OT: New book "The Long Thaw"

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John Fields resents it when his pathetic attempts at undergraduate humour don't get the attention he feels they deserve.

Jim-out-of-touch-with-reality-Thompson once again confirms his status.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Granting Michael Terrell's long list of defects - he does go on about them from time to time - this is an ironic question.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

My myopia is is managed with spectacles. Your problems with reading suggest that you need a new brain, which isn't to be had from the local optician.

A well-known solution, but it does limit the pulse repetition rate.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

re

to

In other words, its all about the time constants of the non-linear systems and has nothing to do with the mathematics. If you'd made your distinction between "fast" and "slow" you would have conveyed exactly the same information, but in a less pretentious way.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Since it is an American city newspaper, probably not. Since they they aren't prepared to pay for decent weather forecasts, the capitalist profit-maximisation principle would seem to be a little too dominant for them to qualify as "liberal".

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

hat

Neat trick. What would you use to make make a weather system - aka a large mass of moving air - make a hard left turn? Here's a hint - look for another, comparable mass of moving air.

And in the meantime, try and find a competent meteorologist. The ones that oare generatig your weather forecasts seem to be crap.

Bur useful if you are growing crops.

Wow! Negative correllation, as in Parkinson's "the who is always wrong" who is thus a reliable source source of advice - you just do the opposite of what he recommends.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

John Larkin wrote: : And none of the nodes of an opamp-based chaotic oscillator will ever : go beyond the supply rails.

Exactly! You got the point. This is your power constraint.

You, as an intelligent designer, have gone through great pains to provide a stable supply to your Chua's circuit (or whatever), chose a good regulator, made sure that bypass caps are sufficiently large and so on.

But you also could have made a poor supply design, one that oscillates in a deterministic manner, or has a lot of 50 Hz ripple, or whose voltage drifts when room temperature goes up or down, or whose output contains a lot of thermal noise. If your supply circuit is complex enough (three degrees of freedom + nonlinearity), it may even show chaotic behaviour.

There is no guarantee that Mother Nature is as good a supply designer as you are. In particular, by simply observing the short term behaviour of Her chaotic oscillator it is not obvious whether Her power supply is following a complicated (but predictable) oscillation waveform or whether it is chaotic.

: Yes, but the difference between 7 and 40C *matters*. As does the : difference between a warm period and having most of North America : covered by glaciers.

That's climate, I don't want to open that can of worms in this context.

I just wanted to say: you cannot argue that the long-term statistics of a system are necessarily unpredictable, solely on the basis that its short-term behaviour is chaotic. You need to know something else about the system.

This goes the other way around as well, of course.

Regards, Mikko

out

I was aware of the allegory, which is why I went on to extend the allegory to include your obvious difficulties with comprehension.

Me neither, much as you'd like people to think that - and putting your pre-emptive (if ridiculous) claim in the middle of the my response doesn't in any way make your claim any more convincing.

If you were a little less of an under-educated yokel, you'd be aware that brain surgery is not a recognised treatment for cognitive disorders. Cognitive therapy - basically teaching you how to recognise when you are out if your depth and need to pull your head in - is about all that is available. I doubt if you'd be the kind of patient for whom that therapy would be seen as promising.

Would you like to compare the repetition rate limit of an SRD, John Larkin's preferred logic gates, and a mercury wetted relay, with the limit imposed by the length of the cable on which you are doing the time domain reflectometry? Mercury-wetted relays would be rate limiting for cables less than about a hundre miles long ...

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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ling

For you to recycle?

There was nothing gratuitous about the insult; you've put in a lot of effort, and really deserve it.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Since the trigger pulse isn't defined by the lash-up, John Fields is once again demonstrating his little cognitive deficit, or perhaps he may think that in any such a lash-up, the 555 should be preceded by a CD4047, which is genuinely edge-triggered?

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Not the time constants, the magnitude of the nonlinearities in the equations of motion. Time scales; a fast or slow system can be regular or chaotic.

Bigger higher-order terms in a polynomial mean more nonlinearity.

Graph the gravitational force on Earth from the sun and planets. That force changes a little over time. Graph the force on Mercury. It's much more variable and more nonlinear.

What's pretentious about explaining simple stuff?

And what are time constants not mathematics?

John

In our business, we'd call that a voltage restraint.

Point?

I never did. I said that the *state* of a chaotic system, at some defined instant in the future, is unpredictable. That's practically the definition.

John

That's the problem, isn't it?

John

Do you have any idea how useless and fatheaded that sounds?

You old hens won't give up.

John