Beta-stable nuclides with the same mass number

I claimed in a previous post that, for a given atomic mass number, there is one and only one nuclide that is immune to all forms of beta decay. It occurs to me that I was probably technically wrong, especially since I made it clear that I considered atoms with different nuclear energy states to……

IPv6.001

Or: Why IPv6 failed (This post is about Internet Protocol, the communications protocol that the Internet runs on.) (Rant alert! I’m trying to be nice on this blog, but I can’t seem to make this post much less mean than it is.) The successor to IPv4 is not IPv6. It might be IPv7, or it……

JPEG thumbnail formats

How many ways are there to put an extra “thumbnail” or “preview” image inside a JPEG (.jpg) image file? This isn’t just trivia. One problem with thumbnails is the possibility that they might be neither updated nor deleted when the main image is edited. If you’re not careful, your edited JPEG file could contain a……

Is there any niobium-92 left?

What primordial radioactive nuclides (isotopes) still exist in the Earth’s crust? To figure that out, we might need to know the original abundances of various nuclides in the matter that now makes up the Earth’s crust. I haven’t found good data on that. But it’s pretty easy to calculate what the abundances would have to……

GIF plain text extensions

Plain text extensions is an obsolete feature of the GIF (version 89a) image format. Essentially, it allows an animated GIF to have ASCII text frames, as well as the usual graphical frames. As far as I know, it was pretty much never used at all. The only GIF file with plain text extensions that I’m……

The northernmost and southernmost trees

Where are the northernmost and southernmost naturally-growing trees in the world? I thought it would be easy to find the answer, but it turn out, not so much. Northernmost The northernmost trees are most certainly Dahurian larch (Larix gmelinii) trees growing in north central Russia. They are apparently somewhere in the marked region below, or……

X-Face format

X-Face is an odd little graphics format, designed around 1990 as a standard way to include your picture/icon/avatar in the email messages you send. It’s not exactly a file format; it’s a special string of text that can be included in email headers. A number of email applications supported it, and maybe some still do.……