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Cake day: March 23rd, 2025

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  • It’s a broadband bang that can be heard across the whole spectrum. It becomes audible when listening to radio broadcasts.

    Regular radio transmissions are comparatively narrow band, allowing lots of simultaneous transmissions in the same airspace, each on its own frequency. The spark gap transistor is very wide band, so it basically sounds as if you are sending a bang sound across all radio frequencies at the same time.

    It wouldn’t destroy radio equipment, but the radio transmissions. It’s basically as if you’d use a radio jammer as a morse code transmitter.


  • Pretty much the first type of commercially viable radio transmitter was the spark-gap transmitter (“Knallfunkensender” in German). It worked by charging up some capacitors to up to 100kV and then letting them spark. This spark sent a massive banging noise on the whole radio spectrum, which could then be turned into an audible noise using a very simple receiver. That was then used to send morse codes (or similar encodings).

    They went into service around 1900, and by 1920 it was illegal to use these because they would disrupt any and all other radio transmissions in the area with a massive loud bang.


  • This.

    There are often actual limits to what can be done, and there are practical limits. Especially in the early days of a technology it’s really hard to understand which limits are actual limits, practical limits or only short-term limits.

    For example, in the 1800s, people thought that going faster than 30km/h would pose permanent health risks and wouldn’t be practical at all. We now know that 30km/h isn’t fast at all, but we do know that 1300km/h is pretty much the hard speed limit for land travel and that 200-300km/h is the practical limit for land travel (above that it becomes so power-inefficient and so dangerous that there’s hardly a point).

    So when looking at the technology in an early state, it’s really hard to know what kind of limit you have hit.


  • Es hieß auch “in eine Führungsposition”.

    Was faktische Macht und Führung angeht ist die Linke ein antikapitalistischer Buchclub mit PR-Abteilung.

    Hier in Österreich waren die Grünen auch immer die tollen Antikorruptionisten. Bis sie unabsichtlich den Bundespräsidenten gelandet und plötzlich eine reale Chance auf Mitregierung bekommen haben.

    Dann haben sie postwendend die antikorrupten Idealisten (wie z.B. Peter Pilz) von allen wichtigen Posten und teils sogar aus der Partei entfernt und durch umgänglicheres Personal ersetzt. Und wie sie dann tatsächlich in eine Schwarz-Grüne Regierung gekommen sind, haben sie direkt mit dem großen Koalitionspartner mitgestimmt die Untersuchungsausschüsse zum Ibiza-Skandal einzustellen.

    Wart bis die Linken eine realistische Chance auf eine echte Führungsposition haben und dann wirst auch sehen wie schnell der Wind sich dreht.










  • 590-620nm. Identical to orange.

    The difference between brown and orange is the brightness level, and since the eyes have an automatic brightness adjustment, brightness levels only appear in context.

    Light becomes a darker variant if there’s brighter light around and vice versa. Shine brown/orange light into a dark room, and it will appear orange. Shine the same light into a brighter context, and it will be brown.

    It’s exactly the same thing as e.g. dark blue or light blue. Both share the exact same wavelength, and their brightness becomes apparent in context.

    If you’ve ever been to a cinema and you saw anything brown or orange on screen, you have seen the effect. If you have ever seen a dim conventional light bulb in a bright room, you have seen it too.

    Brown has just as much a wave length as orange, because it’s the same color.



  • Brown is on the colour spectrum, it does have a wavelength. Specifically, it has the same wavelength as orange. Because brown is dark orange and orange is light brown.

    What’s not on the colour spectrum are multi-wavelength mixed colours like e.g. red and blue light combining to something that looks like spectral violet. And while these multi-wavelength colours are physically different than a pure spectral colour, the sensation to a human is identical, because both trigger the cone cells in the eyes in an identical way. Which is why we can have screens that only emit three colours and still trigger the same sensations as millions of different spectral colours.


  • The same is true for English too.

    Brown and orange are different brightness levels of the same colour. Brown is dark orange and orange is light brown. Yet people experience brown and orange as separate colours, because we have separate words for it, while we experience light blue and dark blue as different brightness levels of the same colour, because both are called “blue”.