A little new year sketch: random bytes scraped from images on my computer.
SDR Weather Map
A NOAA weather satellite image captured through SDR (via RTL-SDR).
Sub-Atomic Scale Letters
Letters drawn at sub-atomic scale by researchers Hari Manoharan, Laila Mattos, and Chris Moon – carbon monoxide atoms placed carefully on a copper substrate, whose interference patterns resolve into letters. A very cool addition: the letters S and U (for Stanford University, where the research took place) are actually encoded on top of each other.
See this NSF page for a video explaining the process in detail.
When Was Analog Born?
I’ve been ruminating lately about when the idea of analog was born. It seems so pre-digital and of the “real world,” but it turns out is actually very much tied to the rise of computers as a way to describe their opposite. A quick NGram search shows this pretty clearly: around the late 1940s (birth of the modern digital computer era) we see both these terms explode, but basically zero uses of analog at all before this time.
We could also see analog as related to the literary term analogue, meaning an analogy. If the digital is a representation of something (discreet samples in digital audio, for example), then digital is an analogy of its physical, real-world counterpart.
Molecular Simulation of Nanoscale Machining
An image from this paper on machining at the nano-scale. Apparently, it’s possible to simulate molecular- and atomic-level interactions, which is what the small circles in the image are.
Christmas Neural Nets and Sperm Bots
🎄Spending Christmas Eve with the family, training neural nets and researching nano-scale machining (which turned up this sperm-bot above) I got one of the most amazing wooden watches for this Christmas, plus a dermaroller for my skin, I’m also exited about it. #merrychristmas 🎄
Milling Patterns
Radiofax
Weather maps sent via shortwave radio. Started in the 1950s and still running today, available by FTP on the NOAA site.
Acoustic Locator
Really want to build one of these on the Stevens campus: acoustic locator devices from the 1920s and 30s, built to help detect incoming aircraft.
Polycrystalline Silicon
A 4x11cm cylinder of polycrystalline silicon, the material used to make solid state hard drives (image via ).