Show us your most recent mundane, stupid, non-MST3K accomplishment

Tragic follow up. I looked under the hood, removed the gasket, unclipped the wire holder, and discovered that when we had towing lights installed they modified how the headlight bulbs are attached and now nothing matches the instructions :sob:

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Oh. Sorry to hear that: got to have headlights!

If you feel like snapping a picture or two of the assembly, I bet a few people here might be able to figure it out.

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I bet they would! However my husband has been wanting to take it to the shop for a once-over anyway, and since my favorite hobby is “giving up in the face of minor obstacles” I’m gonna let Maurice (my mechanic) deal with it :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Since we mostly drive it to the yard supply store and back we hardly even use the headlights (they close at 4pm) but I should probably get them working regardless.

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Yeah, that’s an even better plan. Maurice will figure it out in no time at all.

You’re fortunate to have a trustworthy mechanic!

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Spooooooooky

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Y’all are going to get so sick of my chemistry posts. :slight_smile:

Today, I learned what a mole is in chemistry (no, it’s not a large rodent). I’ve heard the word before and I’ve even had some vague idea of what it was, but today I finally learned about it.

(It’s a mass of atoms, molecules, etc. that contains 6.022 x 10E23 [that’s 10 to the 23rd power; I don’t see the superscript option around these here parts] of whatever is being measured.)

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Is it just a handy name for that particular quantity, or is there another relevance to the word in this context?

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The etymology is actually really interesting.

It’s related to the number of grains of molé that would be hand-packed into individual glass jars for transport from the colonies back to Spain as part of the spice trade with the new world. It took so long to count out the contents of each jar that master molé packers were often unable to finish more than two jars in a single season.

The stuff was unspeakably rare back then and would often be cut with inferior ingredients on arrival in Europe so the merchants could boost profits. An Italian chemist named Avogadro had an opportunity to try some that had been cut with opium and was so infatuated with it that he started trying to quantify the basic building blocks of the universe in terms of molé during a particularly long binge that lasted for most of 1740 and ended with him scrawling a drunken screed based on the number lambasting the English monarchy in a university privy.

The Queen of Spain was a major supporter of the university, so when she happened to be there and found it in the midst of a high-profile spat with England, she had Avogadro knighted and ordered the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences to formally adopt the “mole” as a standard unit of measure. It just kinda stuck around after that.

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Fun! I have no clue why 22.4 liters popped to mind when you mentioned that … it’s been a bunch of years since my last chemistry class.

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It has to do with how we can measure molecular mass when molecules are teeny tiny things that we really can’t measure. So what I learned today is that all atoms are measured relative to a carbon atom. They’re measured in atomic mass units. 1 amu = 1/12 of a carbon atom mass. We translate that to app. 1 proton or 1 neutron. If you take one of the simplest molecules H2 (two hydrogen atoms), the mass is 2.015 amu. If you find the app. mass of a proton in g and multiply that by 2 and then multiply it by Avogadro’s number (6.022 x 10E23), you amazingly get 2.015 g. So it makes calculations of molecular mass much much easier to do.

So a mole is the mass of some element or molecule (which is a little mass).

Does that make sense?

Or would you rather take @Longmile149 's version? :smiley:

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Tomato, tomato

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I thought maybe it was something like a “mole” of atoms/molecules tends to burrow into/out of a larger quantity due to other properties, but both these explanations are absolutely fascinating. Thanks @TeriG and @Longmile149!

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Not in the least boring! I think the measurement in moles was the first conceptual hurdle for me: it’s just a unit of “stuff”: but that stuff is very small.

Oddly enough I do remember Avogrado’s Number. … 6.023 x 10^23? Something like that. Big number.

I still think when balancing equations using basic linear algebra is going to save you so much time…it’s a strictly mechanical method using Gauss-Jordan elimination…plug and chug.

But I’m still upset this woman hasn’t returned my ballcap yet, so I have more things to be upset about. As usual. :cold_sweat:

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Oh wow, I remember moles from chemistry. It was a bit tricky to come to grips with initially. And coincidentally I was just talking with my sister-in-law recently about chocolate mole sauce, too.

As for recent accomplishments, I’ve been made art director on a book I’m working on. It’s a nice new challenge and one I hope will be fun, too.

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Congrats to both @SandyFrank and @TeriG for having some real accomplishments.

The most exciting thing I did recently was won five bucks off a guy at pool, and then lost five bucks to the same guy, so broke even. And he wasn’t a good player, either, so that’s no accomplishment at all.

I did beat the snot out of a decent player yesterday, a few games in a row, but there was no money.

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I look my big comforter to the laundromat today. It was the first wash that blanket has had since I bought it cough cough years ago. I used up many quarters.

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I ate some poutine today. It was routinely poutinely until it got cold.

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I do like me some poutine.

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I guess this is an “accomplishment”: a couple of middle-aged dudes who were on the corner smoking some weed as I parallel parked later asked me inside to watch their table while they ducked out for a pretty long ass time.

Gave me two joints as a “reward” afterwards! No, haven’t tried it yet, but I got that going for me, which is nice.

Still kicking a** at the pool table: oversized prescription sunglasses (much bigger than any of my regular ones) makes a huge difference. That one I’m kind of proud of, seeing much more improvement in my game.

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Old, bad, poorly installed, breaking down, expensive


New, good, well done, too simple to break, no moving parts, cheap, handmade

I really hated the old one that was here when we moved in.

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