19 Feast your eyes on the cutest kindergartner EVER TO GRACE TEH WORLD!
That paper says “Making geometric solids is fun.” Obviously the student teacher wrote that – my hand writing was still… erm… largish and backwardsie. The structure in my hand is obviously an organic compound – since metals had cooties (and still do.) I’m confused as to why a Kindergartner going through the Indianapolis Public School system would have discovered the joys of 
geometric solids – especially when his dad works in a lumber yard and his (at that point) 22 year old mother was going to community college. Whatever. Point being I was awesome and totally fucking cute. Thus, I present the next major synthetic challenge to you, PHIL BARAN. You can’t do it. It’s impossible. You might as well give up now. BECAUSE YOU CAN’T DO IT.
It could also have been some kind of gold complex, what with them linear bonds there. Possibly being some air stable gold complex with cyclobutadiene, in which case Toste already made it, published it, let it fade into obscurity and then recycled it as a fucking Christmas ornament for orphaned Afghan children.
Fair warning – This post is going to be revealing, long and stupid. Everything about chemistry is above, so if you’re just here for chemistry you’ve read everything you need to and are free to go read a real jouranl or some shit. Being a blogger emeritus allows me to focus on “the self” way more than on anything “out there” so, if you’ll forgive, I’ll be talking about “the self” a wee bit here in both flattering and unflattering terms. The recollection I had for myself was, I think, less modest than reality.
What kinda douche uploads his kidnergarden test scores, right? Well. I’m that kind. I uploaded the copy of that Iowa test they gave us. I went and blacked out the horrible butchering of my name. Had they not gotten my last name right, which is rather unique, I wouldn’t have been sure it was my exam. The point is, I was to be promoted 2 grades. Leave Kindergarten and go to 3rd grade. But something stopped me. (I would end up skipping a grade in high school anyway.) I scanned the document responsible for blocking my progress too, but it’s was too old and I think it was typed on transfer paper and is sort of shitty when reduced in scale, but you can see it in full glory here and the gist is: I am an emotional retard that craves attention and will disrupt anything to get it. I am self righteous to a grotesque fault and am overly competitive. What was wrong with just “Does not play well with others” is beyond me but it was, in short, a kick to my still as yet undescended nuts.
That has probably come through in spades on this blog. But let me tell you what has happened as a result of this blog. I’m able to spew my emotional retardation into it. It has, for the most part, allowed the worst of me to be drained into the public, which my Kindergarten teacher KNEW I had to do. This blog saved me, in some regards, from being a shithead in public spaces. I have not yet changed, you know. I’m still what that papers says. I’m still obsessed with fairness and being the best and when I don’t get either I do destructive things. I’m not super awesome, but I’ll fake it as long as I can.
The odd thing is, after this test, I was transferred to a magnet school for science and math called Indian Creek, and my test scores plummeted. Mysteriously enough I became an average student on national standardized exams. Essentially, from 1st through 5th grade, whilst attending my prestigious honors elementary, I scored average nationally. By the end of 5th grade, I was transferred into a regular school and not allowed to enroll into the advanced placement classes (’cause I was average again, you know) and, once again, my scores jumped to well over 90% on the national average in each section. By the time I had matriculated to my public high school I never tested below a 12th grade level and … erm… was allowed to leave in 6 semesters. I like to remind you once again, that these were national (or statewide) exams and in theoretically worse environments I was excelling – even compared to those that remained in advanced placement or magnet schools.
Now, before the ‘big fish in a little pond’ notion comes to you – that I was performing well because I was happy, I was most certainly not. As luck would have it, I have periodically maintained a computerized diary since 1993 and have a few posts from the ol’ middle school days:
December 10, 1993
Now I am quickly seeing the forms of life that I don’t agree upon. I know that I will probably remember this for life but a couple weeks ago I was hit on the head with a lock. By Deric Yockom, anyway I vow revenge for that, for I do not let things like that go over easly. On the other hand my life is beging to slide down hill…
Oh, kids! They write the silliest and most disturbing things. Ah, to be 12 again and vowing revenge after an assault. Memories… And getting hit on the head with a goddamn padlock sucks, but it was an interesting way to wake up from the cushy existence of a gifted school, where parents teach children, you know, not to sucker punch kids with steal locks, to 6th grade in Indianapolis Metro school districts where parents, you know, do.
Anyway, I have thought on the issue for about 2 days and don’t really know if I can fully address many of the reasons my scores dropped in a more advanced school and went back up in regular school. It has made me really think about the utility of gifted programs since, as far as Facebook can tell me, all of those kids end up calling themselves New Yorkers and have useless degrees doing part time work as baristas. (they become the cliché they always wanted to be.)
Back to chemistry. Happy fucking New Year.
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Yeah, yeah, we all went straight across the top of every Iowa Test evaluation slip. A standardized test is only analytic near the median of its score. Any Gifted kid stomps it with manure-clodded hobnail boots.
Finchsigmatane can be improved. Consider two cyclopentanes all cis-linked by five acetylenes. Reduce to alkenes and pericyclic WHAMMO! – dodecahedrane. But all that electronic steric shit… even with looser diacetylene linkages. Polyacetylenes go boom.
Link two chair cyclohexanes all alternating cis-linked with three acetylenes, reduce to alkenes… and get three decks of Lonsdaleite. Diacetylene linkages get you four decks. Make ‘em from the all cis-trinitrile and alkyne metathesis,
(t-BuO)3W#W(t-BuO)3 (Shrock) + Me3Si-C#C-SiMe3 –> (t-BuO)3W#C-SiMe3
(t-BuO)3W#C-SiMe3 + R-CN –> R-C#C-SiMe3
Deprotect and do a five-fold Glaser coupling of the two halves.
Obtain the four-decker
Start with Me3Si-C#C-C#C-SiMe3 for severe trippytude
But wait, that’s undergrad crazy talk! Solution synthesis of hexagonal diamond is not sufficiently creative,
(NCCH2)3C-C(CH2CN)3
R-CN NC-R –> R-C#C-R 3X on both sides
reduce to alkene then pericyclic WHAMMO!
polydiamantane
Slap on some long chains for lytropic liquid crystal solubility. Control polymer MW with H-C(CH2CN)3 termination. Think outside the toroid.
That is undergrad crazy talk! Especially since alkyne metathesis with nitriles works soooo well (sarcasm alert). Although, I haven’t been checking literature for the last month or two, so I could have missed something. Probably geometry-selective alkyne reduction is now a cinch too.
Even if it did work, there is still something else holding me back from rushing into the lab and transforming those dreams into reality. Not quite sure what it is though.
Ah! You put up a picture of yourself! Now everyone will know your real name! I gather it’s not Finchsigmate…
Actually, a similar thing happen to me where I went to elementary school, but there they separated us more by ethnicity instead of giftedness and I was stuck in a class that was about half of my ethnic group while the other three classes of my age group were all full of the normals.
I didn’t do so well with the grades there and became pretty average. Once I moved to a place that was less racist, became white, and went to a school where students weren’t separated into classes by ethnicity, I actually did pretty well for some strange reason. I don’t know why though. Maybe it’s because I had less friends and spent more time at home doing homework instead of exploring construction sites and graveyards?
It could have been some social factor like that for you. You shouldn’t draw conclusions based on a single incident. I think Magnet schools are a great idea and they do wonders even for the kids who don’t excel in them. Though, I’m still really happy I went to a large, regular, public high school, with an advanced program available for those who wished to enroll. I would have missed out on the interaction with all the pot-heads, runaways, and dropouts otherwise; it’s an important part of growing up. Oh, and having one of the worst and most bitter teachers in chemistry in the country. You can’t get that sort of experience in a private school.
Yes. Put a APB our for a white male without the last name of Finchsigmate. Any gumshoe should be able to find me with that photo.
I never was a fan of gifted programs. Or skipping grades, for that matter…
Learning to be a big fish in a big pond is always an interesting challenge involving a different skill set. As far as elementary standardized testing goes… I always tested as retarded in those elementary school tests, I would not put much stock in them. Or perhaps I am a retard, I doubt it though.
Everything I did, or what people thought of me, before I turned 18 was a fucking scam. I prefer not to remember any of it.
I wish it were so simple.
it is: kill yourself
Could you demonstrate that on yourself first before I try? I’m a visual learner, you see.
Here is a step-by-step procedure, with helpful photographs. You need to be super-pissed and get a Frisbee but I think this should be easy enough for you. I hope this helps – good luck and please have somebody to write up and post how it went.
http://www.realultimatepower.net/index4.htm
sorry, here is the correct link:
http://www.realultimatepower.net/ninja/seppuku.htm
This kind of self-rumination can only mean one thing: the final stages of thesis writing.
Hah! So true.
Synthesis is life, everything else is waiting. When one pontificates upon a short paradigm-shattering synthesis instead of bootlegging it one is being a theorist and therefore a skidmarking ass.
The absolute dumbest flesh puppet in Uncle Al’s Gifted classes, so unfathomably substandard that his last name was used as a vile epithet, now brokers international trade in a corner Manhattan office. Adequate.
Yeah, that’s sort of what you do. Make wild statements about chemical synthesis things that can’t be done in reality, without regard to the pitfalls and the ability to analyze products even with all the modern instrumentation at hand.
The problem with the theorists is that they can make any molecule they want. If they are a bad synthetic chemists who are in charge of others, they will make life for their underlings a nightmare. It reminds me of the story I heard of a collaboration between the Grubbs and the Goddard groups, where a member of the later showed to those of the former a picture of a complex with stannane ligands and told them it would be really good for olefin metathesis. The normals then waited politely for the crazy person to finish talking and leave. Of course, it’s fun to argue with them once in a while.
Hydrogen-terminated diamond has a negative workfunction into vacuum – mild fun. Diamonoid hydrocarbons also – and now it gets serious. Diamondoid hydrocarbon polymers are then of not non-trivial potential interest for organic electronics.
Schrock’s alkyne metathesis chemistry is being used stoichiometrically. (t-BuO)3W#N byproduct is an insoluble polymer. [Everybody knows # is a triple bond, right?] Build your alkynes by Sn2 displacement if you like, with the Alpha effect. Directly insert olefin linkages with palladium and a suitable substrate. It’s not the path (management), it’s the destination (productivity).
Put an advanced undergrad on it. If if fails the kid still leaves BS/Chem. If it works you can exclude it from a Nobel Prize without effort. The average technical egress will only find employment flipping fishcakes or fingering fundaments. Homeland Severity never has enough stormtroopers.
I know a lot of really smart people who did not do well in standardized tests, who later became quite successful. On the other hand I know some less-than-smart people who aced them. That’s why I personally don’t trust them too much and think they are like democracy; they suck but they are pretty much the only alternative we have for snaring all the fish in one net.
Maybe the “average” public school you went to taught to the test, meaning they prepared you specifically for it with some warm-ups or something, and the magnet school didn’t.
I think just a little bit of preparation can make huge differences in standardized test scores.