It turns out Jolly Rancher candies light up strongly under UV illumination. I advance some theories as to why.
Jolly Rancher fluorescence
Oct 16, 2026
I tried to take photos for my new laser merch store, and my cats got involved.
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.
Writing
