Wireless Waters

Molecular Gastronomy

While wireless is my vocation cooking is an avocation.  TOmorrow, I have to teach a Quaker friend (a Friend friend) how to make gumbo for a Jazz to the High school benefit we're attending next week.  It's all in the roux -- flour cooked until dark dark brown in an equal volume of hot hot oil.

But the most interesting cooking, or at least the wierdest I've run into in a long time is an application of so-called scientific or geek cuisine, called molecular gastronomy.  I quote from  Boing Boing -- a great blog, btw:

The idea is to create dishes based on the molecular compatibilities of foods. For instance, unripe mango and pine share a molecular structure, so they might be tasty if combined. That's the theory, anyway. Molecular gastronomists combine white chocolate and oysters for the same reason.

Odd, no? Actually, have you ever noticed how unripe mango tastes like pine?

Favorite Wireless Communications Applications 2

Another of my favorite wireless communications applications dates from the late 1980's when radio paging dominated wireless messaging.  A farmer in Iowa duct-taped a vibrating pager to the head of the lead cow in his dairy herd and trained her to, upon being buzzed, get up and walk to the milking barn.  The other cows followed.  A terrific application –- wireless -- focused –- high return on investment – improved productivity -- low cost -- AND it used duct tape!!

Favorite Wireless Communications Applications 1

I've seen, heard of, and in some cases designed and implemented a number of, as my son Matt would say, sweet communications systems.  One of my favorite wireless apps dates from the 1950's and 1960's.

The problem was how to determine the amount of water which would be available from the snow pack on slopes in the Rockies or the Sierras. Sensors could be deployed on mountain sides during the summer by hydrologists, using cheap grad student and intern labor.  The sensors could be provided with radios to periodically transmit snow depth data. But there were limited ways to collect it, as cell phones didn’t exist, satellites were too far away for the limited power budget of the sensors’ batteries, and deploying receivers on each ridge top was unfeasible.

The solution was elegant.  Thousands of small meteors hit the upper atmosphere, the ionosphere, every day.  As they burn up, they create an ionized region which reflects radio energy in the 6 meter band (50 MHz). By periodically transmitting, the sensors will regularly reflect from an ionized region and can be received with a modest antenna hundreds of miles away.  Meteor tail messaging… sweeeet.