Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | snitty's commentslogin

This is shockingly similar to microbial motility mechanisms. Like random walk plus chemotaxis.

In this case aromatic means a ring of atoms where there is electron sharing among all the members of the ring.

They're called aromatic rings because before they understood the structure, they grouped them by their behavior, and the aromatics contain a lot of volatile organics like benzene, toluene, phenol, which have strong odors.


I like your explanation without condescension. Respect.



Plain cyclopentadiene is way stronger smelling than any of those.

Also dicyclopentadiene which is a higher-"boiling" dimer which often serves as a source of cyclopentadiene by thermal breakdown. The DCPD solidifies at lower room temperatures. It also spontaneously decomposes to an extent so what you are smelling is probably the CPD anyway.

General agreement technically is that DCPD is some nasty-smelling shit, one drop on your foot and the shoes are staying outside for the night :\

Interestingly, in very low concentrations it is used in some fragrances as a once-secret ingredient.


So it's not volatile enough to give off a scent?


Massive molecule with a lithium salt on every silicon atom. It's not going to have basically any vapor pressure and thus effectively no aroma unless there are breakdown products


Even if it were volatile, you likely wouldn't be able to smell it. The olfactory sense is complicated and weird, and targeted at organic chemistry. You can smell a few inorganic things (notably, elemental osmium, whose name literally means "smell" because that's so unusual), but your receptors are unlikely to trigger for anything that far removed.


Doesn't this count as organic? Ferrocene smells of camphor, apparently. https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/ferrocene


It is organic; it's mostly carbon. The presence of a metal atom doesn't make it inorganic. To be inorganic it has to have no carbons (or at least, not in the backbone of the molecule).


Well yes, but also what do they smell like?


>Move over cyclopentadiene anion—there’s a new five-membered aromatic ring in town, and this one is made of silicon.

CHEM-Es are build a little different from the rest of us.


Chemists really. Chem-E’s basically just play IRL Factorio at work. The graphs in Factorio look almost exactly like OSI PiSoft charts, which basically every chemical plant uses.


Cyclopentadiene is a great molecule - it can form 'metallocene' compounds where two cyclopentadiene (Cp) rings 'sandwich' a metal ion between them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallocene

Like Cp--M--Cp where the '--' are an unusual kind of 'bond' which is somewhat like five carbon-metal bonds, although I'm sure there is a more accurate orbital description of the interaction.


The ‘--‘ is a ligand bond, a fundamental aspect of coordination and organometallic chemistry.


"The average person probably only knows the formulas for olivine and one or two feldspars" (https://xkcd.com/2501)


And quartz of course.


Perfect! I read this “heart-warming” overview of two papers in Science and learned zero about why this is of any significance. The discovery is significant but I had to probe Opus 4.6 to find out why.

The personal focus is a distraction. It would be great if science writers could focus on the science and significance of the advance.


Not sure why you were downvoted. I love the breathless enthusiasm of the article, but I still have no idea why (or if) this is important. What did you learn from Opus?


Nah, this is just a strict chemical synthesis problem, no need for the engineers yet, until you want to make ten thousand tons of the stuff.


So here the test was effectively given a set of relevant facts, can we influence the way a judge (or LLM) rules based on superfluous facts. The judges were either confused or swayed by the superfluous facts. The LLM was not. The matter was one where the outcome should have been determinative, not judgment-based, under US law.


Arguing that this is a Common Law matter in this scenario is funny in a wonky lawyerly kind of way.

The legal issue they were testing in this experiment is choice of law and procedure question, which is governed by a line of cases starting with Erie Railroad in which Justice Brandies famously said, "There is no federal common law."


I miss Delicious Monster's Library app


Why? It still works for me.


I find this much more readable than KCL[0], but I also understand the ultimate goals of the two are probably a bit different.

[0]: https://zoo.dev/docs/kcl-samples/pillow-block-bearing


That's why I run my server on 7100 chips made for me by Sam Zeloof in his garage on a software stack hand coded by me, on copper I ran personally to everyone's house.


You are joking but working on making decentralization more viable would indeed be more healthy than throwing hands up and accepting Cloudflare as the only option.


But that bears no relation to what happened in the video.


>As I understand it, this is sort of simulating what it would be like to capture this, by recreating the laser pulse and capturing different phases of it each time, then assembling them; so what is represented in the final composite is not a single pulse of the laser beam.

It is not different phases, but it is a composite! On his second channel he describes the process[0]. Basically, it's a photomultiplier tube (PMT) attached to a precise motion control rig and a 2B sample/second oscilloscope. So he ends up capturing the actual signal from the PMT over that timespan at a resolution of 2B samples/s, and then repeating the experiment for the next pixel over. Then after some DSP and mosaicing, you get the video.

>It seems like if you could measure the pulse's propagation in one direction, and the other (as measured by when it scatters of the smoke at various positions in both directions), this seems like it would get around it?

The point here isn't to measure the speed of light, and my general response when someone asks "can I get around physics with this trick" by answer is no. But I'd be lying if I said I totally understood your question.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KOFbvW2A-o


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: