AI Weirdness: the strange side of machine learning

Tag: sciart

Total 71 Posts
(Untitled)

(Untitled)

The cliffs of insanity?  Rising an awe-inspiring 1.5 microns above the wave-lashed sea (about 1/100 the thickness of a sheet of printer paper), these cliffs were formed when high-energy plasma ate away a layer of semiconductor.  All that was left behind was this island, protected by a glassy
(Untitled)

(Untitled)

Pretty rainbow colors brought to you by the wave nature of light. The phenomenon that made these wild colors out of a thin film of photoresist on silicon is the same phenomenon that’s behind the rainbow colors of soap bubbles and oily puddles. It’s also a more chaotic
(Untitled)

(Untitled)

A strange landscape with an even stranger sky. This is a microscope view of the edge of a smooth chunk of silicon, coated with a thin clear plasticy layer of photoresist.  Just like the colors in a soap bubble, this colorless thin layer produces rainbow colors due to the wave
(Untitled)

(Untitled)

It resembles a mushroom cloud, but in fact, it’s one of our microscopic nanolasers, imaged under an electron microscope.  These lasers are among the smallest in the world, so small you could fit a billion of them on an iPhone home button, small enough to one day fit easily
(Untitled)

(Untitled)

Strange formations caused when high-energy plasma from a reactive ion etcher bombards semiconductor materials. We use the reactive ion etcher to carve out microscopic optical devices, like lasers and filters.  Here, there’s no particular device that we were trying to make - we were just testing to see if
(Untitled)

(Untitled)

The cliffs of fluffiness!  Lashed by impossibly pointy nano-waves. The fluffy stuff at the top is actually photoresist, a glassy substance that we use to protect semiconductor from plasma bombardment when we’re doing our etching.  Here, the photoresist protected the semiconductor below it from being etched away, making the
(Untitled)

(Untitled)

The color makeup of a fluorescent light, imaged through a spectrometer made of folded paper and a chunk of DVD.  You can print and fold your own for free following the instructions here [http://publiclab.org/wiki/foldable-spec] (they also have a kit [http://store.publiclab.org/products/foldable-mini-spectrometer] , which
(Untitled)

(Untitled)

This one looked to me like a line of people, standing at attention.  It’s actually an edge-on view of a comb-like grating structure, seen here as it passes between two rectangular alignment markers.  The people-like shape is due to the weird way the plasma etcher ate away the semiconductor,
(Untitled)

(Untitled)

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
You've successfully subscribed to AI Weirdness
Great! Next, complete checkout for full access to AI Weirdness
Welcome back! You've successfully signed in.
Unable to sign you in. Please try again.
Success! Your account is fully activated, you now have access to all content.
Error! Stripe checkout failed.
Success! Your billing info is updated.
Error! Billing info update failed.