Resistor Quotes

I don’t ever want to forget that resistance must be its own reward, since resistance, at least within the life span of the resistors, almost always fails.

The non-violent resistor not only avoids external, physical violence, but he avoids internal violence of spirit. He not only refuses to shoot his opponent, but he refuses to hate him. And he stands with understanding, goodwill at all times.

Resistors heat up. It’s what they do.

I don't ever want to lose sight of how short my time is here. And I don't ever want to forget that resistance must be its own reward, since resistance, at least within the life span of the resistors, almost always fails. I don't ever want to forget, even with whatever personal victories I achieve, even in the victories we achieve as a people or a nation, that the larger story of America and the world probably does not end well. Our story is a tragedy. I know it sounds odd, but that belief does not depress me. It focuses me. After all, I am an atheist and thus do not believe anything, even a strongly held belief, is destiny. And if tragedy is to be proven wrong, if there really is hope out there, I think it can only be made manifest by remembering the cost of it being proven right. No one - not our fathers, not our police, and not our gods - is coming to save us. The worst really is possible. My aim is to never be caught, as the rappers say, acting like it can't happen. And my ambition is to write both in defiance of tragedy and in blindness of its possibility, to keep screaming into the waves - just as my ancestors did.

The battle is always the most spiritually intense wherever the key issues of God’s kingdom are focused. Wherever God is at work, you will find Satan at work, also. The enemy’s name essentially means “the resistor.” How true! He resists God’s purposes and His people. (See, for example, Zechariah 3:1 kjv.) He can’t help it—he is a slave of his own nature. It is paramount that we carry out spiritual warfare so that God’s purposes for His people will be fulfilled. Daniel is a marvelous example of someone who, by prayer and fasting, affected the history and destiny of his people.

While linearity is a truly astonishing property of nature, it is by no means a rare one. All circuits made up of the resistors, capacitors, and inductors discussed in Chapter I in connection with network theory are linear, and so are telegraph lines and cables. Indeed, usually electrical circuits are linear, except when they include vacuum tubes, or transistors, or diodes, and sometimes even such circuits are substantially linear.

Bellevue and its satellites were not suburbs so much as—in the rising term—an Edge City, with its own economy, sociology, and architecture. Things made on the Eastside were odorless, labor-intensive, and credit-card thin, like computer software and aerospace-related electronics gear. They were assembled in low, tree-shaded factories, whose large grounds were known as “campuses”—for in Bellevue all work was graduate work, and the jargon of school and university leaked naturally into the workplace. Seen from an elevated-freeway distance, Bellevue looked like one of its own products: a giant circuit board of color-coded diodes and resistors, connected by a mazy grid of filaments.

The reflection no longer held the image of a woman Ellinor recognized, nor particularly liked. She saw a facsimile of herself, someone who was still unsure how to trust, move forward, to live without Misho.

Be a living electronic circuit. Practice resistance where needed, like a resistor. Preserve energy where needed, like a capacitor. Direct energy where needed, like a diode. And above all, be driven by a purpose, like an IC.

Directed dabbling is what led me to Bre Pettis, a former art teacher from Seattle who started NYC Resistor, a Brooklyn maker space, and also launched the 3-D printing company MakerBot next door. I had been tracking Bre as part of our digital development effort. I e-mailed Bre to ask if I could simply hang out and watch what he was doing: “I want to understand the new wave of micro-manufacturing, and especially what you are doing with 3-D printing.” Resistor was a higgledy-piggledy series of rooms on the fourth floor of a run-down factory. There Bre introduced me to his “makers” as we walked between workbenches covered with bits of sheet metal and wires and boxes of odds and ends. I saw people making a miniature wind turbine and a portable water purification system. That is, GE kinds of things. One guy was building his own miniature gas turbine, because, well, he could. “Why not?” he said. “People want to live off the grid.” “We could use this ingenuity inside GE,” I said out loud. After NYC Resistor and MakerBot, I met with Shapeways, in Queens, an advanced contract manufacturer where people submitted designs to be 3-D printed for a fee. As we toured the space and talked about the jewelry they made, I

The resistance to change frustrates many leaders, but it doesn’t have to. In fact, the resistance you feel often means there’s an opportunity to Cultivate Curiosity and create buy-in. Your change resistors aren’t necessarily lazy, stuck, negative, or even “resistant.” Rather, they’re normal.

In electronic circuits it is often necessary to deliberately limit the current. To do this we use a resistor. The symbol for resistance is ‘R’ and it is measured in ohms (symbol ‘Ω’, the Greek letter omega).

An incandescent lamp is made with a wire filament enclosed in a bulb without oxygen and glows as the filament is heated. Less than 10 percent of the electrical power into an incandescent light bulb is converted into light, and the rest is converted into heat. Lamps of this type are still used, but they are being replaced with fluorescent lights or light emitting diodes. The incandescent lamp therefore is a resistor that just happens to give out light. But what type of light? White light is measured by its color temperature in degrees Kelvin (K). Typically, when we look outside on a sunny clear day, the Sun along with the blue sky provides a color temperature of about 4,500 to 5,500 degrees Kelvin. As the sun starts to go down in the afternoon, the color temperature drops to about 3,000 to 4,000 degrees Kelvin. Finally as the sun sets, we can clearly perceive the sunlight with a yellow to red tint, which means the sun’s color temperature has dropped below 3,000 degrees Kelvin. Human eyes adapt to the color temperature for the most part from about 3,000 to 5,000 degrees Kelvin and perceive light in this range as “white,” albeit at 3,000 degrees Kelvin, it has a warm tone. A standard incandescent bulb for room lighting such as a 100 watt bulb provides light at about 2,700 degrees Kelvin, which provides warm white light. For studio or movie lighting, generally the color temperature is a bit whiter (between 3,200 and 3,500 degrees Kelvin, and sometimes up to 4,000 degrees Kelvin). Halogen lamps or white photoflood lamps provide light in this color temperature range. Incandescent lamps exceeding 4,000 degrees usually are specially made and they are often coated in blue. For standard low-power lamps such as flashlight bulbs or indicator lights, the color temperature is somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 degrees Kelvin.

ADD A BUZZER TO YOUR GAME Congratulations: You’ve finished the last project in the book! Now, it’s up to you to decide what to make next. If you’re not sure where to start, why not add more circuits to your reaction game? The LED in the middle is where you want the light to stop, and I suggest adding a sound circuit to bring some excitement to hitting your target. To do this, you could use an active buzzer like the one in “Project #2: Intruder Alarm” on page 11, as shown in this partial circuit diagram. The darker part of this circuit shows new components you’d need in order to add a buzzer to the reaction game project. The lighter components are just a section of the original circuit diagram. Connect the positive leg of the middle LED through a 1 kΩ resistor to the base of an NPN transistor. Then connect the buzzer to the transistor’s collector. Connect the positive side of your battery to the other side of the buzzer, and connect the negative side of the battery to the transistor’s emitter. You should end up with a circuit that makes a little beep every time the light passes the middle LED. If you can stop the light on the middle LED, the buzzer should beep continuously to indicate that you’ve hit the main target. When you’ve customized the game to your liking, solder it onto a prototyping board. Maybe you’ll even want to place it in a nice box to hide the electronics and show only the buttons and LEDs.

TRY IT OUT: CHANGE THE LIGHT’S SPEED To change the speed and difficulty of the game, play around with different values for R1, R2, and C1 around the 555 timer. Smaller values will make the game go faster. Larger values will make the game go slower. Flip to “How to Set the Output Speed of the 555 Timer” on page 166 for the calculations to figure out specific resistor and capacitor values based on the frequency you want. Note that R1 should not be less than 1 kΩ, as lower values might damage the 555 timer. But what if you want to change the difficulty on the go? Just replace resistor R2 with a potentiometer. Then you can change that resistance value by rotating the potentiometer shaft, which changes the speed!

Step 3: Build the Start and Stop Circuit The last piece of this project is the button circuit that starts and stops the LEDs. Make these connections now: Connect one push button at the bottom of the breadboard, across the notch in the middle. Plug the 4011 NAND-gate IC into the breadboard, a couple of rows above the button. Make sure its chip marking points toward row 1 on the breadboard. Place the second button above the IC on the right component side so that it’s easy to reach it with your finger. Connect the two resistors, R13 and R14, as shown in the circuit diagram. Then, use jumper wires to make the remaining connections in the SR latch circuit, as shown in the following breadboard diagram. Connect the positive and negative supply columns to the NAND-gate IC (pins 14 and 7, respectively), and connect the wire from pin 11 of the NAND-gate IC to pin 13 of the 4017 decade counter.

Step 2: Build the LED-Controlling Circuit Now, you’re going to connect the 4017 decade counter with resistors and LEDs. There are a lot of connections, so take as much time as you need to get them all correct. Plug the 4017 decade counter into the breadboard so that the middle of the decade counter is around row 20, with the chip marker pointing up toward row 1. Then, take out five LEDs and ten 100 Ω resistors. Connect each LED’s negative (short) leg to the negative supply column on the right, and connect each positive (long) leg to its own empty row in the component area on the right. Place the green LED in the middle, the two blue ones on each side of the green LED, and the red ones on each end. Then, connect the ten 100 Ω resistors. In the circuit diagram, notice that pins 1 to 7 and pins 9 to 11 of the 4017 decade counter each connect to one side of a resistor. The other side of each resistor needs to be on a row by itself. Take care to ensure the resistor legs don’t accidentally touch one another. Look at the following breadboard circuit to see how I connected them: Now, connect the LEDs to the resistors on the 4017 decade counter, and connect the decade counter circuit to the 555 timer circuit according to the circuit diagram. Jumper wires are the best way to make those connections. From each resistor, connect a jumper wire to the corresponding LED. Look at the circuit diagram and notice, for example, that the other side of the resistor connected to pin 4 of the 4017 decade counter should connect to the positive pin of the green LED in the middle. Go through the pins in the circuit diagram to figure out which LED to connect each resistor to. Connect pins 8 and 15 of the 4017 decade counter to the negative supply column, and connect pin 16 to the positive supply column. Use a wire to connect the output from the 555 timer (pin 3) to the clock input of the 4017 decade counter (pin 14). Make sure that you have positive and negative connections in all of your power supply columns. The breadboard I recommend in this project’s Shopping List (page 267) divides its power supply columns into two sections, one upper and one lower. Just connect each of the upper and lower halves on the left side with a wire to bridge the gap, as shown. Do the same on the right side. Alternatively, use two jumper wires from the left columns to the right columns. You can use a jumper wire, or you can cut off a small piece of wire, as I’ve done in this photo. Then, use two long jumper wires to connect the lower-left power supply columns with the two lower-right columns. When you’re done connecting the two circuits and all the power supply columns, your breadboard should look like this:

Before you move on to the next step, check that this circuit is working by connecting an LED with a resistor to the output of the 555 timer as follows: Connect the negative side (short leg) of an LED to the output on pin 3 of the 555 timer. Connect the positive side (long leg) of the LED to a 100 Ω resistor, and connect the other side of this resistor to the positive supply column. Connect your battery clip to one of the supply column pairs as usual. Then plug in the battery to check that the circuit works. If your LED blinks really fast, then you’re ready to move on. If not, recheck your connections to find out where the error is. When you know the 555 timer circuit works, unplug the LED, 100 Ω resistor, and battery clip.

Step 1: Build the 555 Timer Circuit Plug the 555 timer into the breadboard all the way at the top so that you’ll have room for the other parts of the circuits farther down. Then, connect the capacitors and resistors to the IC according to this project’s circuit diagram. The capacitor I suggest in this project’s Shopping List is a nonpolarized capacitor, so it doesn’t matter which way you connect it. If you use a polarized capacitor instead, connect it according to the plus marking in the circuit diagram. Use wires to make connections as needed, as I show in this breadboard diagram. In this project, it’s best to use the supply column pairs on both sides to make connections easier and keep everything as tidy as possible. The breadboard that I recommend in this project’s Shopping List doesn’t have blue and red markings, but the positive and negative columns are the same as in breadboards with the stripes. The left and right sides of the breadboard each have a pair of supply columns. The positive supply column is the left column in each pair, and the negative supply column is the right column in each pair. Use a red wire to connect the positive column on one side to the positive column on the other side, and do the same using a black wire with the negative columns. As you follow my instructions, connect everything in the 555 timer circuit that should connect to VCC to one of the positive supply columns, and connect everything that should connect to GND to one of the negative supply columns.

Shopping List A breadboard (Jameco #2212218, Bitsbox #CN204) with at least 60 rows. Breadboard jumper wires (Jameco #2237044, Bitsbox #CN236)—you’ll need around 35 for this project. Standard hookup wire works, too. A standard 9 V battery to power the circuit. A 9 V battery clip (Jameco #11280, Bitsbox #BAT033) to connect the battery. A 555 timer IC (Jameco #904085, Bitsbox #QU001) to create the timing. A 10 kΩ resistor (Jameco #691104, Bitsbox #CR2510K) to set the game speed. A 100 kΩ resistor (Jameco #691340, Bitsbox #CR25100K) to set the game speed. A 1 µF capacitor (Jameco #768183, Bitsbox #CC006) to set the game speed. A 4017 decade counter IC (Jameco #12749, Bitsbox #QU020) to control the LEDs. Two standard blue LEDs (Jameco #2193889, Bitsbox #OP033) Two standard red LEDs (Jameco #333973, Bitsbox #OP002) A standard green LED (Jameco #34761, Bitsbox #OP003) Ten 100 Ω resistors (Jameco #690620, Bitsbox #CR25100R) for limiting the current to the LEDs. A 4011 NAND-gate IC (Jameco #12634, Bitsbox #QU018) to create the SR latch for starting and stopping the game. Two 1 kΩ resistors (Jameco #690865, Bitsbox #CR251K) to act as pull-up resistors for the start/stop circuit. Two push buttons (Jameco #119011, Bitsbox #SW087), one for resetting the game and one for playing.

A Counter to Turn the LEDs On To control the LEDs, you’ll use a decade counter, which is an IC that counts input pulses. Every time the clock input on pin 14 goes from low to high, the counter increments by one. It counts from 0 to 9, and it has 10 outputs marked 0 to 9. For example, when the counter has counted three input pulses, output 3 (that is, pin 7) is high, and the other pins are low. If you connect an LED to output 3, then when the counter is at three, the LED will turn on. If you connect LEDs to several output pins, then as the counter increases, the LEDs turn on in order, according to their output pins. When the counter is at 9 and receives a 10th input pulse, it goes back to 0 and turns the output pins on in order again. But the counter counts pulses only if pin 13 is low. This means you can use pin 13 to tell the game when to start moving the light across the LEDs and when to stop the light. Each output has a resistor to reduce the current through the LED and make sure the LED doesn’t get destroyed. Because two output pins connect to each LED, the resistors keep the voltage to each LED high, even though one output will be low and one will be high. The resistors also ensure that two outputs aren’t connected directly together, which could damage the IC when one output is high and the other low.

WHY IS IT CALLED VCC? The positive voltage symbol is called VCC because of old naming conventions. VCC was the voltage supplied to the collector side of a transistor in common transistor circuits, usually through a resistor or some other components. The collector is where the “CC” comes from. You’ve used a bipolar junction transistor throughout this book, but there’s another type of transistor called a field-effect transistor (FET). The pin that equals the collector on this type of transistor is called the drain, so the voltage that was supplied to the drain side of the FET was called VDD.

CHECKING CONNECTIONS AS A TEAM Finding circuit problems is called debugging, and it’s easier to do with some help. When you get stuck, ask someone else to look at the circuit diagram and say the connections out loud one by one while you check the real connections. For example, if your friend is reading the schematic and you’re looking at the breadboard, you might have a conversation like this: Friend: “The positive side of the battery is connected to one side of R1.” You: “Got it!” Friend: “The positive side of the battery is also connected to pins 4 and 8 of the IC.” You: “Got it!” Friend: “The other side of R1 is connected to pin 7 of the chip and to one side of the resistor R2.” You: “Oh, wait! I don’t have the connection to pin 7!” And just like that, you’ll discover the problem.

Why hire a lawyer? I'll make myself one!" And Trurl went home, threw six heaping teaspoons of transistors into a big pot, added again as many condensers and resistors, poured electrolyte over it, stirred well and covered tightly with a lid, then went to bed, and in three days the mixture had organized itself into a first-rate lawyer.

This was not the first time Ellinor Olysha Rask found herself bound and chained, and she very much doubted it would be her last.

She was starting to forget which scars she had gotten by Misho’s side, and which would be new to him. Mirrors reminded her too much that she was still here, fearing failure and success alike because it took her further from the man she loved.

Tears stung her eyes and threatened to show a weakness she spent years trying to suppress with cheap whiskey and near suicidal jobs.

Euria was like most of the sprawling metropolises in Erhard: tall skyscrapers that didn’t so much kiss the sky as ram their fist through it, their shadows casting a perpetual false night across the ground where the unfortunate dwelled.

Ellinor crossed her arms over her chest, her headache returning in force with Lazar’s words. “So what you’re trying to tell me is, we’re fucked. That about sums it up, yeah?” Lazar smirked. “I just said we’d be in for trouble.

Government sales constituted 100 percent of the market for integrated circuits until 1964, and the federal government remained the largest buyer of chips for several years after that. The military had started funding research on new types of electric circuits in the early 1950s, when the tyranny of numbers first emerged. The problems inherent in complex circuits containing large numbers of individual components were particularly severe in defense applications. Such circuits tended to be big and heavy, but the services needed equipment that was light and portable. “The general rule of thumb in a missile was that one extra pound of payload cost $100,000 worth of extra fuel,” Noyce recalled. “The shipping cost of sending up a 50-pound computer was too high even for the Pentagon.” Further, space-age weapons had to be absolutely reliable—a goal that was inordinately difficult to achieve in a circuit with several thousand components and several thousand hand-soldered connections. When the Air Force ordered electronic equipment for the Minuteman I, the first modern intercontinental ballistic missile, specifications called for every single component—not just every radio but every transistor and every resistor in every radio—to have its own individual progress chart on which production, installation, checking, and rechecking could be recorded. Testing, retesting, and re-retesting more than doubled the cost of each electronic part.

The good thing about the transistor was that by the late 1950s it was becoming smaller and smaller as well as more and more reliable. The bad thing was that an electrical circuit containing thousands of tiny transistors, along with other elements such as resistors and capacitors, had to be interconnected with thousands of tiny wires. As Ian Ross describes it, “as you built more and more complicated devices, like switching systems, like computers, you got into millions of devices and millions of interconnections. So what should you do?

Shopping List A breadboard (Jameco #20601, Bitsbox #CN329) with at least 30 rows. A standard 9 V battery to power the circuit. A 9 V battery clip (Jameco #11280, Bitsbox #BAT033) to connect the battery to the circuit. A standard LED (Jameco #34761, Bitsbox #OP003) A 330 Ω resistor (Jameco #661386, Bitsbox #CR25330R) for limiting the current to the LED. A polarized 1000 µF capacitor (Jameco #158298, Bitsbox #EC1KU25)

The S curve is not just important as a model in its own right; it’s also the jack-of-all-trades of mathematics. If you zoom in on its midsection, it approximates a straight line. Many phenomena we think of as linear are in fact S curves, because nothing can grow without limit. Because of relativity, and contra Newton, acceleration does not increase linearly with force, but follows an S curve centered at zero. So does electric current as a function of voltage in the resistors found in electronic circuits, or in a light bulb (until the filament melts, which is itself another phase transition). If you zoom out from an S curve, it approximates a step function, with the output suddenly changing from zero to one at the threshold. So depending on the input voltages, the same curve represents the workings of a transistor in both digital computers and analog devices like amplifiers and radio tuners. The early part of an S curve is effectively an exponential, and near the saturation point it approximates exponential decay. When someone talks about exponential growth, ask yourself: How soon will it turn into an S curve? When will the population bomb peter out, Moore’s law lose steam, or the singularity fail to happen? Differentiate an S curve and you get a bell curve: slow, fast, slow becomes low, high, low. Add a succession of staggered upward and downward S curves, and you get something close to a sine wave. In fact, every function can be closely approximated by a sum of S curves: when the function goes up, you add an S curve; when it goes down, you subtract one. Children’s learning is not a steady improvement but an accumulation of S curves. So is technological change. Squint at the New York City skyline and you can see a sum of S curves unfolding across the horizon, each as sharp as a skyscraper’s corner. Most importantly for us, S curves lead to a new solution to the credit-assignment problem. If the universe is a symphony of phase transitions, let’s model it with one. That’s what the brain does: it tunes the system of phase transitions inside to the one outside. So let’s replace the perceptron’s step function with an S curve and see what happens.

I don't ever want to lose sight of how short my time is here. And I don't ever want to forget that resistance must be its own reward since resistance, at least within the lifespan of our resistors, almost always fails. I don't ever want to forget even with whatever personal victories I achieve, even in the victories we achieve as a people, or a nation, that the larger story of America and the world, probably does not end well. Our story is a tragedy. I know it sounds odd, but that belief does not depress me. It focuses me. After all...if tragedy is to be proven wrong, if there really is hope out there, I think it can only be made manifest by remembering the cost of it being proven right. No one, not our fathers, not our police, and not our gods is coming to save us. The worst really is possible. My aim is to never be caught, as the rappers say, acting like it can't happen. And my ambition is to write both in defiance of tragedy, and in blindness of its possibility, to keep screaming into the waves, just as my ancestors did.

Greatbatch’s pacemaker is an instance where a great idea came—literally—from a novel combination of spare parts. Sometimes those novel combinations arrive courtesy of the random collisions of city streets or the dreaming brain. But sometimes they come from simple mistakes. You reach into the bag of resistors and pull out the wrong one, and four years later, you’re saving someone’s life.