The other use of razor blades was of course the "fox hole radio" famously used by prisoners of war in WW2 to listen to the BBC - you can tickle the surface of a razor blade with a pencil lead to create a radio detector diode.
No cat's whiskers? No problem: use two razor blades instead.
Apart from being a touch on the dangerous side, this turns out to have other downsides. It's likely to create semiconducting junctions on both sides, or on the wrong side only, and this also greatly depends on the weight of the crystal.
It's a bit easier to swap crystals though, and rotating them to find good spots is simple enough.
More of a write up, and some curve plots from testing various minerals here:
https://cornish-semiconductor.com/index.php/Razor_blade_diode
"Humans are to blame for climate change".
Really? Is a Bangladeshi seamstress to blame? Is a street child from a Brazilian favela to blame? Or perhaps a subsistence fisherman from Somalia or an elderly tribeswoman from Papua New Guinea?
Some quite specific humans are to blame.
New release & free download!
Live at Pattern Club Sheffield
The live rig included the 1920s galena point contact diode in the circuit, probably quite close to where it was mined, so a sort of local guest collaborator along with all the Cornish minerals. I've also swapped to sterling silver cats whiskers, I *think* it works better than steel or copper, but I need to do some proper tests.
bandcamp: https://cornish-semiconductor.bandcamp.com/track/live-at-pattern-club-sheffield
archive.org: https://archive.org/details/cornish-semiconductor-corp-live-at-pattern-club-sheffield
soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/cornish_semiconductor/live-at-pattern-club-sheffield
Thanks to all at @patternclubsheffield
Photo credit Nik Nenov (cc-by-sa)
Happy solstice from my new little friend 💫
"The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb" – Marshall McLuhan
Another terrible AI-generated image of the gynaecological anatomy. It must be a day ending in a Y. Let's take a closer look at this wholly cursed illustration of a menstrual cup via @pzmyers
AI's #environmental #impact is no joke.
"By 2030, #AI infrastructure could generate up to 2.5 million metric tons of e-waste each year, roughly equivalent to discarding 250 Eiffel Towers annually" (page 13).
Roughly 50 pages on this very important matter by a team of reasearchers at the United Nations University:
Maintaining a project on microsoft/azure github seems as bad as maintaining a profile on X. Reputational damage for maintaining a github repo will hopefully catch up to reality soon.
It's bonkers that we let the free/open source community get so comprehensively captured by closed source, inhumane corporate tech.
If your community on there doesn't have an exit plan, it might be worth applying some pressure !
People tend to talk about large, unaccountable moments as a "choice for humanity". You see this a lot in nuclear weapons discourse. But humanity was never consulted. It was always out of reach of democratic control.
Musk is not a milestone for humanity. It's a moment of out-of-control institutional forces. It is an inducement for revolution. It is not a choice made by many but by a tiny few.
AI is like the millennium bug, but in some ways the inverse. Fixing the mess after the fact is going to take years, and ironically - employ a mass of people.
The first electrons passing over this 1920s galena diode for maybe a century, and I'm getting some great curves moving the point contact around. Top left is a fairly respectable (but leaky) approximation of a germanium diode.
They are similar to my diy results with galena, it's more stable, but still easily disrupted by knocks. I can see how using it in the radio must have been frustrating.
Next I'll see how this sounds in the resonant ladder filter. More info and photos here: https://cornish-semiconductor.com/index.php/Semiconductor_history
UK citizens: you can sign this petition by the Creators’ Rights Alliance, to force AI companies to reveal which copyright-protected data they're using to "train" their lie machines.
Finally got my hands on a point contact diode from a crystal radio, it seems to be (well tarnished) galena with a silver cat's whisker. It's 100 years old and a much better designed setup than my attempts at this.
A natural semiconductor from the 1920s that comes "concert tested" already!
Documenting some artifacts like this on the new wiki: https://cornish-semiconductor.com/index.php/Semiconductor_history
Had a nice bit of news lately that I can finally put on here - one of my prints has been longlisted for the World Illustration Awards in the editorial category :D I am baffled and confused but it seems to be real.
https://worldillustrationawards.com/projects/amber-griffiths-heavy-topics/
Cornish Semiconductor Corporation is now supported using public funding by Arts Council England. Dave got a Research and Development for individuals grant to make noise with mine waste.
More info here: https://thentrythis.org/projects/cornish-semiconductor-corporation/
And on the new project mini site here:
https://cornish-semiconductor.com/
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.
#AIEthics #WeDontNeedNoAIEthics #WeAintGotNoStinkeenAIEthics
Gig coming up on the 14th with some amazing people at the famous @patternclubsheffield
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/patternclub/2212197
The background photo is a new circuit for taming 4 Cornish crystal sounds, loosely based on the Buchla 'low pass gate' design from the 60's.
