The Road to Reality

I have been interesting in Physics as a hobby for a very long time. Back in the mid-90's, I was reading about Quantum Mechanics and Relativity on a fairly regular basis. I had to really dig to find books that were deeper than a purely "popular" treatment, but not so deep that an engineer could actually make sense of them. Some math, not all math.

Having been trained as an engineer is "almost enough" to handle "some" of the math, but I ended up with an awfully long road ahead. I eventually got a bit discouraged, but never quite gave up. (Emulation came along and I got a bit distracted for a number of years.)

In 2004 Roger Penrose wrote a giant book on Math and Physics, call "The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Universe". It is a highly mathematical, modern treatment, but it builds on itself such that, theoretically, someone with some math background can actually understand it all. (At least, they'll be able to self-direct to other resources as needed.) There are 16 chapters of Math (the first 1/3 or so), followed by as many on Physics. For comparison, my formal math training ended at chapter 7. I now find myself in chapter 15, nearly finished with the math section. It is definitely not for everyone, but it's exactly what I needed.

Finally, I have found that discussing the details of the book can help a lot with the understanding. I recently created a Yahoo Group called RTRFANS, for just this purpose. With this book, and with internet resources that weren't available in the mid-90's, I've now got a shot at understanding truly modern physics.

Some porting work

I really need to post more often!

For a while now, I've been wanting to experiment with new methods of high-speed circuit simulation. The idea would be to prototype some discrete-audio stuff, possibly for MAME, using something like Python.

After looking into the requirements, I realized that I needed to handle polynomials with a single variable, and ratios of these polynomials. Also, I needed to be able to handle real or complex variables. I looked around on the web, and I found that SciPy is finally coming along nicely on Windows. However, I wasn't entirely happy with the root finder they use.

Along the way, I also found the ratfun package, which looked perfect, but was unsupported on Windows. I dug in and in a couple weekends, got it building under Windows. I think I'll be using it for the experiments, whenever I get back to it.

The Joy of LaTeX

Ok, I'm a geek. Over the past 10 years or so, I've worked on a handful of math and engineering problems that I thought were interesting. Yes, most of them were "spare-time" activities, although a few were inspired by work stuff. I recently made a list of all of them, and I suddenly had the urge to publish them. Maybe some other people will find these things interesting as well.

At any rate, I wanted a way to publish them with all the math equations, as well as generate PDF's and HTML. I had heard about LaTeX for a long time, but now I had a fine excuse to give it a try.

I first tried the TeXLive distribution, but I never could get it to work on Windows. (Maybe this has been fixed since then) Then I tried MikTeX. It was a fairly straightforward installation. After working out a few examples, I was hooked. My first draft of a test article turned out pretty well:

http://www.avoidspikes.com/textest/gamma.html

I use pdflatex to generate pdfs and htlatex (part of tex4ht) to create html + pngs.

At any rate, it's nice to see that free software can be used to do professional typesetting. I'm planning to use this stuff to document my math problems, as well as some theory behind discrete sound filtering in MAME.

Actual MAME-related work!

For those who haven't heard, the speech chip used in Berzerk has been reverse-engineered by "Lord Nightmare"! This is something I've been waiting for for about 7-8 years! I'm sure that the emulation will end up in MAME and PinMAME sooner or later.

Because of this, I spent some time over Christmas looking at the analog filters on the Berzerk speech board. (These are applied to the sound after it comes out of the chip.) I finished the analysis, and it should be pretty straightforward to add them into MAME after the chip emulation is done.

For what it's worth, I've been trying out Maxima with wxMaxima to do the symbolic math for circuit analysis. I know, I could have used SPICE or something - but doing the math from scratch makes it easier to understand what is going on.

After I worked out about half of the math for these filters by hand, I ended up with about 6 pages of algebra. At this point, I figured I should use this as an excuse for learning Maxima. Sure enough, I found an error on page 5. Darned minus signs! :)

The second half of the analysis took about 5 minutes, since the code from the first half was already done, and I could re-use it!

For those who care - the filter is a third-order lowpass - a first order lowpass, followed by a second order with a resonant peak around 2400 Hz.