Yubsie's Yammerings

So... how nerdy is it that not only am I reading The Science of Battlestar Galactica, I am nitpicking it? :p

There's just this one chapter where the general idea is right. It's talking about how silica pathways could slip by medical testing, even an MRI. And their explanation of how an MRI works is wrong. THey talk about the magnetic field interacting with the dipole moment of the water molecules, but it's actually the inherent spin of the hydrogen nuclei in the water molecules interacting with the magnetic field. The reason silica brains wouldn't show up is that silicon-29 resonates at a way lower frequency than hydrogen-1.

This is why my Cylon detector would have just involved tuning an MRI machine to silicon-29. :p (When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. My research, for those of you who don't know, is in nuclear magnetic resonance specroscopy, which is based on the same principle as MRI)

And then they follow up with an explanation of Baltar's Cylon detector as possibly being a mass spectrometer. Which does seem reasonable, but their explanation of how a mass spec works is a little off. They talk about turning a molecule into its constituent atoms... which isn't quite accurate. It fragments the molecules, but that doesn't necessarily means it takes them straight down to atoms. Indeed, it wouldn't be nearly as useful that way. By looking a the fragmentation pattern we can identify molecules.

Hi, my name is Yubsie, and I'm a giant nerd. (Also, I bet you never expected to see that particular combination of tags on an entry :p)

There is a paper in the latest issue of Angewandte about redox economy in organic synthesis. The subtitle is "Stimulus package for organic synthesis".

I giggled way more than I should have. I think I might be a nerd. :p