Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist

Good talk, as usual there was a few times when Niel got a little pushy and over bearing but thats his style I suppose. Its not something I am used to hearing from a scientist, insulting other scientific fields is usually considered quite rude and a sign of lacking intelligence. For instance the complicated jargon he was insulting in the fields of chemistry and medicine happen to serve a purpose. The common english language is ever changing and ambiguous that is why we use a dead language which is much more precise and static, Lantin. It may not matter if the name of say a comet or some astronomical phenomenon is ambiguous or because the language has evolved it takes on a new connotation but, it does matter if that happens in the case of medicine or chemistry. It can cause deaths in the worst case senario and simply complicates things at the least. I’ve had people actually tell me that we use such language to keep our knowledge a secret, confusing the old alchemist tradition with modern day chemistry I suppose. Trust me the only reason we use the naming system we do in chemistry, which isn’t based on latin like biology and medicine, is so we can be precise and because the system allows us to identify certain aspects of the compound in question by what its name is. It tells you if the compound is metal or nonmetal, transition ion or not, how many atoms of a certain element are present, what each elements charge might be, etc. but most importantly it reduces the neccesity of memorizing a different name for every compound. The list of compounds that have managed to retain there common names, mostly polyatomic ions like ammonia or cyanide, is long enough- trust me.