timelined

Yep, this is the "easy" way to chloride silver wires in the lab. I've chlorided silver wires by immersing part of the wire in bleach (regular household Clorox) and taping it in place so it sits for ~10-20 minutes.

Silver wire is pretty cheap online, so it's not too hard to get started.

This is a pretty good introduction. I highly recommend Feynman's book "QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter" as an excellent in-depth work that does not sacrifice accuracy for the sake of making difficult ideas understandable. It is both very clear to the layperson and accurate to the physics.

Computers were at the core of Jurassic Park. Remember, the novel was published in 1990.

Among other important uses:

* the widespread use of computers for nearly complete automation of the park--maintaining feeds (to a certain extent), automatically delivering medicine, etc. These systems were buggy, but it was a major early demonstration of how computers could be used to automate out many jobs.

* Think the Internet-of-Things but for tracking hundreds of dinosaurs in xyzt space around the park using image recognition from hundreds of distributed sensors/cameras around the park.

* They had several Cray XP supercomputers in order to help with DNA sequencing.

* Ian Malcolm studied chaos theory--a field that is reliant on numerical simulations (rather than pure pen-and-paper calculation).

As a slight spoiler to the book: human hubris in building incredibly complex biological systems under the control of relatively simple technological systems is what led to the downfall of the park.

Between Alamaden (San Jose) and Yorktown Heights (NY) in the US, IBM is one of the last few industrial basic sciences/engineering labs in the US, resembling Bell Labs and Xerox PARC from a few decades ago.

IBM/Intel/Samsung buy tools from various companies. By "tools", I really mean huge pieces of instrumentation that cost many (tens to hundreds) millions of dollars from other companies that are used for the various processing steps (deposition/growth of materials on wafers, patterning resists, etching, etc). The development of each of these tools is immensely difficult and challenging and making them talk to each other and designing manufacturing pipelines is another immense challenge. IBM/Intel/Samsung's job is to design chips (a immense challenge on its own), come up with a process to manufacture them, and then take each of these very complex tools, integrate them into a manufacturing pipeline (with QC), and manufacture the devices that they want.

IBM was one of the first big companies to develop/commercialize SOI technologies.

Certain parts of the cleanroom will look yellow--these are the spaces where they do lithography with resists that are openly accessible to the air. UV-sensitive resists will chemically crosslink in UV light, so they put on filters on the fluorescent lights (or use special lights) that keeps the wavelength away from the higher-energy blues and towards the lower-energy yellows and reds.

Yes, I was referring to Microsoft Office in the comment.

I've used LibreOffice for years while running Linux before. I noticed perfomance issues compared to Microsoft Office on Windows that were especially bad for spreadsheets.

I consider myself to be a power-user of MS Office. Last time I used LibreOffice, it did not have many of the features that I used extensively (especially in their PowerPoint analog). In addition, the interoperability between MS Office and LibreOffice was not great.

Lastly--there isn't an adequate OneNote replacement on Linux. Evernote doesn't cut it for me. This is really my killer app--if there was a good OneNote on Linux (non-browser, a native desktop app), I could deal with the other issues as they came up.

This is one step closer towards an effective full Office Suite on Linux, which I would be very happy about.

It is increasingly common for large labs in the life sciences (25+ members) to hire multiple support staff (with PhDs) to help offset this load. This is in addition to positions like Senior Research Scientists (senior postdocs) who often serve as 50% "project managers" and 50% independent postdocs.