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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Brian Skinner‏ @gravity_levity Dec 20
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      They just have tiling that is locally regular but has no long-range order, like Penrose tiles. (left: a real microscopy image. right: Penrose tiles)pic.twitter.com/Ijk21Ve6zL

      2 replies 7 retweets 27 likes
      Show this thread
    2. Brian Skinner‏ @gravity_levity Dec 20
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      All the quasicrystals we have found on earth are apparently meteorite fragments. If you ever want to hear an incredible, adventurous science talk, listen to Paul Steinhardt talk about leading an expedition into Kamchatka to find them:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srBjBiEGP7U …

      1 reply 2 retweets 21 likes
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    3. Brian Skinner‏ @gravity_levity Dec 20
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      39. Most materials expand in one direction when you compress them in a perpendicular direction. But AUXETICS are materials that either shrink or expand in both directions simultaneously. (In engineering terms, they have a negative "Poisson ratio")pic.twitter.com/taNnh5Txg7

      1 reply 2 retweets 15 likes
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    4. Brian Skinner‏ @gravity_levity Dec 20
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      There are lots of fun engineering examples of auxetics. But they also appear naturally. Here's one, for example ("cristobalite", a variant of quartz):pic.twitter.com/TUtpBkyh1a

      1 reply 0 retweets 7 likes
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    5. Brian Skinner‏ @gravity_levity Dec 20
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      40. OPTICAL METAMATERIALS are human-made materials in which a bunch of small electromagnetic resonators are arranged so that their interactions produce unusual behaviors of light (or EM waves in some band of frequency). For example, you can engineer negative index of refraction!pic.twitter.com/eEVbH6E53V

      1 reply 1 retweet 10 likes
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    6. Brian Skinner‏ @gravity_levity Dec 20
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      Brian Skinner Retweeted Brian Skinner

      41. There is a lot of excitement and mystery right now about SAMARIUM HEXABORIDE, which looks simultaneously like an insulator and a quantum metal, in ways that we are still grappling with. See this earlier thread: (https://twitter.com/gravity_levity/status/1179469564423225344 …)

      Brian Skinner added,

      Brian Skinner @gravity_levity
      30/30 Since this is a paper whose major point is mostly to rain on a fun quantum hype parade, I expect it to be essentially ignored.
      Show this thread
      3 replies 0 retweets 9 likes
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    7. Brian Skinner‏ @gravity_levity Dec 20
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      I think that I am out of time and energy now, and tired of spamming your timelines. So let's draw this thread to an END. Thank you all for coming along with me. It's been fun, and nothing at all like a systematic list of "the 100 most interesting materials".

      8 replies 0 retweets 31 likes
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    8. Brian Skinner‏ @gravity_levity Dec 20
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      @vgr I didn't get to 100, but this thread has at least 100 tweets in it and I am now reporting for debriefing

      2 replies 0 retweets 9 likes
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    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 20
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      Replying to @gravity_levity

      🏆🥇

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    10. Brian Skinner‏ @gravity_levity Dec 20
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      Replying to @vgr

      Woooo

      2 replies 0 retweets 1 like
      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 20
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      Replying to @gravity_levity

      Now I want to start my own museum of materials and buy a microscope to look at them with 🤔

      12:18 PM - 20 Dec 2020
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      • Brian Skinner
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        1. New conversation
        2. Brian Skinner‏ @gravity_levity Dec 20
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          Replying to @vgr

          If you ever get a chance to go to the Harvard museum, check out their minerology room. It's the best "shock and awe" display of materials that I've eve seen.

          1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 20
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          Replying to @gravity_levity

          Kinda hard to make a museum of though, since so many materials don’t have visually obvious interesting properties... I think I went to one where there were little balls of metals that all looked the same but you could lift them to feel the weight difference

          0 replies 0 retweets 1 like
        4. End of conversation

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