I remember sitting outside in the sun with shades on checking email with my Newton through a Motorola FlipPhone for no other reason than I could. What a great machine.

checkout: Apple Discontinued the Newton 25 Years Ago Today - MacRumors

So apparently back in November of 2022 (remember, Anti-Hero by Taylor Swift was #1?) I asked for technical support from SwissAir. And heard nothing back and forgot about it. But God bless the Swiss they are methodical! Today I received:

Dear Passenger,

We would like to sincerely apologies to you for the extreme delay in our response to your query, it has regrettably been taking us much longer than usual to respond to queries received via email.

If by this time you are still experiencing this technical issue please contact our technical support department via call

I look forward to getting back there soon.

PSA for those Apple Mail users who (like me) weren’t paying close attention last upgrade. You may notice email returning to your inbox that you thought you had dealt with and not noticed the greyed out “follow up” message in the upper right corner of the message list. Apparently the AI god in your app has decided you need to be reminded about certain messages. I only noticed today when I had a full inbox on the app of messages that weren’t on my server mailbox. Thought it was a syncing problem at first. You can turn it off in Settings. 📬

Using a laser to guide lightning has been demonstrated! A Swiss group used a high power, high repitition rate laser to guide lighning down a laser beam. The application here would be to use lasers to steer lightning away from damaging structures.

Briefly what happens is as follows. A large electric potential develops between a cloud and the ground, which can lead to lightning. What we see as lightning is the return current from the cloud to the ground. But before the flash the cloud has to, figuratively, drop a wire down to the ground for the current to flow through. It does this by ionizing a channel through the air. This feature is called a dart leader, and it takes a jagged path to the surface. What the Swiss group was able to do was make an ionized path to the ground using the laser, which the lightning followed. IMHO pretty amazing work.

Popular Article in the Washington Post here. Inside that article is a link to the Nature Photonics paper if you want the details.

🌞 🌩️ 🚀

I was wondering how I could best introduce myself to the micro.blog community and maybe my old pictures are a good window to some aspects of my Bobiverse. Older posts in the Archive are mostly photos I took and put on Instagram between 2014-2018. Haven’t really used any social media platforms since then, but I’m giving micro.blog a shot. Most of the 2014-2015 pictures are from our stay in Switzerland during my sabbatical, a great opportunity I had to work with colleagues at Meteoswiss. Hope you enjoy them.

I debated putting some of my older blog posts here but decided you can go to the About page and link to them if you are interested.