the Canadian Tech Scene Doesn’t Work,” which dissects the structural and institutional factors that make Silicon Valley so much more effective at spawning successful companies than Toronto.

Modeling ion-pair association/dissociation is an incredibly complex problem, and one that's often beyond the scope of conventional DFT-based techniques.

Last week, I posted a simple Lennard–Jones simulation, written in C++, that models the behavior of liquid Ar in only 1561 characters.

An (in)famous code challenge in computer graphics is to write a complete ray tracer small enough to fit onto a business card.

Michael Nielsen and Kanjun Qiu recently published a massive essay entitled “A Vision of Metascience: An Engine of Improvement for the Social Processes of Science.” Metascience, the central topic of the essay, is science about science.

Spoilers below for Ursula Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” If you haven’t read it, it’s short—go and do so now!

The failure of conventional calculations to handle entropy is well-documented.

Talent, by Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross, is a book about talent selection—in other words, a book about hiring.

In our recently published work on screening for generality, we selected our panel of model substrates in part using cheminformatic techniques.

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.