Good morning, you made it through another week. Congratulations! It’s (finally) Friday.
Those of you who are 1) of a certain age, and 2) fans the Austin Powers franchise, will understand why I sometimes get the giggles the mention of the word “laser“, which conjures up mental images of Dr. Evil and his exaggerated air quotes.
I am old enough to recall a time when lasers were indeed cutting edge technology.
Today, of course, they’re old hat, used for items as mundane and everyday as barcode scanners and printers as well as tattoo and hair removal, light shows and pretend combat. Lasers do have some more high-tech users in industries such as medicine and chip manufacturing. Still, in an age of robotics and AI, they’re sort of old hat.
Lasers have been around for decades. In the early 1900s, Albert Einstein laid the foundation for laser development with a paper on “stimulated emission” of light – a burst of light in which the photons are coherent. It wasn’t until this day (May 16) in 1960, however, that Theodore Maiman, an American engineer and physicist, made the first laser work by shining a high-power flash lamp on a ruby rod with silver-coated surface.
Maiman was working at the Hughes Research Laboratory in California when he accomplished the feat that led him to be dubbed the “father of the electro-optics industry”, though he didn’t fully grasp the enormity of what he had done, saying at one point that a laser was a “solution seeking a problem.”
Maiman ended up founding several companies dedicated to the development and manufacturing of lasers, and held a series of patents relevant to the field. In 2017, UNESCO established the International Day of Light on May 16 to commemorate Maiman’s inaugural accomplishment and highlight the power of technology to be used for positive, peaceful purposes.
“Laser” is actually an acronym. Its letters stand for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, which is a mouthful. In the simplest of definitions, a laser is a very narrow beam of light in which all the waves have similar lengths and therefore can 1) travel very long distances, and 2) concentrate a lot of energy in a very small area.
If you want to go deep on this, click here, (thanks, NASA). You might need some laser-like focus to get through the technical aspects of the science of light (see what I did there?), but I know some of you are definitely up to it.
I hope you really took advantage of the past several sunny(ish) days we’ve had and soaked up that Vitamin D. Because it might be awhile before we see prolonged clear skies again.
Today it will be warm – in the low 80s – with mostly cloudy skies with the chance of a stray shower or thunderstorm. The weekend is looking pretty iffy, if you’re planning any outdoor activities. Tomorrow will again be mostly cloudy with the chance of a shower or thunderstorm, and things will start cooling off, with temperatures reaching only into the mid-70s.
Sunday is shaping up to be downright chilly (comparatively speaking), with temperatures topping only in the low 60s. So far, the forecast is calling for showers in the morning and clouds in the afternoon. But, you know, it’s upstate spring, so things could turn on a dime.
In the headlines…
The Supreme Court yesterday heard arguments on Trump’s landmark effort to end birthright citizenship, which has been considered settled law for more than 150 years after being enshrined in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
In an unusual move, the court heard oral arguments on a series of Trump administration emergency requests seeking to limit the scope of nationwide injunctions that blocked the plan almost as soon as it was announced in January.
Several of the justices appeared torn between two concerns. They appeared skeptical that single district judges should have the power to freeze executive actions throughout the nation.
The court’s conservatives didn’t entirely tip their hands. While some of them have called for the abolition of these nationwide injunctions in the past, yesterday they didn’t seem so certain.
A federal judge this week dismissed charges against nearly 100 migrants detained under a Trump administration effort to arrest undocumented migrants for trespassing on a newly declared “national defense” zone along New Mexico’s border with Mexico.
The Trump administration is planning to drop routine Covid-19 vaccine recommendations for pregnant women, children, and teenagers.
Come this fall, only older Americans and those with chronic health problems may be urged to get the Covid shot — assuming the vaccine is available at all.
The Trump administration fired nearly 600 employees at Voice of America, a federally funded news network that provides independent reporting to countries with limited press freedoms.
The layoffs targeted contractors, most of them journalists but also some administrative employees, and amounted to over a third of Voice of America’s staff.
The Trump administration is investigating James Comey, the former F.B.I. director who was fired by Trump in his first term, for a social media post officials claim amounted to a call for Trump’s assassination, members of the president’s cabinet said.
Bruce Springsteen opened his “Land of Hope and Dreams” tour in Manchester, England, with a forceful denunciation of Trump, accusing him and his administration of trampling on civil rights and workers, abandoning allies and siding with dictators.
Ras J. Baraka, the mayor of Newark, accused the Department of Justice of selectively prosecuting him nearly a week after federal officials arrested him and charged him with trespassing.
Two New York Republicans signaled that the cap on the state and local tax deduction may rise to as much as $80,000 as GOP lawmakers from high-tax states demand a boost in exchange for their votes on Trump’s tax package.
A group of Republican House members, mostly from New York, New Jersey and California, have vowed to vote no on the package unless the cap, which helped pay for the 2017 cuts and expires this year, is raised or abolished.
The New York City Housing Authority’s funding could be slashed in half due to federal belt-tightening, officials warned — as local Democrats called the Trump administration’s budget cuts “reckless.”
“You’re trying to figure out how you get that money out of Medicaid … to continue the tax cuts for the billionaires like Elon Musk,” Democratic Queens Rep. Greg Meeks said.
Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, N.Y., says it’s losing $500,000 in funding due to cuts by Trump’s administration.
Due to Trump’s cuts, NASA has told the more than 100 people who work at its Goddard Institute for Space Studies that they have to leave Armstrong Hall, a Columbia University-owned building at Broadway and West 112th Street, by the end of May.
Gov. Kathy Hochul’s decision to spend $2 billion on one-time “inflation refund” checks for about eight million New York households has been derided by some Democratic legislators as a stunt that is more about politics than good policy.
Hochul says it’s “not OK” that a proposed deal National Grid negotiated with state regulators would raise electric rates for the typical household by 20% over three years and 27% for natural gas customers.
Hochul has touted the budget’s “historic” $1 billion for climate action, but the one-time funding falls short of what the state has been promising for years.
Addressing an affordable housing conference in New York City, Hochul touched on her personal life, saying her parents started out in a trailer in Buffalo and worked hard to save enough to buy a home.
Hochul announced that a total of 350,000 housing units statewide have been built, preserved or are under construction since she took office in 2021.
State lawmakers introduced a new bill this week that would allow more than one company to oversee a $9 billion Medicaid program that allows disabled or elderly New Yorkers to choose their home caregiver.
More than 100 public service retirees, including first responders, packed into two large buses outside of City Hall in Lower Manhattan yesterday morning and headed to Albany, where they said they are prepared to fight for their lives.
New York antitrust legislation that would more easily allow lawsuits against corporate giants like Amazon.com Inc. will not move out of a key Assembly committee this year, according to its chair.
A federal judge ruled this week that an accidentally released memo, in which lawyers for the Trump administration had detailed the weaknesses of the government’s strategy to end congestion pricing in New York City, cannot be used in court.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s criticized plan to “beautify” parts of Chinatown is moving forward as the Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) begins to search for artists for the project.
Under pressure from Adams’ office, New York City’s powerful teachers union earlier this week rescinded a rule requiring mayoral candidates to spend a day teaching in a public school in order to be considered for the labor group’s coveted endorsement.
The city’s Campaign Finance Board should pause its release of public campaign funds to former Gov. Andrew Cuomo while investigating suspected violations of eligibility rules, one Brooklyn lawmaker and good government groups charged.
Council member Lincoln Restler, a Brooklyn Democrat, called on the CFB to reject any taxpayer funds from boosting Cuomo over accusations his campaign illegally coordinated with the Super PAC “Fix the City,” saying the candidate isn’t following the rules.
New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has thrown her political weight behind two left-wing City Council members’ reelection bids, marking her first foray into this year’s local elections as her mayoral race endorsement remains highly anticipated.
Félix Matos Rodriguez, the controversial chancellor of CUNY, will continue at his post despite criticism over anti-Israel campus protests after CUNY’s Board of Trustees conducted a job performance review.
The City University of New York could lose up to $17 million in federal research funding after the Trump administration issued dozens of stop-work orders, school officials said.
New York University said it would deny a diploma to a student who used a graduation speech to condemn Israel’s attacks on Palestinians and what he described as U.S. “complicity in this genocide.”
The university says that the student’s remarks condemning “genocide” were not approved and that he “violated the commitment he made to comply with our rules.”
John Beckman, an N.Y.U. spokesman, said in a statement that the university “strongly denounces” Logan Rozos’ decision to express “his personal and one-sided political views.”
Logan Rozos’s speech yesterday for graduating students of NYU’s Gallatin School sparked waves of condemnation from pro-Israel groups, who demanded the university take aggressive disciplinary action against him.
A lawyer for Sean “Diddy” Combs began grilling the rap mogul’s longtime former partner, Casandra Ventura, after the jury heard two days of devastating testimony from the R&B singer about being subjected to years of horrific and dehumanizing abuse.
In its cross-examination Ventura, the singer known as Cassie, Combs’s defense team confronted her about dozens of messages between them, many explicit.
World Trade Center developer Larry Silverstein strengthened his bid to open a casino on Manhattan’s West Side with an addition to his team that has a foothold in the NY gaming industry: Rush Street, operator of Rivers Casino and Resort in Schenectady.
The first statewide transit strike in New Jersey in more than 40 years began just after midnight when about 450 unionized locomotive engineers walked off their jobs in a dispute over pay.
New Jersey is on pace for a nightmare summer spanning planes, trains and automobiles — as sinkhole-ridden highways, persistent chaos at Newark Liberty International Airport and a transit strike threaten to upend travel plans at the worst possible time.
The chronic delays and frightening service outages that have plagued Newark over the last month can be directly traced to decades of deferred maintenance to the region’s archaic air traffic control systems, according to federal records and aviation experts.
Union College has fallen short in filling its freshman class for two years and is now pulling millions of dollars from its endowment to balance its budget, college President David Harris said in an email to the staff.
A 13-year-old student was charged this week with making threats against Myers Middle School on Snapchat following a string of online threats against area schools, police said in a news release.
The El Dorado Hotel Bar on Fourth Street in Troy suffered smoke and water damage after a fire broke out in the rear of the building late Wednesday night.
Photo credit: George Fazio.
