A billion digits of Pi – experiments in ultra-microprinting with gold on sapphire

You can print extremely tiny text using the same techniques that are used to make semiconductor chips. Like so tiny that you can fit one billion digits of Pi on a 5″ square plate…

You can’t see the digits because they so tiny, but they are all there (I’ve checked). 40,000 digits per row * 25,000 rows. So many tiny digits.

Here is what it looks like under a high-power 1000x microscope…

Here is the upper-left corner zoomed in all the way…

See the “3.1515…”? Each pixel in this 3×5 font is 750 nanometers x 750 nanometers. At the limits of visible light wavelengths.

If you use gold as the ink and sapphire as the paper it will also last for a very, very long time.

This was so cool we felt like we needed to do something cool with it (besides making silicon chips that no one will ever look at). So we teamed up with the cool people at CW&T (the cool pen type-B people) to make a cool pocket sized viewer for viewing these microprints. It looks like this…

Cool, right?

There is a kickstarter where you can get one. As soon as you back, you will get a link where you can upload your own tiny 500×500 image and pick where you want it to go. It is like a tiny gold-on-sapphire time capsule to preserve the 1,000 cool images from 1,000 cool people. You can see a live zoomable online version of the cool stuff the cool people have uploaded so far here…

https://pf.josh.com

If you want to be a part of this then back the kickstarter here (1 day left)…

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cwandt/pocket-fiche?ref=avhkql

If you want to buy one of the 1-billion-digit plates, leave a comment with your contact info (it will not be made public). We will probably charge $5,000 each (pretty cheap on a per-digit basis). Bring your own microscope (we can make recommendations, but it will not be cheap).

-josh

FAQ:

Q: Why?
A: We had to develop the lithology process to make semiconductor chips, and the tech is just so damn cool.

Q: But why Pi?
A: Because it doesn’t repeat, so it is *extremely* challenging. If you know what a GDS is and you are wondering how the hell this is possible, get in touch.

Q: But why gold and sapphire?
A: Pure gold does not oxidize and is resistant to almost all acids (but don’t dip it in iodine!), and it looks so cool. Pure sapphire has extremely high durability chemical stability, and it also looks so cool.

Q: Semiconductors?
A: Gotham Silicon is coming. But don’t tell anyone yet because it is a big secret.

Q: How did you make that cool viewer?
A: So cool, right?? Mostly leaflet JS, but with some tricks. Github here.

How to tie ourselves to the mast: The Persistent Charter

Here I propose a new type of US Federal enactment: The Persistent Charter.

It lives above statues and below constitutional amendments in both the superiority of force and how long it takes to enact/repeal. It would give the federal government a new way to tie itself to the mast, reducing uncertainty and smoothing out bumps in the positive law landscape.

Continue reading →

A utility to create a static HTML website from your Twitter posts

tldr; download your data archive file from x.com and then use this webpage to convert it to a static HTML website that you can host anywhere. Make sure you also move or copy the data/tweets_media folder from the archive to the same folder your you save new tweets.html file.

Check out my exported tweets page here to see what it looks like.

If you are not sure how or why you would do this…

Continue reading →

A pill that makes you sad and happy

Imagine a drug that makes you horribly nauseous and miserable for the first 59 minutes after you take it, but then makes you feel hedonistic bliss for a final 1 minute. The other effect of this drug is that during the those first 59 minutes, it blocks the transcription of long-term memories so that by the next day you only remember the final 1 minute.

  1. Assuming you did not know the full effect profile of this drug until after taking it the first time, would you expect yourself to take it a second time?
  2. Assuming you would decide not to take it a second time during the 12 hours while you still remember how horrible the first 59 minutes were, how would you prevent your future self who only remembers the bliss phase from taking the drug again?
  3. If you were King in the world where this drug existed, what policy measures (if any) would you enact to improve the welfare of your subjects’ interactions with this drug?
  4. If you were trapped on a deserted island with an inexhaustible supply of the drug and no way to prevent your future self from taking it each new day, would your subjective life be one of ecstasy or misery?