LED FIlaments....COOL! https://www.facebook.com/reel/4275573509372277

https://chatgpt.com/share/6a4d47e6-674c-83ea-b905-58951cfc04a2 What the heck? My BS meter is reading high.

Flick a coin and watch it wobble to its death — that rising clatter at the end isn't random. It's a physicist's puzzle hiding in plain sight: the coin is losing energy while its precession rate increases. But how? This piece digs (Delights of the "Wobbler," a Coin or a Cylinder That Precesses As It Spins) from pages of The Amateur Scientist into the surprisingly rich physics of wobbling objects — coins, bottles, cylinders — revealing a "forbidden zone" of inclination angles where steady precession simply cannot exist, determined entirely by an object's geometry. The ratio of a cylinder's half-length to its radius dictates everything: whether it dies lying flat, balanced on its edge, or something stranger. The real gem is Whitehead's apparatus — a polished concave Plexiglas chamber with precision air jets that can sustain a wobbling aluminum cylinder for three to four days, frozen in strobed slow-motion so you can watch both the spin and precession simultaneously. It's the kind of elegant, obsessive experimental apparatus only a true mad scientist builds. Simple enough to explore with a coin on your kitchen table. Deep enough to keep you up at night.

In the last few weeks, quite a few posts have appeared on this forum on exploring the inner workings of the Earth's ionosphere. Here's another addition for the ambitious mad scientist to consider. It comes from September 1980 issue of The Amateur Scientist, and it explains how one can inexpensively detect "gravity waves" as they roll through the upper-most reaches of the earth's atmosphere. (Note: The term "gravity wave" here refers to very long period pressure waves that use gravity as their restoring force, and NOT ripples in space-time that are created by collapsing stars.) This is a fun electronics product that could easily be improved these days using better op amps and current amplifiers than were available way back when I was still an undergraduate. Enjoy! PS: Apparently some of the images aren't displaying on the online link. So I've attached them all here until I can get them fixed on the server.

I have to off load a huge accumulation of emails, including text letter, and images. I bought A new, empty, 320 GB hard drive with a USB connector.