Internet Hoax Of The Week

"We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the Complete Works of Shakespeare;
now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true."
- Robert Wilensky

Imaginary Comics In An Imaginary Week, In November (More Next Month)

Left Out : Pink Slip Day :-(

Yesterday was pink slip day or blue letter day, as we call it here in Germany, with the SW-house whom I'm currently with now laying off IT-consultants due to insufficient contracts :-(

So. I'm now jobhunting! Any help, contacts, pointers etc. would be appreciated.

I'm looking for a job as a CIO, CTO, IT-consultant, project manager, quality geek (ISO 9000ff), writer, flying instructor, cryptographer, loose cannon or whatever, beginning 1st July 2004. Preferably within an hour's commuting time of Paderborn Germany (i.e. a circle including Dortmund, Bielefeld, Kassel, Winterberg). I'll be grateful for your tips and hints. This is not an April Fools' joke, would that it were, for the economy is crappy and still headed downhill.

I've written a CV (PDF, in German) and put a link to it into the sidebar, under my photo.

Done the same with a bilingual list of my publications too. FWIW: IQ still runs >= 135, OK?

How about a new meme for the blogosphere? Help get Stu a job! (e.g link to the permalink).

Thing I Won't Work WIth (2): Nickel Carbonyl

Synthetic organic chemists rely a lot on inorganic chemistry. We let metals do a lot of work for us, particularly when it's time to do the real arc-welding of carbon-carbon bond formation. I have a pretty typical synthetic background, and over the years I've used palladium, platinum, sodium, iron, copper, rhodium, aluminum, mercury, silver, manganese, lithium, titanium, chromium, cobalt, zinc, ruthenium, vanadium, tin, magnesium, cerium, potassium, and probably a few more that escape me right now. Never sit near a chemist and give him any excuse to rattle off a list of elements.

I've never used elemental nickle metal, but I have broken out some of its salts from time to time. I especially enjoy the vivid green of nickel chloride, whose solutions look for all the world like lime jello. Not that you'd want to substitute that in your favorite recipe: nickle salts are rather toxic, and are suspected carcinogens to boot. But I'd work with them all day long to avoid dealing with another nickel compound, its tetracarbonyl.

That's a complex of nickel with carbon monoxide. CO has a good amount of electron density left on its carbon, and it'll line up on a metal atom, slotting into its electron orbitals and making itself at home. You can find carbonyl complexes of all the transition metals, as far as I know. Many of them are liquids, which is rather disconcerting when you consider their metal heritage.

Nickel carbonyl is a liquid, but it can barely restrain itself from being a gas. It boils at 43 C, so it has a pretty substantial vapor pressure, and that's a real problem. Said vapor, as you'd imagine, is rather weighty. It's not one of your wafting-away-on-the-summer-zephyr sort of vapors; it's more like a sort of ghostly molasses. It's so heavy that you really can't rely on a standard laboratory fume hood to contain it, because that's not the sort of hazard they're built for. Depending on the air flow and the sash, the stuff can just ooze right out the front of the hood and pour out into the lab.

You don't want it there. Breathing it is most unwise, because those CO ligands are not stapled on very well. If they find another metal that appreciates them more, they'll bail out, and an excellent candidate is the iron in your hemoglobin. There go four equivalents of carbon monoxide into your blood cells, and there's only so long you can keep that up. And there's the nickle, too - alone, bereft, with only your proteins to complex to. Wonderful. Recall that the metal is toxic all on its own, and you've now dosed in the most bioavailable manner possible. If you make it through the carbon monoxide spike, you have long-term metal poisoning to deal with.

Even if the vapor doesn't get the chance to wander around poisoning you, it can amuse itself right in your fume hood. If it rolls across a hot surface, of which there are no shortage in most working hoods, then it can explode, leaving behind a vile haze of carcinogenic nickle soot. An exploding toxin with a high vapor pressure - I just don't know what else you could ask for in a laboratory reagent. No doubt it does many interesting and useful reactions. They can save 'em for me, because I'm not that desperate yet.

Law 1001: Never Talk To The FBI Without Your Lawyer

Dark Matter 'Highway' Runs by Earth

An astrophysicist suggests invisible and mysterious dark matter from another galaxy showers Earth regularly, zipping through your house, right through Earth even, and providing a possible path for detecting what scientists say makes 90 percent of the material in the universe.

The stuff, dubbed dark matter, has never been identified, but astronomers say it must exist because of how gravity works at the galactic level. Taking into account only regular matter, galaxies should fly apart.

Heidi Newberg at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and her colleagues considered the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, which is being ripped asunder and consumed by our Milky Way. Sagittarius' entrails, running through our galaxy like ribbons, are made of stars, gas, dust and, the researchers suggest, dark matter too. One tail of the debris appears to run right through our solar system.

"As the Milky Way consumes Sagittarius, it not only rips the stars from the smaller galaxy, but also tears away some of the dark-matter particles from that galaxy. We may be able to directly observe that in the form of a dark-matter highway streaming in one direction through the Earth," Newberg said.

The idea was presented in the March 19 issue of Physical Review Letters.

A remaining and somewhat thorny problem: Scientists still don't know what form the dark matter takes nor exactly how to find it. They assume it involves particles of some sort, however, and detection systems have been set up to detect interactions of the particles with regular matter. One candidate particle is called the WIMP, or Weakly Interacting Massive Particle. Several may have streamed through your body as you read this brief article.

Newberg's team suggests revised calculations to allow for the extra, extragalactic WIMPS might help dark matter hunters spot the signatures of their quarry.

A Weekend For Pictures