The little lip at the top of the spray can and the little indentation in which the nozzle is set catch paint from the spray. On extended spraying, it pools there and begins to slosh out and drip onto the floor. If the top of the spray can were a smooth curve without this lip and indentation, the can would work much better.

So, it turns out, at least according to www.dictionary.com, that “configurate” actually is a word, but its meaning is essentially indistinguishable from “configure,” and it costs one more syllable and two more letters. William Safire could probably give a name to this phenomenon, but it’s notable also in the cases of “obligated” versus “obliged” (where the savings is a more impressive 2 syllables for 2 letters), and in that of “ironical” versus “ironic” (again 2 and 1).

As much as I love my Tempur-Pedic pillow, and as much as I pine for one of their full-size memory foam mattresses, I can’t help but make fun of the fact that theirs is surely the only successful international corporate logotype to predominantly feature an ass-crack.

Several years ago I undertook to update George Orwell’s classic maxims of clear prose, from his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, to better reflect modern sensibilities.

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or figure of speech which has been run into the ground.

2. Never employ a polysyllabic construction where a monosyllabic construction will suffice.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always be sure to cut that word right out of there.

4. The passive is never to be used when the active is possible.

5. Never use patois, neologisms, or argot if you can think of everyday English equivalents.

6. Any of these heuristics should be disregarded, if, in the course of putting them through their paces, respectively, one is impelled to commit unpardonable stylistic faux pas.

You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen,
Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen.
But do you recall
The most tragic reindeer of all?

Rudolph the sh*t-faced reindeer (Reindeer)
Had a very ruddy nose. (Like a crabapple!)
And if you ever saw it, (saw it)
You would say his drinking shows. (Like Bukowski!)

All of the other reindeer (reindeer)
Call him names behind his back, (Like degenerate!)
So Rudolph the sh*t-faced reindeer, (reindeer)
Crawls inside a fifth of Jack. (As in Daniels!)

Then one hazy Christmas morn,
Santa intervened: (Oh, no, no)
“Rudolph, you have wrecked your life:
You crashed my sleigh and it killed your wife.”

Now the reindeer take turns driving (driving)
Rudolph every other day (Even Saturdays!)
To meetings of a 12-step program (Al-Anon!)
At the local YMCA. (Like where Daddy goes!)

The original idea of the sandwich was to produce a meal which could be consumed tidily without utensils, perhaps while engaged in some other activity. But why sacrifice quality? Why not take the original concept to its logical conclusion and put a 4-course meal on a sandwich? Exploit the spatially linear form of a submarine sandwich to mimic the temporally linear form of a multi-course meal. The sandwich becomes biased along its length, with one end clearly indicated as the starting end, which contains ingredients evocative of a soup course. As you eat along the sandwich, the soup ingredients give way to salad, and then to meat, and finally to dessert. Obviously, planning the dishes to compliment one another is important here, even moreso than in a traditional multi-course meal.

It’s my understanding that freezing water fast enough to prevent crystallization and its negative effects on biological systems is a classical probem in cryobiology and cryonics. A more mundane application is food preservation, where flash-freezing has demonstrable advantages over slow freezing.

It makes sense that water is slow to freeze, because it has such large thermal mass. In a body of water of any appreciable size, the time it takes to conduct heat away from the central regions to the periphery is significant. There are inherent limits to the speed at which heat can be conducted out of a body of water. Freezing water by lowering its temperature is, obviously, limited by the speed at which you can move heat away, and the larger the body of water the slower that speed becomes.

But there’s another way to freeze water. Consider the phase diagram for water here. The line from point M to point O represents the boundary between liquid and solid phases, and is either the freezing line or the melting line depending on which side you start from. Water is fairly unique among materials in that this line has a negative slope; among other things, this is an expanation for why ice is less dense than liquid water. For my purpose, please notice that at higher pressures the freezing point of water is lower than at ambient and lower pressures.

I propose to freeze water by first compressing it, so that its freezing point is lowered. Then it is cooled to a temperature below its freezing point at normal pressure. Because the elevated pressure will keep it in liquid form, it does not matter how fast the temperature is lowered, because the phase transition will be held off. Then, once it’s cooled to, say, -5C, you rapidly release the hydrostatic pressure and the liquid, now under ambient conditions and well below its freezing point, should solidify very rapidly. Unlike temperature, the hydrostatic pressure of a liquid can be varied essentially instantaneously throughout its volume.

I read now here that this technique is actually in use to freeze food products. I haven’t yet discovered if it has been applied to cryobiological problems, however. It’s generally referred to as “Pressure Shift Freezing.”

Even educated non-scientists know about fullerenes, the novel allotropes of elemental carbon resembling soccer balls or geodesic domes. C60, a spherical structure containing 60 carbon atoms, is the archetype. Each carbon atom in a classical fullerene is sp² hybridized, meaning essentially that it is bound to three other atoms arranged more-or-less in a plane with it. A carbon atom is said to be “saturated” if it has four bonds (sp³ hybridization), and any carbon with less than four–like those in fullerene structures–is said to be “unsaturated” because it could, at least in terms of classical valence bond theory, accept at least one more bond. These are the same “saturated” and “unsaturated” that gives us the terms “saturated fat” and “unsaturated fat.” The chemistry to take an unsaturated carbon to a saturated one is rudimentary and is practiced every day on vast industrial scales.

So I’m driving along the other day and it occurs to me that fullerenes are unsaturated–they’re just carbon. Could we dump them in a reactor with hydrogen and a metal catalyst, just like we do with the vegetable oil that ends up in your oreo cookie filling, and produce the saturated hydrocarbon equivalents of fullerenes? Hydrofullerenes? So I went to the library and, per Hirsch and Brettreich’s excellent book Fullerenes, found out that the short answer is “Yes, but not exhaustively.” While partially-hydrogenated fullerenes like C60H36 can be produced and are relatively stable, exhaustive hydrogenation has not been achieved and is probably impossible, at least under practical conditions. This is believed to be a consequence of steric crowding on the exterior of the carbon shell; the more positively-charged protons you stick on to it, after a point, the less stable it gets.

The next-most intuitive question, at least for me, is “How about fluoridation?” The realization that flourine atoms can be treated analogously to hydrogen atoms in hydrocarbon chemistry gave us Teflon and the whole modern field of fluorocarbon chemistry. So if we can’t make perhydrofullerenes, how about their perfluoro analogs? A sort of “Teflon sphere” idea? Turns out, again per Hirsch and Brettreich, that the answer is “No.” Again, while partially-fluorinated fullerenes can be and have been produced, perfluorination turns out to be unfavorable for reasons which are analogous to those which disfavor perhydrogenation. The only difference is a sign change: While the surface of perhydrofullerene is too positively charged to be stable under practical conditions, the surface of perfluorofullerene is too negatively charged to be stable under practical conditions.

So my hare-brained idea is this: Try to fully saturate C60 using a “hetero-fluoro-hydro” strategy, so that the complimentary positive and negative partial charges of protons and fluorine atoms on the sphere’s surface stabilize the structure. You could either hydrogenate and then fluoridate, or fluoridate and then hydrogenate. My intuition favors the latter, because while it’s known that fluorine will displace hydrogen, the opposite reaction does not occur, to my knowledge.

I’m not an expert in the field by any means but I’ve done some rudimentary literature searches using phrases like “hydrofluorofullerene,” “fluorohydrofullere,” etc. and not found any precedent.

As to benefit, who knows? My readings to date indicate that fully saturated fullerenes of any type have been produced only in trace quantities, if at all. It would be a significant achievement to produce saturated fullerene in significant yield. Then you study its properties and start to think applications. If nothing else, being the first to make lots of saturated C60 could be good for one’s scientific career.

The point has been made that the fullerenes and fullerene type structures are highly stable. They are even more stable, in fact, than carbon in its adamantane geometry (i.e. diamond), because the sp² hybridization of the carbon atoms in fullerenes allows for an enormous amount of resonance stabilization when the double bond electrons delocalize through the enormous pi-system. (Which is what makes them conductive.) This is something I glossed over earlier in discussing the energy costs of saturating fullerenes, when I only mentioned steric repulsion at the surface. If you saturate a fullerene, you’re also breaking a very large resonance stabilization. This is why, as some have suggested, it appears to be feasible to exhaustively perfluoridate diamond surfaces–adamantane carbon is sp³. But it is not safe to assume that because diamond can be perfluoridated, so can fullerenes, again because diamond is not resonance stabilized and fullerenes are.

The hetero-fluoro-hydro strategy I propose might offset the steric costs of saturation with complimentary electrostatic interactions on the surface, but I don’t think it’ll help much with the resonance-breaking problem. However, because the studies I’ve seen suggest that it’s really not too hard to at least partially saturate C60, my intuition is that the steric problem is much more significant than the resonance-breaking problem. After all, the first double bond should be the hardest to break, because it will have the most extended resonance and hence the most stabilization. And since they’ve already made it to C60H36 by conventional hydrogenation techniques, it follows that sterics are the limiting factor, not resonance.

Peroxidation appears to be a workable strategy, c.f. Chemical Physics Letters 384 (2004) 283-287. Tsukuda and co-workers demonstrate convincingly that they can produce C60On with n <= 30 by corona discharge ionization. Again, it hasn't been done in quantity, but Hirsch and Brettreich seem to think it could be. The paper includes a really cool figure showing C60O30. I would also note that traditional "wet" metal catalytic epoxidation has been tried many ways, and they can't seem to get more than 6 oxygen atoms installed.