Full marks for clarity of message. Credit: Euro Route materials When the Channel Tunnel opened in 1994, the undersea rail link saw Britain grew closer to the European mainland than ever before. However, had things gone a little differently, history might have taken a very different turn. Among the competing proposals for a fixed Channel […]
In an era where running a website without HTTPS is shunned, and everyone wants you to encrypt your DNS queries, you’d expect that the telecommunications back-ends are secured tightly as well. Especially the wireless bits between terra firma and geosynchronous communication satellites. But as recently discovered by US researchers, the opposite is actually true. The […]
One of the lost pleasures of our modern world is the experience of going shopping at a grocery store, a mall, or a drugstore, and finding this month’s electronics magazine festooned with projects that you might like to build. Sure, you can find anything on the Internet, but there’s something to be said about the […]
If you ever wanted to win a bar bet about a world record, you probably know about the Guinness book for World Records. Did you know, though, that there are some robots in that book? Guinness pointed some out in a recent post. Ever wonder about the longest table-tennis rally with a robot or the […]
We always enjoy videos from [w2aew]. His recent entry looks at vertical or VFETs, which are, as he puts it, a JFET that thinks it is a triode. He clearly explains how the transistor works as a conductor unless you bias the gate to form a depletion zone. The transistors have a short channel, which […]
There was a bit of a kerfuffle this week with the news that an airliner had been hit by space junk. The plane, a United Airlines 737, was operating at 36,000 feet on a flight between Denver and Los Angeles when the right windscreen was completely shattered by the impact, peppering the arm of one […]
Blaise Pascal is known for a number of things, but we remember him best for the Pascaline, an early mechanical calculator. [Chris Staecker] got a chance to take a close look at one, which is quite a feat since there were only about 20 made, and today we only know where nine of them wound […]
In a recent write-up, [David Delony] explains how he built a Wolfram Mathematica-like engine with Python. Core to the system is SymPy for symbolic math support. [David] said being able to work with symbolic math easily has helped his understanding of calculus and linear algebra. For statistics support he includes NumPy, pandas, and SciPy. NumPy […]
It is hard to remember a time when no one had a spreadsheet. Sure, you had big paper ledgers if you were an accountant. But most people just scribbled their math on note paper or, maybe, an engineering pad. [Christopher Drum] wanted to look at what the state of the art in 1978 spreadsheet technology […]
In our modern semi-dystopia, it seems like most companies add automation features to their products to lock them down and get consumers to buy even more proprietary, locked-down components. The few things that are still user-upgradable are getting fewer and farther between, but there are still a few things that can be modified and improved […]