Posts by greenup

Re: if it works...

+1 for Inconsolata

Inspired by Consolas, a font intended by Microsoft to replace Courier New.

Inconsolata is free, available on Google fonts, and you can use it in web documents with about 2 lines of style, with or without downloading/hosting yourself, depending on your preference.

Re: Yankees and roundabouts

There is a roundabout here that keeps getting repeatedly destroyed by people not paying attention; Unlike the Kentucky one, it has a raised brick center that people keep driving into. They have added some extra (rope?) lights to it, but not sure even that will help.

https://www.khq.com/news/police-alcohol-speed-believed-to-be-factor-in-mans-fatal-crash-into-liberty-lake-roundabout/article_a40e0da6-e9c4-11e9-af1e-d7c910840c47.html

Re: if it works...

The way leaf blowers are generally used, I'd agree, they are not a great solution to the problem.

There ARE situations where they really are The Best Answer though; Our house has a decorative rock fields of varying sizes in three areas of the yard, and a leaf blower is PERFECT for blowing the light organic leaves out away from the dense, bigger-than-a-golfball rocks, over onto the grass where they can be raked up. A broom or a rake would be very ineffective at keeping the nasty things from deteriorating in the rock bed, looking lousy, and promoting weed growth.

Re: Dispersion, not deflection

When light goes from a denser medium (cool air) to a less dense one (hot air), the beam changes direction "away from the normal (90-degree) of the transition(from one material to the other)", in some way proportional to the difference in densities.

In physics, you often have to do diagrams showing light going from air (less dense) into a lens(more dense), then back into air (less dense). There is a particular edge-case where if the angles are tiny enough, there is "total internal reflection" and effectively the light just bounces. This is what is happening with mirages and presumably this laser; the angle of the laser (in the cool [dense] air) to the target was way less than 1 degree to the ground, and it effectively bounced off of some hot air [less dense] coming off the ground between it and the target.

Pretty bad description, but generally the tiny change in density of the air due to waves of heat near the ground changes the direction of the light.

Also, the heat might just disperse the laser beam.

Here's a youtube vid that shows a road reflecting people somewhat like a mirror, and distortion in the air: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYhIKRd-yBM

Re: What happened to all the older search engines?

For google, the correct character for "you must have word 2" is double-quote, not +.

so, when you see word2 crossed out, add quotes around it.