I'll Give you Lamina Propria
What a week. Mondays are always difficult, since my once a week research paper class is in the evenings. Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday I had a test each day. Tuesday went well, except for one question I misread. Although N doesn't account for 96 of one's body weight alone, C, N H and O do. It is just a very rare occurrence that I misread a question, and to miss such a 'gimme' is a shame. Tuesday was Chemistry, which was fine except for a dozen points worth of questions on Dalton. I wish the instructor would cover some useful material so she'd have real questions to ask. If the material is difficult it tends to grab my attention. Following along to a lecture when I'm all over the material is more of an exercise in self discipline. Thursday was Bio Lab practical test, which I felt much more prepared for than the written test, and I should have those grades by Tuesday since that proffessor is Johnny on the Spot when it comes to grading.
At last Friday is here. I'll spend some time with Esmerelda today, write some research paper tomorrow and watch the game on Sunday. Go Bears!
posted by nate @ 10:00 AM
14 Comments:
You get to study Road House in class?
Stuff I've been looking at: 5722 noise tube for old-school random number generator; Russian cat's eyes; Nat Semi audio op amp: LM4562; $20 mpu kit: tms430 (Ti); hi-perf magnetics for tube supply flybacks--MPP; currrent sensing power mosfets.
Too bad you aren't interested in tbermionic hi-fi, I think there may be a little business oppurtunity there.
Hi, this is your conscience speaking...Nah, its just your pa. We need something your brother and I. To cut to the chase, I sorta f'ed up. We were making, or rather attempting to make, a noise gen, for school. Artifact: LM335 temp sensor, Amp: 40 dB TLC 272, dual cmos op amp, admitedly for its stability in breadboarding as it features linear slew rate limiting. First stage 0 db, Second stage inverting configuration with feedback degeneration. Problem: artifact noise: ~= 10nV/Hz^0.5, input refered noise on op-amp: ~=25! F__k! Why even have an artifact? Seems there are two kindsa natural noise, thermal and shot, prob. for Schottky, its discoverer, or at least first formaliser. Partial soln.: Get a quieter op-ap. This year's model: ~= 2.7nv/Hz^0.5. Also, I can get a stack of batteries so that I can stack my artifacts, brute force, but an avenue nontheless. This would bias the use of semiconducting artifacts into the same regime of diffuculty as thermionic ones, ironically enough.
The problem is that I will need to quantify our changes to the system so that we know that we are spending mom's money efficently. For this (where you come in) I will need a bolometer. Think thermos bottle with (four, say) holes in the cap for the leads to a power resistor (let's say 50 ohms, but maybe use screw terminals so that we can change out) and the leads to a temperature sensor.
We need to integrate our signal through an artifact-based method because numericaly-based methods would seem to be problematic.
Would this be up a submariner's alley? Do you think you would be able to characterise this homemade bolo's TC?
Nate: Stop reading now.
You heard me!
Think of pain.
I think Gwen Stephani is on the tube.
To Nate's friends: could you help out a pair of itenerant information scientists' quest for this holy grail, heroically quested after until we freeze to death in Chicago, here? Shame him! Peer pressure sees to really work on this cat! Oh, and in a bow to civic pride:
GO BEARS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sorry about the Bears
I wouldn't be sorry about the Bears. Even he said that the only reason they were going in the first place is because everyone else was sucking more.
flint,
is that knowable? According to Ben, Aristotle had great fun with this idea. If I remember well enough to paraphrase, he said: "People have been claiming that the current generation is degenerate from time immemorial, yet if that was truly the case, the human race would have petered out already!"
Can you offer us a statistical basis for the conclusion that the Bears aren't good, that their competition is merely bad? Personally, I am coming to the other conclusion, that the field needs to be widened because the defenders are so fleet, nowadays, that there is no 'corner' to turn, making for a rather flat and uneventful game.
On the other hand, it doesn't seem as though the NFC did very well versus the AFC, overall this season:
http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/standings?season=2006&breakdown=3&split=15
raising the question whether or not the 'real supe' didn't occur at the AFC championship a fortnight prior.
So whadda I know?
I think Aristotle's argument had a slightly different basis. For the Bears, you can look at certain games and various team records and potentially pick out how when they (the Bears) played a given team, that team had an unusually bad day, whereas human history is significantly less well statistically isolated - a bad thing here may be offset by a good thing over there, or some such.
Realistically, it's just like any other American professional sport - bloated with people who play for the money, not for the love of the game. And we enable it - I'd take a field of guys who were half as good who weren't concerned about their contract, they're just happy to be paid to play a game they love, over most of these egomaniacal schmucks any day.
Either way, I don't like American Football - any game that has a play time of one hour that ends up taking three or more hours to play stops far to often for my liking. Give me 90 minutes of real football anyday - it's over in less than 2 hrs, with fewer annoying commercials.
Yeah, TV timeouts are kinda buggy. I think its TV that makes the game so glacial. Some small high schools play 8-man ball, which might be interesting. My father says that football declined with the advent of synthetic pads and hard helmets. Before these innovations, linemen were more erect, and collisions were less violent. This was the dawn of the era of hyper-specialization.
There is a continuum between football games. American football is at one extreme of organization, 'soccer' at the other, Aussie football, for example, in between.
Professionalism in sports, Jeez.
Yeah, back in the sixties, Mr. Cub, Ernie Banks, was making like a $100K, compatable with a surgeon's compensation in those days -- now! I think an almost as distrubing trend is the search for 'sanitized' sports stars. The college (and SAT) requirements placed on the pros exclude many poor people. The ownership of the Bears is super-duper Catholic. I think the memory of Jim McMahon (himself raised Catholic) is so fresh for them that they want squeeky-clean types in the skill positions, esp. QB and MLB. Almost as troubling as those announcers who tend to cast everything as a morality play. . .
flint,
you are on to something with your idea about our veneration of professional athletes! Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, to paraphrase, states, I think, in the 'Gulag Archipelago' that the 'degree of fascism in a society' is 'proportional to the myth of genius abroad in that society.'
If not there, then, I think, in: "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich"
The NFL never really struck me as a place to look for the "best and brightest" of society...
And I think the college/SAT requirements just means that we get some stupid or egocentric players who come from better backgrounds and just buy their degrees so they can make even more money, and not the well-rounded individuals that we would like to believe that we are getting.
I think as long as sports are all about the money (which they are, no matter how much you may try to deny it - players salaries, advertising, giving the play locations stupid corporate names (it's Seahawks Stadium to me, from now until it's demolished in the name of more revenue)), we will still have far too many commercial breaks, far too many stops in the games, far too much detraction from the sport itself. Honestly, I think soccer is being suppressed by the advertisers who believe that the game doesn't stop enough to give them the commercial time they want.
That's an interesting quote by Solzhenitsyn, although I haven't been able to track it down yet (but I'm pretty sure it's not from One Day in the Life of...). It is sad that our society appears to be headed in that direction.
Boy, maybe the quote isn't Solzhenitsyn's, but another contemporary Russian. When I read the statement it cut me to the quick, it is so evidently true, yet the causal linkage seems non-obvious, to me. Never been able to find it again. Yeah, 'soccer' would be the bane of the mercantilists, wouldn't it? The best they have been able to figure is to stream advertisement during the match. I think Pete Seeger has a song lamenting the fact that we seem to prefer watching athletes on television rather than exercise the alternative of playing at the park, ourselves.
"Corporatism is fascism" says Mussolini. Ben speculates that, nowadays, corporatism is the only way to go due to human overpopulation. The fact of the rise of fascism seems non-controversial. To what would you attribute this?
Albert Camus wrote a wonderful allegorical novel on this topic, "Du Peste," or "The Plague."
Perhaps, part of my alienation with the NFL is caused by the fact that I cannot afford tix. How am I to suss whether my rational infrastructure around this topic isn't just 'sour grapes?'
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