Viewing profile — sbrorson

An interesting corollary to this is that even if the future trajectory of a general 3-body orbit is predictable in theory using numerical methods (and infinite precision calculatio…

I'll add one more piece of ham lore to this thread. The gigantic electronic component distributor DigiKey got its start when the founder designed and marketed a Morse code key to t…

The thing which seems to be overlooked -- both in the linked article and in the HN comments -- is that at one time ham radio was a hobby for folks wanting to play around with state…

You mentioned the cost of tools a couple of times. What's wrong with using MOSIS, which is free? Just asking, since I don't know anything about this area except that MOSIS was ment…

I will probably get downvoted for pointing this out, but the reality is that the geometric algebra approach to E&M, while interesting for its own reasons, will not replace the form…

Besides these test functions I am curious to know if anybody uses the CUTE/CUTEr/CUTEst framework for testing. It's not clear to me how much the CUTE* packages are used in industry…

I worked at the Arch Mach at MIT for a very short period in the very early 1980s. The Arch Mach was the predecessor to the MIT Media Lab. I made absolutely no impact there, but I d…

The reason Americans use cups and spoons (instead of e.g. grams) to measure ingredients is a matter of history. Tradition says Fannie Farmer wrote the "Boston Cooking-School Cook B…

Yes, they still make textiles in Lowell!

Inflatable buildings used for disaster relief. They can be trucked or air-lifted into place, then quickly inflated. https://federalfabrics.com/

That's not how the real world works. A lot of manufacturing equipment and test stands were developed using LabView and used NI cards to control equipment and take data. The people …

Yes, this will be a major problem for factories. Any "cloud based" software is guaranteed to become obsolete and incompatible well within the lifetime of the equipment it controls.…

It's a side gig for me. The biggest hurdle is finding a bunch of companies fielding the old equipment and then becoming known to them. In that sense it's like any other consulting …

This is a relevant article to me since I also make 20yo (or older) computers run legacy stuff ... but not for fun. Factories and labs frequently have machines or instruments which …

https://github.com/brorson/MandelbrotExplorer

I think Gnumeric has supported this for years. https://help.gnome.org/users/gnumeric/stable/sect-extending-... I recall doing a noise model of a transimpedance amp in Gnumeric wher…

This is a very good point, and is likely one of Matlab's pillars of strength. As an open-source guy I find it painful to say it, but the fact that the Mathworks is a commercial org…

> A bit offf topic, but is Matlab relevant still? As many others have pointed out, Matlab is not only relevant, but thriving in many fields. It's a great package and is deeply embe…

Congratulations to the blogger -- he has rediscovered the formulate first described in the 16th century by the French mathematician Vieta. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vieta%27s_f…

I don't know about these days, but back in the 1980s there were a number of electronics surplus stores located on Canal St, below SoHo. I used to pop in now and then to buy stuff. …

As long as we're listing electronics flea markets nationwide, I might as well mention the grand-daddy of them all, the Dayton Hamvention: https://hamvention.org/

As somebody who came to scientific computing late in life, after spending years as a physicist then an engineer, I will step up to defend NR, if only for fun (and because I like th…

I recently bought "Introduction to Nonlinear Optimization" by Amir Beck. It's published by the SIAM. It covers the field from beginning to intermediate level and includes examples …

The Economist is generally pushing an agenda, and the agenda is "capitalism is always right". If you buy their conceptual framework, the idea that you can be paid for BS work can't…

chuckle This is true. As far as I can see (as a hardware engineer frequently doing FPGA stuff) The Intel/Altera combo has not produced any new products nor yielded any customer ben…