Type of laser Created 2024-06-26 Updated 2025-07-16
Lasers vs other light sources Created 2024-06-26 Updated 2025-07-16
The key advantages of lasers over other light sources are:
- lasers emit a narrow spectrum
- it can be efficient collimated, while still emitting a lot of output power: Section "Why can't you collimate incoherent light as well as a laser?"
- can be phase and polarization coherent, though it is not always the case? TODO.
One cool thing about lasers is that they rely on one specific atomic energy level transition to produce light. This is why they are able to to be so monchromatic. Compare this to:As such, lasers manage to largely overcome "temperature distribution-like" effects that create wider wave spectrum
- incandescent bulbs: wide black-body radiation spectrum
- LED: has a wider spectrum fundamentally related to an energy distribution, related: Why aren't LEDs monochromatic
- TODO think a bit about fluorescent lamps. These also rely on atomic energy transitions, but many of them are present at once, which makes the spectrum very noisy. But would individual lines be very narrow?
Crazy difference between 5W laser and 5W LED by Brainiac75
. Source. Baseic but good. Uses a laser photometer. Laser spectrum Created 2024-06-26 Updated 2025-07-16
Twisted pair Created 2024-06-26 Updated 2025-07-16
Education of André-Marie Ampère Created 2024-06-26 Updated 2025-07-16
en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Andr%C3%A9-Marie_Amp%C3%A8re&oldid=1211946256:TODO find the source for this.
Jean-Jacques Ampère, a successful merchant, was an admirer of the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose theories of education (as outlined in his treatise Émile) were the basis of Ampère's education. Rousseau believed that young boys should avoid formal schooling and pursue instead a "direct education from nature." Ampère's father actualized this ideal by allowing his son to educate himself within the walls of his well-stocked library.
André-Marie Ampère Created 2024-06-26 Updated 2025-07-16
Electrical cable Created 2024-06-26 Updated 2025-07-16
One more more electrical wires surrounded by an insulator.
Oliver Heaviside Created 2024-06-26 Updated 2025-07-16
He participated in the development of the electrical telegraph, and he did some good modeling work that improved the foundations of the field, notably creating the telegrapher's equations.
He was one of those idealists who just want to do some cool work even if they have to starve for it, people had to get a state pension for him for his contributions. Nice guy. en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Oliver_Heaviside&oldid=1230097796#Later_years_and_views:He also never married: www.nndb.com/people/627/000204015/
In 1896, FitzGerald and John Perry obtained a civil list pension of £120 per year for Heaviside, who was now living in Devon, and persuaded him to accept it, after he had rejected other charitable offers from the Royal Society.
CIA 2010 covert communication websites 2013 DNS census secureserver.net MX records intersection 2013 DNS Census virtual host cleanup Created 2023-07-19 Updated 2025-07-16
We intersect 2013 DNS Census virtual host cleanup with 2013 DNS census MX records and that leaves 460k hits. We did lose a third on the the MX records as of 260 hits since secureserver.net is only used in 1/3 of sites, but we also concentrate 9x, so it may be worth it.
We did a full Wayback Machine CDX scanning for JAR, SWF and cgi-bin in those, but only found a single new hit:
- 63.130.160.50 theglobalheadlines.com. Just barely missed with our 2013 DNS Census virtual host cleanup heuristic keyword searches as we did think of both "global" and "headlines" in the "news" themes!
Fraternities and sororities Updated 2025-07-16
snap "Pending Update of" notifications Updated 2025-07-16
Happening multiple times a day on Ubuntu 22.04 for Chromium, even though I turn computer on and off daily, unbearable:
- askubuntu.com/questions/1412575/pending-update-of-snap-store
- askubuntu.com/questions/1412140/pending-update-of-firefox-snap-close-the-app-to-avoid-disruptions
- forum.snapcraft.io/t/how-to-disable-snapd-update-notifications-permanently/31117 Settings > Notifications > Snapd User Session Agent
- www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/v1s919/disable_pending_update_of_snap_message_kiosk/
- forum.snapcraft.io/t/refresh-app-awareness-call-for-testing/29123
Social inequality Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli is extremely passionate about this issue, partly due to Ciro Santilli's self perceived compassionate personality.
One of Ciro's most direct experiences with social inequality is described at: São Remo, the favela next to USP.
We have to be careful not to make everyone poorer when trying to reduce inequality.
But as things stand as of 2020, increasing taxes on the very richest, and notably wealth tax, and investing it in free gifted education, seems like a safe bet to achieve any meaningful level of equal opportunity and meritocracy.
Social media feed that forces you to see posts by non-followed Updated 2025-07-16
During the early 2020s, many of the idiotic social media platforms started adding a non optional "feature" of suggesting feed posts by people you don't follow:
It must have been some A/B testing overload that made that decision to try and make things more addictive for everyone. Or perhaps as a way to drive revenue with people paying to cheat the algorithm and boost their posts.
European Union we need you.
Braindumping Updated 2025-07-16
There are two ways:
- manually dumping your brain on media such as notebooks, wikis or videos, i.e. forming a personal knowledge base
- technically using sensors for brain scanning
Yitang Zhang's theorem Updated 2025-07-16
There are infinitely many primes with a neighbor not further apart than 70 million. This was the first such finite bound to be proven, and therefore a major breakthrough.
This implies that for at least one value (or more) below 70 million there are infinitely many repetitions, but we don't know which e.g. we could have infinitely many:or infinitely many:or infinitely many:or infinitely many:but we don't know which of those.
The Prime k-tuple conjecture conjectures that it is all of them.
Brain in a vat Updated 2025-07-16
BrainSimII Updated 2025-07-16
yolov5-pip Updated 2025-07-16
OK, now we're talking, two liner and you get a window showing bounding box object detection from your webcam feed!The accuracy is crap for anything but people. But still. Well done. Tested on Ubuntu 22.10, P51.
python -m pip install -U yolov5==7.0.9
yolov5 detect --source 0 What happens to the definition of the orthogonal group if we choose other types of symmetric bilinear forms Updated 2025-07-16
We looking at the definition the orthogonal group is the group of all matrices that preserve the dot product, we notice that the dot product is one example of positive definite symmetric bilinear form, which in turn can also be represented by a matrix as shown at: Section "Matrix representation of a symmetric bilinear form".
By looking at this more general point of view, we could ask ourselves what happens to the group if instead of the dot product we took a more general bilinear form, e.g.:The answers to those questions are given by the Sylvester's law of inertia at Section "All indefinite orthogonal groups of matrices of equal metric signature are isomorphic".
- : another positive definite symmetric bilinear form such as ?
- what if we drop the positive definite requirement, e.g. ?
What poor countries have to do to get richer Updated 2025-07-16
Like all poor countries, Brazil's lack of money and scientific culture severely limit its ability to make technological and scientific advances.
While this sounds obvious, Ciro Santilli has felt it first hand since he moved from Brazil to Europe, and it is just shocking.
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