thepwnshark

[thepwnshark]

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Expressing my lifelong love of sharks by painting a sweet little nurse shark

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“The Driver” by Jordan Bolton

My first book ‘Blue Sky Through the Window of a Moving Car’ is out now! Order it here - https://smarturl.it/BlueSky

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the only way to get what you want is to be brave enough to move towards it. if there is a willingness to be momentarily uncomfortable in order to live the life that calls from your heart then fear loses much of its claim over you and your decisions

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Beautiful cow who is mooing at you

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Maidgirl spraying a particularly irksome fairy with 1920s pesticides

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laurie 😔

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Okay so a guy in my solid state physics class was telling us about this muon scanning startup he worked at, GScan, and I'm going insane. I don't work there and I have no stake in the company, financial or otherwise, I just need to tell you about it.

Muons are short-lived subatomic particles, same charge as an electron but ~200 times more massive. On Earth, they're produced by cosmic rays colliding with the upper atmosphere, and they hit the ground at a rate of about ten thousand per minute per square meter.

They're moving extremely fast at ground level, like 0.99 c. So they careen right through matter, deflecting only very slightly around heavy atomic nuclei – they'll penetrate like a hundred meters into solid rock.

What do you do with this continuous shower of deep-penetrating charged particles, constantly blanketing every square inch of the Earth's surface?

(source)

The classic thing is use them to image the inside of massive structures, like we use x-rays to look inside living tissue – except instead of generating them yourself, you just use atmospheric muons. Muon archeology is a whole thing, they've used it to find hidden chambers in pyramids and stuff. Neat!

But this one Estonian company is doing some crazy bullshit and I love it.

Sandwich anything between a pair of portable muon detectors and get full 3D imaging of the interior, with sub-millimeter accuracy, by tracking the minute deflection of muons between them. Samples that are WAY too thick for x-rays, made of literally anything. Just put some muon detectors on some two by fours in a warehouse and call it a day.

You can just. Image anything??? Anything you want?? Completely passively!! Just detectors! No particle source! Put them anywhere. The detectors themselves are a mature technology, the company's tech is in the algorithms they use to get this level of spatial and elemental resolution.

You can detect failures inside cable-reinforced concrete bridges without cutting open the bridges.

Decommissioned Soviet nuclear submarine filled with concrete, with no drawings or documentation, that may or may not have spent fuel canisters in it? And you need to cut it up for storage? Just look at the muons.

One of the wackiest ideas is to put one detector under your bed and one on the ceiling, so you get a full 3D scan of your body every night, passively. I want one.

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So I started working again today, and me and my coworker had to squeeze lemons which usually is a really un fun job but TODAY. We had the mostly lovely batch of lemons to work with. So we rated how smoothly they cut and how nice the insides of them looked for about an hour. An absolutely marvelous time I gotta say

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I had a really strange dream last night, I wish I could remember what it was about…

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I just want to help my friends.