You'll go blind if you do that!

[myspicybrains]

It's official. After several semesters of joking to undergraduates that "Oh, the laser is harmless, just as long as you don't [here is where I crouch down and turn my head, always the same pantomime] try to look straight into the beam to figure out if it's on,*" I was puzzled by our poor signal, and just wanted to see if our optics looked dirty.

Comments

[ww0308]

Familiarity breeds contempt. Thank God you moved back away in time! Although you would look kind of great with an eyepatch.

Maybe we could devise a better safety system for lasers? A 3D sign mounted around the barrel of the laser that looks like static from most angles, but resolves into some sort of very striking and obvious symbol or sign when you're getting dangerously close to looking directly at it?

[ww0308]

Actually maybe you should just use a long narrow cone, widening as it goes away from the aperture, painted white on the outside and some flaming red color or something on the inside. Then just train people that they should NEVER be able to see red, much less a large, growing red area in their field of vision, since that could be the last thing they ever see.