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Re: Big Sky Panorama

PostPosted: Fri May 13, 2011 8:23 am
by Doug Coulter
That's why I always have "too many unfinished projects" laying around the place. Sometimes motivation temporarily fails on one -- I'm stuck some way -- need parts or a plan how to proceed.

Sooooo....then there are the other 10 or so, maybe one of them can get pushed along a little? It's not a perfect system -- I forget what I was thinking, lose parts, and the place looks like, well....and I sometimes even forget I had this or that thing going under some particular pile of clutter. Usually I don't even have a list of them. Sometimes it reminds me of the saying "if architects built buildings like software people wrote code, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization". I don't know if this is a "system" I'd recommend to anyone else, but it's more or less what works for me, kinda-sorta. Organization right now is the "archeology method". The older it is, the deeper in the clutter I look for it.

That's just my psychology. I've rarely been good at mono maniacally going after one thing at a time -- I get bored, frustrated, and stuck, lacking some insight on what's the best way to proceed on it. So I just go do something else while I wait for the flash of inspiration on that one. My rationale -- and man is a rationalizing, not a rational animal no matter how hard we try -- is that at least I'm always getting something done. As Paul DiLascia said, "sometimes the best approach to a really difficult software coding problem is to mow the lawn".

I'm "lucky" my wife is an even bigger slob than me. I let her have her own building to make her mess in, so she tolerates mine in the one we live in mostly. Sometimes the creative chaos is indistinguishable from plain chaos, though. And some of the projects will probably never see completion - by the time I get back to them, another solution has been found or another approach to the main vision has been adopted that means "nice try, but no need".

Here's the dumb wiki on these kinds of filters. Not much to go on, but it's the basic idea and looks like linking to more info.

Basically, you are building an interferometer by building up layers of high and low dielectric constant, the differences providing a bit of reflection, and the thicknesses tuning for constructive interference at one light wavelength (which is different in each material). The issue in making them is it takes a lot of layers to make a really good one, and they all have to have precise thickness control. And of course a flaw in any layer shows up in the end product.

Re: Big Sky Panorama

PostPosted: Fri May 13, 2011 4:08 pm
by Jerry
Speaking of thin films, here is some free software to help. I have not downloaded it to try yet.

http://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/FreeSnell/

Re: Big Sky Panorama

PostPosted: Sun May 15, 2011 10:57 pm
by Joe Jarski
I just started poking around some of the filter links and came across something that I thought was kind of interesting - neutron supermirrors. I haven't heard of them before, but apparently thermal neutrons can be reflected pretty well at low incidence angles and the neutron supermirrors can be constructed into guides. Here is a link to the basic concept and a paper on the subject. Might be useful for activation stuff, but probably not so much for fusor diagnostics.