The best non-fiction book I have ever read is 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb'[1] by Richard Rhodes.
Fantastic early history of the people that eventually comprise the Manhattan Project. I feel any person who is interested in physics should read the book.
It is mindblowing the scale of the facilities that they had to build to generate a very small amount of the fissile material needed.
Strangely enough, I started on (a few times already) the second part, 'Dark Sun' [2], which is about the making of the Hydrogen Bomb focused on Edward Teller but I haven't been able to complete it yet.
I scrolled to find this and add my vote. 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb' is a daunting read, but it does a great job of tackling the physics, politics, project management, the difficulties, triumphs, and consequences of the bomb. I feel like reading it is part of what is necessary to understanding the 20th century.
I have been listening to Kai Ryssdal's Marketplace on NPR/KQED the last few days on my commute home from work.
The topic for the last several days was on the CHIPS And Science Act and the new Semiconductor Fabs being built by TSMC and Intel in Phoenx, AZ.
It will be several years before the plants already being constructed will go into production but there is a whole ecosystem of current construction, education of the future workforce that will need to be hired in the future. Not to mention all the ancilliary companies that are needed to support these gigantic plants in the area.
The dollars from CHIPS Act are not only bringing in the manufacturing plants but will be essential to bring this lost capability back to the US in the scale needed both from an economic and national security perspective.
It was great listening to the show and the impact the CHIPS Act on people's lives already happening now and in the future.
For anyone interested the links to the specific shows are available as podcasts here.
TSMC has moved many engineers from Taiwan to Phoenix. Entire towns were built with accomodation, schools, ethnic grocery stores from scratch. It would be interesting to see this initiative's cultural and economic impact on Phoenix in the years to come.
I’m not sure where “towns” (plural) are being built. The first plant is across the highway from a master planned community that was built 20 years ago, long before any fabs were being discussed in that area.
There certainly is a lot of development there, but it’s not like a factory town or anything.
There’s an outdoor recreational shooting facility across the street. I can only assume that is a huge culture shock for anyone coming over from Taiwan.
Honestly, this sounds like normal life being a junior employee at a big company. An ossified clique of old guard managers pick winners and losers with little regard for merit? Unbelievable bureaucratic overhead? Your boss expects you to flatter and fawn all over him because he allows you to work 50-60hrs a week at 80% the median salary without overtime pay? Sorry to say, this is just what they're all like. Do good work, make friends, and try to get a job at a small company where people treat each other decently and incompetents can't hide in the crowd.
I’m hugely supportive of the new factories and investments, but I’m curious why they decided on Phoenix which seems to be affected dramatically by climate change and incidentally has a very different climate and culture from Taiwan.
There are already a number of fabs there. Intel has a big presence. Government support, infranstructure and an experienced (although insufficient at this point) workforce are already there.
The reason there is a chip fab activity in Phoenix goes back to 1949 [0] when Motorola built a lab there. In 1952, they started making semiconductors and eventually chips.
I believe the new term for Phoenix, AZ and other major cities in AZ is "Silicon Desert". You can see a map of the many companies in the high tech space in AZ at the following site.
Major semiconductor manufacturing in Arizona is not exactly new: Motorola had fabs there in the 70s (or earlier?), Intel's presence dates to 1980, etc. The article [1] below from 2001 says that Arizona was "3rd in chipmaking"...
> With Taiwanese transplants moving to north Phoenix in droves, Arizona officials — and a local baker — are working behind the scenes to make them feel welcome
Could we say this is the "Manhattan or Apollo 11 Project for Chips"? For its articulation.
BTW, about this topic, I always recall "A View To Kill" James Bond's (1985) movie [1]. The top hit in the soundtrack from Duran Duran [2] is also recommended and playing in radios even today. Seems like Intel passed the torch long time ago but don't forget to read the mantra book: "Only the Paranoid Survive" [3].
The issue without outsourcing is that the benefits are widespread (lower prices!) but the drawbacks are concentrated (factory town is now a hellhole). And our political system is incapable of redistributing correctly even though the net effect is highly positive.
The seminal study on the topic is the "China shock" paper from Autor et Al.:
Strange, because put this way, it should be entirely positive - widespread benefits and concentrated drawbacks are what we want to happen, as it benefits more people and concentrated problems are much easier to manage. What's very bad is when benefits are concentrated (often in the hands of a small group), and drawbacks are widespread, and therefore near-impossible to manage. See e.g. pollution, emissions...
... and outsourcing. The benefits are concentrated: profits captured by the companies doing the outsourcing. Sure, they may sometimes trickle down to the consumer, but the costs - the distributed drawbacks - are inferior quality of goods, elimination of local jobs, high ecological footprint, abusive business practices, lack of effective customer support. And the extra magic here is, it spreads direct responsibility over national borders, so it's near-impossible to hold anyone to account.
I don’t know or understand this multiplier effect you’re referring to. If you’d like to persuade me (and I assume other readers) explaining your argument might be more effective. Instead I get a sense of “don’t argue against me” as opposed to “this is why I’m right”
Still have not answered my question. Why is lower prices better? Why would vastly higher consumption coupled with vastly decreased production be beneficial?
The show was talking about chip packaging companies to create the end usable chips from the silicon produced.
Just for the construction work alone, they mentioned that the pipefitters local union membership has doubled since 2020. Refinery level complexity on the specialized piping needs for the plants.
Special training programs geared towards the semiconductor industry being offered in the local Community and Trade schools training people to be the skilled and semi-skilled workforce for these companies.
People who were teachers now making four times the income working on the construction project.
Early in my career I once optimized an inherited 10,000+ line C program to less than 500 lines. It was a C program making SQL calls into a Sybase database.
No, not because I had some brilliant insight but for the simple assumption that my predecessor may not have been aware of how to write functions or use parameters to supply variable data to the SQL query. They had literally written the same SQL statement inline with a couple of changed values in each SQL call.
I just rewrote the code making the SQL call as a function call with bind variables as parameters into the function. All the replicated inline code was replaced with the function being called in a loop with the changed bind values supplied from an array.
I started out my computing journey on the ZX81 learning little BASIC programs. I graduated to a full color MSX Spectravideo [1] afterwards. I loved making little graphics programs and playing with the sound chip.
I wish I had seen the original articles in time to order one from the first batch. I am eager to order one when they decide to make another batch.
I wonder if anyone recalls the little worker robots in the 1972 movie "Silent Running". [1]
I don't know what it was about those fellows but I felt emotionally attached to them. It was not that they had any visible means of conveying emotions. They just went about their tasks quietly and diligently.
For some reason they pulled at my heart strings. It was quite heart wrenching to see them destroyed in the last part of the movie.
Even though NASA would likely have restablished connection with Voyager 2 sometime in October during the next pre-scheduled alignment window there would be an element of uncertainty about its health. However they have detected signs that the spacecraft is still functioning.
What an amazing project and a testament to the foresight to plan for such eventualities.
45 years in space and still working. That is just awe inspiring. Maybe it will be found and refitted by an alien civilization (see Star Trek: The Movie).
For those new to MicroPython or to the ESP8266 line of microprocessors here is a talk that I gave at a PyCaribbean conference in 2017. [1]
Its a bit long winded but I tried to touch upon everything that a new entrant to the space would want to know to start playing with the board immediately.
I am not a natural public speaker so please excuse my verbal (or other) tics.
I have also linked the presentation PDF. [2] You can scan the entire PDF in less than 10 minutes to get the gist of the 45 minute+ YouTube video.
Fantastic early history of the people that eventually comprise the Manhattan Project. I feel any person who is interested in physics should read the book.
It is mindblowing the scale of the facilities that they had to build to generate a very small amount of the fissile material needed.
Strangely enough, I started on (a few times already) the second part, 'Dark Sun' [2], which is about the making of the Hydrogen Bomb focused on Edward Teller but I haven't been able to complete it yet.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-Rhodes/dp/...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Sun-Making-Hydrogen-Bomb-ebook/d...
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