I tried to take photos for my new laser merch store, and my cats got involved.
Laser merch photoshoot (sabotaged by cat)
Oct 9, 2026
Since 2019 I've used various language models (from the large to the very tiny) to generate drawing prompts for what has become an annual October tradition. (2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, and my personal favorite is 2022, when the GPTs were small enough to be absolutely bonkers.)
After a failed attempt to get Gemma 3 to be as interesting as the early GPT3's (I gave up after it suggested "The Autumnal Autumning" twice in one list), I decided to go very old-school.
Specifically I'm using a tiny neural net called char-rnn, originally introduced by Andrej Karpathy in 2015, and updated by my friend Dylan Hudson to work with modern libraries. I installed it on my laptop, and then for training data I turned to a dataset that I had fun with in the past, a list of 42,000 registered racehorse names from the Jockey Club. Char-rnn runs only on my cat hair-covered laptop, and it has no general internet training, only what I gave it.
Presenting this year's lineup!
These may not all be winning bets, but they'll hopefully be fun to draw. Mostly I just want to see people draw horsies! Or very much not horsies, it's up to you! Or not draw - every year people interpret these prompts in all sorts of interesting media, from flash fiction to fiber art to poetry. Use the hashtag #botober2026 if you post your art so I can check it out!
There's bonus content for AI Weirdness supporters, which this week is a list of racehorses that didn't make the cut, for one reason or another.
Do they even lase? A laser scientist ranks Steven Universe characters, from D-tier all the way to S-tier, and proposes a few more characters and fusions.
Some lasers are made from lab-grown gems, like specially-formulated ruby, garnet, or sapphire. When used in lasers, they're cut like plain cylinders. But they have all the hardness and brilliance of jewelry-quality gems, which means you can mess around with them if you like...
As a laser scientist I think this is pretty much the coolest thing ever. As they explain, they start with the crusty, bubbly rind of a lab-grown titanium sapphire crystal that's left over after the researcher got the laser-quality material out of the middle. That crusty laser rind is still sapphire, though, and polishes up beautifully into a pretty pink gem not found in nature.
What's particularly fun about this is titanium sapphire is like the Ferrari of laser gems, a high-end research crystal that can make incredibly short pulses of light. The short pulses are useful for high-precision timekeeping and quantum research, and can help researchers see through skin (only about a millimeter, but that's still useful for things like detecting skin cancer). I've used titanium sapphire lasers in the lab before. A whole table-sized laser usually just has a tiny pea-sized chunk of titanium sapphire crystal in it. And let me tell you, we would never be allowed to pick it up and turn it around in our hands and wear it around our necks. Voids the warranty, for sure.
I basically want the entire laser gem collection from gems of science, and they did not pay me to say this.
Which would be your laser crystal power gem?
I found out recently that lasers made a cameo in the 1981 film Clash of the Titans - as the mighty god rays of Zeus.
Gaze upon the majesty!
These are clearly argon ion gas lasers, which I can tell because 1) the beams are in the blue (488 nm) and green (514 nm) wavelengths that you can get from argon lasers and 2) this was one of the few lasers widely available in those days. They also got used in laser shows a lot because, again, very beautiful while being one of the only laser options. If you saw The Who's laser show back in the day, they traveled with several of these argon lasers.
These lasers weren't simple to work with, though. Apparently it took so long to get the lasers set up just right for one scene that Lawrence Olivier (who was playing Zeus) forgot his lines by the time they were finally ready for him to say them.
It is my opinion as a laser scientist that 488 nm blue is the prettiest laser wavelength.
Did you see the movie? Did you think the lasers were cool? I'm honestly too biased by the fact that they're real lasers to be able to judge whether they're really as awesome as I think they are.
Who knew they use lasers to make jeans now?
To laser-wash jeans, a laser blasts them with intense pulses of infrared light, burning away the pigment in a mist of blue smoke. As the laser scans across the denim surface, it leaves behind a surface that looks bleached or worn, and can even artistically place rips and holes. The classic pattern is those crotch rays (there's probably a technical term for it) that make it look like the jeans are wrinkled from wear, and the videos of jeans going from new to broken-in within about three seconds are astonishing enough. But since the wear marks are just an image file downloaded to the laser scanning machine, they can basically do anything, including super complex patterns.
Video description: a 7-second video from CKlaser in which a laser scans a pair of jeans in a brief second, leaving behind a floral design. Then the laser spends another second making another crisp new pair look broken-in.
In this video you see a red laser, but that's probably just a low-power guide laser to let the operators know where the big laser is pointed. The laser that's doing the work is probably a powerful but invisible infrared laser similar to the lasers that cut wood and etch metal. This article describes a 100-600W CO2 laser that can do the job in 90 seconds (as opposed to 20 minutes for traditional stonewashing and chemical finishing) and I wouldn't be surprised if the laser in this video is using even higher powers for faster finishing.
Not only are the lasers faster than traditional methods of bleaching and stonewashing, but it also takes less water and avoids bleaching chemicals. I am honestly amazed by all the places where lasers are behind the scenes in our daily lives. Laser pants!
I checked all my jeans and I'm not sure if any of them were lasered - I don't have any with extreme patterns on them, or really any distinct pre-made wear marks at all. Do you have laser jeans?
Recently my family gave me a hologram-making kit that they found at an antique mall in Indiana. I was with them when they first spotted it among the alien masks and vintage comics, and when they pointed it out, my first thought was "yeah right there's no way that's real holograms" followed by "oh wow it looks like actual real holograms".
As a laser scientist this was basically the perfect gift for me, and they sneaked back to the antique mall to pick it up. Fortunately for me, the antique mall hologram kit was not all that antique, just a few years old, and the film was still good. The company Litiholo in fact still makes these kits.
The kit included a red laser, and a bunch of plastic holders that pieced together to hold the film and the laser in the right positions. A little rectangle the size of a deck of cards indicated where I could put the 3D object that I wanted to turn into a hologram - they supplied some dice so my first hologram would be of something that would probably work. For example, they recommend not trying to make a hologram of plants because they move too much (!) during the five-minute exposures.
I've made holograms in the lab with fancy lasers and floating tables and climate-controlled rooms, so I took their instructions seriously when they told me to sit absolutely still and silent during the hologram exposures. The cats were not allowed in the room.
The key to the hologram setup is that half of the laser beam hits the film directly, while the other half bounces off the dice and then hits the film. When the two halves interfere with each other at the film, they embed the film with information about the shape of the light bouncing off the dice. Then, when I remove the dice, the film recreates what the dice was doing to its half of the laser beam, as if the dice were still there.
The result is a hologram that changes depending on what angle you look at it, just like you were looking around the edges and over the tops of the original dice. For this video I scooted the dice out from behind the film so now there's nothing back there at all.
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You can really see that in this video of some cool calcite crystals; the camera swings up behind the film to show that the calcite isn't there anymore.
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Obviously I haven't perfected the technique yet (maybe the film is a little old after all), but I'm having fun experimenting with making holograms. What thing (that's about the size of a deck of cards or smaller) would you want to see a hologram made out of?
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