RE: [Vo]:Just for fun!!!
Wm: Agreed! I think its all about resonances and harmonics... You might want to read my following postings: 2/26/2011 Interesting article: exchange of single quantum between two ions... its all about resonance. 2/11 flies in Ockham's face... 2/12 RE: flies in Ockham's face... Nearly all of nuclear physics is about brute force methods of how to get nuclei to interact... there is another way which requires much less energy, but EXTREMELY specific conditions (affecting the resonances) and that's why its so hard to find, let alone reproduce. -Mark _ From: Wm. Scott Smith [mailto:scott...@hotmail.com] Sent: Sunday, May 01, 2011 9:05 PM To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Subject: [Vo]:Just for fun!!! How about Anomalous Heat Energy Transmutation a la The Hutchinson Effect? Maybe weird stuff really does happen at certain combinations of frequency changes!
Re: [Vo]:Just for fun...
--- On Fri, 5/21/10, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.com wrote: Sorry for the long delay in replying, it was a... rough week. I used that same substance, different mixture. More sugar, I think, and I used it for smoke bombs, it burned slowly with copious white smoke, basically harmless. Except a friend of mine was melting down the stuff on his stove and pulled a spoon out of the hot mixture, which apparently caused a thread of it to fall down into the gas flame and the whole thing blew up in his face. No eyebrows, but not a lot of permanent damage. One freaked-out mother when the house filled with the smoke, fire department, the whole messs Heh, the way I always did it was with a hot-plate outside, on the picnic table, and I used a double boiler to heat the stuff. One thing I found out, after reading some website I don't recall the name of now, was that substances other than sugar could be used with the KNO3 as a fuel. Sorbitol, of all things, worked very well. The local alternative foods store sold the stuff by the pound. I found it melted down easier, and was less hygroscopic. You didn't use a fuse? I made fuses with matcheads next to each other wrapped up with masking tape. They always worked. We didn't use fuses per se; the earliest method we used was small lengths of plastic straws filled with pyrodex (a blackpowder substitute) which we ball-milled down to a fine powder. The ends of the straw section were sealed with epoxy, with the pyrodex powder inside. A length of nichrome wire was passed through this, and soldered to copper leads, which ran to a switch box and battery some few hundred feet away. Later on, we found a better way to ignite the engines, more rapidly. Epoxy was mixed with fine magnesium dust, wetting it, and then potassium nitrate was added to make a paste. This was cast into small sections (1/4 diameter, say, 2 long), with nichrome filaments embedded inside. When heated from a current passed through the nichrome, the plastic stuff would ignite and burn with a brilliant white light, and ignite the engines very effectively. Anyone know how I could get or borrow a fast neutron source? The level could be tiny. Commercial sources are normally way out of range of what I could afford, AFAIK. Farnsworth fusor? I suppose you could do something like the radioactive boy scout did. But let me state for the record that I ain't responsible for if anyone actually does this, nor if they grow a few extra limbs from the effects of it. :) And as to your discussion of the disappearing art of making Persian carpet... it is an ironic thing that as technology progresses, those things that led to what we now have, seem to vanish by its own hand. There must be another way. --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Just for fun...
Terry Blanton wrote: The Roomba robot carpet sweepers are borderline practical today, but better ones will follow. Oh, I think this furry feline might disagree: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf9wHkkNGUU That's hysterical!! - Jed
Re: [Vo]:Just for fun...
At 09:58 PM 5/19/2010, Kyle Mcallister wrote: Back home, when I was a kid, I was into model rockets. But it seemed boring making something from a kit. So I set about making my own rockets and engines. For fuel, I had a few different things. The most common was common sugar and potassium nitrate, melted together in a 40/60 ratio, then cast into PVC pipe lengths, which were then capped and provided with a nozzle cast from Durham's water putty. I used that same substance, different mixture. More sugar, I think, and I used it for smoke bombs, it burned slowly with copious white smoke, basically harmless. Except a friend of mine was melting down the stuff on his stove and pulled a spoon out of the hot mixture, which apparently caused a thread of it to fall down into the gas flame and the whole thing blew up in his face. No eyebrows, but not a lot of permanent damage. One freaked-out mother when the house filled with the smoke, fire department, the whole messs A teenager at that time, I had this ragtag collection of assorted hangers-on from, of all places, the local Baptist church. These guys, and sometimes girls if we were lucky, would come over and help manufacture rocket engines. We had this test stand, if you can justify calling it that, which was a highly technological device consisting of a piece of 3 steel pipe set vertically into concrete in the middle of the yard. We'd drop an engine in, lit, and run for cover. Sometimes they worked. Sometimes.. You didn't use a fuse? I made fuses with matcheads next to each other wrapped up with masking tape. They always worked. I guess one of the worst incidents was an experimental engine composed of potassium nitrate, magnesium dust (!) and a binder of polyurethane. The geyser of fire and oily, acrid smoke that issued from that test stand was ungodly. If I remember right, it was me and Jerry who were there when it happened. When you see fire flow like a liquid... time to make an exit, stage right. It's amazing that I survived. In fact, though, I was never injured. Anyway, I'm an American kid, still, I'm just older Ditto. The good news and the bad news. Well, I can understand, but I don't really miss that. Heathkits were cheap, main point for me at the time, I built quite a few, but assembly costs are now so low that a Heathkit to do what I can easily buy fully assembled and tested, etc., would be much more expensive. Yes, assembled is cheaper now. Sometimes, late at night, I wonder if that's really better. Where's it made? In the USA? Or by someone slaving in a third world nation, with no chance of anything better? Whether it's an improvement for them or not depends on local conditions. I favor using our buying power and choices to cause improvements in conditions, not to prevent buying from third world nations. That means developing information about the actual impact of these operations, about wether or not good working conditions are provided, compared, not to what exists in the U.S., but to what other conditions exist. It's hard to say that we have improved working conditions if the alternative that we force through a boycott is starvation. Generally, what we need, in just about everything, is reliable information My dad told me stories of taking the tubes from his old TV down to the drug store and testing them. He'd replace the bad one, and back to The Honeymooners it was. Now, you just go to Wal Mart and buy a new TV. In some ways, this is good... an electronics cannibal such as myself finds garbage day to be a great boon to my assets of stuff. On the other hand, I think we're instilling a sense of nonappreciation for what has been made. Screw it, it's cheap, I don't care if I break it, I'll buy another one. Put another way, nothing is made with sockets any more. It's all hard-soldered. There are no VCR repair shops any more. Nothing is repaired, just discarded and replaced. What is the environmental impact of this? Harmful. But the repair labor is the problem. So ... ship broken stuff to third-world countries for repair/recycling. Yes, that shifts some problems to them. Pay them for it, they may be better positioned to find positive uses. The economics should be such, though, that if all they do is dump it, they lose money. They should make money by maximizing usage and minimizing waste. I don't want to trade pollution here for pollution there, kids are the same to me, their kids or our kids. I sell Persian carpets on Sundays. Woven by kids in Iran, these are hand-knotted tribal rugs, not factory rugs. Out in the boonies, this is a way for a family to make some extra income, the kids have a loom and they spend some time knotting rugs. Is this a good thing? Probably. Can it be abused? Sure. Anything can be abused. The biggest problem, right now, is that the market is shot. These are truly beautiful creations, mostly Gabbehs, and they are selling
Re: [Vo]:Just for fun...
I've been working on this, educating people about science, in particular space travel, and rekindling that national interest in going to the moon. A few friends of mine and I are working on creating a non profit for that purpose. Sigh, the problem it seems with non profits is no one will contribute until you are a registered non profit, but you can't really get the paperwork and filing done to BECOME a non profit until some people contribute... Oh the things I would do if I were wealthy. Alexander On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 6:39 PM, Kyle Mcallister kyle_mcallis...@yahoo.com wrote: --- On Wed, 5/19/10, OrionWorks - Steven Vincent Johnson orionwo...@charter.net wrote: All good points, Kyle. The only individual I can think of that is trying to reverse this trend is Dean Kamen, inventor of Segway. Segway is also not practical but it's still an impressive product that has found a niche market. And who knows... Kamen's got a hell of a lot more money than I do... United Neko is after all, a multi-dollar corporation. So far, our best funding source has been the Sofa Cushion Federal Credit Union (member FDIC, an equal housing lender). But more seriously. I went around town telling people about this thing, and some other stuff I've done/seen. I've seen the polls out there that say American laypersons are scientifically inept, or don't care about anything to do with science, etc. I don't know /who/ is being polled, but they were not like that in Biloxi, Mississippi, and they aren't in Wheatfield, New York. They eat the stuff up when told about it. A black kid at work today was milling about the shop as I worked on his car. He struck up a conversation with me. Most people would expect, from his race and style of dress, that he'd be more interested in rap than anything else. Wrong. I told him about the flame radio. He was there for a long time past what was required to work on his vehicle, simply because he wanted to know /how something so simple can pick up radio waves./ We discussed all sorts of things, including the cancellation of the plans to return to the Moon. Turns out he wanted to see men walk there again. The discussion he and I had made my day. There are people, young people included, out there who are willing to grab on to this stuff. But how are we to get them motivated? --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Just for fun...
On 05/19/2010 09:58 PM, Kyle Mcallister wrote: --- On Wed, 5/19/10, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.com wrote: Well, I can understand, but I don't really miss that. Heathkits were cheap, main point for me at the time, I built quite a few, but assembly costs are now so low that a Heathkit to do what I can easily buy fully assembled and tested, etc., would be much more expensive. Yes, assembled is cheaper now. Sometimes, late at night, I wonder if that's really better. Where's it made? In the USA? Or by someone slaving in a third world nation, with no chance of anything better? Doesn't affect the assembled is cheaper balance. With pick'n'place machines doing the board stuffing, and automated wave soldering, and almost everything designed to use a single PC board, assembly costs are a small fraction of the price. Look at an old Heathkit -- there was a *lot* of hand labor in those things. There's labor in maintaining the pick'n'place machines, there's labor in managing the assembly line and loading the bins, but that's not the kind of labor you can eliminate by shipping it as a kit. And, of course, _packaging_ the kit to be shipped had to be done by hand. Compare that with a modern unit, packed up with two hunks of styrofoam -- shipping room labor is still labor, and there's a lot less of it in a finished product than a kit. Here's one example of hand-labor-intensive design that comes to mind that you'd never see nowadays (from Dynaco rather than Heath): The old Stereo 120 had two fat output caps, and the wires from the caps to the terminals had to wound (by hand) around the caps, quite a few turns. That was, of course, to kill the oscillation which the design was otherwise subject to. Can you imagine a modern design that required hand-winding a coil as one of the last production steps? (And that amp also required significant hand labor replacing its output transistors, which tended to blow if so much as sneezed on ... but that's a separate issue.) My dad told me stories of taking the tubes from his old TV down to the drug store and testing them. He'd replace the bad one, and back to The Honeymooners it was. Your DAD told you STORIES of that? Geeze, you young whippersnapper, you! And what's so all-fired old about the Honeymooners? I used to watch Jackie Gleason regularly (with my parents), back in the day. And did your dad also tell you about the diagnostic brochures you could get at the drugstore, that showed different symptoms (zigzag picture, fast vertical flip, slow roll, black screen, no sound, etc) and told you which sorts of tubes were likely at fault for each one? My dad took me down to the local drugstore and showed me how it all worked, and showed me how to ground the picture tube with a screwdriver before you started working so you wouldn't get blown across the room if you touched it, and I put all that to good use when I got my first TV (second hand -- no, third hand, I think, it had started life as a modern set owned by a rich uncle quite some years before, and passed through other family members before it got to me) and it had, shall we say, issues. I have to say it seems like fun looking back, but on the whole tubes were a pain in the neck. I can't imagine using a *computer* built with tubes, for instance. (Never turn it off or the filaments may die, and shotgun all the tubes every so-many-hours of run time... and let's not even talk about the heat it would generate...) It's like slide rules -- I love them, I've collected a bunch of them, but back when I was using them seriously, I was *very* glad to finally get a (four-function) calculator. Extracting a root to 4 or 5 places on the calculator was so easy -- and it was impossible on the slide rule, which gave you 2 places, or maybe 3 if you were careful... Now, you just go to Wal Mart and buy a new TV. In some ways, this is good... an electronics cannibal such as myself finds garbage day to be a great boon to my assets of stuff. On the other hand, I think we're instilling a sense of nonappreciation for what has been made. Screw it, it's cheap, I don't care if I break it, I'll buy another one. Put another way, nothing is made with sockets any more. It's all hard-soldered. Assembly costs! If there's a socket, somebody must put something in it, and I don't know how good robots are at getting all those niggling little pins into the right holes. If it's hard soldered, OTOH, a robot can just drop it into the slightly oversized holes, then run it through the wave, and voila, done, no human fingers required. And if it's surface mount, it's not clear a human even *can* solder it in place, without a huge amount of effort. Easy for the robots, though. There are no VCR repair shops any more. Nothing is repaired, just discarded and replaced. What is the environmental impact of this? I'm selling the material, $27.80 per 9x12 cm. sheet. Be the first on your block Interesting stuff.
Re: [Vo]:Just for fun...
Stephen A. Lawrence wrote: And if it's surface mount, it's not clear a human even *can* solder it in place, without a huge amount of effort. Easy for the robots, though. Yup. Like Lasik eye surgery, only a robot can do it. When computers robots were first invented they were seen as one-for-one replacements for people, but it soon became apparent that they can do things people could never do. I predict we will see a dramatic increase in things that only computers can do, in the near future. It is commonly noted in manufacturing today, and obviously in communications -- with the Internet. It is starting to have a large impact on things like surgery, and agriculture, where they use robot and GPS guides with tractors to allocate fertilizer more carefully. The Roomba robot carpet sweepers are borderline practical today, but better ones will follow. I expect there will be robot assistance in cooking. The Japanese are pushing ahead with robot aided driving, as a way of reducing automobile accidents. Robots and computers will eventually be ubiquitous and this will eliminate the need for human labor just about everywhere in the economy. There will be no point to off-shoring manufacturing when production lines are just about fully automated anyway, except for setup and troubleshooting. I am sure that computers will eventually do many thinking jobs that we assume call for human intelligence and creativity, such as composing music. See: http://www.slate.com/id/2254232 I'll Be Bach A computer program is writing great, original works of classical music. Will human composers soon be obsolete? . . . Answer: Yes, they will. Humans everywhere will be obsolete. Work will be obsolete. We are going to re-think how we live, and how economics work, because right now, both capitalism and communism are predicated on the idea that most people must work and exchange their labor for wealth. When human labor is worth nothing, those systems will collapse. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:Just for fun...
On 05/21/2010 01:34 PM, Stephen A. Lawrence wrote: On 05/19/2010 09:58 PM, Kyle Mcallister wrote: Put another way, nothing is made with sockets any more. It's all hard-soldered. Assembly costs! If there's a socket, somebody must put something in it And reliability! Sockets lead directly to folded-up legs that didn't quite make it into the socket, whether it's humans or robots pushing the chips into the sockets. Usually that leads to crib death, but sometimes the bent leg will make unreliable contact, and the unit will seem to work OK until it's shipped. Hard soldering, particularly with surface mount components, simply doesn't suffer from that (very common) failure mode.
Re: [Vo]:Just for fun...
On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 3:06 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: The Roomba robot carpet sweepers are borderline practical today, but better ones will follow. Oh, I think this furry feline might disagree: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf9wHkkNGUU T
RE: [Vo]:Just for fun...
From Kyle, With some spare time over the weekend, and little to do (a rarity), I decided to make a crystal-less crystal radio. Inspired by Nyle Steiner's work (google him, he is a god among amateur scientists), I conducted a couple hour's worth of experimenting with using flames as a detection method for RF. No kidding, it works! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMQEiRWoiJw Is it practical? No. Was it fun? Oh yes. Unanswered questions: why are American kids not doing this sort of thing? Why are they relying on their iPhones to do everything? There's an app for that... guh... --Kyle, longing for the days of Heathkit and the OLD Radio Shack... All good points, Kyle. The only individual I can think of that is trying to reverse this trend is Dean Kamen, inventor of Segway. Segway is also not practical but it's still an impressive product that has found a niche market. And who knows... Regards, Steven Vincent Johnson www.OrionWorks.com www.zazzle.com/orionworks
Re: [Vo]:Just for fun...
At 11:33 PM 5/18/2010, Kyle Mcallister wrote: With some spare time over the weekend, and little to do (a rarity), I decided to make a crystal-less crystal radio. Inspired by Nyle Steiner's work (google him, he is a god among amateur scientists), I conducted a couple hour's worth of experimenting with using flames as a detection method for RF. No kidding, it works! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMQEiRWoiJw Is it practical? No. Was it fun? Oh yes. Better page: http://www.sparkbangbuzz.com/flame-amp/flameamp.htm Unanswered questions: why are American kids not doing this sort of thing? I'm sure some are. I made a crystal radio that was powered from loose RF floating around, I must have been about 12 or so. I was more interested in stuff that went bang. I don't recall how I happened upon a flash explosive that was aluminum powder, sulfur, and potassium permanganate as the oxidizer. Cool stuff. Anyway, I'm an American kid, still, I'm just older Why are they relying on their iPhones to do everything? There's an app for that... guh... Now, I'd probably be writing those apps if I didn't have other even more interesting stuff to do. I was totally intrigued when I fell into a job repairing a stored program controller for a phototypesetting machine. This thing had a spinning drum with a film with the characters on it around the rim, and a flash tube inside. The controller accepted data from a punched paper tape and would then flash the tube at just the right time to expose photographic paper to the light in the shape of the character. Then it would step the position of a mirror, as I recall, according to the standard width of that character. Anyway, the idea that this SPC was spending most of its time waiting for this drum spinning quite rapidly to come around to position was intriguing. It could think much faster than the drum could turn. Magnetic core memory. Got me interested in computers, so I built an Altair 8800 when it was announced in Popular Electronics in the 1970s. The SPC used flat pack versions of standard logic. Nothing complicated. I assume that flat packs were used because at the time it was being designed, probably 1960s or around 1970, the military versions of ICs were more available but I'm not sure. I think the photosetter cost about $40,000. The printer I was working for still had linotypes, cool machines all on their own. --Kyle, longing for the days of Heathkit and the OLD Radio Shack... Well, I can understand, but I don't really miss that. Heathkits were cheap, main point for me at the time, I built quite a few, but assembly costs are now so low that a Heathkit to do what I can easily buy fully assembled and tested, etc., would be much more expensive. I just bought a Rigol 50 Mhz dual channel digital storage oscilloscope for under $400, color display, compact, a beautiful piece of equipment that I'd have given my eye teeth for twenty years ago when I was working in electronics actively, instead of just as a printed circuit designer. I'll be using it to look for shock waves from a palladium deuteride cathode, one piezoelectric sensor will be on the heavy water cell, one on the light water cell. Tell me, is that fun or what? I just tested LR-115 solid state nuclear track detector material with an AM-241 source ripped from a smoke detector. Too bad the smoke detector had to die, but it was for a good cause and the detector only cost $6.49. I used a Celestron LCD digital microscope to examine the etched detector, and I describe what I found in a post to http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/coldfusionproject/?yguid=40611328 LR-115 appears to be a much more easily used SSNTD material than CR-39. The alpha tracks from the source, striking the detector surface, which is a thin, 6 micron, layer of cellulose nitrate on a 100 micron polyester film, after etching, and if the angle of incidence isn't normal to the surface, show a cone of decreasing radius of disruption, very easy to see. I will be running more tests to determine optimal etching time; this test used the longest time recommended, 40 minutes, in 2.5 N NaOH at 60 degrees C. After thoroughly imaging the test strip, I intend to etch it some more to see what happens. Looking at the film, it seems that there are many more tracks that didn't cause a pit all the way through the sensitive layer (which is red). I'm selling the material, $27.80 per 9x12 cm. sheet. Be the first on your block
RE: [Vo]:Just for fun...
In the (non-ecclesiastical) category of 'nothing new under the sun' Here is an article that many vortician 'flamers' will surely like. I have a vague memory of trying something similar, many years ago without success. http://www.swtpc.com/mholley/PopularElectronics/May1968/Flame_Amplification. htm Best I can tell, a reasonable expectation for this type of a small 'etna' flame (50-100 watt equivalent) without an addition [conductivity enhancer, which can be hidden] would be at least one megohm of resistance and probably more. That is rather limiting, for use an antenna, one would think. Jones
Re: [Vo]:Just for fun...
Jones sez: In the (non-ecclesiastical) category of 'nothing new under the sun' Here is an article that many vortician 'flamers' will surely like. I have a vague memory of trying something similar, many years ago without success. http://www.swtpc.com/mholley/PopularElectronics/May1968/Flame_Amplification. htm Best I can tell, a reasonable expectation for this type of a small 'etna' flame (50-100 watt equivalent) without an addition [conductivity enhancer, which can be hidden] would be at least one megohm of resistance and probably more. That is rather limiting, for use an antenna, one would think. Jones That article was a blast (no pun intended) from the past. I actually saw a demonstration of a flame speaker performance at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Engineering Department. It was around 1968 - 69 (as per the PE article) and I was in high school. Every two years the Engineering department opened up their labs to the public for exhibitions. All sorts of nifty magic stuff was demoed. I especially liked the primitive-by-today's-standards pong-like driver simulation console where you tried to keep a car on the road. Depending on how fast the virtual car was going, combined with how much traction they fed into the tires, would determine how well you could keep the car on the road. The contraption consisted of a box with a steering wheel and a bw TV screen which displayed an upside down V - a road disappearing into the infinite horizon. It was supposed to test prolonged fatigue drunk driving reactions. Of course everyone wanted to test the simulation with tire tread set to maximum traction (no slippage) and speeds exceeding 120 MPH. We all crashed and burned. Regards Steven Vincent Johnson www.OrionWorks.com www.zazzle.com/orionworks
RE: [Vo]:Just for fun...
--- On Wed, 5/19/10, OrionWorks - Steven Vincent Johnson orionwo...@charter.net wrote: All good points, Kyle. The only individual I can think of that is trying to reverse this trend is Dean Kamen, inventor of Segway. Segway is also not practical but it's still an impressive product that has found a niche market. And who knows... Kamen's got a hell of a lot more money than I do... United Neko is after all, a multi-dollar corporation. So far, our best funding source has been the Sofa Cushion Federal Credit Union (member FDIC, an equal housing lender). But more seriously. I went around town telling people about this thing, and some other stuff I've done/seen. I've seen the polls out there that say American laypersons are scientifically inept, or don't care about anything to do with science, etc. I don't know /who/ is being polled, but they were not like that in Biloxi, Mississippi, and they aren't in Wheatfield, New York. They eat the stuff up when told about it. A black kid at work today was milling about the shop as I worked on his car. He struck up a conversation with me. Most people would expect, from his race and style of dress, that he'd be more interested in rap than anything else. Wrong. I told him about the flame radio. He was there for a long time past what was required to work on his vehicle, simply because he wanted to know /how something so simple can pick up radio waves./ We discussed all sorts of things, including the cancellation of the plans to return to the Moon. Turns out he wanted to see men walk there again. The discussion he and I had made my day. There are people, young people included, out there who are willing to grab on to this stuff. But how are we to get them motivated? --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Just for fun...
--- On Wed, 5/19/10, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.com wrote: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMQEiRWoiJw Is it practical? No. Was it fun? Oh yes. Better page: http://www.sparkbangbuzz.com/flame-amp/flameamp.htm I know Nyle's pages are better than mine, that's why I linked to him from my own page. And he was the inspiration for what I did. ...I tried? It seemed interesting at the time, I guess. I'm sure some are. I made a crystal radio that was powered from loose RF floating around, I must have been about 12 or so. I was more interested in stuff that went bang. I don't recall how I happened upon a flash explosive that was aluminum powder, sulfur, and potassium permanganate as the oxidizer. Cool stuff. Back home, when I was a kid, I was into model rockets. But it seemed boring making something from a kit. So I set about making my own rockets and engines. For fuel, I had a few different things. The most common was common sugar and potassium nitrate, melted together in a 40/60 ratio, then cast into PVC pipe lengths, which were then capped and provided with a nozzle cast from Durham's water putty. A teenager at that time, I had this ragtag collection of assorted hangers-on from, of all places, the local Baptist church. These guys, and sometimes girls if we were lucky, would come over and help manufacture rocket engines. We had this test stand, if you can justify calling it that, which was a highly technological device consisting of a piece of 3 steel pipe set vertically into concrete in the middle of the yard. We'd drop an engine in, lit, and run for cover. Sometimes they worked. Sometimes.. I guess one of the worst incidents was an experimental engine composed of potassium nitrate, magnesium dust (!) and a binder of polyurethane. The geyser of fire and oily, acrid smoke that issued from that test stand was ungodly. If I remember right, it was me and Jerry who were there when it happened. When you see fire flow like a liquid... time to make an exit, stage right. Anyway, I'm an American kid, still, I'm just older Ditto. Well, I can understand, but I don't really miss that. Heathkits were cheap, main point for me at the time, I built quite a few, but assembly costs are now so low that a Heathkit to do what I can easily buy fully assembled and tested, etc., would be much more expensive. Yes, assembled is cheaper now. Sometimes, late at night, I wonder if that's really better. Where's it made? In the USA? Or by someone slaving in a third world nation, with no chance of anything better? My dad told me stories of taking the tubes from his old TV down to the drug store and testing them. He'd replace the bad one, and back to The Honeymooners it was. Now, you just go to Wal Mart and buy a new TV. In some ways, this is good... an electronics cannibal such as myself finds garbage day to be a great boon to my assets of stuff. On the other hand, I think we're instilling a sense of nonappreciation for what has been made. Screw it, it's cheap, I don't care if I break it, I'll buy another one. Put another way, nothing is made with sockets any more. It's all hard-soldered. There are no VCR repair shops any more. Nothing is repaired, just discarded and replaced. What is the environmental impact of this? I'm selling the material, $27.80 per 9x12 cm. sheet. Be the first on your block Interesting stuff. If I had the money and time, I wouldn't mind doing a few CF experiments here. --Kyle
RE: [Vo]:Just for fun...
--- On Wed, 5/19/10, Jones Beene jone...@pacbell.net wrote: From: Jones Beene jone...@pacbell.net Subject: RE: [Vo]:Just for fun... To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Date: Wednesday, May 19, 2010, 10:22 AM In the (non-ecclesiastical) category of 'nothing new under the sun' Here is an article that many vortician 'flamers' will surely like. I have a vague memory of trying something similar, many years ago without success. I read that article the same day I did the flame-diode experiment! Fascinating stuff, using plasma to do all sorts of interesting things. Now, one wonders Use my flame diode, with a Nyle Steiner flame-triode amplifier... then send that to a flame speaker... Power the whole thing with a mammoth set of thermocouples immersed in a bonfire? --Kyle
[Vo]:Just for fun...
V, With some spare time over the weekend, and little to do (a rarity), I decided to make a crystal-less crystal radio. Inspired by Nyle Steiner's work (google him, he is a god among amateur scientists), I conducted a couple hour's worth of experimenting with using flames as a detection method for RF. No kidding, it works! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMQEiRWoiJw Is it practical? No. Was it fun? Oh yes. Unanswered questions: why are American kids not doing this sort of thing? Why are they relying on their iPhones to do everything? There's an app for that... guh... --Kyle, longing for the days of Heathkit and the OLD Radio Shack...
[Vo]:Just for fun, something lighter.........
V, If you can watch this with a straight face, well, I'm rather impressed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0bKq3x74UE I don't know if Koji Kondo would be amused or horrified. But, if that made your ears bleed, then THIS is freaking cool, and straight from the man himself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcKurvm_0oEfeature=related --Kyle
Re: [Vo]:Just for fun, something lighter.........
truly amazing. seems he can play just about anything Harry - Original Message From: Kyle Mcallister kyle_mcallis...@yahoo.com To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Sent: Fri, December 4, 2009 11:45:24 PM Subject: [Vo]:Just for fun, something lighter. V, If you can watch this with a straight face, well, I'm rather impressed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0bKq3x74UE I don't know if KojiKondo would be amused or horrified. But, if that made your ears bleed, then THIS is freaking cool, and straight from the man himself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcKurvm_0oEfeature=related --Kyle __ Make your browsing faster, safer, and easier with the new Internet Explorer® 8. Optimized for Yahoo! Get it Now for Free! at http://downloads.yahoo.com/ca/internetexplorer/
