Oh So Boring…

So, this afternoon I was looking at a bottle of fuel additive and the instructions confused me. What it said was to only pour the additive into a nearly-empty tank and then fill it up.

My confusion is…why? Why couldn’t I just pour it into a half-filled tank and then fill the tank? It’s still one bottle of additive in one full tank.

My first thought is that maybe the additive isn’t very miscible, so it needs the physical action of the fueling to help mix? But, really, a fuel additive that isn’t miscible in fuel?

I suppose the real answer is that some yahoo had some overfilled gas tank and then added a bunch of flammable hydrocarbons to it and boom or something.

I dunno. Just irked me. Feel like they could just put “add to one full tank of gas”. But, well, we are the culture that came up with “Careful: Contents Are Hot” on a cup of coffee and all.

Not the Clash song, per se, but the question itself. Should I stay or should I go…from the ACS and APS.

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.

Oh! I forgot to mention that I recently bought some of that new fangled AquaFresh Isoactive toothpaste. If you don’t know it, it has the fun property of getting really foamy (I suppose to get fluoride everywhere).

The science-y part is that it does this by way of isopentane, a substance with the cool property that it boils right around room temperature (28 degrees C or so).  So, the isopentane is in the gel that is put in your mouth, which is at 37 degrees or so, and, voila, the isopentane boils causing the gel to get foamy!  I imagine the heat generated by the friction of brushing helps move things along as well.

Right now I’m trying to figure out any cool demos or something that I can do to have fun with gelled isopentane.  Everything I think of seems to use equipment I’d have in a chem lab, but not at home.  But, then again, are a Bunsen burner and a gas range really that far apart?

The answer, by the way, is yes! A thousand times yes! Don’t use a gas range burner as a Bunsen burner! Sigh…time to find a lawyer…