was_a_dev

Conversely, in the UK we don't have ID cards, but have a fair bit more surveillance

My split second of doubt came from not being American, and past experience of hearing Americas seriously make those points

Like all traffic infrastructure, there's variants that work for such situation.

Roundabouts can have bypass lanes, a protected (right) turn that allievates that issue.

In the UK you see these, and also designs where the through traffic bypasses the roundabout

You're not wrong. But in those scenarios, I tend to be off the clock

I like the implication that FTL is closer on the horizon than electoral reforms

I read most papers on a secondary 19" monitor that's mounted portrait. Seems to cover all the requirements

As a physicist- ChatGPT is no Einstein lmao

What about the Terrascope [1] concept instead? Using the Earth's atmoshpere as a refractive lens. This requires a telescope of L2 rather than some 540AU away for a solar gravity lens.

Not as powerful as the latter, but much more do-able just on the distance scale alone. It would essentially be an "Eath-observing" James Webb

[1] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019ESS.....433310K/abstra...

I agree. It would depend on the definition of "far-field" in this example, even for a quasi-Bessel beam there is a near region that maybe useful for this example given a large enough aperture.

This paper [1] demonstrates the reduced power loss of a Bessel beam compared to a Gaussian for various target distances. For targeting GEO, a Bessel beam can be 75% the size of a Gaussian for the same halving of power-loss.

In reality, I think a Gaussian beam is fine - and much simpler to engineer.

[1] https://opg.optica.org/josaa/fulltext.cfm?uri=josaa-32-11-20...

I think for the any initial project, we'll have to resort to 1km scale laser arrays. These would allow for a beam with a low dispersion so there can be a good initial acceleration.

After a few hundred AU, the probes should be close to the target velocity

Is a single probe subject to 100 GW? Isn't that just the output power of the laser array.

If that 100GW is over 1km2, the incident light is 10W/cm2 and mW levels of heating.

1km2 is typical for these ideal to minimise the laser dispersion

For a Gaussian laser beam, a good metric is the Rayleigh distance, which is the distance where the beam diverges to sqrt(2) of it's initial beam size (waist) [1].

It is proportional to the square of the beam waist and inversely proportional to the wavelength.

For a 1m beam at a 1um wavelength, that is about 3e6m or 3000km.

Therefore larger beam diameters and longer wavelengths reduces divergence.

There's also other beam shapes that are "non-diffracting" which can maintain their original beam profile over an initial distance, such as a Bessel beam [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_length

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessel_beam

There's a bit of difference between the aims of astrophotography and professional astronomy.

Ones getting a subjectively good image where the other is getting an objectively good quantitative measurement.

Do the software "tricks" really translate that well. If they did, these terrestrial telescopes wouldn't engineered to the tune of billions.

My UKRI stipend is less than national minimum wage. And is also without any employer benefits. I'm lucky to have a spouse that supports me through it.

Many in the department are now struggling to attract new PhD researchers within the UK or Europe. And funding rules are restrictive to any interest from further afield.

The fact we have released code before the paper is wild. Typically the promise of open sourced code never comes to fruition

Here, it appears they have used Four Wave Mixing in Xeon gas

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-wave_mixing

The energy required to alter nuclear states is often in the MeV energy range, where Thorium is a rare example that has a very close state to the ground state, seperated by 8.4eV (100,000 less energy)

This means that to exicte to this nuclear state is possible using an ultraviolet laser

It has important applications for nuclear theory, nuclear atomic clocks and fundemental constant metrology.

If atomic clocks become a few orders of magntidude better than the current state of the art (see atomic lattice clocks) then such clocks would do direct gravitational wave measurements and measure some fundemental constants.

The latter is important in physics to determine if these constants are truly constant in space and time. Which is a large assumption we have about the universe.

My dream would be seeing a telescope at the gravitational lensing point in our solar system. But thats beyond 500A

I'm happy they have some data with respect to re-entry. It would have been nice to see the vehicle survive for longer, but there's something to go forward with.

Did you miss the final section on the electrostatic shield?

There's photoswitchable molecules and fluorophores.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoswitch

It was the arrogance that they thought that these subpostmasters had been doing this for years, and just been caught out by their new computer system.

The contempt for their staff is insane

If it was a better algorithm - then of couse. You wouldn't be a very good software engineer (or scientist) if you couldn't recognise that.

This has veered off from my original point. In that saying "follow the science" is not a issue - there is nothing wrong with following the opinion of experts in their field.

Wonderful opinions can come from anyone.

Are these scientifically founded opinions. Not necessarily, hence why "following the science" is valid if you are following experts in their field.

If you're a software consultant, would you take on the opinions from a marketing client on the best algorithm to implement for their solution? Probably not.

If someone put in the effort and time to throughly research the topic and draw an opinion from that. Regardless of their title or their funding, then why would you discount it?

Climate models are fundamentally physical, but I don't have the insight in the field to have the deep insight to make qualified opinions.

I could after significant research as suggested. But that is a significant endeavour, hence following the opinion of the field is typically sufficient.

It's like a fronted developer making comments on kernel development and vice versa. It's both fundamentally code, but different fields.

It isn't if you aren't a scientist in that field. As you're not qualified to do otherwise.

As a physicist in quantum sensing. I follow the science (opinion) of climate scientists as they're the experts of that field. And that opinion is constantly evolving, but I follow that.

Anything else is just being an armchair scientist.

It does make me wonder how a reviewer can truly review a CS paper without running the code.

Or a series of cameras. With one being opened every 10 years or so.