@dbsalk It's a Samsung TV, so we're off to a good start.

@Lizette603_23 Do you know the model or manufacturer?

Does anyone have a good rec on a TV wall mount somewhere between a low profile, flush mount, and a swivel mount?

I'm putting a TV near a corner. Ideally it would spend most of its time flat against the wall, and sometimes swivel (one side more or less staying put, and the side near the corner swinging out just a bit) for better viewing from the whole room.

I've been told that anything articulated, with a big arm that swings out, is a non-starter.

@zombiewarrior Sounds like the Hamburglar's true identity

Well, it finally happened. One of the kid’s friends sent her a link to a YouTube video featuring this tweet and asked “Is that you??”
https://mastodon.social/@mcnees/110334058263166569

@kenkousen Thank you!

Like you, I assumed "Boar's Head" was just a name, and not something scattered around the factory floor and left to moulder.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/08/blood-puddles-mold-tainted-meat-bugs-boars-head-inspections-are-horrifying/

Rutherford’s investigations into elemental transmutation would inspire Leo Szilárd’s idea of producing energy via nuclear chain reactions.

Besides his discoveries, Rutherford trained several notable scientists. I already mentioned Niels Bohr, Otto Hahn, and Hans Geiger.

A lesser known but very important scientist he trained was Harriet Brooks. She was Rutherford's first grad student, and probably the first human to notice the recoil of an atomic nucleus due to emissions during nuclear decay

An important consequence of this experiment was Rutherford’s identification of the hydrogen nucleus as a fundamental particle in its own right. He dubbed it the “proton."

A few years later he hypothesized the neutron, which would account for the non-proton mass of nuclei and somehow hold them together. Ten years later his former doctoral student Chadwick would discover the neutron, there at Cavendish labs.

Technically this was the first time someone had intentionally transmuted one element into another.

Rutherford suspected this might be what happened, but he reported his findings very carefully and adopted a conservative point of view pending more evidence.

But it is fair to say that Ernest Rutherford was the first successful alchemist.

During this period Rutheford brought a young physicist named Niels Bohr to his lab. Conceptual problems with the Rutherford model of the atom (why don’t the electrons crash into the nucleus?) prompted Bohr’s development of his quantum mechanical model.

Rutherford left Manchester for Cambridge in 1919, to lead the Cavendish labs. But before his departure he made one last remarkable discovery: by bombarding nitrogen with alpha particles, he triggered the process ¹⁴N + α → ¹⁷O + p.

These observations were at odds with Thomson’s prevailing model of the atom – “plum pudding” electrons situated throughout a large positively charged blob. That model wouldn’t produce the scattering events Rutherford and his collaborators were seeing.

Instead, Rutherford hypothesized that an atom’s positively charged components and most of its mass must be concentrated in a comparatively tiny nucleus. Head-on collisions with an α would be rare (since the nucleus is so small) but dramatic!

“It was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.”

[Andrade, E. N. da C., Rutherford and the Nature of the Atom, p. 111 (1964)]

This work was awarded the 1908 Nobel in Chemistry.

But Rutherford's (arguably) most significant discovery came after his Nobel prize. He had moved on to Manchester, and was studying the scattering of alpha rays.

In 1909, with Geiger and Marsden, Rutherford scattered α particles off of a thin gold foil. I've seen the foil thickness estimated at 2800 atoms. He noticed that an α occasionally scattered off the foil at large angle, and sometimes even back-scattered directly towards the source!

During Rutherford’s first stint at Cambridge he worked with JJ Thomson on projects that contributed to the discovery of the electron.

In 1898, while still at Cambridge, he reported on two types of radiation that he’d later refer to as “α” and “β” rays.

Rutherford then went to McGill, in Montreal, where he continued to work on radioactivity. It was there he developed his “disintegration theory,” pinpointing some form of atomic breakdown as the source of radioactivity.

Physicist Ernest Rutherford was born in Brightwater, New Zealand #OTD in 1871.

He discovered the nucleus, proton, and α and β particles; explained nuclear decay; and was the first person to successfully transmute one element into another.

Image: George Grantham Bain Collection, LOC

Saddened to learn of @stevesilberman‘s passing, and grateful for all the little conversations and interesting comments he’d offer, both here and on other platforms.

No thank you.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/08/28/fire-bristle-worm-amphinome-rostrata/

It’s not a free trial if you have to provide a credit card number.

[at the crypto meeting]

“Okay, I know we all agreed this would be a standard grift, but look how good the numbers are when we take hostages.”