(unpacking into my new office) I remember picking this up for $0.50 at an MIT Library book sale. check out the inscription 🧪

(getting unpacked into my new office) Once at SNOLab I picked up a piece of rock underground for a souvenir. (Or two?) And I think Harry Nelson brought me a rock from SURF once. Did I label them? Stupidly, no. @steve.mastodon.cooleysekula.net.ap.brid.gy could that be Sudbury norite lower left?

AQI map looks like a diseased brown dragon poised to swallow Cleveland

The NHTSA standard for driver height and sightlines should be set at "Oshkosh NGDV or better".

I took a day off work yesterday and spent 10 hours in the garden, getting 72 bare root trees planted and staked. The eventual goal: a three-season pollinator resource in the form of a South-of-England-inspired laid hedgerow! Using 100% Ohio native plants! Wish me luck!

I'm reading a trashy Icelandic crime novel. It features many flashbacks to characters' childhoods, including this spectacular scene where Tinna solves a math problem correctly:

You know what's a real reading adventure in America in the year 2026? Imelda Marcos' Wikipedia bio.

In this sci-fi-guided era, surely we want guidance from L Frank Baum's TikTok, the mechanical man "fit-ted with Smith & Tinker's Improved Combination Steel Brains", one of the first thinking machines in American literature. L. Frank Baum, what does Tik-Tok have to say about AI liability?

compare/contrast

"No, but they can't get around without legs to find out things." "Cap'n Bill got 'round lively 'nough once, when he had two meat legs," she said. - Sky Island: Being the further exciting adventures of Trot and Cap'n Bill after their visit to the sea fairies

Cap'n Bill and Trot came often to this tree to sit and watch the ocean below them. The sailor man had one "meat leg" and one "hickory leg," and he often said the wooden one was the best of the two. - The Sea Fairies

"You do not seem to be the best loaf, but I suppose that of course you are solid." "Solid what?" asked Chubbins. "Solid sugar," replied the Captain. "We're not sugar at all," explained Twinkle. "We're just meat." - The Twinkle Tales

“Your wooden leg ain’t so bad, Cap’n,” she remarked, looking at it critically. “Anyhow, it don’t take root on a Magic Island, like our meat legs do.” - The Magic of Oz

"How about a plump owl?" asked the beast. "Not a tin one, you know, but a real meat owl." -The Tin Woodman of Oz "... it was here that the Witch enchanted my axe and I lost different parts of my meat body until I became all tin." -The Tin Woodman of Oz

"Permit us to introduce ourselves," replied Shaggy, stepping forward. "This is Tik-Tok, the Clockwork Man—who works better than some meat people. -Tik-Tok of Oz

He ... made me out of glass because the meat cats drink too much milk. - The Patchwork Girl of Oz "Nothing except six ants and a monkey. I thought the monkey would taste like meat people, but the flavor was different. - The Patchwork Girl of Oz

"You're afraid," said the Patchwork Girl, "because so many things can hurt your meat bodies." - The Lost Princess of Oz (maaaany examples in this one)

Perhaps they will never forget the Shaggy Man's awful sneeze, and I am sure they were all glad to see the meat people go away. -The Emerald City of Oz "Must we lunch on tin?" asked Aunt Em. "Oh, no;" replied Dorothy. "Nick Chopper knows how to feed meat people, -The Emerald City of Oz

Following close behind the chariot Dorothy saw her old friend the Scarecrow, riding calmly astride a wooden Saw-Horse, which pranced and trotted as naturally as any meat horse could have done. -Ozma of Oz

"Of course," said the Prince. "We are all vegetable, in this country. Are you not vegetable, also?" "No," answered the Wizard. "People on top of the earth are all meat." -Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz

“He is my dog, Toto,” answered Dorothy. “Is he made of tin, or stuffed?” asked the Lion. “Neither. He’s a—a—a meat dog,” said the girl. -The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

L. Frank Baum really really loved using the word "meat" adjectivally and I have to bring this to your attention. Here is a meat thread of some of L Frank Baum's meat mentions: 🧵

also

also notable: literally the only use of the word "pilcrow" in a full-text search of the arxiv

Final point is: there's no point thinking about blue-sky 0vbb detector ideas unless you're prepared to talk about beyond-ton-scale. Gas TPCs scale up surprisingly easily, and---with some assumptions about what your design constraints are---the gases proposed here can outperform xenon. 16/

is actually easier with this sort of dilution; electron tracks in xenon look like spaghetti and in electron tracks in things like BEBMO look nearly straight. Coauthor Ivana Moya produced Figure 2 to illustrate this effect and we propose a (new, AFAICT) tangling measure to quantify it. 15/

"But Ben", you're complaining, "bisethylbenzene molybdenum (BEBMO) is a huge molecule, all this hydrocarbon junk stuck to your interesting 100Mo; you're building weirdly diluted detectors." Fun thing we learned here is that electron tracking (the key detail that makes gas TPCs useful) ... 14/

We also have experimental evidence for drift/gain in CONGENERS of some gases. Hydrogen selenide is chemically a lot like water, so our proof-of-concept test detector checkout was done with water vapor (Fig 1b) by coauthor and glovebox-wrangler Aneesha Avasthi. 11/

"But Ben," you're complaining, "isn't methaneselenol toxic, flammable, and one of the smelliest chemicals ever invented?". Yes, yes, and yes. That's why this is a theory paper without data on these gases: we're not touching them until our glovebox (Fig 1a) is commissioned. 8/

Using the quantum chemistry simulation code ORCA, we asked which ones might be non-attaching or electropositive. We found 16 actually existing chemicals and made up two plausible new ones. We believe you can build 0vbb-search TPCs filled with these instead of xenon. 7/