Making a list of what I’ve been busying may serve an excuse for not active in blogging (or not?)
- Blogging on sciencenet.cn (in Chinese)
- Polymerizing some acrylic acid
- Nonlinear rheology of … toothpaste(!)
- Blogging more on sciencenet.cn
My blog on sciencenet.cn is terribly Maoism. In case you want to see: http://www.sciencenet.cn/blog/andrewsun.htm. The reason why I blog on sciencenet.cn more is I find things happen in China more irritating and I end up writing thousands of words criticizing in Chinese so that people can read. Criticizing things in China seems much urgent to me. But why not join me in criticizing, blaming or complaining China? Maybe we have had enough ‘China’ since the year 2008 and people just get tired, whether praising it or blaming. I get tired too, to some extent.
To polymerize acrylic acid I have to distill it from inhibitor. I took photos. Chem blogs are characterized in many lab photos (who defines this? CBC?), in which sense my blog is hardly called ‘chem’. CBC always have colorful products because they are doing conjugate – that is, light absorbing – things (correct me if I’m wrong). My field is polymer gels. One of the (dis)advantage of being a polymer chemists is that you don’t need to be synthetically rigor. There are several other things to play besides synthesis – rheology, mechanics, interface chemistry, etc. But I still have to perform the old-school radical polymerization, and my synthesis will only take time but not valuable at all for publish.
Nonlinear viscoelasticity of things is my PhD project. A professor in MIT did nonlinear rheology of snail mucus and published his work on Soft Matter. I heard that he cultures a “snail-line” in his lab. It’s fun to imagine snails climbing all over the lab, the walls, the ceiling…I used some toothpaste to check its nonlinear behavior. One of the character of nonlinearity is the deviation from ellipse in L-rings.
