Monday, February 01, 2021
Strange dream
Odd dream this morning about a power slide rule. It looked something like this:
Basically a regular Pickett in a motorized platform. The buttons around the top were little slide levers controlling various actions. One of them was labeled 'Noise', which introduced jitter into the actions.
I suspect this was a solidified version of the Lukyanov water computer. I wrote a PY to run the Lukyanov, including the ability to add noise. Jitterizing would be a worthy feature in a real** analog computer.
A power drive would actually work better with a BIG circular rule like the Norma Grafia. You wouldn't have to reverse at the ends. For instance, you could set C and D to a proportion, then run the cursor slowly around the circle to see all the similar proportions.
The shape of the platform is tanh. Was that an intentional choice by the dream scripter? A way of saying that we need an analog computer focused on Nature's way of doing things? The curve was important in the dream, and the control levers pivoted around the curve. Probably not intentional, but it's still a good piece of advice. More likely the dream scripter was just copying the VW tool pictured in previous item.... or the iconic shape of the '61 Lincoln that was the main subject of previous item. All tanh.
= = = = =
** Was this feature tried? A quick google finds the vast majority of computers, both analog and digital, were concerned with avoiding or smoothing out the phase and amplitude jitter in real signals. Only one analog computer was trying to do the opposite. ASTRAC was a true analog computer with digital counting and control systems attached. Some of its analog modules intentionally introduced randomness and Zener noise. The developers were apparently using the random for 'Monte Carlo' simulations with repeated analog functions feeding a digital program. I'm thinking more of dynamic stability, wiggling into a negative feedback loop to reach the optimum quickly. Simulating the action of a gamma muscle loop, for instance.
Basically a regular Pickett in a motorized platform. The buttons around the top were little slide levers controlling various actions. One of them was labeled 'Noise', which introduced jitter into the actions.
I suspect this was a solidified version of the Lukyanov water computer. I wrote a PY to run the Lukyanov, including the ability to add noise. Jitterizing would be a worthy feature in a real** analog computer.
A power drive would actually work better with a BIG circular rule like the Norma Grafia. You wouldn't have to reverse at the ends. For instance, you could set C and D to a proportion, then run the cursor slowly around the circle to see all the similar proportions.
The shape of the platform is tanh. Was that an intentional choice by the dream scripter? A way of saying that we need an analog computer focused on Nature's way of doing things? The curve was important in the dream, and the control levers pivoted around the curve. Probably not intentional, but it's still a good piece of advice. More likely the dream scripter was just copying the VW tool pictured in previous item.... or the iconic shape of the '61 Lincoln that was the main subject of previous item. All tanh.
= = = = =
** Was this feature tried? A quick google finds the vast majority of computers, both analog and digital, were concerned with avoiding or smoothing out the phase and amplitude jitter in real signals. Only one analog computer was trying to do the opposite. ASTRAC was a true analog computer with digital counting and control systems attached. Some of its analog modules intentionally introduced randomness and Zener noise. The developers were apparently using the random for 'Monte Carlo' simulations with repeated analog functions feeding a digital program. I'm thinking more of dynamic stability, wiggling into a negative feedback loop to reach the optimum quickly. Simulating the action of a gamma muscle loop, for instance.Labels: Alternate universe, Morsenet of Things, Real World Math
¶ 5:39 AM
