- In the 1985 book *Big Score: The Billion-Dollar Story: The Billion-Dollar Story of Silicon Valley* there is a nice chapter talking about the manufacturing of integrated chips that explains how the process is (or at least used to be) very unpredictable and how it's basically astrology for the managers to try to predict and maximize the yield rates (the percentage of manufactured chips that function correctly). There were companies whose research showed the number of good chips correlated with the phases of the Moon, another one found that chips were destroyed by tiny droplets of piss on the hands of workers who didn't wash their hands and that [women](woman.md) workers during menstruation destroyed more chips because of the increased amount of oil secreted from their hands.
