I'm trying to shoot soap films again. I finally got glycerin which helps the films last longer and I lasercut a 2 inch diameter circle to be my frame. It's really tricky to get things in focus and lit well. I haven't quite got it yet but the colors are popping
Of all the real-world names for chemicals that sound like they were dreamed up by a comic book writer as an ingredient in some superhero’s origin story, “Zoledronic acid” must be near the top of the list.
Deeply uncomfortable and humbling read.
Look, i have a diploma with "engineer" written on it, and i spent years saying with great frustration that it really feels like, when it comes to the software engineering process, we are just slinging our shit at the wall and should learn from more "battle-tested" engineering domains, like civil engineering. It just "feels" right to think that software is somehow uniquely lesser, uniquely unprofessional compared to the other professions called "engineers".
Turns out civil engineering is the exception and not the norm, and even then there's much more improvisation and changing plans than we would like to imagine.
Pretty much no form of engineering is a beautiful linear process where everything is planned upfront, works, and gets implemented. Software engineering is different, but it's not special. Everyone's slinging shit at the wall, we've been trained to more or less accurately guess which wall to aim at and how the ballistics work.
More importantly, people from traditional engineering almost never think S.E. isn't engineering. We, software people, are somehow the only ones torturing ourselves thinking we ought to be like the "real" engineers out there. Now i'm just baffled by the question of "why do we think this?".
RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@whitequark/117556750144531366
@alyx_woodward the 1ml are the same but taller and I don't use much.
The 2.5s i use all the time though.
5 is my smallest with a spout in glass, and i also use them heavily
@alyx_woodward look how cute it is
Yanno...if these thread-based methods can be gotten comparable in accuracy to all the volumetric analyses I've done, there's a lot of volumetric methods that are now open to me that I wouldn't dream of doing ordinarily because they'd be so wasteful of solvents.
Non-aqueous titrations, for example. Weak organic bases that can't be titrated in water can be titrated with much better endpoints in glacial acetic acid, but who wants to fill a burette with glacial acetic acid? But doing it with a few drops of liquid supported on fibers...now the method is attractive. :=D #chemistry
Ah yes my daily routine of deleting sloperating systems from the @osnews submission queue.
A slop Haiku fork? Do you people have any idea how deeply offensive that is to someone like me, who was there when BeOS was an actual thing? Who used it as his main operating system? Who runs a website made great by a former BeNews editor, who also happens to be married to a Be engineer?
Fuck you. Fuck you so hard.
Here's a clever and simple method to achieve a titration-like colorimetric acid-base analysis. A cotton thread is treated with phenolphthalein solution first, then with standard base (sodium carbonate) and finally with a sample of the acid. the result is a zone in which the acid neutralizes the base and decolorizes the phenolphthalein. Measure the length of the bleached zone and you get a titration! More or less. #chemistry
There's a basic experiment I've been wanting to conduct, though maybe there's already info about this. How accurate is a micropipet in practice? Dial-a-pipettes are pretty impressive technology but I'd very much like to know how accurately they actually measure volumes of water
#science
@mxchara i would love to try to convince nathan fielder to help me explain to the populace about the fuckboys ruining science and mathematics. one thing that's also lost in the din now that all of science is a joke (everyone uses LLMs in research, it's so much worse than you think it is) is that there are several theories (in cryptography, complexity theory, and text search) that are laughably bogus and which are directly used to justify the intellectual and technological superiority of corporations like google.
like see this point on the cloud https://eldritch.cafe/@alyx_woodward/117562341041906548 we all know the cloud is rent seeking shit, but these systems (like you say!!) are fucking fractally evil. systemically, they continue to retain enough legitimacy and acceptance to enact their coercive goals.
All this thought about how to make an electronic burette prompted a thought: what if one could dispense with the burette by using a reagent that was dispersed evenly throughout something like a sheet of paper or hydrogel, or a long thread?
The point of the burette is simply adding a reagent in a controlled fashion. The burette is perfectly cylindrical (as possible) and thus a given linear change in its liquid level corresponds to a known volume of solution added. But the burette is simply one means for adding a reagent in small steps.
Imagine something like the following: you have little slips of gelatin sheet, some of which contain known quantities of an acid (sulfamic acid let's say) and other slips containing known quantities of a base (let's say potassium carbonate.) There's slips of various sizes so that you can add lots of acid or base, or tiny amounts. One could conduct a titration by adding these little pieces of gel with reagents on them, and if you add too much you can "back-titrate".
If the reagent were evenly dispersed on a thin strip of material then the length of the strip used would be proportional to the amount of reagent added.
I'm not saying this is a convenient method, only that it's a possibility, a way to do titrations without a burette. #chemistry
I've thought of other ways to implement an electronic buret but commercial sensors for such things all tend to be dreadfully expensive and I feel as if it should be possible to improvise. One thought was to shine a light (suitably modulated) down the length of the tube to bounce off the meniscus. Another thought was to use an acoustic sensor, measuring the length of the resonant cavity formed as the liquid level dropped. (yet another idea, stick to coulometric titration and forget the idea of an electronic burette altogether)
@alyx_woodward i GASPED like REALLY LOUDLY in the theatre when she said the cloud part. i didn't realize how much she was leaning on the same violent grifting regime i know from google and friends
I'd sort of like to build a burette around this device. It's a 12-inch long capacitive liquid-depth sensor, an "eTape" (from Milone Technologies originally) that claims a precision of 0.01" liquid depth:
https://www.adafruit.com/product/464
Because it's all a sealed unit depending only upon the pressure applied to the sensor it should be relatively insensitive to liquid composition and if the precision is really as good as 0.01" then it should have sufficient sensitivity to make a decent electronic burette. #chemistry
In my class on the ending of Gulliver's Travels today (happy 300th!), we were talking about Gulliver learning that Yahoos act the way they do because of the "odiousness of their own shapes." Immediately, one guy smugly says, "My shape isn't odious. I'm adorable."
Okay but seriously: how can I even begin to explain to the other cis men in my job how me ending up in stem at my job is a miracle that i made happen.
"Only boys can do math" is a sentence that I heard until high school and mind you i was assigned female at birth*.
When I was scoring a good grade in math it was deemed a stroke of good luck because it couldn't have possible been a skill from me.
I wasn't allowed to learn chess by my parents.
My parents highly emphasised me to pick up "feminine" hobbies. Heck I was even forbidden to befriend boys when I reached age 11.
The majority of undergraduate students in my major were cis men. And I could really feel that they were sometimes even favoured by some of the teaching professors (in comparison to me & the other folks who were either not cis male or not male alltogether).
And then when I entered job interviews after my studies I had been rejected so many times with sentences like "you would be completely overwhelmed if you were to take this job" + I was misgendered every single fucking time in these job interviews except that one time that I succeeded in my job interview (my profiles on these job hunting plazttforms were always male btw and my official first name is really just a plain old male name so like.. there literally was no reason for the people holding my job interviews to misgender me at all, yet they would just call me "Ms").
*it shouldn't matter what I was assigned at birth but i have no better concept to convey the problem of misogyny directly affecting me / my past / even now tbh
it'd be nice to figure out how to "valorize" #plastics waste onsite, i.e. convert it to useful materials, but this is not a field where consistent results can be expected. certain materials are exceptional: polystyrene can be depolymerized to styrene in high yield, and terephthalate acid derivatives obtained by lysis of PETE.
RE: https://mastodon.art/@mahtheyzhawey/116562517052327724
Need met! Everything is taken care of. Thank you so much!!
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