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A critique of a recent research paper wherein the authors argue that AI generated content is more environmentally friendly than human writing or art When I began teaching organic chemistry, I watched whatever open course lectures I could find for guidance and inspiration. The lecture series that had the most profound effect on my approach
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I’ve had a project idea on the back burner for some time for an in-class module centered around a Socratic dialogue. The idea is that a student volunteer would interact with me as I delivered the lesson (I had the mechanism of second order nucleophilic substitution in mind). I want to turn a passive lecture
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I recently bought a chessboard so that I can play against my young daughter and we can learn the game together. In a previous essay on chirality (right/left asymmetry) I used the example of boxing to describe the possible combinations of two chiral objects. Looking at my new wooden chessboard, it occurred to me that
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In the physical sciences, experiments are designed to potentially falsify some hypothesis, which is an educated guess about some state of affairs in the physical world. Philosophy, in contrast, proceeds by way of thought experiments. A thought experiment is some imagined situation or puzzle that is designed to test the boundaries of a definition, a
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I’ve been teaching organic chemistry for about 10 years now, and introductory physical chemistry for maybe half as long. In that time I’ve had to explain certain concepts what feels like hunderds of times, and I’ve gotten pretty efficient at it. Any long time teacher of any subject will develop their own way of breaking
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Life isn’t fair, is it? No one consulted us teachers and educators before launching these large language models that would effectively break many parts of education as we know it. And now it’s our responsibility to fix things, to rebuild and rethink, because no one else could do a good job of it. So, where
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I don’t like generative artificial intelligence as it currently exists. Part of this is just a personal reaction. As an amateur artist, I felt my stomach drop when I saw a midjourney generated image win an art contest and the person behind it responded to the backlash by saying something like get over it, art
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I decided to call this blog The Model Kit because the way that I have come to approach teaching organic chemistry is to begin with these simple physical molecular models and to teach the subject in a similar way as an artist learns to draw by observing an object. Learning organic chemistry is often compared
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At 45 years of age, I’m looking back and reflecting on the fact that I’ve spent most of my adult life in academia. I’m not sure whether I should find this surprising. I feel like I’m suited to it, but things could have turned out very differently. I always did exceedingly well on standardized tests,
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Using the insights from organic chemistry to understand asymmetries everywhere. Asymmetries make the world interesting. They also arise spontaneously in the evolution of complex systems such as living beings. Asymmeties abound in organic biological molecules such as proteins, carbohydrates and the building blocks of DNA because carbon-based molecules share a property we are familiar with
The Model Kit 