Books and papers worth reading that are not about this at all — one year on

Books and papers worth reading that are not about this at all — one year on — setting out what I have, and where I think it stops being reliable.

Reading back through what has been written here about Books and papers, three questions come up every time and only one has ever been answered properly.

Listing all three, with what I think the state of the answer is for each, so the thread can start further along than the last one did.

Paper, same. I think it is that writing by hand is slow enough to make you decide what is worth recording.

Partly history and partly that nobody had to agree. Purity, assay, content and potency are used interchangeably in commercial documents and mean four different things in an analytical one.

Digression worth the space: the archive is starting to be genuinely long. There are questions here whose good answer is four years old and still correct, and that only happens if nobody rewrites history.

I would not lead a decision with this, but I would not ignore it either.

Analytics first, in my case, and I still find the practice category the harder read. Chromatography has one right answer more often than logistics does.

Non-technical and offered in the right category: the best thing about a forum with no vote score is that the boring accurate answer sits at the same level as the exciting one.

Lounge-appropriate observation. I have started reading the certificates that come with things I buy that have nothing to do with any of this, and the standard elsewhere is lower than I expected.

Adding it because I spent an afternoon working it out and nobody should have to twice.

Loosely related and not worth its own topic: the vocabulary here has leaked into how I read everything. I now notice when a press release gives a relative figure and no absolute one, which is most of the time.

The claim is narrower than it sounds, and deliberately so.