but "professional artists" are an even smaller subset of "art students". All I'm saying's that there's no market for this, even though it'd be cool. That said, people should get back into the workshops and make stuff to their hearts content even if there is zero market for it. There's not enough of that.

And this would cater to a tiny fraction of art students - of which there are not that many. Tiny market, tiny chance of it happening. Buhey, start a kickstarter thing and see how far you get. Who knows, maybe art students actually do have money!

They are, at Schiphol, required to give you the option of going through the old type metal detector gate. It's in the leaflet you can download from here http://www.schiphol.nl/Travellers/AtSchiphol/CheckinControl/SecurityChecksUponDeparture/SecurityScan.htm

B.

This already exists on big parking lots (f.ex. of malls) in Japan, where you can see on a map where the free places roughly are, and in front of each lane of parking spaces you will have another indicator indicating whether there are any free places in that lane. Very useful!

I can honestly say this is not going to work. The working style at NIMS and RIKEN are completely different, and their administration is completely incompatible. This will likely cause headaches all over. Also, one organization does not improve communication between the scientists. I found at RIKEN that the one group was not allowed to talk to the other group at RIKEN in fear one would be copying or taking up time of the other.

...which is not that bad for a laser [to be monochromatic].

As far as my knowledge goes, yes the pump laser has to be X-ray. The energy of the emitted photons from the laser are always lower than the excitation energy of the lasing medium. So you need the high photon energy of x-rays to excite the medium to lase photons of lower (but still x-ray) energy.

Funny, then, that my research focuses on the behavior of X-rays through metals. X-rays can penetrate metals, depending on the energy of the radiation used. high-energy radiation passes through almost everything, and interacts only a little with intermediate objects. Hence, it is very well possible they are using X-rays for this, but they can pretty much only use it to visualize the internal metallic structure of objects as it will pass right through people.

Yup, that's my experience too. I do my research in a particular way (research institute, YMMV), and it is IT's job to facilitate the IT aspects of that job. When I then need to SSH to an outside computational cluster, this is blocked by their (mcafee) firewall. Not only that, but (strangely) DNS requests also seem to be blocked if originating from an application other than a web-browser.

When I then call IT, and ask them to open SSH for my IP, they have no idea what I'm talking about. Finally, after days of explaining, I get access to a SOCKS server circumventing the firewall. Except, of course, for DNS so I am still stuck with editing /etc/hosts to add external cluster nodes.

This is not the first institute I have worked in, and in other institutes IT was more than willing to help me get access, sometimes after a cursory check of the "security" of my computer. Given it's a mac, that was no issue.

Now this current IT gets me riled. They make my life difficult. They stop me from doing my work in an easy way and insist on making it difficult when it does not need to be.

there isn't nearly enough of this common sense around in this thread. I stick with film cameras to be out of the world of "measurebators" - trying to find the best camera based on specs alone. A good picture is not a function of the camera.