asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: picked on you given as you're the only actual machinist i'm even distantly familiar with
asciilifeform: the critical values are: dimensional. (marked on linked picture.)
asciilifeform: they are typically powered by a constant-current circuit, so even the rated voltage is not a critical value.
asciilifeform: stepper is an item that normally either works (turns D degrees per electric cycle) or does not (skips beat, because overloaded, underpowered, etc)
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the actual impedance of a stepper almost never matters
asciilifeform: (along with any other genuine machinist around)
asciilifeform: ben_vulpes is invited to laugh at my n00b m4ch1n1ng
asciilifeform: student exercise. prove that the minimally-braindamaged implementation of hardware finite-precision floating point requires a base of 'e'.
asciilifeform: decimation: halfway on the road to african method - sit in a tub of own shit and call it a 'computer'
asciilifeform: chuck some metal into a lathe, try cutting too deep.
asciilifeform: 'no play' is SOP in physical reality.
asciilifeform: not only notation. to know which operations are not rationally reducible, requires a fairly good symbolic maths apparatus (e.g., 'macsyma' and its plagiarized clones)
asciilifeform: but in a 'rational tower', the output of 'sqrt(2)' is 'sqrt(2)'.
asciilifeform: as in, answers take the form one '1 / 2' rather than 0.500000
asciilifeform: 'rational' has literal mathematical meaning here
asciilifeform: despite working quite well - and cheaply - for many operations.
asciilifeform: it's the reason the tech was abandoned
asciilifeform: but can't use an actual analogue circuit, because the output is non-deterministic or because noise ends up multiplicative due to the nature of the ops
asciilifeform: where we're really trying to simulate an analogue computer, for some gnarly physical model
asciilifeform: or, for that matter, i cannot establish, for anywhere short of several $billion, an actual electric circuit from here to buenos aires
asciilifeform: 'where possible' is answer to decimation's pointing out that you cannot, say, carry out multiplication on integers and 'ieee'-style floats on the same physical circuit with any degree of efficiency.
asciilifeform: and then you say 'british admiralty's logarithmic human calculators were merely emulating this here computer, on account of lacking one'
asciilifeform: sometimes, the simulation turns out to be a superior 'reality' and you throw the old 'reality' out.
asciilifeform: the same way electronic calculator 'emulates' a stable of slaves counting with beads.
asciilifeform: but instead an entity which simulates the behaviour of one where possible (in much the same way a tcp/ip telephone attempts to behave like a traditional electric telephone.)
asciilifeform: wasn't talking about a hand-wired physical circuit
asciilifeform: and it appears you misunderstood 'circuit'
asciilifeform: just as in, for example, common lisp.
asciilifeform: decimation: if the order predicate is non-inferrable, it is given.
asciilifeform: (merely redefine what 'sort' with no arguments does.)
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: on a lisp machine, you actually could.
asciilifeform: on a proper computer, e.g., 'quicksort' or 'newton-raphson method' are distinct entities. and there are no 'programs' as such, only a graph of circuit linkages.
asciilifeform: see, precisely my point - i say 'airplane' and -everybody- assumes i mean 'gadget that flies 2 metres above ground for ten minutes if wind is blowing east'
asciilifeform: i don't mean a specially-instrumented crippled proggy running for the occasion
asciilifeform: this is how we got these things that we call 'computer' even though i can't flip a switch that stops all cpus and shows me all the places 'quicksort' is mentioned on the machine and which ones got invoked in the last 7 days.
asciilifeform: then, for one reason or another (monkey overruns man's city; or, more commonly, man begins to turn monkey-like in his haste and sloth and adopts monkey's approach to design) and the fair-weather airplane becomes the only kind extant.
asciilifeform: sometimes this situation evolves in interesting directions. e.g., monkeys steal a small subset of man's tech, and build a cargo-cultish airplane - but one which sorta flies when the weather is just so.
asciilifeform: naggum wrote that the worst thing that could possibly happen to common lisp is if it became 'mainstream' and popular.
asciilifeform: not everyone is itching to be part of some gigantic 'everyone' who will 'do things their way'
asciilifeform: it comes mainly from not wishing to dissolve in the sea.
asciilifeform: this relates directly to certain circles seen as 'prickly'
asciilifeform: they are 'prickly' in the sense that their only contact with a world outside their own is redditards knocking on the door to 'teach how the world is'
asciilifeform: the most unbearable itch, to monkey, is the mental hole in his picture of the world, the annoying hatefact that rubs his nose in the entire model being horseshit.
asciilifeform: sometimes - a chimp finds a loose brick, and you have a little infestation problem.
asciilifeform: walls tall enough that the monkeys don't even know, normally, that there is a something behind them, or walls at all.
