Sunak: "we're world-leading in our ambition". Absolutely pathetic.

The BBC has many failings, but hard to fault its service to classical music. Roughly 45 mins (starts at 1:28:00) dedicated to the great Bruckner 8, highlighting various conductors and how their interpretation of the work varies. A joy to listen to. bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0…

Cern plans £17 bn, 91 km circumference collider that is entirely underground. That's roughly £186 M per km. Substantially less than HS2 estimate of £247 M per km. Doubtless the collider costs will spiral, but they've got a bit of headroom before they catch up with those of HS2.

Found this rather nice salt crystal in the bottle after emptying out a bottle of fish sauce during a cupboard clean out. About 1 cm x 0.5 cm x 0.5 cm.

Large M&S Percy Pig bag. Essential piece of kit for transporting 100+ exam papers back to the office for marking.

Watching republicans turn up at court to show support for DJT (presumably hoping they will land big jobs if he wins the election), I'm reminded of the line from "A Man for All Seasons": Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world... but for Wales?

Tidying lab and found one of the three samples that we took to ESRF (BM16) in 1997, that helped kickstart development of SDPD using DASH. The others were thiothixene and capsaicin (Chem. Commun., 1998, 931-932). Sample looking a bit off-colour 27 years on!

25 years since the Eighteenth Congress and General Assembly of the International Union of Crystallography in Glasgow. Memorable for a great many reasons, including a scheduled break in proceedings for the partial solar eclipse on the 11th.

Got a citation alert for one of my papers "Polymorphism in Benzamide". The citing paper is "Lead iodide secondary growth and π-π stack regulation for sequential perovskite solar cells with 23.62% efficiency". At my age, I'll take them any way they come 😂.

Just like with buses, you wait ages for one publication, then two come along at once! 7th blind test of CSP; (1) structure generation and (2) structure ranking. Our contribution is small (one of the test structures) but ultimately valuable.

Today, "DASH: a program for crystal structure determination from powder diffraction data" hit 500 citations in Web of Science. Nice to know I've done at least one thing of lasting value in my career 😂.

Surprisingly, there was no SCXRD crystal structure of capsaicin—the natural product responsible for the pungency of chili peppers—in the CSD. So, I measured it!🌶️🌶️🌶️ #ChemTwitter #RealTimeChem #Crystallography Structural Chemistry CCDC Cambridge Rigaku Oxford Diffraction doi.org/10.1107/S20532…

Florian Meurer 📯 Structural Chemistry CCDC Cambridge Rigaku Oxford Diffraction Handling pure capsaicin can be challenging. I keep my sample in a glovebox and haven’t had any bad experiences. Nevertheless, there are some anecdotes about earlier PXRD work. Kenneth Shankland could likely share some ...

Sometimes it's the simple things that cheer you up. Like pumping down the vacuum on a Cryostream (that hasn't been pumped down for a while) and then watching just how quickly the temperature drops to 100K. A joy 😊.

Just published by RSC doi.org/10.1039/978183…

During lockdown in 2020, I finally found the time to photograph "Mount Azera". Just over three years in the making, it was 200 tins, 20 wide at the base, 20 kg of finely-powdered coffee, a nominal 11,000 servings, about £600 to purchase, but to me and Mark Spillman, priceless.

I wonder if Katy Perry had to pay extra, over and above the seat cost, to not be subjected to adverts during the Blue Origin flight today 😂

30 years ago, Bill David, Devinder Sivia and I organised a meeting dedicated to SDPD. A fabulous meeting, in a superb location. So many great scientists, both attending and presenting. The poster may be a bit faded, but the work and the memories remain fresh.

Just landed Heathrow Airport T3. Went into M&S. 3 staff working. I said to them “Generals gathered in their masses”. None of them responded with “Just like witches at black masses”. I have a recording & their names to report to M&S. We must confront Ozzy deniers every time.

You travel all the way to Venice (Lido di Jesolo) only to find one of the favourites of Scottish down-and-outs in the grocery store. And yes, I did buy one for nostalgic reasons.