I started college in 1986, for Chemical Engineering. It was common for students in my school to gripe about how students in related disciplines and in other schools would be learning modern analytical techniques and use modern machines starting on Year 2, while we didn’t study the techniques until Year 5 and were only allowed to look at the machine itself from afar (and this, if the technician was in a good mood). The school’s reasoning was “if you find yourself working for Unicef in the middle of the jungle, you should be able to analyze the water without a bleeping truckful’s worth of equipment and electrical generators. So, step one, this is a mechanical precision scale, it is older than your parents, and when your grandchildren come here to study we expect them to still use the same scale…”
Having tutored people from those other related majors who defined a ketone as “a band at 1700 in the IR”(1), I can certainly see the school’s point!
1: three counts on which this is wrong
a ketone is, first, “a type of molecule” or “a family of molecules”, or “any molecule which” - defining it as “a band in the IR” is like thinking that a picture of some mocha-colored dude(2) is the President of the United States. The picture represents the President but is not the President.
that band in the IR does not only identify ketones, it does not identify them unequivocally. The same band is present in the IR spectrum of several different groups (any group which has a double bond between a carbon and an oxygen: ketones, aldehydes, acids, amides, esters). So the mocha-colored dude in the picture might be the right color and gender but the wrong guy, the picture might not even be of President Obama.
there are no units listed. Yes, I know that four figures means you’re talking in terms of frequency, the unit is cm[sup]-1[/sup], but you’re still supposed to mention it. Otherwise it looks like you’re just pulling numbers out of your armpit, instead of just parroting numbers.
Ditto for thirdwarning. If you owed 4.37 and gave me a 5, I would pull 3 pennies, then a dime, then 2 quarters, and then a single. I add to the items cost until my change adds up to whatou gave me.
If you gave me 5.02, I would mentally subtract the .02 from the item cost, and then start adding again.
I don’t like carrying around change, so I’ll frequently do something like this. I’ve found that giving partial change (like giving pennies to round up to the nearest quarter) often totally screws up the person at the register. They apparently don’t even know how to tell the register that I gave them $5.02 and not $5.00.
Have restaurants and stores given up on requiring balanced tills at the end of the night?
I still remember the young girl who had to use the till to calculate the change for an ice cream from a single bill (I want to say it was a fiver). She was asking her manager to come unlock it so she could punch the buttons. The math consisted of subtracting 80 cents from 100. 8 + 2 = 10.
All three of us just kind of stared at her (and chuckled a bit).