AI Weirdness: the strange side of machine learning

Tag: science art

Total 76 Posts
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Extreme close-ups: Tape at 272x, using an electron microscope This particular kind of tape has a kind of black cratered texture, and you can just barely see the holes when you hold a piece of the tape in your hands.  In fact, the holes are right around the width of
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Bashful dust particle, viewed under an electron microscope Since our electron microscope isn’t inside the cleanroom, it’s hard to avoid the occasional visiting particle of dust.  They appear randomly, like small beings exploring immense and weird landscapes.  This one’s microscopic, and stands on a well-scratched metal surface.
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The “light” at the bottom of this glowing crater is all electrons. What you’re seeing here is a thin layer of glass with a hole chipped in it.  At the bottom of the hole, just out of the field of view, is a layer of silicon.  In the electron
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A particle of dust, viewed at around 19,000x in an electron microscope. It’s sitting on a little pedestal that it made itself out of my semiconductor laser material - no, I didn’t give it permission.  The dust particle selflessly protected that patch of semiconductor from the harsh
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Microscopic hills along a glass fracture Here, the edge of one of my samples was chipped, and the glass had flaked off in a ridged pattern.  The ridges continued right down to the border of the chipped area, where they became microscopic.  These hills are so small that you could
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An upside-down mountain, formed from dust.  The whole thing is about the size of a single bacterium. The mountain is, as usual, not supposed to be there - it’s a piece of dust that landed on my sample.  Despite doing all my processing work in the cleanroom, it’s
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Extreme close-up of tape in a scanning electron microscope. It’s conductive carbon tape, which we use for mounting stuff in the electron microscope, and it’s usually covered in strange craters and textures - I don’t know what purpose those serve.  Does make it look like some kind
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Newton’s rings put on a microscopic show. This is a microscope image, about 20x, of some bright bands of color that appeared on the surface of one of my samples.  They’re formed from a colorless film of residue left behind after some IPA dried on my sample -
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Someone asked me yesterday how big my samples are, and what it all looks like.  This is a zoomed-out view (only 90x!) showing a nearly edge-on view of one of my samples, sitting on a cratered sea of carbon tape. It’s so zoomed-out that I almost feel embarrassed asking
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This entire view would fit easily inside a single cell. The “lake” is a crater with glass at the bottom - being an insulator, glass tends to build up charge that deflects the electron beam my microscope fires at the sample, so very little bounces back… it appears dark.  The
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