Above: if only he'd waited, Σωκράτης (that's "Socrates" to the rest of us) could have seen his name rendered correctly on my site. From "Death of Socrates," by Jacques-Louis David, 1787.
Logging into phpMyAdmin for this site, I was greeted with (the key part of this being the latin1_general_ci)
And, from all reports, the latin1 character set does not support special characters. The character set of choice seems to be utf8mb4, for which a completely usable collation is utf8mb4_unicode_ci. So, to begin, change that.
Next step in this process was the replacement of all instances of latin1 to utf8mb4 in my database, which I performed as per the recommendations found at brianli.com/how-to-fix-wordpress-character-encoding/ but with the SQL query box.
And yes, for f's sake, back up your database first or download a copy and then do this.
Above: I'm an American. Of course it's in the middle (and apologies if I, er, cut you off). Light pollution map as of the data available on 8 March 2025. See the excellent/astronomically depressing details at lightpollutionmap.info.
The most recent issue of Free Astronomy Magazine (March-April 2025) is available for your reading and downloading pleasure in English, Italian, Spanish, French, and Arabic at www.astropublishing.com (and facebook).
The March-April 2025 cover. Click to go to the issue.
Two very young children, COVID, and life in general kept me indoors most evenings (and away from observing) for much of 2020-2021. What I do vividly remember around mid-March 2021 was taking out the garbage a little bit earlier in the morning than usual and seeing a massive celestial caravan moving from west-to-east through a crystal-clear sky. At that moment, I was astounded at the progress SpaceX had made with Starlink, as I'd never seen anything that massive and coordinated and that fast in the sky before (and that includes seeing a space shuttle undock from the ISS over the course of two full orbits, which itself I won't soon forget).
I personally do not know any amateur astronomer who considers that caravan "progress" (feel free to correct me). The good fight from darksky.org, the now-defunct SELENE-NY, whose web presence ended around 2019 (last snap – web.archive.org/web/20190101182128/http://selene-ny.org/; skipping what might be a hacked site, a link and mention is, for instance, skykeepers.org/activism.html), and other local, national, and international organizations seems most up-the-hill as we progress upwards. If it were easy for astrophotographers to plant their gear just past the edge of GEO, it would likely be a different situation. But that's a long time in waiting (because they spent all their money on gear and can't affords rockets and space platforms).
In the defense of progress, very little in the nighttime sky will get a crowd of 200 people looking at the exact same location faster than a pinpoint of light hauling in front of a field of stars. I have no doubt that the sight of a satellite can be a gateway for someone into the hobby (or into one of the many associated professions).
The problem remains far worse here on the ground, as even the darkest of dark skies are seeing light pollution either slowly or rapidly advance (see the cover article above). The tension continues.
Above: the largest dication in the study (barium) produces the most asymmetric coordination complex in the crystal phase (and retains a THF to boot).
Published in the Journal of Coordination Chemistry (article link) and "…dedicated to Professor Jim Atwood to honor his many years as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal or Coordination Chemistry [huzzah!]." I most definitely still have my copy of Inorganic and Organometallic Reaction Mechanisms; that cover stared back at me for six months in one of my grad school offices. The raw data for this paper goes back several years and has finally been put into form – "several years" being long enough that the theory work for this one didn't overlap with the method work that went into the Azobenzene as an Effective Ligand in Europium Chemistry article I posted several days back (as to whether the predictions would have been different or not, we may never know).
We've solved the protein folding problem (fairly well as of late) but still haven't solved the (molecular) crystal polymorphism problem. While this paper and field of work focuses on the presented alkali (Li -> Fr) and alkaline earth (Be -> Ra) metals, in these systems those metals really are just charged, spherical linkers that will preferentially stick to some organic functional groups better than others (ignoring the chemistry to get those metals there, of course). For anyone pondering the design of crystals or (macro)molecular complexes out of these spheres, the key issues are (a) dicationic radius, (b) effective charge at the metals, (c) the strength of the interaction of these spheres with the functional groups, and (d) the preferred means of these metals to interacting with varied ligands due to the varied dependencies within the other three items.
The high-symmetry (or locally so in the "Pseudo-C3" structures) molecular complexes used to study the preferences for two-fold or three-fold symmetric coordination environments for the Ca/Sr/Ba series.
These tetrahedral tetraarylborate anions are valuable molecules because their high symmetry means that many coordination modes are available that can still retain some of the symmetry elements of the isolated anion – this provides the theoretician with a healthy opportunity to speed the calculations along and impose symmetry-constrained geometries that let us explore binding preferences at higher levels of theory. In terms of developing computational models to explore preferred binding modes, these ligands are excellent test cases because they are highly symmetric molecules that, except for barium, prefer to produce highly (locally) symmetric coordination complexes. This was exploited to great extent in the Gaussian 09 (I did say this theory work was older) calculations performed to try to draw firm conclusions about the preferred binding modes across the Ca-Sr-Ba series – and the calculations well-reproduced the observed trends (so there).
Some additional work was done to model the preferred numbers of coordinated solvent molecules (THF and Et2O) down the alkali earth series, but that's an even more academic question given the known coordination energies of both molecules, and so was not included in the article.
Catherine M. Lavin, Damian G. Allis, Miriam M. Gillett-Kunnath, Ashley Clements, Alan G. Goos, Joshua J. Woods, Paul Hager, Donyell S. Logan, and Karin Ruhlandt-Senge
Abstract: The use of the weakly binding tetraarylborate ligands and the careful selection of co-ligands affords novel contact ion pairs exclusively stabilized by Ae-π (Ae = calcium, strontium and barium) interactions of the form [Ae(B{(3,5-Me2)C6H3}4)2(thf)n] (Ae = Ca, n = 0, 1; Sr, n = 0, 2), [Ba(B{(3,5-Me2)C6H3}4)2(thf)]. HN(SiMe3)2, 3 and [Ba(B{(4-tBu)C6H4}4)2].Et2O, 4. The variety of and preference for binding geometries with choice of metal is considered using theoretical calculations.
