The Nautilus:
Much controversy surrounds the design and shape of the wheelhouse and lighthouse.
When both were retracted into the hull, we have Prof. Arronax's assertion that the hull was smooth with only two ringbolts as features.
Extended in cruise mode, we have:
" Toward the middle of the platform the longboat, half buried in the hull of the vessel, formed a slight excrescence. Fore and aft rose two cages of medium height with inclined sides, and partly closed by thick lenticular glasses; one destined for the steersman who directed the Nautilus, the other containing a brilliant lantern to give light on the road.

This leads up to the problem of the steersman being blinded by the lantern shining directly on his back.
Arronax states:
"Captain Nemo led me towards the central staircase; half way down he opened a door, traversed the upper gangways,and arrived in the pilot's cage, which it may be remembered rose at the end of the platform. It was a cabin measuring six feet square, very much like that occupied by the pilot on the steamboats of the Mississippi or Hudson. In the center was a wheel, placed vertically, and attached to the tiller-rope, which ran to the stern of the Nautilus. Four portholes with lenticular glasses,mounted in the cabin walls, allowed the man at the wheel to see in all directions.
This cabin was dark; but soon my eyes accustomed themselves to the darkness, and I saw the pilot, a strong man, with his hands resting on the spokes of the wheel. Outside, the sea appeared vividly lit up by the lantern, which shone from behind the cabin at the other end of the platform."

If the cabin was square, then the back window would be flooded with light.
However, this is a translation, and in French, the critical phrase is:
"C'était une cabine mesurant six pieds sur chaque face..."

Or, in my bad french, 'This cabin measured six feet on each face(of the walls)...'
The translators phrase 'six feet square' directly implies a square room.
But the french merely states that each wall was six feet long.
A pentagonal room with four walls with portholes, and the fifth wall opaque and used for the entrance would solve this problem.

See this website for an excellent discussion on the problem, however, they seem to have missed the critical line.
Castle Grayskull seems to be the long dead bones of an Elder God, with strange powers lingering around the moldering heap. The Goddess's remark about the Cosmic Egg bursting from Grayskull must be metaphorical.
Assuming the universe was built from the body of Ymir, then is Castle Grayskull the cyclopean ruins of the fortifactions raised around his head, so that Others dead for eons could have protected its powers from creatures savage and evil?
Castle Grayskull...
No one seems to have commented on a Quake - Castle Grayskull connection. The playset which was released in the 1980's has a Quake symbol decorating the helmet-dome atop Grayskull's skull.
Almost sounds like I'm stuttering, there.

"It is here where we now stand (in Grayskull's throne room) that the explosion took place which created the universe billions of years ago."
--From the classic episode "The Search"
Skittle madness...
What is a single piece of Skittles(tm) candy called? A Skit?
A Skittle has an intreasting property. When dropped from about four inches, they will bounce off a tabletop several times before rattleing to a stop. The second or third bounce will be higher than the first.
A Skittle is a hard shell encasing a slightly less hard interior. Is energy from the first impact stored as a shockwave inside this shell, to come out on the second or third bounce?
It is important to drop the Skittle edge-first.
It is also a excellant method for annoying co-workers.
Poor, poor Joseph Priestley. The archetype of the Mob; the rage, the torches ;
the burning and desecrated laboratory.
Fire and Ignorance ; the great enemies of human advancement.
Feelers...
So far I've come up with three different designs for a 'sweep-feeler'; I don't like any of them. All too bulky, too fiddly, or both. I may have to go to something pneumatic.
Ever seen an insect walk along, sweeping the ground ahaed of it with delicate , whipping antenna? Some species do. Some species of spiders use elongated forelegs to pat and explore the ground ahead of themselves. I'm looking for a similar motion.

feelings...nothing more than feelings...

The steering arrangement for the Mechanical Mouse.
Vivatar:
Adding an external switch to the Vivatar camera proved simple. Opening the case up reveals that the shutter switch is a surface mount momentary with four solder connections. Now that switch is a DPST - push it part way and it focuses, push it all the way and it snaps the frame. So I turned the camera on and shorted the switch contacts with the blade of a X-Acto knife until I found the right pair.
Probably not the wisest procedure, but it works! Quick and dirty.
Heated the solder iron ; tacked on a pair of leads and a momentary pushbutton off of a junked PC.
Pressed case back together - tested - and victory.
Sweet, sweet victory.
- Age
Of course, Tesla was 76 in 1931. Well past his productive years, and unlikely to be excited about starting a grand new project.
-Savage and Tesla-

Discovered something interesting today, while reading Nikola Tesla's all-to-brief autobiography. Written sometime after the Great War, but before WWII, he talks about his life and mentions a variety of events, one of which remarkable only to the trained eye.
Bear with me here:

Clark Savage, Jr. - better known as 'Doc' Savage was easily the most interesting of the 'pulp heros'; he was a scientist who's achievements were rivaled only by the enigmatic Asian known as Fu Manchu, Ph.D.
While it was claimed that he spent his time 'righting wrongs' the activities of Doc Savage and his five 'associates' seemed primarily engaged in controlling 'mad' or 'fringe' science, usually when the criminal element had begun to exploit a given discovery or invention.
Doc Savage's activities required money. Vast amounts of it. Within a decade of taking possession of his murdered father's offices on the 86th floor of the 'tallest building in New York', it becomes apparent that Savage is buying large numbers of companies - ranging from hotels to airlines to manufacturing plants.
All of these operations must have generated profits. But in the beginning at least, in the 1930's, Savage's source of income was gold from the 'lost mines' in the banana republic of Hidalgo.
Hidalgo.
There is no Central American Republic called Hidalgo. All we know is that it was small, contains a native Mayan population, and has a gold mine. A large gold mine. Whenever Savage requires money, he makes a radio transmission. Shortly, a mule train enters the central city of Hidalgo, and packloads of gold is deposited in DocÂ’s accounts.
This arrangement was there from the beginning which by internal evidence was in 1931. P. J. Farmer argues for sometime in March or April.
A variety of questions immediately appear.Assumeing Doc is transmitting from New York, the radio equipment involved must have been state of the art in 1931.
First, it needed range, for dependable connection across thousands of miles.
Second, it needed security. It would have done no good if an unscrupulous enemy - and Savage had many - listened to the transmissions. Direction finding was a established art by that point, and the location of the transmitter, and hence the gold would have been discovered.
Or when a gold order was radioed, they could have been ready with a band of desperadoes to intercept the pack train.
Part of the security problem would have been handled by speaking in Mayan, or transmitting in code, but that would not deal with the DF aspect.

I found a hint.
Nikola Tesla was the inventor of the polyphase electrical system, of the first radio controlled machines, of the Tesla Coil, and many other machines and devices.
He was the inventor of radio - which led to a lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court. Marconi lost - Tesla had been there first.
Tesla publicly operated radio controlled model boats in the Central Park Basin in 1898, referring to them as 'teleautomatons'... the term '‘Robot'’ having not yet been invented by Karl Capek.
In the Autobiography, Tesla talks about world wide communications, which had been his current preoccupation - remember Wardenclyffe? - and stressed that he had worked out a method of '‘individualism'’ which permitted uninterceptable transmissions.
Further, Tesla remarks that:
'“ ...As throwing light on this point, I may mention that only recently an odd looking
gentleman called on me with the object of enlisting my services in the construction
of world transmitters in some distant land. "“We have no money,"” he said, "“but carloads of solid gold, and we will give you a liberal amount."” I told
him that I wanted to see first what will be done with my inventions in America, and
this ended the interview.'“

'‘Odd looking gentleman'’ !
This would probably have been Major Thomas J. "Long Tom" Roberts, Savage's associate, electronics expert, and often described as looking like someone raised in a basement on a diet of mushrooms.
So did Savage use Tesla's system? I would imagine that Tesla would have bragged of it if he had, being a relentless self-publicist, rather than off-handedly remarking on one of many business meetings.

It has been argued that Tesla's 'world transmitters' were not radio stations as we think of them, but a rather more sophisticated idea based on ionospheric resonance.
Bill Beatty has a good essay
on the theory that may have been behind Tesla's transmitters. (Remarkably crackpot - free!)

...and on that note I have gone from fact to fantasy to speculation, and possibly back to fact.
Hmmm..
The pixs do not seem to be displaying in the last post. Why must this be difficult?
If I cannot make this work, what would happen to any chimpanzee that tried to blog about the Life Primeval?
It would be disappointed, friends. Disappointed and unable to display its homely visage.
Differences:
Take this series of numbers; 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10.
Each of these numbers is different from the previous number by the same amount: 1.
So the series of first differences for this series is 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1.
And the series of second differences is 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0
Its boring. While manipulation of differences can be useful - the Difference Engine after all was not a machine designed to generate social alternatives - its seems to be a rarely used tool in the mathematics toolbox. However its a simple enough tool for my poor brain to understand. Lets try a better series.

The first ten thousand prime numbers:

2 3 5 7 11 13 17 19 23 29 31 37 41 43 47 53 59 61 67 71 73 79 83 89 97 101 ...

Bear with me, I'm coming to a point.
The first differences:
1 2 2 4 2 4 2 4 6 2 6 4 2 4 6 6 2 6 4 2 6 4 6 8 4 2
4 2 4 14 4 6 2 10 2 6 6 4 6 6 2 10 2 4 2 12 12 4 2 4 6
2 10 6 6 6 2 6 4 2 10 14 4 2 4 14 6 10 2 4 6 8 6 6 4 6
8 4 8 10 2 10 2 6 4 6 8 4 2 4 12 8 4 8 4 6 12 2 18 6
10 6 6 2 6 10 6 6 2 6 6 4 2 12 10 2 4 6 6 2 12 4 6 8
10 8 10 8 6 6 4 8 6 4 8 4 14 10 12 2 10 2 4 2 10 14 4 2
4 14 4 2 4 20 4 8 10 8 4 6 6 14 4 6 6 8 6 12 4 6 2 10
2 6 10 2 10 2 6 18 4 2 4 6 6 8 6 6 22 2 10 8 10 6 6 8
12 4 6 6 2 6 12 10 18 2 4 6 2 6 4 2 4 12 2 6 34 6 6 8
18 10 14 4 2 4 6 8 4 2 6 12 10 2 4 2 4 6 12 12 8 12 6 4
6 8 4 8 4 14 4 6 2 4 6 2 6 10 20 6 4 2 24 4 2 10 12 ...

Now this seems to be patterned. The pattern reminds me of a wave form with increasing amplitude and decreasing frequency. Also note the new series ..... remove the redundancies and you end up with

One could also ignore every number in the series that is less than the previous number. This generates
2,4,6,8,10,12....
The set of primes having been proved infinite, I wonder if this means that this subset of differences is also infinite, containing within itself all integers that are a multiple of 2...
I would like to graph this, but tonight I've managed to crash Excel three times, and Quattro wasn't any better at handling it. I would think that a 2.2 Ghz processor with 512 MB of RAM could graph a measly 9,999 data points, even with Micro$oft bloatware...
I'll have to find a better program , and one that preferably does not require two hours of study in order to produce a stinkin' graph. If I was going to bother to learn something, I'd figure out how to do this in Mathematica.

I was going to be a bastard and post all 10,000 primes and 9,999 differences, but that seemed anal. I've uploaded both and here are the links:
First Differences
Second Differences

And , of course the primes:

(Ever notice that there is not a word for 'all three'?
I hereby coin 'Throce' to fill the void...)
Now for the second differences:
1 0 2 -2 2 -2 2 2 -4 4 -2 -2 2 2 0 -4 4 -2 -2 4 -2 2 2 -4 -2 2 ...
Note the negative numbers. This causes a fork in the inquiry. It was the negatives that led me to visualize waves in the first place. If I calculate the differences using absolute values, I get:
1 0 2 2 2 2 2 2 4 4 2 2 2 2 0 4 4 2 2 4 2 2 2 4 2 2 ...
and third differences:
1 2 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 2 0 0 0 2 4 0 2 0 2 2 0 0 2 2 0 0 ...

Amused myself in using the first differences to create a bitmap. Copied a BMP header onto the textfile using DOS EDIT in binary mode; used Find/Replace to deal with the pesky CR/LF characters (that's Carriage Return/Line Feed, a beautiful vestige of the teletype, btw ) ; and then took a peek with photoshop:



The aspect ratio is completely arbitrary. Its a little gray.
I tweaked it a bit, boosted the contrast as high it would go for the pleasant polychrome effect:



Now, if I was feeling progressive, I'd get the computer to generate several thousand copies at various aspect ratios that I could page through and see if any patterns emerged. But not tonight - I'm tired, see?




I was given a broken Vivatar 3826 Digital Still Camera. Its previous owner had smashed the lens off of it - accidently, I assume, and not in a fit of pique. Its names a misnomer, because it can take video as well. That capacity didn't excite me as I shoot very little video, and still use a old VHS camcorder. (Yes I know, its archaic technology, and not quite old enough yet to be hiply retro.)
I adapted a SLR camera lens to it. Most of my lenses are 52mm screw mount, so I cut down a screw on lens cap and glued that to the body of the camera after working out what seemed like the best spacing.
The flash was broken, so I unplugged the flash's circuit board and removed it. I had to cut the power leads to the flash board. The camera did not seem to care. Apprantly, it uses a timer to geuss when the flash capacitor is at full charge rather then some sort of feedback. Makes sence really: the RC constant of the charger should only vary slightly, and within acceptable bounds.
removed the tiny moter that drove the internal zoom lens. This moter is the size of a pencil eraser and will prove quite useful for another project. The big moter (I use the term loosely) that drove the focusing I didn't bother to remove. I just used a sharp X-Acto knife to cut the flexible circuit traces that led to it. I was going to leave the moters in, but they tended to move when I pressed the shutter button due to an irritating 'focus' setting before the switch could move to 'shoot'. This would vibrate the CCD when I wanted itI still.

Shooting indoors with on 30 watts of Compact Flourescent for light - a dim enviroment - the camera did better than my unmodified Kodak EasyShare 7300. This is probably due to the much larger lens aperture.
I then tried to take a shot outside, with a sunny background:







Massive overexposure!
Trying all availible settings of f-stop and exposure time didn't help. The camera was designed under the assumption that it had the light gathering ability of a 6 mm wide lense, and I was feeding it through a 40 mm wide lens.
Thats around a 44 X increase in light gathering!
Useful at night, I suppose, but not very useful for garden parties.



I used a old amateur astromer trick to solve that problem. I blocked the mouth of the lens with duct tape, and used a washer as a makeshift diaphramn. This brought the apeture down to around 5 mm and the overexposure became a thing of the past.
It does make the camera look odd, though.

Next step is to put a new and improved shutter switch on it. The original one takes too much force, and I don't like its action.
Got tired of looking at my brother's broken guitar amp.
Its a Beltone AP-12 that someone lovingly pulled all the tubes out of, and broke one for dessert. I have boxes of old vacuum tubes that are a sad relic of my past; I figured I could find a replacement.
Its a 6AR5. Various sites refer to it as a "commen pentode" one going so far as to claim "This can often be seen in old thrown out televisions" .
I could have bought one for 10.00$ USD, which was more than I was willing to invest. I dug through my boxes.
I didn't have one. I searched for a replacement. The sites wern't real forthcoming on that issue, but by happy accident I found a schematic a Japenese fellow had posted for a receiver design, and he'd noted that I could replace the 6AR5 with a 6AQ5. I found 4 6AQ5s within ten minutes. The sites agreed the pinouts were identical, that the curves were close to matching - and most importantly, the replacement exceeded the performance of the original. I stuck the tube into the amp, doublechecked everything, and plugged it in.
Nothing.
Presently I found the loose wire between the power switch and the fuse. Clamped it by way of a jury rig, tried again. Amp lit up, tubes glowed, the speaker made that sound-not-sound , that peculiar clearing-of-throat
hum/not hum indicative of sucsess.
Now to solder it up, replace the wobbly power switch, and find myself a guitar.
Incidently, the amp contains the following tubes, from the side of the board which contains the transformer:
6AR5 6X4 6AV6 6AV6 6AV6
Which comes to 3 @ 6AV6, 1 @ 6AR5 and 1 @ 6X4 rectifier.
I am told the Beltone was actually made by Teisco. The plate on the back reads
Davis Importing Co. Ltd.
BELTONE
Musical Instrument Amplifier
Model No. AP AP-12
115 V. 60 CYC. 31 VA.
More cogitation: now the ratchets can be dispensed with. Each ratchet can be reduced to a single tooth, and that tooth placed on the end of a spring loaded arm. The neat arrangement of wheels around wheels becomes a bristly mass of hooks and spines. Should be simpler to build, and has less critical tolerences. It does however, lose the victorian steampunk look. I can probably replace the central 'heartbeat' wheel with a linear ram - which would be easier to power with steam or pneumatic power.
Today is Quake's Tenth Anniversary.
Woot!
It is possible to create a eraseable paper tape. Its just not extremely durable.
Two tapes glued togther with internal pockets that contain paper shutters. The shutters can be slid left and right, so that the shutter can cover a hole. Its bulky - I can't imagine making it smaller then 1 cm of tape length per bit without usuing very special equipment. It also is vulnerable to data corruption, as the shutters are only locked in poistion by friction. Of course, if the tape is kept reeled, then the pressure of the tight roll will keep the shutters from shifting.
Diagram to follow.
The most basic design has to be able to avoid running into walls, and it has to be able to avoid falling over edges. Cliff detection and collision detection ; a neuralogical demand somewhere around a amoeba's.
I would also like it to keep a record on punched tape of its travels, and perhaps a odometer count.
Travel records open a new, and interesting can of worms.
Consider 'Direction of Travel'. In the simpliest form, this is left-right-forward-back. But how many 'lefts' does it take to turn a complete circle? The value is not uniform - tire slippage and real world factors act to vary the angles.
But to switch from relative reference to absolute would require a real-world frame of reference.
Bacteria and pigeons use magnetic fields. A compass would work, but would deviate badly in the electromagnetic fields that permeate our indoor enviroment.
Likewise, there are too many light sources to use a 'solar' based frame of reference. Look how badly moths do when they encounter streetlights.
A tiny gyroscope would be ideal, but I am not certain if one could be built that fits within size restraints.

Or perhaps I should say, ' size and patience' restraints - the smaller the scale, the more fiddly the manufacture.
Each cog neuron can be built with 4 possible inputs:
Fire ... which immediately triggers the neuron, unless it is in relaxation time;
Enable_Fire ... which allows the neuron to fire if a signal arrives;
Inhibit_Fire
... which prevents the neuron from firing until the signal is removed;
Inhibit_Reset ... which prevents the neuron from coming out of relaxation -
when the signal is removed, the neuron will still complete its normal relaxation time before resetting.
While Enable_Fire and Inhibit_Fire would seem to be binary choices, the neuron could have Inhibit_Fire and Enable_Fire set or unset by different neurons. A AND gate could be set up by using the Fire and the Enable_Fire inputs together. A NAND could use Fire and Inhibit_Fire together.

Its really not a question of gates though. The idea has been from the beginning to mimic neurons rather than gates, although this means I have to master networks rather then Boolean Logic.
Reading paper tape is relatively easy. I've settled on a bank of 'bump sensors' set below the tape. On every third 'heartbeat' tick, the tape is drawn forward one notch, and a set of plungers are bounced with a piano hammer style mechanism against the tape. Where their are holes, a plunger goes through, and triggers the appropiate sensor.
Writing to tape isn't much harder; the plungers have to be solidly built, and driven with a fair amount of force to punch the holes. Nothing impossible.
Now if I could get magical self-healing tape, than I could do reads and writes on the same paper.
Writing on one tape, and reading on the other is monotonous.
Even if I wrote data on the tape backwards from point X, and read program data forwards from point X, the machine will still spend a lot of time spinning tape. Not to mention the overhead in RAM for all the data pointers.

RAM...RAM...RAM...Curse'd RAM...harder to implement than vision. Curs'd, vile, wick'd inquitious RAM !

... Early scrolls could be seen as a form of paper tape, with optical readers, and a reel on each end of the scroll. Of course, the ancients never seem to have invented the cassette to protect the scrolls.
Books - a sector formatted Random Acsess Format - has proved much more useful.
'The Self Propelled Cart' by none other than the talented Leonardo da Vinci is the oldest example of a spring driven mobile mechanism that I can find. Probably was never built, and merely existed as sketches in the Atlanticus Codex.
Recently reconstructed, it should serve as a spur to the 'steampunk' alternate history buffs.
'Reconstructed'? Probably a misnomer. Recently constructed by historians, and made part of a exhibit. To me, the main question is: what was its purpose? The design is functional, blocky, looking more like the guts of a machine. Was there more to it that was never recorded?
The reconstruction is a metre long - this is a large machine. I can't find any estimates to the length of possible run, or speed, or even, for that matter, a good blueprint.
Its interesting to note the 'springs in drums' design of the power springs...practically identical to the springdrums used today.
While selecting an area of one of my photographs, cursing my laziness for not improving my mouse to be able to handle the fine muscle control I needed, it occured to me that it would be a lot easier following a zones perimeter if I had some sort of force feedback. If the texture beneath my mouse changed as the colours changed. What is needed, is a tablet with a surface which can change its friction. Such a material exists: chalk. Under the influence of electricity, damp chalk changes its modolus of friction. This was exploited in a telephone receiver design of Edison's, during the lengthy lawsuits over the critical patents controlling telephony. Probably a number of other materials exhibit this property - this may be fertile ground for some experiments.
Force feedback input devices seem primarly concerned with reading stylus pressure to perform various tasks like line width, line density, colour. Outputting force to the controller seems to be restricted to the 'bump-n-go' style demands of the rumblepack video game controller.

A pity, really. I could work so much faster if I could actually feel the edges of the colour fields.
World Wide Web has been around for ~14 years. During this time, it has absorbed the attention, thought and energy of millions of humans, a disproportionate number of them our youngest and brightest.
Here is the question: has there been a benefit? A clear, incontrovertible improvement in humanity's creative capacity, innovation, or discovery?
Or has it been, (to steal and misuse a lovely term from Dave Sims) an Exodus Inwards, leaving the real world impoverished for the experience?
If such close contact with Virtu has been a benefit, the benefit should be obvious in Veritie.
(Terms Virtu and Veritie being coined by Roger Zelazny, referring to Cyberspace and the Real World, respectively.)
The reason why I ask is that the results seem to be inconclusive. For every advance, there seems to be a retreat.
Television was argued to be a benefit; after long years it becomes apparant as merely a narcotic, a time waster, a destroyer of imagination.

...The World Wide Web : The New Television.
Connection hit a new low today - 4800 bps. No, I did not drop a zero or two. Office is not wired with twisted pair and the ambient electromagnetic background is noisy. Very noisy.
It was like a time warp to 1979.

I worked out how to chain my sence whisker gearing together in such fashion as to act like simple neurons. This immediately makes me think of changing the design from a wheeled crawler to a hexapod walker.
As a quick count, I should have a touch sensor on the belly, and one on each shin, and one of each foot.Plus probably a couple to sence 'muscle' contractions.
From a construction standpoint, the only fiddly piece is the mutilated ratchet ; I shall have to devise a method for constructing them en masse.

In terms of a walker, I am rather struck with the appearance of RHex.
Searched 'Rod logic' and synonyms.... found a depressing lack of content. Mainly noise, a lot of references to Drexler, a couple to Fowler.
(Fowlers the 'inventor' of central heating as we know it, and also of rod logic. Circa 19th Century.)
Doesn't look like anyone has done much work on them. Beyond discussing volume versus electronics volume (a popular theme - Mickey Mouse beats Donald Duck kind of calculation), or the thermodynamic implications thereof.
Only links I could find of value were:
Clever lego work:
http://goldfish.ikaruga.co.uk/logic.html
Or academic work:
http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/mechano.html
Everyone seems to think that RAM is the toughie for any practical implementation.

Would seem simple to adapt the gates to read and punch paper tape. I wonder how much tape my crawler could carry. Or perhaps, it should string tape from the ceiling, and crawl up and down it as it computes, like some sort of algorithmic spider.

What are the implications of a rod with adjustable studs?
(I'll avoid the joke about the stud with the adjustable rod.)

Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of Mir's re-entry. Easily scorned as old and battered technology ; easily ignored as a relic of the Cold War and hardly relevant in the new 'Culture War' we find ourselves enmired in.
But.
The distinction between 'ship' and 'station' is somewhat artificial. The Mir was a ship that carried its crew around and around the Earth for millions of miles. If it had a spirit, it was battered and creaky - but game.
How much work could have been done in this amount of time if a private company could have bought or leased it? As much - or more - research than has has been done on the ISS in this time, I suspect.
How much would it have cost to buy?
How much for a unmanned launch to rendezvous and boost the Mir to a higher, longer orbit?
How much of a spur to private spacecraft would it have been, for it to have been circleing overhead, waiting?
How much a spur to amateur science, to have this acsess to orbit?

But, like Skylab, it was built by the economies of destruction - and in its time, fell to the same economies.
Ah well.
Mir, we lift a glass; to Mir, the circling, and the fallen.
High point of my week;
Discovering that in E1M8, after grabbing the Pentacle, the Shambler's Lightening Attack can be used to levitate up
to the top platform.
Hard part: Landing. The @#$%& Shamblers won't stop attacking, and I tend to float to the ceiling until the Pentacle runs out.

'E1M8 --what?'
Quake One - the First - The Best and the Only...of course.

Deregulating the sences...

While at work - which entailed standing and staring into space for six hours - I conceived the linkages nescessary for the bump sensors.
Using a ratchet, a pawl and an escapement, I can amplify a gentle push into a axle rotation with considerable torque.
I'm pleased that this rotation trigger eliminates the need for the touch sensors to work according to a clockbeat - even if it depends upon a movement beat. I don't mind a movement beat; if anything it adds aesthetic pleasure.
The real world does not work according to a precise clock, so sences that depend on any form of shuttering should suffer from 'event artifacts' or 'moment artefacts' to coin phrases.

It is probable that our perception of movement when presented with 30 still frames per second is a form of 'event artefact' ariseing from the interplay of our pulsatile neural system and the continuous world.
Co-Operative Vs. Lockstep
Timing can be critical.
If the sensory pulse is used to clutch and unclutch the drivetrain, than in the interest of least effort and minimizing wear, the shifts should be done while the drivetrain is not under load. If the mainspring regulator is pulsatile rather than continous, then sensory switching can be done during the 'null' portion of each beat. Of course, this means that the senses will beat counterpoint to the 'muscles'.
The question: is it more elegant to use one system clock, and than a pair of divide-by-two mechanisms to generate the 'motor' clock and the 'sense' clock ; or should there be a alternating mechanism, so that one beat of the 'motor' clock triggers one beat of the 'sence' clock, which in turn triggers the 'motor' clock?

Co-Operative Vs. Lockstep : Phrased like this it sounds like Dogma rather than Craft.
It should be possible to;
Use an electroplating rig to remove solder from old circuit boards, freeing up the components without heat and nasty solder fumes. Or perhaps a bath of dilute sulfuric acid, and an extra electrode?
Using the Pb + H2SO4 = PbSO4 + H2 + 2e reaction to generate (miniscule) amounts of power, and to recycle the parts.
Will dilute H2SO4 eat PCB material?
Will have to try this one out. Even if it doesn't work, the idea of spending an afternoon with Oil of Vitriol and Lead
sends a tingle right through my Mad Scientisty bits.

woooo chemical formulae. Brings me right back to my misspent youth. Ah, the smell of burning eyebrows...
Clockwork Robots
I use 'Robot' rather than 'Automata' because the idea is an all-mechanical 'Bump-n-Go' explorer style robot.
Useing the bumper sensors to trigger clutches rather than microswitches is an interesting problem. Mechanical amplifiers will probably have to be installed in the sensors, in order to take the impact energy and ramp it up to a level that can drive clutches.
A mechanical amplifier and a diaphramn would allow some level of reaction to loud sounds.
Useing sunshades and bimetal strip style thermometers would allow the robot to sence local tempurtures, and engage in sunseeking 'Photovore' behavior. Ultimately, a parabolic mirror and a small Stirling engine might be able to wind the robot's mainspring back up.
Fluidics would probably be the easiest way to do this, but I am very tempted by the idea of brass clockworks ticking and humming, the sunlight flashing from the sharp edges of gearteeth.
Clockwork being impulsive by its very nature, each robot would have its own heartbeat. It could also be stopped, and be dead until a given sensory stimulus bringing it back from the dead. At least until the lubrication seized from the passage of time.
A electricity-free robot , crawling around the room, seeking sunlight and avoiding loud people. Sounds like the defination of a housecat.