One year ago today: August 25, 2013, general mayhem.
Five years ago today: August 25, 2009, and average day.
Ten years ago today: August 25, 2004, Elvis!
This is the label from a bottle of 1975 Mouton Rothschild. Wine taster types know the vintage and this is your trivia today. It is one of the most counterfeited of wines in a market where most of the highest price bottles are always suspect. This one takes the cake. In the early 80s, a hippie type, noting the label was designed by Andy Warhol, convinced a printer to make up some wallpaper with the image. It was a short step with a cutting machine to slap the labels over the 1974 bottles. His name was Louis Feliciano and he was only caught when the feds resorted to a sting operation.
I use all electric bikes in pedal assist mode. In fact, using them any other way seems to be a quick way to get nowhere. The best store-bought model we ever owned will kill a battery in six miles if actually used as an electric bicycle. It is possible to extend the range by travelling ridiculously slow, say six miles per hour, that is, slower than regular pedaling.
Nor are these electric bikes seen much in Florida if at all. I used mine all year but in my rounds, you’d rarely see another person who rode regularly. It isn’t the weather, it is the people. For example, in the year I rode to the bakery, I never saw another electric bike. And everywhere else, when I did, the owner of the bicycle was particularly clueless about any statistics of any use. There was also the “cult” aura of electric bikes. “He kept his brown hair a boyish shag that downplayed his forty-four years.”
The need for a bicycle is pressing, so I’m surprised they aren’t everywhere. It never did make sense to make small grocery shops in a big vehicle. And there is nowhere in South Broward to mail a letter after 7:00 PM unless you drive out to the boonies or down to North Miami. The nearest mailbox is a seven-mile trip from here. And the post office complains they aren’t making enough money. Y’figure?
Nothing like a successful gig to get me back to study my books. I sincerely feel the reason things go slow around here is because I lack the right tools. I’m the first to point that [lack of tools] is ordinarily an excuse, but we don’t even have an oscilloscope. It's not like I'm crabbing we don't have an electron microscope. But consider this. I find most “inventors” who come up with a home-made solution often have fully equipped labs and the reason they can jury-rig a piece of equipment is because they are already familiar with the technology. In many cases, totally familiar. It isn’t the same as starting from scratch.
In early 2011, our club tried to build an antenna. After all, it is just a wire cut to the right length. Yet we could not get any results at all. This was the first time we began to regard “backwards” invention with more suspicion. For example, if I today built an electric bass out of a tree stump and baling wire, it is because I already know the exact requirements. And that’s a tremendous difference. So pardon me if I’m leery of websites that tell me how easy it is to build a ground-penetrating radar.
The August heat kept me indoors all day. So I read up a lot on an engineering term called “technology transfer”. This is the fancy phrase for using a tool from one application in a different area. (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve caught some people using my screwdriver like a crowbar.) It would seem an ideal topic for the Internet but there is almost nothing. Where you’d expect a little guidance on what to look for, all you get is definitions of the term. And that does not help. However, I can tell you what not to do if you want people to visit your site.
Advertising. Places like Brightstorm and DigiKey get fails. In your face advertising that cannot be skipped. Sorry to tell them, but people really get turned off by lengthy ads. Up to a minute before you get to the subject of your search. And most Internet advertising is boring. As soon as I see a well-groomed young black in a suit, uh-oh, misleading cell phone ad with a two year contract.
ADDENDUM
Today you get a mini-lecture on capacitors. Pick up any circuit card and you see all these capacitors. They are a simple device, two plates separated by an insulator that accumulate opposite charges. They charge and discharge in predictable ways. One common use is to make power lights dim slowly rather than click off instantly. Well, I will explain what none of the textbooks will tell you: why all those capacitors on most circuit cards? FYI, this is part of the lecture I’m planning for the Nova meet-up this week, so there’s a motive here. You're the guinea pigs.
There are two major annoyances. All changing electrical signals, analog or digital, set up a magnetic field around themselves. Ignore that for now. The other problem is battery power. Each part of the circuit that turns on momentarily lowers the battery supply voltage. Think of it as taking a shower and somebody turns on the garden hose. You momentarily get a blast of hot or cold shower until the line balances again.
Same thing with integrated circuits. If you look inside your computer, there can be dozens of these chips right beside each other. It doesn’t take much of a voltage drop from one chip to cause other chips to start acting funny. Capacitors have a smoothing effect on voltages. So you will see a capacitor on at least every third chip. Capacitors are difficult to “burn” into a chip, so they are nearly always soldered onto the circuit board afterward. Now you know.
