I built an ion rocket in 6th grade that was suspended from a string, and would increase the height to which it swung every time the high-voltage transformer was pulsed. Deep Space One had an electric rocket. These have been around awhile.
(I am an EE.) Copper wire is useful because a) it conducts electricity well, and b) it is easily joined to other circuits. It can be joined to other circuits because of its properties: soldering because it copper alloys well, crimping/wrapping/twisting because copper is malleable and ductile.
Are carbon nanotubes solderable? I doubt it.
Are carbon nanotubes crimpable or twistable? Again, I doubt it.
So, how are they going to join two nanotube wires?
Palin staff: already had government e-mail accounts, but used Yahoo accounts to conduct business that they did not want to reveal to the public.
This really is becoming "SlashKos". Anyone who could be bothered to actually READ the screenshots at Gawker of Palin's Yahoo! account could have seen that it WAS NOT GOVERNMENT BUSINESS.
Sheesh. Come on. You may hate Palin, but this is a technology website. Let's deal in the truth.
What nobody mentions is that G. 581 is a FLARE STAR, prone to blowing up regularly, thus laying waste to whatever bugs or Linux hackers may be on said close-revolving planet.
People should read Ward & Brownlee's "Rare Earth". And don't launch into spittle-flecked diatribes on intelligent design, because Ward & Brownlee don't believe in it, and STILL think Earth is extremely rare, if not unique in the universe.
That's exactly what I was thinking! When I was 12, and I read Raymond Abrashkin's "Danny Dunn: Invisible Boy", I was mesmerized. And this mini UAV is essentially the plot device in the book, right down to the dragonfly appearance. Pretty good prediction for a book from the mid '70s.
All this hand-wringing about "warrantless wiretaps" is wasted energy. Unless you are intentionally planning/doing stuff to harm people, you need not worry about this.
Having worked in intelligence, I can tell you: the government does not care what books you check out at the library, or what [legal] porn you download. They have enough trouble looking for whack jobs who are trying to bring down buildings and/or networks.
There have been so many foiled plots from these so-called warrantless wiretaps, plots that if carried would have killed thousands or brought Internet businesses to their knees, that if you knew the full truth, you'd be glad these wiretaps exist. As it is, the general public can't know everything, because it would compromise the very intelligence gathering that saves lives. So, therefore, we must put up with paranoid whining.
If you don't want your brain waves to be read by the government, then don't freaking connect your box to the Internet or the phone line. Go ahead. Be paranoid for nothing.
How about making money on open-source software by bundling it with hardware? Now this might not be relevant for our financial software test case, but it might be; could he sell servers pre-loaded and pre-configured with the OSS software? The revenue source here comes down to one thing: convenience.
I'm the designer of the HamHUD amateur radio controller and our software (really, firmware) has always been open source (first a generic license, then GPL). We've even published the schematic diagrams to the hardware online, and a few people have built their own. But most people keep coming to us to buy the hardware with the software pre-loaded. Very few users compile or modify the software. Why? I believe it's 1) convenience, and 2) most of my users don't have the technical expertise either to build hardware from scratch that looks as good as ours, or load and configure the firmware.
Technically, I'm only making money on the hardware, because that gets marked up over my costs. But without the OSS firmware, HamHUD would be a box with a a button, a knob, and a blank display. Considering again the financial software, a client might install our friend's OS financial software on off-the-shelf computer hardware, but I'd bet that a pre-configured, drop-in-and-go server might be worth a lot more than either the hardware or the software alone.
This concept of bundling OSS with hardware to make money can be extended even further, to systems. In our next HamHUD device, we will be selling one piece of commercially-available hardware and a custom hardware piece, along with OSS software, all bundled together and ready-to-run. The custom hardware won't operate without properly-configured OSS software, requiring the tedious editing of lots of (intentionally) arcane configuration files under Linux. Will users try to compile and configure the software themselves, buy and configure the off-the-shelf hardware, and buy our custom hardware, all in the name of saving a buck? I doubt it seriously, and I am basing my revenue expectations on my belief that they would rather buy the whole pre-configured thing.
Hope that helps. I would be interested in comments on this approach.
Well, another of Federico Faggin's designs, the Z80, has been implemented in VHDL (and Verilog). I implemented the T80, a VHDL variant, along with a VGA-grade video interface, and a triple-ported SDRAM interface into a Xilinx XC3S1000. The combination only used 3% of resources in the FPGA, but the processor itself was about 1%.
The 4004 had 3900 transistors, and the 8080 had 6000, and the Z80 had more than that (more instructions). So, let's say for argument's sake that the Z80 is about twice the size of the 4004.
If that's true, then you can stuff about 200 clones of the 4004 in a Xilinx $15 million-gate Spartan FPGA, and have block RAMs left over for program memory. Wow, I'm sure the Beowulf guys are scared now;-)
On April 10th, at 6:35pm CDT, I sent a message through the ISS digipeater, using nothing but a low-power 2-meter radio in my car, a TNC (radio modem), and a little handbuilt terminal (coulda used a Palm, even). I'm in Oklahoma, and the message was picked up by a station in Colorado, and one in Maryland. Pretty cool. This would make a great "stuck-out-in-the-boonies-and-need-help" thing. Plus, since we're using APRS (transmitting our GPS position along with messages), that means "help" would know where it was needed. Cell phones don't work everywhere, you know, and don't even get me started on Iridium. Ham radio still has some uses.
Check out http://www.hamhud.net to see what I used to get through.
Thanks for the reply. I think we can all learn in this kind of forum.
And, in any case, nothing in this wasp/bacteria tale deals with 'spontaneous' speciation, it deals with an identifiable factor which is providing the barrier to breeding that can facilitate a process of speciation.
Whoops! That statement (as well as the article) assumes that speciation is facilitated through the isolation of breeding stocks from each other. We have two problems here:
1. We are using evidence that fits the conclusions of our assumption to prove our assumption. Bzzt, circular logic, thanks for playing Boole's Buzzer today.
2. The massive infusion of new phyla in the Cambrian explosion cannot be explained by the isolation of breeding stocks. Even though the planet was just recovering from a "Snowball Earth" episode, the are widespread biodeposits during this period, indicating a stable ecosystem filled with complex organisms. What's more, this stable ecosystem didn't have to endure Darwin's millions-of-years "cut and try" approach, it was stable early on in the 2-million-year window about 480 million years ago.
A process, not a miraculous, spontaneous event.
But, wait, that's a contradictory statement! IF speciation is driven by a mindless process, it should be spontaneous, in the sense of occuring without outside intervention. Just species popping up all the time, wherever the process is allowed to work its special magic of DNA differentiation. Here's the problem: we have palentogical evidence of discrete speciation EVENTS, not a continuous ebb and flow of species.
Something is wrong with the model, and facing the facts compells us to admit it.
Because, from everything I've read, species creation has been a constant process over the last 3 or 4 billion years or so.
No, sir. I think the Cambrian Explosion is played down in the textbooks, for this very reason: it stands ready to skewer some very sacred cows.
Makes it a little difficult to observer what is anyway an inherently slow process.
Nice try, might even work if "now" was all we had, but we have palentological evidence of speciation rates in the past. And, far and away, most of the speciation happened during one little 2-million-year (+/- who you ask) slice of time: the Cambrian explosion. There is no phyla of life on earth today that was not present at the Cambrian Explosion. What is the explanation of this 'flowering' of new phyla, and the loss of phyla in 480 million years since? The biological establishment says, 'Evolution was efficent then.' Poppycock. What caused it to be 240 million times more efficient? Can't say it was the atmosphere or insolation, because the sun has been steadily getting brighter, while the greenhouse effect has been getting less efficient (the so-called "Amazing Double Coincidence"). What was it, then? Pansperima? Too many problems, radiation and all that. Intelligent design? "Bah, too religious." Too easily dismissed is more like it.
To say that the principles of evolution are bogus is to say that people will choose pizza pieces randomly, regardless of how many olives each piece has. Thats just ridiculous.
What is ridiculous is for the establishment to keep asserting that something random is going on, with so much evidence of something intentional. Not only are there serious problems with the efficiency of Darwinian evolution (ala the Canbrian explosion), the long-in-the-tooth origin-of-life assumptions don't square with the facts: DNA reads like verbal information. Don't talk to me about Paley's 'watchmaker' argument; I refer you to somebody a little more recent: biochemist Michael Behe, whose book, Darwin's Black Box has been the shot heard 'round the world in molecular biology.
Or, how about this: the utter, erm, lifelessness at the 1999 12th International Conference on the Origin of Life. I have it on good authority that the Miller-Urey experiment is now being downplayed as fundamentally flawed, and the "bright star" graduate students have fled the field like rats from a sinking ship.
All this is to say one thing: sometimes science isn't about science; it's about scientists, and protecting the status quo. If we truly wish to boldly go where no one has gone before, let's come up with theories that square with the facts, and not clutch at straws in buttressing a failed theory like spontaneous speciation.
This is just pap. My wife is a biologist, and I've done quite a bit of reading myself.
Ask Paul Erlich, who said in his book Extinction: "We have yet to see a single instance of speciation in the animal kingdom".
It just doesn't happen in animals these days. Happens in plants, sure, but they have a different DNA structure than us. Come on, give up on the pipe dream of spontaneous speciation as an explanation for the diversity of species. It's beginning to sound as dated as spontaneous generation, which Pasteur and others blew away 150 years ago.
The Display/Keyboard interface (DSKY, pronounced 'diskey') to the Guidance/Nav computer (GNC) was a superb interface. I know an engineer who actually got to play with one. In a pre-GUI, pre-command-line age, the verb-noun interface was actually very intuitive. It's kind of like having a hardware interface that allows you to call various API methods or functions, which prompts you as to the various parameters, then displays the returned values.
To the astronauts, the DSKY was the GNC; the GNC really was just a box stowed in the Lower Equipment Bay.
The interface was so good, it was subsequently used on the F-8 fighter prototype. For more on the DSKY, see:
To see it in action, watch the "From the Earth to the Moon" series from HBO. Most local video stores have 'em. The Apollo 12 one was my favorite for seeing the DSKY in action, when Al Sheppard helped upload new code (IN FLIGHT) to ignore a flakey ABORT button.
This is just another pie in the sky thing that will never fly. The author seems to want something that will 'save' Ham Radio. Well, I'll give him two, both of which have already happened:
Kill the "Old Geezer" Licensing System
Tie Amateur Radio and the New Geekdom together
The first happened April 15th when the FCC (in the United States) decided to eliminate for all practical purposes the testing of Morse code proficiency. (N.B., other countries have done it already.) All you need now to get 99.99995% of the frequencies is knowlege of radio theory and electronics. And, people responded--the FCC was deluged with 20,000 applications for new licenses and upgrades.
The second, which is FAR more important, is the leverage of the Internet savvy,/.-reading, computer-programming, gizmo-hacking crowd into amateur radio. A new mode of Ham Radio operating, the Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS) ties HF, VHF, UHF, and microwave radio, satellites, the Internet, Palm Pilots, GPS, real-time mapping, and nomadness into one juggernaut of technology. Interested? Check out www.aprs.net and www.tapr.org
>NCL is a 3-state logic of "true" and "false", plus the control which is derived from NCL math to be "null" (no data).
Interesting. This sounds a lot like the "data-driven" graphical language LabVIEW, which I spent about three years programming in.
In LabVIEW, the operators only execute when data is present. "Data present" is a condition inherent in the incoming data stream, and, as you said does not require an extra control line to indicate.
The operators themselves can be programs, being activated only when data appears. So, the language is extensible by creating custom "instruments" which are activated by the presence of data.
I've always said implementing LabVIEW in hardware would be a kick!
--The QuantumHack
(no relationship to National Instruments except a satisfied customer)
How many electrical engineers do they expect to fool with this? It's a HUGE electromagnet! I can lift _my_ sorry butt with this. I sent them this email:
Greetings,
After reading the System-G website, I began to wonder if the weight-reduction observed was simply a magnetic effect; that is, the average value of the AC magnetic field pushing against the Earth's DC magnetic field. It seems that the hysteresis induced by the iron would yield a DC component of the magnetic field, that would exist even when the AC excitation crossed zero.
I know that the field was measured with an ELF field meter, but doesn't that simply measure the electric field? Moreover, it would seem that the annealed iron core would _increase_ the external magnetic field strength, not reduce it.
To ensure that this is indeed a bonafide gravitational shielding effect, it would seem that you would need to be able to discount any magnetic effects. Walking around the device with a coil connected to an AC voltmeter would measure the external magnetic field.
OK, if you're a programmer, putting a computer on a mast sounds like a good idea. (Temperature will KILL it, BTW.) To an RF engineer, it sounds like what we really need here is a low noise amplifier/power amplifier combination. The LNA will reduce the noise-polluting (i.e., increased noise figure) effect of the long antenna cable, and the power amplifier will boost the transmitted power back up the Part 15 limit. This sounds like something Wavelan or other wireless LAN outfits should put together.
Slashdot Mirror
Not useful without a serious change in computer architecture.
Amdahl's law. It's a bitch, baby.
SMELL-O-VISION! When your character gets fragged, smell the nasty burning hair!
... willing women.
Or at least ones willing to "put some ice on it" and keep their mouths shut.
The probes ought to be named Heaviside and Van Allen, for the predictor and discoverer of these belts.
I built an ion rocket in 6th grade that was suspended from a string, and would increase the height to which it swung every time the high-voltage transformer was pulsed. Deep Space One had an electric rocket. These have been around awhile.
(I am an EE.) Copper wire is useful because a) it conducts electricity well, and b) it is easily joined to other circuits. It can be joined to other circuits because of its properties: soldering because it copper alloys well, crimping/wrapping/twisting because copper is malleable and ductile.
Are carbon nanotubes solderable? I doubt it.
Are carbon nanotubes crimpable or twistable? Again, I doubt it.
So, how are they going to join two nanotube wires?
Palin staff: already had government e-mail accounts, but used Yahoo accounts to conduct business that they did not want to reveal to the public.
This really is becoming "SlashKos". Anyone who could be bothered to actually READ the screenshots at Gawker of Palin's Yahoo! account could have seen that it WAS NOT GOVERNMENT BUSINESS.
Sheesh. Come on. You may hate Palin, but this is a technology website. Let's deal in the truth.
What nobody mentions is that G. 581 is a FLARE STAR, prone to blowing up regularly, thus laying waste to whatever bugs or Linux hackers may be on said close-revolving planet.
People should read Ward & Brownlee's "Rare Earth". And don't launch into spittle-flecked diatribes on intelligent design, because Ward & Brownlee don't believe in it, and STILL think Earth is extremely rare, if not unique in the universe.
That's exactly what I was thinking! When I was 12, and I read Raymond Abrashkin's "Danny Dunn: Invisible Boy", I was mesmerized. And this mini UAV is essentially the plot device in the book, right down to the dragonfly appearance. Pretty good prediction for a book from the mid '70s.
All this hand-wringing about "warrantless wiretaps" is wasted energy. Unless you are intentionally planning/doing stuff to harm people, you need not worry about this.
Having worked in intelligence, I can tell you: the government does not care what books you check out at the library, or what [legal] porn you download. They have enough trouble looking for whack jobs who are trying to bring down buildings and/or networks.
There have been so many foiled plots from these so-called warrantless wiretaps, plots that if carried would have killed thousands or brought Internet businesses to their knees, that if you knew the full truth, you'd be glad these wiretaps exist. As it is, the general public can't know everything, because it would compromise the very intelligence gathering that saves lives. So, therefore, we must put up with paranoid whining.
If you don't want your brain waves to be read by the government, then don't freaking connect your box to the Internet or the phone line. Go ahead. Be paranoid for nothing.
How about making money on open-source software by bundling it with hardware? Now this might not be relevant for our financial software test case, but it might be; could he sell servers pre-loaded and pre-configured with the OSS software? The revenue source here comes down to one thing: convenience.
I'm the designer of the HamHUD amateur radio controller and our software (really, firmware) has always been open source (first a generic license, then GPL). We've even published the schematic diagrams to the hardware online, and a few people have built their own. But most people keep coming to us to buy the hardware with the software pre-loaded. Very few users compile or modify the software. Why? I believe it's 1) convenience, and 2) most of my users don't have the technical expertise either to build hardware from scratch that looks as good as ours, or load and configure the firmware.
Technically, I'm only making money on the hardware, because that gets marked up over my costs. But without the OSS firmware, HamHUD would be a box with a a button, a knob, and a blank display. Considering again the financial software, a client might install our friend's OS financial software on off-the-shelf computer hardware, but I'd bet that a pre-configured, drop-in-and-go server might be worth a lot more than either the hardware or the software alone.
This concept of bundling OSS with hardware to make money can be extended even further, to systems. In our next HamHUD device, we will be selling one piece of commercially-available hardware and a custom hardware piece, along with OSS software, all bundled together and ready-to-run. The custom hardware won't operate without properly-configured OSS software, requiring the tedious editing of lots of (intentionally) arcane configuration files under Linux. Will users try to compile and configure the software themselves, buy and configure the off-the-shelf hardware, and buy our custom hardware, all in the name of saving a buck? I doubt it seriously, and I am basing my revenue expectations on my belief that they would rather buy the whole pre-configured thing.
Hope that helps. I would be interested in comments on this approach.
Well, another of Federico Faggin's designs, the Z80, has been implemented in VHDL (and Verilog). I implemented the T80, a VHDL variant, along with a VGA-grade video interface, and a triple-ported SDRAM interface into a Xilinx XC3S1000. The combination only used 3% of resources in the FPGA, but the processor itself was about 1%.
;-)
The 4004 had 3900 transistors, and the 8080 had 6000, and the Z80 had more than that (more instructions). So, let's say for argument's sake that the Z80 is about twice the size of the 4004.
If that's true, then you can stuff about 200 clones of the 4004 in a Xilinx $15 million-gate Spartan FPGA, and have block RAMs left over for program memory. Wow, I'm sure the Beowulf guys are scared now
On April 10th, at 6:35pm CDT, I sent a message through the ISS digipeater, using nothing but a low-power 2-meter radio in my car, a TNC (radio modem), and a little handbuilt terminal (coulda used a Palm, even). I'm in Oklahoma, and the message was picked up by a station in Colorado, and one in Maryland. Pretty cool. This would make a great "stuck-out-in-the-boonies-and-need-help" thing. Plus, since we're using APRS (transmitting our GPS position along with messages), that means "help" would know where it was needed. Cell phones don't work everywhere, you know, and don't even get me started on Iridium. Ham radio still has some uses.
Check out http://www.hamhud.net to see what I used to get through.
Steve KA9MVA
"QuantumHack"
Thanks for the reply. I think we can all learn in this kind of forum.
And, in any case, nothing in this wasp/bacteria tale deals with 'spontaneous' speciation, it deals with an identifiable factor which is providing the barrier to breeding that can facilitate a process of speciation.
Whoops! That statement (as well as the article) assumes that speciation is facilitated through the isolation of breeding stocks from each other. We have two problems here:
1. We are using evidence that fits the conclusions of our assumption to prove our assumption. Bzzt, circular logic, thanks for playing Boole's Buzzer today.
2. The massive infusion of new phyla in the Cambrian explosion cannot be explained by the isolation of breeding stocks. Even though the planet was just recovering from a "Snowball Earth" episode, the are widespread biodeposits during this period, indicating a stable ecosystem filled with complex organisms. What's more, this stable ecosystem didn't have to endure Darwin's millions-of-years "cut and try" approach, it was stable early on in the 2-million-year window about 480 million years ago.
A process, not a miraculous, spontaneous event.
But, wait, that's a contradictory statement! IF speciation is driven by a mindless process, it should be spontaneous, in the sense of occuring without outside intervention. Just species popping up all the time, wherever the process is allowed to work its special magic of DNA differentiation. Here's the problem: we have palentogical evidence of discrete speciation EVENTS, not a continuous ebb and flow of species.
Something is wrong with the model, and facing the facts compells us to admit it.
Because, from everything I've read, species creation has been a constant process over the last 3 or 4 billion years or so.
No, sir. I think the Cambrian Explosion is played down in the textbooks, for this very reason: it stands ready to skewer some very sacred cows.
Nice try, might even work if "now" was all we had, but we have palentological evidence of speciation rates in the past. And, far and away, most of the speciation happened during one little 2-million-year (+/- who you ask) slice of time: the Cambrian explosion. There is no phyla of life on earth today that was not present at the Cambrian Explosion. What is the explanation of this 'flowering' of new phyla, and the loss of phyla in 480 million years since? The biological establishment says, 'Evolution was efficent then.' Poppycock. What caused it to be 240 million times more efficient? Can't say it was the atmosphere or insolation, because the sun has been steadily getting brighter, while the greenhouse effect has been getting less efficient (the so-called "Amazing Double Coincidence"). What was it, then? Pansperima? Too many problems, radiation and all that. Intelligent design? "Bah, too religious." Too easily dismissed is more like it.
To say that the principles of evolution are bogus is to say that people will choose pizza pieces randomly, regardless of how many olives each piece has. Thats just ridiculous.
What is ridiculous is for the establishment to keep asserting that something random is going on, with so much evidence of something intentional. Not only are there serious problems with the efficiency of Darwinian evolution (ala the Canbrian explosion), the long-in-the-tooth origin-of-life assumptions don't square with the facts: DNA reads like verbal information. Don't talk to me about Paley's 'watchmaker' argument; I refer you to somebody a little more recent: biochemist Michael Behe, whose book, Darwin's Black Box has been the shot heard 'round the world in molecular biology.
Or, how about this: the utter, erm, lifelessness at the 1999 12th International Conference on the Origin of Life. I have it on good authority that the Miller-Urey experiment is now being downplayed as fundamentally flawed, and the "bright star" graduate students have fled the field like rats from a sinking ship.
All this is to say one thing: sometimes science isn't about science; it's about scientists, and protecting the status quo. If we truly wish to boldly go where no one has gone before, let's come up with theories that square with the facts, and not clutch at straws in buttressing a failed theory like spontaneous speciation.
Ask Paul Erlich, who said in his book Extinction: "We have yet to see a single instance of speciation in the animal kingdom".
It just doesn't happen in animals these days. Happens in plants, sure, but they have a different DNA structure than us. Come on, give up on the pipe dream of spontaneous speciation as an explanation for the diversity of species. It's beginning to sound as dated as spontaneous generation, which Pasteur and others blew away 150 years ago.
QH
If you want to emulate something, emulate the DSKY. THAT is a great interface. See my other post.
<p>
QuantumHack
Right-O, I had a mistype there. Thanks for the correction.
Thanks for the correction. Yep, just a mistype. It was Apollo 14.
QuantumHack
To the astronauts, the DSKY was the GNC; the GNC really was just a box stowed in the Lower Equipment Bay.
The interface was so good, it was subsequently used on the F-8 fighter prototype. For more on the DSKY, see:
http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/gallery/photo/F-8DFBW/HTM L/EC96-43408-1.html
To see it in action, watch the "From the Earth to the Moon" series from HBO. Most local video stores have 'em. The Apollo 12 one was my favorite for seeing the DSKY in action, when Al Sheppard helped upload new code (IN FLIGHT) to ignore a flakey ABORT button.
Best to ya,
Quantum Hack
http://www.hamhud.net
This is just another pie in the sky thing that will never fly. The author seems to want something that will 'save' Ham Radio. Well, I'll give him two, both of which have already happened:
Kill the "Old Geezer" Licensing System
Tie Amateur Radio and the New Geekdom together
The first happened April 15th when the FCC (in the United States) decided to eliminate for all practical purposes the testing of Morse code proficiency. (N.B., other countries have done it already.) All you need now to get 99.99995% of the frequencies is knowlege of radio theory and electronics. And, people responded--the FCC was deluged with 20,000 applications for new licenses and upgrades.
The second, which is FAR more important, is the leverage of the Internet savvy, /.-reading, computer-programming, gizmo-hacking crowd into amateur radio. A new mode of Ham Radio operating, the Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS) ties HF, VHF, UHF, and microwave radio, satellites, the Internet, Palm Pilots, GPS, real-time mapping, and nomadness into one juggernaut of technology. Interested? Check out www.aprs.net and www.tapr.org
Interesting. This sounds a lot like the "data-driven" graphical language LabVIEW, which I spent about three years programming in.
In LabVIEW, the operators only execute when data is present. "Data present" is a condition inherent in the incoming data stream, and, as you said does not require an extra control line to indicate.
The operators themselves can be programs, being activated only when data appears. So, the language is extensible by creating custom "instruments" which are activated by the presence of data.
I've always said implementing LabVIEW in hardware would be a kick!
--The QuantumHack
(no relationship to National Instruments except a satisfied customer)
How many electrical engineers do they expect to fool with this? It's a HUGE electromagnet! I can lift _my_ sorry butt with this. I sent them this email:
Greetings,
After reading the System-G website, I began to wonder if the weight-reduction observed was simply a magnetic effect; that is, the average value of the AC magnetic field pushing against the Earth's DC magnetic field. It seems that the hysteresis induced by the iron would yield a DC component of the magnetic field, that would exist even when the AC excitation crossed zero.
I know that the field was measured with an ELF field meter, but doesn't that simply measure the electric field? Moreover, it would seem that the annealed iron core would _increase_ the external magnetic field strength, not reduce it.
To ensure that this is indeed a bonafide gravitational shielding effect, it would seem that you would need to be able to discount any magnetic effects. Walking around the device with a coil connected to an AC voltmeter would measure the external magnetic field.
I wish you the best of success in your work.
Cordially,
(QuantumHack)
Please. Microwave ovens output 'microwaves' (specifically, 2 GHz), which are electromagnetic (radio) waves, not "nuculer" radiation...
h-bar_hack
OK, if you're a programmer, putting a computer on a mast sounds like a good idea. (Temperature will KILL it, BTW.) To an RF engineer, it sounds like what we really need here is a low noise amplifier/power amplifier combination. The LNA will reduce the noise-polluting (i.e., increased noise figure) effect of the long antenna cable, and the power amplifier will boost the transmitted power back up the Part 15 limit. This sounds like something Wavelan or other wireless LAN outfits should put together.