Burn! Burn! Burn!

S&P has cut the NYTimes bond rating to junk. Please let the coming economic downturn sink the NYT. That would be beauteous. And if the Globe can go down the tubes too, so much the better.

Be true, Unbeliever!

For people who are into self-punishment, be aware that book 2 (Fatal Revenant) of four of The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant will be out this October.

Though if dictionary publishers were more on the ball, they’d strike a deal with Donaldson’s publisher to give away a paperback collegiate dictionary with each copy of Fatal Revenant. Lord knows Donaldson loves his 4-bit words (let alone 2-bit ones).

Happy 40th!

Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Her five-year mission: to explore strange, new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

September 8, 1966.

Space, the final frontier…

It appears that Star Trek is going to be given the “Special Edition” treatment.

While it does sound cool at some level, what’s the point? And changing the music, noises, and SFX shots to be more modern? Won’t that create horrible mismatches with the rest of the footage?

The cynical part of me wonders if this isn’t a ploy on the part of the studios to push fans (who have seen the atrocities Lucas has committed on the original Star Wars films) to start buying DVDs now, so they can have the originals before they go out of print.

Adams or Amend sure. But Trudeau?

This might be a first — the appearance of (which is clearly supposed to be) Thevenin and Norton equivalents in a mainstream comic strip.

Take a look.

He’s even right. A circuit of sources and resistors with only two external terminals can be collapsed down down to two forms, all three of which will yield identical results when you take measurements from those terminals.

The key measurements are the open-circuit voltage (Voc) across the terminals and the short-circuit current (Isc) through the terminals. From those you calculate the Thevenin resistance RT = Voc/Isc.

The Thevenin form is an ideal voltage source of Voc in series with RT with the external terminals being connected to the “free” end of RT and the “free” end of the voltage source. The Norton form is an ideal current source of Isc in parallel with RT and the external terminals being connected across RT.

So indeed, even when nothing is connected to the terminals, the Norton form will be pumping current through the resistor while the Thevenin form will be quiescent. So Alex is quite right that the Norton form will be warmer.