Chem. Educator 2001, 6, 295–305 295 The Dry Martini: Chemistry, History, and Assorted Lore *
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: In the opinion of countless authors, thinkers, statesmen, and connoisseurs, the martini is America’s favorite apéritif. Famous martini quotes; celebrity martini drinkers; movies, books, and songs; the martini and alcohol in chemical education; the 1999 Canadian bioanalytical study of the antioxidant activities of martinis in the British Medical Journal; the standardization of the martini; brief histories of gin, vermouth, and the martini; martini-drinking presidents; the dryness of the martini; and the place of the drink in American society are presented. In the opinion of countless authors, thinkers, statesmen, and connoisseurs, the martini is America’s favorite apéritif. John Doxat proclaimed it “the most celebrated drink in the civilized world ” [1a] and “the king of cocktails ” [1b]. Writer Bernard De Voto (1897–1955), who called it “the supreme American gift to world culture ” [2a], described the purported sensitivity of the drink when he wrote, You can no more keep a martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there. The proper union of gin and vermouth is a great and sudden glory; it is one of the happiest marriages on earth and one of the shortest-lived. The fragile tie of ecstasy is broken in a few minutes, and thereafter there can be no remarriage [3]. This sensitivity is echoed by W. Somerset Maugham’s (1874–1965) words, quoted by his nephew Robin: Martinis should never be shaken. They should always be stirred so that the molecules lie sensuously on top of each other [4]. Even that pungent, controversial sage of Baltimore, crusty old curmudgeon H(enry) L(ouis) Mencken (1880–1956), who rarely said anything good about anything, praised it as “The only American invention as perfect as a sonnet ” [2a]. And at the height of the Cold War, when served a particularly potent sample, Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev (1894–1971) admitted that it was “The U.S.A.’s most lethal weapon ” [2a]. Also, a Cold War acronym for the martini was ICBM—for Ice Cold Beefeater Martini—an implicit comparison to Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile—in reference to the lethal quality of the drink [5]. Another tribute to its potency and sexiness is found in a poem allegedly attributed to Dorothy Parker (1893–
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.170 | 0.065 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".