A question for the home brewers out there who know a lot of chem. One of the biggest problems with home brewing is verifying that the raw active ingredients you order are in fact what you ordered. You order estradiol enanthate or some other ingredient from a manufacturer, and an unknown white powder shows up at your door. There are crude testing methods available like the melting point test, but they are limited. There are also testing services like janoshik out there, but they're expensive and involve shipping samples internationally. With shipping, testing a single specimen with a service like janoshik can be $100-$200.
I know dedicated dedicated optical spectrophotometers like these exist. While accurate, these units are big, bulky, expensive, and not really suitable for the kinds of simple compact labs home brewers use.
I stumbled across this video describing a little cheap spectrometer available from a small shop in China. The videos I can find of it only show measuring the spectra of various light bulbs. However, I'm wondering if it's possible to use such a device to measure the purity of specimens of estradiol enanthate and other HRT medications.
I'm not an expert in spectrometry by any means, but I am aware of the general process. With a dedicated desktop spectrophotometer, you create a calibration/standard curve by measuring the spectrum of solutions of different concentrations prepared with a sample of known purity. Then you use that curve to measure the concentration of your unknown specimen.
But the big desktop units are designed from the ground up to do this. You place solutions in dedicated transparent cuvettes. Everything is in a single fixed unit designed for this purpose.
But is it possible to do something similar using just a simple spectrometer? Could you maybe buy such a spectrometer, bolt it to a surface, and cobble together some means of holding a cuvette? If you could fix the cuvette, light source, and detector a fixed distances from each other, then perhaps you could use such a device to cobble together a basic simple optical spectrophotometer?
Would this actually work? My thought is that while this wouldn't be the most accurate spectrophotometer out there, ultimately it doesn't matter. The goal of testing raws is not to measure their concentration to four significant figures. The goal is simply to verify you have the right compound and to ensure that it hasn't been cut with fillers. Even if such a setup had an error rate of a few percent, this would still be perfectly acceptable for raws testing.
I hope I'm explaining this question well enough. I'm really just wondering if a simple cheap usb spectrometer like this one here could be used or modified into a device that can measure raws concentrations.
I want to encourage more people to refer to this as what it is - the Hitlerian definition of anti-Semitism.
Modern Hitlerian anti-Semites view being Jewish and being a Zionist as one and the same. A Jewish person can be born in the US, have complete loyalty to the US, and have absolutely zero interest in or loyalty to Israel. But according to the Hitlerian definition of anti-Semitism, Jewish people have innate loyalty to Israel from birth. They are inseparable. To be Jewish is to be Israeli. A Jewish person cannot really be a full citizen of the United States, Canada, Germany, or any other nation except Israel. They will always be the suspect foreign other.
I use the word "Hitlerian" because that's exactly what this logic is. The Nazis held that Jews could never truly be full citizens of Germany. Countless Jewish WW1 veterans, people who considered themselves fully German had zero loyalty to any other nation, were sent to camps on the theory that they could never truly be German. They would always be foreigners. They would always be the other. This was also the logic of the Japanese internment camps. Every Japanese person was suspect, simply due to their ethnic heritage. They could be the most stars-and-stripes wearing gung-ho America fan imaginable, it didn't matter. Their preferences, beliefs, hopes, and dreams, none of it mattered. All that mattered was their ethnicity.
Glastonbury is using the Hitlerian definition of anti-Semitism. They follow the Hitlerian belief that all Jews are intrinsically foreigners and owe innate loyalty to the state of Israel. And we can't be afraid to call this logic Hitlerian, as that's what it truly is.