If you are in a financial position to do so, donating your wages for the day (or as much as you can afford) to an organization trying to affect positive change would show support without direct participation. If financial support isn’t feasible at all, then just try to avoid spending any money day-of and share the importance of the strike with people you know. Every little bit of contribution helps, and we can’t afford to let perfect be the enemy of good right now.

There used to be a small icecream chain in SoCal called HugLife. Best icecream I’d ever had, vegan or otherwise. Incredible, creative flavors (matcha cookies & cream, earl grey, thai tea, etc.), creamy, incredible. Whenever I visited the OC to see friends and family, I would go at least 2 or 3 times, even getting noticed once hitting 2 locations in one day. I finally moved to the area, tried the icecream again, completely awful, but I figured it was a bad batch. Come back a couple weeks later, and they tell me it was this location’s last day, icecream is once again bad. Figure they were downscaling, so I went to their last remaining location in Long Beach, and it was still bad. They just put up their closure notice. My fiancée and I think that they started losing money after expanding so quickly (they went from 1 to 3 locations in like 5 years) and had to change their recipe to cut costs, but changing the recipe made the icecream suck, so they went into a spiral of cutting quality to compensate for low traffic, then traffic reduces because of poor quality. My heart aches over the fact that the best icecream I have ever tasted went down the drain the moment I lived within driving distance.

I avoided shorts on YT religiously, but as people sent them to me and they became more tuned to my preferences, I began absent mindedly scrolling them. I fucking hated it, I would realize I had wasted so much time idly swiping. I started running revanced specifically to turn that shit off on my phone so that the temptation wouldn’t exist. So happy with my decision. I don’t think it rotted my brain, but it made my phone a landmine for shit content, scammy ads, and wasted time.

Accessing mbin as a firefox PWA is a nice way to use it outside of your main browser on mobile.

Very minor, but I very recently changed deoderant after not being able to find the one I usually use. I just got to a clinic for a medication infusion and it has completely worn off, being replaced by the smell of stress sweat from traffic, and now this poor nurse has to smell me while I get my medicine, so I am mortified.

I was curious and looked, Jeppsons does actually sell malort spritzers sold in a can! Never seen one irl, so probably not very popular, but it does exist oddly enough

Sip of malort is too much malort. I have to correct myself though, Jeppsons does sell malort spritzers sold in a can, which is more in line with how to actually use malort in making a cocktail, but still probably nasty.

That is just a can of beer, I don’t think you can get Malort in a can. Old Style is a cheap pilsner from the north mid-west

Chrohns pill 4× daily, adderall 1-2× daily, multivitamin 1× daily, D-Vitamin 1× daily, so 7-8 per day. I am 29, so I have gotten a head start on my pill quota. I start back up on injections for Crohns next week, so four of those should be going away in the next month or so.

Yup, though the $50K was specifically the R&D cost to develop a technique for making the lens. It used a nano-scale pattern on glass to focus light via diffraction, as opposed to standard refractive lenses or mirrors. The ultimate goal was to develop a process for manufacturing these lenses en masse, for deployment in a large particle detector where traditional lenses wouldn’t work. They succeeded, and nowadays (6 years later), they can basically print the pattern using the same techniques as in microchip manufacturing. Back then, though, there was just then one prototype that represented that $50K of research, so I am really glad I didn’t fuck it up haha

In my first year of grad school, I was visiting a colleague’s lab and was asked if I wanted to test some of their new diffractive optics. I said sure and started toying with the big lens on the table, no gloves, no precautions other than trying not to drop/smudge it. After about 5 minutes of geeking out over the fact that a perfectly flat, transparent lens was focusing the light, I asked how much it would cost to get one sent to my lab for an experiment I was working on. He said that it was the only one of its kind in existence, but the manufacturing r&d cost for it was over $50K alone. My heart nearly fell outta my chest.

I am very happy that 75% of my PhD in particle physics was hands-on lab work doing detector R&D. Sure, creating simulations and doing data analysis are immensely important, and skills I had to develop, but I think that many scientists are being done a disservice by not getting the opportunity to see how their work will interface in the real world.

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.

I am a physicist. I am good at math, okay at programming, and not the best at using programming to accomplish the math. Using AI to help turn the math in my brain into functional code is a godsend in terms of speed, as it will usually save me a ton of time even if the code it returns isn’t 100% correct on the first attempt. I can usually take it the rest of the way after the basis is created. It is also great when used to check spelling/punctuation/grammar (so using it like the glorified spellcheck it is) and formatting markup languages like LaTeX.

I just wish everyone would use it to make their lives easier, not make other people’s lives harder, which seems to be the way it is heading.

My mom had an inspirational sign in one of her bathrooms that said, “Embrace this moment, for this moment is your life.” perfectly matched to her decor. She knew exactly what she was doing.