Old Friends and Titration

A college friend that I'd lost track of recently got in contact with me. Knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I'd hear from him after college. So I was pleasantly surprised when I opened my email yesterday.

This inspired me to locate a few other friends that had wandered away as post-college life beckoned. Two of them wrote back to me almost immediately. Amusingly, one of them replied thusly:

"What a wonderful surprise to receive your friend invite. Ground Rule no.1: no cracking of column chromatography joke!"

This particular friend studied chemistry and philosophy (among other things) at Berkeley. The column chromatography joke he mentioned was an ongoing friendly jab that I'd make now and again. Not knowing enough about what he actually did as a chemist, and being reasonably curious about it, I'd ask, from time to time, about what he'd titrated in the lab today. Or, when he arrived at philosophy club having come straight from lab, "how'd titration go today?"

For those of you not in the know, titration is a process whereby chemists determine the concentration of a substance. It usually involves the use of a titrant (of known concentration) held in a burette over a flask of a reactant solution. The titrant is then slowly added to the solution until the solution turns the desired color, thus indicating it's concentration. Since this color is typically pink; I have always titrated poorly. Anyhow, most of you have done this in a chemistry class at one time or another.

Needless to say, real chemists don't actually determine concentrations this way very often. They have machines to do this for them; and even if they didn't, you wouldn't catch a researcher doing this sort of menial lab work. So it was a bit of a low blow to continually insinuate that he was titrating all the time.

I guess it was a bit like asking Kris what the biology homework was everyday at lunch during junior year when he wasn't in a biology class. Although that was unintentional.