Comment up or down (Score 1) 192
Would you have moded up or down? Or is that to be decided by the state of the cat?
In order to understand how these dots are optically active, you do indeed need quantum mechanics.
To me, 'nano' is just a word for the boundary between the quantum world and the classical world.
A CMOS sensor is smooth and fairly reflective, so it reflects a considerable fraction of the light. This reflected light does indeed cause flare. The second article states that the new sensors are black, so this new sensor could dramatically reduce flare.
You say you want more portable glass. However, you're still asking for a 700mm lens. You do realise, that in order to have 700mm lens at f/1, you need an entrance pupil with 700/1 = 700mm worth of diameter? Yup, that's right, 70cm of diameter in order to achieve f/1. Not sure that's ever going to be portable, mate.
To quote Frank Abagnale Jr., "I concur."
From wikipedia: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker-Nunn_camera#Baker-Nunn)
A dozen f/0.75 Baker-Nunn cameras with 20-inch apertures – each weighing 3.5 tons including a multiple axis mount allowing it to follow satellites in the sky – were used by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory to track artificial satellites from the late 1950s to mid 1970s.
20 in *25 mm/inch = 500 mm. => 500 mm
If you point any of those cameras toward the sun, you will see flare. This is carefully explained in the video. To suppress flare, you need to stop reflections. On the glass, you can multilayer coatings. On the sensor, you can't do that. So you have to live with the reflection. If you have a concave lens element facing toward the camera body, you have a little concave mirror just waiting to reflect the specular reflection of the sun back onto your sensor. If the new sensors are black, they are not going to reflect much - so less flare.
The Canon 85mm f/1.2 is also a legend. And only about 2 grand.
If these lenses are only 'pretty good', you must be accustomed to the optics in research telescopes
"Our quantum film even looks like photographic film—an opaque black material that we deposit right on the top layer of our image chip."
This is important. Current digital sensors are reflective & that results in a specular reflection. This greatly increases the flare, since much of the light the strikes the sensor reflect back into the lens, where it can reflect from a lens back to the sensor. This is one area where digital has been noticeably worse that film. See PhotoTechEDU Day 4: Contrast, MTF, Flare, and Noise @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNvFsOvVkOg&feature=channel. This is the major loss of contrast at low spacial frequency (eg ~ 10 lp/mm). The digital censors are not living up to the potential of the glass. This could really help. Now if I can just save up enough for a next generation Leica M10...
The doctors could even make house calls if you had a sick child. A wonderful system, and about half the cost of our monstrosity.
Mathematically, the many-eyeballs argument, and the million-monkeys argument are equivalent.
Yes, but this is only true if N(eyeballs) = 2 million - N(one-eyed monkeys) - 2*N(zero-eyed monkeys). Of course, once we have humans and their eyeballs involved, we will need modify this recently discovered Microsoft monkey-eye theorem. We should inquire if Microsoft considers human and monkey eyes equivalent in order to determine the effective conversion factor between human and monkey eyes.
A Microsoft Creationist would set the conversion rate at infinite, since our eyes are in the image of God, and monkey eyes are not in God's image. I find this ironic, since God is invisible and therefore has no image.
A Microsoft geneticist might argue that the similarity in eyeballs is comparable to the similarity in the genetic code that encodes the eye. This might state the monkey eyes and human eyes have 90% of their genes in common. However, these genetic differences represent a vector in an N-dimensional space, where N is the number of genes required to express an eye. If we assume that human eyes are the reference, we can determine the 'gain' (presumably less than 1) of the monkey eyes of by finding 'eye-gain' vectors of the Monkey eyes. We can then use a standard inner product to determine the 'eye-gain' values for the various monkeys used in this "Microsoft Writes an OS with Monkeys at the Keyboards Experiment".
In either case, Microsoft will need a new Math to support this claim. When the blogging Microsofty proves this assertion mathematically, I will be only to happy to equate Microsoft with monkeys coding an operating system.
I've noticed several design suggestions in your code.
