Cold Heat from Canada, a documentary.

[Smokey]

"Cold Heat" just makes me think of these soldering irons.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColdHeat
Someone gave me one back in the day when they heard I "did electronics".  Worked about twice and died.    So also dodgy technology.

[IanB]

Chet, you are not paying attention. What Xena and I were discussing was the thermodynamic state variables of the female/male orgasm!

By explaining, you spoil the joke   

[paul cotter]

Yes Ian, I am guilty- apologies.

[Xena E]

Chet, you are not paying attention. What Xena and I were discussing was the thermodynamic state variables of the female/male orgasm!
"Hey, I need an education"
You most certainly do but I do not know if there is any chance of success- several people here have tried, me included, to no avail.

  Just proves you can bullshit a bullshitter (...or two).

[Chet]

Chet, you are not paying attention. What Xena and I were discussing was the thermodynamic state variables of the female/male orgasm!
"Hey, I need an education"
You most certainly do but I do not know if there is any chance of success- several people here have tried, me included, to no avail.

Well, under those circumstances, no response was required unless -- in the spirit of the thing -- I could counter with another joke of similar caliber or better. But, alas, I'm not prone to joke around about this stuff. And non-relevancies are a distraction.

So, yes, if you need to unwind by sharing a joke whose private meaning is circumscribed to whomever is privy to that sort of thing, then more power to ya. It goes right over me. Or through me.

I guess we don't swim in the same lake of humor. I don't even know what my lake is.

[Chet]

Ok, Chet, can you tell us in plain simple English what this Fogal guy has done that is of any use to man or beast. I did a search and I could not find anything useful or realistic. Any mention of Bearden or his psychoses is an automatic fail, I remind you. The common emitter mode with a bypassed emitter resistor is commonplace and has been for over 70 years.

It's not surprising that Fogal failed to vary what is commonly held to be known: a "common emitter mode with a bypassed emitter resistor".



But since he was probably telling us what we already knew to hide what he had in mind (whatever that was), we have to assume that his patent attorney properly advised Fogal on how to write a patent by sequestering the good stuff.

So, anything imaginable is fair game so long as it produces results which are not commonly held among the collective working knowledge of engineers.

In other words, your objection, although well-intended, is ill-founded. Otherwise, I'd have to ask for a refund from whomever that patent attorney was (whom Fogal hired to assist Fogal) if I were in Fogal's shoes.

[IanB]

Well, under those circumstances, no response was required unless -- in the spirit of the thing -- I could counter with another joke of similar caliber or better. But, alas, I'm not prone to joke around about this stuff. And non-relevancies are a distraction.

So, yes, if you need to unwind by sharing a joke whose private meaning is circumscribed to whomever is privy to that sort of thing, then more power to ya. It goes right over me. Or through me.

I guess we don't swim in the same lake of humor. I don't even know what my lake is.

At this point, we can say that Chet is indistinguishable from an AI bot. The words are there, but there is nobody at home.

[paul cotter]

Chet, on the subject of tuition, you said that you have problems with "Ohm's law". I can't remember such a law so I looked it up and here is my analysis:
if you cannot accept  P=VI=Vsq/R=IsqR , then you are in the wrong game and it is time to find another outlet for your time and energy. A house built on dodgy foundations is liable to collapse.

[IanB]

Chet, on the subject of tuition, you said that you have problems with "Ohm's law". I can't remember such a law so I looked it up and here is my analysis

I believe Chet said Watt's law, and yes, I also looked it up, because I also had never heard of it. We have someone getting upset about a thing that isn't really a thing.

[paul cotter]

Correction accepted, Ian, thank you. I'll put my error down to an age related mental aberration. Since you are commenting here, you must also be a connoisseur of nonsense like the rest of the gang. Chet has phenomenal abilities in the discipline of word salad, way beyond anything I could do even if well remunerated for my efforts. Only the late T E Bearden had abilities to concoct gibberish at a greater scale and scope. 

[Zero999]

Correction accepted, Ian, thank you. I'll put my error down to an age related mental aberration. Since you are commenting here, you must also be a connoisseur of nonsense like the rest of the gang. Chet has phenomenal abilities in the discipline of word salad, way beyond anything I could do even if well remunerated for my efforts. Only the late T E Bearden had abilities to concoct gibberish at a greater scale and scope.

I don't think age comes into it. This thread is enough to give anyone a mental aberration.

[paul cotter]

Point taken.

[Xena E]

he was probably telling us what we already knew to hide what he had in mind (whatever that was), we have to assume that his patent attorney properly advised Fogal on how to write a patent by sequestering the good stuff.

What nonsense! Regardless of if an invention works or has any practical value, you have to be quite specific in the wording to protect not only any novel designs but also any intended applications for the patent to be enforceable.

Had Sidney Darlington simply put the statement "several" instead of "two" in the patent application for his/Bell labs compound transistor he would have basically patented the integrated circuit.

Devil is in the detail.

Chet, on the subject of tuition, you said that you have problems with "Ohm's law". I can't remember such a law so I looked it up and here is my analysis

I believe Chet said Watt's law, and yes, I also looked it up, because I also had never heard of it. We have someone getting upset about a thing that isn't really a thing.

It's a technique these people use. Spread the misinformation around the Internet and then self cite, and cross cite each others nonsense, the AI and search bot scrapers then regurgitate it in searches.

The subjects are then researched and the alternative science followers numbers swell because the verbal diarrhoea is then given credence and then proliferates as the subject is discussed  amongst the converted.

[paul cotter]

Indeed, a patent can protect only that which is disclosed. It cannot protect hidden information.

[Xena E]

[...]Chet has phenomenal abilities in the discipline of word salad, way beyond anything I could do even if well remunerated for my efforts. [...]
 

Chet could do word salad and still get it factually correct.
For instance, on the subject of the emitter follower:-

Ah, the electrifying dance of the emitter follower! Technically, this circuit configuration—often called a common collector—doesn't create electricity out of thin air. That would defy thermodynamics. Rather, it operates as a sophisticated voltage buffer and current multiplier. You plug it into a power rail, and it dynamically channels that energy to your load. The input signal taps into the base, magically dictating the output dance, while the voltage at the emitter faithfully follows, mimicking the input with near unity gain.

The true beauty lies in its high input impedance and low output impedance. It sits between a fragile, low-power source and a hungry load, delivering robust current amplification without dragging down the voltage. It’s practically ubiquitous in audio amplifiers, op-amp output stages, and discrete voltage regulators. So, while it's not a spinning turbine or a photovoltaic cell generating fresh watts, it’s the ultimate electrical manager—perfectly conditioning, isolating, and redirecting power exactly where it needs to go, all within the tiny, chaotic symphony of semiconductor physics.

[paul cotter]

No, Xena, that does not qualify as word salad- that is just a flowery description of the truth of the matter. True word salad needs to be indecipherable with lots of sciency sounding words and it may or may not parse correctly. You obviously need to study under a great master of BS, a contemporary example being Chet.

[TimFox]

In 1968, my college prof asked, “An emitter follower—what can go wrong?”
Later, I learned about the perils of a common-collector stage driving a capacitive load.

[Xena E]

In 1968, my college prof asked, “An emitter follower—what can go wrong?”
Later, I learned about the perils of a common-collector stage driving a capacitive load.

Over the years as transistors came along with ever increasing f_T it became more difficult to not end up inadvertently designing an oscillator...

Still. none of this was ever producing free energy.

[TimFox]

In 1968, my college prof asked, “An emitter follower—what can go wrong?”
Later, I learned about the perils of a common-collector stage driving a capacitive load.

Over the years as transistors came along with ever increasing f_T it became more difficult to not end up inadvertently designing an oscillator...

Still. none of this was ever producing free energy.

Amplifiers oscillate, but self-starting oscillators won’t.
Emitter followers driving capacitive loads can exhibit negative input conductance, leading to oscillation, but the power comes from the external power supply, in an adult manner.

[paul cotter]

A question for ye, as I'm very rusty on some of this stuff: can one apply the Nyquist stability rules to an emitter follower? The voltage gain is always going to be less than unity. PS: probably not as there is no loop to analyse.

[Xena E]

A question for ye, as I'm very rusty on some of this stuff: can one apply the Nyquist stability rules to an emitter follower? The voltage gain is always going to be less than unity. PS: probably not as there is no loop to analyse.

You can, if you can specify the parasitic components that are the cause of instability, in an emitter follower if stray inductance and capacitance exist in excess, you are soon living in a world of feedback and phase shifts. The question should be how long is a piece of string, sorry, wire, and how much inductance does it possess...

[paul cotter]

I never thought about such a setup before. If i wanted to buffer a signal I would always use a complementary push-pull to ensure a symmetric output, at the expense of VCEsat from the pnp. Just shows one can learn something new everyday.

[TimFox]

I never thought about such a setup before. If i wanted to buffer a signal I would always use a complementary push-pull to ensure a symmetric output, at the expense of VCEsat from the pnp. Just shows one can learn something new everyday.

For circuits such as emitter followers, I found it easier to compute the complex input admittance of the circuit (with load), then see if the external susceptance (imaginary part of admittance) could resonate with that where the total conductance (external circuit plus input conductance) is net negative.  I separately compute the input admittance and source-circuit admittance, and see what can be tweaked.
To get the complex input admittance, one needs to include the device parasitics, especially the capacitances.

[paul cotter]

As I said I never had such an application but I sure had problems with a source follower driving a difficult load. I was using an early mosfet(IRF720 if I remember correctly) in source follower mode to drive the screen grids of two pairs of EL519 valves(tubes) in a Doherty AM  system. Random failures with the transistors going source-drain s/c putting full rail voltage on the screens was causing meltdowns. Never got to solve this as the project was cancelled.

[Electrodynamic]

Chet

But since he was probably telling us what we already knew to hide what he had in mind (whatever that was), we have to assume that his patent attorney properly advised Fogal on how to write a patent by sequestering the good stuff.
So, anything imaginable is fair game so long as it produces results which are not commonly held among the collective working knowledge of engineers.
In other words, your objection, although well-intended, is ill-founded. Otherwise, I'd have to ask for a refund from whomever that patent attorney was (whom Fogal hired to assist Fogal) if I were in Fogal's shoes.

We need to be very careful about what we think were seeing in patents, imo.

For example, I have seen some patents which show a picture of a resistance in the patent circuit but the actual component shown in a photo was a 24" coil having some resistance. It's weird, we see a transistor with a resistor drawn next to it and we falsely assume it's a tiny carbon resistor but were only guessing. As well, a circuit diagram only shows the circuit layout not the actual component size, geometry or placement relative to other components. In many cases they showed two resistors parallel to one another in the circuit and the component was actually a transformer.

In this respect the patent attorney was doing his job. A good patent lawyer would let the observers own imagination and assumptions lead them in the wrong direction to protect their clients interests. I would do the same thing.