Amulet-aurora - Amulet Aurora

call me an electron the way i change my behavior when being observed (i have anxiety)

breaking news: (wait for it)

"walking" coral discovered!

ohh...look at it go...

this feels a little TOO accurate

Favorite pirate?

I feel like I’m expected to say Gráinne O’Malley (or the more common anglicized version: Grace O’Malley) since she is considered the “Pirate Queen of Ireland.”

But I have a personal sore spot for Zheng Yi Sao (aka Shi(h) Yang / Ching Shih and a lot others) who is typically considered one of history’s most successful pirates. I used to be able to recite the why but I’d have to look back into it for fear of misremembering lol. She was one aspect I chose for a huge essay I had to do in history and did a large deep dive and found it so cool, there is a reason she is so popular.

(The essay was on the romanticized version of pirates in media, and its the connection to queerness and minority groups, vs actual piracy and how marginalized groups were treated in that world.) Ignore the abomination of a run-on sentence, trust that my essay was much better (it was a college class)

The Victor Ninov situation is one of my favourite cases of scientific fraud because it's rare to see so straightforward an example of someone being brought low by their own hubris.

Like, okay, faking the synthesis of a previously unobserved element: it's one of the few varieties of scientific fraud that actually has a clear gameplan for getting away with it. The physical properties of unobserved elements are, in principle, predictable, and there are only so many ways to go about synthesising them. If you do your homework, it's not outside the realm of possibility that your claimed results will end up being at least mostly consistent with the results of subsequent legitimate efforts to synthesise that element, and any minor discrepancies will end up being dismissed as statistical anomalies and/or the product of sloppy experimental design. It's by no means an easy game to play, but it's a game you can conceivably win.

And Victor Ninov did it. He rolled the dice and he won – twice. His fabricated results for elements 110 and 112 were corroborated by later work, and nobody noticed that his actual data was a crock of shit. He got away with it as cleanly as he could have hoped. It was only the third time he tried it, with element 118, that he biffed it and claimed results which nobody could replicate, and this is the only reason his earlier frauds were discovered. If he'd quit while he was ahead, it's likely the first two incidents never would have come to light.

Like, they say the third time's the charm, and buddy here learned the hard way that sometimes, the opposite also holds true.

Happy Valentine's Day!! Have you ever looked at the periodic table and thought, "This would make a great dating game"?? No??? Take a [quiz] to find out which element you are, and see which elements you can bond with! I made a TON of illustrations for this Doodle. Let me know your otp.

Disenchamtment "Goodbye Bean"