Many hobbyist books out there just provide cookie cutter circuits that you assemble without having any real idea what is going on. On the other end of the spectrum, many college textbooks provide pure theory with no application (a very dangerous thing in Engineering).
"The Art of Electronics" shows you how to actually design something, which is a different skill that being able to understand how something works.
The good thing about "The Art of Electronics" is that the authors assume a background knowledge of only basic algebra. You can actually choose how much theory you want because the really important bits are distilled into a few rules of thumb.
For the first time tinkerer, it may be a little much. Eventually, however, the tinkerer will want to actually design something from scratch and find "The Art of Electronics" indispensable.
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.
$1000 is a huge overkill. Hopefully you can find a good electronics surplus store near you.
I've bought fully functional top of the line '80s scopes (Tek 7000 series) for $20 at surplus stores. You should be able to find a decent used scope for under $100.
Get an analog scope for your first one. They are dirt cheap used and will give you more insight into how oscilloscopes work.
Because most of todays new parts are surface mount, you will eventually want to get a quality soldering iron. Trying to solder SOT-23s with a 1/4" tip is a royal pain. I recommend Metcal RF heated irons. It has excellent temperature regulation (maybe the best?) and heats up in less than 10 seconds. You should be able to pick up a used one for less than $100 off of ebay.
If you ate a double yolk egg, it was certainly not a cloned animal. Assuming you didn't eat a Balut egg, the egg was unfertilized and thus not an animal at all.
I think you meant to imply that eating a twin is the same as eating a clone. It is not. A clone implies that the animal has identical chromosomes to an already existing (adult or otherwise) animal. Twins (identical) share the same chromosomes because they came from the same zygote and split off in early development.
You are right that some animals and plants are capable of cloning themselves, but no higher order animals and certainly no mammals. In light of the fact that people probably eat cloned fruit (cloned by humans), I can understand their uneasiness with eating cloned mammals.
I would probably eat a cloned steak, but if given the choice, I would probably buy the un-cloned steak every time.
Wrong. The first LED was made of Silicon Carbide back in the early 1900's. An LED made out of straight silicon would produce infrared light. The reason they don't make infrared LEDs out of silicon today is that they are not as efficient (i.e. they produce too much heat). You can show this is true with Schroedinger wave equations.
Actually,
All household dimmers use something called a Triac to provide variable phase control to the light. The triac dims the light by only presenting a portion of the 120 vrms sine wave to the light. Google Triac if you want more info./BSEE
Hmmm, this sounds more like the droud from Larry Niven's Tales of Gil the ARM than anything else. Is this going to produce a generation of current addicts?
Parent doesn't know what he is talking about. Fencing isn't exactly painless. It can hurt and leave bruises. I was even hit in the groin (foil) with no cup on. Needless to say, I was on the ground before I knew what happened to me. Then the pain hit.
Also, Epee was invented to train gentlemen to be better fighters in duels where "first blood" determined the victory. You did not want to kill your opponent because his family would string you up and cut your testicles off. You just wanted to stab him anywhere to cause him to bleed, not die.
Modern day fencing isn't supposed to mimic real sword fighting. That is because THERE ARE NO REAL SWORDFIGHTS ANYMORE. The flick that you are refering to is hard to execute and takes great skill.
Also, you must think about scoring before you go touting new targeting systems. It would be very difficult and expensive to implement a system of electronic scoring that weights the score of different areas.
It sounds like you want fencing to be more like LARPing. Do you expect a fencer to hold his hand behind his back if it gets hit? What if you shout "SLEEP SLEEP SLEEP?"
Neuroscientists already know that certain spots in the brain play a vital role for recognizing a familiar face, even as it changes with age or a new hairstyle. But they have not been clear precisely what each area does.
Using mugshots of celebrities, Pia Rotshtein at University College London and her colleagues have shown that there are at least three separate areas for processing and recognising faces. One processes the physical features of the face, one decides whether or not the face is known, and a third retrieves information about that person, such as their name.
Rothstein's team used a computer to create a series of images in which the countenance of film star Marilyn Monroe gradually morphed into that of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, or that of James Bond actor Pierce Brosnan transformed into current prime minister Tony Blair.
Although the physical features gradually change from one face into another, the researchers showed that subjects looking at the images tend to "suddenly flip" from seeing Marilyn to seeing Maggie, explains team member Jon Driver.
The researchers then showed their subjects three different pairs of images from the array while they were in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scanner. The two pictures in one pair were identical; in another pair they had different physical characteristics but were both still recognizable as Maggie; and in the other pair they differed by the same degree in their physical characteristics, yet one was still recognizable as Maggie and the other as Marilyn.
The study allowed the team to pick out the three areas of the brain that carry out different tasks when someone walks into a room. The first region, a pair of structures at the back of the brain called the inferior occipital gyri, was most active when the physical features, such as eyes and hair, in the two pictures differed. It appears to analyse these physical characteristics.
A second region, the right fusiform gyrus, located just behind the ears, was most active when one picture showed Maggie and one showed Marilyn. This region appears to distinguish between faces, perhaps by comparing the face to known ones.
A third area, the anterior temporal cortex, appears to store knowledge connected to the faces. This region was most active when people knew the famous subjects particularly well; less so in those who, for example, were less familiar with the British politicians.
The study is the first to clearly show these three separate stages of face processing, says psychologist Isabel Gauthier, who studies face and object recognition at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.
Driver says he now wants to study patients who, through injury or disease, have particular problems recognising people. Some people with prosopagnosia, or face-blindness, may be unable to recognise faces as familiar as their own children. Patients with dementia may struggle to put a name to a household face.
Driver wants to examine whether he can match up patients' specific problems to different defects within the brain regions identified by the team. He also wants to find out whether some patients could be trained to revamp these failing regions.
Re:What has halloween to do with the world?
on
Halloween Fun
·
· Score: 1
Mod parent Troll! He obviously has never been to a halloween party filled with drunken college girls in revealing costumes!
Their argument for this is bogus. If they think pay-per-view is cutting into the videotape rentals that they so bitterly opposed (you should check out the problems blockbuster had when they first started up), then they should charge more for pay-per-view. It seems like everytime a technological advance comes along, the MPAA has to be dragged kicking and screaming....into a big pile of money. I wish they would stop their whining.
This guy is a hypocrite. First he talks about how VHS cost his industry $3.5 billion (a number he pulled out of his ass) and then he says that the home entertainment market is where they all their money (more money than they ever made before). I seem to remember they fought tooth and nail to kill the betamax (precurser to VHS) when Sony came out with it. I bet if they actually hired some engineers (and not lawyers) to take advantage new technology and not fight it, they could make more money than they ever dreamed of.
Isn't everyone supposed to have an equal chance at getting an organ? Remember Mickey Mantle who pickeled his liver with many decades of hard alcohol? He got a liver ahead of many people then promptly died a few months later. I guess this just proves yet again that some people are more equal that others (namely those with money).
Is it just me or do none of these sound like major innovations? Wow, they are adding a search feature! RSS feeds, don't forget about RSS feeds. And to all you guys talking about how Microsoft is going to start copying apple, who the hell would want to copy these "features" anyway. This is the garbage no one uses in a bloated OS.
Actually, it sounds as if this new galileo system will be reconfigurable once it is in orbit. They may be able to change their frequencies around a little.
Also, any jamming can easily be taken out by a missle. They already have missles that take out radar installations by following the radio waves back to the radar dish. It would be fairly simple to adapt a longer range version to take out the jamming aircraft or other vehicles by following the jamming signal. They may even have these. I am not up to date on our arsenal.
The answer to Spyware and Malware is to fight it with Linux. Sure, its possible to get infected by viruses with Linux, but hardly anyone writes them so you are pretty protected.
Hey chick, have you ever taken a programming class in high school? When do you think they will teach security? In between Hello World and the grade average programs?
Slashdot Mirror
Jones Day is actually headquartered in Cleveland, though they have many law offices around the world, including Chicago.
Look in the 555 timer section.
Get" The Art of Electronics"
Many hobbyist books out there just provide cookie cutter circuits that you assemble without having any real idea what is going on. On the other end of the spectrum, many college textbooks provide pure theory with no application (a very dangerous thing in Engineering).
"The Art of Electronics" shows you how to actually design something, which is a different skill that being able to understand how something works.
I second the choice of AVR microcontrollers. They have some sweet features and are easy to program. Plus, GCC will compile C programs for the AVRs.
The good thing about "The Art of Electronics" is that the authors assume a background knowledge of only basic algebra. You can actually choose how much theory you want because the really important bits are distilled into a few rules of thumb.
For the first time tinkerer, it may be a little much. Eventually, however, the tinkerer will want to actually design something from scratch and find "The Art of Electronics" indispensable.
Spice is nice...
But there is no substitution for building things.
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.
$1000 is a huge overkill. Hopefully you can find a good electronics surplus store near you.
I've bought fully functional top of the line '80s scopes (Tek 7000 series) for $20 at surplus stores. You should be able to find a decent used scope for under $100.
Get an analog scope for your first one. They are dirt cheap used and will give you more insight into how oscilloscopes work.
Because most of todays new parts are surface mount, you will eventually want to get a quality soldering iron. Trying to solder SOT-23s with a 1/4" tip is a royal pain. I recommend Metcal RF heated irons. It has excellent temperature regulation (maybe the best?) and heats up in less than 10 seconds. You should be able to pick up a used one for less than $100 off of ebay.
If you ate a double yolk egg, it was certainly not a cloned animal. Assuming you didn't eat a Balut egg, the egg was unfertilized and thus not an animal at all.
I think you meant to imply that eating a twin is the same as eating a clone. It is not. A clone implies that the animal has identical chromosomes to an already existing (adult or otherwise) animal. Twins (identical) share the same chromosomes because they came from the same zygote and split off in early development.
You are right that some animals and plants are capable of cloning themselves, but no higher order animals and certainly no mammals. In light of the fact that people probably eat cloned fruit (cloned by humans), I can understand their uneasiness with eating cloned mammals.
I would probably eat a cloned steak, but if given the choice, I would probably buy the un-cloned steak every time.
Wrong. The first LED was made of Silicon Carbide back in the early 1900's. An LED made out of straight silicon would produce infrared light. The reason they don't make infrared LEDs out of silicon today is that they are not as efficient (i.e. they produce too much heat). You can show this is true with Schroedinger wave equations.
Actually, All household dimmers use something called a Triac to provide variable phase control to the light. The triac dims the light by only presenting a portion of the 120 vrms sine wave to the light. Google Triac if you want more info. /BSEE
I am a graduating (next week) EE from Case Western. Do you guys have any openings?
Hmmm, this sounds more like the droud from Larry Niven's Tales of Gil the ARM than anything else. Is this going to produce a generation of current addicts?
Parent doesn't know what he is talking about. Fencing isn't exactly painless. It can hurt and leave bruises. I was even hit in the groin (foil) with no cup on. Needless to say, I was on the ground before I knew what happened to me. Then the pain hit.
Also, Epee was invented to train gentlemen to be better fighters in duels where "first blood" determined the victory. You did not want to kill your opponent because his family would string you up and cut your testicles off. You just wanted to stab him anywhere to cause him to bleed, not die. Modern day fencing isn't supposed to mimic real sword fighting. That is because THERE ARE NO REAL SWORDFIGHTS ANYMORE. The flick that you are refering to is hard to execute and takes great skill.
Also, you must think about scoring before you go touting new targeting systems. It would be very difficult and expensive to implement a system of electronic scoring that weights the score of different areas.
It sounds like you want fencing to be more like LARPing. Do you expect a fencer to hold his hand behind his back if it gets hit? What if you shout "SLEEP SLEEP SLEEP?"
I believe they did this already in the '50s by detonating nuclear warheads in space. Doing it by radio waves is really cool though!
Celebrity shots probe face recognition
Helen Pearson
The brain uses three steps to identify faces.
The features in this set of images change gradually, yet our brains flip suddenly from seeing Margaret Thatcher to seeing Marilyn Monroe. © Dr Jenny Gimpel/University College London By transforming the features of Margaret Thatcher into those of Marilyn Monroe, researchers have revealed hints about how our brains put a name to a face.
Neuroscientists already know that certain spots in the brain play a vital role for recognizing a familiar face, even as it changes with age or a new hairstyle. But they have not been clear precisely what each area does.
Using mugshots of celebrities, Pia Rotshtein at University College London and her colleagues have shown that there are at least three separate areas for processing and recognising faces. One processes the physical features of the face, one decides whether or not the face is known, and a third retrieves information about that person, such as their name.
Rothstein's team used a computer to create a series of images in which the countenance of film star Marilyn Monroe gradually morphed into that of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, or that of James Bond actor Pierce Brosnan transformed into current prime minister Tony Blair.
Although the physical features gradually change from one face into another, the researchers showed that subjects looking at the images tend to "suddenly flip" from seeing Marilyn to seeing Maggie, explains team member Jon Driver.
The researchers then showed their subjects three different pairs of images from the array while they were in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scanner. The two pictures in one pair were identical; in another pair they had different physical characteristics but were both still recognizable as Maggie; and in the other pair they differed by the same degree in their physical characteristics, yet one was still recognizable as Maggie and the other as Marilyn.
The study allowed the team to pick out the three areas of the brain that carry out different tasks when someone walks into a room. The first region, a pair of structures at the back of the brain called the inferior occipital gyri, was most active when the physical features, such as eyes and hair, in the two pictures differed. It appears to analyse these physical characteristics.
A second region, the right fusiform gyrus, located just behind the ears, was most active when one picture showed Maggie and one showed Marilyn. This region appears to distinguish between faces, perhaps by comparing the face to known ones.
A third area, the anterior temporal cortex, appears to store knowledge connected to the faces. This region was most active when people knew the famous subjects particularly well; less so in those who, for example, were less familiar with the British politicians.
The study is the first to clearly show these three separate stages of face processing, says psychologist Isabel Gauthier, who studies face and object recognition at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.
Driver says he now wants to study patients who, through injury or disease, have particular problems recognising people. Some people with prosopagnosia, or face-blindness, may be unable to recognise faces as familiar as their own children. Patients with dementia may struggle to put a name to a household face.
Driver wants to examine whether he can match up patients' specific problems to different defects within the brain regions identified by the team. He also wants to find out whether some patients could be trained to revamp these failing regions.
Mod parent Troll! He obviously has never been to a halloween party filled with drunken college girls in revealing costumes!
Shouldn't you be doing something else right now, Nick? Like studying??
Their argument for this is bogus. If they think pay-per-view is cutting into the videotape rentals that they so bitterly opposed (you should check out the problems blockbuster had when they first started up), then they should charge more for pay-per-view. It seems like everytime a technological advance comes along, the MPAA has to be dragged kicking and screaming....into a big pile of money. I wish they would stop their whining.
Watashi wa anime ga kirai desu. But then again, I'm not really a fan of Manga either. I just don't like the style of over emphasizing every emotion.
This guy is a hypocrite. First he talks about how VHS cost his industry $3.5 billion (a number he pulled out of his ass) and then he says that the home entertainment market is where they all their money (more money than they ever made before). I seem to remember they fought tooth and nail to kill the betamax (precurser to VHS) when Sony came out with it. I bet if they actually hired some engineers (and not lawyers) to take advantage new technology and not fight it, they could make more money than they ever dreamed of.
Isn't everyone supposed to have an equal chance at getting an organ? Remember Mickey Mantle who pickeled his liver with many decades of hard alcohol? He got a liver ahead of many people then promptly died a few months later. I guess this just proves yet again that some people are more equal that others (namely those with money).
Is it just me or do none of these sound like major innovations? Wow, they are adding a search feature! RSS feeds, don't forget about RSS feeds. And to all you guys talking about how Microsoft is going to start copying apple, who the hell would want to copy these "features" anyway. This is the garbage no one uses in a bloated OS.
Actually, it sounds as if this new galileo system will be reconfigurable once it is in orbit. They may be able to change their frequencies around a little. Also, any jamming can easily be taken out by a missle. They already have missles that take out radar installations by following the radio waves back to the radar dish. It would be fairly simple to adapt a longer range version to take out the jamming aircraft or other vehicles by following the jamming signal. They may even have these. I am not up to date on our arsenal.
The answer to Spyware and Malware is to fight it with Linux. Sure, its possible to get infected by viruses with Linux, but hardly anyone writes them so you are pretty protected.
Hey chick, have you ever taken a programming class in high school? When do you think they will teach security? In between Hello World and the grade average programs?