Janelle Shane
banner
janelleshane.com
Janelle Shane
@janelleshane.com
I write about the strange side of AI at aiweirdness.com

Also a laser scientist.

She/her. Colorado, USA
I like how the image alt text includes an audio description too. Everyone needs to know
November 1, 2025 at 3:12 AM
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...
Read a New Short Story About a Haunted House, A.I., and a Rock Star
The latest tale from Future Tense Fiction.
slate.com
October 31, 2025 at 8:32 PM
I forgot to note that the paper is from 2011 so it must be an older bull www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Random laser action in bovine semen
Experiments using bovine semen reveal that the addition of a high-gain water soluble dye results in random laser action when excited by a Q-switched, …
www.sciencedirect.com
October 31, 2025 at 5:18 PM
Reposted by Janelle Shane
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-...
October 28, 2025 at 4:56 PM
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).
October 31, 2025 at 2:32 PM
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/...
Microlasers Made Entirely from Edible Substances
Several types of microlasers made completely out of edible substances are developed. They can be embedded directly into edible products and enable the sensing of various parameters, including sugar c...
advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
October 29, 2025 at 10:09 PM
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.
October 29, 2025 at 9:58 PM
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.
October 29, 2025 at 9:57 PM
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.
October 29, 2025 at 9:52 PM
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/...
Microlasers Made Entirely from Edible Substances
Several types of microlasers made completely out of edible substances are developed. They can be embedded directly into edible products and enable the sensing of various parameters, including sugar c...
advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
October 29, 2025 at 9:46 PM
There's a paper on making lasers out of human flesh that is analyzing the differences in the lasers you get from skin, muscle, fat, and so forth. They're hoping surgeons will someday use this effect to tell tissues apart during surgery. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
Investigation of random lasing as a feedback mechanism for tissue differentiation during laser surgery
Laser surgery provides clean, fast and accurate cutting of tissue. However, it is difficult to detect what kind of tissue is being cut. Therefore, a wrong cut may lead to iatrogenic damage of structures. A feedback system should automatically stop ...
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
October 29, 2025 at 9:35 PM
There is a point to making a laser out of bull semen, of course. The researchers point out that the laser's quality was an immediate indication of the sperm count in the sample.
October 29, 2025 at 9:29 PM
Even with updated training data for 2025 the neural net still doesn't know how to complete the phrase "Kpop " but this was a good try
October 28, 2025 at 7:14 PM