Fremescent Floccose Fortification

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Happy New Year! We hope 2012 will be a great year for The Amp Hour and all of our listeners!

• • We have a new theme by Paul Stevenson! We love it!
  • Chris has a ham exam scheduled for next Sunday!
  • Dave has been chasing a hum at his new studios, he took a spectrum snapshot of it.
  • Chris has been preventing noise with his new "studio enhancement"

• • Acoustics is a whole field of its own, but is often coupled to electronics. The AES is actually the Audio Engineering Society, not the Acoustical as Chris thought.
  • Shoutouts:
    • Randall Munroe wows us again with his cartoon about mnemonics to remember science terms, including crazy ones for SI prefixes and resistor color codes.
    • A music/tech enthusiast made his old computer gear sing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w68qZ8JvBds

• • • Devin linked to us and put up a section to discuss The Amp Hour on the newly created OpSoFo, a place to talk about OSHW.
    • Chris was contacted about a cool sounding job for testing analog chips. Do people want us to post jobs? No recruiters, of course.
  • More on the discussion about engineering education, including a discussion on the EEVblog forums started by "Pete in Texas".
  • Chris thinks we should have remedial tinkering classes in colleges for more academically minded students (Chris would have needed these classes).
  • The open source ecology project is looking for help designing their Universal Power Supply. If interested, please fill out the form at the end of this post. If you've never seen it, check out the TED video below.

• Once your 50 top machines are done, why not try making a DIY 1GHz scope probe? Could save you LOTS of money.
• Printing transistors could be a step closer with graphene suspended in polymer. Researchers at the University of Cambridge printed using a commercial printer.
• If that's not quite your level, you can already print resist directly onto FR4 for making PCBs. There is a message board dedicated to doing this.
• A new site talks about the downfalls of having 90 degree turns on your PCB. We'll verify with our guest next week, Dr. Howard Johnson.
• This Week in Nerd History:
  • In 1813 in York England, many Luddites were convicted of destroying equipment in a factory; they believed it was responsible for job loss. 17 were put to death (yikes!) because it was a capital crime back then (Chris wasn't laughing at people dying, but the ridiculousness of the situation). Many others were sent off to the English prison island...now known as Australia. Will we see similar rebellion against robots and the taking of jobs in the future? Will there be next generation Luddites?
• The EU is considering instituting engineering passport cards, so people can practice engineering in multiple countries. Do you think certifying engineers is a good idea?
• The electronics industry is set to grow 2.2% in 2012, according to Gartner. Hopefully these "noisy" predictions aren't being used to cut jobs!

Looking forward to a great year! Please leave us some feedback in the comments section below!