Practice your talk

“I know I’m over time, I just have one more thing I want to tell you about, I think, …”

I practice my talks and try to nail the timing. I use the presenter display in…



The Cousa objective, an ultra long working distance, large field-of-view air objective for multiphoton imaging

We just updated the preprint for the Cousa objective. It’s a big update.

Back in November 2020, we announced a design for a 20 mm working distance objective…



Distilled simplicity for scientific publishing

Scientific publishing is essentially a solved problem.

Research dissemination is almost free. For hundreds of years, humankind relied on printed material and postage or shipping to share their work. That…



Restlessness

This post will probably mean more to me than it means to any of you dear readers. But maybe someone will recognize a bit of themselves in it. Or maybe I’m…



New camera: 316 MPixel, 58.6 square cm

That’s not a typo. 58.6 square centimeters of detector area. It’s the Big Sky camera by Sphere Entertainment Co. I want to know more about that lens on the front too.

Maybe an upgrade for the next version of the ExA-SPIM?



What is your goal?

What drives you?

I’ve been speaking with undergraduates a lot recently, consulting about their career plans, and the discussions can be interesting.

I tinkered a lot as a kid– taking things apart, modifying them, doing crude experiments. Maybe you did similar things. One time I found something interesting and shared it with mother. She asked, “When…



If it sounds good, it is good

From Dall-E, via Bing. The prompt was something about the Santa Barbara coastline with Washingtonia robusta palm trees and Lemon Gum Eucalyptus trees in the style of an Ansel…



Free textbooks online with Internet Archive

Optics by Hecht

About 13 years ago, I wrote a blog post on here about using catalogs as textbooks. I still do that, but catalogs are fading — fewer…



A large amount of apparently unproductive work

I saw this quote, as a photograph of it jotted down on a whiteboard, and it made me smile.

I looked up the source. It’s freely available online. It’s an 1893 book on…



Active alignment for diffraction limited optics in the 1600s

In my optics classes, I often give a brief historical account of Galileo’s telescopes. A point I want to make in this post, is that part of the high performance of Galileo’s telescopes was obtained through careful final adjustments. We do the same thing with our optics, designing in correction collars, adjustable air gaps, and…



Suiting for academics

Humphrey is a gentleman. We relax together after an intense day.

This is post is about suits. Most Labrigger readers will want to skip reading this one. I did…



A sense of scale: web ads pay for AI/ML

Worldwide spending on all advertising is on the order of 1 trillion USD per year (source: statista). Web ad companies capture large fractions of this. For example, Meta gets about 10%, and Google gets about 20%. Then those companies invest heavily in R&D of various types, including for machine learning (ML) / artificial intelligence (AI)….



RF remapping in V2: “Nothing is an absolute reality; all is permitted”

It is both fascinating and frustrating. Large-scale receptive field remapping in V2 neurons: Work by: Sachira Denagamage, Mitchell P Morton, Anirvan Nandy

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.01.539001v1

Our eyes are in constant…



Values

Ikuko Smith taught me that me that Japanese people judge others by the way they wring out a washcloth. “It says a lot about how a person was raised.” That was a new thing for me to be self conscious about, but addressable. Unlike my technique for eating corn-on-the-cob. This Iowa boy is stuck in…



When do you need a pulse compressor for multiphoton imaging?

There are different types of pulse compressors, this is clever single prism design.

Here’s a quick question I received via email that might be worth sharing: Does using a pulse compressor make…