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Episode 50 -- January 30th, 2017 -- Bandwidth, Batteries, Bannon and the Bible
Listen to the episode 48.9 MB MP3
The electromagnetic Spectrum is a model for thinking about vibration, of sound, of light and of Radio Waves. Remember, if you plant a bomb in your tweeker ex-husband's pickup truck, you know that you're 1 mile away from the explosion if there's a 5 second delay after the light of the explosion before you hear the sound because the speed of sound is 1.1 thousand feet each second so after 5 seconds it goes 5500 feet, which is a bit more than a mile. By comparison, the speed of light and radio waves is 186,000 miles per second, so fast that you wouldn't notice.
Bandwidth is the amount of space on the electromagnetic spectrum a given signal takes up.
CW or Continuous Wave is morse code transmissions. That is, a single carrier signal with no information on it whatsoever, interrupted periodically to divide it into long and short bursts with spaces between them is the narrowest bandwidth signal we know of. It can be heard in less than 500 Hz of bandwidth by an appropriately configured receiver with a Beat Frequency Oscillator. That is, if you have a shortwave radio that has a BFO switch, turn it ON to listen to morse code transmissions. Here are some places to learn morse code.
PSK31 is one of a family of computer generated and computer readable codes which fit in an extremely small bandwidth and allows radio operators at both ends of the conversation who have suitably configured computers to communicate clearly often even when the human ear can't hear the signal. It works really well. It can fit in 500 KHz of bandwidth
SSB or Single sideband modulation is an amplitude modulated signal in which the carrier frequency and the opposite sideband are suppressed before the signal is amplified and fed to an antenna so that all the power is put directly into only one side of the radio signal, thus increasing the power and effieciency. It takes roughly 3 KHz of bandwidth
AM or Amplitude modulation is a duble-sideband signal with carrier and the easiest voice signal to engineer a radio to produce or to hear. The voice takes up around 6 KHz but it is easy to hear, needs no BFO and is really inexpensive to build transmitters and receivers for. But suitably inefficient so you need a good bit of power to get the signal out to where you want it.
FM or frequency Modulation is a way of encoding sound onto a carrier which varies the phase or frequency of the carrier in response to the audio waveform with which it is modulated. Wide FM uses 25 KHz and there's a narrow kind which uses 12.5 KHz but wide is a lot easier to hear.
Steve Bannon is in Charge of President Trump's National Security Council. According to Wikipedia, he graduated from Virginia Tech in 1976 with a bachelor's degree in urban planning and holds a master's degree in National Security Studies from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. This makes him fully qualified for the job. He apparently also has a Master of Business Administration degree with honors from Harvard Business School.
The Bible
There was once a Roman Emprorer named, "Constantine" who encounted something people kept calling
"Christianity" and he couldn't figure out quite what it was so he didn't know whether he should
attempt to stomp it out of existence or try and co-opt it and say he was into it himself or not. So, to
help him decide, he called together the Great Convocation of 325 A.D. in which he asked everyone calling
themselves "Christian" to come and talk about it and what it means (so he could figure that out
for himself) and so they could define it and clarify it. Folks came from all over, from far and near, from
Mountains and valleys. I know they came from at least as far away as Armenia. Some monks who lived in the
mountains came from whom nobody had heard in over a thousand years.
And they all brought with them all of
the wise teachings they had. Those monks from the mountains brought word of their predecessors, the Escians,
whom they said died out over 11,000 years before and had created a vast science of human interaction.
Everyone
was encouraged to write down what they thought Christianity was and they all wrote of it all the very best
works and stories and annecdontes until they had created a huge -if slightly poorly organized- manuscript which was then called, "The Bible".
Leviticus 18:22 is often used by uninformed christians to "proove" that it says in the bible that homosexual acts are bad. This is bullshit. While most of the modern interpretations of the 2 sections in the bible which talk about sleeping with a man not in a woman's bed interpret it to mean male and female homosexual behavior and desires are forbidden, this is a purely puritanical interpretation. We really just don't know what it means. It could mean that if a man has sex with another man, he shouldn't do it in the bed belinging to a woman, for hygene's sake and -let's face it- there are quite a few prohibitions in the early bible against unhygenic behaviors; this could just be another one of them, we just don't know. So people should stop justifying their own howmophobia using the bible.
While I don't personally think the bible is worth much myself, it does have some nice (although violent) stories, and it would be a shame to ruin them for everybody with people using it to rationalize their own hatred of persons unlike themselves. Just my personal opinion worth every penny it costs you to read it (unless it actually costs you something, of course).
According to Wikipedia, Donald Trump's mom, Mary Anne MacLeod emmigrated from Scottland to the USA in 1930 and was very keen on becoming a citizen. Although Mary Anne and Fred stated that she was a naturalized citizen on their 1940 census form, records indicate her naturalization did not take place until March 10, 1942. They lied. These days, that'd be grounds for Deportation.
If I've made any mistakes, please Call me or email Kila or you can call us directly at (707) 413-6435. Here is my main website.