The 555 Has Been Around at Least 30 Years

Yup - come one, come all. They are only local blips anyway; unimportant to the big picture.

d

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Reply to
Don Pearce
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Greenies are village idiots. They are such unproductive members of society they have nothing to lose in this sort of catastrophe.

...Jim Thompson

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|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

You need to see the bigger picture to understand why the catastrophe happens. Take a flood plain, build on it, put embankments on the river in the centre of town and Bingo! a disaster waiting to happen.

This ain't rocket science.

d

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Don Pearce

This wasn't a flood plain, nor a river. This was a deadwood issue where greenies, thru their political connections, wouldn't allow anyone to go into the forest and clear it out.

That is going to change!

There is a hanging party attitude sweeping the US and we're going to collect our revenge!

...Jim Thompson

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|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

Same difference - forest needs clearing, either naturally by frequent lightning burns, or by man power. Otherwise you get what poor SoCal is getting right now.

d

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Don Pearce

In article , snipped-for-privacy@invalid.invalid mentioned...

Gotta be careful here; lotsa people out there who might consider this subject not PC. Back to natural life cycle. If that were the case, we should all go back to living in caves, and get rid of that awful indication of a civilized society: electricity. Put all those out-of- work candlemakers back to work. ;-P

= Buggy Whips For Sale - Cheap =

(You'd better watch out, Jim. You might wake up the local village idiot and get him started on one of his RSW(TM) tirades.)

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Reply to
Watson A.Name - "Watt Sun, Dar

Yes, I mean the eyepiece end. My stuff, the PROM cell, and a bunch of other stuff were mounted on a massive, custom fabricated, aluminum frame which was an inch or more thick and several feet across. I was working for the Optical Systems Division of Itek Corp. (Lexington, MA) at the time and I was supporting a couple of our senior scientists who were playing with the PROM call. I don't know if the cell was proprietary to Itek.

My 555 monos were triggered by opto sensors that looked through holes in the circumference of a disk that spun by a synchronous motor. At a different radius on that spinning disk was another hole which acted as a "shutter" for the PROM cell. Thus the timing of my control signals (turned on/off a HV ps) were locked to the shutter's opening/closing.

I helped crate up the monstrosity, and the scientists were off to AZ. They had a couple days of telescope time as I recall and blew all of it putzing with their part of the design. They got no useful data at all ... except for indications that they needed to think on their design some more. My part of the beast performed as advertised. :-)

Reply to
Michael

[snip]

ROTFLMAO! I've certainly never been accused of being PC.

I could enjoy regressing about 150 years... then I'd just shoot the bastards because I don't like their looks ;-)

...Jim Thompson

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|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

First, I am not a greenie! However, I must point out that the most destructive phase of the fire that affected me the most (Cedar Fire in San Diego County) was not caused or abetted by greenie policies. The fire was started by a lost hunter who lit a signal fire in head-high brush, during a Santa Ana wind event (40 MPH winds, gusting to 60, blowing dry and hot out of the desert). The best control method I observed during the fire (and what probably saved my neighborhood) was the decidedly anti-greenie setting of backfires.

Short of burning the entire county every 5 years or so, there is no practical way to control these fires. Firebreaks? The fire jumped a

14-lane freeway. Brush-clearing? The fire burned almost 300,000 acres. Timber harvesting? Except for isolated oak and sycamore stands in creek bottoms, there is no real forest in the area where the fire started (it did burn up into mountain forests after several days) and there is no market for manzanita and mountain lilac. These fires are part of the climate, like hurricanes on the gulf coast.
Reply to
Richard Henry

I think you are causing the cause with the trigger. It doesn't much matter if it was a lost hunter, a discarded bottle or a lightning strike. Fact is it got started somehow. The problem was that the place was packed to the rafters with tinder.

And really an annual underbrush burn is really no bad idea. It can be contained quite easily that way and I bet it would be far cheaper than these last couple of weeks have proved.

Did the fire really destroy timber? I would be very surprised if it burned more than a few millimeters into a mature trunk. Those things just don't burn that easily. I remember over here when the roof of York Minster caught fire years ago everyone thought the roof beams were destroyed. In fact they cleaned up with a wire brush.

d

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Don Pearce

There is a high ridge east of here that suffered an arson fire about 6 years ago. The area that burned then is an island of green now - the fire burned right round it.

Most of the burned over area is cleared of grass, dead leaves, and fallen branches. The skeletons of most of the brush plants stand blackened, and will show fresh green shoots soon after the rains start (it has been drizzling the last two days already). Some plants are resistant by their nature: prickly-pear cactus stands get scorched and shrivelled on the edges, but survive more or less intact inside. I haven't been up to the pine forests yet. The eucalyptus groves are still standing but the damaged trees are being cut down before they fall.

Reply to
Richard Henry

Can't remember what they are, but there are some tress that will only propagate by fire. It is the only thing that will crack open the seed pods.

d

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Reply to
Don Pearce

I read in sci.electronics.design that Michael wrote (in ) about 'The 555 Has Been Around at Least 30 Years', on Sat, 1 Nov 2003:

Well, that's precisely the difference between science and engineering. Engineering is supposed to work - that's how theories are proved in practice; science is supposed NOT to work - that how theories are disproved and new stuff is discovered.

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Reply to
John Woodgate

Scary stuff comes down the hillsides.

See _The Control of Nature_ by John McPhee. It's got a great essay on "Flood", the LA county flood control system.

Mark Zenier snipped-for-privacy@eskimo.com Washington State resident

Reply to
Mark Zenier

Warren, you're remembering something else entirely.

Thanks, - Win

whill_at_picovolt-dot-com

Reply to
Winfield Hill

The So. Cal. brush land is a special case. It's bred to burn. It's a dry land climate brush land, where the foliage ends up creating its own waxy outer layers to prevent moisture loss. Which just happen to be especially flammable. And one neat trick is that they add a layer of waterproofing to the soil, so that after a fire when a big rain comes, it won't soak in.

Add to that the West Coast weather, where the jet stream acts like a fence that collects the rain storms off of Hawaii and herds them all to one spot. You can end up with 5 to 10 inches of rain in a day, (like Seattle got a week ago Monday). The jet stream flails up and down the coast like a garden hose with no one holding it.

So, sometimes you end up with house sized boulders bouncing down the canyons and leaving mud flows several feet deep on the alluvial fans.

But these, of course being So. Cal., are also the areas that are considered prime real estate. Crunch.

Some places, they've set up structures to deal with this. One is the Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area in the San Fernando Valley. Imagine a square mile of Los Angeles just left there to collect mud, which should give you some of the scale of the problem. (Given the real estate values around that place).

Mark Zenier snipped-for-privacy@eskimo.com Washington State resident

Reply to
Mark Zenier

Or see the movies "Chinatown" and "Two Jakes" to get a sense of the political twisting and turning.

...Jim Thompson

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|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

In article , snipped-for-privacy@pearce.uk.com mentioned...

I wish the hell you'd cut out the nonsense. The trees are DEAD!

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Watson A.Name - "Watt Sun, Dar

"W> Warren, you're remembering something else entirely.

My recollection is >10 years later and

Reply to
Richard Crowley

In article , snipped-for-privacy@eskimo.com mentioned...

I lived in L.A. County when I grew up. Us kids took advantage of the flood control system. We went down thru the storm drains to the river bed and set off our cherry bombs and various incendiaries. Great place, if you don't mind getting slimed and bit by black widows. :->

My parents gave me a maroon PaperMate ball point pen and old me to take care of it, because it was expensive. Well, one day I lost it, must've slipped out of my shirt pocket.

A year or two later, I was walking thru the storm drain, hunched over (it was only five feet high), when I saw a glint in the mud. I reached down, and damn, there was my old PaperMate pen. I washed it out, and it started writing, good as new. :-P

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Watson A.Name - "Watt Sun, Dar

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