Posts by cortland

Dog days?

Is that when members begin to chase their own "tales"?

Already on file!

http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/Pluto

Wakeup for masochists?

Some decades ago I proposed an electric Platoon Sergeant: First it blows a whistle, next it shakes the bed, and finally overturns it and roars at you.

Ah, technology!

And yes, I've BEEN a Platoon Sergeant.

So

So the lights are going off all across Europe. This time, HACKED.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/features/uk-turn-lights-next-month-3834559

Just pick 'em from EE Smith.

http://thelensuniverse.blogspot.com/2009/05/planet-trenco.html

Meanwhile in Brussels...

http://www.brussels.be/artdet.cfm/4328

Prepare in advance

Generate data on millions of randomly spelled names with compliant but imaginary telephone numbers and IP addresses, for communications to occur in the future.

This probably violates six kinds of privacy laws.

What you mean "we", paleface?

My 1970;s and 80's stereos work just fine, thanks, and a license-free FM transmitter serves the whole house. Even better, at 70 I don't NEED 20 KHz audio (can't hear it, in fact).

So F Off, you vendors. It's used CD's 'til I die!

Sons of toil and plunder

Will you knuckle under

Or bow down to RIAA?

(apologies to Rudolf Friml)

http://lyricsplayground.com/alpha/songs/s/songofthevagabonds.shtml.

Two words

Comb filter.

Do it in DSP and notch mains frequency harmonics.

Not that it will help. There's already a mike in the telephone.

It's done, then?

And that's your base canard, right? (ducking)

Could be worse

In,1984 or so, my then-employer wanted to find out how much shock a planned laptop computer needed to withstand. One of our VP's, a Russian who'd escaped the USSR many years previously, was flying to the Far East on company business, and he was elected to carry a clockwork-accelerometer-instrumented briefcase. The way I heard things, he might have gotten less attention on that trip if our tech had not had a very strange sense of humor....

When our flyer's bag was X-rayed at the San Francisco airport there was of course nothing for it but to open the briefcase. As the tale reached me, that was when the trip became interesting. The tech who fitted the instrument had done a little more than specified; he'd painted dowels used to hold the accelerometer in place red, stenciled "DYNAMITE" on them and wrapped copper wire around the package to really make people nervous.

At that point, a Russian accent probably did not help.

It was apparently a long enough trip for a hot temper to cool, else the tech might have been dismembered by one very Mad Russian on his return, but he wasn't even fired. IIRC, this was the same tech who later (IIRC) came to work one week with his arms bandaged, having on a fishing trip needed >100 stitches after one night falling into a campfire full of broken beer bottles and passing out...

Ah, youth!

http://devilanse.wordpress.com/2009/11/20/nablopomo-wang-laptop/

http://www.vincentflanders.com/wang-laptop.html

And in the "How the mighty are fallen" department:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Wang-Laboratories-Vintage-Professional-Laptop-Floppy-Drive-Paper-Disks-Case-/291179730117?pt=US_Vintage_Computers_Mainframes&hash=item43cbaa14c5

No bids, four days to go and a minimum of just $50US.

But it was rugged! And as I can personally attest, it could take as much as 25kV of ESD.

Say

"burning dinosaur food," not "dinosaurs."

Gutenberg

And movable type were the tipping point for a wider spread of information and the end of church monopoly on what's in its bible. We've been waiting for the Net to go supersonic and maybe we are seeing it accelerating. How long will it be before the education that has been a guild monopoly (look at their robes) is available to everyone? Free!

The currency of physical trade is standards of living. THIS sea change will end with no one in Africa disconnected from the Net -- and everyone in Afghanistan allowed to use it.

High School

Physics and Chemistry are a lot more capable than people like to think it is. The "railgun" I built at age 12 could embed ball bearings in my bedroom wall , and with more coils and some not very complex sequencing, could have penetrated them. Now imagine someone creative with a barrel of finishing nails...

The landlord and Dad bought me a crystal radio the very next week Gee. What a surprise.

FWIW, tune around; you may not need WiFi or Bluetooth to hear that CD player.

My electron

Feynman wrote that he once tried to verify mathematically the idea that there is in fact only one electron, traveling forwards and backwards (as a positron) in time,. Didn't work, but...

Ideitifying features

Physicist Richard Feynman wrote that he and some colleges went to conference on gravity and forgot the address. They told the taxi driver to go where other passengers using words like "mu" and "nu" with each other had sent him. No problem.

We don't have boffins in the US (One of my High School classmates -- 1962 -- would qualify for his work at Argonne National Labs) but sometimes use nerd or geek. I suspect these are rather off target, though; I've been called the latter myself simply because I know a little about electronics . (Is a kid who builds a railgun in his bedroom at 12 a nerd or a geek? The landlord thought I was a threat to his wallboard.)

A few years ago, before I retired, I was to do a class on practical electromagnetic compatibility at an aerospace firm to newly hired engineers , and had to drop part where I wanted to ask them the field radiated by a wire carrying current (given radiation pattern and resistance). High School arithmetic!

Boffins? Ask an archaeologist.

Surely

just the STEAM age, no? The telegraph system mostly survived one that DID hit us, with aurora's as far South as Cuba.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/06may_carringtonflare/

Do remember

That the thermal expansion/contraction of your your copper-wire (tinned?) electrical contacts and the tubing it slides into has to match. It is _slightly_ warmer at ground level than at altitude underneath the balloon, and it could be *embarrassing* were those wires to hang up on ignition.

.._. ._ ... _

I calculated him hitting 89 wpm. FAST fingered, indeed.

http://www.arrl.org/news/morse-code-at-140-wpm (receiving)

http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/records-1/fastest-speed-for-a-morse-code-transmission/ (sending) 216 "marks"(?) in one minute

It is apparently not a crime to SAY one is subject fo an NSL unless he's actually gotten one.

I foresee a popular theme for webtags and avatars: "I got an NSL."

When it goes away everyone will know what happened.

Ohmygosh --- fish F*CK in it!

Controlled airspace ENDS at 60,000 feet, or do we route around satellites now?

Who's THAT?

http://www.abbreviations.com/term/19362