One year ago today: March 26, 2024, gas station coffee.
Five years ago today: March 26, 2020, another Miami flat tire.
Nine years ago today: March 26, 2016, one in sixteen million.
Random years ago today: March 26, 2014, Brainiac mating site.
Who remembers my attempt to build a butterfly capacitor? I found a very similar design on-line by someone who had the patience I sure didn’t. These have become rare and expensive and I need some sort of quiet project I can do sitting down if I need a short break. There are seven of these plates which should be more than needed. The plates are not just randomly cut, there is a formula for the “air” space and sizes you can find online. Avoid the ones that show plates of odd shapes, as the capacitor effect behaves funny by trying to collect where there are any corners.
Here’s something you probably have not seen before, a numeric description of memory size. Today we have four major prefixes, they are kilo, mega, giga, and tetra. Memory addresses thus quickly outstrip the capability of RAM. Here are the numbers. 2¹º is a kilo, 2²º is a mega, 2³º is a giga, and 24º is a tetra. If you wanted to address all addresses in RAM, you’d need a lot of it and it is expensive.
So instead, the memory uses an offset. If you had 4 gigabytes of RAM you could address 4,294,967,295 different addresses each once byte long. (These bytes can be combined into doublewords, and quadwords etc) but it is easier to separate the memory into “pages”. Now you can repeat the memory addresses by putting each group of four billion bytes on a separate “page”. I learned this week that most computer programs (and apps) are designed to begin on the third highest possible memory address. Why third? I do not know.
Family Dollar is for sale for a billion. I never shop there, it is just a high priced Dollar Tree where the prices seem rounded up instead of down. That’s a seven billion dollar loss for Dollar Tree. I fared little better, by mid-morning I still felt tired and went back to sleep. Will I get anything done today?
Hydrogen powered Coke machine,
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
By late afternoon, I slowly came around. Not enough to lift the floor, so instead I managed to build two boxes and get a third underway. Just plain storage crates for my pile of DVDs. Each box holds 30, so I will finally count how many I have. I’ve learned quite a bit about the ways boxes can go wrong. I glue only the sides now and have learned to live with small gaps here and there. My rule of time is confirmed, it takes 80% as much time to build a shoddy box as a nice one. So unless you don’t give a hoot, take the time. Also, jig or not, every sixth box requires attention, usually from warped wood or seemingly identical pieces that just won’t fit.
Call it a good day, just not all that productive. I’d like to find something challenging to read today. I read a chapter on two’s complement, which I can do, but don’t understand. And it is time to give navigation a short break. All the books I have give differing instructions on the sight reduction phase. And that is the one operation you don’t gloss over, it is the link between your sextant calculations and drawing your all important LOP, line of position. The good news is I now understand what is going on, it’s getting there that isn’t so clear. All four books I own contradict each other on the application of Z and Zn. This is the all important azimuth angle, that is, the angle between your chosen navigation point and where the Sun was (GP) when you took your readings.
Nothing on-line was up to par and I’ve read most of the books here. Other than a short video on how bad Italian weapons were in the last big war, I found nothing to keep awake.
ADDENDUM
Another flurry of “life on Mars” claptrap is making the rounds. The Mars Sample Return project won’t even be reviewed until next year. NASAs bureaucracy has pushed the launch window into the 2030s. The so-called evidence of life is nothing more than long-chain molecules from a core sample in the Gale crater, which was chosen because it was very likely the bottom of an ancient sea or lake. There are a host of chemical reactions that, if containing the right impurities, often mimic or form similar chains.
The ones found on Mars are from the clay drilled up by the rover. They have less than 50 molecules of hydrogen and carbon. On Earth 140 atoms is considered organic. All the Mars chains prove is that if life as we know it did ever exist on Mars, we could easily find it.
