@realChem@beehaw.org

realChem

@realChem@beehaw.org

he/him

Materials Science PhD candidate in Pittsburgh, PA, USA

My profile picture is the cover art from https://buttonpoetry.com/product/not-a-lot-of-reasons-to-sing-but-enough/, and was drawn by Casper Pham (recolor by me).

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

realChem, (edited )

I feel like I should clarify because the article didn't do a good job at explaining: perovskite is a kind of structure, not a particular material. They have the generic formula ABX3 (where A and B are different kinds of cations and X is some kind of anion), although not everything with the formula is a perovskite.

Simple perovskites include some lead-containing materials like lead titanate, but also lead-free materials like barium or strontium titanate. And in general there are a lot of different kinds of perovskites, especially because some of the structural sites can be filled by small organic molecules instead of pure elements.

Edit: I think I was misreading the journal article before my edit (it's early I'm not awake yet lol). I had said it looks like they're using a lead-based perovskite but actually I can't tell what exactly they're using with a quick skim. The article is very review-y, the formula I thought they were using is from another paper. I'll have a more thorough look later.

Edit 2: It's a review paper, and the way it was described in the linked news article is kinda misleading. Its not specifically about this company's particular composition or architecture.

realChem,

Yeah as far as I can tell without a close read of the paper – which I just don't have time to do – it's a review paper that just happens to have been written by some of the people involved in this commercial endeavor. (I imagine they don't want to share their proprietary composition and architecture.) It seems like the reporter covering this didn't catch the distinction.

To my previous comment, this means we really have no idea if they're using a lead-containing composition or not. Like I mentioned, perovskites are a large class of materials. Since the review paper has a section on the challenges around lead containing compositions I'd hope they're not using lead, but who knows 🤷‍♂️

realChem,

I linked a PBS spacetime video on this topic a couple weeks ago. Personal opinion but I found it much more accessible than the Wikipedia article.

realChem, (edited )

This feels very similar to the magic angle twisted bilayer graphene research that's been going on for a while now. The fact that the bosonic excitons "crystallize" is fascinating, and feels really weird and unexpected for bosons. I have no real idea what the implications of that are though.

realChem,

Objective numbers: Steam tells me my most player game is Tabletop Simulator, but that one doesn't really count since it's lots of different games. My second most played game is still Destiny 2 at 285 hours, despite the fact that I stopped playing years ago. My most played non-steam game – also my most played game by quite a large margin – is Final Fantasy XIV, at 990 hours.

My favorite game I've played so far this year has been Citizen Sleeper, and that took me around 13¼ hours. Pentiment is probably my second favorite of the year, and that one took like 16¾ hours. I've done one playthrough of Disco Elysium and at 33¾ hours that one was starting to feel a bit long. Webbed was a really fun experience that felt nice and bite sized, and that one got 7½ hours. The most memorable game I played last year was probably Before Your Eyes, and that game is about two hours long!

Subjective thoughts and feelings: These days I much prefer games that keep themselves contained. I've got one big game I'm investing a lot of time in (FFXIV), but that's over the course of years and also a game played with friends, which I feel changes the dynamic. For solo games I look for things that tell a compelling story or offer a compelling gameplay experience, and don't feel the need to pad out gameplay to 200 hours (so most AAAs are kinda out for me these days).

I'm just busier these days than I used to be. Most nights when I get home from the lab I've got 4, maybe 5 hours free if I have leftovers and don't need to cook, there are no chores, I don't need to go grocery shopping, etc. Some nights I'll want to use those hours playing FFXIV with my friends. Some nights I'll want to work on other hobbies. Some nights I'll just be tired and want to lay down to read or watch someone else play some games on YouTube.

So even though a game like Disco Elysium only took a bit under 34 hours to finish, that was spread over like a week of evenings dedicated only to playing that game. I will admit to having lost sleep for Citizen Sleeper (ironically); I beat that one in about 2 days despite the length, because it was compelling enough to really not want to put it down. And Webbed I beat in its entirety in one long weekend day (plus coming back the next day to 100% it, something I almost never do anymore).

realChem,

Neat! I used to work with a guy who studied the physics of photosynthesis (after he graduated and moved to industry). I remember him describing the darkroom and the light locks (like airlocks but for light) used to keep stray light from messing up the experiments. Sounds like extremely tedious research, but on an extremely interesting problem so I supposed it all washes out to be equal in the end.

Here's the link to the journal article for anyone else interested in getting eyes on it (it's open access).

realChem,

(Caveat: this is kinda outside my normal field, some part of this is probably wrong or misleading in some way.)

This is the wrong way to think about this, for kind of a subtle reason. So generally when we talk about dimensions in science we mean one of two things:

  • The kind of units something has (so if a quantity can be measured in seconds/years/etc it has time dimensions, if it can me measured in meters/inches/etc it has length dimensions, and so on). That's clearly not the kind of dimension you're asking about.
  • How many numbers you need to describe a particular system (so a particle in space needs three dimensions to describe it's location – or four if we want to consider time – and we can approximate the position of a pendulum in a clock to a system that can be described in one dimension: how far along we are in one swing cycle). I believe you're talking about this kind of dimension: extra directions that we could, in theory, travel in: ie, an extra fifth (sixth, seventh, eighth, etc) number beyond the normal four we have in "everyday" spacetime.

Consider a sphere. It's two dimensional and both dimensions are unbounded (no edges), finite, and curved (convex in this case). Now, you're probably imaging a sphere in 3D space, because that's what our brains are wired to do. But this is a mathematical sort of object, and it turns out that the third spatial dimension is completely unneeded: you only need two numbers to describe where you are on a sphere (for example, latitude and longitude). In this case, the sphere doesn't need to be contained in anything! We can just toss out that third number, it's an extra. The sphere just is.

Likewise, our four dimensions of space-time don't need to be contained in anything else. Their topology is different, sure. The space dimensions are, as far as we can tell, unbounded (no edges), infinite, and basically flat; time is more complicated. But just like you can use three numbers to describe your position on a sphere but only need two, you can use a fifth number to describe your position in spacetime but it's an extra. And, just like the sphere, the dimensions don't need to be in anything, they just are.

Now, you could say: "What if we assume that we do actually need five numbers, and the four we normally use are actually just a simplification?" That's a valid thing to do (although hard or impossible to prove), but in that case you can play the same game by adding a sixth number. That number is extra and not actually needed to contain the five dimensions in our new theory.

So tl;dr dimensions don't need to be inside of anything. You can embed different kinds of spaces into higher dimensional ones by adding an extra number, but even in that case you don't need anything to "hold" the extra number. Dimensions just are.

I hope this is more helpful than it is confusing!

realChem,

Nobody needs to write an essay; I wrote two (maybe three?) sentences in mine. You just need to actually be interested in beehaw for what makes it different from other instances and express that. My application wasn't really any longer than this paragraph

Registration happens to be behind right now, mainly for technical reasons as alyaza mentioned, but the admin team is working diligently on it (♥)

realChem, (edited )

I've also heard great things about Crosscode. I haven't started it yet (mainly because I'm worried about what it will do to my already flagging productivity), but from what I've heard about it, it sounds like it'd fit the bill quite well!

I really enjoyed Death's Door, which is frequently compared with Tunic. That might be one to check out!

You might also be interested in Supergiant's older games: Bastion and Transistor. They're the team behind Hades, but those older games don't have the same rogue-like elements that Hades does. (They also both have absolutely phenomenal soundtracks by Daren Korb!)

You might also like Divine Divinity (the 21 year old predecessor to the popular Divinity: Original Sin).

realChem,

But that the lemmy.world admin (at the time of the post) had not responded

This has changed now! Everybody's talking to everybody else at this point. None of the admins are upset at any of the other admins or anything, everyone's chill except for (some of) the users

realChem,

OpenAlex sounds really interesting! It would be fantastic if someone could develop a UI for viewing the local graph of an area of research (say, starting from a particular paper, and traversing the citations back and forward to build it the local network). Seems like it would be a very useful way to discover subareas, get good coverage on literature reviews, etc.

realChem,

Marvelous, thank you!

realChem,

22% is distressingly low, especially given it's on a downward trend still.

Plot from the article, for those who didn't click through:

https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/ad66f1ee-64a5-4fc6-9b4f-cd4e0a421462.jpeg

Edit: although I do wonder how much the absolute values are affected by the wording of the survey...

realChem,

I have it's a great book!

I feel like this kinda thing is a bit of a trope in sci-fi and cyberpunk, where one staple crop is used to cheaply feed a large number of people. In some works the staple crop is algae, in some it's soy, etc. Arguably, in the real world US it's corn.

realChem,

Fusion is very hard. There's been some intriguing progress and I do believe we'll get there – and maybe sooner than many think – but to have a real effect on the climate change timeline I think we'd need to be just about finished with the experimental phase now (if not several years ago) and moving into widespread scale-up. That's just not realistic at this point, unfortunately. So while promising in the long view, I wouldn't bet on it solving any of our near-term problems.

(Edit: and that's ignoring the practical issues of sourcing the required amounts of deuterium / tritium and beryllium, which would rapidly exceed the entire world output under any kind of real scale-up)

realChem,

Yep, haha, it sure would be convenient if the world only ever threw challenges at us when we were well and fully prepared to deal with them! 🙃

realChem,

Happy to have you in the community!

Also, I actually have a large variety of interesting research papers saved, and I'd be more than happy to share some of the open access ones on here if people are into that. They're typically not as up-to-the-minute as this one though.

realChem,

They look delicious! A home-grown tomato is, in my experience, always much tastier than anything you can buy in a store these days. I love to snack on some fresh cherry tomatoes with nothing but a little bit of salt whenever I'm at my parents' place during the right season for them. (And they'll be the first thing I plant when I'm in a permanent enough place to have my own garden.)

realChem,

Thanks for sharing this, its the first I'd seen of it. It feels like a kinda message-in-a-bottle sorta thing. The few messages I read were a melancholy mix of people who were clearly going through some hard times, and people trying to share some positivity. (And also some chain-email style "If you see this message pass it on," messages; very nostalgic.)

realChem,

As a fellow phone-poster, I totally get it! Lol

realChem, (edited )

Yes! I've actually switched entirely too using the mobile web UI (for now) because of that particular bug (edit: plus the fact that I can't do any moderation in Jerboa). It makes writing any comments longer than a couple of sentences extremely frustrating. I'll keep my fingers crossed for Boost to come over, but I also won't be holding my breath.

realChem,

Oh yeah, I just have the one account for now, so I'm just using a Firefox tab without "installing" it

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • megavids
  • khanakhh
  • mdbf
  • ethstaker
  • magazineikmin
  • cubers
  • rosin
  • thenastyranch
  • Youngstown
  • InstantRegret
  • slotface
  • osvaldo12
  • kavyap
  • DreamBathrooms
  • JUstTest
  • Durango
  • everett
  • tacticalgear
  • modclub
  • normalnudes
  • ngwrru68w68
  • cisconetworking
  • tester
  • GTA5RPClips
  • Leos
  • anitta
  • provamag3
  • lostlight
  • All magazines
    •