WingNews logo WingNews
top | item 45949326

Britney Spears' Guide to Semiconductor Physics (2000)

286 points| lachlan_gray | 3 months ago |britneyspears.ac

87 comments

order

AlbertoGP|3 months ago

Around the time this website was made, I was building an application for a big company in Spain that was to run as a Java applet and required the code to be signed.

They did not yet have their own certificates so I had to make my own CA during testing and sign the code, and I wanted to make sure that they did not forget to switch to their certificates later, so instead of signing the code with my name which some bureaucrat might decide to not bother changing, the code was signed by Britney Spears.

They noticed it, got the joke and made sure to switch certificates for the release. Everything went well thanks to Britney.

varenc|3 months ago

Love the old internet feel to the site.

You can see it's been basically unchanged for 25 years! Here's the 2001 snapshot from the wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20010202180000/https://britneysp...

Just keeping any site functional and up for so long is impressive by itself.

userbinator|3 months ago

It's only impressive if you've become accustomed to the unfortunate trend of forced obsolescence and the desire of many to justify useless recurring "maintenance" busywork. Basic HTML and CSS will always work.

junon|3 months ago

I love the idea of this but the mention of Hedy Lamarr could be confused as parody too when she was in fact an incredibly intelligent engineer and physicist.

Anyway it reminds me of the deep fake of Kim K and Nicki Minaj explaining subnetting: https://youtu.be/KcgyGYTnk4M?feature=shared

ekropotin|3 months ago

Dexter Holland from the Offspring, the punk band I was obsessed about during my childhood, has PhD in molecular biology.

I thought this thread is a good place to share this fact.

Hoasi|3 months ago

> I love the idea of this but the mention of Hedy Lamarr could be confused as parody too

Exactly, that was a bit puzzling.

AdmiralAsshat|3 months ago

Meanwhile Dolph Lundgren has an actual MA in Chemical Engineering. It's a pity we can't get him to do something like this in earnest to teach engineering concepts.

Guestmodinfo|3 months ago

From Wikipedia "...Lundgren received a degree in chemical engineering from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in the early 1980s and a master's degree in chemical engineering from the University of Sydney in 1982...."

Excerpt from https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/remarkable-rise-dolph-lundgren/ "....As a result, he was awarded a full ride to the world-renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Fulbright Scholar..."

The above Wikipedia article says Dolph quit studying at MIT after two weeks for acting career.

andrehacker|3 months ago

Brian May (Queen) has a PhD degree in astrophysics :)

leeoniya|3 months ago

and Mayim Bialik holds a neuroscience PhD

skopje|3 months ago

MA is master of art according to google. MSc seems right.

exabrial|3 months ago

The old Internet was so fricken cool before we allowed monopolies.

bigfishrunning|3 months ago

Nothing stops people from continuing to put up fun stuff like this; not everything has to be on X or Facebook

DeathArrow|3 months ago

There must be Mia Khalifa's Guide to Rocket Science somewhere on the Internet.

JSR_FDED|3 months ago

I was crushed when I saw the site needed Flash.

embedding-shape|3 months ago

And also Java in the browser for the (presumed) awesome chat, provided the surely still amazing freejavachat.com

philipwhiuk|3 months ago

Author briefly/currently worked in SEO as a result.

captn3m0|3 months ago

I thought .ac was the Academic TLD, and was wondering how this domain was registered, but it is just a ccTLD (2 letter, so has to be). .ac just happens to be the academic second level TLD of choice for many countries.

Apparently, you could have gotten a .edu before 2001 without being an accredited institution in the US.

modeless|3 months ago

From the same era of the internet I recall a site called the "Large Hardon Collider" making fun of the very common subtle typo. IIRC it had a light blue background and crude (in more ways than one) pencil diagrams. I can't find it now and I wonder if anyone else remembers it?

caliweed|3 months ago

"In the last section, we looked at the p-n junction. More efficient recombination of electron-hole pairs can be acheived by incorporation of a thin layer of semiconductor material, either p or n type semiconductor with a smaller energy gap than the cladding layers, to form a double heterostructure. (More on this in the future). As the active layer thickness in a double heterostructure becomes close to the De-Broglie wavelength (about 10nm for semiconductor laser devices) quantum effects become apparent."

Are you playing with my heart?

opan|3 months ago

The picture on the front page reminds me of the Why's Poignant guide to Ruby, specifically it had a picture of a baby shouting some Ruby code.

kopirgan|3 months ago

Not sure if this is a tribute to great women ( like Lamarr) that were entertainers and brilliant in science or a parody of them!

fnands|3 months ago

Blast from the past.

I remember landing on this site when studying for my undergrad solid state physics exams.

amelius|3 months ago

I don't see much connection here between miss BS and semiconductor physics.

It's just a physics book that happens to have pictures of the popstar in it.

conception|3 months ago

It’s a 25 year old joke. It was a simpler time.

shermantanktop|3 months ago

A joke is like a soap bubble. The act of explaining a joke pops it and reveals it to have no substance.

The essence of humor is simply surprise. Once the surprise is gone, or if it never was surprising, it seems flat or silly.

Some people enjoy humor with deeper meaning, and explaining that meaning might be illuminating. But that’s lipstick on a duck.

sheepscreek|3 months ago

Autistic me wanted to half believe it. You don’t get any cookies for bursting my bubble :(

Dilettante_|3 months ago

Non-sequitur humor was the style at the time.

neilv|3 months ago

Before anyone has a lighthearted Sunday night moment of humor sharing: you probably don't want to link to this site in your employer's Slack watercooler channel.

Different people might deconstruct the humor of the site's gimmick different ways. Some innocuous, some not.

But no need to do any literary analysis and critical thinking this time, because...

Today most people will immediately realize that something like the "Booble" search form on that page is probably a bad idea for a welcoming modern work environment.

(Related: for the same less-welcoming reason, it's maybe not a great idea on HN.)