GR Experimenters

Nice link! Downloaded some stuff.

It isn't all that widely known but Rutherford was seriously involved in early radio experiments before he moved onto radioactivity. Marconi beat his first efforts by about an order of magnitude in distance ~ 10 miles.

The reason being that he was advised by his supervisor, no less than J J Thompson that radio waves would never really amount to much.

The "New Cavendish" (back in the 70's when it *was* new) housed the Radio Astronomers *and* High Energy Physicists in the Rutherford Building for this reason. They were as far as possible from the solid state guys with their powerful electromagnets in the Mott Building.

There is now an even newer Cavendish facility and part is called the Ray Dolby centre and named after a former Cavendish student who went on to invent Dolby encoding of audio signals. It is on JJ Thompson avenue.

PS Merry Christmas everyone!

Of course it is still done, but now it gets published in peer-reviewed academic journals that John Larkin doesn't read, and doesn't even seem to know about.

If you publish good stuff in academic journals it gets cited in other academic journals, and that makes you more employable in universities around the world. It can also get noticed by people in industry, and that can help you get an even better paying job.

I'm astounded that my key fob and garage door opener work from half a block away. JJ was right, it's obviously impossible.

Second that!

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Thanks for that. Merry Christmas! Ed

You could publish your own “Highland Flings”

How's that working for you?

Most of the sci journals are paywalled, and most of the papers are silly.

When I'm in a good library I browse The Review of Scientific Instruments, for the hilarious schematics.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

I'm considering that: emailing a lot of newsletters and archiving them on our web site.

I get maybe 100 spam emails a day. I can tell from the sender address or the subject line that I don't want to read them. "Touching base" is instant killfile.

We did one mailing with subject line "We hate power supplies". It had a high open rate. People will open interesting or quirky stuff but ignore the usual word salad.

I have forbidden the word "solutions" in all my company communications.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

It worked fine when I was younger.

Not exactly silly, but specialised. And you can get around paywalls a lot of the time - people who work at universities usually have institutional access

It does publish some pretty rotten electronics. For time to time I write comments pointing out the defects. Five of them have got published. The first was in 1972, and the most recent in 2011. There are two others in similar journals.

It also publishes some pretty impressive stuff.

Increasingly they are not. Premium content like Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society used to be but went free access about two years ago. They have all had to adapt since these days almost everyone puts their preprint work onto arXiv which is pure free access for all.

Elselvier tend to be more awkward. But you can always read them in any copyright library and most departmental libraries for a given subject.

ADS abstracts will often allow you to see enough to know whether it is worth a trip to the library even for serious pay to view stuff.

Physicists do design (that's not the right word) some pretty odd stuff.

They have a compulsion to use discrete-component diffamps and current mirrors.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

They know they have to keep up with the physics literature, but they are less aware that the electronics business develops new and better parts at much the same kind of rate.

My 1996 paper on a milli-degree thermostat was novel in using a cheap

And I published in the British "Measurement Science and Technology" - formerly the "The Journal of Scientific Instruments" which was always a bit more commercial than "The Review of Scientific Instruments." I'd refereed a couple papers for them earlier, long after I'd moved into industry.