Scales of beauty
SJP and company used to have some sort of logarithmic scale for girls' looks. Something like a girl who scores 1 is 10 times uglier than one who scores 2. And negative scores are beyond the threshold of beholding.
A researcher in my group who typically spends his weekends with the NMR on the first floor told us of this scale of beauty his friends from college days made up. Helen of Troy is set to be the standard unit of beauty. The Greeks sent a thousand ships to get her back. That thousand ships is made equivalent to one Helen. Then girls' degrees of beauty are subquently measured in miliHelens (mH). 1 mH = 1 ship. So all my female comrades, how many miliHelens do you deserve?
Disclaimer: I'm neither feminist nor willing slave of masculine domination and judgement. Just trying to be funny from an intellectual perspective.
Another funny story from the NMR expert:
He used to work in Liverpool, UK. There is a pilot plant lab in his institute. One of the units is a batch extraction unit for products from natural substances. So once, folks back then would like to extract an alkaloid from plants. Correct name for the process could have been called "leaching", but that is not the focus of the story. Huge quantities of flowers and leaves were collected and pounded to a pulp, and the plan was to dissolve the mish-mash in chloroform and extract the alkaloid into the aqueous layer with acid, in a gigantic separation funnel. For this operation they employed an Australian chemist, who travelled to Liverpool by ship. The journey took him 18 months (in what epoque could that have been?). So he got there and started the operation. But then disaster struck. He threw away the aqueous layer and kept the chloroform instead, by virtue of his habits from training as a chemist, to whom the organic layer often contains the product, and the aqueous layers are just "washings". It got down to the fact that not a drop of the desired alkaloid is left. And the poor guy was sent back to Australia on the next ship available.
A researcher in my group who typically spends his weekends with the NMR on the first floor told us of this scale of beauty his friends from college days made up. Helen of Troy is set to be the standard unit of beauty. The Greeks sent a thousand ships to get her back. That thousand ships is made equivalent to one Helen. Then girls' degrees of beauty are subquently measured in miliHelens (mH). 1 mH = 1 ship. So all my female comrades, how many miliHelens do you deserve?
Disclaimer: I'm neither feminist nor willing slave of masculine domination and judgement. Just trying to be funny from an intellectual perspective.
Another funny story from the NMR expert:
He used to work in Liverpool, UK. There is a pilot plant lab in his institute. One of the units is a batch extraction unit for products from natural substances. So once, folks back then would like to extract an alkaloid from plants. Correct name for the process could have been called "leaching", but that is not the focus of the story. Huge quantities of flowers and leaves were collected and pounded to a pulp, and the plan was to dissolve the mish-mash in chloroform and extract the alkaloid into the aqueous layer with acid, in a gigantic separation funnel. For this operation they employed an Australian chemist, who travelled to Liverpool by ship. The journey took him 18 months (in what epoque could that have been?). So he got there and started the operation. But then disaster struck. He threw away the aqueous layer and kept the chloroform instead, by virtue of his habits from training as a chemist, to whom the organic layer often contains the product, and the aqueous layers are just "washings". It got down to the fact that not a drop of the desired alkaloid is left. And the poor guy was sent back to Australia on the next ship available.
posted by Azzurra | 2:26 PM
2 Comments:
Who is this NMR colleague of yours? Do I know him? Is he sam??
Oh he's new. Joint ICES this June just before I did. He's an Indian who became a UK citizen.
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