If NASA scientists are right, the Thames will be freezing ov

On Feb 1, 2:15 am, John Larkin <jlar...@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:
On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:57:41 -0800 (PST),BillSloman









bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
On Feb 1, 12:19 am, John Larkin <jlar...@highlandtechnology.com
wrote:
On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:13:53 -0800 (PST),BillSloman

bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
On Jan 31, 7:24 pm, Joerg <inva...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Phil Hobbs wrote:
BillSlomanwrote:
On Jan 31, 3:46 pm, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSensel...@electrooptical.net> wrote:
BillSlomanwrote:

On Jan 31, 3:24 am, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSensel...@electrooptical.net> wrote:
Phil Hobbs wrote:
BillSlomanwrote:
On Jan 31, 1:13 am, John Larkin <jlar...@highlandtechnology..com
wrote:
On Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:50:47 -0800 (PST),BillSloman
bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
On Jan 30, 6:09 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:39:26 -0500, "Tom Del Rosso"
td...@verizon.net.invalid> wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
Maybe the apparent AGW was itself just a cyclic variation.
But the sunspot thing looks serious.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sunspot_Numbers.png
The sunspot minima correspond to low temperatures.
The "modern maximum" started about 1900.
One of the early episodes of Nova in the 1970's was all about sunspots.
Aparently they also correspond to hemlines and Beatlemania.
Since the sun warms the earth, and sunspots indicate something serious
going on with the sun, there's a chance the sunspot-temperature thing
is actually causal.
Sunspots are entirely superficial - confined to the outermost layers
of the sun,
And how do you know that?
General knowledge - just because you don't know it doesn't mean that
most educated adults are similarly ignorant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunspot#Physics
"Although the details of sunspot generation are still a matter of
research, it appears that sunspots are the visible counterparts of
magnetic flux tubes in the Sun's convective zone that get "wound up"
by differential rotation. If the stress on the tubes reaches a certain
limit, they curl up like a rubber band and puncture the Sun's surface.
Convection is inhibited at the puncture points; the energy flux from
the Sun's interior decreases; and with it surface temperature."
Idiot.
And how deep do you think that convective zone is?
https://nar.ucar.edu/2011/lar/page/sun%E2%80%99s-convection-zone-shed...
says that it is roughly the outer 30% of the sun. Roughly 99% of the
power generated by nuclear fusion is produced with the inner 24% of
sun's radius.
The sun-spots don't influence that rate of fusion, just the short term
rate of convective transfer of the power generated to the outer
radiating layers - a rather slow transfer, since it apparently takes
10 millions year to get the photons from core to surface.
I don't happen to be an idiot, and only an ignorant twit like you
would be silly enough to make such a fatuous claim based on such
totally inadequate evidence - evidence that you obviously don't
actually understand.
--
BillSloman, Nijmegen
The temperature gradient in the interior of the Sun is very steep near
the photosphere, because it's only gas pressure that holds up the weight
of the outer layers.  The solar photosphere is very thin--less than 1000
km--so apparently minor perturbations of the convective transport in and
below the photosphere can be very important.  See e.g.
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/Dalsgaard1_density_vs_r.jpg.
Cheers
Phil "former astronomer" Hobbs
Sorry, that was density--here's temperature:http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/Dalsgaard1_T_vs_r.jpg
It could be very important in terms of short term fluctuations in the
"solar constant", but it isn't going to change the average amount of
heat coming out over any kind of extended period - the proposition
that changes in solar output could explain the ice ages is obvious
nonsense.
The energy emitted by a Solar flare can amount to 15% of one second's
worth of solar output.
Stellar flares can be more intense - but they seem to happen on
smaller stars with stronger magnetic fields.
The outer layers of the sun are well stirred.  Convection moves at
almost exactly the speed of sound, which in the solar interior is a
_big_ number, so you have to worry about the heat capacity of a lot more
than the photosphere.

The large-scale, time-averaged structure of the Sun is determined by
hydrodynamic equilibrium, but there are smaller variations on all time
scales--0.1%-ish since good satellite measurements have been available.

As for "obvious nonsense", that's not very persuasive.
Only if you don't engage your brain. The heat output of the sun is
generated by nuclear fusion in the core - 99% of the energy is
generated within 24% of solar radius from the centre.

There may be some 100,000 years worth of output proceeding through the
sun at any one time, but it's kind of hard to imagine a mechanism
operating in the convective zone (from 70% of the solar radius out to
the surface) that could change the solar output for long enough to
create an ice age (for which the current cycle time seems to be about
100,000 years).

Those tenth-of-a-percent wobbles were widely considered impossible too, until
there were measurements to back them up.
"Widely considered" in the absence of precise measurements is scarcely
a scientific opinion. I suspect that if anybody had actually been
asked back then they wouldn't have said that it was impossible, merely
that the weren't any observations that suggested that anything like
that might be going on. Remember that the variation is paradoxical -
the "dark" sunspots that we can see accompany an marginally increased
solar output from the adjacent bright areas which more than compensate
from the reduced radiation from the dark areas.

That's pretty amusing--you're way outside your field,Bill, and it
shows.  You've shot yourself in the foot again.

It seems by now we should have a staffed position here at s.e.d. .... a
foot surgeon :)

Don't take Phil too seriously. He gets this urge to pontificate and
gets shirty when anybody argues with him - the similarity with John
Larkin is a trifle depressing.

What's depressing, to you and to me, is that he's a lot smarter than
either of us, and much more likely to be right.

He's certainly smart. He certainly knows more than you do, which isn't
all that difficult, but he's not infallible.

Really?
I can't recall any gross failures, but some of his advice has struck
me as sub-optimal. It's only an impression, and I'm not minded to mine
his output to find whatever it was that created that impression. I'm
not saying that he is not good - he's up there with Spehro Pefhany as
a mostly reliable source - but he's not quite as good as Win Hill.

Read his book.

I meant to, sometime. What I see in his output is a little too much of
the physicist and a little too little of the electronic engineer -

Well, read the book and see.

he may well referee articles for Review of Scientific Instruments.

I doubt he'd waste his time doing that!
It's certainly not a directly productive activity - you get to see a
great many bad papers before they are published (or - mostly - not
published) and very few good papers, but if you've benefited from
reading the good stuff in Rev. Sci. Instrum. (which you don't seem to
have done) you owe the scientific community and some refereeing is an
appropriate way of paying off that debt.

I've only been invited to referee a Rev. Sci. Instrum. paper once, and
had to knock it back because I didn't enough about the subject to
offer a useful opinion. I've looked at a few papers for Measurement
Science and Technology but I'm clearly not one of their preferred
referees, which is fine by me.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
 
On Feb 1, 2:25 am, John Larkin <jlar...@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:
On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:06:18 -0800 (PST),BillSloman









bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
On Feb 1, 12:47 am, Jamie
jamie_ka1lpa_not_valid_after_ka1l...@charter.net> wrote:
BillSlomanwrote:
On Jan 31, 8:58 pm, John Larkin <jlar...@highlandtechnology.com
wrote:

On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:52:55 -0800 (PST),BillSloman

bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:

On Jan 31, 5:34 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 06:31:19 -0800 (PST), mrstar...@gmail.com wrote:

On Tuesday, 31 January 2012 22:19:34 UTC+10,BillSloman wrote:

On Jan 31, 8:21 am, mrst...@gmail.com wrote:

And they have to be incredibly inept to dither for years over a simple
2-transistor oscillator.

I'm not dithering. I know exactly what I want to do, but I'm finding
it difficult to get around to actually doing it. And I'd be inept if I
though that the Baxandall class-D oscillator was a simple 2-transistor
oscillator - Jim Williams (who wasn't inept) found it tricky enough to
justify publishing  six Linear Technology application notes on the
subject - AN45, AN49, AN51, AN55, AN61, and AN65.

Jim's electronic productivy was probably a million times yours.

So what? His job was to churn out application notes, mine was to put
together hardware that did specific jobs. Our situations weren't
easily comparable. My point, which you haven't been able to answer -
so you opted instead for the irrelevant insult - was that Jim
Williams, who wasn't inept, didn't find it a simple circuit.

Your claim that it is a simple two-transistor oscillator thus suggests
that you are inept. When it gets down to poke and fiddle electronics
you do rather better, but when you try to be intellectual about what
you are doing the wheels do tend to fall off.

  And you're still standing around waiting for some one to come rescue
you when your wheels fail off. You see, most of us can change our own
tires, you on the other hand, as you say, are inept.

You are allowing your imagination to run away with you. I'm most
certainly not inept, and the nearest I get to sitting around and
waiting for someone to rescue me is asking if anybody has got a VBIC
models of the 2N3906 - the one I can improvise from Gummel-Poon
parameters doesn't work any better than the Gummel-Poon model, which
isn't all that surprising.

Your own level of performance - in as far as it is visible here -
doesn't really hit guru level. Self-satisfied nitwit comes closer to
the mark.

You must be another nym of AlwaysWrong. All you do any more is churn
out lame, self-aggrandizing insults.

How pathetic.
The original claim that I'm inept came from you, and was a typical
example of your responses to posts that injure your vanity. As your
insults go, it was more than usually silly, which makes it a lame
insult.You may have seen it as self-aggrandising - I can't see why you
would have bothered otherwise, though I can't imagine why you'd think
that calling me inept would make you look any better.

Jamie - who really does seem to be inept, though he's too dim to
realise it it - then jumped on the bandwaggon with an equally silly
observation, and I responded with the kind of put-down it deserved.

Calling Jamie a nitwit isn't actually wrong - though it may be an
exaggeration - and it doesn't do a thing for my status, one way or
another, so it isn't self-aggrandising. It's certainly an insult, but
his post was purely and simply a personal insult, and an insulting
response strikes me as entirely appropriate. Phil Allison or Richard
Steven Waltz would have done it better, but insults aren't really my
thing.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
 
On Feb 1, 2:02 am, John Larkin <jlar...@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:
On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:28:54 -0800 (PST),BillSloman









bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
On Jan 31, 8:58 pm, John Larkin <jlar...@highlandtechnology.com
wrote:
On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:52:55 -0800 (PST),BillSloman

bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
On Jan 31, 5:34 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 06:31:19 -0800 (PST), mrstar...@gmail.com wrote:
On Tuesday, 31 January 2012 22:19:34 UTC+10,BillSloman wrote:
On Jan 31, 8:21 am, mrst...@gmail.com wrote:
Try not to recite your dogma so uncritically.

It's not dogma - what I'm saying is based on the available scientific
evidence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogma

Dogma "is authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted, or diverged
from, by the practitioners or believers."

Scientific evidence is fairly authoritative, but it is regularly
doubted, and disputed, and can be diverged from if you have better
counter-evidence, so it isn't dogma.

John Larkin's problem is that he treats denialist propaganda, which
purports to doubt and dispute the scientific evidence, as if it was
dogma.

"Dogma is the established belief or doctrine held by a religion, or a particular group or organization[1]."
AGW is the established belief for your particular religious group, so much so that you ignore all evidence which conflicts with it and try to pretend you are the only scientific ones.  There is no science but your science.
Here is an even better definition:
a point of view or tenet put forth as authoritative without adequate grounds  (Merriam-Webster)

Unfortunately, his grasp of what constitutes "adequate grounds" is
inadequate.

You could learn something from King Canute.  People have to be incredibly egotistical and semi-hysterical to believe they can determine the climate.

Actually, all that's required is some grasp of the physics involved.
Once you've got that you don't have to be either egotistical or semi-
hysterical to get the point.

And they have to be incredibly inept to dither for years over a simple
2-transistor oscillator.

I'm not dithering. I know exactly what I want to do, but I'm finding
it difficult to get around to actually doing it. And I'd be inept if I
though that the Baxandall class-D oscillator was a simple 2-transistor
oscillator - Jim Williams (who wasn't inept) found it tricky enough to
justify publishing  six Linear Technology application notes on the
subject - AN45, AN49, AN51, AN55, AN61, and AN65.

Jim's electronic productivy was probably a million times yours.

So what? His job was to churn out application notes, mine was to put
together hardware that did specific jobs. Our situations weren't
easily comparable. My point, which you haven't been able to answer -
so you opted instead for the irrelevant insult - was that Jim
Williams, who wasn't inept, didn't find it a simple circuit.

He built some and made them work, which is more than you can manage.
Don't be silly. I've built a couple of Baxandall class-D oscillators
and made them work - there's even one in my Ph.D. thesis. The
variation that I'm failing to turn into working hardware at the moment
is one that I first put together in 1986 at Cambridge Instruments for
the Metals Research (then a wholly owned subsidiary of Cambridge
Instruments) GaAs crystal puller. That machine used an LVDT-based
weighing head to keep track of the increasing weight of the GaAs
single crystal, and the circuit originally designed - some ten years
earlier - to excite the LVDT and demodulate its output had depended on
a couple of components that had gone obsolete by 1986.

I put together a new circuit - including my low distortion variant of
the Baxandall Class-D oscillator - which worked quite a bit better
than the original and still fitted into the same - very restricted
space. It went into every subsequent crystal puller that Metals
Research produced and was field retro-fitted to a number of machines.

To be honest, it's main virtue was that the output op-amp wasn't the
741 designed into the original, but - IIRR - the rather quieter OP-07,
which didn't suffer from pop-corn noise, so that the 30kW induction
heater in the puller stopped switching from full on to full off every
minute or so, but stayed running at about half power once the Ga/As
charge had heated up to 1238 °C.

The operators really liked that - it not only meant that the machine
didn't wake them up all the time but also (in theory) decreased the
thermal strain in the GaAs single crystal.

Your claim that it is a simple two-transistor oscillator thus suggests
that you are inept. When it gets down to poke and fiddle electronics
you do rather better, but when you try to be intellectual about what
you are doing the wheels do tend to fall off.

Look at my web site and see how much of that looks like fiddling.
It never looks like fiddling after you've got the circuit working.
Circuit analysis after you've got it working is almost always easy.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
 
On Feb 1, 6:37 am, mrstar...@gmail.com wrote:
On Wednesday, 1 February 2012 09:51:27 UTC+10,BillSloman wrote:
On Jan 31, 11:06 pm, mrst...@gmail.com wrote:
On Wednesday, 1 February 2012 03:43:36 UTC+10,BillSloman wrote:
On Jan 31, 3:31 pm, mrs...@gmail.com wrote:
On Tuesday, 31 January 2012 22:19:34 UTC+10,BillSloman wrote:
On Jan 31, 8:21 am, mrs...@gmail.com wrote:
Try not to recite your dogma so uncritically.

It's not dogma - what I'm saying is based on the available scientific
evidence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogma

Dogma "is authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted, or diverged
from, by the practitioners or believers."

Scientific evidence is fairly authoritative, but it is regularly
doubted, and disputed, and can be diverged from if you have better
counter-evidence, so it isn't dogma.

John Larkin's problem is that he treats denialist propaganda, which
purports to doubt and dispute the scientific evidence, as if it was
dogma.

"Dogma is the established belief or doctrine held by a religion, or a particular group or organization[1]."

AGW is the established belief for your particular religious group,

The scientific establishment is not a religious group, and the belief
is only established to the extent that it hasn't yet been falsified.
<snip>

Here is an even better definition:
a point of view or tenet put forth as authoritative without adequate grounds (Merriam-Webster).

You may think that the scientific case is inadequate, but that does
strongly suggest that you don't know much about the science involved.

snip

Some things are beyond wikipedia.

Wikipedia is a excellent place to find simple low-level explanations
for the unsophisticated audience, and I mine it shamelessly.

Irrelevant because I was not suggesting it isn't useful. Just that you need to be able to think, as well as research.
I've got my name on couple of patents, which does make it evident that
I can think as well as research.

snip

There is a huge difference between wisdom and knowledge.

How would you know? You don't seem to exhibit either.

What now?! Do you think they are the same?
Obviously not. Wisdom is evidenced by what you do with the knowledge
you've got. You don't seem to have much in the way of knowledge, and
you don't seem to be using that little you've got at all wisely.

You may need to get out more. Then you'll realize that the rest of the world has moved on. Deep down, we all know it does not
matter because we are not immortal. You'll drive yourself mad or at least become increasingly cranky if you try to put everyone
straight on every single topic of discussion.

I do restrict myself to the more egregiously erroneous posts on
sci.electronics.design.

Well, try making them less erroneous instead of drowning in tedium.
Since you clearly don't understand much, the tedium may reflect your
limitations rather than mine.

Sorry for interrupting - but you just keep going on, and on, and on......

This is your third post in this thread. None of them says more than
that you don't agree with my opinions -

Well spotted. But you'll argue with anyone about anything.

and the one fact that you adduce
is one of Merriam-Webster definitions of "dogma" - you didn't actually
provide a link to the full definition

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dogma

presumably because definitions 1a and 1b, and 2 didn't suit your
argument as well as 1c. This is actually dishonest, but you seem to be
too dim to appreciate this.

You're telling the story. I thought you knew that some words in English have more than one meaning. You seemed to need help with
understanding which meaning I intended so I quoted 1c. I don't think it is possible, in that situation, for me to have been being
dishonest. On the other hand, in accusing me of being dishonest, you are either confused or being dishonest.
Scarcely. If you selectively quote from an external authority you
really should provide access to the complete item from which you are
quoting. Anything less looks rather like text-chopping.

I didn't need any help understanding the meaning of "dogma" that you
had in mind. The problem is - as I'd already made perfectly clear - is
that a scientific concensus isn't dogma, no matter how much you'd
like it to be.

I don't know what you think you are doing, but I think you have
already established that I get up your nose and that you don't know
enough to post any kind of substantive comment on the subject under
discussion, so as far as I am concerned it's you that just keep going
on and on.

Never mind me. If you manage to keep abreast of what you're doing, you'll do well.
There is no point posting substantive comment because you are stuck in the mud and very pleased with your own opinions.
They aren't my opinions in any substantive sense. I've just adopted
the opinions that are well-supported by the scientific evidence. You
may think that this is some kind of intellectual mud, but the only
argument that you have advanced that might justify that opinion is
that you think that it is "dogma" which excuses you from having to
deal with the scientific evidence (which you clearly don't have a clue
about) as such.

The other reason - I don't have time. There's work to do.
Good - get on and do it. I hope you are better at it than you are at
posting comments here.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
 
It was never about science. It was all about power and the redistribution of wealth.
 
On Wed, 1 Feb 2012 01:51:19 -0800 (PST), Bill Sloman
<bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:

On Feb 1, 2:15 am, John Larkin <jlar...@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:
On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:57:41 -0800 (PST),BillSloman









bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
On Feb 1, 12:19 am, John Larkin <jlar...@highlandtechnology.com
wrote:
On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:13:53 -0800 (PST),BillSloman

bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
On Jan 31, 7:24 pm, Joerg <inva...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Phil Hobbs wrote:
BillSlomanwrote:
On Jan 31, 3:46 pm, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSensel...@electrooptical.net> wrote:
BillSlomanwrote:

On Jan 31, 3:24 am, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSensel...@electrooptical.net> wrote:
Phil Hobbs wrote:
BillSlomanwrote:
On Jan 31, 1:13 am, John Larkin <jlar...@highlandtechnology.com
wrote:
On Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:50:47 -0800 (PST),BillSloman
bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
On Jan 30, 6:09 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:39:26 -0500, "Tom Del Rosso"
td...@verizon.net.invalid> wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
Maybe the apparent AGW was itself just a cyclic variation.
But the sunspot thing looks serious.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sunspot_Numbers.png
The sunspot minima correspond to low temperatures.
The "modern maximum" started about 1900.
One of the early episodes of Nova in the 1970's was all about sunspots.
Aparently they also correspond to hemlines and Beatlemania.
Since the sun warms the earth, and sunspots indicate something serious
going on with the sun, there's a chance the sunspot-temperature thing
is actually causal.
Sunspots are entirely superficial - confined to the outermost layers
of the sun,
And how do you know that?
General knowledge - just because you don't know it doesn't mean that
most educated adults are similarly ignorant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunspot#Physics
"Although the details of sunspot generation are still a matter of
research, it appears that sunspots are the visible counterparts of
magnetic flux tubes in the Sun's convective zone that get "wound up"
by differential rotation. If the stress on the tubes reaches a certain
limit, they curl up like a rubber band and puncture the Sun's surface.
Convection is inhibited at the puncture points; the energy flux from
the Sun's interior decreases; and with it surface temperature."
Idiot.
And how deep do you think that convective zone is?
https://nar.ucar.edu/2011/lar/page/sun%E2%80%99s-convection-zone-shed...
says that it is roughly the outer 30% of the sun. Roughly 99% of the
power generated by nuclear fusion is produced with the inner 24% of
sun's radius.
The sun-spots don't influence that rate of fusion, just the short term
rate of convective transfer of the power generated to the outer
radiating layers - a rather slow transfer, since it apparently takes
10 millions year to get the photons from core to surface.
I don't happen to be an idiot, and only an ignorant twit like you
would be silly enough to make such a fatuous claim based on such
totally inadequate evidence - evidence that you obviously don't
actually understand.
--
BillSloman, Nijmegen
The temperature gradient in the interior of the Sun is very steep near
the photosphere, because it's only gas pressure that holds up the weight
of the outer layers.  The solar photosphere is very thin--less than 1000
km--so apparently minor perturbations of the convective transport in and
below the photosphere can be very important.  See e.g.
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/Dalsgaard1_density_vs_r.jpg.
Cheers
Phil "former astronomer" Hobbs
Sorry, that was density--here's temperature:http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/Dalsgaard1_T_vs_r.jpg
It could be very important in terms of short term fluctuations in the
"solar constant", but it isn't going to change the average amount of
heat coming out over any kind of extended period - the proposition
that changes in solar output could explain the ice ages is obvious
nonsense.
The energy emitted by a Solar flare can amount to 15% of one second's
worth of solar output.
Stellar flares can be more intense - but they seem to happen on
smaller stars with stronger magnetic fields.
The outer layers of the sun are well stirred.  Convection moves at
almost exactly the speed of sound, which in the solar interior is a
_big_ number, so you have to worry about the heat capacity of a lot more
than the photosphere.

The large-scale, time-averaged structure of the Sun is determined by
hydrodynamic equilibrium, but there are smaller variations on all time
scales--0.1%-ish since good satellite measurements have been available.

As for "obvious nonsense", that's not very persuasive.
Only if you don't engage your brain. The heat output of the sun is
generated by nuclear fusion in the core - 99% of the energy is
generated within 24% of solar radius from the centre.

There may be some 100,000 years worth of output proceeding through the
sun at any one time, but it's kind of hard to imagine a mechanism
operating in the convective zone (from 70% of the solar radius out to
the surface) that could change the solar output for long enough to
create an ice age (for which the current cycle time seems to be about
100,000 years).

Those tenth-of-a-percent wobbles were widely considered impossible too, until
there were measurements to back them up.
"Widely considered" in the absence of precise measurements is scarcely
a scientific opinion. I suspect that if anybody had actually been
asked back then they wouldn't have said that it was impossible, merely
that the weren't any observations that suggested that anything like
that might be going on. Remember that the variation is paradoxical -
the "dark" sunspots that we can see accompany an marginally increased
solar output from the adjacent bright areas which more than compensate
from the reduced radiation from the dark areas.

That's pretty amusing--you're way outside your field,Bill, and it
shows.  You've shot yourself in the foot again.

It seems by now we should have a staffed position here at s.e.d. ... a
foot surgeon :)

Don't take Phil too seriously. He gets this urge to pontificate and
gets shirty when anybody argues with him - the similarity with John
Larkin is a trifle depressing.

What's depressing, to you and to me, is that he's a lot smarter than
either of us, and much more likely to be right.

He's certainly smart. He certainly knows more than you do, which isn't
all that difficult, but he's not infallible.

Really?

I can't recall any gross failures, but some of his advice has struck
me as sub-optimal. It's only an impression, and I'm not minded to mine
his output to find whatever it was that created that impression. I'm
not saying that he is not good - he's up there with Spehro Pefhany as
a mostly reliable source - but he's not quite as good as Win Hill.

Read his book.

I meant to, sometime. What I see in his output is a little too much of
the physicist and a little too little of the electronic engineer -

Well, read the book and see.

he may well referee articles for Review of Scientific Instruments.

I doubt he'd waste his time doing that!

It's certainly not a directly productive activity - you get to see a
great many bad papers before they are published (or - mostly - not
published) and very few good papers, but if you've benefited from
reading the good stuff in Rev. Sci. Instrum. (which you don't seem to
have done) you owe the scientific community and some refereeing is an
appropriate way of paying off that debt.
I used to read RSI whan I was a kid, working summers (microwave
spectroscopy and nuclear instrument design) at LSUNO, where the
"library" (actually a trailer) had the hardcopy version.

A couple of years ago I had online access (paid!) to RSI so I culled
the past few decades of good stuff, which turned out to be not much.
The electronics tends to be somewhere between primitive and dreadful.

I can go to the nearby Mission Bay campus of UCSF and look up RSI, and
other journals, there for free, and print stuff for $1 a page. I do
that occasionally, specifically when I have some new science to
instrument.

--

John Larkin, President Highland Technology Inc
www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com

Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators
Custom timing and laser controllers
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links
VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
 
On Feb 1, 1:09 pm, mrstar...@gmail.com wrote:
It was never about science.  It was all about power and the redistribution of wealth.
That may be all you want to see in it, but that is a rather short-
sighted point of view.

The reality is that the earth has already warmed by about 0.8°C over
the past century. Atmospheric CO2 levels have risen from about 270ppm
before the industrial revolution to some 315ppm when we first started
measuring them accurately in 1958 to to 387ppm at present.

Correlation isn't causation, but we do have a fairly clear idea of how
rising CO2 levels make the earth's surface temperature rise, and no
explanation of the 0.8°C temperature that doesn't involve increased
greenhouse warming from the extra CO2 looks remotely plausible.

If we keep on pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at an every increasing
rate, global temperatures are going to rise quite a bit more, which
seems unlikely to do as any good at all.

Simple prudence suggests that we should slow down on burning fossil
carbon to generate energy, and move over to renewable energy sources
as fast as possible. This is going to cost money, but nothing we can't
afford - at the current extra cost of renewable energy an immediate
switchover would set the global economy back by a couple of years
worth of normal economic development.

Since it would take us a decade or two to build enough renewable
generating plant to replace existing power stations, we really
wouldn't notice that energy had gotten more expensive, and the
steadily rising price of fossil carbon - which isn't a renewable
resource and is getting progressively more expensive to dig up as we
get through the more accessible deposits - and the economies of scale
involved in building really extensive renewable energy generating
plant will almost certainly mean that renewable energy will be the
cheaper option whenever we get around to building enough plant to
replace a significant proportion of the fossil-fuel-based plant.

The only people who object to this logic are the guys who are making a
lot of money out of digging up fossil carbon and selling it as fuel.
They seem to figure that they are all going to be dead before anything
serious happens, and that they will be able to accumulate enough money
to let their kids buy their way into some sort of safe haven when
climate change does go from an inconvenience to a real threat.

Jahred Diamond's book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or
Succeed". New York: Viking Books. ISBN 1-586-63863-7 makes it
perfectly clear that the top dogs in any society under threat will
concentrate on remaining top dogs as their society disintegrates
around them. It's going to take an effort to get them to behave more
responsibly.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
 
On Wed, 1 Feb 2012 02:45:51 -0800 (PST), Bill Sloman
<bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:

On Feb 1, 2:02 am, John Larkin <jlar...@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:
On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:28:54 -0800 (PST),BillSloman









bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
On Jan 31, 8:58 pm, John Larkin <jlar...@highlandtechnology.com
wrote:
On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:52:55 -0800 (PST),BillSloman

bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
On Jan 31, 5:34 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 06:31:19 -0800 (PST), mrstar...@gmail.com wrote:
On Tuesday, 31 January 2012 22:19:34 UTC+10,BillSloman wrote:
On Jan 31, 8:21 am, mrst...@gmail.com wrote:
Try not to recite your dogma so uncritically.

It's not dogma - what I'm saying is based on the available scientific
evidence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogma

Dogma "is authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted, or diverged
from, by the practitioners or believers."

Scientific evidence is fairly authoritative, but it is regularly
doubted, and disputed, and can be diverged from if you have better
counter-evidence, so it isn't dogma.

John Larkin's problem is that he treats denialist propaganda, which
purports to doubt and dispute the scientific evidence, as if it was
dogma.

"Dogma is the established belief or doctrine held by a religion, or a particular group or organization[1]."
AGW is the established belief for your particular religious group, so much so that you ignore all evidence which conflicts with it and try to pretend you are the only scientific ones.  There is no science but your science.
Here is an even better definition:
a point of view or tenet put forth as authoritative without adequate grounds  (Merriam-Webster)

Unfortunately, his grasp of what constitutes "adequate grounds" is
inadequate.

You could learn something from King Canute.  People have to be incredibly egotistical and semi-hysterical to believe they can determine the climate.

Actually, all that's required is some grasp of the physics involved.
Once you've got that you don't have to be either egotistical or semi-
hysterical to get the point.

And they have to be incredibly inept to dither for years over a simple
2-transistor oscillator.

I'm not dithering. I know exactly what I want to do, but I'm finding
it difficult to get around to actually doing it. And I'd be inept if I
though that the Baxandall class-D oscillator was a simple 2-transistor
oscillator - Jim Williams (who wasn't inept) found it tricky enough to
justify publishing  six Linear Technology application notes on the
subject - AN45, AN49, AN51, AN55, AN61, and AN65.

Jim's electronic productivy was probably a million times yours.

So what? His job was to churn out application notes, mine was to put
together hardware that did specific jobs. Our situations weren't
easily comparable. My point, which you haven't been able to answer -
so you opted instead for the irrelevant insult - was that Jim
Williams, who wasn't inept, didn't find it a simple circuit.

He built some and made them work, which is more than you can manage.

Don't be silly. I've built a couple of Baxandall class-D oscillators
and made them work - there's even one in my Ph.D. thesis. The
variation that I'm failing to turn into working hardware at the moment
is one that I first put together in 1986 at Cambridge Instruments for
the Metals Research (then a wholly owned subsidiary of Cambridge
Instruments) GaAs crystal puller. That machine used an LVDT-based
weighing head to keep track of the increasing weight of the GaAs
single crystal, and the circuit originally designed - some ten years
earlier - to excite the LVDT and demodulate its output had depended on
a couple of components that had gone obsolete by 1986.

I put together a new circuit - including my low distortion variant of
the Baxandall Class-D oscillator - which worked quite a bit better
than the original and still fitted into the same - very restricted
space. It went into every subsequent crystal puller that Metals
Research produced and was field retro-fitted to a number of machines.

To be honest, it's main virtue was that the output op-amp wasn't the
741 designed into the original, but - IIRR - the rather quieter OP-07,
which didn't suffer from pop-corn noise, so that the 30kW induction
heater in the puller stopped switching from full on to full off every
minute or so, but stayed running at about half power once the Ga/As
charge had heated up to 1238 °C.

The operators really liked that - it not only meant that the machine
didn't wake them up all the time but also (in theory) decreased the
thermal strain in the GaAs single crystal.

Your claim that it is a simple two-transistor oscillator thus suggests
that you are inept. When it gets down to poke and fiddle electronics
you do rather better, but when you try to be intellectual about what
you are doing the wheels do tend to fall off.

Look at my web site and see how much of that looks like fiddling.

It never looks like fiddling after you've got the circuit working.
Circuit analysis after you've got it working is almost always easy.
I rarely breadboard, and that's mostly to characterize parts that are
inadequately specified, or sometimes to play with a fun circuit. We
never prototype, because that wastes time and teaches bad habits. Our
products are designed, formally released, and built by manufacturing,
and most of the time we can sell rev A, the first release.

We don't do a lot of Spice simulation either, because we design things
that will work. What does take a lot of time is FPGA workbenching,
which makes sense because FPGA designs are usually very complex and
you can't easily probe the guts of an FPGA to find out what's wrong.

I did fix a real stumper yesterday, on a laser controller we're doing.
My guys are coding both ends of a 32-bit ARM-to-Xilinx memory-mapped
interface and three of the bits were weird. The ARM would always read
back whatever it last wrote to the FPGA, on three bits out of 32, bits
16, 17, and 18. The guys wanted to send the board out to be x-rayed,
on the assumption that the problem was bad BGA soldering on the PCB.
But two boards did the same thing, so I thought that unlikely. We
never have BGA soldering problems anyhow.

So I fortified myself with chocolate and opened the ghastly 1200-page
NXP LPC3250 manual, the trick being to ignore the big print and look
for the tiny footnotes where they hide the real horrors. Bingo, those
three bits have alternate/multiplexed functions having to do with one
DDR DRAM mode, and the ARM setup code somehow enabled the 32 bit data
bus *and* the 16-bit DRAM mode... one bit in some obscure register set
wrong, three man-days wasted. NXP lets things like that happen.

Maybe Google will index this, and somebody with the same problem will
trip across it.


--

John Larkin, President Highland Technology Inc
www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com

Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators
Custom timing and laser controllers
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links
VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
 
On 02/01/2012 05:29 AM, Martin Brown wrote:
Phil Hobbs wrote:
Bill Sloman wrote:
On Jan 31, 3:46 pm, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSensel...@electrooptical.net> wrote:

The large-scale, time-averaged structure of the Sun is determined by
hydrodynamic equilibrium, but there are smaller variations on all time
scales--0.1%-ish since good satellite measurements have been available.

As for "obvious nonsense", that's not very persuasive.
Only if you don't engage your brain. The heat output of the sun is
generated by nuclear fusion in the core - 99% of the energy is
generated within 24% of solar radius from the centre.

There may be some 100,000 years worth of output proceeding through the
sun at any one time, but it's kind of hard to imagine a mechanism
operating in the convective zone (from 70% of the solar radius out to
the surface) that could change the solar output for long enough to
create an ice age (for which the current cycle time seems to be about
100,000 years).

Those tenth-of-a-percent wobbles were widely considered impossible
too, until
there were measurements to back them up.
"Widely considered" in the absence of precise measurements is scarcely
a scientific opinion. I suspect that if anybody had actually been
asked back then they wouldn't have said that it was impossible, merely
that the weren't any observations that suggested that anything like
that might be going on. Remember that the variation is paradoxical -
the "dark" sunspots that we can see accompany an marginally increased
solar output from the adjacent bright areas which more than compensate
from the reduced radiation from the dark areas.

That's pretty amusing--you're way outside your field, Bill, and it
shows. You've shot yourself in the foot again.

If basing a claim on the excellent agreement between physics-based
models and the best available observations isn't scientific, that sort
of knocks the pins out from under your climate research friends, even on
your showing.

Stellar structure calculations based on hydrostatic equilibrium have
been made since Kelvin, and with appropriately tweaked values for the
solar composition, they model the life cycle of main sequence stars
pretty well.

Although you should remember here that Kelvin used a model of the sun to
prove that no known fuel could possibly power the sun over geological
timescales and so used it as a stick to beat Darwin over the head with.
Young Earth Creationism was obviously correct - modern historians neatly
airbrush this out and state that Lord Kelvin anticipated nuclear energy.
I hadn't forgotten, I was just talking about hydrostatic equilibrium.
And whatever the merits of Darwin's work (his reputation in
philosophical circles is not very high just now AIUI), he was personally
a bit of a git. (The Geological Society produced a fair number of those
round about that time--if you haven't read Martin Rudwick's book, "The
Great Devonian Controversy", I highly recommend it. A classic of the
history of science, and enormous fun besides.)

Schwarzschild's classic book on stellar structure was published in the
1950s, and we were still using it as a textbook in the 1980s.
My stellar structure prof at UBC, Dr. Jason Auman, was one of the first
to make a full numerical model of the Sun, back in the early 1960s when
that was hard. (Back in the day they used the photosphere to infer the
initial composition, and ran the nucleosynthesis model to figure out how
it changes with time. Progress has probably been made, but I haven't
followed it very closely.) The boundary condition used in the early
models was that the photosphere temperature was absolute zero--that
perturbed the luminosity calculation only a little.

So the previous received wisdom on the constancy of the solar constant
wasn't poorly supported at all. It was supported about as well as
anything in astronomy, and quite a bit better than anything in
climatology. It was just wrong, at least in detail. That's how science
advances.

But it was only very slightly wrong. It was historically stated as fact
that the suns output was constant in Abetti's classic "The Sun" in 1934.

The solar constant was demonstrably reliable over all of geological time
as the Earth had liquid water over all of that time so we can put bounds
on the prevailing equatorial temperature at Earth of >273 and <373.
Taking todays global average as a nice round 300 that allows you -10% to
+25% slop in temperature and so using T^4 -35% to +144% in solar flux.
(in fact you get more slop on the cold side as prehistoric atmospheres
were CO2/CH4 rich with GHG until plants polluted the planet with oxygen)
And even if it froze completely with a gradually increasing solar output
and/or a bit of lucky vulcanism you eventually get back to a goldilocks
position - not so reversable if you boil the oceans off into atmosphere
as greenhouse effects then dominate and you end up with Venus.
That's a bit of an overstatement, I think. In broad averages, the
hydrostatic solution has to work--there's nothing that's going to change
the mass of a proton or the charge on an electron, and the calculation
of luminosity on the basis of stellar mass and composition is pretty
fundamental stuff. (You can argue about the treatment of metals, but
that's a second order effect anyway.) So over timescales comparable or
longer than the thermal time constant of the Sun, I entirely agree.

But the topic came up in regards to things like the Maunder minimum,
which was only 300 years ago. That's long compared with the acoustic
timescale, but short compared with the thermal time scale. Our
satellite data span what, 10% of the time since then? I'm not saying
that I have a good mechanism for larger variations, but who knows?
Stars do funny things sometimes.

It wasn't until computer simulation codes became possible and reliable
in the mid-60's that the early details of stellar evolution could be
determined. BTW I thought it was Icko Iben at UIUC who led on this.
Jason got his Ph.D. in 1965, for doing a reasonably complete numerical
model of the Sun. I'm sure there were a fair number of people
involved--it was one of the pressing problems of the day. I haven't
seen his thesis, or read any of the other folks' stuff. I was mostly
passing on content from the class. (It was my favourite astronomy
class, closely followed by celestial mechanics.)


The solar models for the sun gave something like 2.8x10^33 erg/s and
r=6.6x10^10 cm at zero age main sequence and a current value 3.90x10^33
erg/s and r=6.94x10^10cm for our sun (astronomy was cgs back then). In
astronomy and over billions of years that is pretty much a constant
output with a tiny systematic trend of +40% over 5 billion years.

It pales into insignificance when you compare it with the +/- 10% annual
variation of insolation that variations in the Earth's orbital elements
can produce as orbital eccentricity, perihelion and inclination to the
ecliptic vary.
The measured changes do, I agree, but the very short data set we have
available doesn't prove that the Maunder minimum wasn't associated with
a century or two of lower solar output. Annual variation is too fast
and equinoctial procession is too slow to fit. Anyway, that wasn't what
I was mostly on about.

Mostly I was subjecting Bill to mild ridicule for saying that it was
unscientific to believe stellar models, when he believes climate models,
which contain far more in the way of fudge factors and parameter fitting.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
 
On Feb 1, 4:28 pm, John Larkin
<jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Wed, 1 Feb 2012 01:51:19 -0800 (PST),BillSloman

bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
On Feb 1, 2:15 am, John Larkin <jlar...@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:
On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:57:41 -0800 (PST),BillSloman

bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
On Feb 1, 12:19 am, John Larkin <jlar...@highlandtechnology.com
wrote:
On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:13:53 -0800 (PST),BillSloman

bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
On Jan 31, 7:24 pm, Joerg <inva...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Phil Hobbs wrote:
BillSlomanwrote:
On Jan 31, 3:46 pm, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSensel...@electrooptical.net> wrote:
BillSlomanwrote:

On Jan 31, 3:24 am, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSensel...@electrooptical.net> wrote:
Phil Hobbs wrote:
BillSlomanwrote:
On Jan 31, 1:13 am, John Larkin <jlar...@highlandtechnology.com
wrote:
On Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:50:47 -0800 (PST),BillSloman
bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
On Jan 30, 6:09 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:39:26 -0500, "Tom Del Rosso"
td...@verizon.net.invalid> wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
<snip>

he may well referee articles for Review of Scientific Instruments.

I doubt he'd waste his time doing that!

It's certainly not a directly productive activity - you get to see a
great many bad papers before they are published (or - mostly - not
published) and very few good papers, but if you've benefited from
reading the good stuff in Rev. Sci. Instrum. (which you don't seem to
have done) you owe the scientific community and some refereeing is an
appropriate way of paying off that debt.

I used to read RSI whan I was a kid, working summers (microwave
spectroscopy and nuclear instrument design) at LSUNO, where the
"library" (actually a trailer) had the hardcopy version.

A couple of years ago I had online access (paid!) to RSI so I culled
the past few decades of good stuff, which turned out to be not much.
The electronics tends to be somewhere between primitive and dreadful.
I've published at least one comment there saying pretty much exactly
that about a specific paper

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=4993539

and I've published comments that are only slightly less disparaging
about a couple of others. The referees they use for electronics-based
papers don't always seem to be all that good.

I can go to the nearby Mission Bay campus of UCSF and look up RSI, and
other journals, there for free, and print stuff for $1 a page. I do
that occasionally, specifically when I have some new science to
instrument.
See if you can find somebody who subscribes the the British
"Measurement Science and Technology" published by the British
Institute of Physics. It seems to publish a bit more stuff from
industry, and the electronics isn't usually too bad.

http://iopscience.iop.org/0957-0233/23/2

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
 
Bill Sloman wrote:
Before you get too enthusiastic about using the Maunder Minimum to
explain the Little Ice Age, you may want to read

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/pip/2011GL050168.shtml

which explains it in terms of no less than four substantial volcanic
eruptions which produced significant and sustained growth in the
northern ice cap.
So how big a factor is the low level of volcanism since Krakatoa?

BTW, what do you think of Lomborg?


--

Reply in group, but if emailing add one more
zero, and remove the last word.
 
On Feb 1, 6:24 pm, Phil Hobbs <pcdhSpamMeSensel...@electrooptical.net>
wrote:
On 02/01/2012 05:29 AM, Martin Brown wrote:









Phil Hobbs wrote:
Bill Sloman wrote:
On Jan 31, 3:46 pm, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSensel...@electrooptical.net> wrote:

The large-scale, time-averaged structure of the Sun is determined by
hydrodynamic equilibrium, but there are smaller variations on all time
scales--0.1%-ish since good satellite measurements have been available.

As for "obvious nonsense", that's not very persuasive.
Only if you don't engage your brain. The heat output of the sun is
generated by nuclear fusion in the core - 99% of the energy is
generated within 24% of solar radius from the centre.

There may be some 100,000 years worth of output proceeding through the
sun at any one time, but it's kind of hard to imagine a mechanism
operating in the convective zone (from 70% of the solar radius out to
the surface) that could change the solar output for long enough to
create an ice age (for which the current cycle time seems to be about
100,000 years).

Those tenth-of-a-percent wobbles were widely considered impossible
too, until
there were measurements to back them up.
"Widely considered" in the absence of precise measurements is scarcely
a scientific opinion. I suspect that if anybody had actually been
asked back then they wouldn't have said that it was impossible, merely
that the weren't any observations that suggested that anything like
that might be going on. Remember that the variation is paradoxical -
the "dark" sunspots that we can see accompany an marginally increased
solar output from the adjacent bright areas which more than compensate
from the reduced radiation from the dark areas.

That's pretty amusing--you're way outside your field, Bill, and it
shows. You've shot yourself in the foot again.

If basing a claim on the excellent agreement between physics-based
models and the best available observations isn't scientific, that sort
of knocks the pins out from under your climate research friends, even on
your showing.

Stellar structure calculations based on hydrostatic equilibrium have
been made since Kelvin, and with appropriately tweaked values for the
solar composition, they model the life cycle of main sequence stars
pretty well.

Although you should remember here that Kelvin used a model of the sun to
prove that no known fuel could possibly power the sun over geological
timescales and so used it as a stick to beat Darwin over the head with.
Young Earth Creationism was obviously correct - modern historians neatly
airbrush this out and state that Lord Kelvin anticipated nuclear energy..

I hadn't forgotten, I was just talking about hydrostatic equilibrium.
And whatever the merits of Darwin's work (his reputation in
philosophical circles is not very high just now AIUI), he was personally
a bit of a git.  (The Geological Society produced a fair number of those
round about that time--if you haven't read Martin Rudwick's book, "The
Great Devonian Controversy", I highly recommend it.  A classic of the
history of science, and enormous fun besides.)











Schwarzschild's classic book on stellar structure was published in the
1950s, and we were still using it as a textbook in the 1980s.
My stellar structure prof at UBC, Dr. Jason Auman, was one of the first
to make a full numerical model of the Sun, back in the early 1960s when
that was hard. (Back in the day they used the photosphere to infer the
initial composition, and ran the nucleosynthesis model to figure out how
it changes with time. Progress has probably been made, but I haven't
followed it very closely.) The boundary condition used in the early
models was that the photosphere temperature was absolute zero--that
perturbed the luminosity calculation only a little.

So the previous received wisdom on the constancy of the solar constant
wasn't poorly supported at all. It was supported about as well as
anything in astronomy, and quite a bit better than anything in
climatology. It was just wrong, at least in detail. That's how science
advances.

But it was only very slightly wrong. It was historically stated as fact
that the suns output was constant in Abetti's classic "The Sun" in 1934..

The solar constant was demonstrably reliable over all of geological time
as the Earth had liquid water over all of that time so we can put bounds
on the prevailing equatorial temperature at Earth of >273 and <373.
Taking todays global average as a nice round 300 that allows you -10% to
+25% slop in temperature and so using T^4 -35% to +144% in solar flux.
(in fact you get more slop on the cold side as prehistoric atmospheres
were CO2/CH4 rich with GHG until plants polluted the planet with oxygen)
And even if it froze completely with a gradually increasing solar output
and/or a bit of lucky vulcanism you eventually get back to a goldilocks
position - not so reversable if you boil the oceans off into atmosphere
as greenhouse effects then dominate and you end up with Venus.

That's a bit of an overstatement, I think.  In broad averages, the
hydrostatic solution has to work--there's nothing that's going to change
the mass of a proton or the charge on an electron, and the calculation
of luminosity on the basis of stellar mass and composition is pretty
fundamental stuff.  (You can argue about the treatment of metals, but
that's a second order effect anyway.)  So over timescales comparable or
longer than the thermal time constant of the Sun, I entirely agree.

But the topic came up in regards to things like the Maunder minimum,
which was only 300 years ago.  That's long compared with the acoustic
timescale, but short compared with the thermal time scale.  Our
satellite data span what, 10% of the time since then?   I'm not saying
that I have a good mechanism for larger variations, but who knows?
Stars do funny things sometimes.



It wasn't until computer simulation codes became possible and reliable
in the mid-60's that the early details of stellar evolution could be
determined. BTW I thought it was Icko Iben at UIUC who led on this.

Jason got his Ph.D. in 1965, for doing a reasonably complete numerical
model of the Sun.  I'm sure there were a fair number of people
involved--it was one of the pressing problems of the day.  I haven't
seen his thesis, or read any of the other folks' stuff.  I was mostly
passing on content from the class.  (It was my favourite astronomy
class, closely followed by celestial mechanics.)

The solar models for the sun gave something like 2.8x10^33 erg/s and
r=6.6x10^10 cm at zero age main sequence and a current value 3.90x10^33
erg/s and r=6.94x10^10cm for our sun (astronomy was cgs back then). In
astronomy and over billions of years that is pretty much a constant
output with a tiny systematic trend of +40% over 5 billion years.

It pales into insignificance when you compare it with the +/- 10% annual
variation of insolation that variations in the Earth's orbital elements
can produce as orbital eccentricity, perihelion and inclination to the
ecliptic vary.

The measured changes do, I agree, but the very short data set we have
available doesn't prove that the Maunder minimum wasn't associated with
a century or two of lower solar output.
If you want to propose a century or two of significantly reduced solar
output, you've got to find a plausible place to store the extra heat
that isn't getting out. Got any suggestions?

0.1% over an 11-year sun-spot cycle isn't quite as demanding.

 Annual variation is too fast
and equinoctial procession is too slow to fit.  Anyway, that wasn't what
I was mostly on about.

Mostly I was subjecting Bill to mild ridicule for saying that it was
unscientific to believe stellar models,
Which isn't what I'd said; I was objecting to the proposition that
anybody had claimed absolute stability in solar output on the basis of
a theoretical model. The theoretical model doesn't leave a lot of room
in which to store energy so that you can get fluctuations in the rate
of delivery of energy that is being produced by a fusion process that
is taking place in the core of the sun, a long way from anything that
might perturb the fusion process, but the sun's convection layer was
known to be turbulent pretty much as soon as anybody had worked out
that it had to exist, and turbulence should have suggested some small
scale variation.

when he believes climate models,
which contain far more in the way of fudge factors and parameter fitting.
The climate models required to validate anthropogenic global warming
aren't that complicated. The models required to predict how bad it
will be are more complex, and those required to predict how climate
change will screw up local weather conditions and agricultural
productivity are worse again. This doesn't mean that we ought to
ignore the problem until it is bad enough to make the modelling is
simpler.

Before you get too enthusiastic about using the Maunder Minimum to
explain the Little Ice Age, you may want to read

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/pip/2011GL050168.shtml

which explains it in terms of no less than four substantial volcanic
eruptions which produced significant and sustained growth in the
northern ice cap.

"The persistence of cold summers is best explained by consequent sea-
ice/ocean feedbacks during a hemispheric summer insolation minimum;
large changes in solar irradiance are not required."

It showed up on the science page of the Volkskrant today - on the web-
site the paper is still in press, but google shows up quite a few
references to it.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
 
Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 02/01/2012 05:29 AM, Martin Brown wrote:
Phil Hobbs wrote:

Stellar structure calculations based on hydrostatic equilibrium have
been made since Kelvin, and with appropriately tweaked values for the
solar composition, they model the life cycle of main sequence stars
pretty well.

Although you should remember here that Kelvin used a model of the sun to
prove that no known fuel could possibly power the sun over geological
timescales and so used it as a stick to beat Darwin over the head with.
Young Earth Creationism was obviously correct - modern historians neatly
airbrush this out and state that Lord Kelvin anticipated nuclear energy.

I hadn't forgotten, I was just talking about hydrostatic equilibrium.
And whatever the merits of Darwin's work (his reputation in
philosophical circles is not very high just now AIUI), he was personally
a bit of a git. (The Geological Society produced a fair number of those
round about that time--if you haven't read Martin Rudwick's book, "The
Great Devonian Controversy", I highly recommend it. A classic of the
history of science, and enormous fun besides.)
Some of Darwin's supporters were worse and cartoonists had a field day!

But his basic hypothesis and the observational foundation was sound.

Schwarzschild's classic book on stellar structure was published in the
1950s, and we were still using it as a textbook in the 1980s.
My stellar structure prof at UBC, Dr. Jason Auman, was one of the first
to make a full numerical model of the Sun, back in the early 1960s when
that was hard. (Back in the day they used the photosphere to infer the
initial composition, and ran the nucleosynthesis model to figure out how
it changes with time. Progress has probably been made, but I haven't
followed it very closely.) The boundary condition used in the early
models was that the photosphere temperature was absolute zero--that
perturbed the luminosity calculation only a little.

So the previous received wisdom on the constancy of the solar constant
wasn't poorly supported at all. It was supported about as well as
anything in astronomy, and quite a bit better than anything in
climatology. It was just wrong, at least in detail. That's how science
advances.

But it was only very slightly wrong. It was historically stated as fact
that the suns output was constant in Abetti's classic "The Sun" in 1934.

The solar constant was demonstrably reliable over all of geological time
as the Earth had liquid water over all of that time so we can put bounds
on the prevailing equatorial temperature at Earth of >273 and <373.
Taking todays global average as a nice round 300 that allows you -10% to
+25% slop in temperature and so using T^4 -35% to +144% in solar flux.
(in fact you get more slop on the cold side as prehistoric atmospheres
were CO2/CH4 rich with GHG until plants polluted the planet with oxygen)
And even if it froze completely with a gradually increasing solar output
and/or a bit of lucky vulcanism you eventually get back to a goldilocks
position - not so reversable if you boil the oceans off into atmosphere
as greenhouse effects then dominate and you end up with Venus.

That's a bit of an overstatement, I think. In broad averages, the
hydrostatic solution has to work--there's nothing that's going to change
the mass of a proton or the charge on an electron, and the calculation
of luminosity on the basis of stellar mass and composition is pretty
fundamental stuff. (You can argue about the treatment of metals, but
that's a second order effect anyway.) So over timescales comparable or
longer than the thermal time constant of the Sun, I entirely agree.
I'd be wary of claiming universal constancy of output from stars in all
cases. A proportion of stars are variable and some like Cepheids and RR
Lyrae have periods that are determined by their absolute luminosity. The
solution may be OK on average but if it bounces around the equilibrium
it doesn't have to be constant. They provide excellent standard candles
for local galaxies now as Henrietta Lovett first observed. For anyone
interested:

http://www.astronomynotes.com/ismnotes/s5.htm

And even when we think we know how they behave there are still minor
twists and turns.

http://www.astronomy.com/News-Observing/News/2011/01/Cosmology%20standard%20candle%20not%20so%20standard%20after%20all.aspx

And the sun itself is a bit quirky when you really look up close with
modern instruments. I can't find the latest but this will do:

http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/Helioseismology.shtml

But the topic came up in regards to things like the Maunder minimum,
which was only 300 years ago. That's long compared with the acoustic
timescale, but short compared with the thermal time scale. Our
satellite data span what, 10% of the time since then? I'm not saying
that I have a good mechanism for larger variations, but who knows? Stars
do funny things sometimes.
No disagreement there and on the face of it there is now evidence that
lack of sunspots and consequent changes in UV output can alter the
position of the jetstream making Northern Europe colder in winter. Not
necessarily global cooling but locallised in highly populated areas.

There is no doubt that an active sun also fluffs up and dumps energy
into the thermosphere (mainly causing extra drag on satellites) but it
might also play a very small part in warming the Earth. The pure TSI
change on its own is too small to explain the periodic variation in
temperature so some additional feedback must occur on the Earth.

But the recent warming occurred during a period where there was good
satellite monitoring of TSI so magic hand waving will not hack it.

It wasn't until computer simulation codes became possible and reliable
in the mid-60's that the early details of stellar evolution could be
determined. BTW I thought it was Icko Iben at UIUC who led on this.

Jason got his Ph.D. in 1965, for doing a reasonably complete numerical
model of the Sun. I'm sure there were a fair number of people
involved--it was one of the pressing problems of the day. I haven't
seen his thesis, or read any of the other folks' stuff. I was mostly
passing on content from the class. (It was my favourite astronomy
class, closely followed by celestial mechanics.)
I rather liked the idea that more massive stars burn much faster.
Essentially since a bigger volume inside them met the conditions for
fusion and the surface area for light to escape from scales as r^2.

The measured changes do, I agree, but the very short data set we have
available doesn't prove that the Maunder minimum wasn't associated with
a century or two of lower solar output. Annual variation is too fast
and equinoctial procession is too slow to fit. Anyway, that wasn't what
I was mostly on about.
I agree there is a distinct possibility that some of what we see as
climate change on Earth is due to changes in the sun (roughly about half
of what has been observed since 1850). Certainly during the Maunder
minimum there is a real possibility that solar TSI was lower although
Keeling and Whorf offer another explantion that I personally find more
appealing - that the tidal influence of the Sun-Moon-Earth system has
certain key periodicities which seem to be reflected in climate data.

http://www.pnas.org/content/94/16/8321.abstract

Whilst I have technical reservations about parts of their analysis
(notably how they isolated the decadal variation) I think they might be
onto something. Unfortunately the non-linear coupled oceanic circulation
model folk are all in vogue to explain this at the moment.
Mostly I was subjecting Bill to mild ridicule for saying that it was
unscientific to believe stellar models, when he believes climate models,
which contain far more in the way of fudge factors and parameter fitting.
Although they do include adjustable parameters you must know as well as
I do that in astrophysics it is just the same but you don't get many
fossil fuel lobbyists complaining about relativistic jets in distant
galaxies, cold dark matter or dark energy. I find the latter much harder
to accept since it was discovered long after my involvement. YMMV

Regards,
Martin Brown
 
Martin Brown wrote:
Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 02/01/2012 05:29 AM, Martin Brown wrote:
Phil Hobbs wrote:

Stellar structure calculations based on hydrostatic equilibrium have
been made since Kelvin, and with appropriately tweaked values for the
solar composition, they model the life cycle of main sequence stars
pretty well.

Although you should remember here that Kelvin used a model of the sun to
prove that no known fuel could possibly power the sun over geological
timescales and so used it as a stick to beat Darwin over the head with.
Young Earth Creationism was obviously correct - modern historians neatly
airbrush this out and state that Lord Kelvin anticipated nuclear energy.

I hadn't forgotten, I was just talking about hydrostatic equilibrium.
And whatever the merits of Darwin's work (his reputation in
philosophical circles is not very high just now AIUI), he was personally
a bit of a git. (The Geological Society produced a fair number of those
round about that time--if you haven't read Martin Rudwick's book, "The
Great Devonian Controversy", I highly recommend it. A classic of the
history of science, and enormous fun besides.)

Some of Darwin's supporters were worse and cartoonists had a field day!

But his basic hypothesis and the observational foundation was sound.

Schwarzschild's classic book on stellar structure was published in the
1950s, and we were still using it as a textbook in the 1980s.
My stellar structure prof at UBC, Dr. Jason Auman, was one of the first
to make a full numerical model of the Sun, back in the early 1960s when
that was hard. (Back in the day they used the photosphere to infer the
initial composition, and ran the nucleosynthesis model to figure out how
it changes with time. Progress has probably been made, but I haven't
followed it very closely.) The boundary condition used in the early
models was that the photosphere temperature was absolute zero--that
perturbed the luminosity calculation only a little.

So the previous received wisdom on the constancy of the solar constant
wasn't poorly supported at all. It was supported about as well as
anything in astronomy, and quite a bit better than anything in
climatology. It was just wrong, at least in detail. That's how science
advances.

But it was only very slightly wrong. It was historically stated as fact
that the suns output was constant in Abetti's classic "The Sun" in 1934.

The solar constant was demonstrably reliable over all of geological time
as the Earth had liquid water over all of that time so we can put bounds
on the prevailing equatorial temperature at Earth of >273 and <373.
Taking todays global average as a nice round 300 that allows you -10% to
+25% slop in temperature and so using T^4 -35% to +144% in solar flux.
(in fact you get more slop on the cold side as prehistoric atmospheres
were CO2/CH4 rich with GHG until plants polluted the planet with oxygen)
And even if it froze completely with a gradually increasing solar output
and/or a bit of lucky vulcanism you eventually get back to a goldilocks
position - not so reversable if you boil the oceans off into atmosphere
as greenhouse effects then dominate and you end up with Venus.

That's a bit of an overstatement, I think. In broad averages, the
hydrostatic solution has to work--there's nothing that's going to change
the mass of a proton or the charge on an electron, and the calculation
of luminosity on the basis of stellar mass and composition is pretty
fundamental stuff. (You can argue about the treatment of metals, but
that's a second order effect anyway.) So over timescales comparable or
longer than the thermal time constant of the Sun, I entirely agree.

I'd be wary of claiming universal constancy of output from stars in all
cases. A proportion of stars are variable and some like Cepheids and RR
Lyrae have periods that are determined by their absolute luminosity. The
solution may be OK on average but if it bounces around the equilibrium
it doesn't have to be constant. They provide excellent standard candles
for local galaxies now as Henrietta Lovett first observed. For anyone
interested:

http://www.astronomynotes.com/ismnotes/s5.htm

And even when we think we know how they behave there are still minor
twists and turns.

http://www.astronomy.com/News-Observing/News/2011/01/Cosmology%20standard%20candle%20not%20so%20standard%20after%20all.aspx

And the sun itself is a bit quirky when you really look up close with
modern instruments. I can't find the latest but this will do:

http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/Helioseismology.shtml

But the topic came up in regards to things like the Maunder minimum,
which was only 300 years ago. That's long compared with the acoustic
timescale, but short compared with the thermal time scale. Our
satellite data span what, 10% of the time since then? I'm not saying
that I have a good mechanism for larger variations, but who knows? Stars
do funny things sometimes.

No disagreement there and on the face of it there is now evidence that
lack of sunspots and consequent changes in UV output can alter the
position of the jetstream making Northern Europe colder in winter. Not
necessarily global cooling but locallised in highly populated areas.

There is no doubt that an active sun also fluffs up and dumps energy
into the thermosphere (mainly causing extra drag on satellites) but it
might also play a very small part in warming the Earth. The pure TSI
change on its own is too small to explain the periodic variation in
temperature so some additional feedback must occur on the Earth.

But the recent warming occurred during a period where there was good
satellite monitoring of TSI so magic hand waving will not hack it.

It wasn't until computer simulation codes became possible and reliable
in the mid-60's that the early details of stellar evolution could be
determined. BTW I thought it was Icko Iben at UIUC who led on this.

Jason got his Ph.D. in 1965, for doing a reasonably complete numerical
model of the Sun. I'm sure there were a fair number of people
involved--it was one of the pressing problems of the day. I haven't
seen his thesis, or read any of the other folks' stuff. I was mostly
passing on content from the class. (It was my favourite astronomy
class, closely followed by celestial mechanics.)

I rather liked the idea that more massive stars burn much faster.
Essentially since a bigger volume inside them met the conditions for
fusion and the surface area for light to escape from scales as r^2.

The measured changes do, I agree, but the very short data set we have
available doesn't prove that the Maunder minimum wasn't associated with
a century or two of lower solar output. Annual variation is too fast
and equinoctial procession is too slow to fit. Anyway, that wasn't what
I was mostly on about.

I agree there is a distinct possibility that some of what we see as
climate change on Earth is due to changes in the sun (roughly about half
of what has been observed since 1850). Certainly during the Maunder
minimum there is a real possibility that solar TSI was lower although
Keeling and Whorf offer another explantion that I personally find more
appealing - that the tidal influence of the Sun-Moon-Earth system has
certain key periodicities which seem to be reflected in climate data.

http://www.pnas.org/content/94/16/8321.abstract

Whilst I have technical reservations about parts of their analysis
(notably how they isolated the decadal variation) I think they might be
onto something. Unfortunately the non-linear coupled oceanic circulation
model folk are all in vogue to explain this at the moment.

Mostly I was subjecting Bill to mild ridicule for saying that it was
unscientific to believe stellar models, when he believes climate models,
which contain far more in the way of fudge factors and parameter fitting.

Although they do include adjustable parameters you must know as well as
I do that in astrophysics it is just the same but you don't get many
fossil fuel lobbyists complaining about relativistic jets in distant
galaxies, cold dark matter or dark energy. I find the latter much harder
to accept since it was discovered long after my involvement. YMMV

Regards,
Martin Brown
Interesting stuff, Martin, thanks.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs
--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
 
Bill Sloman wrote:
On Feb 1, 2:25 am, John Larkin <jlar...@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:06:18 -0800 (PST),BillSloman









bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:

On Feb 1, 12:47 am, Jamie
jamie_ka1lpa_not_valid_after_ka1l...@charter.net> wrote:

BillSlomanwrote:

On Jan 31, 8:58 pm, John Larkin <jlar...@highlandtechnology.com
wrote:

On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:52:55 -0800 (PST),BillSloman

bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:

On Jan 31, 5:34 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 06:31:19 -0800 (PST), mrstar...@gmail.com wrote:

On Tuesday, 31 January 2012 22:19:34 UTC+10,BillSloman wrote:

On Jan 31, 8:21 am, mrst...@gmail.com wrote:

And they have to be incredibly inept to dither for years over a simple
2-transistor oscillator.

I'm not dithering. I know exactly what I want to do, but I'm finding
it difficult to get around to actually doing it. And I'd be inept if I
though that the Baxandall class-D oscillator was a simple 2-transistor
oscillator - Jim Williams (who wasn't inept) found it tricky enough to
justify publishing six Linear Technology application notes on the
subject - AN45, AN49, AN51, AN55, AN61, and AN65.

Jim's electronic productivy was probably a million times yours.

So what? His job was to churn out application notes, mine was to put
together hardware that did specific jobs. Our situations weren't
easily comparable. My point, which you haven't been able to answer -
so you opted instead for the irrelevant insult - was that Jim
Williams, who wasn't inept, didn't find it a simple circuit.

Your claim that it is a simple two-transistor oscillator thus suggests
that you are inept. When it gets down to poke and fiddle electronics
you do rather better, but when you try to be intellectual about what
you are doing the wheels do tend to fall off.

And you're still standing around waiting for some one to come rescue
you when your wheels fail off. You see, most of us can change our own
tires, you on the other hand, as you say, are inept.

You are allowing your imagination to run away with you. I'm most
certainly not inept, and the nearest I get to sitting around and
waiting for someone to rescue me is asking if anybody has got a VBIC
models of the 2N3906 - the one I can improvise from Gummel-Poon
parameters doesn't work any better than the Gummel-Poon model, which
isn't all that surprising.

Your own level of performance - in as far as it is visible here -
doesn't really hit guru level. Self-satisfied nitwit comes closer to
the mark.

You must be another nym of AlwaysWrong. All you do any more is churn
out lame, self-aggrandizing insults.

How pathetic.


The original claim that I'm inept came from you, and was a typical
example of your responses to posts that injure your vanity. As your
insults go, it was more than usually silly, which makes it a lame
insult.You may have seen it as self-aggrandising - I can't see why you
would have bothered otherwise, though I can't imagine why you'd think
that calling me inept would make you look any better.

Jamie - who really does seem to be inept, though he's too dim to
realise it it - then jumped on the bandwaggon with an equally silly
observation, and I responded with the kind of put-down it deserved.

Calling Jamie a nitwit isn't actually wrong - though it may be an
exaggeration - and it doesn't do a thing for my status, one way or
another, so it isn't self-aggrandising. It's certainly an insult, but
his post was purely and simply a personal insult, and an insulting
response strikes me as entirely appropriate. Phil Allison or Richard
Steven Waltz would have done it better, but insults aren't really my
thing.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
What's the matter Bill? Things hitting to close to home lately?

Jamie
 
On Feb 2, 12:17 am, Jamie
<jamie_ka1lpa_not_valid_after_ka1l...@charter.net> wrote:
BillSlomanwrote:
On Feb 1, 2:25 am, John Larkin <jlar...@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:06:18 -0800 (PST),BillSloman

bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:

On Feb 1, 12:47 am, Jamie
jamie_ka1lpa_not_valid_after_ka1l...@charter.net> wrote:

BillSlomanwrote:

On Jan 31, 8:58 pm, John Larkin <jlar...@highlandtechnology.com
wrote:

On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:52:55 -0800 (PST),BillSloman

bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:

On Jan 31, 5:34 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 06:31:19 -0800 (PST), mrstar...@gmail.com wrote:

On Tuesday, 31 January 2012 22:19:34 UTC+10,BillSloman wrote:

On Jan 31, 8:21 am, mrst...@gmail.com wrote:

And they have to be incredibly inept to dither for years over a simple
2-transistor oscillator.

I'm not dithering. I know exactly what I want to do, but I'm finding
it difficult to get around to actually doing it. And I'd be inept if I
though that the Baxandall class-D oscillator was a simple 2-transistor
oscillator - Jim Williams (who wasn't inept) found it tricky enough to
justify publishing  six Linear Technology application notes on the
subject - AN45, AN49, AN51, AN55, AN61, and AN65.

Jim's electronic productivy was probably a million times yours.

So what? His job was to churn out application notes, mine was to put
together hardware that did specific jobs. Our situations weren't
easily comparable. My point, which you haven't been able to answer -
so you opted instead for the irrelevant insult - was that Jim
Williams, who wasn't inept, didn't find it a simple circuit.

Your claim that it is a simple two-transistor oscillator thus suggests
that you are inept. When it gets down to poke and fiddle electronics
you do rather better, but when you try to be intellectual about what
you are doing the wheels do tend to fall off.

 And you're still standing around waiting for some one to come rescue
you when your wheels fail off. You see, most of us can change our own
tires, you on the other hand, as you say, are inept.

You are allowing your imagination to run away with you. I'm most
certainly not inept, and the nearest I get to sitting around and
waiting for someone to rescue me is asking if anybody has got a VBIC
models of the 2N3906 - the one I can improvise from Gummel-Poon
parameters doesn't work any better than the Gummel-Poon model, which
isn't all that surprising.

Your own level of performance - in as far as it is visible here -
doesn't really hit guru level. Self-satisfied nitwit comes closer to
the mark.

You must be another nym of AlwaysWrong. All you do any more is churn
out lame, self-aggrandizing insults.

How pathetic.

The original claim that I'm inept came from you, and was a typical
example of your responses to posts that injure your vanity. As your
insults go, it was more than usually silly, which makes it a lame
insult.You may have seen it as self-aggrandising - I can't see why you
would have bothered otherwise, though I can't imagine why you'd think
that calling me inept would make you look any better.

Jamie - who really does seem to be inept, though he's too dim to
realise it it - then jumped on the bandwaggon with an equally silly
observation, and I responded with the kind of put-down it deserved.

Calling Jamie a nitwit isn't actually wrong - though it may be an
exaggeration - and it doesn't do a thing for my status, one way or
another, so it isn't self-aggrandising. It's certainly an insult, but
his post was purely and simply a personal insult, and an insulting
response strikes me as entirely appropriate. Phil Allison or Richard
Steven Waltz would have done it better, but insults aren't really my
thing.

What's the matter Bill? Things hitting to close to home lately?
Not that I've noticed. And you don't qualify as thing - if you were
harbouring any delusions about your own status - and barely even
qualify as an object of derision.

Apologies to the usegroup for giving this much attention to the twit.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
 
Bill Sloman wrote:

On Feb 2, 12:17 am, Jamie
jamie_ka1lpa_not_valid_after_ka1l...@charter.net> wrote:

BillSlomanwrote:

On Feb 1, 2:25 am, John Larkin <jlar...@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:06:18 -0800 (PST),BillSloman

bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:

On Feb 1, 12:47 am, Jamie
jamie_ka1lpa_not_valid_after_ka1l...@charter.net> wrote:

BillSlomanwrote:

On Jan 31, 8:58 pm, John Larkin <jlar...@highlandtechnology.com
wrote:

On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:52:55 -0800 (PST),BillSloman

bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:

On Jan 31, 5:34 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 06:31:19 -0800 (PST), mrstar...@gmail.com wrote:

On Tuesday, 31 January 2012 22:19:34 UTC+10,BillSloman wrote:

On Jan 31, 8:21 am, mrst...@gmail.com wrote:

And they have to be incredibly inept to dither for years over a simple
2-transistor oscillator.

I'm not dithering. I know exactly what I want to do, but I'm finding
it difficult to get around to actually doing it. And I'd be inept if I
though that the Baxandall class-D oscillator was a simple 2-transistor
oscillator - Jim Williams (who wasn't inept) found it tricky enough to
justify publishing six Linear Technology application notes on the
subject - AN45, AN49, AN51, AN55, AN61, and AN65.

Jim's electronic productivy was probably a million times yours.

So what? His job was to churn out application notes, mine was to put
together hardware that did specific jobs. Our situations weren't
easily comparable. My point, which you haven't been able to answer -
so you opted instead for the irrelevant insult - was that Jim
Williams, who wasn't inept, didn't find it a simple circuit.

Your claim that it is a simple two-transistor oscillator thus suggests
that you are inept. When it gets down to poke and fiddle electronics
you do rather better, but when you try to be intellectual about what
you are doing the wheels do tend to fall off.

And you're still standing around waiting for some one to come rescue
you when your wheels fail off. You see, most of us can change our own
tires, you on the other hand, as you say, are inept.

You are allowing your imagination to run away with you. I'm most
certainly not inept, and the nearest I get to sitting around and
waiting for someone to rescue me is asking if anybody has got a VBIC
models of the 2N3906 - the one I can improvise from Gummel-Poon
parameters doesn't work any better than the Gummel-Poon model, which
isn't all that surprising.

Your own level of performance - in as far as it is visible here -
doesn't really hit guru level. Self-satisfied nitwit comes closer to
the mark.

You must be another nym of AlwaysWrong. All you do any more is churn
out lame, self-aggrandizing insults.

How pathetic.

The original claim that I'm inept came from you, and was a typical
example of your responses to posts that injure your vanity. As your
insults go, it was more than usually silly, which makes it a lame
insult.You may have seen it as self-aggrandising - I can't see why you
would have bothered otherwise, though I can't imagine why you'd think
that calling me inept would make you look any better.

Jamie - who really does seem to be inept, though he's too dim to
realise it it - then jumped on the bandwaggon with an equally silly
observation, and I responded with the kind of put-down it deserved.

Calling Jamie a nitwit isn't actually wrong - though it may be an
exaggeration - and it doesn't do a thing for my status, one way or
another, so it isn't self-aggrandising. It's certainly an insult, but
his post was purely and simply a personal insult, and an insulting
response strikes me as entirely appropriate. Phil Allison or Richard
Steven Waltz would have done it better, but insults aren't really my
thing.

What's the matter Bill? Things hitting to close to home lately?


Not that I've noticed. And you don't qualify as thing - if you were
harbouring any delusions about your own status - and barely even
qualify as an object of derision.

Apologies to the usegroup for giving this much attention to the twit.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
I am glade you apologized to the group, it is only a small step but
at least you're starting to get it.

Maybe somewhere along the lines, you may even start admitting to be
misinformed, about many things.

Jamie
 
On Feb 2, 3:45 am, Jamie
<jamie_ka1lpa_not_valid_after_ka1l...@charter.net> wrote:
BillSlomanwrote:
On Feb 2, 12:17 am, Jamie
jamie_ka1lpa_not_valid_after_ka1l...@charter.net> wrote:

BillSlomanwrote:

On Feb 1, 2:25 am, John Larkin <jlar...@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:06:18 -0800 (PST),BillSloman

bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:

On Feb 1, 12:47 am, Jamie
jamie_ka1lpa_not_valid_after_ka1l...@charter.net> wrote:

BillSlomanwrote:

On Jan 31, 8:58 pm, John Larkin <jlar...@highlandtechnology.com
wrote:

On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:52:55 -0800 (PST),BillSloman

bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:

On Jan 31, 5:34 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 06:31:19 -0800 (PST), mrstar...@gmail.com wrote:

On Tuesday, 31 January 2012 22:19:34 UTC+10,BillSloman wrote:

On Jan 31, 8:21 am, mrst...@gmail.com wrote:

And they have to be incredibly inept to dither for years over a simple
2-transistor oscillator.

I'm not dithering. I know exactly what I want to do, but I'm finding
it difficult to get around to actually doing it. And I'd be inept if I
though that the Baxandall class-D oscillator was a simple 2-transistor
oscillator - Jim Williams (who wasn't inept) found it tricky enough to
justify publishing  six Linear Technology application notes on the
subject - AN45, AN49, AN51, AN55, AN61, and AN65.

Jim's electronic productivy was probably a million times yours.

So what? His job was to churn out application notes, mine was to put
together hardware that did specific jobs. Our situations weren't
easily comparable. My point, which you haven't been able to answer -
so you opted instead for the irrelevant insult - was that Jim
Williams, who wasn't inept, didn't find it a simple circuit.

Your claim that it is a simple two-transistor oscillator thus suggests
that you are inept. When it gets down to poke and fiddle electronics
you do rather better, but when you try to be intellectual about what
you are doing the wheels do tend to fall off.

And you're still standing around waiting for some one to come rescue
you when your wheels fail off. You see, most of us can change our own
tires, you on the other hand, as you say, are inept.

You are allowing your imagination to run away with you. I'm most
certainly not inept, and the nearest I get to sitting around and
waiting for someone to rescue me is asking if anybody has got a VBIC
models of the 2N3906 - the one I can improvise from Gummel-Poon
parameters doesn't work any better than the Gummel-Poon model, which
isn't all that surprising.

Your own level of performance - in as far as it is visible here -
doesn't really hit guru level. Self-satisfied nitwit comes closer to
the mark.

You must be another nym of AlwaysWrong. All you do any more is churn
out lame, self-aggrandizing insults.

How pathetic.

The original claim that I'm inept came from you, and was a typical
example of your responses to posts that injure your vanity. As your
insults go, it was more than usually silly, which makes it a lame
insult.You may have seen it as self-aggrandising - I can't see why you
would have bothered otherwise, though I can't imagine why you'd think
that calling me inept would make you look any better.

Jamie - who really does seem to be inept, though he's too dim to
realise it it - then jumped on the bandwaggon with an equally silly
observation, and I responded with the kind of put-down it deserved.

Calling Jamie a nitwit isn't actually wrong - though it may be an
exaggeration - and it doesn't do a thing for my status, one way or
another, so it isn't self-aggrandising. It's certainly an insult, but
his post was purely and simply a personal insult, and an insulting
response strikes me as entirely appropriate. Phil Allison or Richard
Steven Waltz would have done it better, but insults aren't really my
thing.

What's the matterBill? Things hitting to close to home lately?

Not that I've noticed. And you don't qualify as thing - if you were
harbouring any delusions about your own status - and barely even
qualify as an object of derision.

Apologies to the usegroup for giving this much attention to the twit.

   I am glade you apologized to the group, it is only a small step but
at least you're starting to get it.

    Maybe somewhere along the lines, you may even start admitting to be
misinformed, about many things.
On those rare occasions when I have proved to be misinformed, I do
admit it. One of the reasons that I post here is that it tests the
state of my knowledge. You - on the other hand - don't know much, a
lot of what you think you know isn't so, and you show no capacity for
becoming better informed. To cap it all, you are so unaware of your
ignorance that you presume to tell me that I'm misinformed on many
subjects.

Thanks for the moment of amusement. I hope the rest of the group finds
it equally funny.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
 
Bill Sloman wrote:

On Feb 2, 3:45 am, Jamie
jamie_ka1lpa_not_valid_after_ka1l...@charter.net> wrote:

BillSlomanwrote:

On Feb 2, 12:17 am, Jamie
jamie_ka1lpa_not_valid_after_ka1l...@charter.net> wrote:

BillSlomanwrote:

On Feb 1, 2:25 am, John Larkin <jlar...@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:06:18 -0800 (PST),BillSloman

bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:

On Feb 1, 12:47 am, Jamie
jamie_ka1lpa_not_valid_after_ka1l...@charter.net> wrote:

BillSlomanwrote:

On Jan 31, 8:58 pm, John Larkin <jlar...@highlandtechnology.com
wrote:

On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:52:55 -0800 (PST),BillSloman

bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:

On Jan 31, 5:34 pm, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 06:31:19 -0800 (PST), mrstar...@gmail.com wrote:

On Tuesday, 31 January 2012 22:19:34 UTC+10,BillSloman wrote:

On Jan 31, 8:21 am, mrst...@gmail.com wrote:

And they have to be incredibly inept to dither for years over a simple
2-transistor oscillator.

I'm not dithering. I know exactly what I want to do, but I'm finding
it difficult to get around to actually doing it. And I'd be inept if I
though that the Baxandall class-D oscillator was a simple 2-transistor
oscillator - Jim Williams (who wasn't inept) found it tricky enough to
justify publishing six Linear Technology application notes on the
subject - AN45, AN49, AN51, AN55, AN61, and AN65.

Jim's electronic productivy was probably a million times yours.

So what? His job was to churn out application notes, mine was to put
together hardware that did specific jobs. Our situations weren't
easily comparable. My point, which you haven't been able to answer -
so you opted instead for the irrelevant insult - was that Jim
Williams, who wasn't inept, didn't find it a simple circuit.

Your claim that it is a simple two-transistor oscillator thus suggests
that you are inept. When it gets down to poke and fiddle electronics
you do rather better, but when you try to be intellectual about what
you are doing the wheels do tend to fall off.

And you're still standing around waiting for some one to come rescue
you when your wheels fail off. You see, most of us can change our own
tires, you on the other hand, as you say, are inept.

You are allowing your imagination to run away with you. I'm most
certainly not inept, and the nearest I get to sitting around and
waiting for someone to rescue me is asking if anybody has got a VBIC
models of the 2N3906 - the one I can improvise from Gummel-Poon
parameters doesn't work any better than the Gummel-Poon model, which
isn't all that surprising.

Your own level of performance - in as far as it is visible here -
doesn't really hit guru level. Self-satisfied nitwit comes closer to
the mark.

You must be another nym of AlwaysWrong. All you do any more is churn
out lame, self-aggrandizing insults.

How pathetic.

The original claim that I'm inept came from you, and was a typical
example of your responses to posts that injure your vanity. As your
insults go, it was more than usually silly, which makes it a lame
insult.You may have seen it as self-aggrandising - I can't see why you
would have bothered otherwise, though I can't imagine why you'd think
that calling me inept would make you look any better.

Jamie - who really does seem to be inept, though he's too dim to
realise it it - then jumped on the bandwaggon with an equally silly
observation, and I responded with the kind of put-down it deserved.

Calling Jamie a nitwit isn't actually wrong - though it may be an
exaggeration - and it doesn't do a thing for my status, one way or
another, so it isn't self-aggrandising. It's certainly an insult, but
his post was purely and simply a personal insult, and an insulting
response strikes me as entirely appropriate. Phil Allison or Richard
Steven Waltz would have done it better, but insults aren't really my
thing.

What's the matterBill? Things hitting to close to home lately?

Not that I've noticed. And you don't qualify as thing - if you were
harbouring any delusions about your own status - and barely even
qualify as an object of derision.

Apologies to the usegroup for giving this much attention to the twit.

I am glade you apologized to the group, it is only a small step but
at least you're starting to get it.

Maybe somewhere along the lines, you may even start admitting to be
misinformed, about many things.


On those rare occasions when I have proved to be misinformed, I do
admit it. One of the reasons that I post here is that it tests the
state of my knowledge. You - on the other hand - don't know much, a
I guess your method of testing has failed ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
lot of what you think you know isn't so, and you show no capacity for
becoming better informed. To cap it all, you are so unaware of your
ignorance that you presume to tell me that I'm misinformed on many
subjects.

Thanks for the moment of amusement. I hope the rest of the group finds
it equally funny.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
But like you said above, you test your knowledge. Your test has failed
you grossly.. Like I said before, misinformed.

Didn't your mother tell you to believe half of what you see and
nothing of what you hear?


Jamie
 
amdx wrote:
Met Office releases new figures which show no warming in 15 years
Met = UK's National Weather Service
Some of the rivers are already in the process of freezing over:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/n/a/2012/02/03/international/i055420S51.DTL

[...]

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
 

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