At this point, atomic clocks are old news. They’ve been quietly keeping our world on schedule for decades now, and have been through several iterations with each generation gaining more accuracy. They generally all work under the same physical principle though — a radio signal stimulates a gas at a specific frequency, and the response […]
Muon tomography (muography) is the practice of using muons generated by cosmic rays interacting with Earth’s atmosphere (or equivalent) to image structures on Earth’s surface, akin to producing an X-ray. In lieu of spending a lot of spending a fair bit of money on dedicated muon detectors, you can also hack such a device together […]
Generating random data is incredibly hard, and most of the random data around you isn’t truly random, but merely pseudo-random. For really random data, you’ll have to look at something like radioactive decay or *holds up spork* something like this. YouTube commenters will also suffice. The idea of using random data for generating musical notes […]
When the topic is radiation detection, thoughts turn naturally to the venerable Geiger-Müller tube. It’s been around for ages, Russian surplus tubes are available for next to nothing, and it’s easy to use. But as a vacuum tube it can be somewhat delicate, and the high voltages needed to run it can be a little […]