Francis 🇾🇪 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ @francis@greenplenty.social

Interesting fact of the day: The same effect that cuased light in a prism to split up into different colors is what ultimately caused the first transatlantic telegraphic wire in 1858 to fail.

Morse code is transmitted as on-off signals, effectively square waves. Square waves are in fact made up of many different frequencies. Like in a prism different frequencies move at different speeds through a wire. Therefore as the on-off pulses traveled through the transatlantic telegraph wire the signal spread out like it does in a prism and ultimately the pulses would overlap and be indistinguishable.

The effect was so extreme that it took a message of only 98 words (the first message sent) over 67 minutes to send one way and a whopping 16 hours to confirm the message.

Whitehouse, a doctor with little mathematical understanding, thought he could solve the problem by increasing voltage, which we now know was a futile effort. He increased the voltage to the point he managed to short out the cable entirely and made it useless. However Lord Kelvin had already warned of the problem as was ignored and he came up with the law of squares to describe the problem which later was refined to give us the telegraphers equation. The telegraphers equation is still used today to model feedlines in radio transmitters and receivers.

#Science #STEM #Physics #History @Science #QOTOJournal

imagine deciding which engineers to keep around based on lines of code and choosing to keep the ones who wrote the MOST

Time for an #introduction post from me I think

Hi, I'm Simon! I'm a full-time open source developer based in Half Moon Bay, California (half an hour south of San Francisco), mostly working on https://datasette.io and the 100+ (seriously) tools and plugins around it.

The theme of my work is helping people explore, analyze and publish their data.

You can learn lots more about me in this post I wrote celebrating my blog's 20th birthday https://simonwillison.net/2022/Jun/12/twenty-years/

Should have added some hashtags! I'll likely be talking mostly about #python, #datascience, #DataAnalytics, #sqlite, #datasette, #ai, #ml, #webdev, #nichemuseums (https://www.niche-museums.com is my website for that last one)