promiscurity

We've all seen this cartoon a thousand times and I'm always struck by how relevant and accurate it is.

Lemme share my own Quartz moment.

My degrees are in organic chemistry. When I was doing my undergraduate research project, my mom asked me what it was about. My mother is a smart woman but has zero science education.

I thought, okay, start simple. So I drew this:

I opened my mouth to start talking about the project and she stopped me and said:

"What do those lines mean?"

I just sat there mute, utterly wrong-footed. This is a totally reasonable question, but to me, it was like I'd written a word and she'd asked me what the letters meant. This notation (standard molecular drawing notation) is so second nature to me that it's every bit as natural as writing English.

I had not fully appreciated how far I'd need to downshift to explain this. A friend of mine on the same project was asked to give a talk to a group of non-science folks about what we were doing and she made slides with overlays to let them know what the notation means.

The above notation is shorthand for this:

The lines are bonds. The single line is a single bond, the double line is a double bond (well...in benzene technically each bond is 1.5 bonds but this is the usual way it's drawn even though it's not really accurate). Each corner is a carbon atom. We don't draw the carbon atoms unless we're calling attention to them, and we leave off the hydrogens entirely unless they're significant for some reason, they're just understood to be there.

None of this would be obvious to someone who's never taken chemistry. But I had to remind myself of this, and my mom's question knocked me for a loop for a second.

We got it sorted out.

This really becomes an issue when there are news events having to do with science. Vaccines come to mind. People have HEARD of DNA, but they've barely heard of RNA, and even if they have, most don't understand it, or what it does or what it means. There was a lot of effort put into making analogies and cartoons and other tools to help explain how an mRNA vaccine works, but too many people still hear it and think SCARY.

Historically it was made from murex snails and was hugely expensive and used by royalty, but chemically it’s similar to indigo so the class was able to create it in the lab without snails.

Thus with xAa as the imperative 'dispact/throw', the scales determinative doesn't belong to that word and is thus a word in and of itself the 3-consonant jws.w (the .w is just a plural, it's still 3-consonants), and then .tj which should be =k.

It's more: xAa jws.w ib=k 'chuck your heart on the scales' *ma'at gets obliterated* ptr 'what'.

As an aside; it's not good practice with Middle Egyptian to go 'we can infer this from context' when you can't find that word in one dictionary. You should be consulting at least three. Also, because my ass has been doing this for nearly 20 years, just so you're all aware xAa is in Faulkner: