links for 2008-04-17

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Due to work stuff, I'm very busy this week, and I don't have time to write a detailed pathological language post, so I chose something that doesn't take a lot of explanation, but
While browser over at programming.reddit.com, I came across something simultaneously hideous and amazing.
I saw it at Julie's.
"American Music," the Violent Femmes "California Stars," Billy Bragg and Wilco "The City of New Orleans," Arlo Guthrie "Song to Woody," Bob Dylan "The Body of an American," the Pogues

Collar, JI, et al., Science 319(5865) 933 (2007)
"Spin-Dependent WIMP Limits from a Bubble Chamber"

Sensitivity, selectivity, modest cost, and active medium Enviro-whiner hissy fit CF3I. Large scale apparatus using perfluorobutane is exciting.

Like 100,000 gallons of perchloroethylene buried 4900 feet deep, it lacks the looming visceral thrill of dropping a hex nut and blasting South Dakota into space. Uncle Al recommends a Media darling active medium: iodine heptafluoride, IF7.

CF3I,
bp -32.5°C, d = 2.36 g/ml
@ 25°C, d = 2.06 g/ml liquid
29.092 wt-% F, 64.777 wt-% I

IF7,
mp = 4.5 C d = 2.7 g/cm^3 (solid)
bp = 4.77 C, colorless
51.171 wt-% F, 48.829 wt-% I

Incompatible with Pyrex, fused silica (Teflon AF windows?), and most metals (Monel?); expensive, corrosive, toxic, malodorous. IF7 has it all!