Transmission #25: Chip-making, Valence and Symmetry, Smells, Freediving and Labelling Sustainability.
Design, ideas and other flotsam.
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This is Transmissions by me, Martin Brown. Father. Husband. Design Lead at Craig Walker, sometime lecturer at RMIT. Marty to most.
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Design
Inside the machine that saved Moore’s Law
Clive Thompson, MIT Technology Review
File under: humans are amazing. This is an extremely nerdy yet accessible look into how the Dutch chip-making giant ASML pioneered a new method for making ever tinier computer chips, thus ensuring that processor speeds will continue to get faster in line with Moore’s Law. Thompson, the author, does an immaculate job breaking down a mind-bogglingly complex engineering processes into digestible nuggets.
When it reaches the center of the light-producing chamber, a laser pulse strikes the tin droplet. Immolated in a burst that reaches a temperature of about 500,000 K, the tin produces a plasma that glows with EUV light. The mechanism repeats this process, shooting and destroying tin droplets, 50,000 times a second.
“It’s non-straightforward, let’s put it that way,” [the project’s VP of tech development] says drily.
Sometimes, the technical challenges that human beings are able to overcome take on truly stupendous dimensions:
These mirrors for ASML would have to be orders of magnitude smoother: if they were the size of Germany, their biggest imperfections could be less than a millimeter high.
I mean, wow.
Ideas
The Symmetry Theory of Valence
Andrés Gómez Emilsson, Qualia Research Institute
Fascinating, wide-ranging and discursive presentation transcription, where Emilsson describes how the interplay between arousal and valence can describe a wide swathe of human mood states. Exactly what ‘valence’ constitutes is a large part of the presentation, but roughly it has to do with the degree of positivity in human emotions. High valance = happy, low valence = sad. Then it gets really interesting, as Emilsson starts to layer in both introspective and objective data around various stimuli, including psychedelic drugs like DMT, LSD and psilocybin, and notes that as humans, we’re strongly attracted to symmetry, and that this symmetry might in fact have to do with the harmonisation in the electrical signals of the brain. More than a little ‘3am stoner vibes’, but riveting nonetheless.
The Odor of Things
Scott Sayare, Harper’s Magazine
We don’t really know how smell works. Isn’t that strange? Master perfumers, or nez, those whose job requires decades of training in mixing chemicals to make new scents, rely mostly on experience, intuition, and trial and error. Their profession verges somewhere between art and quackery. Computers can’t really help, as the necessary theoretical foundations for how chemicals interact with the nose and the brain are still a matter of intense conjecture. This article gives a lovely overview, filled with odd moments like this:
Aloe vera has come to be associated with a soothing, green, lily-of-the-valley scent. “That’s the code, that’s the translation,” one perfumer told me. “Except that no one knows what aloe vera actually smells like. Because aloe vera has no smell.”
Interestingly, related news is that scientists have now turned to worm brains and machine learning to help understand the mysteries of how smell works.
If you’re interested in this subject, I can highly recommend Luca Turin’s The Secret of Scent.
The Depths She’ll Reach
Xan Rice, Long Lead
A gorgeous piece of immersive (pardon the pun) storytelling about a Alenka Artnik, a world-record setting freediver. Best viewed on desktop, and layered with video and audio that really do compliment the story, this is the kind of multimedia storytelling that we were all imagining might be the future of quality reportage, back in 2012. Instead we got Buzzfeed.
Quotes
Improvements in technology generally help friends connect, but the move onto social-media platforms also made it easier—indeed, almost obligatory––for users to perform for one another.
Public performance is risky. Private conversation is far more playful. A bad joke or poorly chosen word among friends elicits groans, or perhaps a rebuke and a chance to apologize. Getting repeated feedback in a low-stakes environment is one of the main ways that play builds social skills, physical skills, and the ability to properly judge risk.
– The Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls, Jonathan Haidt, The Atlantic
Chart of the Week
“We steadily "dry out" as we age. A newborn human baby is 75 percent water, adult men are about 60 percent, adult women 55 percent, and elderly people are roughly half.” (Massimo)
Other
🤓Tantalising details of Apple’s impending AR glasses. Link
⚛️ Nuclear fusion: are we finally getting close? Link
🌿 When we talk about sustainability, what do we really mean? The EU’s new proposed labelling laws rate synthetic fibres like polyester as more ‘sustainable’ than cotton and wool. As we transition towards a lower-footprint world, we will be forced to confront these counter-intuitive truths more often, learning that more ‘natural’ does not always equate to ‘better for the planet’. A reminder that you’d need to use a cotton tote bag thousands of times before it is less damaging to the environment than just using plastic bags. Link
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Till next time!