I wish I could but it's s long while ago. More precisely the book wasn't lost but loaned to someone who never returned it and I lost track of him.
The book was a harback with a bright yellow dust jacket and I think its title was printed in red. It was about 300 pages and was no lightweight, full of resonance equations, tables etc.—the sort of book you'd find in the lab of a commercial crystal manufacturer.
Can't remember the price but it was damned expensive. At times over the years I've had need to refer to it and I still get a bit peeved when I think about it.
ok, could it be:
Crystal Oscillator Design and Temperature Compensation :Marvin E. Frerking (1978).
or perhaps
Introduction to Quartz Crystal Unit Design : Virgil E. Bottom (1982)?
Could well be either, it was around the late 70s early 80s when the book went walkabout.
Damn nuisance my memory isn't better. However, I'd recognize it instantly if I saw it. Must check those references out. There may be enough info online for me to figure it out. Thanks.
"Crystal Oscillator Design and Temperature Compensation :Marvin E. Frerking (1978)."
Ah, that has to be the book, just did a search and there's a photo of the cover on Amazon that I recognize. I said it was bright yellow with red writing and I was pretty close with its red lines and bits.
240 pages and not 300, but that's not too bad after close on 50 years. And I was correct about the price too, it is expensive, Amazon has it at $110 for the hardback.
The premise behind this vibe-coded website is excellent. It would have been great if a bit more effort had been invested in the visualization side and, if instead of using "AI-rendered" images, you'd have fetched scientifically accurate representations from papers and open repositories.
Those really were the good old days. My BBS ran out of my parents’ attic, with two phone lines and Renegade on the server (on a beefed-up PS/1). It was pure magic.
The use case could vary from person to person. When you think about it, hacker news has large enough data set ( and one that is widely accessible ) to allow all sorts of fun analyses. In a sense, the appeal is:
Science magazine used to run a genuinely thought-provoking “Breakthrough of the Year.” Lately, it feels like it has narrowed to AI+AI+agents, and more AI.
I’m looking for an outlet that consistently highlights truly unexpected, high-impact scientific breakthroughs across fields.
Have you considered that breakthroughs in AI research now might be more consequential than their equivalents in other fields - simply for bringing us nearer the point where AI accelerates all research?
I recommend the natural number game (also mentioned above) for a casual introduction to the mathematics side, just to get a feeling.
If you are serious about learning lean, I recommend Functional Programming in Lean for learning it as a programming language and Theorem Proving in Lean for learning it as a proof assistant
This is a video about the diode, in this case a Schottky diode made with a coil of copper wire filed to a fine point touching a piece of galena sitting loose in a bottlecap found by the side of the road.
The video is notable for demonstrating the original "breadboard" technique, where you connect your wires and components by clamping them to a wooden board with the head of a wood screw. The book I learned the technique from recommended using a dished washer under the head of the screw so that the screw head doesn't push the wires sideways as you tighten it.
