Cartoon characters may be hiding on your microchips

Chip designers have been secretly etching microscopic artwork on unused areas of mass-produced microchips. Drawings of Milhouse, Godzilla, and Mr. T, among others, appear on microchips commonly used in cell phones, computers, and many other electronic devices.

Chip art has been around for decades, but has remained unknown to virtually everyone besides the designers themselves because it’s too small to be seen without a microscope, and designers tend to keep such creations secret. Photographer Michael Davidson noticed the children’s book character “Waldo” hiding among the circuits of a microchip he was photographing under a microscope in 1998. Davidson made chip art better known after posting images of the artwork on his website.

The same technology that allows microchip manufacturers to etch intricate circuit patterns on the surface of a microchip allows them to draw sometimes equally intricate works of art on unused areas of those same microchips. Designers create the artwork just for fun, and as another way of “signing” their work besides the traditional etching of their initials. Images of the artwork can be seen online at www.micro.magnet.fsu.edu.

Hardy clock to outlast civilization

A US-based foundation is attempting to build a clock that will run accurately for 10,000 years, surviving any natural disasters that occur, and even a potential collapse of civilization to bronze-age conditions.

The Long Now Foundation, whose members include the former editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and composer/musician Brian Eno, hopes the project will counteract what it sees as the increasing pressure to focus on short-term goals due to “market-driven economics” and the “next-election perspective of democracies.”

The foundation purchased part of a Nevada mountain in 1999 as a potential site for the clock. The clock is still in its design stages, but a working prototype uses a torsion pendulum to set its basic pulse, swinging back and forth only once every thirty seconds. The final clock is supposed to be large enough to walk inside and maintainable with bronze-age technology, with temperature changes acting as a power source. The regular motion of the sun across the sky would be used as a backup reference pulse in case the clock drifts out of rhythm.

See www.longnow.org.