Blog Posts

A few weeks ago, British Columbia announced that they were implementing a vaccine passport system. It started being enforced this week and to prepare for that they have a system to download the “cards” from the government’s Health Gateway website. Turns out, the card is a QR code that you can download to your phone and present to businesses. They’ve released a companion app that businesses can use to scan the QR codes and verify they are valid proofs of vaccine. I was curious how the system works, so I did some reading and wrote some code to see what I could learn.

In 2018, I quietly set myself a challenge - to spend the whole year only reading books by women. I didn’t tell anyone else I was doing it until January 2019 (much to the chagrin of my wife). In that year, I read 17 books, all by women authors.

It’s now been over two years since I did this and I was curious to see if my reading habits have changed. Fortunately, I’ve been logging every book I read in GoodReads since 2014, so the data to answer this question exists. This isn’t a post to talk about the technical details of how I analysed the data, so let’s get to a graph.

About a year ago, in September 2019, a new director was hired to lead the organization I’m part of at work. Normally, this wouldn’t be a particularly noteworthy event, but her arrival ultimately had a profound impact on the work I’m doing today. First, let’s provide some context.

When I first envisioned this website, I had intended for it to be a place for me to write about interesting bits of chemistry and other science that caught my attention. As you can see from my publishing record during 2014, that plan hasn’t been going very well. I have had plenty of ideas for things to write about, but there are always other things that seem like more of a priority. Today, I will tell you about some of those other things and my plan to (hopefully) bring more frequent content to Quantum Geranium.

Please describe what you consider your most significant accomplishment as a research scientist.

This seemingly simple question posed on a job application I completed recently had me stumped when I first came across it. What in my seven year research career has been my most significant accomplishment? I haven’t done anything that will be earning me a Nobel Prize or a paper in Science or Nature*. That isn’t to say that I haven’t done any interesting research – I would argue that my work has generally been quite interesting – just that no single project stands out as my greatest accomplishment.

The “chemical-free” movement has been getting increased attention in the media and many companies have begun labelling their products as such. This is a dangerous trend, in my opinion, because it is rooted in fear and fundamental misconceptions about science. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) defines chemophobia as an “irrational fear of chemicals”. Due to the inherently irrational nature of chemophobia, the best way to combat it is through education. With a basic understanding of chemistry, many of these issues can easily be understood for what they are.

I was talking to some friends about cooking and the topic of adding salt to the water you cook pasta in came up. Someone asked what purpose of the salt is in the cooking process. At first, the answer the foodie on the group came up with was “it makes the pasta cook better”, but this wasn’t satisfying, so we started brainstorming to come up with some ideas.  In the end, there were two theories that had the most support:

1. It prevents the pasta from sticking.
2. It raises the temperature of the water, cooking the pasta faster.

I don’t know enough to pass judgement on the first theory. I know that the second is technically true through boiling point elevation, but how much does it really increase the boiling point of the water? Let’s do the math.

I recently read one of Robert Heinlein’s first novels, “Rocket Ship Galileo”, after it sat on my bookshelf for a few years among the other golden age sci-fi I have collected. It got me thinking and I wanted to share some of my thoughts here.

SPOILERS FOLLOW! Stop reading this and go get the book from your local library* if you don’t want to be spoiled.

If you talk to any chemist, they will tell you the importance of solvent in chemistry. The majority of reactions, especially those in research and used to produce commercial products, take place in the solution phase. It is rare to encounter reactions that are done purely in gas or solid phase. Any article or seminar about organic synthesis will tell you how a reaction works in this solvent but not that one.

Unfortunately, it is quite difficult to model solvent effects using computational chemistry methods. At their most basic, most computational models assume that the system exists at zero kelvin (which is a different problem entirely) in a vacuum. This makes it quite difficult to account for solvent effects. You could simply add solvent molecules to your model system. However, this is generally impractical if you are doing any sort of electronic structure theory calculations, since it can take dozens or hundreds of solvent molecules to achieve complete solvation of a relatively small molecule.

One of the members of my current research group is defending her master’s thesis next week and as I was reading through her thesis, I was reminded of my favourite part of my own thesis. In the introductory chapter, I wrote a brief description of the development of the modern field of computational chemistry. More than a year later, these four paragraphs remain some of my favourite writing to date, so I wanted I’d share it with the world here.