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Long gone are my high-school days of grinding and polishing a 20cm mirror in the cellar, carefully using Foucault knife tests to parabolize it. As an undergrad,

Long gone are my high-school days of grinding and polishing a 20cm mirror in the cellar, carefully using Foucault knife tests to parabolize it. As an undergrad, using Gaussian formulae when matching lenses in eyepieces. In grad school, writing ray-tracing codes to design multi-element lenses. Then, as a postdoc, using Zernike polynomials to estimate optical errors in the hexagonal mirror segments of the Keck 10 meter telescope. Today's iPhone optics astonish and impress me: A lens built with over a half-dozen aspherical elements. Coordinated imaging with multiple cameras. Wow!

unfocussed_mike 5y ago
> Today's iPhone optics astonish and impress me: A lens built with over a half-dozen aspherical elements. Coordinated imaging with multiple cameras. Wow! Yep. And the same is true of modern "prime" lenses, which appear more like incredibly optimised non-zooming-zooms than the traditional prime recipes we are familiar with from textbooks. A side note: thank you thank you thank you for The Cuckoo's Egg. As a Brit I would ordinarily say that the reason I am a tech guy is the ZX Spectrum or the BBC Micro, but I am not sure my life would be the same in a much bigger way without your book. At 15 or 16 in early 1990 I was sure I wasn't going to university; I was sure I didn't belong there. A friend of my mother's suggested your book to her as something I should read, and I received it as a birthday present. Over time I have come to understand that this recommendation was extraordinarily shrewd. Not just about the tech aspect, or the internet community aspect, or the thrill of the chase aspect, but because it helped me understand that I was exactly the sort of person who should go to university. When I am asked to recommend books it's yours I recommend, twinned with John Naughton's A Brief History Of The Future; they are like companion volumes for a particular kind of way to think and feel about technology. Douglas Hofstadter should be so lucky.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago

> Today's iPhone optics astonish and impress me: A lens built with over a half-dozen aspherical elements. Coordinated imaging with multiple cameras. Wow! Yep. And the same is true of modern "prime" lenses, which appear more like incredibly optimised non-zooming-zooms than the traditional prime recipes we are familiar with from textbooks. A side note: thank you thank you thank you for The Cuckoo's Egg. As a Brit I would ordinarily say that the reason I am a tech guy is the ZX Spectrum or the BBC Micro, but I am not sure my life would be the same in a much bigger way without your book. At 15 or 16 in early 1990 I was sure I wasn't going to university; I was sure I didn't belong there. A friend of my mother's suggested your book to her as something I should read, and I received it as a birthday present. Over time I have come to understand that this recommendation was extraordinarily shrewd. Not just about the tech aspect, or the internet community aspect, or the thrill of the chase aspect, but because it helped me understand that I was exactly the sort of person who should go to university. When I am asked to recommend books it's yours I recommend, twinned with John Naughton's A Brief History Of The Future; they are like companion volumes for a particular kind of way to think and feel about technology. Douglas Hofstadter should be so lucky.