Today, 10/23 in USA date style, is Mole Day, which quite likely every chemist knows, if not actually celebrates.
Phil Plait, a physicist who blogs at Bad Astronomy, has a “Happy Mole Day” post today for us chemists. Either it’s a slow news day in astronomy, or Phil Plait is just an equal-opportunity science geek. With the International Space Station taking pictures of Mother Earth and Hubble Space Telescope taking pictures of everything else, Plait always has far better graphics for his posts than we do. So we thank him for taking time for us.
He does try to explain the non-rodent mole concept, but doesn’t do a great job of it. That’s not a real surprise. Isaac Asimov took a swipe at chemical moles once, too, but was wise enough not to try to explain. He just said ask a chemist, and be prepared for a too-long dissertation.
Anyway, chemists, Happy Mole Day! no matter how hard it is to tell a happy mole from a sad one.
Photo by Kenneth Catania, Vanderbilt University, used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
“Computers and the physics of complex biological systems”
