sbrorson

6 ms·

1.
by sbrorson 10mo ago
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 calculations), in practice the use of finite-precision floating point
2.
by sbrorson 2y ago
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 the ham radio audience. DigiKey was originally a mail-
3.
by sbrorson 2y ago
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-of-the-art technology. It was more than just a bunch of gu
4.
by sbrorson 2y ago
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 mentioned multiple times when I was in grad school b
5.
by sbrorson 2y ago
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 formalism based on Gibbs's vector calculus. One reason
6.
by sbrorson 2y ago
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 or by developers of optimization software.
7.
by sbrorson 2y ago
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 do recall one of the successes of the lab was a kind of pro
8.
by sbrorson 2y ago
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 Book" in 1896, and for the first time in a cookboo
9.
by sbrorson 3y ago
Yes, they still make textiles in Lowell!
10.
by sbrorson 3y ago
Inflatable buildings used for disaster relief. They can be trucked or air-lifted into place, then quickly inflated. https://federalfabrics.com/
11.
by sbrorson 3y ago
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 who developed all that stuff are long gone and the ne
12.
by sbrorson 3y ago
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. If you're dealing with real manufacturing
13.
by sbrorson 3y ago
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 gig -- it's mostly about who you know, not
14.
by sbrorson 3y ago
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 are controlled by a computer. They are run off control card
15.
by sbrorson 3y ago
https://github.com/brorson/MandelbrotExplorer
16.
by sbrorson 4y ago
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 where I called out to Python&#x2
17.
by sbrorson 4y ago
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 organization means they have lots of revenues which they
18.
by sbrorson 4y ago
> 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 embedded into the engineering world. I won't repea
19.
by sbrorson 4y ago
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_formulas
20.
by sbrorson 4y ago
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. They were part of a larger ecosystem of industrial su
21.
by sbrorson 4y ago
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/
22.
by sbrorson 4y ago
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 the book for what it is). At least one commenter here dismisse
23.
by sbrorson 5y ago
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 written in MATLAB. I found the book very r
24.
by sbrorson 5y ago
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 be right since Mr. Market always knows best
25.
by sbrorson 6y ago
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 benefit beyond what would have happened if the two com
26.
by sbrorson 6y ago
You are right the ARM cores, mostly. Xilinx Zynq devices have ARM A devices built into them as "hard" cores. That is, the ARMs are instantiated directly in silicon, not as "soft" cores which take LUTs (gates) from the
27.
by sbrorson 6y ago
It's more than an idea... https://www.federalfabrics.com/