The late, great Steve Jobs!!

How could i not say something about the late, great Steve Jobs!

He died of pancreatic cancer, & that alone makes me feel for him - various members of my family have died of cancer, & pancreatic cancer took one of my closest friends - Petrina Jane Glover (1946-2003) - in a particularly horrible way (she was so stoic throughout the whole ordeal) & her partner Amanda died of a stress-related illness in the same month (December); i was a basket case for weeks afterwards..

i sincerely hope he didn't suffer too much.

Cancer doesn't kill you - it just rips you apart & then you die!

What an amazing story! The 6502 chip..

One of my working-life mottos was (& still is):
Never do anything by hand if you can get a machine to do it for you!

And i stand by that - i learned it the hard way while trying to foot it in heavy manual jobs with guys the size of All Black forwards with hands almost bigger than my head.  These guys could casually pick things up & walk away with them - i had to think!  And be on good terms with the fork-lift/crane driver!

So when i read this account of the design layout of the MOS6502, i was gobsmacked.  The guy who did the layout made not a single mistake in a design involving 3510 transistors (modern CPUs have several hundred million) & he did it all by hand!!

We take a great deal for granted in our Age of Technology, not least the idea that we can boot up our capabilities with machinery of various kinds that make hitherto difficult jobs easier (& faster) & in some cases practically impossible jobs possible.

Somewhere in my messy house is a little book about the humble screw-driver (yes, & it's an interesting story too).  Along the way, the author delves into the history of screws, nuts & bolts (once made by hand to fit each other & tied together with string because they were unique & not inter-changeable) & the engineers who revolutionized manufacturing (the word itself is now a bit of a misnomer because it's derived from the Latin meaning 'made by hand').


For more on the MOS6502 tho', read about this account by Brian Bagnall.

Motor-mouth..Dear Helium..

It's not that i'm a real motor-mouth, just that when i get started, i switch from topic to topic until i run out of steam, or i notice my audience getting a little restive.

I need to get out of the house at least every couple of days, or i go stir-crazy (or lie in bed feeding my face).  
Even if all i do is have a coffee in some public place like a cafe (or the Vehicle Testing Station, where my car got its latest Warrant of Fitness without a hitch - surprise, surprise!), 
read a zine, or earwig sometimes (but i completely forget the topic of conversation unless it's something on which i could've voiced an opinion, then i remember what i Would Have Said..), tho if it's personal to someone i quickly lose interest - can't be doing with gossip - boring boring..


Dear Helium!! 
It looks like you're not too long for this world - well, this earth actually, according to an article in "New Scientist" magazine - projections have you gone by 2030.
I'm really surprised you're here at all, coz you're lighter than air, & should've been all gone millions of years ago, but there have been underground reserves, & the US has kept a national helium reserve since 1925, one billion cubic metres (1 000 000 000m3) at a recent count, until a 1996 US Congress ordered that it all be hocked off by 2015 - Duh!.


What part of 'irreplaceable resource' did they not understand?

Who was US President then?  I can't remember, off the top of my head..
(Can't be bothered finding out, either, easy tho it is with the WFSE)

"Zero Time Space"

The title of a book by two German scientists, Gunter Nimtz & Astrid Haibel.
Basically, about quantum mechanics & some very weird (well QM is weird - weird is normal in QM!) stuff about superluminal velocity (i.e. faster-than-light speed) stuff.

Doesn't (can't) happen in free space but you get things like quantum tunneling (i think i've got that right), which has been exploited in the semi-conductor tunnel-diode for decades (invented in 1957!, by Leo Esaki 
when he was working for what is now Sony), which behaves a bit like a Gunn diode in that it has a "negative differential resistance" section in its Voltage-Current characteristic curve..


The authors go thru some very strange behaviour of light, and they also mention the Casimir effect.


However, sci-fi & sci-fan fans, prepare to be disappointed!
Cause still has to precede Effect & you can't travel back in time (& kill Adolf Hitler or whatever).
And while it is technically possible to traverse a worm-hole, 
the amount of energy needed is absolutely gargantuan!!


Never mind, i'm not worried, the Universe is quite strange enough for me.
People sometimes ask me if i get lonely or bored (i live on my own)..


Nope.  Not at all.

Sun-In-A-Bottle..

I've just finished reading Charles Seife's entertaining book
"Sun in a Bottle" - about the controversial & so-far-fruitless attempts to harness the power of nuclear fusion in a reactor (as opposed to the Hydrogen Bomb).

There are reviews here, here & here.

The strangest part of the hydrogen (well, Deuterium actually) fusion story is that it IS actually possible to construct a table-top reactor!

These should not to be confused with various spurious claims of cold fusion.
(Yes, as i've said before, i DO use Wikipedia - it's a good jumping-off point)

I kid you not! The problem, of course, is their tiny, tiny yield of neutrons, & the fact that - inescapably it seems - they consume far more energy than ever comes back out of them in any useful form.

Confining a super-hot, high-pressure nuclear fusion plasma is like trying to nail jelly to a tree!

Various enormously energy-hungry (& stupendously expensive) devices, like the Russian tokamak (pics,pics,thingies,moreThingies), gigantic magnetic 'bottles', 'pinch' machines, & the international project ITER, have all run into the same problem - it takes so much energy even to try to stabilize the mercurial & leaky 'heavy' hydrogen plasma at the kind of temperatures & pressures needed to sustain nuclear fusion, that their net output is less than zero!!

The 'table-top' machines (here & here) are ingenious, & (as Seife himself says) could even be an economical source of neutrons for, say, neutron-scanning substitutes for X-ray machines.
I thought they were really clever. And they're astonishingly simple, compared to the high-tech behemoths that were constructed for the 'positive-net-output' outcome which, according to Seife, is as far off as ever.

I'm wondering if a bigger 'flood-of-neutrons' table-top machine could be used to tickle up a less-than-critical-mass nuclear reactor to the point where it would run despite its small size..

That would be interesting..

Cradle-to-Cradle..

My house is full of stuff because i'm a bit of a hoarder.
Throwing things out is hard for me, & the sight of things
building up in land-fills is not something i can ignore.
A little spare money means a trip to the recovery store at the local landfill site.

Our primate ancestors had no problem with throwing stuff away - it was biodegradable & living mostly in trees meant not having to live with their own rubbish.
We haven't quite adjusted yet - if our ancestors had been feline, would we insist on burying our effluent, i wonder?

Industry & farming have the same problem, on a larger & more destructive scale. Planned obsolescence took no account of what to do with the newly obsolete because it didn't directly cost manufacturers anything, & anyway that's what second-hand dealers of all sorts were there for..
At the end of the chain was the tip (aka dump, landfill, whatever).

Cradle-to-grave..

Now we have to start thinking about ways out of this problem.

So Cradle-to-Cradle makes interesting reading. And it's actually a commercially viable concept according to the two people who formed this company.

And there are others..
"let's start designing things with the idea that they will never become waste but will always be reused in some form or another"

As a kid i lived next door to an old bloke who had a work-shop with a big 3-phase electric motor mounted under the rafters - it drove his grinder & wire-brush buffer & his 4-speed drill-press; all done with belt-drives! In one corner was a big German lathe salvaged from World War 1 or 2, i never worked out which, & he had the usual oxy-acetylene & arc-welding gear (& - quite rightly! - he went really went crook at us kids if we ever looked at the welding process, even for a second!).

And he never seemed to throw anything away!
Someone would come in looking for an odd-sized bolt or something, & he'd have it! Somewhere. In one of a whole lot of tins full of kerosene to stop them rusting..

Composting is a form of recycling that i became most familiar with. I hated digging the garden, it was exhausting, & i hated weeding even more. But the thing i loathed most was "mowing the lawn". Yes, it's supposed to be good stuff for kids to play on, & we did, but the baulky, stiff little push-mower was definitely not my friend. At all. Composting was the only thing i was any good at, & i enjoyed experimenting with heaps & bins of various sizes, collecting stuff to feed them, & keeping an eye on them.

We weren't made of money, so we couldn't afford waste. The habit's stuck.

When all else fails, follow the instructions..

My Minor Project might've gone a little better if i'd stuck to Lewis Loflin's original instructions.

It wouldn't be the first time. Back in the day, when i had (by chance) the use of my (at the time) boss's workshop, i decided to give my sister's car a bit of a clean-up.

I duly borrowed, from the Dunedin Pulic Library, the manual for the Standard Vanguard Phase III (this WAS a very long time ago, you understand) - back in the day, you could actually do that; but so many people were nicking the manuals, or not bringing them back, that the DPL said "No more" & marked them all as 'Read-Only'.

And (back in the workshop) i'd decided to take the head off the old Massey-Fergusson tractor donkey that formed the power-plant of this vehicle, & clean up the valves. So..
..i undid all the head-nuts & tried to lift the head off; it was stuck - one end came free & the other stayed stubbornly put! The 'stuck' end did have this irrelevant-looking little bolt that the manual said should be removed, but i'd thought "WTF's that got to do with anything??" & ignored it. Eventually (when all else failed!) i removed the harmless little bolt &..
..lo-&-behold the head came off just like that! I still don't know how the stupid little bolt stopped the head coming off, because it didn't go into the block (which is why i ignored it in the first place!), but it did..
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