I have heard the "superfluid helium films can climb out of containers" fact umpty-ump times, always in a "woOoO it's weird and quaAantum" context I never followed up to try to understand, but today in a zoom seminar Alex Kavner from Zurich showed a potential energy diagram and it finally clicked. ⚛️

as always I forgot to tag ⚛️🧪🎢🔭

I want to chime in here to explain why something like "Chemistry BA" probably appears on this list and why it's a bad and stupid thing to cut. Only guessing at the Syracuse-specific details but I know the big picture. Thread: 🧵

Note that SBIR/STTR grants typically involve collaboration between a small business and a university, with very short (6 to 9 month) funding periods. For a university researcher, there is a HUGE difference in how you plan your research time over a summer vs during the academic year ... 1/2

Remember the Department of Energy's SBIR/STTR small business grants, a beloved bipartisan program that's de-facto the seed fund for America's green energy R&D startups? Were Phase I awards announced 5/29, as planned? No, in June they delayed to 8/29. Were awards announced 8/29? Also no.🔌💡🧪

I know that energy-frontier new-physics searches are the LHC’s reason to exist, but I love all the Standard Model processes they can see along the way. WW pair production in (maybe not the right word for pp) ultraperipheral pp interactions?!? Crazy. ⚛️🧪

Ask Me About My Research! at #CWRU We caught up with Prof. Robert Brown & rising senior Darcy Chew (physics + BME) on CAPGLO—a device using magnets and fluorescent tags to capture T cells, aiming to make CAR T cell therapy more accessible and affordable. #physics #askmeaboutmyresearch

You know the thing where a screenwriter hints at a backstory for their newly-introduced spy by having them mention "the Bucharest fiasco" and "the Gdansk job" and the whole spy team nods? Just had this experience listening to a radiation safety officer namedrop "the Harborview incident"

Trying to figure out why I have a directory called ~/projects/lhc_hcal_muons. Some fragments of C code last updated in 2009? A clone of the old Geant4 ExampleN02 directory, apparently compiled and run? No notes, no code comments, no readme? NO IDEA what I had been thinking about. ⚛️

Surprising nature sighting today: little ~15mm mushroom (puffball?) emerging from shale along a stream bank. Is it eating the mossy surface detritus, or tree roots in the cracks? It can't eat kerogens in the shale, can it? (Cuyahoga Formation shale, Southerly Park, Shaker Heights OH) 🧪

Technology bleg: when I point my iphone camera at a QR code, it recognizes it and gives me the option to click a link or something, but otherwise forgets it. Is there an iOS app that will run the camera and just *keep a log file* of all the QR codes it sees?

(let me share my favorite dumb idea) since you need thermal rather than electric energy, you could (a) "charge up" a kettle with an electrochemical reaction that makes a supply of reactants, which later react (contained, in a heat exchanger) to boil water. I called it a "thermite teakettle"

I would like to put in a request for electric kettle on the same principle. Charge up a 0.2 kWh battery, discharge it with like three kiloamps, and you can bring a liter of water to a boil in thirty seconds.

Hi folks, I've processed some new information and made some additional slideshows and videos about Lower Shaker Lake flood risk. <click "view full thread" for links> The dam-failure Emergency Action Plan includes a huge AECOM flood-modeling data dump. What do we learn from it? 1/5

ME, TWO MONTHS AGO: I wonder what day of the week my fall teaching starts. CAMPUS REGISTRATION SERVER: <big "my schedule" button> ME: lets see <clicks> SERVER: your class starts August 26th <fine print>in 2024, a semester you recently logged and looked at</fine print> ME: thanks, sorted

we’re joining a panel discussion shortly to talk about our latest recommendation for Lower Shaker Lake and where we go from here. livestream starts at 6pm: www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt3B...

Favorite places for freshwater play, by government agency: Metroparks: South Chagrin NEORSD: West Creek Shaker Heights: Shaker Lake Nature Ctr NPS: Cuyahoga Valley NP ODNR: Punderson Cleveland Water: our street, which has been a kid-friendly creek for three days due to a water main break

Also: there's a great way to get much-more-appropriate ship-themed wall decor: for most of the US research vessel fleet, you can find PDF *deck plans* and other schematics online. Download these and send 'em to a poster printer, they look awesome, trust me. (Links in thread.)

Missed this news two weeks ago: the Hyper-Kamiokande neutrino detector *excavation* is finished! The world's largest hard rock cavern! ⚛️🧪 <gets on hobby horse> still not as big as the huge pressurized caverns used for fluid storage in salt domes! www.icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/news/16770/

Fellow Clevelanders will have seen @neorsd.org's update on the end of their Shaker Dam engineering work. I have some technical-detail thoughts about this, as an engineering-adjacent STEM person and a fan of the lake and brook. Keep reading for a summary (incl. links to slides and video): 1/8

I think about this every once in a while #waroncars

Today I learned that the word "gorilla" is borrowed from the unidentified language of an unidentified tribe whose members accompanied Hanno, a Carthaginian navigator, as translators on a voyage around East Africa in 500 BCE. 🧵 1/4

ASTRONOMERS: what will Rubin Telescope learn about interstellar asteroids? Let's find a widely-respected seminar speaker who knows POT-SMOKING BITCOIN MILLIONAIRE: is Mars made of blockchain? Nobody on my megayacht seems to know. AVI LOEB: my new preprint is about the Martian blockchain

Mine: DNP 1998 in Santa Fe (the inaugural run of the APS Conference Experience for Undergrads program). In a tribute to Dave Schramm they played video of an Elements Song parody that replaced all the lyrics with "hydrogen and helium deuterium and lithium". (At the time I had never heard the Lehrer!)

When I mentioned this idea to @snark.bsky.social he suggested the visual antecedent for fast-object-tracking camerawork might not be "missiles" but "sports", which is a good excuse to mention that Clyde Tombaugh was the great-uncle of Clayton Kershaw

There's a visual trope in superhero movies which I think has an astro/aerospace connection. If you're showing Superman in flight in a city, you can tell he's going fast by the scenery. How do you emphasize Superman's speed in an empty sky? youtu.be/IYdg1Y8S0N0?... 🎢⚛️🧪🔭 🧵 1/10

Cool alt-ac job opportunity for experimental physicists. TeachSpin's products are a ton of fun to teach with and I imagine they're a ton of fun to design and build.

This---from du Halde's compendia (1736) of Jesuit missionary reports from China, used to illustrate a dictionary entry by Rousseau (1767), cribbed by Carl Maria von Weber for incidental music (1809) for Gozzi's Turandot---is recognizable today to fans of Hindemith's Symphonic Metamorphoses (1943).

Around 1983, a family moved to Syracuse, NY from, I forget, Pullman or Spokane or something. New kid joined my 1st-grade class, stood up for show-and-tell, and opened a box of Mt St Helens ash! Everyone took a baggie home. 40+ years later I still have it. @mountsthelens1980.bsky.social

it's my new glovebox!

<slaps hood of my lab's new glovebox> you can put so many chemicals in this puppy

I have walked past this sculpture on the Cleveland Museum of Art south lawn before; today for the first time I noticed the title is THE CITY FETTERING NATURE. The CMA listing says the city figures represent "beauty" and "utility" so I think the sculptor is cheering for them to bring down the brute.

Congrats to CWRU Physics students and alumni for being recognized by the #nsf! @urochester.bsky.social PhD student Alex Jasko (CWRU '23) was awarded the GRFP, while @cmu.edu PhD student Sofia Splawska (CWRU '23) and physics majors Ben Wellnitz and Sydney Winner got honorable mentions. 🎉

Thanks @seasonedrice.bsky.social (in a fascinating @saavikford.bsky.social comment thread) for linking this fascinating and grumpy Gian-Carlo Rota essay. Go read it! Then: go write your own grumpy essay about an intro physics class.

Today I learned that Tony Smith made of small 14" models of Spitball in black granite! There was an edition of 50! There is one up for auction next month. Can I afford it? No. Did I start the world's gauchest GoFundMe campaign? Also no. Did I think about it? MAYBE

#astronomy history question: what was the Victor Blanco Telescope before they named it after Victor Blanco? Was it just "the CTIO 4-m"? 🔭

I brought this to #standupforscience instead of a sign---an American flag that flew in space! (My thesis data came from this flight!) a) Science is patriotic! b) Science trains people! c) "NASA is awesome" used to be a "water is wet" consensus until the Mad King declared opposite day

highlights from my CWRU cosmology colleagues!

Please please do NOT use ChatGPT to write recommendation letters. You put "enthusiastic" in the prompt, genius? Go to hell. Your ultra-fluent platitude-machine letter SUCKS. This is your job, asshole! Do it! Choose words that you actually mean! "I, a human, chose to say this" IS THE MESSAGE.

Also: here's the link to the college's (non-physics-specific) version of the ad. apply.interfolio.com/158912 🧪

Job ad! My college "invites applications for a tenure-track faculty position in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning with specialization in natural, social or mathematical sciences." academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/29524 1/

Have a look at the great experimental facility of our nuclear astrophysics colleagues at Dresden! Highly recommended partner of ChETEC-INFRA.

Around 11:58 last night I pointed my phone at everyone's favorite countdown clock, Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Time Dot Gov ... and the page was overloaded.

"What is that little animal you are so tender of?” “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.

Sometimes winter may seem long. Today I was looking at some wildflower seeds I'd planned to sow mid-winter and discovered that Ohio Spiderwort seeds need 120 days of cold to trigger germination—C(120) M G in Prairie Moon's code—and I suddenly felt that winter is too short.

Keynote's and Powerpoint's line-style options were devised by someone who does a lot of business illustrations ("I want to underline the word 'synergy', I need a dynamic swoop") and not by a scientist ("I want to put photons into a complicated technical illustration; I need a goddamn sine wave")

this years' Weirdest Grad Recommendation UI is UCLA's, which innocently asks "How long have you known this applicant? * In months, whole numbers only" Alienating both the people who need to answer "36? no, uh 31?" and, I presume, people who are like "THE CANDIDATE'S REU BEGAN ON MJD 60560.2"

Anyone need a big wind tunnel... for a dollar? In the bay area www.publicsurplus.com/sms/auction/...

the other 20% of the appeal is when you're wondering why this job is taking so long and you discover you'd compiled it with OMP_NUM_THREADS=2

Have you ever come across something in a science paper that compelled you to read it aloud? (from Das Sarma, Freedman, and Nayak, PRL 94 (2005)) I apologize to anyone within earshot of my office this morning. ⚛️🧪