evilstevie @evilstevie@mastod1.ddns.net

American physicist and chemist Katharine Burr Blodgett was born #OTD in 1898.

She was the inventor of a technique for making non-reflecting "invisible" glass, a material used in virtually all camera lenses & many other optical devices. She was also responsible for developing an instrument that can measure film thicknesses to within a few angstroms. She did research on methods of removing ice from airplane wings. She is also credited with the development of a new type of smoke screen.

#science

Donations aren't what they seem

Összesen 7 óra volt kirakni. Úgymond challanger nehézségű. Nagyon jól szórakoztam! 😊

Good morning Mastodon.

Some excellent cloud action this morning.

#sillyScribbles #photography #clouds #silly #dinosaur #drawing

Right. Time to stop 1. scrolling through old photos, 2. booping animals and 3. making numbered lists, which seems to have been my thing this evening. 'night!

#sillyScribbles #boop #photography #chicken #bird #silly

It came to my attention yesterday that #photoJanuary2024 is going on & I totally missed it in the chaos of the new year. So I'm joining in for day 8 which has a theme of "Shot in 2022".

I picked this one because

1. I really like the dragonfly, and

2. it still makes me laugh that I thought it had some weird & wonderful stripy proboscis but what I was actually looking at was a wasp's bum as wasp was devoured.

Dragonflies are proper wee beasties.

#photography #dragonfly #nature #Scotland

So had an interesting Sunday evening shopping for food. Found this on one of the POS machines in a local supermarket.

@SwiftOnSecurity this explains the origins of the name “splunk collector”

#silentSunday #photography #frost #nature #icetodon

Went for a walk this morning & my reverie was interrupted by the rhythmic whoooomp - whooooomp of a swan flying by. I paused to watch, turning to track its flight & shading my eyes from the low winter sun.

So aye. Apparently I salute swans now.

Didn't get a photo of the swan, so have this artist's impression with the more obliging robin in my garden.

#sillyScribbles #photography #robin #bird #silly

glitchy

#Caturday

Who did it better?

I’ll be chatting with Nikki Bedi tomorrow on BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live show at 9am about #mythicalcreatures, and probably bees, goats and the Wimblestone too.

Rarely do you get to see the roots of post boxes like these ones waiting to be re-potted.

Slightly annoyed I didn't do a hashtag for the Friday Dancers. I didn't realise I would commit so thoroughly to my ill-thought-out aim to "add a dancer every Friday until I run out of space".

If I add one now everyone who has faved or boosted an old one gets notified, which is a bit much for a vanity hashtag, so I'll just point out that I have nicely tagged them on my website.

It's a proper old school website too. No adverts. No pop-ups. No cookies.

See all 31 here...

https://eclectech.co.uk/gifsTag?tag=FridayDancers

Welcome to the future, goats and monkeys.

[ credit: https://stoney.monster/@stoneymonster/111592567052438463
h/t @chebra ]

I can see why people like ChatGPT. I asked it “What would happen if I stuck my dick in the Large Hadron Collider?” and it gave me a very detailed and plausible sounding answer, whereas CERN didn’t even reply to my email.

@bamboombibbitybop

The worst thing I've ever seen is a dude who was using an LLM to turn a short prompt into a longer email, and then another dude using an LLM to generate a short summary of that longer email so he didn't have to read it all.

My dudes

You have invented the world's first anti-compression algorithm, which sends a short statement by means of turning it into a larger statement for transmission.