Ode to test engineers and the role they play in product quality, by Test & Measurement Magazine's Senior Technical Editor Martin Rowe.

A video collection of really clever Rube Goldberg mechanisms.

"It's an eyesore." "It's a monstrosity." Whiny neighbors in an exclusive Lubbock, TX development want to take down this 40-year Ham's antenna. The FCC protects him. Score one for the good guys!

Control the Show
Control the Show is a unique Christmas display which allows anyone in the world with a computer connection to log on and control the lights. We are currently live each night from 5pm until midnight until New Year's Day.

This year the Virginia Tech / Wake Forest University School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences (SBES) has been generous enough to sponsor the entire show!

Watch the salt patterns on the membrane change in response to varying frequencies. It gives me terrifying flashbacks of physics exams with Bessel equations.

Watch a teardown of the Sony PlayStation 3 by Semiconductor Insights

Swiss veteran combat and commercial airline pilot Yves Rossy has done the "impossible."

Click here to see lightning strike a Boeing 747 airplane.

Wicked cool! This is a video with a little sound, so you might want to turn down your speaker volume.

University of Iowa Farm Machine Music
This is just amazing - a work of genius!
Click on either image to view the video.

This incredible video has been passed around the Internet as a real-life contraption. The myth is repeated widely; indeed, I received it in an e-mail from a friend that believed it to be real. The first thing I did was look at the University of Iowa website for the named music and engineering schools, and of course they did not exist. Here is the text that goes with the video clip:

 "This incredible machine was built as a collaborative effort between the Robert M. Trammell Music Conservatory and the Sharon Wick School of Engineering at the University of Iowa. Amazingly, 97% of the machines components came from John Deere Industries and Irrigation Equipment of Bancroft Iowa, yes farm equipment!

It took the team a combined 13,029 hours of set-up, alignment, calibration, and tuning before filming this video but as you can see it was WELL worth the effort.

It is now on display in the Matthew Gerhard Alumni Hall at the University and is already slated to be donated to the Smithsonian."

The real source of the video is the Animusic company. Amazon has the best price on the DVD set - please click here.

Digital Phosphor Technology (DPX™)
(video link below)

This is NOT a paid advertisement for Tektronix, but after reading about this new technology in an article in RF Design magazine and then visiting the Tektronix website, I felt a duty to bring it to your attention.

Shown above is a couple screen captures of one of the videos available on the Tektronix website. It pits an Agilent E4440A PSA against the Tektronix RSA6100 RSA with Digital Phosphor Technology (DPX™). The signal is a signal that is experiencing an infrequent frequency hop due to a faulty PLO. The DPX display not only captures more information in less time, but it uses color coding to imply the relative length of time a signal dwells at a particular frequency. Hotter colors (more duration) are redder, and cooler colors (less duration) are bluer. Click on the image above to select narrated videos of a number of different scenarios on ISM band and radar signals.