Aucbvax.1377 fa.human-nets utzoo!duke!mhtsa!ucbvax!DERWAY@MIT-ML Tue May 19 22:28:41 1981 HUMAN-NETS Digest V3 #104 HUMAN-NETS AM Digest Wednesday, 20 May 1981 Volume 3 : Issue 104 Today's Topics: Query - Polling Large Lists, Corrections - Hearst Papers & Format of CompuServe Article, Query Replies - Pay TV System & Left Handed Sugar, Communicating via Network - Cross Net Access & Impacts on Language, FYI - ESS name change ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 10 May 1981 1918-PDT From: Daul at OFFICE-2 Subject: LARGE-MAILING-LISTS Has anyone considered how do you poll such a large group of people? Even if you just want a sampling, how do you collect the responses efficiently? What prompts this question was a thought I had about what different fields the readership here entails. Anyway, I hope to hear (read) your thoughts. --Bill ------------------------------ Date: 19 May 1981 03:21-EDT From: William B. Daul Subject: Mailing List Polls I have a quick question. Is it feasible to take polls of the readerships of these LARGE mailing lists? Has anyone thought about this and have some ideas to share? Planet has a good facility for polls, but what about lists with such large readerships? ------------------------------ Date: 19 May 1981 03:27-EDT From: Charles Frankston Subject: Slander against the Heart empire No arguments about the quality of the San Francisco Chronicle's reporting, but the Examiner is the Hearst paper in this city, not the chronicle. ------------------------------ Date: 19 May 1981 1845-PDT From: ROODE at SRI-KL (David Roode) Subject: Re: CompuServe Information Service article on Teletext Probably the biggest reason I didn't completely reformat the CompuServe stuff was because their small screen format disgusts me and I didn't want to fail to inform (i.e. mislead) HumanNets people about this aspect of their service. 32 columns by 14 lines at 300 baud just won't cut it! Perhaps my attempt at better utilizing the available screen area by laying two of their windows side by side merely made it worse. It truly does seem to me that their attitude embodies the idea that their potential customers will be ignorant of any better way of doing things than those they choose. Their EMAIL program is the most cumbersome messaging system I have seen, and its improved palatability for the naive user over MM, MSG, RMAIL and the like is not clear to me. ------------------------------ Date: 15 May 1981 11:33 cdt From: Phinney at HI-Multics Subject: HN V3 #100 -- Pay TV decoders The pay-TV decoder description from ihnss!karn at Berkeley is probably correct and my description is probably wrong; I was writing from memory, and I only looked briefly at the schematic that a friend was using (who actually built a decoder). I do recommend that interested people buy decoders on the open (underground) market, rather than building them from scratch; the signal quality of most home-builts is poor, and the "modify your TV" approach won't work with most new TVs or with VCRs (video recorders). Shop around and compare received signal quality as well as cost. ------------------------------ Date: 15 May 1981 14:27 PDT Subject: HUMAN-NETS Digest V3 #100 (Pay TV Decoders) From: JKennedy@Parc-maxc Wanting to build a decoder for my local subscription TV, I first observed the baseband video (still scrambled) with a scope. I didn't observe any superimposed sine wave, which I had heard was the case. It is still a valid assumption when designing a decoder, because a baseband signal will inherently have a detectable and usable 15,750 hz content which is phase locked. In this instance (Channel 26, San Francisco), the entire horizontal pedestal is level shifted up to a point between black and white, and only needs to be level shifted back down. This pedestal includes the color burst. The sound is indeed produced like subscription FM, with one small change. Instead of L+R from 0-15 Khz, the "barker" is there. Instead of L-R at 20-38Khz, the movie sound is there, only a little further down than that. Down far enough, coincidentally, for them to use a 15.75 khz stereo pilot instead of the regular 19 khz pilot. Hence the pilot, which normally doesn't do much except light a stereo light, can now be used to generate phase locked pulses, which in turn can effect the level shitf of the horizontal pedestal. My end result, which works quite well, consists of picking off right after demodulation of the sound (not preliminary carrier detection), the important thing being to get the signal before any audion deemphasis occurs. This can easily be done even in sets where the sound detection, deemphasis, and first audio are all in the same chip. There is a pin for detector out, which is usually connected to the pin for audio in. It helps to remove the deemphasis capacitor which is hung on one pin of the ic. lDoesn't seem to cause any grief. This is then fed to an fm stereo demodulator chip, I used an LM1800. The 15.75 khz taken from the lamp driver drives a one shot which is adjusted to trigger until the beginning of the next horizontal line, then triggers another one shot which adjusts the width of the correction pulse. I inserted an LM318 high bandwith op amp in line with the detected video, before it is seperated into video, sync, and chroma. I connected it as a unity gain buffer, and added the correction pulse (or subtracted, whichever you prefer) through the inverting input. This takes care of the picture nicely. To get the sound, I took the left and right channel outputs from the LM1800, and fed them to both inputs of a 741 op amp. The common mode supression from this produces the movie sound, with no evidence of the barker. Hope all this is of some use to someone. Joe Kennedy ------------------------------ Date: 05/15/81 09:44:27 From: TRB@MIT-MC Subject: Left handed sugar My dictionary says that the word is dextrorotatory, not dextrorotary. I wonder why. Also, according to my dictionary, the word sinistrose is available; dextrose is right-handed glucose, glucose exists ambidexterously (why not ambimanually?), but there is no special word for the levorotatory glucose. Sinistrose seems to have a nice ring (sorry), and its confusingness with dextrose would probably appeal to avant garde snobbish scientist types. Not being erudite enough to qualify myself, would someone explain whether dextrorotatory is the digestable form of all sugars, the naturally occuring form of all sugars, and what about racemic (combined dextro-levo) forms? Andy ------------------------------ Date: 05/18/81 09:19:28 From: Jerry Leichter at Stoned via Subject: Reversed sugar. If I remember my chemistry right, sucrose is a dimer (if that term is applied to sugars) of glucose and its R-varient fructose. Hence there is no such thing as "reversed" sucrose - it's already 50-50. Further, many of the simple sugars exist in nature in both forms - fructose is called fructose because it is common in fruit. There are big differences in sweetness; I really don't remember the numbers, but fructose is something like 12 times as sweet as glucose. Both of these are equally digestible; R and L variations really aren't all that important for the very simple molecules. Hence: Whatever it is these people are selling, it is more complicated than people are assuming. There are an infinite number of possible sugars (polymer forms of the simpler ones), although the big polymers are called starches and have rather different properties. Sweetness is a rather sensitive issue and even among sugars (there are other, unrelated substances that taste sweet - sacharrine is quite different, and some (quite poisoness) lead salts are sweet) the range is 2 or more orders of magnitude. I would assume that these people have some fairly large, complex sugar polymer that is screwy enough to be undigestible but tastes sweet. I believe several of these are already known - is sorbitol, used in some no-sugar gums - one of them? -- Jerry ------------------------------ Date: 14 May 1981 07:55 PDT From: ChiNguyen.ES at PARC-MAXC Subject: HUMAN-NETS Digest V3 #98 (Accessing Human-Nets) Right now I'm sitting in front of a Star workstation and typing this message to be sent to you and the Human-Nets folks. If you had intelligently reflected before issuing your statement, I believe you would not have mailed it to the Human-Nets world. Regards, Chi. ------------------------------ Date: 14 May 1981 0933-PDT From: Michael D. Dolbec Subject: HUMAN-NETS Digest V3 #99 (Accessing Human-Nets) Well this is another interesting case of accessing Human-Nets. Usually, I look at Human-nets using my Dolphin but today PARC-MAXC is down right now. So I go over the Ethernet to a dial line server (a dial out modem that accepts phone numbers, calls them and connects you to a site at 300 baud. I am on the line to Stanford right now since Score is up I can reach the Arpanet that way and talk to Human-nets. Its really not hard to connect to other nets, you just use a little imagination sometimes. --Mike ------------------------------ Date: Sunday, 10 May 1981 16:44-EDT From: Jonathan Alan Solomon Subject: Influencing Language. I tried that in my Fraternity house, I started using the 'hacker buzz words' around all the people (those like Foo, bletch, barf) but also some of the TOPS-10 system calls (exit, init.) and machine instructions (skipa, lsh). What I found was that people didn't catch on to the machine dependent stuff, but my room (which was room #2 in the house) was called 'Room FOO' and some of my hacker friends were branded "foo people". And then there was the day that this was discovered scrawled on my refrigerator.... "Foo Bar Baz Waldo Pepper Salt Pork Sausage Links Chains Bondage Discipline Ahh....." Translation not available, but THAT bunch of meaningless words caught on like wildfire!! ------------------------------ Date: 11 May 1981 2316-EDT From: Hobbit Subject: Jargon I have my parents and friends using all kinds of ITS-ey jargon by this time! They didn't quite understand it at first, but now they'll say things like 'that would be a fun hack' or 'don't barf all over me' or 'enough flamage'... It's an integral part of my vocabulary by now and becoming part of theirs, simply by hearing me use it so much. In context of course it's easier to understand. _Hobbit_ PS. Next time you go into McDonalds, order 'Chicken Frobs'! ------------------------------ Date: 11 May 1981 0316-CDT From: Mabry Tyson Subject: Influencing Language Unfortunately I can't remember all the details, but a few weeks back (April 17?) I was listening to a radio network (CBS?) newscast and they carried one of their editorial-type features. The newscaster (whom I recognized as a newscaster for one of the TV networks but I can't recall his name) was saying something to the effect of "Let's show these word experts who really is in control of the language - the people." He made a proposal of adopting a particular word (already in use with a totally different meaning) to mean "totally exhausted". He wanted to see just how long it might take this usage of the word to get into the general language and then into the dictionary. Obviously it didn't impress me too much as I can't remember what the word was supposed to be. (On the other hand, maybe this note will result in more people finding out about his attempt and increase its chances of success.) Anyone else out there hear this newscast and recall the word or other details? ------------------------------ Date: 05/11/81 09:44:11 From: TRB@MIT-MC Subject: ESS and the feminists In response to heavy pressure from the feminist quarter, the Bell System will change the name "ESS" (Electronic Switching System) to "". This change in nomenclature will start with #5ESS, which will hereafter be known as #5. A spokesman said, "We're trying to eliminate all sexist prefixes and suffixes from our product names." ------------------------------ End of HUMAN-NETS Digest ************************ ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.