drail

It is the only scent that gives me a headache, and I think its overrated on top of that. Give me a minty, give me pine-y, give me fruity, literally any other scent profile.

Every time the LHC fires a collision, we continue to descend into increasingly less likely realities where the world doesn't blow up.

Watched it last night, along with a Tale of Two Santas.

This post was brought to you by Gunderson's Unshelled Nuts. It's Nut-So Good!

That's not quite fair, a cardboard box has multiple uses, both built and deconstructed. The Brian Thompsons of the world are only useful to society in their deconstructed form.

The assignment was to infodump, so I will take that as a compliment. I was aiming for detailed and hyperspecific.

Here goes:

During my dissertation, I was lookig for information on the emissiom of 172nm scintillation light in mixtures of gaseous Xe and CO2 (95:5% - 98:2%), with results being difficult to come by. I found a collaborator who had tested this at lower CO2 concentrations (0-0.5%), but nothing else, no predictions or generalizable applications. Not knowing the optimal search engine terms or what textbook to look in for rules governing gaseous light emission, I ended up looking in fluorescence chemistry papers (my previous field of study) which had something called the Stern-Volmer relation for different concentrations of quenchant in a fluorescent solution. I figured gas scintillation queching was probably similar to liquid fluorescence quenching, but the standard relation didn't quite fit below 10% additive.

I dug around more and found a modification of this relation for diffusion-limited quenching of fluorescent solutions (the same limitation imposed in gas mixtures, quenching due to random Brownian collisions) that employed an exponential term, allowing for a smoother curve down to low additive concentrations. This perfectly matched the available data and allowed me to model the predicted behavior. I discussed this with the one member of my committee who was available, an organic chemist (my PI was on vacation, everyone else was sick, and my dissertation defense was in 2 weeks). He said my reasoning and math for using this formula made sense and gave me a thumbs up to include this analysis. When my PI came back from holiday, he asked me why I didn't use some equation generally used in the field, or even just a generic exponential fit. I was ignorant of his suggestion, but it provided the same general formulation as Stern-Volmer, though Stern-Volmer was more rigorously derived mathematically.

Mixing fields is super cool and can allow a much deeper understanding of the underlying principles, as opposed to limiting yourself to one branch of science. While my PI's recommendation would have given approximately the same answer, understanding and applying Stern-Volmer allowed me to really dig at the principles at play and generate a more accurate and in-depth model, which I managed to write up and defend at the 11th hour.

Tie between:

If anyone needs me, I'll be in the angry dome

angry muttering as the PES flies away

and

Well Susie, it isn't foreigners, it's global warming

Gwabu wabu?

Uh, sure...

Yup!

Fianceé's dad is a Senior Level Employee and he was told he'd be safe for at least the first 2 rounds of layoffs, but they couldn't guarantee he'd survive round 3. Expect two more cullings and for them to get increasing severe: if a ~20 year Boeing vet, 40 year industry vet, working the worst hours with the worst people isn't safe, nobody except the executives are (he is forced to comply with another country's work hours halfway across the world AND be present in the office for normal working hours).

I can't get over how bad the pelican's broadcast audio is. Everything sounds like the broadcasters are sharing a webcam mic. I don't remember pelicans audio sounding like this in the past...

Nuggets truly rounding back into form. Jokic is producing more than ever, but we need to scale back his usage more as the other players each start hitting their marks.

I am a new CA resident, moved here just in time to register and vote. Thank you to CAA & HJTA for dissenting against everything good so that I didn't have to know anything (I actually spent 2 hours researching the ballots and candidates to make sure of the right choices, but it was nice to use that as a sanity check.)

Prop 34 was truly insidious in how it was written, I spent half the time filling my ballot trying to figure out why a bunch of shitty groups were supporting a boring, procedural sounding prop about federally funded prescription revenue spending.