Let's Take A Vote...

I would say, let them spin around the nucleus forever, and maybe sometime in the near future let us capture some of that beautiful energy that is available... the easy way! :-)

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What? Phil I thought your nose was always in a book, not pointed at the TV?

George H.

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I don't watch TV or movies normally, but I'm not ideological about it. (Of course the last movie I watched was in 1987, but that's because there haven't been any good ones lately.)

My winsome #1 daughter (who grew up with no TV in the house, courtesy of her cruel and inhuman father) bought the Nth season of Rocky & Bullwinkle on DVD, and I happened to pass by the room she was watching it in. I always did like the Confederate Corrector episode. (And #2 daughter is winsome too, in case she's reading this.)

My kids also keep me in good reading material--on Sunday, when I was getting ready to go on my monthly trip to NM, the same daughter gave me a book on the Trojan War to read on the airplane, and my son gave me his favourite Hemingway.

So yeah, I read a lot, and I've been doing more normal circuit design in the past year than I have in a looong time. Fun. :)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Which Hemingway was the favorite?

So sorry that you had to wait to get dimensional analysis until college, i got it in my sohpmore year physics in high school.

Given the well known issues with getting realistic data from SPICE which has well calibrated and tested models, do you really want to trust anybody making climate predictions with models whose very theory is suspect as well? Particularly when there is no track record of model testability or calibratability?

It is nice to hear, but no one else here abuses that difference to the extent you do, not do many others claim to be so scientific in approach as you do. Grow up some, Mr. Businessman, and acknowledge what you have become really good at: the regular manufacture of test equipment at reasonable prices.

The Old Man and the Sea. I'm saving it for the plane home on Saturday.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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If I were going to pick one movie to see from your 20+ year hiatus it would be Peter Jackson=92s =93Lord of the Rings=94. (Assuming you have rea= d the books.) Quite a work of love for many involved, and made for a BIG screen.

I can't wait till my kids are old enough to recommend/ lend books to me. Ages 9 and 11 now, so it won=92t be long. My daughter has inherited my reading bug, and has been wading through the Harry Potter books this summer. Volume seven is being saved for our vacation on Cape Cod. (We leave tomorrow!)

George H.

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Thanks. I've read The Hobbit, TLOTR, and the Silmarillion many times--I got TLOTR in one big thick volume for Christmas when I was 16, and proceeded to read it all the way through, straight, twice. Love at first sight, and I've never wavered.

I'm a big fan of fairy stories in general--good ones, that is, ones that follow the rules of the genre and take the story seriously, *as a story*, and not merely a medium for politics, or artistic theory, or score-settling.

Tolkien's essays ]Mythopoeia' and 'On Fairy Stories' are a good way in, for people who don't know the difference between a fairy story and a straightforward fantasy on one hand, and a parody on the other. [Hint: Spenser, Lord Dunsany, Charles Williams, Tolkien, Lewis, and Peake, good, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Evangeline Walton, bad, Lloyd Alexander, somewhere in between. I enjoyed some of Bradley's other stuff back in the day, but her Arthuriad is a disaster--full of gender-feminist axe-grinding and with no sense for the story whatsoever.

#1 daughter went to Washington College, and her Tolkien professor there has a web site with a bunch of canned lectures and stuff--it's called TheTolkienProfessor.com, strange to tell. Good stuff if you're interested in that sort of thing--very engaging and fun.

I also like Homer, Virgil, and especially Dante, who is as good a theologian as he is a poet, and is therefore very widely misunderstood. Lots of folks only read the Inferno for the thrill, whereas the heart of the Commedia is the Purgatorio and Paradiso. At one time I also liked Norse sagas, but they kind of palled when I was 20 or so. It's one of my life's regrets that I quit taking Latin in grade 9, and never learned any Greek or Italian at all. I've been gradually learning Middle English (one day I hope to be able to actually write it), and am picking away at a little bit of Anglo-Saxon, though nothing serious. I have a number of AS texts printed with the original on the left-hand pages and a translation on the right. Plus I have all this fun technical stuff to do, that I usually talk about here. So I rarely get bored--except when watching moving pictures for longer than about 15 minutes, which will do it every time.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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I fell asleep in all three.

Beautiful Mind, Schindler's List, Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby all won Academy Awards in that period and are on my must-see list.

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Good choice. Another I liked was True at First Light, which was released after his death, completed from his notes and papers by his wife and son.

wiper

If you like LoTR, you'd probably like the Lyoness trilogy by Jack Vance.

In addition to being a ripping yarn, his writing is superb. This is worth re-reading every few years.

Speaking of that, try P.G. Wodehouse's "A Damsel in Distress", possibly the most perfectly written novel in the English language.

Good stuff too:

John

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I know Wodehouse well--one of my favourite W. quotes is "she's not the kind of breathtaker that takes the breath."

I'll look at the others, thanks. I read a bunch of Vance's SF when I was young, but nothing of his in the last 25 years or so.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I found a math joke:

wiper

sorry.

Interesting how tastes differ. Those are real-world, here-and-now dramas. The other stuff is spaceships, wizards, distant fantasy.

John

Particulates aren't "climate predictions." They are soot that is real, can be measured, causes health problems, and melts ice. And could be reduced a lot, soon, if diesels, coal fired power plants, and things like aluminum smelters were cleaned up.

John

Explain "abuses." We are rigid about using SI units and keeping our dimensions straight. Coulombs are not a measure of force.

Sorry, I'm a design engineer, and I leave all the money, marketing, sales, and management to others.

And our products ate *not* reasonably priced. Of all the nerve!

John