Ben Monreal

<shooting torch carrier in the foot, passing torch> Congratulations to the Chinese Academy of Sciences! The Einstein Probe is a really neat instrument.

Timeline of American X-Ray Astronomy
1978: US launches HEAO-2
1999: US launches Chandra
2005: US launches SWIFT
2012: US launches NuStar
2026: Trump/Musk/BigBalls layoffs destroy so much NASA expertise that nobody is even left to generate cost estimates for future x-ray telescopes

In the Bishop's Carriage by Miriam Michelson Free eBook digitized and proofread by volunteers.

OK look so I'm not saying it's aged well (vintage racism level: incidental only) but my guess is it's as good as you'll find for John-Buchan-paced vintage pulp adventure with feminist elements. Get the ebook at Gutenberg.org: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/481 /end

Nancy's clean when she is searched, but the baby's been taken home---where?!---and Nancy has to find out where (peril!) and talk her way in (peril!) to search its petticoats. Oy. 10/11

The most WTF episode is when she's about to be searched at a police station and has to hide a stolen document. She pretends to want a HUG from a RANDOM LOST BABY and sneakily SAFETY PINS the HOT ITEM to the BABY'S UNDER-PETTICOAT. WTaF lol 9/11

Thereafter, her rise through the theater is under constant threat as various people keep ALMOST fingering her as a onetime pickpocket or burglar or burglar's accomplice that got away once. "You've mistaken me for my burglar sister" is one of her cheaper escape lines. 8/11

Nancy is on a solo burglary when the resident blocks her exit. As they wait for the cops (peril!) Nancy monologues about her sad origins at The Cruelty, and the resident (a theater producer) decides to cast her as a spunky orphan in his show. A+ plot twist, no notes 7/11

although a laugh-out-loud reveal later shows it to be the "Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children"). At the beginning of the novel Nancy is a street pickpocket and burglar (escaping several perils!). 6/11

who is also apparently interrupting her ("Be patient, Mag; let me tell it my way") and confusingly maybe actually present for some of the action? Mag was Nancy's protector in a miserable New York orphanage ("The Cruelty", the inmates call it, 5/11

and Michelson's spunky girl orphan thief, Nancy Olden, is full of unique voice almost to the point of incomprehensibility. The whole novel is Nancy's account (verbal? sometimes epistolary?) of her adventures to her friend Mag 4/11

Vast reams of writing in this genre have been forgotten but people still read, what, John Buchan, Baroness Orczy, Edgar Rice Burroughs. What distinguishes one from another isn't the specific perils or spunky escapes but the through-line of a character with a unique voice and personality 3/11

Serial-era pulp/adventure writing is always a trip to read because of the BREAKNECK PACE of EPISODIC PERIL. Your main character gets in a scrape, talks (and/or punches) their way out, and four pages later they get into another. Lather rinse repeat 2/11

Here at #CWRU we all know physicist Albert A Michelson. Did you know his sister, journalist and writer Miriam Michelson (1870–1942)? I just read her novel In The Bishop's Carriage (1904), about ... a spunky girl orphan thief Vaudeville star! Here's a thread 🧵⚛️ 1/11

The Journal of Irreproducible Results (sadly not online, it was in their 1983 Best Of collection) published "Anecdotal Evidence of an Unfilled Niche", in which Theodore H Fleming laments that no birds are visiting his backyard feeder and speculates that a specialist feeder-visitor might evolve

WWII vet and machinist on one side; minor civil servant (overseas, he never immigrated here) on the other.

I pulled all the (invasive, annoying) Japanese Barberry out of my garden. Look at the wood! It's Big Bird yellow! And it smells like dead fish! I'm going to try drying these root balls and see if there's a small piece of useful #woodturning or inlay material.

It turns out that levelheaded Barack Obama, statesman John Kerry, and MIT nuclear physicist Ernie Moniz were good at Iran negotiations, and Donald "welcher" Trump, Jared "real estate industry inbreeding expert" Kushner, and Pete "just denounced MIT as anti-American" Hesgeth were not

pinging @moppety.bsky.social

If you're a funeral home, and you're putting up an online obituary for an artist, maybe use the artist's own work for the header slideshow? Easy, right?

Maybe do that INSTEAD OF prompting an AI to pretend that Pixar-shaped versions of the artist's characters are sad about her death, ffs

I was picturing sort of a drumhead court but a drumhead colonoscopy is a good idea too

I have said this before, but eliminating programs that teach a lot of students but don’t have many majors is like a restaurant not buying flour in its grocery delivery because people aren’t ordering flour on the menu.

I want the GSA and DOT to hire up an 18F-like civil-engineering design firm. Cities can call up DOT Corps for the design phase of transit projects instead of AECOM or Turner. Better, leaner, public-interest-focused designs go out to bid, and a GSA Corps staffer can help with oversight!

2 morb 2 morbius

Sabraw has a big piece on exhibit at the #Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art (in the group show "Ohio Now: State of Nature") and it is 100% worth seeing

The detail that hits home for me "the Indian Air Force had to airlift oxygen cylinders from steel mills to cities where the hospitals had run out." What are the denialists thinking? "Remember when the Indian steel industry overreacted to a fake crisis invented by woke American teachers' unions?"

From context it's definite being used to mean "electron".

Yeah, it seems like it's "opposite of positron"? Are they worried that "electron" was being used in a beta-decay context to mean "beta decays of either sign" and they wanted something more specific? No idea.

The 1995 and 2023 hits are talking about the Korteweg-de Vries equation (no idea) but the 1988 one is a big Warsaw group talking about "negaton-positron pairs". Nice try fellas but that's embarassing.

Paper title/abstract: "Negatons and conversion electrons from the decay of 96Nb". Authors from Uppsala. Date 1968.

Graph of papers by date from Inspirehep. One blip in 1957, 15 clustered in five years in the late 60s, three more (later two with a different string-theory meaning I think) between then and 2023.

Doing some background reading, I stumbled across one of the exactly 15 nuclear physics papers that tried, and failed, to make "negaton" happen ⚛️🧪☢️

Cross-sections of two bundles of coaxial cables. A mix of air insulation gaps and plastic spacers are visible in the cables. Big bundle on the left with 20 cables in two rings, small bundle on the right with 12 cables in one ring. Source https://archives.long-lines.com/mfoster/System.htm

TIL that AT&T's big postwar buildout of long distance telephone cables involved burying thousands of miles of a kind of fancy low-loss coaxial cable I've only encountered in research labs: air-insulated hard-line. "L carrier" was still running (alongside microwave relays) in the 1970s.