It has a USB ocular which Linux recognised straight away. Feels nice and solid, with only a tiny bit of hysteresis on the adjustment knob. Nothing a child couldn't cope with.
Optics are surprisingly good quality and the light sources use a little mains adapter, which is included. No batteries required!
There are also a few sample slides included with the microscope, but Bresser sells stained slide kits separately, these might be worth exploring, not sure.
Anyway, check the reviews, I thought it was a terrific microscope for a kid.
Thanks, got the paper! So much to think about... I'm starting to think that if I don't have the money to buy a suitable laser, maybe I shouldn't. I'll talk to someone in Photon Science.
Hiya, thanks for taking the time to answer my comment!
I'm in the process of building a multiphoton microscope (donated axiovert 135 body and Hamamatsu detectors). Of course, I have nowhere near the amount of money to buy a Ti:Sapphire and would much rather spend the money on good IR lenses and upgraded optics.
I've been looking at "alternatives" in the form of Ytterbium based lasers for the reasons you describe: small 2 box footprint (with a pulse picker), integrated solid-state pump and no cavity tuning (or so the manufacturer says). Other advantage is the reduced photodamage with a two photon excitation around the 1030nm mark, but I am still waiting for an answer on the expected second harmonic / third harmonic signal generation efficiency (probably something I won't find out for certain until the entire microscope is built). 1-5% for THG seems frighteningly low, but fortunately, the detectors I'll be using have low dark count.
Also the 5nJ per pulse spec from the manufacturer worries me slightly. One thing I haven't quite worked out from the available literature is the discrepancy between the available energy (say 60-100nJ per pulse from a Yb:KGW laser) and the energy deposited on the sample (around 1nJ per pulse, when mentioned). I hope the loss comes from using a neutral density filter and not from losses due to the microscope optics...
With the right skills of course, the whole process of building your own microscope seems easy enough:-)
Question is, how much was the laser? When newport won't even tell you in writing how much one of their tsunamis is, you can bet your ass that 225K doesn't include the laser lines...
One amateur reprocessed images from Soviet Venus landers and brought out some amazing detail, finding landscape features that weren't spotted before. It's simply the case that sometimes amateurs are simply motivated to spend the necessary time and attention to detail more so than "professionals", who normally have full in-boxes. Amateurs can decide to be as anal as they want. Call it open-source astronomy.
The upper image is the raw 6-bit telemetry, about 115 by 512 pixels. Automatic gain control and logarithmic quantization were used to handle the unknown dynamic range of illumination. Previously published images from these probes suffered from severe analog generation loss, so it is fortunate that the original data was found.
The raw image was converted to optical density according to Russian calibration data, then to linear radiance for image processing. It was interpolated with windowed sinc filter to avoid post-aliasing (a "pixilated" appearance), and the modulation transfer function ("aperture") of the camera was corrected with a 1 + 0.2*frequency**2 emphasis. This was then written out as 8-bit gamma-corrected values, using the sRGB standard gamma of 2.2. Some of the telemetry bars on the right were replaced with data from the 124 panorama.
The bottom image is digitally in-painted, using Bertalmio's isophote-flow algorithm, to fill in missing data.
Read Bachelard Formation of the scientific mind and weep. If only it were so easy and blame everything on the catholic church. For a very long period of time, it looks as if entertainment value was put way above scientific rigor... that and scientific thinking is quite a recent thing. From the book, experiment held around 1700 (from vague recollection): Electricity from a battery cell passes through a liquid and the experimenter's tongue. Experimenter then "tastes" the electricity. Taste through milk? "Soft and sweet" as opposed to electricity flowing through vinegar "strong acid taste". Anyway, interesting read.
Nice one! Jitter looks a bit high at 80ps but other than that, interesting concept.
SPAD afterpulsing is probably not an issue for this project because it's looking at photon pairs, so uncorrelated random events occurring on all the SPADs won't affect the detection... but will decrease the counting/processing rate by bogging down the electronics.
For measuring concurrent events, I would've thought TTS would be much more critical, and you can't get much better than MCP-PMTs (10-20ps these days?). Just wondering if the same detection could've been done with a multi-anode MCP, although if the sensor is CMOS tech, APDs would probably be easier to incorporate onto an ASIC / SoC.
Yes, if you want to be pedantic, I meant URL, not web address (since you so cleverly pointed at the ftp/ftps schemes). Here's my geek card, I give up...
If you are Korean, this makes perfect sense as they have a numeral system based around 10^4.
"man" stands for 10000 (10^4). 10,0000 would be "sib man".
By the way, listen to a Korean convert a big number (say a house price) from a 10^4 based system to a 10^3 one and hilarity ensues...
I don't need no stinking login, I can be anonymous!
I remember feeling exactly the same at the time... The great thing about/. was that although everybody was anonymous, there was enough respect that we didn't steal each other's ID. That's why I waited too before registering... by then it looked like we were going to get stuck with them IDs anyway...
Sure, nothing beats off-the-shelf components... but powering 4 motherboards using 4 separate PSUs sounds like waste!
Look at this design: http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/cluster/. It uses DC-DC converters on each motherboards (mini-itx, so low power), a single 12V PSU and a UPS for regulation:
The DC-DC converters require a clean, well-regulated 12VDC source. I chose to use a heavy duty 60 ampere 12VDC switching power supply capable of delivering 60 amperes peak current which I ordered from an online electronics test equipment supplier. Since badly conditioned AC power is potentially damaging to expensive computing equipment, I use a 1 KVA UPS purchased at an office supply store to make sure the cluster can't be "bumped off" by power line glitches and droputs.
Interesting... in the 6th image of the gallery, you can clearly see a Mitotoyo lens. 20x magnification? (sorry can't read)
Compared to normal lens, apo plan lenses have a long working distance. They are used in inspection microscopy because around the focus distance, you won't crash into the sample you are looking at. If I'm not mistaken, the red colour coding of the lens used here indicates it's a near infrared lens.
Microscope lenses are often used with lasers to focus light into a tiny spot (say, into a fiber).
The lens threading on the apo plan lens is also compatible with Thorlabs SM1 threadings, which make those ideal for... burning things at a distance using off-the-shelf bits and bobs!
Motors in the wheels are okay when you're moving at low speeds and/or over extremely regular pavement. So they're fine for city-only cars that will never go over 35 mph. But while you might be okay going up and down the hills in SF, get on the freeway to scoot across town and you're fucked.
The car has eight wheels enabling it to be closer to the ground for better traction. Each of the wheels has a 60 kW (80 hp) electric motor, giving a 480 kW (640 hp) eight wheel drive which can tackle all kinds of road surfaces.
Same here. From the written languages that I can read (latin, greek, cyrillic and Hangul), Hangul is the one I'm most impressed with.
Cyrillic in comparison is puzzling. Who in their right mind would let a monk create an alphabet? (not being judgemental or anything...)
Was based on latin and greek with a hint of hebrew thrown in (che, she and sh'e if I remember)
Upper case and lower case letters have the same shape.
Handwritten and printed letter shapes differ wildly.
In comparison, hangul just makes sense and I can read it quite fluently (huhu, understanding is a different matter).
Yes, some chinese characters are still used in South Korea (much less than in japanese, North Korea apparently not using any).
Still, I think they're a nice addition. From experience, they're used in people's names, to direct people to tea rooms and in restaurant for big, medium, small (I know, I'm just a stupid foreigner;).
Town names in Korea make sense when you know some chinese: Taejon litterally means "big field" (flat area of Korea, used to have rice fields everywhere), Sanbon got its name from "mountain-root" (built at the bottom of a mountain) etc etc etc.
Err.. not pretending to be an expert or anything, parent poster said he/she liked Hangul, so do I.
For those idiot western media brainwashed idiots who don't know a thing about Korea, get a clue, nobody gives a damn about eating dogs or even hears about North Korea more than once a month here, just listen to your dear leader dog tell you who to attack next.
If only people knew how freaken delicious dog meat is, they wouldn't object so virulently (one would hope). After all, piggies are cute animals too, but we still eat them. "Oh no, the piggie I ate looked just like babe!" Big freaken deal!
I really love bosintang and suyuk but there's only so much I can eat in a week:-) What I'd love to try is dog meat samgyupsal! I guess it'll have to wait until I can travel to Pyongyang... unless there's a good DPRK restaurant in Seoul? Haven't found one yet.
And for all you animal lovers, check this page, it has many excellent recipes...
Considering that I eat bundaegi and like it, I'm not bothered by pigeon meat at all. Au contraire! Only here in Britain, farmed pigeon is almost impossible to find and I'm not that keen on the flying rats you can see flying around.
It's really funny though: You start mentioning "silk worms", "dog meat", "pigeons", "rabbits" or even... "deer" (you eat bambi???) to some people (without pointing fingers to anyone people in particular) and they almost start puking their guts out just at the thought of putting it in their mouth... How sad.
I've never been to Morocco, but my grandma used to visit friends in Marrakesh, so I had plenty of super-nice moroccan food when I was a kid (anything she cared to fly back). Will have to go there with the Wife:-)
A russian scientist from Novosibirsk (central Siberia) was telling this brilliant story:
At conferences, there was always one american guy asking him if there were any polar bears in the streets of Novosibirsk. Tired to reply "no" every time he was asked the question, he once said "yes".
His story then grew wilder and wilder to the point that he was telling at the dinner party how there was this one little cub that was always stealing food from their rubbish bin, so he took pitty on the bear (siberia is a cold country) and was feeding it with chocolates and honey... The bear became like a domestic pet and was following the guy to work, waiting for him and then walking back home with him. Of course, the guy said, my wife doesn't know about it, she'd be really upset if she knew I'm giving the bear her chocolates...
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It has a USB ocular which Linux recognised straight away. Feels nice and solid, with only a tiny bit of hysteresis on the adjustment knob. Nothing a child couldn't cope with.
Optics are surprisingly good quality and the light sources use a little mains adapter, which is included. No batteries required!
There are also a few sample slides included with the microscope, but Bresser sells stained slide kits separately, these might be worth exploring, not sure.
Anyway, check the reviews, I thought it was a terrific microscope for a kid.
they're not even in the periodic table!
Thanks, got the paper! So much to think about... I'm starting to think that if I don't have the money to buy a suitable laser, maybe I shouldn't. I'll talk to someone in Photon Science.
I'm in the process of building a multiphoton microscope (donated axiovert 135 body and Hamamatsu detectors). Of course, I have nowhere near the amount of money to buy a Ti:Sapphire and would much rather spend the money on good IR lenses and upgraded optics.
I've been looking at "alternatives" in the form of Ytterbium based lasers for the reasons you describe: small 2 box footprint (with a pulse picker), integrated solid-state pump and no cavity tuning (or so the manufacturer says). Other advantage is the reduced photodamage with a two photon excitation around the 1030nm mark, but I am still waiting for an answer on the expected second harmonic / third harmonic signal generation efficiency (probably something I won't find out for certain until the entire microscope is built). 1-5% for THG seems frighteningly low, but fortunately, the detectors I'll be using have low dark count.
Also the 5nJ per pulse spec from the manufacturer worries me slightly. One thing I haven't quite worked out from the available literature is the discrepancy between the available energy (say 60-100nJ per pulse from a Yb:KGW laser) and the energy deposited on the sample (around 1nJ per pulse, when mentioned). I hope the loss comes from using a neutral density filter and not from losses due to the microscope optics...
With the right skills of course, the whole process of building your own microscope seems easy enough :-)
Question is, how much was the laser? When newport won't even tell you in writing how much one of their tsunamis is, you can bet your ass that 225K doesn't include the laser lines...
Not seen this one mentioned yet. pfsense is by far my favourite specialised linux distro.
Thanks! I looked it up, and if you are referring to Don Mitchell's story, it is indeed well worth reading. http://www.mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogVenus.htm
Even better, the re-processing pipeline for each of the Venera mission datasets is explained in great detail. For instance, about the Venera-9 mission images (from http://www.mentallandscape.com/V_DigitalImages.htm:
Read Bachelard Formation of the scientific mind and weep. If only it were so easy and blame everything on the catholic church. For a very long period of time, it looks as if entertainment value was put way above scientific rigor... that and scientific thinking is quite a recent thing. From the book, experiment held around 1700 (from vague recollection): Electricity from a battery cell passes through a liquid and the experimenter's tongue. Experimenter then "tastes" the electricity. Taste through milk? "Soft and sweet" as opposed to electricity flowing through vinegar "strong acid taste". Anyway, interesting read.
SPAD afterpulsing is probably not an issue for this project because it's looking at photon pairs, so uncorrelated random events occurring on all the SPADs won't affect the detection... but will decrease the counting/processing rate by bogging down the electronics.
For measuring concurrent events, I would've thought TTS would be much more critical, and you can't get much better than MCP-PMTs (10-20ps these days?). Just wondering if the same detection could've been done with a multi-anode MCP, although if the sensor is CMOS tech, APDs would probably be easier to incorporate onto an ASIC / SoC.
When did FTP become the "web"?
About the same time gopher was being phased out?
Yes, if you want to be pedantic, I meant URL, not web address (since you so cleverly pointed at the ftp/ftps schemes). Here's my geek card, I give up...
This what I ended-up using:
((?:http|ftp)s?://)?(((([\d]+\.)+){3}[\d]+(/[\w./]+)?)|([a-z]\w*((\.\w+)+){2,})([/][\w.~]*)*)
There may well be something more robust...
If you are Korean, this makes perfect sense as they have a numeral system based around 10^4. "man" stands for 10000 (10^4). 10,0000 would be "sib man". By the way, listen to a Korean convert a big number (say a house price) from a 10^4 based system to a 10^3 one and hilarity ensues...
I too am keeping an eye on their efforts. Something lighter than XP would be fine by me.
I wonder if signal 11's ID will auctionned off :-)
For a more hands-on approach, maybe these 200W+ DC-DC converters will do: http://www.mpegcar.com/acatalog/200w_and_above_PSU .html#aD220PSU. The 220W version is rated at 95% efficiency... can't go wrong with that!
Look at this design: http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/cluster/. It uses DC-DC converters on each motherboards (mini-itx, so low power), a single 12V PSU and a UPS for regulation:
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contr ib/mla-paper/
A few more links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee_genome_pro ject
http://www.evolutionpages.com/chromosome_2.htm
Thanks mate, that's really cool.
Compared to normal lens, apo plan lenses have a long working distance. They are used in inspection microscopy because around the focus distance, you won't crash into the sample you are looking at. If I'm not mistaken, the red colour coding of the lens used here indicates it's a near infrared lens.
Microscope lenses are often used with lasers to focus light into a tiny spot (say, into a fiber). The lens threading on the apo plan lens is also compatible with Thorlabs SM1 threadings, which make those ideal for... burning things at a distance using off-the-shelf bits and bobs!
Cyrillic in comparison is puzzling. Who in their right mind would let a monk create an alphabet? (not being judgemental or anything...)
- Was based on latin and greek with a hint of hebrew thrown in (che, she and sh'e if I remember)
- Upper case and lower case letters have the same shape.
- Handwritten and printed letter shapes differ wildly.
In comparison, hangul just makes sense and I can read it quite fluently (huhu, understanding is a different matter).Yes, some chinese characters are still used in South Korea (much less than in japanese, North Korea apparently not using any). ;).
Still, I think they're a nice addition. From experience, they're used in people's names, to direct people to tea rooms and in restaurant for big, medium, small (I know, I'm just a stupid foreigner
Town names in Korea make sense when you know some chinese: Taejon litterally means "big field" (flat area of Korea, used to have rice fields everywhere), Sanbon got its name from "mountain-root" (built at the bottom of a mountain) etc etc etc.
Err.. not pretending to be an expert or anything, parent poster said he/she liked Hangul, so do I.
I really love bosintang and suyuk but there's only so much I can eat in a week :-) What I'd love to try is dog meat samgyupsal! I guess it'll have to wait until I can travel to Pyongyang... unless there's a good DPRK restaurant in Seoul? Haven't found one yet.
And for all you animal lovers, check this page, it has many excellent recipes...
It's really funny though: You start mentioning "silk worms", "dog meat", "pigeons", "rabbits" or even... "deer" (you eat bambi???) to some people (without pointing fingers to anyone people in particular) and they almost start puking their guts out just at the thought of putting it in their mouth... How sad.
I've never been to Morocco, but my grandma used to visit friends in Marrakesh, so I had plenty of super-nice moroccan food when I was a kid (anything she cared to fly back). Will have to go there with the Wife :-)
(man, I haven't had real pastilla in years, think of me if you ever eat some :)
At conferences, there was always one american guy asking him if there were any polar bears in the streets of Novosibirsk. Tired to reply "no" every time he was asked the question, he once said "yes".
His story then grew wilder and wilder to the point that he was telling at the dinner party how there was this one little cub that was always stealing food from their rubbish bin, so he took pitty on the bear (siberia is a cold country) and was feeding it with chocolates and honey... The bear became like a domestic pet and was following the guy to work, waiting for him and then walking back home with him. Of course, the guy said, my wife doesn't know about it, she'd be really upset if she knew I'm giving the bear her chocolates...
Who said Russians didn't have a sense of humour?