Re: Electrostatic actuators to move robots legs...

On 16/09/2024 3:12 am, Nick Hayward wrote:

On Sun, 15 Sep 2024 11:38:53 +0100, Jeff Layman wrote:
 

On 15/09/2024 10:58, Cursitor Doom wrote:

On Sun, 15 Sep 2024 08:13:15 +0100, Jeff Layman wrote:
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On 15/09/2024 03:49, john larkin wrote:
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The best thing about MK is that it's close to Oxford.

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I really must disagree. The best thing about MK is Bletchley Park.
It's more than possible that none of us would be here if it wasn't for
the activities at Station X in the early 40s.
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It's perhaps interesting to surmise that if what went on at Bletchley
Park hadn't been kept secret until the mid 70s, perhaps the new town
envisioned in the 60s would have been called "Bletchley" in honour and
recognition of what it had done to hasten the end of World War II.

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They've made a museum out of it and it's *very* well worth a visit.

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I visited at the end of November 2009, when it had just opened and the
huts were still in a pretty rough state. It was a good time to go as it
was a very cold day and there were few visitors. I was lucky on twos
counts. Firstly, we were shown round by Jean Valentine (who worked there
during the war and had appeared on numerous "Station X" documentaries.
She was one of those who entered the various settings onto the Bombe
machine, and then phoned the possible decryption code to the hut where
Turing worked. It was more-or-less next door, but she had no idea where
it was, not even if it was at Bletchley Park!). Secondly, I was able to
chat to Tony Sale for a while, as there was nobody else around. He, of
course, was the driving force behind rebuilding Colossus. He had spoken
with Tommy Flowers, who designed and built the original, and helped Sale
with the rebuild as almost all the original documentation had been
destroyed on Churchill's orders

 Astounding brain power those guys had. What is it about the English that
makes them such amazing thinkers? They're not so great when it comes to
building things affordably and efficiently, but as conceptualists, they're
simply unbeatable.

No nation has a monopoly on brain power. Bletchley Park did pull in an interesting mix of academic and practical skills - Alan Turing was primarily an academic, though he was also good with hardware.
Tommy Flowers was a telephone system engineer before he went to Bletchley Park. In the early 190's Britain did have its back to the wall, and some of the social prejudice that separated upper-class English academics from middle-class engineers did get repressed (for a while).
People from the colonies also got accepted. William S. Butement - the inventor of the proximity fuse - came from New Zealand. He was my boss for it bit - around 1970 - and I suspect that he would not have been a good choice to get the proximity fuse to work, which is a job the Americans took on.
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney