IEEE Spectrum: Physicists Invent a Chip That Stores a Photon's Quantum State

IEEE Spectrum: Physicists Invent a Chip That Stores a Photon's Quantum State

2009 AAAS/Science Dance Contest

2009 AAAS/Science Dance Contest

Dance your PhD. Of course, why didn't I ever think to ask in a viva, "Please phrase your answer in the form of dance. I will also except mime and poetry with an iambic pentameter."

This allergies hysteria is just nuts -- Christakis 337: a2880 -- BMJ

This allergies hysteria is just nuts -- Christakis 337: a2880 -- BMJ

It's strange we see 'Warning: may contain nuts' on so many food items these days it makes the whole thing pointless. If you were allergic to nuts I bet you have to ignore the warning or starve to death. It seems the whole thing is more hype whipped up by the media. It's strange that I never see a seafood warning on my fish and chips, or if I buy someone flowers "Warning: may attract bees."

Terrence Collis on publish and be damned

Terrence Collis on publish and be damned
from the British Medical Journal

Optics books

I've been think about what are the best books on Optics for degree level and above and attempted to come up with a top five. Here's my list

1. Hecht - Optics. My copy is now falling to bits from over use. This is the first book I will refer to myself and I normally recommend it to other people when they want to learn about the basic physics of optics. The books scores highly for its readability and Hecht ability to explain concepts. I can be a bit light in places but makes a good starting point.
2. Goodman - Introduction to Fourier Optics. This is really the bible of Fourier optics. Goodman has produced an excellent book that covers the theory and applications of Fourier optics.
3. Saleh & Teich - Fundamentals of Photonics, an excellent overview of the whole field of photoncs
4. Born & Wolf - Principles of Optics, the most rigorous of books. Its not the easiest of reads.
5. Smith - Mordern Optical Engineering

Chrome

I'm trying out Google's Chrome web browser to write this. I've got to say I am really impressed with the speed of rendering complex pages. It's still missing a few things, like a spell checker for forms and it doesn't render MathML which I use a lot of. 

The new blog

Well it looks like Google now own my life since I've started this blog. I'm basically going to using to talk about interesting thing I've found or done in the field of optics and image processing.