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Steve Cohen

@drstevecohen.bsky.social
593 followers 125 following 545 posts

Chemical history🧪 (podcast “The History of Chemistry”; book “O Mg! How Chemistry Came to Be”)/Author/Jewish music/Yiddish (raised 2 Yiddish-speaking children)/Calligraphy/Genealogy/Etc. Attempts to argue that science isn’t real get you blocked.

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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 19h
Godfather II: where Vito Andolini had his surname changed to Corleone at Ellis Island. Can I scream this again and again? “NO CLERK CHANGED ANYONE’S SURNAME AT ELLIS ISLAND!” Genealogists play whac-a-mole with this ever-present myth.
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
Ruin a book title by adding a word: Dr. No Smoking
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
Ruin a book title by adding a word: Clams Casino Royale
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
Ruin a book title by adding a word: All-of-a-kind Family Feud
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
Ruin a book by adding a word: Watership Downwind
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
Ruin a book by adding a word: The Snowy Day Trader
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
Ruin a book by adding a word: Curious George Carlin
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
Ruin a book by adding a word: Candide Camera
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
I, Robot Chicken
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Sad to hear, 40 years after my aunt Carol Nadelson was the first female president of the APA.
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
J.J. Thomson announced the discovery of the electron this month 129 years ago, in "Cathode Rays," Phil. Mag., 44, 293-316 (1897). (G.J. Stoney had already coined the word "electron" in 1891.) #ChemSky #ChemChat 🧪 Read his paper here: web.lemoyne.edu/giunta/thoms...
web.lemoyne.edu
J. J. Thomson 1897
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Send the Elgin Marbles back.
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Le Bel simultaneously with Van ‘t Hoff had the idea that ”chimie dans l’espace” meant molecules had 3-D shapes. Here is his 1874 paper. #ChemSky #ChemChat 🧪 babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hv...
babel.hathitrust.org
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
This year’s Chemis try Nobel Prize is about chirality, so here is the original paper by Van ‘t Hoff from 1874 showing chirality and 3-D atomic position in molecules are related. He and Le Bel worked in the same lab…. #ChemSky #ChemChat 🧪 www.chemteam.info/Chem-History...
chemteam.info
Van 't Hoff on Tetrahedral Carbon
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
It’ll be for phlogiston
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Well, there is the compound arsole.
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Robert Millikan, 115 years ago this month, showed that electricity was quantized into electrons (and gave a value for Avogadro's number) with his famous oil-drop experiment in Phys Rev 32 (1911), 349-97. #ChemSky #Chemchat 🧪 Read the long paper here: www.columbia.edu/~mm21/exp_fi...
columbia.edu
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Morality Player
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
White Teether
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Treasure Islander
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
bsky.app/profile/bagp...
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
אַ פֿריילעכן סוכּות אײַך אַלעמען! Happy Sukkot to all!
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
I call it “The Eye of Sauron”
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
What chemistry papers or texts do you think are most important historically? I've been posting for about a year. Let me know, and if I haven't yet posted it, I may add it to my spreadsheet for future posting. #ChemSky #Chemchat 🧪
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
The joke has potential.
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
John Lennard-Jones published his "Electronic Structure of Some Diatomic Molecules" 97 years ago this month in Trans. Faraday Soc. 25 (1929) 668-686. He explained O2's paramagnetism, N2's triple bond, & gave support to MO theory. #ChemSky #ChemChat 🧪 Read it here: www.chemteam.info/Chem-History...
chemteam.info
Lennard-Jones: Electronic Structure of Diatomic Molecules
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Having been through dealing with teens, may I say that when you send them off to college, they come back at the first break (e.g., Thanksgiving) remarkably civilized.
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Disclosure: I have a “periodic” table of the vegetables on the wall of my kitchen.
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
I am increasingly in favor of Nuremberg-style trials.
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
bsky.app/profile/cdel...
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Oh, it’s extremely believable. I await the Nuremberg-style trials when this regime is consigned to the dust.
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Been there, done that.
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Hear one of my choral arrangements, “Bénissez-Nous,” at 6:10, by the superb Harmonium Choral Society. #JewishMusic #choir m.youtube.com/watch?v=xBbk...
m.youtube.com
Live Harmonium Choir Tour Performance - June 30, 2026 - Harmonium Choral Society
YouTube video by Harmonium Choral Society
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
In a word, "yes." The ideologues care not a whit about the jokes we use.
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
249 years ago this month, Antoine Lavoisier had his paper, "Memoir on Combustion in General," read to the French Academy of Science, rejecting phlogiston as the principle of combustion, accepting oxygen instead. #ChemSky #chemchat 🧪 Read it here at web.lemoyne.edu/giunta/lavoi...
web.lemoyne.edu
Antoine Laurent Lavoisier
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
I had an undergraduate class with Alan MacDiarmid at Penn in inorganic chemistry.
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Make a band edible. ”The Rolling Scones”
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Maybe the ACS will start being up-front and blunt to the regime, instead of cowering like scared children.
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Wait, so, like, my eight-year-old self with a Chem-Craft chemistry set could use the NMR, too? Kewl!
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
‏אַ גוט, געבענטשט יאָר אײַך אַלעמען! ‏ May the new year 5787 be an improvement on what the world experienced in 5786. #RoshHashanah
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Done.
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Demand that your institution of higher education not bow to the Rapist Felon and his fascist minions. Send emails through Stand Up For Science now. I did. www.standupforscience.net/sufs-compact...
standupforscience.net
Demand your school's leadership publicly endorse SUFS America's Compact for Higher Education — STAND UP FOR SCIENCE
Email your school's president urgently asking them to publicly endorse SUFS America's Compact for Higher Education
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
I am curious as to whether there will be a Nuremberg-style tribunal after the collapse of the American fascists, or a South African-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Chemistry texts. Like, say, Sol Feinstone's כעמיע: צו לעזען און צו לערנען from 1920. Though I don't believe he uses that word in his book.
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Linus Pauling's landmark paper "The nature of the chemical bond. IV...." appeared 94 years ago this month in JACS; it introduced electronegativity. #ChemSky #Chemistry #Chemchat 🧪 Read it here: scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/coll/pauling...
scarc.library.oregonstate.edu
"The nature of the chemical bond. IV. The energy of single bonds and the relative electronegativity of atoms." May 18, 1932. - Published Papers and Official Documents - Linus Pauling and The Nature of...
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Except I *did* grow up in New Jersey, and am proud of that.
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
This has to be the playbook for *all* issues, and not be on defense like the Democratic Party has been for the past 45 years.
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Well, “MyDialect”’s results are no surprise.
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
I am now in the “Chemistry Creators & Communicators” starter pack! Follow us! #chemsky #chemchat 🧪
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Steve Cohen @drstevecohen.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
I am going say something that may be controversial, as a co-author of “America’s Scientific Treasures“, 2nd ed. We did NOT include this museum in our book because it catered to kids, not adults. Yes, it’s historic, but other museums have figured out how to move on; whereas ANS hasn’t.
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