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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • Mi was trying out labplot yesterday, and as far as I can tell it can only really plot, not do any sort of transformation or data analysis. The plotting UI itself is pretty nice and the plots look good, but for most of my use cases its worth it to just spin up a Jupyter notebook and work with MatPlotLib directly.

    If it could become a general-purpose UI for matplotlib, thatd be fantastic, but its pretty limited in actual usability for me at the moment.





  • IrritableOcelot@beehaw.orgtoScience Memes@mander.xyzWhat is this shit?
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    4 months ago

    While I agree that publishers charging high open access fees is a bad practice, the ACS journals aren’t the kind of bottom-of-the-barrel predatory journals you’re describing. ACS nano in particular is a well respected journal for nanochem, with a generally well-respected editorial board, and any suspicions of editorial misconduct of the type you’re describing would be a three-alarm fire in the community.

    I will also note that this article is labelled “free to read” – when the authors have paid an (as you said, exhorbitant) publishing fee to have the paper be open access, the label used by ACS journals is “open access”. The “free to read” label would be an editorial decision, typically because the article is relevant outside the typical readerbase of the journal, and so it makes sense both from a practical perspective (and more cynically for the journal’s PR) to make it available to everyone, not just the community who has institutional access.

    Also, the fact that the authors had a little fun with the title doesn’t mean its low-effort slop – this was actually an important critique at the time, because for years people had been adding different modifications to graphene and making a huge deal about how revolutionary their new magic material was.

    The point this paper was trying to make is that finding modifications to graphene which make it better for electrocatalysis is not some revolutionary thing, because almost any modification works. It was actually a useful recalibration for expectations, as well as a good laugh.

    Edit: typo



  • My favorite overheard undergrad story:

    I was walking past the lecture hall right after an organic chemistry midterm, and there was a cluster of 4-5 students talking about the exam. One asked about question 8b, and another one said “you’re not supposed to mix nitric acid and ethanol, that makes TNT, right?” I had to stifle a chuckle as I walked by.

    So close, and yet so far! Nitrated acetone is explosive, and TNT (trinitrotoluene) is also made with nitric acid, but toluene is a much more complex molecule than acetone. If those undergrads could figure out how to turn acetone into TNT efficiently, they’d get a Nobel!









  • Obsidian is not FOSS, but you can switch to it for now because the whole idea is that it’s just a folder of markdown files. I recommend shopping around by pointing each app at the same markdown folder, so you can see your same notes without having to worry about complex migration. Being able to look at all your notes gives you a better idea of what will suit you.

    Also, I recommend Pandoc for translating between document formats. It’s not not absolutely perfect, but it is wildly good at dealing with the complex problem of translating.

    The simplest thing you can use, IMO, is Marktext. It’s basically Notepad for markdown – no file manager, no special features on top of the markdown syntax, etc. Beyond that you start getting into what features you want on top, at which point you really do just have to test them out for your use case.

    As far as options go, you have basically two options as far as systems go:

    • A built-in sync in the program between the desktop and phone version of the same app (i.e. obsidian, Joplin)
    • Use a tool like syncthing for sync between devices, which allows you to use any app you want for actual note-taking, and allows you to use different apps on phone vs. desktop. I do the latter, and use Zettlr on desktop (more document than note-centric) and Markor on android. The issue with the former is that a great desktop app might not have the best phone version. Also, the apps that do sync typically use an internal database that you can export as a folder of markdown files (i.e. Joplin), and don’t actually just look at a folder of files. This makes testing out different editors kinda hard, unfortunately.

    The other wierd variable is that some apps are literally just a WYSIWYG markdown editor (Marktext, etc.), whereas most of them are markdown editors with Other Stuff On Top™ (Obsidian, Zettlr, LogSeq, etc.). Not all apps implement the same flavor of markdown (which can be maddening, but you can use pandoc to change markdown flavor), but if you rely on a specific app’s special flavor of garnish on top of markdown, it becomes harder to switch to another app in the future if you prefer its functionality or UI. Just something to keep in mind.

    For me personally, one of the make or break traits is a good table creator. Making tables by hand in Markdown is a maddening, so having a GUI way to do it makes a huge difference if you end up needing to make a lot of tables. That is really hard to find because it is hard to automate Markdown table formatting in a foolproof way. As far as I know, the table plugin in Obsidian is the best way to do that by far at the moment. The Zettlr devs are working hard on rewriting theirs from scratch to be way more robust, but that is WIP.

    tl;dr Just pick a Markdown editor, and you can shop from there as long as they store their files in a simple folder.


  • IrritableOcelot@beehaw.orgtoScience Memes@mander.xyzYEET
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    7 months ago

    Hypersonic heating is really weird. We only have data going to about mach 17 (the HTV-2 was the fastest solidly atmospheric vehicle I found) but as we go from subsonic, to supersonic, to hypersonic regimes air becomes pretty much incompressible, and forms a really solid shockwave in front of a fast-moving object. Air is a pretty good thermal insulator, so for very fast, blunt objects they actually heat much slower than you might expect.

    Tl;Dr it absolutely vaporized, but it likely lasted longer than you might expect.


  • IrritableOcelot@beehaw.orgtoScience Memes@mander.xyzHeavy Metals
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    7 months ago

    Doesn’t exist. Some metals can form organometallic complexes (with CO, CN, methyl groups), in which case you get for instance “organic mercury” compounds. Iron can also do that, but that’s not what theyre talking about here.

    What they mean is “biogenic” iron. The snail precipitates dissolved iron and sulfur in the water to form its shell out of iron sulfide. Its a different physical structure, but chemically similar to iron pyrite (fools gold).