My other identity

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www.madhu.com

My 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!

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A fantastic concept, the content is equally impressive! The Web is really starting to become useful again ;-)

Background

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Science 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:

Interests

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I'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

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  • Water is 800 times more dense than air.
  • Steel saturates at about 20 Amp-turns/inch

User articles

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I 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

Transformer design and my transformer design

Oscillator Analysis

Pages in progress

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Authorship

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Significant contributions

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Minor contributions

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Other stuff

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Quotes

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Small minds try to form religions, the great ones just want better routes up the mountain.
Alan Kay - Early history of Smalltalk
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
Alan Kay - Early history of Smalltalk
Oh, I travel... a sort of licensed troubleshooter
James Bond, Thunderball, 1965
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.
Abraham Lincoln
Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.
Eleanor Roosevelt
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.
Socrates
Nothing can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.
Sydney J. Harris
I look for durable competitive advantage and that is hard to find.
Warren Buffett
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.
Calvin Coolidge
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.
Pablo Picasso
My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what's really going on to be scared.
P. J. Plauger
Anarchy is an opportunity for the ambitious and unprincipled.
Hal Porter
Simplicity quotes
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is stoned to death.
Joan D. Vinge
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.
Hermann Hesse
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
Jackson Browne
It's what daydreamers have nightmares about.
Paul Nelson
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.
Frederick Brooks
The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
James Baldwin (writer)
Complexity is the enemy of computer science, and it behooves us, as designers, to minimize it.
Charles P. Thacker
Novelty was not Steve’s highest value. Beauty was.
Mona Simpson
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.
Leonard McCoy from Balance of Terror
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.
Eric Hoffer
Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.
John F. Kennedy
Want to increase innovation? Lower the cost of failure.
Joi Ito
It seems that perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Antoine_de_Saint-Exupéry
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.
Steve Jobs
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.
John Naisbitt

Nonlinearity

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Need 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