thinkingisfun

The flat lens eliminates optical aberrations such as the “fish-eye” effect that results from conventional wide-angle lenses.

Surely you wouldn't claim that is referring to wide-angle thermal lenses?

“In the future we can potentially replace all the bulk components in the majority of optical systems with just flat surfaces,” says lead author Francesco Aieta, a visiting graduate student from the Università Politecnica delle Marche in Italy. “It certainly captures the imagination.”

Oh yes it does. If you help the imagination along with misleading phrasing, that is. If you don't believe me, just read the rest of the comments here, most of them expecting to see some application in photography.

If you get good glass it'll beat the resolution/noisiness of your sensor anyway. Distortion and aberration can be fixed in software quite well; it sure beats waiting that won't come for a long, long time, if even ever.

Don't get me wrong, this is cool for what it actually applies to, but flirting with "capturing the imagination" in such ways gets no respect from me.

But does it really matter? If I had a grandma she wouldn't be using techcrunch, she'd be using facebook.

Time passed. Like someone who first makes lewd remarks, doesn't encounter (enough) resistance, then tries for a grope.

I don't, I see sucking up as sucking up. E.g. If someone says all black people should be killed, do I even have a right to assume they have great, superb, excellent intentions? Should I really start my response with lauding those? Nah. There's limits.

But all that assumes good intentions behind what you criticize. They're all happy feel-good "we're in the same boat here" examples.

How would you criticize extreme greed or callousness? Or blind obedience to state authority, and hand-waving away murder? I've had bitter fights both with someone who kinda glorifed the RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion, not Royal Air Force), as with about anyone I run into on the web who says things like "Assange should be shot on sight, and without trial, traitor blah blah". And then there was this dude on a unmoderated forum who kept mocking someone else for being lesbian and having been raped as a child.

Reacting politely to things like that would have made me feel kinda dirty, you know? Beyond certain points I simply give up trying to change someone's opinion, and try to make it costly for them to have it. There are billions of people, some are complete sociopaths, or are deceived by the same; the more energy you waste on them the less you have for the rest. And being friendly to something disgusting drains me. Attacking it nourishes me. So that's that.

But to pad everything with sucking up to a total stranger? Nah. At least not when talking about general or bigger stuff, as opposed to personal suggestions or projects. I show people I care; just not necessarily about them. They kinda have to earn that, first.

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also, this sentence broke my brain: Well what if they really couldn’t “breathe” water” but since the urge to breathe is natural, that must take place…

To me, and I really have to think of the the Simpsons movie when I say this, that just goes to show when you dream a dream, it can also become a website with technology in it. At the end of the day, that's something you can take away from all this, and that's nothing short of okay.

if that turns out to be such a problem,

1.) you can simply assume that everything fresher than 5 minutes is subject to change, so you ignore it until it's at least 5 minutes old.

2.) whatever site or app you're using could simply mark unread messages, and inform you of out-of-order messages.