For example: where would you start designing the circuit I mentioned above (a simple blinking LED) using stuff from this book? I don't mean searching for ready circuits online or something like that, but doing this yourself with stuff you learned from the book.
At that level, the Forrest Mims books that others have linked to would be the right choice. AoE was written for practicing scientists and grad students -- in other words, for people in other scientific fields besides electronics. It is not the most approachable book for a beginner, especially if you don't have people around that you can bug with questions.
If you have no idea how circuits work, it is unlikely that you will get any usable results from a simulation program. You really need some practical knowledge first.
You'd probably be surprised. LTSpice is the greatest learning tool since... well, since books.
In addition to simulating circuits, it also simulates test equipment very effectively.
The evolution of the standard atomic model is a perfect illustration of how the scientific process is one of continuous refinement. You can use it to introduce the idea that the Universe doesn't owe us an explanation of itself, and how there will never be a time of genuine "enlightenment" when we can stop asking questions.
It's a good way to give the kid antibodies against superstition and mysticism, in other words. "No, we don't really understand what stuff is really made from. Nobody does... not yet. But people know a lot more about it than they did I was your age, and we can do a lot of cool stuff with the knowledge we have."
This reference was the one I had in mind when I wrote that post. My point stands: if even one other person understands your work, or is as close behind you as Planck was to Einstein, you aren't as indispensable as you think you are.
Certified Geniuses are not a rare species nowadays, and they're cheaper to hire by the dozen. The work of a truly-gifted explainer and "popularizer" is more important than any one individual's research contributions, in the long run.
This isn't an attempt to disparage Wheeler or offend any C.G. candidates, it's just a simple statement of fact.
What might follow is arguments of who is more important, the man who discovers this science or the man who makes it easily accessible and digestible by a vast majority of the five billion simpletons living on the earth?
Regardless what the objective answer to that turns out to be, elitism isn't healthy. Those 5E9 simpletons -- or at least the ones in the US, Europe, and Russia -- are the ones who pay for all the expensive research toys like the LHC. I think the most important role of a Hawking or a Sagan is to help explain what the "simpletons" are getting for their money.
Put another way: no matter how "smart" you are, you can be replaced. Some bored kid, somewhere, will gladly do your job, and probably for fun. Everybody knows about the rivalry between Newton and Leibniz, right? If one of them had been run over by a bus^H^H^H horse, it would've been a shame, but we'd still be where we are today, give or take a few years. Even work as apparently-revolutionary as Einstein's early stuff was more a synthesis of current ideas than anything truly new.
But if you're a good "explainer," you really are indispensible. By educating, challenging, and inspiring the tax base, those guys and gals make everybody else's work possible. And by making tedious fields of study seem romantic and boundless, they recruit future generations of researchers, some of whom will make a real difference.
Right now, every technical field from physics to biology to space science is suffering these days for want of more Sagans and Hawkings. It was not only petty and lame for your professor to criticize Hawking for being a "pop physicist," but it was out-and-out counterproductive.
My results show a temporary increase (lasting around 15-20 minutes) in violent behavior after playing a selection of video games with varying types of violence. Some of these are first person shooters, some are fighting games, etc.
And your control group included kids running around outside playing Cowboys & Indians and Cops & Robbers, too... right?
I doubt the Doppler calculations are off, but those calculations are entirely dependent on the onboard timebase standards. If the probe is moving, say, 10 km/sec relative to Earth, then the stated measurement accuracy of 0.1 mm/sec requires 1E-8 precision. The best quartz oscillators are good for about that much drift per year, but that's on Earth, at 1g and STP. Maybe the master clocks are behaving anomalously after a decade in space. I'd be more inclined to suspect an unknown quartz aging phenomenon than a change in some fundamental physical constant.
Didn't RTFA yet, but maybe some of the probes have rubidium standards onboard. If two different timekeeping technologies show a similar error, that would be a lot more interesting...
Admittedly, I don't run Vista myself, so I can only relay what others have said. Another poster above gave some pretty clear instructions, though (quoting):
1) Turn off indexing.
2) Right-click on the task bar, choose Properties, switch to the "Start Menu" tab, click on "Customize" to the right of the Start Menu radio button at the top of the dialog box, scroll down and make sure "Search Files" is checked, and "Search this user's Files" is checked.
3) Launch ProcExp from System Internals. Double-click on the Explorer process and switch to the threads tab.
4) Open the start menu and start typing in the search box - you will see one thread at full usage for each character that you type.
Having apparently overlooked step 1) above, I'm guessing you didn't actually try any of the others. The assumption of user inexperience is another mistake on your part, one of rather-amusing magnitude and no small irony.
Nice rant, though! Keep it up; good for the blood pressure.
... came from another fellow in the office who shall remain nameless:
In XP, I always shut off all the indexing crap because it's slow and unpredictable. The searches are slower, but at least you know when things are slow. So, we do the same thing on (other colleague)'s computer, but it is running Vista.
Now, first thing, in Vista, by default, there is no "Run Program". In Vista, if you pop open the start menu and start typing, it "searches" for what you typed. You can turn on searching for favorites, programs, and finally, search the index, or search the drive. By default, "seach the drive" is off, and everything else is on. But when you turn off indexing, it flips the option from search the index to search the drive.
So, now, when you search for something in that window, the drive grinds away looking for what you searched for. Now, somewhere along the time, the smart people at Microsoft said, why don't we start searching for what they are typing, _as they are typing it_, so that by the time they press enter, we are closer to the results.
That means, when (colleague) was trying to run Zoomin to debug a rendering issue, he typed Z..o... and the background thread started searching... the entire disc. But now, that's just the first two letters, so now (colleague) types the second "o" and it starts another background search... of the entire disk. BUT IT LETS THE ORIGINAL THREAD continue to run! So, how you have two threads both searching your entire drive (contents, mind you, not just file names). But let's continue with "min.exe". Yup, you now have 8 different threads all scanning your entire fucking drive, and the machine is fucking melting. Thank goodness (colleague) has an 8-way box and Zoomin.exe is only 8 searches, or this might have been a bad decision on Microsoft's part.
And now the drive is crying out for mercy, but it's kind of hard to tell, because drives are so quiet now-a-days, right? So, all (colleague) notices is that the fan in the computer has sped up. So, he presses enter to execute Zoomin. BUT EVEN WHEN YOU RUN THE APP AND EXIT THE MENU, they don't shut down the threads!! They continue running with absolutely no way to show the user the results anyway because the window is closed!
Now, his rendering code is running like shit, because 99% of the machine is now searching for "zo", "zoo", "zoom", "zoomi", "zoomin", "zoomin.", "zoomin.e", "zoomin.ex", and finally"zoomin.exe". And with all of the threads simulataneously hitting the disc, it takes like 5 minutes for them to exit!
I suggested that they probably cap the max threads to the number of CPUs in the machine... Ooooooh no!! If you just keeping hitting letters, it just merrily keeps adding threads. I creamed his machine by typing "zoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo".
Fucking awesome!
Oh yeah, one other cool thing, if you backspace, it starts a new thread for the shorter string. WHICH IS ALREADY BEING SEARCHED FOR ON ANOTHER THREAD! So, Zoom launchs five threads.
Sweet action!
So where does Microsoft even go to find programmers this stupid? Elbonia? How do you screw up an operating system this badly and still make money with it?
Who is hurt more from retaliatory feedback, the honest seller making their living on eBay who has 10000 feedback or the honest buyer with under 100 feedback who is retaliated against by a bad seller?
The seller.
If you're a buyer, your feedback is almost completely irrelevant. If you're a seller, it is quite important. That's why the feedback system needs to be weighted in favor of sellers; they're the only ones with anything at stake.
The new policy, which prevents sellers from warning other sellers about problematic buyers, is not a good move for anyone. For eBay, every solution to every problem seems to involve a reduction in transparency and accountability. This is really just another example.
How does it dick over the sellers to not be able to retaliate? TFS says they're going to replace it with other steps for seller protection, so I think you're venturing into hyperbole territory.
For one thing, I can't afford to offer a return policy anymore, because the buyer has no incentive not to abuse it. Previously, I could leave neutral feedback to the "Gee, I changed my mind," types and negative feedback to the "Gee, it didn't work when I took it out of the box (because I swapped out a part that I needed to fix my other one)" folks.
There is a lot that an unethical buyer, or a just-plain-stupid one, can do to make an honest seller's life rough. As usual, eBay's attempt at addressing one problem has created several others.
Perhaps that inspiration went the other way? Or is your date off?
Nope; that's the original "Iolo." He's been making crossbows since the early 80s at least, but I didn't meet him until 1987-1988. Good to see he's still in business (going by the link in the other post.)
That looked a lot like the handmade crossbows fabricated by "Iolo the Bard," a well-known SCA figure in Austin circa 1990 (and inspiration for the character of Iolo in the Ultima games.)
Iolo's bows weren't made to be competitive with modern polonium-doped nanocrystalline bolt launchers or whatever, but to recall the craft of medieval weaponsmiths. Still more than enough to shoot your eye out with.
I agree with the other poster who suggested that these LCDs are coming to police riot shields near you. That's just too cool an idea to pass up. Shove enough images of flowers and frolicking puppies in their faces, and the Black Bloc crowd will surrender without a fight, right?
Well, it might have been insightful, but it certainly wasn't right. Surf through eBay's electronic components and equipment categories sometime, and if you don't come away with more cool ideas for stuff to build than you will ever live to try, you're not much of a hacker.
Sure, the barriers to entry are high if you want to mess with FPGAs or do microwave engineering in your garage, but at least it's possible for you to do that kind of thing if you want. There are probably a hundred times more opportunities open to the hardcore amateur electronics buff nowadays than there were in Woz's day. You can bitch and moan all you want about how "hard" it is, but I can remember when a 6502 was a pretty intimidating thing to deal with, too.
I've been reading Philip Ball's (excellent) biography of Paracelsus, The Devil's Doctor, and he describes this phenomenon to a 'T'. Apparently, it was common for medieval physicians to work hand-in-hand with apothecaries, prescribing drugs whose principal healing attribute (besides being poisonous as hell, most likely) was how expensive they were. The more the patient had to pay, the more likely the drug would help him.
Homeopathy is interesting from a historical standpoint, because it's really the only semi-mainstream form of quackery to have survived the fall of the alchemical age.
That's nothing. A few years ago, Charles Schwab once "gave" me $63,000,000 and change. I hit F5, and there was another transaction removing the funds. Made for an interesting 20 seconds.
Well, sure. The point being, the standing waves are by no means necessary to cook the food. If you could generate the same power level without them, you certainly would prefer to do it that way, just to avoid hot spots.
On the other hand, an appropriate load for the magnetron is necessary, so the Mythbusters experiment the other poster mentioned proves essentially nothing.
Try it with a bar of chocolate sometime. Heat it for a bit and measure the distance between soft spots. It'll be the wavelength you calculated.
Something tells me the velocity factor of chocolate isn't exactly 1.0. Have you actually tried this experiment?
Also if you like, nab an old microwave and rip out the magnetron, see if you can get water to boil with it.
That's an impedance-matching issue. The magnetron feed is designed to deliver maximum power to a particular load. The dimensions of the cavity, as well as its contents, will determine the (complex) impedance the magnetron sees. I imagine that when you run the tube with no cavity at all, you're just not giving it a load it can work with. Most of the input power ends up being dissipated in the tube's internal elements when that happens, and in fact, the tube may not be willing to draw much power at all under those conditions. Regardless of what looks good on Mythbusters, you can't make meaningful RF measurements this way.
Microwaves rely on the concept of standing waves to operate.
Doesn't seem likely. If you actually wanted your TV dinner cooked with a combination of bubbling-hot and frozen-solid spots, then yes, you would want to apply standing waves. Instead, the ideal cavity for cooking food would be a reflective one whose dimensions had no fixed relationship at all to the wavelength.
Microwave ovens often use mechanical stirrers, analogous to fan blades that scatter the radiation around in the cavity, precisely to avoid standing waves.
Microsoft probably violates more software patents than Linux. Shall we start a web page listing patents that/.-ers believe M$ violates? It might be useful one day, if M$ goes all legal on us.
With enough eyes, all patent violations are visible. Chances are, many large companies that hold patents that MS infringes upon don't even know the infringement is happening. If users were to discover and publicly document a few thousand tidbits such as, "Windows Vista's user-account control database clearly violates IBM's patent 1,559,664 of June 29, 1997," why, companies like IBM would almost be obliged to sue MS for damages.
I like this idea a lot. It's elegant as hell, because it takes advantage of the fact that Microsoft has more to lose than anyone from software patents.
Which is funded by Congress. The school administration does not have the right to censor Wikipedia, for the same reason they do not have the right to organize prayer services.
Take your own advice, and maybe a night school class on Constitutional law.
Also another interesting bit of trivia: the three terminal transistor was discovered *before* the two terminal diode.
Well, not really. The first three-terminal transistor was probably a crude FET built in the 1920s by Lilienfeld. And the first practical diodes would have been the cat's-whisker detectors used around the turn of the century in early radio work.
Shockley's post-Bell Labs work was notable, but none of it was anywhere near as critical to the Valley's development as the founding of HP or even Apple Computer.
Are the later episodes still chopped to 4:3, though? I don't mind a few compression artifacts now and then, but paying 100% of the price for 75% of the picture is not my idea of a bargain.
Slashdot Mirror
For example: where would you start designing the circuit I mentioned above (a simple blinking LED) using stuff from this book? I don't mean searching for ready circuits online or something like that, but doing this yourself with stuff you learned from the book.
At that level, the Forrest Mims books that others have linked to would be the right choice. AoE was written for practicing scientists and grad students -- in other words, for people in other scientific fields besides electronics. It is not the most approachable book for a beginner, especially if you don't have people around that you can bug with questions.
If you have no idea how circuits work, it is unlikely that you will get any usable results from a simulation program. You really need some practical knowledge first.
You'd probably be surprised. LTSpice is the greatest learning tool since... well, since books.
In addition to simulating circuits, it also simulates test equipment very effectively.
The evolution of the standard atomic model is a perfect illustration of how the scientific process is one of continuous refinement. You can use it to introduce the idea that the Universe doesn't owe us an explanation of itself, and how there will never be a time of genuine "enlightenment" when we can stop asking questions.
It's a good way to give the kid antibodies against superstition and mysticism, in other words. "No, we don't really understand what stuff is really made from. Nobody does... not yet. But people know a lot more about it than they did I was your age, and we can do a lot of cool stuff with the knowledge we have."
This reference was the one I had in mind when I wrote that post. My point stands: if even one other person understands your work, or is as close behind you as Planck was to Einstein, you aren't as indispensable as you think you are.
Certified Geniuses are not a rare species nowadays, and they're cheaper to hire by the dozen. The work of a truly-gifted explainer and "popularizer" is more important than any one individual's research contributions, in the long run.
This isn't an attempt to disparage Wheeler or offend any C.G. candidates, it's just a simple statement of fact.
What might follow is arguments of who is more important, the man who discovers this science or the man who makes it easily accessible and digestible by a vast majority of the five billion simpletons living on the earth?
Regardless what the objective answer to that turns out to be, elitism isn't healthy. Those 5E9 simpletons -- or at least the ones in the US, Europe, and Russia -- are the ones who pay for all the expensive research toys like the LHC. I think the most important role of a Hawking or a Sagan is to help explain what the "simpletons" are getting for their money.
Put another way: no matter how "smart" you are, you can be replaced. Some bored kid, somewhere, will gladly do your job, and probably for fun. Everybody knows about the rivalry between Newton and Leibniz, right? If one of them had been run over by a bus^H^H^H horse, it would've been a shame, but we'd still be where we are today, give or take a few years. Even work as apparently-revolutionary as Einstein's early stuff was more a synthesis of current ideas than anything truly new.
But if you're a good "explainer," you really are indispensible. By educating, challenging, and inspiring the tax base, those guys and gals make everybody else's work possible. And by making tedious fields of study seem romantic and boundless, they recruit future generations of researchers, some of whom will make a real difference.
Right now, every technical field from physics to biology to space science is suffering these days for want of more Sagans and Hawkings. It was not only petty and lame for your professor to criticize Hawking for being a "pop physicist," but it was out-and-out counterproductive.
However, the phase noise of an oscillator goes up by 3dB for each doubling of frequency
6 dB (or 20*log(N)).
My results show a temporary increase (lasting around 15-20 minutes) in violent behavior after playing a selection of video games with varying types of violence. Some of these are first person shooters, some are fighting games, etc.
And your control group included kids running around outside playing Cowboys & Indians and Cops & Robbers, too... right?
I doubt the Doppler calculations are off, but those calculations are entirely dependent on the onboard timebase standards. If the probe is moving, say, 10 km/sec relative to Earth, then the stated measurement accuracy of 0.1 mm/sec requires 1E-8 precision. The best quartz oscillators are good for about that much drift per year, but that's on Earth, at 1g and STP. Maybe the master clocks are behaving anomalously after a decade in space. I'd be more inclined to suspect an unknown quartz aging phenomenon than a change in some fundamental physical constant.
Didn't RTFA yet, but maybe some of the probes have rubidium standards onboard. If two different timekeeping technologies show a similar error, that would be a lot more interesting...
Having apparently overlooked step 1) above, I'm guessing you didn't actually try any of the others. The assumption of user inexperience is another mistake on your part, one of rather-amusing magnitude and no small irony.
Nice rant, though! Keep it up; good for the blood pressure.
So where does Microsoft even go to find programmers this stupid? Elbonia? How do you screw up an operating system this badly and still make money with it?
Who is hurt more from retaliatory feedback, the honest seller making their living on eBay who has 10000 feedback or the honest buyer with under 100 feedback who is retaliated against by a bad seller?
The seller.
If you're a buyer, your feedback is almost completely irrelevant. If you're a seller, it is quite important. That's why the feedback system needs to be weighted in favor of sellers; they're the only ones with anything at stake.
The new policy, which prevents sellers from warning other sellers about problematic buyers, is not a good move for anyone. For eBay, every solution to every problem seems to involve a reduction in transparency and accountability. This is really just another example.
How does it dick over the sellers to not be able to retaliate? TFS says they're going to replace it with other steps for seller protection, so I think you're venturing into hyperbole territory.
For one thing, I can't afford to offer a return policy anymore, because the buyer has no incentive not to abuse it. Previously, I could leave neutral feedback to the "Gee, I changed my mind," types and negative feedback to the "Gee, it didn't work when I took it out of the box (because I swapped out a part that I needed to fix my other one)" folks.
There is a lot that an unethical buyer, or a just-plain-stupid one, can do to make an honest seller's life rough. As usual, eBay's attempt at addressing one problem has created several others.
Perhaps that inspiration went the other way? Or is your date off?
Nope; that's the original "Iolo." He's been making crossbows since the early 80s at least, but I didn't meet him until 1987-1988. Good to see he's still in business (going by the link in the other post.)
That looked a lot like the handmade crossbows fabricated by "Iolo the Bard," a well-known SCA figure in Austin circa 1990 (and inspiration for the character of Iolo in the Ultima games.)
Iolo's bows weren't made to be competitive with modern polonium-doped nanocrystalline bolt launchers or whatever, but to recall the craft of medieval weaponsmiths. Still more than enough to shoot your eye out with.
I agree with the other poster who suggested that these LCDs are coming to police riot shields near you. That's just too cool an idea to pass up. Shove enough images of flowers and frolicking puppies in their faces, and the Black Bloc crowd will surrender without a fight, right?
Well, it might have been insightful, but it certainly wasn't right. Surf through eBay's electronic components and equipment categories sometime, and if you don't come away with more cool ideas for stuff to build than you will ever live to try, you're not much of a hacker.
Sure, the barriers to entry are high if you want to mess with FPGAs or do microwave engineering in your garage, but at least it's possible for you to do that kind of thing if you want. There are probably a hundred times more opportunities open to the hardcore amateur electronics buff nowadays than there were in Woz's day. You can bitch and moan all you want about how "hard" it is, but I can remember when a 6502 was a pretty intimidating thing to deal with, too.
I've been reading Philip Ball's (excellent) biography of Paracelsus, The Devil's Doctor, and he describes this phenomenon to a 'T'. Apparently, it was common for medieval physicians to work hand-in-hand with apothecaries, prescribing drugs whose principal healing attribute (besides being poisonous as hell, most likely) was how expensive they were. The more the patient had to pay, the more likely the drug would help him.
Homeopathy is interesting from a historical standpoint, because it's really the only semi-mainstream form of quackery to have survived the fall of the alchemical age.
That's nothing. A few years ago, Charles Schwab once "gave" me $63,000,000 and change. I hit F5, and there was another transaction removing the funds. Made for an interesting 20 seconds.
Well, sure. The point being, the standing waves are by no means necessary to cook the food. If you could generate the same power level without them, you certainly would prefer to do it that way, just to avoid hot spots.
On the other hand, an appropriate load for the magnetron is necessary, so the Mythbusters experiment the other poster mentioned proves essentially nothing.
Try it with a bar of chocolate sometime. Heat it for a bit and measure the distance between soft spots. It'll be the wavelength you calculated.
Something tells me the velocity factor of chocolate isn't exactly 1.0. Have you actually tried this experiment?
Also if you like, nab an old microwave and rip out the magnetron, see if you can get water to boil with it.
That's an impedance-matching issue. The magnetron feed is designed to deliver maximum power to a particular load. The dimensions of the cavity, as well as its contents, will determine the (complex) impedance the magnetron sees. I imagine that when you run the tube with no cavity at all, you're just not giving it a load it can work with. Most of the input power ends up being dissipated in the tube's internal elements when that happens, and in fact, the tube may not be willing to draw much power at all under those conditions. Regardless of what looks good on Mythbusters, you can't make meaningful RF measurements this way.
Microwaves rely on the concept of standing waves to operate.
Doesn't seem likely. If you actually wanted your TV dinner cooked with a combination of bubbling-hot and frozen-solid spots, then yes, you would want to apply standing waves. Instead, the ideal cavity for cooking food would be a reflective one whose dimensions had no fixed relationship at all to the wavelength.
Microwave ovens often use mechanical stirrers, analogous to fan blades that scatter the radiation around in the cavity, precisely to avoid standing waves.
Microsoft probably violates more software patents than Linux. Shall we start a web page listing patents that /.-ers believe M$ violates? It might be useful one day, if M$ goes all legal on us.
With enough eyes, all patent violations are visible. Chances are, many large companies that hold patents that MS infringes upon don't even know the infringement is happening. If users were to discover and publicly document a few thousand tidbits such as, "Windows Vista's user-account control database clearly violates IBM's patent 1,559,664 of June 29, 1997," why, companies like IBM would almost be obliged to sue MS for damages.
I like this idea a lot. It's elegant as hell, because it takes advantage of the fact that Microsoft has more to lose than anyone from software patents.
Because classrooms are just like offices, and students are being paid to perform specific tasks using specific resources, and... yeah. OK.
Just that it's blocked on the school network
Which is funded by Congress. The school administration does not have the right to censor Wikipedia, for the same reason they do not have the right to organize prayer services.
Take your own advice, and maybe a night school class on Constitutional law.
Also another interesting bit of trivia: the three terminal transistor was discovered *before* the two terminal diode.
Well, not really. The first three-terminal transistor was probably a crude FET built in the 1920s by Lilienfeld. And the first practical diodes would have been the cat's-whisker detectors used around the turn of the century in early radio work.
Shockley's post-Bell Labs work was notable, but none of it was anywhere near as critical to the Valley's development as the founding of HP or even Apple Computer.
Are the later episodes still chopped to 4:3, though? I don't mind a few compression artifacts now and then, but paying 100% of the price for 75% of the picture is not my idea of a bargain.