Hiya Skeleton Crew,

After my wonderful month of travels, I get back & have a week of relative calm … but now that’s ALL OVER. *sigh*

The issue’s that I’ve got somethin wrong with my internet hookup. It ain’t a huge issue, things are kinda workin, they’re just a bit janky. But now I’ve got my pal Milo comin over every afternoon explainin all sortsa stuff that don’t actually make any sense. Either the stuff he says is so confusin that it goes through one set of ossicles & out the other, or so crazy that I can’t believe it’s true. I mean, the guy started talkin ’bout IMAGINARY NUMBERS at some point. They’re IMAGINARY, Milo!! That means they ain’t real!!! So why do I gotta worry ’bout ’em!!!

OK, OK, I gotta calm down. Let’s just get to last time’s answers, why don’t we?

Trivia 1

One of the things I really resent ’bout this whole internet hookup business is the sheer amount of acronyms I gotta deal with: Mbps, Gbps, MHz, SC-QAM, MoCA, SNR, PHY, OFDMA, blah blah blah! In fairness to my cable connection, I think my pal Milo might just be overexplainin stuff in way more detail than’s necessary; he kinda only has two modes, which is either to explain NOTHIN or to get into hyper-detail ’bout stuff. So, uh, maybe this stuff I’m gettin frustrated ’bout is less of a me problem than it is a Milo problem.

But so anyway, I’m gonna try & gently elicit an answer from youse guys ’bout one of those acronyms – specifically, MoCA, where the MoC stands for Multimedia over what? Apparently my house don’t got no fancy fiber-optic cables in it, but it DID get wired up once upon a time for cable teevee, & this MoCA stuff has somethin to do with usin that existin wiring for internetty things.

Trivia 2

Cable signals rely a lot on waves – sine waves, cosine waves, that sorta thing. Some French guy figured out a while back that any ol’ wave function can be decomposed into a unique linear combination of simple sine & cosine waves.^[1] It’s a pretty handy result, ’cause it means ya can add waves up together & then take ’em apart again, which helps when ya wanna send lotsa different signals across just a single wire.

Look, I ain’t gonna pretend like I understand this stuff in any great detail. But I DO know there’s a process, goes by the acronym FFT, that’s an algorithm to do that wave decomposition work, & it gets used in signal processin & wireless communication tech & all that sorta stuff. The first “F” stands for “Fast”, the “T” stands for “Transform”, & the second “F” stands for the name of that French guy I mentioned earlier. What is it?