Slashback: Periodicity, Vacuum, Strength

Slashback's updates tonight (below) bring you more information on chemically interesting furniture, old-school electronics in new-tech devices, and Brigham Young's ultra-strong building materials. Welcome to the home, car and wind-farm of the future, please mind your step.

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."

Comments

The Reason Software Sucks:

[Skyshadow]

There's a really simple reason why Software Sucks:

Software development is driven by clueless pointy-hairs, overreaching sales guys who make baseless promises and people who've never had a single software development class or written a single line of code

I realized this at my last company -- I was in a high enough staff position to see the whole tragedy unfold. Features were driven by what the sales team promised, deadlines by what was written into contracts without development's input, and product managers would bypass the release process and give customers internal test versions of the software. The developers were simply issued marching orders and then ignored.

I believe this is the way most crappy software comes about, regardless of how obvious this process is.

Of course, leave it to the geeks and you'll get Mozilla (good, solid, standards-compliant and really, really late). There's a balance between shipping decent software and shipping a product in time to stay alive as a company. id Software has this balance, ION Storm certainly did not.

Rant over. Please go about your business.

Slightly OT: Programming and Artwork...

[NanoGator]

"People are understandably reluctant to add real engineering discipline to software development..."

I found this 'alternative reason to why software sucks...' to be true with 3D Animation as well.

As a hobby, I assist people entering into the world of 3D art. My goal is to teach them professional methods to achieve their goals. What I've found interesting, though, is that a lot of them are reluctant to actually design what it is they are building or animating.

With new recruits, I can almost never get them to actually sit down with some paper and design the robot they want to build, for example. What they try to do is just sit down and build it. I'll hear stuff like "Oh I can't draw...", or "It's faster if I just sit down and build it. I know what I want it to look like."

The results? Well, the models they invent are ... well.. ameteurish. But when they make a model that they have lots of reference of, like the starship Enterprise for example, then they look top notch. Even presented with such a startling comparison, they still refuse to do the design work. Why? Because it adds overhead to their project.

I really think what happens is that they have in inaccurate impression of what being a 3D artist really entails. This is similar to what Ray said in his post about why software sucks. The sad thing is that until they start taking approaches like designing your model, they'll always look like a 3D newb.

Is there a solution? Well, I have an idea as to how to help both the 3D Artists and the Programmers out there: Make it clear that there is more to their job than just poking keys. I had no idea what all a Software Engineer (I used to call them Programmers...) did until I got a job at a software company. I had the impression in my mind that all they did was write code. The thought of them doing things like 'designing the UI' was alien to me.

Heck, before I got a job doing 3D, I thought all I had to do was build a model as fast as I possibly could. I expected they'd give me 3 days to do what would normally take me a week. I had no idea that they'd actually give me time to design and understand my model before building it. I spent over a year trying to be faster in LW, only to find that faster isn't what they wanted.

In short, I think it's very important to alter the perception out there about what a job really entails. If somebody aspiring to be a programmer knows that they need to pay attention to design and UI, then they'll be far more observant about those aspects during their education. If I had known how much learning to draw would help me with my 3D work, I would have done a lot more drawing exercises in high school.

Vacuum Tubes in Cars - Car Radios in the 1940s.

[BigBlockMopar]

Has this been done before? Any comments on ruggedization?

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.

1. Tubes don't like vibrations. Putting tubes into cars is like putting a hard disk drive into a hardware store paint mixer. If they were really concerned about sound quality, they wouldn't put tubes there.
2. Lightbulbs always burn out when you turn them on or off. So do tube filaments. Count how many times you started your car today. The tube won't last long.
3. It's for use in a *car*. I love cars. And I love audio. But a car is a resonant steel can. You cannot change its nature and have it remain a car. Therefore, good sound in a car is not possible. You can have good sound, or a good car, but not good sound *in* a car. I will, however, concede that there is such thing as good sound *for* a car, ie. given the limitations of the venue. But the limiting factor there remains the venue - the car, not the fact that your preamplifier doesn't use Mullard 12AX7s. That's kinda like putting a 3" exhaust tip on your Honda Civic's 1" diameter engine-to-tailpipe exhaust system and somehow thinking that you've reduced the restriction.

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.

Re:In short, yes (mostly)

[An Onerous Coward]

"The official name of the church is "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints"."

And the prepositional mangling begins.

What's worse, there are several groups that claim to be "Mormons" - most notably the "Reformed LDS Church" and the polygamists [4] in southern Utah (who I think call themselves "Fundamentalist Mormons", or something like that) - who have little to do with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. For the most part these other "Mormon" churches are splinter groups formed by people who left the church (or were kicked out) because they felt that they should be leading the flock instead of the current Presidency. The legitimate leaders are understandably anxious to make a clear distinction between the real LDS church and the others that call themselves "Mormons".

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.

[2] Mormon was a real person, a prophet-historian who compiled the Book of Mormon. It's his book, so it's named after him.

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.

[3] We recognize the Bible as scripture, too. There are also a couple of other books of scripture that we use: the Doctrine and Covenants records revelations given to Joseph Smith, the first prophet of the latter days; and the Pearl of Great Price, which records revelations recived by Moses and Abraham, found and translated by Joseph Smith.

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.

[4] Polygamy used to be practiced by the LDS church, but was discontinued about 150 years ago. Anyone church member who practices it modernly is promptly excommunicated. So Tom Green, on trial for various sex crimes against one of his underage wives has nothing whatever to do with the LDS church, regardless of how much he may protest that he is a "Mormon".

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.