/synapse image credits
Every image on the Synapse posts is public domain or self-made. No exceptions (see the publishing rule: self-made or properly-licensed only, never textbook figures or paywalled screenshots).
Hero images live in assets/heroes/, one per post plus three for the landing pages, and
each doubles as that page’s og:image so a share card never falls back to nothing. They are
built by tools/gen-assets.py, which also renders the favicon set — run make assets after
adding a post. Two kinds:
<slug>.jpg— the post’s own lead photo, cropped to the hero aspect and re-encoded to JPEG (LinkedIn’s crawler does not reliably render the WebP originals). Same source, same licence as the in-post image; see the table below. Which post uses which is thePHOTO_HEROESmap in the script.<slug>.png— generated abstract art, own work, for posts whose imagery is diagrams or portraits that crop badly to a banner. Colour is derived from the post slug unless the post setshero_hue:in its frontmatter.
| File | Subject | Source | License |
|---|---|---|---|
| reef.jpg | Australian coast / Great Barrier Reef from orbit | NASA Goddard | PD (NASA) |
| crater-lake.jpg | Crater Lake in winter | US National Park Service | PD (US Gov) |
| hokusai-wave.jpg | The Great Wave off Kanagawa, c. 1831 | Katsushika Hokusai | PD (age) |
| lost-city.jpg | Lost City hydrothermal chimneys | NOAA Photo Library (expl1169) | PD (NOAA) |
| enceladus-plume.jpg | Enceladus backlit plumes along the tiger stripes, “Bursting at the Seams” (PIA11688) | NASA/JPL-Caltech, Cassini | PD (NASA) — corrected 2026-07-23: previously this file actually held PIA06443, an ice-grain-size spectral plot mislabeled “Enceladus Plume,” not a photo at all. Shared with the #4 post, so that post picked up the same fix automatically. |
| enceladus-prediction-timeline.svg | 1993 prediction → 2000/2017 confirmations timeline | self-made | own work |
| culture-iceberg-two-directions.svg | one culture iceberg read in two opposite directions (anthropology vs marketing) | self-made | own work |
| turing-nobel-convergence.svg | Simon and Hinton, two paradigms converging on “search under limits” | self-made | own work |
| iceberg-underside.webp | Arctic iceberg with underside exposed | AWeith, Wikimedia Commons (“Iceberg in the Arctic with its underside exposed”) | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
| herbert-simon.webp | Herbert Simon, photographic portrait | Rochester Institute of Technology, Wikimedia Commons (“Herbert Simon close-up (cropped)”) | PD (RIT/no notice) |
| hinton-nobel-2024.webp | Geoffrey Hinton at the 2024 Nobel lectures | Jay Dixit, Wikimedia Commons (“Geoffrey Hinton at the 2024 Nobel Lectures”) | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
| enceladus-tiger-stripes.webp | Close-up of the tiger stripe fractures themselves, July 14 2005 flyby (PIA06247, “Tiger Stripes Up Close”) | NASA/JPL-Caltech, Cassini | PD (NASA) |
| two-reframed-one-open.svg | Three questions about what life needs, tested against Enceladus: two reframed, one an open question (ocean age) | self-made | own work |
| three-theories-llm-test.svg | Three theories of disruption (Schumpeter, Christensen, Marketing/Rogers) tested against the frontier LLM: fits, doesn’t fit, fits | self-made | own work |
| gpu-useful-life-divergence.svg | Assumed server useful life at Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta, 2022 to 2026, showing the 1 Jan 2025 fork where Amazon shortened and Meta lengthened. Every value read directly from the firm’s own 10-K | self-made | own work |
| dating-isotope-halflives.svg | Half-lives of the five parent isotopes used for dating, on a log scale, split by which field uses which. Values from the NPS half-life table, except potassium-40 which uses the current 1.248 Bya figure rather than the older 1.31 carried by the textbook | self-made | own work |
| apollo11-two-answers.svg | The two Apollo 11 ages published in 1970 (crystalline rocks at 3.65 Bya by Rb-Sr, soil and breccia at 4.6 to 4.66 Bya) plotted against the 4.567 Bya age of the solar system, which the soil ages exceed | self-made | own work |
| little-ice-age-chronologies.svg | Published Little Ice Age chronologies (Owens et al. 2017; Miller et al. 2012) and Neukom et al. 2019’s regional coldest epochs, drawn on one linear time axis against the Maunder Minimum band of 1645 to 1715, showing that no chronology aligns with it and that northwestern Europe is the single overlapping region | self-made | own work |
| thames-freeze-confound.svg | The Thames freeze record (roughly 24 recorded winters, 1400 to 1831, with the six documented major frost fairs marked) against the lifetime of medieval Old London Bridge, 1209 to 1831, showing the record ending with the five-arch replacement. Fair years from the London Museum frost-fair record | self-made | own work |
| delaware-capital-chain.svg | The same three-step chain of money (the fund’s investors, the venture fund, the startup) drawn twice: as an LLC, income passes up to the investors, who owe US tax; as a C corporation, tax stops at the company. Mechanism per the Morgan Lewis VC/PE Funds Deskbook | self-made | own work |
| delaware-glossary.svg | Plain-English glossary card: C corporation, LLC, dividend, venture fund | self-made | own work |
| delaware-taxed-twice.svg | A dividend-paying company taxed twice ($100 profit, $21 at the 21% federal corporate rate, tax again on the $79 dividend) against a venture-backed startup taxed once on the sale of shares | self-made | own work |
| delaware-two-decisions.svg | “Delaware C corporation” split into its two halves: what the C corporation form buys (QSBS, tax stop for fund investors, stock) and what Delaware buys (the Court of Chancery) | self-made | own work |
| genome-sequencing-cost-curve.svg | NHGRI production cost per human-sized genome, 2001–May 2022, on a logarithmic scale; January 2008 platform transition marked. Drawn from the institute’s published 78-row spreadsheet, preserved locally as genome-sequencing-cost-nhgri.csv |
self-made from NHGRI public data | own chart; US government data |
| genome-sequencing-cost-curve-mobile.svg | Phone layout of the same 78-observation chart, with a simplified axis and separate value cards | self-made from NHGRI public data | own chart; US government data |
Originals and their full provenance live with the video episodes in ~/Works/synapse-video/episodes/*/PROVENANCE.md.