Silicon Valley Redneck

Bring back engineer pr0n!

Over at the Castle, Bad Cat Robot expounds (in short form) on the need to bring back the sense of wonder in science fiction.

Ah, yes: the good old days!  When the hero would invent a star-drive, build a space-ship, and go gallivanting off around the galaxy, fighting and/or befriending bug-eyed monsters along the way!  And, if a villain was needed, a lawyer or pointy-haired manager would do nicely!

And, indeed, this is the sort of thing that used to inspire a new crop of budding engineers: the notion of creating cool new toys (yes, folks, toys can be created, not just bought), using them to do awesome stuff, and making the galaxy a better place.

Not only is it inspiration to the young, it's escapism for those stuck in the world our future turned into, in which even a small and mildly innovative project drags on interminably, and no mighty deed would ever get past corporate management and government regulators.

So bypass the publishing cartels, and go back to writing the good stuff.  Perhaps it'll inspire the youngsters, and show them the future we've lost.  And maybe, just maybe, they'll try to salvage it from the present we have.

More teevee

Still under the weather, though I seem to be recuperating.  So, what with my brain being out of order, it's an occasion for more mindless entertainment.

The boss had mentioned Rocket City Rednecks, on account of he's been having business dealings with someone connected somehow with the show (that was a few weeks ago, and the details escape me).

It's kind of a fun show - sort of like of Red Green, if the denizens of Possum Lodge were Southerners and also were Piled Higher and Deeper.  And had a penchant for kludging laptop computers into their creations, and occasionally resorting to math.

And that counterweight-catapult gizmo with the balloons is kinda halfway to an idea that's been rattling around my head for a couple of years now, as an untried solution to a common Scrapheap Challenge problem: imparting controlled multi-G acceleration to flangable objects using block & tackle and a 16-ton weight.  Sometime when health and work schedule cooperate (i.e., not anytime in the next few weeks), I need to test the concept, and, if it works as it ought, make an instructional Youtube video or something.

Oh, and the "this stuff is dangerous" warning?  In the case of the moonshine rocket fuel, yeah: that kinda stuff can get you shot by the revenooers, can't it?

Anyway, as edumacashional teevee goes, it's not even up to the recent standards of Pinky and the Brain and the Three Stooges Mythbusters, but it is fun.

Downtime

Virus.  Ugh.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure it's a virus.  The boss had similar symptoms a couple of days ahead of me.  Debilitating headache, sore throat, queasiness, wobbliness, and bonus all-over soreness.  Body temperature a couple of degrees below normal, which might account for some secondary symptoms (and which doesn't match flu hardly at all).  I thought at first the sore throat was just the result of talking too much while making the rounds at the Design2Part show on Wednesday, but no such luck.

Got a little work done yesterday, but not a heck of a lot.  Hard to focus on anything that requires actual thought.  Kludging up an RF test widget: yes.  Analyzing a critical QA document: not a chance.

And, just in time to occupy some of that can't-do-much-useful time, there's a new edition of the popular battery-decharger app, The Birds Who Commandeer Neutral Transport - oops, no, those would be Angary Birds - sorry, Angry Birds vs. Captain Link Hogthrob.  A few hours of semi-mindless entertainment, fun while it lasts.

And there's napping to be done.

Meanwhile, work gets further behind, and next week looks like ever more of a scramble.  Such is life in the small-business lane.

Gotta run down my task list and see if anything calls for making lights blink.  It's easier to focus on work if blinking lights are involved.

Forgetting the details of a political year

Over at Patterico's place, Karl has a post about the political climate of 1980, and how people forget what it really was.

There's another, more famous political year, a bit further back, whose history is even more distorted in the popular memory.

I keep noticing how many people - notably, those for whom it's Forever 1968 - have completely forgotten how things stood in that year.

Yes, 1968 was the glorious year of anti-war protests, burning draft cards, and the great masses of We the People demanding that the U.S. get out of that accursed never-ending war in Vietnam.

Which Nixon got us into.

Er... wait.  How's that again?  In the Wonderful World of Forever 1968, did Nixon steal the election in 1960, so in '68 he was running for a third term?  Are the entire Kennedy and Johnson administrations airbrushed out of history, except for Camelot and the Great Society?

Or did Nixon use the Republican Time Machine (invented by Karl Rove in 2003) to go back and start the war before he took office?

Uh-oh.

News from Mercury:

Something besides volcanic eruptions and asteroid and comet impacts has sculpted the surface of Mercury -- an unknown process, possibly still going on today, that causes the ground to swell from the inside out.

It's been incubating in the Sun's warmth since time immemorial... and now it's hatching!

Diodes. Why'd it have to be diodes?

Let's see... I've had issues with reverse current (and its change with temperature) a few times.  Forward voltage, once in a while.  The diode property of the day is...

Junction capacitance!

Perfectly straightforward circuit.  Gate of FET has a weak pulldown to handle startup conditions.  Logic can drive gate HIGH or LOW via a 10K resistor (a value that can't be much reduced due to constraints elsewhere in the circuit).  A pair of global enable signals, when in the LOW-to-disable state, pull the gate LOW through Schottky diodes of a familiar type.  So, the global enables and the logic all have to agree that the FET should be turned on before it gets voltage (in excess of a Schottky drop @ low current) applied to the gate.

All seemed well, until, in checking out a reported timing issue on the tens-of-milliseconds scale, I observed that there was a microsecond-scale ACTIVE pulse on the output of the FET when the enables went HIGH, but before the logic had gotten around to taking action.

Oog.  Edge getting coupled backward through the diodes?  Edge getting coupled backward through the diodes.  Capacitively.  Turns out those suckers have 60 pF typical junction capacitance, each.

Tossing in a 470 pF cap from gate to ground suppresses the pulse, without obvious untoward effects.

A possibly better solution is to swap the diodes for a footprint-compatible model of adequate specs for the application and 2 pF maximum junction capacitance @ 0V.

 

Teevee

Been watching some recent TV during downtime.  Specifically, Archer, whereof I first read here.

Crazy animated spy-show spoof.  With extra crazy.  In crazy sauce.

Er... not a kid-friendly show.  Nor Santorum-friendly.  Nor Eloi-friendly.

Joy keeps getting Archer mixed up with the Tick's sidekick (only he doesn't wear a bunny suit, and doesn't fly).  I get him mixed up with Sam Spade's sidekick (only he hasn't been shot with a Webley-Fosbery, and isn't dead).

Oh, and that authentic weaponry?  Drawn well enough for me to notice when someone's brandishing a single-action pistol with the hammer down.  (Funny how none of the characters in these shows ever spot that, even, in The Rocketeer, when the thugs pulled the menacing-with-uncocked-1911s bit on a bar full of WWI vets.)

Anyway: for those who like spy spooves and don't mind over-the-top sex and violence in their comedy, it's a fun show.

Huh.  Silly spellchecker flags Eloi and Rocketeer, but doesn't mind spooves.  Until I type it a second time; then it flags both of them.

Scare

Wednesday, 2200ish: bedtime, a little on the late side for me, but, as previously mentioned, my circadian rhythm hasn't fully adjusted to the time shift.

Wednesday, 2330ish: wake up, whazzat?  Phone?  Phone.  Whereza phone?  Missed it.  Hmm?  Prolly the I've-fallen-and-I-can't-get-up people wanting to tell me that my mother pushed her button, and has been assisted, and everything's OK.  I mean, who else calls my home phone at such an hour?

A moment later: cellphone.  Private number.  Well, my parents' home phone has been mostly reporting as private ever since they got that AT&T Per-Verse thing ('course, that had a few weeks at the beginning when their phone service was flakey in arcane ways, so having everything working except for outbound caller ID is not so bad).

Anyway: it's my mother on the phone.  My father's just been loaded onto an ambulance with what might be a heart attack.

Wednesday, 2350ish: dressed again, grab swig of caffeiniferous nectar, get in car, head for Palo Alto, pick up mother, head for Stanford Hospital.  Apparently he'd been having moderate chest pain for a couple of hours - not a sudden collapse, but neither a wait-until-morning nor a drive-yourself thing, given his history.

Thursday, 0010ish: arrive at Stanford Hospital.  Or the hospital complex, at any rate.  It's a big complicated place by day, and it's night, and the roads are all torn up.  Head for main entrance & associated parking - oh, foo, we forgot to bring my  mother's handicap placard - well, find a drop-off area, anyway - hmmm, apparently 0015 is "after hours" at this entrance.  Well... so let's try the emergency-room entrance.  Follow the blue signs, in the dark, on another big loop around the detours; find emergency-room entrance.  Nice attendant offers mother a wheelchair, and opens gate of lower parking lot (across road) so's I can stash the car.

Thursday, 0030ish: arrive on foot at emergency-room entrance.  Security checkpoint?  Metal detector?  Oh... this is maybe the trauma center for East Palo Alto.  Have to check my dinky Swiss Army Knife (as if there weren't plenty of deadlier things to hand in any hospital).

Father is off being X-rayed.  Some minutes later, we get to visit him: lying down (like all the other patients), but alert and coherent.  They've been feeding him dynamite, and the pain has diminished to 2/10.  No word of a diagnosis.  A little later, when the nurse comes around again, the pain is down in 1/10 territory, but he now has some abdominal pain too.  She gives him another dynamite pellet.  We leave him to rest for a while.

Thursday, 0200ish: they've given him a dose of morphine, and it's sleepy-byes time.  He's being officially admitted, so it's time for the rest of us to go home until the morrow.

Update, Thursday, 1030ish: heard from my mother, who'd finally heard back from the hospital after a couple of hours of runaround.  He'll be ready to go home soon.  So, off to parents' house to await the call.

Final update: Waited and waited... around 1245 the call finally came, and we went over to pick him up.  Found him standing outside the main entrance, looking healthy again.  Release had been delayed by further tests - stress echocardiogram or some such.  Which, like the night's X-rays, revealed nothing to explain the evening's symptoms.  And so, back to normal, but with instructions to talk to his regular doctor and his cardiologist at the earliest opportunity.

Helping to understand...

Over at Instapinch, some commentary on the preliminary NTSB report on Lex's crash.

An informed take on the sparse facts, and enlightening as to just how conditions and events seem to have stacked up.

Could be that, no matter how well anyone and everyone performed that day, it just wouldn't have been good enough.  And there are endless what-ifs: what if he'd had a few seconds more fuel, or a few seconds less, or if any of a long series of decisions that day had been timed just a little differently... just one parameter tweaked a little....

But, no: sometimes, with everyone making the best decisions they can at the time, with the best information they have, the whole endeavor runs up against the forces of nature and the laws of physics.  And going back and tweaking history is not an option.

There may be useful big-picture lessons as the investigation proceeds; perhaps changes in equipment and procedures will be called for, to prevent the next loss.  And it remains to be seen whether any of the day's actions should have been taken differently.  We shall see what comes out of the investigation (actually, multiple investigations) in due time.

Distracted.

Having an inefficient morning.  Had a look at a certain one-week-later preliminary report.  Not a lot of information, but what there is fits together and is consistent with both initial news reports and the facts (but not the speculation) that had come through the rumor mill, and my poor Visualization of the Cosmic All now includes a scenario which makes a lot more sense than the one I'd earlier been pondering and failing to grok.  And no tinfoil is required, which is a big plus.

Anyway: having been in something of a blueberry-muffin mood since yesterday evening, and finding the weather forecast non-conducive to venturing forth into the hills, I set about making muffins.

And, being distracted, left out the sugar.  (That's one of those things that can happen when you don't use recipes.  Recipes: they're like checklists for the kitchen!)

Sugar-free, whole-wheat blueberry muffins.  Edible, and I do need to cut back on sweets, but... I think the remaining ones will be best cut in half and drizzled with honey.

And now, time for work: stuff to respond to, a preliminary schematic to finish, strategy to discuss with the boss (or, if he's still afield today: there's plenty of other stuff that needs doing, and strategy can be discussed tomorrow).