11 Chem, week 8 - Moles love (sig)Figs!

Hey y'all, Liam here.
I just wanted to say how great it is to be back here!!  I just wanted to take a couple weeks off so I employed some ghost writers in my stead.  Yeah, two words.  Ghost.  Writer.


ANYWHO, here is a sigfig:

Actually these are chemists

How's that information sinking in?  Good?  Maybe not, cause I haven't even explained it?  WELL, a sigfig (or significant figure in actual words) is the number of important digits in an answer.  It boils down to accuracy: how accurately can something be measured?  In math, it's okay to add together 10.01 and 14 to get 24.01, but in applied science like chemistry the second number is not as accurate as the first number, and so the first number must represent the overall accuracy of the calculation.  Therefore, the answer will be rounded to 24.
"Excuse me," I hear you saying, "but how do you know where to stop rounding?"  This is where the importance of SIGFIGS comes in!  There are three main rules:

• Numbers that are not 0 are ALWAYS CONSIDERED SIGNIFICANT
• Any zeroes between two significant figures is significant
• Trailing zeroes are only significant AFTER THE DECIMAL

Let me using rule one the number 245 has three sigfigs (2, 4, and 5).  Using rule two the number 2000000000000058 has sixteen sigfigs (2, the thirteen 0's, 5, and 8).  Using rule three, 450900 has four sigfigs (4, 5, 0, and 9) as the trailing zeroes after the nine are not significant.  However, in the number 0.00100 there are three sigfigs (the first zeroes do not count, but 1, 0, and 0 are sigfigs).

Permit me to say one thing: moles are annoying.  They appear one day, and then you can't get rid of them.  They sprout hair, dig in, set up camp and sit tight.  Confused about whether I'm talking about the skin mole or the hairy and scary Star-Nosed Mole?  Be confused no more, because you can forget about both of those as I introduce to you the mole!  Also known as, Avogadro's Constant!  A mole is defined as "an extremely large number of units, 6.022140857 × 1023, which is the number of atoms determined experimentally to be found in 12 grams of carbon-12."  (Source) Essentially, a mole of anything is 6.02*10^23 of that thing.  This is an easy way to measure amounts of atoms, as it allows chemists to deal with enormous amounts of atoms very easily.  

That's all I have time for today, folks.  Hopefully I can write more next week but as of right now my fingers are cramping up.  I really haven't used them for a couple weeks.  I haven't used anything for a couple weeks.  It was very relaxing, I promise.  Let me leave you with something.