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The appearance and behavior of quite a few types of cancers
Medieval European building techniques, specifically heavy timber framing and lime plaster
Compost
Fireworks and pyrotechnic chemistry.
Current Canadian politics.
Growing and managing strawberries in a commercial setting.
Lord of the Rings. Not as much as the insanely awesome folks who memorized the Silmarillion, but I know a lot about The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
Holography. I dream of one day getting a quiet place to live with a huge walk-in closet to set up a darkroom in for holography. And once I get that I’ll start dreaming of getting my hands on a pulse laser
I work in a museum space. Any recommendations for implementing various forms of holography to create interesting exhibits?
The least temperamental kind to create and display are 540 nm (red) reflection holograms. To create, you get a laser pointer, gut it, turn it on for 15 minutes to let it stop doing funky diode stuff, set up your diorama behind the photo plate, and then shine the laser through the plate onto the diorama for however long your plate takes to develop. And to display it, you just need a point source of light, like a bright red LED.
Compare this with a green or blue hologram, which at the low end needs a high quality laser, a vibration-cancelling optical table, and even with all this can still be ruined by someone coughing in the other room. Or a transmission hologram, which at minimum needs a beam-splitter to create and must be displayed with the same color laser or the scale will be magnified or shrunk a bit, unless you are willing to make a rainbow hologram which also requires either an optical-grade cylindrical mirror/lens or some experimenting with paper slits, followed by a second pass through projecting the master print on the rainbow print.
I’m skipping a lot of details on the setup, but you get the gist. This all being said, the coolest holograms are rainbow holos
Sounds pretty involved, but I might have to experiment with this. Thanks for the info! I’m going to start researching a bit more, and see if I can squeeze some R&D funds from work.
Good luck! Like I said earlier, this is all pretty aspirational for me since I don’t have a good space to do any of this and likely will not in the near future either. Even if I go with the shoebox method (use fibre-optic cables to compress the darkroom setup into a shoebox) I live right next to train tracks lol
These are the types of hobbies I can get behind! Update me/us in the future whenever you create anything cool. That’s the type of content Lemmy needs!
The history of computing and video games.
I wouldn’t say I’m a world class expert or anything, but I know enough to talk your ear off at a dinner party.
Bollards, roads signs and other road signalisation. It is honestly a problem.
what’s your favourite type of bollard and why?
I am a big fan of the Slovenian/Austrian combo snow pole+bollard. I think they are such a clever thing for places where it snows enough to cover the actual bollard and doesn’t require workers to drag around a bunch of snow poles every winter, they just gotta pull them out.
What’s the reason to not just have the pole permanently attached on top, instead of retracting?
Honestly I can’t give you a proper answer here. I never actually thought about it before so I just looked up the Slovenian law about it (I don’t speak German so I didn’t bother with the Austrian one) and I couldn’t find anything that specifically says that the snow poles must/can’t be there between XY dates (just a bunch of stuff about how they gotta be positioned). If I had to guess it is a mix of these things:
- Aesthetics
- Visibility
- Giving the road workers something to do
- It is how it has always been done. Before these combo bollards became a thing and in places they still haven’t replaced the old ones they still add/remove a full on wooden snow pole next to the bollards every year.
There might be some other reasoning for it too, but this is what comes to mind as possible options.
Depends on your definition of “a lot,” but I know a fair amount about Star Trek
The history of food culture in Asturias in northern Spain.
I surfed the north coast of Spain many years ago, and the food was epic. I never forget that trip. Where can I learn more of the Asturian food history?
I write about it in English at https://eatingasturias.com, assuming self promotion isn’t a terrible sin here
Southern Appalachian medicinal herbs
The lottery, suits and the pope.
Supreme court cases. There are some real doozies, not that anyone irl cares.
