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

But ECL is expensive, big, and a power hog. There doesn't seem to be much going on in ECL. Internally, even a cheap FPGA has way fancier and faster logic elements.

There are still some fast lvds/CML parts being designed, mostly for telecom. But even those are being obsoleted by full-custom high-volume chips.

I wonder if anyone is still designing at the gate/flop level with discrete ECL. Must be rare.

Then the problem is corecting for the time offset between the clock and a random trigger. SRS does that, but it's complex. The Pepper patent was genius but has bad drift issues.

When we trigger our oscillator, the clock is aligned with the trigger. Then we can phase-lock it to a XO at leisure.

That would make the project interesting.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Hot buttered rum is more efficient.

Logic has been

Relays Tubes Neon tubes (cool decade counters) Discrete transistors RTL DTL (and a few weird things like Utilogic) ECL Fluidistics Some superconductive things TTL

I wonder what's next.

No it can't. It can only detect the strength and direction of the magnetic field right here, right now, at one point.

Not at all like looking around. You can't "see" a magnetic field in the distance.

To get a differential measurement you have to travel a long way, remember the last measurement accurately, and know how far you've gone in what direction.

Even if you can do all that faithfully, it still doesn't tell you where you are.

Not enough information to navigate. Especially somewhere you've never been before.

In that case, why don't we just task Bill Sloman to improve life expect- ancy according to my earlier estimation?

The HP 5370B Precision Time-Interval Universal Counter has a start-stop oscillator that has survived the test of time. (Pun intended) Its innards are not secret. <

I once inherited one from a local ham, but it has transmofrified to a large array of contact problems. I think there are even some replacement boards.

For daily work, I use a Stanford SR620. I still wonder how its miniature "power" transformer can feed all that ECL & LED displays.

In the early 1980s I used cross-coupled AD9500 in an ultrasonics phased array for beam forming. That worked quite OK. There have been been better "digital monoflops" in the meantime. IIRC, sth. like SY-xxxx.

Gerhard

Am 05.10.26 um 20:05 schrieb Gerhard Hoffmann: ...

gs/transmofrified/transmogrified/

We still have a few 5370s. They were wonderful. We now mostly use Keysight 53230As in test stands. From a user interface standpoint, the

The 5370 used a Motorola MC6800 p-channel 8-bit uP. The code must have been incredible.

And less likely to cook the heat recipient.

Your cat would disagree.

By controlling vermin that ate crops, cats facilitated our ancestors' transition to agrarianism. Thus were humans domesticated. Both species fancy themselves apexual, but humans labor to buy cat food while cats lounge about the yard all day. Now you tell me who's deluded.

By that logic, we can also say that wheat [1] domesticated humans. By appealing to our taste buds, we strive to make sure there's abundant wheat growth all over the planet, even in places where it couldn't seed itself naturally.

This has made sure that wheat is the preeminent grain [2] and is likely to be the most popular for next few millennia as well.

I'm fairly certain all of these plants that have dedicated industry think of us as nothing but slave labor.

What do you think?

I haven't got a cat, and haven't had one since I became an adult. I did take a kitten over to my parents in Tasmania when I turned 21, and it did end up as the dominant cat in the area around my parents house, but it didn't hang out with me when I came back to visit.

Is there any evidence that cats drove the transition to agrarianism?

All the evidence for cat-human association that I know of all post-dates the agricultural revolution. Dogs were around earlier.

Cat don't write. They certainly feel superior, but thinking that you are an apex form of life involves concepts that aren't going to evolve without a written language.

The implication is that Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson thinks that he has a mind. There's not a lot of evidence around to support that hypothesis. It's like John Larkin claiming to have ideas, when he's clearly talking about misconceptions.

Not all that rapidly.

I'm 83. My 83-year-old cousin died last month. The oldest Australian has just hit 113 (it was on the news last night). The average age at death for Australian males is currently 81.1 but since I've made to 83 there's an even chance that I will make it 90. Figure in that I never smoked and completed tertiary education and it may go up another year or so

I expect to be able to continue to correct your more flagrant errors and those of other, for a few years yet. The ignorance involved is all yours, and any hatred around seems to arise in your dislike of being corrected. Cleaning up after the incontinent is messy, but it does need to be done.

Nobody can read linear B. Not enough of it has survived to provided a decodable corpus. I don't recall denigrating any hobbies, but nut-cases to tend to react badly to correction.

Miserable?

Jim Thompson would have been your beau ideal. He once claimed to have reported me to the FBI for my dangerously anti-American ideas. He didn't report their reaction, but in 1970 I'd been let into US Army ECOM back when it was at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey at a time when I'd been cleared to "most secret" under the Australian system, so it probably didn't go down well.

That ia the point I was making, the birds fly (move in 3D) 'look around'.

Birds often fly in flogs, many together Some 'have been there before'

Sun position, time, (sextant) brain internal clock..

Just the kind of half-witted suggestion we can expect from Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson. There are experts who work on improving life-expectancy, but they start acquiring the relevant expertise as undergraduates, and demonstrate and develop the relevant skills through a long period of post-graduate education and supervised research before they get let loose to start researching the problem on their own (usually as part of a team).

A Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry isn't a good starting point for that kind of trajectory, and moving off into electronic engineering wouldn't have helped.

But does it have quieter ones?

If you can put it inside a chip and get the circuit layout within the chip optimal, you should be able to do well.

A lot depends on batch size. When you had to pay $100,000 for a mask set, chip level design only made sense for industry standard products.

We did it at Cambridge Instrument back in 1988. It wasn't complicated. We did rely on frequent auto-calibation to deal with drift issues

But not all that precisely.

Perhaps impracticable.

But are they quieter?

But you don't seem to know enough to ask the right questions. One of my colleagues at my first job

You aren't making sense. You aren't explaining how birds determine their location and navigate by magnetic compass alone. Because they can't, any more than an airplane can.

Can you predict next week's weather by knowing only the temperature outside your door? Or by reading tea leaves? Same thing. The information just isn't there. It's ok, I don't expect you to understand.

No doubt those things help. It takes a lot besides a simple compass.

Now you're going to tell us how whales can determine their location by sonar?

Good luck with that.