Seeking schematics/plans for decimal to binary (microswitch/relay) selector/controller

Perhaps you would like to quote one of these "best parts"?

I've not seen any evidence that you comprehend anything more complicated than the proposition that Texas is not a great place to live.

On the contrary, I value it. You might try producing some sometimes, but I wouldn't give up the day job.

You flatter me. I don't consider myself intellectually superior to many people at all - I do consider myself intellectually superior to you, but then who wouldn't. You may like to think that this claim is inaccurate, but it is scarcely self-serving - being your intellectual superior isn't an uncommon distinction. Even Jim Thompson could probably manage it if he confined himself to electronics.

Possibly - you do take being a dullard to previously unplumbed depths of dimness. You may not be quite ill-informed enough that other Texans would go to the trouble of commenting on it, but the world outside Texas does have the - perhaps egocentric - idea that you ought to know more about the world than just Texas, in the same way that you ought to know more about electronics than just plausible applications of the

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Only becasue it was crosposted to a newsgroup where I didn't have you kill filed, but that is being take....................

Probably not - the 555 isn't being designed into new products these days, outside the bizarre niche market which you exploit.

I'm inclined to agree that skill in using the 555 would be evidence of the kind of hobby interest in electronics that one would look for in candidates for an entry level technician position. I'm a little too old and a little too over-qualified to be a candidate for this kind of job, as you'd know if you had much experience of working in companies big enough to hire wet-behind-the-ears technicians.

Is it yours? The implication of "you would like to think that" is not that you are thinking something other than you claim, but rather that your opinion is one that suits you, with a strong suggestion that a more objective observer would have a different opinion.

A similar phrase was famously used by Mandy Rice-Davies during the Profumo scandal in the U.K. in 1963 and variants are often presented as quotations of what she said.

As an intellectually challenged speaker of a restricted American dialect of English you might be forgiven for failing to understand what was meant

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Substantive dialogue? Now that I've persuaded you to buy yourself a mail-order dictionary, I think I'll bow out.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Sure.

Since there is a Complete Oxford Dictionary in my wife's study (admittedly the microprint version) that would be a little redundant. You should keep in mind that Noah Webster couldn't spell all that well

which he covered by claiming that his errors were more "American" than the correct spellings. Your ancestors bought the story and you have been spelling like yokels ever since. That - of itself - doesn't make you communications unintelligible. The Elizabethans were prone to idiosyncratic spelling which didn't stop Shakespeare (or whoever actually wrote his plays) communicating very effectively, even though he never signed his own name the same way twice, but social conventions have changed since then ...

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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They would say that, wouldn't they. English spelling is a mess - it embodies six sets of different rules for representing sounds with alphabetic characters - and Noah Webster's heart could have been in the right place when he started tidying up English spelling, but he ended up changing the spelling of very few words, so American spelling is just as much of mess as English spelling, albeit a slightly different mess. If he'd managed to impose a single consistent set of rules he would have qualified as brilliant - as it is all he did - and all he probably intended to do - was to make it difficult for U.K. publishers to sell their dictionaries in the U.S.A.

Sure, but it's still true ...

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

According to one of the six sets of character to phoneme transciption rules ... Slightly less of a mess is still a mess.

The words weren't different when Noah Webster wrote his dictionary - the U.S. and the U.K. chose to use different words (all from the same common vocabulary) when they developed cars (automobiles) and started talking about them. The Complete Oxford lists ten slternative meanings for "bonnet"and eight for "hood", none of which directly refer to the part of the car you get your head under when you are working on the engine/motor though both include definitions which would include this usage.

I've never said that, though it is true that the yokel element of the American population does seem to be over-represented on this user- group, but even here there are decidedly non-yokel Americans - Fred Blogs is nobody's idea of a yokel.Your yokel-like enthusiasm for idiotic over-generalisation has led you astray - not for the first time.

I happen to a fan of the "obstacle course" theory of post-graduate education, which sees the Ph.D. as evidence that the person who earns it has been able to do significant research despite the numerous obstacles placed in their way by the universities who barely support the research, but taek credit for it once it is done. One of the first things I had to do for my Ph.D. research project was make my own silica glass windows for my reaction cell - my supervisor gave me a sheet of cast silica, and I had to cut out the circular windows, grind them flat, then polish them until they were optically smooth.

It took me about a week, and I've never used that particular skill since then - unlike the electronics I had to learn in order to build my own measuring gear. Happily, we did have a big enough budget to let me buy discrete transistors, so I wasn't obliged to learn to diffuse my own.

The University of Texas happened to be one of the better obstacle courses around in my wife's area - she did clean out a few of the obstactes on her way through the course, which probably made it a better educational institution - not that it ever seems to have been all that good, but a poorer obstacle course.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Not really. It is now two essentially identical messes, serviced by two sets of dictionaries, when one set would have worked just as well.

Far from it. There's now a BBC program - "Balderdash and Piffle"

where the BBC invites its viewers to help up-date the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language. Victoria Coren, who presents the program, managed to include her father - Allan Coren, one-time editor of Punch - in one of the earlier programs.

It's great fun if you like that sort of thing.

Incidentally, does the Webster's definition work for the Volkswagen and other rear-engined cars? As far as I'm concerned, they keep their engine/motor in the trunk/boot and you put your luggage under the hood/ bonnet.

The OED is scrupulous about that sort of thing.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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The "mess" is the fact that English spelling reflects six indepedents sets of rules relating the phonemes we hear and produce and the alphabetic characters that we use to represent them. Noah Webster switched the spelling of a few words from one set of rules to another, further complicating an already complicated situation, by institionalising two different sets of spellings for what is - in fact

- a single language.

I'm not aware that Noah Webster coined any new words, and I wouldn't care if he did - all languages coin new words all the time, and lose old ones. Dictionaries try to keep up, but not even the complete Oxford expects to incorporate every new word as it is coined. Many of the new words don't last and there is little point in incorporating them in a dictionary.

Dictionaries reflect the language - and should include those new words that end up being used by appreciable numbers of people. This has nothing to do with Noah Webster's half-baked ventures into spelling reform, which had the incidental - but surely not unwelcome - effect of protecting his market from U.K.-based competition.

It doesn't work for me.

Which means that it doesn't reflect popular usage - at least in the places I've been

Can you cite an example of somebody using the word "hood" to describe the engine-cover of a Volkswagen? I've done a little Googling, and the nearest I've got to something unambiguous was somebody advertisng a VW "hood emblem" that went on the front of the Beetle, not the engine cover.

They just give - as one particular meaning of the word - a phrase covering any kind of external protective cowl for any mechanism.

It is non-ambiguous, but not specific.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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And what do you expect your readers to learn from that web-site?

Like I said, English spellings are derived from one of six different sets of rules for doing that. Noah Webster just switched the spelling of a lmited number of words from one set of rules to another. This doesn't represent a significant or particularly useful simplification. Serious spelling reform would involve fixing on one set of rules and using that set without exception

Noah Webster's changes aren't "better" in any practical sense - Americans don't learn to read or write better or faster than English speakers in other countries who use the traditional spellings.

You introduced the subject of new words - which strikes me as totally irrelevant to Noah Webster's contribution (such as it was) - and your suggestion that the OED might be "frozen" did imply that you needed an exposition of this well known and banal aspect of language.

Since there are six sets of pronounciation rules for written English, all that Webster was doing was switching from one set of rules to another - his dictionary still contains examples of words spelled/ pronounced according to all six sets of rules, so his corrections were partial and arbitrary.

I didn't claim that he was a charlatan - he only had to be idiosyncratic and ill-informed to behave as he did and it is possible that he never noticed that he was freezing out U.K. publishers, though he seems to have been too much a publisher for that to be all that likely.

He died in 1843, so it wouldn't have worked for him either.

That's funny - everybody else's 1964 Volkwagen had a boot/trunk under the hood, because the engine/motor was in the back of the car.

None of them showed where the hood was supposed to be fitted on the car, and none of the hoods I saw had the ventilation slots I seem to remember seeing in the engine covers on the Beetles I knew.

No, it doesn't - according to them both "bonnet" and "hood" can refer to external protective cowls.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen