AI Weirdness: the strange side of machine learning

Tag: ucsd

Total 119 Posts
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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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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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