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     The week ahead could be... interesting. I have Chemists' Dinner tomorrow, a ChemSoc black tie party (they call it a Ball, but I suspect this is best categorised as 'PR' or 'lies') plus a tutorial on B-Metals. The B-Metals are the arse end of the periodic table. The whole concept of the tutorial is to draw out the trends in the chemistry of the elements. There aren't any trends. This makes the work a little tricky. In light of the fact that tomorrow night will be lost (and the additional not-feeling-well on Tuesday morning will doubtless eat into the work time) I decided to make a good start on the tutorial. At this point, Mark and I realised that we had one copy of the textbook by Phillips and Williams (which is about the only decent text on the subject) between us, and even that could only muster half the index. We decided that we should do the seating plan for Chemists' Dinner instead. This is always a tricky subject, since you have to keep people who should be together on the same table, keep people who hate each other apart (or sit them next to each other, depending on the sort of evening you want), balance the number of females and males on each table, balance the number of people from each year, etc., etc. We initially decided to leave all the complexities of the decision to random chance. After about three minutes we scrapped that plan and began to carefully mix and match chemists around the table. Mark tried to dissuade me from creating a table with me and all the female chemists on it. He said that a certain bias might be noticed and commented on. Four hours later, we had produced table plans, place names (printed in green ink since my printer was running out of black) and lists of who was eating what, since it was obvious that most people would forget what they had requested on the RSVP bit of the invitation. The tutorial work was less well advanced. |
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