conductor
"If as a child he was impressed by the solitude of the conductor, standing alone in front of the orchestra, he now knows he's just a part of the whole. "Being a conductor is like being an architect: you need to be both an artist and engineer, while working in a highly social environment. A conductor must guide, form and let things happen. Magic can't be decided, you know. It depends on too many elements. But when it does happen, wow!"
"One of the things I find myself doing in Boston with my own orchestra is greeting people when they come into the hall,' he says. 'I'm just about to take them on an amazing journey so I should be there to welcome them. The music profession is very careless; the conductor is like the priest on Sunday - we are the holders of the sacred flame. We fall into the trap of becoming removed and aloof - that's exactly the opposite of what we should do"
"A conductor is like a mother. The attitude of a mother is the drive conductors must embrace. The society of an orchestra is really complex and delicate because all people have separate personalities as they play their instruments. They also all believe they are the best at their instrument."
" Leonard Slatkin, I think, said that being a conductor is like being a good driver. You have to understand what sort of vehicle you're driving. There are orchestras that are Maseratis: they are so precise, so tight on the steering, that if you pound on them like you're driving a Mack truck you're going to end up in a ditch. On the other hand, if you drive the Mack truck the way you're driving the Maserati, it's not going to turn. He said the Boston Symphony is a Rolls Royce: very elegant, very stately. The Cleveland Orchestra is a Maserati. They are so quick and exacting in their movements. And he said some orchestras are Mack trucks. There's nothing subtle about them but they get you where you want to go."
"Both the police service and any orchestra is managed top down. Police value a chain of command but so too do orchestras. The Conductor is like God and what he (usually a he) says goes and then the Concertmaster interprets this message and then the Section Leaders lead their sections accordingly"
"A conductor is like a head football coach," says Adam Dinitz, Solo English Hornist of the Houston Symphony. "Some teams respond to a mean coach who pushes them really hard and others do not. The orchestra, and our new maestro have a very similar approach to how he goes about getting what he wants out of the orchestra, and that is why we have such a great chemistry together."
"Here is another way to think about current flow. Its the "pipe and ball" analogy for conductors. A
conductor is like a pipe full of electrons. If an electron is pushed into one end of the pipe, another
electron must fall out at the other end. Think of electron flow through a wire as balls traveling through a pipe, not like an empty pipe that electrons "fall" through "
"Imagine that a semiconductor is like a cold pipe full of water. In its natural state, most of the water is frozen solid-only a little can flow-and the material is an insulator. However, if we raise the Fermi level, we melt the water so that it can flow. "
"A semiconductor is like a raisin cake, where the raisins give the cake the special flavor that makes it sell. By itself, a semiconductor can't really conduct electricity that well, but if you introduce impurities into it then those impurities turn it into a conductor. The impurities are called dopants, and electric current travels through doped silicon under the right conditions. Think of the dopant atoms as the raisins in the raisin cake, and the raw semiconductor material that's in between the dopant atoms as the cake in which the raisins sit."
Stained glass window creation:
1. Turn sand into glass
2. Add impurities to cause desirable properties (colors)
3. Cut and polish glass
4. Repeat as needed to build up final window parts from components
5. Dice and assemble with metal interconnects into final structure
6. Install into windows.
Semiconductor lithography:
1. Turn sand into glass(ish)
2. Add impurities to cause desirable properties (electrical)
3. Cut and polish wafer
4. Repeat as needed to build up to final wafer layer from components
5. Dice and assemble with metal interconnects into final structure
6. Install Windows.
Seems about the same.
"An intrinsic semiconductor crystal is like a sea with no air bubbles below the surface and no water droplets above the surface. A metal with conduction electrons is like a sea with no air bubbles but lots of sea spray far above the surface of the sea."
METAMIA is a free database of analogy and metaphor. Anyone can contribute or search. The subject matter can be anything. Science is popular, but poetry is encouraged. The goal is to integrate our fluid muses with the stark literalism of a relational database. Metamia is like a girdle for your muses, a cognitive girdle.