The Pnictogen Wing

there's an old story about King Midas, he who was cursed with the ability to turn everything into gold with a touch, and therefore found that he could no longer eat. that's an old fable, well-known. lesser known perhaps is the story of how Midas offended the god Apollo: the king was called upon to judge a musical competition between Apollo and a satyr, and Midas chose the satyr. Apollo took offence turned Midas's ears into a donkey's, so everyone could see that he had poor taste in music. I suppose that was in Apollo's portfolio, so to speak, as a god of music; he could mess with Midas's ears.

(but not with his hearing, I would presume. Apollo would still want Midas to hear the music, "with his perfect ears", to paraphrase the Great Pirate Wesley.)

anyway Midas is a king still so he can make sure that only one person in the world sees his new ears and that's his barber, the only human being who gets to see what Midas's head looks like; everyone else gets to see Midas's hat. the barber was sworn to secrecy—presumably with suitable threats, such as only a king gets to deliver—but one night he can't bear it any long and he digs a hole in a meadow and whispers the secret of King Midas's donkey ears into it. eventually reeds grow over that spot and release the secret into the world, whenever the wind blows through: "King Midas has asses' ears."

it's a fable about how "truth will out", but I've also long felt that it's a metaphor for the Internet—why people hope and pray that they find power in a place like the Internet. it's like leaving a message scrawled on a lamppost or a toilet, or like Sadako's videotape.

maybe, one day, the right person will see the message.

~Chara

an OLED big-screen TV proved to be one of our household's best ever purchasing decisions; I've never enjoyed watching movies (at home) more. black and white movies look especially delectable on an OLED screen—such deep crisp shadows!

there's a certain kinship, too, between the OLED television of today and the CRT screens that I grew up with, which formed my earliest and most lasting impressions of what watching something on a screen is like. both glow from the light of phosphorescence, though employed quite differently. an efficient phosphor tends to emit its light within a fairly narrow emission band, and the eye tends to perceive such light as unusually saturated and pure in color. I can well remember studying the little phosphor dots or rectangles on old color TV screens, marvelling at how each dot was its own tiny island of deep blue or scarlet red or emerald green.

the cathode-ray tube and the OLED screen share a common problem, one intrinsic to phosphorescent materials: the phosphors take damage during their use, and they slowly "burn in", losing phosphorescent efficiency over time. crystalline inorganic phosphors accumulate damage to their crystal lattices during use; the phosphorescent organometallic complexes in OLEDs undergo slow photochemical breakdown; in either case, they gradually lose their ability to emit light. to use such devices is to push them a little closer towards their ultimate demise...

...such is the way of all matter, I guess.

in any case, I find myself wondering if there's some subtle psychological effect that comes from staring at such an unusual source of light all the time. the "big screen" (whether it's a movie screen or a computer monitor or something else) has a way of filling our vision and replacing it, and it shines with a sort of light that's outside the ordinary experience of earthly lifeforms. it's only in the last century or so that humanity's become used to light sources that aren't broadband and constant; narrow-band illumination, as well as illumination that's precisely pulsed, requires technology that's not been around for all that long. arguably...human beings still aren't really used to it.

~Chara

there's a curious phenomenon involving rough surfaces which we've had some lucky direct experience with, because a long while ago I pursued the project of hand-grinding and polishing a telescope mirror, but gave up after a few failed tries (scattered throughout a number of years). but doing those failed telescope-making projects gave me a glimpse of this curious phenomenon: a bumpy surface can still produce what looks like a perfect mirror reflection, as long as the path of reflection is nearly parallel to the mirror surface, i.e. "grazing incidence". specular reflection at grazing incidence off specially textured surfaces can in fact be far more efficient than ordinary reflection off a flat surface, and this phenomenon can be exploited in special "ridged mirrors" or "Fresnel diffraction mirrors" (q.v. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ridged_mirror)

in making a telescope mirror, you grind two round pieces of glass together with various sizes of carborundum or alumina abrasive powders suspended in water. pressure on the top disc against the bottom disc causes selective wear on the bottom disc, slowly rounding it into a convex surface while the top disc grows slowly concave to match, and it leaves the surface of the glass covered with tiny pits chipped out by the grains of abrasive. this ground-glass surface looks translucent grey at normal viewing angles, with a "matte" surface that doesn't reflect images; but if you sight down the surface of the glass at a narrow angle (the "grazing incidence") you can see images clearly reflected even off this rough and bumpy surface. the smaller the pits in the glass are, the brighter this reflection will look, and it'll be visible over a greater range of angles.

it's a fascinating thing to see, and it prompts thoughts about how this might have some kind of analogy in looking at a person's life (like, one's own life, for example.) you can sight along the full length of your life (at "grazing incidence", so to speak) and feel like you see a bright reflection: "God is reflected in me, I can see it!" but the pits are still there. you're just picking out a viewing angle that makes you forget they're there.

(yeah I'm in that kind of mood)

~Chara