. . . it's on again . . .

If money were no object an amenity I’d install is a garden-house. Harbouring this dream an accompanying technical feat to brood about was how to protect selective areas within the shelter from bright sunlight when conducting certain activities. Wouldn’t it be beautiful if such a system were automated with solar tracking to constantly target the designated areas against a changing orientation of the sun? In view of such a requirement I’d lean towards the actuator being electronically controlled. In my day dreaming that narrowed down the means to accomplish the task. Since light has an electromagnetic wave nature I imagined a system that could interact with incident light in a way that would cancel it out by destructive interference through superposition with waves somehow generated by the system.  Consulting an electromagnetism book I changed my position slightly, being reminded that electromagnetic waves are attenuated by the medium in which they propagate by an attenuation, 𝛂, gi...

At some point it came to my attention that a cardinal challenge with drip irrigation is that mud clogs may accumulate in the pipes if the pipes’ pores are in contact with the ground. Evidently this would stifle the pipes. Now, isolating the location of clogs in lengthy pipe networks is a tall order.  So I ruminated on how we could design irrigation pipes that would be rigged with instrumentation for this purpose. Using light could seem a natural avenue for one’s wit to take in such an undertaking since this is how we ourselves see. Accordingly, I imagined concentrated light beams, laser perhaps, being reflected off the lining of a pipe, as they propagate along it, in a way that could locate any clogs.  It occurred to me that this solution was just the thin end of the wedge. The remedy I’d come up with could also be used in conduits of fluids in other contexts such as natural gas pipelines. In these the discontinuity could be caused by perforations conceivably factitious as in ...