Well, if I subract my mortgage from what my house is worth I end up with a negative amount of money I own.
It's great to realize it is only abstract! I'll call the bank tomorrow to give them the news
jan didden
Hi Jan,
Money itself is an abstract concept, particularly so since the gold standard was tossed. Money only has the value we humans assign to it. It can be rapidly created and destroyed only out of other peoples opinion of it's momentary value. One only need to look at the rapid value multiplication of some hot IPO to see wealth creation taking place pretty much out of thin air. Likewise, many established large corporations have vaporized wealth just as quickly.
Those of us who work for a living are conditioned to see a linear relationship between money and our time/efforts. To earn more money we have to work longer and harder. This is an illusion. Money or wealth has no intrinsically linear realtionship to hours worked. Which how Bill Gates amd Warren Buffet can each be worth on the vicinty of $50B.
Yes, it certainly is no illusion that the mortgage banks want their money or will use the courts and sheriff to evict us. The enforcement of currency payment is real enough. Ask yourself this, should the real estate market dramatically improve, and your home equity become positive, what really changed about your home? The intrinsic value it provides to you as your residence is unaltered. Yet markets, often acting on emotional whim, can either make you wealthy or get you evicted.
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You never know. There are companies out there making power converters that work at 77kelvin, liquid nitrogen. It's more efficient to run the dc to dc's in cryo because of switching losses, and the higher voltage low current warm to cold transitions are cheaper to cool than a 20 or 30 kiloamp one. Helium operating temperatures are considerably more difficult however....diode forward voltage drops can climb to anywhere between 10 and 30 volts at 4.5 kelvin. It's actually a feature I've used to my advantage. MRI's use it as well.
Kinda wished they had spent more money learning how to solder though. That error cost them 50 million (US) in hardware, 50 million(US) in manpower, 1.5 years, and more importantly....face..
Cheers, jn
ps..I do recall doing electrical tests on a sapphire substrate based fet back in '81. Had to test the chips delivered in waffle packs. I remember gate leakage was below the equipment capability, I could only go down to about 10 femptoamps, attoamps were not very realiable readings...
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Thing is that the money they loaned you is just a figure on your account....You sign a paper...get the money in you account...buy a house or materials...The seller then deposits some of your money/debt back in the bank...The bank than gears the money they got back from your loan by a factor 100, so they can make more loans...and thus is a gigantic bubble made from the purest of air and some signatures.... 
I don't disagree with you on that, but disagree with your example on the -1 apple. That is very real: it's an apple I owe. I don't have it so you can't touch it but as soon as I get it I can.
If you say that math and reality are not necessarily the same you're on dangerous ground. We use math to send probes to Mars and the math bloody well corresponds to reality because the probe gets there. If the reality of the mechanical construction and electronics hold together.
janwe :
Keithly made a 10^17 Ohm saphire insulated electrometer, as a joke the service manual showed two 1N914's as protection on the input.
Did you hear about the empty Heineken can incident at CERN?
No.. I did hear about the baguette dropped on a feedthrough by a bird.
Heineken??? Clearly, nobody would take credit for drinking that, right??
Cheers, jn
ps..just googled it... Nope, I never heard about it.
We had the same kind of problem here, somebody left a wadded up paper towel (rag on a roll) in the beam pipe. The controls guys actually steered the beam around the wad using the dipole magnets...how they figured that out, I have no idea..but holy mackeral, they were good!!!
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Yah, I remember that honkin tome..If I'm not mistaken, you either pointed me to that, or you actually sent it to me.
It went no further than the essex article on this topic. Nowhere in it did he elaborate on the test setup, the errors, the inductance internal to the wires, no baseline of the test setup...
It did have other musings, things like capacitors...but posting that it might contain further elaboration in support of a poor test setup, nope.
Cheers, jn
Not sure I agree. There is a view that maths is discovered by us. We may invent the symbols, the language of maths, but the concepts already existed before we knew about them. On this view, reality and maths have a common origin. I can't say more, as it would be seriously OT!Ken Newton said:
I don't disagree with you on that, but disagree with your example on the -1 apple. That is very real: it's an apple I owe. I don't have it so you can't touch it but as soon as I get it I can.
If you say that math and reality are not necessarily the same you're on dangerous ground. We use math to send probes to Mars and the math bloody well corresponds to reality because the probe gets there. If the reality of the mechanical construction and electronics hold together.
janwe :
Yes, but the math does not dictate reality, reality must dictate the math. These are not reversible principles. I find it interesting that such a basic logical notion of which dictates the definition of the other, seems to provoke confusion and even some mild offense.
Right on DF96! You tell him.
Math is just a type of language - language is abstract especially when you don't speak it, but different languages can be used to describe the same thing in most cases.
English still doesn't have a neuter term to describe people in general, so in talking about people we use "He." Some use "he/she," in some cases and is a kind of a political correctness, so women don't feel bad, or just to be clear. We are so far behind!
Math is just a type of language - language is abstract especially when you don't speak it, but different languages can be used to describe the same thing in most cases.
English still doesn't have a neuter term to describe people in general, so in talking about people we use "He." Some use "he/she," in some cases and is a kind of a political correctness, so women don't feel bad, or just to be clear. We are so far behind!
I can essentially agree with that. Although, I would say that reality has rules which define existence in our universe. Material and energies in this universe inter-relate according to such rules. So, in that sense, yes, math coexists as the language which precisley describes these rules. We observe phenomena and search for the rules, the math, which are governing it. The important distinction is that the history of science is filled with math which we though completely desribed some rule of existance, only to have further observation reveal our understanding to have been incomplete or even faulty. In those cases, the math is revised to reflect reality, the reality isn't revised to reflect the math. This is more than a distinction without a difference.
Is this the one about "fuzzy distortion"? I took that to mean that carriers injected into the BJT's base come in integral quantities, so in effect "quantized" the input current in very small signal very high Beta situations. I'm not smart enough to say whether or not it's real, but it's certainly interesting. Any comments?
Thanks,
Chris
Ken, right on! I am always annoyed when I find that Ohm's law is sometimes violated, or that our galaxy needs dark matter to keep it together. I thought that my education in Newtonian laws, 50 years ago, were a darn good approximation of how the galaxies hung together. Oh well, so much for math! '-)
Nope that's the wrong way around. We observe patterns in the behaviour of nature and infer that there are rules - however the rules are an artifact of thinking. Nature just has habits which we observe. We use math to model those habits and our models evolve over time. Math no more governs reality than grammar governs what people write in a natural language.
So when you said "see various tests from me and my collieagues (sic) on capacitors, cd-players and amplifiers," how am I supposed to do that?
Yes, i remember that although i have never seen some official presentation of data.
Under the question you have quoted, the exclusion of socalled outliers were indeed highly questionable.
But, although i personally don´t like the ABX-protocol and had to note that listeners had the same problems in ABX-tests, it seems that people who are used to the ABX are able to get useful results. Bruno Putzeys would be one example for this group-
There is actually no need to rely on ABX as there other methods to choose from.
The ITU for example relies on ABC/HR or MUSHRA.
That seems to happen quite often. Demonstration of extra high quality attempts on lower than average systems. Hard to understand.
The "ABX mafia" might exist, but the ABX supporter group is as heterogen as every other group, i think.
See for example Arny´s ABX website- as long as it did work, he at least emphasized the need of training to get used to controlled listening tests and that was a really good advice.
Otoh, interesting enough his posts over at hydrogenaudio wrt to the Pras/Guastavino ABX on Hi-res/downsampled material were quite funny.
At that time i read the comments of the anonymous professor in the Audio Critic, but had not read (and have still not) Hawksford´s article and afair the anonymous got at least two things wrong in his rather short statement.
The funny thing is, that according to jneutrons arguments, the anonymous professor might have missed a lot more.
So it´s time to read the original papers.
Sorry for the inconvenience, but i thought i did post some descriptions of these tests over the years?!
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