Lightsmith

New Matrix movie pitch:
The AI awakens to find itself plugged into a Dada centre.

To clarify--as @christophersbaird.bsky.social points out--What looks like a diffraction pattern through a gap in the doors is just projected slit-image of a bank of LED lights directly above.

[I was hoping for a fun misdirection, but now fear that my post is misinformation]

Cool, but it's not diffraction. There are multiple lights beyond the door at different locations, each creating its own beam of light through the crack. It's effectively a pinhole camera. For incoherent visible white light, you need a way smaller slit than that to get noticeable diffraction.

I was waiting for this comment. Indeed, the extended light source above the door is a line of closely-spaced white LEDs. 😅

Edge diffraction to single-slit diffraction in a closing door next to my office. I'm greeted by this happy natural phenomenon every day and finally decided to film it.
#photonics #iteachphysics

Delicate gossamer on a still river, belying the tumult of December exams.
@trentuniversity.bsky.social

I know that the NYT Spelling Bee is bad with scientific/technical terms, but this omission is particularly egregious.
#photonics #NYTimes

Uncurious or incurious? Damn, now I've got to look it up! 😉

Will the NYT please use a science dictionary?! This is getting ridiculous.

Unveiling ignis fatuus: Microlightning between microbubbles | PNAS Will-o’-the-wisps, ghostly blue flames seen at night in marshlands and long attributed to methane cool flames, have remained scientifically unexpla...

Fun stuff here in PNAS.
Static electric 'microlightning' in micro water bubbles may be the long-sought ignition mechanism for mashy will-o'-the-wisps...
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

More common science words, please.

What is going on with the NYT Spelling Bee. This is Canadian erasure.

Is it just me, or is the Spelling Bee particularly frustrating for scientists?

a close up of a man 's face with the words we are so cooked below him ALT: a close up of a man 's face with the words we are so cooked below him

Is the youth cooked?

I just found my teen daughter's desk lamp in the recycling bin. When I asked her about it she said "It's broken. I didn't do anything to it! it Just stopped working!".
LED bulbs last so long that she didn't know about bulb replacement.

Happy Wordle-in-one day to me! 🎉
Time to find a new starter.

Wordle 1,538 1/6
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Answer: Both are river scum.

Pine nuts and tomatoes?! that's fucken awesome!

For a well-functioning partnership, rapid discontent can arise when the two 'decohere' temporarily; communication feels unusually viscous. This can manifest as 'mutual PMS', or not agreeing on where to eat (especially when travelling).

Not completing a chore on the spouse's preferred timeline

A sense of unacknowledged unequal distribution of labour

Our new paper asks (and answers) whether a shallow-learning approach (decision trees) can be as useful in (hyper)spectral analysis as advanced deep-learning methods.
tldr: Yes it can. Complex ≠ better.
doi.org/10.1088/2515... via @ioppublishing.bsky.social
#photonics

this is the way

I'm struggling to parse the moral landscape on this one. If this gambit succeeds, who has the greatest moral failing: the authors, the reviewer, or the journal editors?

Polarization?

Let's play Jupiter or River Scum?

Pear Jam

"Although fewer women apply for tenure-track jobs, those who do apply are more likely to be interviewed and more likely to get offered the job... These findings run directly counter to the claim that women are discriminated against in STEM hiring." www.stevestewartwilliams.com/p/rethinking...

Well, maybe it is weird that near-freezing water has a negative coefficient of thermal expansion, but once you accept that you shouldn't marvel that pressure liquifies ice.

Or am I weird by naturally connecting the two?!

so, are you going to change your starter now?

Spring has now truly sprung at Trent U.
Does your campus have a riverside bench from which you might count new goslings?
@trentuniversity.bsky.social

zoonotic?