Authors Foone
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Everyone likes to forget this episode just because it's terrible, but we were really sleeping on inherent comedy in a unfreezing an investor 300 years in the future and having them discover we've transitioned to a moneyless post-scarcity utopia.
it's like a classic twilight zone episode.
in fact, it IS a twilight zone episode.
The Rip Van Winkle Caper, Season 2, episode 24.
Four criminals steal a million dollars of gold bars, then put themselves in suspended animation for a hundred years to hide from the law.
they wake up, then start killing each other from mistrust, then the last one dies in the desert, as he offers a gold bar to the driver of a passing car, asking for water and a ride into town
the confused driver walks back to his car with the bar, and his wife asks what the gold bar is.
he says something like "It's gold... they used to use this for money, before we figured out a way to manufacture it."
He tosses it away, and drives off.
— Star Trek Minus Context (@NoContextTrek) January 28, 2021
it's like a classic twilight zone episode.
in fact, it IS a twilight zone episode.
The Rip Van Winkle Caper, Season 2, episode 24.
Four criminals steal a million dollars of gold bars, then put themselves in suspended animation for a hundred years to hide from the law.
they wake up, then start killing each other from mistrust, then the last one dies in the desert, as he offers a gold bar to the driver of a passing car, asking for water and a ride into town
the confused driver walks back to his car with the bar, and his wife asks what the gold bar is.
he says something like "It's gold... they used to use this for money, before we figured out a way to manufacture it."
He tosses it away, and drives off.
A fun fact on the wikipedia page for the metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor:
it is the most frequently manufactured device in history, and the total number manufactured from 1960-2018 is 13 sextillion.
That's 13,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
Though this picture is a bit misleading.
Even with devices this small, we couldn't make 13 sextillion of them in 60 years.
So imagine a chip like this. It's the 555 timer, which is one of the most popular integrated circuits ever made.
In 2017, it was estimated a billion are made every year.
And at the heart of it is the die, which looks like this:
(from Ken Shirriff's blog)
https://t.co/mz5PQDjYqF
And that's fundamentally a bunch of CMOS transistors (along with some diodes and resistors), which are a type of MOSFET. How many of them are on a 555?
about 25. Not many, but it's a very simple chip.
it is the most frequently manufactured device in history, and the total number manufactured from 1960-2018 is 13 sextillion.
That's 13,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
Though this picture is a bit misleading.
Even with devices this small, we couldn't make 13 sextillion of them in 60 years.
So imagine a chip like this. It's the 555 timer, which is one of the most popular integrated circuits ever made.
In 2017, it was estimated a billion are made every year.
And at the heart of it is the die, which looks like this:
(from Ken Shirriff's blog)
https://t.co/mz5PQDjYqF
And that's fundamentally a bunch of CMOS transistors (along with some diodes and resistors), which are a type of MOSFET. How many of them are on a 555?
about 25. Not many, but it's a very simple chip.