Boffins claim to create the world's first wooden transistor Talk about branching out: Swedish researchers have built what they claim is the world's first wooden transistor. In a recent paper [PDF], researchers from Sweden's Linköping University and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology say they've managed to build a working gate transistor shaped like a "T" from three pieces of balsa …
I went for an interview at Nokia in Linköping many years ago. It was the most desolate place I’ve ever been to. I remember the taxi ride from the airport (think Postman Pat kind of scale) to the Nokia office. At one point, I wondered if I was going to be murdered as we travelled along an utterly empty road into what seemed boundless wilderness; just endless pine forests and grasslands. Eventually the Nokia office appeared in the middle of bugger-all anywhere. And I remember thinking the inside of it was just like an Ikea showroom :-)
Years later, some Swedish colleagues tried to convince me that Linköping was actually a really buzzing place. Clearly my taxi driver managed to avoid all the sights and fun!
And no, I didn’t get the job but I wouldn’t have accepted it anyway - just too isolated for me.
If you want a desolate taxi ride from the airport, might I suggest the one into Reykjavík from the airport at Keflavík. Most of what you'll be driving past will be mile upon mile of volcanic tephra, although you will at one point pass an Iceland store, which I believe is one of a handful actually in Iceland.
Oh, and get the bus rather than a taxi, unless you're rolling in cash...
The keyboard was wooden
The screen was wooden
The motherboard was wooden
The processor was wooden
The memory was wooden
The hard drive was wooden
The operating system was wooden
...
It wooden work
<walks away singing "I talks to the trees, that's why they put me away">
Why? For what purpose wood you make a wooden transistor? It's not like there is a shortage of silicon. There's a shortage of engineers and they are making a wooden transistor wtf. Tell me it has nothing to do with the balsa it's just the chemical process that makes it interesting/useful? There has to be more to this??
And here we have it, the inevitable, "why do fundamental research" post.
Fundamental science isn't about applications, it is entirely about providing a foundation for further research, and applications down the line.
The whole purpose is to advance human knowledge, the usefulness of that knowledge is a value judgement.
So what if there's a shortage of engineers, this isn't engineering. That argument is like saying I shouldn't work in software because there's a shortage of care home staff.
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Yes, as long as the station you're listening to broadcasts on a frequency of 0.2Hz or lower: in other words, the 1,500,000,000 meter band.
Building the antenna will be fun. A quarter-wave stretching from the earth to the moon should be about right.
A quarter-wave stretching from the earth to the moon should be about right.
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