What's your favorite journal?

Organic Letters is my favorite journal. There are a number of reasons why, and herein I will try and coerce you to take my stance.

The beauty of a continuously updated electronic book

I guess this blog post could be called "The Portable Chemist's Consultant Part 2" (see part 1 here). The reason for the existence of this blog post is three-fold: 1) to write about the advantages of an electronic book that is continuously updated; 2) to show you how to update this book once you have it on your iPad; and 3) have a history of updates on this page so that you can check back to see when the next update comes out. 

Somebody Tell Me What These Numbers Mean

Or, a completely unscientific survey of total syntheses published in JACS in the last 30 or so years.

Who wants to be a heterocyclic millionaire?

In case you didn't know, Phil has been teaching a Heterocyclic Chemistry class here at Scripps since 2005. This course consists of approximately two dozen 1.5-hour lectures. Other than the students, there are many Scripps postdocs and industrial chemists auditing this class (25-30 people from local companies are sitting in each time). Phil discusses traditional topics such as pyridines, pyrroles, furans and indoles as well as more specialized topics such as benzodiazepines and alkaloid biosynthesis. The industrial chemists are also encouraged to bring in their personal chemistry problems and write it up on the chalkboard before class for "free consulting" from Phil (avoiding IP-sensitive functional groups and side chains, of course!). This course wraps up with a fun class quiz under the title of "Heterocyclic Millionaire" where Phil brings out his best Regis impersonations.

(Read on to see the midterm yourself!)