There are established software approaches aimed at modeling potential runaway polymerization for the times that polymer is intentionally being made from a monomer:

https://iomosaic.com/docs/default-source/papers/polymerizati...

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/modeling-runaway-scenario-but...

That's the same Butyl Acrylate incident reviewed by the same safety contractor, but published differently in both links. Keep in mind this Butyl Acrylate explosion was a pressure vessel reactor, rated for many atmospheres of duty before physical failure.

It appears the MMA tank in question at Garden Grove is not a reactor, but a more common industrial storage tank. Much more sizable of a tank than an expected batch reactor would be, but "mere" storage is not supposed to be at any significant pressure. So the tank walls are not usually any more thickly built than ordinary gasoline tanks. IOW if the tank were not properly vented to the atmosphere, it would not be expected to require as much pressure before rupture, compared to an actual reactor. And that may or may not affect the theoretical physical blast radius and/or chemical damage radius. Considering both the amount of chemical and the force differences.

In monomer storage, all effort necessary is supposed to be focused on prevention of polymerization. Now here is a paper from 1994 where some lab work was done to give better ideas about when runaway is already occurring and needs to be halted or at least curtailed:

https://www.icheme.org/media/10375/xii-paper-40.pdf

Disclosure: I'm one who developed a number of techniques for more reliably measuring the inhibitor content of monomers, and with MMA still maintain two instruments when no more than one instrument has ever been needed at one time. Needless to say, this is an important test and to provide routine one hour turn-around on a 24/7 basis you've just got to have a backup.

In addition to the common MEHQ inhibitor, we are also seeing Topanol (dimethyl-tert-butylphenol) in established use for MMA. The alternative inhibitor phenothiazine is apparently not very common in our area.

One problem is that the inhibitors are solids or syrups which don't really evaporate. However they are very effective inhibitors when dissolved in the liquid monomer at quite low concentrations. But as the monomer slightly vaporizes to an extent while being contained in the storage tank, these vapors contain no inhibitor. And these are the vapors that condense on the walls and roof of the tank which can end up polymerizing on their own, sometimes forming "stalactites" or gumming up the vapor-recovery atmospheric ventilation arrangement. If that was badly clogged it could be one reason causing the tank to bulge which does sound pretty ugly.

All these industrial acrylate monomers are some nasty smellers, but the lighter ones like methyl acrylate or MMA do evaporate fast like an alcohol or acetone. With good ventilation the vapors dissipate just as quick. More toxic though and just as flammable to boot. OTOH butyl acrylate is heavier, so it dries up and goes away much slower, fondly known as "Brutal" Acrylate on the tank farm or by the few lab workers who are familiar with it.

They all basically make you say "ack" when you smell it, and you can pick it up miles further away than almost anything else.

For instance in Houston the sunrise aligns with Texas Avenue around the June solstice.

Consequently, there are no sunset alignments for the downtown skyscrapers.

From what I understand, recent autoupdates to Chrome-based browsers including Edge are to autodownload the newest AI features (which is a 4GB package) only if you have more than 22GB of free space.

Seems like there could be some advantage to maintaining free space at lower levels than that in order to retain best suitability for some ordinary PC user scenarios.

The thing is, the only realistic time to size the first partition is before Windows is installed.

And off-the shelf Windows PCs having UEFI/GPT layout started out using too small a FAT32 volume for the ESP boot volume, and have stayed that way far too long.

That was a good time to experiment with "full-size" FAT32 boot volumes, so I pretty much settled on 32GB size since that was the default maximum FAT32 size for so long since the 1990s, and even DOS 6.2 can access the volume if it is in MBR layout on a BIOS or CSM-enabled UEFI motherboard.

I figured if you want to try a bigger FAT32 volume for partition 1, you really need to do it on a new or blank HDD or SSD anyway, so might as well go all the way to 32GB.

Turned out to be a pretty good place for some Linux kernels too once you have the space. Also you can copy & paste them into their FAT32 folders using Windows which is pretty convenient. Plus some superb distros now put all their boot files in the FAT32 ESP volume (no longer storing them on the main EXT system volume for later virtual mounting), and this is incredibly convenient for PCs that are primarily Windows machines who want to experience about the most convenient dual-booting to Linux.

Interestingly, one of the automatic "upgrades" in the last couple of 2026 sessions is the feature extension of FAT32 partitioning in Windows 11 to no longer be limited to 32GB in size, if you use the command line instead of the GUI to do the partitioning & formatting. You can have up to 2TB in a FAT32 volume now.

This extension of FAT32 could very well fit better in the EEE category, when you look at it as perhaps most effective at producing volumes which are potentially more incompatible than ever with everything that came before. Which might turn out to be a more significant long-term effect rather than overall utility to users.

No telling if the latest FAT32 will now handle individual files over 4GB in size or if this form of FAT32 now has patents that have not fully expired. Will probably find out before too long.

Well before the iPhone flew off the shelf, using the the previously established smartphones I never had to settle for less than a week of battery life.

Plus anybody could just slap in another spare battery whenever they wanted to, whether they were off the grid for an extended period or not.

Never thought it was going to end, only get better not worse.

Maybe there is some parallel to the way that AI is moving "cutting edge" programming closer to the mainframe/dumb-terminal paradigm.

And you may be able to sell them what they are already asking for a lot faster than what they are not.

Now if you are trying to sell them something that they would rather not even have at all, that's another story too.

Beyond that though is the dream that highly persuasive efforts will be effective at overcoming hesitation and converting it into new desires and preferences. Like the way it has worked under so many situations. But with survivor bias firmly in mind, those are the orgs where no miracle was actually required before it could lead to a windfall.

People that are already rich are building machines that can do more math than anybody else.

The whole idea is to do it faster than you can no matter what, at all costs

The echo of a distant tide

By chance two separate causes meet

And no one calls us to the void

Proud within the day you fall

Disclaimer - I remember the first US tour where they played this. It was not the first time I had seen them, and it was way before Dark Side of the Moon caught peoples' attention.

Pink Floyd was still unheard of by most DJs everywhere.

Echoes was on a vinyl album called Meddle that got very little airplay, along with their others. For about 5 years people kept telling me that nobody was ever going to listen to Pink Floyd or want to have them on the radio. Nobody believed me when I told them that cassettes were going to replace 8-tracks either :\

Years later after their hit records had flown off the charts and their concerts were packed, by the time of the Pompeii-featured movie, it was pretty much a final act of documentation about how they used to sound before they got popular.

In the 1970's Quadraphonic touring feature film this video is from, the live Pompeii footage was juxtaposed with the studio footage from behind the scenes while they were crafting the Dark Side, which was in a typical way that would resemble what record companies were getting from other bands. Each musician often individually with headphones seriously and carefully perfecting the tracks that would be layered into the final product. In a relatively sterile and uninspiring environment by comparison to Pompeii. The contrast was quite intentional. Even without a crowd whatsoever they were having much more fun playing live and making this kind of recording, just like they used to do when their concerts were not crowded at all.

"What difference can it make?"

"Please look the other way."

So many athletes now can almost not imagine how it was, when I tell them about when I was a boy the NFL was still drinking Kool-Aid.

Only the Gators had Gatorade.

Well, if you want more mayhem than was expected . . .

This says a lot right here:

>One of my initial ideas was to modify the HDD firmware to introduce a delay of a few hundred milliseconds when a specific sector is read from the drive, which would give enough time for the exploit to trigger successfully.

>As it would later turn out I found other ways to dial in my race condition attack and ended up not needing to modify the HDD firmware at all.

The result is a remarkable paper documenting outstanding milestones that is outstanding on its own, and was completely unintentional to begin with, and with subject matter that was also unintentional if not a completely unrelated subject than the direction that the initial ambition was leading toward.

If your research leaders or techniques don't allow for excursions like this, you'd probably be better off getting some.

I would say if you start inventing as a child [0], the question reduces quite directly to "Why would you want to wait anyway?"

Think how many lifetimes go by where the real question goes completely unasked of the same exact inventors, "How long do we wait for attractive enough terms to bring the full 1% of the unutilized inventions to deployment?"

Answer that, and many other questions will be resolved.

[0] Like so many always have been doing for centuries, to where there will never be enough positions of eminence to accommodate them, and never was. But who vastly outnumber the credentialed, and especially the most eminent few, overwhelmingly.