Annoying Peeve: Naming substances after the institution at which they are discovered sucks.

[NNadir]

So today I'm reading a paper with this title: Selective Recovery of Rare Earth Elements from Mine Ore by Cr-MIL Metal–Organic Frameworks (Charith Fonseka, Seongchul Ryu, Youngwoo Choo, Mark Mullett, Ramesh Thiruvenkatachari, Gayathri Naidu, and Saravanamuthu Vigneswaran, ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering 2021 9 (50), 16896-16904)

MIL? What the hell is MIL? Metal ionic liquid? Methylisoleucine? I looked up the synthesis in the supplementary data, nothing "MIL-like" was there either.

No, I had to poke around.

MIL is "Matérial Institut Lavoisier"

Another example of this stuff - metal organic framework (MOF) people do this a lot is UiO-66, a famous MOF named after the University of Oslo.

This kind of thing is not helpful to young people, or, speaking only for myself, old people either.

Pet Peeve over.

[eppur_se_muova]

1. The object lesson here should be N-rays ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-ray

[NNadir]

2. This story is ably told in a wonderful little book I read years ago on the plane...

Yes, We Have No Neutrons: An Eye-Opening Tour Through the Twists and Turns of Bad Science

It's a wonderful read.

[eppur_se_muova]

3. I take it the title is in re. Pons and Fleischmann -- could be an interesting read, thanks. nt

[NNadir]

4. Yes, correct. It's a Wiley publication, and goes back to 1997, but probably still a good read...

...if it's still in print.

[eppur_se_muova]

6. Well, at least we don't use "oil of Mirbane" or "Julia's alcohol" anymore. nt

[NNadir]

7. Well actually, I remember when we had to buy books on named reactions. One of the fun things about March's...

Advanced Organic Chemistry was that the names of reactions were stripped away in favor of a mechanistic description.

Personally, that was probably a better way to teach Organic Chemistry. One of the things that always annoyed me when non-chemists who talked about having to take organic chemistry for some other field complained "it's all memorization."

No, it's all mechanism, I think. Somewhere in my library is Lowry and Richardson's Theory and Mechanism in Organic Chemistry.

Organic synthesis used to be my life, but it's been many years since I even opened an organic chemistry monograph. I ended up in analytical chemistry, something of a surprise to me, but I got here by being there I guess.

Sigh...