Signals

I remember it like it was yesterday. I was consulting for a car company and I needed to A/B two tweeters. I dashed over to the nearest RadioShack and picked up a speaker-switching box. Crazy to think about it now – a brick-and-mortar store selling something like that. Of course, RadioShack is just a distant memory now. Or is it? Is RadioShack making a comeback?

I guarantee that you will react to this news item in one of two ways:
First Way: “Oh, no! I wish they'd keep doing that!”
Second Way: “Wait. What? They're still doing that?”

A few months ago, I described how a certain airline has devised a fiendish way to torment its passengers. That is, a type of torment beyond the usual run-of-the-mill torture of flying on any airplane. In a letter to the editor, alert reader Douglas Mandel commiserated with me but pointed out that I was overlooking another kind of torture that is much, much worse.

So, I have this recurring nightmare where the spaceship's crew pushes me out of the airlock and, screaming, I am inexorably pulled into a black hole where I am transported into a new dimension where space and time cease to exist.

The dictionary defines a genius as someone who displays “exceptional intellectual or creative power or other natural ability.” Nowhere in that definition does it say that a genius has to be infallible. That's something you and I share with a genius. Sometimes we are wrong.

Ohm's law describes the essential, bedrock principle upon which rests all things electrical. Consider the technological world around you. Everything that has electricity running through it owes its existence to this principle. And Georg Ohm was the guy who mathematically described it. Ohm's law. Pure genius. His contemporaries despised him.