brainwagon

I wanted some information on VGA signal timing. A few minutes of googling turned up this information. Bookmarked for future reference. VGA Signal Timing

The intertubes are all a-twitter (is Twitter a-twitter?) with the video of what appeared to be a missile launch off the coast of Los Angeles yesterday. It did look pretty weird, but the evidence is mounting that this was not any kind of missile launch, but in fact just the contrails of flight AWE808 from […]

For whatever reason, I have been finding it difficult to find time to blog. Perhaps it is a combination of increased amount of travel, work, or just the shorter daylight hours, but I’m finding it hard to find the muse. So, for the next little while, I thought I’d scan through my bookshelf and find […]

A couple of times in the last few months, I’ve seen this very odd statistic that the average American consumes 3790 calories per day. This is usually used in conjunction with some argument about why Americans are overall so obese. For instance, here is one such thing from diet-blog.com. Do Americans Eat 3,790 Calories Per […]

Okay, I’m really more of an Oakland fan, but ultimately I’m a baseball fan, and the Giants provided one of the most compelling post-season runs in recent memory. Narrowly winning the pennant on the last day of the season, avoiding a potential three-way tiebreaker. Agonizing, one inning games in round one against Atlanta. A great […]

The legendary Phil Karn, KA9Q is apparently the brains behind the digital telemetry modem that will be used aboard the ARISSat-1, a satellite designed to be tossed off the ISS sometime next year. From his paper: ARISSat-1 will carry a new telemetry modulation and coding scheme, BPSK1000, designed to handle the severe fading often encountered […]

A couple of months ago, I did some simple simulations of light refracting through raindrops in a hope to understand the details of precisely how rainbows form. The graphs I produced were kind of boring, but they did illustrate a few interesting features of rainbows: namely, the double rainbow, and the formation of Alexander’s band, […]

A very nice looking little CNC mill that looks like it would be very nice for milling pc boards and the like, and costs $100 to make. I’ll have to look at this carefully in the future. Mantis 9.1 CNC Mill – Make Your Bot!. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlDpZl-QIAA

The Make blog brought the Dead Reckonings blog to my attention. The blog is fascinating: consisting of essays of bits of lost mathematical lore, and nomography in particular. Author Ron Doerfler has some great stuff, and a cool give away: a calendar that demonstrates and explains many different kinds of nomographs. Of course, it’s kind […]

Sixty-one percent of Americans said the President should have the ability to shut down portions of the Internet in the event of a coordinated malicious cyber attack, according to research by Unisys. Most Americans support an Internet kill switch. 51% percent would also like cars made out of candy that run on stupidity.

Years ago, I remembered that someone (couldn’t remember who) had invented a clock which looked like a version of the classic video game “Pong”. A few minutes of searching now reveals who that was: Sander Mulder. I thought it was a cool idea, and I was thinking of a project that could get me back […]

Wow, last night’s Game 4 of the NLCS was a real nailbighter, with the Giants ultimately prevailing 6-5 in a game which saw three different lead changes. I’ve begun to look at baseball-reference.com for play-by-play and statistical analysis, since it breaks down the outcome of each play and gives the change in winning percentage as […]

Courtesy of the Make blog, here’s a link to an 1896 book on the design of bicycles and tricycles. I suspect a lot has been learned about bicycle design in the past 100 years, but I think it’s pretty interesting to see how much design theory had been developed at this early stage. Bicycles & […]

Okay, I’m currently reading The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball because I hate to see intentional walks. Case in point: last night’s 7th inning walk of Chase Utley with one out and pitcher Roy Oswalt on second. You’d expect him to score on a double, but he’s not a huge immediate threat. In any […]

Back in 2004, I blogged a short message about the game four performance of the Red Sox against the Yankees. brainwagon » Blog Archive » Red Sox 6, Yankees 4, 12 innings. I had turned off the game after 7 innings, missing Bill Mueller’s RBI single in the bottom of the ninth to tie the […]