The ABQ Correspondent

THE ABQ CORRESPONDENT

ISSN 1087-2302 Online Edition Number 370.....October 2026

Published since 1985 for clients and contacts of ABQ Communications Corporation, the fuzzy focus of The ABQ Correspondent is "the impact of new technology on society." If you'd like to receive email notification when each monthly issue is posted, please let us know. correspo at swcp dot com

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MMMMM…MAYBE

The St. Louis PBS station recently ran a piece titled Meet huitlacoche, a gnarly corn fungus that's now gracing plates in St. Louis by Kate Grumke. In my sheltered life I had never encountered huitlacoche, and was repelled to discover that it’s better known in the US as “corn smut,” a sort of plant cancer…”uncontrolled growth of corn tissue”…considered a plague by Europe-oriented American farmers. (My French mother-in-law cooked brains in our house perhaps twice, and she and my wife enjoyed them, but the gagging reaction of our hamburger-and-potatoes-oriented kids prevented further experiments along those lines. No, none for me either, thank you, gastronomic coward that I am.) Actually, the idea of trying some hideously expensive corn smut improves on reading another article by Alejandre Graf, who sensibly refers to these things as “Mexican truffles.” Her instructions for preparation include unsettling lines like “cut away the huitlacoche galls”…galls?...and “don’t soak in water, as it can turn mushy.” Heaven forefend. I guess it really comes back to the term “smut.” Hard for us WASPs to cope with. Come to think on it, how did somebody figure out that parts of an artichoke are edible?

GRAND FINALE

Ondine steered us to a fascinating 55-minute video explaining in baby talk we can follow part of the stupefyingly complex process of manufacturing integrated circuit chips. I’d first learned about semiconductor chip production from an excellent article in Business Week in about 1958 when transistors were still novel.

This current video recalls an anecdote from what must have been 1968, when the lower San Francisco Peninsula was becoming Silicon Valley (though our house was in Sunnyvale, the Cupertino High School athletic field was over our back fence).

The electronics industry had just got beyond the stage of manufacturing discrete transistors, and was making rapid progress with integrated circuits. One of the leading companies in the field was having a problem so stressful that they were willing to try any desperate measure to fix it. Somehow they got an impression that our little company might be able to help, and we were invited to a meeting at which (with strong NDAs and threats in place) they showed us their super-secret final step in producing chips. These decades later, the NDA probably has little force, so here’s what they were doing:

Like everybody else, they first made a pure silicon wafer. At the time, a big wafer was about 2¼ inches in diameter. (The wafers in the video look to be about 10 inches in diameter.)

They coated the wafer with photoresist, and projected an image of the circuitry they wanted onto the wafer…typically neat rows of square images that became individual chips. After a series of miraculous high tech, precise operations, they had what amounted to a 2¼-inch piece of glass with hundreds of circuits printed on its surface. The remaining critical step was to break those individual circuits apart.

If you’ve ever cut a piece of glass into separate pieces…even with curved shapes…you’ve probably been surprised to learn that you’re not supposed to “cut” the glass with that odd instrument you bought at the hardware store, but to “scratch” the surface of the glass as lightly as possible, maintaining a continuous line from one edge of the glass to another. Then, you tap the glass lightly, and, if you’re lucky, the pieces on both sides of that scratch separate cleanly. It takes practice and some bleeding to learn the art of doing this consistently, and a skilled practitioner is impressive to watch.

Our hosts showed us how they did this with the wafers, First, they dragged a diamond with a sharp point along each row in each direction, making the scratches along which the wafer was to be broken. Then came the “tap”…and this was their big secret step after the many marvels of modern technology in the process that preceded it.

A technician placed the wafer on a piece of heated waxed paper, so that when the chips broke apart, they would stick to the paper without scattering.

Then she placed a resilient plastic hair curler on the bench, placed the wafer on the curler paper-side-up, and with her hand rolled the wafer firmly over the curler. Then she turned it 90°, and rolled it again.

We could hear the wafer breaking…but the second time, it sounded a bit different.

“Oh,” said the technician. “that wasn’t so good.”

When she showed us the chips sticking to the waxed paper, sure enough, most of them were separated properly, but the break had not followed the line completely on the second roll, and a depressingly large number of the chips were ruined.

The problem, they said, was that the diamond making the scratch sometimes bounced, making the scratch discontinuous. They hadn’t been able to prevent the bounce, and were hoping, because they’d heard we were etching images on a surface with a laser using sub- micron dots, we might be able to draw continuous scratches on the wafers. (Maybe, but it wasn’t a sure thing, and neither we nor they had budget for research.) We didn’t know offhand how to improve their yields.

They were happy enough to have all that spectacular technology funnel down to a clever lady with waxed paper and a hair curler, but the bouncing diamond was a real problem.

Big stuff depends on a lot of little stuff.

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NELS MUSES

Item:

There are continuing reports of positive effects of installing solar panels in fields on a large scale. Here’s an example of a technical paper on the subject. While there’s a certain amount of upset and arm-waving about “covering perfectly good agricultural land with ugly solar panels,” apparently, humidity is increased under the panels, enabling growth of plants, which may be desirable crops. Animals shelter under the panels, often grazing on those new plants. Solar panels have their own problems…notably dust that reduces their efficiency, but it isn’t all one way or the other.

Item:

We recently tipped our hat to associate/friend Jim Dowe. Might have included this: Jim and I talked so comfortably, that once (before boarding airplanes became such a complicated process) we were at LAX, at the gate, checked in to board our flight home to Albuquerque. We were chatting about something I now forget, and became so much involved in the conversation that we didn't notice that our flight had boarded everybody. The staff had probably looked for us, sitting not far from the gate, but with no response, had flown off without us. With no more flights open we had to spend an extra night in L.A., talking about interesting stuff. I'll miss fifty-some years of that.

Item:

The use of wind power (without conventional sails) to propel ships…not replacing other power plants, but substantially reducing fuel consumption, seems to be making economically practical progress. Here are several recent reports; This, this, this, and this. Kinda reassuring. _________________________________________

ITEM FROM THE PAST

This item from the poorly organized Correspo archives,

probably the late 1980s, seemed worth additional

commentary.

MANUFACTURED NEWS

When three Americans first crossed the Atlantic in a balloon, the trip was featured on the cover of every major journal in the world that week.* "Some think we were simply lucky to be associated with a project that just naturally attracted publicity," says Jim Mitchell, "but the luck was the product of years of hard work of which I'm rather proud." Jim was friend and PR man to late balloonist and mining executive Maxie Anderson, staging The Beryllium War of the early 60's, for example. (See LIFE and other magazines of the era.) "Some members of the launch crew were irritated by the constant presence of prying reporters," says Jim. "They made it clear that they'd prefer to launch secretly from a secluded meadow in the Maine woods, then make a brief announcement to the press in case the balloon happened to make it to France. Although Mr. Anderson never quite articulated the sentiment, my clear impression was that without reporters, there wouldn't be a launch at all. Publicity was not a price, but a goal." When you see other such examples of dumb luck, you may want to look a little closer, to learn whose work it is.

*Except, Ironically, for the New York Times,

whose staff was on strike.

Expanding a bit on The Beryllium War…Ranchers

Exploration and Development Company here in

Albuquerque (acquired by Hecla a couple of years

after Maxie’s death…falling from a balloon not

surprisingly) felt that mining giant Anaconda had

jumped some of little Ranchers’ claims, and they

wanted to do something about it. Jim Mitchell

suggested staging a very public event that would

attract a lot of attention, showing Ranchers as a

brave underdog taking on a big bully. He then

organized what became known as The Beryllium War,

sending in a number of trucks with crews and

materials to stake formal claims. “The laws said

that we couldn’t sneak into the disputed area

surreptitiously, and the place was full of Anaconda

guards,” he explained. “So, we lined up our trucks,

and one moment after sunrise had them roar into

the area. Every so many yards, we’d toss out shovels,

stakes, supplies, and a college kid who would

immediately drive the stakes officially, and start

digging to show that we were really mining.” The

Anaconda guys were properly surprised, but recovered

quickly, and fights broke out. One of the Ranchers

guys, having been hit improperly, he felt, crawled

under a stalled vehicle with a shovel, and waited until

guards walked by. He could swing the shovel outside

the vehicle, and did…breaking a knee or two. The

guards were armed, but intelligently did not throw

down on anybody. Instead, they fired at the engines of

the invading trucks. Jim had thoughtfully arranged to

have reporters there from major media. When one of

the guards shot a truck radiator, a media photographer

just missed the action. He asked the guard if he could

shoot again. The guy was happy to, and the photographer

got a beautiful picture of the guard, the gun, and a

delightful smoke ring. The picture appeared in some

publication like LIFE or Time.

The affair was a great success from Jim’s point of view.

He was pleased that when Anaconda and Ranchers

had a meeting to settle things, one of the key Anaconda

guys, on seeing him, said, “So you’re the guy who started

the war!”

…and you may have thought Public Relations wasn’t

really an exciting activity.

I knew Maxie slightly, through Jim, and liked him. That

picture of him must have been shot not long before his

fatal accident. He had a problem with a detached retina

and was wearing the eye patch the last time I saw him,

outside Little Anita’s restaurant in Old Town. (Be careful.

Sometimes the chile is very hot.)

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This book was written, richly illustrated, and published by excellent grandkid Malia. At 7 (gosh, twelve years ago) she was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes… suddenly, of course; “Get her to the hospital NOW!” and things have been nip and tuck since then with many scary crises. She’s taken control of her life…played and sang at Whisky A Go-Go on the Sunset Strip at 15, put out an album at 16, published this book at 17, and is off to college hundreds of miles from home. She has been videoed reading the book at a kids’ hospital, and every incoming T1D patient there from now on will see that video. Some of us are rather proud of her.

ISBN‎ 979-8320821917

See on Amazon

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