The latest of my "sixth grade class trip" adventures found me (and some co-workers) at SLAC - the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

Side note - my notes on previous "sixth grade class trips" include Nike Missile Site SF 88L and an REI Map and Compass Navigation course.

Maybe, like me, you've seen the SLAC sign countless times whilst driving down the SF peninsula past Menlo Park and wondered what sort of particle physics wonders were being conducted hundreds of feet beneath you and Interstate 280.

Well, now I know. And I have the obligatory two-mile long hallway selfie to prove it:

If you think you can see the end of this hallway, you're a liar! The human eye can't do it. Our guide told us so, and he was a scientist, okay? Okay!

For the so-tempted, SLAC offers a free tour, once per month, and I'm pretty sure it sells out faster than Phish tickets or Yosemite camping sites (bookmark this page if you want in!).

I've been daydreaming about visiting SLAC ever since I wrote a scene in my manuscript about someone accidentally discovering a particle accelerator beneath their parent's office -- and then subsequently realizing that I have no idea what a particle accelerator actually looks like.

Also, particle accelerators are just cool. You may be aware that the World Wide Web was created in one in 1989 - not directly influenced by hyper-charged electrons, of course, but also not-not-directly influenced either. Plus, this one -- SLAC -- also played host to some meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club during the 1970s.

I was therefore, understandably, quite excited when I successfully conjured tickets for the April tour, and then entered a building on Sand Hill Road for the first time.

SLAC tour walkthrough

The SLAC tour begins, excitingly, in a conference room where you watch a pre-recorded video, which despite a valient effort, is nowhere near as good as its Jurassic Park "frog DNA" counterpart. The SLAC video covers the Cold War era SLAC origin tale in the early 1960s, the fascinating Nobel-prize-inducing discoveries discovered here (including the charm quark and the tau lepton particle), the unplanned-obsolence of the primary linear accelerator, and its recent renewal for other cool x-ray stuff.

Approximately twelve minutes later, we hop in a bus and head on over to the linear accelerator, which from the surface, looks like a bunch of shipping-container style buildings in a row. A very long row. Here's Google Maps proof:

Inside this record-setting building (once the longest building the world), you'll first see a sample section of the accelerator itself (the rest of which is buried many feet below you).

The bigger silver pipe is called the Light Pipe and it helps align the smaller copper pipe above it where the particles travel. Because the accelerator is two miles long, they had to factor in the curvature of the Earth its contruction and its ongoing alignment. Though the advent of the laser pointer pen (you know, the thing your cool, but also kinda mean, middle school classmate secretly pointed at the guest speaker during an assembly about drugs or something) rendered the light pipe obsolete, the light pipe served its purpose effectively, helping align what was once the world's "most straight object."

After checking out this sample section of the accelerator, we're allowed to enter the "Klystron gallery".

A Klystron is this big microwave thing that helps speed up the particles traveling along the accelerator. This is the best visual of what's going on where with these here klystrons.

The "gallery", where we are, is the top section. Below us, beneath many feet of "Earth shielding" which appears to be dirt based on this diagram, is the accelerator. Every X feet (I forget how many), a kytstron will send microwave-like energy down to the accelerator, and help ... accelerate ... the particles flinging along the path (electrons and positrons). The inside of the copper accelerator pipe looks like this, where the microwaves from the Klystron enter these open sections.

The pipe with the particles is also water-cooled, cause it gets real hot.

What else? Well, here's the caution sign right as you enter the Klystron gallery.

Is there radiation risk in here, you might ask? No more so than when you eat a banana, says our guide. However, we are still greeted with these warnings:

Not sure about that leaky window thing.

Here's the view of the gallery looking left:

And now looking right:

It really is trippy to look down this hallway. I asked our host if he'd ever run the full length. He chuckled (not sure if that was an affirmative), but did say that there used to be a 5k among the scientists, up and back along the accelerator. I'd love to have seen - or better run -- that race.

Science stuff

Eventually ,the SLAC linear accelerator lost steam, so to speak. You may be loosely aware that the top accelerators these days are all curved (e.g. CERN). Our host explained that electrons lose energy during a curve, so why did the curved accelerators win out? Mainly, money. Because each klystron in a linear accelerator can only be used "once" for a given particle -- the only way to speed things up even more would be to make the linear accelerator longer, and that's just impractical money-wise and land-wise. But a curved accelerator, even with energy-loss along the way, can reuse its klystrons (and the like) many, many, many times. Even SLAC ended up building some curved sections at the end of the accelerator.

All that to say that the linear accelerator is no longer used in the same way anymore. But scientists have built a bunch of other interesting things using components of the accelerator, like the Linac Coherent Light Source - a giant x-ray laser.

And for the next part of the tour, we got to see where these scientists are doing their science. And guess what? This part was even cooler than the endless hallway, because it felt active and alive and also like a space station.

Like, what the heck is this thing?

Better wear the correct goggles, or else!

I know this says "hutch" but I read it as "hatch," and imagined Desmond from Lost stuck down here.

Inside the hutch, where they are using the x-ray laser to "record videos of photosynthesis happening." Awesome.

This is what I wish the inside of my garage looked like.

Here's more of the wild and weird machines just sitting in the hallway:

Some warning signs:

A whiteboard where they are presumably working on LeetCode problems while waiting for their turn with the laser.

Another fun facts

And that's it! The tour must end, science must continue. We're delivered back to the original building via bus, and as a final thank-you, we're allowed to make a commemorative flattened penny, which I would have loved to do, but the line was too long.

A few final SLAC notes:

While they were digging up the ground to build the accelerator, they found an intact Paleoparadoxia skeleton - which was an ancient manatee looking thing, and they've kept the big ol' fossil on-site.

Finally, though I did not learn this on the tour, this factoid is too important not to directly rip from Wikipedia:

The SSRL facility was used to reveal hidden text in the Archimedes Palimpsest. X-rays from the synchrotron radiation lightsource caused the iron in the original ink to glow, allowing the researchers to photograph the original document that a Christian monk had scrubbed off.

Palimpsest! My favorite word! Just when you think a place couldn't get any cooler it goes and reveals hidden text on ancient manuscripts.

Straight from the Nand Cave and also somewhere else in a cave or maybe outer space comes The CS Primer Show.

Here's episode one, where Oz and I meander around Richard Hamming's excellent talk You And Your Research.

Subscribe to the YouTube channel for future episodes. You can expect a whole lot of Bell Labs content. Also check out Oz's new educational venture CS Primer - it's like having your own personal Aristotle-Oz computer science tutor and I'm loving it!

The Wayback Machine is a treasure. But it's also a little slow to navigate IMHO (perhaps purposely harkening back to those halcyon microfiche days). Can't we use computers to speed up our research endeavors?

Yes, we can. Here's a neato gif of Apple's homepage from 1996 to present:

Or maybe you're looking for some H1 or CSS gradient inspiration for your enterprise SaaS web3 startup? Look no further - here's Stripe's homepage since 2009:

Gotta love that cloud with gears inside image. APIs, baby.

These gifs are neat, right? Much faster than clicking around the Wayback Machine UI. Careful observers may be wondering about the snapshot cadence here - I'm grabbing one screenshot per year in these examples. The Wayback Machine has waaay more snapshots for these sites (there are currently 349,843 available snapshots of apple.com between October 22, 1996 and February 1, 2023), but an annual capture -- in gif format -- definitely gives you a good sense for the evolution of these homepages.

Here's another great example: whitehouse.gov (and, no, this is not whitehouse.com, to those of you from the 90s who've made that most-enlightening of mistakes before):

This is almost itself a history lesson of the web in a single gif.

How I made these GIFs

Speaking of the GIF format, did you know it was created in 1987? That's two years before the World Wide Web. Also, the gif spec is nuts and has tons of features that no one really uses or knows about. These magical features (like the "wait for user input" flag) were first revealed to me in our Escaping Web interview with Lauren Budorick of Figma. But I digress.

My point here -- and I do have one -- is that I've been thinking about this idea -- gifs of the Wayback Machine results -- for a couple years now, and never actually did anything about it. And then my pal Nicholas extolled the virtues of coding with ChatGPT to me last night. I was skeptical, despite dabbling with (and enjoying) GPT-3 and DALL-E 2 during last year's writing project. But then I remembered this little Wayback gif idea, and I thought I'd give ol' ChattyG a try, since this would mostly be a "string some boilerplate together until it works" sort of project.

AI rubber duck debugging

This is not going to be a how I, for one, came to love our new AI overlords post. But I will quickly share my takeaways.

The most impressive thing about working with ChatGPT was that I shipped this project. Period. Something that had been rattling around in my skull for a couple years is now available for you to try out on GitHub and even Replit if you want to give it a try in your browser.

Did ChatGPT get it right the first time? No. But sometimes editing is easier, and it got me started in a direction. I still had to do some documentation digging and even some StackOverflowing, but that was fine, cause I was paired up with a robot buddy. In this sense, ChatGPT felt like rubber duck debugging, except with a rubber duck who has some fairly decent ideas of its own.

Where ChatGPT really excelled for me was when I wanted to add conveniences to working code which would have been annoying to code myself.

For example, the URL to search was originally hardcoded in the script. After everything was working, I asked ChatGPT to update my script to accept the URL as a required CLI argument. ChatGPT crushed this task, pulling in an arg parsing library for Python and updating my script structure accordingly. That was pretty cool.

More GIFs, please!

How about the Everything Store?

Seems like they got wind of the automated test software by 2020.

Let's do one more. How about YahoooOooOOo?

Kinda disturbing to see Yahoo transform from covering "Arts and Humanities" and "Science" into the LCD of our attention span over the years, actually. I think I'm going to stop now.

Homepage as history

Homepages are cool. And we're lucky we have the Internet Archive out there recording them all for posterity.

Please consider donating to the Internet Archive - creators and maintainers of the Wayback Machine, as well as many other Library of Alexandria-esque Internet.. um, archival programs - right here. I just did it, and it was super easy with PayPal.

In the spirit of Brick Experiment Channel's post about their YouTube channel's earnings, I thought I'd share some stats about last year's short story writing project Fahrenheit 52.

With it being the New Year and all, I thought I'd channel my inner Stoic and classify these stats into Those Things I Can Control and Those Things I Cannot Control.

Those Things I Can Control

Stories

52! And I managed to hit the weekly deadline for every single one, which wasn't always easy, like during our honeymoon (I had to basically pre-write that one).

Words

59,913.

NaNoWriMo says a novel is 50k words, so I wrote a book this past year. That's cool. Maybe I should self-publish it!

For future Charlie's edification, here's how I grabbed that stat:

# make a tmp folder
mkdir tmp
cd tmp
# copy the stories into the tmp folder
cp ../fahrenheit-52/pages/stories/*.md .
# remove frontmatter from each story
sed -i '' -n '16,$p' *.md
# count words for all files in this directory
cat * | wc -w

I'm also curious about average words per story. Since there are technically 53 stories in the project (I preloaded a zeroth story to make myself feel good in the beginning), we can just divide 59,913 by 53, which gives us 1,130 average words per story. Now, my writer heroes like Stephen King and Delilah Dawson are probably outputting 1k+ words per day rather than per week, but, hey, it's a start!

Most Common Word

Now that we have a corpus of text, there's a bunch of fun data mining things we can do, like word clouds and Markov chains. In fact, I already wrote a story about just that this year, so I'll link over to that story rather than recreate the fun here: Writer's Blockchain.

Minutes of Audio

As a fun bonus, I read aloud each story and quickly published out as a podcast, which I listed in the iTunes Podcast Directory and the Spotify Podcast thingie. I'll share some (spoiler: disappointing) stats below, but the Spotify Wrapped for Podcasters did share this one:

Fairly certain they also missed the last episode/story or two, so I think we can safely call this ~300 minutes of audio. That's (carry the one...), 5 hours of audio! Roadtrip, here we come.

If you're at all intrigued by the F52 podcast, I can also reveal that there are also a few surprise narrators in there, including Carly, my parents, my mother-in-law, my sister, and one more!

Of every good outcome from this project, of which there are many, these recordings of my people reading my stories is by far my favorite treasure. Audio of your loved ones, I cannot recommend it enough. It's better than video. Close your eyes and listen to your people.

Those Things I Cannot Control

Page Views

Oof. We weren't doing this for the page views, were we? No! But they would have been nice, right?

Annoyingly (or perhaps for the best), Cloudflare Web Analytics only retains data for 30 days. Here's a current screenshot:

570 visits in last 30 days (with a minor spike from my Year in Short Stories post). Not super great.

BUT -- what you're not seeing are the Hacker News bursts for a few of my stories. I posted my stories when I thought they'd be interesting or relevant to the HN crowd. A few of them did okay, and Nibbles - a story about cute hungry hungry von Neumann probes) did great. This post hung around the home page for a few hours and I think I saw ~1-2k visitors that day. There was also another post that completely destroyed my bad science in Shimmer - my diamond asteroid mining story -- but in a super constructive positive way, where I learned a ton! All told, I had a very positive experience posting these on HN, and the comments were uplifting and helpful. It can really happen, people.

RSS subscribers

No idea. I don't have this instrumented, and I'd love any guidance or tips for the future on how to best do this. For F52, I'd wager a guess it's less than 10, even with the recent re-interest in personal blogs and whatnot.

Spotify Subscribers

Hi, Mom!

Apple Podcasts Subscribers

Also, hi Mom!

Clearly all my listeners must use Overcast, like me!

Notes for next time

I think I missed an opportunity in not collecting emails for a newsletter on the F52 website - especially during the big HN bursts. Or perhaps I should have just done everything as a Substack instead?

Like the good H2 says, just some notes for next time!

I wrote a short story every week in 2022. My goals were to get better at writing and to have fun. I'll let you be the judge of the former but I sure did have a good time. This is what they look like:

Colorful, right? Technically, there's 53 stories, but that's cause I preloaded up a zeroth story that I'd written a year back so that the site wouldn't look empty and also to trick me into thinking I'd already made progress - you know, the proverbial todo list items you've already done but still jot down so you can cross them out immediately.

Speaking of task management, this is also probably the first "New Year's Resolution" that I really achieved.

#TODO: Fix me later (JIRA CH-4202)

There's always chatter around this time of year about whether or not New Year's Resolutions are a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe we're supposed to be doing goals instead. Or anti-resolutions.

The debate reminds of when we were told by our teachers at St. Leo the Great to switch from "giving something up" in Lent to "doing something new that's also good" - which is actually a good setup for a story!

Regardless, what I like about Resolutions Time is the "resetting" it can bring. Sometimes you gotta blow on that Nintendo game to make it work again. It's also a great opportunity to try new things. Many of us seem to calcify as we age (see Thanksgiving dinner discussion topics). But we can resist, my friends, if we simply follow Merlin's advice. Finally, there's often a health theme around New Year's Resolutions, and hopefully you already know my thoughts on being your own health advocate.

Resolutions-rant aside, I thought I'd share some LEARNINGS (is there a more annoying word in modern business-speak? Yes, probably, but don't you dare tell me it) from my year of writing short stories.

Learn the Learnings Learned by a Learned Learner

Have fun

This one's already part of my life motto (borrowed from children's publisher Klutz Press), and I view it as critical to the success of my short story writing project. I wrote these stories for me, and I like reading them. I think they're fun, and I didn't stress about writing them, even though I did have to carve out time to write them each week. But it doesn't take much time to make a meaningful dent into a short story. I think everyone would be surprised by that - take a phrase or a name or a memory and just start... going.

Clear the cache

I wrote many of these stories to simply get them out of my head (where some of them have been rattling around for years, like what if it's The Young Adventures of Indiana Jones but it's Warren Buffett instead and all his greatest investment ideas came from hijinks and misadventures?). As it turns out, not all of my long-standing story ideas were prize winners, but they're at least OUT of my head now, where I can edit or revise them or, most-likely, just move on! My creative cache is cleared and is feeling very performant now.

Remove technical barriers

I coded up the project's website last December. I made sure that I could deploy it with a simple push to GitHub. I made sure that all I needed to do each week was "write the story" and "git push" (other than the podcast recording, a process which I also kept as simple as possible, partly due to lack of audio editing knowledge but mostly because I knew no one was really listening to them anyway other than Carly and my mom).

Jot stuff down

Write down your dreams, any bits of them that you remember. I use the Drafts iOS app to do this. I dump ideas, character names, dialogue, etc. throughout the day into Drafts, and then process the queue when I'm back at my computer. My phone's always with me, and I'm trying to make it a tool for creativity over pure consumption.

Review the list of things I didn't do good cause I'm no-good

Here's where I would normally write down some "opportunities for improvement" - where I reveal that I'm simply masquerading as a lifelong learner but I'm simply a shameless millenial optimizooor.

However, this is not only a blameless post-mortem, it's also a faultless one, too. I know I could have done a better job of editing and revising my stories. I know I could have written more every single day, and made it a true daily habit. But we are not doing this, okay?

Try to forgive yourself for being human, Charlie, and instead enjoy the fleeting joy of creative fulfillment before the next project begins tomorrow. Have fun, remember!

10 PRINT "HAVE FUN!"
20 GOTO 10

Mini story collections

Lessons be damned, one of the fun things that unexpectedly emerged this year was my use of recurring characters and companies and locations. If I'm allowed to be critical again, it's because this tactic became a shortcut. It was definitely easier to keep developing the same characters versus going full-on tabula rasa each week. But, also, I liked these characters and companies and locations, so there, brain!

If you do give my stories a try, keep your eye out for the megacorp Eagle (can we trust them? do we even have a choice?) as well as several adventures across Old New Jersey and the town of Little Bighill.

I'll also highlight two recurring characters: Penelope "Thesaurus" Green and Will. Penny's braver than just about anyone, and Will's -- well, Will's me. Anytime you read a Will story, it's an ever-so-slightly-veiled memory. They're the beginnings of my Dandelion Wine.

Penny stories

• The Secret of Skull Island
• Thesaurus Green and the Case of the Walkoff Strikeout (Part 1)
• Thesaurus Green and the Case of the Walkoff Strikeout (Part 2)
• The Outer Beach
• We Built a Blimp

Will stories

• St. Pumpkinhead
• The Ginny-Pigs Catch a Frog
• Will and the Turtle
• A Ladder in the Attic
• To Tell in the Dark
• Latchkey 17
• The Hive
• Cuttyhunk
• What Did Ya Get?
• Way Out of the Money