Odd Lots
- I’d heard of MEMS vibrational gyroscopes (used in handheld devices to track changes in orientation) but my understanding was a little fuzzy. This essay will fix that. Click to it for the pictures if nothing else! (Thanks to David Stafford for the link.)
- The New York Times Bestseller List now includes ebooks. Bout damned time, doodz.
- Motorola’s Xoom will apparently be released for public sale on February 17. I hope to lay hands on it at Best Buy, but one wonders how many other people will be thronging it that week as well.
- And, of course, while Xoom may arrive early, it won’t be lonely for long.
- One interesting argument for the iPad is all the stuff you can buy for it. The ZaggMate keyboard is striking: When you need a keyboard, you’ve got it. When you don’t need one, it’s not weighing down the gadget and getting in your way.
- Samsung’s Galaxy Tab has sold enough units to attract some accessory action too–including its own version of the ZaggMate. Dare we hope that Xoom will be popular enough to do the same?
- Border’s could file for bankruptcy as early as Monday. All the financials I’ve seen on them are horrendous, and people are starting to compare them with Circuit City. When’s the last time you saw a Circuit City?
- This was evidently a real research project in the mid-60s. It would certainly make it easier to scratch.
- Here’s a gallery of “modern ruins,” which are nothing if not sobering. I’m not sure I’d go quite as far as “creepy.” (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- And that collection led to this one, which edges more toward creepy, and somehow reminded me of walking Mr. Byte in Santa’s Village in Scotts Valley in 1987, amidst feral chickens and strong evidence of squatter inhabitation. (Santa’s Village was later razed and Borland’s HQ built on the site.)
- No, if you want creepy, consider that a town right here in Colorado is one of the few places in the US where funeral pyres are legal. (Thanks to Terry Dullmaier for the link.)
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: aerospace · books · ebooks · hardware · humor · tablets
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There are several photo books on modern Japanese ruins.
http://www.jbox.com/product/APB025
http://www.jbox.com/product/APB066
http://www.jbox.com/product/APB122
Jeff, I hope you are feeling better — you have been missed.
Rate Gyros vs Directional Gyros. To the best of my knowledge the MEMS gyros that are used in hand held electronics (and RC helicopters) are Rate Gyros and not Directional Gyros as the article seems to assume. A Directional Gyro, which is what most people picture as a gyroscope is the kind build with the spinning wheel that tries to maintain a fixed direction in space if set in proper very low friction gimbals. The MEMS Gyros do not do this but provide an output signal proportional to the angular velocity about an axis.
Since, with a digital computer, one can integrate the angular velocity signal accurately and cheaply you can CALCULATE the angular changes from an initial direction so you can get directional information from a RATE gyro and if you differentiate the angular direction signal from a position gyro you can get the angular rates. Today, the former appears to be easier, but it was not always so.
If anyone is looking for what I think was the best description EVER of how Gyroscopes — of both types worked — try to find a copy of “Basics of Gyroscopes” by Carl Machover. I still have my treasured first edition from 1960 on my book shelf. It will also give you a deep appreciation of how engineers of that era made do with what we would consider almost impossible limitations of technology today.
Actually, the NY Times bestseller list has been a running joke for years among authors. It never has had much to do with actual sales, but they lost me completely when they arbitrarily decided not to include J. K. Rowling’s books because her Harry Potter books were taking up slots that the NYT thought should be available for more worthy books.
Also, they don’t really include ebooks, just those offered by some (by no means all) traditional publishers. They completely ignore indie authors, some of whom belong there. Amanda Hocking, for example, is a self-published author who’s now selling 15,000 books a *day*. (Granted, that’s total sales for nine titles, but IIRC her bestselling title is selling more than 40,000 copies a week.) She doesn’t count, as far as the NYT is concerned.