The Friday Thing #678

Friday July 24th. Poof…..just like that, we’re almost in August. 

The Friday Thing #678 is a collection of things that have been bouncing around in my inbox and on my mind this week. Some of the things I really would love to share this week are internal projects we’ve been working on at Microsoft – and one or two may find their way externally at some point – but not quite yet. I will start with a shameless plug for a story we did share externally this week. Sunday marks the 30th anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act – the first-ever comprehensive civil rights legislation for people with disabilities passed in the United States – and in recognition and celebration of the occasion, we released an animated video series titled Simple Things Count. It features stories and wisdom from legendary activists like Senator Tom Harkin, Judy Heumann and Emily Ladau, along with Microsoft experts and advocates including Leah Katz-Hernandez, John Porter, Angela Hooker and Jessica Rafuse. I love these stories and admire the creativity to bring this to life in a period where video and photography is very hard to do. 

Next up is another loosely Microsoft related piece – an interview with my pal Chris Ashworth. A fellow scouser and Liverpool FC fan, Chris is a prolific designer who worked on the legendary Ray Gun magazine between 1992 and 2000 and has carved out his own style known as Swiss Grit. If you don’t follow him on Instagram, you really ought to….and likely will after reading Type-of-Graphic – Chris Ashworth's Swiss Grit. There’s lots of good advice from Chris in this interview and a good reminder for me to get back to analog a bit over the next month or so. It feeds the creative soul. 

Continuing the creativity theme, there are few people around as creative or innovative as Sir James Dyson, the British inventor and industrial designer. He famously came up with the Dyson cyclone vacuum after 5000+ failed prototypes and I think it’s fair to say he is now something of a success. He’s currently the Provost of the Royal College of Art and has an estimated net worth of over 16 billion pounds. He is testament to the notion that failure can be successful – if you’re dedicated. He set up the James Dyson Foundation in 2002 to support design and engineering education and this week I came across the “Challenge Cards” from their website. Perfect timing for a summer with kids the cards include challenges (and instructions) on topics such as ‘changing states’ (making an egg fit in to a bottle without breaking it) or ‘measuring the speed of light” (using chocolate and a microwave oven). Seriously….I worry a bit about my house over the next few weeks…but the kids are going to have a ton of fun. And a few adults too I bet. Check out the James Dyson Foundation Challenge Cards. 

Last up this week is a story that will appeal to many here – those who love technology for sure – and those who love writing. For the writers, check out this lede:

An extreme ultraviolet lithography machine is a technological marvel. A generator ejects 50,000 tiny droplets of molten tin per second. A high-powered laser blasts each droplet twice. The first shapes the tiny tin, so the second can vaporize it into plasma. The plasma emits extreme ultraviolet (EUV) radiation that is focused into a beam and bounced through a series of mirrors. The mirrors are so smooth that if expanded to the size of Germany they would not have a bump higher than a millimeter. Finally, the EUV beam hits a silicon wafer — itself a marvel of materials science — with a precision equivalent to shooting an arrow from Earth to hit an apple placed on the moon. This allows the EUV machine to draw transistors into the wafer with features measuring only five nanometers—approximately the length your fingernail grows in five seconds. This wafer with billions or trillions of transistors is eventually made into computer chips.

“Shooting an arrow from Earth to hit an apple placed on the moon” may be the best tech explanation I have read this year. And then the story itself is a fascinating deep dive in both EUV lithography and tensions between the United States and China. Check out The chip-making machine at the center of Chinese dual-use concerns. 

Something for everyone there I hope. For me, another weekend of great reading and riding ahead….albeit not at the same time.

Take care and have a great weekend.

-Steve