I love these Derek Lowe posts. Somehow he mixes highly technical details with down-home folksiness. Examples: > Hydrogen sulfide, for example, reacts with four

I love these Derek Lowe posts. Somehow he mixes highly technical details with down-home folksiness. Examples: > Hydrogen sulfide, for example, reacts with four molecules of FOOF to give sulfur hexafluoride, 2 molecules of HF and four oxygens. . .and 433 kcal, which is the kind of every-man-for-himself exotherm that you want to avoid at all cost. and > Organometallic reagents come from large tribes, and there are always wild cousins up in the hills. A good place to look for the livelier ones is in the simplest alkyl derivatives, and you should go all the way down to the methyls if you want to know their real character. Ignore the halides. Methylmagnesium bromide you can get in multiliter kegs; they might as well sell it in Pottery Barn. and > ... compounds with lots of nitrogens in them – more specifically, compounds with a high percentage of nitrogen by weight – are a spirited bunch. They hear the distant call of the wild, and they know that with just one leap of the fence they can fly free as molecules of nitrogen gas. And that’s never an orderly process. and > perchloric anhydride (dichlorine heptoxide) [is] a liquid with a boiling point of around 80 C, and I'd like to shake the hand of whoever determined that property, assuming he has one left.