It was boron in post #336.
Very impressive either way, but boron isn't toxic.
-Gnobuddy
Yeah, still saddens me a bit to think of all that work ending up wasted. At the time, I didn't have much time to worry about that, I was too busy scrambling to find a way to keep paying the mortgage so we wouldn't lose our house.
These days, there are some free, open-source alternatives. I haven't really tried any of them, other than a brief experiment with Octave a while ago. ( https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/ )
As far as I know, scientists still use a lot of Fortran. There is a huge body of legacy code that no-one wants to re-write. Bugs in scientific software used to publish research papers could have very, very bad consequences. And researchers don't care much about how fashionable their software happens to be.Those programs were ported from Fortran orginals!! That's showing my age..
For myself, I've been using mostly Javascript for my own little projects in recent years. The GUI is super-easy (just HTML), all you need is a good browser, and the language keeps growing capabilities. Manipulating and generating audio, for instance, is pretty simple these days.
-Gnobuddy
I was not aware of the importance of the difference between active and passive. Thou exploit language, which blurs that logical difference. A needle tracking a groove is not really changing its speed according to waves written into the groove, but its speed becomes changed by the waves within the groove. The needle is passive. Opposite example: A laser tracking a groove is not really tracking but sampling it, because it either consists of an electromagnetic wave or a particle stream, both of which are changing at all time, the first in a determined way, the second at random. A laser is active.
Let your mind run a 100 miles per minute about AFM tips. Vinyl is child's play in comparison. Mechano-optical FTW.
And, yes long boron fiber reinforced plastic is stupidly good for stiffness:weight. I'm sure plenty a woven high modulus CFRP with optimal resin ratio (carbon multiwall nanotubes aren't so necessary for stiffness as strength/durability IIRC, but why not add that in?) will get you very far, though.
The point is that normal human language - words and thoughts - do not do a very good job of explaining and describing how the physical world around us actually operates. We (humankind) found out the hard way, that only mathematics (in the form of physics), combined with the scientific method, actually works, lets us understand what's happening, and make progress as a species.
As an example, for thousands of years, people used words to describe how all the planets appeared to wobble through the sky, occasionally, and quite inexplicably, reversing directions for a while ("retrograde motion"). Careful observations let them see the weird things that planets apparently did, but nobody had a clue why.
It took at least three huge insights to clear up the confusion: Galileo figured out the earth wasn't the center of the solar system, the sun was. Using that insight, Kepler realized that the planet's movement wasn't weird and wobbly, just a straightforward ellipse around the sun, and he figured out some mathematical relationships that planets followed (though he had no idea why). And then Newton came along and reduced the whole thing to a three-letter equation that explained it all, and a million more natural phenomena: f=ma.
Thousands of years of arguing that celestial angels pushed the planets into retrograde motion every now and then led absolutely nowhere. But the very counter-intuitive f=ma led, eventually, to NASA, JPL, moon landings, ICBMs, satellite trips to all the planets, and so many other advances that I can't even begin to think of them all.
In a nutshell: words and imaginings fail us completely if we're trying to figure out how the world works. They are worse than useless, because we may fool ourselves into thinking we understand something that we do not.
For example: "The sun cannot be the center of the solar system, because if it was, the earth would be whooshing along at a tremendous speed, and none of us feels the earth whooshing along, so it must be standing still. So the earth is the center of the solar system."
Those words sound pretty convincing, if you've never heard of Galileo, or Kepler, or Newton. So convincing that pretty much every human who lived prior to 1609 believed them. And yet, they were all completely wrong!
Neither sentence is a full and correct description, because ordinary language stinks at describing physical phenomena.
What actually happens is f=ma; the walls of the vinyl groove exert force (f) on the tip of the stylus, and it accelerates away in response (a). Yes, it's velocity changes, as does its position. How? According to the laws of calculus, also invented by Isaac Newton.
Can you see that both those statements mean literally nothing? It's like saying "A cactus is flarble. A rock is glubrub." There are words, there is a period at the end, but it conveys no objective reality.
Now, your eyes work the same way the laser does - using light, i.e, a stream of photons, or if you prefer, an electromagnetic wave. So, if a laser is "active", are your eyes "active" too, according to you?
The muscles in your body are a collection of atoms, like the record player needle, and not light, like the laser. Since the needle is "passive", are the muscles in your body "passive" too, according to you?
Passive muscles? Active eyes? What on earth?
You see? This sort of language is meaningless. It's like saying "Friday is square, and Sunday is triangular". That might make a good line of poetry, or a good lyric in a Joni Mitchell song. It sounds good, it fires up the imagination, it is creative.
But it's actually useless at communicating information, and therefore, completely useless for understanding anything.
-Gnobuddy
If I ever start a band, perhaps I'll call it Flarble. It has a nice ring to it, no?
-Gnobuddy
Language is imperfect, but so is mathematics. Mister Goedel proved, that any formal system can create expressions, which cannot become proven within that formal system. This is, because mathematics are designed to be abstract, out of life, hence cannot become proven by anything. (The only touch of mathematics with life is statistical). Only life can prove life. So i will continue to call a needle following an external force passive and a laser emitting power active.
Just another quick stab at bandwidth of the Compact Disc: A certain digital oscilloscope samples one trillion times per second, yet its -3dB bandwidth is only 100 MHz, not 500 MHz, as sampling theorem allows. This is, because electro-technicians care about impulse response and do not like their laboratory equipment to ring. Yet consumers are supposed to bear ringing? Because they are that stupid to fall for that telepathic stuff anyway? Eh?
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