But no, it's always nanophotonic coherent imager tomorrow, never nanophotonic coherent imager today.*
From MotherBoard:
In just a few years, we could see the mass proliferation of DIY, smartphone-enabled replicators. At least, Caltech electrical engineering professor Ali Hajimiri and his team of researchers thinks so. They’ve developed a very tiny, very powerful 3D imager that can easily fit in a mobile device, successfully tested its prowess, and published the high-res results in the journal Optics.
Hajimiri claims the imager may soon allow consumers to snap a photo of just about anything, and then, with a good enough 3D printer, use it to create a real-life replica “accurate to within microns of the original object.”
It’s called the nanophotonic coherent imager (NCI), and it’s small—it spans just a single square millimeter, and therefore easy to integrate into a smartphone—and cheap, since it’s made out of silicon, like most sensors. It is also exceedingly accurate, Hajimiri says—it utilizes LIDAR, a remote detection and sensing technique that bathes the intended object in lasers.Gentle reader is correct, we're through the looking glass:
“In the NCI, the object is illuminated with this coherent light,” Caltech’s announcement explains. “The light that is reflected off of the object is then picked up by on-chip detectors, called grating couplers, that serve as 'pixels,' as the light detected from each coupler represents one pixel on the 3D image.”...MORE
The “purposive” man is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his acts by pushing his interest in them forward into time. He does not love his cat, but his cat’s kittens; nor, in truth, the kittens, but only the kittens’ kittens, and so on forward forever to the end of cat-dom. For him jam is not jam unless it is a case of jam to-morrow and never jam to-day. Thus by pushing his jam always forward into the future, he strives to secure for his act of boiling it an immortality."Keynes was of course riffing on Lewis Carroll:
-J.M. Keynes Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, pp. 5
"I'm sure I'll take you with pleasure!" the Queen said. "Two pence a week, and jam every other day."
Alice couldn't help laughing, as she said, "I don't want you to hire me – and I don't care for jam."
"It's very good jam," said the Queen.
"Well, I don't want any to-day, at any rate."
"You couldn't have it if you did want it," the Queen said. "The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday – but never jam to-day."
"It must come sometimes to 'jam to-day'," Alice objected.
"No, it can't," said the Queen. "It's jam every other day: to-day isn't any other day, you know."
"I don't understand you," said Alice. "It's dreadfully confusing!"
