Monthly Archives: April 2017

Yet Another FPGA Differential Termination Example

An engineer asked me for assistance on determining the termination circuit for a Xilinx uG476 series 7 FPGA. The circuit works is slightly different manner than those termination circuits I have developed before (here and here) because there is not termination voltage, so I thought I should document my work in detail. I will be using Mathcad 15 to determining the optimal resistor values for (1) terminating the circuit in printed circuit board's characteristic impedance (Z0), and (2) ensuring that I preserve as much of the transmit signal level as possible without exceeding the input circuit's maximum voltage level. Continue reading

Posted in Electronics | 7 Comments

Naked and Afraid – Who Taps Out More? Men or Women

I have been receiving quite a few questions about my database of Naked and Afraid information. I only track the shows with 2-person teams – I am not a big fan of the XL episodes. There recently has been a number of shows where women have been particularly strong leaders and finishers, and some big, tough-looking men struggled right from the start and failed to complete the challenge. In response to some of the recent shows, a number of people have asked "Who taps out more – men or women?" So I have updated my Excel Workbook with the data from recent episodes and went to work. I have also updated Figure 1, which shows where the episodes were filmed. Continue reading

Posted in Naked and Afraid | 32 Comments

Royal Navy Losses in WW2

I have been doing quite a bit of reading lately on WW2 naval actions, and I have been putting together tables that show me ship losses by year. This information gives me a feel for the tempo of battle during the war. I first looked at US naval losses (link) and am now looking at the Royal Navy losses (Figure 1). Continue reading

Posted in History Through Spreadsheets, Military History | Comments Off on Royal Navy Losses in WW2

A Little Beer Data

I gave a seminar last week on the use of Python with Pandas using Jupyter notebooks. When I give a seminar, I always have a worked example to illustrate the points that I am trying to make. This attendance at this seminar had a number of young men in it, so I decided to focus on a topic near and dear to their hearts – beer. I was amazed at the amount of beer knowledge showed by some individuals in the audience. Clearly, beer is a major part of their lives. I myself know NOTHING about beer, so I had to educate myself. The data provide interesting to analyze, and I will probably be augmenting my seminar with additional data over time. Continue reading

Posted in Python, software | Comments Off on A Little Beer Data