97-million-year-old fossils reveal the earliest known animal "GPS"

"Settled science" is an oxymoron. Science is never settled - it's just waiting on better data

Sloman A.W., Buggs P., Molloy J., and Stewart D. “A microcontroller-based driver to stabilise the temperature of an optical stage to 1mK in the range 4C to 38C, using a Peltier heat pump and a thermistor sensor” Measurement Science and Technology, 7 1653-64 (1996) – 27 citations so far, only two of them by me.

It's hard to see it as a "discovery" but it was original enough to get published, and since it has been cited, it has been of scientific value. The three patents were definitely were discoveries - by definition they weren't obvious to those skilled in the art - but their value is debatable.

As a rhetorical flourish, this may have looked good to you, but it is total nonsense. The link to

Why would I be silly enough to taste something like that? There was a generation of German chemists who did taste the compounds they were working on, but as they found out more about chemistry they got to realise how risky that could be. I think it had fallen out of favour by the 1880's. I got my Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1970. My supervisor had got his in 1948 - the first one awarded in Australia, so I'm quite few generations of chemists away from that kind of lunacy.

It looks more like malicious ill-wishing.

Of course they haven't. They were around a couple of billion years ago

It's certainly theoretical. But there was clearly something around back then - it shows up in the geological record.

But we can see the traces in the more recent life forms, in the way their now very different biochemistries work

The current scientific literature does seem to moving in a useful direction. People whittering on about "theoretical bullshit, poppycock, and balderdash" don't seem to be contributing anything useful.

Your scientific judgement doesn't seem to be worth much. Most science is putting bricks into the structure. Some people get lucky and are around when there are larger bricks to be slotted in. Einstein and Dirac do come to mind. I have discovered stuff of scientific value - not a lot of it and nothing of any particular value - but I've made my very minor contributions. You won't know about them because you don't know anything much. Scholar.google could enlighten you if you had the capacity to be enlightened, but there's no evidence that you have.

Am I upset? You are just another pretentious clown, and we have plenty of them. What you think you know is only of interest to the extent that you post it here, and it's mainly of interest as a target for exercising my anti-bullshit routines.

Maybe you could get a dog.

I like my triggered LC oscillators as the coarse-delay part of a delay generator. From the trigger to the first usable timing edge is 3 ns.

The Stanford Research architecture works but is complex and has a lot of uncalibrated insertion delay.

I did one delay generator with a coaxial ceramic resonator as a triggered delay-line oscillator. It worked but was expensive. The resonators start at about 500 MHz and go up from there and run around

SAWs and BAWS and quartz crystals have the problem of quenching the oscillator at the end of a shot; mechanical resonators ring like a bell mostly forever.

An on-chip oscillator/divider should be practical these days. That might be cool student capstone project.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Forgive me for this historical ignorance, but wasn't the term /electro- magnetic/ coined to underline the fact that electronics and magnetism was the same thing?

How can you have a "field" of one, and not the other? Please explain that like I was five hundred years old.

Thank you. I was under the -- perhaps mistaken -- apprehension that the Tupandactylus -- Tupa for short [1] -- used the larger flat surface for greater accuracy when measuring these things. Geomagnetic, electronic, it doesn't matter to me.

Because otherwise, I see no point in the rather large flat /sail/ that cannot be solely for sexual selection of reproductive usability. It would create too much of a hazard during a windy storm.

Unless you believe the storms have changed in the last five hundred million years or so? Can that be? I don't know, I'm not that old.

Now, somewhat theoretical question, and one that should be answered at some point, even if the question is stupid [2], can greater accuracy of geomagnetic sensory organs detect the same thing from the moon? Does that help in navigation?

Best wishes, and happy navigation by solar radiation, otherwise known as /daylight/.

Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson snipped-for-privacy@myrkraverk.invalid wrote or quoted:

In a given inertial frame, the field of an electric charge at rest is a pure electric field with no magnetic field.

In a given inertial frame, the field of a current in an electrically neutral perfect conductor is purely magnetic with no electric field.

(A superconductor may be used as a perfect conductor.)

Now I recall reading something about that. Superconductors have no mea- sureable magnetic field, right?

But how do we go in the other direction? Where do we find examples of measurable magnetic fields without electricity? Do lodestones qualify? I mean, don't they have electrons surrounding the nucleus of the atoms?

So what else is out there?

People can play with words, if they want.

I could wave a probe around inside my microwave oven and make a 3D map of what I measure. I'd call that a "field."

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson snipped-for-privacy@myrkraverk.invalid wrote or quoted:

I meant to say instead that a current in a neutral wire with no resistance (as in a superconductor) does create a magnetic field, without an electric field.

What you remember might be based on the fact that a charged superconductor has an electric field on the outside, but not in its interior (inside).

So, to summarize, in a given inertial frame (for an observer at rest and not being accelerated) it's possible to have both an electric field without a magnetic field and a magnetic field without an electric field. So you can have a purely electric field and a purely magnetic field.

Dear John,

I recommend you do not do that with your own bare hands. I have a rather sad anecdata of unknown veracity from Iceland, of a convenience store owner who got tired of always opening and closing of the microwave oven, with the side effect the disk would stop spinning.

So he disconnected the security valve that stops the electronics of the microwaves once the door is opened. He presumably could feed hungry students faster with this stunt.

Alas, woe! Some time later, days, months, years, I do not know; it wasn't part of the story when I heard it.

He went to the medical doctor with his hands hurting. But the doctor could do nothing. The innermost meat on his hands was cooked.

I presume you knew all that already, but thought to share with the rest of sci.electronics.design, in case someone else had that folly of an idea. Best wishes, and happy microwaves!

So the horrid creature could get its latitude with magnetic and gravity sensors, and with one of these Iceland Spars it could get longitude. Might need a clock, and probably has it. Sloman's got a real GPS here, no satellite links or power source necessary.

Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson snipped-for-privacy@myrkraverk.invalid wrote or quoted:

Robert V. Pound suggested to use low-dose microwave radiation to keep people warm in winter, heating them directly in an energy-efficient manner. (Physicists know his name from the Pound-Rebka experiment.)

Electricity and magnetism are different but closely related. An electric field can be created by positive and negative charges (eg proton/electron) separated by a distance. A magnetic field is created by moving charge.

If you have oscillating electric and magnetic fields in sync, they form an electromagnetic *wave* which has additional properties, carries energy, and propagates in a certain direction, and is quantized into individual photons. Light, for example. Fields in a wave exist without the presence of charge or motion.

If you have separated charge without motion, you have an electric field without magnetic field. If you have a charged particle moving alone, magnetic field without electric.

A permanent magnet has a field caused by the unpaired spin of one of the electrons in an iron atom. The "spin" is moving charge that creates a magnetic field, and it isn't cancelled out by adjacent electrons as it is in other atoms.

HTH.

How does the bird detect curvature at one point? It requires accurately measuring a field change at multiple points a known distance apart.

Even then, how does it find position from that, and how accurately does it have to measure?

I think the function of the crest is unknown. If it could be used for navigation, I don't see how. These reptiles look heavy, not like they are made for long-distance flight.

I don't understand the question. The moon has no significant magnetic field of its own, so probably not. If you're on the moon, you can only detect the local magnetic field, not the field down on the earth's surface.

Yes, better to fly VFR.

They are good questions, thanks.

Bipedal means having 2 feet. Nothing about hands, etc.

Do a kangaroo's arms have feet?

So you're saying birds have 4 feet?

Most animal species don't even have feet.

There are lots of trade-offs in any real design.

Don't know it. Why is the insertion delay un-calibrated? If you know what it is you can measure it, and should then be able to calibrate it.

The resonators started at 500MHz back in 1988, and you had to buy a batch. Management wasn't going to wait for any batch to be delivered.

Lot's of ECL is a good thing. From an analog point of view it's a lot less noisy than switching logic.

Which is why I prefer continuously running oscillators.

Practicable and practical are two different criteria. The on-chip oscillator has been practicable since the 4046. Getting a good stable low jitter oscillator on a chip is trickier.

At my age, the dog would probably outlive me. The dog wouldn't enjoy that.

By moving, it can move in 3 ways up-down, left-right and back-forward

That 3D freedom, when it can feel the inner magnet's effect on it's neurons, can tell it where it is. A bit like looking around where you are.

Also object recognition is part of the brain temperature, wind, smell, all together now!

Old MacDonald does enjoy his unrealistic fantasies.

Mariners had a lot of trouble working out their longitude until Harrison came up with his marine chronometer.

If you could moor next to a nice stable island and set up and astronomical observatory on shore, you could eventually work out exactly where you were, but it did take a while.

Why do you presume so? Sure, you always think you know better than any- body else here in sci.electronics.design, but why cut your age short? Isn't life expectancy always going up?

So I'm going to assume for now you're less than eighty years old, and that life expectancy reaches one hundred and thirty in the next decade, so now you can live miserably for the next fifty years and continue to spew your ignorance and hatred all over sci.electronics.design.

Wouldn't that be fun? To have Bill Sloman butt in on every discussion that he doesn't approve of, denigrate all hobbies that don't involve electrons, disapprove of cryptography, steganography, and all around fun, just because he doesn't understand any of it? I mean, what's wrong with Egyptology as a hobby? And why can't you read Linear B?

So, please, do what you have to make it happen, and continue to be mis- erable here in sci.electronics.design for the next fifty years. That will be fun for the rest of us!