relays

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That'd

Understand "denominator"? You never mentioned it.

John

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That'd

The gate leakage is finite and measurable, so the power gain is finite. Typical low-frequency power gain for a medium-size power fet is probably in the ballpark of 1e16. Spec-sheet (guaranteed) gain will be a lot less.

John

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Sure--I meant it as fun thing we do, not as a contribution to the "what is infinity" question.

Our pal Dan's got a 2-fet 2-LED flip-flop "IN/OUT" indicator on his office door, toggled with static electricity somehow. Cool.

Cheers, James Arthur

Please explain how "using about 125 microjoules" is not a statement indicating joules in, or how "it will easily dump 50 watts" is not a statement indicating watts out.

It is either power or it is measured over time. It cannot be both. A watt-hour is not a watt. A watt is not a watt-hour. Power is not energy. Energy is not power.

Infinite and unbounded are not the same thing. For example, the number of sides of a regular polygon is unbounded (define a polygon of any size and I can define one with that number of sides plus one), but the number of sides of a regular polygon is always finite. The *set* of such polygons is infinite. Source: _Fundamentals of Mathematics for Linguistics_ by Barbara Hall Partee. page 38 [

I cannot prove that they do or do not decay (if you can prove that they don't, the Nobel committee should be notified), but for your latching relay to keep passing a current for an infinite amount of time, you have to not only have no proton decay but no heat death of the universe, no universe ending in a singularity, etc.

Reference: [

A Google search on [ difference between unbounded and infinite ] may help you to understand this nbasic mathematical concept:

I especuially recomend the link to Al's Infinite Hotel and Garb's Arbitrarium. (The Arbitrarium is a arbitrarily large, finite hotel.) Find it here: [

"Before launching into an exploration of the infinite. I find that it is more productive to start with infinity's humbler, hard working cousin: the arbitrarily large set.

"An arbitrarily large set has a finite number of members. Yet we can always expand it to fit our needs. Of course, there are a few things that arbitrarily large set simply cannot do. They cannot hold every point on the plane. They cannot hold every digit of an infinite decimal expansion. Despite these limitations, they are are good things to have around ... especially in the computer age."

Source:

they do while the rope is slipping.

getting the phase shift and, and avoiding latch-up seems to be hard. but the right combination of springs, weights, and pulleys should do it

it seems very similar to a common base amplifier to me (if coulombs are inches and volts are pounds, and beta is the friction term)

what we have for latching relays, faucets, and mosfets is a gain-bandwidth product.

at some high switching rate they perform poorly, but at lower frequencies they excel.

A button depression controlling mucho power is by definition gain. The problem is that there is only destructive results in that application. A very different issue.

A bit of a fine distinction, but technically correct. It can have infinite energy gain though. As energy is the time integral of power and the switched energy can grow without bound and the switching energy is finite.

There you go again, typical sloppiness between energy and power. The power gain is finite and large, the energy gain is unbounded and increases indefinitely with time.

Close, steam control valves for steam engines. At least for man made stuff.

No, that is just using a more powerful prime mover (motor). The whip and the earlier goad (a stick) however is another matter.

Greg; P(out)/P(in) is gain, no lever makes it, no matter how configured.

Isn't power gain always specified over some freqency response? For a latching relay, I guess it would from be 1/MTBF to

The power gain would be (duty cycle) * (contact rating in amps) * (contact rating max volts) / (switching energy to turn on + switching energy to turn off) * Hz

Mark Zenier snipped-for-privacy@eskimo.com Googleproofaddress(account:mzenier provider:eskimo domain:com)

Wouldn't it be the output *energy* which is the integral of the input power (times a multiplicative constant)?

There's always a boundary condition. The sun will expand in 5 billion years and envelop the earth. Your valve will melt. There will be no water since all the oceans will boil away. The entire process will stop working. This limits the gain to a finite value.

There is no place in the universe where you can put the valve and guarantee it will work forever. Therefore the gain cannot be and is never infinite.

The only thing that has infinte gain is a thought or an idea. It weighs nothing, occupies no space, has no temperature to measure, and can easily be distributed to others.

The act of processing a thought costs energy, that is true. But before it pops into your brain, no energy is expended.

So the gain becomes infinite as soon as you are aware the thought exists.

Regards,

Mike Monett

The Von Neumann-Landauer Limit sets a lower limit on the energy required to processing a thought of ln(2)kT per temporary bit discarded during the computation (T = temperature of the computing device, k = Boltzmann's constant) There is a way around this limit; see [

Whether it "pops into your brain" (from out of nowhere?) or is a result of ongoing processing is an interesting question.

There seem to be a lack of posts confusing power with energy today. Probably because it is the weekend. :)