AI Weirdness: the strange side of machine learning
Janelle Shane

Janelle Shane

Total 840 Posts
Monday September 30, 2013

Monday September 30, 2013

A speck of dust sits on a pedestal - this is a smallish piece of dust, only about 1/100 the thickness of an average human hair. The dust made its own pedestal by protecting a small area from the high-energy plasma that I was using to etch away the
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A speck of dust sits on a pedestal - this is a smallish piece of dust, only about 1/100 the thickness of an average human hair.  The dust made its own pedestal by protecting a small area from the high-energy plasma that I was using to etch away the
Wednesday September 18, 2013

Wednesday September 18, 2013

Nanoscale forces work in non-intuitive ways sometimes. This wall of semiconductor was plasma-etched so thin that the middle was etched entirely away, leaving the wall’s top floating eerily above void. It’s thin and lacy, and only touches the wall’s bottom in a few delicate places, yet it
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Nanoscale forces work in non-intuitive ways sometimes.  This wall of semiconductor was plasma-etched so thin that the middle was etched entirely away, leaving the wall’s top floating eerily above void.  It’s thin and lacy, and only touches the wall’s bottom in a few delicate places, yet it
Saturday September 14, 2013

Saturday September 14, 2013

String! I definitely wasn’t expecting to see this - it startled me when I first came across it, partly because it was looping up dramatically into midair before it sagged, as I watched, under the glare of the microscope’s electron beam. It came to rest draped over one
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String!  I definitely wasn’t expecting to see this - it startled me when I first came across it, partly because it was looping up dramatically into midair before it sagged, as I watched, under the glare of the microscope’s electron beam.  It came to rest draped over one
Tuesday September 10, 2013

Tuesday September 10, 2013

Looking like architectural columns, these structures are more than two million times shorter than their life-sized counterparts. Put another way, they’re only knee-high to a bacterium - the only way we can see them is with a powerful electron microscope. We’re not making buildings with these structures, but
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Looking like architectural columns, these structures are more than two million times shorter than their life-sized counterparts.  Put another way, they’re only knee-high to a bacterium - the only way we can see them is with a powerful electron microscope. We’re not making buildings with these structures, but
Monday September 09, 2013

Monday September 09, 2013

Here’s another example of what happens when dust lands on my sample just before the etching phase. The giant wing-like airy structure is the dust - due to the odd way nanoscale forces work, this fragile thing remains upright and intact even after the sample’s tilted and jostled.
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Here’s another example of what happens when dust lands on my sample just before the etching phase.  The giant wing-like airy structure is the dust - due to the odd way nanoscale forces work, this fragile thing remains upright and intact even after the sample’s tilted and jostled.
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