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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The character of Cameron Howe resonated with me greatly.
What a fantastic show.