Today in quantitative chemistry, the lecture topic was the difference between detectors in common spectrography equipment. One detector (the photomultiplier tube) is extremely sensitive, while the other (the photo diode array) is significantly less sensitive (but cheaper). So the professor proposed the following question:
If a PMT yields a limit of detection of 2 zeptomoles (10E-21) and a PDA has an LOD of 1 picomole (10E-12), how much more sensitive is one than the other?
I said “about one billion times” and another kid said “2.” Thankfully, I got the answer right, but I got to thinking about it. I mean, this kid was 500 million off from the right answer. And he wasn’t 500 million units away from the answer - no - he was off by a factor of 500 million. He responded with “oh … whoops.”
Great idea, great photoshop - This great picture flawlessly merges images of an iPod and Swiss Army knife to give the appearance of a great idea: an iPod with flip-out multi-tools on its sides.
Calvin and Hobbes - More! - Look at this: the Calvin and Hobbes on my birthday in 1993. Just start messing around with the dates in the URL, and you can find quite a few comics in this link. With a name like “transmogrifier.org,” that’s not surprising. A rather hidden archive of Calvin and Hobbes.
For the more prolific tumbledryers amongst you (I think it would be cool if that nickname for us caught on), opening many posts on which to comment on has been a nightmare. Even when you copied the letters in the security image very precisely, the code still said “nah nah nah try it again.” So, I have a gift for you (especially Dan, who was having commenting problems) - I have fixed some very pesky bugs in the commenting system that popped up when you tried to open a bunch of tumbledry pages and comment on each one. These were strange bugs - usually I work through them by coding on-the-fly, but I actually had to leave the computer and just concentrate hard on the problem to map it out on my head and figure out a fix. Hopefully, things are working better now. An outline of the patches/bug-fixes/thank-Gods follows.
(1) Image verification now works better. You (probably) no longer will type the correct security phrase, only to have the script boot you back and force you to “have another go at it” as they say in Britain. Now, you can open as many tumbledry pages as you want and image verification will work plus I fixed the strange bug we saw where a comment sometimes posted to the completely wrong thread (that was weird). You will encounter some minor weirdness with the verification if you open two posts, go to the first one opened, enter the image incorrectly, and then hit the back button on your browser. However, I do not expect this to be much of a problem, plus it is easily fixed by refreshing the page you are trying to comment on (which was the previous fix). Regardless, a majority of the image verification bugs should be squashed.
(2) Tumbledry saves your comment if something goes wrong in your submission so you don’t lose all your writing, but that saved comment used to follow the illustrious tumbledry visitor all over the site. This rather weird and I’m-being-chased-feel has now been fixed as well.
As I write this, the kid who lives next to me is singing along to a polka. It’s a long but very uptempo tune. He’s really getting into it; I can hear him through the wall quite well. He also laughs quite a bit when there is no one else in his room. At least he is happy.
