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I’ve been following the Beijing Olympics with a mixture of awe and disappointment as the amazing athletics and dazzling pageantry is occasionally punctuated by incidents of heavy-handed political oppression and of athletes who hacked their biochemistry in hope of gaining a slight edge over their competition. But it seems that the athletes are not the only ones resorting to clandestine performance-improvement as tales of electronic enhancement of the opening ceremony come to light.Between the digitally enhanced videos of the opening ceremony fireworks or a lip-synched opening act that rivaled the exploits of Milli Vanilli, it was pretty evident that Beijing’s Great Leaders were not above using the electronic equivalent of steroids to project a better-than-perfect image of their nation to the rest of the world. Unfortunately, electronic trickery knows no borders so it’s not surprising that some of our own Great Leaders may have also started using technical means to gain an unfair advantage in ...

Editor’s Note: this is a modified version of an Editorial originally published in 2003. The subject matter has become very relevant again in the last few months, judging by my e-mail in-box…In my first year of college we had, as potential engineers, to study outside my chosen field of electronics. We had technical drawing, mechanical engineering, structural engineering, fluid engineering, and the heavyweight of the lot: power engineering. All of those areas were actually of use in my career, although I never dreamt they would be at the time, but it was power engineering where I was most intimidated.The knowledge gained was of considerable use in later life as I spent years hanging around high-voltage power conversion, filament generators, mercury-arc rectifiers, and blower equipment in RF transmitters, but the course lecturer terrified me…Mr. George was a tall man with a large beer belly and he was a natural haranguer. Work came back from him covered in red ink and the ultimate threat was ...

With the price of home heating oil climbing, and my contribution to global warming not in doubt, it's clear the time has come to augment my home's oil-fired furnace and woodstove. To get the ball rolling, I gathered brochures from vendors displaying their wares at a local home energy expo here in Maine.Next, I paid due diligence, searching the Web for more information. Before too long, I had a fair understanding of many turnkey OEM technologies, as well as the limitations and benefits of a number of popular solar collection products, such as collector panels, heat exchangers, and liquid pumps.The average oil-burning furnace in New England needs to deliver 50,000 to 100,000 BTUs every hour to heat a typical home. Fortunately, my Jotul woodstove typically puts out about 45,000 BTUs an hour, which is more than adequate for my Cape Cod dwelling.On the other hand, a well-designed solar collector can deliver only about 20,000 to 40,000 BTUs a day. Understanding that a gallon of home heating oil can yield about 144,...

Andrew Lloyd Webber, now Lord Lloyd-Webber (the hyphen came with the peerage) - or, more correctly, Baron Lloyd-Webber of Sydmonton in the County of Hampshire - came up with a real TV winner in 2005. In conjunction with the BBC he started a reality audition program series for the starring role of a new stage production of The Sound of Music in London (my godmother took me to the original many years ago, but that’s another story).Over a period of about six weeks the search for Maria was whittled down from the hundreds to the twenties to ten. And, for a period of weeks the people of England voted for their favorite and a final Maria emerged.CBC took on the challenge of repeating that success for the production of the same show premiering in Toronto in the Fall of 2008. The show was hosted by a rather camp Canadian comedian and the final choice for Maria was announced on the evening of July 28, 2008.One of the judges of the show, Simon Lee, a conductor and musical director of international repute and long-...