AI Weirdness: the strange side of machine learning

Tag: science

Total 122 Posts
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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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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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Sometimes the most interesting part of electron microscopy is the carbon tape. It’s basically just conductive tape, and we use it to stick our samples to their little metal holders before we put them in the microscope.  To the eye, it’s jet black and lightly textured.  Under the
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Hand + cold water = fun with thermal camera Here’s another picture from when I was “testing out the thermal camera”.  I think I’ve well-established now that the thermal camera works, and that I’ve figured out how to capture video from it.  Now I’m just… getting even more
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Blowing on a hot cup of tea to cool it - works! This is a movie taken with a thermal camera, so the hottest areas show up brightest.  When a hot piece of iron cools, it glows yellow, then orange, then red, then finally goes dark - at least to
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Still life of funnel with gold.  One rule of the cleanroom: if it looks like gold, it probably is. We use a lot of gold in the cleanroom, as it turns out to have pretty useful optical and electrical properties.  It’s just unfortunate coincidence that it’s also lovely
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It’s just water.  Cold water on a warm hand, to be exact. This is an image from an infrared camera I was testing today.  It turns out that humans glow in infrared, exactly in the same way that a red-hot piece of iron glows in visible light.  We’re
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Here’s another view of the sample I posted earlier, the one that was so wonderfully, spectacularly ruined. This time I’ve zoomed in near the very edge of the chip, where the vast plain of laser material abruptly ends at a jagged cliff.  By the time I was looking
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Check it out - we made opal! My labmate Lindsay Freeman [http://emerald.ucsd.edu/Members/Lindsay.html] made this thin layer of opal on glass, and this is what it ends up looking like under a microscope - crazy patterns and planes of swirled color, some areas calm, some
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Sometimes our samples get visitors. In most cases, they’re simply little flecks of dust that have settled to the surface of our chips.  Since most of the structures we’re making are so small, your average chunk of dust can be comparatively building-sized. They usually scare the willies out
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