For many moons, I’ve been a member of both the ACS (American Chemical Society) and APS (American Physical Society), the former for ten or more, the latter for a few.  As a theoretical chemist, having a membership to these societies was quite useful. You get a subscription to a very good “popular” magazine, Chemical and Engineering News and Physics Today, discounted registration at conferences, and, perhaps most importantly, access to the respective job banks.

All this, though, comes at a cost. When you are a grad student and recent postdoc, the membership cost isn’t too expensive and the benefits well outweigh the costs.  But once you are a “professional member” the costs double–I think–at least to $140 and $118 per annum.

Okay, that’s not bad, not great, but not horrible. *But*, I am no longer a practicing chemist/physicist. I’m a code monkey. A membership to IEEE or ACM would make more sense, really. Heck, I’m kind of attending SC09, the supercomputing conference, next weekend.

But, but, but. I am a chemist. I am a physicist (according to Feynman, no less). I still think of myself as such and I suppose a part of me thinks one day I might be a practicing chemist/physicist again.

I’m not sure what to do.

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!