Now that I have Electric installed, I need to go through the various tutorials. 

Once that is done, the first order of business is to empirically find out a few values of great importance.

 

1. Critical Field Strength
   
2. Oxide Capacitance
   
3. Saturation Velocity
   
4. Effective mobility
   
5. Nominal Threshold Voltage
   

I will need to find these for both NMOS and PMOS.

I've decided I don't want to loose my circuit design skills, if my new job is software related. 

So I have conceived of the following project:

1. Design a super fast chip with multiple processors (perhaps with PDP-8 like instructions), with super fast, L1 and L2 caches made with 6-T SRAM, with many ports and queues. This will really test out my abilities. A lot of trade offs to consider for optimum circuit speed.
   
2. Have a PCI-E interface on chip, and have a really dumb driver that allows for direct access to the caches and code-streams for the processors. Cache coherency and instruction sequencing will be the responsibility of the programmer. 
   
3. Of course, I will then have to put it on a card, and that will refresh my PCB skills from a long time ago. 
   
4. Do a MOSIS run to create the chips, and I will need to get a cheap motherboard that supports PCI, with a cheap processor. I can then code programs to run massively parallel calculations like Black-Scholes, LU Factorization, Fast Fourier Transforms, SVD computations, and a whole school of such things on my PCI-E card. 
   
5. I will likely run Ubuntu on the system, meaning I will need to learn how to write Ubuntu drivers. 
   
6. Another nice challenge will be to see if I can convert some Apache Licence software to use my card to improve performance. I think the database, especially, can benefit from my MP-PCI card. 
   
7. Also, it will be fun to so some architectural modeling to see the trade offs between number of processors vs. cache etc. In addition, the circuit trade offs between power and speed, latch based design vs. domino vs CML vs. other logic families will be intense.
   

This is going to be very fun...but really expensive. Maybe I can take a class at Sac. State that puts runs through MOSIS.

I already downloaded Electric, MVSIS, and Dragon. I need to evaluate free simulators. I may just use the student version of Modelsim, but that would ruin any chance of me selling these cards. Making money isn't the point though.

Reviewing Basic Special Relativity

So, it didn't take very long to review the math needed to understand Maxwell's equations. I think I have a good grasp of the basic (though, as with mechanics, I will need more practice).

So on to special relativity. It has been a while since I took my modern physics course, but luckily Wikipedia, once again, has what I need for a basic review. 

Of course, let's start with the all-important Lorentz Factor:

Then the simple Lorentz Transformation for an inertial reference frame moving in the x direction...

Which yeilds time-dialation, and length-contraction in the direction of motion...

Which of-course has the inverse...

We also get the new way to add velocities...

And, we need definitions of Energy and momentum that'll be conserved...

We also need an reference frame invariant way to define "mass"...

If we try to relate the velocity four-vector  to the momentun four-vector  to get the analogous equation to the non-relativistic  we have...

Which leads to the famous equations...

Giving back our definitions of Energy and momentum. Cool huh?

But that was just a small digression from the straight summary of the basics (i.e. Special Relativity without the formalism)

So what do we have left? Force of course.  Which has quite a large number of forms.

We start with the definition that keeps...

...and just crank out from there...

Since , we have...

We can split that into components of acceleration, thus...

Well, that should cover the basics...well, there is Kinetic Energy. Real quick...

Let's look at the integral:

 

This allows us to conclude:

Well, that last bit was ugly, but the result was simple enough.

All this is a bit much for me to digest. But I think I got most of this (excepting maybe exactly knowing when to use inveriant mass, relativistic mass, or rest mass--but I'll figure it out).

After, I digest this stuff, it may be time to move to the formalism.

Re-Learning the Theories of Electricity and Magnatism

I am now in the process of changing from Engineer to Physicist. So, and reviewing a lot of my physics. It'll be a long road, and I will being going back to undergrad to do it. 

The laws of mechanics are straight forward enough.

Newton's second law:

Which is equivalent to the basic law in Lagrangian Mechanics:

Which is in-turn equivalent to the basic law's in Hamiltonian Mechanics:

Certainly, there are a lot of special cases to consider, the work energy theorem, the notion of conservative forces, etc. --I need plenty of practice, in addition.

But I will now focus on Electricity and magnetism, since it is used as a model to thing about many of the big problems in physics.  

The laws themselves are plenty....

There are the four equations for free charges:

Then the two new equations for total charge:

Beyond that each one has an integral form:

Beyond that, we need to comrehend that:

There is all that funkiness with the units of current density,  magnetizing field, electric displacement field, electric field, and magnetic field.  The accounting for that is something I don't have straight yet--not even conceptually.  

Mathematically, I need to review the meaning of the div and curl, as well as integrating over lines and surfaces. 

Beyond that, there is the task of learning how special relativity plays into things, and learning the covariant formlation of clasical electromagnatism.  But I suppose the last part can come while I try to tackle special relativity in full-form. 

So much to learn and so little time.

Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW)

So I know there are a lot of skeptics of AGW, but I am still fairly certain that the prevailing viewpoint holds that AGW is real.

In my opinion, the negative effects of pollution are obvious whether or not AGW is real.

Also, many of the soulutions offered (alternative enegry, energy concervation, more energy efficient trasportation) are also good things whether or not AGW is real.

Still, I found a couple of good sources discussing the current scientific viewpoint.

The Royal Society of the UK provides a very simple guide.

The American Institute of Physics has an amazingly comprehensive source.

A Strange Dream

I had a dream last night that I was a very successful business-man who made a lot of money on investments and trading. I was also, for some reason, and African American named Dwayne Wade.

I was approached by an old friend who had now become the principal at my old high school (my actual high school) about investing a small fraction of the schools funds. Somehow I was able to convince the county to invest a good portion of their funds, and the funds of any of the teachers, and principals who wanted it, in my new hedge fund for public schools.

I was very proud. This county was not going to have budget problems in short order. But then I got real nervous. What if state workers, being the non-investors they typically were, started demanding that I invest things in a certain way, or start pulling their money out in a panic. I would not be able to time trades at all.

So I made a deal. I would end the hedge fund if anyone pulled out their money within a year, or if anyone demanded that their funds be invested or not invested in certain ways ever. It was to be part of the contract. Somehow people agreed.

Later, there were old teachers who would come in wanting to invest, and would say things like, "don't invest my whole income just a small portion" (apparently the state had decided to automatically put part of their income into my fund). I informed them that they would have to talk to the state or county people to deal with that. I felt sorry for that. Since they likely wanted all their concerns addressed by a single person.

That's when I woke up. I don't know how I would have handled the situation. I would probably have made sure next time that a representative from the automatic withdrawal program is at the customer relations office when taking investment requests.

Are Journalists Science Dopes?

Richard Feynman said something to that effect once....at least about a particular journalist. I watched a clip of the Today Show where an economics professor was making medal predictions. A few things annoyed me.

1) He wasn't allowed to finish even the basic explanation, before interupted by blabbering of how confusing it was.

2) Then there was a joke about "decoding" this rather simple formula.

And to top it off, the graphic included used the U.S. flag for Germany.

Communication Skills Found Wanting

I read my older posts, and now have a glimpse into what people mean when they say they don't understand me. This blogging exercise is useful, if for no other reason than providing me feed-back on my written communication skills (even if it is from me to myself).

I suppose, a journal may have filled the same purpose; but I rarely ever went back and read my old journal entries. I certainly didn't evaluate them for how well they communicated ideas.

I need to relearn English. Can you believe that it has been over 12 years since I took writing instruction?

I don't know grammar, and I rely on my spell-checker for spelling.

I wonder if there is a good cheap course on writing. I may as well get voice-coaching/public-speaking tuition while I'm at it.