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Automation, Motion & Drives
It's a drive system - but not as we know it!
At HANNOVER MESSE 2018, WITTENSTEIN is showcasing a host of new stars orbiting its Galaxie drive system, which won the HERMES AWARD when it was launched at the event three years ago.
WITTENSTEIN Galaxie
HANNOVER MESSE: the final frontier. Captain's log, stardate 2018. These are the voyages of WITTENSTEN SE, with a crew of 2,000 on board. Its continuing mission for 69 years: To boldly develop its own innovative galaxy, seek out new drive systems and new versions of gearboxes. Far from mission control in Igersheim, WITTENSTEIN SE is showcasing solutions previously unknown to mankind... So, the Star Trek pastiche might seem a little far-fetched, but it's actually not that distant from reality. After all, WITTENSTEIN SE is clearly intent on boldly pushing back boundaries at this year's HANNOVER MESSE with its slogan "Make the impossible possible". And we are talking about a galaxy and stars, even if Galaxie is in fact the name of a drive system and the stars are product highlights rather than celestial bodies. On show is a new size for shafts that have to be exceptionally compact and precise at low to medium torque, an ultra-slim design and a gearbox version with or without hypoid gearhead for space-saving integration into machinery. Further highlights include a range of practical trade fair display models that clearly demonstrate the technological advances, application and advantages of the Galaxie drive series in machine tools, milling heads and robotic welding guns.
This year's WITTENSTEIN showcase is the logical progression from the immensely successful launch of the Galaxie drive system at HANNOVER MESSE 2015, where it won the HERMES AWARD. Since then, this innovative system has proved itself to be "superior on principle" in numerous industrial applications and has frequently achieved the impossible. So much so that it has been classified as an entirely new category of gearbox, which is soon to be included in one of the standard reference works for machine tool engineering. The Galaxie is even being heralded as a "technological milestone" in publications and presentations by members of industry and associations such as the Research Association for Power Transmission Engineering (FVA) and the German Engineering Federation (VDMA).
KEB Automation Toyo Automation ACHSTRON Motion Control USA Pavilion Forum Motion & Drives Faulhaber, Dr. Fritz


Definition - What does Galvanized mean?
Galvanized refers the process of depositing a protective zinc layer on iron or steel to protect against corrosion of the base metal. After this process, galvanized metal is produced. The zinc forms a corrosion resistant coating and prevents corrosive substances from penetrating to the base metal. The zinc works as a sacrificial anode.
Galvanized steel is used widely where rusting or corrosion is anticipated. It is used for street furniture, building frameworks, balconies, ladders and walkways.
Galvanized steel can last for over 100 years without rust if the environment does not contain sulfur or salts.
Galvanized is a process in which metal items (mainly steel or iron) are submerged in pure molten zinc at a temperature of approximately 454 °C (850 °F). This process gives galvanic protection to the metal when exposed to a corrosive environment. It not only protects various 'soft metals' from corrosion but also adds strength to the original metal. A galvanized coating is very useful in extremely corrosive environments such as a marine atmosphere. The corrosion performance and life of the galvanized product depends on the thickness of a galvanized coating; a thicker coating will provide longer life.
Galvanized steel is essentially pure zinc with a very small percentage of aluminum. The aluminum provides improved adhesion between the coating and the steel substrate during formation.
Galvanized steel is not the same with galvanneal steel. Galvanneal steel is produced by the process of galvanizing with an additional step – annealing is performed after the zinc coating.
Galfan provides better corrosion protection performance by 50% or more over traditional galvanizing. Galfan is environmentally friendly and provides better paint adhesion. Therefore, galfan is an alternative to galvanization.


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Hydractinia polytentaculata is een hydroïdpoliep uit de familie Hydractiniidae. De poliep komt uit het geslacht Hydractinia. Hydractinia polytentaculata werd in 2006 voor het eerst wetenschappelijk beschreven door Xu & Huang.

Hydractiniidae

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
I spent part of the weekend down in Orange County, looking at birds, then the better part of an hour scrolling around on Google Maps, trying to figure out where we'd been all day.
[Image: Courtesy Google Maps.]
In the process, I noticed some incredible street names. I love this development, for example, with its absurdist, greeting-card geography: you can meet someone at the corner of Luminous and Dreamlight, or rendezvous with your Romeo on the thin spit of land where Silhouette meets Balcony.
The same development has streets called Symphony, Pageantry, and Ambiance—and don't miss "Momento" [sic]. Nearby is a street called Heather Mist.
I live on Yacht Defender; please leave my packages at the front door.
As you can probably tell, I have nothing particularly interesting to say about this; I'm just marveling at suburban naming conventions. I'm reminded of when we moved back to L.A. a few years ago and we were looking for paint colors, finding shades like "Online," "Software," and "Cyberspace." A paint called "Download."
A beautiful new house on Firmware Update, painted entirely in Autocomplete. Spellcheck Lane, painted in a color called Ducking.
In any case, Orange County is actually a fascinating, Ballardian landscape of freeways built for no apparent reason other than to connect one grocery store to the next as fast as possible, residential subdivisions forming interrupted crystal-tiling patterns, migratory bird species flying over car parks, and vaguely named corporate research centers on the rims of artificial reservoirs.
Anecdotally, it has always seemed to me that fans of J.G. Ballard—or ostensible fans of J.G. Ballard—are suspiciously quick in condemning the very landscapes where so many of Ballard's best stories take place, the suburban business parks, toll motorways, and heavily-policed private infrastructures of real estate developments outside London, in the south of France, or here in Orange County, where subdivisions seem named after the very animals whose ecosystems were destroyed during construction.
But, I mean, come on—where else should a J.G. Ballard fan read Concrete Island or Super-Cannes than in a $3 million rented home on Gentle Breeze, pulling monthly paychecks from ambiguously-defined consultant-engineering gigs, studying schematic diagrams for water-treatment plants at your kitchen table, all while driving a leased luxury car?
One such engineering firm, based near the developments described here, describes its expertise as tackling "earth-related problems" on "earth-related projects." Earth-related problems. There should be a DSM-5 entry for that.
Anyway, all future Ballard conventions should take place in landscapes like this—enormous rented homes impossible to climate-control, overlooking electric-SUV dealerships constructed atop former egret nesting grounds—at the metaphorical intersection of Luminous and Dreamlight.
Author Geoff ManaughPosted on January 10, 2022 January 10, 2022 Categories BLDGBLOGTags Birds, California, Concrete Island, Earth-Related Problems, Housing, Infrastructure, J. G. Ballard, Landscape, Los Angeles, Migratory Birds, Names, Orange County, Residential Crystallography, Suburbs, Super-Cannes, Yacht Defender6 Comments on Luminous Dreamlight
[Image: "The Empty Quarter (Nevada)" (2021), collage by Geoff Manaugh, using maps from the U.S. Geological Survey.]
I'm thrilled to have some map collages in the latest issue of the Yale Review.
[Image: "Groundwater Grids (North Dakota)" (2020), collage by Geoff Manaugh, using maps from the U.S. Geological Survey.]
I started making these during lockdown, as part of a larger (and, to be honest, now doomed-feeling) graphic novel project using public domain U.S. Geological Survey maps as the main material.
[Images: "Keys II (Florida)" (2020) and "Keys I (Florida)" (2020), collages by Geoff Manaugh, using maps from the U.S. Geological Survey; the source maps for these are particularly interesting, because they utilize satellite photography.]
The images in this post include a few collages not published in the Yale Review, but click through for the full issue's broad selection of poetry, essays, fiction, and more.
[Images: "Morse Landscape II (Louisiana)" and "Morse Landscape I (Louisiana)" (2021), collages by Geoff Manaugh, using maps from the U.S. Geological Survey.]
And huge, huge thanks to Eugenia Bell for the editorial interest!
[Images: Various collages by Geoff Manaugh, using maps from the U.S. Geological Survey.]
If you're looking for someone to design a book cover or album cover or event poster, hit me up.
[Image: "Terrestrial Astronomy (Nevada)" (2021), collage by Geoff Manaugh, using maps from the U.S. Geological Survey; it's a pedestrian observation, but inverting the color scheme of geological maps makes them look like maps of stars.]
Author Geoff ManaughPosted on June 28, 2021 June 28, 2021 Categories BLDGBLOGTags Archipelagos, Art, Cartography, Collage, Everglades, Florida, Geology, Graphic Novels, Grids, Hawaii, Infrastructure, Islands, Landscape, Louisiana, Maine, Maps, Massachusetts, Nevada, USGS, Yale Review5 Comments on Terrestrial Astronomy
[Image: Binnewater Kilns, photo by BLDGBLOG.]
While I was over in New York State last fall, reporting both the "witch houses" piece for The New Yorker and the Middletown High School piece for The Guardian, I stopped off in the town of Rosendale, enticed there by several things I noticed on Google Maps.
[Image: The Rosendale Trestle, photo by BLDGBLOG.]
First was what turned out to be a satirical reference to something called the Geo Refrigeration Crevice, which, even on its own, sounded worth a side-trip. But, in the exact same area, there were also photos of an incredible-looking railway bridge converted to a hiking path that I wanted to walk across; there were these gorgeous, ruined kilns built into the hillside; and there were supposedly huge caves.
How on Earth could I drive past all that without stopping?
[Image: Caves everywhere! Photos by BLDGBLOG.]
Being—perhaps to my Instagram followers' frustration—an avid hiker, I spent far more time there than I should have, mostly looking down into jagged crevasses that extended past the roots of trees, carpeted in fallen leaves, often hidden beneath great, shipwrecked jumbles of boulders slick with the waters of temporary streams.
I crossed the bridge and was ready to hit the road again, when I saw another site of interest on the map. I decided to walk all the way down and around to something called the Widow Jane Mine.
Having visited many mines in my life, I was expecting something like a small arched hole in the side of a hill, probably guarded with a locked gate. Instead, hiking into the woods past some sort of private home/closed mining museum, the ground still damp from rain, I found myself stunned by the unexpected appearance of these huge, moaning, jaw-like holes blasted into the Earth.
[Image: An entrance to the Widow Jane Mine; photo by BLDGBLOG.]
I walked inside and immediately saw the space was huge: a massive artificial cavern extending far back into the hillside. Excuse my terribly lit iPhone photos here, but these images should give you at least a cursory sense of the mine's scale.
[Image: Inside the Widow Jane Mine; photos by BLDGBLOG.]
Several things gradually became clear as my eyes adjusted to the darkness.
One, I was totally alone in there and had no artificial illumination beyond my phone, whose light was useless. Two, a great deal of the mine was flooded, meaning that the true extent of its subterranean workings was impossible to gauge; I began fantasizing about returning someday with a canoe and seeing how far back it all really goes.
[Image: Flooding inside the Widow Jane Mine; photo by BLDGBLOG.]
Three, there were plastic lawn chairs everywhere. And they were facing the water.
While the actual explanation for this would later turn out to be both entirely sensible and somewhat anticlimactic—the mine, it turns out, is occasionally used as a performance venue for unusual concerts and events—it was impossible not to fall into a more Lovecraftian fantasy, of people coming here to sit together in the darkness, waiting patiently for something to emerge from the smooth black waters of a flooded mine, perhaps something they themselves have invited to the surface…
[Image: Lawn chairs facing the black waters of a flooded mine; photo by BLDGBLOG.]
In any case, at that point I couldn't be stopped. While trying to figure out where in the world I had left my rental car, I noticed something else in Google's satellite view of the area—some sort of abandoned factory complex in the woods—so I headed out to find it.
On the way there, still totally alone and not hiking past a single other person, there was some sort of Blair Witch house set back in the trees, collapsing under vegetation and water damage, with black yawning windows and graffiti everywhere. I believe it is this structure in the satellite pic.
[Image: A creepy, ruined house in the woods, photo by BLDGBLOG.]
Onward I continued, walking till I made it, finally, to this sprawling cement plant facility of some sort just standing there in a clearing.
[Image: Cement world; photos by BLDGBLOG.]
I wandered into the silos, looking at other people's graffiti…
[Image: "Born to Die"—it's hard to argue with that, although when I texted this photo to a friend he thought it said "Born to Pie," which I suppose is even better. Photo by BLDGBLOG.]
…before continuing on again to find my car.
Then, though, one more crazy thing popped up, sort of hidden behind those kilns in the opening photo of this post.
There was a door in the middle of the forest! With a surveillance camera!
[Image: Photos by BLDGBLOG.]
It turns out this door leads down into the massive document-storage caverns of Iron Mountain located nearby, a company whose subterranean archive fever was documented in The New Yorker several years ago (albeit referring to a slightly different location of the firm). I would guess that this is the approximate location of that door.
This was confirmed for me by a man sitting alone in a public works truck back at the Binnewater Kilns parking lot, near my rental car. He was smoking a cigar and listening to the radio with his window rolled down when I walked up to the side of his truck and said, "Hey, man, what's that door in the woods?"
Author Geoff ManaughPosted on February 15, 2020 March 4, 2020 Categories BLDGBLOGTags Archive Fever, Bridges, Caves, Cthulhu, Folklore, Geo Refrigeration Crevice, Geology, H. P. Lovecraft, Hiking, Infrastructure, Iron Mountain, Kilns, Mines, New York, Railways, Rosendale, Subterranean, Underground2 Comments on The Deep
Void Shaft Electricity
[Image: An engraving of mining, from Diderot's Encyclopedia.]
A Scottish firm called Gravitricity wants to turn abandoned mine shafts into gravity-driven, underground electrical batteries. Power could be generated and stored, the Guardian reported back in late 2019, "by hoisting and dropping 12,000-ton weights—half the weight of the Statue of Liberty—down disused mine shafts."
By timing these drops with regional energy demand, Gravitricity's repurposed mines could act as "breakthrough underground energy-storage systems," a company spokesperson explains in a video hosted on their site.
"Gravitricity said its system effectively stores energy by using electric winches to hoist the weights to the top of the shaft when there is plenty of renewable energy available, then dropping the weights hundreds of meters down vertical shafts to generate electricity when needed," the Guardian continues.
[Image: From the Gravitricity website.]
In Subterranea: The Magazine for Subterranea Britannica, where I initially read about this plan, some of the proposal's inherent design limitations are made clear. "What would be required for the Gravitricity scheme," SubBrit suggests, "would be very deep, wide, and perhaps brick-lined shafts clear of ladderways, air ducts, cables and the like. On what sort of surface the weights might land, time and time again, is another consideration."
Of course, this suggests that such shafts could also be deliberately designed and excavated as purpose-built battery-voids stretching down hundreds—thousands—of meters into the Earth, a not-impossible architectural undertaking. Repurposed domestic wells, using smaller weights, could also potentially work for single-home electrical generation, etc. etc.
So here's to a new generation of proposals for how to perfect such a scheme, proposals that should be awarded bonus points if the resulting gigantic underground cylinders might also function as seismic invisibility cloaks (or "huge arrays of precisely drilled holes and trenches in the ground").
Author Geoff ManaughPosted on February 9, 2020 February 9, 2020 Categories BLDGBLOGTags Abandoned Mines, Britain, Electricity, Gravitricity, Gravity, Infrastructure, Mines, Power, Scotland, Subterranean, UndergroundLeave a comment on Void Shaft Electricity
Secret Telephone Buildings
"In harmony with its residential location," we read in a paper called "Radio Relay and Other Special Buildings," originally published in the Spring 1950 issue of Bell Telephone Magazine, "this building serves nevertheless as a voice-frequency repeater and coaxial main station." An empty suburban house, inhabited only by machines and spectral voices.
(Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Transformer Houses.)
Author Geoff ManaughPosted on January 28, 2020 Categories BLDGBLOGTags Architecture, Bell Telephone Magazine, Infrastructure, Special Buildings, Telephones7 Comments on Secret Telephone Buildings
Norwegian Dream Tunnels
Almost exactly five years ago, I was in the Norwegian town of Tromsø to speak at a conference called "Future North," part of the annual Arctic Frontiers event.
One of the most interesting parts of my visit—and I do not say this to downplay the conference, but to indicate my enthusiasm for infrastructure—was this odd bit of traffic design: to get back and forth from Tromsø to its local airport by car, you have to pass through a sprawling underground tunnel network, complete with at least one subterranean roundabout carved into the roots of the mountain, a journey that, for someone newly arrived and jet-lagged like myself, seemed surreally endless (it probably took three minutes).
At the end of the journey, though, it gets stranger: you pop out of the ground floor of an otherwise nondescript building and turn directly onto a normal town road, passing through an opening that looks like an entrance to an underground parking garage.
These images, taken from Google Street View, show that building from the Tromsø side, peering into the mountain depths within. (Here is the tunnel entrance on Google Maps.)
While we're on the subject of Norwegian tunnels, however, it would be a mistake not to mention the Lærdal Tunnel, allegedly "the longest road tunnel in the world."
The tunnel is so long that, to address potential adverse effects on human neurology, it includes artificial caverns lit to invoke the Homeric glow of dawn.
[Image: The Lærdal Tunnel, photo by Patrick Reijnders, via Wikipedia.]
The design of the tunnel takes into consideration the mental strain on drivers, so the tunnel is divided into four sections, separated by three large mountain caves at 6-kilometre (3.7 mi) intervals. While the main tunnel has white lights, the caves have blue lighting with yellow lights at the fringes to give an impression of sunrise. The caves are meant to break the routine, providing a refreshing view and allowing drivers to take a short rest. The caverns are also used as turnaround points and for break areas to help lift claustrophobia during a 20-minute drive through the tunnel. In the tunnel, there is a sign on every kilometer indicating how many kilometers have already been covered, and also how many kilometers there are still to go. To keep drivers from being inattentive or falling asleep, each lane is supplied with a loud rumble strip towards the centre.
As another site mentions, "Since 1990, research has been carried out to study driver behavior in long road tunnels." Of course, one wonders how extreme this research has gotten, perhaps suggesting a new story by Nick Arvin or J.G. Ballard. (The construction of the tunnel is also fascinating, involving lasers, GPS satellites, and computer-controlled drilling platforms.)
Tunnels that mimic sunrise, built to accommodate human neurology using artificial stars as reference points, emerging from the ground-floors of buildings in coastal towns.
Dream tunnels, perhaps just one floor beneath your apartment, leading deep into the mountains beyond.
(If you just can't get enough Norwegian road tunnels, check out Kiln, previously on BLDGBLOG.)
Author Geoff ManaughPosted on January 28, 2020 January 10, 2022 Categories BLDGBLOGTags Driver Behavior in Long Road Tunnels, Engineering, Fatigue, Infrastructure, J. G. Ballard, Lærdal Tunnel, Neurology, Nick Arvin, Norway, Psychology, Tromsø, Tunnels8 Comments on Norwegian Dream Tunnels
The Atlas of Natural Regions
[Image: "Saint-Valentin, Champagne berrichonne (Centre-Val-de-Loire), 2019, by Eric Tabuchi].
I've been enjoying the Instagram account of photographer Eric Tabuchi for quite a while now. Tabuchi is working on an ambitious ten-year photographic project, kicked off in 2017, that he calls The Atlas of Natural Regions, basically a catalog of spatial conditions found throughout France.
The project "aims to create a photographic archive offering a broad overview of the diversity of the buildings, but also the landscapes, that make up the French territory," Tabuchi explains. "Ultimately, 50 shots will be taken in each of France's natural regions, geographical and cultural entities that are simple to grasp by their size (a few tens of kilometers)."
It will include 25,000 photographs when it's done—and I am already excited to see the final exhibition or book when it's complete. So far, there have been flooded quarries, sports complexes, and emergency training towers, industrial ruins, coastal bunkers, and surreal scenes that resemble something designed by Simon Stålenhag.
Tabuchi's Instagram account is well worth following, and you can also support his work by purchasing a print.
Author Geoff ManaughPosted on June 26, 2019 Categories BLDGBLOGTags Architecture, Bunkers, Cities, Eric Tabuchi, France, Infrastructure, Landscape, Photography, Ruins, Simon StålenhagLeave a comment on The Atlas of Natural Regions
Metropolitan Accomplice
[Image: Photo by Jonas Roosens/AFP/Getty Images, courtesy of the Guardian].
You might have seen the news that a crew of burglars used sewer tunnels beneath the diamond district in Antwerp, Belgium, to break into a nearby bank vault.
"Detectives in Antwerp are searching for clues in a sewage pipe under the Belgian city's diamond quarter after burglars apparently crawled through it to break into a bank holding safe deposit boxes full of jewels," the Guardian reported.
The heist allegedly began across the street, in a separate building, where they dug into the sewer network; one of the city's many subterranean pipes led close enough to the bank that the crew could then tunnel just a few more meters to make entrance.
A couple of details stand out. For example, the police apparently had to hang back long enough to take gas measurements above the newly opened sewer tunnel, fearing either that the air quality would be so bad that they could risk asphyxiation or that the sewer emanations themselves might be explosive.
Either way, this suggests a possible strategic move by future burglars, who night now know that police—or, at the very least, police not equipped with gas masks—will be delayed due to chemical concerns. Infrastructural off-gassing could become a kind of criminal camouflage.
The other detail is simply that, when the police began investigating the crime, "The first the residents of the central Antwerp district knew of the incident was when police raised all the manhole covers running down the centre of Nerviërsstraat," the Guardian reported. This otherwise inexplicable sight—law enforcement officers suddenly raising the lid on the city's underworld—was actually part of a forensic investigation.
I've already written at length about tunnel jobs used in bank heists—including a still-unsolved crime from Los Angeles, back in the 1980s—in my book, A Burglar's Guide to the City, so I will defer to that book in terms of addressing specific aspects of underground crime. In fact, I would perhaps even more specifically recommend the book Flawless by Scott Selby and Greg Campbell, about another, massive heist in Antwerp's diamond district pulled off in 2003.
[Images: Sewer maps and diagrams are now freely available online; the ones seen here are from Los Angeles and detail the same neighborhood in which a 1986 bank heist occurred, where the bandits tunneled into a vault using the city's stormwater network. Read more in A Burglar's Guide to the City or in retired FBI agent Bill Rehder's absurdly enjoyable memoir, Where The Money Is].
Instead, what seems worth commenting on here is simply the very nature of urban infrastructure and the ease with which it can be repurposed for designing, planning, and committing crimes. The city itself can be an accomplice in acts entirely unrelated to the infrastructure in question. A freeway route enables a bank-heist getaway, a sewer tunnel offers jewel thieves a subterranean method of entry, a specific intersection's geometric complexity means that carjackings are more likely to occur there: the city is filled with silent accomplices to future criminal activity, activities and events unforeseen by most city planners.
Will this intersection lead to more carjackings? is unlikely to be high on the list of questions posed by community feedback, yet it's exactly that sort of tactical thinking that might allow designers to stay one step ahead of the criminals who seek to abuse those same designers' finished projects.
(Thanks to Nicola Twilley for the tip!)
Author Geoff ManaughPosted on February 5, 2019 August 3, 2021 Categories A Burglar's Guide to the CityTags A Burglar's Guide to the City, Antwerp, Bank Crime, Burglary, Cities, Crime, Greg Campbell, Heists, Infrastructure, Los Angeles, Scott Selby, Sewers, Tunnels, Urban Design, William J. Rehder4 Comments on Metropolitan Accomplice
La vie minérale
[Image: Photo by Virginie Laganière and Jean-Maxime Dufresne].
A new exhibition featuring photos, videos, and sound installations by Virginie Laganière and Jean-Maxime Dufresne looks at life underground in Helsinki, Finland.
"Imagine a city with more than 400 underground facilities, tunnels that span over hundreds of kilometres and 10 million cubic meters of space carved into old Precambrian bedrock," they write. These spaces serve as "athletic training sites, energy distribution networks, globalized data centers, archival chambers, a buried church or undisclosed military facilities," to name only a few of their everyday uses.
The exhibition is up until June 17th, in Québec City. Read more at l'Œil de Poisson.
Author Geoff ManaughPosted on May 22, 2018 Categories BLDGBLOGTags Caverns, Caves, Cities, Finland, Helsinki, Infrastructure, Jean-Maxime Dufresne, Photography, Sound, Subterranean, Underground, Virginie LaganièreLeave a comment on La vie minérale
The Surface of a Terrestrial Sea
[Image: A sinkhole in Wink, Texas, surrounded by oil extraction and wastewater injection infrastructure].
A story I meant to include in my link round-up yesterday is this news item about a "large swath" of active oil well sites in Texas "heaving and sinking at alarming rates."
In other words, previously solid ground has been turned into a slow-moving terrestrial sea.
"Radar satellite images show significant movement of the ground across a 4000-square-mile area—in one place as much as 40 inches over the past two-and-a-half years," Phys.org reports. The land is tidal, surging and rolling with artificially induced deformation.
"This region of Texas has been punctured like a pin cushion with oil wells and injection wells since the 1940s and our findings associate that activity with ground movement," one of the researchers explains.
[Image: Infrastructure near Wink, Texas].
What's particularly fascinating about this is why it's alleged to be happening in the first place: a jumbled, chaotic, quasi-architectural mess of boreholes, abandoned pipework, and other artificial pores has begun churning beneath the surface of things and causing slow-motion land collapse.
For example, "The rapid sinking is most likely caused by water leaking through abandoned wells into the Salado formation and dissolving salt layers, threatening possible ground collapse." Or a nearby region "where significant subsidence from fresh water flowing through cracked well casings, corroded steel pipes and unplugged abandoned wells has been widely reported."
This utterly weird, anthropocenic assemblage—or should I say anthroposcenic—has also changed the terrain in other ways. Water leaking into an underground salt formation has "created voids," for example, which have "caused the ground to sink and water to rise from the subsurface, including creating Boehmer Lake, which didn't exist before 2003." It's like upward-falling rain.
The site brings to mind the work of Lebbeus Woods: jammed-up subterranean infrastructure, in a sprawling knot of abandoned and semi-functional machinery, causing the solid earth to behave more like the sea.
Read more at Phys.org.
Author Geoff ManaughPosted on May 17, 2018 Categories BLDGBLOGTags Anthropocene, Anthroposcenic, Earth, Extraction, Geology, Ground, Infrastructure, Landscape, Lebbeus Woods, Oil, Salt, Sinkholes, Subterranean, Texas, Underground, WinkLeave a comment on The Surface of a Terrestrial Sea
How The City Uses Algorithms
New York City has announced the "Automated Decision Systems Task Force which will explore how New York City uses algorithms." This makes New York "the first city in the country bringing our best technology and policy minds together to understand how algorithms affect the daily lives of our constituents. Whether the city has made a decision about school placements, criminal justice, or the provision of social services, this unprecedented legislation gets us one step closer to making algorithms accountable, transparent, and free of potential bias."
(Spotted via Kate Crawford.)
Author Geoff ManaughPosted on May 16, 2018 May 16, 2018 Categories BLDGBLOGTags Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, Cities, Equity, Infrastructure, Kate Crawford, New York CityLeave a comment on How The City Uses Algorithms
So good you can't see it
Living batteries and the wire garden
White House Redux
Thrilling Wonder Stories 3
New York City in Sound
The Topography of Hell
Utopian Typography
The Architecture of Polar Ice Floes

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


10x Pedal Power Your Home?
Innovation: Get fit and fight climate change at the same time?
In honor of the thousands of delegates in Paris this week at COP21 trying to save the planet, we thought we'd share interesting news from one innovator trying to do his part.
Admit it… Sitting there on a stationary bike or looking at all those people at the gym on ellipticals, you've thought to yourself, I bet you could power the whole building with the energy generated by all those little spinning wheels. Get fit and fight climate change at the same time? Hell, yes!
Well, someone else is actually doing it.
Manoj Bhargava, the inventor behind Five Hour Energy Drink (something else you're probably familiar with if you've ever pulled an all-night coding session), has recently built a prototype of the Free Electric bike — a stationary bicycle that can power a home's lights and basic appliances for an entire day after just one hour of pedaling.
Using stationary bikes for alternate uses is not new. Perhaps you've seen Maya Pedal, an NGO in Guatemala bringing pedal power to rural artisans, or even the Pedal Powered Snow Cone Camp at Burning Man, but Bhargava is one of the first to take the technology to the next level in an effort to fight to climate change.


text:
\section{Introduction}

Due to the global COVID-19 epidemic and the rapid changes in the epidemic, citizens are highly interested in learning about the latest news, which covers various domains, including directly related news such as treatment and sanitation policies and also side effects on education, economy, and so on.
Meanwhile, citizens would pay extra attention to global related news now, not only because the planet has been brought together by the pandemic, but also because they can learn from the news of other countries to obtain first-hand news.
For example, the epidemic outbreak in Korea is one month earlier than in Japan. Japanese citizens could prepare better for the epidemic if they had obtained more information from Korea.
Citizens could learn from Asian countries about the effectiveness of masks before local official guidance.
Universities can learn about how to arrange virtual courses from the experience of other countries. Thus, a citizen-friendly international news system with topic detection would be helpful.

There are three challenges for building such a system compared with systems focusing on one language and one topic~\cite{dong2020interactive, thorlund2020real}:
\begin{itemize}
    \item The reliability of news sources.
    \item Translation quality to the local language.
    \item Topic classification for efficient searching.
\end{itemize}

The interface and the construction process of the worldwide COVID-19 information aggregation system are shown in Figure~\ref{fig:framework}.
We first construct a robust multilingual reliable website collection solver via crowdsourcing with native workers for collecting reliable websites. We crawl news articles base on them and filter out the irrelevant. A high-quality machine translation system is then exploited to translate the articles into the local language (i.e., Japanese and English). The translated news are grouped into their corresponding topics by a BERT-based topic classifier. Our classifier achieves 0.84 F-score when classifying whether an article is about COVID-19 and substantially outperforms a keyword-based model by a large margin. In the end, all the translated and topic labeled news is demonstrated via a user-friendly web interface.

\begin{figure*}[h!]
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width=1\linewidth]{img/framework.v2_en.pdf}
    \caption{The construction process and the interface of the system.}

    \label{fig:framework}
\end{figure*}

\section{Methodology}

We present the pipeline for building the worldwide COVID-19 information aggregation system, focusing on the three solutions to the challenges.

\begin{table*}[!htb]
    \begin{center}
    \resizebox{\textwidth}{!}
    {
        \begin{tabular}{c|c|c|c|c}
        \toprule
        Website & Country & Primary & Reason & Topics \\
        \midrule
        \multirow{3}{*}{www.cdc.gov} & \multirow{3}{*}{US} & \multirow{3}{*}{True} & \multirow{3}{*}{\shortstack{The site is a government website, \\ specifically the Center for Disease Control.}} & \multirow{3}{*}{\shortstack{infection status\\ prevention and emergency declaration\\symptoms, medical treatment and tests}} \\ & & & & \\ & & & & \\
        \midrule
        \multirow{2}{*}{www.covid19-yamanaka.com} & \multirow{2}{*}{Japan} & \multirow{2}{*}{False} & \multirow{2}{*}{\shortstack{Shinya Yamanaka is a famous medical researcher and \\ his insights about COVID-19 are reliable.
}} & \multirow{2}{*}{\shortstack{prevention and emergency declaration}} \\ & & & &\\
        \midrule
        \multirow{4}{*}{www.internazionale.it} & \multirow{4}{*}{Italy} & \multirow{4}{*}{False} & \multirow{4}{*}{\shortstack{This website collects and translates articles from\\ news agencies and magazines from all over the world.\\Has up-to-date news, but also long-form analysis articles.\\Most of my deeper information comes from here.
}} & \multirow{4}{*}{\shortstack{infection status\\economics and welfare\\prevention and emergency declaration\\school and online classes}} \\ & & & &\\ & & & &\\ & & & &\\
        \midrule
        \multirow{1}{*}{covid.saude.gov.br} & \multirow{1}{*}{Brazil} & \multirow{1}{*}{True} & \multirow{1}{*}{\shortstack{This site is the goverment web site.}} & \multirow{1}{*}{\shortstack{infection status}} \\
        \bottomrule
        \end{tabular}
    }
    \caption{Crowdworkers give trusted websites that they use to obtain COVID-19 related information. They also give the reasons to choose the website and what kind of information he/she obtaines from the website.}
    \label{tab:website_crowdsourcing}
    \end{center}
\end{table*}

\subsection{Reliable Website Collection}

To avoid rumors and obtain high-quality, reliable information, it is essential to limit the information sources. Since we aim to create a multilingual system, the first challenge is to obtain a list of reliable information providers from different countries and in different languages.

Crowdsourcing is known to be efficient in creating high-quality datasets~\citep{behnke2018improving}. To collect the list of reliable websites of a specific country, we use multiple crowdsourcing services (e.g., Crowd4U\footnote{\url{https://crowd4u.org/}}, Amazon Mechanical Turk
\footnote{\url{https://www.mturk.com/}}, Yahoo! Crowdsourcing\footnote{\url{https://crowdsourcing.yahoo.co.jp}}, Tencent wenjuan\footnote{\url{https://wj.qq.com}})
and limit the workers' nationality because we assume that local citizens of each country know the reliable websites in their country. The workers not only suggest websites they think are reliable but they must also justify their choices and give a list of related topics they address, similar to constructing support for rumor detection \cite{gorrell-etal-2019-semeval, derczynski-etal-2017-semeval}.

We decided to use eight countries of interest, including India, the United States, Italy, Japan, Spain, France, Germany, and Brazil.
For other countries or regions such as China and Korea, reliable websites are provided by international students from these areas.

We treat official news from the governments as primary information sources and reliable newspapers as secondary information sources. We counted how many times each website was mentioned by the crowdworkers and found that the primary information sources tend to be ranked at the top three in each country. So we mainly crawl articles from primary sources.

Table~\ref{tab:website_crowdsourcing} shows examples of the crowdsourcing results. The workers provide websites indicating for each one whether it is a primary or a secondary source, what are the reasons to choose this particular website, and which topics are addressed by the website.  These topics are selected from a list that includes eight topics (e.g., \textit{Infection status}, \textit{Economics and welfare}, \textit{School and online classes}).

\subsection{Crawl, Filter and Translation for Information Localization}
We crawl articles from 35 most reliable websites everyday by accessing the entry page and jumping to urls inside it recursively.

The number of crawled web pages is too big and exceeds the translation capacity. We consider only the most relevant pages by filtering using keywords such as \textit{COVID}. We can focus on pages with a higher probability to be COVID-19 related.

We use neural machine translation model TexTra\footnote{\url{https://mt-auto-minhon-mlt.ucri.jgn-x.jp/}} with self-attention mechanism \citep{bahdanau2014neural, vaswani2017attention}. The translation system provides high-quality translation from news articles in multiple languages into articles in Japanese and English. The translation capacity is approximately 3,000 articles per day.

\subsection{Topic Classification}
To perform topic classification, we first collect the dataset via crowdsourcing. The topic labels are annotated to a subset of articles. Then we train a topic-classification model to label further articles automatically.

\subsubsection{Crowdsourcing Annotation for Topic Classification}
All articles are in Japanese and English after the translation stage, we then apply crowdsourcing annotation to label the articles with topics. As shown in Figure~\ref{fig:article_crowdsourcing}, the crowdsourcing workers first check the content of the page and give four labels to the article: whether it is related to COVID-19, whether it is helpful, whether the translated text is fluent, and topics of the article.

Each article is assigned to 10 crowdworkers from Yahoo Crowdsourcing and we set a threshold to $50\%$ for each binary question, i.e., if more than 5 workers think the article is related to COVID-19, then we label the article as $related$.
We post this crowdsourcing task twice a week and can obtain 20K article-topic pairs each time.

\begin{figure}[thb]
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width=0.6\linewidth]{img/article_crowdsourcing.pdf}
    \caption{A sample of crowdsourcing annotation.}

    \label{fig:article_crowdsourcing}
\end{figure}

\begin{table}[!htb]
    \small
    \begin{center}
        \begin{tabular}{c|c|c}
        \toprule
        \diagbox{Country}{$\#$}&Questionnaire&Reliable sites\\
        \midrule
        India & 122 & 67 \\
        US & 106 & 77 \\
        Italy & 104 & 68 \\
        Japan & 102  & 49  \\
        Spain & 126  & 90  \\
        France & 127  & 71 \\
        Germany & 106 & 61 \\
        Brazil & 115 & 67 \\
        \midrule
        Total & 908 & 550 \\
        \bottomrule
        \end{tabular}
    \caption{Statistics of the number of questionnaires and reliable sites of each country.}
    \label{tab:reliable_website_collection_result}
    \end{center}
\end{table}

\begin{table}[!htb]
    \begin{center}
    \resizebox{0.37\textwidth}{!}
    {
    \begin{tabular}{c|c}
    \toprule
    Country & Article with topic label \\
    \midrule
    France & 31K \\
    America & 6K \\
    Japan & 5K \\
    China & 8K \\
    International & 3K \\
    Spain & 1K \\
    India & 2K \\
    Germany & 1K \\
    \midrule
    Total & 57K \\
    \bottomrule
    \end{tabular}
    }
    \caption{Statistics of the article-topic dataset constructed by crowdsourcing.}
    \label{tab:crowdsourcing_annotation}
    \end{center}
\end{table}

\begin{table*}[t]
    \begin{center}
    \begin{tabular}{c|c c c|c c c}
    \toprule
    \multirow{2}{*}{Task} & \multicolumn{3}{c|}{Keyword-based model} & \multicolumn{3}{c}{BERT-based model} \\ & Precision & Recall & F-score & Precision & Recall & F-score \\
    \midrule
    Is about COVID-19 & 0.36 & 1.00 & 0.54 & 0.82 & 0.87 & \textbf{0.84} \\
    Topic: Infection status & 0.09 & 0.53 & 0.16 & 0.43 & 0.81 & \textbf{0.56} \\
    Topic: Prevention & 0.05 & 0.73 & 0.10 & 0.19 & 0.73 & \textbf{0.30} \\
    Topic: Medical information & 0.17 & 0.70 & 0.27 &  0.27 & 0.91 & \textbf{0.41} \\
    Topic: Economic & 0.06 & 0.36 & 0.10 & 0.14 & 0.84 & \textbf{0.24} \\
    Topic: Education & 0.06 & 1.00 & \textbf{0.11} & 0.05 & 0.60 & 0.09 \\
    Topic: Art and Sport & 0.06 & 0.41 & 0.10 & 0.08 & 0.94 & \textbf{0.14} \\
    Topic: Others & 0.52 & 0.07 & 0.13 & 0.87 & 0.79 & \textbf{0.83} \\
    \bottomrule
    \end{tabular}
    \caption{Topic classification results. Each line stands for one task. We use F-score to evaluate.}
    \label{tab:topic_classification}
    \end{center}
\end{table*}

\begin{table*}[!htb]
    \begin{center}
    \begin{tabular}{c|c|c|c}
    \toprule
    Topic & Positive & Negative & Positive percentage \\
    \midrule
    Is about COVID-19 & 24361 & 32265 & $43.0\%$ \\
    Topic: Infection status & 6664 & 49962 & $11.8\%$ \\
    Topic: Prevention & 2533 & 54093 & $4.5\%$ \\
    Topic: Medical information & 5075 & 51551 & $9.0\%$ \\
    Topic: Economic & 2066 & 54560 & $3.6\%$ \\
    Topic: Education & 173 & 56453 & $0.3\%$ \\
    Topic: Art and Sport & 657 & 55969 & $1.2\%$ \\
    Topic: Others & 37331 & 19295 & $65.9\%$ \\
    \bottomrule
    \end{tabular}
    \caption{The number of positive and negative samples for each topic.}
    \label{tab:topic_classification_num}
    \end{center}
\end{table*}

\subsubsection{Automatic Topic Classifier}
The pretrained language model BERT~\citep{DBLP:journals/corr/abs-1810-04805} shows reliable performance on many NLP tasks with limited annotated data including document classification \citep{adhikari2019docbert, sun2019fine}. We use a pretrained BERT model in a feature based manner \cite{lee2019would} where encoder weights kept frozen and train a classifier using the labeled articles by crowdsourcing. The BERT-based topic classification can then label other pages.

We also compare it with a keyword-based baseline method where we set keywords for each topic and find exact match.

\section{Results} \label{sec:results}
We show the statistics of the reliable website collection , topic classification results, translation quality evaluation and statistical information of the interface in this section.

\subsection{Reliable Website Collection}

As shown in Table~\ref{tab:reliable_website_collection_result}, we totally recieved 908 questionnaire results from 8 countries with totally 550 websites. Rumors are rampant in this era, the reliable websites dataset can help people to protect themselves from COVID-19 and avoid trusting rumors about COVID-19.

\subsection{Topic Classification}

\begin{table}[!htb]
    \begin{center}
    \begin{tabular}{c|c}
    \toprule
    \multirow{2}{*}{Topic} & \multirow{2}{*}{\shortstack{Krippendorff's\\ alpha}} \\
    & \\
    \midrule
    Is about COVID-19 &  0.927 \\
    Topic: Infection status &  0.898 \\
    Topic: Prevention & 0.851 \\
    Topic: Medical information & 0.867 \\
    Topic: Economic & 0.931 \\
    Topic: Education & 0.938 \\
    Topic: Art and Sport & 0.994 \\
    Topic: Others &  0.884 \\
    \bottomrule
    \end{tabular}
    \caption{Inter-annotator agreement measured by Krippendorff's alpha of each topic.}
    \label{tab:topic_classification_Krippendorff_alpha}
    \end{center}
\end{table}

We compared the BERT-based model with the keyword-based baseline model on topic classification task.

For the keyword-based method, there are totally 76 selected keywords of different topics such as \textit{COVID}, \textit{Remote work}, and \textit{Social distance}.

For the BERT-based method, we use the pre-trained BERT-LARGE model with Whole Word Masking (WWM).
We add one linear layer after the BERT encoder without fine-tuning the encoder.
For every article, we take the hidden state of the ending symbol of each sentence as the sentence embedding and perform mean and max pooling of all sentence embeddings. The input of the linear layer is the concatenation of mean and max pooling embeddings and the output is a binary label.

The article-topic dataset is shown in  Table~\ref{tab:crowdsourcing_annotation}, it contains totally 57K articles from 8 countires with topic label.
We calculated the Krippendorff's alpha~\footnote{https://github.com/pln-fing-udelar/fast-krippendorff} as an inter-annotator agreement measure for 57K human checked articles, as shown in Table~\ref{tab:topic_classification_Krippendorff_alpha}, the inter-annotator agreement of all topics is larger than 0.8 which is high enough \cite{krippendorff2004reliability}, showing the quality of our dataset is guaranteed.

We randomly selected select $90\%$ data as train set and the remaining $10\%$ as test set.
As shown in Table~\ref{tab:topic_classification}, the BERT-based model outperforms the baseline model in almost all tasks. We can see that our system can reliably classify which articles are related to COVID-19 with 0.84 F1, and that our interface can show related news to our users. The topic classifiers achieve relatively satisfactory performance on the medical related topics (i.e. Infecction status, Prevention and Medical information). The general high recall guarantees the most topic relevant articles are returned. When presenting to end users, the topic predictions are filtered by the 'Is about COVID-19' classifier to ensure the eventual precision. Meanwhile, for some topics such as Arts \& Sports and Education, the performance of the current system is still limited.

We further analyze the balance of the dataset by calculating the positive and negative number of each topic.
As shown in Table~\ref{tab:topic_classification_num}, labels of several topics are imbalanced, for example, Education, Art and Sport, Economic. Analyzed together with the BERT topic classifier results, we found that the performance is poor for such imbalanced topics. For more frequent and balanced topics such as Infection status and Medical information, the F-scores are relatively higher.

\subsection{Machine Translation Evaluation}

For the evaluation of the translated text, we conducted human evaluation through crowdsourcing. As shown in Table~\ref{tab:mt_eval}, 61.7\% of the articles are fluent in the translated language and the inter-annotator agreement is high enough ($>$0.8).

\begin{table}[!htb]
    \begin{center}
    \begin{tabular}{c|c|c}
    \toprule
    Fluent & Not fluent & Krippendorff's alpha \\
    \midrule
    15036&9235&0.877\\
    \bottomrule
    \end{tabular}
    \caption{Human evaluation of translated Japanese articles related to COVID-19 and inter-annotator agreement.}
    \label{tab:mt_eval}
    \end{center}
\end{table}

\subsection{Statistics of the System}

\begin{table}[!htb]
    \begin{center}
        \begin{tabular}{c|c|c|c}
        \toprule
        \multirow{2}{*}{Country}&\multirow{2}{*}{Raw($\uparrow$/day)}&\multirow{2}{*}{Translated}&With\\ & & &topics \\
        \midrule
        France & 774K(8K) & 74K & 9K\\
        US & 69K(730)  & 15K & 2K\\
        Japan & 25K(260)  & 5K & 2K\\
        Europe & 50K(510) & 2K & 50  \\
        China & 38K(400) & 3K & 342  \\
        Int. & 45K(470) & 3K & 263\\
        Korea & 16K(170) & 260 & 71 \\
        Spain & 4K(40) & 370 & 36 \\
        India & 14K(150) & 860 & 66 \\
        Germany & 16K(170) & 8K & 6K \\
        \midrule
        Total & 1.05M(11K) & 110K & 18K\\
        \bottomrule
        \end{tabular}
    \caption{Statistics of the growing database of the system.}
    \label{tab:database}
    \end{center}
\end{table}

The detail of the system database is shown in Table~\ref{tab:database}. There are totally 1.05M website pages with 110K of them translated into Japanese and 18K of them with topic labels. The dataset is still growing approximately 11K pages per day.

We collected the number of visits to the website through google analytics, there are about 200 to 500 visits per month and more than 100 people at the peak per day. It suggests that the system is actually taken up by the public.

\section{Conclusion} \label{sec:conclusion}
We built a system for worldwide COVID-19 information aggregation by combining crowdsourcing, crawling, machine translation, and a topic classifier, which provides reliable, comprehensive and latest information from the world. In the meanwile, we proposed an effective approach to annotate large cross-lingual news topic datasets with high inner-annotation agreement, which potentially benefits the NLP community to enrich the solutions for preventing COVID-19.  The contextual BERT based classification models achieve reasonable performance considering the imbalance of the topic labels.  We assume this work could attract future research interests to the COVID-19 related tasks.

\bibliographystyle{acl_natbib}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


Toronto area home sales rebounded by 12 per cent from September to October, pointing to a stronger fall market after a policy-driven pullback from a frenzied market that peaked earlier this year.
The Toronto Real Estate Board said Thursday that 7,118 homes were sold in October, up from the month before but down 27 per cent from the same month last year.
"Every year we generally see a jump in sales between September and October. However, this year that increase was more pronounced than usual compared to the previous ten years," said board president Tim Syrianos.
"While the number of transactions was still down relative to last year's record pace, it certainly does appear that sales momentum is picking up."
The average selling price in October was $780,104, up less than one per cent from September but up 2.3 per cent compared with October 2016. Price growth was driven by appreciation in the townhouse and condo segments.
The average price of a townhouse in the GTA was up 7.4 per cent at $629,507, while the average condo price was $523,041 up 22 per cent year-over-year, the most of any housing type. Meanwhile, the average price of a detached home was down 2.5 per cent year-over-year at $1 million. Prices of semi-detached homes rose 6.3 per cent to $764.293.
Sales in the first 10 months of the year slipped to 80,198, down 19 per cent from the same period in 2016. Sales have dropped more than 10 per cent from the record set in March before Ontario announced its housing plan.
A spike in Toronto-area home prices earlier this year resulted in the provincial government's imposition of a number of measures to cool the market after a shortage of detached home listings helped push up prices.
In addition, the Bank of Canada has raised interest rates twice in recent months to the current overnight rate of one per cent, signalling a clampdown on cheap borrowing and driving the big bank prime rates and the cost of variable-rate mortgages higher. The cost of new fixed-rate mortgages have also risen as yields on the bond market have also risen.
Meanwhile, the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions will implement new lending guidelines at the beginning of next year. Among the changes being considered is a requirement that homebuyers who do not require mortgage insurance still have to show they can make their payments if interest rates rise.
The policy-driven changes in the Toronto market, which include a tax on foreign buyers, have followed the trajectory of the Vancouver market, with a pullback directly after new rules were introduced followed by a pick up after a relatively short time, said TREB's director of market analysis Jason Mercer.
"It appears that the psychological impact of the Fair Housing Plan, including the tax on foreign buyers, is starting to unwind."
Vancouver home sales data from October is expected later Thursday.
The CHMC warned last month that the country's hottest housing markets remain "highly vulnerable" with evidence of moderate overvaluation and price acceleration in Toronto, Hamilton, Vancouver, Victoria and Saskatoon.


Here are examples of teams widely used amongst the Gems of War player community. For general tips on building teams see this article.
This team is great at any point in the game but particularly as a new player: none of these Troops are above Ultra-Rare so are easier to obtain. This is a great looping team as each Troop has an effect on the Gems on the board, increasing your chances for an extra turn. The more turns you can keep on your team, the greater the chances you will have of wearing down the enemy team.
Treant can assist in an increased chance of a 4/5 Gem match and is a great tank - with each Spell Treant increases its Armor and Attack. Alchemist will generate Mana by converting Gems to Yellow, helping you gain extra Gold as well and Valkyrie is a fantastic blue Mana generator - with a bonus of 10 Souls for each Spell cast. Banshee is your main damage doer and will also gain Souls.
Valkyrie's Spell generates 10 Souls each time it is cast, while the Warlocks' Necromancy Trait increases Souls earnt by 50%. The first Troop in your Team is often the first Troop to be defeated so by having a Warlock in front it protects Valkyrie so she can continue earning Souls even if the first Troop is defeated.
Traitstone farming is done by completing as many Explore Battles as possible as fast as possible so this Team is built for speed on the lowest Explore Difficulty Setting.
Sunbird and Rowanne both do damage split amongst enemies. Fire bomb starts the Battle with full Mana and will defeat an enemy when it casts its Spell, so that means you can defeat 2 opponents at the start of the Battle. When Fire Bomb explodes it also explodes Red Gems to give Sunbird Mana, so you could potentially finish the Battle in 3 or 4 turns.
A similar team variation of this is Sunbird, Bombot, Sunbird, Bombot with Dark Banner.
You could also replace Rowanne or a Fire Bomb with the Weapon Imperial Jewel to earn more Class XP for your Hero at the same time.
Goblins are great at looping: firstly, most Goblin Spells give you an extra turn, and secondly, a few of them also explode Gems, which generates Mana for the Team. This means you can continue casting > gaining an extra turn > casting > gaining an extra turn and so forth.
In this build the Nobend Brothers take the role of our tank, protecting Queen Grapplepot and Princess Fizzbang in the middle. Queen Grapplepot is the main damage dealer for this Team while Princess Fizzbang can explode a lot of Gems and give the Troops a lot of extra Skill Points. Goblin King is in the last place with high health so if you get into a tricky situation he can summon more Goblins.
The aim is to get Princess Fizzbang looping as much as possible so the Dark Elven Banner is a good choice for this Team, providing +1 Purple and +1 Green gem Bonuses.
Queen Grapplepot, Nobend Brothers, Princess Fizzbang.
If Nobend Brothers explodes and charges up Grapplepot's AND Fizzbang's Spells, go back to the start and cast Queen Grapplepot's Spell. Cast Princess Fizzbang only when the other Troop's Spells aren't ready: this will maximise your looping potential.
Forest Troll and Nyx give each other Mana by creating Gems on the board. You can get lucky and sometimes get extra turns from the Gems that are created, making it harder for the other team to take as many turns.
With Queen Mab fully Traited, the 4-5 Gem matches that Forest Troll and Nyx create will Freeze random enemies, preventing the enemy taking an extra turn.
Finally, Kraken does a decent amount of damage to the last 2 enemies with the chance to devour the last enemy. In addition, Kraken also creates Blue Gems which will help charge Forest Trolls spell to start the loop with Nyx again.
Although Kraken uses the same Mana colours as Nyx, and Queen Mab is Mana blocked by the first 3 Troops as they use Blue and Purple Mana too, a lot of Mana is being generated with this team and there will be enough to power every Troop up throughout the match.
This is an advanced Team that a lot of end-game players are using at the time this article has been written. It contains a special Event only Weapon (Divine Protector), 2 Mythic Troops (Infernus and Ubastet) and 1 Legendary Troop (Divine Ishbaala).
This is a high damage Team which makes use of a lot of exploding Gems, Storms which generate more Gems of the colours the Team needs and also takes advantage of a Troop Type Team Bonus for Divine Troops. The Hero also heals the Team every turn. Infernus burns all enemies on 4-5 Gem matches AND the entire team starts the battle with 50% Mana.
We have generalised commonly used to teams in order to understand why they function well. If you would like more tips on team building specifically to the Troops you own feel free to reach out to other players on the forums or Discord community.
Added an early-game looping team and corrected some grammatical errors.


Good Samaritan Hospital seeks to hire a Registered Nurse who will embrace our mission of improving the health status of the people we serve. We pursue our mission by providing a full range of health-related services, including prevention, wellness and education. Our service identity is rooted in our Mission and Core Values, which serve as guiding principles in our healing ministry.
This position applies the nursing process in providing direct and indirect holistic care to patients and their families. The position also collaborates, in a collegial manner, with physicians and other health care team members in meeting the patient's needs. This position may delegate certain aspects of care to those under their direct supervision, within the scope of nursing practice.
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text:
Chat NOW What's On Your Mind Digital Dialogues
Magnetic Core Memory
Ask questions and give answers about computers, mobile devices, game boxes, PC security and all manner of geeky stuff.
Post by yogi » 19 Jan 2023, 15:57
This is pretty much how it all started. I remember seeing later versions of this particular version back in the days when computers were just coming out of the laboratories and into factory production environments. Amazing.
CoreMemory.jpeg (400.42 KiB) Viewed 94 times
Re: Magnetic Core Memory
Post by Kellemora » 19 Jan 2023, 16:46
I guess it didn't catch on, hi hi.
It was state of the art at the time. Semiconductors were only lab experiments back then, but when that technology improved core memories had no place in the world anymore. The core memory board I recall was on a PC board about the size of a 10 x 14 photograph and I don't think it had more than 1024 bits of memory. It might have been 2048, but it's too long ago for me to recall clearly. We used punched paper tape to feed it data because small sized disks weren't popular yet.
My Heath/Zenith Octal Entry, besides the numeric keypad, I also had a paper tape reader/punch.
It saved a lot of time entering data by hand. But that is all it was, a toy, hi hi.
My Apple I motherboard used a cassette player with data tapes, so did my Apple II at first, then I bought the floppy disk drives for it. It was lot's of money back then too!
It is amazing how far along computers have come in our lifetimes!
True that. The day I started my first job at Motorola semiconductors were a theory. We didn't make any products that used them until I worked there nearly ten years, and those products were hybrids. Closed Circuit cameras were the first product to use semiconductors and then hospital products. You could say I've been in electronic before silicon chips were invented. Now they are talking about qubits and quantum computers than can break every encryption code known to mankind in under twenty minutes. As fantastic as computers seem to be, they are based on the geometry and physics of our brain, which apparently is magnitudes more complicated than the world's most super supercomputer. The day where artificial intelligence will be smarter than humans is 5-6 years off. Then what? I can't imagine where that will end up. But, Stephen Hawking predicted it's one of the few things that will do away with humanity as we know it.
When I used to go with my brother on his overseas buying trips, usually to Japan, Hong Kong, and parts of China.
I saw technology signed, sealed, and blocked from sale, until the current technology was all sold.
As simple example was the CD players, then recorders, even though they had already developed DVD players and recorders, and BlueRay was already in the works. You couldn't buy a DVD until the CD market was saturated first.
At the time my brother was buying CD jukeboxes, which only played music, they already had DVD jukeboxes with VIDEO Screens on display in their What's Coming Next showroom. But no sales could be made for like 2 more years on those.
He was so sure that the Hoverboard craze would become popular, he bought like 8,000 of those to be delivered somewhere around 6 months down the road is when they would leave China. These were the two-wheeled type, but ran vertically, not horizontally, so had good speed to them, compared to the later horizontal types that worked like Segway's work. He ended up selling the bulk of them at cost to get rid of them, nobody wanted that type after the horizontal ones came out. We had fun playing on them around his warehouse. You used them like you did a scooter, but they had no handle. More like a motorized skateboard, just put more pressure on your front foot to go faster, or more pressure on your back foot to stop. They didn't speed up until both feet were on the board, which was a benefit to them.
It was on our last trip over together that I bought the recumbent bicycles, two of them, one for me and one for Ruth. I rode mine a lot, she rarely rode hers at all. I ended up selling both of them together to a couple for around double of what I paid for them, but then too about 1/3 the price that they sold for here from a bike shop.
I don't recall seeing many hover boards on the streets. I am certain that I have seen more recumbent bicycles than I have hover boards. LOL Frankly I don't know how technology is marketed these days. I've been out of that game for a couple decades now. It always amazed me how our development engineers would come up with the next generation product but not be able to sell it right away. It almost sounds like a conspiracy because I would think the guy with the game changing technology would have a marketing advantage. Why would he care about those other folks with last year's toys? I don't know the answer to that but that is how the game was played for many years. Also, China never was the leader in technology. They took what the Western World developed and made it more efficiently and cheaper. That's no longer the case because China is at par with us technologically, and possibly ahead in some areas. It could be that the marketing strategy has changed due to that.
I hear ya, and agree, it doesn't seem like something cutting edge companies would do.
You got something new, get it out there before everyone else.
But then too, all these hi-tech companies just might be in collaboration with each other, to make sure they recoup their R&D investments on the current latest product, before flooding the market with the newer tech stuff.
There is also the issue with the parts needed to make those things en masse to sell to the public also.
Although they could make recordable CDs, first they hit the market with pre-recorded CDs that could be mass produced by stamping them in a similar way that vinyl records were stamped. So the music industry got them first, and also pre-recorded programs for computers, then finally they released the recordable CDs.
DVDs started in much the same way, but for the movie industry first.
I once went through a plant that made 4-track tapes, the smaller cartridge size like 8-tracks.
It was amazing to see how they had these humongous machines with 6 large spools of tape on them, feeding through recording heads at fairly high speed, then another machine that wound them up and cut the tapes off at the right point and slipped them onto the self-feeding reel. After I saw this in operation, I then understood why some of the 4-track tapes had such a long leader between the end of the last song and the start of the next group of songs.
I was also in a record stamping plant, but it was not for music, it was an advertising companies product. Well it did have music, but not the kind you listen to, hi hi. Ironically, some of these were printed on the side of cardboard boxes their product came in, so you could cut it out and play it on a 45 rpm turntable. Cereal boxes also did the same thing for a while.
You are my favorite time machine in that you bring back memories I completely forgot I was keeping in storage. LOL I recall those cereal box records and had a few of my own. I don't know now what was on the disks nor do I remember what cereal we are talking about, but I do recall the excitement of hearing what was on those records for the very first time. My uncle worked for a company that made turntables and as if by magic I happened to have owned a couple different kinds of my own. I think they started out being dedicated to one speed and came up with the multiple speed decks much later. The first one I owned was a 45rpm version, which is what was just becoming popular at the time. I must have been about twelve years old.
I don't think CD manufacturers were in cahoots in any way, but I do know the RIAA is the Mafia of the recording industry. They only reason they changed their ways was due to the porn industry advancing the technology at a multi-billion dollar rate. All that recording technology was available but the RIAA controlled the copyrights and the royalties. So even if you had a writable CD, it was illegal for you to use it for copying music. It took a while for them to figure out how to stop pirates, but eventually they did and then both read and write CD's were in public hands. Now it's all about streaming and the money is laundered before you even hear the music.
Almost everybody remembers the 8-track cartridges, but almost nobody remembers the 4-track which handled all sizes of cartridges from single song, to multiple songs, to entire albums in a super larger cartridge.
I liked the 4-track cartridges much better, because the player had it's own drive wheel and capstan. You pulled a lever to raise the capstan into the hole in the back of the cartridge, and they never slipped. Plus, the disk the tape sat on had graphite bars to keep the tape well lubricated. Great little machines and cartridges.
Then, after they came out with the one size fits all 8-track tapes, the quality of the cartridges fell into the crapper.
Many of them had plastic capstan wheels which caused slippage, and instead of bonding the end of the tape to the lead end of the tape, they just stuck the foil sticker over the seam to hold them together, which of course tape dries out fast, and comes apart in a hot car.
You could play the standard size 4-track tapes in the 8 track players by adding a little device called a Gidget to the 4-track so it had a capstan wheel for the drive wheel to push against.
My first recording device was an old hand me down Wire Recorder. But for around my 12th or 13th birthday, for Christmas right after, my dad bought me a brand new commercial grade VM (Voice of Music) reel to reel recorder. He knew I took excellent care of everything I owned. I still owned it when I married Debi, but passed it and the tapes I had for it to my son just as I was moving south to Tennessee. I had lots of recordings of my sisters and brothers, plus mom and dad and a few friends, besides all the commercially bought music tapes, plus I did have some I recorded from the radio as well.
Ironically, even though it had many tubes in it, I only had to replace like three of them over a 40 years span.
One thing for certain, even though many of the electronic type toys we had were actually mechanical and not electronic, we sure had a lot of neat things back then. Some used small motors, others used vibrators to make them work. And you know me, I loved to take things apart to see how they worked, hi hi. Especially the things that looked like they had flames in them, or caused lights to move around in odd patterns. But once you took it apart and saw how they did it, then it wasn't so mystifying anymore, hi hi.
Electronics is probably the fastest growing phenomena outside of viruses like COVID. LOL I discovered something last night that really got me excited and I will share a few details with you here.
SOFTWARE-DEFINED RADIO (SDR): https://airspy.com/download/
This software came out of Russia and for that reason I'm just a tad suspicious of it. It downloads clean however, and shows no signs of malware after being on my system for at least six hours now. This software is about radios and in particular short wave monitoring. The signals are digitized and relayed by various servers. Those servers are in fact limited in spectrum coverage which is why you might want to use one of the various dongles these guys sell to compliment the software. I may do that in the future, but for now I spent a few very enjoyable hours learning how to use this software to hear what's going on in the 40 and 2 meter amateur radio bands.
I've not owned anything too sophisticated as far as SWL or ham gear is concerned so that the features available with this SDR package are a bit overwhelming. Every modulation mode known to man can be detected and decoded, and there are both real time audio and rf spectrum analyzers on the control panel. I don't know what most of the filters are supposed to do, but there is one in particular that I wish I had when I ran my own ham radio station. They created a digital filter that rejects adjacent channel interference. I've only had one small opportunity to use it and it seems to work great at rejecting QRM from close by broadcasts. You can get rid of some of that by adjusting the bandwidth, but these guys found a way to null the inter-modulation too. Amazing. Actually it's amazing I discovered any of this on my own. There is a manual that you should download or at least bookmark. It's huge but then there are a gazillion things you can do and they explain it all in detail. The best news is that they apparently have a Linux version, or several versions, along with the expected Windows version. If you want to get back the feel of those good old rag chewing days, this amazing software is the way to do it. The only word of caution is that there is a huge learning curve. Once you get it all down pat, however, it seems fairly easy to operate. Unless you like to roam around the radio bands like I do. It's easy to lose a couple hours time listening to squawking. LOL
I wish I had the time to learn and fiddle with it. Looks interesting!
I've seen SWL simulators in the past, but this one is alluring and well made. I spent a few hours this morning listening to 40 meter hams and trying to learn how to use the software. My feed is all served by some computer out of Wichita, but apparently there are several others too. All the dials, knobs, and buttons I recall on my old ham gear are on this site along with a lot of equipment I only wish I had, such as audio and rf spectrum analyzers. It was all more exciting than I had anticipated and brought back the feeling of my old amateur radio station days. Then again, those rag chewers don't talk like us cyber nerds, but they DO talk and not type out their messages. LOL I also listened to some CW which was amazing in that I recognized a lot of the characters, but could not copy any conversation. Maybe if I listened more I could revive some old copy skills. Not sure why that would be desirable at this stage in my life, but it could be an alternative to trying to figure out Linux.
Back in the day, learning CW was the basis for getting your ham license. You just had to know it to get started. At the super slow rate of only 5 wpm. Then in later years they came out with a Tech license that didn't require code. I guess the purpose was to draw more folks into ham radio.
I spent most of my time on 40 and 80 meter CW for many years. I loved it! But it was still agonizing until I broke that 20 wpm barrier. I would have never broke it if it were not for a ham I talked to nearly every day. He told me the trick, which is not really a trick at all, just a different way of listening to the code transmissions.
Think about this for a moment if you will. Let's say you had to memorize an awful poem to recite in front of class at school.
It was one heck of a lot of work, if you remember from back then.
Now lets take a look at a totally different approach to learning.
When you hear a song on the radio you like, you only have to hear it a few times before you can sing along with the song.
But a song played at a slow speed would drive you bonkers in short order.
CW is like that. Slow will drive you bonkers!
To get started in life, you do have to learn the alphabet, numbers, and punctuation.
The same as when you were learning to read and write in English.
But when we talk, we don't do so in letters, we do so in whole words.
If you listen to higher speed code on your radio, you will often hear someone calling CQ.
Most hams who send a CQ don't leave a space between the C and the Q, or if they do, it is super short.
The reason for this is the MUSIC the code makes. Dah Dit Dah Dit - Dah Dah Dit Dah.
You will often hear that string sent three times in succession.
Dah Dit Dah Dit Dah Dah Dit Dah - Dah Dit Dah Dit Dah Dah Dit Dah - Dah Dit Dah Dit Dah Dah Dit Dah.
Followed by DE which is Dah Dit Dit - Dit. Then much slower you will hear their callsign.
The reason for being slower when sending your callsign is it don't make music and needs to be understood letter for letter.
If you start with many of the simple words, such as My, Is, And,The, Rig, Saw, Now, Had, Some, Very, Just, Were, Know, That, When, Felt, Could, Should, Would, etc. And listen to them at high speed 25 to 35 wpm, same word in succession several times, you will learn CW by words instead of letters.
Sadly, it is not necessary anymore. Since the mid-1980's we all had CW readers that would listen to the code and display the word or sentence on a display screen, and now with computers, almost all CW is done on the screen using the keyboard.
What is great about CW is it can get through when nothing else can!
What's boring is most exchanges of information are just location, rig, antenna type, power, and thanks for the QSO, hi hi.
It's been too many years for me to recall all the details, but it seems as if I was able to copy code in excess of 35 wpm. Knowing how to send and copy Morse Code was indeed a requirement for getting the license. In fact the FCC examiner would give the applicants the code test first before they were allowed to do the written part. If you failed the code then you did not get to do the written part. I did learn code and like yourself that's about all I did for the first several years. 40 and 15 meters were my playgrounds, and when 10 meters opened up that was a bonus. I got my license when it was free. Shortly thereafter they started to charge for it.
The trick you describe is what I learned, but did not think of it as music. As you aptly point out we don't read words letter by letter, and that same idea can be applied to aural phenomena. I used to copy code and write the conversation down on a note pad so that I could recall all that was said. I got to the point where the code was too fast for be to write text while receiving it. At that point I just made notes and didn't copy letter by letter. It's all pretty interesting but honestly it's useless to know code. It does have the advantage of merely being a carrier that can penetrate the heaviest QRM. I think only the military uses it now.
There was talk about dropping the code requirement back in my day, but it never happened while I was active. I don't recall the justification for them making it mandatory but it was something archaic like voice was too complicated for most people. Maybe that was true in the days when you built your own rig. You had to do it right or you could kill all the neighbor's TV's lickity split. HiHi.
The software I found is different than what I've seen in the past. This is not a simulation. It is a live stream of some server with a radio attached. The company giving away the software is actually selling these radios packages and I'm likely to get one eventually just to try it out. It's a matchbox with an antenna and a USB cable. The USB connects to the virtual front end software and gives you all kinds of virtual instruments. They have plug-ins too and I would not be surprised to learn that they have a CW decoder and display similar to the one you mentioned.
I know I bragged about this before, but I got my CB license in 1957, the year the service opened. I was the first person in Missouri to get a CB license, so my initial call was simply 17Q. The first person ever to get a CB license was Mary Stanley in California, and her call was 1Q. Years later when she moved to Missouri I met her and we had a lot of fun talking about the early days of CB and all of the restrictions it carried. CB back then was nothing like it is today and the simple radios were Rock Bound. Fortunately, my uncle picked me up like four crystals to use, and he was the only one I had to talk to for months. Walter Ashe put a big sign up in their store that said all of us in the Kirkwood area should use channel 7, and Webster Groves channel 10, and named a few other cities around us. Because I was simply 1Q, Walter Ashe had QSL cards printed for me at no cost to me, and set me up with a better radio and antenna system for fairly low price. And nearly ever person who had a !7Q call contacted me to get a QSL card. I never did find 17Q1 through 17Q12 as those were in Kansas City I think, too far for 4 watt CBs and also illegal to talk that far, hi hi. But I had contacted, or those who contacted me from 17Q22 all the way up to 17Q58 with only a couple missing in there.
The Q calls ended at the ripe old age of 1 year, due to some international regulation about transmissions or whatever. CB was not exactly local is why, signals could skip. I was slow to get around getting a new call sign, but when I did, the FCC issued me call sign KNH-7564, and a few months later, I had some friends telling me someone else is using my call sign. We tracked that person down and found out the FCC issued him the same call sign, so we called the FCC to get it straightened out.
Turned out, his call sign was issued before the gal went to lunch, and mine was issued after she got back from lunch. She just forgot to scratch that callsign off her list. So they changed mine to KPI-1591 which I held until they stopped licensing CB service at all. CB became fairly much unregulated and overcrowded, so instead of the 23 channels we already had, they increased it to 40 channels, which really didn't make sense, because CB was already a royal mess and falling out of favor for a new service called Family Radio which is controlled heavily by the FCC.
I got my first HAM license in 1959, KØVCH. I had that call sign all the way up to 1968. It lapsed while I was in the service, so after getting home I had to take all of my tests over again a couple of years later when I got back into Ham Radio in 1972, KAØCDE, which was only a Novice license. But I enjoyed 40 and 80 meter so much on my home brew rigs, and on my later Heathkit rigs, I never upgraded until 1993. My main reason for wanting to upgrade was my uncle gave me a Heathkit Sixer, from the series called Heathkit lunchboxes, hi hi.
Once again, the FCC messed up royally. An individual can only hold ONE Ham License. In 1993 I took my test for a General Class license, passed with flying colors. However, they said my KAØCDE license had lapsed. So I had to start all over again at the bottom. I passed my Novice Class and got the call sign KBØLMW. A week later I took my Technician Class so I could use the 6-meter rig, then took my General Class. The crazy FCC issued me a new call sign after each upgrade when they were not supposed to do that. I was surprised when they came in the mail. I don't remember what they were anymore, because they told me to use the latest for General, which was NØZOI. I used that call for 2 years before upgrading to Advanced Class in 1995 and got a two x two callsign, KGØZP which I still hold to this day. I also took my Extra Class a couple of times while I was working on electronics, but missed a few too many answers. And then with my wife so sick and no time for much of anything else, I just never got back into it, and also I had my brain erased, so it would be nearly impossible to upgrade after that attack. They discontinued the Advanced Class, and they should have just given us all a free upgrade to Extra since they alleviated many of the hard questions on the test and also code.
I'm glad to hear you were proficient at CW. I had a CW key used by pilots that clipped to my leg, and did CW while mobile in my car. A few were surprised I could carry on a conversation using CW while driving, especially since my cars were all stick shifts, hi hi.
I moved south 20 years ago, and never got my Ham station set back up again. A shame really! But there was a lot going on trying to renovate a house for me and Debi, then her dad dying and my taking care of her mom, then selling the house I started on to buy Debi's mom and dad's house for her and start renovations on it.
Before I took an interest in ham radio I was an avid short wave listener (SWL). My first radio was bottom of the line and didn't work very well, but it was intriguing to listen to those foreign broadcasts live. Then I discovered the amateur radio frequencies which perked my interest even more. I had two or three SWL receivers before I got interested in hamming it up and each one was more sophisticated than the previous one. Even when I got my General Class license I still listened to the SWL bands below 30 MHz. At the time I thought there simply wasn't any thing better than getting news about Russia directly from Moscow. LOL
The SDR software I discovered recently is still pretty new to me. Apparently it's just the front end for interfacing with either the hardware they sell or the network stream they host. There are dozens of servers on their network and I've only listened to a few here in the states. There is a server is St Louis, for example, but they only go down to 24 MHz and up to 2 Gigs. Most of my interest is down in the single megahertz range and that is where the server in Wichita comes in handy or the one in Fargo. I don't think it's very complicated at the server side. The radio electronics is in a very small package and all you need is an antenna - or that is all I think you need. The output of the radio goes to some kind of network card and that's it. Of course you can do all that without hosting on a server, which is probably what I will do some day. The SDR network is global and there are a ton of servers in Europe and Asia. Might be a few in China too. Once I master the software I currently am using I might attempt to see what those foreign servers are picking up.
I never had a lot of trouble with the FCC, but then I didn't do all the upgrades that you did. My novice license was one that specifically was limited to novices so that when I got the general license my call letters changed. I never tried for a higher grade license because the added features that go with it didn't interest me. I noticed that the SDR servers cover a 12 meter amateur radio spectrum. All I've ever head there was a carrier signal, and the band is quite narrow. I'm guessing that's the band for one of the advanced licenses probably dedicated to TV and or FM broadcasts. That might be why I can only detect a carrier. I can detect FM, but there isn't that much activity there for me to do any serious investigation. Anyway, I was a little surprised to find that band. I totally forgot that it existed until recently. Then, too, I am absolutely ignorant when it comes to anything above 2 meters.
When I was a little tyke, my dad had a console TV with a 78rpm record player on one side, and a radio on the other side that tuned AM radio, FM radio, and 3 different Short Wave bands all in AM only. My dad thought I was crazy listening to what was probably telex signals, because they were just a roar over AM. But that is not what I was listening to, there was talking underneath the noise which I could make out if I played with the knobs a bit.
Many years after that, I had a few old short wave radios my uncle gave to me, and that got me hooked, hi hi.
He's the one who knew about the new CB band opening up, and helped me get that license. He didn't get one for himself though, which surprised me. But he did help me learn the code, so I could get my General license. When I did, he gave me his old Heathkit Sixer which was pretty beat up. But it was fun and I could talk to him and a friend of his every day.
I only found 12 meters to be useful at night when the solar flux was high. So rarely used it. Did more on 17 meters.
I see pictures of guys (and gals) ham shacks, and they all have computers and monitors now, plus a few laptops. Not many radios like I used to have piled up on my desk, hi hi.
My first encounter with the wonders of radio communications was when I still was wearing diapers. LOL Back then the police used the AM band just above 1600 KHz for communications. Once in a while if we fiddled with the radio enough we could hear them. It didn't take too long for them to figure out how easy it was to eavesdrop and they changed frequencies and modes of broadcast probably before 1950 came rolling in. I don't recall exactly what I heard them saying, but I do have memories of being amazed by it all.
I did a little more exploring last night and this morning and it turns out the 13 meter ham band was fairly active. There were several CW signals that all sounded like novices. Very slow code sending. I also picked up some audio at the upper end of the band. I couldn't tell where they were located but I imagine some skip was involved. To my amazement I also discovered the 30 meter amateur band. This morning I could not find any intelligence there, but it's an entirely new range of frequencies for me. I never heard of 30 meters prior to this morning. I guess the world of Amateur radio has changed drastically since I had a license.
One thing that did not change is the style of communications. I used to think the Internet was "like ham radio" but am being reminded now that they are two separate worlds with two different civilizations populating those realms. After all these years in chat rooms and social medial, I think I would have a very difficult time dealing with all those old guys talking about nothing on the ham bands. There are the networks with lots of members and all they do is check in every day and give a weather report. Perhaps a short comment too, but that's it. They don't do anything other than announce their presence. I guess there are times and circumstances when they accomplish something useful. but. and I can't believe I'm saying this, the trolling between democrats and republicans on Facebook is infinitely more interesting. I dunno. Now that I've been on the Internet, I don't see how I could ever go back to the ham radio crowd ever again.
I don't remember much about the bands other than some countries have different bands than we do, so we listen on their band and transmit back on ours.
I also used to belong to GreenTree which used the 2-meter band to transmit and receive, and the 440 band to tune into the HF frequencies. They often had unusual bands we could use, because they were licensed to the person operating the HF rig.
There was another 2-meter cross-country group, but for the life of me, I can't remember the name of it right now.
There are many types of discussion groups on Ham Radio, you just have to know what frequency and the times of the get togethers. There was also a model railroad club who met on 10-meters every Friday night around 9:30 to 10 pm. Most of the talk was about building different types of scenery. But with no video, it took a lot of explaining on how to do something to get the affect one was talking about. There was another group for miniature steam engines and trains, big enough to ride on. I was into trains back then, so dropped in on them often.
Now they are all on-line on the Internet and are really cool to watch.
And as always there are the plentiful rag chewers groups who talk about anything and everything 24/7 or as long as the band holds out, hi hi.
Return to "Digital Dialogues"


I have been talking a lot about my new rhythm this year and you would be forgiven for thinking it is just about writing. Because, well that's pretty much all I have blogged about!
But if you recall when I introduced this phrase back in January, I also talked about one day being house day. A day for intentional decluttering. And I haven't written about that because it is a slow process, and painful and it seems like I am making no real progress.
Or at least these are all the reasons I have in my head to tell you. But if I dig a little deeper, a little closer into my heart, I discover another reason altogether.
It is because I can't declutter.
Not the play room or the closets.
I am trying to achieve some physical decluttering but mentally and emotionally I am definitely not in that place.
And yes I know that uncluttered spaces can lead to peace of mind, but I think the opposite is true too … An uncluttered mind might just lead to uncluttered spaces.
And yes this is a recent realisation.
Hence the recent spate of "be still" or "be quiet" posts on my Facebook feed.
And as this soaks in there will probably be some more posts focusing on being present, not worrying about the future, and letting each day have its own rhythm and pace.
It is because at heart I am exhausted by all I feel I have to do. Because I am fed up with trying to hurry everyone along and get them places on time. Because I am emotionally taking too much on board. In reality we have never once been late, everything gets done, and I just need to relax a little. Clear out some of the junk that is hanging around my head.
In this day and age we all have a lot on our plates. Your plate might look different to mine but I bet it is just as full. The real question is "how much of what is on my plate actually needs to be there today?".
How much is yesterday's left-overs? How much is tomorrow's fruit that is not yet ripe? If we clear those things off our overloaded plates, we may just find we have a healthy plate for us to deal with today.


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text:
Boulder Crest Retreat Virginia opened its doors on September 6, 2013, as the nation's first private wellness center in the country serving active-duty, reserve and National Guard personnel, veterans, and their family members. After 3.5 years of success, and in recognition of considerable demand for our programs and services, we acquired Boulder Crest Retreat Arizona in May 2017.
Boulder Crest Retreat is the vision of Ken Falke and his wife Julia. Ken was seriously wounded in 1989 while serving as a U.S. Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) Technician and Master Chief Petty Officer. Ken is a 21-year combat Service-Disabled Veteran and the Founder and Chairman of the EOD Warrior Foundation. While visiting many of the wounded EOD warriors and their families since the start of the wars in the Middle East, the Falkes witnessed firsthand the desolation and frustration they experienced while spending time in inpatient and long-term care outpatient units in the Washington, D.C. area.
Ken and Julia began their warrior care work by bringing wounded EOD warriors and their families for meals and short stays at their home. This support of their fellow warriors inspired the Falkes to make a lasting and sustained commitment with the building of Boulder Crest Retreat – which included the donation of 37 acres of their property as well as a substantial initial contribution to establish Boulder Crest Retreat Foundation. The Retreat was incorporated in July 2010 and received is 501(c)(3) certification in February 2011.
""As a nation, we have a responsibility and opportunity to provide the healing, support and guidance required for combat veterans and their families to prepare for their new mission – a life of passion, purpose and service – here at home. That is precisely why we built Boulder Crest Retreat and we see the benefits of our approach and the safe and peaceful setting the Retreat provides every single day." "
— Ken Falke, Boulder Crest Retreat Founder and Chairman of the Board
The Falkes' philanthropic vision is based on the belief that there is a critical need to help service members and their families, especially those dealing with long-term issues like severe physical injuries, Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). This vision includes access to privately-funded wellness programs.