The Law of Nine

I've been back at work for effectively a week now; I don't think I'm going to count the rather spaced-out-with-jetlag day that was last Wednesday. A beery evening made that part of intercontinental travel a bit easier to deal with.

I've been waiting for my 18-crown-6 to arrive (ordered long before Christmas), and so in the meantime have been trying to resurrect some obstinately unsuccessful chemistry in the meantime, apparently succesfully. It worked once, about eight months ago when I first got here and then refused to play ball since, to much general consternation and tearing out of hair. There's only one thing worse in chemistry than no results, and that's an unreliable one that you can't repeat.

So this week, a bit of tweaking here and there, ignoring my methodology of recent attempts and going back to the first time I did the reaction back in April. And hey presto, success! And then the two subsequent reactions also worked to the point where I feel on the edge of something quite exciting.

But the thing that prompted this posting was an uncanny happening that happens far too often. Once again, the experiment number (ALG243 if you're that interested) added up to 9. And it's really weird. If the experiment number has a 9 in, or adds up to 9, it always seems to work. This is a phenomenon that dates back to the first meaningful, significant result I ever got in my PhD (which was ALG59, oddly enough in the ninth month of my PhD).

I'm not, as a scientist, supposed to believe in superstition......but in the law of nine, I certainly do.

The Anti-Tuesday

Those of you who've known me for some time will know of my fear and loathing of the second day of the working week. For those that haven't a clue what I'm on about, it all stems back to my early PhD days in Leeds where I once overheard two of my more senior lab mates in the McGowan group pantheon having a conversation which ended with the exchange "oh, it's Tuesday, I wouldn't bother, it'll go wrong".

This wisdom apparently came from the lab of a very distinguished research group in organometallic chemistry next door where apparently several major accidents/fires happened on said day. When that group left for Naaaaarwich, one of them joined us as a postdoctoral fellow. Almost straight away, we started having bad days on Tuesdays. As scientists, we weren't/aren't supposed to be superstitious, but I can confess to occasionally putting off large reactions and potentially tricky manipulations. This followed me to both London and Warwick. I do believe my first attempt at making the ketone of doom at the latter ended up with a very loud outburst for trying to do said reaction on the day-that-doth-not-speak-its-name, turning three days of laborious effort into viscous black crud.

So I have been puzzled to note that of late, here in Calgary, for some odd reason that Tuesdays are suddenly turning into good days. Capped today by several odd occurrences: 1) a win for BCFC at the football, turning a 0-2 deficit into a win for the second time in about a month, something I have only seen in the flesh once in nearly 20 years of watching; 2) an easy win for the Flames; 3) finally locating a peak in my carbon NMR that I have been trying to find for weeks...finally having managed to bag an overnight spot on a spectrometer (this is like trying to nail jelly to a wall), 30,000 scans managed to find it. Hussar!

Hockey pool watch: +5 tonight, all from the Flames-Kings game. Up to the vertiginious heights of 6th