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Ratio is just a single number. 4:3 can be expressed as 1.3333~ and it just says how much bigger one number is compared to another.

RE: Yes, I was able to read and understand the article. I also have 8 years of EE. Ratio is still a single number in the end. You can have an actual size of a monitor 1600 x 1200 and the ratio of sides is 1600/1200, which is just a single number. You can express it in multiple ways. You still need at least one size + understanding of what the aspect ratio is used to describe in a particular situation (units (mm, px, ...), ...) to be able to calculate the complete dimensions of a monitor screen.

Same issue with % or ppm, or whatever.

You always need a defintition to understand what the numbers are abstracting in any particular situation.


Sure, and 10db means "10x more power". But:

1. 10x more power than what? It changes, and you Just Have to Know.

2. It's 10x more power; so if you're measuring power, like pascals, then 10db means 10x more pascals. But if you're measuring something like voltage, then it's not 10x more voltage, it's something else.

3. And if you're talking about sound, you may be talking about objective power; or you might be talking about how much more powerful it seems to humans.


> Sure, and 10db means "10x more power". But: 1. 10x more power than what? It changes, and you Just Have to Know.

That gives me an idea - explicitly state the basis and multiply. So the current notation "3 dBm" should instead be "1 mW × 3 dB".

Furthermore, any addition in the logarithmic domain must be grouped, like: "3 dBm + 5 dB" --> "1 mW × (3 dB + 5 dB)".


So my display aspect ratio is 2.5dB. Or is it 5dB because it's not measuring power?

I don't think anyone should be impressed by watts. Jouls are where all the real work is.

Asside for the PR article. What's the use case for pettawatt laser pulse lasting 25 quintillionths of a second?


Laser pulses can ablate materials and the shorter the pulse the crisper the edges. Back in the 90’s or early 00’s they demonstrated pulses laser cutting of tissue where the heat damage to surrounding tissue had a width of a single cell.

What, like a surgical laser?

"Okay, hold really still..."


At femtoseconds, assuming your tracking matches, you could probably sit a sugar-loaded kid in a chair without instructions and just make it work.

Probably like watching people play war sims with a sniper rifle. Just waiting for the crosshairs to bounce over the target’s head and then blam.

Bigger problem I suspect is children with white coat syndrome. When I was a kid doctors got away with being monstrous to children.


Why the Dougie Howser hate?

Yeah and I think this and radiological tools are why chemo tattoos exist. The system has to react to the twitch you can’t control when a weird noise happens next to your head. Instead of stabbing bolts into your skull through your skin with a device Torquemada would have been proud of, they target versus the dots and if the dots move? Well this is where my knowledge runs out. Either they shut down the beam or they target in realtime. But either way the payload is delivered where it’s supposed to be or not at all.

I don’t know if they are using laser scalpels in surgery. My medical fascination mostly ends at diagonostics and experimental procedures. If I don’t know anyone with a disorder I tend not to hear about new procedures. My friend in college was helping a prof work on picosecond violet lasers and now we are on femtosecond.


Some radiation therapy machines use metal fiducial markers and can account for movement such has patient breathing

So it’s for targeting rather than aborting a treatment?

I'm not certain, probably both. If the pt jumped out of frame it would probably abort. But they allow the pt to breathe normally and still receive treatment.

A previous press release lists some research applications and potential practical developments. https://news.engin.umich.edu/2019/09/most-powerful-laser-in-...

Thanks. :)

Watts are just joules per second.

It doesn't make any sense to measure joules alone. _Any_ laser can output 2 petajoules. The only question is how long it takes to do that: hence Watts.


Well you probably don't want a petawatt laser lasting a second, cause it'll obliterate a lot more than what you wanted to.

Including of course the laser. It's about 240 kilotons of TNT, or over 10 times the power of the nagasaki or hiroshmia bombs.

Yeah, or even if it were some more reasonable amount of energy that doesn't self-destruct it, there are probably applications where you want to hit a small area quickly without burning things around it.

Seems like you always start somewhere. First you have 25E-18, then bump it up to 1e-15, and maybe someday you are at 1e-9 and are doing inertial confinement fusion.

Journalists being a "check on the government" is a tale for the gullible. That's why there doesn't need to be any silencing of them. Glory to the exceptions, of course.

Yes. It would then be upon the government to do something about it, which would create some controversy, penalties for MS, and a political debate.

Same for refusing orders. It may change nothing, like in this story:

  > One commander ordered a sapper to put two old women in
  > a certain house ... and to blow up the house with them.
  > The sapper refused ... The commander then ordered his
  > men to put the old women in the house and the evil deed
  > was done. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Dawayima_massacre

But people sometimes still do it.


Yeah, clear law:

"(b) Persons Authorized To Be Freed.--The authority of subsection (a) shall extend to the following persons: (2) Covered allied persons."

That includes Nehterlands, which is a member of NATO.

So US can snatch Dutch war criminal from Netherlands if US president likes the person or whatever? :) Very clear law with no weird implications.

Addenum: I solely react to your claim that this law is very clear.


> [Covered allied persons] includes Nehterlands, which is a member of NATO.

Because the Netherlands signed the Rome Statute, it does not (italics mine):

> COVERED ALLIED PERSONS—The term ‘covered allied persons’ means military personnel, elected or appointed officials, and other persons employed by or working on behalf of the government of a NATO member country, a major non-NATO ally (including Australia, Egypt, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Argentina, the Republic of Korea, and New Zealand), or Taiwan, for so long as that government is not a party to the International Criminal Court and wishes its officials and other persons working on its behalf to be exempted from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.


Exceptions for everything. :-)

I would actually pay money to see that happen, should the opportunity arise.

Jokes aside though, remember that the prior commentator brought in the American Service-Members Protection Act as a weird form of whataboutism. Bringing that up does not transform the ICC into a European court, even if an actual American military intervention of The Hague would not bode well for the integrity of Dutch sovereignty and my advise to the European nations and citizenry that can’t grok the implications of hosting an international political institution is to convince the ICC to relocate itself so the Eurocentric among you stop mistaking it for a European court.


No, I don't want EU tech VC oligarchy. I just want to avoid big tech SaaS regardless of where it's from.

I've been quite happy with smaller local services for a loong time. Started using them in 2004 when I got my first website and aside from short try of gmail when it was still free, always used them.


It's not large:

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/screen.git/tree/src

A few 2kLOC files and the rest is rather small.


No sympathy to anyone who justifies destruction of entire cities (like this https://x.com/SuppressedNws/status/1920242384111055286) as self-defense. Even in my small disgusting genocide supporting country in the center of europe, things are slowly starting to change at this point.


Many people don't deplore your government, they deplore the whole concept of political zionism as it is practiced - violent creation of Jewish state on the land inhabited by a lot of other people, driving many of them out, and avoiding solving resulting political issues repeatedly through the use of overwhelming force, insane militarization of society, long term occupations, blockades, assassinations, political imprisonment of opponents, and international political maneuvering and propaganda, for decade after decade after decade, in order to preserve Jewish majority rule over the territory.

More honest Israelis, like Meir Kahane, at least acknowledged that Jewish majority state is not compatible with democracy, when "greater Israel" is mostly occupied by non-Jews.

It doesn't matter whether you or other Israelis deplore your "current government". They can deplore it for all kinds of reasons, and replacement they'd prefer may not be much better wrt the issue above.


Yes, even Russian soldiers were surprised when they were suddenly marching to Ukraine.

Buildups were happening repeatedly in the past under the guise of exercises.

Eg. here tanks and ~80k soldiers in 2018: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/15/world/europe/ukraine-russ...


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