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Of lightsabers and laser cutters

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I just saw Rogue One and so I’m in a Star Wars mood.  A long time ago (March) in a galaxy far, far away (downtown), I went to C2E2.  (Here are the photos to prove it.)  I had purchased some nice Star Wars art and have been looking for a frame to display it.  I gave up (read: had to put the project on the back burner because of the piles of grading).  Recently, I revisited the problem (read: finished grading) and decided that the only way I was going to get the frame style I wanted at a price I could afford was to, well, you know:

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Predicting elemental properties for #RealTimeChem Week

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Happy #RealTimeChem week everybody.  What, you don’t know what it is?  Neither did I, untill I happened to read about it over at Compound Interest . (You guessed it, I’ve got lots of grading to do so I’m procrastinating again.) Since the theme this year centers on the four new elements that have been added to the periodic table, and I have an affinity for the table and all its secrets, I thought it might be fun to take advantage of the periodic properties of the table and predict some of the characteristics of the new elements.

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Microwolf – running Mathematica on a Pi Zero

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Wolfram’s Mathematica can run on a $5 Raspberry Pi zero. While it may be painfully slow, it does open up opportunities to use Mathematica in low-power, remote-sensing applications. This blog post is a first in a series highlighting the design challenges I’ve encountered (and in some cases overcome) building Mathematica on Pi (MoP) devices. (Hey, I think I just created a new acronym.)

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Adventures in PCB milling – journey begins

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This is a short post to show off my first attempt at PCB milling. I’m a member of the Chicago Innovation Exchange.   Well, I was, but now it’s no longer CIE but the Polsky Center, or maybe the Polsky Echange North, I’m not sure, but that’s what happens when someone invests $35 million in your incubator; you change your name.  The center provides me access to a pretty swanky fab lab equipped with (among other things) an X-carve CNC mill. I recently completed my training on the machine and I wanted to put my skills to the test.

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