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    Actinometry geekiness and some deep, dark desires.

    We have two lamps. These two lamps are crucial to the semiconductors project, in which we are testing how TiON will photochemically react to degrade several pollutants in water. Now, I don’t know the technical names for these lamps, but I think one is a mercury arc lamp. It shall be known as the Trash Can Lamp, because the merry-go-round reactor is set up in a trash can with a felt covering to keep out other light. It (theoretically) has a strong ultraviolet (UV) output. Our second lamp shall be called the Little Lamp. Its output is mostly in the visual spectrum, and we suspect very little hits the UV…

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    Is your conversation offending me? Perhaps I should speak up

    (Initial note: Mae has a blog. Let it be known.) So a recent dispute between C. and Mae has me thinking. (This is a good thing, although there may be some controversy.) Yes, another dangerous thought “thread” has forked off. The question: should we censor the topics of discussion to avoid possibly offending a friend who refuses to speak up on her discomfort? (And I’ll add to that that it’s even unknown whether the topic of discussion is offending the woman, or if she’s just tired of the topic being discussed. She just doesn’t speak up.) For instance: Some woman is Catholic. Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that…

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    Steve Pinker’s Words and Rules

    In Words and Rules, Steven Pinker provides a well-rounded glimpse into linguistics, history of languages, language families, childhood speech errors, neural networks, and various other related topics through the examination of regular and irregular verbs. What one might consider a rather boring topic on the surface (“j’ai, tu as, il/elle/on a…”, anyone?) is presented in such a manner as to make reading the same lists of the families of irregular verbs (in four languages, no less) several times bearable and even interesting. I found my interests leaning towards the history of languages and language families discussed throughout the first five or six chapters and my attention waning on the last…

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    What happens when all the love is gone?

    One develops some damn shin splints and sore feet, that’s what. I need new shoes. Even walking, I can feel that the cushioning is gone in the toe/ball of the foot section of these, and my feet are starting to stay sore all day after my runs. They’re just cheap Saucony Grid Auras, but they’ve served me well for over three hundred miles. I need to acquire another pair, is all. This morning, I walked 3.5 mi at a 15:17 pace on the track. I even remembered to reverse direction today so that I’m going clockwise. And I managed to keep count of laps. I’m starting to wonder if there’s…

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    Just a stroll with a side of iron

    I suppose another challenge in this blog will be to keep the titles interesting. How many ways can I label a weight-lifting workout or a run? I got a half-mile into my first interval yesterday morning and felt a splint-like twinge in my left leg. Given that yesterday was my sixth day in a row of running, with two of those days being my rougher “weekend runs”, I decided to walk. I’d rather miss a day (or even the rest of the week) in running than to miss two weeks from splints or even longer if I let it compound into something more serious. So a day or two of…