Here are some collected Twitter ramblings from October 2021.
![Twitter avatar for @KRHornberger](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_96/KRHornberger.jpg)
![Yoda Coffee GIF](https://substackcdn.com/video/upload/e_loop,vs_40/zlbbnbpw27yszqera31c.gif)
I don’t talk about it much on Twitter, but I’m very active with my youngest son’s Cub Scout pack and also with the Boy Scout troop for my older boys. The camping trips are a lot of fun, but not conducive to getting a lot of sleep!
Craft beer and homebrewing are among my other hobbies. Counter Weight Brewing in Hamden, CT is pretty close to the Arvinas site, and many of our happy hours have been hosted there when we were doing them in-person. I hope that COVID recedes enough soon that we can get back to doing these face to face. Another fun fact… I’ve actually brewed at home very little during the pandemic. Getting outside seemed more important under the circumstances, so most of my free hours have been spent hiking. I still like to drink the beer that other people made, though.
![Twitter avatar for @KRHornberger](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_96/KRHornberger.jpg)
![Twitter avatar for @StephenMarche](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_40/StephenMarche.jpg)
It’s a nails-on-a-chalkboard word for me in scientific manuscripts. Adverbs are the limpest, laziest words in any language. I find this one galling because what the authors are really saying is, “Importantly (according to me)…” Value judgements like this have no place in scientific writing. Are the results so weak, and/or is the manuscript so poorly written, that readers are incapable of determining for themselves what’s an important result?
This was tremendous fun and people really ran with it. The comments are just terrific.
![Twitter avatar for @KRHornberger](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_96/KRHornberger.jpg)
The 2021 chemistry Nobel was a springboard for this side tale about taking a graduate organic synthesis class from Sam Danishefsky. Everyone’s who’s interacted with Sam knows that he’s something of a character, and everyone has a trove of “Sam stories” to share. This is one of them, and not even the best.
![Twitter avatar for @KRHornberger](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_96/KRHornberger.jpg)
Yeah, little did I know after that IC50 vs. Ki tweetorial that we’d be shooting right past that to the neighborhood of 1700+ in another month. I’m grateful to everyone who’s hopped on the train. #ChemTwitter has been a lot of fun for me, especially in the last year. It’s been great to meet and virtually hang out with so many interesting and diverse people.
![Twitter avatar for @KRHornberger](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_96/KRHornberger.jpg)
![Twitter avatar for @ChemScrapes](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_40/ChemScrapes.jpg)
This is a true story. Stork never threw out anything, and I did indeed get this reaction to work with the OG reagent bottle that was nearly 20 years old. At some point in the future, I’ll tell another story about the Stork stockroom that happened when the EPA came to inspect the Columbia chemistry department labs. Hint: it didn’t go so well.
![Twitter avatar for @KRHornberger](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_96/KRHornberger.jpg)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_600,h_314,c_fill,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff3131e31-5f02-465c-93cf-38adcd15f6ac_1128x564.jpeg)
Is it too meta to post a Twitter post about your Substack in your Substack?
![Twitter avatar for @KRHornberger](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_96/KRHornberger.jpg)
I still can’t believe this publication made it to the light of day. Ingo Hartung and a very large agglomeration of chemists on Twitter thoroughly debunked the findings in the original manuscript months ago. And now another publication, while the debunking publication still hasn’t made it into the journal? Not pretty.
I love this meme and it fit the previous story really well.
![Twitter avatar for @KRHornberger](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_96/KRHornberger.jpg)
![Twitter avatar for @KRHornberger](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_40/KRHornberger.jpg)
Zero likes on this means that nobody shares my passion for molten potassium rolling around in THF. And you call yourselves chemists! *cries*
![Twitter avatar for @KRHornberger](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_96/KRHornberger.jpg)
![Twitter avatar for @KTElliottMicro](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_40/KTElliottMicro.jpg)
This was just terrible. Everyone involved in producing this figure was clearly inebriated when they did it.
![Twitter avatar for @KRHornberger](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_96/KRHornberger.jpg)
![Twitter avatar for @ProfFeynman](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_40/ProfFeynman.jpg)
The Prof. Feynman bot account is a great source of Feynman wisdom, despite the fact that it repeats itself a lot and that Feynman had a great many shortcomings as a human being. Again and again, almost 20 years in the pharma industry has reinforced to me that the best way to learn something is to teach it. If you can’t explain it to someone else in a way that they can understand, then you probably don’t understand it well enough yourself. It’s been the great surprise of my time on Twitter that the reaction to the tweetorials I’ve posted has been so positive. I wrote these things to teach myself, and practice communications skills in a different medium. I’m nonetheless happy to have so many others along for the ride. It’s an almost limitless source of fact-checking too.
![Twitter avatar for @KRHornberger](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_96/KRHornberger.jpg)
![Twitter avatar for @Chemjobber](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_40/Chemjobber.jpg)
This one treaded into some sensitive territory. CJ’s follow-up to my post, where he said (paraphrasing) that postdocs were bascially a holding pattern for people who couldn’t get industry jobs was a real zinger. This opened up a whole conversation about the privilege of going to elite schools and the prejudices of industry hiring practices. It’s a big knot that I don’t know how to untie, either.
![Twitter avatar for @KRHornberger](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_96/KRHornberger.jpg)
![Out Of Gas GIF](https://substackcdn.com/video/upload/e_loop,vs_40/ezdoyypapp8qxagm48ds.gif)
Also a true story, and one that it seems others have also experienced based on the comments. I remember being pretty chuffed when Sudafed went behind the pharmacy counter and I had to start getting my ID scrutinized every time we have to buy some because someone has a cold. But seriously, ask any pharmacist. To the last person, the ones I’ve asked have said it’s made a big difference in cracking down on illegal meth production in home labs.