The World is Too Much with Us

Today I would like to share with you a poem by Wordsworth.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. --Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Food as Medicine (week 8)

Duh! Considered the "King of Chinese Medicine", Sun Si Miao said, "Before you use acupuncture and herbs, change the diet."

After air and water, we consume food to survive. A proverb goes, "Sickness enters via the mouth, calamities come out of the mouth." According to TCM, when eating, one must understand the nature of each food element: yin or yang, nourishing or draining, flavors, and direction.

Yin or yang could refer to temperature, cold or hot; some food can benefit qi or blood and some can drain excess element from the body (such as heat, cold, or damp). Flavors can determine the organs entered, eg, salt goes to kidneys, sweet goes to stomach. Wine can bring energy up while salt can bring it down; ginger is somewhat floating and vinegar is sinking.

ChemBalancer (week 8)

FunbasedLearning ChemBalancer is useful. However, the graphics and interactivity are pretty crude. It looks like a product made in the early days of computing. The Wake Forest University has much better explanation and graphics and seems more fun to play with.

Semiconductor of the week (week 8)

Let's talk about arsenic. Yup, it's poisonous but combined with gallium, it gives us present day solar panels!

With lead, we get car batteries. With groundwater, it becomes a worldwide problem. When heated, it smells like garlic.

Because it is so poisonous, China is the top producer of this material. It has been used in chemical weapons, insecticides, alloys, and even in treating cancer.

Avogadro's Hypothesis (week 7)

The science of Avogadro's time was impressive but what was more remarkable was how politics can stifle scientific development. Our understanding of chemistry was severely delayed by scientists who clung onto their "theories" and by political turmoil of the times causing the untimely death of Lavoisier.

Imagine what chemistry would be like had Dalton recognized Avogadro sooner and had Lavoisier been spared. Would we have achieved the perfect electrical battery today?

What is a mole (week 7)

Moles are a unit of measurement for chemicals, in a way feet is a measurement unit for length and pound for weight. When a chemist wishes to make a chemical reaction happen, he or she wants to make sure there is the right amount of each kind of chemical. Moles are used so that chemists know how much of different kinds of chemicals to use to have reactions that work out correctly. A chemical can be atoms of a single element or atoms of many elements combined into molecules, so a single molecule of a chemical can weigh three or four times what a single molecule of another chemical weighs. For this reason, chemists can't just measure the weight of different chemicals to have the right proportions of reactants.

When chemists want to have a chemical reaction come out they need to know how many molecules of each kind of chemical they have, so they measure the chemicals in moles. A mole is the atomic weight of a molecule of the chemical in grams. So a mole of a molecule like hydrogen (H) with an atomic weight of 1 is one gram. Meanwhile, a complex molecule like glucose (C6H12O6) has an atomic weight of 180, so one mole is 180 grams. But even though the weight is different, the two moles contain the exact same number of molecules, 6.02 x 10 to the 23rd power.

Alkali Earth Element of the week (week 7)

Remember Chernobyl? After the fallout from 1986 disaster, a large swath of land was (is) contaminated with Strontium 90 (90sr). 90SR is a by product of nuclear fission and has a half-life of 28.78 years. It, like calcium and magnesium, has strong tide with our bones. Hence, if 90SR gets into the bones, it would be bad news indeed!

Yet, the good SR can help the bones and prevent osteoporosis.