Two Soul Brothers Grow Naps on Silicon to Make Chips Cool

My headline is deliberately designed to sound like a caption for a racist Playboy cartoon from the 1970s. It sounds like skin-head fiction but actually its true: engadget.com starts with “Purdue’s carbon nanotubes could trump heat sinks,” introducing American-born Baratunde Aole Cola and Nigerian-born Placidus Amama. Baratunde might like my sense of humor here because he refers to himself as “the king” throughout his site—but Placidus might be a serious catholic, as, surely, his name comes from a devout reference to Saint Placidus.

But, gentlemen, my nap joke comes from divine science: as the curly hair, genotypic for many Africans, is designed to dissipate heat. Even when our hair is cut almost as clean as your hand the stubble certainly reminds me of the “forests of tiny cylinders called carbon nanotubes” covered oh so formally in “Nanotube forests grown on silicon chips for future computers, electronics” at physorg.com.

And my inane joking makes it difficult to remove the Blackness from this Western scientific progress. These two gentlemen are just another new millennium entry in the Ivan Van Sertima Journal, Blacks in Science: Ancient and Modern (Journal of African Civilizations ; Vol. 5, No. 1-2). They are just another happy few to add to the names mentioned by Russell de Pina in this little journal. Really, this “race thing” should not be such a big deal—okay so what about the business deal? What’s going to happen to these two and the possibility that all future computer chips will be significantly cooler because of their work? Here are my guesses (in order of increasing optimism):

• The Baratunde and Placidus cooling method may just one method of many. It may be politically expedient to use another method—even when it is known to be inferior.
• The other names listed as authors of the official findings published in the September 2007 issue of Nanotechnology simply push these two out of the picture. Note how the official news stories use words like “show” to describe what Baratunde and Placidus are doing—it may actually be legally improper to use words like “discover” or “invent.”
• These guys will actually do the macho thing and try to start their own company with a view to be institutional. Okay. Let Robert X. Cringely tell you about the ingenious technology of Burst.com and what the big mafia players did to them…
• Both of these guys will be paid incredible amounts of money to never attempt to take credit for their work ever again and they will be installed at some corporate vice-presidential gilded cage or some corner in a prestigious research facility. The idea behind this is that the marketplace is based on perception and computer chips known to be the Real McCoy may hurt sales.
• These guys will become tech gods outside of the United States and show leadership among the major players overseas. Some shiny buildings on some Siemens corporate campus will frame a statue and garden devoted to them. It’ll be like an Alexander Pushkin thing…

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