My other identity
editMy real name is Madhu Siddalingaiah, in case you were wondering.
If you want to contact me directly:
Yes, that's supposed to be an @ in the middle. The image will hopefully confuse address scrapers. If you know of a way to add @ to math image, let me know!
This Wiki thing just might take off!
editA fantastic concept, the content is equally impressive! The Web is really starting to become useful again ;-)
Background
editScience and technology, as you might expect. I have worked in a range of industries such as aerospace, radio frequency communications, digital signal processing, 3D graphics, embedded systems, and of course, enterprise software. I'm a physicist by education, an electrical engineer by vocation, and software engineer by necessity.
These days I do more software consulting and architecture, but I have a fair amount of test equipment to satisfy my hardware interests. Thanks to eBay! Here is a short list of equipment I own:
- Tektronix 2465A, 475A, and 465M oscilloscopes
- Hewlett-Packard 8590A spectrum analyzer
- Hewlett-Packard 8660C synthesized signal generator
- Wavetek 2500 synthesized signal generator
- Power supplies, meters, and other sundry equipment
Interests
editI'm a rated helicopter pilot. I have been flying since 1987. That should explain many of my helicopter related contributions. I have flown Robinson R22, Bell Jetranger, and Hughes 500.
I like to work on embedded systems, wearable computers, wireless controls/monitors, and anything else small and electronic. The simpler, the better. I really enjoy analog electronic design, much more so that digital. Digital stuff can be fun, but it's not always as challenging.
Facts and figures
edit- Water is 800 times more dense than air.
- Steel saturates at about 20 Amp-turns/inch
User articles
editI recently saw a video clip of a particularly spectacular helicopter crash. Fortunately, no one was hurt.
Is Pegasus stronger than the average horse? This analysis begs the question.
The sinking of the RMS_Titanic was tragic and largely preventable. Many arguments have been made about what should have been done prior to collision with the iceberg. Some ideas are presented here about what could have been done after collision.
I recently took fantastic trip aboard a vintage diesel-electric train in Minneapolis. The conductor gave us a hands on tour of the locomotive, but first he had to start it...
Some have an idealized, romantic view of the past -- I don't. Older, simpler times, the age of chivalry all suffer from a major problem: bad plumbing.
I've given quite a bit of thought to deterministic vs. non-deterministic processes. Some thoughts are given here.
Is the hybrid alien from Alien: Resurrection structurally weak? Consider this evidence.
Bipolar transistor transition frequency
Some analysis of high voltage generators
Pages in progress
edit- RLC circuit
- Electronic filter
- Electronic oscillator
- Negative resistance
- Phase locked loop
- Typical filters and design equations
Authorship
editSignificant contributions
editMinor contributions
editOther stuff
edit- Fundamental limits
- Ideas
- Python snippets
- Lisp
- Magnetics
- OS compiler links
- Tranlinear oscillator
- Two counters are as powerful as two stacks, which are as powerful as a Turing machine
- Chomsky hierarchy
- Converting a NFA to a CFG
- TCP/IP links
Quotes
edit- Small minds try to form religions, the great ones just want better routes up the mountain.
- Amateurs talk about strategy; Professionals talk about logistics.
- Former General R.H. Barrow, Commandant, USMC
- Don't fight the tape
- Unknown securites trader
- An engineer is someone who will spend 3 hours figuring out how to solve a 2 hour problem in one hour
- Anonymous?
- Why program by hand in five days what you can spend five years of your life automating?
- Parr motto
- But this ship can't sink!
- She is made of iron, sir. I assure you, she can.
- Movie dramatization of exchange between Ismay and Andrews
- point of view is worth 80 IQ points
- Oh, I travel... a sort of licensed troubleshooter
- You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.
- Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.
- If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.
- African proverb
- As for me, all I know is that I know nothing.
- Nothing can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.
- I look for durable competitive advantage and that is hard to find.
- Nothing in the world will take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than the unsuccessful person with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
- There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.
- My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what's really going on to be scared.
- Anarchy is an opportunity for the ambitious and unprincipled.
- In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is stoned to death.
- If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.
- As in any resource-rich developing country with weak institutions and woeful oversight, corruption and official misconduct go easily unchecked.
- Todd S. Purdum
- Gotta do what you can just to keep your love alive - Trying not to confuse it with what you do to survive
- It's what daydreamers have nightmares about.
- Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera, once said that his method of design was to start with a vision of what you want and then, one by one, remove the technical obstacles until you have it. I think that’s what Steve Jobs does. He starts with a vision rather than a list of features.
- The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
- Complexity is the enemy of computer science, and it behooves us, as designers, to minimize it.
- Novelty was not Steve’s highest value. Beauty was.
- Logic offers a serenity humans seldom experience in full. We have emotions but we deal with them and do not let them control us.
- Spock from Yesteryear by Dorothy C. Fontana
- In this galaxy, there's a mathematical probability of three million Earth-type planets. And in all of the universe, three million million galaxies like this. And in all of that, and perhaps more, only one of each of us. Don't destroy the one named Kirk.
- In times of change, the learners will inherit the Earth while the knowers will find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
- Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.
- Want to increase innovation? Lower the cost of failure.
- It seems that perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
- A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.
- Natural Talent is a pre-disposition in the mind and the body, to do the right thing in a particular field of activity.
- Jamey Andreas
- We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.
Nonlinearity
editNeed a new article on this.
- Contradicts common sense, e.g. graceful degradation
- Policy and planning consequences
- Chaos, mathematical modeling
- Examples
- Strained resources
- Manpower, communications, networks, storage (primary and secondary)
- Climate
- Structural
- dams, levees, bridges, buildings, scaffolding
- Electrical
- Wires, circuit breakers, fuses
- Strained resources