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And Introducing the G-Man!

gordonliddy

Bluelighter
Joined
Mar 7, 2023
Messages
847
Location
South Carolina
Hello lads!

Long time lurker, first time poster. This site is a gas. Pleasure to be here.

First I wanted to say what a delight it is to read about the trials, tribulations and trigonometries of the psychonaughts! Party on brothers!

About me? I'm a yoga teacher in the process of moving to Canada. I suppose I'm somewhat of a hippie. Sometimes I don't know.

Ironically I'm posting here in spite of the fact that I'm taking some time off. Delta-8 is legal where I live and so I've been high AF (quite legallly) for most of the past year. Cheeck & Chong style.

So as far as party supplies go someone I met really loves weed and MDMA. I don't deal well with the stronger psychedelics. The milder ones can sure be a delight.

Nice to meet you!
 
Hello lads!

Long time lurker, first time poster. This site is a gas. Pleasure to be here.

First I wanted to say what a delight it is to read about the trials, tribulations and trigonometries of the psychonaughts! Party on brothers!

About me? I'm a yoga teacher in the process of moving to Canada. I suppose I'm somewhat of a hippie. Sometimes I don't know.

Ironically I'm posting here in spite of the fact that I'm taking some time off. Delta-8 is legal where I live and so I've been high AF (quite legallly) for most of the past year. Cheeck & Chong style.

So as far as party supplies go someone I met really loves weed and MDMA. I don't deal well with the stronger psychedelics. The milder ones can sure be a delight.

Nice to meet you!
I really recommend mushrooms if you want to explore your psyche. There not too heavy imo. So long as you understand how they work and don’t take too much. Too much can lead to ego death ( really no such thing but that’s another topic) Great tool to grow spiritually and excellent for mindfulness which sounds like you may be into being a yoga teacher.

Welcome btw!
 
G-Gordon-Liddy.jpg
 
I really recommend mushrooms if you want to explore your psyche. There not too heavy imo. So long as you understand how they work and don’t take too much. Too much can lead to ego death ( really no such thing but that’s another topic) Great tool to grow spiritually and excellent for mindfulness which sounds like you may be into being a yoga teacher.

Welcome btw!

Are mushrooms ever a good recommendation! What I perhaps like about them most is that when you smoke half of a cap, it produces a terrific buzz and can provide the initiate some sense of whether or not he wishes to proceed further into the experience.

I've had about five or six experiences with them, and never a bad one. What I dislike about them is that I get a stronger disociative (sp?) effect from them than I do with my other favorites, like weed and molly. At worst those two tend to make me feel a bit floaty.

You much of an ether guy? Ether and crack are two drugs that have the worst reputations, but seem in my silly judgement to provide little enough harm. Ether especially. You'll meet cats on this board who've probably tried more than three score of drugs, but they will be terrified to try ether.
 
Are mushrooms ever a good recommendation! What I perhaps like about them most is that when you smoke half of a cap, it produces a terrific buzz and can provide the initiate some sense of whether or not he wishes to proceed further into the experience.

I've had about five or six experiences with them, and never a bad one. What I dislike about them is that I get a stronger disociative (sp?) effect from them than I do with my other favorites, like weed and molly. At worst those two tend to make me feel a bit floaty.

You much of an ether guy? Ether and crack are two drugs that have the worst reputations, but seem in my silly judgement to provide little enough harm. Ether especially. You'll meet cats on this board who've probably tried more than three score of drugs, but they will be terrified to try ether.
I like the occasional whiff of ether.

I use to use filter masks and spray them with ether and then wear them. That's a crazy trip!
 
OK, so here is my chemical background. When I was at uni I chose to major in chemistry for...the same reasons as most of the folks here, I'd suppose. I never really saw my self as a cook but I'd figure cooking would be a great backup option if...some retarded game show host took over the country and plunged the land into bedlam.

Anyways, here we are!

My graduate work was in non-linear optics. A field which I truly to this day do not understand. Meaning that I was studying physical chemistry. I had trouble in grad school and should probably have picked analytic chemistry as a major. I dropped out. Now I'm a yoga teacher. I think I like that career better, really.

But if you think about it, I'm in my mid-40's and spent about six and a half years mostly studying chemistry. A significant fraction of my life, right? Months turned in to years, and in time I more or less forgot about it. I stopped bringing it up with people, because they were always trying to get me to cook them meth.

On the other hand, I'd done all of the work needed to get into the club, and never got to use it. Never fully got to be in the club. ...until now!

It has been so much fun these last few months to talk with you about chemistry. The first few days I was here, I bumped into some of the chemical chats here and found that I had largely lost the art. ...and yet, I saw the mistakes that the other chemists were making. It was glaringly obvious that none of the lads here were physical chemists, and largely lack the perspective. I was however powerless to help, as any sense of chemistry I had was long atrophied. We're talking decades.

But for some reason, chatting with you all a few nights ago it all came flooding back to me, and then some. Crazy, huh? I was able to stretch some muscles that I hadn't used in years, and perhaps a few that I had never truly used. What better gift for a yoga teacher?

Regarding physical chemistry, what I think that we covered in those classes, which was not really covered in other branches of chemistry was information theory. About 85% of physical chemistry is eliminating error. Few non-physicists seem to do this at all, or even worry about. Most civilians seem to alight upon an idea, and then to charge pell-mell without once questioning their assumptions? Goodness!

Ask me about that, I'd love to put my natural skepticism to some use. Life seems to be about 15% signal and 85% noise. Physical chemistry is like 2% signal and 97% noise.

I don't think that I had any potential to become a good chemist, but I will say I shewed aptitude for quality control, insrumentation, chemical kinematics, and spectroscopy. Who knows? Thanks again it has been a lovely experience so far.

Oh, and I think I've made it a week sober!

@sekio
@Skorpio
@AlsoTapered

If I missed any chemists, sorry.
 
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OK, so here is my chemical background. When I was at uni I chose to major in chemistry for...the same reasons as most of the folks here, I'd suppose. I never really saw my self as a cook but I'd figure cooking would be a great backup option if...some retarded game show host took over the country and plunged the land into bedlam.

Anyways, here we are!

My graduate work was in non-linear optics. A field which I truly to this day do not understand. Meaning that I was studying physical chemistry. I had trouble in grad school and should probably have picked analytic chemistry as a major. I dropped out. Now I'm a yoga teacher. I think I like that career better, really.

But if you think about it, I'm in my mid-40's and spent about six and a half years mostly studying chemistry. A significant fraction of my life, right? Months turned in to years, and in time I more or less forgot about it. I stopped bringing it up with people, because they were always trying to get me to cook them meth.

On the other hand, I'd done all of the work needed to get into the club, and never got to use it. Never fully got to be in the club. ...until now!

It has been so much fun these last few months to talk with you about chemistry. The first few days I was here, I bumped into some of the chemical chats here and found that I had largely lost the art. ...and yet, I saw the mistakes that the other chemists were making. It was glaringly obvious that none of the lads here were physical chemists, and largely lack the perspective. I was however powerless to help, as any sense of chemistry I had was long atrophied. We're talking decades.

But for some reason, chatting with you all a few nights ago it all came flooding back to me, and then some. Crazy, huh? I was able to stretch some muscles that I hadn't used in years, and perhaps a few that I had never truly used. What better gift for a yoga teacher?

Regarding physical chemistry, what I think that we covered in those classes, which was not really covered in other branches of chemistry was information theory. About 85% of physical chemistry is eliminating error. Few non-physicists seem to do this at all, or even worry about. Most civilians seem to alight upon an idea, and then to charge pell-mell without once questioning their assumptions? Goodness!

Ask me about that, I'd love to put my natural skepticism to some use. Life seems to be about 15% signal and 85% noise. Physical chemistry is like 2% signal and 97% noise.

I don't think that I had any potential to become a good chemist, but I will say I shewed aptitude for quality control, insrumentation, chemical kinematics, and spectroscopy. Who knows? Thanks again it has been a lovely experience so far.

Oh, and I think I've made it a week sober!

@sekio
@Skorpio
@AlsoTapered

If I missed any chemists, sorry.
First off congrats on the sobriety!

I've had little physical chemistry exposure, so your perspectives are definately welcomed. I'm not actually a chemist, nominally I do pharmacology, but my day to day is some mix of biochemistry and cell biology. I do like organic chemistry, and find it a wonderful lens to view the world through. Sometimes I wish I was an organic chemist, as there is something downright romantic about total synthesis.

Can you expand on this information theory you allude to?
 
Can you expand on this information theory you allude to?

Sure. So you mentioned you're into pharma but not necessarily an organic chemist, but several of the lads here definitely seem like o-chemists. But for these guys signal is like 40% of their world. I mean spectroscopy.
Don't believe me? With femtosecond spectroscopy you're almost watching a reaction happen in real time, at the molecular level. Pretty important to get right, huh? But a lot of people who aren't worried about information theory are pretty much just winging it, right?

A lot of people don't question their assumptions enough. They learn about benzene maybe once in school, and then they will start running reactions in it for the next 20 years without taking time to update their models and develop a better understanding of it's properties. Not people on Bluelight, really but I have to assume you've met your share of procedural thinkers.

IMHO gravity potentially can affect a chemical reaction, in that I predict that chemicals in a high-gravity environment (let's assume that Earth has close enough to zero gravity for our purposes) should have a higher frequency of > AE collisions in situations where reaction tolerances are tight.

Mars, is it spinning faster or slower than Earth (again, relativistic effects). I mean since Mars is smaller, it has slower angular velocity to Earth? Meaning.....reactions should go just a bit faster, eh? On the surface of Mars. Not really fast enough for us to care, yet.

To me so many scientists don't spend adequate time:
  • Question assumptions
  • Focus on what's important
  • Eliminate distraction
  • During modeling, most variables that people want to think matter, don't.
But they don't have a full time dude sitting around their lab to worry about stuff like this, so what can you do? One of my professor's (note: not my favorite professor) was obsessed with getting a really clean single line spectrum off of hydrogen. This was one of Dirac's protégé. Imagine all of the noise cancellation that cat had to do to get rid of everthing? You've seen an IR before.

How about instrumentation. What corner of your lab has the least current passing through (wires in the) wall? This will affect your spectrum. You willing to take 10,000 spectrums under track lighting as opposed to another 10,000 spectrum under candle light? I bet I could tell the difference!

But it gets even more fun than that! Electrons get measured by electrons, right? But electons move! You wouldn't believe how persistent they are! You can yell at an electron to stop moving for hours, but it won't! So you're trying to take a reading of something that's moving in a direction that you will never be able to guess (although I could narrow it down for you, hehe but I don't have my patent yet) by using an instrument (other electrons) that is also moving around unhelpfully. Where does it end?
 
. I had trouble in grad school and should probably have picked analytic chemistry as a major.

Such a shame. I don't read NMR/GC-MS data enough because I ended up just doing presumptive analysis and ChemOffice would calculate what peaks/doublet/multiplets should be where and fragments aren't too hard. If someone only asks once a year, I have to sit down and reread my textbooks. Those being rather out of date since I studied in the 80s-90s.

Someone with a facility to draw the structure from JUST the NMR & GC-MS would be of vast utility.

But you have to do what's best for you.

It's just nice to know there are decent people in this world. It's what keeps me going.
 
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