The other day I was talking about resumes with a friend (apparently two pages is the norm now, is that shocking or what! Shows you how long it's been since I had to put one together) and we came up with the concept of the anti-resume.

Not the anti-resume as presented in trendy business book The Black Swan:

People don't walk around with anti-resumes telling you what they have not studied or experienced (it's the job of their competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did.

No, our version of an anti-resume is a list of all the true and unpleasant things about yourself you would normally attempt to conceal or mitigate while on a job interview. Something more like the examples here. You know: I'm arrogant, I don't work well with others, I only want this job for the money and I don't care about the product/professional development/customer, I like to play office politics and backstab.

I think I may write it all up as a formal document. Could be fun!

Second in an occasional series. Links to the first entry, category archive.

OK. So suppose you're in the situation of having been served a cup of coffee, and wanting to determine whether it is decaffeinated (as you ordered) or regular. You have a cup (4-6 oz) or a mug (about 8 oz) of steaming hot liquid in front of you. It contains a variety of different chemicals leached out of the crushed roasted seeds from the fruit of Coffea arabica or if you're not so lucky, Coffea robusta. There are flavorful oils, and a number of water-soluble compounds including caffeine and its close relatives theophylline and (to a much smaller extent in coffee) theobromine.

Fortunately you have the complete resources of a chemical lab available to you. So you take your cup of coffee into the lab, weigh it in a tared flask, measure its volume, and proceed to the caffeine extraction procedure.

First you add concentrated sodium hydroxide solution to basify the solution and precipitate out some junk. (Typically tannins, but why be technical?) Sodium hydroxide is household lye, by the way. I hope you weren't planning on drinking this coffee. In fact, once you brought it into the lab, it became undrinkable by the standards of good lab practice.

We'll filter off the gummy precipitate and buffer the solution back to neutral. Now we extract the caffeine into a non-polar solvent. Let's use methylene chloride, also known as "dry cleaning chemical". Yum yum yum! It has a lovely heavy sweet scent and is only a little carcinogenic. Use a hood to avoid sniffing too much of the vapors.

We extract with three 50-mL aliquots of methylene chloride. (I don't know why, but somehow all chemists love to say "aliquot"). This process involves putting the water and MeCl₂ in a separatory funnel and shaking to improve surface area contact between the two immiscible liquids. Always remember to periodically vent the funnel, since mixing liquids can cause them to significantly expand in volume, and the overpressure can break your funnel. Not only do you lose your product, you wind up wearing the methylene chloride.

Next we get the crude yield by evaporating off the methylene chloride. Put your solution in a round-bottom flask, attach it to the rotary evaporator, get a nice cold dry ice trap and put it in line between the aspirator and the rotovap. (If we didn't have a nice cold trap, we'd be sending methylene chloride down the drain, which is not the approved way to dispose of chlorinated organic solvents.) Place a warm water bath or gentle steam bath under the round-bottom flask, and let 'er rip. Low-boiling methylene chloride will evaporate on heating, and recondense in the trap, leaving behind any solids dissolved in it. Including our caffeine. And anything else that liked non-polar solvents more than water. Weigh and record crude yield.

So now -- last step -- recrystallize your caffeine to remove the other solids. Add your crude product to a clean Erlenmeyer flask. In a hood, heat acetone over a steam bath to just below boiling and add dropwise until the crude product dissolves. Plan on doing a hot filtration to remove impurities that were soluble in MeCl₂ but not acetone. Slowly allow the acetone to cool to room temperature, then place in a salted ice bath. Collect the crystals and dry on a watch glass in a drying chamber. Collect any crystals from filter paper, rotovap off the acetone, and assess whether another recrystallization is useful. Weigh and record yield, and after drying, dry yield.

Caffeinated coffee contains between 100 mg - 200 mg caffeine per cup, and decaf contains about 3 mg per cup. So if the amount of caffeine you recovered was over, say, 30 mg, it's safe to assume that the coffee was caffeinated. If the amount was less than 3 mg or nonexistent (as long as you didn't screw up the procedure), it's safe to assume the coffee was decaffeinated. In that case, it's safe to go back to the restaurant and ... order a new cup of coffee. Which we again won't know whether it's caffeinated or not.

Next time: nondestructive lab-based testing.

This procedure is based on my memory of the procedure outlined in Pavia, Lampman, and Kriz.

Crib notes for the Turing test. Personal favorite: "3. Constipation's gone!"

(I don't even what to think what sort of Google hits I am now going to get.)

I used to have a web page with some pictures of caffeine I had optimized and ray-traced, some caffeine information, links to the MSDS for caffeine, that sort of thing. This was in 1995 or so, before blogs existed and when people still wrote web pages in vi. (Mine was cool because I wrote it in emacs.)

I used to get one or two emails a year from people who had come up with A GREAT IDEA! And if only I could help them put it into practice, theywe could make LOTS OF MONEY! It would be these little strips of paper, you see, small enough to keep a container in your purse or pocket, and then when you ordered decaf coffee in a restaurant, you could test it by dipping the strip into the coffee and if it turned color (say, blue) then DA DA DUM you would know that the waiter had messed up your order and brought you regular caffeinated coffee instead. Thus saving you from the harm of drinking the real, unleaded stuff. And presumably giving you a reason to yell at the waiter/manager.

I hope it's clear that I have always considered this to be a stupid business idea. But what I tried to do -- first in email, and then by adding another web page -- was explain WHY this is technically infeasible. I never finished it. Perhaps I will finish it now, in serial form. (Don't hold your breath).

Just another attempt to sell that despicable man, John McCain on the basis of his alleged conservatism. Jonathan Rauch claims that McCain is more Catholic than the pope, or rather, contra Gingrich and Reagan, a true adherent to the conservative ideals of Edmund Burke.

For homework: please explain how his promotion of unconstitutional speech restrictions can be reconciled with his newly discovered Burkean roots. Extra credit: square the circle.

Hillary in '08. The devil you know, etc. etc.

Just deleted this comment spam from the kids' blogs:

I’ve basically been doing nothing worth mentioning. Not much on my mind to speak of. Not that it matters. More or less nothing seems important.

Now I wonder, though, do they have people write this stuff? Or are they skimming it off of myspace? Is there a disaffected blog comment generator somewhere out there?

It's kind of like the mysterious puzzle of porn soundtracks. Who composes that stuff? Sad, burned-out Juillard dropouts? Or worse -- do the people who compose it really enjoy their work?

I can't even blame it on reading xkcd before bed, because I wasn't this time.

But something needs to change.

Tonight, again, I dreamed about gatecrashing Donald Knuth's secret school for hackers. As part of my initiation I threw a bottle of rum at a bunsen-burner equipped car.

My subconscious is definitely trying to tell me something. Unfortunately, the message is "Sam, you're a psycho."

Client's backup server died. It was brought up in .. looks like May of 2005, with the main backup target being a RAID5 set consisting of seven 80GB partitions distributed over six disks. The RAID members were (hda3, hdd1, hde1, hde2, hdf1, hdg1, hdh1). There was also a RAID1 set (hda1, hdc1) of about 30GB. The CD was hdb.

Those of you keeping score at home will note that having seven RAID members but only six disks means that two RAID partitions reside on the same disk. Two partitions on the same disks means that a single disk failure knocks out two partitions, and RAID5 is only robust against a single failure. So originally the RAID set had five active disks and two pre-configured spares, with one of the two partitions on hde (the 160GB drive) active and the other set to spare.

That worked for a very short while until the IDE card we'd had to install (to get the extra 4 IDE devices) started consistently failing to give us hdg and hdh. After a while of failing to get this to work, I gave up and let the RAID5 run with only five partitions on four devices - (hda3, hdd1, hde1, hde2, hdf1). This was the configuration it had until Wednesday, when it died.

So the RAID5 set, when running, yielded 294GiB of redundant storage, from a base of about 374GiB. (Some disks were slightly larger than the 75GiB size of the smallest contributing disk, and RAID5 always uses the smallest size disk to construct its parity sets.)

You can see what the problem with this server was, I think. Its capacity was grotesquely out of date. Today I can buy a new 500GB disk from Memory Express for $120.

Some of my friends are into life extension / anti-aging, and today I was skimming through resources they recommend.

I was reading this anti-aging protocol and it starts out sensibly: get enough sleep, exercise, be undernourished, eat green vegetables, all good things.

Eventually it says "Increase pure filtered water consumption" and I clicked through to find out what they had against tap water.

Apparently it's not magnetized, that's part of the problem. Here's an excerpt from that page, for your non-clicking-through delectation:

Some decades ago, Russian scientists faced a major industrial problem. When water flows through pipelines of a boiler or an engine machinery, some deposits from the water cling to the walls of the pipes. Over time, the lumen becomes narrower and the delivery of water to the machinery is reduced. The efficiency, fuel consumption and mechanical strength of the machine is therefore reduced.

While researching on this problem, scientists noticed that such undesirable deposits did not occur in those pipes with water that was magnetized. This started the magnetization of water for industrial use in countries where water source is less than desirable

Where is the paper from these water-magnetizing Russkies, that's what I want to know.

Stuff like this doesn't help your credibility, life-extension promoters. Just FYI.