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A Panhandle Hooker


petitepedal

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3 hours ago, Wilbur said:

You Americans, having to name everything..  IT's a storm!  

I think it's the scientists.  All the scientists except we chemists have to put a tag on everything.

I took a 400-level Biochemistry course given by the Biology Department in my senior year of college and the professor began to discuss the "Michaelis-Menten Equation." With a name like that we students all thought, "Oh God! Here's another complex mess!"

But, after it was displayed, we chemistry majors looked at each other and just shook our heads. I raised my hand and asked, "What's the difference between the Michaelis-Menten Equation and a simple Pseudo First Order Reaction Equation?" - which every chemistry major learns by 2nd or 3rd year is what you get when all of the chemicals that determine a reaction's speed are present in huge excessive amounts except for one.

Of course, the answer was, "Well, actually they're the same thing."  So Michaelis and Menten actually just applied a simple, well-known equation to biological stuff and got their names attached to it!

You get physicists naming Quarks they discover "Faith" and "Hope," geologists naming ores things like "goosecreekite," and meteorologists naming things like "snowmageddon," while we chemists only go as far as things like "Schrodinger's Equation" because Schrodinger invented it.  Of course, chemists invent things like Acetyl Salicylic Acid because the inventor's father's stomach was too sensitive to take Salicylic Acid for a headache, and then the company the chemist worked for, Bayer, renamed it "Aspirin," but that's not the chemist's fault.

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