Solid State Microwave

Ampleon Solid State Microwave Module

Something new, sort of: solid state microwave ovens. Monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) is Wikipedia's term for the device, which explains why I had a hard time tracking it down.

Regular microwave ovens employ magnetrons, which are large, complicated vacuum tubes, to generate the mircowave radiation they use to heat your coffee. A Magnetron requires high voltage electricity, which is provided by a big, heavy, electrical transformer, which is why the control panel end of the microwave oven is so heavy.

Now some guys have come out with an MMIC that can produce enough microwave energy that it could be used for cooking. Solid state microwave devices have been around for years, but they are generally very low power, like your cell phone. Yes, that's right, your ear gets warm when you hold the phone up it because of that whole watt of microwave radiation being beamed into your head. NOT. Your ear gets warm because the phone is keeping the air from circulating past your ear and carrying off the excess heat being produced by your ear, which is much greater than that one watt being produced by your cell phone.

The military has probably been using them for years, but we haven't heard anything because 1) they're secret, and 2) we can't afford to buy one anyway.

While I was looking for an explanation, I did find these little bits:

Passive electronically scanned array (PESA) radars, introduced in the 1960s, used a single microwave source and a series of delays to drive a large number of antenna elements (the array) and electronically steer the radar beam by changing the delay times slightly. The development of solid-state microwave amplifiers, JFETs and MESFETs, allowed the single klystron to be replaced by a number of separate amplifiers, each one driving a subset of the array but still producing the same amount of total power. Solid-state amplifiers can operate at a wide range of frequencies, unlike a klystron, so solid-state PESAs offered much greater frequency agility, and were much more resistant to jamming. - Frequency agility

To meet the marketplace demands on cost, size, and power consumption of monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs), research continues in the development of mainstream digital bulk-CMOS processes for such purposes. The continuous scaling of feature sizes in current IC technologies has enabled microwave and mm-wave CMOS circuits to directly benefit from the resulting increased unity-gain frequencies of the scaled technology. This device scaling, along with the advanced process control available in today's technologies, has recently made it possible to reach a transition frequency (ft) of 170 GHz and a maximum oscillation frequency (fmax) of 240 GHz in a 90 nm CMOS process. - Distributed amplifier

Microwaves have a wavelength between one and ten centimeters, which means thay are actually longer and lower frequency than millimeter waves, never mind the nomenclature.

Via Bayou Renaissance Man

The Governing Cancer of Our Time

Early Warning Signs of Fascism

Story in The New York Times by David Brooks. Clarifies the whole Trump thing. Via Comrade Misfit, who doesn't think much of Mr. Brooks. I've never heard of the guy before, but this piece makes sense.
Also in my 'pages', if you can't get to the Time's version.

I'm not sure what the girl and smoking pot have to do with Facism, but hey, nekid wimmen!

Coincidences / Connections

Florida Keys

Portions of the book Cuba Straits take place in Key West, which is in the Florida Keys. We've started watching the Netflix TV series Bloodline, which is set on Islamorada, in the Florida Keys. We're in Season 1. In episode 5, Sissy Spacek (the mom) tells her son a story about his father, now deceased. When pop was a boy he lived in rural Texas. He comes home one day and finds that his father has beaten his mother and locked her in the basement.

Mademoiselle Blanche Monnier
Locked in her room by her mother when she was 25.

     I just finished Vendetta by Michael Dibdin, a murder mystery set in Sardinia, which is an Italian island in the Mediterranean. Seems to have many of same features as Sicily: vicious, ignorant peasants, stuck in 16th Century. Turns out the killer, and our hero's savior, is a diminutive woman who got locked in her parents basement when she was 15. Elsewhere in the book he mentions Catullus, an ancient Roman poet.

Gaius Valerius Catullus

    The Fifth Floor starts off with the hero quoting Catullus. Chain, chain, chain . . .

RADIUM AGE SCI-FI: 100 BEST

Amazing Stories Cover

A guy by the name of Josh Glenn has put together a list of the best 100 Science Fiction stories from the 'Radium Age', 1904-1933. I'm a little leery, a lot of what gets written and published is absolute dreck, not worth your time or mine. And the qualities that recommend a story for inclusion on this list may not have anything to do with whether it is a good story or not. On the other hand, there are books that I have read and thoroughly enjoyed that wouldn't make any critic's best-of list. You take a gamble every time you pick up a book.  Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is from this era.
    I vaguely remember reading and enjoying some Tom Swift stories when I was a kid, and the cover art from some of the old Science Fiction books and magazines was pretty cool. I might have to try one of these. ARS Technica has the story. HiLoBROW has the list. HiLoBooks has republished some of them and they are available on Amazon. Via Posthip Scott.

Oggún Tractor

Oggún Tractor

What do they need in Cuba? Perhaps farm implements, perhaps the Oggún Tractor. Two guys from Alabama are building a factory in Havana to assemble them. It doesn't look like much compared to the behemoths that we use in the midwest, but it is very similar to the Allis Chalmers Model G.

Allis Chalmers Model G small tractor from the late 1940s

Bicycles in Cuba

A soldier with bundles of grass loaded onto his bicycle; Guantanamo, Cuba.

Since I now have in in-laws in Cuba, and since the economic situation is still pretty tight down there, I got to wondering just what kinds of things might be helpful. The first thing I thought of was bicycles. Seems I'm not the only one thinking that. These bits are kind of illuminating. The first one is from 2014, the second looks to be from the early 1990's.

A Contemporary Cuba Reader: The Revolution under Raúl Castro

The big increase in demand for bicycles has had considerable spill-over effects on the Cuban economy. Although China has been the main supplier of bicycles to Cuba, Cuba is increasingly building more of its own bicycles and components. In 1990 the Giron bus factory in Havana was refit and retooled for the manufacture of bicycles. After its first year of operation it produced approximately 20,000 bicycles. Projected production for 1995 is 100,000 bicycles. Cubans can now manufacture all components except spokes, bearings, the rear hub and chains, and heavy-gauge seamless pipe, which comes from Mexico. The Cuban 26" wheeled bicycle is about 15 pounds lighter than the 57 lb. Chinese models and better suited for multiple purposes than the 28" Asian wheel. Cuban bikes also come in a variety of colors (now in 12 tropical varieties), and most use the all-terrain type straight handlebar.  - Cycling in Havana: Green Transportation by Default

And since we can't live by facts alone, we also have a story about the Rick-en-Billys.

Mickey Finn

Mickey Finn Bar

I just finished reading The Fifth Floor by Michael Harvey. It wasn't a very good book, but along with the story (a murder mystery) it was full of stuff about Chicago. There's some info about the Chicago Fire and a litany of not-so-well-known Chicago landmarks, and a bit about Mickey Finn. Mickey, you may recall, gained infamy for his practice of doping his customers and then stealing their wallets. It's where we got the term to 'slip someone a Mickey'.
    When I thought of Mickey Finn, I imagined a disreputable place, a dive bar, dirty, scruffy, full of ner-do-wells, bar flys and alcoholic bums. And the image I created in my mind's eye was always sepia toned, kind of like the one above.

Mickey Finn's Bar

In truth, Mickey ran one of the preeminent palm garden beer halls in Chicago in the 1890's. When I thought about it, it makes perfect sense. If you are going to rob someone, it makes more sense to rob someone who has bundle of cash rather than a bum who has none. On the other hand, no one will notice if you rob a bum, but if you rob a rich man, people are going to make a fuss. Which is probably why he got caught and why we know about him.