You know how strobe light photography lets you 'freeze' very fast moving things so you can study what they look like mid motion. This is used for basically that, except for much much smaller things moving much much faster.
The wavelength at the size of a watermolecule in the range of Exahertz x-ray rather implies very precise laser pulses because the focal point is proportional to the wavelength. It is also relevant for energy transfer into molecules at resonant frequencies.
from the last paragraph linked above:
> For example, attosecond pulses can be used to push molecules, which emit a measurable signal. The signal from the molecules has a special structure, a type of fingerprint that reveals what molecule it is, and the possible applications of this include medical diagnostics.
Basically it's a more precise higher energy X-Ray laser.
I believe the fast turning on and off is a byproduct of a basic method (high-harmonic generation). They do stress the importance of short pulses, but this again may have to do with decoherence of the focal point and not so much the speed of electrons inside the molecule, which is only a model (i.e. relativistic) and remains to be investigated with this new method.
Another benefit of pulsing light really fast is that you can more easily perform studies of really delicate things (eg proteins) because you effectively have higher control over the amount of energy you're pouring into the sample. That isn't directly what they were working on here, but a similar extremely high frequency pulsing is one of the things that makes free-electron lasers 'next generation' compared to synchrotrons.
L’Huillier, who became the fifth woman to win the physics prize, was teaching when she received the call from the committee, having the advantage of being in the same time zone as the committee.
(On a side note, Bing chat already knows now that she won the prize. Color me impressed.)
> (On a side note, Bing chat already knows now that she won the prize. Color me impressed.)
It actually doesn't. Bing searches for your query and uses plain old search results as extra context for the actual LLM. GPT-4 still has the same knowledge cutoff as when the model was last trained.
Here's what it feeds to the model when searching for "nobel prize in physics 2023":
Yeah, she had it "off" for the lecture and turned it on during the break, which is when they reached her (in Sweden course lectures are almost always divided into several 45 min blocks, with a break in between each block).
I understand, low powered red laser pointers are difficult to see for people with color blindness. And the high powered laser pointers are legal only in some countries. A long stick just works.
I expect they did spring for it when the room was last remodelled, but since then for sure the batteries have died several times, some lecturer brought it with them to their office by mistake and forgot it there, and the students have stolen it.
The best professors I had in my time in university were the ones who didn't let technology get in the way of effective teaching. The ones who grabbed the newest technology were the ones willing to waste combined days of time (that's a big lecture hall; there could easily be hundreds of students in that class).
I guarantee the university would have let her expense a laser pointer, but those break, run out of batteries, and can be harder to place accurately or spot. Sticks just work.
I have been hosting it locally for a couple of months now.
Stuff I like:
- The mobile app is quite friendly
- It supports "automatic upload" (after opening the app)
- It supports deleting pictures from the device after uploading (to save space... much needed on the wife's old iphone)
- The pictures are stored hierarchically on the filesystem
- Very lightweight (the whole docker setup uses less than 128MB of RAM)
Stuff I'm not a fan of:
- The web interface is "okay". It could use some modernizing.
- When there's no more space on the device, the app fails to upload new pictures, but gives no error message.
All in all, Piwigo is a solid 7.5/10 for me, but I'm watching and testing some other active software such as https://immich.app/
Very straightforward reason: less capabilities for naughty executables to "live off the land" from.
Kind of like the sysadmins removing any scripting languages and compilers from servers to avoid giving rogue processes any leg up.
It's legitimately making it harder for baddies to exploit a way in.
...Though it's never been easier to package your own interpreter (micropython or equivalent), so I don't expect it slows people down much.
In the mindset of MS: legit devs should package their own tooling, and baddies shouldn't get the freebies.
"We have books made 500 years ago that look freshly printed, but we don't know how long electronic formats will survive. Today's computers are not able to read prehistoric floppy disks. All that is said is recorded, and knowing it is recorded, we don't feel any more the need to remember it"
I fully on agree on all the points and I try to protect my home (network), but I feel that’s a lost cause both from technical (e.g. dns on http/3) and psychological (more subtle and mixed with the actual content) aspects. My only hope is to try to digitally vaccinate my kids that they become more self aware on what they are exposed to.
