New book project

I like that, so perhaps:

Hints, tips and project lore

I'm on board. The preface to the other book begins, "This is a book of lore ."

The last 35 years or so have been a pretty good ride, even though a lot of it was "blind luck and bloody ignorance" in my father's phrase.

Hopefully so. The impetus is that I've seen so many people chicken out of d oing their own photon budgets and sensitivity analyses even when their live lihood depended on the results. That causes a lot of failure and heartbreak , as you'd expect. One project I watched from the sidelines resulted in two divorces and a nervous breakdown, due to making two changes to the proto's optical system, *either of which would have worked by itself*.

Another one was a startup where a contract engineering house in SoCal took my working proto and detailed calculations, broke the one, ignored the othe r, ran through nearly a million bucks, and produced complete crap.

I got called back in at the 11th hour to try to fish it out, but the money ran out too soon. I understand that the founder skipped the country and ha sn't been heard of since. (You can't make this stuff up.)

I wouldn't want to say in print that something was unencumbered, but I'll c ertainly mention the possibility of somebody owning the ideas.

I know a guy who did that, so I don't need to. He's even more my hero than RV Jones. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

+1

Please make it available on Kindle. Can't wait to read it.

--

Best Regards, 

ChesterW

Hmmm, you knew L-Ron? :)

--

John Devereux

Note the present tenses. ;)

The Hubbard-Heinlein bet is one in a very long sequence of American religious oddities that stretches back to Ann Hutchinson at least. Hubbard wrote "Dianetics" and founded Scientology based on E-Meters, which consisted of a couple of two-quart juice cans wired in series with a battery and a microammeter and supposedly measured your compatibility with Martians. (They've got a lot slicker since then.)

Heinlein wrote his pseudo-religious novel "Stranger In A Strange Land" in the same spirit. He made some money and deluded a large number of people--probably not as many as Hubbard, and certainly not as permanently.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

I recently re-read that, and was still amused and still think it is a superb piss-take.

Does /anybody/ take it seriously, other than as a parody?

LRon is a different kettle of fish, though. Icelandic

I once had a spare hour near a superb (long gone) ice cream shop, so I went next door and had my personality tested by them. Even as a teenager, and before much was known about that mob on this side of the pond, it was very apparent that the questions were designed to find suss out whether someone felt lonely, frightened or vulnerable.

You might think that was so they could find people they could sink their hooks into. I couldn't possibly comment.

They did in the '70s. I suspect Heinlein was testing the water for a Hubbardesque bid, but I could be wrong about that. I've certainly never heard of his admitting it was a joke. He did take himself pretty seriously, by all accounts. His Randian politics showed through quite unpleasantly in places, e.g. his normalizing vigilante justice in "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress".

Rotten, for sure.

Yup. I got a bunch of Hare Krishnas talking one time, and it was the same gig. I was sort of brought up New Age, so I'm very sensitive to the close connections between fake religion on one hand, and money and sex on the other. You see a lot of that in New Age.

A very dear relative of mine got sucked into the Jehovah's Witnesses for

20 years before discovering that they were a fraud. When he joined up in about 1971, he went from being a lot of fun to suddenly being a sanctimonious prig. He got out about 25 years back and is just now recovering. (To give the devil his due, the JW leaders are all about control, not so much about money, and hardly at all about sex.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

That sounds like a good read, I'm always interested in the ramblings of a lab rat. Although I'm primarily an analogue/instrumentation type of fellow I've never been involved too much in optical systems (I did a camera design back in the 80's when they were still all done using discrete transistors, and was involved in the optical design for sub sea cameras at the same time).

I've being trying to address the gap in my knowledge of applied optics, but books that are strong on practical applications seem a bit thin on the ground. I read Mark Johnson's book a while ago (Photodetection and Measurement) which I liked, but it left me wishing he'd written a part two. It looks like your proposed text could be the main course to his

I like Mark's book too. He and I have been in touch off and on for about 15 years, and I think we'd agree that his book and my other one (Building Electro-Optical Systems) form a good sequence like that. (I've been recommending his book to folks since it came out.)

The proposed one is sort of orthogonal, being a bunch of annotated case studies rather than general principles and advice.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

"Egg blood-spot detector"?

I'm sold.

That was a fun one that I did last year. Hens' oviducts sometimes bleed a bit, and the blood can get incorporated into the egg. It isn't dangerous, but it is a bit gross to open a nice soft-boiled egg and find the inside all red instead of white, so blood eggs aren't considered fit for human consumption.

Haemoglobin has a strong absorption line near 578 nm. Like most molecular lines in fluids, it's pretty wide--roughly 20 nm FWHM.

The problem is that the normal brown-egg pigment (protoporphyrin) has a strong absorption peak near 589 nm. This can be as deep as 2 absorption units (10**-2, i.e. 1% transmission), and it's about the same width. The two thus overlap fairly catastrophically--a 1% blood absorption is

10**4 times smaller than the background signal.

The trick is to use two bands: 578 nm and 599 nm, and take the ratio. The two bands sit at the same place on opposite shoulders of the protoporphyrin peak, so they go up and down together. You can dork the tracking a bit by adjusting the exponents in the ratio, i.e. taking I_699/I_578**1.005 or something like that.

I used a Luxeon white LED and two custom interference filters from Omega Optical. I had a good try at using coloured LEDs, but there are two problems: first, 578 nm is in an efficiency hole, meaning that there are no bright LEDs at that wavelength, and second, the unit-to-unit and temperature variation of the LED emission spectrum was way too sloppy for the purpose.

The two-filter approach worked great--the customer's happy, and their new line of egg-grading machines should be coming out soon.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

Just so.

And on that note, don't forget "Time Enough For Love". IIRC that was the last readable novel before his stroke.

I and a friend went to some talks by the Hare Krishna mob. The "monk" was a perfectly normal affable character, but thinking about his "acolytes" gives me the chills 30 years later.

They would do absolutely nothing until told. Their eyes were blank as if there was nothing behind them. They had apparently abdicated being independent adults.

I had them on the doorstep a few months ago. After relating some family experiences, they tried the pitch "oh, that shouldn't happen". When I indicated proof they could check themselves, they beat a retreat. They'll be back in another 20 years, I suppose.

What was the experience?...

When I was about 4, there was a kid (Tommy Gibson) of the same age opposite, who had an infant sister, Yasmin. His father was a kind dutiful caring father, but he was often absent since he was a squaddie stationed in Germany. His mother was kind and well intentioned, but not well educated.

A local JW, a Miss Lily White(!) gor her claws into the mother, and convinced to become a JW. That ripped the family asunder, but that didn't matter, since the mother's soul was saved and nailed to the churches' door.

Fast forward to 1990, and the film "Home Alone" appeared. Then, in February 1993, a 12yo, was found living at home while her mother was on holiday. The tabloid press had a field day and crucified the mother. Not unreasonably, the mother lost control of her daughter, Gemma Gibson. Yes, her mother was Yamin Gibson.

So, to "save" one soul, the JWs destroyed three generations of a family. Too damn right "that shouldn't happen". But it did.

In other news...

I once managed to get a group of (Plymouth?) brethren to give up their pitch on the high street. They were foolish enough to bring their kids out to proselytize, so I started talking to the kids in ways the adults could object to.

Basically I asked the kids what they thought of certain scenarios: fathers encouraging a mob to rape their daughters, or what should happen when a children tease a bald person (like me). Eventually I revealed the bible stories of Lot and 2 Kings 2, the last 3 verses.

By the end of my pitch, the children were leaning forward and listening, and the adults were muttering amongst themselves. Finally they sheperded the kids away - for re-education, I presume.

Still, if I have saved even one of them from a life of slavery, my life will have been worthwhile ;) Heh heh.

The Sodom story is a lot more complicated than that. First of all, it took place roughly 3800 years ago, about the time of Hammurabi, so we have to be super careful not to assume we understand the context without due care. Second, Lot was stuck between two sacred duties: care for his family and ca re for his guests. In the ancient Near East, a guest was sacrosanct. One ga thers from the context that (a) the mob was pretty scary--there was imminen t danger of their burning Lot and his family alive in their house--and (b) they weren't interested in girls, so there was less danger to them than mig ht be assumed. (The mob wanted Lot to give up the _men_ who were visiting h im.) Of course the men turned out to be angels, who were in no danger and w ere far more powerful than their poor host. (Lot was well-intentioned but a bit gormless.)

The Elisha story is one of those oddities from long ago that is given with almost zero context, so it's hard to interpret. We tend to see the young me n's offense as just a few catcalls directed at an old bald guy, but that's not the case. Elisha was God's prophet, a man who was well known as a wonde rworker and a champion of the poor. Rejecting him was tantamount to rejecti ng God.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

That sounds like a fun project. It must've made you wish for a tunable LED.

I measured a bunch of LED aquarium lights a while ago (

), noting a very liberal definition of 'measured'. Looking back over those plots, I see what you mean. But there are a couple of prominent exceptions, specifically the "Ecoxotic 8112" and TrueLume 3000" plots.

That's interesting as well. What would cause LEDs to vary like that? Any concerns about spectrum shift with aging?

-- john, KE5FX

I have read that several times in my youth and did not take that away from it. It was just an entertaining enough read as far as I was concerned.

It does not seem to me that he was deliberately trying to start a religion, although I am sure he did set out to challenge / ridicule aspects of existing ones.

Anyway it would be a nicer one than L-Rons I think!

--

John Devereux

[...]

I saw this evil b*tch going about her rounds many times, with children in tow IIRC.

--

John Devereux

I've occasionally wondered, given that Stranger was published in 1960, how much it set the scene for 1967 et al, vs how much it was reflecting/amplifying existing zeitgeist that was leading to 1967 et al. Not being there, I cannot judge.

In Childhood's End (1953) Clarke explicitly stated that a reliable contraception plus reliable paternity testing lead to free sex.

Sure. But if the bible thumpers conveniently ignore that thing have changed over the millennia, then I am free to do the same. I have no qualms about giving them a taste of their own medicine by using their "debating" tactics against them.

Usually the zealots haven't actually read the "awkward bits" in the bible, and they certainly expect their audience to be ignorant.

Shrug. It is reprehensible either way, and it is interesting to watch the zealots try to explain why it is justified.

Me too, but I knew people who were mesmerized by it. This would have been in the mid 1970s.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs