I recently read about renewed interest in thorium reactor technology, which was explored by AEC physicists during the 50's. Supposedly the thorium/uranium technology burns hotter, is more efficient, and leaves behind much shorter lived isotopes in the waste stream, i.e 10's to 100's of years. In any case, there are now a bunch of interesting reactor possibilities on the table that make the nuclear power discussion much more promising than the old, "more of the same is good enough and safe enough, so just trust us." Regards

I really like a lot of the suggestions, but my personal TV favorite is still Babylon 5. Whatever gets rebooted however, I want to see the result of good writing and good production quality. Cheers

Any form of stored energy can present a fire hazard, and yes those fires are often "spectacular." A "whole house battery" should be subject to the same sorts of construction rules that apply to things like home fuel storage tanks. It's not for the fainthearted, but that hasn't stopped people from making good and productive use of energy storage for centuries.

I'm a semiconductor test engineer in a department that has folks in various places across the US, and in Asia. I wanted to setup a departmental wiki so that we could share best engineering practices. My employer is not known for frivolous purchases, so free software sounded like a good deal to me. I'm not a Linux expert, but I wound up trying TWiki running in a canned Linux distribution inside a VM on one of my desktop PC's. It was a bit daunting at first, however I got an excellent prototype site running reasonably quickly. Since it was running inside a well-maintained firewall, security needs were nominal rather than dire. My boss liked the idea, so I went to IT to get them to host it on a "real" Intranet server, and they were favorable at first. They quickly made a counter proposal however and proposed that I employ their Enterprise Web solution instead. My first impression was disappointment, as I felt that their solution was a lot stodgier, with less flexible content editing. I quickly changed my mind for practical reasons however, as my career is based upon developing electronic test methods, and not upon fiddling around with open source software that is based upon a sweat equity model of ownership. I like TWiki, but the technical details of our Enterprise Intranet Web solution are managed by our IT team with corporate level backups and maintenance. In that context my departmental web site is growing into a major source of information for our far flung team members. If I were 30 years younger I might have stuck with TWiki anyway, but my job is very demanding and I have a family and a life to go home to after work. Regards.

It seems like no one here has heard of ham radio licenses. Check out one of the license study manuals sometime to get an idea of what such a process could conceivably look like. Ham radio is now pretty mature compared to "amateur computing", but the license requirements, if I recall correctly, were intended to raise the level of competency within the ranks of radio hobbyists. Don't forget that back in the day, ham operators would be up late at night in the attic or the basement exchanging cryptic technical messages with similarly inclined souls all over the world. Does that sound familiar? Just a few months ago here in Santa Clara Valley some deliberate fiber optic sabotage took out land line phones, cell phone service (the back haul routes were blocked), internet service and of course 911 service for quite a large pool of users. Ham radio club volunteers provided point to point communication services to augment emergency agency radio services. That doesn't mean that computer licensing is necessarily a good idea, but it would be nice to see the debate center around analogies that are actually relevant in the technical arena.

I agree with the sentiment concerning non-exciting production coding. In precision analog semiconductor test engineering we write programs that run on ATE (automatic test equipment) systems to eliminate defective units and grade good units. The crux of the matter however is that these programs are run 24/7 by production operators, not engineers. The operators have suitable skills, but may or may not be interested, well-rested or motivated on any given work day. Like any other humans, they may be good-hearted or malicious. The best programs keep preventable operator mistakes at a minimum, while being maintainable for years by various staff members. This arena requires creative problem solving in the test engineers, but not really artistry. And never forget that "test escapes", bad parts testing good, can result in a product recall at best, and a system breakdown in the field at worst; think planes or automobiles. On the other hand good parts testing as bad cause reduced profitability. Either situation is bad for your career. I have colleagues who like employing rampant artistry in their test code, and their programs are difficult for others to maintain, and there usually isn't sufficient time or labor available to completely validate deliberately off beat coding. When I mentor test engineers I emphasize that test coding isn't meant to be exciting. When I want coding excitement I go home and work on coding something completely different than work. Cheers, Art

I still have the slide rule that I received in about 1959 in junior high. It's a good companion for the monochrome vacuum tube TV and the mid-50's military radar transponder. Honestly though I have to keep this stuff out of my wife's way in order to avoid unwanted scrutiny of my vacuum tube collection and the books about designing circuits with vacuum tubes, and the use of analog computers to solve engineering problems.

Actually I've looked at a number of papers in recent years that estimate 2-4 year energy payoff for solar panel mfg. You're right that there is a capital cost to install them, but that is true of any power plant. The economic sense of home solar electricity was slim 6 years ago when we installed our panels, but is now considerably more favorable. Our panels are well on the way to payoff. When we installed them I had many people say that they could get better yields in the Stock Market. Our power meter still spins backwards on most days of the year, but our 401K's have lost substantially. Need I say more? I don't feel particularly green or moral, it's just good engineering sense to get electrical energy from our own roof! Art

Get them the model rocketry simulation program Rocksim from appogeerockets.com, or some equivalent. You can then have them build and fly virtual rocket models. If you can get permission for an outdoor lab exercise they can then build and fly their rockets to compare actual versus simulated performance. The good news is that Rocksim supports designs with standard low cost rocketry materials, but can also be used for fairly advanced custom projects. There is even a machine shop that will produce custom laser cut fins from Rocksim design files. I've used them before and was quite pleased, as it was a lot easier than shaping them by hand in my garage. Regards, Art

Actually I think that we may be primarily disagreeing over terminology. When I refer to a high dynamic range sensor I actually mean the entire chain from the pixel through the buffer and ADC, all of which must have compatible performance in order to be a valid product. I dabble a bit with a DSLR, but my technical interest in these sensors stems from a brief stint developing manufacturing test methods for CMOS image sensor chips. I've also developed high resolution manufacturing test methods for ADC chips over the years, so mixed signal test problems interest me. In any case, given a truly high dynamic range sensor, I agree that a RAW file output is the only reasonable approach for the users to be able to avail themselves of full performance. It might also be necessary to employ double the usual math precision in subsequent processing in order to avoid subtle but systematic rounding errors in high dynamic range data streams. Regards, Art

The issue of being able to simultaneously record widely divergent light intensities is one of the advantages of higher dynamic range. In other words your intensity spread can be greater before detail washes out at both the top end and the bottom end. An additional benefit is being able to more precisely match the desired color response curve. Obviously this requires greater capture sensitivity as well as a compatible signal to noise ratio. Overall it is analogous to employing more dynamic range (i.e. bits of linearity) in audio captures in order to achieve better signal to noise and signal to distortion ratios. Regards, Art

I've been into flying model rocketry since I was in elementary school, and years later I still love it. Nowadays however you can build much larger rockets and fly real instrument packages. To make it even better you can now purchase simulation packages that allow you to construct virtual models of commercial rocket kits as well as fully custom designs. You can then perform virtual flights with different sizes of engines and payloads, prior to actual construction and flight. In actual flight though, there is nothing that beats that crackling roar when modern composite engines shoot off the pad. Regards, Art

Bigger optics will allow more light gathering, but that's not the issue with dynamic range. Greater dynamic range allows a larger number of distinct intensity levels, or shades of color to be simultaneously recorded on a given sensor. Better optics is a good thing, but the better optics still need a sensor with improved dynamic range in order to achieve the new levels of performance alluded to in the original article. Cheers, Art

I'm an engineer at a Calif Semiconductor mfg and while we're still in reasonably good financial health, we've had a temporary de facto paycut of about 15% since about early December. We've only had a few layoffs, and there are none on the horizon at this time, but the work load still must be maintained even through staff reductions. We all agree that the paycuts are painful, but no one wants to be out of work, looking for a job during a down market. The bottom line is that we work hard, deliver good product, and make good money. If we need to have shared sacrifice through hard times, then so be it. I'm very sympathetic to those who wind up jobless during times like this, but before you complain about pay cuts versus profitability, never forget that you are working for a company that is in business to make money. If that concept is alien to you then step aside for some of those good folks who are jobless and will gladly take your job. Cheers

NIH Image is an image processing program aimed at scientists, and distributed by US National Institutes of Health. It has been around since the early days of the Mac, although now it's done in Java, and runs on PC's as well. It's still free though and I just used it last week to process some engineering images. Cheers