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what have we got here...

ortho-alkylation of phenol with a terminal olefin, using dirhenium decacarbonyl as the catalyst. oh, yeah, everyone's got rhenium carbonyls lying around the stock room

ok looks like a few non-terminal alkenes worked too

catechol and hydroquinone gave mixed mono- and di-alkylation

orgsyn.org/demo.aspx?prep=v94p

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trying a little experiment here...

went to a page that supplies me with a random English word

gonna put that word into the _Organic Syntheses_ search box

and see what the first hit is

all right the word is "possess"

re: replace or fix web? (politics) 

@packbat @kara_dreamer@plural.cafe eh, you're not wrong, but the stuff that people _do_ put effort into curating all tends to be in fields I don't care about ;=3

the computer-geek bias is infuriating sometimes

re: replace or fix web? (politics) 

@packbat @kara_dreamer@plural.cafe *sighs* yeah, I can't deny that, although I feel like web learning is very much a poisoned pill. sure there's info to be found but you practically have to teach yourself to be a media expert just to find the shit you can actually _trust_. 95% of the web is ad copy, basically

replace or fix web? (politics) 

@packbat nah just kill it. think of everything we could get rid of at a stroke. the web is basically just an unstable buggy half-assed virtual machine at this point

@packbat the web really needs to die and be replaced with something else

asking for money within next 2 days, trying to shut a credit account 

so paypal credit is handing over their business to a new bank that wants to do credit checking, and i don't want a credit score. i need to stop using paypal credit by june 18, but my dad hasn't paid what he promised and there's $600 on my balance.

the good news is that i technically have enough money to make this payment. the bad news is that it'll leave my wallet quite anemic. i'd appreciate any help!

paypal.me/trwnh

salt about Tesla, reference to DeLorean crime 

@maple I'm kinda holding out for the Elon Musk equivalent of John DeLorean getting caught with a suitcase full of coke

@wigglytuffitout I hate to refer to a Brad Bird movie but, you know, there's a career in matching the clothes to the person

politics, transhumanist/singulatarian literature, thoughts (boost with CW) 

From @Azure in vulpine.club/@Azure/1022773850
----
A lot of transhumanist/singulitarian literature really bugs me since it assumes some Big Powerful Thing either benevolently running the world or trashing. Instead of what you would actually want which is people increasing in capability together and those who went before pulling others up along with them and iterating on progressive improvement and whatnot.

It reminds me of David Brin's criticism of Star Wars, where in that world you have a choice to follow The Good King or The Evil King but no agency beyond that.

People claim that universal improvement is 'impossible' but only if you assume it's only available to The Rich and that's good and okay…

(Obviously we need a red and silver flag with a sprocket and synapse and the slogan 'Socialist Transhumanism: No Gods, No Master Computers!')

ooh here's a thing! porphyrin complexes of iron(4) that can achieve certain organic oxidations

cbs.ewha.ac.kr/pub/data/2007_0

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huh. decamethylferrocene can be oxidized to Fe(4). wonder if that's any use for anything

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what's the point of this? hypervalent iodine reagents are one of the few types of chemical reagent that can be made to carry out organic oxidations that traditionally require heavy metals (like hexavalent chromium or osmic acid). and they can be regenerated after use with auxiliary oxidizers that are cheap and clean, like peroxo salts

jeez kinda wonder if hypervalent iron can be a thing. like, people have tried to use inorganic "ferrates" (hexavalent iron salts with the FeO4= anion) as oxidants

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I kinda wanna play with the hypervalent iodine stuff but only with polymer-bound versions. that would offer an easy way to recover and reuse the precious iodine

it's totally a thing. here's a randomly chosen Google Images result for polymer-bound IBX ("IBX" is the usual abbreviation for "iodoxybenzoic acid" which is really a benziodoxole derived from oxidation of 2-iodobenzoic acid)

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I feel like a synthesis like this, in an earlier age of _Organic Syntheses_, would have had a lot more trials done on whether you really needed the weird reagents. there'd be footnotes about how they'd tried (say) methanesulfonic acid or toluenesulfonic acid instead of camphorsulfonic acid, only with poorer results. we'd get more glimpses into the experimental process

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bleh another one of those _Organic Syntheses_ entries where you look at it and think "welp I probably ain't never gonna even think of using this one"

the reaction: oxidative coupling of aryltrialkylsilanes to electron-rich arenes to yield unsymmetrical biaryls. high-valent iodine reagents as the oxidizing agent, in the presence of racemic camphorsulfonic acid (camphorsulfonic acid?! why?) and *gold* catalysis

orgsyn.org/demo.aspx?prep=v96p

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