September 9, 2024

A painfully incorrect graphic

Source - macosicons.com/#/u/antonin1802
The reddit thread on which I found today's graphic saw quite a few comments pointing out the horrific incorrectnesses (sp?) in the folder graphic found to the right.

Amongst the many issues...

  • The chemical reaction as written eschews an arrow (or even equilibrium arrows) in favor of an equal sign. For people who don't know chemistry, those symbols might seem equivalent, but they are not - in spite of what some of my students have dismissively claimed over the years.
  • The reactants in the reaction includes monatomic oxygen, a drastically and dangerously unstable form of oxygen. Typically, diatomic oxygen is written in the reactions because that's the stable form of elemental oxygen.
  • The structural formula as drawn contains a carbon at the center top of the 'molecule' that has six bonds, expanding the octet of carbon which - to my understanding - is rather impossible.

There is some suggestion in a few of the comments that this figure might be generated by artificial intelligence. I can't speak to that, but if it was created by a human - assumedly antonin1802 - then it was clearly created by a human who didn't know how organic chemistry works.


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