Re: Conservation Laws

[brian whatcott <inet@INTELLISYS.NET>]

 I wrote:
> Heee yah! A deep insight.  liked that!
>
> brian whatcott

> At 15:10 3/14/00 -0500, Hugh Haskell wrote:
>
> You got that wrong. Here in our part of
 the south, its "Yeeh Hah!"
> Hugh
>
> Hugh Haskell
>
> By George! So I did. As clear a malapropism as I could have
> committed. Nope - not a homophonic malapropism in fact - but rather
> a swapping of homologous letters in coupled words - now I'm sure
> there's a term for that.
>
> Help me out Hugh - you're comfortable with homophones and homologs
> I know    :-)
>
> Brian

> What's to be comfortable with? I have one type of telephone on my
> desk and one type of log in my fireplace. Beyond that I don't know
> much. Wait, that's "monophone" and "monolog" isn't it?
>
> Hugh

> Hugh Haskell

Well, well - a scintilla of divergence from the stronghold of
strong convergers - all is not lost....
   (I muse that one reason it's important that makers of
important physics discoveries should not be completely
conversant with their field, is that knowledge enforces such strict
boundary conditions on the imagination...)

This talk of phones reminds me of a comment I think John Denker
made some weeks ago - about equipment to dig out signal from the noise.
At that time, I thought he was somewhat overstating the case for the GPS
for example:
it is a given that commercial GPSs can lock functionally with a signal plus
noise at least as big as -170dBm and a low noise input amplifier can hardly
 get  much better than 3microvolt.Hertz.

A little gambolling with 3uV expressed in dBm given an input of 50 ohms
seems not definitively huge compared with that modest signal....
   So it all depends on how much instantaneous bandwidth that receiver is
using - not a lot, I don't suppose.

 The question of what -170dBm is meant to be compared to is another point.
    Of course the answer is 1 milliwatt (indicated by that boy's club
secret letter m in the ratio).

    Which brings me to the point: the phon needs no secret handshakes or
 suffixed letters to make its absolute magnitude clear - though like the
grease spot photometer, a unit that depends on subjective intensity
matches, loses something in the wash, wouldn't you say?




brian whatcott <inet@intellisys.net>
Altus OK