Category: Uncategorized

A daguerreotype of Louis Daguerre

Technology moved so slowly for so long, and then around the Industrial Revolution we all become accustomed to technology moving very quickly. We…

This comment by Ryan Cooper came to me from Mark Histed. It has stuck with me, and Mark has repeated the idea a few times. For years now, I’ve been…

“by opening the door to irrational medicine alongside evidence-based medicine, we are poisoning the minds of the public” – Baum and Ernst 2009 …

I’ve posted a couple of times about Typst (some tips to get started, and why I like it over Word and LaTeX). I was happy to…

When you publish a paper on a new imaging system, people often want to compare figures of merit. Field-of-view, resolution, speed, etc. They want to know in what ways your…

Maybe you learned that his name was Snell. It wasn’t.

Let me back up. Electromagnetic waves propagate at about 3 x 10^8 meters per second in vacuum. We often call that number “c“. When those waves have frequencies around 400 – 800 terahertz, we call them visible light.

When those waves go through…

This handbook is available for free online. Here’s the link.

There is much evidence that updates to factual beliefs, even if successful, may not translate into attitude or behaviour…

There are always people who complain loudly that they are unconvincing. They won’t say it that way, though.

Instead, they might blame suppression of speech, or a conspiracy, or people being…

It’s right there in the name of this blog. A double entendre: (1) for experimental apparatus rigs and the people who build them, aka “riggers”; and (2) rigor, an important…

I have a little piece I often reuse, it goes something like this.

We know that visually guided navigation is a hard problem even for state-of-the-art AI because…

One time, years ago, I was asked (by a very nice person and an accomplished scientist) to write a book chapter. I didn’t want to. But I was working with a brilliant postdoc who…

It has been a long standing interest of mine to better understand (and find ways to address) how entire fields of scientists can lead each other astray– into ideas…

Imagine your car won’t start. Your mechanic has a theory: “The battery is dead.” Now, they have several ways to share that theory:

Option 1: Launch a podcast. They…

To what degree of precision can your evaluations of grants, papers, or applicants be quantified—if forced into a single numerical score?

How many bits of resolution can we reasonably…

If you have been using Overleaf to write grants and papers, and are thinking of trying Typst, here are some points to get you started. Typst updates live, while you code up a document, and it is much faster than Overleaf. Plus, it has a lot more functionality. Some of Typst will…