AcademicalNerd @academicalnerd@social.cleverlibre.org
People are more important than wires.
Joined Jan 2021
not quite sure*
It's evening and eyesight gets blurry, I can barely see letters sometimes.
@FailForward
Heheh, thanks for the concern. I am more or less fine, there is quite a lot going on with studying and lab work. I'm quite sure if there'll be daily posts, not in the next month at least.
Also, I'm turning 21 today! Survived for this long somehow.
There is an itch to start a more personal blog-like record, but this feels outdated and boring, so I'm unsure.
1) Ha-ha, classic.
2) Ha-ha, I live here.
3) Oh fuck, I really do live here, don't I?..
On a serious note, the propaganda around vaccines is real, there are even speaker announcements in subway along the lines of "vaccinate, help to stop the spread of the virus".
AcademicalNerd
boosted
🇳🇱
Productivity tip: Assume everyone is an idiot.
inb4 yea you are probably an idiot as well, but at least you can effect that.
2021-03-26, 19:05, Friday
I promised a few paragraphs about x-ray diffraction, so here it goes. This is mostly unedited because I'm tired and lazy.
Basically, light has a property to undergo what's called diffraction: shine a laser beam on a grated piece of plastic and beam will split into an uneven number of new beams. Using this pattern and some trigonometry you can calculate the wavelength of light if you know how fine the grating is and the angle between beams. This works only when wavelength is a few times smaller than the grating size.
Now, the important bit is that atoms in crystal sort of work like grating. Light reflects from different layers of atoms differently and this forms the same diffraction pattern. Since the distance between atomic layers determines the structure of the crystal, we can now measure it using light and some math called Bragg's law. The only thing we need is a light source with fixed, well-known and very small wavelength. Now, the "grating" in our case is approximately 2-4*10^-10 m, or 2-5 angstrem.
Conveniently, metallic anode, when put in a vacuum and under high voltage, emits high energy photones, generally of a fixed wavelength, corresponding to the valent electron's excited state. And if we use copper, this wavelength is roughly 1.51 angstrem, which is about what we need.
Now that all elements are in place, we just need to build a complex machinery that will hold our sample, put a piece of copper under a few kilovolts, cool it down simultaneously, while also rotating a detector to capture light intensities under a range of angles. Different lattices will give different diffraction patterns, and one can be calculated from another.
And this is more or less how x-ray diffraction works.
2021-03-25, 20:35, Thursday
I am slightly behind on my studying. Still managed to write a piece on XRD, I'll proofread it and post either here or in the blog. We'll see how it goes.
I am also kinda fascinated by the quantum physics and ab initio approach, so maybe something will come up about this. Not quite sure.
Aqua regia, "royal water" - a mixture of hydrochloric and nitric acids, 3:1 by volume, which can be used to dissolve gold. The more important and common application, however, is cleaning pots for high-temperature experiments/studies.
Mix acids together in a glass beaker, better use a new one. Put small melting pots in, cover with a piece of glass leaving a small hole for fumes to come out. Now heat this sheer monstrosity up to a boil! Nitric acid gives a nice "fox tail", dark-orange cloud of NO2, nitrogen oxide IV, when heated up. Your pots will be ready in a few hours. Remember to do it under an exhaust and rinse your pots afterwards.
2021-03-24, 15:30, Wednesday
One thousand words per day turned out to be a doable task. In two sittings, and this is a zero draft, but you have to start somewhere.
Now I need to prepare for a test on crystall chemistry. It is a surprisingly difficult subject that requires very few math and a lot of imagination and logic. I might do a short post here explaining some basic concepts once I'm done with the test.
Come to think of it, at this point most of the science I learn looks like some perverted wizardry. Let's shine some light onto a powder, look at how it is reflected and compute it's atomic structure from the result, huh. But the visible light's wavelength is too big so let's take a piece of copper and put it under a few megavolts, this should do the trick. It sounds like random bullshit but it is actually the way XRD works.
2021-03-22, 19:40, Monday
Stephen King writes around two thousand "decent" words per day. I tend to land around 500 words of the first draft, and even this is a challenge. There is a long road to go down and I finally feel like having enough persistence.
Oh, neat, thank you. Unfortunately for such data to be meaningful it's necessary to have statistics on how often the condition occurs in population. I'm way too busy to look the data up at the moment, but might do it later.
Also, we don't have astrazeneca's vaccine here, only hardcore sputnik. And I am yet to see any data - 3rd phase ends in May.
2021-03-21, 19:00, Sunday
Well, I managed to write some notes on the classes I skipped this week. There is a lot more left but I'll manage to catch up in a few days, I believe.
Quantum mechanics (and solid state physics in general) is sure fun, but I feel like our professor spends a bit too much time talking and to few time teaching. I watch recordings with doubled speed and take notes like that, without any issues.
2021-03-20, 14:35, Saturday
The "not too bad" part turned out to be false, I'm still a miserable wreck and the headache subsided only this morning. I managed to study for half an hour before it kicked in again, rendering me useless.
I'm now in my chair, drinking freshly brewed cocoa, trying to get some rest.
2021-03-18, 08:50, Thursday
So I caught a cold. It's not too bad but I'm still out of the game for a few days. That sucks.
2021-03-17, 08:47, Wednesday
Yesterday I was on "Billie Eilish: The World's A Little Blurry" in actual cinema and here are some thoughts on it.
A documentary film about life or rather performances of Billie Eilish. It shows the process of song writing with Billie's brother, Finneas, and tours, and some of the struggles. There are some things that impressed me and that I'd like to mention.
- She is 19 this year and got popular 3 years ago, I couldn't pull that off in my 16 or even now.
- Her parents are a huge part of the success and even survival. They both played music for her and her brother, they taught them and encouraged them. In a sense, I would not like to be Billie Eilish, but I would like to someday be as good as a parent.
- If you have ever seen the videos of her jumping during "bad guy" - she spained an ankle at one of them, had fairly severe complications because of it and kept going, along the lines of "the worst thing isn't not giving the show, the worst thing is giving a crappy one".
- Pet spider! So cute.
- She writes songs with Finneas, her brother. By the way, he has a music project of his own called "FINNEAS", as opposed to "billie eilish". Worth checking out.
- Popcorn in movies is sooo overpridced these days. Buying some snacks in advance was the best financial decision of the year, honestly.
2021-03-16, 12:23, Tuesday
New diary [entry](https://academicalnerd.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-mall.html) I decided to publish. There is no storyline, just a sketchy piece I put together in the evening and felt like sharing.
2021-03-16, 10:20, Tuesday
So I had an anxiety attack last night. Managed to get some sleep, but clearly not enough. Trying to relax and do some errands like pruning my houseplants and organizing drawers. Come to think of it, I might get a bonsai...
Anyhow, the name of the game is taking advantage of the situation. I now have a uniqye opportunity to watch all of my classes recorded from zoom, and that's why I can relax now for a bit and catch up later. Gotta write some of that novel now.
2021-03-15, 08:00, Monday
Today I'll need to somehow juggle tensor analysis, English classes and creative writing, along with some homework. That's gonna be tough.
2021-03-14, 16:45, Sunday
You know what would be cool? If governments or political parties flexed not just their programs and ideologies, but their resources in terms of mathematicians and supercomputers. Hey, we can run these supercomplex simulations instead of blindly picking whatever looks like a decent option! Would save some trouble for average folk that faces the consequences of the decisions made by politics. Not a solution to all the problems, but it would be nice.
2021-03-14, 09:27, Sunday
It's going to be a tough day. I wrote some notes and lectures are quickly becoming useless at this point. I need a decent textbook on solid state quantum physics and a few hours of solitude to actually dig into this stuff. I hope to manage a couple diary entries next week and expect some progress on the novel. Google says novels are generally over 50k words and I'm somewhere around 4k now. A long way to go.
