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