customdesigned @customdesigned@qoto.org

Interesting fact of the day: The same effect that cuased light in a prism to split up into different colors is what ultimately caused the first transatlantic telegraphic wire in 1858 to fail.

Morse code is transmitted as on-off signals, effectively square waves. Square waves are in fact made up of many different frequencies. Like in a prism different frequencies move at different speeds through a wire. Therefore as the on-off pulses traveled through the transatlantic telegraph wire the signal spread out like it does in a prism and ultimately the pulses would overlap and be indistinguishable.

The effect was so extreme that it took a message of only 98 words (the first message sent) over 67 minutes to send one way and a whopping 16 hours to confirm the message.

Whitehouse, a doctor with little mathematical understanding, thought he could solve the problem by increasing voltage, which we now know was a futile effort. He increased the voltage to the point he managed to short out the cable entirely and made it useless. However Lord Kelvin had already warned of the problem as was ignored and he came up with the law of squares to describe the problem which later was refined to give us the telegraphers equation. The telegraphers equation is still used today to model feedlines in radio transmitters and receivers.

#Science #STEM #Physics #History @Science #QOTOJournal

So I setup a list of maybe 30 highly active matrix rooms organized into Matrix Spaces on the QOTO Matrix server (though you can access them from any spaces enabled matrix server).

Just login to your existing matrix account on any server, or register for a free one at https://element.qoto.org (registration open to everyone). Then join any of the following spaces (make sure you turn on spaces in your config under labs first).

Please let me know if you have any rooms you'd like to suggest to be added to any of the below spaces. Also, feel free to create your own space and share it.

#QOTO_space:qoto.org - Rooms related to QOTO itself

#Fediverse_space:qoto.org - Various rooms from matrix servers that have a fediverse hosted as part of the same community.

#STEM_space:qoto.org - A collection of general topic STEM rooms like Electronics, Physics, Math, etc.

#Regional_space:qoto.org - Rooms specific to Countries, towns or regions around the world.

#Projects_space:qoto.org - Channels for various open-source projects

#linux-distros_space:qoto.org - Rooms for various linux distribtuion flavors.

#Matrix #Mastoadmin #OSS #FLOSS #FOSS #STEM @QOTO #QOTO