Andy Napper

Tons of people have "PhD-level" intelligence. The fun secret is that you don't have to be all that smart to earn a PhD. You just have to be willing to work yourself into the ground for years on end.

Also...PhD's often seem extra smart 'cause you generally encounter them on their chosen terrain.

So, Did I Miss Anything? “Confessions of a Community College Dean” author Matt Reed returns to his column at Inside Higher Ed.

It’s good to be back! www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

Too pissed to comment. // Trump requests 93% cut to Appalachian Regional Commission. Ohio would take a huge hit. • Ohio Capital Journal https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2025/07/15/trump-requests-93-cut-to-appalachian-regional-commission-ohio-would-take-a-huge-hit/

This is a wild, wild story.

Here's his video: x.com/GeoffLewisOr...

Here's his tweets: x.com/GeoffLewisOr...

A prominent OpenAI investor who using Chat-GPT is convinced of some eclectic conspiracy, due to GPT-generated text looking like scp-wiki.wikidot.com articles.

Photoelectron spectroscopy and molecular orbital theory : Ballard, R. E. (Roy Ernest), 1932- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive ix, 192 p. : 25 cm

This book on the internet archive has a few PES spectra of some homonuclear diatomics in chapter 6 (free to borrow with an account): archive.org/details/phot...

It also lists doi.org/10.1016/0368... as a reference for the N2 and O2 spectra. If you can't access the paper, feel free to DM me.

Photoelectron Spectroscopy | PDF | X Ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy | Molecular Orbital Scribd is the world's largest social reading and publishing site.

There are some PES spectra given (and I think cited) in this document: www.scribd.com/document/816...

The peaks don't quite correspond to MO energies IIRC (Koopman's theorem), but the ordering of states going across the second period is (I think) what you're looking for, right?

Visualisation of different causes of food poisoning showing people vomiting, with the length of the vomit proportional to the number of cases.

The data journalists were so busy wondering if they could do something they never stopped to think if they should.

www.theguardian.com/news/datablo...

A map showing South West England and Wales, labelled "Graph of British Rivers". Two river courses are shown, labelled 'Wye axis' and 'Exe axis'. Does anyone read these descriptions, or am I wasting my time?

Graph of British Rivers

Microsoft's recent claims of AI having "four times higher diagnostic accuracy than medical doctors" is total horseshit.

Link: microsoft.ai/new/the-path...

It's a classic example of AI evangelist / vendor oversimplifying a complex problem that isn't tech. So unbelievably dangerous it's disgusting.

A tungsten wire SEM cathode

Yesterday, I gave a lecture on "Microscopy in Battery Research" covering the basics of SEM, TEM and AFM 🔋🔬.

I love to have some things to show around, so I took a 3D-printed model of an AFM cantilever and some real cantilevers to compare. What the students liked most 1/2

I think so! 🤢

A floor lamp from Honeywell, with a (to me) nonsensical description: “Optikprocessor ensures that every beam is a note in nature’s symphony, while SICLS orchestrates the ambiance, adapts to life’s dance. … Liguilator is the maestro of hues, painting with the palette of soul.”

IDK why the last image was so pixelated, but here's a better view of it:

Yeah, looks like it! It was the "Amazon top rated" lamp in its category, but the copy was ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

A floor lamp from Honeywell, with a (to me) nonsensical description: “Optikprocessor ensures that every beam is a note in nature’s symphony, while SICLS orchestrates the ambiance, adapts to life’s dance. … Liguilator is the maestro of hues, painting with the palette of soul.”

Shopping for a reading lamp on Amazon. This one looks good… but what the heck does this description even mean? 🤯

RSS feeds showing "Confessions of a Community College Dean" as being "unread" from Inside Higher Education.

@deandad.bsky.social My RSS feed reader showed a bunch of your IHE articles as "updated". Are you coming back? 🤞

(Hope so—missed your distinctive voice!)

TIL: You can order up to six free posters directly from the Nobel Foundation!

Be the talk of the dept when your package from the Nobel Prize folks gets delivered. 🤣

#Chemistry

www.kva.se/en/prizes/no...

Well, there goes your summer! :)

Terrible Maps: The Mercator projection on a sphere - interesting choice Photo of SPALDING basketball with the globe as Mercator projection (Canada and Greenland look huge).

#gis #cartography #gischat

Le Chatelier spelled without the circumflex in the 2nd edition of Pauling's College Chemistry book.

By the second edition (1955) of Pauling's "College Chemistry" book, the spelling had changed to Le Chatelier:

Letters to F. J. Allen: An Informal Portrait of Linus Pauling On October 25, 1924, Linus Pauling, then a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, wrote the first of close to 70 surviving letters to his former physical chemistry instructor, Frederick J. Allen. This article is a chronicle of some of those letters with a few additional pieces including the Life editorial, titled A Weird Insult from Norway.

I suspect your intuition was correct!

PS The letter writer to Pauling pointing out his error appears to have been Fred Allen, his old p-chem prof...

pubs.acs.org/doi/epdf/10....

A screen cap showing a letter Linus Pauling received about misspelling Chatelier in his Gen Chem textbook (1950)

Screenshot of Chatelier misspelling - letter to Pauling:

An excerpt from Linus Pauling's General Chemistry book where he misspells Chatelier as Châtelier.

Linus Pauling spelled the name as "Châtelier" in his famous General Chemistry textbook.

Oregon State's Pauling site mentions that he received a letter in 1950 about the mistake.

Perhaps this is where it originated?

scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/coll/pauling...

The Google Books Ngram viewer seems to show an uptick in the circumflex spelling around 1870, and another change in slope around 1980... for what it's worth!
books.google.com/ngrams/graph...

What is #dataviz animation good for? An updated thread with examples.

I just "binge watched" your stat mech lectures on YT last week-end. So very good! Picked up some tips for next time I teach the course. Also—I might be developing a crush on the letter ξ... now I know how to pronounce it. 😀

Currently working through your computational lectures. Long time bookmarked

The Continuing Crisis, Part XIII: Lasting Damage

The lasting damage that the Trump administration is doing to US science is barbaric. But more and more of the general public is hearing about it and just how bad it is:

Brilliant vis as well as an important takeaway by @chezvoila.com

“Remember, a chart doesn't have to be understood in 3 seconds. It should reward the effort you put into understanding it.”

Damn strait! Simple viz can have good ROI; but so can complex and/or time consuming vis.

Smell-O-Scope "If a dog craps anywhere in the universe, you can bet I won't be out of the loop." ―Hubert J. Farnsworth[source] The Smell-O-Scope was an invention created by Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth. It allowe...

Citation: futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Smell-O...