NEOWISE seen from my garden
Categories: Space PhotographyI know, this comet was seen 1 and a half year ago, but I didn't had a blog then, so I have to do it now......
Brain of Theseus - Consciousness upload in the cloud ?
Some thought experiment about the well known Ship of Theseus. It goes like this: imagine a ship leaving shore to go on adventures. Every day, the ship gets damaged and repaired with new material. One day it is a piece of the hull, another day, it is the sail, and so, and so. Eventually, all the elements of the ship have been changed. Is it still the same ship? One might say yes....
Previously...
That Time When We Lost The Position Of Some Satellites
Categories: SpaceI wrote about Carrington events here, just a few days before the solar cycle 23 unleashed some strong storm with an X1 flare the 28th October and several other CMEs the next days... Fortunately, the impact on earth was minimal: It was a mostly a miss. But it sparked some wonderful display of aurora in the last days of October. See here and here for some nice images....
Laser physics: gain medium and population inversion
Categories: Physics OpticsContinuing the series on lasers. In the first part, I went fast over plenty of concepts and left others on the side because they were not necessary to get a global understanding of lasers. Here, I want to get a little deeper in some specific concepts. I want to talk more in details about the gain medium of a laser and why population inversion is a vital concept....
How to check dimensions in equations
Categories: PhysicsAs a physics student, our teachers would usually spend a few minutes talking about how it is extremely important to check dimensions. Back then, I was listening and not really thinking how that would help me concretely to find the answer to the problem they were giving us. I would always be puzzled by why they were talking about this, and then never, ever, using it themselves in class or during th...
An introduction on laser physics
Categories: Physics Optics LaserSo I want to start a series of posts that will focus mostly on lasers, what they are, how they work, what are the most important elements, etc... It can still evolve....
The dangers of solar eruptions: the dreaded Carrington event
Categories: SpaceI am a fan of disaster movies. I have grown in the 90's and 00's, at a time where Hollywood started a trend of summer blockbusters that usually involved alien invasion, or volcanoes and other gigantic threat that was supposed to threaten the existence of Humanity. We had it all: Independence Day, Volcano, Armageddon, Deep Impact, 12 monkeys, etc... Spectacular and frightening....
A new surprising sorting algorithm
Categories: ProgrammingJust a small post today. I stumbled upon a paper [1] on ArXiv recently on a surprising sorting algorithm that was discovered pretty recently (in October 2021)....