Apr 13, 2009
JACS Image Challenge = Nerd Fun!
I knew there was something I hadn’t blogged about here that I wanted to: JACS Image Challenge. If you’ve never visited it, it’s a fun little game that JACS is hosting on their spiffy new AJAX-y beta site.
They present you with an image or images from a paper, some text, and then ask you a question about it. Most of the time, you don’t need to read the paper to know the answer if you have a reasonable chemistry background. But, that doesn’t mean to say you’ll always get it right. What you can be sure of, though, is that you’ll usually go “Oh yeah…” when you get one wrong.
For me, the current challenge (#35 as of writing), is one that is pretty easy for me. And, I suspect, for just about anyone. But, some are a bit out of my field, like biochem or inorganic. I can give a slightly educated guess, but random might be more effective for this theorist. But, it is JACS: you get theory, experiment, analysis, everything, all in one journal.
Plus, sometimes you get a really cool one. Looking back to recent ones, there is #30 where you get a fun video of some rather impressive science. Or, there is #31 which, after answering, you find that most visitors actually get it wrong (myself included). And, thus, I learned something new!
