Out of Lab Notebook

Fun Fact: @sciencehistory.org has the photos (cf. www.sciencehistory.org/about/press/...) and their exhibits are free and easy to get to in downtown Philly! [Their fireworks exhibit is also a delight to surely everyone and not just pyromaniacs. (…But I know my audience: definitely pyro friendly!)]

It's been just long enough since the annual ASMS conference that last night I had a dream about it where my best science pals were for whatever reason not around and I woke up ready to ping them like, "you are definitely coming to the conference next year, right?!" I reasoned it's too early to ask.

There are object lessons in un-binned data artifacts and this kind of plot that also suffers from the complications of granularity of reported heights can live in that educational material.

Free Data Viz Advice: When making any radial plot (pies, donuts, etc.) use the 12'o'clock position as an edge for slices. Particularly when comparing two things, use the mirror plane down the middle for obvious relative clarity. ALSO, in this kind of situation, maximize distance to the 3rd color.

It would be more weird to pick up a phone and greet the caller with "...So I've been thinking about ion clouds," in a world where caller ID is not a thing but, strictly speaking, only slightly.

When I used to judge science fairs, I had an internal heuristic for the kids who were going places in terms of likely science success based on their solid acronyms. So it is with delight that I note that I just heard, "I am giving you the easily digestible version of 2-D L.A.S.A.G.N.A." #ASMS2026

There's a flatter plains accent from which "deuterate" (as in HD exchange/swapping in of deuterium) comes out "dude-erate" in a cool Mary J. Blige portmanteau way and it really leads to effective earworm planting: there may be 30% more holleration in this dancery today. (…Stable hateration levels.)

It is a delight to realize there are people with whom one can happily be in a back-of-a-session nodding relationship for ~25 years. (It is not a surprise, but a variant of the joy of realizing that one can ID so many luminaries from their profiles and shadows.) #ASMS2026

I love the iconification of different application spaces but also i feel like someone on the design team was like, "I made that phospholipid like you asked; real slutty, definitely could be working a corner."

Always delighted to see applications of analyses of thin films in action. Also: somehow Gavin has not aged in the 17 some years since I last saw him! youtu.be/jUSJtEH03_A

The Science Panel-show I am shopping around with friends will be hella wild if I can get past the various social and business and legitimacy complications. (Especially given that the pitch benefits from familiarity with niche international reality programming.)

A couple dozen years in with some of the most interesting people, I am honored and jazzed to get to help compile and preserve the stories of outstanding science (and scientists!) and technology in our field. (Mostly hoping to maintain the team of the history committee+Jane and not drop the ball!)

I am delighted in suddenly realizing that the ethos that uses "nanoscale" for anything from ~2 nano-units to 1.999 micro-units is broader than certain subgroups of scientists. (...Below 2 nano-units you're BASICALLY working high pico-scale, like a delicious roostery salsa. [or so I've been told].)

"The EH&S and Radiation Safety Officer trainings of both me & my parents became obvious to anyone listening when on our call we joked about my aiming for ALARA* in reference to both the level of mess in my apartment & the amount of work I wanted to do to get there. *As Low as Reasonably Achievable"

Though parsing between experienced data, stuff one was told, or conjecture may be more the focus of this paper, the delineation of when info was acquired dividing time into chunks from now->-1month, -1month to -50 years, and -50 years to time immemorial is 🔥🔥🔥. www.researchgate.net/publication/...

I am delighted to report, based on a gentle cross-language investigation induced by a glorious moment in a dubbed international cooking program, that Koreans refer to "Horseradish" as "Western Wasabi". ¡Yeehaw!

After years of being unable to smell being remediated via a knock-on effect of meds for a lungs situation, I've been going on Sniffin' Safaris and am almost ready to do some extractive analyses to isolate some favorite found smells from out in the wilds (of the garden section of the hardware store).

"Melissopalynology" though a very strong word is TOO strong(/long) for Scrabble utility.

A wild thing about coming to the same conference over 20 years (and being predisposed to sitting in the backs of sessions) is realizing how many scientists one *knows* from the silhouettes of the backs of their heads. #ASMS2025