Neat!

I liked that book so much I bought it in paper form; also YWIMC. Lieberman's work in particular has always been inspirational. I think he sits down the hall from Jonathan, but I could be misremembering.

This morning I was working on a problem that I was thinking would be ideal for a system like this: I was taking notes in prose about potential blowing agents for waterglass or other geopolymer foams—things that produce gas when the polymer is heated to its softening point. For example, chalk, ammonium chloride, sulfur, aluminum hydroxide, sal mirabilis, saltpeter, or carbon plus silica. Each of these blowing agents produces a certain number of moles of gas per mole of blowing agent, has a certain molar mass, a certain density, a certain cost, and a certain activation temperature, plus certain material-compatibility concerns—you can't disperse hydrated sal mirabilis in an aqueous solution, for example, or chalk in an acid solution, if you want them to be intact in the unblown geopolymer preform. These are "givens" that can be found in a literature search or, in some cases, a search on MercadoLibre.

In the prose document, I would like to be able to tag the gas production per mole, molar mass, density, activation temperature, and material compatibility in such a way that I can render a table of the candidate materials in the document itself, and then sort it by gas production per mass, per volume, or per dollar, and filter it by activation temperature. Gas production per mass is calculated from molar mass and molar gas production; gas production per volume is calculated from gas production per mass and density, and similarly for gas production per dollar.

Is that the kind of thing you're thinking of, or am I imagining wits very differently from what you really have in mind? I look forward to reading your notes! (I'm not in the Slack. I hate Slack. It's ransomware.)

A step beyond would be to type the reaction equations into the prose document and calculate the gas production per mole from that, and use a database of atomic weights to calculate the molar mass from that as well. With a database of the formation entropies and enthalpies of the compounds, I could not only calculate how endothermic the decomposition is (or, rarely, exothermic) but plot an Ellingham diagram as well, which would be pretty useful as a double-check on the sanity of the reported activation temperatures from the littrachaw. Together with combinatorial search functionality, it might also enable me to anticipate problematic side reactions, or how the activation temperatures would shift if the foaming was carried out at 1 MPa.

Some of the quantities I'm calculating on have units attached, such as temperature and density, and some have intervals of uncertainty, such as price, and it would be useful to have the computer track those things instead of the human. Confusing a Gibbs free energy in kJ/mol with kJ/kg can be a problem; similarly gas production per gram or per cubic centimeter.

Some of Jonathan's work on Subtext has focused on variants of or alternatives to test-first programming; in spreadsheets people sometimes do test-first programming (for things like the equilibrium-temperature calculation I mentioned above, for example) and then delete the tests. In a context like the blowing-agent survey, being able to hide them instead would be better.

Finally, ideally, I'd like to be able to transclude at least the givens and possibly the calculation results in other notes: "According to my notes in [0], aluminum hydroxide is stable at atmospheric pressure up to 220°, ..." perhaps eventually refactoring those inputs into a centralized database so that I don't have to remember which note has the boiling point of sulfur in it.

The calculation part would be easy to do in Gnumeric or localc, but those handle the prose, units, and intervals very poorly at best; and they would be hopeless for the equation parsing part and, at best, clumsy for the database queries and Ellingham-diagram plotting.