This is a blog with photographs of nature, my garden, and goings on in college. The pictures are mine and my mother's. Please enjoy. RSS Feed follows: Add to Google
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Protest SOPA
If ever there was a time to associate your name with an online cause, perhaps this is it. When people like Rupert Murdoch say this:
"Piracy leader is Google who streams movies free, sells advts around them. No wonder pouring millions into lobbying," Murdoch wrote.
Murdoch said he searched Google for Mission Impossible clips and found "several sites offering free links."
Then you know it is time to take action.
Call your state representatives, tell them to vote NO on the SOPA/PIPA vote, set to take place on January 24.
I've taken advantage of winter break to start cooking again. It is so exciting to make delectable things out of almost nothing!
This was Mushroom Omelette with Pita Bread. (Kind of looks like a large slug, no?)
This was Apple and Cranberry Brown Betty. It was much enjoyed by the adults. Next time I will manually crush bread to make bread crumbs, as the ones here are more suitable for coating meats.
Yesterday, in what was probably a freak occurrence, an upper low dumped 1-2 inches overnight over the area. Then, between 9 and 11 AM, an additional 4-5 inches came down, with rainfall rates of 2 inches in 15 minutes on a bayou two miles away. That skinny trunk of a bayou couldn't handle the elephant of water and flooded the neighborhood streets, despite the fact that it (the neighborhood) sits nowhere near a flood zone. Here are some pictures:
That's the bayou nearly cresting in the Medical Center area.
A familiar intersection along the way to school, nowhere near a bayou.
The high water at this point of the highway swallowed up a Mustang.
The end of our street, which didn't even flood during Allison 10 years ago. It was truly astounding (water 2 feet deep at the end), since it happened in just half-an-hour, almost as fast as the infamous 1000-point Dow drop. People unaccustomed to flooding found themselves facing yawning lakes, and turned back because of the alligators.
The Grignard reaction that was performed involved reacting bromobenzene and magnesium to produce phenylmagnesium bromide. Methyl benzoate, an ester, was then added, and the addition of a sulfuric acid served to reprotonate the result, giving triphenylmethanol(from Wikipedia):
It was an interesting experiment and definitely the longest, lasting nearly 7 hours over two lab times. It was done on November 8th and 15th. The most important requirement for this lab was that all the glassware used had to be completely dry, because the Grignard reagent (phenylmagnesium bromide) is such a strong base that it reacts with water. Even the humidity level in the lab can affect the reaction. All glassware was carefully washed and dried the week before, using a heat gun when needed:
The apparatus for the initial reaction was set up like so, and also heated to remove traces of vapor: Then, drying tubes were packed with cotton and calcium chloride and inserted into the top of the condenser (higher part) and the addition funnel (lower part) to keep the enviroment anhydrous.
Note that the bromobenzene has already been added to the funnel. In the actual experiment, that happens after the drying tubes have been attached. Then, magnesium turnings were added to a flask at the bottom of the apparatus, and bromobenzene was added to cover them. The mixture began to react spontaneously with no additional heat. When the reaction slowed, more bromobenzene was added.
Video showing the vigorous reaction:
After all 9 mL of bromobenzene had been used up, the reaction continued for a little while with the help of a warm water bath.
The methyl benzoate was then added, as was ether, turning the mixture a reddish-punch color. Methyl benzoate, used to train drug-sniffing dogs to detect cocaine, smells like new shoes at Payless. With the help of a hot water bath, the reaction started and a solid formed.
As much solid as possible (someone next to me compared it to pumpkin pie) went into a slurry of sulfuric acid and ice, and a vigorous reaction was seen. The whole caboodle was then transferred to a seperatory funnel to remove the aqueous layer. The yellow layer was kept.
As in other experiments, sodium sulfate was added to the ether to remove water. This material comes as an anhydrous powder, and upon absorbing any water remaining in the ether it takes on the appearance of salt. Afterwards, the mixture was filtered and the ether evaporated.
This experiment leaves lab benches covered in interesting glassware:
A week later, the solid left after the ether had been evaporated was triturated (mixed) with petroleum ether. The solid turned white, and the now yellow ether was removed.
After a bit of warming, isopropyl alcohol was added to dissolve all the solid. After this mixture cooled down, crystals began to form out of solution, looking for all the world like the inside of a snowglobe.
This was then filtered, and voila - 3.224 grams of triphenylmethanol were produced.
Last Monday the lab titled 'Steam Distillation' was performed (semi-microscale procedure). Basically, 10g of ground cloves were put into a flask with water and the mixture was boiled to extract the essential oil, eugenol. This process is called steam distillation, and is used because the normal boiling point of eugenol is 254 degrees C. This way, when water boils, the cloves boil, and eugenol drips out.
The whole lab smelled like gingerbread cookies or besamim. The TA said it reminded her of an alcoholic drink from Sweden, probably glogg.
So here is a diagram of the set-up - somewhat modified simple distillation, since a small separatory funnel had to be used to add water to the boiling mixture (so that the concentrations would remain the same and you wouldn't wind up getting eugenol diluted with a lot of water).
Here's the set-up as it was actually done:
Locked and loaded:
Joints greased - check. Rubber bands tight - check. Sep funnel loaded - check. 500 mL flask loaded - check. Condenser water on - check. Heating Mantle on - check.
Raise Mantle... BOIL! Ever so slowly, the condensation line crept up the Claisen connecting tube and then the distilling head, and then began to trickle down into the Erlenmeyer flask as a whitish liquid.
When about 105 mL had been collected the heating mantle was lowered. Now came the solvent extraction, which we are by now familiar with. The white liquid was mixed with ether and the layers separated out. This time, ether was on top, visible here as a bit of a layer on the surface.
Draining of the ether layer:
Eugenol was now dissolved in the ether rather than mixed with water. It was dried out with sodium sulfate, after which it looked like this...
...and then 'twas evaporated with rotary evaporator. Afterwards, just a bit of (hopefully) pure eugenol was left.
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