Bill Meara over at Soldersmoke built a cloud chamber particle detector! He has all the details on the Soldersmoke blog , including the plans for the detector and a few videos of particle traces. Cloud Chamber de Soldersmoke Between the chamber and the book the plan came from, it all put me in mind of the time Ruidoso High School had not one, not two, but three particle accelerator science fair projects occupying the high school lab. Including a Tesla Coil version, a cyclotron, and one of these highlighted in the plan book Bill links above: From "The Amateur Scientist" by C. L. Strong (The cyclotron was mine.)
I started a project, ahem, yesterday to 'quickly' see if ChatGPT could read the entire United States general class amateur radio exam question pool into a Datasette instance using the datasette-extract plugin. As of this morning, I haven't been able to coax ChatGPT using the gpt-4-turbo model. I capture my rather raw notes below. The short version of this is that I was never able to get the AI to capture more than 19 questions at a time. I'm hopeful that the pool could be moved into a database table using iterative processes, but for now, I've run out of time for this quick project :) Occasionally ChatGPT seemed to hallucinate out part of its process into the table Notes Follow I'm going to track how easy it is to get the general exam question pool into a database using the Datasette Plugin. I started this endeavor at 20:37 UTC. Get my already existent OpenAI API key ready to go 20:43: Done. As usual with OpenAI, the hardest part was finding login screens