Drinking from a Fire Hose

PhD Comics (c) Jorge Cham

When I took Introduction to Architecture, Luis, a classmate used to say the same thing every day: there was so much material being presented, that trying to absorb any of it was like trying to take a drink from a fire hose. It was the first time I'd heard the saying, but certainly not the last. As a student of Industrial Engineering, I've come to appreciate that sentiment on many occasions. I cannot count the number of times that, despite hours of studying, I could not grasp a particular concept.

In one particularly infuriating case, in Chem II, a homework question wanted to know what the value of K was. Trying to pick it out of the textbook was no help; not only was there not a search engine, but the index was useless to me. I read the chapter from start to finish, then read the previous chapter, then the next one. I tried searching for "K" on the net, as it related to the problem, and got nowhere. Sure, there was Kc, Ksp, Kip, Ka, Kb, Kw, Kf, K-prettymuchanyletteryoucanthinkofandthensome, and don't even get me started on the Qs. But nowhere was there simply an explanation of what K was. It wasn't until three chapters later, after I had wasted almost an entire weekend on it and long since given up weeks earlier, that our dear professor explained to us that K was, in fact, any constant derived from dividing the products of an equation by the reactants. Or, more simply put, multiply all the parts of the right side, and divide them by the parts of the left side.

...unless it was Kd, because that one you divide the reactants by the products. And also, K has like a million other definitions, most of which are completely unrelated...

fig. 1

And it's not like this is an isolated incident. Even as recently this last week, I could not, for the life of me or anyone I hold dear, find any suitable explanation for how to find the pH of a solution given only the molar concentration of two separate chemicals. I still don't know, to be honest. In all likelihood, I'll probably just have to hope it's not on the final exam, or that one of my future Industrial Engineering jobs comes forward with a million dollar proposal and says "Well, everything seems to be in order, Mr. Safford, but we need to know one more thing... If we prepared a solution by adding 15.4 mL of 2.2 M NaF to 12.1 mL of 0.13 M HF. What is the pH of the final solution?"

(see fig. 1)

It's not like there's not a million sites telling me how to find pH in almost any other conceivable circumstance. It's not like I don't understand the principles of acid/base chemistry. It's that nowhere, in the course of the book, the lecture, the lab, or apparently on the world wide web, did anyone ever think to, you know, provide an example of this particular type of problem, at least not one that I was able to find in yet another weekend of fruitless searching through way too much information to try and find the one thing I needed. I needed a sip, and instead...

fig. 2

 Once I actually had to invent my own formula, because despite the fact the homework asked me to calculate partial pressures using only Kp and Total Pressure. This would seem like an easy task on the surface. It was not. I could find formulas to establish what Kp was, ideal gas constant, Kp how it related to Kc, and Partial Pressure as it related to moles and total pressure, so I could see point A, and Point Z, but in between was a whole lot of info I neither understood, nor was able to fully comprehend at the time. Thankfully, the particular homework program gave alternate examples that you could cheerfully fail on over and over before tackling the "real" problem. I let it give me the answer to the example question, then used my meager math skills to take the answer, the two bits of data the question provided, and create a relationship between the two that worked repeatedly. It worked. Sure, in an ideal world, the light would have clicked on upstairs and I suddenly would understand how to navigate through each of the formulas I needed in the way that I needed, to come up with the answer the proper, intended way. But in an ideal world, someone, somewhere, would have been able to show me how to do it at least once while I still had my chemical training-wheels on. In the real world, sometimes you just want the answer instead.

(see fig 2.)

And so, after much thought, I have decided to start this blog, to help students through concepts that utterly baffled me, took way too long to understand, or even ones that came easily to me but did not to my classmates. My goals are simple: to educate in science, math, and finance, in layman's terms as often as possible. My focus will be on tiny, bite-sized chunks of information. Most of you will never read anything more than the one blog entry that discusses your problem, which you will get from a Google search, and promptly forget about this site. But some of you might decide to check out some other articles on the site, and perhaps to stay a while and learn some things, or even to contribute some knowledge yourself. Some of you might even decide to follow the blog and that would be wonderful. 

But for me, I'll be happy just knowing I saved one more student a lot of frustration about one tiny little thing. Our chosen fields of study are difficult enough, why not help each other out? This blog will be a hopeful haven of daily bites of knowledge for students and armchair enthusiasts alike. Let this be your Daily Constant. 

Or... you know... there's always Yahoo Answers...

Yes, it's exactly like that.