Tfs appears to describe a frequency comb (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_comb)

The "rainbow" ooh ahh pretty is a shorthand for the fact that the frequency domain representation of a series of uniformly timed pulses (a "comb" in the time domain) is also "comb" in the frequency domain. That is a spectrum of narrow frequency bands at uniform spacing.

One of the fixed points of the fourier transform. The fourier transform of a comb is a comb. The fourier transform of a gaussian is a gaussian.

What this is really describing is an ultrastable pulse generator on a chip scale with some possible applications to the 20 to 50 GHz regime used for high bandwidth wireless devices.

You sound like a plant. Are you tasty and nutritious?

I tell you what I think and why I think it. I post on slashdot for fun.

Academics playacting as public intellectuals earn their salaries directly or indirectly from selling themselves as people qualified to tell you how or what to think, and they know it.

See the difference?

Yeah man. Just like back when mike pence rounded up the gays and put them on cattle cars. Dark times.

Citation required for every single thing you said.

No evidence I benefited from past nastiness any more or any less than any person alive today. The direct descendants of slaves are long-dead and the last people to come of age under institutional racial segregation in this country are past retirement.

No evidence the bag of crazy one finds in Robin DeAngelo (read her work, I did, and there's literally elementary school logic mistakes on every page), Ibram Kendi, or their many copycats actually does any good to anyone other than the consultants pocketing fees for their diversity training services.

Also no evidence that saying land acknowledgements ad nauseum, renaming columbus day, or prefacing all your statements with a header packet listing your ancestry and supposed guilt has the power to reach back in time and undo the slave trade or innoculate the natives against smallpox.

I was told to go along with race-baiting, race-essentialist, communist-adjacent propaganda so I voted for the guy who promised to fight it. And he is.

Scientists are fallible humans the way everyone else is. And my personal observation is that academic science is a magnet for several particular human failings.

At its best, the intentionally adversarial nature of the scientific process (in experiment, nature is your adversary; in publication your peers are your adversary) separates the wheat from the chaff.

At its worst (when money and personal reputation and prestige are on the line), it's far easier to go along to get along, get the grant, get the publication, get the recommendation letter. And bad ideas fester.

There are a lot of bad ideas festering in American universities. Not least of which is the idea that having the letters PhD after your name qualifies you to opine on $current_events with unquestioned solomonic wisdom regardless of whether you have any expertise in the subject or whether your next grant is riding on a particular direction of public opinion.

As someone who's been in and around American academia for close to 25 years, I can say with certainty that a large element of American academia absolutely earned its place in the doghouse.

Years and years of quiet ascent to this shit:
https://www.newsweek.com/smith...

will grate on you too. Twenty plus years ago almost every announcement for a grant or fellowship application in my university was followed up with "women and minorities especially encouraged to apply" and not too long ago my wife (both a woman and a "minority!") is required by her employer to put a disclaimer in every presentation she gives to medical students that she did her due diligence to seek out scientific and medical sources written by underrepresented minorities before she may proceed to give the lecture, citing the people who actually did the work in question. Complexion and chromosomes notwithstanding.

And definitely not that the college kids these days literally don't read and occasionally don't know arithmetic beyond the middle school level.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/1...

https://www.kpbs.org/news/educ...

It's totally not anything within one's own control. It's absolutely the outside forces conspiring against you.

Almost makes one admire the stereotypical millenial liberal arts grad slinging coffees or flipping burgers. At least *he* didn't think he's too good for gainful employment that may be outside his formal training.

Other than collecting that sweet sweet chinese and/or russian money in exchange for "raising environmental concerns," that is to say, the rabble rousing, what is the actual fucking deal about a building full of computers?

Plenty of nitpicking. Plenty of bluster, insults, and "if you don't already know I don't owe you an explanation" but zero articulation of why you actually don't like buildings full of computers.

Almost like you actually don't care, but just enjoy a good witch hunt.

Okay genious. List any reason other than "well other people are hating on it so I have to" for why a building full of computers is an existential threat to our freedom and prosperity. Any reason at all.

It's a building full of computers.

Not the prettiest thing, but also not the devil's own workshop either.

Oh but it steals the water!...How?

Oh but it hikes up our electric bill!...No more than any other industrial user would.

Oh but it invites children into its gingerbread house!...That almost makes more sense than the other stuff they're saying...about a building full of computers.

Instead of copy-pasting a postdoc or grad student's verbiage as her own she cut out the middleman and cheated all by herself.

Much better in my opinion than copying off of someone else's cheating and claiming it as your own. We're not animals after all.

An incident comes to mind from about a decade and a half ago when I was in grad school and our research group was collaborating with a university on the wrong side of the planet.

One of their postdocs submitted a progress report that was almost completely copy-pasted from emails and powerpoints we had sent his way and claimed it as his own analysis. SOP over there if you pay attention to the way they write and present at conferences. Lots of focus on perfecting the form. Original work...not so much.

Film at 11.

Okay lefties, here's a good analogy for you:

Eli Whitney believed the cotton gin would make slavery obsolete since it would automate away the then-most labor intensive part of the cotton harvest. It had the opposite effect. Removing the bottleneck lowered the cost of cotton products and increased demand for cotton.

The dream of idle riches was always dreamt by people who didn't understand where whatever measure of material prosperity they had came from. In their imaginations it may as well have been a magical goose laying golden eggs, not the hard work of talented people.

Right-leaning hoi polloi imagined themselves stumbling upon such a goose as God's reward for hard work and moral rectitude. Left-leaning hoi polloi (and "intelligen"tsia) imagined a tophat-wearing capitalist hoarding for himself the goose that rightfully belonged to ThePeople(TM).