Yes.

This is stupid, I know. It’s facebook, spilling over into the internet-at-large. But I was curious, so I did the quiz. Suffice to say I have learned my lesson about taking internet quizzes. (No, I really haven’t).

In those posts Lowe, who holds a PhD in organic chemistry, describes certain chemical compounds of such properties that His Noodliness himself couldn’t convince Lowe to permit them in his lab. Or, if the decision is up to him, the lab next door either.

I love the way Lowe writes – he has a knack for bringing chemistry for the masses, using terms we can all understand. Of chlorine triflouride he writes “Yep, that stuff, the delightful compound that sets sand on fire and eats through asbestos firebrick“, and his description of thioacetone’s unique odour (“An 1890 report from the Whitehall Soap Works in Leeds refers to the odor as “fearful”, and if you could smell anything through the ambient conditions in a Leeds soap factory in 1890, it must have been.) is most colourful.

It’s still a painfully geeky read, though.

Unless these signs are calculated and printed by hand, in which case whoever does them is missing some vital mathematics skills.