This account is being kept for the posterity, but it won’t see further activity past February.

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: April 9th, 2021

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  • Glacial = anhydrous. People call it this way because pure acetic acid has a rather high freezing point (16°C), and it looks a lot like plain ice when frozen. (It still stinks vinegar once you open the bottle though.) But once you add even a bit of water, the freezing point drops considerably, so acetic acid solutions don’t show the same “ice”.

    So in colder days, you need to rewarm it back into a liquid. Then people get really sloppy (I know it not just from that professor’s anecdote, but from watching it). They say “I’m just rewarming it, and it’s just acetic acid, what could go wrong?”. Well, it’s still a big flask of a corrosive, volatile, and flammable substance.

    In the meantime, the same people doing dangerous reactions like nitration (it literally explodes if you let it get too hot - spreading nitric acid, sulphuric acid, and some carcinogenic solvent) “miraculously” pay full attention, obsessively taking care of the temperature of the ice bath.

    Part of the advice that I mentioned in that comment chain is that - smaller dangers are still dangers, do not underestimate them.



  • Most “rules of thumb” become awful advice when used indiscriminately.

    People assign slightly different meanings to the same words. You need to acknowledge this to understand what they say.

    Words also change meaning depending on the context.

    When you still don’t get what someone else said, it’s often more useful to think that you’re lacking a key piece of info than to assume that the other person does.

    Hell is paved with good intentions. This piece of advice is popular, but still not heard enough.

    Related to the above: if someone in your life is consistently rushing towards conclusions, based on little to no information, minimise the impact of that person in your life.

    Have at least one recipe using leftovers of other recipes. It’ll reduce waste.

    Alcohol vinegar is bland, boring, and awful for cooking. But it’s a great cleaning agent.

    Identify what you need to keep vs. throw away. Don’t “default” this indiscriminately, analyse it on a per case basis.

    The world does not revolve around your belly button and nature won’t “magically” change because of your feelings.

    You can cultivate herbs in a backyard. No backyard? Flower pots. No flower pots? Old margarine pot. (Check which herbs grow well where you live.)