Weight of the Soul or Dust on the Scale?

Back around Halloween I mentioned my visit to the J. B. Rhine Research Center (Rhine was the first to do experiments with 'ESP' at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina in the 1920's), see Near Death at the Rhine Research Center. The first formal report of the optical work, Electromagnetic Emission From Humans During Focused Intent by William T. Joines, Stephen B. Baumann (deceased), and John G. Kruth, see Journal of Parapsychology 76(2), is now online (Membership is required). The formal report does cover Mitogenetic Radiation something I thought was lacking previously.

What also fascinates me is that if they can get the funding for this future research project: They want to try to weigh people that claim they can leave their body, sometimes refereed to as Astral Travel or Astral Projection (the original experiments invovled death, no one wants to be killing the research subjects today) , and see if there is a change in their weight.

If you believe in such things that is your personal choice, what is fascinating to me after looking into this a bit is just how hard it is to make an precise and accurate weight scale. This scale road has been traveled in the past:

[Jim Williams] worked for a few years with the Nutrition and Food Sciences Dept at MIT, building equipment for them. Once he built a scale that was so sensitive he could stand on it, take a bite out of a donut and measure the weight of the bite. He had to add a low frequency notch filter to take out the heartbeat of the user as the blood flowed up and down the femur arteries, modulating the weight on the scale. - I Remember Jim Williams, a Guru of the Analog Electronics World, as Much an Artist as Engineer.

Scott Wayne, Analog Dialogue's editor, pointed me to Jim Williams scale paper, Thank You Scott: High resolution scale: Measures up to 250 lb +/- .01 lb, detects a single bite of food, Analog Dialogue, vol. 10, no. 2, p. 17, 1976. Every issue of Analog Dialogue, from Volume 1, Number 1, 1967 through the present is available in Analog Devices' Analog Dialogue's archives.

Getting back to our current time, Vishay Precision Group (VPG) has released a Video, described here, on their Z-Foil Resistors.

In the video, a custom designed scale is used to weigh 200 grams of gold at +25C and +60C, first utilizing thin film technology for the gain resistors and then using the Z-foil resistors.

At +25C, both the thin film and Z-foil resistors measure the 200 grams of gold for a value of $11,400. With an ambient temperature increase to +60C, however, the assembly utilizing precision thin film resistors weighs the gold as 197.8 grams for a value of $11,277 - which represents a 'loss' of $123. The same assembly using Z-foil resistors is not affected by the temperature change, providing an accurate measurement of 200 grams at +60C - and no loss in measured value.

See also Why Honest Weigh Scales Are Application Specific and Application Note 5275: Calibration - Needless or a Necessity?, from Maxim Integrated.

In 1976 we could measure +/- 0.16 of ounce change in a 250 pound person. Thirty-seven years on, I wonder if Analog Devices, Intersil (see the video), Linear Technology (Jim Williams), Maxim Integrated or Vishay Precision Group (VPG), would step up to the challenge of funding the Rhine's project to showcase their current technologies, on how things have improved? Maybe you think you are up to the challenge of this scale design? Let us know.

Rest In Peace Bob Pease

Does the Universe have a sense of irony? Sadly it seems so. Another analog legend Bob Pease died in a car crash while returning from Jim Williams private memorial service.

What is even more ironic is that Bob wrote the book How to Drive into Accidents - And How Not to, and he was not wearing his seat-belt!

To me not wearing a seat-belt is simply incomprehensible. There is no rational argument that you can come up with to justify not wearing one. Buckle Up!

I had the pleasure of meeting Bob in Cleveland at one of his seminars. We struck up a conversation on 'Floobydust' of all things...

Floobydust is a contemporary term derived from archaic Latin miscellaneous, whose disputed history probably springs from Greek origins (influenced, of course, by Egyptian linguists) -- meaning here "a mixed bag." -- National Semiconductor Audio Handbook, 1976 Corporation.

Rest In Peace Jim Williams

This week has been a sad one for anyone doing analog design. Jim Williams of Linear Technology died suddenly and unexpectedly from a stroke on June 12th. More on Jim here.

Jim is survived by his wife Siu and son Michael. His family requests that donations in Jim's memory be made to The Parkinson's Institute, 675 Almanor Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94085.

Archive of Jim's analog design collected writings can be found here and here. After reading those you will understand why we have lost the best among us.

I once had my own Jim Williams encounter, back at the height of the Dot Com Bubble around 1998, when I was writing Circuit Cellar Online Resource Pages. Out of the blue Jim called me up to tell me that I was miss applying his LT1088 (Yes it was his design, that he had to convince LT to make it), RMS wave form to Heat converter. We had a lengthy discussion on how to measure esoteric wave forms from even more esoteric sources (always work with First Principles if you can, like heat in the LT1088).

We never know when our own number is going to come up. Find an industry that lets you spend more time with your family and less time at work...