Shed

My parents recently had our two old and falling apart sheds torn down. Now my parents back yard has a distinct lack of sheds.

A new shed is clearly required and my parents started shopping for one.  Its turns out that store bought sheds are expensive and crappy. It was suggested that I design and build a shed.  So I have designed a shed.

It is a wee bit over-designed and I haven't framed out the door yet. However, I now know how to frame out at one story building.  You will probably be hearing more about this in the future.

Pictures from a 4 year old

I saw this great instructables about kid-proofing a camera, and I decided to do this for our older son after he broke our camera. This is his camera:

And here's a self-portrait of the photographer:

He's taken some good pictures of his younger brother:

And some great pictures of him, too:

Here are some still-life shots:

The whole, semi-curated album, updated occasionally, can be seen here:

A new paper

I just had a paper, "Light localization, photon sorting, and enhanced absorption in subwavelength cavity arrays" (based on some of my dissertation work) accepted for publication in Optics Express. It's now listed on their Issues in Progress page, and the journal is open access, which means the full-text PDF version is available for free.

The basic idea is that the structure we designed and made:

can spectrally and spatially split incoming radiation into different holes in the metal, where it is almost entirely absorbed. This is pseudo-color plot (from a simulation) of where the absorption happens inside a single unit cell of the structure:

For the rest of the info, read the paper!

E. Lansey, et al., "Light localization, photon sorting, and enhanced absorption in subwavelength cavityarrays," Opt. Express  20, 24226-24236 (2012).

Loud Bicycle

Hey everyone, check out a new project I'm working on with famed blogger Aryeh/Andrew
Loud Bicycle

Also if you have a moment, please fill out this survey,

Thanks so much!

Do You Like My Hat?

Last night me and Yoni where chating in a Google hangout.  Google hangout has a number of apps that allow you to add silly things to the video, such as hats and beards and similar.  I had been messing around with these when my internet went down and it froze.  When I had re-obtained internet access, I found a picture in my inbox.

That is where the video had froze.  As a side note, I love Google hangout.  When I had gotten my internet back I simply restarted the hangout window, reentered the hangout and continued where I had left off with Yoni.

For bank use only

I recently filled out an online application for a credit card. At the bottom of it, they had this section:

The section at the bottom wasn't made of input boxes, since it was "For Bank Use Only." No clue why they felt the need to include the empty fields in an online form.

Small market

I saw this Mrs. Schlorer's Ham Glaze in the grocery store a few weeks ago. Check out the label: It's good to know you can use kosher ham glaze during your next Christmas dinner.

Happy and Healthy New Year

We are fast approaching the Jewish holiday season (5 holidays in a month).  Which means its time to bake a ton of challah, and by ton I mean 15 pounds of whole wheat challah doughs worth.

 

For scale, my chefs knife has an eight inch blade.

 

Trip to Seattle

Here is a photo from partway up Mt. St. Helens. More to come later.