Quote:
Originally Posted by Pie
I measured a 3.5 dB noise figure today...
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I don't know what that means. Isn't 3.5 dB on the quiet side? It must be good if you are happy about it. What was making the noise?
Why am I happy? Last night I was a chaperone on a field trip to the Air and Space Museum. It was cool, I took my daughter and a neighbor kid to the school, we got on school busses with a bunch of other 4th and 5th grade kids and their parents, we rode into town through rush hour, and after the museum was closed to the public for the night, we got to look through telescopes, get a tour of the closed museum, hear a NASA astronomer talk for about 45 minutes, and see an IMAX movie.
It was really neat. We had been to the museum numerous times before, but the tour and talk were both really good.
The most interesting thing for me was when the astronomer was trying to give us a sense of the scale of the universe. If the sun is a grapefruit located in the IMAX theater of the Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, the nearest star is a cherry located in Golden Gate Park in California. And if we wanted to travel there, and could somehow travel at the speed of light, it would take as long as it would take an actual ant to walk from the grapefruit in DC to the cherry in California.