AI Weirdness: the strange side of machine learning

Tag: science art

Total 76 Posts
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Multicolored marbled patterns! Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you an unsuccessful attempt to clean tape scum off a delicate semiconductor surface.  The carbon tape I use in the scanning electron microscope, which looks so cool in the microscope and improves my image quality so much, leaves scum behind, as it
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The lace ship. This is some sort of dust that landed on my sample before etching - I do try to clean dust off, but I don’t get everything removed.  This particular sample had a few of these airy, lacy dust particles - I’m not sure what they
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I posted a picture of the jagged broken edge of my sample the other day.  Now here’s the same spot under the electron microscope.  This view’s looking from the side, so you see all the detail of the dark edge where the silicon snapped. This far zoomed out,
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Nom nom. Apparently, my nanostructures are tasty. This little guy is only about 1 micrometer high, less than 1/100 the thickness of a typical piece of paper.  And the guy appears to have latched on to one of my little structures - ruining it, I might add.  I guess
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Here’s the jagged edge where my sample broke. I blame the carbon tape, which is usually my friend, a nice way to get rid of those pesky extra electrons, and a way to stop my sample from falling off the holder in the electron microscope.  Except this time, the
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Islands! Actually, it’s Newton’s Rings again, a rainbow effect caused when white light shines on really thin films of transparent stuff.  In this case, I don’t know what the transparent stuff is.  The material beneath is semiconductor laser material.  I was trying to clean it with alcohol,
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Welcome to Mount Gloop. I don’t know what this mountain is made of - like most of the naturalistic landforms I discover, it’s not supposed to be there.  It’s probably some sort of residue or gunk.  It rises out of a plane of semiconductor laser material.  Those
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Colorful flames and smoke? This is actually Newton’s Rings again, a colorful microscopic pattern that appeared on my sample of laser material after some isopropyl alcohol dried funny.  It must have left a thin film of something behind, and that produced rainbow patterns in the same way a thin
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It’s too bad that whenever I get interesting images, it’s usually a sign that something’s gone wrong. In this case, the rainbow rings means that there’s some junk left on my sample - this is residue left behind from IPA (now, that’s isopropyl alcohol, not
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Here’s carbon tape putting on a show again. This is the most commonplace part of scanning electron microscope imaging - and in my opinion, one of the most consistently cool-looking.  We use carbon tape because it’s conductive, and stops electric charge from building up on the samples we’
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