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[Trekkin]

You know that trope where time travelers arrive in the past and the locals treat their most mundane items with a mixture of fear and wonder because they think electricity is magic or whatever?

Reading your florid descriptions of things I do on a daily basis has given me some idea of how watching that would feel. It's nice to know some people still think it's cool/important enough to worry about.

[Starver]

If you can (no idea if geographic limitations apply to others, and it will probably become unavailable after a few weeks, at least until the next time it gets repeated) listen to the recently (re)broadcast episode 5 of series 3. Can't offhand tell you how far through the half hour it is (I think it's near the end), but you'll know which sketch you just reminded me of when you hear it. And the rest of the episode (and episodes) will also surely entertain you, so no great loss to take thirty minutes out of doubtless otherwise full schedules. 


If you'll excuse a bit of.an additional diversion. Albeit in what I think isn't too far off topic for intelligencia such as ourselves. 

[Trekkin]

Albeit in what I think isn't too far off topic for intelligencia such as ourselves. 

You misspelled "intelligentsia" intentionally, right? Because I'm laughing harder than I have in a while.

[Max™]

As are energy output of the Sun as observed on the surface of Earth, and the original energy exuding from a similarly-sized area of surface before the 93 million miles of transit smooshes together a whole hemisphere but (mostly) inverse-squares itself out thinly over the heavens with only a minute amount ever getting into our skies, clear or otherwise.

(I seem to have completely missed that we're not talking, the way I first read it, about someone shining something brighter than the Sun at the Sun (which, after 150Gm of travel, probably wouldn't bother it in the slightest). I think that error arose because it looks like someone thought that it was the shining of the DLS at the enzyme that changed it, rather than just the method to take a snapshot of the various versions of enzymes that had or had not been corrupted with accidental improvements through more traditional "mess with it a bit, see what it does" method.)

I was just talking about the 10 million times brighter than the sun bit here (peaks at 1 kj per second per meter squared) could mean lots of things, flashing something for an incredibly short period of time at an incredibly high intensity is going to be really fucking bright but it's not the same brightness as you would normally classify sunlight as being.

[wierd]

A femtosecond laser is still able to do some very interesting and nontrivial things, at least when it is driven at the intensity mentioned.

But shooting it at the sun? Uhm..... No, not gonna do a hell of a lot.  Are you kids familiar with the "random walk"?  The sun's interior is a seething ocean of photons being emitted and absorbed in random directions, and what we see as light took hundreds of years to escape the inside of the star. There is more photonic energy in the inner layers of the sun than you care to contemplate. A puny little laser on the surface atmosphere of the sun is not going to upset it much, if at all.

[Max™]

I DON'T MEAN SHOOTING THE SUN, FUCKS SAKE!

[wierd]

Well, if we are just talking a femtosecond pulsed laser, those have all kinds of industrial and research uses.   Depends on the wavelength it is tuned for at that point.

I dont think "10 billion times brighter than the sun" is technically achievable with our tech though--

[Reelya]

https://interestingengineering.com/fda-just-approved-first-contact-lenses-that-turn-dark-in-bright-sunlight

On a related topic, the FDA has recently approved light-sensitive contact lenses that darken in bright sunlight, so you can wear them while shining light that's 10 billion times brighter than the sun at something a little more comfortably.

[Kagus]

The home site for the DLS actually has some more information about the enzyme and how it works. The article's title is fairly bombastic though...

They also talk a bit more about how the big thing works.

"This very intense light, predominantly in the X-ray region, is millions of times brighter than light produced from conventional sources and 10 billion times brighter than the sun."

Apparently it doesn't necessarily mean 10bn times the visible light, so that can easily get misconstrued. Still though, pretty neat.

[wierd]

https://interestingengineering.com/fda-just-approved-first-contact-lenses-that-turn-dark-in-bright-sunlight

On a related topic, the FDA has recently approved light-sensitive contact lenses that darken in bright sunlight, so you can wear them while shining light that's 10 billion times brighter than the sun at something a little more comfortably.

Now YOU TOO can have solid black eyes, just like a zeta reticulan grey alien!

[Starver]

Albeit in what I think isn't too far off topic for intelligencia such as ourselves. 

You misspelled "intelligentsia" intentionally, right? Because I'm laughing harder than I have in a while.

I was just fbibing!

[Loud Whispers]

birth of the grayy lmao

[Trekkin]

Apparently it doesn't necessarily mean 10bn times the visible light, so that can easily get misconstrued. Still though, pretty neat.

Crystallography in general is pretty neat, if you can get your head around working in Fourier space. I feel compelled to point out that it's a purely analytical technique, though. Literally all it does is shine X-rays through a crystal brightly enough for us to work out the electron density from the diffraction peaks and then fill in the structure; it's really not a novel technique.

[Kagus]

Perhaps, but there's still something to be said for doing non-novel things in a novel fashion... or just doing non-novel things in a non-novel fashion, but doing it really well (see: "You are already fed." "Naan?!").

[Trekkin]

Yes, there is. It is closer to "good job adhering to the basic standards of protein structure determination" than "wow, particle accelerators can make really bright light", though.