h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

They've now renamed them arsenoles I believe.

Whilst not as funny, this still has potential in the football world

I knew what this was about as soon as I say the name pyrrole appear at the top. Nice one

You saw it a bit quicker than me then Orcus. I had to read down as far as phosphole before I saw what was coming

Ah, it's one of my favourite chemical anecdotes so I'm primed before you start

Well, when I draw the structure into our reagent management system, and get it to name it, it refers to it as [1H]-Arsole.

Nicely done!

Hmm, I got that from an old lecturer of mine who told me IUPAC had renamed them.

However, a google search for Arsole gets many many hits whereas that for Arsenole gets almost none.
It sees he was (and hence me be proxy) having been speaking out of my arseoles.

Long may they live!

Sadly chemdraw cannot generate a name for the structure of arseole, shame.

It's a classic Chemistry anecdote isn't it? One of my colleagues once wrote a (fictitious) paper on the chemistry of moronic arsoles, made by reacting moronic acid with an arsole.

Incidentally ChemDraw doesn't generate a structure for arsEole, but it works for arsole, or my version does anyway.

I did it the other way around. Drew Arseole and aked it to create a name

I think they do it on purpose.

If you stick "Molecules with Silly or Unusual Names" into Google, you get a whole page with lots of daft named chemicals, minerals and the like. Spamol and penguinone are two I quite like.

Also, if you Google "nearing zero" there is a massive collection of (some quite good) science based cartoons....

I saw that self-same colleague yesterday, and we tried to hunt for the paper...but it's vanished.

But of course there's always "The Journal of Unpublished Chemistry" - I got a paper in there under the initials HK...

Yes the nearing zero cartoons are quite amusing,

>>Sadly chemdraw cannot generate a name for the structure of arseole, shame.<<

actually it can. It was just me drawing the structure wrong

This takes me back to my student days when I studied chemistry at university. There we developed the arsoles further. Diificult to achieve, but if you can substitute in a benzene ring you get benz-arsole. The next (hazardous) step is to perform a condensation reaction with succinic acid to yield succin-benz-arsole

Olé!!

Is The Journal of Unpublished Chemistry still up and running? I must admit I haven't looked at it in ages. Which paper was yours?

I heard Mike was back in the country and looking for his next post-doc. I'm surprised he didn't keep a copy of the Moronic Arsoles paper, he was always frighteningly well organised and it was a seminal work.

Speaking of humorous chemistry, do you remember the reference of the nanoputians paper? I always thought that was quite amusing, not the least because they somehow managed to talk their way into JACS!