Spending a day doing SEM and seeing fuck all then seeing this meme feels targeted
this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2025
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EM = electromagnetic? Å = a Swedish letter? What am I missing?
I think this is referring to electron microscopy, and å is a unit for 10^-10^ meters. Electron microscopy can be very noisy and it is hard to distinguish objects
Angstroms hurt my brain. A $10^{-10}$ of a metre, but not a nanometre or a picometre. Just...why?
... However, they soon realized that the definition of the metre at the time, based on a material artifact, was not accurate enough for their work. So, around 1907 they defined their own unit of length, which they called "Ångström", based on the wavelength of a specific spectral line. It was only in 1960, when the metre was redefined in the same way, that the angstrom became again equal to 10^10 metre. Wikipedia
Edit: also some atoms are about 1 angstrom in size, so it's convenient, I guess..
Exactly this
This gets worse when talking about cryo EM
Electron Microscopy. Often used to see very small structures at high resolution. So 1.2 Å is 1.2 angstrom, or 0.12 nm.
Edit: I should add that often at really high magnification, there is a lot of noise, so the joke is that non EM people would just see static. Not too far from the truth. Practice helps seeing the patterns!
When do the blondes, brunettes and redheads show up?
That symbol means Armstrongs, but that's all I know
I don't know if you're memeing but for anyone else, it's angstrom (Ångström originally, but the Swedish spelling is not needed or appreciated anymore >:( ), or 0.1 nm, 10^-10 m
I'm taking a moment to appreciate it right now.