THE HOME-BOY ELECTRONICS READER

First of all I'd like to apologise to anybody who bet money on the Bears based on what I said in my blog. Both Randy Rhodes and Ed Schultz were rooting for the bears and both hated this superbowl. I thought it was one of the most poorly played superbowls of all time. There was one 51 minute period where the Chicago offence only had the ball for about forty seconds. How would the worst defence that the Colts had shut down the Chicago offence the way it did? Randy thinks there were too many metaphores about "balls" like "losing your balls" "ball control" "ball handeling" or "slippery balls" aand she also said that Prince's guitar in shaddow looked like a giant penis. It's still inconceivable at this date that the Colt's won. It only goes to show that nobody can predict the future even when the outcome seems obvious. Even if I had been right I would have done comentary on humility. I never claimed that "God" told me the Bears would win. I came up with that on my own. It's a greater sin to claim God did something that God didn't do. Even if the bears had won that might not necessarily have been because of a "dyspensation from God" for the Beats to win. It might have just been good playing. The same thing goes for the Colts. Personally I thought the commentary was biased all the way through in favor of the Colts. There just seemed to be more Colts fans than Bears fans.

I'd like to talk about electronic theory a little. If you're looking for a lecture on capacitors, resisters, diods and coils, you've come to the wrong place. Search the dumpster of your local Good Guys for these. I'd like to get more abstract and I apologise in advance to those of you with an IQ over 150, because to these I'm likely to come off as either over simplistic, or just pretentious. I'd also like to apologise for readers of early drafts of this file because there was a glairing error in one part. So I've been silent but deadly and now is the time for me to let rip even if it gives you an unconfortable feeling. (OK no more metaphores) People get screwed up over the most obvious things, for instance talking about a "digital" antenna. You don't need a "digital" antenna to get digital TV; you need a digital tuner. An antenna just increases the gain. Of course unlike analog, digital is not subject to snow or static or double images you get on analog. If you want "analog" defined- - analog numbers are "real numbers" and they are characterized by decimal point figures that go off to infinity and never repeat. We are getting away from analog. Now they have digital radios which like I say are not subject to static or that other problem of FM, wave clipping, otherwise known as fuzz or distortion. "Overmodulation" is most comonly seem by an amplifyer turned up too high without enough power so you get "wave clipping". That is the tops of the waves are flat lines rather than normal spikes. This gives you that fuzz distortion. On FM overmodulation is also caused by the station not properly locking on to a frequency. You can best think of AM as "frequency modulation" and think of FM as "volume" modulation. What this means is that the FM waves ocelates between two frequencies that are 200 kilocycles (or kilohertz) apart, giving you about fifty or sixty decibles of dynamic range, of you're lucky. Dynamic range if the radio or decible count (done on a logarithmic scale) between the softest sound you can hear on that radio and the loudest sound. If you are not properly atuned to that proper 200 hilohertz bandwidth you get "wave clipping". You don't get distortion on AM because AM works on "frequency" varience or modulation. AM radio has an accompanying modulating wave from the primary wave that causes "beat" frequencies that make up the sound. This means that a 5000 sound is either 5000 cycles either above or below the primary wave. AM is deliberately dezigned to sound inferior. Just as the phone company deliberatly engeneers their sound on purpose to sound like crap. There is nothing inherently in the wires that makes it sound like that. Even a modist 35 kilobits per second computer will give you a vastly superior sound to a phone line. When you turn in an AM station the higher frequencies of the sound are off to the side of the signal so if you off-tune it a little sometimes you get better highs. If there's any wave clipping it affects only the high frequencies by not picking them off. It doesn't give you the sort of flattened, mutant waves you get by an ill tuned FM station. Just to review decibles is the SN ratio otherwise known as dynamic range. Ideal is eighty but FM is probably only 50 or 60 decibles.

I'd like to talk about waves. Last night a friend of mine was asking if a computer program can draw a parabolic curve. Parabolic curves of course are defined as the equal distance between a dot and a straight line. The figure is used in rising or falling missiles, but it's also used in focusing light in lenzes. It's also the shape of the reflecter in your auto headlights or a flashlight, ideally. A hyperbolic curve is based on the 90 degree angle rather than a 180 angle. Normally things that should be drawn on a logarithmic curve come out in a hyperbola when done on a straight numeric curve. Population growth is like this. Stock prices often graph out on a hyperbolic curve but in this case since you are actually measuring how much money people are making off their investment, you want a numeric scale rather than a logarithmic scale. This guy asked me if you had to get a "3D: card to see 3D on your computer. No you don't but you may need more memory. 3D is not a physical property of the screen but only in the software. It also seems to me there should be no distinction than, say, "color" vidio tape or "black and white" vidio tape. The tape shouldn't care. It's just a carrying medium. It's the coding that counts. People want to know about sine waves. Sine waves are pure sound. You can modulate them, but don't confuse this modulation with radio modulation. Sine waves are based on the trigometric sine figure graph. These are called circular trigometric readings because they graph out in a circle if you're doing program graphics like in BASIC based on turning objects. (3D graphics also incorporates trigometric readings) But if you measure out wave magnitude on a forward time basic you get a sine wave. You've all seen sine waves. They opperate on the one, two, three principle. One third the way up is half the square root of one. Half the way up or 45 degrees is half the square root of two. This is the median power of the wave. Half the time it's above this and half the time it's below this. .707 is a key figure to remember. 2/3rds the way up is half the square root of three in measuring power. The top of the wave is obviously half the square root of four. Waves obviously interract with each other and there are points of in phase strength of signal and out of phase weakness of signal. Digital does not change these machinations of wave interractions.

Leo Le Port was saying that a million or 1.3 megapizel picture consists of 480 by 640 pixels or something. His math is suspect. A million pixels is obviously a thousand by a thousand and if you can achieve that you are doing well. What Leo may be thinking of is 1.3 megabits. That's bits and not bytes. Bytes are still seen as consisting of eight bits. 1.3 megabytes may well be 640 by 480 pixels because there are three bytes per pixel. When there were 240 colors there was a one byte to one pixel corospondance. This allowed eight bits per byte. A two to one ratio would allow for 6500 colors and you'd think that would be enough but it isn't. Now you ned ten million or so colors. In a typical analog TV picture you have a hundred thousand variences. Analog does not per se transmit in pixels. A TV picture in analog is AM transmitted using about a 4.5 megahertz frequency varience. This means in the AM format you have 4.5 million variations in wave dynamic. But you have to devide six magahertz by sixty because there are sixty frames per second. This gives you the hundred thousand figure. TV works on a single sideband principle. The other side is surpressed. The sound is FM and at the top of the six magacycle band. When FM encounters phase interfearance it either has snow weakness or else wave clipping or fuzz distortion. When the AM picture wigs out with image phase interferance it behaves like a short wave AM signal does. It does not automatically black out. You get manifestations such as ghost images and also loss of shading. With waves it makes little difference where you "bounce" off the ionesphere, like in AM short wave, or "bounce" off physical objects like TV waves, which are about a meter accross so interact with objects. Vertical controls the number of lines per each 60th. of a second scan and horizontal controls the speed of the scan. TV unlike AM radio does not have a "default" of silence. Because the found is FM The picture is not a default black but gray. Snow comes black and also white. Perhaps this is due to TV being single side-band and not double. The "default" is gray, which means if you see black in the picture, it's modulate, and if you see white, it's modulated. The color in the picture comes from the other 1/60th. second of the picture. These "gaps" are filled in with color because a TV will repeat a 525 line picture twice each 30th. of a second tomake up an entire "frame". You know something? We've said enough.

Leo Le Port seemed to have a little bit of trouble a few months ago in talking about the relative strengths of waves. With optics and electronics it's the same. An object four feet away will only get a quarter the light or resolution as an object two feet away, and it could be yards, miles or anything we're talking about. Picture a "disons sphere" like they talk about in Startrek. This is an imaginary sphere where every surface is equal distant from the source. If this sphere were only half the radius than four times as much energy would hit the sphere. What this means is that a radio or TV (or digital) station has only a quarter the power fifty miles away as it does 25 miles away. Also the strength of signal varies with the length of the wave. Waves at one megahurt or 1000 kilihertz in the AM band have a hundred times as much inherent strength as 100 megahert waves do in the FM band. The higher the frequency the less the inherent strength. I did a BASIC program based on this formula. AM signals would be more powerful in the day time were it not for the curviture of the earth. Very long wave signals actually travel along the curviture of the earth. AM at night and short waves bounce off the ionesphere and so when you do your measurements of strength now the curviture of the earth is no longer a disatvantage. Gain is the amount of signal boosting your TV and antenna do. It says on the package there is such a thing as "too much gain" but I don't see it that way.

Calculus regards infinity as different from other math branches. Others will say that parrellel lines never meet but calculus regards infinity as a mesauragle fixed comodity and has equations based on this. Many other equations need to be repeated an infinite number of times like Base E or the golden mean progression to be completely accurate. There is the whole realm of hyperbolic trig functions we haven't even gone into where the functions of sine, cosine, and tangent seem to graph out into hyperbolas. In an artist drawing parrellel lines meet at infinity. The Federation has the "zero is infinity" principle. They call this the seventh dimension. A camera lens focused at infinity will focus down to an infinetessable point. Once again infinity is seen as an exact finite point of focus. Metaphysically what this means is that if you were aware of everything you would not be specifically aware of anything. You would be like in Nirvana. It is said the dead are not aware of nothing. This isn't just a double negative. To be aware of nothing you still have to be aware. If you're really dead, not even "non existance" exists, so you can't be in that state. Perhaps this is what they mean by Universal conscience. Everything in the universe is Aware.

Now they are saying that Bush may actually be sending fifty thousand more troops into Iraq and not 20,000. John Mc Cain has chided democrats almost goading them into cutting off funding of troops for real if that's what they want to do, rather than "not putting their money where there mouth is" and voting for a non binding resolution with no force of law. His point is well taken. If the democrats are going to be relivant in the next two years they have got to have "party discipline" and work together. I hope you have enjoyed the topics discussed today.