Shelter journal entry: Section 14.9 Isotopes

I like my metaphor of through-hiking the AMA Manual of Style. The point of reading Big Blue beginning to end isn’t to memorize everything I see along the way. It’s that the act of doing it is inherently different from reading one section as needed or looking up individual issues as they arise.

The AT does not always hit the best hiking in the states through which it passes (Bill Bryson commented in A Walk in the Woods that he felt Pennsylvania in particular was underrepresented on the AT) because it needs to connect the different parts of the trail to each other. The upside of that is that hikers go to places where they wouldn’t otherwise go. The point of my trip isn’t to memorize every acronym in the book. It’s to visit a place where there are acronyms for terms of this type.

And every once in the while, something memorable: “ul” isn’t always a typo for “µl,” which is what I’m used to in my usual stomping grounds, where microliters tweet like so many goldfinches. If the context is isotopes, “ul” is “uniformly labeled.”

Embers are burning down. Tomorrow, another foot in front of the other.