(Somebody better at Latin than me could make this into a better joke.)

But who edits the editors?

And I still can't plug it in on the first attempt...

Happy birthday to Robert J. Widlar, who would have been 88 today (Nov. 30).

To solve the temperature variation problem, Widlar invented the band-gap reference (Fig. 2), now used in voltage references everywhere, and National Semiconductor produced the 5V LM109 (Fig. 5), which is the grandfather of all three-terminal voltage regulators.

By which he meant, "The author has previously advanced arguments that misled all you suckers."

A year later, in 1970, he unveiled the solution in an ISSCC talk and a JSSC paper: a 3-terminal regular using a band-gap voltage reference. Widlar wrote, "The author has previously advanced arguments against including the pass transistor in an integrated-circuit regulator."

Widlar piled on more arguments... circuit interactions with the temperature gradient, leakage, and cost, are all bad.

That's not rain, Greg.

You have to get the inflections right, but still... www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNqp...

What does the array of ports on the back look like?

What’s the Sandbar?

And all the cops who promised to quit!

(I know this is not an original observation, but Alex Karp‘s TV appearance popped up in my feed like six times today…)

The latter named his company after an object in the former’s book... [goose meme] was that object used by the good guys?