Suppose you are blindfolded and asked to sort a pile of one hundred gloves into separate piles of right- and left-handed gloves. (Never mind how you got into this predicament!) The gloves are identical except that fifty are right-handed, and fifty are left-handed. The mixture of gloves is a “racemate.” How would you separate them? You can’t do it by weight, by smell, or by any other simple physical property, because right- and left-handed gloves have the same properties. The way you do it, of course, is by trying each glove on your right (or left) hand. Your hand thus acts as an “enantiomerically pure” chiral resolving agent. A right-handed glove on your right hand generates a certain feeling (which we describe by saying “it fits”), and a left-handed glove on the right hand generates a totally different feeling. You allow the hand (resolving agent) to interact with each glove, and you segregate the gloves on the basis of the resulting sensation. You then break the hand-glove interaction (remove the glove) and put the glove in the appropriate pile.
—Louden’s Organic Chemistry, 249.
While it is not what I came here (i.e., TN) to do (e.g., make friends*) this is what I somehow ended up attempting to do daily. (Chemical Enantiomeric Resolution, not glove sorting. My cold-weather mittens are from the dollar store and there is no difference between L and R. Though maybe a part of me really does spend a lot of time trying to get someone to hold my hand with reasonable “fit”. Hmm. Hm.)
It could be kind of a big deal if I get it to work, which is why I keep doing it. The separations. Maybe. There is a lot of somewhat philosophical churn going on of late.
*I stopped to try to remember what “reality” program remix included an “I didn’t come here to make friends!” montage, and I think it might be “all of them”.
