Throw another Blog on the fire

From deep within my archives, I pulled out and scanned the front page of this little booklet about the "Tele-Viewer", which contains "complete assembly data and diagrams providing for the construction of a high quality 5 channel superhet television receiver". It probably dates back to the 1930s, i.e. before television transmission was suspended during World War 2. In those days it seems people could buy kits to build their own televisions, which were much more expensive in terms of monthly pay than today's consumer devices. You actually built the television in stages, and each stage could be purchased separately as follows:

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STAGE 1 (Vision and Sound) - £2 8s 0d
STAGE 2 (Coils, chokes etc.) - £3 7s 6d
STAGE 3 (Power & Timebase) - £8 3s 6d
STAGE 4 (Power & Timebase) - £1 11s 0d
STAGE 5 (Final assembly) - £5 16s 4d
Complete set of valves, including some surplus types - £7 10s 0d
Total - £28 16s 4d

C.R.T.s were extra, surplus 12 inch tubes being £12 19s 6d and new 12 inch types being £16 13s 8d.

The technology was nearly all valve, of course, except for the HT rectifier, which was a metal rectifier (a type of metal-semiconductor junction based on the interface between a metal layer and a copper oxide or selenium oxide coating). The copper oxide rectifier was invented in 1927 by L.O. Grondahl and P.H. Geiger, and began to be used in radio receivers in the 1920s, and the selenium rectifier was invented in 1933 by C.E. Fitts. I would guess that it was more likely to be a copper oxide one. I once heated up the disk from a selenium rectifier and it gave off a most interesting red smoke!! Do not do this at home, the fumes are actually rather toxic!

Unashamedly jumping on the MySpace bandwagon, I have uploaded a couple of tunes that I have composed and synthesised to MySpace on My MySpace Music Page. One tune is reggae dub, the other is electro-pop-dance music... sort of.

My musical tastes are influenced by people such as Kraftwerk, Mike Oldfield, David Bowie, Marc Bolan, the Sex Pistols, the Stranglers, Prince Buster, Desmond Dekker, Dave and Ansel Collins, Prince Far I, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Dennis Brown, Bob Marley and the Specials.

(I also have an ordinary MySpace page here)

I have put up some pictures of Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders that I took in February 1980 at Hull University. I had a webpage with these pictures in 1997, but they were removed when I redesigned my website in 2000.

Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders

I visited Albania in 1987, two years after the death of the Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha, when Ramiz Alia was in power. Alia eventually abolished the one party state and held elections in 1992.

I first put up an online record of this visit in 1997. When I redesigned my website in 2000, the Albania web pages were left out. I have now scanned a lot more photos from my trip, updated the web page to XHTML, and integrated it with my current website. There are other accounts of trips to Albania, but not many tourists visited the place in 1987! You can read the whole thing here:

Albania Travelogue: Pictures and diary from November 1987

If British water companies had been around in Biblical times, Noah would never have needed the Ark... or would he? The Government has granted several drought orders in Southern England, allowing water companies to bring in emergency water saving measures across Surrey, Kent and Sussex, going further than the usual hosepipe bans which are also in force in London.

They've even banned clowns at a circus from throwing buckets of water over each other. Meanwhile it has rained nearly every day for at least 2 weeks - we've had above average rainfall in the South East during April and May - my son is off school because of flooding, and the golf course just cancelled a lesson because the golf course is waterlogged. They must be pleased they don't have to use their sprinklers, which are banned in a drought order.

If you want to see clowns perhaps you should go visit the HQ of those water companies. They complain that many of the pipes are over 100 years old and leak, but how did they get that old except by being neglected for a hundred years? And how come the Victorians were so good at putting in all those water pipes in the first place and we can't manage a rolling replacement programme?

Pundits and stock market shills would have you believe that the rising price of oil and fuel doesn't matter much. The economy is a supertanker going full steam ahead and can take it, so they say. But industry knows better. In the mid-September IEE Careers Review, an article lays it on the line: "...fuel costs approaching £1 a litre could trigger wage inflation, job cuts and stall the economy...".

Here is a brief extract from what Toby Stephenson, who is a partner at business advisers and accountants PKE, is reported as saying in the article:

"We're looking effectively at a 20% rise in a year on fuel prices, which- certainly for anyone in manufacturing or distribution- is horrendous. Some will be able to pass that on due to flexibility in their supply contracts, but others will be looking to cut costs. Weaker businesses won't be able to ride the storm".

Last week there were petrol queues (for Americans, "Petrol queue" = "Gas line") at petrol stations all over England and Wales, where protestors had organised a bit of placard-waving at fuel distribution points and a slow convoy up and down the M4 motorway. People were lining up to fill up their tanks just in case fuel should be blockaded, which the protestors had denied was going to happen. Queues formed even in Scotland, where no protests were organised, and it is a separate country with its own Parliament, although anyone can cross the border any time they like (kind of like Mexico and the USA eh).

Chancellor Gordon Brown, local councils, police and motoring organisations urged people not to "panic-buy". Don't they know that when people hear the phrase "There is no need to panic", their brains automatically translate the "no" into "definitely a", and add "before everyone else does"? In fact, if I stood outside Sainsbury's with a placard saying "There is no need to panic-buy as there is no shortage of toilet paper", I triple-guarantee that people would rush to buy toilet paper and 3 days later the country's toilet paper warehouses would be empty.

"Yesterday, with the threat of refinery blockades just a couple of days away, it only took a hint of a queue outside a filling station or the glimpse of a black plastic bag over a pump to fuel the rumour mill.

At lunchtime queues were starting to form at petrol stations. By the evening rush hour long waits for petrol were commonplace and forecourts were reporting shortages."

75% of the fuel price in the UK is tax and the UK is an oil producing nation. How come people in rich Middle Eastern countries (and even non-rich ones like Iraq, where petrol has been reported at 5 or 6 pence per litre) get cheap fuel, and we get super-taxed fuel?

At the weekend, it seems every fuel-supplying supermarket and petrol station network came out to say they were cutting prices. It makes you think perhaps the panic was all a giant conspiracy to get people to rush out and fill up their tanks with the last of the super-expensive stuff

But if you think fuel today is expensive, wait until it runs out. To shed light on the cost of fuel in the absence of mineral oil resources, I have calculated the cost of fuel in ancient times:

In ancient Greece and Rome, lamps were fueled by olive oil (using this as a basis seems reasonable, as they would surely have used something cheaper if it had been available).

In Pompeii in 79 AD, according to http://www.ancientcoins.biz/pages/economy/, 1 litra (1/3 kg) of oil cost 1 sestertii [1 Denari = 4 Sestertii = 16 As].

This was about 1/4 of the daily wage of a skilled labourer.

A Legionary Soldier (Private) earned 20 Denari / month (http://www.ancientcoins.biz/pages/economy/)

= 80 Sestertii / month (1st Century AD)

= 2.63 Sestertii / day

Today, a US army private (rank E-2) makes $15,727/year
Link

Total: $43.06/day

I'll ignore any housing allowance because I assume Roman soldiers would have had something similar.

Therefore, the ratio of modern $ to Roman sestertii = $43.06 / 2.63 = 16.4

Now, one US crude oil barrel contains 42 USD gallons or 158.983 litres, and 1 litre of olive oil weighs 0.9kg, so 1/3 kg = 0.3 litres.

1 litra of Roman oil cost 1 sestertii = $16.4 for 0.3 litres, i.e. $54.7/litre, so 1 barrel of Roman oil therefore cost the equivalent of $8696. And you think you have it bad.

Well, it seems putting CCTV on buses didn't do much to deter the terrorists (see post below). And only today it emerged that the terrorists did dummy runs. The CCTV cameras didn't spot that either.

An anonymous email from someone claiming to be an employee of the bus company Stagecoach to Prison Planet said:

"CCTV gets maintained at least 2 or 3 times a week and can digitally store upto 2 whole weeks worth of footage. this is done by a private contractor....So when I heard that the CCTV wasn't working on a vehicle that's no more than 2 years old since last June..... I'm sorry that's rubbish, I work for the company I know different."

According to the New York Times, there are more than 4 million closed-circuit television cameras in Britain, and the average Briton crosses the view of a security camera 300 times a day.

Whatever the uses of CCTV may be, they are unlikely to be effective in situations of "asymmetric warfare". There is no substitute for properly trained humans. There is also a danger of creating a false sense of security.

Now that passport photos are going biometric (great care is taken that new photos show a plain head and shoulders shot, with no smiling or face obstruction, and a standard light background). This would technically allows faces to be recognised in CCTV pictures, and computers to follow you around wherever you go. I've seen pattern recognition technology in use, and can tell you that this kind of thing was beginning to be possible quite a number of years ago. It has now gone way beyond number plate recognition, which to my recollection was being worked on in the 1970s. You could be charged a "pedestrian congestion charge", or a local tax bill could be sent to you for walking on a particular local authority's pavements. If you are claiming a welfare payment such as unemployment benefit, the government could see if you were visiting places that meant you were not following the "available for work" rule. The movements of known felons could be tracked and correlated with other people who happen to be around at the same time. The uses of this technology are limited by your imagination.

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CCTV is now fitted on all new London buses so as to provide evidence in the event of an incident and to deter offenders, and within 3 years they plan to fit CCTV to the whole bus fleet.

• Two cats desiring thermal equilibrium with a heat source are mortal enemies.
• Heat, of its own accord, always flows from hot objects into cats.
• It is not possible to extract heat from cats, neither is it possible to get them to do any useful work.
• By no finite series of processes can a cat be removed from a heat source (or from on top of your paperwork) without personal injury.

I found this old switch on an old radio chassis- and noticed that it still bore the name "Radio Spares", which is what RS Components used to be known as.

How Alchemists believed Mercury could be transformed into Another (Gold)

Abu Musa Jabir ibn Haiyan (721-~803 C.E.) was a famous old Arabian Alchemist who was known to the West as Geber, the Arabian Prince. Richard Russel, who translated and published his work in 1678, described him as Geber, the most famous Arabian prince and philosopher. Jabir believed that various metals (especially gold) could be produced by mixing mercury and sulphur in different proportions.

It is well known that mercury, the only metallic element that is liquid at normal Earthly temperatures, will form alloys with other metals, which may be considered a solution of the other metal in mercury. When this happens with gold, on heating mercury is driven off as vapour (which is very toxic to the nervous system!) and the gold remains. This process can be used for extraction of gold from mined ore, even when the gold is not visible in the ore.

ANOTHER

Mercury are you the element
        sealed in the sacred vessel
        of putrification and decay?
Mercury are you the catalyst
        that would transform
        from lower to higher?
Mercury you are missing the creation
        of the Most High's
        Mercy
Mercury are you the solution
        that kills the lesser
        and multyplys the greater?

Beyond you
        is Another
In you
        is Another
for you are an allusion
        to Another
beyond the thought of you
        Another

From "Alchemical Solution" by A A Aziz, 1995, ISBN 1 85652 153 2, Banton Press

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This is a photo taken some time between 1970 and 1973, showing some of the things I had been "experimenting" with in the garden shed.

In the top left "quadrant" (as defined by the shelves and partitions) can be seen the chassis from some old valve radio. A dual-gang tuning capacitor can be clearly seen on top. I did a lot of dismantling in those days, often finding broken radios and other electronic items dumped in back alleys. Many such items then were based on valve technology, so some of my earliest experiences in constructing electronic circuits were based on valve circuits, using stripped-out radio chassis to provide the 250 to 300 V anode power supply and the 6.3V heater supply. The bare chassis provided valve bases and tag strips, and then circuits such as multivibrator oscillators using double triodes, and audio amplifiers using the valves and audio output transformers from the radios, could be built up.

Incidentally, I have a valve radio (actually a wedding anniversary present from my parents to my grandparents) which I had in constant use up until around 2003, when the FM band stopped working... I've had it since the mid-'70s, and heard the announcement of Elvis Presley's death through it on Radio Luxembourg in 1977. I also have a 1941 valve military radio receiver, the "Reception Set R107", purchased from another radio amateur in 1973 for five pounds [still working in May, 2006]! How about that for reliability? Reliability is not purely a function of technology. Rather, it depends on the number of components, their statistical failure rates, how far they are stressed with voltage, temperature and other environmental factors relative to their nominal ratings, and how tolerant the system design is of parametric changes in componenents that do not suffer catastrophic failure. And valves are much much less susceptible to nuclear EMP than transistors, but that is a whole new topic.

Vacuum tubes were actually quite a good introduction to electronics for the amateur, as their circuits were remarkably tolerant of abuse, were relatively simple to understand, and components were large enough to handle with common tools.

In the top right quadrant, between a couple of paraffin heaters, on the left is an old bellows-type camera- I don't think I ever got it working.

In the bottom left quadrant are miscellanous components from dismantling. At the back, I believe, are various inductors, one of them in an aluminium screening can. In the middle an iron-cored inductor of some kind can be seen. I recall having one or two chokes like this- these were used in valve power supplies in series to reduce mains hum. I may even still have them in my garage.

In the bottom right quadrant are various chemical substances, a lighted candle, a test tube rack with three test tubes containing who-knows-what, and what appears to be a mug on the right which I do not remember. Of course, eating and/or drinking should never be done while handling chemicals! I can still identify some of the chemicals. Boracic acid powder, Wright's Flowers of Sulphur, Potassium Permanganate.

A lot of the stuff I did in that garden shed might be considered dangerous... but sometimes, it's the best way to learn!