Author Topic: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?  (Read 35382 times)

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Offline Bud

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #150 on: February 11, 2019, 03:27:13 pm »
There is no denying that the climate is warming and there is no denying that the energy sources we use can contribute end of!
There is no denying by Simon that....<rest of quote goes here>
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Offline james_s

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #151 on: February 16, 2019, 12:56:56 am »
The data showing human impact on climate change is readily available and about as plain as it gets, there is no controversy to speak of in science, the people denying it are operating off of an emotional belief that is not based on reason or rational thought. I suspect it's exactly the same mental mechanism that leads many otherwise intelligent people to believe in wacky conspiracy theories. Why anyone would want to make this stuff up I have no idea. I mean I love fossil fuels, I love big powerful cars, I love big noisy old airplanes, I would love to not have to concern myself at all with energy efficiency or pollution but wishing it didn't have a negative impact doesn't mitigate the impact.

That said, most of the data I've seen also suggests that the situation is essentially hopeless with no reasonable chance of significant mitigation, we may well have passed the point of no return already. It's also possible that the changes forced by simply exhausting the supplies of readily available fossil fuels will be as effective in the grand scheme of things as trying to make large changes now.
 
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Offline Simon

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #152 on: February 16, 2019, 08:12:26 am »
Yea, I had a guy from a solar inverter manufacturer come and help me set up my inverter. It went from isn't the quality of education shit these days to "rothchild family" conspiracies. Refugees are all part of the plan as they are not very clever so they are brought to the UK to dilute our intelligence. Clobal warming is man made by 3 5MW RF generators that heat the atmosphere like microwaves because all of the air has tiny aluminium particles in it and on and on. He reconed he had made for £40 what his employer spent millions on developing hydrogen electrolyisis kit and he thinks he can run whatever hydrogen device he wants off this thing he made that only uses 300mA and was basically claiming over unity although he did not go so far as to clearly state it. The guy was completely off his rocker. No wonder his employer does not use any of his designs
 

Offline rhb

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Offline Simon

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #154 on: February 16, 2019, 07:08:51 pm »
Yea, yea, conspiracy theory bullshit.
 

Offline tooki

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #155 on: February 17, 2019, 12:11:57 pm »

Would you consider the consensus of a bunch of auto mechanics about a medical problem valid?

Of course not.  Likewise, geoscientists' opinion on climatology is also not very relevant.  It isn't their field.

Excuse me, but geology deals with the earth in its totality.  A major portion of that is 4.2 billion years of history.    Climatology is just a small fraction of that.  And there is also the issue that all of the climatology data constitute less than 1 ppm of the earth's climate history.  "Climatology" is just a scam invented by a bunch of failed meteorologists who got their PhD because their supervisor wanted to get rid of them.  I don't think the field even existed when I got my geology MS in 1982.

I have an acquaintance of many years who got his PhD in meteorology.  He went to work for the British weather service.  He found a major bug in their weather prediction software.  He fixed it and went home thinking that the weather forecasts would dramatically improve.  It had *no* effect.

The last time we chatted about the subject (there are many more interesting topics, so I'm not sure how this drudgery came up) he made the observation that the thermal dynamics of the oceans are largely unknown.  The thermal capacity of water is *much* larger than air. And until recently, the climate models assumed a constant ocean temperature.

Recently there was a paper by some oceanographers  who had detected the cooling effect of the little ice age in the ocean bottom currents, some of which have circulation times of a million years.  I think we can reasonably expect that other workers will follow their methods and develop better models of the earth's temperature over time.

There are over 30 major changes in sea level on the order of 1000 ft.  Where do you think all that water went?  It's pretty simple.  It turned into immense glaciers which then melted.  Except for the last one or two humans did not even exist.  Much less alter the CO2 and CH4 content of the atmosphere,

So would you state the voltage of a reference from a single microsecond of data?    If so, I certainly don't want you doing my metrology or anything else.

I don't comment on  subjects of which I am ignorant.  Perhaps you should consider doing the same.
Mmmmmm, yeah, um, your entire post above pretty much proves otherwise.
 

Offline EEVblog

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #156 on: February 17, 2019, 01:58:22 pm »
And even debunkers need to be careful to stay on the side of truth. As mad as thunderfoot can come across as (heavy dose of aspergers coupled with a high IQ I suspect) I respected his reasonings until the other day when I saw a video he did about how shit tesla batteries are when in fact it ws a comparison between battery technology and petrol/diesel energy density. Sorry thunderfoot, you have an axe to grind, so the next time i see one of his videos "debunking" pseudo science do i beleive him or do i suspect he simply has an axe to grind? fortunately i can tell the difference but why should i waste my time listening to a guy who it may turn out simply has an axe to grind.

I didn't even need to watch that video to know it really had nothing to do with Tesla (Panasonic) batteries as such, and knew that he was just using the Tesla angle to troll the people who hate his Tesla videos. I think he enjoys baiting them immensely  ;D
 

Offline Simon

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #157 on: February 17, 2019, 05:04:57 pm »
And even debunkers need to be careful to stay on the side of truth. As mad as thunderfoot can come across as (heavy dose of aspergers coupled with a high IQ I suspect) I respected his reasonings until the other day when I saw a video he did about how shit tesla batteries are when in fact it ws a comparison between battery technology and petrol/diesel energy density. Sorry thunderfoot, you have an axe to grind, so the next time i see one of his videos "debunking" pseudo science do i beleive him or do i suspect he simply has an axe to grind? fortunately i can tell the difference but why should i waste my time listening to a guy who it may turn out simply has an axe to grind.

I didn't even need to watch that video to know it really had nothing to do with Tesla (Panasonic) batteries as such, and knew that he was just using the Tesla angle to troll the people who hate his Tesla videos. I think he enjoys baiting them immensely  ;D

All well and good if you have that tight a following that they know what you are up to but I think he needs to pick which he is doing, trolling and provoking or scientific debunking. I have also noticed some rather generous rounding up of numbers in his debeunkings, a bit more generous than I'd like. If you are making an honest point make it honestly, if you are as dishonest as the dishonest person who can tell the difference. I drifted off his videos because they became wild rants about everything else with repetition of significant amounts of old material. He seems to have tried to clean things up a bit but still rants off topic.
 

Offline rhb

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #158 on: February 17, 2019, 05:09:48 pm »
Yea, yea, conspiracy theory bullshit.

The author is *rather* hyperbolic, but the science is sound.  The 15,000 year solar cycle is the main driver of climate with the occasional caldera collapse, asteroid impact, etc tossed in for novelty. 

The earth's wobble is so precisely  understood and measured that in the late 80's another grad student at UT Austin was modelling the effects of tropical monsoons on the wobble with an Apricot PC.

The Dane's hypothesis about the galactic radiation and rotation is quite intriguing.  I was a member of the Royal Astronomical Society when it first appeared in print.  It neatly accounts for a lot of geological history for which no one has found a satisfactory explanation.

As this started on the subject of critical thinking, I'd like to note that there are people, including former attorney general Loretta Lynch, who want to make it a crime to disagree on a matter of science.  A stunning parallel to the persecution of Galileo and the "thought crimes" of "1984".
« Last Edit: February 17, 2019, 05:18:30 pm by rhb »
 
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Offline Simon

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #159 on: February 17, 2019, 05:19:37 pm »
We know for a fact that:

1) fossil fuel is bad, it produces poisonous gasses and those gasses are green house gasses. You may debate how much they contribute to global warming.
2) fossil fuel is not limitless and we need a new solution anyway.

And yet the dinosaurs of our society will argue forever that we should just carry on.
 

Online coppice

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #160 on: February 17, 2019, 05:46:35 pm »
We know for a fact that:

1) fossil fuel is bad, it produces poisonous gasses and those gasses are green house gasses. You may debate how much they contribute to global warming.
2) fossil fuel is not limitless and we need a new solution anyway.

And yet the dinosaurs of our society will argue forever that we should just carry on.
I think there are two drivers for that. The most obvious one is people with vested interests in the way things are done now. The other is people kinda realise in a vague way what Without The Hot Air spells out in detail, and its just too awful to face. You can see this in the abuse thrown at David MacKay in the comments below YouTiube videos of his talks. Few of the people making those comments can really be dumb enough to believe what they are saying. They just don't like reality.
 
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Offline Simon

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #161 on: February 17, 2019, 05:53:22 pm »
We know for a fact that:

1) fossil fuel is bad, it produces poisonous gasses and those gasses are green house gasses. You may debate how much they contribute to global warming.
2) fossil fuel is not limitless and we need a new solution anyway.

And yet the dinosaurs of our society will argue forever that we should just carry on.
I think there are two drivers for that. The most obvious one is people with vested interests in the way things are done now. The other is people kinda realise in a vague way what Without The Hot Air spells out in detail, and its just too awful to face. You can see this in the abuse thrown at David MacKay in the comments below YouTiube videos of his talks. Few of the people making those comments can really be dumb enough to believe what they are saying. They just don't like reality.

Ah well, I'm sure natural selection will take care of them and all of us. This planet will not die, we will. Even if the climate is naturally warming why do anything to help that? We are where we are today because we evolved and learnt to control our environment and we created technologies that made life easier, too easy it would seem as now we are allowing the unintelligents to breed, they are not being selected out because our advances in technology allow them to survive in our society structure. Perhaps they should remember who they owe their lives to or rather the professions that created the system that sustains such an inferior human and have some respect for it.
 

Offline rhb

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #162 on: February 17, 2019, 09:18:37 pm »
Except for carbon monoxide and hydrogen sulfide, none of the gases produced by the burning of fossil fuels is toxic.  The hydrogen sulfide is only a consequence of the presence of an impurity which is iron sulfide in the case of coal and readily removed by using appropriate technology.  The resulting byproduct is calcium sulfate,  otherwise known as plaster of paris.  The walls of most houses in the Western world are made of it.

Carbon monoxide is just a combustion process failure. Neither carbon dioxide nor water is intrinsically toxic.  Coal is obviously more complex, but petroleum products are just various combinations of carbon and hydrogen.  Without fossil fuels we would still be living in a neolithic culture and this conversation would not even be taking place.

All of the predictions made about the effects of "greenhouse" gases are dependent upon complex computer models and data which are not available for public inspection.  Mann et al insist they must remain confidential.  The general acceptance of Mann's assertions under such circumstances is a glaring example of the absence of critical thinking.  If the evidence is so overwhelming, why can't those who question his results see his data and software?  What became of the open source software mantra that "many eyes improve code quality"?

I spent my career writing and maintaining numerical codes which were much less complex.  A couple of observations:

They are difficult to get right no matter how careful you are.

Any method you choose has error artifacts that depend upon the method and the parameters.  Without knowledge of the method and the parameters there is no way to evaluate the results accurately

Furthermore Mann et al apply "corrections" to the raw data.  They will not release the raw data.  And the 'corrections" have been changed repeatedly in the IPCC reports.

I spent my career in the oil industry because  my chosen field, mining geology, had no employment opportunities at the time I graduated.  My initial reaction to "climate change" was it was preposterously silly, but if it led to a reduction in the insane rate at which we were consuming oil it suited me just fine.  Most environmental regulations drive me up the wall because they are written so badly they are simply silly and complying with them a waste of money. However, that probably only applies to someone like me who understands the system from one end to the other and understands the consequences of decisions.  I agonize over discarding a 1/4" of 10 AWG copper wire because I look at that wire and I see the hole in the ground and all the resources consumed to produce it.  Where does the cost of recycling make conservation prohibitive?

Unfortunately, instead of outlawing 6-8 mpg SUVs they wrote laws which drove up the cost of automobiles without in any way curbing the consumption of fuel.  I would *love* to see a variable tax that imposed a constant $5/gal gasoline and diesel retail price.  That money could be used to build a high speed rail system down the median of the interstate highway system.  You pulled up at an exit, a small train stopped, you drove your car onto the train and the took off at 120 mph.  At your destination exit, it stopped briefly to let you off. Travel on the train was at no cost.

I got involved in this only because of the subject of critical thinking and it's general absence.  In an environment where discussion is restricted because of emotional sensitivities, however silly, there is no possibility of anyone learning any sort of critical thinking skills. A woman was reportedly recently  jailed in the UK for "misgendering" someone.  WTF?   Any restriction of discussion other than a simple requirement of civility is an absolute guarantee of the collapse of that society because that restriction carries with it the loss of the ability to examine any subject effectively. At which point science is impossible.  I am a scientist.  If you will not let other people examine your data and methods I must ask the obvious question.  Why?

Science requires transparency and Mann et al are prime exemplars of the opposite.
 
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Offline Simon

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #163 on: February 17, 2019, 09:25:02 pm »
Except for carbon monoxide and hydrogen sulfide, none of the gases produced by the burning of fossil fuels is toxic.  The hydrogen sulfide is only a consequence of the presence of an impurity which is iron sulfide in the case of coal and readily removed by using appropriate technology.  The resulting byproduct is calcium sulfate,  otherwise known as plaster of paris.  The walls of most houses in the Western world are made of it.

Carbon monoxide is just a combustion process failure. Neither carbon dioxide nor water is intrinsically toxic.  Coal is obviously more complex, but petroleum products are just various combinations of carbon and hydrogen.  Without fossil fuels we would still be living in a neolithic culture and this conversation would not even be taking place.

:palm:

The gases resulting from burning stuff are not toxic except for the gases resulting from burning stuff.
We have always done it this way so why change?
We once rode horses instead of drive cars, WTF did we start driving cars for? Technology evolves.
 

Offline rhb

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #164 on: February 17, 2019, 11:45:35 pm »
???????

I can't divine the point of your comment, Simon, but I'll try to make my statement more detailed in the hope that helps.

Toxic gases from the combustion of  fossil fuels is a *process* failure.  It is not an intrinsic property of the fuel. They are only emitted in trace amounts in  modern equipment which is operating properly. 

Because oxygen is essential to life processes in animals, they die if deprived of it whether by entering a closed space lacking sufficient oxygen or by drowning. They do not die from toxic effects.  They die from the lack of oxygen.

Several states have begun using dry nitrogen to execute condemned criminals.  It does not produce the anxiety that high levels of CO2 produces.  So they just fall asleep and die from lack of oxygen.  Furthermore, because nitrogen is not toxic there is no risk to personnel from ventilating or entering  the chamber afterwards.

The collapse of linguistic and logical competence  is far more of a threat to civilization than a natural geological cycle with a 15,000 year period.

Modern technology has its origins in the calculus, but mathematical developments had relatively little effect on people's daily lives until abundant energy in the form of petroleum became available 160 years ago. Without  the availability of that energy to mechanize the production of food, it would not be possible to support modern technology at all.  Most of the population would be too busy farming.  Only a very small number of people would have time to engage in science and technology.

There was no technology above the neolithic level until agriculture made it possible for a single person to produce more food than they consumed themselves.  But technology was relatively static for several millenia after the development of agriculture.  It was an improvement in that it freed up a few people to develop technology.  But technology was limited severely by the labor demands of agriculture.
« Last Edit: February 18, 2019, 01:27:18 am by rhb »
 

Offline T3sl4co1l

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #165 on: February 18, 2019, 12:55:28 am »
Agreed, CO2 and H2O are not toxic -- you'll gladly sit in a chamber consisting of a pure atmosphere of both, right? ;)

The dose makes the poison; so it is with biology, so too the atmosphere.

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Offline rhb

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #166 on: February 18, 2019, 04:20:05 am »
Agreed, CO2 and H2O are not toxic -- you'll gladly sit in a chamber consisting of a pure atmosphere of both, right? ;)

So in your mind drowning, asphyxiation and poisoning are all synonymous? 

Quote

The dose makes the poison; so it is with biology, so too the atmosphere.

Tim

This is nonsensical.  I'd have expected a more intelligent statement from you.  Without CO2 & H20 plants die.  Without water people die.  Since we produce CO2 we are able to tolerate it to some degree, but our bodies are very sensitive to excessive levels.

The atmosphere has become highly toxic many times in the past in the vicinity of major volcanic events.  Not that it matters much in the case of a caldera collapse  as everything will already be dead from the white hot rock fragments raining down in the area affected by the release  of H2S.  At greater distances where the ash  has had time to cool will kill everything out to a range of 1000 miles or more.  The ash kills the plants by blocking the sunlight; the herbivores die for lack of food followed shortly after by the carnivores.

The problem is not just limited to the area of the ash fall.  So much superfine ash is injected into the stratosphere that large expanses of the planet are covered with snow year around.   But after a few years the ash eventually settles out and it warms up.  The eruption of Mt. Tambora in 1815 resulted in what is referred to as "The Year Without a Summer" in 1816.  Carl Sagan's nuclear winter was based on that. Mt. Tambora was big, but by no means the largest such event.

The releases of H2S accompanying  the great basalt floods such as the Deccan traps would have been much larger than releases related to a caldera collapse.  There is a lot of H2s associated with a million cubic kilometer volcanic eruption and it is quite toxic if you are downwind of it.

All of human history is the blink of an eye in geological terms.  And the death toll in mass extinction events is truly astonishing, almost everything big enough to die does.  Many years of effort have gone into trying to understand what happened.  The earth is a *very* violent place. Organisms either adapt to the change or they die.  The list of extinct organisms is *much* longer than the list of living organisms and vast numbers of organisms leave no fossil record other than some burrowing marks in the sediment.

The melting of the polar ice caps over the last 15,000 years raised sea level by about 600 ft.  That is an *average* sea level rise of 1/2" every year for 15,000 years.   We are now at about average historical sea level high stand.   Sea level has been around 100 ft higher at times.  So given that our reference is mean global high stand this rise  might continue at about 1/2" per year for a while longer. 

All of that water came from melting huge sheets of ice which had accumulated.  That melting was the result of thousands of years of global warming which made it possible for the the small number of humans to move to higher latitudes.  The Gulf stream brought a great deal of heat energy to Europe and making it especially hospitable.

There certainly is coastal flooding caused by humans.  But it's been caused by pumping oil and water out of the ground. Venice is particularly affected by ground water pumping.

While sea level has been over 1000 ft below current MSL, it's unclear how much of that is  the result of the addition of surface water from the release of H2O during volcanic eruptions and how much is the result of the continental plates moving around.

In all of recorded history there have only been a  few large geological events and  *no*  major events.  All of this was fairly well known long before "paleoclimate studies" got rebranded as "climatology".

All of this is well documented.  The available data is freely accessible and various details hotly debated in the geological community in open discussions in which anyone who has an informed opinion may participate.  It *is* science, so you *are* expected to know the facts and be able to justify your opinion with a logical argument which accounts for *all* the known facts.  But there is no secret data and no one is going around proposing that those who disagree be put in prison.

So I suggest a bit of critical thinking might be in order.  I have not been significantly involved in geology for 35 years, so this is just what I remember from school.  I got into reflection seismology and got entranced by all the digital signal processing involved.  Any good PhD level geologist, which I am not, my geology studies ended with my MS, can cite far more issues that Mann et al ignore or misrepresent.
 

Offline EEVblog

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #167 on: February 22, 2019, 04:58:45 am »
Let's please stop the climate change talk, this forum and this thread are not the places for it.
 
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Offline Simon

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #168 on: February 22, 2019, 07:29:07 am »
i have temporarily banned rhb as he started a "critical thinking" thread in general chat which was another way of saying lets disprove climate change. Hopefully he has got the message.
 
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Offline kd4ttc

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #169 on: December 15, 2020, 04:51:03 am »
Yes he was. Back then the 7400 series of ICs had come out and they seemed a bear to use. What Don did in his TTL cookbook was to distill out the essential design prindiples that were needed to successfully use TTL ICs. Back then getting datasheets was not easy. No internet back then. One didn't really know all the ICs that were available in the series. After Don described the design principles he then came up with a very consistent way to describe the pinouts of the chips in the series. It was a breakthrough book for engineering. Turned out TTL was pretty eash to use, which the engineers knew, as long as you had a good power supply, used enough decoupling capacitors, and paid attention to fan-out. Once the concepts were in place he then went on a survey of very useful digital techniques. After the TTL cookbook CMOS became available, and the CMOS cookbook came out, very similar to TTL cookbook and also chock full of practical design recommendations. The CMOS is also full of great circuit ideas.

Back then the folks at Birginia tech published a series of books called the Bugbooks. For bugs cuz the ICs looked like bugs and it was cute. The Bugbook I through The Bugbook VI. These came out after the TTL cookbook, but advanced the idea of outboards for prototype design. Bugbooks were college textbooks. The TTL cookbook was written for the engineer maybe moving into digital and giving advice gained from years of design wisdom. Thing is, after reading the TTL cookbook reading anything TI put out on their superb literature was completely accessible.

As to Postscript, turns out there are a number of very sophisticated things you can do with it. It is really a functional language with the power of LISP but none of the safety. Don had discovered that PostScript is a general programming language with some very advanced features. Don used postscript to create the graphics in his books/ It seems that the language was so effective at creating generalized graphics which could be programmatically driven that he wanted to share his discovery. I've been pleased to follow his advice. I have a form for my business that I've updated multiple times. What you can do is create a form expressed a program. So you can change the positioning of an element and automatically have all the fonts change size, the number of rules on a form are drawn precisely and don't go of the page. The parts of a form can be moved and the right rargin of all the rules end at the right place. I had a complex schecule I had to draw. Postscript let me write a program that drew the schedule graphically, allowing me to revise it by changeng a few parameters and all the  graphics go redrawn. I can't do this justice with these descriptions, but learing PostScript will let you draw arbitrary graphs with ease, but which can be changed in useulf ways with just easy parameter changes. If your learn it be sure to explore dictionaries, which let you easily send postsript functions with arguments like you would invoke functions with arguments in traditional computer languages.

Go get a copy of the TTL cookbook and the CMOS cookbook. After reading them then just grab a data sheet of one of the newer families of MSI logic and you will know exactly how to use the whole family. The books are very conceptual while being superbly practical. You will have the ability to glue together any high level IC (which of course is the whole point, amazing functinality is available nowadays) with addtional parts and Analog ICs to create any electronics you need.  Amazing. It's like 2-3 years of college engineering courses.
 

Offline kd4ttc

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #170 on: December 15, 2020, 04:57:40 am »
It's really hard to grasp for the younger folks, how much world changed in the last 20 years.

more like 10 years. When i started thinkering in high school here was NOTHING compared to what hobbyist can get today. 5 years if we want to remember the dark times before cheap-ass pcbs from china became mainstream
I'm amused by the fact that i studied power electronics in a book from the seventies and a couple years later i would have studied from a book from 2010s :)

Now we can run LTSpice on our PCs, design circuits on a computer, then send files out and get a circuit board in a few days, perhaps even populate the the parts. Sooooo much better than hand drawn circuits, making state diagrams of the digital signal sequencing, making trace diagrams, coating boards, exposing, etching away the copper, drilling, and finally building. Just amazing now. Or the rub on transfers to make circuits. Oh my, those were the days ... that we are so happy we have surpassed!
 

Offline Non-Abelian

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #171 on: December 16, 2020, 10:04:50 am »
And what's his obsession with PostScript?
Not sure what his obsession with postscript is, but postscript is a great language.
That's not right - It's not even wrong - W. Pauli
 

Offline Zero999

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #172 on: December 16, 2020, 01:38:26 pm »
I don't want to reignite the debate about anthropogenic climate change, but some myths have been posted, other than the usual ones I can't be bothered to debunk. I feel compelled to post this because these myths are widely believed to be fact.

This is nonsensical.  I'd have expected a more intelligent statement from you.  Without CO2 & H20 plants die.  Without water people die.  Since we produce CO2 we are able to tolerate it to some degree, but our bodies are very sensitive to excessive levels.
CO2 is toxic. Not hugely so, but it is true that if a human is placed in a sealed chamber, they would die from CO2 poisoning, before oxygen levels drop dangerously low. High serum CO2 levels cause the pH of the blood to fall to dangerously low levels.

Quote
The Gulf stream brought a great deal of heat energy to Europe and making it especially hospitable.
No it doesn't. The main reason why Europe has milder winters, for its latitude is because it's downwind of a large expanse of ocean.  The Atlantic absorbs heat during the summer, which is released in the winter as the wind blows over it. A similar pattern is seen in North America, with the Pacific Northwest having similar mild winter temperatures to Europe. On the eastern side of large landmasses, winters are much colder, as the wind has travelled over the freezing continent.

As long as the prevailing wind direction is westerly and Europe is to the east of the Atlantic, it will remain much milder, than Eastern Canada.

In cold winters, blocking highs cut-off the mild wind over the ocean, occasionally turning the wind into the east, giving Europe a taste of real winter. When this happens, other areas become abnormally mild. These weather patterns are unusual and normally don't last longer than a week. There's a grain of truth in some of the scare stories about Europe freezing, in that a changes to the global aptmospheric circulation pattern and weakening of the jetstreem, might make winter blocking highs more common, but it simply isn't true we'll be plunged into the freezer.
 

Offline Simon

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #173 on: December 16, 2020, 02:30:46 pm »
did you post that in the right thread?
 

Offline DrG

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #174 on: December 16, 2020, 02:48:51 pm »
I came across this thread late. I think that within the first 10 posts, the OP’s question/issue was answered/rebutted unequivocally. I just want to relate an anecdote and make a small point or two. I am talking about the original topic.

Back in the late 70s early 80s, I had absolutely no hardware experience and only a smattering of software experience. I had a TRS-80 Model 1 (which I still have). As purchased, there are no lower-case descenders on the video. Adding a single RAM chip could give you lower-case descenders.

Lancaster wrote an article about how you could do that (either Kilobaud or one of the first issues of 80-Micro, as I recall). The prospect of doing that scratched me where I itched. I got the RAM chip and some wire-wrap, but I could not understand where the chip was going to get power from. I was able to solder the chip as a piggy back as per instruction, but couldn’t figure out where to connect Vcc and GND. I had never been inside the machine before, it was a huge expenditure for me and, quite frankly, I was as insecure as a puppy dog.

I actually called him up on the phone. We spoke for maybe five minutes. Him basically saying, “take them from anywhere” and me saying “huh?”.  I figured it out and it worked and it was amazing.

From then on, I paid particular attention to whatever I found that he wrote. I bought a hardcopy of the TTL cookbook (which I still have). I came to admire him and I still do.

The “guru” label was probably a bit of an unfortunate marketing choice, but as I recall, it was not used until much later. Tinja quests and the like were stylistic and a testimony to his openness.

For me, from my perspective, he was quite influential. He took electronics out of the realm of a subset of engineers and into a realm that I could feed on – it was simple as that. Sure, I guess I could have taken engineering classes, but I was knee-deep in other things that I preferred and were, to me, more important and therefore, more demanding.

I put him alongside Forest Mims (the HS or Undergrad teacher that I longed for) and Steve Ciarcia (the time I spent reading and trying to understand his circuits, was always rewarding even though I didn’t always realize that). Not for content similarities or expertise per se, but for the impact of feeding me at the right time. The right time was when I was ready and able to eat what they were serving.

No claim here as far as data concluding importance, just anecdotal. You may certainly feel that I don’t count because I am just a hobbyist (or whatever). I don’t necessarily expect people to fully understand or appreciate his impact if they were not there because it is too difficult to communicate how little information was easily available.

I often wonder if that same excitement is still out there…those same “first time” adventures…and of course the answer is a definite yes and I search for them all the time.
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