Superpositioned

The Four Dees of Analog is a story written by ADI Fellow Barrie Gilbert about a job interview circa 2025. It is crazy to imagine being interviewed over live HDTV quality teleconference with noncontact stress monitors live at the site. The story goes on to describe the differences between simply collecting information and aquiring knowledge by relating and applying that information.

Of course, this is an article in Analog Devices’ Analog Dialogue so the Sci-Fi aura quickly fades into an advertisement for analog design. In the surrounding of a digital world, the story is a great reminder that analog instrumentation is still all around us. Additionally, it highlights the benefits and challenges of analog circuitry.

Stolen from Now to offend some maths students on Mark’s Things*:

What is the difference between a Ph.D. in mathematics and a large pizza?

This is a Google Video of a 500kV switch opening in the Nevada desert. I really wish I could have been there.

Also check out a 345kV switch opening. This story got buried on digg. I’m not sure how something so popular got buried, but I saved something from the comments:

As the switch first swings open, the gap is very small and the voltage makes an arc as it breaks down the air (turning it from an insulator to a conductor.) Once this arc is established it grows in length as the switch is opened further since most of the air between the switch contacts has already been rendered conductive. Notice that the arc rises as time goes by because the arc heats the air and hot air goes up. The arc goes through the longer path because that hot air that is rising is still more conductive than the cold air down below which replaces it. Eventually the conductive air rises enough that the path through it has to also go through the colder non conductive air and this breaks the arc.

I dugg up an interesting article describing the ‘free electron’ and his role in a company. “The Free Electron is the single most productive engineer that you’re ever going to meet.” Although I have not spent significant time in the ‘real world’, I definitely know a few characters that meet his criteria. I have to say that working with them was more of a nuisance until they pulled something spectacular off.

Digg This!

Some ‘talented’ students at the University of Alabama at Birmingham searched for own idol through engineering related song parodies during an open house. The videos are hysterical. The parodies include:

• Friends in Three Phases
• In da EE Club
• Ohm’s Law Pie

Luckily, they will be making plenty of money at their day jobs.