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209.208.77.219 03:00, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
Talk:Mims-Pianka controversy#Forrest_Mims_did_not_Misrepresent_Prof._Eric_Pianka.27s_Statements
Removed from this page. No point to troll anonymously on three different pages. DLX 05:41, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
Can anyone verify this claim:
"He wrote some Amateur Scientist columns for Scientific American magazine in 1990, but the magazine refused to hire him after discovering that Mims was a creationist and had doubts about evolution. However, the magazine did say that Mims' work was "great", "fabulous" and "should be published somewhere.""
Considering that quite a lot of things from this guy are snake oil, I really wouldn't put this claim here w/o any (independent!) sources. DLX on 07:14, 3 April 2006]]
You need to see http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA320_1.html on that controversy, as it is a bit more complex than it might initially appear. — Dunc| ☺ 10:38, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
Transcript of Pianka's speech. Whole controversy should be expanded, to show it as an smear campain against Pianka and evolution in general - or would link to Pianka's article be enough? Also William Dembski's campain?
I removed the sentence " NASA has sent Mims and his instruments to several of the Western states and twice to Brazil to measure the effects of smoke from large wildfires." pending a reliable reference. -- MarcoTolo 23:10, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
As an electronics hobbyist I used to be impressed with Mims's Engineer's Notebooks, until I started buying the chips and found the exact same information on the data sheets for the chips as provided by the manufacturers. I have added a sentence on that, as contributing to a more balanced view of the subject, since the opening paragraph reads like a publicist's work. If it is too controversial, you are welcome to delete it. 83.79.7.14 07:32, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
Do you Know if Mims did the borrowing or if it was the other way around?
Opinion #2:
This accusation of borrowed material is completely ridiculous, and I'll wager that the poster making this claim hasn't spent even five minutes of his life depending on his um, vast knowledge of electronics to make a living. He says that he "found the exact same information on the data sheets for the chips as provided by the manufacturers". This is coming from someone who doesn't know about data sheets and where they fit into the world. He, evidently, didn't notice that the data sheet from one brand, say, Motorola, had the exact same information as the data sheet from, say, National. Ah ha! No, no ah-ha here, information is not subject to copyright and, more importantly, despite the copyright notice on data sheets, the companies are making them just to sell the parts and are begging you to rip them off any way you can. Many, many companies build products using the example schematics in the data sheet. If it works, that is the obvious place to start with a new design, modify as needed or not, then manufacture it. They want you to do that so that you will have the application to order their chips for. My company does this. Everybody does this.
Back on point, in 1980 when I was ten years old and reading the Forrest Mims III Engineer's Notebooks series of books (then being sold by Radio Shack), I had no data sheets, I had never seen a data sheet, I didn't know how to get a data sheet, wouldn't have known what it was or why I wanted it, and if I had it, I'd throw it down in boredom, as it would have the three things I wanted to know buried behind 97 things like thermal information I didn't want to know. Mims gave me a picture of how it worked, and showed me why I wanted it. If we had only had data sheets and not Forrest Mims III Engineer's Notebooks, millions of us would have never gotten into electronics at all. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.127.211.40 ( talk) 15:52, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
User:Time Guy added the following section, this has way too much detail on one small topic for a biography. I am moving it to this talk page. SWTPC6800 ( talk) 18:53, 14 March 2010 (UTC)
Using LED's as narrow band light sensors
Among Forrest Mims many accomplishments, he was the first person to realize that LED's ( Light Emitting Diodes) had the ability to not only emit light, but also to sense light. [1] This dual-action (emission/detection) of LEDs or “Mims Effect” was unknown before his discovery.
Forrest Mims interest in LEDs began when he was experimenting with photosensitive devices back in 1962. In the "Backscatter" section in an online issue of The Citizen Scientist, Forrest Mims describes this himself:
[2]
While a high school senior in 1962, I first got the idea that light sensors should be able to double as light detectors. So I connected an automobile ignition coil to a cadmium sulfide photoresistor, switched on the power, and observed bright flashes of green light emitted by the semiconductor. The green flashes were distinctively different from the yellow flashes of an electrical arc.
While studying government (my major) in college, I found that certain silicon photodiodes can emit near-infrared radiation that can be detected by similar photodiodes. I managed to send modulated tones between such photodiodes. In 1971 I demonstrated the ability of many LEDs to detect light while experimenting with an optical fiber communication system. By placing a single LED at each end of the fiber, it was possible to send signals both ways through the fiber with only a single, dual purpose semiconductor device at each end of the fiber.
Later experiments by Forrest Mims were done in 1971, when he utilized two LEDs to perform bi-directional communication. In 1980, Forrest Mims demonstrated bi-directional LED voice communication through the air using near-infrared (940 nm) LEDs and also through a 100-meter section of optical fiber (650 nm). This demonstration was done at 1325 L Street in Washington D.C. – the exact same site where Alexander Graham Bell invented lightwave communications exactly 100 years earlier! Present for the demonstration, which was sponsored by the National Geographic Society, were representatives from National Geographic, the Smithsonian Institution and Bell Labs. Bell first demonstrated his
Photophone
[3] on 3 June 1880.
In addition to utilizing the dual-mode use of LED's for communication, Forrest Mims decided to utilize these same principles to measure specific properties of the atmosphere. In a paper published in Applied Optics (1992), entitled “Sun Photometer with light-emitting diodes as spectrally selective filters
[4], Forrest Mims describes how “Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) can function as light detectors with a spectral bandpass similar to the diode's spectral emission band, typically 25-35 nm at the half-maximum points. This means that LEDs can serve as detectors in miniature sun photometers that measure precipatible water and atmospheric turbidity at wavelengths from 555 to 940 nm.”
When an optical sensor is designed, very careful attention must be given to the filtering used to guarantee a response for a specific wavelength. A typical method would be to use an expensive optical sensor with even more costly interference filters. Even when this is done, the response may not be as narrow as desired and may be unstable over time. A simple and inexpensive solution was realized by Forrest by using LEDs, due to the fact that the emission and detection wavelengths of LEDs have very narrow bandwidths. The peak wavelength for detection is slightly below that of the peak emission wavelength. The amount of shift is typically around 25 to 35 nm below the peak emission wavelength.
Among the many electronics books written for
Radio Shack
[5], Forrest Mims also developed several electronics kits. One in particular made use of the "Mims Effect" of LEDs, by utilizing 5 separate LEDs acting as narrow band light sensors to perform atmospheric analysis. Dubbed the Sun & Sky Monitoring Station
[6]
[7], this kit - which sold 12,000 units - allowed the user to make sophisticated measurements, ranging from measuring the total amount of sunlight at a given location, the amount of atmospheric haze, the total amount of atmospheric water vapor, the amount of PAR (Photosynthetic Radiation), and determine the ET (Extraterrestrial Constant). Sadly though, the Sun & Sky Monitoring Station is no longer carried by Radio Shack.
For some additional details concerning the Sun & Sky Monitoring Station, it is necessary to quote Forrest Mims directly from the Sun & Sky Station instruction manual:
The spectral tuning available by using different kinds of LEDs forms the basis for the Radio Shack Sun and Sky Monitoring Station, which uses four different kinds of LEDs to detect wavelengths of about 505 nm, 625 nm, 816 nm and 930 nm. This very broad range of wavelengths from very simple, inexpensive LEDs permits this instrument to measure photosynthetic radiation (PAR) and to detect aerosols and the total column water vapor.
Using LEDs as narrow band light sensors opens up a whole world of applications. Following upon Forrest Mims early work with LEDs as narrow band sensors, he developed the TOPS (Total Ozone Portable Spectrometer)
[8] instrument that can measures the ozone layer. Although the TOPS unit did not utilize LED’s operating in the Mims effect, it was a prototype for the current commercial version - MicroTOPS II
[9] which instead of LEDs, uses narrowband filters and photodiodes. Some of the many examples of Forrest’s idea of using LED’s as narrow band light sensors include the following circuits and devices:
A Pulsed Light LED receiver [10]
An Optical Sensing approach utilizing LEDs [11]
An LED based photometer [12]
Using LEDs to detect vegetation [13]
An LED based Sun Photometer [14]
Last, but certainly not least, there is a cool video from New York University showing the "Mims Effect" LED Touch Switch [15] in operation.
References
{{
cite web}}
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(
help)
The assertion that Mr. Mims "has no formal academic training in science" seems contradicted by the section "Early life and education" where his studies at Texas A&M University are described. 109.228.169.205 ( talk) 15:58, 14 February 2011 (UTC)
Seems to be a blog post based on second-hand hearsay; not sure why the link is included... AnonMoos ( talk) 14:48, 24 January 2012 (UTC)
I suggest removing the following line from the end of the third paragraph.
"He is also a skeptic of global warming."
This statement needs clarification (exactly which aspects of Global Warming is Mr. Mims skeptical of) and external validation, and the two references cited #8 and #9 supply neither - they don't lead to the cited papers. Even on Mr Mims own personal publication list on his Website, I could not find these references.
^ Temperature doesn’t affect global warming Forrest Mims, Seguin Gazette-Enterprise, September 1, 1999. Publications, ForrestMims.org ^ Questions and Answers About Climate Change Forrest M. Mims III. Citizen Scientist, Society for Amateur Scientists, March 11, 2005 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tgmcnaughton ( talk • contribs) 22:26, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
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In the discussion of LEDs as photodiodes, it quotes Mims saying that he had the idea that "light sensors should be able to double as light detectors." That appears to be an accurate quote of the source, but it's nonsense. Sensing and detection are basically the same thing. What he clearly means is that light sensors should be able to double as light emitters; they are already detectors. In the next few sentences, he describes his experiment testing the idea, using a photoresistor to emit the kind of light that it would normally sense or detect. The quoted sentence appears to have been a writing error on Mims's part, or by the editor of the original publication. Is there a better way to use this source? I'm tempted to insert "sic" in the quote, but then it might require some explanation. Maybe there are other sentences that could be quoted instead and would better represent the information. 2607:FEA8:129F:E389:0:0:0:8E23 ( talk) 20:04, 8 April 2019 (UTC)
He referenced the idea he had in high school: "...I connected an automobile ignition coil to a cadmium sulfide photoresistor, switched on the power, and observed bright flashes of green light..."
These sources were dropped into AfD discussion for the aforementioned article, whose consensus was to merge here. They maybe useful for expanding the Atari Punk Console subsection Graywalls ( talk) 02:23, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
In: Forrest Mims #Stepped-tone generator (Atari Punk Console) / last sentence.
Summary:
'kaustic machines' is a company that produces sound circuits.
Their logo spells it with lower 'k' and 'm'.
--- ---
Sources:
(Google:)
W O R T H _ E K I K .:: GEOCITIES.ws ::. http://www.geocities.ws › worthekik › atari this is a neat little noisemaker from kaustic machines. a sample and the schematic can be found here. a vero layout by andrew carrel is here. an altered " ...
--> http://www.geocities.ws/worthekik/atari.html
--- ---
(Gooogle:)
Robert Dickson (hipstarsound) - Profile Pinterest https://www.pinterest.com › hipstarsound kaustic machines. kaustic machines. Robert Dickson · DIY Audio · Dc Circuit · Circuit Design · Diy Electronics · Electronics Projects · Synthesizer Diy · Diy ...
---
--> https://www.pinterest.com/hipstarsound/
---
(link) 'kaustic machines'
--> https://www.pinterest.com/pin/349662358539191493/
( NOT recognizable as a link ) 'compiler.kaustic.net'
--> https://compiler.kaustic.net/machines/apc.html
There is a logo 'kaustic machines'.
--- ---
Ping welcome, Steue ( talk) 22:14, 12 October 2023 (UTC)