Congratulations!!!

AND your mocktail looks amazing!

This shit is delightful

I like how the image alt text includes an audio description too. Everyone needs to know

You can read my Halloween short story "The Skeleton Crew" here.

I wrote it in 2021 but I think the world of remote work and crappy AI is still pretty recognizable today!
slate.com/technology/2...

I forgot to note that the paper is from 2011 so it must be an older bull www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I trained the tiny neural net on the latest set of reader-submitted Halloween costumes and do I have some costume suggestions for you! www.aiweirdness.com/tiny-neural-...

Howdy! My first guess would be multiple scattering and interference between the pixels of the camera that took the picture. When a detector is extremely saturated (as this seems to be) you can sometimes see weird geometric effects. A filter might reduce this effect (and protect your camera).

Yeah - the exception is a few papers like this one on food-grade lasers where the entire laser cavity is constructed out of edible materials and they use extracted chlorophyll as the dye. advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Yup, they inject it full of dye, and then plop it in front of a bright light source to energize the dye. Most often the laser I've seen used for this is an infrared or green Nd:YAG laser.

In most of the weird squishy lasers, the goal is to inject something (like peacock feather) full of laser dye, and then hit it really hard with another laser to energize the dye. You may get new laser light out, whose exact wavelength depends on the fine structures surrounding the dye.

I was going "what??" a lot too

Apparently a lot of these are a type of laser called (appropriately enough) "random lasers" which can be made of a very chaotic material.

They're working on making edible lasers out of food-grade sunflower oil, spinach, olive oil, etc so they can be used as embeddable sensors in food. The laser can be very sensitive to its environment and react to the change in acidity as food spoils. advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...