Posts Tagged Tufte
Microscope objectives – NA, cost, and parabolas
Posted by Michael Beach in math, metrology, optics, tech notes on December 14th, 2009
We were looking at various microscope objectives – those lenses on the turrets that aim toward the slides. Or, if you’re like me, the expensive silver thing that just went ‘crunch’ on the slide while I was trying to focus the image.
Pete noted that there seemed to be a parabolic curve fit – better NA, numerical aperture, better light collection, and the more expensive the objective lens gets. Here’s the curve, and the supporting data.
US Energy Use graph
Posted by Michael Beach in energy on March 14th, 2009
To comprehend how much energy we use, and what goes where, this is great place to start.
Produced at Lawrence Livermore Labs (https://eed.llnl.gov/) this ‘Sankey diagram’ shows the flow of energy from source to destination, shows what gets used and what gets wasted. We found it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quad_(energy)
click on the chart to see it larger. It’s in the public domain.
