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dblack12705on Anything Will Lase If You Hit It Hard Enough

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.

dblack12705on Google-Wiz deal fizzles out, company will pursue IPO

Yes, all the time. It is a common idiom, especially in history books.

dblack12705on Does anybody know this fractal? (2012)

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.

dblack12705on Two lifeforms merge in once-in-a-billion-years evolutionary event

You two fix nitrogen together?

dblack12705on The Case Against Children

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.

dblack12705on Rainwater everywhere on the planet is unsafe to drink due to chemicals (2022)

Baseline testosterone levels are actually even lower in most hunter gatherer populations. This suggests that your explanation is not necessarily correct.

dblack12705on What makes a language flourish? Or: Why can't I speak Latin? (2021)

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.

dblack12705on They studied dishonesty – Was their work a lie?

In case anyone hasn’t read it, the Datacolada article demonstrating Ariely committed fraud is a great read and extremely convincing.

https://datacolada.org/98

dblack12705on Show HN: Hacker News user blogroll

Damn this is cool

dblack12705on Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

Thank you! And sure, you can email me at dblack12705@gmail.com

dblack12705on Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

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!

dblack12705on Lingua Latina per se illustrata (2012)

I love this book! It’s really quite excellent for teaching Latin.

dblack12705on Pop-shoot: Synthwave styled space shooter, inspired by 80s arcades

Cool! It’s really fun

dblack12705on Reddit mods and scaling problems in social control

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

dblack12705on Reddit mods and scaling problems in social control

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…

dblack12705on Yan tan tethera pethera pimp – an old system for counting sheep (2013)

This counting system is fascinating! I wrote an article about this as well:

https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/a-brief-history-of-dik

dblack12705on Faster Than Light in Our Model of Physics: Some Preliminary Thoughts

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.

dblack12705on “What color is the Sun?” An example of science education pathology (2012)

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.