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Slashback: Periodicity, Vacuum, Strength
Bratty kids get to sit near the volatile elements. Theodore Gray writes: "About a month ago there was a slashdot lively discussion about my wooden Periodic Table Table. A bunch of slashdot readers sent me elements for it: Thank you slashdot! Two people actually sent me free Ag and Pd, contrary to the jokes in the discussion. I decided the world could stand another periodic table website. Since all the eight dozen other periodic tables on the web have better reference information than mine, I used some Mathematica programs to generate links to many of them for each element. But my site is more beautiful. I'm going for science as art. Mine also has by far the best quality sample photos: High resolution, high quality macro shots of 89 samples so far."
Starts with a crank, too. ripaway writes "With all the recent stories about vaccuum tubes, I find it ironic that I stumbled on this today. Sterephile reports about the Panasonic CQ-TX5500D(link to Japanese site) car stereo that uses a vaccuum tube, with analog vu-meters. It also plays mp3 files 8-) Naturally, this is for the Japan market only."
Sounds like material for a Burning Man tent ... nm1m writes "A superstrong composite developed by Brigham Young University scientists and students has received financing for its first practical application -- mammoth wind turbine towers able to more than triple the electrical output of existing steel models. Read the story here."
We mentioned this interesting lattice-looking material a few weeks ago.
Sucking requires a context to be good or bad. Sun Tzu writes "After the recent discussion on bad software, how about a different reason for why software sucks? Maybe we programmers and users don't have it quite so bad after all."
That dadburn whippersnapper, why when I was a boy ... Junks Jerzey writes "I remember reading about Halcyon Days: Interviews with Classic Computer and Video Game Programmers five years ago in Wired News. Pretty cool stuff, with an introduction by some guy called John Romero. It was available for a long time as a commercial product that used HTML for formatting, but it's now completely online, as reported by the author."
.. and safe to have around, so long as you don't eat them (these ones are alpha emitters; alpha particles can't penetrate a sheet of paper). They're also unregulated (in retail quantities) so you don't have to get NRC approval to have them.
Polonium: You can buy photographic negative brushes that contain polonium, from good camera shops. The polonium gives off alpha particles that help to discharge static from the negatives as you brush them. $10-$20.
Americium: Smoke detectors contain Americium-241. A tiny speck of it is in the detector head -- the roughly cylindrical gizmo that looks like a stamped-metal flying saucer. $9
Uranium: pitchblende is comparatively easy to find, and of course the infamous 1970s Fiesta Ware is still to be found (though getting more difficult).
What's the difference between "mormon" and "latter day saint"? Is it simply a usage issue (aka, followers of Islam are Muslims, not Islams)? Is it an honorific type of deal? Is it simply a preference? What would John Smith or Brigham Young have referred to themselves as?
Anyhow, serious curiosity. Reply appreciated.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
This may be a little off topic, but Halcyon by Orbital is such an awesome, completely beautiful song.
The word Halcyon, if you care, refers to a hallucionigen(sp?) that was used as a pain medication in dentist's offices a long time ago, but turned out to be incredibly addictive. The song is about the Hartnoll brothers dealing with their mothers addiction.
I know, off topic, but if you've ever heard the song you'd agree with me, and the word is hardly common english, so I have to get my plugs in when I can.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
Don't forget tobacco. The tobacco plant likes to collect elements which tend to be radioactive (polonium in particular). Smoking a pack exposes you to more radiation than a chest x-ray.
Yes. Plenty.
The car radio was not invented with the transistor. Motorola, who was originally founded to make "Motor Victrolas", ie. car audio, branched into semiconductors almost as soon as it was seen that they had practical aspects in car radios.
In the beginning, car radios had tubes. Tubes require filament power as well as the power and B+ power. The parallel would be a transistor radio which needs a 9V battery (main power) to power the radio and a whole bunch of 1.5V D cells (filament power) to keep the transistors warm enough to work.
The filaments of appropriate tubes will run happily off 12V, but they still need something from about 90V to 250V for main power (known as B+ or plate supply). Back then, cars ran off 6V or 12V electrical systems, and this had to provide sufficient voltage for the radio. Before transistors and switching power supplies, there was only one way: the vibrator.
Sexual references aside, a vibrator is basically a relay wired to break its circuit when it's turned on. The raspy buzz chopped a circuit on and off, which made DC from the car's electrical system into a pulsetrain which drove a small transformer. The transformer stepped up the voltage and it was rectified in the usual way for the era: a small recifier tube. Of course, this was highly inefficient and noisy.
Never mind that the car radio would take several amps while it was on, and these were in the days before alternators. Less efficient generators and battery technology meant that leaving the radio on for too long while in traffic would run down the battery to the point where the ignition system stopped - and so did you.
Durability was another issue. Tubes are held in their sockets by friction, and would have a tendency to vibrate out of their sockets, making the radio fail. The "loctal" base was invented to deal with this. It was a base design where the tube's keyway was notched and would hold the tube with a spring on the base. They're a pain in the ass since they always corrode in the locked position and you often break the tube trying to get it out of the socket.
Tubes are basically light bulbs with a whole bunch of closely-spaced wires, grids and sheetmetal electrodes. If they move relative to each other, the electrical characteristics of the tube change - and therefore so does the behavior of the radio. This effect is called "microphonics". Not to mention vibration fatigue causing shorts, cracked glass and vacuum loss, etc. Tubes don't like vibrations. If don't believe me, hit your monitor a few times.
While I love tubes, a car stereo is about the last place they belong.
On this site you can see what a 1930s car radio looked like. Note that the radio was too large to fit in the dashboard and often ended up in the passenger's footwell. A "control head" was a set of remote volume and tuning knobs on the dashboard; they were usually connected by a cable arrangement similar to speedometer or bicycle brake cables.
Background? I collect and restore antique TV sets and 1960s/1970s musclecars. Lots of my friends are into 1930s and 1940s cars, and often get me to fix their vintage tube car radios so that the full experience of driving a car of that era can be preserved.
Sterephile reports about the Panasonic CQ-TX5500D(link to Japanese site) car stereo that uses a vaccuum tube, with analog vu-meters. It also plays mp3 files 8-) Naturally, this is for the Japan market only."Even with a modern DC-DC converter powering the B+ circuit, what a profoundly stupid idea.
While I really like the fact that it plays MP3s, this is just more stuff for homiez with gold chains, small cars, and smaller penises.
Can't wait until "Da Bass" people get their hands on this. A car stereo which can bounce quarters on the roof of the car will be more than sufficient to make the tube microphonic. Feedback between the subs and the tube will result in blown subs, toasted amplifiers, and no more din of license plates rattling on every rusting 1984 Prelude at every traffic light.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I found a basket full of buggers out of a few old TV sets on a friend's property last week. They tend to weather the elements pretty well.
Sadly, TV tubes don't tend to be very valuable. With the number of 6GH8As that I have, one would think that I should be a millionaire, but most people don't need a bandpass amplifier for a 1960s color TV.
I've grabbed a few tubes out of the backs of radios, TVs and industrial equipment I've found mostly in (primarily) automotive junkyards. Usually the type number is washed off the glass, making the tube nearly useless. If you can tell a triode from a pentode by looking through the glass, you can make guesses and then careful analysis on the tube tester, but that assumes the tube was good to begin with.
Only TV tube I've ever got like that which was useful and rare enough to warrant the effort was a 6BK4. Fortunately, those are pretty easy to spot through the glass, it looks like a death ray in there. (High voltage triode, designed as a shunt regulator in early (late 1950s) color TV sets.)
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
iD is a great example of a company which knows how to please it's target audience.
Simply put, their products work well, and they sell well. They sell well; other game developers notice this, and they license their technology.
They please the geeks by releasing linux versions of their products, as well as releasing source code to their old engines which no longer pull in any cash for the company (after all, what good IS the source doing on a dusty pile of old disks in the closet?). They also release game sources for mod developers and such: once again, they help themselves by helping others, but they aren't loosing anything by doing this (have ANY 3rd-party games incorporated the QuakeII engine since the release of the QuakeIII engine?) This generates a highly positive image for the company.
Now only if they could please the overprotective parents!
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Jello?
How about White Supremacy, forced tithing (paycheck withholding; mandatory in Utah), Brigham Young's declaration of war against the US, the Meadows Mountain Massacre (look it up), and special Government-Issued underwear?
"Jello"?
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
The problems with this statement are going to be tough to clear up for those just joining the Mormon debates. When Joseph Smith died, he threw the proverbial boquet into the drunken bridesmaid horde. He never left clear instructions on who was to succeed him, and he had a tendency to make crazy promises to keep people happy. In short, there were about ten people who thought they should lead the Church, each with their own valid claims of authority (see "Origins of Power," by D. Michael Quinn).
Brigham Young just happened to be really charismatic, and got the majority of the early Mormons to accept his authority above other claimants (Sidney Rigdon, James Strang, Samuel Smith, Joseph Smith III). The victors rewrote the history books to demonstrate their legitimacy.
If you want a truly unambiguous name, call yourself the Brighamites. Each of the other splinter groups (gun-toting polygamists included) have every bit as much right to call themselves Mormons/Latter-day Saints as Brigham Young's followers do.
Yes, Mormon was a real person. And the Native Americans really are dark-skinned Jews, and the early inhabitants of this continent really did use steel in large quantities, and really raised cattle and corn and wheat, and really rode horses into battle. The fact that there's no more archaeological evidence for any of these cultural items shouldn't unsettle you. After all, you have a testimony.
According to the Articles of Faith (also LDS scripture), Mormons believe the Bible to be the Word of God insofar as it has been translated correctly. But Mormons also believe that the modern Bible was so thoroughly mangled by "wicked and corrupt priests" that the Bible actually became a stumbling block to those who wanted to find God. Smith made numerous revisions to the Bible to make it more theologically acceptable to him (and included a prophecy of his own birth). Of course, none of these revisions match up with the earliest copies of the books of the Bible.
As a die-hard atheist, I could really care less. But Mormons get a lot of flack from mainstream Christians for minimizing the differences between themselves and traditional Christianity, especially when they smell a conversion.
Oh, the Book of Abraham--purported to have been the writings of Abraham, the Patriarch of Israel--were really an Egyptian funeral book called "The Book of Breathings," written for a man named Horus. Joseph Smith got suckered, and so did his (now 12,000,000 strong) flock.
Polygamy was actually discontinued less than 100 years ago, in 1905. Mormons generally claim that the practice ended in 1890, but plural marriages were still being approved by the President of the Church and other apostles for fifteen years afterwards. Finally, with the second Manifesto, the Church got serious. Now they don't even allow plural marriage in areas of the world where it's legal.
To make things more complicated, Mormons still believe in polygamy in the afterlife. A widower can choose to be married to a second woman "for eternity" without affecting his marriage to his first wife.
Correction: Tom Green has nothing to do with the clean-cut young men on bicycles, the pretty white buildings you see from the freeway, the 2002 Winter Olympics, the commercials on TV for a free Bible, or anything else put out by the Corporation of the President. But in their zeal to distance themselves from polygamy, your presidency ignores the fact that early LDS theology left the door wide open for the Tom Greens of the world. The word "Mormon" can and does encompass all the supposedly illegitimate splinter groups.
The basic feeling of the Corporate Church towards the term "Mormons" is as follows: You can't use it to refer to us. You can't use it to refer to anybody else. They've tried some laughable PR blitzes to change the common usage, and it's never worked.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!