Oh, the Sprite was a total loss, and my back still hurts a bit now and then. I was in the passenger seat and my first kid was in my lap and the car was crushed from behind and there was gasoline all over the place. But up to then it was a fun thing to drive.
Cars were a lot more dangerous then.
Your contributions to that aren't remotely fundamental.
Nothing that you could make any sense of.
The standard NIF implosion capsule is already extremely expensive and very small. Making it spherical and out of diamond wouldn't make it any more expensive.
You contribution to that will have been exactly zero. This suggests that you may be barking up the wrong tree,
There's no fruit fly on my plate. I can see everything else but the fruit fly.
These come with enough liquid stuff for one refill. Actually, if they dry out some one can add water too. Until they are solid plugged with dead flies.
That looks labor intensive. We'd rather be designing electronics. I figure that a year of engineering should result in one or better yet two million dollars in ultimate sales, which works out to around $1000 per hour. And Amazon delivers.
Our state+fed corporate tax rate is about 50%, so we get half off everything!
The steam plants were deafening too, and we had a giant aux diesel too. You had to scream directly into someone's ear. People wore construction-type helmets with ear pads, but I wore my motorcycle helmet.
I was tweaking a trimpot to tune a nonlinear function generator and got the prop up to 50 RPM, and almost tore the LASH ship off the dock into the Mississippi river, and probably would have killed someone. The Chief ran over and shut things down.
I once rode a ship from San Francisco to San Pedro, at maybe $100 per hour, to diagnose an erratic steam plant. The fix was a quarter turn on a screw on a terminal strip. That was from the RPM feedback tach. The constant vibration had loosened a lot of screws.
Doing physical stuff is fun. Typing all day, not so much.
Try me.
Our second-generation modulators greatly improve the beam modulation precision and s/n, which turns out to be valuable.
The NIF folks are great to work with. They are collegial and fun and have interesting physics problems but they aren't very good at designing electronics. Ideal customers.
It's weird how some very intelligent scientists are not good at designing electronics. Maybe because electronic design is not a science.
Yikes. 9 or 10 for me. When I was younger, I'd sleep for 12.
I don't dream much that I know of, and the rare dream is just a bit of everyday life. My wife has nightmares.
I do solve problems and design stuff while I sleep, and wake up briefly to take notes.
Visualize cold beer!
So the first generation was perfectly useless?
There's nothing weird about it at all. Science involves getting deeply involved in a particular problem. Designing electronics is a different kind of problem, and they haven't put in the time to learn what has been done with electronics in the past, or the new components that make it possible to do better now.
When I ended up writing a guide to which op amp to use at Cambridge Instruments in 1988 I listed 159 different devices, all of which I'd at least thought about using practical projects.
There nothing to stop them acquiring the knowledge, except the time it takes.
When I was working at Nijmegen University we got a query from somebody having trouble with the LT1028 (which is a great op amp, but with a slightly cranky output stage), so I suggested that they try the AD797 which has got ion-implanted PNP transistors in its output stage, and is correspondingly more expensive and better behaved. It worked for them.
Of course not; we got fusion. But the kind of Gbit DACs that are available how were not available 25 years ago. At that time, there weren't any decent fast DACs, so we had to, basically, multiplex 120 slow dacs at a 4 GHz rate.
We knew that suitable DACs were just a few years away.
I did learn about Gibbs Ears and Gaussian math and cool stuff.
And you didn't have enough sense to find an approach that didn't need them.
If you mean Gibbs oscillations, I found about them around 1978 when a bat researcher I happened to know needed a high-frequency random noise generator to interfere with her bat's echo-location.
Like you, I copied a device from the Hewlett-Packard Journal. Sadly, they'd left out the bit about a applying a Hamming window to the tap weights on the shift-register-based low pass filter.
I had to knock up another set of 30-odd weighing resistors (which didn't take all that long).
I note that you have snipped most of my post without marking the snip.
I designed an acoustic monitoring system for NASA, for measuring sound levels around their Mississippi Test Facility, where they tested the moon rocket engines. It was claimed that my electronics was oscillating at low frerquencies. After some research, it was determined to be subsonic mating calls of bull alligators, which may have been previously unknown.
We used a temperature-controlled GR electret microphone, new technology at the time. I dumped it into a jfet follower with no gate resistor, which was controversial.
One could put a wind turbine on a boat and drive a prop in the water. It's just an impedance matching problem.
Not exactly. A wind-turbine big enough to generate much power is big enough to get blown over in a storm.
Sailing vessels could strike their canvas in bad weather and run under bares poles. Wind turbines can be feathered, but the blades still have a lot of surface area.
Elon Musk is the Henry Ford of his day, Jan. A true pioneer. The fact that his business managed to survive all those catastrophic car fires whilst the occupants were locked inside by the car's brain testifies to that achievement.
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