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Quorten Blog 1

First blog for all Quorten's blog-like writings

Ah, yes! Red List building materials. This ia a great summation that agrees with much of my previous materials science discussion. However… the summary of the red list falls short by not mentioning alternative materials to use. Maybe that is included in more detail on the direct site. Also, it does not address the question I’ve posed earlier: if you abuse this material, will it transform into one of the mentioned hazardous materials?

20190309/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_List_building_materials

Ah, I’ve almost had an important oversight. Plaster is another good material that does not burn. Two formulations, clay-based and gypsum-based, do not contain any carbon. The limestone-based formulation does contain carbon since linestone is calcium carbonate, but don’t worry about this burning. However, plaster is not resistant to very high temperatures: it can melt or otherwise decompose unless it is designed to be heat-resistant.

And, of course! I should have realized this. Powder bed and inkjet head 3D printing processes use a gypsum plaster powder and apply water very much in a plaster-making process. So, if you 3D print your electronics cases with this material, you need not worry one bit about flammability and fire retardants.

20190309/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaster

Vermiculite is a mineral rock that is popular for many aggregate or concrete uses and does not contain carbon, enough said.

20190309/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermiculite

Mineral wool and asbestos are also fire resistant, but these ought to be avoided due to their risk to human health.

20190309/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineral_wool
20190309/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos

Back in the days of the late 1990s and early 2000s, I remembered seeing many school bus side passenger windows that were made by the company “Guardian,” with the distinctive “G” logo on them. “Those windows aren’t safety glass” I knew, as I thought we’ve talked this through before… car windows are safety glass, school bus front and rear windows are safety glass, but school bus side windows are not safety glass. And by safety glass, I mean the glass-plastic-glass sandwich.

Well, we can hold that thought about safety glass, even on car windows. So, I was looking at one of the old 1970s or so era large glass back door windows in my house, and I noticed that it also had the distinctive Guardian “G” logo on it. So, I looked closer at the markings and read “Guardian tempered safety glass.” Interesting, so I looked that up on the Internet, and this is what I found out about it…

20190309/DuckDuckGo guardian tempered safety glass
20190309/https://www.guardianglass.com/GuardianGlass/glassproducts/TemperedGlass/index.htm

Guardian tempered safety glass is 5 times stronger than annealed glass, so it is less likely to break. But, if it does break, it shatters into very small pieces that are less likely to cause injury than larger shards. Now, about the side windows on cars. For many car models, those windows too are designed to shatter into many small pieces, and only the front and rear car windows are truly made of the glass-polycarbonate-glass sandwich.

Read on →

Very interesting. Foldable smartphones are here. Bendable screen devices are coming. At the end of the day, I must say this is more about novelty than about practical functionality. A foldable screen smartphone honestly isn’t that much different than, say, a Nintendo DS with two folding panels that contain separate, non-foldable screens.

20190308/DuckDuckGo Samsung Galaxy Fold
20190308/https://www.cnet.com/news/galaxy-fold-samsungs-foldable-phone-is-one-of-the-most-exciting-devices-weve-seen/
20190308/https://www.cnet.com/news/using-the-mate-x-made-me-a-foldable-phone-believer/

Chicken eggs? A genetic modification could ease testing for male/female among egg laying breeds. Currently, the fastest, easiest, and cheapest method is to check after hatching and send the males off to meat grinders.

20190308/https://www.cnet.com/news/how-crispr-could-save-6-billion-chickens-from-the-meat-grinder/

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Well, I’ve read about flying cars many times before, but I thought it would be good for me to repost these articles that I’ve seen on Twitter recently about flying cars.

20190307/https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-flying-cars-20190222-story.html

Oh, and about self-driving cars. “Ask for permission rather than for forgiveness.” People really don’t like the rollout of the test vehicles. After they were effectively banned from California and companies started testing in Arizona, people would sabotage and attack the self-driving vehicles upon sight.

20190307/https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-court-self-driving-cars-20190111-story.html

How far away is Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our sun? But a mere 4 lightyears.

20190306/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri

Here, there is a lot of interesting discussion about why our Earth-ball we live on is so extremely unlikely to be found elsewhere in the Universe. Most of the Universe is either too barren or too violent to be reasonably stable for complex life to flourish.

20190306/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Earth_hypothesis

This is an interesting concept to reach Proxima Centauri. Build a light sail and propel it with Earth-stationed lasers.

20190309/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot

What is the current status of the EOMA Earth Friendly Computing Devices project? On the one hand, I see no updates on the Crowdsupply project page.

20190304/https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop

On the other hand, I do know that there is still being progress made by the same community on the RISC-V project. So, let’s see where that is at.

20190304/https://www.crowdsupply.com/libre-risc-v/m-class
20190304/https://www.crowdsupply.com/libre-risc-v/m-class/updates/microarchitecture-by-osmosis
20190304/https://www.crowdsupply.com/libre-risc-v/m-class/updates/modernising-1960s-computer-technology-learning-from-the-cdc-6600
20190304/https://www.crowdsupply.com/libre-risc-v/m-class/updates/microarchitectural-decisions

So, the most exciting thing that I wanted to point out. There is a architectural processor optimization that was implemented in the CDC 6600 decades ago, yet somehow this was not picked up by modern Intel and ARM processors. Out-of-order processor execution can be implemented either by the Tomosalu Algorithm with a reorder buffer or by scoreboarding. Tomosalu Algorithm is straightforward to implement, but scoreboarding, in the common interpretation of implementation, is energy intensive due to the use of content-addressable memory. However, the two methods can be understood to be functionally identical by the means of implementing a single-bit logical AND decision tree. I haven’t completely$ explained this here (see the articles for details), but the overall implementation and its results is ingenious. It allows you to get powerful out-of-order execution capabilities for a very low power budget.

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Have you ever wondered about all those “Best Doctors” and “Top Doctors” things out there? Surely, they can’t be all that representative of the full medical field, now can they? Indeed, they are not. There is this really interesting story of a journalist, who primarily investigates the medical field and literature, who received a “Top Doctors” award. He accepted it after some deliberation, deciding that the humor and the investigative lead was worth it. Indeed, there are many such questionable or fake private awarding agencies out there, and as it turns out, often times the reason they’re so successful is that they are able to take advantage of doctors. Many doctors are so busy and having assistants handle things like this for them that they can easily be taken advantage of.

20190303/https://www.propublica.org/article/top-doctors-award-journalist

So, for quite some time, I was wanting to get a video capture card for a variety of purposes… viewing an Apple II screen on my laptop, recording retro video game playing sessions from the real hardware, or simply digitizing VHS videocassettes. But, until now, I wasn’t sure what I wanted. At one point, I was sure that I wanted to get the very best, highest resolution video capture cards available. Alas, I came to the conclusion that those are unnecessarily featueeful and expensive for my applications that are in most need of video capture, especially in the near-term. Thankfully, in light of the expiration of the last MPEG-2 patent in the United States, the decision has become much easier.

For sure, I don’t need a video capture card that can do more than standard definition, DVD-quality video. If the device sends MPEG-2 compressed video, I’m okay with that. No need for super high quality uncompressed video streams for the time being. Also, I must have a device that connects via USB so that I can use it with a laptop or a Raspberry Pi with ease. PCI cards are a no-go as they require a desktop PC.

So, how did I find out more information on such available devices? I continued from my previous basepoint of the USB video capture device that I found that was partially adequate, but non-ideal. Then I went to the main Linux TV site, then to the Video4Linux driver documentation. From there, I could find a list of all supported boards and chipsets. That’s where I could find the differentiation between PCI or USB devices. Note that webcam devices were listed separately, and I did not look into those in great detail.

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On the subject of building cheap, simple, handcraft, non-flammable electronics cases suitable for prototyping, there was an important oversight of mine that I was thinking about for quite some time but did not yet discuss in detail: clay. At the outset from an arts and crafts standpoint, clay is simply Playdough’s heavier, harder, more difficult to work, and more traditional counterpart. Alas, on the subject of flammability and fire resistance, the differentiation is obvious. Just as the ground beneath your feet does not burn, dried clay does not burn, ever. Clay that is baked into ceramic is especially fire resistant. A thermite reaction does nothing to melt or burn through a ceramic gardening pot. Intuitively, if clay or a substance of clay is used correctly, it can also be used as an adhesive for paper and cardboard, in place of the typical combustible carbon-based adhesives.

20190301/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay
20190301/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_minerals

Clay, fundamentally, is composed out of “clay minerals.” Some of these clay minerals, i.e. Kaolin group minerals, are used in the production of Portland cement. Clay contains water, and when the water is dried out, the clay hardens. When clay is heated in an oven, permanent changes occur to it that turn it into ceramic.

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