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Quantum chemistry and simulation help characterize coordination complex of elusive element 61

When element 61, also known as promethium, was first isolated by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1945, it completed the series of chemical elements known as lanthanides. However, aspects of the element’s exact chemical nature have remained a mystery until last year, when a team of scientists from ORNL and the National Institute of Standards and Technology used a combination of experimentation and computer simulation to purify the promethium radionuclide and synthesize a coordination complex that was characterized for the first time. The results of their work were recently published in Nature.

What’s Wrong with Symbolic Logic?

Actually, nothing is wrong with it if you are a computer science major. It’s just that it has no place in the philosophy department.

From the point of anyone wanting to work in natural language, symbolic logic has all of the vices of mathematics and none of its virtues. That is, it is obscure to the point of incomprehensibility (given the weak neurons of this English major at any rate), and it leads to no useful outcome in the domain of human affairs. This would not be so bad were it not for all those philosophy major curricula that ask freshmen to take a course in it as their “introduction” to philosophy. For anyone looking to explore the meaning of life, this is a complete turnoff.

What were the philosophy mavens thinking?

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