Credibility Pursuing Incredibility
It was fun working with editor Frances Reed to address her diverse newsletter audience. My Story: Cognitive Radio
A comparison to the original (Cognitive Radio is Here) shows her having set a broader context, while simultaneously pulling out from me the three figures for more detail.
Out of the corner of your eye you wonder if she is at the door.
When it rains, you wonder if she is OK; in or out? needs drying?
Before you leave, you check where she is.
If she isn’t in the kitchen, you peer into the living room.
You lock all the yard gates for no reason.
If others will be late, you still think to feed her between 5:30-6.
It gnaws that instead of whatever you are doing,
you should at least be taking her for a walk.
You realize the privilege of having witnessed, perhaps assisted, Nature’s intent to exemplify pure life, pure will, pure thought, and pure love.
You recall one of the few useful things a Western philosopher (Schopenhauer) has observed:
“How is a man to get relief from the endless dissimulation, falsity and malice of mankind, if there were no dogs into whose honest faces he can look without distrust?”
The issue of the Payroll Tax Compromise is quite beyond pretense of my understanding though I do well understand the resource largely tapped to pay for it: so-called “white space,” that is, unused frequencies in the over-allocatted TV spectrum.
I have before praised Rep. Greg Walden as an active critic of the FCC and Chairman Genachowski—that agency having been lost in the woods on issues of white space and Emergency Interoperability (among very many others). Walden has investigated the FCC and recently offered reforming legislation. But now, as House co-sponsor of the Payroll Tax bill Walden has in one stroke solved two key issues the FCC has fumbled for a decade, and deserves hearty congratulations therefore.
Walden Statement on Job Creating Spectrum Provision in Payroll Tax Conference Report – YouTube
Having spoken with Walden’s well-qualified Communications staff, I am confident they deserve specific credit for the emergency interoperability provisions, and am encouraged that they may re-visit the dubious P25 technology, hopefully leapfrogging it. (And as a cherry on top, in-filling the TV spectrum uses wavelengths that are far less controversial as unhealthy.)
You are rightly picturing many of the required new jobs building infrastructure: laying fiber, building servers and transceivers. But you might not yet realize that in truth none of this will happen without inventors and investors deploying legions of radio engineers to realize the required entirely new architectures for software-defined radios (SDR) that are agile enough to exploit the new spectrum. The challenge and opportunity for SDR is now, precisely as we are graduating programmers newly familiarized with these techniques!
That in this political environment Congress reached this compromise is certainly significant. Walden is right: It is now up to technologists to respond to the government’s lead, sharpening their management and engineering drills to ensure that electronic commerce continues to cause bandwidth to gain value against crude oil.
Use this idea to move that noisy power supply away. Or use the Male connector to energize a switched-off house branch with 12V. Obey current limits and create at your own risk.
Besides the November elections, for many of us the biggest ordeal in 2012 will likely be campaign-level carpet-bombing by ‘insights’ about 2012. The slapstick articles aligning The Mayan Calendar, the obligatory Nostradamus, and The End of Days. The thick but vacuous best-sellers. 66.6% of the pre-GED History channel. In fact, there is no rare galactic alignment due. So, the rearrangement of continents is a non-starter. As well, believers may not meet their makers, and neither will our problems necessarily explode nor be solved.
Though it may not sell well, I suggest 2012 will be a year as any other—like the weather itself—no more predictable, no less chaotic. There will be hurricanes in Florida. Of the hundreds of daily earthquakes, a few will merit news coverage. Accidents will happen. An Italian sea captain will inexplicably use a half-billion dollar ship as his personal surfboard. And sure, Iran seems deliberately provocative of military intervention, but even this kind of confrontation is hardly unprecedented for the historical Persia. (A prior trade route blockage having stimulated discovery of the New World.)
To the extent one cares, the facts of the matter are thus: NASA – The Great 2012 Doomsday Scare.
So, one of the best results for which to hope is that on December 22, a segment of the population will look around at their hysterical collections of hysterical popularbacks and magazines, reflect on their time wasted listening to hapless commentators, decide that they have been conditioned for the last time by the publishing industry, traditional and “social” media outlets, and declare their mental independence from them.
Perhaps then the perennial, beguiling, idle cliche’ about “the shift in consciousness which the planet is about to undergo” can finally be laid to rest in favor of a less selfish, indolent, and oblivious awareness of world events that recognizes rather than substitutes for humanism and activism.
Now that would be revolutionary, because I suspect that the exploited and starving billions sleepless from gunfire in the night are not waiting for liberation or food from supposed bourgeoisie ‘shifts in consciousness’ arbitrarily linked by marketeers to The Mayan Calendar. More likely, they would justifiably regard such insightful, profiteering light-worker missionaries actually daring to message that view among them to be irrelevant if not insane contributors to their ordeals, murder-able simply for their sandals.
You are not going to get any names because I promised my counterpart confidentiality.
Over the holidays I noticed in an otherwise reputable catalog one of those $30-dollar cell phone add-ons promising to protect you from virtually all radiation. I jumped on it. The marketing manager proved to be extremely reasonable and open to discussion. He even offered to send me one to examine. I declined, because it was pointless in the absence of the claims documentation. (And I could pretty much predict what I would find—a small coil or capacitor, maybe a tiny IC.) How do you test a featureless hoax?
Of course, that the device’s claims could not actually be substantiated made my job easy enough, but specifically upon learning the following, the gentleman without hesitation removed the item from this year’s catalog, with my deep thanks and appreciation.
Now of course, SJL has worked intensely developing technology that formerly made the same claims. But we have not made them. If there is such an effect, it is totally unproven. And there is no solution involving linear thinking: shielding with the phone won’t help (which is what your car does). You aren’t going to talk many people into wearing protective tower-climbing or lineman suits, nor metal-screened wetsuits with grounding straps. The only way to theoretically cancel an electromagnetic wave is to generate one of equal frequency and opposite phase exactly in line with its approach. Practically, under controlled conditions with a few signals this is quite difficult, and under uncontrolled real-world conditions, impossible. Considering the variety of signals with which you are bombarded as you move around (literally, thousands), do you think a deftly-priced sleek $30 plastic puck contains the required light-speed supercomputer?
The science and the evidence just isn’t there, and I was extremely glad to earn agreement on this point to the benefit of both the seller and their loyal customer base.
The only authentic antidote of which I know is correct information, starting with Cross Currents by Dr. Robert O. Becker. For an introduction to the realpolitik and regulatory issues I recommend Cell Towers by Blake Levitt.
Finally, I’m obliged to remind everyone that SJL has a patent pending through which it is hoped the technology can be developed to address this very serious issue non-linearly:
The motor is old, the blades a bit out of whack, and most of the noise is really coupled to the cabinet by the decayed and ineffective rubber isolation bushings on the three-point mounting plate.
In this parsimonious approach the two rear support plate studs are coaxed slightly to fit a 60 x 60 mm 10 CFM Fulltech unit {Jameco 213867}, while on the other side the fan’s ground hole is supported by a brass strap that needs no fastening. Though not mechanically isolated, the substitute method is inherently quiet and efficient.
And if you are motivated to search for the parts, nothing prevents you from replacing the original fan and suitable gaskets for the original mounting plate.
Wikipedia, Google, Facebook: Imagine a World with Respect for Intellectual and Creative Property Rights
By Stanley Jungleib1 CommentWholesale theft has been a widely-rationalized right of the cheap, lazy, and generally bewildered since the web’s inception. Strong action against online piracy is long overdue, and the Stop Online Piracy Act is the justified legal reaction caused by the failure of on-line services to take responsibility for their peddling stolen goods. Zealots seeing no other way besides theft to get knowledge, have likely as well never considered supporting local public libraries. And with ultimate hypocrisy, Wikipedia now reveals its true understanding of who controls everything the public gave it for free—themselves!
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