Speaking of AofE 3rd edn.

ROTFLMAO - thanks, I need a good laugh.

Winfield Hill has contracted me to write the philosophy, politics and religion chapters, so I might include something.

I need to rant about sex and race more, so I can write chapters on that too =)

Yes, thanks!

We could pick the third topic in the thread, and write about memes.

There was a much better thread (in that it stayed on topic!) concerning AoE 2nd in the last year or two, where I recall that Win asked us for what changes we might want for a future edition (and ISTR he said it may be a long while before a 3rd edition comes out). I can't find the thread in google, but I recall I pointed out a practically identical circuit that was in two of the "Circuit ideas"/"bad circuits" sections.

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Back then I bought copies of various mil specs and commercial standards for schematic drawing and sent them to Winfield Hill.

Seriously, do you have any specific plans or ideas for the next edition?

Nope. Those chapters were sub-contracted out to RSW.

I have several friends who want to know if it might be available in Braille.

Kurzweil has some VERY nice OCR/reading software that will allow the visually impaired and blind to read at least the text of many books. I don't know what you'd do about schematics and so on. It recognizes columns and deals well with typical proportional print fonts. It a few thousand dollars, but that's really not much compared to getting a Braille paper every day etc., and usually there are tax breaks or other ways of covering the cost for those in need.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Easier than that. The Art of Electronics is typeset with LaTeX. Run it through detex, and you'll have a fairly clean ASCII text of the whole book, which can be fed to a speech synthesizer. The diagrams, of course, are harder...

That would end up being a HUGE book!

You may laugh but I heard of a guy who continued to mess around with high-voltage valve radio after he went blind. If you asked him where something was, he would nonchalantly wave his hand past EHT equipment and say "over there somewhere".

I hope he had a damn good memory...

I knew an old ham in Hastings like that many years ago. He had an almost supernatural ability to fault-find valve-based radio equipment. Much respect due. He's almost certainly dead by now, though, sadly. :-(

The problem with that, of course, is the conversion process. No fun at all, for you or the book.

The fellow that I'm asking this for, is a ham, and a builder. He has built a number of kits, and has some good ideas for other adaptive gear that either does not exist, or is done so badly that it might as well not exist. It seems few designers of this stuff actually try to use it without vision.

He amazes me though, building throughhole circuits, operating a chain saw and table saw... (yes, he still has all his fingers!)

I hope not due to touching something HT...