EE rant...

[server]

John Larkin <jlarkin@highlandsnipmetechnology.com> wrote:

On Sat, 7 Jan 2023 01:04:32 -0000 (UTC), antispam@math.uni.wroc.pl
wrote:

Ed Lee <edward.ming.lee@gmail.com> wrote:
But not immediately. I tested 400V occasionally, but couple of them died while testing 12V. I am wondering it 400V weaken the meter.

High voltage can destroy resistors, but this seem to be quite fast.

The old CenTech meters are 1000V, but the new models are 250V. Why even bother to have 50V more than the next range of 200V. Perhaps it\'s just same design with new label, when they got enough reports/complaints.

Lot of folks live in countries where line voltage is 230V. So 50 volts
makes a lot of difference.

I am wondering if it\'s worth picking up some of the older 1000V models off ebay.

I know nothing about CenTech meters. But I have several \"DT830B\"
meters. Available schematics shows 3 resistors in series for 1000V.
My oldest one have 2 resistors. Newest one have single resistor.
Standard miniature resistors are rated for 250V, one can get
better ones, but I doubt that one can get cheaply 1000V capable
ones. Still, meter is marked as 1000V DC, 700V AC (the same
as old meters).

They eliminated 0.2 cents worth of resistors. Ignore temperature and
voltage coefficient effects. Maybe some of that is mathed out?

Chinese product prices ratchet towards cheap, and the specs ratchet
deep into the lies region. Chinese amps and volts and per cent are
about 10:1 off from SI standards.

Well, the cheap \"DT830B\" were surprisingly accurate. I have
used 4 to measure the same voltage. IIRC the differences
were in last digit and did not exceed 2 counts. They were
bought from different sources at different times, so it
is unlikly to be the same error on all. And they agreed
with better meter. Newest ones seem to have larger
errors, but still well withing specs.

AFAICS biggest problem with cheap meters are test leads,
they tend to fail rather quickly. Second problem is
main switch, which is formed from part of PCB. It
seem to degrade with use. And failing switch can
produce all kinds of wrong results.

--
Waldek Hebisch

 

[Les Cargill]

Martin Brown wrote:
<snip>

Things which do have an important place in modern software that is
intended to be provably correct are invariants (borrowed from physics).

Going towards \"checklists of constraints\" goes a lot faster
( meaning is orders of magnitudes cheaper ) and is therefore more
Useful than \"provably correct\". Constraints are suspiciously binary
things and we\'re pretty good with lists of those.

The rest is instrumentation.

Maybe in a generation or two we\'ll see Hoarse style proofs. We\'ll see.
They\'re nibbling about the edges now but so much in language design
is just promoting the bloody thing.

--
Les Cargill

 

[Les Cargill]

Martin Brown wrote:
<snip>

Things which do have an important place in modern software that is
intended to be provably correct are invariants (borrowed from physics).

Going towards \"checklists of constraints\" goes a lot faster
( meaning is orders of magnitudes cheaper ) and is therefore more
Useful than \"provably correct\". Constraints are suspiciously binary
things and we\'re pretty good with lists of those.

The rest is instrumentation.

Maybe in a generation or two we\'ll see Hoarse style proofs. We\'ll see.
They\'re nibbling about the edges now but so much in language design
is just promoting the bloody thing.

--
Les Cargill

 

[Les Cargill]

Martin Brown wrote:
<snip>

Things which do have an important place in modern software that is
intended to be provably correct are invariants (borrowed from physics).

Going towards \"checklists of constraints\" goes a lot faster
( meaning is orders of magnitudes cheaper ) and is therefore more
Useful than \"provably correct\". Constraints are suspiciously binary
things and we\'re pretty good with lists of those.

The rest is instrumentation.

Maybe in a generation or two we\'ll see Hoarse style proofs. We\'ll see.
They\'re nibbling about the edges now but so much in language design
is just promoting the bloody thing.

--
Les Cargill

 

[Fred Bloggs]

On Sunday, January 1, 2023 at 11:04:59 PM UTC-5, John Larkin wrote:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/18/electrical_engineers_extinction/?td=rt-9cp

I\'ve been thinking for some time now that EE schools don\'t turn out
people who like electricity, but maker culture might.

University can\'t teach or even get people interested in something they don\'t know themselves.

The author of that article, a mere content provider, doesn\'t know what he\'s talking about. Most engineering is an instantiation of a requirement conceived by higher level thinking minds, not the other way around.

Nobody cares what the public thinks about electricity. The ignorance level is appalling and beyond comprehension. There was a newspaper report on the proceedings of a local government planning board meeting concerning the build of a 500 MW solar farm in the area. Some dumbass woman asked the board members if they knew where all that power went when it wasn\'t being used, and would it be a hazard. Nearly as dumb as the woman politician in Australia who in an oversight meeting asked the admiral if it was true the planned nuclear submarine could only stay submerged for 20 minutes before it had to come up for air...Australia has since given up plans to design their own nuclear submarines. It took them a few years to learn enough about the technology to ask themselves wtf we want to even do this when there are other massively more experienced allies who will sell them to us.

 

[Fred Bloggs]

On Sunday, January 1, 2023 at 11:04:59 PM UTC-5, John Larkin wrote:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/18/electrical_engineers_extinction/?td=rt-9cp

I\'ve been thinking for some time now that EE schools don\'t turn out
people who like electricity, but maker culture might.

University can\'t teach or even get people interested in something they don\'t know themselves.

The author of that article, a mere content provider, doesn\'t know what he\'s talking about. Most engineering is an instantiation of a requirement conceived by higher level thinking minds, not the other way around.

Nobody cares what the public thinks about electricity. The ignorance level is appalling and beyond comprehension. There was a newspaper report on the proceedings of a local government planning board meeting concerning the build of a 500 MW solar farm in the area. Some dumbass woman asked the board members if they knew where all that power went when it wasn\'t being used, and would it be a hazard. Nearly as dumb as the woman politician in Australia who in an oversight meeting asked the admiral if it was true the planned nuclear submarine could only stay submerged for 20 minutes before it had to come up for air...Australia has since given up plans to design their own nuclear submarines. It took them a few years to learn enough about the technology to ask themselves wtf we want to even do this when there are other massively more experienced allies who will sell them to us.

 

[Fred Bloggs]

On Sunday, January 1, 2023 at 11:04:59 PM UTC-5, John Larkin wrote:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/18/electrical_engineers_extinction/?td=rt-9cp

I\'ve been thinking for some time now that EE schools don\'t turn out
people who like electricity, but maker culture might.

University can\'t teach or even get people interested in something they don\'t know themselves.

The author of that article, a mere content provider, doesn\'t know what he\'s talking about. Most engineering is an instantiation of a requirement conceived by higher level thinking minds, not the other way around.

Nobody cares what the public thinks about electricity. The ignorance level is appalling and beyond comprehension. There was a newspaper report on the proceedings of a local government planning board meeting concerning the build of a 500 MW solar farm in the area. Some dumbass woman asked the board members if they knew where all that power went when it wasn\'t being used, and would it be a hazard. Nearly as dumb as the woman politician in Australia who in an oversight meeting asked the admiral if it was true the planned nuclear submarine could only stay submerged for 20 minutes before it had to come up for air...Australia has since given up plans to design their own nuclear submarines. It took them a few years to learn enough about the technology to ask themselves wtf we want to even do this when there are other massively more experienced allies who will sell them to us.

 

[Martin Brown]

On 10/01/2023 15:39, John Larkin wrote:

On Tue, 10 Jan 2023 10:21:20 +0000, Martin Brown
\'\'\'newspam\'\'\'@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

On 09/01/2023 11:23, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 9 Jan 2023 09:57:03 +0000, Martin Brown
\'\'\'newspam\'\'\'@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

In the old days a compile cycle was sufficiently tedious that you tried
to get as many faults out in each batch run as you could.

Exactly. People were more careful. Like we are still with hardware
design.

Board revisions and chip mask revisions are visibly high cost.

I find it ironic that you rail against software developers and yet trust
making your hardware designs based on the output of software simulators.

Do you mean FPGA test benches? An FPGA is just a tick-tock state
machine; it\'s not hard to get that right. The hard blocks inside an
FPGA, things like PLLs and serdes blocks, must be well tested or they
couldn\'t sell the chips.

I had Spice in mind - which is way more complex internally.

> Most progrmmers don\'t know what a software state machine is. I explain

I find that *very* hard to believe.
Did they sleep through their lectures?

them and they are amazed, or stunned. They write multi-thread
procedural hairballs with async inputs and depend on system calls that
someone else wrote. They are trapped in a very thin abstraction layer.
I ask embedded programers \"how long does that take to execute\" and
\"what frequency can we run that interrupt routime at\" and they have no
idea. They bail on the first and tend to gr

Sounds to me much more like what EE\'s do to software.

Some software is actually pretty reliable (and unlike hardware it tends
to become more reliable the longer that it is used for and bugs get
found and eliminated). We tend to notice the stuff that *doesn\'t* work.

Sure it\'s reliable after the bugs are worked out. Unless someone goes
out of business or the plane crashes.

And some very big software has latent issues that only ever get found
when some unusual error occurs. Often such latent faults lurk in dark
corners of error recovery or reporting code.

We found one in VAX VMS once due to someone (a beginner) writing a
programme that opened new IO channels every time around a loop.
Eventually it ran out of them at system wide level and what was the
first thing the error handler did?

Try to open an IO channel to the system console and report the failure.

I note that US domestic flights are down today due to a probable
software SNAFU. It is being reported as a computer failure.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/computer-failure-faa-impact-flights-nationwide/story?id=96358202

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Martin Brown]

On 10/01/2023 15:39, John Larkin wrote:

On Tue, 10 Jan 2023 10:21:20 +0000, Martin Brown
\'\'\'newspam\'\'\'@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

On 09/01/2023 11:23, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 9 Jan 2023 09:57:03 +0000, Martin Brown
\'\'\'newspam\'\'\'@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

In the old days a compile cycle was sufficiently tedious that you tried
to get as many faults out in each batch run as you could.

Exactly. People were more careful. Like we are still with hardware
design.

Board revisions and chip mask revisions are visibly high cost.

I find it ironic that you rail against software developers and yet trust
making your hardware designs based on the output of software simulators.

Do you mean FPGA test benches? An FPGA is just a tick-tock state
machine; it\'s not hard to get that right. The hard blocks inside an
FPGA, things like PLLs and serdes blocks, must be well tested or they
couldn\'t sell the chips.

I had Spice in mind - which is way more complex internally.

> Most progrmmers don\'t know what a software state machine is. I explain

I find that *very* hard to believe.
Did they sleep through their lectures?

them and they are amazed, or stunned. They write multi-thread
procedural hairballs with async inputs and depend on system calls that
someone else wrote. They are trapped in a very thin abstraction layer.
I ask embedded programers \"how long does that take to execute\" and
\"what frequency can we run that interrupt routime at\" and they have no
idea. They bail on the first and tend to gr

Sounds to me much more like what EE\'s do to software.

Some software is actually pretty reliable (and unlike hardware it tends
to become more reliable the longer that it is used for and bugs get
found and eliminated). We tend to notice the stuff that *doesn\'t* work.

Sure it\'s reliable after the bugs are worked out. Unless someone goes
out of business or the plane crashes.

And some very big software has latent issues that only ever get found
when some unusual error occurs. Often such latent faults lurk in dark
corners of error recovery or reporting code.

We found one in VAX VMS once due to someone (a beginner) writing a
programme that opened new IO channels every time around a loop.
Eventually it ran out of them at system wide level and what was the
first thing the error handler did?

Try to open an IO channel to the system console and report the failure.

I note that US domestic flights are down today due to a probable
software SNAFU. It is being reported as a computer failure.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/computer-failure-faa-impact-flights-nationwide/story?id=96358202

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Martin Brown]

On 10/01/2023 15:39, John Larkin wrote:

On Tue, 10 Jan 2023 10:21:20 +0000, Martin Brown
\'\'\'newspam\'\'\'@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

On 09/01/2023 11:23, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 9 Jan 2023 09:57:03 +0000, Martin Brown
\'\'\'newspam\'\'\'@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

In the old days a compile cycle was sufficiently tedious that you tried
to get as many faults out in each batch run as you could.

Exactly. People were more careful. Like we are still with hardware
design.

Board revisions and chip mask revisions are visibly high cost.

I find it ironic that you rail against software developers and yet trust
making your hardware designs based on the output of software simulators.

Do you mean FPGA test benches? An FPGA is just a tick-tock state
machine; it\'s not hard to get that right. The hard blocks inside an
FPGA, things like PLLs and serdes blocks, must be well tested or they
couldn\'t sell the chips.

I had Spice in mind - which is way more complex internally.

> Most progrmmers don\'t know what a software state machine is. I explain

I find that *very* hard to believe.
Did they sleep through their lectures?

them and they are amazed, or stunned. They write multi-thread
procedural hairballs with async inputs and depend on system calls that
someone else wrote. They are trapped in a very thin abstraction layer.
I ask embedded programers \"how long does that take to execute\" and
\"what frequency can we run that interrupt routime at\" and they have no
idea. They bail on the first and tend to gr

Sounds to me much more like what EE\'s do to software.

Some software is actually pretty reliable (and unlike hardware it tends
to become more reliable the longer that it is used for and bugs get
found and eliminated). We tend to notice the stuff that *doesn\'t* work.

Sure it\'s reliable after the bugs are worked out. Unless someone goes
out of business or the plane crashes.

And some very big software has latent issues that only ever get found
when some unusual error occurs. Often such latent faults lurk in dark
corners of error recovery or reporting code.

We found one in VAX VMS once due to someone (a beginner) writing a
programme that opened new IO channels every time around a loop.
Eventually it ran out of them at system wide level and what was the
first thing the error handler did?

Try to open an IO channel to the system console and report the failure.

I note that US domestic flights are down today due to a probable
software SNAFU. It is being reported as a computer failure.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/computer-failure-faa-impact-flights-nationwide/story?id=96358202

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[John Larkin]

On Mon, 2 Jan 2023 20:57:05 -0500, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 2 Jan 2023 11:00:52 -0800, Joerg <news@analogconsultants.com
wrote:

On 1/1/23 11:08 PM, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Sun, 01 Jan 2023 20:04:49 -0800) it happened
John Larkin <jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote in
mrl4rhhtkup3sn9t4an65r9buogjtk9er1@4ax.com>:


https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/18/electrical_engineers_extinction/?td=rt-9cp


I\'ve been thinking for some time now that EE schools don\'t turn out
people who like electricity, but maker culture might.


It\'s almost always been that way. Except in the last century it
was ham radio. I learned way more useful stuff that way that in
years at the university.

I think that electrical instincts should be acquired young. Then the
college courses add the theory. That\'s why the lego/maker/Raspberry
Pi thing is interesting.


I agree. As a young teenage hobbyist with little guidance, I went
through about four years of frustration at not being able to design my
own circuits. I\'d salvaged all these tubes and things from a couple of
old TVs that my folks were chucking out, but didn\'t really know how they
worked. (Transistors were too expensive, and IC prices were just moving
down from the stratosphere.)

That bottled-up frustration gave me a fire in the belly to figure it all
out, which eventually I mostly did. (Never got round to using anything
from that Motorola MNOS nonvolatile memory book they sent me, though.)

At IBM, I was occasionally asked to interview candidates, and one of the
things I always asked them was whether they had any hobby background in
electronics or physical science. Almost all the best designers I know
started out as hobbyists, which ISTM says more about the fire in the
belly than the expertise so acquired.

Now if you\'d just get off your duff and write that \"Electronics From
Scratch\" book you used to talk about, we might have a few more.

I\'ve been giving a few trial lectures. Leprechauns dressed like elves
hurling electrons between big bonze statues, things like that.

In the EE school I was in it was known that only \'hobbyists\'
would pass the final exams. The dropout in the first year was
very very very high.


At my university the drop-out rate (start to degree) was at times
83%.

Too many kids selected an EE degree based on some high school
counselor\'s advice, or dreams of a tidy income. Too late.

I dunno. Washing out of a hard program isn\'t the worst thing that can
happen to a young person. It\'s not nearly as bad as hanging on by the
skin of your teeth and then failing over a decade or so in the industry.

The old saying, \"C\'s get degrees\" has caused a lot of misery of that sort.

For the 30 or so in the first year, I was 1 of the 4 people at
the final graduation party in the local pub,

Granny\'s radio with 10 transistors? You mean those old radio
bulbs?

Give me some and I will build you a radio or TV (if you can find
an old CRT).


In the old days that also required a crate of beer and some Ouzo


[...]

Barbaric. Rum and Coke is the ideal balance. The rum numbs your
frontal cortex and the sugar and caffeine power up the better parts.

Gin and tonic for us recovering Commonwealth types, thanks. Lately I\'ve
been enjoying Inverroche Verdant from South Africa, with lots of ice and
a splash of Fever Tree tonic. Highly recommended.

Our sensors are differently calibrated.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

 

[John Larkin]

On Mon, 2 Jan 2023 20:57:05 -0500, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 2 Jan 2023 11:00:52 -0800, Joerg <news@analogconsultants.com
wrote:

On 1/1/23 11:08 PM, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Sun, 01 Jan 2023 20:04:49 -0800) it happened
John Larkin <jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote in
mrl4rhhtkup3sn9t4an65r9buogjtk9er1@4ax.com>:


https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/18/electrical_engineers_extinction/?td=rt-9cp


I\'ve been thinking for some time now that EE schools don\'t turn out
people who like electricity, but maker culture might.


It\'s almost always been that way. Except in the last century it
was ham radio. I learned way more useful stuff that way that in
years at the university.

I think that electrical instincts should be acquired young. Then the
college courses add the theory. That\'s why the lego/maker/Raspberry
Pi thing is interesting.


I agree. As a young teenage hobbyist with little guidance, I went
through about four years of frustration at not being able to design my
own circuits. I\'d salvaged all these tubes and things from a couple of
old TVs that my folks were chucking out, but didn\'t really know how they
worked. (Transistors were too expensive, and IC prices were just moving
down from the stratosphere.)

That bottled-up frustration gave me a fire in the belly to figure it all
out, which eventually I mostly did. (Never got round to using anything
from that Motorola MNOS nonvolatile memory book they sent me, though.)

At IBM, I was occasionally asked to interview candidates, and one of the
things I always asked them was whether they had any hobby background in
electronics or physical science. Almost all the best designers I know
started out as hobbyists, which ISTM says more about the fire in the
belly than the expertise so acquired.

Now if you\'d just get off your duff and write that \"Electronics From
Scratch\" book you used to talk about, we might have a few more.

I\'ve been giving a few trial lectures. Leprechauns dressed like elves
hurling electrons between big bonze statues, things like that.

In the EE school I was in it was known that only \'hobbyists\'
would pass the final exams. The dropout in the first year was
very very very high.


At my university the drop-out rate (start to degree) was at times
83%.

Too many kids selected an EE degree based on some high school
counselor\'s advice, or dreams of a tidy income. Too late.

I dunno. Washing out of a hard program isn\'t the worst thing that can
happen to a young person. It\'s not nearly as bad as hanging on by the
skin of your teeth and then failing over a decade or so in the industry.

The old saying, \"C\'s get degrees\" has caused a lot of misery of that sort.

For the 30 or so in the first year, I was 1 of the 4 people at
the final graduation party in the local pub,

Granny\'s radio with 10 transistors? You mean those old radio
bulbs?

Give me some and I will build you a radio or TV (if you can find
an old CRT).


In the old days that also required a crate of beer and some Ouzo


[...]

Barbaric. Rum and Coke is the ideal balance. The rum numbs your
frontal cortex and the sugar and caffeine power up the better parts.

Gin and tonic for us recovering Commonwealth types, thanks. Lately I\'ve
been enjoying Inverroche Verdant from South Africa, with lots of ice and
a splash of Fever Tree tonic. Highly recommended.

Our sensors are differently calibrated.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

 

[John Larkin]

On Mon, 2 Jan 2023 20:57:05 -0500, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 2 Jan 2023 11:00:52 -0800, Joerg <news@analogconsultants.com
wrote:

On 1/1/23 11:08 PM, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Sun, 01 Jan 2023 20:04:49 -0800) it happened
John Larkin <jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote in
mrl4rhhtkup3sn9t4an65r9buogjtk9er1@4ax.com>:


https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/18/electrical_engineers_extinction/?td=rt-9cp


I\'ve been thinking for some time now that EE schools don\'t turn out
people who like electricity, but maker culture might.


It\'s almost always been that way. Except in the last century it
was ham radio. I learned way more useful stuff that way that in
years at the university.

I think that electrical instincts should be acquired young. Then the
college courses add the theory. That\'s why the lego/maker/Raspberry
Pi thing is interesting.


I agree. As a young teenage hobbyist with little guidance, I went
through about four years of frustration at not being able to design my
own circuits. I\'d salvaged all these tubes and things from a couple of
old TVs that my folks were chucking out, but didn\'t really know how they
worked. (Transistors were too expensive, and IC prices were just moving
down from the stratosphere.)

That bottled-up frustration gave me a fire in the belly to figure it all
out, which eventually I mostly did. (Never got round to using anything
from that Motorola MNOS nonvolatile memory book they sent me, though.)

At IBM, I was occasionally asked to interview candidates, and one of the
things I always asked them was whether they had any hobby background in
electronics or physical science. Almost all the best designers I know
started out as hobbyists, which ISTM says more about the fire in the
belly than the expertise so acquired.

Now if you\'d just get off your duff and write that \"Electronics From
Scratch\" book you used to talk about, we might have a few more.

I\'ve been giving a few trial lectures. Leprechauns dressed like elves
hurling electrons between big bonze statues, things like that.

In the EE school I was in it was known that only \'hobbyists\'
would pass the final exams. The dropout in the first year was
very very very high.


At my university the drop-out rate (start to degree) was at times
83%.

Too many kids selected an EE degree based on some high school
counselor\'s advice, or dreams of a tidy income. Too late.

I dunno. Washing out of a hard program isn\'t the worst thing that can
happen to a young person. It\'s not nearly as bad as hanging on by the
skin of your teeth and then failing over a decade or so in the industry.

The old saying, \"C\'s get degrees\" has caused a lot of misery of that sort.

For the 30 or so in the first year, I was 1 of the 4 people at
the final graduation party in the local pub,

Granny\'s radio with 10 transistors? You mean those old radio
bulbs?

Give me some and I will build you a radio or TV (if you can find
an old CRT).


In the old days that also required a crate of beer and some Ouzo


[...]

Barbaric. Rum and Coke is the ideal balance. The rum numbs your
frontal cortex and the sugar and caffeine power up the better parts.

Gin and tonic for us recovering Commonwealth types, thanks. Lately I\'ve
been enjoying Inverroche Verdant from South Africa, with lots of ice and
a splash of Fever Tree tonic. Highly recommended.

Our sensors are differently calibrated.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

 

[Phil Hobbs]

RichD wrote:

On January 1, John Larkin wrote:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/18/electrical_engineers_extinction/?td=rt-9cp
I\'ve been thinking for some time now that EE schools don\'t turn out
people who like electricity, but maker culture might.

I advise younguns against an engineering degree, it\'s over-specialized,
and obsolete in 5 years.

Only if you get sucked into spending all your time on the flavor of the
month. People who spend their time in school learning fundamental
things that are hard to master on your own (math, mostly) and then pick
up the other stuff as they go along don\'t get obsolete. That\'s not
difficult to do in your average EE program even today, AFAICT. Signals
and systems, electrodynamics, solid state theory, and a bit of quantum
are all good things to know.

Spending all your time in school programming in Javascript or VHDL or
memorizing compliance requirements is not a good career move for an EE.

I tell them to get a physics education. Study hard. Then you have the
tools to do anything you want.

Physicists turn up everywhere, it\'s true. Folks with bachelor\'s degrees
in physics can do most kinds of engineering, provided they\'re willing to
bone up on the specifics. Of course there are some who assume they know
everything and just bull ahead till they fail, but, well, human beings
are everyplace. Thing is, the basic professional qualification for a
physicist is a doctorate, whereas in engineering it\'s a BSEE.

> That is, first the academics, then the vocational training.

I agree that knowing the fundamentals cold is very important. However,
(a) physics isn\'t for everyone, by a long chalk; and (b) there\'s a
glorious intellectual heritage in engineering, so calling it \'vocational
training\' is pejorative.

Cheers

Phil \"Intermediate energy state\" Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

http://electrooptical.net
http://hobbs-eo.com

 

[Phil Hobbs]

RichD wrote:

On January 1, John Larkin wrote:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/18/electrical_engineers_extinction/?td=rt-9cp
I\'ve been thinking for some time now that EE schools don\'t turn out
people who like electricity, but maker culture might.

I advise younguns against an engineering degree, it\'s over-specialized,
and obsolete in 5 years.

Only if you get sucked into spending all your time on the flavor of the
month. People who spend their time in school learning fundamental
things that are hard to master on your own (math, mostly) and then pick
up the other stuff as they go along don\'t get obsolete. That\'s not
difficult to do in your average EE program even today, AFAICT. Signals
and systems, electrodynamics, solid state theory, and a bit of quantum
are all good things to know.

Spending all your time in school programming in Javascript or VHDL or
memorizing compliance requirements is not a good career move for an EE.

I tell them to get a physics education. Study hard. Then you have the
tools to do anything you want.

Physicists turn up everywhere, it\'s true. Folks with bachelor\'s degrees
in physics can do most kinds of engineering, provided they\'re willing to
bone up on the specifics. Of course there are some who assume they know
everything and just bull ahead till they fail, but, well, human beings
are everyplace. Thing is, the basic professional qualification for a
physicist is a doctorate, whereas in engineering it\'s a BSEE.

> That is, first the academics, then the vocational training.

I agree that knowing the fundamentals cold is very important. However,
(a) physics isn\'t for everyone, by a long chalk; and (b) there\'s a
glorious intellectual heritage in engineering, so calling it \'vocational
training\' is pejorative.

Cheers

Phil \"Intermediate energy state\" Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

http://electrooptical.net
http://hobbs-eo.com

 

[Phil Hobbs]

RichD wrote:

On January 1, John Larkin wrote:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/18/electrical_engineers_extinction/?td=rt-9cp
I\'ve been thinking for some time now that EE schools don\'t turn out
people who like electricity, but maker culture might.

I advise younguns against an engineering degree, it\'s over-specialized,
and obsolete in 5 years.

Only if you get sucked into spending all your time on the flavor of the
month. People who spend their time in school learning fundamental
things that are hard to master on your own (math, mostly) and then pick
up the other stuff as they go along don\'t get obsolete. That\'s not
difficult to do in your average EE program even today, AFAICT. Signals
and systems, electrodynamics, solid state theory, and a bit of quantum
are all good things to know.

Spending all your time in school programming in Javascript or VHDL or
memorizing compliance requirements is not a good career move for an EE.

I tell them to get a physics education. Study hard. Then you have the
tools to do anything you want.

Physicists turn up everywhere, it\'s true. Folks with bachelor\'s degrees
in physics can do most kinds of engineering, provided they\'re willing to
bone up on the specifics. Of course there are some who assume they know
everything and just bull ahead till they fail, but, well, human beings
are everyplace. Thing is, the basic professional qualification for a
physicist is a doctorate, whereas in engineering it\'s a BSEE.

> That is, first the academics, then the vocational training.

I agree that knowing the fundamentals cold is very important. However,
(a) physics isn\'t for everyone, by a long chalk; and (b) there\'s a
glorious intellectual heritage in engineering, so calling it \'vocational
training\' is pejorative.

Cheers

Phil \"Intermediate energy state\" Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

http://electrooptical.net
http://hobbs-eo.com

 

[Flyguy]

On Friday, December 30, 2022 at 12:42:17 AM UTC-8, bill....@ieee.org wrote:

On Friday, December 30, 2022 at 3:59:11 PM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Wednesday, December 28, 2022 at 11:47:28 PM UTC-8, bill....@ieee.org wrote:
On Thursday, December 29, 2022 at 6:04:37 PM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Tuesday, December 27, 2022 at 10:23:27 PM UTC-8, bill....@ieee.org wrote:
On Wednesday, December 28, 2022 at 9:34:21 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
Bill keeps claiming that Joe Biden HAS a grid modernization plan. Well, Bill IS right: Joe Biden DOES have a plan and here it is:
https://www.eenews.net/articles/more-more-more-bidens-clean-grid-hinges-on-power-lines/

Sewage Sweeper finally concedes the point.

Sorry Bozo, but I have ALREADY pointed this out - go check out my past posts, but you are too LAZY to do that.

It\'s not laziness. I just don\'t share your your enthusiasm for grubbing through sewage. You are great at claiming that what you posted meant what you want it to mean now, less good at being correct in your claims.

No, Bill, you are just too LAZY to do it.

This may be the explanation you like - it is more flattering to you than my rather more credible explanation - but it isn\'t plausible.
Unfortunately, the \"plan\" is only funded for $16B. Now, $16B SOUNDS like a lot, but it isn\'t when it comes to the US grid, which consists of 160,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines (https://www.generatorsource.com/US_power_grid.aspx#:~:text=The%20country\'s%20electric%20transmission%20grid,of%20high%2Dvoltage%20transmission%20lines.)

There\'s actually quite a lot more to it than that, but Sewage Sweeper does simplify stuff down to a level that he imagines that he understands (and doesn\'t).
He\'s great on mindless alarmism, but falls short on actual information.

I found what was in it; if you think there is some hidden pot of gold they FIND IT! That\'s a challenge which I doubt you will produce on.

Why bother? You are a fount of nonsense, and totally unwilling to admit that you get stuff wrong. Working out how you\'ve screwed up this time is a thankless and unrewarding task - you always get it wrong, so we can rely on you to have got it wrong again.

Wrong again, Bill, I produce the FACTS and you just bloviate your usual comment!

Not quite right. You recycle pro-Trump election propaganda, which has nothing to do with facts, and I point out that it is rubbish.

Hey Bozo, that is your STANDARD RETORT (which is TOTALLY FALSE) - why don\'t you bother to come up with some ACTUAL FACTS for a change?

Expanding this by 60+ percent will cost TRILLIONS, not billions.. Don\'t believe, then just listen to what the DOE (Dept. of Energy) says:

\"DOE invited suggestions this month on how to structure the shorter-term initiative. It will contract to purchase up to half the electricity on new power lines up to a total commitment of $2.5 billion, aiming to get previously announced projects across the starting line to construction.\"

“[T]he good and the bad is there’s only $2.5 billion in this program,” said Michelle Manary, acting deputy assistant secretary at DOE’s energy resilience division in the electricity office, speaking at a February webinar that also featured Granholm. “I wish I had a couple of other zeroes on there, because I could spend it, because transmission is expensive.”

As usual, Sewage Sweeper doesn\'t understand the information he is relying on. That $2.5 billion isn\'t to pay for the transmission lines, but for the power which will be transmitted across them, which is to establish the market, not to build the transmission lines.

The quotes I provided explain EXACTLY what their strategy is.

To your total satisfaction. You can always understand stuff to mean what you want it to mean, even when it doesn\'t.

You can\'t refute actual QUOTES by Joe Biden\'s own people, so you DODGE the facts! You might try explaining exactly WHAT they were saying.

To you? You know what you want to hear and mere facts won\'t distracdt you from that.

Again, produce REAL FACTS or shut the fuck up. Also, improve your SPELLING.

The bottom line is that the Feds have NOTHING to do with funding and building of actual transmission lines - they can only rely on indirect incentives.

Note that a \"couple of zeroes\" would make it $2,500 billion, or $2.5 TRILLION.

Which is more of Sewage Sweeper carrying on about numbers he doesn\'t understand.

I do, but you DON\'T!

You do like to think that.

I KNOW that! You are an electrical engineer WANNA BE - and you come up WOEFULLY SHORT!!
You are an anonymous troll who doesn\'t post in electronics related threads. I doubt if you know what an 1N829 is.
If there was an electrical engineer wanna be posting here, you\'d be the obvious candidate.

You wish - you ARE the WANNA BE EE.

If you think putting in high-voltage transmission lines is cheap, read this:

https://cdn.misoenergy.org/20190212%20PSC%20Item%2005a%20Transmission%20Cost%20Estimation%20Guide%20for%20MTEP%202019_for%20review317692.pdf

Which tells you how much they\'d cost per mile, but doesn\'t seem to make any kind of estimate of the of the miles of new line that might be required. Up-grading existing lines to carry more power is cheaper, but too complicated for Sewage Sweeper to get his head around.

Take 160,000 and multiply it by 0.6; that is the number of miles Joe Biden is talking about.

What 160,000? You do love your invented numbers.

So, Bill, HOW many miles of transmission lines do YOU think there are?????

What\'s that got to do with how many more there need to be? Bearing in mind that in many cases you will just have to up-grade existing transmission lines.

Again, you question the facts, but don\'t produce ANY of your own. Start at EIA.ORG.

and
https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/the-grid/pge-to-bury-transmission-lines-at-cost-of-2-million-per-mile/

Which tells you how expensive it is bury transmission lines, but doesn\'t tell you how many mile of line ought to be buried.

See above,

Sewage Sweeper expect us to take him seriously, while working tirelessly to remind us that this would be a very silly idea.

So says the IDIOT who advocates FIREBOMBING and NUKING his own damn country!

No, I don\'t expect a TOTAL IDIOT to take me seriously, Bil!

When in reality only a total idiot would. Sewage Sweeper does have some very silly ideas

DITTO!

--
Bozo Bill Sloman, Sydney

Bozo\'s Sewage Sweeper

 

[Flyguy]

On Friday, December 30, 2022 at 12:42:17 AM UTC-8, bill....@ieee.org wrote:

On Friday, December 30, 2022 at 3:59:11 PM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Wednesday, December 28, 2022 at 11:47:28 PM UTC-8, bill....@ieee.org wrote:
On Thursday, December 29, 2022 at 6:04:37 PM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Tuesday, December 27, 2022 at 10:23:27 PM UTC-8, bill....@ieee.org wrote:
On Wednesday, December 28, 2022 at 9:34:21 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
Bill keeps claiming that Joe Biden HAS a grid modernization plan. Well, Bill IS right: Joe Biden DOES have a plan and here it is:
https://www.eenews.net/articles/more-more-more-bidens-clean-grid-hinges-on-power-lines/

Sewage Sweeper finally concedes the point.

Sorry Bozo, but I have ALREADY pointed this out - go check out my past posts, but you are too LAZY to do that.

It\'s not laziness. I just don\'t share your your enthusiasm for grubbing through sewage. You are great at claiming that what you posted meant what you want it to mean now, less good at being correct in your claims.

No, Bill, you are just too LAZY to do it.

This may be the explanation you like - it is more flattering to you than my rather more credible explanation - but it isn\'t plausible.
Unfortunately, the \"plan\" is only funded for $16B. Now, $16B SOUNDS like a lot, but it isn\'t when it comes to the US grid, which consists of 160,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines (https://www.generatorsource.com/US_power_grid.aspx#:~:text=The%20country\'s%20electric%20transmission%20grid,of%20high%2Dvoltage%20transmission%20lines.)

There\'s actually quite a lot more to it than that, but Sewage Sweeper does simplify stuff down to a level that he imagines that he understands (and doesn\'t).
He\'s great on mindless alarmism, but falls short on actual information.

I found what was in it; if you think there is some hidden pot of gold they FIND IT! That\'s a challenge which I doubt you will produce on.

Why bother? You are a fount of nonsense, and totally unwilling to admit that you get stuff wrong. Working out how you\'ve screwed up this time is a thankless and unrewarding task - you always get it wrong, so we can rely on you to have got it wrong again.

Wrong again, Bill, I produce the FACTS and you just bloviate your usual comment!

Not quite right. You recycle pro-Trump election propaganda, which has nothing to do with facts, and I point out that it is rubbish.

Hey Bozo, that is your STANDARD RETORT (which is TOTALLY FALSE) - why don\'t you bother to come up with some ACTUAL FACTS for a change?

Expanding this by 60+ percent will cost TRILLIONS, not billions.. Don\'t believe, then just listen to what the DOE (Dept. of Energy) says:

\"DOE invited suggestions this month on how to structure the shorter-term initiative. It will contract to purchase up to half the electricity on new power lines up to a total commitment of $2.5 billion, aiming to get previously announced projects across the starting line to construction.\"

“[T]he good and the bad is there’s only $2.5 billion in this program,” said Michelle Manary, acting deputy assistant secretary at DOE’s energy resilience division in the electricity office, speaking at a February webinar that also featured Granholm. “I wish I had a couple of other zeroes on there, because I could spend it, because transmission is expensive.”

As usual, Sewage Sweeper doesn\'t understand the information he is relying on. That $2.5 billion isn\'t to pay for the transmission lines, but for the power which will be transmitted across them, which is to establish the market, not to build the transmission lines.

The quotes I provided explain EXACTLY what their strategy is.

To your total satisfaction. You can always understand stuff to mean what you want it to mean, even when it doesn\'t.

You can\'t refute actual QUOTES by Joe Biden\'s own people, so you DODGE the facts! You might try explaining exactly WHAT they were saying.

To you? You know what you want to hear and mere facts won\'t distracdt you from that.

Again, produce REAL FACTS or shut the fuck up. Also, improve your SPELLING.

The bottom line is that the Feds have NOTHING to do with funding and building of actual transmission lines - they can only rely on indirect incentives.

Note that a \"couple of zeroes\" would make it $2,500 billion, or $2.5 TRILLION.

Which is more of Sewage Sweeper carrying on about numbers he doesn\'t understand.

I do, but you DON\'T!

You do like to think that.

I KNOW that! You are an electrical engineer WANNA BE - and you come up WOEFULLY SHORT!!
You are an anonymous troll who doesn\'t post in electronics related threads. I doubt if you know what an 1N829 is.
If there was an electrical engineer wanna be posting here, you\'d be the obvious candidate.

You wish - you ARE the WANNA BE EE.

If you think putting in high-voltage transmission lines is cheap, read this:

https://cdn.misoenergy.org/20190212%20PSC%20Item%2005a%20Transmission%20Cost%20Estimation%20Guide%20for%20MTEP%202019_for%20review317692.pdf

Which tells you how much they\'d cost per mile, but doesn\'t seem to make any kind of estimate of the of the miles of new line that might be required. Up-grading existing lines to carry more power is cheaper, but too complicated for Sewage Sweeper to get his head around.

Take 160,000 and multiply it by 0.6; that is the number of miles Joe Biden is talking about.

What 160,000? You do love your invented numbers.

So, Bill, HOW many miles of transmission lines do YOU think there are?????

What\'s that got to do with how many more there need to be? Bearing in mind that in many cases you will just have to up-grade existing transmission lines.

Again, you question the facts, but don\'t produce ANY of your own. Start at EIA.ORG.

and
https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/the-grid/pge-to-bury-transmission-lines-at-cost-of-2-million-per-mile/

Which tells you how expensive it is bury transmission lines, but doesn\'t tell you how many mile of line ought to be buried.

See above,

Sewage Sweeper expect us to take him seriously, while working tirelessly to remind us that this would be a very silly idea.

So says the IDIOT who advocates FIREBOMBING and NUKING his own damn country!

No, I don\'t expect a TOTAL IDIOT to take me seriously, Bil!

When in reality only a total idiot would. Sewage Sweeper does have some very silly ideas

DITTO!

--
Bozo Bill Sloman, Sydney

Bozo\'s Sewage Sweeper

 

[Flyguy]

On Friday, December 30, 2022 at 12:42:17 AM UTC-8, bill....@ieee.org wrote:

On Friday, December 30, 2022 at 3:59:11 PM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Wednesday, December 28, 2022 at 11:47:28 PM UTC-8, bill....@ieee.org wrote:
On Thursday, December 29, 2022 at 6:04:37 PM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Tuesday, December 27, 2022 at 10:23:27 PM UTC-8, bill....@ieee.org wrote:
On Wednesday, December 28, 2022 at 9:34:21 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
Bill keeps claiming that Joe Biden HAS a grid modernization plan. Well, Bill IS right: Joe Biden DOES have a plan and here it is:
https://www.eenews.net/articles/more-more-more-bidens-clean-grid-hinges-on-power-lines/

Sewage Sweeper finally concedes the point.

Sorry Bozo, but I have ALREADY pointed this out - go check out my past posts, but you are too LAZY to do that.

It\'s not laziness. I just don\'t share your your enthusiasm for grubbing through sewage. You are great at claiming that what you posted meant what you want it to mean now, less good at being correct in your claims.

No, Bill, you are just too LAZY to do it.

This may be the explanation you like - it is more flattering to you than my rather more credible explanation - but it isn\'t plausible.
Unfortunately, the \"plan\" is only funded for $16B. Now, $16B SOUNDS like a lot, but it isn\'t when it comes to the US grid, which consists of 160,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines (https://www.generatorsource.com/US_power_grid.aspx#:~:text=The%20country\'s%20electric%20transmission%20grid,of%20high%2Dvoltage%20transmission%20lines.)

There\'s actually quite a lot more to it than that, but Sewage Sweeper does simplify stuff down to a level that he imagines that he understands (and doesn\'t).
He\'s great on mindless alarmism, but falls short on actual information.

I found what was in it; if you think there is some hidden pot of gold they FIND IT! That\'s a challenge which I doubt you will produce on.

Why bother? You are a fount of nonsense, and totally unwilling to admit that you get stuff wrong. Working out how you\'ve screwed up this time is a thankless and unrewarding task - you always get it wrong, so we can rely on you to have got it wrong again.

Wrong again, Bill, I produce the FACTS and you just bloviate your usual comment!

Not quite right. You recycle pro-Trump election propaganda, which has nothing to do with facts, and I point out that it is rubbish.

Hey Bozo, that is your STANDARD RETORT (which is TOTALLY FALSE) - why don\'t you bother to come up with some ACTUAL FACTS for a change?

Expanding this by 60+ percent will cost TRILLIONS, not billions.. Don\'t believe, then just listen to what the DOE (Dept. of Energy) says:

\"DOE invited suggestions this month on how to structure the shorter-term initiative. It will contract to purchase up to half the electricity on new power lines up to a total commitment of $2.5 billion, aiming to get previously announced projects across the starting line to construction.\"

“[T]he good and the bad is there’s only $2.5 billion in this program,” said Michelle Manary, acting deputy assistant secretary at DOE’s energy resilience division in the electricity office, speaking at a February webinar that also featured Granholm. “I wish I had a couple of other zeroes on there, because I could spend it, because transmission is expensive.”

As usual, Sewage Sweeper doesn\'t understand the information he is relying on. That $2.5 billion isn\'t to pay for the transmission lines, but for the power which will be transmitted across them, which is to establish the market, not to build the transmission lines.

The quotes I provided explain EXACTLY what their strategy is.

To your total satisfaction. You can always understand stuff to mean what you want it to mean, even when it doesn\'t.

You can\'t refute actual QUOTES by Joe Biden\'s own people, so you DODGE the facts! You might try explaining exactly WHAT they were saying.

To you? You know what you want to hear and mere facts won\'t distracdt you from that.

Again, produce REAL FACTS or shut the fuck up. Also, improve your SPELLING.

The bottom line is that the Feds have NOTHING to do with funding and building of actual transmission lines - they can only rely on indirect incentives.

Note that a \"couple of zeroes\" would make it $2,500 billion, or $2.5 TRILLION.

Which is more of Sewage Sweeper carrying on about numbers he doesn\'t understand.

I do, but you DON\'T!

You do like to think that.

I KNOW that! You are an electrical engineer WANNA BE - and you come up WOEFULLY SHORT!!
You are an anonymous troll who doesn\'t post in electronics related threads. I doubt if you know what an 1N829 is.
If there was an electrical engineer wanna be posting here, you\'d be the obvious candidate.

You wish - you ARE the WANNA BE EE.

If you think putting in high-voltage transmission lines is cheap, read this:

https://cdn.misoenergy.org/20190212%20PSC%20Item%2005a%20Transmission%20Cost%20Estimation%20Guide%20for%20MTEP%202019_for%20review317692.pdf

Which tells you how much they\'d cost per mile, but doesn\'t seem to make any kind of estimate of the of the miles of new line that might be required. Up-grading existing lines to carry more power is cheaper, but too complicated for Sewage Sweeper to get his head around.

Take 160,000 and multiply it by 0.6; that is the number of miles Joe Biden is talking about.

What 160,000? You do love your invented numbers.

So, Bill, HOW many miles of transmission lines do YOU think there are?????

What\'s that got to do with how many more there need to be? Bearing in mind that in many cases you will just have to up-grade existing transmission lines.

Again, you question the facts, but don\'t produce ANY of your own. Start at EIA.ORG.

and
https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/the-grid/pge-to-bury-transmission-lines-at-cost-of-2-million-per-mile/

Which tells you how expensive it is bury transmission lines, but doesn\'t tell you how many mile of line ought to be buried.

See above,

Sewage Sweeper expect us to take him seriously, while working tirelessly to remind us that this would be a very silly idea.

So says the IDIOT who advocates FIREBOMBING and NUKING his own damn country!

No, I don\'t expect a TOTAL IDIOT to take me seriously, Bil!

When in reality only a total idiot would. Sewage Sweeper does have some very silly ideas

DITTO!

--
Bozo Bill Sloman, Sydney

Bozo\'s Sewage Sweeper

 

[Phil Hobbs]

Joerg wrote:

On 1/2/23 5:57 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 2 Jan 2023 11:00:52 -0800, Joerg <news@analogconsultants.com
wrote:

On 1/1/23 11:08 PM, Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Sun, 01 Jan 2023 20:04:49 -0800) it happened
John Larkin <jlarkin@highlandSNIPMEtechnology.com> wrote in
mrl4rhhtkup3sn9t4an65r9buogjtk9er1@4ax.com>:


https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/18/electrical_engineers_extinction/?td=rt-9cp



 >>>> I\'ve been thinking for some time now that EE schools don\'t
turn out
people who like electricity, but maker culture might.


It\'s almost always been that way. Except in the last century it
was ham radio. I learned way more useful stuff that way that in
years at the university.

I think that electrical instincts should be acquired young. Then the
 college courses add the theory. That\'s why the lego/maker/Raspberry
Pi thing is interesting.


I agree.  As a young teenage hobbyist with little guidance, I went
through about four years of frustration at not being able to design my
own circuits.  I\'d salvaged all these tubes and things from a couple of
old TVs that my folks were chucking out, but didn\'t really know how they
worked.  (Transistors were too expensive, and IC prices were just moving
down from the stratosphere.)

That bottled-up frustration gave me a fire in the belly to figure it all
out, which eventually I mostly did.  (Never got round to using anything
from that Motorola MNOS nonvolatile memory book they sent me, though.)


I started building my own stuff very early on. PRoblem was, I took what
I had learned in physics class literally. Well, initially. Like that
capacitors are ideal components. Until one fine day the fluorescent
lights in my room dimmed and I new they weren\'t dimmable. What the heck?
Huh? ... *POP* .. WHOOOSH  ... hisssss

That was one of the electrolytics that had turned itself into a missile
and whizzed by inches from my left eye. Whew! I learned about ESR the
hard way. It took some plaster out of the ceiling and after return to
earth melted an ugly splotch into the carpet.


At IBM, I was occasionally asked to interview candidates, and one of
the things I always asked them was whether they had any hobby
background in electronics or physical science. ...


Bingo! Exactly what I did.


                         ... Almost all the best designers I know
started out as hobbyists, which ISTM says more about the fire in the
belly than the expertise so acquired.

Now if you\'d just get off your duff and write that \"Electronics From
Scratch\" book you used to talk about, we might have a few more.

In the EE school I was in it was known that only \'hobbyists\' would
pass the final exams. The dropout in the first year was very very
very high.


At my university the drop-out rate (start to degree) was at times 83%.

Too many kids selected an EE degree based on some high school
counselor\'s advice, or dreams of a tidy income. Too late.

I dunno.  Washing out of a hard program isn\'t the worst thing that can
happen to a young person.  It\'s not nearly as bad as hanging on by the
skin of your teeth and then failing over a decade or so in the industry.

The old saying, \"C\'s get degrees\" has caused a lot of misery of that
sort.


I had pretty bad grades because I worked a lot on the side, did
\"pre-degree consulting\" and stuff like that. Bad grades are ok.

In an honest system, bad grades mean that the student either didn\'t do
the work, or was unable or unwilling to do it well. There can be lots
of reasons for that, such as being unavoidably too busy, but that\'s not
the usual case.

The result is wasted time and money, and usually a skill set that\'s full
of holes and harder to build on later. It sounds like you were sort of
making up your own enrichment curriculum as you went on, which is a bit
different, of course.

I knew some very smart folks whose grades were poor, but they were
mostly unmotivated or undisciplined. One guy (a math genius) was in my
grad school study group for awhile, but was way too handsome for his own
good--he spent his time playing soccer and chasing women, and tried to
skate by on talent as he\'d always done. Eventually it stopped working.
If you go far enough, it always does.

That\'s the real benefit of weed-out courses--not that many people flunk,
but that the ones who succeed have to learn to learn mental discipline
in the process. That\'ll stand you in good stead for a lifetime.
(Flunking isn\'t the worst thing that can happen to you. I got fired from
my first job, which was very beneficial overall.)

Students sometimes ask me for advice, and I always tell them three
things: first, in every field, make sure you have the fundamentals down
cold; second, concentrate your course work on things that are hard to
pick up on your own, especially math; and third, join a research group
where you can do a lot of stuff on your own. (The ideal is to have an
interesting smallish project, where you have to do everything, and a
bunch of smart and supportive colleagues.)

That\'s the most direct path to wizardhood that I know about.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs


--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

http://electrooptical.net
http://hobbs-eo.com