wycx

I hope that prevalence of AI coding agents might lead to a bit of a revival of RAD tools like lazarus, which seem to me to have a good model for creating cross-platform apps.

One big advantage synchrotrons have is flux over a broad spectrum. When you want monochromatic x-rays you can start with broad spectrum x-rays from a synchrotron source and throw almost all of the photons away, and still have orders of magnitude more x-rays in your 1 eV bandpass beam than the flux of a laboratory source, (even if it has a peak in its spectrum at the energy you want). The plots on slides 4-6 linked in the first comment [1] demonstrate this clearly.

However, the energy range where inverse compton scattering sources seem most attractive are at energies >100 keV where it appears there is the potential for inverse compton sources to approach and even outperform synchrotron bend-magnet sources (slides 31 to 35), particularly in comparison to bend-magnets/wigglers at synchrotrons with lower storage ring energy than facilities like ESRF (6 GeV). High flux at higher energies (>100 keV) is difficult to generate at the more common 2.0-3.0 GeV storage rings.

[1] https://indico.cern.ch/event/1088510/contributions/4577523/a...

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

When heavy mineral sands are processed to extract the Ti and Zr ( from rutile, illmenite, zircon), the residual concentrate is rich in monazite. This material comprises the bulk of our easily accessible Th reserves. However, you can't just leave this monazite-rich material lying around heaps, as it creates a windborne radioactive dust hazard, so it gets mixed back in with the other light material. This is a bit of a shame. All that energy and effort is expended to extract the heavy minerals, but as there is no immediate market for the monazite, and it is a liability to keep it in the extracted state, all that work hard work is undone to mitigate the dust hazard and it gets mixed back with the quartz etc.

So it is perhaps somewhat ironic that we mine beaches to get the minerals that are the source of the bulk of the radioactivity of granites.

Where does Australia rank on the global scale?

Worse than Mauritius, Macedonia, Oman, Moldova, Vietnam, Egypt and Botswana.

Worse than Georgia, Kuwait, Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and El Salvador.

Sitting embarrassingly and awkwardly between Kazakhstan and Jamaica, and worse than the Dominican Republic at 74 and Guatemala at 75,

Australia ranks off the deep end of the scale at 77th place.

77th and falling. After Tajikistan, Australia had the fourth highest loss in Economic Complexity over the last decade, falling 18 places.

Not the behavior of a modern, mixed economy that many Australians pretend that we have. We are an anomaly. A third world economy with a first world standard of living. Will is last?

[1] http://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/rankings/

As a past/present resident of both LA and Melbourne, I would modify that to say that Syd/Mel are as dependent on cars as much as Los Angeles, but without the planning commitment to cars that LA has exhibited. Bring up maps of LA and Sydney/Melbourne on the same scale. LA has a grid of freeways with a cell-size of 10-15 km. Not so for Sydney and Melbourne, and their surface streets are much worse. Roads designed as two lanes each way made into 3 narrow lanes each way by turning the shoulder into a new lane. Nowhere to go when someone breaks down. Without a commitment to either a comprehensive transit system, or a decent freeway network, Syd/Mel have half-arsed implementations of both.

In LA I was comfortable cycling along PCH, Santa Monica Blvd, Sepulveda Bvd etc, but I would never consider cycling on their Melbourne equivalents.

I abandoned Mendeley because it would not permit relative paths, and I have not looked back.

Is codeine abuse really a problem in Australia, or more than it has been in previous decades?

After much searching I found the energy resolution here [1], stated as <2 keV. For comparison, a modern silicon drift diode fluorescence detector will have an energy resolution of ~130 eV.

[1] http://dpnc.unige.ch/seminaire/talks/campbell.pdf

Also: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-0221/8/02/C02...

Some people say no one is interested in passing it because it might reduce flows of money necessary for sustaining the price of Australian real estate.

[1] https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2018/03/federal-government-...

I assume that is because such a tunnel would involve dealing with the city of Beverly Hills, which has historically been unenthusiastic about mass transit.

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/the-collapse-of-complex...

The article is in no way stating the oldest bit of the Earth's crust is 1.8 million years old. Crust has a specific meaning, the chemically differentiated rocks at the surface i.e. everything but the very very rare bits of exposed mantle. Oldest oceanic crust is <200 Ma, oldest continental crust dates to the Hadean (4.4 Ga, if you set the bar at only zircons).