Junk_Collector

Some discussion from when it was last posted

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21630333

Correct. If he's limited to transistors and basic LRC components, then the typical hello world would be an oscillator into an output. An LED will blink but I think a piezo speaker is funner if you have a turnpot. When you get to opAmps, add a simple microphone (a microphone element can be had for about 5 cents) and feedback to make one of the classic "shushing" devices.

FPGAs aren't really analog. FizzBuzz is just a counting operation, so the analog equivalent is just a pair of accumulators that discharges to a "Fizz" or "Buzz" led or perhaps a plotter arm if you wanted to print the whole list.

I actually think that novice hobbyists are better off with the venerable 741 because there is just so much clear and concise documentation on it's use in hobby projects that have accumulated over the years. Once you have a grasp of what the different specifications mean, then it's easy to make the jump to other more modern chips with better performance.

That's funny because the US actually has reduced per capita CO2 emissions by about 20% back down to levels not seen since 1960.

Edit: I suppose I should include a source. From the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location...

Am I the only one who notices that you can't throw a board in the bed without strapping it because all of the modern trucks have 6 ft beds instead of 8 ft?

Disney uses something similar in a lot of their stage shows at their parks. They use a water fountain to create a screen and project onto the water sheet. It works surprisingly well, but I would assume that it is pre-rendered.

They're used in Smartphones too in the form of S.A.W. filters.

Maybe you should read up on the history of HP. It is largely considered to be the case study in how a company can be ruined when technical management is replaced by "MBA" management.

This is a function of the permittivity of the material. A Vacuum is 1, the lowest possible. Air is 1.0006 so you won't see much difference.

Fiber optics of various types are usually on the order of 2 to 3 (closer to 2).

It's a good book and I really respect their management philosophy which could not be more different than modern corporate theory. Just look at this snippet of Dave's statement on the purpose of a corporation (The whole thing is really worth a read).

"I want to discuss why a company exists in the first place. In other words, why are we here? I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company exists simply to make money. While this is an important result of a company's existence, we have to go deeper and find the real reasons for our being. As we investigate this, we inevitably come to the conclusion that a group of people get together and exist as an institution that we call a company so they are able to accomplish something collectively which they could not accomplish separately. They are able to do something worthwhile-they make a contribution to society (a phrase which sounds trite but is fundamental)"

Remember that Bill and Dave started HP as a 2 man operation in their garage during the great depression. They basically built the company from nothing into a technology power house over the course of their lives and the things that they went through clearly shaped how they ran the company. It is a testament that you can still find a large number of impressive engineers that were HP lifers.

When Bill and Dave were finally out of the company there was a stark 180 in philosophy. You can always tell when management is about to do something sleezy in any of the HP spin offs (including HP) because they invoke the founder's to justify their obviously poor decisions.

"I really think this is what Bill and Dave would have done"

Your first link was paywalled so I couldn't read it, but the potential issues with meta-analysis papers has been discussed to death already.

The article you linked second, is interesting. He makes some bad claims (The electric fields produced by muscles are strongly polarized contrary to his claim that they are unpolarized) and there is some questionable math, but what I really want to highlight is how he uses the pulse repetition interval in his section on forced oscillation. By his own math, a CW signal at mm-wave frequencies produces no biological effect being to low of intensity. The formula given is proportional to 1/(2pif) so it follows, but he then uses the PRF to set the frequency and displacement and finds that at these low frequencies, the effect is strong enough to be dangerous.

The problem with this though, is that the PRF is how often you activate the transmitter and not the frequency of the transmitted RF signal which leaves us with the perverse conclusion that, mm-wave is fine under normal circumstances but becomes more dangerous the less you are exposed to it.

A finding from your link.

"the biological activity of any specific type of EMF is inversely proportional to its frequency and proportional to its intensity"

If anyone is interested in this sort of thing, I highly recommend getting into your local Ham Radio club and learning about Fox Hunting events.

This is getting beat up but it's prescient.

There have already been calls for DRM inclusion on 3D printers and consumer CNC machines. The bans start with objects of violence, i.e. guns and knives. Next it will be to prevent copyright violations. No more printing your own warhammer figurines or Micky Mouse Novelty phone holders. Then we move on to objects of sexual deviance, gotta think of the kiddos. Eventually it leads to the day where you are buying 3D printers that only print from a pre-approved and monitored repository of models. But don't worry, you can upload your owns models to Google-CAD!

Nothing in the link is clickbait though. It's a town repeater station being told to vacate land because "advancing technology" has rendered it's benefit to the state obsolete. They then request $7500 to perform a study to draft a lease and $5000 a year to administer that lease once the amount is determined.

Most of the link is the site operator's response to the administration and it's all very level headed and well thought out.

It's pretty telling when they want almost 10 grand, about half of which is recurring, to draft and administer a lease without ever discussing what the lease might entail.

That's how you know it's a Google product.

It's the same market and in the same band so, yes.

No useful technical details yet to know much about it.

Yeah, Jeri's Amphour talk is one of the things I make people I know who are trying to get into tech startups listen to. It's a great insight into what happens when a sucessful startup gets the wrong kind of VC help.

For what it's worth, the original glasses set worked wonderfully years ago when I used them and I'll back this one again. I'm still determined to have my floating CAD solidworks demo with it. Customers will freaking love it.

p.s. The games were fun too. Try it with Alien Swarm.

Sort of. If you don't have roads out to those rural areas you can't bring food into the city. If you don't have power infrastructure out to the sticks, you can't produce food nearly as efficiently. The modern city can't exist without a rural infrastructure.

There are a large number of Suburban areas now, that began as smaller towns and cities grew into and filled the gaps between. Those primarily existed as local concentration points to facilitate rural infrastructure at one time.

Here is the actual study for your perusal

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S147020451...

Unfortunately, it only covers the 7 countries that funded the study, but it is much more in depth than the news article.

Well no, what I said was, a decade ago was the most active period for Hurricanes. This current decade is less active than the previous one, or the 1930's or the 1960's. Most decades have little to no Cat 5 hurricane activity so if you take the last 2 decades and compare them to the previous 10, then Hurricane density seems 3 times higher even though it is currently lower than it was 70 or 100 years ago depending on your measurement period. If we were to bin in 20 year chunks, then it would put this bin as the most active by a small margin. The most reasonable way to organize it would probably be year by year but category 5's are a relatively rare event so you don't see much variation if you just compare individual years. Most are 0, with high points being 2 a year, and a very rare 3 in a year. The real issue is that extreme hurricanes are clustered events. There seem to be a number of years where they hit heavily, then stop for a while before starting back up and we only have about 100 years worth of records which isn't enough to make a lot of meaningful predictions for something that seems to run on a 30 to 40 year cycle.

This is without touching on the issue of measurement bias, which is extremely difficult to determine the level of.

It appears that Hurricanes are fairly clustered when broken down by decades so that the most active time period for category 5 hurricanes was the 2000's with the second most active being the 1930's followed by the 1960's. It's also difficult to determine the actual number of Cat 5 hurricanes in the past because previously they could only be measured roughly at Landfall and more modern measures can monitor any hurricane in existence meaning that there will be an increase in Cat 5's because of measurement bias. The impact of this is unfortunately, almost impossible to say with certainty. This is all covered in the first few paragraphs of the link you posted.

To claim a 3x increase would be an example of binning your data to exaggerate effect.

They do; I thought that this was common knowledge.

A quick example from a few years ago http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,135999,...

See also last election.

You might call that a failure of management.

User interfaces are measurably slower than they were 20 years ago by at least an order of magnitude depending on how you measure it. They also do more, so it's up to the particular user and use case to decide if the trade off was good.

There was someone who said something along the lines of, "Heaven is old software on new hardware" and I personally agree with them.

Perhaps instead of assuming a position that he didn't actually state and calling him "confused" you could have addressed his larger point that the vocal proponents of climate action alienate large portions of the population by painting them as ignorant or stupid instead of attempting to engage with them.

You could do this today without any sort of "smart" appliance for about $1.00, $50 if you are being lazy. Just get a super simple micro-controller and radio on a board and throw it into your fridge. Have it record the temperature at a regular interval into a ring buffer and poll it periodically from a chron script. Get your power from the light switch in the fridge door. Alternatively, a Li-po or Li-ion battery can last an extremely lond time powering a little micro in a refrigerator. If you put a $0.02 photo diode on it, you could also track how often the door is open.

If you went the full on $50 route and bought a pre-integrated board with wifi and a full linux stack, you could even have a push notification to twitter or email or whatever when the temperature goes out of spec.