Power outage in San Fran

Probably built something designed by Bill Sloman.

Must have been Eddy currents...

It was my cousin Eddy come for a visit. He's a chemist. He's dangerous to allow around electricity.

(I really do have a chemist cousin named Eddy. Of course he now has a PhD and has become Edwin.)

I'm innocent. Unless it was running Spice on that new circuit.

We didn't notice the outage, even though it's a few blocks away on my very own street. I did hear the news helicopters, so looked it up online. The helis are our event alerters.

There is also a John street here, and St Joseph's St is a near miss on my middle name. There is even a Junior Terrace. My wife's middle name is a street close to our house. We named The Brat with three San Francisco street names, two of which intersect near our house.

I know a guy named Hurricane Weeks. Great name.

It takes electrical engineers to take out power substations. Electronic eng ineers rarely command enough power - I think the biggest thing I ever built was a constant current power supply for a 450W xenon arc lamp, and none of them ever blew up anything. The Southampton University Chemistry Departmen t workshop decided that they could improve the arc-lamp starter circuit (20 kV for a microsecond or so) after I'd moved on, and did manage to blow most of the semiconductors in one them, but the damage was repairable.

There was a rack of ECL-based signal processing that was in the same power ball-park, but that never blew up.

Do you remember the Students Union projector PSU (at least that's what I remember it being used for)? A mercury arc rectifier at the bottom of one of the exit stairwells, under the staircase.

Very big, very pretty, pretty exposed if anyone had dropped something on it.

You could take away my Metcal if I ever did that.

Chemists are, particularly PhD chemists.

Is eddy's full name maybe Eddy Current?

One of the worst scientific instrument electronic designs that I have seen (an FTMS signal amp) was designed by chemists. They gave up about

The cold fusion thing was probably multiple instances of bad calorimetry.

John Larkin doesn't read the Review of Scientific Instruments. It publishes a lot of bad electronics designed by physicists. I've managed to publish a few comments there, pointing this out.

Academics are rarely good engineers - Phil Hobbs is an honourable exception - and the cast of mind that makes you happy in an academic environment doe sn't seem to be one that screws the last ounce of performance out of a bit of electronic hardware.

Fleischmann was pretty good at what he did. I never met Pons. Electrochemis try is a pretty messy subject. Current thinking seems to be that what they' d seen were low-energy nuclear reactions driven by ultra-low-momentum neutr ons.

-something/

Fleischmann and Pons' calorimetry was probably fine, but their theoretical explanation didn't turn out to be useful - which is something that happens to a lot of theories. John Larkin's judgement about scientific theories isn 't all that good at the best of times.

There was a solar storm.

Regards,

Boris Mohar

Got Knock? - see: Viatrack Printed Circuit Designs (among other things)

void _-void-_ in the obvious place

You've led a sheltered life then. ;) people routinely put microamp photocurrents into 50-ohm loads "because I need the bandwidth".

That's one reason for the popularity of lock-ins.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

What a confused babbling idiot- thank God he found something to keep his confusion insanity occupied while he waits to die.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is as good an example of "projection" as I've seen in the last month!

Bad call. Fred Bloggs is irascible, but he isn't babbling, nor in the least confused.

Oh, I've had my fair share of horrors.

The jfet opamps have no cooling (this is a high vacuum system) so they run roughly 120C. Their gigantic input bias currents make tons of shot noise into the resistors (1 Meg!) on top of the huge Johnson noise.

Chemists!

I was guessing that, with good electronics, it might be barely possible to detect a single molecule in orbit in the FTMS cell.

Things that need big superconducting magnets (FTMS, NMR) seem to be falling out of favor lately.

Hey, I'm designing a photodiode amp now, with the PD current dumping into a 50 ohm resistor first. It's not my fault.

No worries, as long as it's more than a couple of milliamps. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Two ranges, 25 and 50 mA! Lots of light.