Lesser Goldfinches...

I took this photo (as usual, click to enlarge) last Sunday, of a group of Lesser Goldfinches (Carduelis psaltria) feeding on niger thistle seeds in our feeders.  These are very common birds here; we have dozens that visit our feeders and waterers every day.  This time of year the black-capped males have very bright yellow plumage.  Sometimes when perched in a tree they'll startle observers with their almost neon lemony color.

The angry-looking bright red bird (out of focus) in the upper-right is a common house finch (Carpodacus mexicanus), perhaps the single most abundant bird on our property.  This fellow is perched on another feeder that's serving up black oil sunflower seeds...

Starting to Look Like a Very Big Deal...

Memristors, that is.  If you're interested in electronics at all, this is something you'll want to keep an eye on.  I first heard about them in 2007, but didn't get too excited at that time – we've seen too many such claims of new “fundamentals” and seemingly miraculous new capabilities that ended up being just so much hogwash.  But memristors are following the same pattern that any new technology development does: replicable results, multiple people working on it, and increasingly impressive results from labs.

In other words, it's starting to look like the real deal.  And it has the potential to foment much change in electronics – most especially with storage.  Single chips fabricated with conventional semiconductor techniques, with the storage capacity of hundreds of today's disk drives, archival quality storage lifetime, and nanosecond write speeds.  If that ain't miraculous storage, I don't know what is.

The “new fundamental” bit with a memristor is that it represents the fourth fundamental electronic component.  The other three (resistor, capacitor, and inductor) have been known for 200 years or so; the memristor would be the only component ever added to that list.  In the 1960s a theoretical physicist predicted that memristors should exist, based on the symmetry of the mathematics used to describe the other three components.  Looks like they really do exist, and (more importantly) are actually producable...