Posted on 05/22/2009 10:12:59 AM PDT by joejoejoe1
Joe's Babe of the Week: Debbie Stabenow
Never divide by zero.
Or let one run a government.
LOL! Forward to the past indeed.
Hey! My TV isn’t working!
What’s 0bama done now?
Experiments over the Christmas holidays with a converter box told me that rabbit ears did not pull in anything (digital) in the family room and only 3 stations (barely) in the living room. There's a signal level they call the "digital cliff" -- whereas analog just gets noisier as the signal-to-noise ratio falls, digital remains fine to a point then rapidly degrades into useless.
A few weeks ago I built a little fractal TV antenna based on this plan but using materials at hand -- $1.06 for over-sized wire from Home Depot, and $~4 for the transformer, and the rest from materials around the house, including old campaign signs for substrate and (probably generally unnecessary) housing.
Final experiments early this morning told me I'd get quite a number of channels with the antenna up high enough, so the youngest sionnsareen and I built and installed a housing for it (mainly to hide the innards and keep unprotected elements out of the weather).
Lo and behold, it worked! Where we once had 3 or 4 channels, full of noise, we have well upwards of a dozen good channels plus a few that are on the margin.
Will have to confer with family on spending $50 (that's 5000 whole pennies! *\;-) for an amplifier to bring in some more marginal channels.
We were taking naps.
Long shower ... who’s paying the water bill? ;-).
I emailed you another picture.
Agreed! Must have the stream turned down to minimum: drip... drip... drip...
Sounds like Chinese Water Torture to me.
OTOH, there is a great Celtic tune composed by a musician who spent a night in a Scottish hotel with a dripping faucet. It's called "The Little Cascade" (the name is SO perfectly in the Highland Gaelic tradition, but I don't know how to explain this). I found a recording online, for all I think this one inadequately miked -- the attention should have been on his right hand, not the left. But if you listen closely, you may hear the drip... drip... drip...
The harp is not LoM's, but is of similar size.
We need to get back into our music....
It looks as though you could get much of the benefit of a fractal antenna by simply weaving a thin wire through the holes of a square of pegboard.
For this exercise, it won’t matter which side of the board you’re on as you do your dance. It’s pretty much flat anyway.
The fractal antenna looks as though it could also benefit from stacking, as long as each layer is insulated or spaced apart from the next.
Another idea would be to use “baby chicken wire”, which has hexagonal cells. You would have to be careful to not destroy the integrity of the whole as you cut away the sections not needed.
We can all experiment with these concepts, harkening back to the days of tin foil on the rabbit ears, and their requisite attendant, the youngest child in the household.
Don't know about stacking -- RF is NOT my field. And my brief tests with reflectors indicated there wasn't much to gain from such,and definitely loss in terms on omnidirectional capability. It's cheap and it works fairly well -- what could be dearer to a Scottish heart?
Besides, I'm not the one watching teevee. *\;-)
I don’t waste a lot of time with TV, but it was the reason I learned about ETFE.
A long time ago, someone asked what would be a suitable material for the walls of our Venus balloon forms. I think I now know.
ETFE is “the next thing to Teflon”, perhaps as suitable as any material could be for the atmosphere of Venus.
I’m envisioning carbon fiber struts supporting ETFE “pillows”, as they are currently developing them architecturally, and filled with nitrogen gas extracted from the atmosphere of Venus.
Building a wall of these pillows filling out the interstices of a space frame geodesic dome, you’d easily have enough interior volume for the breathable air to provide buoyancy to the whole structure.
Add dirt scooped from the depths below, and suitably enriched, and you could grow your food supply and your oxygen supply.
It seems the only thing you really have to fight for is the hydrogen. Coaxing hydrogen away from sulfuric acid takes real salesmanship.
i had to help arrange his funeraL
then we had to arrange to put his much beloved lady into "assisted living" (she has both Lupus & MS) & convert his assets into cash for her continuing care.
then i got the flu.
it hasn't been a really FUN time.- i missed you folks!
free dixie,sw
Thanks for stopping by, General.
And thanks for your service, once again.
We've got this "Maker Faire" out in San Mateo annually (and there are others in various locales) that brings out some creative folks, such as the gentleman who authored "Absinthe & Flamethrowers", who display their creative works for the amazement of packs of curious onlookers. Around the world you find other such faires, and creative genii such as the gang that built, and operated "The Sultan's Elephant" as part of a production of the same name.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQbTMEupTpk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sultan%27s_Elephant
Excellent still shot here.
The actual "show" began with a Vernesque "rocket" crashing -- nose first -- into the paving
Some guy on Flickr has a whole set of shots here.
It's all quite fantastic, in the archaic sense.
The dissonance of the olde world costuming juxtaposed with the modern mechatronics -- it's a genre that's acquired the name "steampunk." Think Jules Verne; The Nautilus, where a pipe organ and cast iron meet nuclear power with brass fittings, steam pipes, and clockwork instrumentation.
Alas, you say, but you can't do without your bits and bytes? No worries, because somebody's gone and built a steampunk laptop that even dual-boots to either XP or Ubuntu.
And then there's this blog page featuring a few DIY steampunk conversions.
All quite cool.
As a kid I we had a cat that would wonder off for weeks at a time. She was gone for about a year once. She came back when she felt like it or kicked out. She didn’t loose much weigh while she was gone. I guess she had a few places she called home.
Maybe yours was a nice cat!
I’ve seen cats like that.
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Drive-by post!
Just letting you know I’m alive!
:o])
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