Analog versus digital: power consumption

do

======================================= You are correct. When it comes to signal power and noise power the most efficient, least error, coding method is to translate the signal into Gaussian white noise.

And white noise is certainly not digital.

Certainly. If you know exactly what processing is required, and it can be simply implemented in a compact form. If you'd like to be able to trim the exact response, or even have the option of changing it drastically, then digital is usually better.

I think the IEEE spends too much time proving the obvious in the most complex way possible.

The two lowest powered hearing aids are the ear trumpet and a little sign that says "speak up damya". Both are analog and draw zero battery current. No digital circuit can do better.

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kensmith@rahul.net   forging knowledge

Hello Ian,

The challenge would be to pre-determine how much change is really required in the field. Filter slopes could be adjusted nicely with switched capacitor filters. But it seems that technique has gone into a boutique corner when I look at how quickly those chips have vanished for the discrete world. I am guilty as well but I didn't use them because the prices never really came down enough.

Regards, Joerg

The fact that the human body runs all day on a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of milk is beside the point.

Life is more than just watts dissipated by meat ( I hope ).

RL

Hello RL,

But it sure is impressive. However, when taking the bicycle to travel the 70 miles from my parent's house to my college town I found that in terms of Dollars I spent more on fuel than my car would have needed. The liquid kind of fuel :-)

Regards, Joerg

"They're made out of meat."

"Meat?"

"Meat. They're made out of meat."

"Meat?"

"There's no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."

"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?"

"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."

"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."

"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."

"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."

"I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they're made out of meat."

"Maybe they're like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage."

"Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take long. Do you have any idea what's the life span of meat?"

"Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside."

"Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads, like the weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through."

"No brain?"

"Oh, there's a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat! That's what I've been trying to tell you."

"So ... what does the thinking?"

"You're not understanding, are you? You're refusing to deal with what I'm telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat."

"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"

"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you beginning to get the picture or do I have to start all over?"

"Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."

"Thank you. Finally. Yes. They are indeed made out of meat. And they've been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years."

"Omigod. So what does this meat have in mind?"

"First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the Universe, contact other sentiences, swap ideas and information. The usual."

"We're supposed to talk to meat."

"That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio. 'Hello. Anyone out there. Anybody home.' That sort of thing."

"They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?" "Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."

"I thought you just told me they used radio."

"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat, it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."

"Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"

"Officially or unofficially?"

"Both."

"Officially, we are required to contact, welcome and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in this quadrant of the Universe, without prejudice, fear or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing."

"I was hoping you would say that."

"It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"

"I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say? 'Hello, meat. How's it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?"

"Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can't live on them. And being meat, they can only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact."

"So we just pretend there's no one home in the Universe."

"That's it."

"Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you probed? You're sure they won't remember?"

"They'll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we're just a dream to them."

"A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat's dream."

"And we marked the entire sector unoccupied."

"Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?"

"Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotations ago, wants to be friendly again."

"They always come around."

"And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the Universe would be if one were all alone ..."

the end

martin

[snip]

Bwahahahaha! ROTFLMAO! Very nicely done, Martin!

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

snip bandwidth

Not my work, unfortunately. these days I just cut 'n paste circuits from data sheets

But keeping an eye on boingboing and digg puts the repuglicans and the weanies into perspective

martin

Thanx for the refresher of why that magazine is not worth the time to read it. That Sishawasnikar or whoever has the cochlea theroy of operation all wrong- not to mention his condescending simplifications of everything else were quite sickening.

I second that. We subscribe to the IEEE and combined with my colleagues I think we only find a couple of articles per year that looks partly interesting (how many more ways to make a matrix converter can be found)

Often these Ph. D guys (sorry - no offense) has no clue getting a real circuit to work

Regards

Klaus

Or, if you're feeling philosophical, here's something completely different:

;-)

Cheers! Rich

I was grocery shopping the other day, and there was a display where they had 16 oz. bottles of water on special: only $1.00! Lessee, two pints in a quart, four quarts in a gallon - that's EIGHT BUCKS A GALLON! And people complain about the price of gasoline?

Thanks, Rich

Cheers! Rich

[snip]

I recently bought flats of 48 pints at Sam's Club for $4.19 and sold them to the Girl Scouts for 50¢ each ;-)

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

I get 500ml (17oz) bottles of spring water on sale for 0.12 each. That's about 1/4 the price of regular gasoline. Of course they're more like $1. or $1.19 cold at convenience stores, so there are advantages to owning a fridge. ;-)

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it\'s the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

Well, there we have it, folks! Jim Thompson has just admitted that he rips off girl scouts.

Must take one helluva man!

Thanks, Rich

As usual you f***ed up and drew the wrong conclusion...

We sold them to 261 attendees at a father-daughter fishing at a local lake.

The profits went into the troop bank account.

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

You're so right. Of course, holders of BSEE degrees are no longer required to know which end of a soldering iron to hold, so what do you expect?

On the other hand, academic and other research folks are stuck on this treadmill--it doesn't matter how good your work is, if someone's done it before, you're a schmuck. Fortunately reviewers aren't that knowledgeable, so the same stuff gets published over and over at intervals of 20 years...like the guys who figured out how to use Z transforms to design analog filters. My only pure theory paper came to grief when I discovered (after sending it in) that the result had first been obtained by Lord Rayleigh in about 1880.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs