iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Andy Napper @quantumdot2.bsky.social · 16/08/2025

We had an HP diode array spectrophotometer that was running on a Windows 3.11 for workgroups PC. Honestly it worked great! We upgraded it bc our undergrads were confused about the OS. They'd never seen anything more ancient than Win 95 before (and that was 15 years ago)

A screenshot of Windows 3.11 for workgroups from: https://winworldpc.com/product/windows-3/311

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Andy Napper @quantumdot2.bsky.social · 14/06/2025

IDK why the last image was so pixelated, but here's a better view of it:

A floor lamp from Honeywell, with a (to me) nonsensical description: “Optikprocessor ensures that every beam is a note in nature’s symphony, while SICLS orchestrates the ambiance, adapts to life’s dance. … Liguilator is the maestro of hues, painting with the palette of soul.”

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Andy Napper @quantumdot2.bsky.social · 13/06/2025

Shopping for a reading lamp on Amazon. This one looks good… but what the heck does this description even mean? 🤯

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Andy Napper @quantumdot2.bsky.social · 07/06/2025

@deandad.bsky.social My RSS feed reader showed a bunch of your IHE articles as "updated". Are you coming back? 🤞 (Hope so—missed your distinctive voice!)

RSS feeds showing "Confessions of a Community College Dean" as being "unread" from Inside Higher Education.

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Andy Napper @quantumdot2.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

By the second edition (1955) of Pauling's "College Chemistry" book, the spelling had changed to Le Chatelier:

Le Chatelier spelled without the circumflex in the 2nd edition of Pauling's College Chemistry book.

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Andy Napper @quantumdot2.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

Screenshot of Chatelier misspelling - letter to Pauling:

A screen cap showing a letter Linus Pauling received about misspelling Chatelier in his Gen Chem textbook (1950)

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Andy Napper @quantumdot2.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

Linus Pauling spelled the name as "Châtelier" in his famous General Chemistry textbook. Oregon State's Pauling site mentions that he received a letter in 1950 about the mistake. Perhaps this is where it originated? scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/coll/pauling...

An excerpt from Linus Pauling's General Chemistry book where he misspells Chatelier as Châtelier.

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Andy Napper @quantumdot2.bsky.social · 14/04/2025

Looks great! Our cats love theirs, too. You're a good cat dad who definitely earned a couple of beers!! :)

A set of wooden shelves with cutouts allowing cats to climb from shelf to shelf. Occupied by three cute cats demoing how much they love it!

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Andy Napper @quantumdot2.bsky.social · 06/03/2025

OMG - such a perfect remake of the Powers of Ten video by CGP Grey. How did I miss this three years ago?! “Metric Paper…” www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUF5esTscZI

A honey bee overlaid with A4 paper proportioned rectangles

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Andy Napper @quantumdot2.bsky.social · 18/01/2025

“The ethical case for resisting AI” chuckpearson.wordpress.com/2025/01/… It’ll be interesting to see how ChatGPT and its ilk disrupts the world of (online) homework in chemistry and other STEM fields. Challenging days lie ahead

Text Shot: I knew the gig was up when a student submitted correct answers to randomly generated percent yield and limiting reagent stoichiometry problems – the historic stumbling block in developing understanding – and submitted those correct answers 68 seconds after first seeing the problems.

That student didn’t do the problems by themself, or even with the help of an expert tutor. Again, these chemical equations and mass amounts were randomly generated. Something technological had to be helping.

And that’s how I used Chat-GPT for the first time myself, throwing my own ethical and moral concerns to the site, and input a randomly generated homework problem of my own to be solved.

Decorative-two students looking at a laptop

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Andy Napper @quantumdot2.bsky.social · 29/12/2024

“The Sinclair ZX81” As someone who remembers the ZX81 fondly, and spent a lot of time typing in programs on a TI-99/4A - this comment about the Apple Pencil really hit home to me how far we’ve come. www.metafilter.com/206917/The-Sincl…

Text Shot: Even the first Apple Pencil has a 32mhz 32 bit cpu w 64k, which almost certainly blows any home computer around at the time of the spectrum out of the water - it’s kind of crazy how much computing power is just casually sloshing around in everyday objects now

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Andy Napper @quantumdot2.bsky.social · 29/12/2024

“Standards for Graphic Presentation” Hard to believe these data-viz recommendations are >100 years old! 📊 infowetrust.com/project/1915-standa…

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Andy Napper @quantumdot2.bsky.social · 27/12/2024

“Interacting With History - Info We Trust” Some gorgeous looking charts and history here! Who knew small multiples were this old? (1630) infowetrust.com/project/history-ess…

An interactive timeline of infographics.

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Andy Napper @quantumdot2.bsky.social · 26/12/2024

A lovely story (recently RT by @stephaniesb.bsky.social) which reminded me of a quote about brass from @dereklowe.bsky.social book, “The Chemistry Book: From Gunpowder to Graphene, 250 Milestones in the History of Chemistry” #Chemsky

If you want to see real, old-fashioned bronze of a kind that would have been recognized thousands of years ago, take a close look at a drum kit. Bronze has been the preferred metal for bells and cymbals for hundreds of years. The more tin in the mix, the lower the timbre…

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Andy Napper @quantumdot2.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

“Alissa Eckert on designing the ‘spiky blob’ Covid-19 medical illustration” I always wondered about the creation of *that* image. Fascinating back story! www.wallpaper.com/design/design-eme…

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Andy Napper @quantumdot2.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

My DAX is almost as rusty as my FORTRAN 66, but I can still write a line or two. 😀 Looking forward to some daily practice thanks to Ruth Pozuelo (Curbal)! curbal.com/25-days-of-dax-frid… #25DaysOfDAXFridays #PowerBI

25 Days of DAX Fridays - 3rd edition - day 1 answer (Camembert Pierrot). See https://curbal.com for details!

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Andy Napper @quantumdot2.bsky.social · 24/08/2024

"gift open warning" ... whatever that means! :) github.com/microsoft/fa...

Fabric icons from Github showing "gift open warning"

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Andy Napper @quantumdot2.bsky.social · 11/08/2024

I'm using the July 2024 version from the MS App store. Not sure what version @pbiqueryous.bsky.social is using though. Zooming in/out using CTRL + SHIFT + (PLUS / MINUS) affects everything in this window, not just the function definition text, for me.

Power Query interface (July 2024 desktop PBI app) showing a larger than usual function definition text.

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Andy Napper @quantumdot2.bsky.social · 25/04/2024

I have to be honest - I rarely use what-if parameters!

A Power BI graph showing views of a video vs time along with a shaded region that shows a dynamically chosen percentile range from prior data

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Andy Napper @quantumdot2.bsky.social · 24/04/2024

Sure, I've included the median (which I think should be the same as the 50th percentile, but the INC vs. EXC differences are not at my fingertips). It's a dotted dark grey line. Sure looks like there's some skew here!

Power BI visual showing the number of video views as a line, and an area representing the interquartile range. The average (mean) and median lines are also plotted as comparisons.

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Andy Napper @quantumdot2.bsky.social · 24/04/2024

I wrote a couple of measures using PERCENTILEX.INC to create the IQR, then carefully arranged them and set the shade area for the 3rd quartile to grey, and the 1st quartile to white. Bit hacky, but it does show the underlying distribution at least!

Power BI chart showing a grey interquartile range in order to compare a video's views since inception

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