Ray Garrison

Guys, guys, guys... There's this thing called the "internet".... it has this thing called "wikipedia"... if you go there and type in "5 way binding post" you get: Commonly designed in a style called five way or universal, such binding posts allow the connection of several different types of connections: Banana plugs, inserted into the open end of the binding post Pin connectors, inserted into a hole drilled through the metal post and clamped by the screw-down portion of the binding post. Bare wire inserted through the same hole and clamped, or Wrapped around the metal post and clamped. A lug terminal inserted around the metal post and clamped.

They're very bright in Mount Shasta. I'm tellin' you, it'd be a great pilgrimage location.... It's not until you have the chance to go someplace where you can really see the stars that you realize how much we've lost with the encroachment of large cities, lights and smog... a few years ago I spent several winters in Del Norte, Colorado on my girlfriend's ranch. About 225 miles southwest of Denver, 7900 ft up in the air in the Sangre de Cristo mountains. Population was about 760 when I was there. We could sit on her front porch at night, and watch the satellites fly by overhead. I've never, ever been anyplace else where the stars were so thick and so close.

Burrr..... you must be part Inuit. I keep mine set on 76 during the winter, and about 82 during the summer when the A/C is needed (not frequently)

.Nope. The wheel experiences no net forward motion due to the conveyor, per the given state. The wheel spins in a forward direction relative to the airplane The conveyor's surface at the point of contact moves towards the rear of the airplane, thus the conveyor moves backwards. Its all relative... And still the preoccupation with the red herring conveyor which has nothing to do with whether the plane can fly. You guys would be an ideal audience for a magician! (and TV 'wrassling' - sure its real!) Just a thought on the TV wrestling reference... think about this. A 250 pound guy climbs 6 feet up a corner post, jumps 15 feet through the air, and lands on top of another 250 pound guy without killing either of them. That, to me, seems like it would take quite a bit of athletic ability. The outcomes are scripted and the acting is usually a bit over the top, but the athleticism is real.

That's certainly an improvement. How do you prove they didn't pay you?

At the risk of exposing my own ignorance, I don't see what's "wrong" with hooking an eq up between the pre-out and the main-in. As long as the input circuitry on the eq has the headroom so as to not be overdriven by the pre-out, and it has enough signal output to drive the amp section, what exactly do you think is wrong here? If I'm applying, say, a 6dB boost to the bass at 32 cycles, that is 6db relative to some baseline (say, the output level at 1 kHz). If I raise or lower the baseline by turning the volume on the preamp up or down, I am not changing the fact that I am still raising the 32 Hz level by 6dB relative to the rest of the signal. If I have a really good preamp that's capable of putting out a signal well in excess of 2 volts, and an insensitive amp that needs a lot of voltage to reach peak output, and I put a cheap eq in between them that peeters out at anything much over 1.5 or 2 volts, then I might seriously compromise the sound, but it's not because of the eq per se, it's because I have a cheap box throttling the system.

Interesting, but I disagree with your conclusion. While at the point of contact the bottom of the wheel is stationary with respect to the conveyor, this is only true for a period of time while they are in contact, which with a nondeforming perfectly round wheel and perfectly flat belt would be tending to zero. Actually, the wheel is scurrying away westword with that contact point defining a cycloid curve.

Fishing, photography (Sony a100 and a bunch of Minolta lenses), attending to 8 year old Cub Scout

I sold a few things on EBay about 6 years ago with no problem (pair of La Scalas, subwoofer, fly rod), but then had a run of totally dismal results. I had a lot of computer equipment I was liquidating after my dot com imploded, and I was selling it under my personal EBay account. I must have listed 4 or 5 dozen different individual auctions - laptops, couple of servers, some switches, you get the idea. In *EVERY* *SINGLE* *CASE* I received bids on the items that cleared my (low) reserves, then the buyers disappeared. Try to contact the 2nd, 3rd, 4th place buyer, nothing. My guess is that during the 2001 / 2002 meltdown buyers were in the habit of bidding on many, many different laptops, then honoring whichever auction came thought with the lowest winning bid and bailing on the others. EBay, meantime, was insisting that since I had a completed transaction I owed them their fees. I tried to tell them that *NONE* of the buyers had actually *BOUGHT* anything, but EBay didn't believe me. Started sending me dunning letters, got a negative entry on my credit report according to Experian, finally EBay closed my account and refused to let me open another one.

Marvel really got me thinking, and I had this cool rhyme about this guy... ... but somehow it just seemed, I dunno, inappropriate somehow...

Amy and Ear, re the Diet Soda thing... I always drink diet soda because there's so much sugar in the regular stuff that it makes me stomach sick, and I don't really care for the taste. Doesn't matter whether I'm having a lunch consisiting of a veggie salad with light dressing or a mega double cheeseburger with extra bacon, I'll order either a black coffee or a diet coke to drink. Has nothing to do with the calories in the drink, I just like it better.

[^o)] ...puzzled and scratching head...

The future has a humorus way of appearing in exactly the form SciFi predicted it would take, yet not resembling our expectations or assumptions. This hit me like a tonne of bricks a couple of years ago. One of my partners had just gotten a BlueTooth headset for his phone and taken to wearing it all the time. I was standing in front of him having a conversation about some mundane thing, and all of a sudden it was like someone pulled a curtain over his face. He stopped talking in mid-sentance, had this far away blank expression on his face, then starting talking in what seemed to me to be gibberish, completely unrelated to anything we'd been talking about. Then i realized he'd gotten a call, and was talking to someone only he could hear. It was like the BlueTooth headset was plugged directly into his brain, and completely took over when the call came in. Then it hit me. It was like watching a scene from SG1 or any other SciFi show where the population is enslaved by the ever present Net (always capitalized) that dictates thoughts and actions to the helpless masses through implants on the side of their heads. Holy crap. I have met the future and he is us. Now I can't help but be fascinated by the number of mindless automotons I see walking around with wireless headsets in their ears, their attention and consciousness focused on something else, someplace else, far away from their physical body. The future done snuck up on us when we wasn't lookin. I don't really fear that some AI is going to suddently develop consciousness, infiltrate the Web and the Net and take over control of civilization like some crazy Sarah Conner nightmare. But what could easily happen, and wouldn't look too much different, would be some terrorist (or bored 8th grader) unleashing a virus that DID infiltrate the Net, DID take down power plants, communication systems, MAE East and MAE West with devistating consequences.

"So much to noodle, so little time. So few answers..." "So little time" is relative. Think of the changes you've seen in your life, how different even the most mundane tasks and chores we deal with every day from those of your parent's parents. Most of the life on this planet does not have the advantage of living 50, 75 or even 100 years (if lucky) to see events come and go, assumptions rise and fall, truths and postulates presented and retracted. The world as we know it today would be unrecognizeable to someone from even a hundred years ago. Scientific American has a page that reprints copy from 50, 100 and 150 years ago. A few months ago there was a reprint from a late 19th century issue in which an offhand comment was made regarding the moon. The gist of it was that truly knowing what the moon was composed of, what the surface was like, actually touching it was something that would remain forever beyond the experience of man. And that perception was presented as a simple, uncontestable and immutable fact, a simple statement of the nature of reality and an acceptance of its laws. There was absolutely no room for consideration that someday, perhaps, a man might actually visit there. I think of this whenever I read an argument talking about the distances between the stars and how this forever precludes the possibility of life of one form traveling to and interacting with life in some other form. Perhaps a touch too much Merlot tonight. Then again, my first post was on 9/8/1999. The world we live in today is so different than that world that I believe, sometimes, that I am not that person. Music provides one continuity - my family another. What will I be typing in some thread in this forum in 2018?

I find the whole question of whether there might be life someplace else in the universe to be so silly that I find it hard to understand some of the points of view I hear. There are on the order of 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, and each contains on the order of 100 billion stars. That's ten to the twenty second stars. Do you have any idea how remote the probability of life occuring would have to be in order for there to be no life out there? Even if there's only one chance in a million that life might form in some star system, that would leave, uh, ten quadrillion places where life started. Some of them, surely, would be at least as smart as we are. Now, whether they've happened to stroll past our little out of the way corner of the Sagitarius arm of the Milky Way galaxy any time that we've been around to notice is another question entirely. Probably not, we're not that interesting.

I'd use EBay to experiment with a bunch of different kinds of used integrateds in an attempt to find out what "family" of sound you prefer - tube or solid state, mosfet or bipolar, high power kick b*tt bass or midrange emphasis, etc. Once you find the kind of amp that sounds best to you, then you can investigate options available within that style, new or used cheap or expensive. Reading opinions and asking for suggestions isn't going to tell you a damn thing about the system is going to sound to *YOU*. Funny enough, the absolute best sounding amp I ever found for my La Scalas and KHorns was a little vintage 1985 Rotel RA830BX2 integrated. Preferred it to Jolida, Acurus, TEAC, Golden Tube, even a Krell KAV300i. Have no idea why, maybe I just stumbled on a one-off box embued by aliens with magic pixie dust, but for whatever reason it sounded, and sounds, wonderful. Grossly underpowerd in current application driving CF4's (*NOTE PUN*) but I still keep it.

Hi Coulter. Any chance there's a file on hand somewhere that would decode my serial number? Just curious... current location doesn't permit La Scalas or I'd have those, these CF4's have been with me for 12 years through various incarnations of houses / music rooms / ancillary equipment, and for right now they're doing nicely, but I am curious when they were made. OT - any thoughts on the Sony Alpha 700?

Seriously, anyone have a clue what that serial number means?

I just took a look at one of my CF4's and the serial number is 3956202 Does that mean it was made on the 395th day of 2006?

Been a while. Time to revisit Richard Feynman and the water sprinkler. That's a *REAL* puzzle.

If nothing else, the amount of hot air generated in this thread will lift the plane off irregardless of any other considerations.

Let's see... PDP-8 360/30 PDP-11 DEC-10 5100 370/158 S/36 Northstar Dynabyte Vector Graphics Wang Apple ][ Apple III TRS-80 IBM PC Lisa Fortune 32:16 Macintosh TI Pro Rainbow 100 Pro 350 various HP/UX Solaris AIX Windoze Linux God how I hate computers...

10 INPUT "How many cards do you have "; N 20 PRINT "Jeez, you really have "; N; 30 PRINT " cards?" 40 REM 50 FOR I = 1 TO N 60 PRINT "I AM SORRY, WE CAN NOT READ CARD "; N 70 NEXT I 80 INPUT "DO YOU HATE COMPUTERS?"; A$ 90 A$ = LEFT$(A$,1) 100 IF A$ = "Y" OR A$ = "y" THEN 120 110 GOTO 10 120 PRINT "YOU ARE MY HERO" What passed for computer programming in 1979...

OMG I can't believe someone else remembers that... It's About Time, It's About Space, About Strange People In The Strangest Place. It's About Time, It's About Flight, Travelin' Faster Than The Speed Of Light. About Space People And A Brave Crew, As Through The Barrier Of Time They Flew... I particularly liked the tinfoil spacesuits... Ah yes, the golden age of television... now we have to settle for mindless *** like Battlestar Galactica...

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