I have a book titled “Descriptive Inorganic, Coordination, and Solid-State Chemistry” and I think it is a perfect title for the book. The teacher who taught our class started with Chapter 1 and moved to Chapter 9, and it was probably the best way to start. Chapter 9 is a sort of reintroduction of General Chemistry, dealing with the commonest elements found in nature, Group I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, and VIII, from alkali metals to the nobel gases, excluding the transition elements (those that add d or f orbitals).After reaching the end of the book, for the ...

It's very hard to think. The liberals are too despondent now to vote for Obama again, but I would not be surprised if Obama picked Hillary to be his VP for the second term--however craven it might be, not many people could resist voting for such a power team. But, Clinton might say no. She will sooner leave a sinking ship than try to hitch her wagon to him. That's what I see.A filibuster threat is more powerful than the filibuster itself, and that seems wrong to me. Senators should be allowed to filibuster 24 hours a day, as needed, ...

Politics is the art of the possible. Right now, we have a Congress in which all Republicans are opposed to reform. This isn't healthy for democracy, and they must be punished. I hope that the bill passes and Obama is able to pass it into law, however bad it is. But I hope much more than all the Republicans are replaced by new ones that are at least more pliable and more willing to contribute rather than stonewall.Otherwise, they are just disgusting creatures who besmirch the institutions they are supposed to stand for. ...

This threatening to raise insurance rates if the health reform legislation passes is simply ridiculous. We should just say, "Damned if we do, and damned if we don't."For the last 20 years, insurance rates have been rising and have never gone down. They're going to rise if we pass health insurance and they're going to rise anyway if we don't. But legislation is precisely for the purposing of taming the rising costs of care. The health insurance industry knows it is going to lose a lot of money, and that is why it is running a massive scare campaign.i ...

The economic news is so depressing, there's nothing to do except to feel gratitude, that it isn't the worst yet. Millions of jobs lost are so much more in magnitude than the fact that during the Great Depression, 25% of the population were unemployed, because the population at that time was smaller.The population of the United States was 123 million, which means that a 25% unemployment rate is equivalent to 30 million people. Now, we have a population of 317 million people, meaning that a 10% unemployment rate is over the total number of people ever unemployed in the ...

Single-Application Mode via Daring FireballI haven't heard of this feature, but it makes me think that is where the iPhone went, despite everyone not liking it on the Mac OS X. The small screen space of the iPhone almost necessitates the focus of one application at a time, so even if, in the future, the hardware is powerful enough to permit background processes, it will maintain the single-application mode, with the Home button being the Finder that quits each application as you switch.I did not know what it was called, but now I understand that it is what ...