How a Diode Changed My Life | Hacker News Reader

How a Diode Changed My Life

onurcelebi.com

344 pointsonurcel108 comments

How many of us got one of those Radio Shack 150-in-1 electronics kits as a kid? (https://www.google.com/search?q=radio+shack+electronics+kits...)

It came with a book of projects (e.g. 150 projects and hence the toy's name) and each page had a listing showing the wires you attach from one coiled spring to another. Hook up different components of the board to make an AM radio receiver, or a "lie detector", or tone generator.

Here's the crazy thing. I ran across an old one 20 years later as an adult and the toy's brilliant idea finally dawned on me: it allows small children to play with electronics without getting burned by a hot 700 degree soldering iron! Instead, the child's fingers push the springs apart and he inserts the pre-stripped wires to connect it to another spring. It was even genius that all the wires it came with were pre-stripped so that even wire cutters weren't necessary. Everything was also low voltage (9v & 1.5v batteries) so you didn't have to worry about a naked power supply plugged into the wall electrocuting the kid. (E.g. https://youtu.be/9RMKrpzoMkE?t=2m52s)

My kit had diodes on it but unlike the author, the toy didn't teach me about them. Perhaps for others, the Radio Shack kit was a gateway drug to an electronics career.

Elenco still makes and sells similar kits:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00000IUD2/ (50 in 1)

http://www.amazon.com/Elenco-Electronic-Playground-Learning-... (130 in 1)

My apologies - I think I accidentally downvoted you. Just to make up I upvoted two of your other comments. I am sorry

As well as the "Radio Shack 150-in-1" springy terminal kits, I also had a Germany kit with white squares that connected together magnetically on a metal base, where each block had the component's symbol printed on the top.

The biggest bit I remember though was the instruction book, which explained each component in terms of diagrams of "electrons" with legs and a set of various structures/obstacles - diodes were just one-way gates, transistors were gates with a rope going from the base which pulled open the collector/emitter shutter...

Thanks to Google, I now know you can still get them:

http://www.lectron.de/index.php?option=com_content&task=blog...

There's a small sample of the instruction book on this page: http://www.lectron.de/index.php?option=com_content&task=blog...

(My dad was an electrical engineer, so I guess it was obvious I'd get this stuff for birthdays, but he also built model plane (control line when I was around 10, radio control gliders when I was an older teen), kites, sailing boats, model trains, slot cars... - he was a great guy, I'll raise (another) glass in his memory when I get home tonight. Thanks Dad...)

I had one of these are a kid, around 10 or 11 years old. I did a few of the experiments, soaked up all the knowledge I could get out of the limited documentation, and then didn't touch it for a long time. When I got into electronics again (and for real this time) at around age 17, all of that knowledge amazingly still stuck to me. I had to look up how to actually wire transistors to be useful, but I remembered how they operated, and what they were capable of (except for the book didn't cover amplification). This is one of the reasons why I think kids should be exposed to as much as possible. Even if they drop it later, if they ever pick it back up, they will be significantly more prepared, and hopefully can learn the rest on their own

Oh man, i loved those things. I tried to make sure I got some variant of one of those for at least one holiday a year.

I still managed to start a very small fire by hooking up a 9v battery to some steel woold that had been soaked in some chemical (thanks, chemistry set!), but that's hardly their fault.

I credit my 150-in-1 kit (and the 8th grade buddy who let me borrow his until I got my own) as part of the ancestry of a career in software development. Not just for what I learned about electronics, but what I learned about experimentation, and what I learned about constructive play.

Yes! the no-solder thing made my parents very happy, and I could take it with me on long car rides. Mine was the earlier 100-in-1; my favorite (though limited) were the Radio Shack P-Box kits and are highly collectible on EBay. I did get a hold of a few hundred volts generated from a AA cell; that was the Eureka moment.

My parents got me this one:

http://www.generalatomic.com/teil1/index.html

Although I could build the circuits and had a great time with it, I didn't understand much of the German and had trouble figuring out why they worked. I still have the remains of the set somewhere in the basement.

Kosmos was nice enough to let me scan and host the manual.

For me it was a similar no-solder-required project book called "Dick Smith's Fun Way Intro Electronics" (the cover project being a "beer powered radio"!), I think at about age 6.

There was a volume 2 which introduced more advanced projects and soldering, and a volume 3 which introduced integrated circuits.

I wandered over to find Dick Smith's somewhere in silicon valley (first US store?) at some point. Other than that, it was an Aussie thing, right?

It was an Australian thing, although it's (sadly) gone now.

It's in a better place now. We can remember it as it was, back in the glory days, instead of the failed Harvey Norman wanna-be that it became.

Jaycar took up the mantle of the hobbyist electronics store years ago anyway.

Does anyone know how Jaycar are doing these days?

Apparently OK:

http://www.afr.com/real-estate/jaycar-founder-offers-way-out...

I remember those books from my childhood too. Definitely helped foster my interest in electronics and programming, it's a shame that they are less common now than they used to be.

It was also great for father-son bonding, having him help my with the projects and teaching me how to solder.

Yep, I remember having one of those too. Poor DSE, having to be a second-rate consumer electronics store all these years.

I had the springy thingy kit, a soldering iron and access to deadly tube based electronics, wire strippers and motors. I would get "broken" electronics as Christmas presents along with a SAMs.

The real gateway drug was "Understanding Solid State Electronics" by the TI Learning Center.

That kit was a key part of my engineering education. Yes, low voltage, but that didn't stop me from hooking my own wire from the meter to an electrical outlet. In a snap and a flash, I learned about max ratings on circuit components. I loved that kit.

I remember seeing this kind of kits ads in magazines back then. Somehow it never appealed to me, I though they were too opinionated of what you can or cannot create with. But there is a good chance I was wrong and they may have been an excellent way to go further when you improve your skills

I learned a ton from one of these myself back in the days when Radio Shack sold actual electrical components.

The part I love the most is that his father let him find his own answers instead of telling him the answer. I am on the board of a small science education non-profit. We do hands on science with kids under age 12. The hardest part about hiring teachers is that most teachers love sharing what they know - and thus give kids the answers. We want kids to explore for thier own answers. We have better luck hiring story tellers and teaching them enough science to deliver the lesson.

When I took Calc I in school, I was hanging out with another student from Hungary who had done the course already in the old country but somehow needed the credit here (in Canada), so he decided to read the "additional reading" that the professor recommended. He discovered that one of the books suggested to instructors to make errors on purpose when demonstrating a calculation on the blackboard. The idea is that once you reach the part where the equation doesn't resolve, you have to go line by line and examine everything carefully to see where the error is, and that's how as a student you better remember the calculus strategy used.

The professor who I thought was a distracted older lady was actually a wily teacher :)

It's my impression that Calculus is one of the courses most commonly taught using this method. I'm not sure that's always on purpose, however...

Well now I feel bad for thinking my high school physics teacher was underqualified. :/

I suspect this is why the kinds of people who get good with technology tend to be somewhat asocial. As a kid, I never, ever asked for help. I'm not exactly sure why, but I do know anxiety and lack of confidence talking to adults played a part in it. Another part was I just assumed I should be able to do these things, afterall wasn't everyone just doing things on their own?

So I just soldiered away over and over until I got something that worked. I remember building an RC car from a kit (Team Associated's RC10) when I was in 6th or 7th grade and not being able to finish one part. It took me a long time to ask my dad to take me to the hobby shop to get it fixed. It almost felt like a defeat.

Now that I'm older, I have no real sense of this. I'll just ask for help and see tough projects as naturally being team projects. I am glad I had these experiences as I tend to be more technically competent than my more social peers who learned these life lessons earlier.

On the flipside, I work with a guy in his 40s with this attitude. He has a "dont read documentation, don't ask for help, cant take direction" attitude and he's constantly struggling and he's a nightmare to work with. I guess some people don't outgrow this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_%28philosophy%29

"the capacity of an entity ... to act in any given environment"

Some cultures and personalities encourage it, some strongly discourage it. The educational system and large corporate employers generally strongly discourage it.

I've always wondered if he did this on purpose. I asked him recently but he doesn't remember, so there's a good chance that he just wanted to hack his stuff on his own :-) But as I mentioned he is a teacher, so let's say he did this unconsciously.

My parents were both teachers and did the same thing. From my perspective, I think that asking a child (or student) why they think something, or "what do you think X should do?". This is the main reason I despise Australia's education system, it doesn't cater to students that actually want to learn.

My bad experience with Australia's education system was when my 5yo son got chastised for looking at the clouds...No matter the context, i.e. he was the last one back in class, I can't fathom a worse educational approach. He was asking me whether he was allowed to look at clouds for months afterwards.

That's horrible. I would take it up with the teacher and tell them that's not acceptable.

Another thing that irks me about the Australian education system is how it's designed to create pacifists who aren't motivated to protect themselves. If another child in the playground hits you, you're meant to do nothing. That's not how to create a generation of people who can stand up for themselves.

My parents were very pissed off when they found out that's what I'd been taught at school. Sure, it makes life easier for teachers, but that's not the point of education. But it's probably a cultural thing, since my parents came from a country that was at war and that experience taught them how to protect themselves.

Just wanted to say, this was a beautiful story and was very moving. Thanks for posting it. :)

The key is letting learners find things out on their own but making sure the right information is within reach and not spoon-fed.

This reminds me of being forced to do math by hand in school, instead of using a calculator. Mostly this just left me with contempt for the teachers.

It's also worth mentioning that transistors are basically back-to-back diodes, and that understanding a diode, really understanding a diode, is the first step towards understanding semi-conductor physics, and electronics in general.

I remember well making crystal radios, firstly with store-bought diodes and capacitors, subsequently making my own capacitors, and then diodes. Taught me so much.

The diode - gateway drug to semi-conductor physics and electronics.

So true, one of the coolest moments in college was taking a final where the problem described a PN junction and asked a series of questions about it. That required that you analyze the junction and derive all of the properties of the resulting diode (as I recall it was a crappy diode). But being able to think about computers from a quantum mechanical analysis, up through register transfer logic (RTL) was an amazing feeling for me.

If you want to understand computing as a fundamental level, starting with diodes is a good first step.

of course no one makes bipolar computers .... understanding FETs without understanding the quantum stuff is pretty easy

Tell that to the PDP-8 on my dresser (it's all Bipolar TTL logic, but you are not wrong). FETs are a lot easier to understand in many ways, there is a reason they took over as the dominant semiconductor switching element :-).

Although my favorite FET demo is a piece of surgical tube connected to a faucet, and a water balloon sitting on the tube as the "gate". You can demonstrate all sorts of things like avalanche voltage (water flow regardless of the gate state), gate leakage (poke a small hole in your balloon), pinch off potential etc. Makes a great science fair project for you parents out there.

A transistor is not two diodes back-to-back. It may be literally true that a transistor is two P-N junctions, but if you think of a transistor this way, you'll never understand them. The magic of the transistor is that if the P-N junctions are close enough together, you get transconductance -- when either junction is forward-biased, current can flow between the collector and emitter. Diodes don't do this!

See my comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11522126

You are right about the difference, you are wrong when you say that thinking about them like this will mean I'll never understand them. It's the merging of the N (or P) bands that makes the magic of a transistor happen, but not thinking of them as diode-like junctions means you're only thinking about them one way, not as an integrated concept.

We are probably in violent agreement, but I suggest that if you only understand diodes as diodes and transistors as transistors, you are limiting your points of view, and potentially not seeing the whole picture.

In fact looking at them as a diodes can let you use some bjts to get a fast low leakage diode in a pinch.

http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/16966/transis...

I don't think that's true. If you out two diodes back to back you won't get a functioning transistor. A transistor works by letting current run across because electrons are filling holes in the middle region, this smooths the potential across the entire component, allowing for travel. If you just out diodes back to back, the intervening wire segments disrupt the analogous structure and also the individual diodes probably don't have their potentials calibrated to provide efficient switching action.

You can't take separate two diodes and connect them back-to-back, because wire is in the way. When you connect two diodes in a circuit, that's not connecting the junctions back-to-back.

But if you take the PN junction of one diode, the NP junction of another, and then merge the N of one with the other, you have a PNP transistor. The level of doping in each layer matters, and that then (in part) controls what type of transistor[0] you get, but it is, honestly, two diode junctions. What you have done is to think about connecting diodes in a circuit, which is not the same thing at all.

[0] There are switching transistors and amplifying transistors. Then there are field-effect transistors which are another animal entirely. And more. But in essence, a PNP transistor or an NPN transistor, are each two diode junctions.

I think we just have different definitions of "back to back". But I don't think you could even take two diodes and put them together the way you suggest (without a wire) and make a transistor. Correct me if I'm wrong, but to simplify: part of the reason why the transistor works is that the "meat of the sandwich" is extremely thin. My understanding of transistors could be deficient since I only fully understood them recently, and for a rather... Unconventional context:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yeiOE1Gy0YoPXlLdMo9y8XSS...

Wouldn't it be awesome if two diodes connected back-to-back would form a transistor? But alas, [1]

[1] http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/78366/why-can...

This is somewhat offtopic, but I've tried building crystal radios over and over again in my life, and have never gotten them to work. I've built them from kits. I've studied them online and built them from scratch, in various designs. I'm in a city so the signal should be strong enough. I wish I could figure out what went wrong. I am able to build any other type of circuit that I've attempted.

Have you checked for absolute certain that there is an analog AM transmitter in your area? Simply being in a city is no longer enough. You might want to check.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=HvLmJGM_T3M

Try listening at night maybe?

I suggest that you join one of the Crystal Set Forums.

eg "The Radio Board" http://theradioboard.com/rb/index.php

There are many patient Guru's there who will help you resolve any problems.

Did you connect the ground to an actual earth-connected cold water pipe? I made that mistake when I was a kid, thinking I could ground it to any old metal pipe.

Either not getting a good ground, or not having a long enough antenna are two issues I have commonly seen with some of the more basic kits.

"gateway drug to semi-conductor physics and electronics." => So true. But I will wait a little bit more than 9 years before teaching semi-conductor physics to my little boy ;-)

But I will wait a little bit more than 9 years before teaching

Why? When I was that age, I would tear apart all of the electronics in my possession trying to figure out how they worked. I never could figure it out, until much, much later. Not because I couldn't have understood it, but because I didn't have anyone to help guide me with regards to electronics.

edit:

I would have killed for someone to have gotten me something like http://www.amazon.com/Snap-Circuits-SC-300-Electronics-Disco... which is listed as appropriate for age 8

Even Horowitz and Hill [1] don't explain the transistor in terms of semiconductor physics. Yet they provide useful operational insights.

[1] http://artofelectronics.net/

because he is 3 months old now :-)

Semi-conductors physics may be too much for a 9-year-old, but an introduction to transistors or doing a H bridge to reverse the rotation direction of a motor could be pretty impressive.

Ah, I see. Totally misunderstood what you said, sorry!

I was exactly the same; once, just once, one of my friends told me his Dad was into electronics; he showed me a room full of his Heathkit kits in various stages of construction (I remember the full-size organ). But we moved that summer before I could ever meet him - he may or may not wanted to mentor someone in grade school, but I was so very eager to learn.

Not the diode here; in the 1960s electronics became interesting and available as there was so much junk. I mean, people used to litter everywhere and there was random junk piles (and landfills) within minutes in any direction filled with TV and radio chassis, waiting to be hauled home with my minibike, spending hours retrieving valuable components as there were no retail electronics supply houses within a hundred miles and no one taught me mail order (RS Electronics - you suck, charging a 13 yo who walked miles and his whole weeks earnings the commercial MSRP for a single bridge rectifier). Each component was carefully removed, curated, and possibly fitted into some circuit from the few electronics books available to me. I cannot imagine how much lead exposure I had. My 15th birthday was a trip to a distant town and $100 to spend at this place called Radio Shack (and a bike), where I discovered all this other stuff and Forrest Mims. Theory had to wait until I went to HS and College in a larger city, but my seventh grade spanish teacher gave me his GI bill oscilloscope because I could identify transistors and current flow through them (Thank You prof Ludwig) and that kept me busy until then. Looking back, where there was a will there was a way.

Diodes are cool. One changed my life too! But I built a crystal radio set with mine. Many nights of listening to AM stations across the eastern part of the US. (WGN, WOR, KYW, KDKA, WABC, WSM and WBAL)

That took me to ham radio and electrical engineering. All because of a 4 cent part.

Diodes are cool. One changed my life too! But I built a crystal radio set with mine. Many nights of listening to AM stations across Europe.

That took me to electrical engineering. All because of a 3 penny part.

Nice! Looks like there's always a point of no-return experience for geeks like us.

An Arduino Uno changed mine :( I feel uncool.

Don't, the Arduino is the 60's crystal set diode!! Also they are about 75 cents in 1960's dollars!!! So it's all good.

I had a teacher in high school who liked to mention that "any diode can be light-emitting, once."

Still makes me chuckle :)

I, too, have a special place in my heart for diodes.

When I was a kid, I had one of those 200-in-1 electronics kits. It had a germanium diode on it. The diode was clear. I connected a 9V battery directly to it, no resistor or anything else. It glowed super bright bluish white for a second or two and then burned out.

Now my EE friends tell me that no one uses germanium diodes anymore, and it makes me sad.

Germanium is still coveted for audio usage at least. Not for audiophiles per se, but musicians, especially guitar effects. It definitely sounds a different than silicon, and it's also more "lively" and unpredictable.

I have a Fuzz Factory, and that baby can definitely scream and squeal like none of my other effects. But it also sounds different from night to night with the exact same knob settings. All my other effects, I can make a marking for where to line up the knob, and visually spot-check before a gig, but the Fuzz Factory I have to audibly test. Things like room temperature, age of the strings or length of my input cable even seem to make a difference!

Well, the manual said the kit included a light-emitting diode. Problem?

haha. I still keep a vintage pack of 50 around for the rare instance I have to throw down a crystal radio set for the kids...

Save them, real 1n34 diodes are hard to find. Most of the ones from HK or China are fakes and lack the sensitivity for crystal sets.

Dude's EE friend here. It's true. 10/10 did break heart.

B...b...but SiGe HBTs!

Haha, I might have had the same kit as you. Mine from radio shack, and had besides the usual resistors and capacitors and BJT's also a JK flip flop and quad nand gate.

I used to like wiring the IC's backwards briefly to make them get really hot. Though one day I left it too long and burnt one of them out. Alas no brilliant blue glow though.

I found an image of the one I had!

https://www.quasarelectronics.co.uk/media/ecom/prodxl/200-in...

That's a revamped version of what I had (newer case). Mine was an older version with the same parts.

Lovely story. Don't forgot that diodes also have a voltage drop across them which means that they can be used to change voltages from batteries or other sources if needed.

This story is short, sweet and presented very nicely with the picture and diagrams. Thanks for posting it for us.

> We should first awake the curiosity and teach just enough to help them solve a simple problem.

You should consider submitting it elsewhere online, as I'm sure teachers will find it of pedagogical interest, and worth a look, whether or not they are surprised by the conclusions/points you raised.

> Even nowadays, my dad and I occupy the balcony table in sunny spring days with electronic stuff to remember those days. Somehow, there is less magic in playing with Arduino and Raspberry pi than simple diodes.

It's too bad the old Radio Shack Science Fair kits are no longer available. Here's a page from the 1975 Radio Shack catalog listing them: http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/html/1975/h100.html

Go on to the next page, where there is more information and some pictures.

Here's a site that has scans of the documentation for several of them: http://my.core.com/~sparktron/pbox.html

Hah. I actually had the 10-in-1 Junior Electronic Lab Kit here:

http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/html/1975/h104.html

I had an recurring fascination with electronics, but didn't really grok analog stuff until much later. Digital stuff and programming really caught my fancy, and has never let go.

Great article but this statement struck me as blind nostalgia.

> Somehow, there is less magic in playing with Arduino and Raspberry pi than simple diodes.

The lack of magic is likely due to being an adult. I'm sure certain kids still find this stuff just as magical.

To a degree, yes, but in my capacity as a moderator in /r/electroncis on Reddit, my heart sinks a little when a person asks what's the best way to get into electronics and someone replies that they should get an Arduino and a few interface shields or a bunch of LEDs and start turning things on and off. Programming I/O or PWM signals is considered by many to be 'electronics'.

It's certainly much more likely to lead to a more profitable career. Do you wind your own transformers and use vacuum tubes? The really old guys would look down on cheating by using transistors and store bought coils. It's all just nostalgia. People can and should find the magic in different places than the previous generations did.

> Do you wind your own transformers and use vacuum tubes?

Have done in the past.

The trouble is, starting with an Arduino is a bit like wanting to be an engine specialist so buying an engine and fitting it to a chassic and wheels, but never digging in the opposite direction.

The first time I tinkered with a microcontroller was such a relief for me. Analog circuits seemed to never work just right; digital logic seems much less finical.

I volunteer on Sundays at the Boston Museum of Science, and lead an activity showing kids how to make circuits out of Play-Doh (yup, regular Play-Doh -- it conducts electricity!), 9 volt batteries, LEDs, motors, and a few other odds and ends.

You'd be shocked at how many kids -- mostly boys in the 8-13 range -- show up at the activity, full of confidence, the parents are telling me how their genius child is constantly doing Arduinos/Rasberry pis/Little Bits/electrical engineering flavor-of-the-month toy at home, the kids are like "Oh, I already know how to do this!" I hand them they equipment, and they promptly take all the leads for the LED and the battery and jam them into the single ball of Play-Doh expecting it to do something.

Well, it does do something -- it short-circuits my battery is what it does!

Microcontrollers and simple circuits are just so different, the skills are different, the mindset is different, and people tend to react to them differently.

Once the kids, or adults, do finally get the LED to light up, they're often just completely blown away, in a way that you or I might find a little silly. Parents are constantly taking pictures, filming their kids doing this for, like, 10 minutes, just shocked (not literally!) and amazed that they're actually controlling electricity. It feels a little primal/fundamental and magical. Like you're interacting directly with some previously-mysterious force of nature, whereas some of the other electrical engineering tools feel more like "appliances," which people use every day.

I've seen thousands of reactions to people playing with the programmable robots, and Little Bits, Makey Makey (which also teaches circuits, but there's a lot of other "stuff" going on), Lego Mindstorms, but I have to say that those things never get quite the immediate and primal reaction that Play-Doh, LEDs, and 9 volt batteries get. They're just such different things.

Modern SoCs and microcontrollers are just as magical to me now as LEDs and motors and buzzers were when I was a kid. The fact that you can get a wireless internet connected computer for <$5 (eg ESP8266) blows my mind every time I think about it. I never imagined how cheap electronics would be when I was young.

Loved the story and brought back many happy memories of hacking simple circuits with diodes and lights in almost exactly the same way.

Ohh man .. this guy made me remember my all time love of hacking wth all sorts of electronic circuits .. those NPN transistors .. those FM transmitters .. those AM transmitters using 555 timer chip .. gang condensors .. and then on Digital side .. my favourite Op Amp , decade counters ... ohh my ohh myy .. i just miss those days .. :(

Fantastic story! Electronics work is amazingly rewarding; beats most hobbies out there.

Is this guy sure he's not me?

The only difference seems to be that my dad introduced me to electronics after he got sick of me taking apart various household devices to see how they worked, with mixed success at getting them back together in working shape.

You're such a lucky boy. My biggest challenge is making buildings from tape and VHS cassettes in my childhood.

-- Adam muzik seti hastasiydi, sanssizlik aq.

Quote: "Of course, as you can imagine, as a little boy, that peaked my interest."

No, it piqued your interest. Should I read on and find more of the same?

    We were a little happy family living in
    a modest appartment at Düzce in Turkey.

There may be more "errors", but I have to say that the English in this article is significantly better than my Turkish. It may be that the writer would appreciate some proof-reading assistance, or other comments on the details of spelling and grammar, but such offers should perhaps be made as such, and not as bald unsolicited criticisms.

Note: It wasn't I who down-voted you. In fact, assuming you really were simply intending to be helpful I've upvoted you to balance some of the downvotes.

Fixed, thanks! Sorry, english is not my first language so there may be lots of mistakes, I would be very happy if you are kind enough to tell me. The funny thing is that I speak french and I didn't know that the spelling of this word is more french-ish than english-ish.

The writer is Turkish, and apparently speaks Turkish, French, and English. The article was interesting enough for me that I didn't feel a need to pick grammar or spelling nits.

I think there's a need for a format of soliciting editorial corrections that allows people to provide errata without feeling like they're being too picky?

I think this need extends to other areas of potential improvement, too. We could all be much better at many things if there were widely used, polite ways to give and receive unsolicited feedback.

Most of the time, just couching the comment with a little kindness works fine...

"Great article, enjoyed it. I noticed a couple of minor typos you might want to fix..." or "I see you speak several languages. English is a little tricky with homonyms, "peeked" in this context would be "piqued".

Even that seems a bit like it gets in the way. Also, if you didn't like the article does that mean you shouldn't offer a correction?

Perhaps what I'm after is a meta-thread content-thread separation in some way.

Just email the author using a toastmasters style feedback that is hearty and respectful. No need to pollute the thread or have a meta-thread.

As a non-native speaker (who does mistakes a lot), I think it's sad most sites (esp. forums - although it's tricky as it could be abused there) don't have an option to select a mistake or typo and silently report it to the original text's author, with optional comments on what's wrong there. I only ever saw such things on news sites, where readers could report problems to the editors.

So, many people see the mistake, but stay silent out of politeness or just feeling that it would be off-topic.

"who does mistakes a lot" -> "who makes mistakes a lot"

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that English isn't his first language based on his name. Focus on the content and not the presentation and you will find a nice story about discovery that we can all relate to.

> I'm going to go out on a limb and say that English isn't his first language based on his name

Or the third paragraph of TFA, which states that he was living in Turkey at the age of 9.

A valid criticism, but only fair if you write it in Turkish.

>Should I read on and find more of the same? Omit this part or replace with "I know English may not be your first language so if I may..." to be allowed to use english.

How many languages can you speak or write in?

"Some people can read, write, and speak three languages. We call those people trilingual. Some people can read, write, and speak two languages. We call those people bilingual.

"And then there are those who speak one language, and those we call Americans."

Peaked is perfectly fine too. His interest was at peak. A local maxima.

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