Rubidium85

I just learned that I was awarded a ~$100,000 grant to purchase some new equipment for my lab at work. That feels good! 🧑‍🔧🧑‍🔬

I found an old wallet.dat file on an external backup drive from 2015. It was just an old dust wallet, but that dust isn't quite dust anymore. Just swept it into a modern wallet. Nice.

Oh my... what is this old file???

Full house tonight at Christ the King Lutheran Church Holliston Massachusetts for our November community dinner! When there's more people than expected, we roll out more tables and chairs. ⛪️

I just had lunch with an old friend of mine who is a class of early 2011 Bitcoiner. He is not on any social media. We had a great conversation about how far bitcoin has come and how crazy things are today. Stack friends. 🧡🧡

I just finished Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb. What a book—long and heavy, but I really enjoyed it. I already knew a lot about the Manhattan Project itself, but what stood out this time were the stories of the scientists as people. Seeing them not just as names in textbooks, but as real, human characters gave me a whole new appreciation. I’ve especially connected with Ernest Rutherford—an experimentalist at heart, like me. Reading about him brought me back to the joy I felt doing chemistry experiments as a teenager in my garage lab. So now I’ve picked up Rhodes’ full Rutherford biography, A Force of Nature, to dive deeper. Most of what became modern nuclear physics was uncovered well before the Manhattan Project—between 1910 and 1932—when Rutherford and his students were at the center of discovery. Reading about those experiments is reminding me why I fell in love with science in the first place.

Decided to have breakfast for dinner tonight and got to try this great new maple syrup I got from @Mapletrade. Absolutely delicious. Great flavors I've never gotten from stores bought syrup. 🥞