In a recent NY Times article, Chef Andrew Zimmern points out the chefs never use Teflon pans, because they don’t need them. These non-stick pans are safe and work fine UNTIL the coating starts to disintegrate or is overheated. In both of those cases, you are then exposed to the poly-fluoro alkyls (PFAS) that have been found to be quite toxic “forever chemicals,” meaning that they don’t break down in the environment, but remain there more or less forever. And of course, the manufacture of Teflon spreads this problem quite broadly.
When my last Teflon pan started to crumble a few years ago, I tossed it and bought a ridged sort of Henkels pan from Costco that claimed to be nonstick. It wasn’t.
But here’s the thing. As Zimmern points out, your cast iron skillet really is pretty much non-stick and utterly durable. I have two such cast iron pans, about 10” and 12” diameters. They were my mother’s and she took good care of them. In fact, those pans are nearly centenarians!
Last weekend, I made my usual bacon and eggs using my 10-inch pan (probably an inside diameter of 9 ½ inches. The results were outstanding! These pictures show the 10-inch pan. We could cook 4 eggs in te 12-incher.
I cooked the bacon as usual, using medium to medium/high heat, and let to pan cool down a bit to medium/low. I like my eggs basted rather than over-easy, so I spooned the bacon fat to cook the tops.
And now, the important test. Did the eggs stick? Not at all. They slipped easily onto my spatula and onto my plate. Another time, I make an egg sandwich with a single egg using just a dab of butter, and it too cooked without sticking.
So forget your 1950s Teflon pan and just use your mom’s cast iron pan, or buy one yourself.
Cleanup? Swirl the pan in hot water, perhaps with a dish brush, and dry it with a paper towel.
Do you have to be careful of using soap? Not at all. These pans wear “like iron.” In fact, we once absent-mindedly ran one through the dishwasher, and with just a swish of oil to re-season it, it was good as new (or old).
You probably know that I am not a fan of Bonnie Garmus’ error riddled book, but I thought maybe they would clean up all that mish-mosh in the TV series. After all, there are probably hundreds of people working to produce this series based on the book. Foolish me. It’s worse.
I admit I could barely get through one episode, not only because of the scientific errors, but because Elizabeth Zott’s overwhelming paranoia about being mistreated as a woman is so overplayed. And all of the men in the lab are treated as ignorant, overbearing boors, laying it on pretty thick.
The scientific babble about phosphate rings and the like is better than her talking about covalent bonds in the book. But it’s pretty clear that the actress (Brie Larson) has no idea what any of that babble actually means as she races through it.
The writers took an incident from later in the book where she is a TV cooking show host and moved it into the preliminary scenes as a teaser of what is to come. In the book, she tosses out some canned soup because it if “full of chemicals,” but in this scene she adds “bad chemicals” and implies they will kill you. This is utter nonsense, of course, and nothing but pandering to the fears of the uneducated. The FDA regulates additives and preservatives, and no one is going to die!
Zott tells people that she is interested in abiogenesis, or how life began. But she never mentions that we have a pretty good idea how it began. She should know as every chemist does, about Wohler’s syntheses of urea from inorganic starting materials in 1828, showing that there is no difference between living and non-living compounds.
Soon after that, she is shown beginning her own after-hours research and discovering that the bottle of a compound she needs is empty. So, she sneaks into Calvin’s lab to get one of his. We soon learn that she needed some ribose (a simple sugar) for her experiment. But the bottles they show are narrow necked brown bottles, which would be unlikely to be the container for ribose, a white powder. And, in fact, it would be in a commercially labeled wide mouth bottle, because it was easily available from chemical supply companies. Today, it is sold as a dietary supplement, so anyone can see that it is a powder by a simple search.
Just to extend Zott’s humiliation, Garmus throws in a beauty contest for the secretaries, and Zott is asked to join. All of the secretaries are portrayed as ridiculously stupid, which is simply unreasonable. They are working in a research lab and have to know what they are doing. This would never happen in any company, not even in 1951!
Zott and Calvin join up in the same lab before the first episode is over, and Zott reorganizes the lab to make things easier to find. She put all the spatulas in a beaker near the sink. But the spatulas they show are the kitchen spatulas that you might use to spread cake icing. Lab spatulas are considerably smaller, like these:
You’d think someone would check on that sort of thing.
Calvin’s lab is decorated with huge 1-liter and 2-liter round bottoms and Erlenmeyers, all perfectly clean, because the kind of biochemical research they are interested in is actually carried out in very small flasks with milligrams or micrograms of material.
He is also shown eating food (mostly peanuts) in his lab and leaving them on lab benches, where both he and Zott help themselves. This is a lethally dangerous idea and again would never happen in any real lab. You don’t eat on the lab bench (or preferably at all) in the lab!
Calvin is also shown showering under the lab safety shower. This is very cute, but they don’t work that way. Once you pull the chain, they stay on until you reach up and turn off with the lever. They are made to drench you if you spill something dangerous on yourself. And they can’t be enclosed like that: they have to be accessible from anywhere in the lab within 10 seconds.
And finally, Larson mispronounces citrate with a long “I,” saying sy-trate instead of sit-rate. Surely someone on the staff would know better than that. This is just embarrassing.
Bonnie Garmus’s novel Lessons in Chemistry has been wildly popular since its 2022 publication, and praised by nearly everybody. The story of Elizabeth Zott, a Master’s student at UCLA who was attacked and raped by her research supervisor makes quite a tale. In this story, she is denied permission to continue for her Ph.D. and essentially expelled, for defending herself from this attack. Sadly, it is all too believable.
The story is essentially a charming fantasy where Elizabeth leaves the research institute where she took a job to become a TV cooking show host, where she emphasizes the chemistry in the recipes she describes. I call it a “fantasy” because of her dog Six-thirty with a 1000-word vocabulary, who apparently can read Proust, and her preposterously precocious daughter, who is reading Dickens around age 4. The story over all is a lot of fun: especially in the first two acts. The third act is a deus ex machina ending that seemed a bit much, and more worthy of Gilbert and Sullivan.
But, let me interject that I was a chemistry graduate student about the same time as her story, graduating from Oberlin College in 1964 and getting my Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Ohio State in 1969. And Garmus and her editors simply did not take a lot of care in describing the chemistry and the labs of those days, and these clinkers spoiled the elegance of her beguiling tale. I note that female Ph.D. scientist Ricki Lewis has somewhat similar views you should read as well. The following contains spoilers.
One event Garmus comes back to several times, is that women in the lab are so uncommon that everyone assumes they must be secretaries, even in graduate school where there are sure to be female students. The fallacy, of course, is that secretaries dress professionally, while student researchers wear lab attire: sweatshirts and jeans are common, or grubby lab coats. I still have one of mine.
Having missed her chance at a Ph.D. (at least at UCLA) Zott takes a job at Hastings Institute, a sort of Nevermore Academy for second string scientists. But among them is Calvin Evans, an up-and-coming scientific wunderkind who is carrying out research on abiogenesis, the conversion of common chemicals into components found in living organisms. Of course, the book makes no mention of Wohler’s synthesis of urea from inorganic materials in 1828 or the Miller and Urey experiment in 1952 that started with a flask of gases (water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen) likely to have been in existence before life began. After applying an electric arc inside the closed system, Miller found that several essential amino acids had been formed. (Lewis mentions this as well.)
The initial confrontation between Zott and Evans comes about when her lab needs beakers, and she learns that he has boxes of them. Beakers? What the heck would she want beakers for? They are essentially glass vessels open to the air and, I might note, easily spilled. If she is doing biochemistry related to her own interest in abiogenesis, she’d be doing it in small, closed flasks under nitrogen or argon.
Needless to say, these two socially inept scientists are quickly attracted to each other and soon move in together. While they are attracted by their scientific discussions, Garmus can’t reproduce them very well. She quotes them arguing about the number of covalent bonds in some compound: basically, an introductory high school or freshman chemistry topic. In fact, we have no idea what either of them are actually working on.
Bunsen burners
The book mentions Bunsen burners throughout, as if they are part of the standard research lab. But they are not. Open flames in an organic chem lab are an invitation to bench fires. I never saw a Bunsen burner after I left undergraduate school, and when I visited a couple of years later, they had all been replaced with electric appliances.
Heating mantle
Hot plate with magnetic stirrer
Basically, chemists use hot plates and heating mantles, which wrap the round-bottom flasks they use in carrying out reactions. And many hotplates have a second control knob that controlled a spinning magnet under the heating surface. Then you put a small Teflon covered magnetic bar in the flask, and used the rotating magnet to spin the stirring bar and keep the solution stirred.
Cooking is Chemistry
One of the principal ideas we are to get from Zott’s abilities as an excellent cook is that “cooking is chemistry.” And it is indeed, but Garmus’s examples are not that persuasive. While living with Evans, Zott does most of their cooking, and makes notes like
@200˚ C/35min = loss of one mol. H2O per molecule sucrose, total 4 in 55 minutes = C24H36O18.
The reason why this is utter nonsense is that there are probably hundreds of compounds with that compressed empirical formula. It tells us absolutely nothing about what the compound is or what is actually going on!
In a later scene, after she has set up a lab where her kitchen was, she has a sack meaninglessly labeled C8H10N4O2. Since she uses it to make coffee for her neighbor, we are to infer that the label refers to a formula for caffeine. But it would have been more correct and almost simpler to have simply sketched the molecular structure instead:
Caffeine
After her first show, she makes out a shopping list, including CH3COOH, which no one recognizes as acetic acid (or vinegar). If she’s not trying hard to be obscure, she could have written “vinegar” in the same number of characters, or HOAc, the usual abbreviation. In that abbreviation “Ac” stands for the acyl group, CH3C=O and the H attached to the oxygen is the acidic proton. Concentrated (glacial) acetic acid is nasty stuff, and not suitable for salads. Vinegar is about 4% acetic acid, and she should say so.
She also keeps saying “sodium chloride” for salt, but chemists would usually just say “table salt” to distinguish it from other salts in the lab. Or, they might say “NaCl,” which is shorter, still.
During one of her shows she takes questions from the audience and one woman confessed she had really wanted to be an open-heart surgeon. Zott asks her the molecular weight of barium chloride, and she quickly answers “208.23,” so Zott assures her that she is ready for work towards a medical degree. I don’t know a single chemist who could answer that off the top of her head. We’d look at the periodic table and find the atomic weight of barium and of chlorine (137.327 and 35.453) and knowing that the formula is BaCl2, we’d calculate the atomic weight and come up with the same answer. But answering that immediately is just a parlor trick for a few people with photographic memories who are super-calculators. It doesn’t say much about her knowledge of science. (OK, maybe this was a joke, but it didn’t land that way.)
In another amusing moment, she was given a can of the sponsor’s soup. She tosses it into the trash, because “it’s full of chemicals.” Well of course it is. Everything, including water, is a chemical. She then goes further suggesting products like that would eventually kill you. This may be Garmus’s opinion, but it shouldn’t be Zott’s, because there is no science behind it. Preservatives added to canned soup are there to keep it from killing you. And there is no evidence that they are dangerous. “Full of chemicals” is just a random slogan based on ignorance and would not be Zott’s view.
Publications
Throughout the book, Garmus refers to the nonexistent magazines Chemistry Today and Science Journal. If she means Science she should have said so. It’s a major publication. Other professional journals she might have mentioned are the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Journal of Organic Chemistry,Proceedings of the National Academy and Nature. I don’t think the ACS journal Biochemistry existed yet. But for news, she should have mentioned Chem & Engineering News, which is a weekly chemistry news magazine published by the ACS.
However, if her boss Donatti copied her notes and published a paper, it would have taken him weeks or months to write that paper and probably a year for it to be refereed, edited and published. So, it appearing two months after Zott returned is just literary license.
Calvin Evans’ Death
Sadly, their loving relationship is cut short by a freak (and preposterous) accident. His original gravestone gets damaged, and when she has it remade, she included the inscription below.
She says that she is “opting for a chemical response that resulted in happiness.” This is probably the structure for oxytocin, but a more accurate structure drawing is shown below, that would be easier to engrave on stone.
Oxytocin
Oxytocin is sometimes called “the love drug,” because it is associated with romance, sex, childbirth and lactation. She could have written it on the tombstone more succinctly as the 9 amino acid components:
Cys – Tyr – Ile – Gln – Asn – Cys – Pro – Leu – Gly – NH2
Or even more compactly in biochemist’s notation as
CYIQNCPLG-NH2.
Conclusions
This is a funny and entertaining book, that would have been more authentic if they’d talked to some lab chemists about how labs really operated in 1960s. Some of us remember them quite well. Read it and enjoy it, with a grain of salt (er, sodium chloride).
Oh, and there is no conceivable reason why Elizabeth would be using a cyclotron (p. 6). They are primarily for physicists, and sometimes for radiation therapy. And finally, The Mikado dialog is not racist (p.21), and the soprano does not cause all the trouble. That job is reserved for Koko, the patter baritone!
The photo at the top of the article is from the set of “Jekyll and Hyde, the Musical,” performed at the Wilton Playshop in November, 2022.
If you’ve ever been given a can of Diet Coke or Diet Pepsi and it tastes a little off, or way off, you probably just toss it out. Why does this happen and what can you do about it?
Many diet soft drinks are sweetened with aspartame a leading non-nutritive sweetener that works very well in cold or room temperature foods. Aspartame is little more than 2 amino acids (aspartic acid and phenyl alanine) stuck together in a peptide linkage with one extra methyl group. This useful colored diagram came from the paper by Prodolliet, et. al. [1].
Aspartame, showing aspartic acid(red), phenyl alanine (blue) and the methyl ester (magenta)
Aspartame was discovered in 1965 by James M Schlatter, while working at G.D. Searle. He said that he had made the aspartame (methyl ester) and was trying to recrystallize it to purify it, when some of the mixture bumped outside the flask. Later, when he licked his fingers to turn a page, he discovered a very sweet taste. Since he realized that the compound he made was unlikely to be toxic, he tasted it and found it extremely sweet indeed. In fact, aspartame is about 200 times as sweet by weight as sugar.
Searle patented this product, naming it Nutrisweet and Equal. Officially, aspartame has a half-life of about 300 days in solution at about pH 4, about the pH of soft drinks, but half life means that half if it as gone by that time. And if the cans are exposed to a hot storeroom or stored in a warm summer garage, they may deteriorate faster.
Why does it start to taste awful?
Diet sodas have a date on the package: it’s not the “sell-by” date, it’s the “use-by” date. Depending on you grocer, this may be 2 to 2-1/2 months from the date you bought it. Grocers are not too good at stock rotation of diet sodas, so it is up to you to make sure you don’t get an early one. Nearing the end of January, we have picked up cartons dates from Mar 21 to April 11 in the same stack! Unless you only buy one or two at a times, this won’t matter, but if you buy several on sale (and they all do this) you need to be watchful.
Carton date
Can date
So what happens? Well, the simplest thing that happens is that the two amino acids come upzipped: this is called hydrolysis, since it always amounts to adding a water molecule at a carbon-oxygen bond. If you unzip aspartame into the two amino acids and remove that methyl to become methanol, you have a tasteless mixture of pretty harmless compounds. Your body easily metabolizes that bit of methyl alcohol and you are none the worse for it. This is described in the Prodolliet paper [1] and in the one by van Vliet [2].
Aspartic acid
Phenyl alanine
Methanol
What tastes so awful?
It is easy to understand that a solution of those two amino acids might well be tasteless, which is one of the outcomes when diet sodas age. But what about that really vile taste you sometimes encounter in old diet sodas?
I think there are two possibilities. If you look at the various steps aspartame undergoes as it unzips [1], you discover that one of the intermediate products is a form of diketopiperazine. The basic compound is shown below along with the derivative, sometimes also referred to as DKP that is actually produced:
Basic diketopiperazone
DKP found in aspartame decomposition
Bothwick [4] has described the taste of DKPs as “bitter, astringent, metallic, and umami.” This is not surprising, since ring compounds with one or more nitrogen usually are pretty smelly. And a table of the concentrations of intermediates in van Vliet[2] shows that DKP occurs in significant amounts. But, in case you are concerned about their toxicity, Ishii et. al [3] studied aspartame and DKP for 104 weeks in Wistar rats and found no toxic effects at all.
The other possibility, albeit less likely, is another form of the sweetener called β-aspartame, which differs only in the position of that NH2 group: it is moved one carbon to the left. This isomer has a pronounced bitter taste, and does occur during aspartame decomposition, but in much lower concentration. But again, it is harmless.
beta-aspartame
Diet Coke mythology
You can’t discuss diet sodas for very long before someone brings up the old saw the diet sodas cause weight gain. The theory was that the sweetness induces hunger and you eat more actual food to satisfy it.
In 2008 Fowler and Williams[5] published a paper noting a correlation between obesity and diet soda consumption. A correlation, not causation. But in 2009, Chen and Appel [6] monitored 810 adults for 18 months, recording their beverage intake. They found weight gain from sugar sweetened beverages and but no weight gain from artificially sweetened beverages.
Finally, in 2012, Maersk and Belza [7] compared satiety scores for milk, sugar sweetened beverages and artificially sweetened beverages, and found no evidence that artificially sweetened beverages increased appetite or energy intake, concluding that “diet colas had effects similar to water.”
Regarding unfounded rumors that artificially sweetened beverages had some neurological effect, a panel of 10 experts examined all the current literature [8] and concluded:
The data from the extensive investigations into the possibility of neurotoxic effects of aspartame, in general, do not support the hypothesis that aspartame in the human diet will affect nervous system function, learning or behavior. Epidemiological studies on aspartame include several case-control studies and one well-conducted prospective epidemiological study with a large cohort, in which the consumption of aspartame was measured. The studies provide no evidence to support an association between aspartame and cancer in any tissue. The weight of existing evidence is that aspartame is safe at current levels of consumption as a nonnutritive sweetener.
So aspartame is safe before and after it degrades into the component amino acids, but for the best taste, you should check each package’s expiration date.
References
Prodolliet, Jacques; Bruelhart, Milene (1993). Determination of Aspartame and Its Major Decomposition Products in Foods. Journal of AOAC INTERNATIONAL, 76(2), 275–282. doi:10.1093/jaoac/76.2.275
2,5-diketopiperazines in food and beverages: Taste and bioactivity, A Bothwick and NeilC DaCosta, Crit Rev Food Sci Nutr. 2017 Mar 4;57(4):718-742 doi:10.1093/jaoac/76.2.275
Fueling the obesity epidemic? Artificially sweetened beverage use and long-term weight gain. SP Fowler, K Williams, et. al., Obesity (Silver Spring). 2008 Aug;16(8):1894-900. doi: 10.1038/oby.2008.284. Epub 2008 Jun 5.
L Chen and L J Appel, et. al. Am J Clin Nutr. 2009 May;89(5):1299-306. doi: 10.3945/ajcn.2008.27240. Epub 2009 Apr 1.
M Maersk, A Belza et. al., Eur J Clin Nutr . 2012 Apr;66(4):523-9. doi: 10.1038/ejcn.2011.223.
We started raised bed gardening in 2014 when we realized that they would keep the soil from washing away. We bought cedar beds made by Greene’s Fence both from Home Depot and Amazon, and over several years worked up to about 23 4×4 beds. We had some topsoil delivered and added our compost and some commercial compost as we built them up.
Greene’ Fence raised beds, 1 year old and 2 years old.
But by the third year, the cedar beds started to deteriorate and we began replacing the beds about every three years. Needless to say, this can get expensive. In the above picture, you can see the one year old frame in the foreground and a two-year old frame behind it, already starting to fall apart.
Last year we decided we’d had enough, and we ordered 4 vinyl 4×4 beds to replace four of our rotting beds. The original ones were made by New England Arbors. These were very sturdy and still look great today. However, they don’t seem to be available any more.
New England Arbors– dog not included
This January we ordered some from Amazon made by Kdgarden which were pretty similar, but the Chinese company (Qingdao Kdgarden) that makes them seems to have dropped them from their product line. Or maybe they fell into the Suez?
Barton and Kdgarden match each other
We looked at ones from Home Depot made by Vigoro, but when we tried to assemble them, we discovered that they snapped together without any strong vinyl vertical tracks in the support poles and they came apart very easily. They also had some tiny little corner locks that were very hard to insert and didn’t stay together either, so we returned them to Home Depot.
The final order through Amazon was for frames made by Barton. These were identical to those from Kdgarden and the panels and posts were interchangeable. These are what we have switched to. They are very strong and fairly nice looking. However, they don’t exactly match the panels and posts from New England Arbors so we will have to use our table saw to cut a groove in the other side of one of the new Barton boards to lock into the posts from NE Arbor.
Joints in Barton (left) and NE Arbors (right)
All of the Barton frames come with glue to secure them. We haven’t bothered yet but may use it on the ones of separate ancestries. These vinyl frames cost about twice what we paid for the original Greene’s Fence cedar frames (they are about $80 each) but considering the cost of replacing the cedar frames several times this is a far better deal. Thankfully, they are still available.
Kindred, Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art, the new book by Rebecca Wragg Sykes, is a thorough look at what science now actually knows about Neanderthals and their dominant position for thousands of years. Sykes explains that recent research shows that Neanderthals were the dominant hominin in Europe for over 350,000 years (350 ka). And by Europe, we actually mean a huge swath from Britain all the way to Israel!
This is one of the most fascinating books I have read in many years. It covers their entire history and lives in much more detail than I had any idea we knew about.
Living
Sykes explains that Neanderthals were a nomadic people, apparently moving from camp to camp, and to some extent following the migration of game that was so important to them. Many of these camps included caves or “rock shelters,” and they apparently returned to them many times over the years. She explains that their meat rich diet included reindeer, horses, aurochs (huge early oxen), and even mammoths and elephants, and it appears that each individual consumed 5000-7500 calories a day because of their active lifestyle as well as the sometimes very cold climate. Plants were also part of their diet, but the evidence for which ones is a bit scanty. They survived several glacial and inter-glacial periods and persisted until relatively recently.
While popular imagination considered Neanderthals to be very primitive, current evidence shows that they had much the same vocal apparatus we do, and probably had speech and some language. They were probably closer to Alley Oop (without Dinny) than to the Flintstones (with recycled Honeymooners voices and humor), but we know that they made complex tools from various types of rock, and used them for sophisticated butchery, hide scraping and construction of fur clothing. In fact, the lack of many nicks on the recovered animal bones suggest that their butchers were very skilled indeed.
They even mastered some chemistry: tools exist that had stone blades but wooden handles, glued on by reduced birch sap cooked under low oxygen conditions, or when that wasn’t available, pine sap tempered with beeswax.
Sykes explains that Neanderthals were a bit shorter than us homo sapiens, and of course had the sloping brow you see in most pictures. Their fingers were a bit longer than ours, but their brain case was much the same as ours, implying they had the same level of intelligence we do.
Rather than the rough-looking images reconstructed from their skeletons, you might consider the beautiful paintings of Thomas Björklund more representative of what Neanderthals really looked like. They were as human as we are and lived and loved much as we do.
Art
Much of the art that Neanderthals produced was using red and yellow and black colors that they dug from the ground. There is evidence that they decorated shells that way and added colors to their tanned leather clothing. But one of the most astonishing finds was the arrangement of stalactites in a cave at Bruniquel in Spain. Sykes explains that they broke off over 400 stalagmites, selecting the middles of them by size, and arranged them in two rings, with the larger one 6 by 4 meters.
There is also a flat plate balanced on a cylinder. And careful dating shows that this construction is 174,000 years old. There were fires placed on some of these structures. Bear in mind that all this took place deep in a barely accessible cave with no light whatever. We have no idea whether it was art or some ceremonial construction, although there may have been some bear remains in some of the fires. It remains an amazing mystery.
Pieces of cave art were also reported in Spain in 2018 in Cantabria and two other sites that were about 65,000 years old. If you look carefully, you will see a painting of a red ladder pattern with some sort of pathway along the top. This is the oldest known cave painting and took place long before there were homo sapiens in Spain.
Interbreeding
Homo sapiens didn’t begin to arrive in Europe from Africa until about 100 ka, and evidence seems to indicate that there was some interbreeding with Neanderthals. Most people of European descent have about 2% Neanderthal genes while indigenous Americans, Asians and those from Oceana and Papa “have up to a fifth more.” Those of sub-Saharan descent have much less, and when they do it appears to have come from later interactions.
The major migration of homo sapiens from Africa to Europe didn’t take place until about 42ka and eventually they dominated, although we still do not understand what happened to the Neanderthals. Their burial customs were variable but for the most part we have found far fewer bones than you would expect from such a dominant race. Sykes believes there is still a lot more work and excavating to do to resolve this mystery. There are also genetic theories of one species’ DNA replacing another’s, although this has happened in other species, we have no proof it happened with Neanderthals.
In summary, Sykes describes the lives of Neanderthals over much of their long reign in Europe and gives us a fascinating picture of their accomplishments. You really need to read this book.
Cable news, even when its reporting is sound, is rife with advertising of products you never heard of. And for good reason, advertising is relatively cheap on cable news and anyone can flood the news with “wonderful new products” that probably aren’t that great.
Prevagen does not improve your memory, as explained in this Harvard Health blog. . You have probably seen Prevagen ads everywhere. Targeted particularly at seniors who may experience normal word finding difficulties, the claims may mention “studies,” but not “doctors,” because no doctor recommends. It. Allegedly extracted from jellyfish (apoaequorin) actual studies have shown no significant effect, although by rearranging their data (called p-hacking) Quincy Biosciences has claimed it does. The FDA does not agree as explained in this Science Based Medicine article. The Global Council on Brain Health concludes that “there is no convincing evidence to recommend daily dietary supplements for brain health in healthy older adults.”
The ASPCA does not help your local animal shelter. Despite their tear-jerking ads, the ASPCA is a New York City organization, and is not an umbrella organization for your local SPCA. Give to your local animal shelter instead. Further the ASPCA has been criticized for euthanizing pets rather than saving them.
Mr Clean Magic Eraser. These products look like a good idea and have positive reviews, although it is not clear how they improve on a damp paper towel and some SoftScrub. According to reviews at The Spruce, “Because the eraser works by scrubbing at the surface with tiny but extremely hard threads, you should not use on highly glossy or satin finishes….it is not appropriate for paneling or wood finished surfaces. It will strip away the surface and create damage and the sponge does begin to break down after [several] uses.
Tac Shaverby Bell and Howell. The reviews of this shaver are mixed, but according to this review apparently it didn’t last long and the beard trimmer didn’t do much. The Bell and Howell company you may remember from years back essentially got out of the technology business in the 2000’s and is now just a name owned by Westview Capital Partners.
Yoshi Copper Grill Mat– It “sort of works” but can’t be placed over an open flame. You could use it on a gas grill with covered burners, though.
Spin Power – is a multi-outlet charging station for your cordless devices. It does not include any spot for phones that can be charged by induction. It has mixed reviews on Amazon as you might expect from anything from ASOTV.
WATCHMAN – is an implant from Boston Scientific for stroke prevention. It is FDA approved and in wide use, But it was criticized in a handful of studies cited by Dr David Becker from Chestnut Hill Temple Cardiology and by Dr John Mandrola of Baptist Medical Associates of Louisville. If you are a candidate for this implant, discuss these objection with your cardiologist. The product has been generally successful.
Spurtles – I never heard the word outside of the commercials from Lucinda’s Kitchen. They seem to be a set of wooden kitchen utensils made of acacia wood. Lucinda claims these exactly fit pans and jars and are more useful than what you have now. (I seriously doubt that.) You must hand wash them rather than tossing them in the dishwasher. This review calls them low-quality, not durable and having delayed delivery.
PyQt5 is an alternative GUI interface for Python that you can use instead of Tkinter. Both systems provide ways to create buttons, listboxes, tables, checkboxes and radiobuttons. PyQt5 has a number of advantages, though, including built-in Tooltips. Coding for PyQt is in general as easy or easier than for tkinter, but there are some quirks.
One place where you might find it more troublesome is in the way that it handles Radiobuttons. So, in this article, we show you how to make the QRadioButton class a little friendlier.
Now, the idea of a Radiobutton is that you can only select one button, just like old car radios. This interface is now displayed on some screen in your car, rather than by actual push buttons. But the idea is that if you pick one, any other selected button is unselected.
If you have more than one group of Radiobuttons on a page, you want to find a way to group them so that clicking on a member of one group doesn’t affect the other group. In Tkinter, you do this by associating all the members of one group with a single external variable. Then, whatever button you click changes the value of that variable. So, if you have three buttons, the variable might take on the value 0, 1 or 2.
In Qt5, you group the variables by putting them inside a frame or Groupbox. And how do you find out which on was clicked? You have to run through them all to look for which one’s isChecked() status is true. Now, if there are only two buttons this is simple: you only need to check one button. If its status is false, then the other one must be true.
But what if you have six or more buttons like in this interface for storing cast members in an operetta?
Figure 1: Six radio buttons used in generating a cast table.
In the tkinter approach, you just take the value of that external variable. In PyQt5, you would have to run through them individually or put them in an array (or List) and run through that.
But here is where we have a cooler solution. The QRadioButton is a first class object and you can create derived classes from it really easily. So, all we need to do, is create a RlRadioButton derived from QRadiobutton which contains an index value for each instance of the button. So, we could write
Lead = RlRadioButton(“Lead”, 0)
MinorLead = RlRadioButton(“Minor lead”, 1)
And so forth. We can then keep the index of the each button in an instance variable: self.index.
class RlRadioButton(QRadioButton):|
clickIndex = 0 # key of last button selected stored here
def __init__(self, label, index):
super().__init__(label)
self.index= index
Note that the variable clickIndex is a class-level variable There is only one copy of this variable, shared by all six instances of the RlRadioButton class. But how does this variable get set?
It gets set when you click on that RadioButton. We connect the click event for each button to the same method within the button class.
self.toggled.connect(self.onClicked) #connect click to onClicked
The toggled event occurs whenever you click on a button. The event occurs on the button you click on AND on the button which becomes deselected. So, you must check to see whether the button is selected. If it is selected, this method copies the index of that button in that instance into the class variable clickIndex.
#store index of selected button in class variable def onClicked(self): radio = self.sender() if radio.isChecked(): #if it is checked, store that index RlRadioButton.clickIndex = radio.getIndex()
So, what is happening is that there are six instances of RlRadiobutton, one for each button. Each instance has a different index number, and if the button for that instance is clicked, it copies its index into the class variable clickIndex they all hold in common. Then, to find out which was selected you simply check the variable RlRadioButton.clickIndex from anywhere in the program.
We illustrate these instances of the RlRadioButton in Figure 2 below, where button 1 was selected.
Figure 2: Three instances of the RlRadioBtton class, showing that they all have access to the same clickIndex class variable.
This shows that while there are three instances of RlRadioButton with three different indexes, there is only one copy of clickIndex that all instances of the RlRadioButton class share.
In Figure 1, you can click on the Status button to see which Radiobutton was selected. The program then fetches that value from RlRadioButton.clickIndex and displays it in a message box using this somewhat verbose message box code:
So, to conclude, the best way to query a large list of QRadioButtons is by deriving a class which can save the current index and asking the class for the index of the last selected button.
Yes, the above picture is definitely of poison ivy. In this late spring/early summer season, the question “is that poison ivy?” comes up really often on-line and in real conversations with actual people. The slogan “leaves of three, let them be” is a little too general to be helpful and even then people still seem to be confused and hesitant.
The pictures here are of real poison ivy taken in June in southern Connecticut.
Note carefully from the photo– poison ivy has three leaves: the center one is symmetrical and the outer two are asymmetrical, with jagged edges along the outside. Just as important, the stems of the outer two leaves do not run through the center of the leaf, but are located closer to the inner side of the leaf. This is a distinguishing feature you can look for when you can’t decide whether or not you are looking at poison ivy.
Younger leaves may be reddish and shiny, but more mature leaves are just green. And the amount of the irritant urushiol is the same on plants of any age.
Now let’s look at the above picture of Virginia creeper, a 5-leaved plant that doesn’t look anything like poison ivy. The problem is that Virginia creeper frequently grows right alongside or among poison ivy plants, and though it is not an irritant itself, you can regard it as a warning that poison ivy may be nearby. You can see that in the next two photos.
You will also see poison ivy climbing trees. What you may not see at first is the huge hairy rope-like stem the leaves grow from. The whole root also contains the same urushiol oil and if you grab that rope to steady yourself while gardening, you need to go wash your hands and arms right away. Even in the winter, these “ropes” still can spread the urushiol irritant.
Jewel weed
If you have jewel weed (a wild impatiens variety) growing wild nearby, many people report that the juice from the stem will help remove the urushiol and reduce skin inflammation. This was supposedly a Native American remedy and has at least some utility if you can get to hot soapy water right away. However, it does not seem to have been studied. If you develop a rash, lotions like Calamine will help reduce the itching.
In your garden
Poison ivy has the annoying habit of showing up in your gardens from time to time.
This happens more every year as the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere increases, and poison ivy loves it. You could put on heavy gloves and a heavy shirt and pull out the plants, but this usually leaves some roots behind which will eventually regrow. You can definitely kill poison ivy with Roundup, but in the garden it might kill valuable plants as well. A better choice is one of the commercial poison ivy killers: they all seem to contain triclopyr. This will kill broad leaved woody plants like poison ivy but leave grasses and the like alone.
Be careful in handling poison ivy debris: it all contains urushiol. Put the waste in a trash bag, never in the compost pile. And never burn it, since the smoke itself could still contain urushiol
Poison Oak and Poison Sumac
There are two other plants that secrete urushiol: poison oak and poison sumac. Poison oak has groups of 3 leaves that look rather oak like. Poison sumac is best recognized by the bright red stems. The Eastern variety has a rather short habit, while on the west coast, the bushes grow much taller. WebMD has very good pictures of all three plants. You will usually find poison sumac in or adjacent to swaps and wetlands, so unless you trudge through swamps you are less likely to see it.
Pacificpoisonoak is found mostly along the U.S. west coast, and eastern poison oak is mostly found in the southern U.S. It is somewhat similar to poison ivy and sometimes mistaken for it.
In the summer of 1978, a group of IBM executives met in Armonk to form the Instrument Systems Task Force and explore IBM’s entry into the chemical analytical instrument business. The IBM PC was not yet even a glimmer in Don Estridge’s eye, and the only well-known personal computers were the Apple II, the Tandy TRS-80 and the Commodore Pet.
By October, IBM’s Corporate Management Committee had approved the venture and IBM Instruments was soon formed. This book explores and memorializes the rise and successes of IBM Instruments and its eventual demise, only about 6 years after it was announced. To many, this was a shocking failure from one of the greatest computer companies in the world, and it is worth taking some time to examine how the Instrument Division grew and how it finally was shut down.
It tells the never-before written full story of IBM Instruments and why everyone who worked there misses it.
This corporate Greek tragedy details the ideas for great products like a redesigned NMR spectrometer console that concealed obsolete electronics, to a desktop computer far ahead of its time that received far too little support.
Successes included an excellent AF series NMR spectrometer and an IR spectrometer based on new PC-AT, as well as a satellite PCNMR workstation package for the PC-AT that revolutionized the organization of NMR labs.
But eventually, IBM’s Instrument business unit was shut down and we all went off to other jobs. What they did wrong was mostly management-based, not technical and the book explains it in detail.
If you have jewel weed (a wild impatiens variety) growing wild nearby, many people report that the juice from the stem will help remove the urushiol and reduce skin inflammation. This was supposedly a Native American remedy and has at least some utility if you can get to hot soapy water right away. However, it does not seem to have been studied. If you develop a rash, lotions like Calamine will help reduce the itching.
