Fire is part of the forest ecosystem, to the point that many trees are evolved to need fire to open their seed cones, and other trees are evolved to sprout back from underground after a fire, and fire is needed to open the canopy to new growth and remove debris from the forest floor. Man disrupts the fire cycle by preventing fires to protect property. Thus, when it does burn, you get a big conflagration due to all of the stored fuel. The area where the fire started had not burned in 40 years. Perhaps that was a mistake.
I was at the base on Friday the 16th to see the first attempt at the launch. It's a long drive from Berkeley. There was some smog at the time, perhaps from the Soberanes fire, but no local fires visible. I viewed the launch attempt from Hawk's Nest and drove down Ocean Ave. to Surf Beach later on. That's about as close as you can get to the SpaceX and ULA pads. The area where the fire started is really far within the base gates - not anything an outsider could have gotten to.
If we can solve the problem of cancer within 10 years by treating it as a computer virus, why not treat gravity as a computer virus and come up with practical, cheap antigravity? Or that pesky light-speed limit, we need to beat that, and 10 years sounds about right
It's not nice to have something that large deorbit out of control, but note that the earth is mostly covered with ocean and the two Space Shuttle crashes and various other things that have fallen out of the air haven't struck anyone. The largest problems so far have all been about radioisotope thermal generators that fall to earth and cause contamination. A few satellites and Apollo 13 have dropped them, but the contamination from Soviet RTGs that were used to power beacons and lighthouses has been much worse.
What is stopping you is that you think you need ultrapurification and microscale fabrication. No. Remember that the first receiving diodes were semiconductors, and while some used germanium it was not unusual to just use a rusty razor blade and the graphite point of a pencil. There are lots of semiconductor materials available to you, and making a cat's whisker is not difficult. It won't be the best transistor in the world, but it will amplify.
BTW, Neon electrodes are different; they are designed to hold mercury.
Those are colored phospor cold-cathode tubes. They aren't as pretty as real neon tubes which get their color from an ionized gas, and I wish folks would not call them neon at all.
This is better stated as "most people don't know what good sound reproduction actually sounds like". We certainly can measure sound quality. People like Amar Bose didn't ever publish specifications because the average listener prefers unreal bass (go listen to a live orchestra) and isn't too sensitive to distortion.
It gets worse with digital. We took a medium that could reproduce sound much better, and compressed it, taking away that advantage. All musical compression is designed to replace aliasing with noise because that is easier for the listener perceptually, so it all hisses and sizzles.
Of course, modern solid state amplifiers aren't particularly power limited (at least if you have the cash) and should never be driven into distortion. Effects pedals give you whatever distortion you want and have the advantage that you can turn the amplifier some level other than 11 and you still have the distortion you like.
Just think of it as even harmonics, and it fits better into musical theory.
Obviously, what you really want to do is use amplifiers with sufficient power that they are never driven into distortion. And if you want distortion, get it from an effects pedal.
Various rock musicians prefer tube amplifiers because the conventional tube circuits used since the 1950's, when driven far into distortion, emit even harmonics much more than odd harmonics. This is a perceptually more comfortable sound to the music listener.
Older transistor circuits (we're talking the 1970's) tended to emit odd harmonics.
Obviously you can make a transistor circuit that distorts with even harmonics. However, it is much better to use an amplifier of sufficient power that it is not driven into distortion.
Transistor amplifiers are capable of tremendous power today. I own a 1.3 kilowatt peak envelope power linear RF amplifier using just one or two final amplifier transistors. That is the real power rating, not the fake power rating used on audio amplifiers. It must not distort, indeed all spurious emissions must be 60 dB down, because harmonics would show up as unwanted signals on the radio bands and would immediately be identified as my station. This amplifier weighs just 18 pounds! And that's including the internal power supply.
If you want distortion, use an effects pedal. Don't get it from your amplifier.
Well, auto racing used to be in part about building better cars. Until the turbine came along. Now, turbines and 4-wheel drive are banned at the Indy 500.
It's not too long before someone with a genetic advantage comes along and gets banned.
I found this interesting article how to argue about doping in sport. I am not a sports fan in general, it's just never interested me. Thus, I am sitting on the sidelines rather than involved as so many are. From the sidelines the anti-doping movement has the flavor of a witch-hunt. Now, you might have good arguments in favor of it, but it should not go as unchallenged as it seems to be today.
This sounds suspiciously like the Volkswagen scam. Certain driving patterns change the behavior of the vehicle. I wonder if the emissions parameters change too?
You don't begin to understand what a high internal resistance means for a battery.
Sigh. If you're going to say something like that, at least try to substantiate yourself. The thing that I am talking about is ionic resistance and interfacial resistance, rather than the structural impedance of the battery which provides the internal load that results in self-discharge.
The safest high-density battery would have ionic or interfacial resistance that increases with heat or current, limiting its instantaneous output.
If you want to design a supernerdy audio system, put an accelerometer on your headphone diaphragm and make it part of the feedback loop. Then you can do predistortion (as we now do in RF amplifiers) and perhaps even learn the dynamics of the listener's ear cavities.
I'd be with you if this was RF wiring. But at 20 kilohertz maximum (which you won't hear past teenage), no way. The resistance is not significant, the capacitance is not significant, the headphone wire is not acting as a transmission line in any relevant way at that length and frequency, the way it would at RF. If it were acting as a transmission line, what you say would make sense.
Those folks who are selling you oxygen-free copper wires and other forms of guilding the lily are depending on your psychological expectation that things will sound better, just as your car might seem to run better after you give it a good shine.
Slashdot Mirror
Big Sur is North, not South, Oops! Sorry.
The fire is now at 12,000 acres, 45% contained.
Fire is part of the forest ecosystem, to the point that many trees are evolved to need fire to open their seed cones, and other trees are evolved to sprout back from underground after a fire, and fire is needed to open the canopy to new growth and remove debris from the forest floor. Man disrupts the fire cycle by preventing fires to protect property. Thus, when it does burn, you get a big conflagration due to all of the stored fuel. The area where the fire started had not burned in 40 years. Perhaps that was a mistake.
I was at the base on Friday the 16th to see the first attempt at the launch. It's a long drive from Berkeley. There was some smog at the time, perhaps from the Soberanes fire, but no local fires visible. I viewed the launch attempt from Hawk's Nest and drove down Ocean Ave. to Surf Beach later on. That's about as close as you can get to the SpaceX and ULA pads. The area where the fire started is really far within the base gates - not anything an outsider could have gotten to.
If we can solve the problem of cancer within 10 years by treating it as a computer virus, why not treat gravity as a computer virus and come up with practical, cheap antigravity? Or that pesky light-speed limit, we need to beat that, and 10 years sounds about right
Well, given that the Earth is constantly being bombarded by meteors, you must live in terror :-)
It's not nice to have something that large deorbit out of control, but note that the earth is mostly covered with ocean and the two Space Shuttle crashes and various other things that have fallen out of the air haven't struck anyone. The largest problems so far have all been about radioisotope thermal generators that fall to earth and cause contamination. A few satellites and Apollo 13 have dropped them, but the contamination from Soviet RTGs that were used to power beacons and lighthouses has been much worse.
Sure it is not HAARP. But an honest 1kw in a loudspeaker is lot.
My amp is used for SSB, and FreeDV which is a multi carrier modem (several different ones), definitely not a class C amp, it has to be linear.
Ones that make nuclear accelerators or the emitter in any synchrotron, cyclotron, bevatron, etc. It's a big long vacuum tube.
Don't you have that backwards :-)
What is stopping you is that you think you need ultrapurification and microscale fabrication. No. Remember that the first receiving diodes were semiconductors, and while some used germanium it was not unusual to just use a rusty razor blade and the graphite point of a pencil. There are lots of semiconductor materials available to you, and making a cat's whisker is not difficult. It won't be the best transistor in the world, but it will amplify.
Those are colored phospor cold-cathode tubes. They aren't as pretty as real neon tubes which get their color from an ionized gas, and I wish folks would not call them neon at all.
You're not using the original capacitors, are you? If so, some time with an ESR meter and the required replacements would help.
Yes, I definitely have solid-state electronics that old. Including test equipment. But most have been recapped.
Doesn't matter. No modern amplifier has to be driven into distortion. We've got all of the power you need.
This is better stated as "most people don't know what good sound reproduction actually sounds like". We certainly can measure sound quality. People like Amar Bose didn't ever publish specifications because the average listener prefers unreal bass (go listen to a live orchestra) and isn't too sensitive to distortion.
It gets worse with digital. We took a medium that could reproduce sound much better, and compressed it, taking away that advantage. All musical compression is designed to replace aliasing with noise because that is easier for the listener perceptually, so it all hisses and sizzles.
Of course, modern solid state amplifiers aren't particularly power limited (at least if you have the cash) and should never be driven into distortion. Effects pedals give you whatever distortion you want and have the advantage that you can turn the amplifier some level other than 11 and you still have the distortion you like.
Just think of it as even harmonics, and it fits better into musical theory.
Obviously, what you really want to do is use amplifiers with sufficient power that they are never driven into distortion. And if you want distortion, get it from an effects pedal.
I like this idea. This way, your 3D printer can create absolutely nothing where it's useful to do that. :-)
Various rock musicians prefer tube amplifiers because the conventional tube circuits used since the 1950's, when driven far into distortion, emit even harmonics much more than odd harmonics. This is a perceptually more comfortable sound to the music listener.
Older transistor circuits (we're talking the 1970's) tended to emit odd harmonics.
Obviously you can make a transistor circuit that distorts with even harmonics. However, it is much better to use an amplifier of sufficient power that it is not driven into distortion.
Transistor amplifiers are capable of tremendous power today. I own a 1.3 kilowatt peak envelope power linear RF amplifier using just one or two final amplifier transistors. That is the real power rating, not the fake power rating used on audio amplifiers. It must not distort, indeed all spurious emissions must be 60 dB down, because harmonics would show up as unwanted signals on the radio bands and would immediately be identified as my station. This amplifier weighs just 18 pounds! And that's including the internal power supply.
If you want distortion, use an effects pedal. Don't get it from your amplifier.
Well, auto racing used to be in part about building better cars. Until the turbine came along. Now, turbines and 4-wheel drive are banned at the Indy 500.
It's not too long before someone with a genetic advantage comes along and gets banned.
I found this interesting article how to argue about doping in sport. I am not a sports fan in general, it's just never interested me. Thus, I am sitting on the sidelines rather than involved as so many are. From the sidelines the anti-doping movement has the flavor of a witch-hunt. Now, you might have good arguments in favor of it, but it should not go as unchallenged as it seems to be today.
Once it is in thermal runaway, discharging is what keps it there. Also consider mechanical damage like a car crash.
This sounds suspiciously like the Volkswagen scam. Certain driving patterns change the behavior of the vehicle. I wonder if the emissions parameters change too?
Sigh. If you're going to say something like that, at least try to substantiate yourself. The thing that I am talking about is ionic resistance and interfacial resistance, rather than the structural impedance of the battery which provides the internal load that results in self-discharge.
The safest high-density battery would have ionic or interfacial resistance that increases with heat or current, limiting its instantaneous output.
If you want to design a supernerdy audio system, put an accelerometer on your headphone diaphragm and make it part of the feedback loop. Then you can do predistortion (as we now do in RF amplifiers) and perhaps even learn the dynamics of the listener's ear cavities.
Will it make a difference you can hear? Naah! :-)
The thing that really bothers me, is that young people prefer the sound of MP3 over FLAC. They've been trained that real music sounds that way.
I'd be with you if this was RF wiring. But at 20 kilohertz maximum (which you won't hear past teenage), no way. The resistance is not significant, the capacitance is not significant, the headphone wire is not acting as a transmission line in any relevant way at that length and frequency, the way it would at RF. If it were acting as a transmission line, what you say would make sense.
Those folks who are selling you oxygen-free copper wires and other forms of guilding the lily are depending on your psychological expectation that things will sound better, just as your car might seem to run better after you give it a good shine.