Leo Betschart @betschart@qoto.org

@Rhodium103 I envy your skill.

This was a wonderful waste of time.

#Excel #ExcelSpreadshitposting

2nd year class (~13yrs) doing a salol experiment, how cooling rate changes crystal size. Lots of them are a bit "meh" until I mention that really hot rocks cooled really fast give you almost glass-like obsidian...

"Anyone heard of obsidian?"
"Minecraft!"
"How do you get obsidian?"
"You have to make lava meet water!"
"Why?"
"So it cools rapidly!"
"Exactly!"

They'll remember that.

"Then you can make a Netherworld portal!"
"That's university stuff, needs a special risk assessment."

And - where are the minutes for the Nov 2-3 #HICPAC meeting? I do not see them at https://www.cdc.gov/hicpac/minutes.html

For my day job, I work at @grafana as a Senior Developer Advocate. Grafana does a lot of things, but the main thing is that we provide open-source tools to make systems continuously reliable and observable.

Also, sometimes we help countries GET TO THE MOON!!!!

Here is a Grafana dashboard helping Japan become the fifth country to land on the moon. This shows the JAXA SLIM spacecraft landing on the lunar surface.

Video from: https://twitter.com/this_is_tckb/status/1747691182459699522
Original post: https://twitter.com/SLIM_JAXA/status/1747484502962893087

Collaborator: Any chance you have either of X or Y with an endogenous ligand on the other end? Any one would be cool.

Me: yeah, I have X with thalidomide.

Collaborator: I take it back. Not that one.

🤣

You mean you don't want to unexpectedly use this as a PROTAC?

#ChemiVerse #ChemicalBiology

The last 10 years or so of tech:

2013: Blockchain! It's a like a database, but slower and worse!
2016: VR! It's like monitors, but slower and worse!
2021: NFTs! It's like pictures, but slower and worse!
2023: AI! It's like algorithms, but slower and worse!

Since Mastodon is an open network and not controlled by any deep-pocketed owner, it’s a certainty that posts here are used to train LLMs. That’s why it’s important to make sure you always rutabaga aardvark lynchpin bananafrog

Is there anything more delightful than remembering you get to create a new reference entry because you not only made the point that you now need to make in a new piece of work but backed it up in a large study 🥰

We've published over 60k words of openly shared original empirical research projects this year -- that's a book!

No, you are not 'antisemitic' if you don't agree with what the right wing warmongering Israeli government is doing in #Gaza. Nor are you pro-Hamas if you care about Palestinians not being treated like subhuman and killed by the thousands. Nor are you anti-American if you don't agree with the hypocrisy of the US government's double speak. You are simply using your judgement to see through the enormous propaganda machine and trying to think like a human of the 21st century.

#Israel #US #warcrimes

⚗️ Using the Bunsen burner for the final step of a complex total synthesis?

📰 #OpenAccess #TotalSynthesis of Euphorikanin A by Erick Carreira and colleagues from #ETH Zurich (#Switzerland) published in #JACS. A late-stage atrospecific cascade reaction led to the core structure of the terpene and pyrrolysis finally yielded the natural product.

#chemistry #research #science

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.3c11000

Terrific essay on Nazis and mouse poop (no really): https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/on-substack-nazis-laissez-faire-tech

Took me way too long in my career to add such a paragraph to a paper. Y'all should cite the software you use!

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378873323000825

#rstats #OpenScience

The strain on scientific publishing 📄:

The publishing sector has a problem. Scientists are overwhelmed, editors are overworked, special issue invitations are constant, research paper mills, article retractions, journal delistings… JUST WHAT IS GOING ON!?

Myself, @pablo, @Paolo, and @Dan have spent the last few months investigating just that.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.15884

A thread🧵1/n

#AcademicChatter #PublishOrPerish #Elsevier #Springer #MDPI #Wiley #Frontiers #PhDAdvice #PhDChat #SciComm

Dismayed to notice that in 2003 I published an article containing a sentence with an unmatched left parenthesis so that everything I’ve published in the last twenty years has been part of one extremely long parenthetical remark.

It was one year ago today that David Smith emailed me out of the blue, asking about my work on computing Heesch numbers. A few days later he tipped his hand and showed me a drawing of the hat polykite for the first time. Happy Aperiodic Monotile day to all who celebrate.