Please Note! Before I go any further, given the headline topic, it behooves me to point out that there are great benefits to perusing the material on Mole day. You may be a chemist who is sure that you know all about moles, or someone who is certain that there is no use or purpose to reading this, or somebody who otherwise has simply no interest in the subject. Nonetheless, it is important to take the time and made the effort to pay attention here, as will be made clear shortly. Trust me, it is to Your Personal Benefit, honestly.
-OK, so I'll start with the easy part, a quickie wiki on the general topic of mole day:
Mole Day is an unofficial holiday celebrated among chemists, chemistry students, chemistry enthusiasts and Design & Technology teachers and students on October 23, between 6:02 a.m. and 6:02 p.m.,[1][2] making the date 6:02 10/23 in the American style of writing dates. The time and date are derived from the Avogadro number, which is approximately 6.02×1023, defining the number of particles (atoms or molecules) in one mole (mol) of substance, one of the seven base SI units. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mole_Day )
Not such a great definition, how much or many, but not what it is or is for. Of course, you can readily see that it deals with molecules, while my illustration is sort of a stylized atom, but before you get on my case, please remember the Noble Gases, whose molecules are but single atoms, so there. At any rate, were sort of at an intersection of physics and chemistry. To get a handle on this we need to look back to processes and procedures as they wee before we redefined the SI units and such. If you were to make water from scratch, you'd combine two hydrogen atoms with one oxygen atom. Normally, both of those elements exist as molecules, however, H2 and O2, so you'd mix two hydrogen molecules and one oxygen molecule and get 2 water molecules. (2H2+O2=2(H2O)). Hard to grab those tiny suckers, though. So we look up hydrogen and it has a mass of 1 amu, so H2 would be 2amu. Oxygen is 16 amu, so O2 is 32 amu. An amu is still minuscule, but if we multiply by a big enough number we'll get a serviceable quantity. Thus evolved the gram molecular weight, or mole. 1 mole of H2 is 2 grams, and one mole of O2 is 32 grams, so we mix 4 grams of H2 with 32 grams of O2 to get 36 grams of water. Easy peasy, right? That "big enough number" is Avogadro's number, the number of atoms/molecules in a mole. Of course, we do have to find a way to weigh these gases, but we now have an idea what moles are good for.
-I picked 2 gases because getting there started with the gas laws, which were largely developed in the 17th century. They deal with ideal gases which, of course, don't exist any more than das ding an sich does, but real gases are a close enough Imagine a closed cylinder with a piston in one end. Fill it with a gas, and the gas will undergo Brownian motion at any temperature above absolute zero, little particles bouncing around at random with energies and hence velocities statistically roughly proportional to the temperature. (First described by Robert Brown in 1827, we really didn't have that good of a handle on Brownian motion until some guy named Albert Einstein wrote a paper on it in 1905.) All that bouncing off the walls creates Pressure, Temperature dependent pressure. Guy-Lussac formulated this thusly P=kT, where k is some constant, assuming, of course, that the Volume does not change. If you push the piston in, you obviously compress the gas, because you decrease the Volume. This generated Boyle's Law, that the pressure of an ideal gas is inversely proportional to its volume (at a constant temperature) (PV=k) for some other constant k. Pulling the piston out, of course, lessens the volume and decreases the pressure, often seen as a partial vacuum if performed in an environment which includes normal outside air pressure. Meanwhile, Charles' Law describes the fact that the volume of a gas held at a constant pressure will vary in accordance with the temperature, in essence, V=Tk (yet another constant). So, you can massage all of those around to formulate a Universal Gas Law for the kinetic theory of gases (bouncy, bouncy) and net/aggregate all of the constants into one Unified constant R, as follows: PV=nRT. What, what's that "n" doing in there? That is the number of moles of gas, because if you add more gas to the container, then obviously the pressure, temperature or volume must increase, right? Enter our old friend Amadeo Avogadro who formulated Avogadro's Law (cue da wiki):
Avogadro's Law states that the relationship between the masses of the same volume of all gases (at the same temperature and pressure) corresponds to the relationship between their respective molecular weights. Hence, the relative molecular mass of a gas can be calculated from the mass of a sample of known volume.
Huh? Okay, how about the volume of a gas is proportional to the number of atoms or molecules regardless of the nature of the gas, or, better yet equal volumes of all gases, at the same temperature and pressure, have the same number of molecules. Yep, a cubic foot of any gas at one atmosphere of pressure and 65 degrees will have the same number of molecules as a cubic foot of any other gas at that temperature and pressure. This is what ties it all together and permits us to formulate a truly Universal Gas Law: PV=nRT. Whew!
-NOW, About That Reward Benefit: On April 30, 2017, Quartz published The psychological importance of wasting time by Olivia Goldhill. It is here: https://qz.com/970924/the-psychological-importance-of-wasting-time/ , it is short, and it is worth the read. For Grins. "google"(tm) that exact title, "The psychological importance of wasting time", and check the results. As of 10/22/2019, the first page serves up The article in Quartz already cited, The Psychological Importance of Wasting Time - Allison Hudson (https://medium.com/@allyhudson03/the-psychological-importance-of-wasting-time-c1c486d41eba ), The psychological importance of wasting time – SACAP (https://www.sacap.edu.za/blog/psychology/wasting-time/), Wasting Time May Be the Best Thing You Do Today ... ( link to Quartz), The Psychological Importance of Wasting Time - Self-Coaching (404), The Art Of Wasting Time And Its Psychological Importance (looks like excerpts from Quartz), Wasting Time May Be the Best Thing You Do Today ...(https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-couch/201201/wasting-time-may-be-the-best-thing-you-do-today), The psychological importance of wasting time | Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14231158), and that's just page 1 (and not all of it either). Clearly, there is profound psychological benefit to "wasting time", creating an interesting paradox in that said benefit(s) mean it isn't really wasting time. It seems that we do waaaay to much multi-tasking and not nearly enough half-tasking or non-tasking.
-So get with it! Stop tasking and go waste some time. Re-read this column, take a stroll outside, go sit and look at the sky, play table top football or make paper airplanes. Grab a buddy and go out to a somewhat busy outdoor area look up and point, when people ask what is going on tell them that you're trying to overcome your pathological fear of crowds. You'll thank me later. You'll thank me later.
-Title Image is Atom
-It's an open thread, so have at it. The floor is yours .
- -Cross posted from caucus99percent.com