Avocados and Sudden Epiphany

At the beginning of last semester our RA, Travis, had put paper Lego minifigure heads on the doors of the rooms on our floor, labeled with each person's name. We thought that was great, but this semester he left it up to us to decorate our own doors. My roommates set about drawing door signs for themselves with crayons (as it turns out, as soon as you abandon your stubborn teenage pride you grow back into coloring with crayons) but I wanted to do something better, because that's how I roll. I'm still working on my own sign, but I decided that wasn't enough, so I made one for the entire apartment in photoshop. Behold.

Yeah, this is probably proof that I've been listening to too much Retro Wave while doing homework.
As a side note, that chrome effect is WAY harder than you think it is. We're talking, like, six layers of gradients.

As I hoped, everyone loved it, and we're going to print a big one to put on our door. Basically we want our door to say you wish you were as cool as us, because nothing strikes fear into the hearts of your rivals like laser grids and neon pink. While talking about the sign and its overwhelming 1980's influence, we theorized a substance that is, in fact, the condensed and purified essence of the eighties, which we named Compound-80. A single drop of Compound-80 can turn a normal group photo into the gloriousness you see before you.

Now, I expect you want to know what's up with the title of this post, but by now you should know that I always get around to it eventually. This story has little to do with avocados, although I just recently discovered that avocados actually taste okay. This is a story about chemistry.

Back in my sophomore Honors Chem class, we learned about a special number. It is called Avogadro's number (or Avocado's number if you have any sense of humor at all), and it is defined as 6.022 x 10^23. That seems kind of random, much like the quantity e in other realms of math and science, and naturally my classmates and I wanted to know what the heck it meant. My teacher explained it as the number of atoms in a mole (a mole is a measure of matter to chemists, and a small, furry burrowing creature to everyone else), such that a mole of a particular element had mass equal to the atomic mass of that element. It made the math easier, but in practical terms that definition made NO sense whatsoever. It all seemed much too arbitrary.

Three years later, while teaching myself chemistry again, I finally realized something: Avogadro's number is the number of atomic mass units in a gram. For some of you that clarification might not help at all, in which case I'm sorry, but for me it was like harp music and beams of light descending from heaven as I rose to a new level of sublime enlightenment. I had never thought of the quantity as a unit conversion factor, and that realization alone will make Chem 105 as much as 12% easier. Don't ask me where I get my numbers--they're just as fake as all other statistics.

So either you learned something just now, or you're saying to yourself Will, you idiot--it took you three years to realize that? If the latter is the case, you aren't entirely right. It only took me a matter of seconds to learn the truth. It took three years to occur to me to Google it.

Hic Manebimus Optime!