Monday Links from the Bench vol. DCLXXIII

[DoctorStrangelove]

Shockley was a really nice guy. Not.

His lack of managerial nouse created Silicon Valley.

This is what happened to The Shockley Semiconductor factory:

https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blo...ilicon-valley/

And then they knocked it down.

Good to know that Drywall contained asbestos up until 1980. How reassuring.

Useless factoid: the parameter Alpha for a point contact transistor is greater than one. For the BJT it's 0.98. Not a lot of people know that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point-...20%20and%20200.

Who'd have thunk?

[_V_]

The Map of the Universe, I was expecting a Google style street view thing

[NickFitz]

I believe they're doing one of those football things at the moment, so you'll need plenty to read

• ‘That Girl is Going to Get Herself Killed’ - ”In 2012, I was working at a hotel in Glacier National Park when a man I’d just met invited me for a day of tubing and drinking beer on the river. Little did I know, I would nearly drown in the rapids.” Krista Diamond offers further evidence of the inadvisability of going places and doing things
• Laser-driven fusion’s internal energies not matching up with predictions - ”There's a change in behavior when the plasma starts burning, and nobody knows why.” Have they tried turning the universe off and on again?
• The Map of the Universe - ”…from the Milky Way to the edge of what can be seen.” As Douglas Adam said, it's big
• The time Pepsi got sued for a $33m fighter jet - HT to ladymuck for this story, now adapted for television by Netflix: ”In 1996, Pepsi ran a promotion that jokingly suggested entrants could win a military aircraft. One man took it very seriously.”
• ‘Who remembers proper binmen?’ The nostalgia memes that help explain Britain today - and a HT to Doctor Strangelove for this examination of the phenomenon of nostalgia memes on social media: ”Idealising the past is nothing new, but there is something peculiarly revealing about the way a certain generation of Facebook users look back fondly on tougher times.”
• Drywall & Plasterboard Composition, tests, history - and finally, a HT to Paddy for this excellently niche topic: ”This article series discusses the identification and history of older interior building surface materials such plaster and lath, Beaverboard, and Drywall - materials that were used to form the (usually) non-structural surface of building interior ceilings and walls.”
• The story of Wallace Hartley, Titanic bandmaster - ”One of the most lingering images of the sinking of the Titanic is that of the band playing, regardless of their own safety, while all the lifeboats sailed away. All eight band members perished that night. Their leader was Wallace Hartley, who had not been famous, but had lived a life of relative obscurity, a life he had devoted to music.”
• Souvenirs of Climate Catastrophe - Anna Badken considers the future, if any: ”Contemplating relics of environmental catastrophe from the near and distant past, Anna Badkhen speaks to our present human story of despair, grief, and hope. As the Earth endures great change, she wonders: What markers will we leave behind?”
• How the First Transistor Worked - ”Even its inventors didn’t fully understand the point-contact transistor.” An interesting and surprisingly obscure bit of electronics history, often overshadowed by Shockley's invention of the junction transistor a year later.
• A 900-Page Pre-Pantone Guide to Color from 1692: A Complete Digital Scan - ”It’s arguable whether the world as we now see it would have been possible without monopolistic color systems like Pantone… These circumstances did not yet exist in 1692, when Dutch artist A. Boogert created a huge, almost 900-page book on color.” The complete online scan is at Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l'eau at the Bibliothèque Méjanes
  
  

Happy invoicing!