Okay, so I wrote that last sentence as if I was an electronics teacher. My mini-lesson on the 4017 chip [last day] must have impressed some readers, so I’m going to design and build a demo circuit. After the car show I walked over to the donut place thinking deeply about this chip and its relation to a Johnson counter. I was so beguiled, enchanted you might say, by this component that I delved more into the theory. See addendum for an expansion.The City of New Orleans. I love to travel but I’m the first to warn that there is little of the romance found on travel brochures. Hotels, no matter how pretty, are rarely up to their reputations. Three-star is plenty for me as I begin to scout what is available within walking distance of the train station in downtown Chicago. True, I joked about hotels with potted palms, but that is what I want. A place with a lobby so I can be Walter Mitty for the day.
Of Chicago, I know virtually nil. But these older cities usually have a cluster of public buildings and events which I’d like to breeze through. On the map it seems like a compact heritage type city core but I’d still plan on at least a bicycle once I arrived. Ah, have we forgotten I did the train-bike combination long before I bought the eBike? I know exactly how to travel this way. (I’d buy a used bicycle locally.)
Watch for developments on this. Though I have no specific budget for this trip, my shoulder injury has created an opportunity here. The planning as gone from a cheap ride on the historical train to include a stay that was not even anticipated when I last looked. I know better than to go on-line and ask what there is to do in Chicago. I’ll look on my own.
Besides, my anti-spyware has been blocking most inquiries into Illinois. My spyware is fine tuned to issue warnings on all but the worst of cases. It will only actually block when the far end is fanatically jockeying to infect my computer, as shown here. Avoid “enjoyIllinois” sites altogether.Here is the old joint, a.k.a Wally’s Folly. One can still see the grand size of the place in this view of the fence along the west road. A novel view it is as this shot would have been impossible when I lived there. Although this strip of land belongs to the city, it formed an effective hedge and passersby could not look directly into the living room as they can now.
Most of the underbrush and larger trees have been cut down. The sheer size of the premises was the real feature, Wallace could have been living in paradise for free. Even the rent was half the usual, paying only for a single-wide. The patio shown here was nearly forty feet long. I never did get the credit I deserved for finding this place. Instead, my business partner tried to shaft me by not honoring our agreement to share.
He listened to his insane daughter, known as Patsie in this blog. She convinced him he was a landlord and I was the tenant, therefore I should pay six times the agreed rent. I’ll never understand why he fell for that, considering he knew I was broke and trying to help him make money, which we would have. Worse, his bull-headed refusal to allow any maintenance had the ceiling caving in.Checking the city records shows that considering the repairs he eventually had to do and rent paid while vacant, old Wallace managed to lose money. That is astonishing poor performance but some people never learn. (The place was worth at least $34,000.) Again, I feel that Wallace fell victim to the machinations of his evil-minded daughter, the second such greedy female in his immediate family. I don’t hold that against him, but I cannot forgive him for threatening to sell the place if I didn’t pay money he knew I did not have. That was blackmail.
Of course, the lot of them are so peasant-minded, they view their pitiful conduct as business acumen. How strange they think their attempt at crime would not be exposed. How strange they think they can belittle this blog as “mind control” so they can cover their tracks. But, that is the sick logic of the lower class, they spend their lives trying to cheat for easy money and still die paupers, disrespected and unknown.
Last, I just got the call from Colorado. Benjamin is gone, or will be shortly. Cancer of the tongue. Marion has no immediate plans.
ADDENDUM
A Johnson counter is one that counts by keeping a tally. We’ve all done this, where you make a small vertical tick up to four, then a diagonal across them to represent five. This is familiar territory, but I’m inviting you to think a little more about the process. Clearly, any mathematical operations on this “tick tally” would be difficult, so your brain converts the ticks into numbers you can use. What I’m pointing at is that the ticks themselves are not numbers.
As I studied my logic gates, it was inevitable I came across counters. At first I ignored Johnson counters because the beginner’s texts failed to explain what I’m about tell you. And you know how I feel about instruction books that use unfamiliar terms.
I don’t like bad teachers. I noticed early most students who “studied hard” were the same ones who nodded when something wasn’t clear. They then had to make up for their own stupid complacency in the classroom, researching on their own time what they had paid good tuition to be taught. I’m the opposite. My hand shoots up the instant any instructor says something unexplained.
Hence, as we are about to see, when I study this is not to be confused with that "other" kind. Here’s my own learning about Johnson. A quick recap, each digital logic circuit can hold a zero or a one. So, with a basic Johnson counter, you’d need ten such circuits to represent the number 10, the equivalent of ten "tick marks". This will become clearer shortly. It took me a month to build the memory circuit shown here. It will only count to one, as shown by the yellow light. The reason I’m bringing this up is to emphasize the sheer cost of building enough of these circuits to do anything useful.
This circuit [in my photo] is one electronic “tick mark”, so to represent a million, I would need a million of these circuits. The supplies alone would cost six million bucks. There has to be a better way. There is. (Bear in mind, I just learned a lot of this myself. Yeah, I got snippets of it over the years, but tying it all together like this never happened in school.) The Johnson counter is a little more sophisticated, so watch how we ease into it below.
First, we’ll count to ten with a pretend Johnson counter. By the time we get to ten, we [find that we] do indeed need ten expensive memory “locations” [to represent the largest number].
1 = 1
11 = 2
111 = 3 and so on . . .
1111
11111
111111
1111111
11111111
111111111
1111111111
I’m going to represent the SAME count, but add in zeros to represent all ten memory locations. Make sure you understand I’m not changing the 1’s, just adding zeros to represent a “nothing”. I still need ten memory locations to "hold" ten ones.
1000000000 = 1
1100000000 = 2
1110000000 = 3 and so on . . .
1111000000
1111100000
1111110000
1111111000
1111111100
1111111110
1111111111
Johnson found a way to halve the number of circuits. Watch closely how I count to ten with only five memory locations.
10000 = 1
11000 = 2
11100 = 3 and so on . . .
11111
01111
00111
00011
00001
00000
Like I said, Johnson was a genius. Each “number” is different, that we need only a unique way to represent a number to use it for counting. Yet, these are not binary numbers. It is just a simple way to count using only two digits. This is the theory behind the 4017 counter. And proves I’ve gone the distance on that one. That’s all for now, I hope you had fun with this.
