Encyclopedia Dramatica once referred to 4chan.org as “the asshole of the Internets”, which in my humble opinion is pretty dead right. Allow me to paraphrase:

Nomenclature is the asshole of organic chemistry

Remember where you heard it first, and quote me if you want, but before you do anything else, go ahead […]

J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1968, 90, 5034-5036. (DOI: 10.1021/ja01020a053)
I like the close proximity of the words “Bastard” and “Sir”.

J. Org. Chem. 1979, 44, 2811-2812. (DOI: 10.1021/jo01329a053)
Comments unnecessary.

Org. Lett. 2008, 10, 4557-4560. (DOI: 10.1021/ol801772p)
This […]

Grad students and post-docs in the labs of the chemistry top dogs seem pretty well prepared for their internal group meetings, according to stuff you sometimes find on Google. Unfortunately, few of these amazingly jam-packed slides have real links to them, even though they are indeed online, free for all to see.

So I […]

As such, DDT is an outstanding pesticide. I have seen it in action with my own eyes. Most impressive. Its use has however been banned in many Western countries for a long time now, because nature does not know what to do with it. It is very chemically stable and very lipophilic, leading […]

I just felt like showing off a little here tonight. These are the before and after pictures:

Upon work-up, many grams of a viscous oil were obtained, contaning a mixture of diastereomers (whose exact composition I cannot go into). My God, did I struggle to get the one isomer I so highly desired out […]

As we were preparing manuscripts a while ago, I spent quite some time reading through guidelines for authors for various journals. A small paragraph in JOC‘s instructions is pure gold and quite some food for thought. For reference, the full version can be retrieved here. This is an excerpt:

2.1.1 Title
[…]

Remember good old reaction #86? Our new paper about it, and a couple of analogs, is officially out today!

Tetrahedron Lett. 2011, 52, 4558-4561. (DOI: 10.1016/j.tetlet.2011.06.092).

By serendipity, we discovered that hydantoins 1 could be transformed into aziridines 3 in one step upon treatment with an excess of Red-Al.

Take-home […]