I have been having a good time getting Claude to code in the unfashionable choice of Object Pascal/Lazarus. Fast compile times, native cross-platform support, and small statically-linked binaries that should work for years to come in our RAM-constrained future.
I have been getting claude to us free pascal/lazarus to write cross-platform (linux qt & gtk, windows and cocoa) apps as well as porting 30-year old abandoned Windows Delphi apps to all three platforms using precisely because I can end up with a small, single binary for distribution after static linking.
I hope that prevalence of AI coding agents might lead to a bit of a revival of RAD tools like lazarus, which seem to me to have a good model for creating cross-platform apps.
I have settled on a way to do append only notes by having a "journal" user on my xmpp server, and I take notes by sending them asciidoc formatted messages. I have been too lazy to do it so far, but I could extract the messages from the server and compile them into something more easily browsed.
I had a very convenient setup using linked files stored in Dropbox that worked very well for 15 years. The Zotero 6 to 7 upgrade completely broke this, and modified the database so that rollback is not possible. There was no warning that this workflow would be completely broken on upgrade.
In this context energy=wavelength=frequency, and hard x-rays means x-ray with energies > approx. 5 keV. I am assuming properties they are after in their particular context are <i>tunable</i> hard x-rays with with relatively narrow bandwidth, such that they can tune the energy/frequency/wavelength of their beam to be above the absorption edge of particular elements in the pigments in paintings and compare the x-ray fluorescence maps above and below the absorption so they can see where particular pigments are and thus paintings hidden below the visible painting.
One big advantage synchrotrons have is flux over a broad spectrum. When you want monochromatic x-rays you can start with broad spectrum x-rays from a synchrotron source and throw almost all of the photons away, and still have orders of magnitude more x-rays in your 1 eV bandpass beam than the flux of a laboratory source, (even if it has a peak in its spectrum at the energy you want). The plots on slides 4-6 linked in the first comment [1] demonstrate this clearly.
However, the energy range where inverse compton scattering sources seem most attractive are at energies >100 keV where it appears there is the potential for inverse compton sources to approach and even outperform synchrotron bend-magnet sources (slides 31 to 35), particularly in comparison to bend-magnets/wigglers at synchrotrons with lower storage ring energy than facilities like ESRF (6 GeV). High flux at higher energies (>100 keV) is difficult to generate at the more common 2.0-3.0 GeV storage rings.
Radioactivity of rocks is caused by only a few elements so is useful to consider the minerals in which those elements are hosted. i.e. the radioactivity is not evenly distributed among the minerals that comprise granite. The elements that contribute most to the radioactivity of granite are U, Th and K. The K is mostly contained in alkali feldspar and mica. The U and Th are contained in accessory minerals, such as monazite and zircon. Monazite and zircon are dense, robust minerals, which means they persist after weathering and go on to accumulate in detrital sediments, and we call the sediments in which they are concentrated heavy mineral sands. Alkali feldspar is much less robust and rarely survives in mature sediments (i.e. quartz-rich sands), instead all the K ends up in clays.
When heavy mineral sands are processed to extract the Ti and Zr ( from rutile, illmenite, zircon), the residual concentrate is rich in monazite. This material comprises the bulk of our easily accessible Th reserves. However, you can't just leave this monazite-rich material lying around heaps, as it creates a windborne radioactive dust hazard, so it gets mixed back in with the other light material. This is a bit of a shame. All that energy and effort is expended to extract the heavy minerals, but as there is no immediate market for the monazite, and it is a liability to keep it in the extracted state, all that work hard work is undone to mitigate the dust hazard and it gets mixed back with the quartz etc.
So it is perhaps somewhat ironic that we mine beaches to get the minerals that are the source of the bulk of the radioactivity of granites.
Worse than Mauritius, Macedonia, Oman, Moldova, Vietnam, Egypt and Botswana.
Worse than Georgia, Kuwait, Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and El Salvador.
Sitting embarrassingly and awkwardly between Kazakhstan and Jamaica, and worse than the Dominican Republic at 74 and Guatemala at 75,
Australia ranks off the deep end of the scale at 77th place.
77th and falling. After Tajikistan, Australia had the fourth highest loss in Economic Complexity over the last decade, falling 18 places.
Not the behavior of a modern, mixed economy that many Australians pretend that we have. We are an anomaly. A third world economy with a first world standard of living. Will is last?
There is hardly any water and the cities were designed around cars far more than any city outside Los Angeles.
As a past/present resident of both LA and Melbourne, I would modify that to say that Syd/Mel are as dependent on cars as much as Los Angeles, but without the planning commitment to cars that LA has exhibited. Bring up maps of LA and Sydney/Melbourne on the same scale. LA has a grid of freeways with a cell-size of 10-15 km. Not so for Sydney and Melbourne, and their surface streets are much worse. Roads designed as two lanes each way made into 3 narrow lanes each way by turning the shoulder into a new lane. Nowhere to go when someone breaks down. Without a commitment to either a comprehensive transit system, or a decent freeway network, Syd/Mel have half-arsed implementations of both.
In LA I was comfortable cycling along PCH, Santa Monica Blvd, Sepulveda Bvd etc, but I would never consider cycling on their Melbourne equivalents.
5 years and 7464 references later Zotero has become an integral part of my workflow. The combination of Zotero and the custom renaming of Zotfile lets me store all my pdfs in Dropbox, but sync all database by Zotero such that I can add references at work and have them waiting for me on my PC at home.
I abandoned Mendeley because it would not permit relative paths, and I have not looked back.
After much searching I found the energy resolution here [1], stated as <2 keV. For comparison, a modern silicon drift diode fluorescence detector will have an energy resolution of ~130 eV.