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thoughts that keep electrical engineers up at night
Friday, August 16 2002
The Talibanization of territories within Bush-family control continues apace. The latest Christian extremist rescued from a life spent putting tin foil on his head is Jerry Regier, whom Jeb Bush (Governor of Florida) is appointing to head Florida's child welfare agency. Among other things, Regier believes that it's okay to spank a child hard enough to cause welts and that married women shouldn't have careers. These and other hilariously medieval views are carefully laid out in a document entitled "The Christian World View of The Family," signed by Regier (among others). It exists on the web in PDF form, but I've made things easier on my readers by reformatting it in much clearer HTML, a randomly ever after exclusive.
Other choice documents in this series (all unfortunately in PDF form) can be accessed on the COR documents page. Be sure to check out "The Christian World View of Science and Technology," "The Christian World View of Art and Communication," and "The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy." Reading these documents gives me a new found appreciation for the term "healthy skepticism" (whose opposite is "pathological faith").
Meanwhile, my interest in 2.4 GHz wireless computer equipment is showing no signs of drawing to a close. Today I experimented with sending five volts of power down 100 feet of 16 gauge speaker wire, just to see if there was enough juice on the other side to run a wireless hub 100 feet beyond from my rooftop power station. According to an online chart, a 100 feet of 16 gauge copper wire has a resistance of 0.6 ohm. Since a current traveling down 100 feet of double-conductor wire would actually pass through 200 feet of copper, the resistance is more like 1.2 ohms, or enough to rob me of an entire volt at one amp, or two volts at two amps (the specified demand of the device), leaving me with only three volts. This didn't seem like enough to power the wireless hub, but I tried it out anyway and damned if it didn't work just fine. I suppose I could always use the difference in voltage between the five volt line and the twelve volt line (of the rooftop DC power supply) to get seven volts, which the wire run would then trim down to 5.6 volts, but what if that is too much? Some TTL circuits are destroyed by voltages in excess of 5.25 volts. Obviously, though, I'm not working with traditional TTL here, because TTL does not function at less than 4.75 volts. I'm no electrical engineer, but these are probably the kind of thoughts that keep electrical engineers up at night. This is why they make such fabulous husbands.
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