gmcharlt (u/gmcharlt)

gmcharlt commented on Preparation of a neutral nitrogen allotrope hexanitrogen C2h-N6 nature.com/articles/s4158... · Posted by u/bilsbie

gus_massa · 9 months ago

Note that "C2h" is the symmetry[1] and "N6" is the chemical formula. Yes, 6 Nitrogen in a line, N-N-N-N-N-N with some weird bounds and internal charges, probably a good candidate to "Things I Won't Work With" in https://www.science.org/blogs/pipeline From the article:

> Detonation calculation details

[1] See for example another molecule with a different shape but the same symmetry in https://www.cup.uni-muenchen.de/ch/compchem/geom/sym_C2h.htm...

gmcharlt · 9 months ago

Derek Lowe of "Things I Won't Work With" weighs in: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/hexanitrogen

gmcharlt commented on NASA's oldest active astronaut is also one of the most curious humans arstechnica.com/space/202... · Posted by u/andyjohnson0

kaonwarb · a year ago

He also received the first patent for an object invented in space, a very clever zero-g coffee cup: https://ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadBasic...

gmcharlt · a year ago

Alternate link since the USPTO site is rate-limiting at the moment: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20110101009A1/en

gmcharlt commented on Omni, the Iconic Sci-Fi Magazine, Digitized in High-Resolution (2017) openculture.com/2017/06/o... · Posted by u/walterbell

mikestew · a year ago

EDIT: yeah, the domain expired and got snapped up:

http://ww12.omni.media/

Still available for purchase at Amazon, though:

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=omni+magazine

=-=-=-=

TFA is just rambling on about the origins of the magazine, but the archive is supposed to be here:

https://omni.media/channel/omni-archive

But on my end it appears that the domain is down.

gmcharlt · a year ago

The Internet Archive has a copy: https://archive.org/details/omni-archive/.

gmcharlt commented on The failure of self-checkout technology bbc.com/worklife/article/... · Posted by u/LaksiMati

bombcar · 2 years ago

Our library has self checkout and no anti-theft, but it still uses barcodes.

No doubt if they were rolling out a system today they’d use RFID instead, but the absolute massive inertia from millions of barcodes books throughout the system must be huge.

gmcharlt · 2 years ago

That inertia is indeed huge. For example, if your library uses RFID but also shares a catalog and their books with other libraries, they'll still need barcode labels (with the same number that's encoded on the tag) so that the other libraries can deal with the items. Barcode scanners are ubiquitous in libraries; RFID readers, not so much.

Also, one of the promises of RFID for libraries has not panned out very cleanly. When a library does an inventory, not only do they want to verify the existence of the books, but that they are _in order_ on the shelf. RFID vendors for libraries promised that you could do this "shelfreading" accurately just by passing the wand across each shelf, but for various reasons the results are imperfect enough that it's not a clear winner over doing it with a barcode scanner. Given the fact that RFID tags have historically been far more expensive than barcode labels, the economics don't pencil out for many libraries to switch to RFID.