Ask Fran: Intro Music, Kits Friggin Kits, And Gravity

The idea of spacetime being something that's continually draining around you (into a gravity well) made little sense to me when Leonard Susskind said it (he has fish in a large shallow swimming pool with a drain in the center to be the gravity well), but having you reach for the same metaphor helped me get over a major hump, because, if two good explainers reach for the same metaphor, and in other circumstances they explain things in different ways, then the analogy is probably a good one, and I can accept it. I can imagine a vector field of the relative acceleration at any point in space, or whatever: I don't know how to solve a 2nd order PDE but I'm starting to know what they mean. What I can't wrap my head around is, all that spacetime that's flowing down the hole, where does all that wind up? I'm used to thinking of spacetime like Leggs nylon stocking material, so doesn't it bag around some ankles somewhere? (Don't get me wrong, I know the answer is in the math, and I truly am learning it, but it boggles the mind.) p.s. I learned about electromagnetic flux in college, so I can handle a surface integral, as well as the fact that "flux" (from Lat cognate for flow) is a useful abstraction, but spacetime is weirder than that to me. When I was in college high energy physics was all the rage (searching for the Beauty Quark) so GR was de-emphasized. I wish it weren't, so much exciting is happening now.

There is not meaning, intrinsically - only whatever meaning you put to it.

Fran Blanche

I don't watch too much YouTube. I'm too busy managing my own channel and making content.

Fran Blanche

No. I imagine every HAM in the world watches my channel at some point, and every one of them has messaged me with the very same question. I keep answering it the same way too - I live in the center of a large city, I have nowhere for an antenna, and the RF interference here makes any AM listening impossible, so my shortwave radios are all packed away.

Fran Blanche

Fran- I know exactly where you are coming from when you try to turn a hobby into a business. The amount of work involved, coupled with the expense, is just a massive ball ache. How you managed to produce those pedals without help is just amazing. You have my utmost respect as a fellow entrepreneur . I gave up because of the stress- even though I loved my creations, people wanted them for Phuk all!! well below cost at times. You are one hell of a marvellous person . I just really enjoy hearing your anecdotes and vintage teardowns from my childhood.

Mike Hughes

I'm enjoying your Ask Fran q&a. I hope you are well Fran? 🤍

I really like Mr. Carlson's "kit model". He just gives the designs to patrons of a specific level and encourages people not to put the project files out there. (I have no idea if he does any enforcement in a legal sense, but I suspect not.) The trick is that his stuff is often something we really want (e.g. test equipment) so it's not only niche, there is also an implicit skillset limitation in having people make them—which overlaps the people who want them. Thus, a FranLab kit would have to be more like an effects pedal front-end and back-end, perhaps with a basic effect in the middle that can be tweaked or replaced. Or something to do with driving nixies or something like that. I recently got a design of mine (Apple ADC monitor to DVI adapter, www.jasondoesitall.com/adc/ ) featured on an unknown-to-me YouTube channel and have had a couple recent requests to build it. Obviously this is so niche it's not even worth pursuing, and I really don't want to build a board for someone only for them to find out their monitor is not going to work with it, or any of the myriad of customer-service problems that would entail. Nonetheless, anyone can get the board from OSHPark easily, or get the gerbers, and even all the design files. All this to say I understand all your reasons for not wanting to make kits.

Jason Olshefsky

Fran, I know how aggravating it can be to make circuit boards and they're the most frustrating element of a kit. The real frustration is that some people really want to build kits of your inventions, but there is just not enough of them out there to turn a profit . And you don't seem to have a staff, so kitting all these things up would require vast amounts of time. Like you said, I just look at what you're doing and what parts you are using and reverse-engineer from there. But you almost always have a schematic, so I don't even have to work that hard. I work with a small group of aircraft enthusiasts that turn real airliner cockpit into functional simulators. I'm much better at hardware than software, so I trade the hardware I make to other sim builders and they respond in kind and provide me the code to interface my hardware to the computers flight simulation hardware. All the circuit boards I assemble are generic through-hole "anyboards" like what I've seen you work with. Everything I wire is by hand from point to point. I can't work with SMD parts as I have no tools or patience for them. I was asked a few times why I don't design PC boards and I simply answer "There are simply not enough geeks in this tiny niche hobby that would ever justify multiple custom PC boards." Experience has shown me that once a potential sim builder finds out just how complicated and messy it is to make real airliner parts work with a PC, they abandon the idea. I have no staff either, and if I did, no kit I could make could possibly justify his/her salary. So I can clearly see why you feel so strongly about kits. Your gravity explanation is also really new to me. I never investigated it past the point where I was told that large masses, like planets, grow dense enough to attract other matter and thus eventually get as big as the planets we have in our solar system. I was asked once by a child "What holds atoms together?" and I had no ready explanation. I have no training in physics and certainly not to the sub-atomic level. The only thing I could think of is demonstrating how two powerful rare earth magnets snap together in close proximity. This happens with invisible energy. There is no hand reaching out and grabbing the other magnet. We know how to work with magnetics, obviously, but their action is invisible. Whatever happens at the sub-atomic level, to hold atoms together, is something we cannot see, but like the magnet, we know it's there. Probably a real dumb answer, but I tried. You would do the question justice. I'm just going to point every kid who asks complex question to you. :-)

Matt Wietlispach

I just noticed the YouTube code is ...Z0GRM, "zero 0 G Radius Mass???"

PFitzart

What is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything? I asked a computer, and it came up with the dumb answer,”42.” Perhaps you are smarter than that computer?

Rocco Rizzo

Kits Friggin Kits? Just paste your picture over Mr. Wizard's and resell them at twice the price.

The ultimate question: What is the meaning of life?

Do you follow any non-electronics YouTube channels? If so, which ones, and why?

Interesting. I didn't know such "community" projects existed. Can you give some examples of the ones you've worked on?

Welcome to Isaac Newton's laws of motion, as Fran alluded , not the end all be all, but it got us to the moon and back.

That's an interesting description of gravity. The idea that we don't feel a force when moving with space time and do feel a force when space time is moving relative to us is not one I've come across before.

David Peaker

It seems that in all businesses people who don't know your business are always telling you how to run your business. That is one of the best simplified explanations I have ever heard, even a professional computer nerd like me could follow it.

Dr Andy Hill

Are you into HAM Radio or have you ever had an amateur license?

Any thoughts on starting a GitHub account for your project designs? It would make them easier to share, permit the community to contribute to them, and also permit us to coordinate self-managed things such as group PCB and component orders (which I've done on other projects).

BobC