AI Weirdness: the strange side of machine learning

Tag: science

Total 122 Posts
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Sometimes the view under an electron microscope can be positively scary.  I’ll be scrolling along at low magnification, checking out some nanoscale features, when all of a sudden a colossus will loom huge above the nanolandscape.  Sometimes I actually jump.  Usually it’s a tiny microscopic speck of dust,
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The long valley, surrounded by jagged mountains, occupied by a picturesque leaning castle….  Actually, this is a closeup of a minuscule scratch in a coating of photoresist.  At this magnification (2096x), it’s clear that the photoresist has a rough, mountainous surface, caused by the high-energy plasma I’d bombarded
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ThorLabs displays a keen understanding of graduate school - as of a few years ago, they’ve included snack boxes with many of their orders of optics components. The boxes include things like trail mix, granola bars, goldfish crackers, and fruit snacks - not, of course, that this influences any
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Low-budget geeky grad school magnetic poetry: cut up the fridge magnet ads that they hand out at conferences and job fairs.  If there’s any whitespace, go to work with a Sharpie.  Thanks to some junk mail, I’ve got a pizza-themed set as well!
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Light in a circular cavity makes a variety of standing wave patterns, some of which look like flowers, wagon wheels, or even tie-fighter spaceships. These images are from my simulations of the light in the cavities of nanolasers - each pattern is called a mode, and the smaller the laser,

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<a href="https://aiweirdness.com/" style="text-decoration:underline;">lewisandquark</a>: Someone recently asked me if there were other grad students/scientists blogging pictures from their daily life in the lab. I realized that I only know of a couple scientist bloggers who
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The view inside one of our lab’s titanium sapphire infrared lasers - if you see a view like this, you’re doing something wrong.  Specifically, you’re not wearing laser goggles around a 10W laser source (bad), and placing your eyeballs at beam height (very bad, yet done almost
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The beachgoers flee as hulking monsters climb from the dark water… This is a scanning electron microscope image of some various-sized pillars that appeared on one of my samples during a plasma etching test.  They’re made of semiconductor, and the bright plain beneath is silicon.  Showing through the dark
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Traffic looks like fireworks when viewed through diffraction glasses.  You can pick up diffraction glasses for pretty cheap online - they’re popular as a trippy party effect.  But you can also think of them as giving you the superpower of spectrometer vision, the ability to tell apart different kinds
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The microscopic fractured edge of a piece of semiconductor looms like an enormous cliff face.  However, this entire view would fit easily inside the diameter of a single human hair.  At the top of the cliff is a rough dark layer, the remains of a protective layer that we bombarded
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