Random Stuff

• (Feb 10 2021) Can across this handy online passive filter designer: https://rf-tools.com/lc-filter/
• (Feb 6 2021) I recently watched a play in the Push International Performing Arts Festival by Njo Kong Kie and set to the poetry of Xu Lizhi. I was touched by the poignant poetry by Xu Lizhi, who sadly committed suicide while working at Foxconn. I went to the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen a couple of times when I worked at Nokia. After watching the show, I hunted down some of his poems and reposted them here.
• (Jul 20 2020) Nice demo:
  
• (Mar 8 2020) Interesting historical note for this year's international woman's day:
  • Eunice Newton Foote was the first scientist known to have experimented on the warming effect of sunlight on different gases, and went on to theorize that changing the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would change its temperature, in her paper "Circumstances affecting the heat of the sun's rays" at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in 1856.
• (Mar 4 2020) Seems like Joseph Fourier, whose analysis technique is so often used in engineering, is one of the Pioneers of climate change science:
  • Joseph Fourier in 1824 reasoned on the basis of physics that Earth's atmosphere kept the planet warmer than would be the case in a vacuum. Fourier recognized that the atmosphere transmitted visible light waves efficiently to the earth's surface. The earth then absorbed visible light and emitted infrared radiation in response, but the atmosphere did not transmit infrared efficiently, which therefore increased surface temperatures. He also suspected that human activities could influence climate, although he focused primarily on land use changes. In an 1827 paper Fourier stated, "The establishment and progress of human societies, the action of natural forces, can notably change, and in vast regions, the state of the surface, the distribution of water and the great movements of the air. Such effects are able to make to vary, in the course of many centuries, the average degree of heat; because the analytic expressions contain coefficients relating to the state of the surface and which greatly influence the temperature."