National Mole Day

 October 23rd is National Mole Day!

Now when I saw that it was National Mole Day I was excited I thought it was about the animal the mole.  I think moles are cute and interesting.  I was ready to put up mole pictures and list some mole facts.  But this Mole Day is to celebrate something else.  Apparently the mole is also a unit of measure in chemistry.

Not that I have anything against chemistry, but that was a little less exciting to me.  But I decided to take it as an opportunity to learn something.  So I looked up the definition of mole.  

Dictionary.com says:

noun Chemistry,

The basic unit in the International System of Units (SI), representing the amount of a substance expressed in grams containing as many atoms, molecules, or ions as the number of atoms in 12 grams of carbon-12 (which is Avogadro's number, or 6.022 X 10 to the 23rd power) 

I still didn't know what a mole was.

From the National Mole Day Foundation website (after some more stuff I didn't really understand) I got:

In general, one mole of any substance contains Avogadro's Number of molecules or atoms of the substance.

That was a little more helpful  I'm still uncertain why that is something you would need to know.  I guess I should have paid more attention in chemistry class.  I did a little more looking and I think one of the reason's this is helpful is that it helps people talk about and compare really large numbers.  There is more to it but my mind was having trouble by then so I had to give it up for now. 

You can find more info here if you are interested.

And here is a picture of a mole.  Because I had my heart set on it.