dblack12705
Re:Anything Will Lase If You Hit It Hard Enough
on Sunday March 15, 2026 @03:11AM (#47385007)
Article author here. I wanted to write an accessible overview of basic laser physics, and in the process collected a zoo of weird things that lase (if pumped sufficiently hard) from the historical literature: edible lasers in peach compote, the Martian atmosphere, cancer cells, peacock feathers, etc. Happy to answer questions, especially if you disagree with my pronunciation guide.
The title is a quote from
Arthur Schawlow, Nobel Laureate and inventor of the “nearly nontoxic” Jell-O laser.
Anything Will Lase If You Hit It Hard Enough
AI-Generated Podcasts with NotebookLM
Re:Wiz walks away from $23B deal with Google
on Wednesday July 24, 2024 @08:57AM (#41056608)
Yes, all the time. It is a common idiom, especially in history books.
Re:Does anybody know this fractal? (2012)
on Wednesday June 19, 2024 @07:35AM (#40727259)
The flower patterns remind me of Smith charts. https://www.antenna-theory.com/m/tutorial/smith/chart.php
Since smith charts are made by mapping the complex plane (grid) to another complex plane via a Mobius transformation Z->(Z-1)/(Z+1), maybe that’s what’s going on here too. The inverse certainly produces a grid again.
Daenerys Targaryen, Humanitarian
Re:Two lifeforms merge in once-in-a-billion-years evolutionary event
on Saturday April 20, 2024 @06:33PM (#40101618)
You two fix nitrogen together?
Re:The Case Against Children
on Wednesday March 13, 2024 @10:41AM (#39691774)
I feel like I see antinatalism and childfree movements in the news more frequently now. I suppose if they're any good at their job, the movement won’t exist in seventy years or so.
Re:Rainwater everywhere on the planet is unsafe to drink due to chemic...
on Tuesday February 27, 2024 @10:24AM (#39525145)
Baseline testosterone levels are actually even lower in most hunter gatherer populations. This suggests that your explanation is not necessarily correct.
Re:What makes a language flourish? Or: Why can't I speak Latin? (2021)
on Saturday February 24, 2024 @09:58PM (#39497195)
Latin is actually very well attested, both in the classical and ecclesiastical pronunciation. There’s lots of languages, like Egyptian, where the phonology is pretty speculative, but Latin isn’t one of them.
Re:They Studied Dishonesty. Was Their Work a Lie?
on Saturday September 30, 2023 @10:23AM (#37715720)
In case anyone hasn’t read it, the Datacolada article demonstrating Ariely committed fraud is a great read and extremely convincing.
Re:Show HN: Hacker News User Blogroll
on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @11:03PM (#36610547)
Damn this is cool
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?
on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @11:01PM (#36610531)
Thank you! And sure, you can email me at [email protected]
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?
on Tuesday July 04, 2023 @10:09PM (#36594791)
https://maximumeffort.substack.com/
“Some things that aren’t worth doing are worth overdoing.”
I write about physics, language, and history, or whatever interests me at the moment, with an overarching theme of spending way too much effort analyzing useless topics. Here’s some of my favorites:
https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-wago... I derive an expression for number of donkeys needed to move an army a distance L, and discuss its relationship to the tyranny of the rocket equation.
https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/guinea-pigs-are-fermion... I postulate that Guinea pigs are fermions, and simulate the quantum dynamics of multi-pig states.
https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/a-statistical-analysis-... I attempt to answer the timeless question of whether the characters in Wheel of Time sniff in disapproval more than average.
https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/i-taught-chatgpt-to-inv... ChatGPT and I invent a slime language.
https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/an-offering-for-the-dea... I teach you just enough Middle Egyptian to read some of the hieroglyphs on most museum artifacts.
https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/the-great-kings-of-assy... I share my technique for annoying text spammers by pretending to be Assyrian Royalty.
Mostly up to date index of posts: https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/coming-soon
Hope you enjoy!
Re:Lingua Latina per se illustrata (2012)
on Saturday June 17, 2023 @10:22AM (#36370406)
I love this book! It’s really quite excellent for teaching Latin.
Re:Pop-shoot: Synthwave styled space shooter, inspired by the 80s arcades
on Wednesday April 19, 2023 @10:14PM (#35635577)
Cool! It’s really fun
The Evolution of the Alphabet
Re:Reddit Mods and Scaling Problems in Social Control
on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @08:00PM (#34718232)
If you have any quantitative data on that, even anecdotal, I’d be very interested! I’m curious to see if my 300,000 number holds up
Re:Reddit Mods and Scaling Problems in Social Control
on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @07:01PM (#34717629)
Thank you! The Reddit mod thing was really just supposed to be a catalyst for some of the ideas I had about group size limits, not really the point of the article. Though I WAS a little annoyed by the mods lol.
Edit: rereading your comment this is a very good summary of my article and maybe I should have put something like this up front to stave off the inevitable focus on Reddit mods…
Reddit Mods and Scaling Problems in Social Control
Dungeons and Dragons, Peasant Accelerators, and Inertial Confinement Fusion
Ancient Alien Linguistics, the Pyramids, and Radio Antennas
Re:Yan tan tethera pethera pimp – an old system for counting sheep (2013)
on Saturday December 10, 2022 @11:23AM (#33933875)
This counting system is fascinating! I wrote an article about this as well:
Re:Faster Than Light in Our Model of Physics: Some Preliminary Thoughts
on Friday October 02, 2020 @11:09PM (#24669177)
I just wanted to say that this is a really fantastic explanation of the current state of the art, particularly the way you state the high-level motivation for ultra high energy colliders. Of course, without a few orders of magnitude gain in acceleration gradient, the necessary collider size is impractically large, so these sorts of questions may not be investigated for a while.
Re:“What color is the Sun?” An example of science education pathology ...
on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @09:14AM (#24119934)
What a strange article. I’m a physics grad student and I entirely disagree with his rather smug answer. From astronomy grad students, he seems to expect a plot of the black body spectrum when asking a casual question over lunch, yet he asks the same question to five year olds? If he wanted an “unambiguously correct” answer then he should ask an unambiguous question. The only pathology demonstrated here is his own.