ornery_chemist @ ornery_chemist @mander.xyz

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2 yr. ago

Man, fuck hetcat. You put extremely rare metals on special rocks in a very particular way just to burn something juuuuuust the right amount. Or un-burn it, I suppose. How does it work? Well, oxygen adatoms react with the substrate bound to a metal nanoparticle on its 10(-67) face following a formation of an oxygen vacancy-- jk, jk, it's actually all happening at a tellurium defect in your special rocks, you silly goose. Oh wait, nvm, it's actually iron contamination from manufacturing defects in the walls of your vessel. Git gud. Oh wait nvm it is actually catalyzed by your precious metal, but that metal needs to be slightly poisoned by lead and nickel from the radioactive decay of trace thorium from the welds and cobalt-60 in the steel, respectively. How could you have forgotten?

"But it works in my reactor!"

Not gonna lie, I thought about your comment multiple times today trying to make sense of it, and only just now did I realize what you meant by it.

Yes, like Alan Turing. Ugh.

Ya "an historic", when the h is clearly pronounced, strikes the wonderful double blow of being both pretentious and wrong as far as I'm concerned. Looking at you, NPR. Go run up an hill, why donchya?

I think cleanse and clean are not quite interchangeable. Cleanse has a gravitas that clean lacks. For example, growing up, I heard a lot of things like "be cleansed of your sins". "Be cleaned of your sins" makes me vaguely uncomfortable.

Hard agree on business lingo, though.

Homogeneous, meaning having a uniform composition. Hoe-moe-jee-nee-us (or hoe-muh- and/or -jee-nyus; point is, there's an ee sound before the last syllable). Saying homogenous (huh-mah-jeh-nus) in that sense is not only wrong but also means something else.

To add, labcoats don't just mitigate splash hazards. When walking around lab and working at the bench, you can brush up againt all kinds of surfaces that, despite people's best efforts (or less-than-best if in school), may not be perfectly clean. The coat guards against contamination of your skin, yes, but also of your other clothing, which may transfer the contamination to skin, eyes, or mouth by inadvertent contact later. I've got a sweater with a lovely nitric acid stain (read: a small charred hole) from such a scenario, though that was partially due to a poor coat fit.

Also, I see you premeds. Button up your damn labcoats and do not leave the lab with them on. This ain't TV.

swish-swish-swish pfshhht, swish-swish-swish pft, swish-swish-swish pt

My take-home was $1700-2100/mo after taxes and fees depending on whether I was teaching that semester (teaching paid less). We were paid just above minimum wage (at the time $15.50/h, CA MW = $15/h) on the basis of 8 h/day, 5 days/wk, 52 wks/y (lmao). Rent split 4 ways was $1500 ~$1200 per person, and that was the lowest of anyone I knew. UC Berkeley PhD 2022.

Edit: Checked my admission letter, turns out it was actually $15.50/h. Also got decent health insurance, at least until UCPath fucked it up. Livin' the high life.

Fact: 90% of science is made with quartz

... accurate

Mr. fancypants with a garage over there. Meanwhile, ain't no public chargers for miles around here.

...and then we take the partial derivative of the log of this infinite sum wrt molar volume to find that--

Why?

Why what?

helplessly gestures at the whiteboard

Oh, yeah, it's so the math works out later! Anyway, for small Θ, the derivative has a nice closed form that we can Tailor expand in f-

You make a good point about the voicing distinction that I was unsure of, so I looked it up. According to clearly the most authoritative source on the internet, [s] and [z] are both "hissing" sibilants.

.... how do you mean? S's are sibilants in every variation I know if not silent like in French.

I thought it looked a bit like an Old English word maybe resurrected for D&D, so I initially thought something like /gεɑs/ (a bit like "gas" or "GEH-ahs"; ain't no player actually gonna say /ɣ/ or /æɑ/ properly) or /jεɑs/ ("yasss")

Then I looked it up on Wiktionary. It's from Irish "geis" with the wrong spelling apparently. Irish spelling do be silly, so all phonetic preconceptions should be checked at the door.

Wiktionary says /ɟɛʃ/ for Irish, anglicized as /ɡɛʃ/ or /ˈɡiː.əʃ/ (gesh and GEE-ush, respectively).

Nah, we just use it to define inches and pounds and the like.

you mean let.

and then letting Hindley-Milner do the rest

Man I just built a new rig last November and went with nvidia specifically to run some niche scientific computing software that only targets CUDA. It took a bit of effort to get it to play nice, but it at least runs pretty well. Unfortunately, now I'm trying to update to KDE6 and play games and boy howdy are there graphics glitches. I really wish HPC academics would ditch CUDA for GPU acceleration, and maybe ifort + mkl while they're at it.

"Proper" conjugations are not totally settled, especially given its slang nature. Yeet does feel like it might be strong (stem-changing), though there's really no authority on it. Interestingly, I found through googling that there is a version of the verb yeet stemming from Middle English verb yeten, which has two variations. The first meant "to address with the pronoun ye" (e.g., as opposed to thou) and had weak conjugations (i.e., yeeted/yeted). The other sense referred to pouring or moving liquids and could be either strong or weak (simple past: yet or yote, or yeted; participle: yote, yoten, yeted). So, looking for historical comparisons is also unhelpful.

Edited for TLDR: no one knows, both forms have historical support; it doesn't matter, go crazy

So many solver solutions that day, either Z3 or Gauss-Jordan lol. I got a little obsessed about doing it without solvers or (god forbid) manually solving the system and eventually found a relatively simple way to find the intersection with just lines and planes:

1. Translate all hailstones and their velocities to a reference frame in which one stone is stationary at 0,0,0 (origin).
2. Take another arbitrary hailstone (A) and cross its (rereferenced) velocity and position vectors. This gives the normal vector of a plane containing the origin and the trajectory of A, both of which the thrown stone must intersect. So, the trajectory of the thrown stone lies in that plane somewhere.
3. Take two more arbitrary hailstones B and C and find the points and times that they intersect the plane. The thrown stone must strike B and C at those points, so those points are coordinates on the line representing the thrown stone. The velocity of the thrown stone is calculated by dividing the displacement between the two points by the difference of the time points of the intersections.
4. Use the velocity of the thrown stone and the time and position info the intersection of B or C to determine the position of the thrown stone at t = 0
5. Translate that position and velocity back to the original reference frame.

It's a suboptimal solution in that it uses 4 hailstones instead of the theoretical minimum of 3, but was a lot easier to wrap my head around. Incidentally, it is not too hard to adapt the above algorithm to not need C (i.e., to use only 3 hailstones) by using line intersections. Such a solution is not much more complicated than what I gave and still has a simple geometric interpretation, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader :)

Oh absolutely, I don't blame KDE or arch repos lol. I did see that it was a KDE update but somehow didn't clock the version number. I had it in my head that KDE6 was much farther off.