Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
An article in the Proceedings of the US Naval Institute says that a major factor in the Gallipoli disaster of WWI was the great effectiveness of the Turkish minefields, which checkmated the power of the Allied (British, French, and Russian) navies and prohibited a seapower-only passage through the Strait of Dardanelles. The authors argue that China’s intensive production of naval mines could result in a similar strategically-critical threat in a future conflict.
Several approaches to reduce the minefield threat are discussed…one rather surprising angle is to exploit the characteristics of the snapping shrimp…these crustaceans generate extremely loud sounds when they close their claws, and American submarine commanders in WWII would sometimes hide in snapping shrimp colonies to mask their acoustic signatures from enemy hydrophones. These creatures are especially and conveniently dense, it seems, in the East and South China Seas, and it is suggested that arrays of sensors, backed by considerable computing power, could process the returns from the noise generated by the shrimp and hence locate the enemy mines.
Here’s a 22-year-old who builds microchips in his parents’ garage. His most recent production contains 1200 transistors, he made a 6-transistor version when he was a senior in high school. The famous Intel 4004 microprocessor contained 2300 transistors, and he’s hoping to get to that level soon.
The article also mentions Jeri Ellsworth…in 2002, she created a system to emulate the old Commodore 64 computer, and also other systems of that period, so that she and other people could play old games that had been developed for them. This led to Mammoth Toys hiring her to create a computer on a chip for the C64 Direct-to-TV joystick…it sold over half a million units.
Haven’t watched it yet, but she describes her own adventures in making microchips at home in the YouTube series Cooking with Jeri.
This is being described as “humanity’s last view of the JWST.”
6:50 AM CST, Christmas Morning
I expect imaging, and even direct viewing, of the James Webb Space Telescope from terrestrial telescopes to become a popular amateur astronomical activity in the summer of 2022. Here is why:
A full Moon has apparent magnitude -12.7. This is the result of its distance of ≈380,000 kilometers, its effective area (a circle of radius ≈1,700 kilometers) of ≈9.1 million km ², and its albedo of ≈0.12.
The JWST will be at ~4 LD, the effective area of its sunshield will be ≈830 m ², and its albedo will be very close to 1.
Its distance makes it 16 times as faint, its effective area makes it 11 billion times as faint, and its albedo makes it 8.3 times as bright. Multiplying all these together yields a factor of 21 billion.
The magnitude scale is measured in increments of âµâˆš100 ≈ 2.5, such that each 5 steps downward is 100 times brighter. Venus, which can reach an apparent magnitude of -4.7, is nearly 100 times brighter than Arcturus (α Boötis), at -0.05. The stars in the Big Dipper and in Orion’s Belt are around magnitude +2.
The limits of my experience are the Sun, apparent magnitude -26.7, and some of the fainter Pleiades, magnitude +6.5 or even fainter—note that this takes not only very clear, dark, moonless skies, but also an hour and a half or more of no artificial light whatsoever for excellent dark adaptation, and probably eyes younger than mine are now (I am recalling an incident from my 30s). That’s a factor of almost 20 trillion.
Anyway, doing the math, something 21 billion times fainter than a full Moon has an apparent magnitude of +13.1.
Every amateur astronomer reading this just went huh. Easy.
Taking the usual limiting magnitude of the unaided eye to be exactly +6 and the effective aperture of the human pupil to be 7mm, less than 200mm of primary lens or mirror diameter would be enough. In the real world, it’s going to be harder than that … but I found Pluto in my 333mm f/4.5 Newtonian at magnitude +13.8 or thereabouts during a Texas Star Party in the 1990s.
The challenge will be figuring out which thirteenth-magnitude speck in the field of view is actually the JWST, but one thing’s going to make it a lot easier: it won’t be moving with the starry background. Its motion will essentially be at the solar rate, ~1 °/day. That’s 2 ½ arc-minutes per hour, or 2 ½ arc-seconds per minute. A pair of images taken even a few minutes apart will pop it out, much like the discovery images of Pluto in 1930.
This post argues that the Sunbeam Radiant Control Toaster, introduced in 1949, is the best toaster ever built.
I’m not much of a toaster expert…when there is toasting to be done around here, we mostly use the broiler…but do the toaster aficionados, assuming we have any such here, agree with the assessment?
In any case, the post raises an interesting question: what other types of products are there in which one particular historical product model is so excellent that it has never since been improved, or even matched?
We’ve discussed some of the findings and recommendations made by Ryan Petersen of Flexport with regard to the West Coast seaport snarl-ups. I see that the company, which defines itself as a digital freight forwarder, is going to be hiring quite a few people–list of openings at their website:
https://www.flexport.com
The company says that many of the jobs, especially those in sales and software development, do not require specific logistics experience.
