This article traces two lines of philosophical interpretations of the character of Don Quixote. Common to both is the view that Don Quixote should be treated as a paragon of directness, i.e. a subject that strives to attain his ideals – a sphere of sense that is general – without any mediation (in the sense of Vermittlung). For the existentialist Miguel de Unamuno, who in this respect follows Kierkegaard, the individual cannot constitute himself unless he rejects mediation, Quixote is a knight of faith, whose every intervention is an act of heroism analogous to Abraham's leap of faith. For the Hegelian Constantin Noica the opposite is true: any attempt to move from the particular to the general without mediation is a symptom of an existential and ontological disorder. Taking his cue from Hegel’s Law of the Heart and the Frenzy of Self-Conceit ( Phenomenology of Spirit), Noica repudiates Quixote’s unswerving commitment as insane folly. These two diametrically opposed assessments – one inspired by Kirkegaard, the other by Hegel – show the significance of Don Quixote as a focus of the modern debate about mediation and its dilemmas.

The paper analyses the possibilities of treating the ignition cable in the internal combustion engine as a distributed parameter system. It presents the experimental verification of computer simulations of signal propagation generated by ignition systems in the ignition cables, modelled by the distributed parameter system. The tests conducted to determine the wave parameters of ignition cables, as well as the results of numerical simulations and their experimental verifications, are presented. It is concluded that the modelling of the ignition cable by means of a long line gives positive results that can be used for the design of a spark plug with impedance equal to wave impedance of the ignition cable.

This paper presents equivalent impedance and operator admittance systems for fractional order elements. Presented models of fractional order elements of the type: s ^α L _α and 1/s ^α C _α, (0 α 1) were obtained using the Laplace transform based on the expansion of the factor sign to an infinite fraction with varying degrees of accuracy – the continued fraction expansion method (CFE). Then circuit synthesis methods were applied. As a result, equivalent circuit diagrams of fractional order elements were obtained. The obtained equivalent schemes consist both of classical RLC elements, as well as active elements built based on operational amplifiers. Numerical experiments were conducted for the constructed models, presenting responses to selected input signals.