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Cake day: March 31st, 2025

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  • i don’t mean beta-oxidation, it’s just a series of separated normal reactions. i mean something like this: when first learning about ketones, you might learn about aldol condensation, which has enol as a nucleophile and another carbonyl as electrophile. at some other point you might learn about strecker reaction, which has iminium ion as electrophile and cyanide as nucleophile. but really, what you can do is mix and match, and you can pair enolizable ketone and iminium (mannich reaction) or carbonyl and cyanide (cyanohydrin formation) and then generalize, for example you don’t need strictly ketone for mannich, you can use any electron rich conjugated system like malonate or nitroalkane anion (henry reaction) or phenol or indole. to figure this out you need to study mechanisms. these last two are usually treated as variants of friedel-crafts reaction, but really categories like this are fake

    and to get that right, you need to know how these reactive intermediates look like, how reactive they are, what influences their stability which means that ochem starts with discussion of carbocations, carboanions, radicals, their shapes and orbitals involved, hyperconjugation, solvent effects and the like. and then first reactions taught are sn1/sn2, because these showcase these fundamentals nicely, and from there, it’s about introduction of more compound classes

    we only had synthons introduced during lecture at around 4th year, and only for ochem path, it’s not doing a lot at that point and imo would have much more impact right after ochem intro course



















  • Manufacturers, knowingly or unknowingly, use commercial-grade PG when making cough syrups to cut costs.

    i’d note that there’s zero technical reason why DEG would end up in PG. reaction of water with ethylene oxide gives you ethylene glycol, diethylene glycol and higher analogues and these are then separated by distillation. propylene glycol is made from propylene oxide instead, and it’s more expensive than ethylene oxide. diethylene glycol has little use on its own, at least compared to other glycols

    however,

    The physical properties of diethylene glycol make it an excellent counterfeit for pharmaceutical-grade glycerine (also called glycerol) or propylene glycol