A little more midnight oil, and we have success with the LED lamp displays. Shown here, I can get two different numbers to display in pairs, in this case 75 and 36, chosen arbitrarily. I can’t get them to count or time anything, but the fact it works is good enough for me. Importantly, it uses the same 7 resistors as the single lamp display (plus the two resistors on the transistors).
I did not have to double the number of leads for two lamp displays. This is a full-fledged operating display, multiplexed and transistor controlled, completely designed using on principles learned with no outside kits or directions. That’s why these things get mentioned so often—they are the most significant events of a given day. I’d say I gotta get out more, but the hobby is intended to stop me from doing just that.It isn’t all roses. If you look closely, the elements are only half as bright as a single digit. They are one atop the other instead of side-by-side. There is a faint back-glow from the elements that are supposed to be off. And I won’t tell you what having to look through all the wiring reminds me of.
How about some trivia? When Bill Gates was 25, he paid $50,000 for CP/M, the operating system he illegally copied to produce his first disk operating system (DOS). Did you know the reason the Beatles quit performing live is that they could not hear themselves on stage. No, not the amplifiers. The fans. This is where I like to point out Eric Clapton never had a top ten single. Cotton is 25% stronger wet than when dry and under the right circumstances can stop an arrow on the same principle as Kevlar. During WWII Germany produced 142,000 aircraft. The Allies destroyed 116,000. What happened to the rest? I know.
Rehearsal tonight was a disappointment. We chose 12 standards which we individually knew and so could be expected to mesh. No mesh. It is rarely a good plan to get on stage with me without knowing your part inside out and backwards. Thus, I’ve scheduled a live show a week from Friday. I’ll be watching the audience, not the people beside me.
It was so early, I stopped in to see Laura’s Karaoke show at My Buddie’s Place. With maybe ten regulars, imagine the surprise when I got a standup cheer for singing “North To Alaska”. One gal in the crowd said she knew some guitar players who could play like me. The first three she mentioned are men I’ve fired years ago, the “Hotel California Gang", right up there with the "Mustang Sally Bunch". She was old enough to have bought into the guitarist-as-hero ticket. But not old enough to realize times have changed.
Sleuth that I am, I got home and saw the tire tread marks in my driveway. A lot of people came by after I left for the library at 4:00 PM. The trick is to catch me in the mornings, when I’m likely to be sipping coffee and working the computer. And taking lunch out of the oven, even though I like my microwave. My newest antenna is able to detect the signal from the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts. And what can be detected can be filtered and amplified. (It took them a year to figure out to put in a passworded log-on.)
Here’s a reward for those of you who read this far. A nugget of information that could take countless hours of research on your own, I give you for free. Most of us have heard that scientists have found meteorites from Mars on the south polar ice cap. Ah, but how do they know they are from Mars? Sure, all meteorites come from outer space, but what makes them think a particular few are Martian?
Actually, it is done by matching up a factor that can be measured very accurately from Earth. Spectroscopes allow us to examine the finest details of atomic structure in the distant stars, so there is no problem analyzing the atmospheric gases of the nearby planets and moons that have them. It turns out Mars has, as planets go, a distinctive atmosphere. Its rocks contain entrapped pockets of gas that are like a fingerprint of origin. Now you know.
[Author’s note: pieces of Mars get to Earth when Mars itself is hit by a large meteorite. Mars gravity isn’t enough to stop chunks of the planet from being flung off into space when this happens. Some pieces eventually reach Earth.]
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