An Unfortunate Coincidence

I read Joe Hanson’s post The Evolution of Tyrannosaurus rex this morening (i.e. yesterday, relative to this appearing) about the correction of the posture of Mr. T as depicted in various media over the years.

[T]he tail-dragger myth persisted, and in 1988’s The Land Before Time (which, let’s face it, is where most of us first formed our images of dinosaurs) Sharptooth was frustratingly upright

I remember thinking that I’m not going to face it, because it’s quite possible our first glimpse of dinos, including an upright T. rex, was (as it was for me) in a movie was as a stop-action clip made possible by the wizardry of Ray Harryhausen.

And, later in the day, it was announce that Ray had passed.

So here’s a video, which includes an upright, posturically-incorrect, rexie, along with similarly-depicted Allosaurs, Ceratosaurs and Sceraptosaurs.

[A] compliation of every Ray Harryhausen animated creature in feature films, presented in chronological order.

Read the complete creature list at http://www.harryhausen.com

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There's a Catch to This

Kill Thrill: Watch Animals Capture Their Prey in Slow-Mo

Animals use a variety of strategies to capture prey, some of which clearly kick ass (see the sniper-like archer fish, which spits at flies from underwater). But these strategies are even more awesome when scientists film them and produce super slow-motion replays, complete with awkward faces and outtakes. Here’s a gallery of some of nature’s finest prey-capture instant replays.

The Mystery of Magenta, and of Light Mixing

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Interesting and fun, but about 35 seconds in he says that you can’t combine photons together, and that’s just plain wrong.

I know that you can’t mix photons together. So you can’t take a blue photon and a green photon and mix them together to get some other photon. That just doesn’t happen.

Except that it does. You have to do this in a nonlinear medium like certain crystals, but it can be done. It’s called sum frequency generation.

Energy is conserved, so in the example given a 2.5 eV (green) photon added to a 3 eV (blue) photon will result in a 5.5 eV photon, which will be ultraviolet. The addition is not what we see with our eyes, since that’s a different process.

A special case of this is where the two photons being added are the same frequency. This is called frequency doubling, and a common (amongst geeks, at least) example of this is a green laser pointer. The source inside of this is actually an infrared laser emitting at 1064 nm, which then passes through a doubling crystal to produce light at twice the frequency, or half the wavelength: 532 nm. (and cheap laser pointers may not filter the IR from the output, which can be a danger)