Eleven things I learned in Organic Chemistry:

I wasn’t sure if I would continue with this blog after the semester ended, but I kind of miss it, so…

I guess I’ll keep writing it.

But, if you’re reading this, you already knew that. Well then, let’s get to the interesting bit!

In O. Chem, I learned-

11.) How to draw a damn good hexagon in under two seconds.

Glorious, is it not?

10.) It is completely possible to get a cramp in your thumb.

9.) It is completely impossible to get rid of a cramp in your thumb.

8.) I can take notes in my sleep.

7.) My hair is an excellent indicator of my stress level.

6.) Chemistry teachers really do know how to make meth, and will explain the process in great detail.

5.) There are many compounds that explode upon contact with water.

Labs involving these compounds will, invariably, occur on days when there is a thunderstorm.

4.) The aforementioned compounds are kept in the same rooms as equipment worth several hundred dollars.

3.) The aforementioned rooms do not have security cameras.

2.) Some people aren't joking when they say their homework could kill them.

1.) No matter how much time you have to sink into studying for O. Chem, your dogs will still love you.

Zombie Safety Series: I’ve Got Good News and Bad News

It’s Dead Week, and everyone’s walking around like shambling corpses, so it seemed only fitting to write about zombies.

The other day, I realized my Safety Series was overlooking a crucial fact. I never considered how the zombie virus was transmitted. If it’s only transmissible by bite, everything I said still goes. However…

If the virus is airborne, we’re all doomed.

Doomed.

On the bright side, history and biology set good precedents for the complete non-airborne-ness of the zombie virus. The thing you have to remember is that viruses are (sort of) living things, and all living things have been hard-wired to survive and reproduce. For viruses, that means forming new populations by infecting new hosts. Therefore, any given virus wants to infect as many hosts as possible.

Really virulent viruses (and I think we can all agree the zombie virus qualifies as really virulent) tend to be waterborne. (The relevant info is about halfway through the video, but the whole thing is worth watching.) Airborne viruses, like the common cold, tend to be less nasty. After all, airborne viruses need their hosts up and walking around and breathing on people. The Black Plague, on the other hand, is just as capable of riding in fleas that bite dying people as it is capable of riding in fleas that bite non-dying people. This all seems to indicate that the zombie virus is transmissible by fluids only.

Here’s the rub. This virus’s symptoms are rather unique. While the zombie virus does kill its hosts, it also keeps them walking around. And anything still walking around is still capable of passing on an airborne pathogen.

So, the bad news is I really have no idea whether the virus would be airborne or not. The good news is I hear there’s a sale on gas masks at the local supermarket. 

Zombie Safety Series: Gaylord College

Alright, this was fun for a while, but I’m running out of buildings I’m familiar with, so the Safety Series is coming to a close soon.

Anyways, let’s take a look at Gaylord. Walk in through the big, lovely, glass front doors and you will be confronted with a big, lovely, indestructible staircase that provides easy access to all three of the building floors. On a normal day, that’s great. But, during a zombie attack? Not so much.  

While there are doors that could be used to close off portions of the building, there are a lot of indefensible ways in and out on the bottom floor. The elevators could be shut down, and the smaller staircases could be locked, but there’s no way to keep the advancing horde off that main staircase once they’re in the building.

The only food supply is on the bottom floor, too. Not that you should stick around long enough to need food. Once the zombies get in, you need to get out, ‘cause there’s no way to make this building safe.

When it’s time to flee, you do have one advantage. Gaylord College is full of writers. If there’s one group guaranteed to have zombie survival plans, it’s writers. Any fiction writer is guaranteed to have at least three escape routes, five cure hypotheses, and twenty-seven makeshift anti-zombie weapons close at hand. (And that’s when there aren’t any zombies around.)

You’ll need a good plan, too. That third floor won’t be easy to get out of once the staircases are lost. And, again, you cannot defend those staircases.

Here’s the breakdown of Gaylord College’s safety rating:

Pros-

• Fellow refugees highly likely to be prepared for this scenario

Cons-

• No way to secure main part of building
• Meager food supply
• Giant staircase provides horde with easy access

Overall Zombie Safety Series Rating: 3 4/7 out of 11. Zombie Snack Pack

Zombie Safety Series: Physical Sciences Center

Let’s skip the introduction and dive right into the content. How safe would you be if you hid from zombies in OU’s Physical Sciences Center?

Both the ground and second floor of the Physical Science Center have lots of big, glass doors any zombie horde would take full advantage of. That means the first two stories would have to be barricaded or evacuated in the event of a zombie attack.

Considering the fact that Physical Sciences center is full of scientists, it shouldn’t be too hard to rustle up a few engineers to do the work. The building is also filled with heavy vending machines, thick fire hoses, and other materials that could be press-ganged into barricade service.

Assuming the first two floors were lost, securing the rest of the building wouldn’t be that difficult. There are ten more floors and a roof to flee to, if need be. Plus, whole sections of the building can be cut off using a system of thick, lockable doors. The staircases look like they were meant to survive an explosion, too.

Speaking of explosions, the Physical Sciences Center is also filled with things that make other things go BOOM. Even better, the Physical Sciences Center is filled with people who know how to make things BOOM. It’s easy to imagine luring an advancing horde into a stairwell, locking the door, and tossing in a canister of propane.

And if it does come to destroying the staircase, you still have the hope of an aerial rescue. The roof is plenty big and flat enough to land a helicopter on. Even if rescue never comes, you can always rappel down the outside of the building using those fire hoses.

The down side is that you’d need to make your escape pretty quickly. The Physical Sciences Center’s entire food supply is contained in a few vending machines. There’re plenty of things to store water in, but there’s a small risk of contamination from all the labs.

Here’s the breakdown of the Physical Sciences Center’s zombie safety rating:

Cons-

• No food
• Uncertain water supply
• Lower floors difficult to defend

Pros-

• Easy to fall back and establish new defensible perimeter
• Other refugees likely to have medical, engineering, and chemical knowledge
• Plenty of raw weapon material
• Roof access
• Escape routes

Overall Zombie Safety Series Rating: 7¾ out of 11. A good option.    

Zombie Safety Series: Bizzell Library

I had some time between classes today, so I started thinking. (A dangerous thing for me to do, I know.)

I was wondering: Which campus buildings would make good shelters during a zombie attack?

And thus the Zombie Safety Series was born. During this however-long-I-feel-like-keeping-this-up-for special, I shall discuss the zombie-safety pros and cons of the various buildings on the University of Oklahoma’s main campus. This week, we have the Bizzell Memorial Library.

I think we can all agree that at first glance, the library seems like a fairly defensible structure. I mean, the place is built like a castle.

The problem is the first floor, and its big, sliding, automatic doors. I don’t know what they’re actually made out of, but I wouldn’t bet my brains on their ability to stand up to a prolonged zombie pounding.

The lower and upper levels, though- those look promising. The doors on all the stairwells are thick and, I assume, lockable. Bizzell is usually pretty crowded, too. This means that, while there are a lot of stairwells that would need guarding, you should have enough people to staff all the lookout stations. What’s more, since Bizzell caters to all majors, you should find yourself trapped with people with a good mix of skills. Hopefully, this means you’ll have some pre-med and ROTC students in the mix.

What’s more, the metal bookshelves could be dismantled and repurposed as decent weapons or blockades.

And we mustn’t overlook the value of all the water fountains and restrooms on each floor. While the meager food stores in the Bookmark might not feed a library full of refugees, there will be plenty of sources of running water… At least until the water shuts off.

You’re probably going to need all that water, too, because Bizzell has one major zombie-proofing flaw: the roof. There’s no way to land a helicopter on the roof for an aerial rescue, and there’s no easy way to get out of the lower levels. (Remember, you’ve given up the first floor.) If you were really desperate, you might be able to climb out of the Canyon Garden, but I wouldn’t count on being quiet enough to do that without alerting the zombies. 

No, once you’re holed up in Bizzell, you are well and truly stuck.

So, Bizzell’s zombie-safety rating breaks down like this:

Cons-

•  Ground floor isn’t defensible
•   No easy escape route
•   Not a lot of food

Pros-

•  Upper and lower floors can be locked down
• Weapons and barricades are available
• Plenty of water
• Other refugees should have a good mix of skills

Overall Zombie Safety Series Rating: 6 ½ out of 11. Safe-ish.    

The Seventh Sense:

Close your eyes – Well, finish reading this sentence, then close your eyes – and touch your finger to your nose. Now tap your nose.  Now make a circle with that finger and your thumb.

 That was easy, right? Let’s make it a little more complicated. This time, close your eyes and clap your hands. (Ignore any friends or family who may be directing concerned expressions your way.) Still not difficult, was it?

But, why were you able to do that? Your eyes were closed, so you couldn’t see. You couldn’t hear your hand moving. You weren’t touching your hand. You weren’t smelling your hand, and you certainly weren’t tasting your hand, or so I hope.  

In short, you were able to touch two moving objects together without using any of the standard five senses.

This is because your kindergarten teacher lied to you. Humans actually have a lot more than five senses. We have upwards of fourteen, depending on how you count them. A few of those are equilibrioception, your sense of up and down; chronoception, your wonderfully complex sense that reconstructs the passage of time; thermoception, the sense of temperature that snakes have downto an art; and nociception, the less pleasant but still highly useful sense of pain.

And that’s only a few of your external senses. You also have a basketful of internal senses, like the ones that keep your lungs from splitting and your bladder from bursting.   

The one you were just using is called proprioception. Basically, this is the sense that tells you where all your body parts are in relation to each other. Without it, we’d end up jamming our forks up our noses every time we tried to take a bite of something.

I’d still type at the same speed, though…

Take TwO:

Hi guys. Sorry I’m so late. I was just getting-

 Oh, thanks. You know, you two are a lot more pleasant than the last couple of characters I had in here. It took them the whole word count to get a single line out.

It’s a window, actually-

That’s… nice, but we’re running out of time. If you two could just read the first few lines, there-

 Stop!There’s only seven words left!

…Sigh.

About those toilets...

I’d actually planned a different post for today. It was a lovely, serious, scientific-y post that I went and researched and everything. But, as I sat down to write it, I kept having this question pop into my head.

Do vampires ever get more than a few feet from a toilet?

Think about it. Vampires have an entirely liquid diet, and they’re working with a basically human physiology. I mean, obviously something in them changed when they started being vampires and stopped needing food or being able to go out into the sun, but nobody ever told me about any vampire that grew an extra kidney.

The reason this bothers me so much is that our blood has a lot of crud in it. Damaged cells, metabolic byproducts, microbes, and a whole host of other nasty things swims around with our plasma. We have three whole organs dedicated to keeping our blood clean.

Then along comes this vampire. Now, I could understand a vampire not having to worry about the crud in blood if she always got it straight from the kidney. That would make sense. The stuff leaving your kidneys has been freshly scrubbed and is ready to go. Only, the vampire never does go for the kidney, does she? Nope. It’s pretty well documented that vampires go for the throat, where your blood is icky and mixed with hormones and lymph stuff and other metabolically useless junk.

So where does all of that stuff go? Do the vampires digest it? Even if they do, no chemical reaction is without a product. After they’ve slurped the energy out of their scarlet slushes, what happens to the leftovers?

Essentially, I want to know if vampires constantly need to pee, because science says they should.

And yes, I am four years old. Thanks for asking.  

And a Universe was Born:

When I think of baby things, I think of puppies and kittens. I do not think of baby universes born in the death throes of a collapsing star.  When I think of mutations and natural selection, I do not think of applying these concepts to cosmological constants.

But a guy named Lee Smolin thinks about this stuff so much that he decided to write a book about it.

Smolin points out that our universe, according to the Big Bang Theory, started out (maybe) as an infinitely dense… thing. This thing rapidly expanded into the universe we all know and live in.

When certain stars die, they collapse inward on themselves, forming a black hole.

A black hole is a thing so dense that not even light can escape it.

Smolin hypothesized that behind the event horizons of these black holes, the collapsed matter is re-expanding into new, baby universes. AND that these universes could, in time, spawn their own black holes, their own baby universes. Imagine it- Worlds within worlds, branching out across infinite dimensions, with time flowing through them.

This could actually be real.

That alone was enough to give me goose bumps, but what he said next completely blew my mind.

Smolin hypothesized that, like puppies and kittens and more stereotypical babies, infant universes would resemble their parent. They would resemble their parent, but they would not be identical. Tiny, random mutations could accumulate in their “genetic code,” the physical constants and laws that govern the nature of their realities.

Universes with physics that favored the creation of black holes would pass on their information to new generations of universes, and those with unfavorable physics would die childless. I don’t know about you, but that sounds a lot like a biological process to me.

This brings up a final point. Scientists have never really settled on a definition of “life.” The best anyone’s ever done is something like: To be alive, a thing must have all or most of the characteristics of living things. A few of these characteristics are reproduction, metabolism, homeostasis, and exposure to natural selection.

So, our universe may reproduce itself, and its children may experience a form of natural selection. So, our universe converts energy and matter into other forms of energy and matter needed to maintain itself, which could be a sort of metabolism.  So, as far as we can tell, our universe maintains a stable-ish internal environment, which could be a form of homeostasis.

So, could that mean our universe is, itself, alive? 

Blobfish: The Name Says It All

Typically, I draw little caricatures for these posts, but when the thing I’m writing about looks like this, I don’t have to.

Allow me to introduce the blobfish- a swimming balloon full of jelly that makes its home in the briny deeps off the coast ofAustralia.  I think he looks kinda cute, actually. Well, until you take him out of the water…

Then he looks like a melted head.

The blobfish practically melts when it leaves deep water, because its flesh really is made out of jelly. While this may not work so well on land, it’s a great adaptation for a world under thousands of pounds of pressure. See, most fish have a gas-filled organ called a swim bladder that keeps them at the proper buoyancy. The problem is gas compresses under pressure. The farther down you go, the less a swim bladder does to keep you floating.  The blobfish’s jelly-flesh is less dense than water, letting it float where other fish would be squished. That’s why they start doing impressions of Marvin whenever they have to go out on the town.  

  And you know what? I think I know why they’re so sad all the time. (Well, other than because they’ve been dragged out of the water into an environment where their flesh melts and they can’t breathe.) It’s because they’re always getting caught by lobster fisherman, and the mean old fisherman just throw them back!

“Oh,” say the fisherman. “You’re not actually edible and you kind of remind me of my uncle Joe, so I’m just going to toss you back now.”

What do you think that does to an impressionable young blobfish’s self-esteem, hmm? How would you feel if you were constantly being called inedible and being compared to Uncle Joe?

No, seriously, how would you feel? I do have a comments section and people are welcome to use it.

Who needs silver when you have chocolate?

This has been bothering me for a while now. Humans can have a whole slew of allergies to chocolate, right? And dogs are really, reallyallergic to chocolate, right? Well, if dog(human) = werewolf, and allergic(allergic²) = allergic³, then it follows that a chocolate cake would be just as lethal as a silver bullet to your typical lycanthrope.   

Hear me out. First, let’s consider one trait all werewolves have in common: shape-shifting. To change shape on that scale, a body would have to rapidly generate new tissue and/or rearrange all or most of the cells in the existing tissues. Both processes put the body under manageable, but considerable, strain.

This is where the chocolate comes in. The compound in chocolate that kills dogs is theobromine, a close relative of caffeine. The wonderful scrub brush that is the human liver is more than capable of processing out theobromine before it can get up to too much mischief, but a dog’s liver (or, say, a liver that was busy rearranging its cells to fit into a new, more dog-like body) processes theobromine much more slowly. This means a substance that can stimulate the heart enough to cause seizures in dogs would be hanging out in a werewolf’s body while his or her cardiovascular system was already under stress.   

But that’s not even the best part. While scholars debate whether or not lycanthropy can be inherited, most people agree that it is transmissible by bite. Something in that bite does a serious overhaul of the human genome, giving the newly-afflicted werewolf’s cells the instructions they need to morph into a functioning organism, instead of a giant tumor.

Maintaining a new genetic code would be too much to ask of a venom, but retroviruses  hijack their host’s molecular machinery, going so far as to insert new instructions into their host’s DNA. So, this retrovirus forms a mutualistic relationship with its host, providing genetic info that makes the host stronger, faster, and generally less killable, in exchange for a safe place to live and a means for establishing new populations.

Then along comes theobromine, which (I kid you not) acts as a mutagen on single-celled organisms.

Chocolate simultaneously destroys both the werewolf’s cardiovascular system and the virus that’s keeping the werewolf running. All a silver bullet can do is poison him and make him bleed a little.

So, to any werewolves reading my blog, stop eating those death-chip cookies! Maybe the first couple didn’t get you, but they will!    

Lovely Day in the Park

I can’t draw a park. Just pretend. We have to establish the setting for the readers.

What now?

Oh, come on! You’re a rectangle! The only reason you’re not an “it” is that would make the pronouns too confusing.

Better?

Okay, okay, okay. Pants. You have pants now. Your name’s not Mark, you’re not in a park, and everyone’s clothed. Just read the script already.

Why are you apologizing? Everything was going fine. You got a whole line out that time.

Sitting down. You were- ach! Never mind! Just keep reading the script!

 … Never mind. Start over, then.

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