Monday Links from the Lounger vol. DCCCXIV

[ladymuck]

Am I right in thinking that a labyrinth is just a single, very convoluted, path but a maze will have dead ends and false routes that tease you into thinking you're on the right path?

EDIT: I scrolled down the above article and realised that I was indeed correct. Yay me.

[DoctorStrangelove]

As I once remarked whilst peering down a microscope at a chip about to be reverse engineered: "What's that round thing, Keith?".

"It's a lateral PNP" quoth Keith.

Not something we saw much of at Siliconix, where, Specifically In General, everything on the chip was rectangular.

I wonder what chip that was. Can't ask Keith because a) it's now 40 years ago and b) I'd need a ouija board.

Famously used in the 741 opamp. I recall that I was able to see the compensation capacitor on a decapped TO-99 round can 741 with my unaided old eye. It was big.

How things have changed since 1948:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/transistor-density

.

[NickFitz]

Sorry about the weather - I'm on what the permies call "annual leave", so expect the tempests to continue with ever-increasing vigour

• The Talented Mr. Bruseaux - Dodgy business in the 1920s: ”He made his name in Chicago investigating racial violence, solving crimes, and exposing corruption. But America’s first Black private detective was hiding secrets of his own.”
• Chimps are sticking grass and sticks in their butts, seemingly as a fashion trend - It isn't just the whales exploring new trends in fashion: ”The new phenomenon appears to be a fresh spin on an old fad of wearing grass in the ear.”
• NASA's Eyes - Looking for a celestial body or spacecraft? Here you go: ”Experience Earth, our solar system, nearby asteroids, the universe, and the spacecraft exploring them with immersive real-time 3D web-based apps. Start exploring your solar system now!”
• Tom Lehrer’s memorable "Revue" session - Remembering one of the musical satirist's earliest ventures into entertainment: ”In January 1951, word began circulating around the Harvard campus that one of the graduate students had written… a 19-song musical about science, math, and life at Harvard that premiered on 13 January 1951 in a physics department lecture hall.”
• Vehicle Crash Test Films from the 1970's and 1980s - ”Deep in the public archives of the NHTSA, there are thousands of films of some classic (and some ugly) 70’s and 80’s cars being smashed into smithereens.” This is a compilation of various interesting crash test films but the article has more, plus many additional details about both the testing and filming processes.
  
  
• The Great Sword Heist of 2025 - Talia Lavin suffered an unusual domestic burglary last week: ”The bare facts are that an unknown thief entered my apartment (possibly via a back window) while four people and a dog were sleeping, and made off with absolutely nothing but ten of the swords off the walls. They bypassed a gaming laptop worth more than the entire collection right beside the window, didn’t steal anything else at all. Just waltzed out with ten swords.”
• The extremities of the London bus network - Nigel, “a sixty-something Londoner”, boxes the compass: ”Having circumnavigated London using the Superloop network of buses the previous month, which took just 7¼ hours, I felt like taking on a far more challenging bus odyssey. I was inspired by a Diamond Geezer blogpost, which identified the most northerly, southerly, easterly and westerly bus stops to be served by a Transport for London (TfL) bus… My aim was to do a tour of the capital, travelling only on London buses, catching a bus to or from all four of these extreme bus stops, and then returning to my starting point.”
• “From here?” - John Hoare explores the history of a joke: ”Over the years, I’ve written plenty about comedy writers reusing jokes. Today’s topic is one of the most famous and most-quoted examples of the lot… The joke was actually taken from the very first episode of Porridge, ‘New Faces, Old Hands’, which first aired on 5th September 1974.”
• How to reverse engineer an analog chip: the TDA7000 FM radio receiver - Ken Shirriff shares some of his techniques: ”Have you ever wanted to reverse engineer an analog chip from a die photo? Wanted to understand what's inside the "black box" of an integrated circuit? In this article, I explain my reverse engineering process, using the Philips TDA7000 FM radio receiver chip as an example. This chip was the first FM radio receiver on a chip. It was designed in 1977—an era of large transistors and a single layer of metal—so it is much easier to examine than modern chips. Nonetheless, the TDA7000 is a non-trivial chip with over 100 transistors. It includes common analog circuits such as differential amplifiers and current mirrors, along with more obscure circuits such as Gilbert cell mixers.”
• Mazes and Labyrinths: An Illustrated History (1922) - Twist in the tale: ”William H. Matthews leads us through his 1922 book Mazes and Labyrinths from his home in Ruislip in the English county of Middlesex. Compiled shortly after his return from fighting on the trenches of World War 1, the books takes us from the ancient water and stone mazes of Egypt and Crete through the Middle Ages, when nearly 25% of cathedrals had a labyrinth in their grounds. to the then fashion for mazes made from hedges.”
  
  

Happy invoicing!