Question: What sort of things have you discovered?

Dan Veal answered on 15 Mar 2012:

I havent’ made any life changing discoveries, but have done some good things at work no one had thought of.

For example, I use a camera and a laser to illuminate small reflective spheres. So it’s like a high-viz jacket, except a little sphere about 1cm in diameter coated with that bright stuff. When you shine a laser on it, it’s SUPER bright, much brighter than everything around it, and i can see it on my camera.

You know how cameras usually are focused? A bad shot is one that’s fuzzy, or out of focus. However, i discovered if we purposefully blurred our images I could locate the centre of the bright sphere more accurately because it was spread over a wider area in the image. So i improved our measurement system by doings omething you would normally never want to do. Sometime you find these things by accident and they’re really good ideas.