Authentic Original

Do you have any real products, real originals, one off oil paintings or samurai swords? Do you own anything custom made that is unlike anything else? In todays 4IR era of mass produced goods does the concept of original even cease to have meaning? 

The Master Copy, the first one, the real original, not a print, not a duplicate, no injection moulded, I am talking about custom, one off, really authentic products, the production of expert craftsman. 

Higher cost, higher quality, heritage, legacy, durable, flavorful, historical, stronger, expertly made, hand crafted, high skill production, traditional manufacturing, making things the old better way to enhance flavor, aroma, surface finish, product longevity, the look or feel, the weight or mass of the product, think before plastic & polymer, thing wood, leather, metal & glass, premium materials made with the highest standards & best practices refined over centuries before computer & information technology, before the 20th century.

Traditional crafts like Japanese woodworking masterworks made without nail or screw or bolt, using sharp chisels to cut wood joints that expand & contract at the same rate such that some Japanese buildings made in the traditional woodworking way before power tools & metal jointing methods, made entirely of wood, that last centuries outside 24/7/365, getting wet & expanding, drying out & shrinking, no separation or dry rotting or splitting, just periodic staining or waxing for maintenance.

I am talking about high quality clothing made to last. Items that can be passed down from one generation to another, really well made, like some Toyota Vehicles that drive daily in the real world for 40+ years with basic oil changes, tire charge, brake services, belt & fluid changes, e.g. basic maintenance, with the original engine & transmission & transaxle, made with the highest quality that keeps going even if they are not maintained correctly. 

You are a genetic original, the product of sexual DNA random shuffle reproduction when your Mom & Dad's gametes fused (#biology)(#science)(#fact) to make your original cell, the first of many cells that end up composing your physical body, which is also made of 126 chemical elements from the environment, assembled by DNA & epigenetic information & conditions. Most of the elements in the human body were forged by gravitational fusion synthesis in stars much larger than the Sun, the closest star to planet Earth. We are literally made of recycled star dust! Each person unique & special & slightly different than everyone else. So you, the reader, are a 100% authentic original! 

I believe & have evidence to suggest that Toyota makes the highest quality automobiles, that last the longest, with the greatest reliability, durable & well made, such that production error minimized by exceptional continual quality control improvements at the design & manufacturing level! Any employee, even the lowest level employee on a Toyota production line can suggest an improvement to a manufacturing process. The team tries the suggested change & tests if its better, if the results show that the suggestion improves the quality of the production or solves a problems, then the newly suggested better improvement immediately adopted into the series production process. 

This means that small iterative continual tuning & improvements are made in the Toyota Way manufacturing, such that good quality control & quality analysis happening at every stage. Each Toyota production employee stretches before starting work, stays hydrated & given bathroom breaks to pee more accordingly. Toyota stops the line & gives people regular short breaks & lunch breaks & shift transition breaks, then ramps up production speed when the line operation to keep throughput excellence happening, even with the interruptions. I digress since Toyota makes vehicles by the million.

Not even a Rolex wrist watch classifies as a true original since they are made in series production, often by the thousands such that the prices do not reflect the costs of the materials or the overhead manufacturing costs & are inflated as luxury products where the cost only limits who can actually own a real Rolex in a world of ultra-real looking super clones. 

Not just Swiss luxury wrist watches that are cloned, many counterfeit items are produced as clones of real luxury products. Authorities in many countries crack down on this legally. I was talking with an EPA inspector who seized a shipment of "Yamaha motorcycles from China" at a import dock in California. He told me they had fake / empty catalytic converters. 

In the United States road legal vehicles with a fuel burning engine must be equipped with an oxygen sensor, EGR, air injection, CCV, catalytic converter, engine control module & related exhaust treatment technology that reduces toxic tailpipe emissions by 90% or more! Emissions controls like the catalytic converter convert toxic exhaust components like nitrogen dioxide into non-toxic nitrogen & oxygen gas, which as gases are the major constituents of Earth's atmosphere anyway. To review, air primarily consists of ~78 nitrogen with around 21% oxygen & 1% argon. 

Emissions control systems are expensive because of the high cost of a quality oxygen sense that coverts heat energy in the exhaust to DC current flow voltage so the ECU can use a formula to measure the exhaust gas temperature, in passenger cars with data from at least two O2 sensors, so as to vary the fuel injection pulse width to control the fuel air ration & vary the air to fuel ratio from lean to rich & back repeatedly during cold startup of the engine, so that the extra HC or hydrocarbon in the rich mix exhaust burns off in the catalytic converters ceramic honeycomb where that heat warms of the the platinum, rhodium, nickel, copper & gold oxides slurry coated as a thin layer onto the ceramic, such that exhaust gas flowing over these catalytic noble metals exchanges electrons to be reduced back into their bases elements, so that common pollutants like HC, NOX, SOX are catalytically reduced to non-toxic elements like and compounds like water vapor & CO2 respectively. 

Properly functioning vehicle emissions controls reduce acid rain, which improve aquatic health of organisms that live in bodies of water like lakes, rivers, streams & oceans. Emissions controls reduce air pollution & help to reduce corrosion to infrastructure & fouling of building materials. Simple carbureted engines without emissions controls emit 25X more soot & fumes & toxic air pollutants that are bad for public health. A typically gasoline fueled lawn motor engine for example, per gallon, emits 25x more air pollutants that passenger car from the same model year, since the car contains advance emission controls, fuel injection & the lawn mower does not! There are excellent battery electric lawn mowers with 3kw of performance from 60-200vdc lithium ion battery packs that work way better, weigh less & are less noisy & do not emit air pollutants, so unless your doing commercial landscaping work all day, every day, a battery electric lawn mower probably superior for homeowners! 

An oil painting from the artist, on canvas, that takes dozens to hundreds of hours to produce, larger works taking thousands of hours. A real original!

If you take an existing vehicle, and modify it by removing its drivetrain & replacing it with generators or turbine engines or electric motors & batteries, if you remove the original engine & transmission & install a custom kit made with power electrics or other engine technology, you are modifying a mass produced product into a custom tuned product, sorta like an original since it diverges significantly from what the manufacture made & sold! 

Energy Mass Paradox of chemical rocks such that if they are to contain more fuel & oxidizer, they become larger & heavier to a diminishing return point where it takes more propellent to launch the bigger rocket. In smaller applications, like my 23 lb (11kg) 2016 Segway miniPro for example, the 348WH lithium ion battery now only holds around 280WH, capacity fade from hundred of cycles & 6 + years of operating for more than 780 miles now; if I wanted to tap into the battery connection & dump 59.5vdc at 1-10 amps, so as to use an external battery generator or gasoline fueled generator to convert it into hybrid electric range extended operation, then I would be adding mass to the vehicle, which increases the vehicles energy consumer per unit of distance travel or reduces the vehicles operating energy efficiency. Given that 300WH lithium iron phosphate battery pack of about 10lbs or 4.5kg, can about double the range, that's not a huge mass penalty. 

I don't know of any low mass gasoline fueled generators with the correct voltage or power output that could be adapted for such use at low cost, considering that the vehicle is mostly depreciated & that anything more than 30% of the original purchase price of ~$1k in 2016 would not make fiscal sense. So the hard target for energy extension an portable external power generator supply that costs less than $300, that can be easily electrically connected to the Segway MP without reducing its water resistance or imposing a significant performance penalty. The battery generator in my backpack with a quick release electric cable connection seems like the most rational engineering adaptation solution at a feasible price point, but then again, does riding a vehicle without suspension for more than 3 hours at a time even make sense in the first place? 

Maybe it would make better sense to just get a battery rideable, or different one, like the Hiboy S2 Pro for $600. It has a 36v 11.6AH lithium ion battery & 500w brushless motor & can hit 19 mph (~30km/h) on flat ground with my 170lb body & non-aerodynamic clothing, backpack & gear! I did 6 miles last night with lots of flat out full throttle action, and drained the battery from 100 to 75%, so this kick scooter has enough range as a toy, but the lack of suspension up front, twitch steering with tons of vibration feedback into the handle-bars, think NVH or noise vibration and harshness, its not good for off-roading, riding in traffic on the street, its more like a bicycle that can be operating on the shoulder in the bike lanes on smooth paved trails, paths & roads. 

Every little bump translated to my hands through the front motor wheel assembly & up the stem into the grips. Thankfully it has cruise control so that if I hold the thumb throttle at the same speed for 5 seconds with that feature turned on by the smartphone App, then the unit holds that speed so I can hold the handlebars very loosely, to let them vibrate without translating that vibration to my wrists as much. I am almost 40 years old now so less vibration better. I wish it could climb hills better & had more power, but I wanted a unit that I could easily lift over my head and that Meg my lovely wife could safely lift into the back of a passenger car. 

At ~36lbs (~16kg) the Hiboy S2 Pro just low enough mass to make it safely liftable, so that I can carry it folded up concrete staircases, to bring it inside, to store it in the trunk of my car to transport it to a local with smooth trails & paths enable smooth travel on this underpowered vibrating twitchy electric kick scooter. It is also much harder to ride than the Segway self balancing scooter, such that if you let go of the handlebars even for a fraction of a second the steering will turn rapidly & cause a crash; that's why I mean by twitchy, the steering needs a damper & I will be investigating how to add some resistance to the steering to tighten it up. I also need to soften the rear suspension a bit since it cam overly stiff from the manufacturer. 

A real original product usually cost 3x+ more than a mass produced equivalent. Mass production leverages lower cost per unit volume manufacturing that wraps in the overhead costs of the production machinery, energy used to make the product & cost of human capital to design, sell, support & provide replacement parts & other services, over many units, such that the total cost per unit reaches a lower minimum & approaches the BOM or balance of materials & energy costs, in order to maximize profit. 

Companies that invest in high volume manufacturing have to produce at least 10,000 units to make high volume manufacturing feasible. The lowest production cost per unit made comes by making 10,000,000 units. Its at the 10 million unit scale of high volume production that the cost of each unit produced approaches the BOM. Apple works with contract manufacturing firms in China for example, to high volume make the iPhone, Air Pods, Apple Watches, iPads, MacBooks, iMacs & other designed in California & made in china products by Apple! Apple works with TSMC to make the chipsets for their latest information technology, and its at TSMC that we see the original masks for the ASLM EUV lithography machines. 

Silicon crystal being grown by the Czochralski method at Raytheon, 1956.
Induction heating coil visible with the end of the crystal just emerging from the melt.
The technician is measuring the temperature with an optical pyrometer.
The crystals produced by this early apparatus were only one inch in diameter.

Chips are made by several hundred automated processing stages applied to ion doped single crystal silicon wafers cut from enormous rods slowly extracted as the hod liquid poly-crystalline deposited onto the cold seed crystal being spun & retracted from the inert gas covered silicon smelting furnace. 

Watch this video of Chip Fab manufacturing, how computers chips are made https://youtu.be/13-JmHpCmNA

Silicon Boule Ingot

A 1mm diameter rod of pure silicon can lift a 350lb (600kg) boule ingot of single crystal silicon via the exceptional tensile strength, though crystallized silicon has a low elastic modulus or is very brittle & can crack like glass easily if mechanically impacted. 

These high precision inert smelting furnaces use the Czochralski method, Czochralski technique or Czochralski process, which can also be used to make large single crystals of semiconductor like germanium or gallium arsenide, metals such as palladium, platinum, silver & gold, to make salts thereof or synthetic gemstones. 

Named after genius Polish invented Jan Czochralski, who invented this material science in 1915 when investigating the crystallization rates of metals, accidentally dipping his ink-well pen into a small molten pot of tin on his desk, drawing a tin filament out upon removing his pen, analyzing it & discovering that a single crystal of tin had formed this way! 

In chip fabs, they buy wafer. At the wafer making factor, many of these special furnaces make large cylindrical single crystal ingots, known as boules, often single crystal icon widely utilized in the electronics industry to make semiconductor devices or integrated circuits. Lower defect density crystals can be achieved by the later Bridgeman-Stockbarger method. 

Even though we are entering the high K post silicon era, think germanium semiconductor chips, or silicon carbide & graphene chipsets, its obvious that silicon semiconductors will continue to enable IC innovation into the ultra-large-scale integration or ULSI system-on-a-chip future. Beyond 5nm, down to 4nm, 3nm, 2nm and 1nm, problems such as cross talk or signal noise from electrons leaking between transistors becomes problematic by degrading information quality in such chipsets. This is a major headache for increasing innovating at chip fabs so that future chips have better power efficiency. Perhaps the architecture needs a revolution. 

Maybe we can apply lessons from 3D printing to chip fabrication such that more 3D with different semiconductors, many more layers, chip-lets & SOC integration of many chipsets into one package, there are going to be ways to convert entire motherboards into a single chip, the only trace paths in & out are to pump the display or brain with imagery & sounds, for networking or IO input output signal processing, for DC electrical energy input, and thermal heatsink output to dump waste heat away from the transistors. 

Room temperature quantum computing with Q-bit processors poised to make all of this other technology completely obsolete in big data applications like cryptography, digital security, antivirus, secure transactions, blockchain ledgers, digital records, digital assets, digital rights management, in banking, finance, accounting, mortgages, auto loans, peer to peer payments, all sorts of emerging technology will leverage quantum computing to enhance network connected security. 

With todays networks & computer there is always a trade off between network speeds & security. Internet security also defined by the number of secure enclave encrypted layers, such that any internet connected information system can be hacked, but if they are many more encrypted layers, it makes it impractical for anyone other than a nation state funded hacking system to break into. The only really secure way to store information is offline, in devices that are not connected to the World Wide Web or internet, in paper copy, in climate controlled safes that are protected from natural hazard & disasters & man made physical attacks. Its so hard to make data last a long time. 

Magnetic drives & solid state drives can only store information for a few decades before noise from radiation and particles from space degrade the data. This is why the highest level classified information stored as physical documents in complicated heavy underground vaults in secrete locations with military guard protection 24/7/365! All the security in the world cannot save a country from economic changes.