TI degrading specs of existing parts without changing part numbers

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

The breakthrough was that somebody glued a flagellum down and saw the bacteria rotate.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

The neurons from each ear merge together in the brainstem in humans and undoubtedly also in bats. Once signals from each ear are running alongside each other there is plenty of opportunity for cross correlation between the ears to take place. There is evidence that this takes place, but it is around 25 to 30 years since I was involved in auditory research, so I can't immediately pull out the references. John

Yes, that was irrefutable. Even if they could not see what was going on.

I do recall the initial announcement of the effect of tethering the flagellum to a surface - the bacteria rotated at a few Hz. Ended that debate.

Joe

It certainly isn't hard, and I'm better at it than you are. The problem is the time it takes to filter out the irrelevant nonsense (and you don't spend enough time on that, perhaps because you lack the relevant skills). Its you who needs the class in critical thinking, but since you haven't got a clue what that might be, you aren't going to enroll any time soon.

I've got three patents. You've got your name on one. I'm demonstrably not hostile to new ideas, if they are any good. This isn't any kind of brain-storming venue, and your attitude is more "gullible sucker" than "receptive to novel ideas".

You might. Talented people come up actual patentable ideas quite frequently. My father and two of my friends have all managed about 25 each over their careers. People like that can afford to winnow out the nonsense early - probably because they are whole lot better at it than you seem to be.

And pigs might fly. The "electrical impulse" we can see is generated by changing sodium, and potassium concentrations. That is simple chemical messaging, with single ions moving about. More complex molecules aren't going to move any faster.

You have a strange idea of fun. They are all buried underground in an incoherent mess. and the signalling is all going to changes in the concentrations of chemicals.

We can dream of finding a long chain molecule that isomerises rapdily from end to end in a series of tiny local bond shifts, but evolution has been looking for that for a couple pf billion years now and doesn't seem to have found it.

There's a simple version of that.

One-trial learning happens.

Whwn I started work in a radio factory I had to train myself NOT to catch things thrown at me - they were sometimes fully-charged 500v capacitors.

When I later worked in a laboratory, the chief technician shouted "catch" as he threw a 1-litre round-bottomed flask at me; I stood still and watched it shatter on the floor. He was most upset.

Patents are mostly silly ego trips or VC hype. About half are abandoned. Only a couple per cent earn more than they cost.

I'd rather design stuff and sell it. I know of only two cases where someone copied our designs, and both are out of business now.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

I knew a guy who chewed on most everything. Someone (not me) left a charged cap on his desk.

That was good long-term, reduced his lead input.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Patents are expensive. That winnows out a lot of the silly ego trips and the VC hype. I abandoned a provisional patent (which is very cheap) when I realised that it was based on a misconception. On the other hand Tektronix abandoned a patent on a better confocal microscope that made a friend of mine $A12 million.

They are rather like venture capital investments, where nineteen out of twenty fail, but the one in twenty success pays out more than the nineteen failures cost.

The point about patents is that they aren't obvious to those skilled in the art. They are an original solution to a problem - whether the problem is worth solving is a different question.

You'd like to design stuff and sell it. You design skills aren't impressive, but you do seem to be able sell what you can cobble together.

If your design skills were more impressive your stuff might be worth copying.

Unfortunately, there are many patents that describe prior art. They should not have been approved. The problem is, that if the holder has deep pockets you can't afford to prove that you are right. (I do have some myself, but never made any money from them, unlike "knowhow" agreements that have worked very well on occasion.)

I dug a little deeper. Turns out that the bit about the tethered flagella was the news-report version, and the actual science had been going on for some time before.

The big name is Howard C. Berg, who published a review article "The Rotary Motion of Bacterial Flagella". .

or

.

Joe

Sounds like our designs are perfectly calibrated: good enough to sell but not good enough to copy.

I used to attend some physics conferences and hang out in the bar with competitors. We'd share what we were working on. In a small market, it doesn't make sense to have two vendors do the same stuff.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Incidentally around 10ms of processing delay in e.g. guitar amplifier simulation is noticeable to an experienced player. 20, 30+ ms starts to go from just noticeable to an annoying lag.

The aim, as a vendor, is to have stuff that blows the competition out of the water. You don't seem to have the design skills that might let you do that. I've had some good ideas, but none of them turned out to be all that good. Handy in the application, but not industry changing.