Femtosecond Lasers at Uncertain Principles

Hey, I just wanted to draw some attention to this great post of Chad's about femtosecond lasers and laser bandwidth in physics and chemistry. Those lasers are near and dear to my heart, as they're one of the main focuses of my research group.

And just so you have some original content, here's the Crazy Matt Opinion Of The Day: I like the Seinfeld Microsoft ads. They don't make me want to buy Windows, and they're not very dramatic or even interesting. I like them because they have Bill Gates doing the robot and reading a programming manual as a little kid's bedtime story. I like the idea that a staggeringly rich and powerful man is actually still a kind of an awkward and lovable nerd. Maybe it's just marketing, but somehow it seems like it's probably true anyway.

The "I am a PC" ad on the other hand is pretty bad. We already know lots of different people use a PC. That doesn't tell us if using a PC is better than a Mac or whatever. (For the record, I dual-boot Vista and Linux. Linux for science, Vista for everything else.)

Now if he'll just make an officially-supported Windows runtime environment for Linux so I can play Half-Life, I'll actually be excited about his products.

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I'm a funny kind of person: I use only Linux and FreeBSD, and haven't owned or regularly used a Windows computer in my whole life! This of course makes me very confused every time I have to do something under Windows -- but I can survive that too without losing too much face :-)

(My parents had a Mac, I'm old enough that the computers in school had weird operating systems specially developed for schools, and I'm not that interested in computer games.)

I had to explain the purpose of the "I am a PC" ad to my wife last night. I find it sorta tortured logic but it is obviously in response to the "cool guy" vs. "nerd guy" ads by Apple which I hate. They were amusing the first hundred times but are pretty irritating now. The purpose of the "I am a PC" ad is to show that PC users are not all chubby nerdy guys but come from all walks of life. As I said, sorta tortured. Coulda been done a lot better, IMHO.