TI degrading specs of existing parts without changing part numbers

In my neck of the woods, when you rhetorically quote some spec in the

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

The numbers that were cited were all for timing in nanoseconds and NOT for distance as in nanometers.

Incidentally, I've read through various papers that mention the 10 nsec number. The majority refer to a 10 nsec jitter and NOT a 10 nsec resolution. Also, the 10 nsec number seems to be at the extreme edge when graphs were supplied. My guess(tm) is that there might be some confusion between 10 nsec jitter and nsec resolution in some of the various papers. For example:

"Delay accuracy in bat sonar is related to the reciprocal of normalized echo bandwidth, or Q"

I couldn't determine what the author meant by a "small fraction of a microsecond".

So that's a source of the 10ns stuff. The theory is that there was an instrumentation error, which is certainly plausible as no biological system is that fast, so biological researchers are far out of their domain for sure.

Joe

PS: The 100,000 rpm spinner in biology is "ATP Synthase", the enzyme system that converts between ADP and ATP in the mitochondria (in animals) and chloroplasts (in plants).

.

JMG

Why do you say that no biological system can be that fast?

Anything less than a microsecond is astounding, inside the gooey head of a bat flapping its wings mid-air hunting a moth.

DNA helicase, the little gadget that splits our DNA when a cell divides, spins at about 10,000 RPM.

Google the <> above.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

It's only my best guess(tm). I didn't have much success at finding the oldest bat related citation that included a 10 nsec response time.

Sigh. I initially mentioned that there might have been some confusion between response time and jitter. Now, you add DNA replication to the confusion. Time for a sanity check.

What got my attention was the radical difference between the alleged

"Nerve conduction velocity"

I once watched a "cloud" of fruit bats emerging from the trees at dusk:

To put it in perspective, a microsecond at the velocity of sound in air corresponds to 0.25mm (or 0.125mm for echolocation distance measurement).

The resolution would be the time-difference between two pulses and could possibly be resolved to 10nSec if the delay times were equal (or equalised). Prediction, based on existing trajectories, is a more likely explanation.

They measure what's easy to measure, an electrical impulse. Maybe that's not the information being sent.

Bats catch moths. Baseballs get hit.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

If nerve impulses travel 100 m/s and a bat's ears are 2 cm apart, the neural delay between ears is 200 us. And that's modulated by movement, heartbeats, things like that.

Maybe nature doesn't care about our opinions of how it's allowed to work.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

The electrical impulse isn't all that easy to measure, but at least it is visible, if you measure carefully enough.

You can hypothesise all sorts of magic connections, but until you spell out what one of them might be and how you'd measure it, you are just going in for hand-waving mysticism.

It all looks very as if you got caught being even stupider than usual, and are now trying to back off.

And half-wits have very silly ideas about what that implies.

Obviously it doesn't. That doesn't excuse you from picking up particularly half-baked ideas about how well it might be performing and posting them here.

True. Please note that the URL's I provided were not in response to your posting. I was responding to a question by snipped-for-privacy@comcast.net: Message-ID: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com "Bats are pretty good, but that seems a bit too good. Can you find that study?"

Methinks the mechanism might be similar to measuring the speed of electrons in wires. Energy transmission in a wire moves at near light speed. Electron drift velocity in wires (the movement of individual electrons) is about 1 mm/sec, which is much slower. I suspected that nerve impulse transmission in bats might be similar. However, my analogy breaks down because nerve impulse velocity can be 1 to 100 meters/sec, which is still much slower than near light speed (3*10^8 meters/sec).

"Nerve conduction velocity"

"Bats are surprisingly fast decision makers"

Caroline Palmer's Ph.D. thesis is on the timing in skilled piano playing. I've got a copy.

We probably do as well as bats in our own areas of interest.

It's not hard to use an internet search engine. You could take a class.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Most ideas are half-baked at first. But hostility to ideas guarantees that you will have none.

We need more goofy ideas; lots more. Then we need to sift out the few good ones, not club them all to death on first sight.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

I did not say that, although it was widely believed in the past.

Yes.

Yes. It's true that this was believed back in the day when no microscope of the day could see these little motors.

There were ways to determine the arrangement of atoms in crystals (X-ray diffraction), and it was possible to analyze such motors to the degree that they could be made to form good crystals. The motor assemblies are 10 to 15 nanometers across. Modern electron microscopes can see them directly as little blobs, but one cannot figure out the mechanism without using other kinds of data.

Joe

Not a bit. Maybe a complex chemical message travels very fast, and the electrical pulse is a system refresh that chases it.

That would be harder to detect, especially if one wasn't looking for it.

Have you read "Finding The Mother Tree"? It would be fun to instrument those fungi filaments in real time.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Some things happen locally, in the spinal cord or even closer to the action, without having to send messages to the head and back. The spinal cord is really just a part of the brain.

But some things, like hitting a baseball, must use an eye-brain-muscle path fast.

I surprise myself at how fast I can catch something that I drop. This morning I trapped an orange between the countertop and my belly, in a fraction of a second. Something decided that the belly would work better than a hand.

I once caught a hot soldering iron in mid-air. Just once. Now something tells my muscles to grab oranges but not soldering irons.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

We did find it after all.

These are directly measured values, taken in a wet lab.

Yes. There is a relevant visual example in birds, a murmuration of sparrows is famous. Starling murmuration creates incredible aerial display, Israel, from euronews:

Hearing not required. I think the control law has been figured out for schooling fish, and it's quite simple.

Joe