reuben
Trail Wise!
Gonna need more Camels at the next refugio...
Posts: 11,141
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Post by reuben on Feb 23, 2020 17:07:23 GMT -8
And where would architecture be without cupolas?
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reuben
Trail Wise!
Gonna need more Camels at the next refugio...
Posts: 11,141
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Post by reuben on Feb 23, 2020 17:08:48 GMT -8
Your commentary seems a wee bit "hostile". :^D Nope. Just joking. Sorry if I offended you.
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gabby
Trail Wise!
Posts: 4,537
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Post by gabby on Feb 23, 2020 17:21:48 GMT -8
Nope. Just joking. Sorry if I offended you. None taken. As you noted, I have a well-known propensity for encouraging "thread drift". Let's face it: it's not going to get any better. While I'm still capable of typing, I am getting older every minute. My mind wanders, so I tend to "gab". I've become a wee bit more worried lately, as my apophenia seems to be intensifying: I have begun to see faces, animals and whole words in the weave of our carpets. I suppose they aren't really there. :^D ETA: As luck would have it, I've recently taken up "sketching" as a casual hobby, so I have an example. Once, driving home late at night on a dark highway, I saw what I thought was a Christmas greeting on a house on a hill in the distance. I drove for a mile or two, trying to figure out what it said: Was it "Merry Xmas"? Or "Happy Noel"? After a while, I realized that it was merely a string of "icicle lights" on the top edge of the house's porch way up there. I have to admit that, prior to that realization, I was starting to see, at the very least, the word "NOEL" spelled out in shimmering white and blue lights. Apophenia (/æpoʊˈfiːniə/) is the tendency to mistakenly perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things. The term (German: Apophänie) was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia. He defined it as "unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness". He described the early stages of delusional thought as self-referential, over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions, as opposed to hallucinations. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia ANDPsychology Today: "Being amused by apophenia"
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Post by autumnmist on Feb 23, 2020 18:30:46 GMT -8
I guess I had apophenia before I had cataract surgery. I never knew what it was though, other than what I called the need to squint.
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Post by johntpenca on Feb 23, 2020 19:29:17 GMT -8
I guess I had apophenia before I had cataract surgery. Nah, it's the transistors. Rather than cataract surgery, you should have had your transistors replaced while drinking a fermented beverage.
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Post by autumnmist on Feb 24, 2020 5:36:02 GMT -8
johntpenca , perhaps I'll ask for a transistor replacement the next time I go to the ER. It would certainly create some different reactions than to the usual symptom questionnaire. OTOH, I might end up in a psych unit.
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ErnieW
Trail Wise!
I want to backpack
Posts: 9,855
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Post by ErnieW on Feb 24, 2020 6:01:20 GMT -8
Although I guess the transistor made it possible I'm surprised not one has offered the Internet as the greatest invention of the 20th century.
The wheel was nothing until it was put on a cart.
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Post by Lamebeaver on Feb 24, 2020 9:03:47 GMT -8
Not just the wheel, but the ball bearing. Wheel is great & all...but none of our high speed parts for anything could exist without the ball bearing I would respectfully disagree with this. Ball bearings make things cheaper and simpler and they require less maintenance, but machinery with pressure lubricated babbit bearings can be made with very small tolerances as well.
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davesenesac
Trail Wise!
Our precious life is short within eternity, don't waste it!
Posts: 1,710
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Post by davesenesac on Feb 24, 2020 9:13:27 GMT -8
During the 1950's radio was a dominant communication product of the day that all Americans listened to. And a common product advertised in newspapers and magazines was the small rectangular hand held transistor radio, the first successful commercial product made with semiconductors. I still have one of those radios in my electronic junk box. Advertisements of that day touted numbers of transistors in such radios just as cameras today tout megapixels with 9 transistors top of the line.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_radio
It was a decade after the transistor's 1948 invention that semiconductor integrated circuits aka IC's, arose that packaged multiple transistors on the same physical substrate. Up until that point, vacuum tubes dominated more serious electronic equipment that continued through the early 1960's until the military became heavily involved in the industry during the Viet Nam War. By 1971 when I entered the Silicon Valley workplace as a lowly junior tech making $2.87 an hour, the major semiconductors companies had already formed out of the break-up of Fairchild Semiconductor. I still have a stack of earliest semiconductor component engineering data books from that era. In the 1970's it was the rise of Transistor Transistor Logic IC's, aka TTL, that most significantly led to the explosion of most modern day electronic products.
computerhistory.org/blog/who-invented-the-ic/?key=who-invented-the-ic
Although many of that generation went into semiconductor product technical work, the difficulty of understanding basic semiconductor physics with its atom level phenomenon, prevented the majority of workers from ever rising beyond limited technical levels and that ensured my own career. Although telecom, computers, the Internet, and cellphones are subsequent technology products rising from the invention, none would have appeared without the rise of semiconductor technology. It is sad due to the nature of Capitalism that the United States has now lost its created world envied electronic manufacturing base as eastern Wall Street and stock market types ravaged the industry for personal gain few of them deserved by selling off technology and offshoring manufacturing to the rest of the world. And then forced into companies their Ivy League educated human resource directors to destroy careers of so many good people that entered that early industry by blatantly preferring to hire non citizens instead of Americans.
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