Cyberconversations

1
Cyberconversations
Jello Lasers Lots of different dyes will lase and
you see the occasional reference on the web to
Jello and whiskey lasers. These sound like urban
legends, but in fact are not. Arthur Schawlow,
who shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1981
with Townes for building the laser, shows you can
make Knox gelatin lase. See "Laser Action of Dyes
in Gelatin", T. W. Hansch, M. Pernier, A. L.
Schawlow, IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics,
January 1971, pp. 45-6. Interestingly, the
longevity of the laser improves if you jiggle it.

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2
Talking to people I cant see

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"I have seen a substance excellently adapted to
the purpose of wiping from paper the mark of
black lead pencil." Joseph Priestly 1770
3
Writing
The Curta is a precision calculating machine for
all arithmetical operations. Curta adds,
subtracts, multiplies, divides, square and cube
roots... and every other computation arising in
science and commerce... Available on a trial
basis. Price 125 From an advertisement in the
back pages of Scientific American in the 1960s.
This is about 700 in 2002 dollars about the
same price as Mathematica.

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