Feeling a bit bored this evening I was looking through webcams when I came across this one.
Can anyone tell me what this machine is for?
I can’t get any of the cams to show up.
This Kratos Axis Ultra XPS is housed at the U of Michigan Electron Microbeam Analysis Laboratory.
From their website:
Looks like the Kratos Ultra is a really big camera.
Clearly it is the secret orgasm machine.
cooool. thanks!
Hopefully, it goes "PING!"
Nothing. That’s the beauty of it.
pulls out a shotgun for the next ‘turbo enfabulator’ reference Come on, you know you wanna.
It makes strange grid balls.
Also from their website, I found this:
Bolding added. And now I really wish I’d pursued a more . . . . advanced degree.
I used a fancy expensive home-built XPS for my research. It essentially is used to determine what types of atoms are present on a sample and give an idea of their oxidation state, or what they are bonded to.
It pretty useful for surface analysis when you want to know what alloy of stainless steel you have etc. Something this high-tech though would be used for research, where a graduate student might have modified some surface atoms and want to know if they successfully accomplished their goal. For example…did I really chemically bind nitrogen atoms to my graphene sample? THe XPS will be able to show if nitrogen is really there and possibly if it has some charge. THe XPS will also show different peaks that might relate to different states of the carbon in the graphene…or silicon…or aluminum…or nickel…whatever.
In 1996 a physics professor at NYU, Alan Sokal, sick of the intellectual rot in many lit-crit circles, wrote an article for and had published by the journal Social Text:
“Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”
[from Wiki:]
[…in his article Sokal proposed that] quantum gravity has progressive political implications, and that the “morphogenetic field” […] could be a cutting-edge theory of quantum gravity. He concluded that, since “physical reality” is, at bottom, a social and linguistic construct, a “liberatory science” and an “emancipatory mathematics”, spurning “the elite caste canon of ‘high science’”, must be established for a “postmodern science [that] provide[s] powerful intellectual support for the progressive political project”.
A sample footnote:
Just as liberal feminists are frequently content with a minimal agenda of legal and social equality for women and ‘pro-choice’, so liberal (and even some socialist) mathematicians are often content to work within the hegemonic Zermelo–Fraenkel framework (which, reflecting its nineteenth-century liberal origins, already incorporates the axiom of equality) supplemented only by the axiom of choice.
The incident had an enormous impact. One study of the event told one group of students a big-shot in the field had written it, another group was told hat a student had. Guess which group thought the article was on the level?
That’s the beauty of it. It doesn’t DO anything.
SFC Schwartz