Week Three - Website Review

http://www.knowledgebydesign.com/tlmc/tlmc_cg.html
This site is not for me. I'm not very math-oriented anymore, and I don't find it particularly interesting or useful for my own purposes. I liked the one video that showed the pyramid shaped molecule being superimposed into the pyramid. Probably because it was the most basic! I just didn't really understand what I was looking at for the most part.

NEXT!

I really liked the Water Concepts site. It takes a common molecule, water, and breaks it down in layman's terms that are easy to understand and relate to. I liked that it asked questions throughout the page, to kind of test your knowledge along the way, which is particularly useful as we are (re)learning this material. It's easy to breeze through paragraphs and read without actually comprehending. The questions make you stop and think....am I comprehending?!

Week Three - Transitional Metal: PLATINUM

A few years ago I helped my friend pick out his wedding band, and he had his heart set on one made of platinum. I decided to dig deeper into my friend's symbolic commitment.

Platinum is indeed a transitional metal, extremely wear and tarnish-resistant, appearing greyish-white when pure and sporting the "Pt" logo. I was surprised to read that it is more precious than gold, worth more than twice as much, and about 30x rarer!! 

Platinum is often used in many kinds of medical implants, including pacemakers, and while studies have not revealed evidence that platinum free radicals are toxic to the body, it certainly seems like a logical concern any time a foreign object is introduced into our bodies. After all, some platinum complexes, while great for chemotherapy, have severe side effects such as irreversible kidney damage and deafness. Interestingly enough, platinum as jewelry is a safe choice for sensitive skin as it is hypoallergenic. I wonder what happens inside the body that makes platinum so potentially harmful, and if any of those effects, on a much smaller scale, have transdermal potential effects. 

Week One - Quiz Results

It's nice to revisit a subject, Chemistry in this case, and not feel like you have to learn everything from scratch (unlike TCM Theory, for example)....these concepts are familiar! It turns out my long-term memory may not be as poor as I originally thought.

I kind of guessed on the coffee question - let me talk it out here to see why I answered/guessed correctly. So it's homogenous because it's black coffee - there's no other substances mixed in there like cream, sugar or Bailey's :). It's impure because....I'm not certain on this one, but I think because not all coffee is created equally and maybe different kinds have different acidities or types of beans that can have different chemical reactions...?