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So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.


The Profile


Zanzibar
Age. 39
Gender. Female
Ethnicity. that of my father and his father before him
Location Altadena, CA
School. Other
» More info.
The World









The Link To Zanzibar's Past
This is my page in the beloved art community that my sister got me into:

Samarinda

Extra points for people who know what Samarinda is.
The Phases of the Moon Module
CURRENT MOON
Croc Hunter/Combat Wombat
My hero(s)
Only My Favorite Baseball Player EVER


Aw, Larry Walker, how I loved thee.
The Schedule
M: Science and Exploration
T: Cook a nice dinner
W: PARKOUR!
Th: Parties, movies, dinners
F: Picnics, the Louvre
S: Read books, go for walks, PARKOUR
Su: Philosophy, Religion
The Reading List
This list starts Summer 2006
A Crocodile on the Sandbank
Looking Backwards
Wild Swans
Exodus
1984
Tales of the Alhambra (in progress)
Dark Lord of Derkholm
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The Lost Years of Merlin
Harry Potter a l'ecole des sorciers (in progress)
Atlas Shrugged (in progress)
Uglies
Pretties
Specials
A Long Way Gone (story of a boy soldier in Sierra Leone- met the author! w00t!)
The Eye of the World: Book One of the Wheel of Time
From Magma to Tephra (in progress)
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Harry Potter 7
The No. 1 Lady's Detective Agency
Introduction to Planetary Volcanism
A Child Called "It"
Pompeii
Is Multi-Culturalism Bad for Women?
Americans in Southeast Asia: Roots of Commitment (in progress)
What's So Great About Christianity?
Aeolian Geomorphology
Aeolian Dust and Dust Deposits
The City of Ember
The People of Sparks
Cube Route
When I was in Cuba, I was a German Shepard
Bound
The Golden Compass
Clan of the Cave Bear
The 9/11 Commission Report (2nd time through, graphic novel format this time, ip)
The Incredible Shrinking Man
Twilight
Eclipse
New Moon
Breaking Dawn
Armageddon's Children
The Elves of Cintra
The Gypsy Morph
Animorphs #23: The Pretender
Animorphs #25: The Extreme
Animorphs #26: The Attack
Crucial Conversations
A Journey to the Center of the Earth
A Great and Terrible Beauty
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Dandelion Wine
To Sir, With Love
London Calling
Watership Down
The Invisible
Alice in Wonderland
Through the Looking Glass
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The Host
The Hunger Games
Catching Fire
Shadows and Strongholds
The Jungle Book
Beatrice and Virgil
Infidel
Neuromancer
The Help
Flip
Zion Andrews
The Unit
Princess
Quantum Brain
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
No One Ever Told Us We Were Defeated
Delirium
Memento Nora
Robopocalypse
The Name of the Wind
The Terror
Sister
Tao Te Ching
What Paul Meant
Lao Tzu and Taoism
Libyan Sands
Sand and Sandstones
Lost Christianites: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
The Science of God
Calculating God
Great Contemporaries, by Winston Churchill
City of Bones
Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne
Divergent
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Old Man and the Sea
Flowers for Algernon
Au Bonheur des Ogres
The Martian
The Road to Serfdom
De La Terre � la Lune (ip)
In the Light of What We Know
Devil in the White City
2312
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Red Mars
How to Be a Good Wife
A Mote in God's Eye
A Gentleman in Russia
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
Seneca: Letters from a Stoic
The Juanes Module


Juanes just needed his own mod. Who can disagree.
A Computer Chip from A Butterfly's Wing
Thursday. 1.11.07 7:38 pm
So I was reading "Physics Today", but it was really "Physics Last October", since that's when the issue was from.

It was talking about photonic crystals. Photonic crystals are an awesome kind of structure where you build a lattice of molecules and you build it with exactly the right spacing so that the walls of the crystal are just as far apart as a particular wavelength of light. If this is the case, it will be difficult for that wavelength of light to propagate through the crystal, or it will only be able to propagate in certain directions, depending on the geometry of the crystal.

People started making these things back in the 1980s, and the ramifications are huge. If we were able to construct a nano crystal and design it so that you could control the flow of light through it (like today's wires control the flow of electrons in electrical applications) then we could send information at near light speed through a computer chip that would be smaller than any computer chip we have invented thus far. Your average fiber optic cable, now able to carry about 40 channels of information, would be able to carry something like 10,000.

As is often the case, no sooner did we develop this technology did we discover that the animal kingdom has been using the same technology for milennia. Photonic crystals make up the iridescence of many butterfly wings, the vibrant quality of a peacock feather, and the brilliant fluorescent light show of certain kinds of jelly-fish. The more equant types of photonic crystals are able to project the same light, no matter what angle the object is viewed. Other types of crystals, like those of the jellyfish, are parallelograms, and they reflect white light in one direction, and a rainbow light when viewed from another direction. The jellyfish can control which by moving its tentacles.

If you made a photograph out of these crystals, it would last forever, because while pigments fade over time, the crystals always channel light in the same way.

And creepiest of all... scientists have been working on making the perfect photonic crystals for decades, but it's really difficult. The crystals are tiny, and small defects can ruin everything. However, if you could decode the genome of a weevil or butterfly and find the gene that codes for the photonic crystals, you could adjust the genes of the creature so that they built the kind of photonic crystals you wanted. Not only would the DNA make it perfectly, if it did make a mistake, it had a self-correction mechanism. Not only that, but you wouldn't have to manufacture the photonic crystal chips... they would reproduce themselves.

So maybe you could get a computer chip by pulling the wings off butterflies....

Kind of makes you think differently about MSN's lovely BUTTERFLY LOGO, DOESN'T IT???????

Categories:

1 Comments.


When I was a little kid I used to pull the wings off of butterflies and put them into the "butterfly hotel"... a little structure made of twigs...

To this day I still view it as one of the horrors of my past.
» randomjunk on 2007-01-11 09:30:59

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