ucsd - AI Weirdness (Page 6)

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By Janelle Shane On November 13, 2013 - 1 min read

A strange miniature landscape, none of which is supposed to be there. It’s quite small indeed - the pinnacles are each less than 1 micrometer tall, which means you’d need to stack a thousand of them on top of each other to equal one millimeter. This landscape is

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By Janelle Shane On November 09, 2013 - 1 min read

Standing at the edge of the world. At microscopic scales, even a clean break isn’t very clean - this electron microscope picture is of the edge of a piece of glass, on which I had fabricated a long wall of semiconductor (the long columned wall you see at the

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By Janelle Shane On November 07, 2013 - 1 min read

There are no dyes or pigments in this microscope image - it’s a thin clear film on a blank mirrorlike surface, and all the colors come from the interference of light waves. It’s the same effect that produces the rainbow colors in thin soap bubbles, or on a

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By Janelle Shane On October 31, 2013 - 1 min read

A ghost? This is a speck of dust sitting on a metal surface, seen close to the edge of a piece of tape - the tape is the weird lumpy surface looming over the whole scene. The ghostly figure (it looks to me a bit like a panda) may be

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By Janelle Shane On October 28, 2013 - 1 min read

Another eerie example of nanoscale terrain echoing macroscale terrain - the cliff in this image is only about 1/200 the thickness of a typical human hair. It’s been weathered away not by wind and rain, but by a blast of high-energy plasma. The thick black mountainous layer is

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By Janelle Shane On October 22, 2013 - 1 min read

The broken edge of a piece of semiconductor laser material, viewed at 2,402x under an electron microscope. At this magnification, it’s clear that the edge isn’t cleanly broken at all, but has all sorts of furrows and ripples, all invisible to the naked eye, making it look

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By Janelle Shane On October 17, 2013 - 2 min read

Even when working in the cleanroom, a little dust is hard to avoid. This is a gallery of electron microscope pictures of dust specks I’ve encountered while making nanoscale devices in the UCSD Nano3 cleanrooms. Dust is made of a variety of materials - dead skin cells, tiny bits

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By Janelle Shane On October 14, 2013 - 1 min read

I found an area of strange mesa-like structures on one of my samples - near this spot, the sample broke, scattering tiny fragments of glass and laser material across that part of the sample’s surface. After I used high-energy plasma to etch most of the laser material away, the

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By Janelle Shane On October 13, 2013 - 1 min read

Nanosouffle? This piece of dust appears to have partially deflated. I’m not sure if it really did crumple, or if it’s just a trick of the angle. The light-colored platform it’s sitting on is all semiconductor laser material, that the dust protected from the high-energy plasma that

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By Janelle Shane On October 08, 2013 - 1 min read

Closeup of artificial opal, formed on fragments of microscope slides by drying little plastic beads. Everywhere that the beads happened to assemble themselves into regular arrays as they dried, you get iridescent rainbow colors - the “fire” of opal. The rainbow iridescence comes from the interference of light waves as

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