Dead Trees.
So I wrote this a little over a year ago. I'd finished a big-ass chemistry book, and I was at a crossroads on which book to read next. I've been on a mission to actually read the books that have been gathering dust on my shelf, you see.
Well, about an hour ago, I finished the last of the six, The Chemical Tree, and I'm pretty jazzed about actually completing an entire list of books I had set out to read. It shouldn't have taken this long, but one of them was a physical chemistry textbook where I resolved to work the problems and learn the material in addition to just reading, so that took a long time. And I read some other books in between, so it's not like I was idle. In all, it was like those six books, Theodore Gray's coffee table book about the periodic table, The Casual Vacancy, Death Rat!, Movie Megacheese, A Year at the Movies, and a buttload of Captain Marvel comics. Maybe some other stuff I forgot about, but that's the gist of it.
To celebrate, I'm cooking a frozen pizza and popping in a Dragon Ball Z movie. Probably Lord Slug, because the disc is still in the machine.
I suppose I held off on Chemical Tree for so long because it was so hard to read, and I attributed this to a lack of chemistry expertise. This is probably true, because I found the easiest parts to understand were the ones that covered topics I was familiar with: element discovery, the Haber-Bosch process, parts of Linus Pauling's career, the discovery of oxygen, etc. These are all things I learned about after getting the book, and there's still a lot more to research. In a way, Chemical Tree is more like an index of topics than a history of chemistry in itself. The author was so focused on condensing the material into one volume that he tends to ignore explaining the scientific principles that underlie the important discoveries. By his own admission, he assumes the reader is already up to speed on these things, which is kind of dumb, since a lot of the instrumentation, terminology, and practices of 19th Century chemistry are so obsolete that not even professional chemists would recognize them.
Put simply, a lot of chemical research is done with computers these days, and yet a lot of this book covers work done before electric lights were a thing. I have a vague idea how chemists used to figure out molecular structures, but I don't understand the techniques because I never had to use them myself, and the book doesn't offer much insight. I can research it, but that was kind of why I bought the book in the first place, and it turns out it's really a compass instead of a map. Well, at least I've finished it, so I know where to look when I'm ready to go through it again.
There's still some books to be read, but this is kind of a milestone, and I wanted to observe it. I tend to overlook accomplishments like this, to the point where I'd look back and go "Crap, I've barely read anything for the last few years." Well, I have electronic records that prove otherwise.
Well, about an hour ago, I finished the last of the six, The Chemical Tree, and I'm pretty jazzed about actually completing an entire list of books I had set out to read. It shouldn't have taken this long, but one of them was a physical chemistry textbook where I resolved to work the problems and learn the material in addition to just reading, so that took a long time. And I read some other books in between, so it's not like I was idle. In all, it was like those six books, Theodore Gray's coffee table book about the periodic table, The Casual Vacancy, Death Rat!, Movie Megacheese, A Year at the Movies, and a buttload of Captain Marvel comics. Maybe some other stuff I forgot about, but that's the gist of it.
To celebrate, I'm cooking a frozen pizza and popping in a Dragon Ball Z movie. Probably Lord Slug, because the disc is still in the machine.
I suppose I held off on Chemical Tree for so long because it was so hard to read, and I attributed this to a lack of chemistry expertise. This is probably true, because I found the easiest parts to understand were the ones that covered topics I was familiar with: element discovery, the Haber-Bosch process, parts of Linus Pauling's career, the discovery of oxygen, etc. These are all things I learned about after getting the book, and there's still a lot more to research. In a way, Chemical Tree is more like an index of topics than a history of chemistry in itself. The author was so focused on condensing the material into one volume that he tends to ignore explaining the scientific principles that underlie the important discoveries. By his own admission, he assumes the reader is already up to speed on these things, which is kind of dumb, since a lot of the instrumentation, terminology, and practices of 19th Century chemistry are so obsolete that not even professional chemists would recognize them.
Put simply, a lot of chemical research is done with computers these days, and yet a lot of this book covers work done before electric lights were a thing. I have a vague idea how chemists used to figure out molecular structures, but I don't understand the techniques because I never had to use them myself, and the book doesn't offer much insight. I can research it, but that was kind of why I bought the book in the first place, and it turns out it's really a compass instead of a map. Well, at least I've finished it, so I know where to look when I'm ready to go through it again.
There's still some books to be read, but this is kind of a milestone, and I wanted to observe it. I tend to overlook accomplishments like this, to the point where I'd look back and go "Crap, I've barely read anything for the last few years." Well, I have electronic records that prove otherwise.