181–190 of 204 posts
Interesting to some, YouTube force fed this video to me today after a seemingly unrelated video about Legos finished. It was a good story but I have to imagine the hacker news traffic may have had a significant effect on "the algorithm" as they call it.
Quoting several others here: “We have blue LEDs because one guy bet many years of his life on his ideas, against significant opposition.” This is great for us, but it’s important recognize the real cost of this success: probably hundreds, maybe thousands, of others also worked hard, and bet years of their lives, and… failed. In the words of Willy Wonka, they lost - they got nothing.
>maybe thousands, of others also worked hard, and bet years of their lives, and… failed.
For most of them it was not the lab where they were so hard at work.
Some of them bound to be conducting their financial survival activities working in places like fast-food companies, and worse in positions where they aren't allowed to even fix things like broken milkshake machines.
Far outnumbering the highly significant percentage of PhD's who are not gifted experimentalists but they are the ones hogging their share of equipment and facilities.
So a huge amount of expensive facilities don't do any good, and the vast majority of those ultimately capable of getting something out of it end up getting nothing done. Of the sort.
I remember when blue LEDs started appearing in guitar FX pedals just out of novelty,resulting in a pedals becoming harder to use as when the pedal was on the brightness meant visibility of the controls was reduced. On pedals I made I always used fine sandpaper to increase the diffusion of each LED, and the result was significantly better. Early blue LEDs,especially, seemed to have a very narrow projection angle.
I got a couple blue ones but never went back for more, stuck with green and red when I built something.
The blue came in handy for a musician who was legally blind though.
This was before commercial pedals had any blue, so it did get some attention.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I liked it, though it bugs me a little when people equate infrared and heat. Infrared is light. Light can heat things, and hot things can glow, but "infrared is heat" isn't exactly right.
I know basically nothing about physics, so sorry if this is a dumb question. The existence of infrared LEDs seems to indicate to me that infrared light can exist without heat. The existence of infrared thermometers seems to imply that hot stuff radiates infrared light, at least usually. So my question is, is there any case where heat does not cause infrared radiation? What are those cases? Some special materials? Spe…
That was a great story! We have the blue ones because one guy was willing to put it all on the line to get it done. Amazing so much hangs on just one of us sometimes. We also have it because the research scientist acquired real electromechanical skill. Most of the time those skills are not there and my mind is on fire thinking about what could be done, and done faster with that kind of know how more broadly distribut…
This is what made the white LED possible.
And as can be seen, not only incandescent but also LED lighting was only made possible when it was by truly Edisonian efforts.
>Anytime there is an opportunity to score inexpensive, relevant gear, they do it.
Up into the 1980's things were done a bit differently than they are now in industrial research when it comes to equipment.
For energy, well-funded places like Exxon and Shell would store and accumulate used equipment in surplus warehouses when they recommissioned laboratories or replaced individual gear with the latest & greatest. There it would age for 5 to 10 years on average before being tagged for discard.
The material was traditionally being held as a resource as in previous decades, when it was expected that principal investigators would look first in the vast storehouse for useful items before requisitioning & purchasing new equipment for their labs. But nobody was doing that any more, energy had skyrocketed in price and oil companies had plenty of money so they had only been buying new equipment for years.
These were big warehouses, but eventually they would fill up and stay full, and they needed to make room for more on a regular basis so things were auctioned off.
Cashthedayofthesaleasiswhereisnowarrantiesofany kind.
I ended up with a very small (carefully selected) fraction of what was passing through those warehouses, and it was still a nice multiple of the tonnage that any one PhD had at their disposal during an average career. A lot of them don't want to touch the equipment anyway, they make the interns do it. So it's not often the most scientifically advanced one in the lab leveraging their hands-on experience, and conversely seldom the most capable hands-on operator having their abilities leveraged most scientifically.
I collaborated with some of their people who would visit my lab at the time, plus non-research customers and there was nothing to be ashamed of using their second-hand equipment which still had inventory stickers from the original owners. I was constantly validating equal or superior performance to their own in-house work.
They would never think of using their own surplus equipment or even going down to the warehouse to see how much overwhelming tonnage there actually was.
It just wasn't done.
Which is why I was always baffled by the decorative lights in my old office. It was a wall with small scattered lights in different colors, so they used recessed LEDs. Fine. But instead of color LEDs with a neutral diffuser, it had red+green+blue triple LEDs to make white light, with a red/green/blue plastic in front to recolor it! I understand how this could be cheaper to assemble or maintain, but I'll never not bal…
The blue is nicer if you do that. Technology Connections has made 3 videos over the last 5 years mostly centering around how he hates the blue led lights used in holiday lights. I think I've only seen the 2 yr old one, but now that I have I can't unsee it. The blue is just too blue. If you see a set that is all blue instead of multi-color it's unbearable. It's just too blue. White light in blue plastic is where it's…
But anything blue always looks blurry unless I'm very close to it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A counter argument is that they paid his salary for all those years, they paid for his lab, for his machines etc. They don't owe him a job.
The late founder had supported the direction of the research. It's just that the new CEO does not have the same level of risk taking vision, and instead listened to prevailing experts on the direction. He had assumed that this lone researcher is just following a dead end. Childish behaviour aside, the conservative decision to cut costs and shut down the research is justifiable to some degree. The only problem is that…
The more statically intelligent investment is to support exploration of the less exhaustively searched path.
Assuming everything is reported fairly, I really can't imagine being Nichia's customer. Ever. Sacking and not compensating the employee that single-handedly made Nichia successful by inventing a working blue LED and saving Nichia from bankruptcy is just not acceptable.
Odds are good I've bought hundreds of consumer goods with Nichia LEDs in it without knowing, and I'll probably buy hundreds more.
(Not that I'm endorsing not caring, just pointing out how frustratingly hard it is to avoid giving money to companies like this.)
That was a great story! We have the blue ones because one guy was willing to put it all on the line to get it done. Amazing so much hangs on just one of us sometimes. We also have it because the research scientist acquired real electromechanical skill. Most of the time those skills are not there and my mind is on fire thinking about what could be done, and done faster with that kind of know how more broadly distribut…
Not just the blue LED. This is what made the white LED possible. And as can be seen, not only incandescent but also LED lighting was only made possible when it was by truly Edisonian efforts. >Anytime there is an opportunity to score inexpensive, relevant gear, they do it. Up into the 1980's things were done a bit differently than they are now in industrial research when it comes to equipment. For energy, well-funded…
>>The material was traditionally being held as a resource as in previous decades, when it was expected that principal investigators would look first in the vast storehouse for useful items before requisitioning & purchasing new equipment for their labs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would agree. Having said that I still think it was a bit wishy washy. The whole treatment of band gap energies I think is quite complicated beyond the simple diagram shown.
Also, I don't think the explanation for silicon was correct. As I understand it, the problem with Si is not that the bandgap is in the infrared, it's that it's an indirect bandgap semiconductor which suppresses emission of photons. Instead, the energy of recombination goes into heat.