Latest Posts by twilightzoinked - Page 8

good thing i have a flawless edgar allen poe-ker face

It’s me boy I’m the tell-tale heart continually beating as a reminder of the sins you have committed from inside your floor

Today's LGBT+ Headcanon is;

Uncle Deadly from the Muppet Franchise-Gay Transgender Man

Species: Muppet

Requested by @sarahthetransguy

Status: Alive

take my hoof

Hysteric Glamour spring/summer 2001

how’s it goin’ there

Some kid is going to get a really bad birthday present.

Architectural Record September 1938

In New York City, a dining table that’s like a jigsaw puzzle counterpoints the colorful play on dimensions juxtaposed on the wall. Designer Michael de Santis has created an environment that sets off the games.

Rooms by Design, 1989

I know what you have all been desperate to know.

"Lilly, have you finished any 1000 piece Ravensburger puzzles featuring several unicorns lately?"

Yes. Yes I have.

“Spectator” Shelf by Freia Achenbach,

Foam, Resin, Sandstone,

Height: 200 cm (78.75 in.), Width: 233 cm (91.74 in.), Depth: 33 cm (13 in.)

Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Warm Water (1988)

Humphrey Bogart and Paul Heinreid, play a game between takes on the set of Casablanca, while Claude Rains watches.

THE TWILIGHT ZONE | And When the Sky Was Opened

reblog if the first musical you listened to was not Hamilton

Bare CPU Printed Circuit Board for the Alpha NT XL366 workstation I designed back in 1995 or so. This was an obscure model of an obscure product line, made by a company (Digital Equipment Corp.) that is now itself obscure. To be honest I don't even remember much about this machine now.

What I do remember is the HUUUUGE fight I got into with our Signal Integrity team while I was designing this, over decoupling capacitors.

Decoupling caps are small components that hold a charge to help even out power when a circuit is active. This board featured hundreds of them, smaller than a grain of rice (see photo comparison of mounting pads vs rice grain below).

Our Signal Integrity team was tasked with making sure everything was electrically stable, so they required many hundreds of these to be added to the board, based on power simulations they did. Trouble was, they wanted so many, we couldn't even build the board.

My job as the Systems Engineer here was to meet the requirements from the SI team, but also from manufacturing, and the requirement that my PCB layout techs don't go insane trying to place and route the board. SI really only cared about signal quality, so they would not relent, and I ended up getting shouted at at one point by a junior SI engineer who was also under a lot of stress, when I said "There are different schools of thought on this.." and he screamed THERE ARE NOT DIFFERENT SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT ON THIS!!

It got to the point where the product was not going to get built, because we just couldn't fit like a thousand of these tiny caps on the board, we needed to ditch at least 25% of them to have a hope. The models were the models though, and you couldn't argue against them.

But then my boss got a genius idea. What if we could prove the simulation models were too conservative? We came up with an experiment where we would remove caps from an older system and measure the power supply noise, to see how many caps could be taken off before the system became unstable.

Me and the junior SI engineer were tasked with doing this experiment (later deemed The Decapitation Project), so we grabbed a Tektronix scope and Metcal soldering station and headed over to this abandoned lab we had in our old Maynard headquarters, a now creepy attic space on the 6th floor of an old mill building. Here were a few older Alphastation 3000 workstations we built years earlier, working but waiting to be recycled.

We had this special program that would thrash the CPU within an inch of its life, to put a big demand on the power supply system. While this was running, the SI engineer measured the power quality, while I proceeded to (very carefully to avoid short-circuiting the system) actually desolder caps from the board while the workstation was running.

We managed to get about 1/3 of them off before there was any noticeable effect, and we found one specific type of cap was not doing much of anything at all. We took the data back to the head of the SI team, and he finally relented and let us remove several hundred capacitors. (He also buried the report and data I had, because he didn't want the bad publicity - I remember being mad about that)

The system got built after that, and worked just fine. We did try to enact a small bit of petty revenge on the SI team manager though - there was a recognition event for people involved on the project, and me and our PCB procurement guy decided to give the SI team manager a special "Faraday Award" for achievement in capacitance (Farads are a measure of capacitance - geeky eng joke). We took an old bowling trophy with a giant, beer-can sized electrolytic capacitor strapped to the top of it as the award. He was a no-show so we didn't get to present it. Those SI guys never did have much of a sense of humor.

Anyway, long story sorry. Just thinking of it recently because I was helping someone at work with an analog simulation and I remembered this..

The speed of light is actually really slow, and this is a pain in the neck.

All you aerospace engineers and economists understand my pain, but I'm not talking about signal delays from Earth to the asteroid belt, or between Chicago and the New York stock exchange. There are local problems too!

I was once working on a project that involved a big honkin’ high voltage power supply.  It was powering a bunch of klystrons, devices that produce high-energy radio pulses.  In the event that something went wrong in the experiment, the power supply needed to shut down within 20 microseconds. Any longer than 20 and our very expensive klystrons would break, to the tune of a quarter million bucks a pop.

I'm simplifying things a lot, but here’s the basic timeline involved:

Something goes wrong in the experiment (the experiment was a fusion reactor btw, but that’s not relevant here).  The clock starts ticking down from 20 microseconds.

The fault detection circuits take 8 microseconds to realize something has gone wrong. 12 microseconds left.

The power supply does its emergency shutdown procedure, which takes ten microseconds. 2 microseconds left.

Everything is shut down and safe. We breath a sigh of relief, and replace about $1K worth of parts.

There was just one problem:  When I say “big honkin’ power supply,” I mean big. It was the size of two shipping containers stacked atop each other. The only place with enough room for it was about 1000 yards away.

Hm. 3 micro light-seconds.

So now we have to add an extra step to our timeline:

Something goes wrong. The clock starts ticking down at 20 microseconds.

The fault detection circuits trip. 12 microseconds left.

The fault signal travels via fiber optic to the power supply, 3 micro light-seconds away.  9 microseconds left.

The power supply takes 10 microseconds to shut down

Everything is finished… 1 microsecond too late.  We rend our clothing and spend a million dollars replacing fried klystrons.

The solution? Spend a metric buttload of cash on fancier fault detection circuits that will trip much much faster.

But we could have saved a LOT of money if the speed of light were just a tiny bit faster instead.

Amputees with specialized prosthetics for their jobs is the most metal thing the modern world has given us.

Engineer Karen Leadlay working on the analog computers in the space division of General Dynamics, 1964.

When a physicist falls in love :)

Richard Feynman's love letter to his deceased wife, 1946.

“Scheme against your most sacred principles in thought, word and deed…. The only clear view is from atop a mountain of your dead selves.”

— Peter J. Carroll

Today a old postcard from 1910 New York.

The Ansonia Hotel was since 1904 a very exclusive place. The greatest stars have living there: Eleanor Steber, Geraldine Farrar, Lily Pons, Feodor Chaliapin, Ezio Pinza, Lauritz Melchior, Arturo Toscanini and Igor Strawinsky are only a small part of great names. When was season at the MET this was the home of important Personalitys. Take a look on the History of this Hotel. For better reading click on the pics.

Deleuze & Guattati, Anti-Oedipus

Igor Stravinsky

Igor Stravinsky, June 17, 19982 – April 6, 1971.

1927 photo by George Hoyningen-Huene.

Library

Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious by C.G.Jung

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Chaos Magick Condensed by Phil Hine

Common Poisonous Plants and Mushrooms of North America by Nancy J. Turner, Adam F. Sczawinski

Dorodango The Japanese Art of Making Mud Balls by Bruce Gardner

Drug Users Bible by Dominic Milton Trott

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake

Folk Witchcraft: A Guide to Lore, Land, and the Familiar Spirit for the Solitary Practitioner by Roger Horne

Gathering Moss A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushroom by Paul Stamets

Growing the Hallucinogens by Hudson Grubber

Hallucinogenic Plants: A Golden Guide by Richard Schultes

Herbal Alchemists Handbook, The A Grimoire of Philtres. Elixirs, Oils, Incense, and Formulas for Ritual Use by Karen Harrison

How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan

Jambalaya: The Natural Woman's Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals by Luisah Teish

Kinesic Magic by Donald Tyson

Liber Null & Psychonaut by Peter J Carroll

Narcotic Plants as Sources of Medicinals, Nutraceuticals, and Functional Foods by Ernest Small

Occult Botany: Sédir's Concise Guide to Magical Plants by Paul Sédir

Peyote and Other Psychoactive Cacti by Adam Gottlieb

Phytomedicines: Herbal Drugs, and Poisons by Ben-Erik Van Wyk, Michael Wink

Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred Healing and Hallucinogenic Powers by Richard Evans Schultes, Albert Hofmann, Christian Rätsch

Psychedelics Encyclopedia by Peter Stafford

Psychonaut Field Manual by BlueFluke

The Encyclopedia of Aphrodisiacs: Psychoactive Substances for Use in Sexual Practices by Christian Rätsch, Claudia Müller-Ebeling

The Encyclopedia Of Psychoactive Plants by Christian Rätsch

The Magical and Ritual Use of Herbs by Richard Alan Miller

The Poison Path Herbal by Coby Michael

The Sexual Herbal: Prescriptions for Enhancing Love and Passion by Brigitte Mars

Veneficium: Magic, Witchcraft and the Poison Path by Daniel A. Schulke

Viridarium Umbris: The Pleasure Garden of Shadow by Daniel Alvin Schulke

Walking the Twilight Path: A Gothic Book of the Dead by Michelle Belanger

Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants by Claudia Müller-Ebeling, Christian Rätsch etc.

Eat all loathsome things until they no longer revolt you. Seek union with all that you normally reject. Scheme against your most sacred principles in thought, word, and deed. You will eventually have to witness the loss or putrefaction of every loved thing. Therefore, reflect upon the transitory and contingent nature of all things. Examine everything you believe, every preference, and every opinion, and cut it down. The personality, a mask of convenience, becomes stuck to the face. Eye becomes clouded by I. The human spirit becomes a trivial mess of petty identifications. The most cherished principles are the greatest lies. I think therefore I am. But what is I? The more you think, the more the I closes. Thinking, I am asleep; my I is blinded. The intellect is a sword, and its use is to prevent identification with any particular phenomenon encountered. The most powerful minds cling to the fewest fixed principles. The only clear view is from atop the mountain of your dead selves.

Liber Null and Psychonaut

Peter J. Carroll

The Painter and Pianist

Lionello Balestrieri

Saint Sebastian, Gerrit van Honthorst, 1623

martyrdom