True fact. I am an atheist Christian. I have a friend who's an agnostic Jew. We don't believe in a different God. When we worked together, he had an electric menorah on his desk, while I had a Stryper album above my desk.
Better trick: A few years back, I told the cute clean-cut Mormons at the door that most of my Mormon friends are gay. That blew some fuses in their brains, and they haven't been back since!
An interesting aspect of the brain is that it may be possible to build circuitry that mimics its behavior without understanding that behavior. There are many complex systems (collections of simple parts) that exhibit surprisingly coherent behavior that you just wouldn't expect. Swarms of locusts are one example. The insect robots that learn how to walk every time you turn on their power is another example.
The folks in charge of the music industry have a view formed by decades of paying for bands to record, then pressing a bunch of records. That makes a barrier to carrying an artists' work. Currently, the only barrier is the addition of more data to a database - nearly zero cost.
I know you're being silly, but I've measured both. I found that electricity on a printed circuit board (I know, not technically a wire) is 2 nanoseconds/foot, which is half as fast as light in air. Most coaxial cables' velocity factor is rated at about 70% of the speed of light.
Measuring the speed of light to 1% accuracy with junk-drawer parts and Ebay bargain istruments is not trivial, but it can be done.
I agree - I think that all the engineers I've worked with who are really sharp started tinkering with stuff in their childhood. I'm one of those folks who had a very early start at engineering. My dad liked to bring home random surplus electronics stuff, and it would get taken apart, repurposed, messed around with etc.
By the time I was in high school, I was designing circuits and writing code. A midlife career change from industrial computers to radioastronomy equipment was facilitated by a hobby of building a pirate radio station.
> In case I decide to take it up in retirement, does anyone know a cheap way to make a 4-way mobile platform for an automotron?:)
There is a robotics company called Vex that makes kits with all the necessary parts. It's like an erector set with a radio control unit and motors, but more sturdy. My nephews use them in high-school robotics club for competitions.
And after 300 miles of empty Australian desert your Neon would roll to a halt, drained of gasoline, as the solar car just kept on going and going and going...
The batteries could be replaced with more modern ones, now that Li-ion and NiMH are readily available. Remember, the EV1 was designed about 15 years ago, so its technology was quaint by today's cellphone-driven technology standards.
My wife recently talked me into buying a Prius, and it's a fine car that can be converted without much work to run on batteries exclusively. However, it's such a gas-sipper that it's not economically feasible to do so - it would cost 50,000 miles worth of gas ($3K) to convert to electric use. And that with a whopping 40 mile range!
I just had one go bad on me in the bedroom, and it died by flickering, then emitting a stream of smoke as it buzzed and glowed orange in the ballast through the plastic. My wife opened all the doors to get the stinky smell out of the house.
I cut it open and found that two resistors had melted at quite a high temperature. This was a Feit 13 watt Conserv-Energy unit.
Until this happened, I was quite happy with the Feit bulbs - they start fast, have a decent color, and fit in all my fixtures! Here's the schematic of the unit that died - the resistors are on the bases of the two transistors.
Curious statement about getting a non-hybrid car with better mileage than a Prius. I just got a Prius since it has the roominess of the other cars of the small class (Civic, Corolla, PT Cruiser etc.) yet gets significantly better mileage, especially in town. Please name another car that has better mileage and the same interior space. (The Prius gets 45+ MPG in real world driving for me.)
It was a thing of beauty - the studio would send a signal via a UHF radio link to the solar-powered main transmitter in the mountains. The 1 watt signal had amazing reach due to the 3000 foot altitude gained by using the mountains. The first one was confiscated by the Forest Service, so I redesigned it to be mass-producible and built a half-dozen more.
The studio contained an amusing amalgam of cobbled-together home audio equipment, homebrew signal processing etc.
The station itself was recognized as one of the best radio stations in town by people who care about such things, but that's mostly due to choosing good people and letting them do what they wanted to on air. For that matter, the people aspect was really the most amazing thing about the radio station engineering.
See it in the movie Making Waves by Michael Lahey - not at Netflix, unfortunately.
Perhaps Steve Jobs doesn't invoke the same "I'm gonna get him!" feeling in the black hats that Bill Gates does. Or maybe it's that darn reality distortion field...
I work on a couple telescopes of this type in Arizona, the old NRAO 12 meter scope on Kitt Peak and the 10 meter submillimeter scope on Mt. Graham. See them here. It's true that there aren't many scopes of this type available. There are a couple in Europe and one on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
The NSF has sunk nearly all their money into the ALMA array in Chile, and we get the scraps. That's unfortunate because they'll never let students near the ALMA array, since it will cost gazillions of dollars per hour to operate. So it's nice to see another single-dish millimeter wave scope opening.
I realize that this is just a laboratory curiosity at this point, and no one would try to use such a compound commercially. Still, a brief description of what it's like to make 0.35K is in order.
I work on a radiotelescope that uses receivers cooled to 4K. These use a helium refrigerator that works just like the Freon thing in your car but using helium instead of Freon as the phase-change medium. It takes three stages of cooling (with compressors and heat exchangers) to get to the 4K point. It also takes 10 kW of electrical power to cool one watt of load to 4K.
We until recently had one receiver, a bolometer, that was cooled to 0.4K using the 3He isotope of helium that has a lower boiling point. The refrigerator for this is a fist-sized gadget that uses a charcoal trap, a heater resistor and some plumbing to make a refrigerator that can be cycled to produce 0.4K for a day or so at a time. It makes many microwatts of 0.4K coldness from less than one watt of 4K coldness.
Unfortunately, the 3He leaked out and the gizmo is currently a paperweight since it was made by a very clever French guy who's no longer in the business.
You can still buy 3He refrigerators from other manufacturers, but they are two feet long. The 3He is available for several thousand dollars a bottle.
I must admit that I don't understand your point - the failure rate of newish disk drives is so much lower than the failure rate of 3-year-old disk drives that I don't think you have a point. I've seen dozens of disks die in my 25 years of working with them, and I am having a hard time remembering any that were less than 2 years old when they died. Infant mortality just isn't a concern with disk drives, compared to that of worn-out mechanical parts.
The hard drive industry (so far) has this magical quality of doubling their products' capacity every year or two. This dovetails nicely with the rate at which crap piles up on your hard drive, necessitating an upgrade of capacity.
Disk drives have bearings and heads that wear out over time. They may not wear out enough to fail in a couple years, but why go through the grief of a disk crash if you don't have to?
New software comes out every few years, such as new OS versions etc. If you are planning to install a new OS on your computer, why not do a clean install on a shiny hew disk drive and keep the old one on hand as insurance against catastrophe?
I work as an engineer at a non-NSF-funded university radio observatory and we have the hardest time getting funding for even paper clips. We took over an old ex-NSF telescope a few years ago and have been keeping it running on a tiny budget.
It's rather difficult to provide students with telescope time if the only telescopes available are those big $billion arrays that the NSF has put all its funding into. I'm not sure where the balance should be, but some amount has to be provided to keep the lesser isntruments going for the next generation of astronomers to learn with.
My wife has looked into these plants. Some folks called "Global Energy Resources" proposed one near where I live. The guys running the company were baically con men, so it appeared to anyone who looked closely at their records. They dropped the idea after a few months of inquiries.
Google this:
"Global Energy Resources" sierra vista
to learn more.
We'll be harvesting landfills in 100 years to get the materials (plastic stuff mostly) that our country is so busy paying China to manufacture, then buying and disposing of in said landfills. If all that fodder is vaporized for energy, we're screwed.
With all due respect, the article doesn't describe the device as you say. It weighs 125 lbs in prototype form, which will be reduced for production, and there's only one needed per airplane, not one per drive. What they're proposing is much less bulky than a similarly useful grinder or furnace. After all, it has to be usable on many packaged drives, quickly, in emergency plane-crash conditions.
In a previous life, I did some work for E-Systems on a spy plane (Rivet Joint) using big removable ESDI drives of a few hundred megabytes each capacity, and the project guy said that it took about 20 minutes for their emergency drive erase sequence to finish. Not good if you're going down in enemy airspace!
It depends whom you ask. The folks who make atomic clocks would be highly bothered if you were to change the definition of a second. Mere mortals, on the other hand, probably wouldn't notice until the day had stretched to 26 hours long, and they may well adapt evolutionarily to that by then.
The thing about the daily cycle of a human is that it's a driven oscillation - the earth's rotation makes us get up in the morning and to bed at night. Driven oscillations occur at a higher frequency than the natural frequency of the resonator (you).
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True fact. I am an atheist Christian. I have a friend who's an agnostic Jew. We don't believe in a different God. When we worked together, he had an electric menorah on his desk, while I had a Stryper album above my desk.
Better trick: A few years back, I told the cute clean-cut Mormons at the door that most of my Mormon friends are gay. That blew some fuses in their brains, and they haven't been back since!
An interesting aspect of the brain is that it may be possible to build circuitry that mimics its behavior without understanding that behavior. There are many complex systems (collections of simple parts) that exhibit surprisingly coherent behavior that you just wouldn't expect. Swarms of locusts are one example. The insect robots that learn how to walk every time you turn on their power is another example.
What would an Apple user be doing in Wal-Mart in the first place? We all go to Target for our designer plastic crap.
The folks in charge of the music industry have a view formed by decades of paying for bands to record, then pressing a bunch of records. That makes a barrier to carrying an artists' work. Currently, the only barrier is the addition of more data to a database - nearly zero cost.
Measuring the speed of light to 1% accuracy with junk-drawer parts and Ebay bargain istruments is not trivial, but it can be done.
By the time I was in high school, I was designing circuits and writing code. A midlife career change from industrial computers to radioastronomy equipment was facilitated by a hobby of building a pirate radio station.
> In case I decide to take it up in retirement, does anyone know a cheap way to make a 4-way mobile platform for an automotron? :)
There is a robotics company called Vex that makes kits with all the necessary parts. It's like an erector set with a radio control unit and motors, but more sturdy. My nephews use them in high-school robotics club for competitions.
And after 300 miles of empty Australian desert your Neon would roll to a halt, drained of gasoline, as the solar car just kept on going and going and going...
My wife recently talked me into buying a Prius, and it's a fine car that can be converted without much work to run on batteries exclusively. However, it's such a gas-sipper that it's not economically feasible to do so - it would cost 50,000 miles worth of gas ($3K) to convert to electric use. And that with a whopping 40 mile range!
I cut it open and found that two resistors had melted at quite a high temperature. This was a Feit 13 watt Conserv-Energy unit.
Until this happened, I was quite happy with the Feit bulbs - they start fast, have a decent color, and fit in all my fixtures! Here's the schematic of the unit that died - the resistors are on the bases of the two transistors.
Curious statement about getting a non-hybrid car with better mileage than a Prius. I just got a Prius since it has the roominess of the other cars of the small class (Civic, Corolla, PT Cruiser etc.) yet gets significantly better mileage, especially in town. Please name another car that has better mileage and the same interior space. (The Prius gets 45+ MPG in real world driving for me.)
The studio contained an amusing amalgam of cobbled-together home audio equipment, homebrew signal processing etc.
The station itself was recognized as one of the best radio stations in town by people who care about such things, but that's mostly due to choosing good people and letting them do what they wanted to on air. For that matter, the people aspect was really the most amazing thing about the radio station engineering.
See it in the movie Making Waves by Michael Lahey - not at Netflix, unfortunately.
Perhaps Steve Jobs doesn't invoke the same "I'm gonna get him!" feeling in the black hats that Bill Gates does. Or maybe it's that darn reality distortion field...
The NSF has sunk nearly all their money into the ALMA array in Chile, and we get the scraps. That's unfortunate because they'll never let students near the ALMA array, since it will cost gazillions of dollars per hour to operate. So it's nice to see another single-dish millimeter wave scope opening.
I work on a radiotelescope that uses receivers cooled to 4K. These use a helium refrigerator that works just like the Freon thing in your car but using helium instead of Freon as the phase-change medium. It takes three stages of cooling (with compressors and heat exchangers) to get to the 4K point. It also takes 10 kW of electrical power to cool one watt of load to 4K.
We until recently had one receiver, a bolometer, that was cooled to 0.4K using the 3He isotope of helium that has a lower boiling point. The refrigerator for this is a fist-sized gadget that uses a charcoal trap, a heater resistor and some plumbing to make a refrigerator that can be cycled to produce 0.4K for a day or so at a time. It makes many microwatts of 0.4K coldness from less than one watt of 4K coldness.
Unfortunately, the 3He leaked out and the gizmo is currently a paperweight since it was made by a very clever French guy who's no longer in the business.
You can still buy 3He refrigerators from other manufacturers, but they are two feet long. The 3He is available for several thousand dollars a bottle.
I must admit that I don't understand your point - the failure rate of newish disk drives is so much lower than the failure rate of 3-year-old disk drives that I don't think you have a point. I've seen dozens of disks die in my 25 years of working with them, and I am having a hard time remembering any that were less than 2 years old when they died. Infant mortality just isn't a concern with disk drives, compared to that of worn-out mechanical parts.
The hard drive industry (so far) has this magical quality of doubling their products' capacity every year or two. This dovetails nicely with the rate at which crap piles up on your hard drive, necessitating an upgrade of capacity.
Disk drives have bearings and heads that wear out over time. They may not wear out enough to fail in a couple years, but why go through the grief of a disk crash if you don't have to?
New software comes out every few years, such as new OS versions etc. If you are planning to install a new OS on your computer, why not do a clean install on a shiny hew disk drive and keep the old one on hand as insurance against catastrophe?
I work as an engineer at a non-NSF-funded university radio observatory and we have the hardest time getting funding for even paper clips. We took over an old ex-NSF telescope a few years ago and have been keeping it running on a tiny budget.
It's rather difficult to provide students with telescope time if the only telescopes available are those big $billion arrays that the NSF has put all its funding into. I'm not sure where the balance should be, but some amount has to be provided to keep the lesser isntruments going for the next generation of astronomers to learn with.
My wife has looked into these plants. Some folks called "Global Energy Resources" proposed one near where I live. The guys running the company were baically con men, so it appeared to anyone who looked closely at their records. They dropped the idea after a few months of inquiries. Google this: "Global Energy Resources" sierra vista to learn more.
We'll be harvesting landfills in 100 years to get the materials (plastic stuff mostly) that our country is so busy paying China to manufacture, then buying and disposing of in said landfills. If all that fodder is vaporized for energy, we're screwed.
Everything in my life *is* cheaper (except healthcare, housing, gasoline, food...) Yup, everything.
With all due respect, the article doesn't describe the device as you say. It weighs 125 lbs in prototype form, which will be reduced for production, and there's only one needed per airplane, not one per drive. What they're proposing is much less bulky than a similarly useful grinder or furnace. After all, it has to be usable on many packaged drives, quickly, in emergency plane-crash conditions. In a previous life, I did some work for E-Systems on a spy plane (Rivet Joint) using big removable ESDI drives of a few hundred megabytes each capacity, and the project guy said that it took about 20 minutes for their emergency drive erase sequence to finish. Not good if you're going down in enemy airspace!
till we move to a country with a sense of freedom.
The thing about the daily cycle of a human is that it's a driven oscillation - the earth's rotation makes us get up in the morning and to bed at night. Driven oscillations occur at a higher frequency than the natural frequency of the resonator (you).