As someone who works at a DoD FFRDC, I can confirm this is true. Matlab is the language of choice for 95% of my colleagues who have no CS or programming background, the other 5% is Labview. They write spaghetti code to get the job done. I’ve been scolded for using Python or Julia in programs because no one else can use it/understand it. I’ve wasted hours setting Python environments up for people which is especially hard due to strict firewall rules. Even once it is setup, it is usually to run some script the found on the internet, if it doesn’t do exactly what they need, they give up and move on. Matlab on the other-hand is a one click install with all the packages pre-installed.
I don’t know that I’d agree that political discourse is worse today than (checks notes) during the civil war?
I’d say you may be looking at US politics through some rose colored spectacles. Being involved in politics is relatively much less hazardous to one’s health than at virtually any previous time in the nation’s history.
If you limit yourself to Supreme Court opinions and memoirs, it can be pretty good.
I recently read the takes on the subprime lending financial crisis in Obama's memoir [0] and McCain's memoir [1], and I found they agreed on the facts completely, but had completely different political approaches to what needed to happen next.
Ignoring politics Twitter and cable news is also a big help.
Yeah, the era where pro-slavery congressmen would beat their abolitionist peers in the Senate chambers [0] was definitely a high point in American politics.
The 1850s and 1860s were a battleground leading up to the literal battleground of the Civil War and the “quality of political debate” declined severely as the government became more and more polarized on the issue of slavery.
I love the idea of these electro-optic (or in this case electo-thermal) configurable lenses. and fourier optics in general.
What range of optical wavelengths did this lens operate well over, or could a similarly constructed system operate. My experience with electron beam exposed PMMA grating/lenses was that they were OK over the optical range, but did show noticeable dispersion, while for filtered (or laser) optics they worked extremely well to replace much thicker/heavier system solutions.
This was designed for the mid-IR (5.2um). I don’t recall its bandwidth but is was small on order of 100nm.
The dispersion of this material in the mid-IR is relatively flat.
There is active research on dispersion engineering via more complex geometry of the ‘meta-atoms’ to broaden the bandwidth for achromatic metalens optics.
Other research is actively looking to design materials that could have this phase change functionality in the visible wavelength range. All stable phase change materials to my knowledge strongly absorb in the visible range.
Thanks a lot for the quick response! I read enough to see it was designed for multi-micron, but was hoping it would still work down to near-IR. It will be hard to use this for depth imagers or standard CMOS at those longer wavelengths, but for true IR cameras it could be amazing.
