Shri

I've been having fun on the fourth installment of the How The Heck series: How The Heck Do Solar Panels Work?

It's a topic I've always known about only at the highest level: the Sun shines light into a solar panel, it jiggles some silicon, and somehow that can power your home. That feeling of “huh, I wonder how that actually works” makes it a perfect candidate for this series of everyday tech explainers.

Tuning the bandgap — silicon, at 1.12 eV, captures 30.9% of the spectrum.

It's been a deeper rabbit hole than I imagined, and will likely be the longest piece in the series so far. I'm not particularly a physics/chemistry person (although I did minor in astronomy!), so I've read a lot of explanations and watched a lot of videos preparing this piece. I'm happy with how the interactive visuals are looking. On a technical level, I'm using almost every tool in the toolbox for this piece: Canvas, SVG, and ThreeJS.

Photons hitting the silicon lattice — ~33% captured, ~67% lost as heat.

I'm hoping to get this out into the world in the next week or two. Can't wait for you to see it!

— Shri

Rob

The paradox of the month is Jevons', where AI makes writing software easier and will thereby increase demand for it.

For me, the more relevant story is animation. When animators had to painstakingly draw every frame by hand, they made sure every frame mattered. It's only when frames got cheap that we end up with The Emoji Movie and a flood of low-intent productions. But at the same time, we also got Into the Spider-Verse.

Friction is an easy way to enforce intention. But it serves more as a blocker against low-quality work rather than a requirement for truly remarkable work.

I've found my own satisfaction is tied less to my productive output and more to the time I spend in good, deep thought. All the good stuff comes from solving the hard problems, obsessing over the details, making sure that the underside of the table is held to the same high standard as the top.

For my Heart Rate Index, the underside of my table was… a scorebug.

Chiefs–Rams — the second-highest-rated regular-season game on the Heart Rate Index. Click for the one that tops it.

A scorebug is the small thing at the bottom of the screen during a game. The score, the clock, the down & distance. Scorebugs have fascinated me for years. This is the first one I've built.

Here's the underside:

• The logos match the year of the game. A 2005 Chargers–Dolphins game gives you the marks both teams wore that year. Sports lives in nostalgia. The right logos help bring Drew Brees and Ronnie Brown back more viscerally.
• Four typefaces, four jobs. Instrument Serif for the score. Familjen Grotesk for the clock. Cormorant Garamond, italic, for the play. IBM Plex Mono for the probability. Some may call it unnecessary network load, but I call it hours well spent digging through fonts.
• Gradient washes on the top left and the top right, faint, biased toward each team. You almost cannot see them.
• And my favorite part, the matchup color algorithm. Consider the Giants and the Cowboys, who both have blue as their primary. Put two near-identical primaries side by side and the win-probability line becomes a one-color smear. If the RGB distance between primaries is too small, the algorithm tries every combination of each team's known colors and scores each pair. Three things go into the score. Euclidean distance, with diminishing returns so we don't over-reward extreme contrasts. A grayness penalty, which for Cowboys–Giants is why we prefer navy-red over silver-blue. And a secondary color penalty: a team-dependent tax for swapping away from the primary. The Saints pay heavily to leave their gold, the Ravens to leave their purple. The Broncos pay almost nothing — navy and orange both belong to Denver.

Chargers–Dolphins, in the marks both teams wore in 2005.

Giants–Cowboys — the algorithm at work past the same-blue smear.

Explore the Heart Rate Index →

I keep coming back to Seneca:

“You may say: ‘For what purpose did I learn all these things?’ But you need not fear that you have wasted your efforts; it was for yourself that you learned them.”

Does anyone else care?

I do.

That is enough.

— Rob

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