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Monthly Archives: April 2015
Prime Number Magnitudes
I am responsible for some of the authentication features in our products and these features use prime numbers. People often have basic questions on prime numbers, such as:
What happens if I choose the same prime number as someone else?
Are there enough prime numbers? Continue reading
Posted in General Mathematics, software
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Temperature Sensing and a Current Ratio of 17
One of the most common diagnostic functions requested for an electronic system is to measure its own temperature. We want to know the hardware temperature when a problem occurs because many system characteristics are affected by temperature and temperature may give us a clue to the problem's root cause. Continue reading
Posted in Electronics
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Reasonable Budget Plan for a Young Person
In my role as annoying father, I regularly talk to my sons about financial matters and this post summaries a recent discussion on budgeting. One reasonable goal for a young person's budget is called the "60% solution". Continue reading
Posted in Financial
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Computing Percent Differences
I have recently been computing a lot of percentage differences – mainly in variance calculations. I have been using the formula that I was taught in 7th grade and recently discovered that this formula fails miserably when dealing with negative quantities – I had never considered what happens when the O variable is negative. Continue reading
Posted in Financial
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Lighthouse Visual Ranges
Yesterday, I received a question from a reader who was puzzled by a web page written by a flat earther that presented a seemingly rational argument in favor of the flat earth position. In a nutshell, the flat earther's argument says that to see a lighthouse at long distance on spherical Earth would mean that you would have to be able to see around the horizon. Therefore, the Earth must be flat. I may be mischaracterizing their argument, so you may want to visit web sites that go into the details of the flat earth rationale. Of course, I argue that refraction can literally allow you to see "around" the horizon. Continue reading
Posted in optics
17 Comments
Earth With All the Ice Melted
Last night, one of my sons and I discussed using R to process geographic data. Related to this topic, we also discussed was how to visualize the impact of global sea level rise on certain countries. The video below does a good job showing what would happen if all the ice on Earth melted, which would raise sea level by ~70 meters. Continue reading
Posted in General Science
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Return Loss of a Glass-Air Interface
I received an email today about a deployment issue that involved the reflection of light from unterminated connectors. When light travels down a fiber and encounters a change in the index of refraction, part of the energy will reflect back toward the transmitter because of a phenomenon called Fresnel reflection, which I define below (source). Continue reading
Posted in Fiber Optics
2 Comments
Space Station Math
I read an article this morning on a space station proposal concept from United Space Structures (Figure 1). I find it interesting that so many proposals for space station structures are appearing now. These proposal appear to be driven by recent discussions of asteroid capture , sending a married couple on a Mars flyby, and a Mars surface exploration mission. Continue reading
Posted in Astronomy
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Natural Nuclear Reactors
I read an interesting article today about the natural nuclear reactors of Oklo, Gabon. I had first read about these reactors in a Scientific American article back in 2005. The article I read today was interesting because it did a good job presenting some of the key numbers related to uranium isotope ratios on Earth, how the uranium got here, and how natural nuclear reactors could have formed ~2 billion years ago, but probably not today. Continue reading
Posted in Geology
2 Comments