I like Marmite and was lucky to find a jar in the ever-expanding yuppie aisles over at the Hallandale Publix. Not that I eat it every day, but like Popeye’s fried chicken, when you want it. Basically, it is the dead yeast from the bottom of beer vats, but you don’t have to know where it comes from. According to the web, Indonesians use it in their porridge. You decide. I have no idea how this picture slipped past censorship. You are supposed to only look at the Marmite.
Taking Ray-B’s advice, I am able to play and strum around 20 tunes before scraping bottom of the barrel. I understand my limitations but I’m at least as good as some of the people who play Jakes. Well, even if I was a worse musician, they can’t write like I do so you know where to bet your money. I still can’t play certain chords and to gloss it over, I’m leaning again toward the drum box. At least I have a backup I can turn to without revamping my entire system. It rained constantly all day, so expect that I studied a lot.For the first time in around 30 years, I bought a Reader’s Digest. Once, I was an avid reader but some slight change in their form put me off in the 80s, same with PopSci and Mechanics Illustrated. Mind you, the latter two can also be attributed to repetition. Flying cars, dirigibles, that kind of thing wears thin. But, the price of the digest was right enough for me to give it another chance.
I’ve read a hundred pages on fat content in American food and took a stroll down the yuppie aisle at Publix. What you see when you don’t have a camera. Olive oil at $33 a pint. Soup $9 a can. Balsamic vinegar $13 a jar. We knew what would be happening to imported food as the world loses confidence in the greenback. We need some organically grown money, America. Actually, we do have such a thing, it is called silver. Back to food, that will not be the only commodity to soar and considering the number of imported products on America’s tables, there is going to be a ruckus.
But we have nobody to blame. The Anglo majority didn’t speak up over farm subsidies and illegal workers, as long as they lived in their middle-class cocoon of credit cards. Now time to pay the piper. The farm subsidies caused over-mechanization, a John Deere S690 base price is $453,703. Tell you what, for a treat, this video gives the sensation of riding in the cab of one of these monsters. Take a look.
This was a test case to see how well I’ve learned to read the labels for fat as well as calories. I can already tell that shopping will be a different experience. It is a fact that my diet was not that bad, fat-wise, but this will sharpen my habits against unnecessary sources. Other than evap in my coffee, my only dairy product is destined to be non-fat yogurt. Again, it is not like I was doing anything wrong before. I was well within all limits. But now I’m driven to the extreme because being nice didn’t work. Here is a photo of my lunch today.Electronics, what a hobby. The more reading I do, the less impressive integrated circuits become. Within each category, the chips are boringly repetitious. Add, store, count, or operate logic gates, and that’a about it. The pundits who say ICs detract from thinking now make sense to me. I own one quad logic gate, which I’ve connected and got working, but what’s inside I can’t say.
And that’s not my style. Take a look at this video when an IC is instructed to divide by zero. Chips, around here anyway, are at a premium, but transistors and resistors are not, so I’ve decided to build some of these logic gates using only discretes. The goal is to get this setup to add two numbers, though I have not the foggiest how to do so at this point. This is a pure logic experiment that can only proceed as fast as I can locate and assimilate the knowledge.
Now I said locate. My intention is to build and understand what others have already done and I don’t expect much help from them. But I know that everything a computer does is a result of adding very fast. Somebody pulled this off 50 years ago, so I’ll start with what components were available then. That means no integrated circuits. See addendum for what I’ve come up with so far.
But before you do that, have a laugh. Here is Steve Martin singing the entire Atheist’s Hymnal.
ADDENDUM
Today’s electronics report is not for everyone. But if you’ve ever had a stab at logic gates and given up, this version might make sense. Work along with me. What I’ve done is draw the truth table and the logic diagram together, since they are supposed to represent the same thing. Oddly, this relationship is never taught, the two ideas are never presented in conjunction. I’m not first, just saying I’ve never seen it broken down before, so this could be the link that brings it together for some.
I learned how to make transistors act on LEDs in easy combinations, therefore I know I can build a logic gate. I chose the XOR, the “exclusive or gate”, because it is the most educational. I did not choose the AND gate, which is over-simplistic. I’ve drawn the table nearby to show how X (the output) is true (1) whenever either A or B is true (1). Yeah, well how does this do anything useful?
Good question. You see, the other teachers who are not me leave out the fourth column on the table, the C or Carry column. Stay with me here, there are two situations that produce a false (0) in the X column. When both A and B are zero, and when both A and B are one. But clearly these are not identical situations and the C column is needed to demonstrate this. Aha, breakthrough. What I did was take this table and break it into its parts. AB is the input, XC is the output. Then it made sense. I diagramed the whole process so you can see what I did. I dissected the table because I needed to understand more than how to just read the numbers, and because I’m pretty darn good at doing things like that. Shown is the standard table, then the same table expanded to include the C column, then the two columns separated by function as either input or output.
Now we’re getting somewhere. Imagine a second table to the right of the first, but this second table could “read” the carry column of the first table. That’s where all this is headed. First though, I had to get is straight that while one table can produce four different results only one of those results is valid at any moment. Why, if I had eight such tables side by side, I could represent any eight-bit number (from 00000000 to 11111111).
But for now, stick with a single XOR table and you’ll be keeping up with me. I’ll memorize this table so that I can continue learning. Now, I’ll memorize it backwards, too. It becomes very easy after that to figure out the AND and NOT tables. Good, because the way things are taught, that is about as far as most people get. But now is our chance to go much, much further.Next, things get complicated, but the good news is this is as complicated as it gets. I found the logic gate diagram on the Internet, shown drawn in black. Same problem again, the diagram did not take apart the pieces and explain what they did. So I applied the identical procedure and lined the parts up, then wrote in red what happens at each stage. Now you can see the four steps needed for an electric circuit to produce the correct XOR output.
First you’ll notice there are more steps and more parts. Yep, but my diagram breaks them into bite-sized pieces. See the A and B inputs to the left and the single X output to the right. For now, we’ll forget ignore the carry digit, because we know it is there and we can get back to it later.I’ve shown only one situation, where A is 0 and B is 1. Two inputs, A and B; one output, X. With no carry digit. But if you can follow this situation through all four steps (takes about five minutes study), the rest will be easy. Hint, follow A and B independently through each AND gate. How I wish somebody had shown me this when I was a child.
Can you see how the NOT gates change an input to its opposite? Can you see the two AND gates? Can you see how these two AND gates are needed to simulate the output of the single table above? When you can, the XOR gate seems easy. If you can convince yourself this really works, believe it or not, you could design a computer, even if you don’t believe it yet. Every last of the zillion transistors in your computer boils down to what is shown in this diagram.
The revelation for me was that I used to think a computer worked on 0 or 1 in isolation, but I now see that the most basic unit of operation is a combination of two inputs, either of which can be a 0 or a 1. Two inputs, not just one, are needed to accomplish anything more logical than turning on the porch light.
I have three programming degrees, and they never mentioned this.
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