Math and electrical desgin

[Phil Hobbs]

On 2020-03-28 16:26, blocher@columbus.rr.com wrote:

On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 3:55:53 PM UTC-4, George Herold
wrote:
On Friday, March 27, 2020 at 3:29:36 PM UTC-4,
blo...@columbus.rr.com wrote:
A topic to elicit some thoughts....

How important is mathematics to you as an engineer? Do you
consider yourself an applied mathematician? I would say that I
do. As an analog designer how much do you use various
mathematical concepts. Basic electronic circuit design does not
seem to require a lot of theoretical math, where as, signal
processing requires a lot of math.

I have been working , on and off, to really try to understand
linear algebra. I am on my 3rd pass ( of the first 10 lectures)
of Gilbert Strangs on-line MIT course. I think I am finally
getting it. I really want to know linear algebra because I want
to be good at matlab which is rooted in linear algebra. However,
is linear algebra used in circuit design other than an occasional
solving of two or three simultaneous equations?
Linear algebra, as in matrix manipulation? V=I*R is linear algebra.
:^) Is the online course from a math prof.?

This online course is from Gilbert Strang, who I think I can say, is
considered one of the world experts in fundamental Linear Algebra.

The thing that is tough about linear algebra is that there are not a
lot of applications that continually reinforce your expertise on the
subject. We use simple algebra all the time. It gets constantly
reinforced. With linear algebra, you learn the various concepts ,
which are quite difficult - or at least hard to sort it all out, and
then it does not seem like there a lot of applications for the --get
er done - type of engineer. I am convinced though, that mastery of
the subject will allow new insights into different problems.

The connection between eigenvectors and normal modes is a key one.
Learning it in linear algebra first is a huge help in learning PDEs.

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

 

[Phil Hobbs]

On 2020-03-29 16:45, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 16:04:58 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 2020-03-29 15:34, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 15:09:08 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 2020-03-29 11:26, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 08:47:23 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 2020-03-29 07:59, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno@decadence.org wrote:
Phil Hobbs <pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote in
news:fd467d02-06d6-78e5-bd05-d420a9f8948f@electrooptical.net:

On 2020-03-28 23:12, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno@decadence.org
wrote:
George Herold <ggherold@gmail.com> wrote in
news:494f975a-54da-46d1-bdfb-9eaeb783919b@googlegroups.com:

Designing something cool with a few smart people at a whiteboard
is the

most fun you can have standing up.
Amen,
George H.

Barefoot water skiing.

Running off a whole rack at pool.


You've apparently never done it.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs


Going over my design ideas with supportive co-engineers is one
thing. Having one or more unable to see what you've come up with
'providing' stupid input is entirely another, and therefore is not a
favorite thing to do. I'll design it, they'll do their pieces. No
need for a white board discussion, just a white board project
declaration, and any issues they have can be brought up while they
are doing their assigned part.

Which is not what I was referring to, at all, and sounds boring, I agree.

Collaborative design at a whiteboard may go something like this example
of a phase-sensitive laser microscope. Somebody says, "How about using
a heterodyne interferometer with an acousto-optic cell and a Wollaston
prism to recombine the beams? That way we can make the whole thing
common-path so we can use normal galvo scanning." (A real example from
long ago--an English guy improving on an idea of mine.)

Then everybody chimes in with questions such as the following.

"You'll need at least a milliwatt of laser power to get to the shot
noise in that bandwidth. That's about 200 kilowatts per square
centimetre--will your sample stand that?" (Leading to a discussion about
3-D heat conduction in solids.)

"The topological phase shift in the galvo scanner will screw up the beam
recombination in the return path, won't it?" (This is a real issue that
constrains the scan range.)

This isn't rock-throwing at all--everybody wants the thing to work, and
ideally they're all friends. After half an hour or so, everybody has a
much better idea of whether the scheme can be made to work, and the
final version probably doesn't look much like the initial proposal.

It's better if there are two or three schemes being discussed, along
with lots of ideas for improvements. You also need a few harebrained
notions tossed in. (*)

It only works if nobody minds having their pet ideas demolished, because
that's definitely going to happen. Personally I'm very glad when it
happens to me, because it may save a lot of wasted work. I have lots of
ideas, so I'm not at all attached to the bad ones.

You've apparently moved toward the Larkin attitude of presumimg
things which you know no facts regarding as it relates to me. That
is a character and integrity hit you do not want. But you live as
you like.


Not intending to be insulting at all, but as your first paragraph
suggests, you've probably never done what I'm attempting to describe.
(Or perhaps I just didn't describe it well enough initially.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

(*) The use of helicopter propwash to knock ice off high-tension wires
allegedly came out of a discussion like that.

We did a brainstorm session once, with DR, about reflections off a
liquid metal sphere. That was wonderful. You and DR did, in about 20
minutes, astounding math. My function was just to make a lot of random
noise that could be filtered.

Pretty good quality noise, that.

I have a really big bag of tricks for doing those sorts of calculations,
mostly consisting of amusing facts, such as that in the ray model, a
shiny sphere scatters parallel light exactly equally into 4 pi
steradians, and that the scattering cross section is twice its projected
area.

No, that's impossible. It defies all common sense.

That's why it's an amusing fact, and therefore memorable. The law of
reflection tells you that tipping a mirror by an angle theta steers the
beam by 2*theta, so going from the centre to the edge, the reflected
angle rotates through 180 degrees. So you do illuminate all 4 pi
steradians. The growth of the circumference with radius is exactly
balanced out by the obliquity of the surface and the solid angle vs.
deflection, so the illumination is uniform.

You showed me that some years ago, when we did the liquid metal thing.
But it's still boggling. What happens exactly behind the sphere? Light
spot? Dark spot? Edge diffraction? Limiting case.

There's a shadow, but in scattering theory you compute the distribution
at infinity, where the shadow is infinitesimal. In wave optics things
are different--you get diffraction rings and Poisson's spot.

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

 

On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 15:09:08 -0400, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 2020-03-29 11:26, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 08:47:23 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 2020-03-29 07:59, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno@decadence.org wrote:
Phil Hobbs <pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote in
news:fd467d02-06d6-78e5-bd05-d420a9f8948f@electrooptical.net:

On 2020-03-28 23:12, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno@decadence.org
wrote:
George Herold <ggherold@gmail.com> wrote in
news:494f975a-54da-46d1-bdfb-9eaeb783919b@googlegroups.com:

Designing something cool with a few smart people at a whiteboard
is the

most fun you can have standing up.
Amen,
George H.

Barefoot water skiing.

Running off a whole rack at pool.


You've apparently never done it.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs


Going over my design ideas with supportive co-engineers is one
thing. Having one or more unable to see what you've come up with
'providing' stupid input is entirely another, and therefore is not a
favorite thing to do. I'll design it, they'll do their pieces. No
need for a white board discussion, just a white board project
declaration, and any issues they have can be brought up while they
are doing their assigned part.

Which is not what I was referring to, at all, and sounds boring, I agree.

Collaborative design at a whiteboard may go something like this example
of a phase-sensitive laser microscope. Somebody says, "How about using
a heterodyne interferometer with an acousto-optic cell and a Wollaston
prism to recombine the beams? That way we can make the whole thing
common-path so we can use normal galvo scanning." (A real example from
long ago--an English guy improving on an idea of mine.)

Then everybody chimes in with questions such as the following.

"You'll need at least a milliwatt of laser power to get to the shot
noise in that bandwidth. That's about 200 kilowatts per square
centimetre--will your sample stand that?" (Leading to a discussion about
3-D heat conduction in solids.)

"The topological phase shift in the galvo scanner will screw up the beam
recombination in the return path, won't it?" (This is a real issue that
constrains the scan range.)

This isn't rock-throwing at all--everybody wants the thing to work, and
ideally they're all friends. After half an hour or so, everybody has a
much better idea of whether the scheme can be made to work, and the
final version probably doesn't look much like the initial proposal.

It's better if there are two or three schemes being discussed, along
with lots of ideas for improvements. You also need a few harebrained
notions tossed in. (*)

It only works if nobody minds having their pet ideas demolished, because
that's definitely going to happen. Personally I'm very glad when it
happens to me, because it may save a lot of wasted work. I have lots of
ideas, so I'm not at all attached to the bad ones.

You've apparently moved toward the Larkin attitude of presumimg
things which you know no facts regarding as it relates to me. That
is a character and integrity hit you do not want. But you live as
you like.


Not intending to be insulting at all, but as your first paragraph
suggests, you've probably never done what I'm attempting to describe.
(Or perhaps I just didn't describe it well enough initially.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

(*) The use of helicopter propwash to knock ice off high-tension wires
allegedly came out of a discussion like that.

We did a brainstorm session once, with DR, about reflections off a
liquid metal sphere. That was wonderful. You and DR did, in about 20
minutes, astounding math. My function was just to make a lot of random
noise that could be filtered.

Pretty good quality noise, that.

I have a really big bag of tricks for doing those sorts of calculations,
mostly consisting of amusing facts, such as that in the ray model, a
shiny sphere scatters parallel light exactly equally into 4 pi
steradians, and that the scattering cross section is twice its projected
area. (This is easy to show for a plane obstruction--the hole it
punches into the plane wave scatters just like the obstruction, except
180 degrees out of phase. Add them back together and you get the
original beam.)

That's how I do photon budgets for instruments all the time, but it's
way more fun doing it live.

How's DR doing? Have they started paying him what he's worth?


Old cars, like MGs, and old Honda motorcycles, had carburetors that
obviously couldn't work. There was way too much static friction for a
little bit of differential air pressure to move the needle valve. But
there was a lot of engine vibration too.

There's a recent physics coinage for that: "stochastic resonance". Like
that famous remark of Voltaire's about the Holy Roman Empire, of course
stochastic resonance is neither stochastic nor resonance.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Sounds like a fancy name for dithering. I used to do that to make a
really bad 6-bit ADC do street-legal electrical metering. I used a
triangle instead of noise; that has some virtues.



--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

Science teaches us to doubt.

Claude Bernard

 

On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 16:04:58 -0400, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 2020-03-29 15:34, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 15:09:08 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 2020-03-29 11:26, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 08:47:23 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 2020-03-29 07:59, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno@decadence.org wrote:
Phil Hobbs <pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote in
news:fd467d02-06d6-78e5-bd05-d420a9f8948f@electrooptical.net:

On 2020-03-28 23:12, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno@decadence.org
wrote:
George Herold <ggherold@gmail.com> wrote in
news:494f975a-54da-46d1-bdfb-9eaeb783919b@googlegroups.com:

Designing something cool with a few smart people at a whiteboard
is the

most fun you can have standing up.
Amen,
George H.

Barefoot water skiing.

Running off a whole rack at pool.


You've apparently never done it.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs


Going over my design ideas with supportive co-engineers is one
thing. Having one or more unable to see what you've come up with
'providing' stupid input is entirely another, and therefore is not a
favorite thing to do. I'll design it, they'll do their pieces. No
need for a white board discussion, just a white board project
declaration, and any issues they have can be brought up while they
are doing their assigned part.

Which is not what I was referring to, at all, and sounds boring, I agree.

Collaborative design at a whiteboard may go something like this example
of a phase-sensitive laser microscope. Somebody says, "How about using
a heterodyne interferometer with an acousto-optic cell and a Wollaston
prism to recombine the beams? That way we can make the whole thing
common-path so we can use normal galvo scanning." (A real example from
long ago--an English guy improving on an idea of mine.)

Then everybody chimes in with questions such as the following.

"You'll need at least a milliwatt of laser power to get to the shot
noise in that bandwidth. That's about 200 kilowatts per square
centimetre--will your sample stand that?" (Leading to a discussion about
3-D heat conduction in solids.)

"The topological phase shift in the galvo scanner will screw up the beam
recombination in the return path, won't it?" (This is a real issue that
constrains the scan range.)

This isn't rock-throwing at all--everybody wants the thing to work, and
ideally they're all friends. After half an hour or so, everybody has a
much better idea of whether the scheme can be made to work, and the
final version probably doesn't look much like the initial proposal.

It's better if there are two or three schemes being discussed, along
with lots of ideas for improvements. You also need a few harebrained
notions tossed in. (*)

It only works if nobody minds having their pet ideas demolished, because
that's definitely going to happen. Personally I'm very glad when it
happens to me, because it may save a lot of wasted work. I have lots of
ideas, so I'm not at all attached to the bad ones.

You've apparently moved toward the Larkin attitude of presumimg
things which you know no facts regarding as it relates to me. That
is a character and integrity hit you do not want. But you live as
you like.


Not intending to be insulting at all, but as your first paragraph
suggests, you've probably never done what I'm attempting to describe.
(Or perhaps I just didn't describe it well enough initially.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

(*) The use of helicopter propwash to knock ice off high-tension wires
allegedly came out of a discussion like that.

We did a brainstorm session once, with DR, about reflections off a
liquid metal sphere. That was wonderful. You and DR did, in about 20
minutes, astounding math. My function was just to make a lot of random
noise that could be filtered.

Pretty good quality noise, that.

I have a really big bag of tricks for doing those sorts of calculations,
mostly consisting of amusing facts, such as that in the ray model, a
shiny sphere scatters parallel light exactly equally into 4 pi
steradians, and that the scattering cross section is twice its projected
area.

No, that's impossible. It defies all common sense.

That's why it's an amusing fact, and therefore memorable. The law of
reflection tells you that tipping a mirror by an angle theta steers the
beam by 2*theta, so going from the centre to the edge, the reflected
angle rotates through 180 degrees. So you do illuminate all 4 pi
steradians. The growth of the circumference with radius is exactly
balanced out by the obliquity of the surface and the solid angle vs.
deflection, so the illumination is uniform.

You showed me that some years ago, when we did the liquid metal thing.
But it's still boggling. What happens exactly behind the sphere? Light
spot? Dark spot? Edge diffraction? Limiting case.



--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

Science teaches us to doubt.

Claude Bernard

 

On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 12:42:10 -0700 (PDT), Lasse Langwadt Christensen
<langwadt@fonz.dk> wrote:

sřndag den 29. marts 2020 kl. 21.14.13 UTC+2 skrev Joerg:
On 2020-03-29 02:54, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 29/03/20 04:31, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 00:55:47 +0000, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 28/03/20 22:48, Phil Hobbs wrote:
Instinct is super useful for generating ideas. We come up with some
scheme by
instinct, but then test it by math. The math involved is super
familiar--what's
the noise floor, the bandwidth, the settling time, and so on. It's the
familiarity that makes that seem like it's the same as design
instinct, but it
isn't.

Very true, IMNSHO.

Practice without theory is blind fumbling.

It built aqueducts, ships, roads, cathedrals, all sorts of stuff.

Er, no.

Wells cathedral is near me. There are strange additions
that became necessary because it rapidly started falling
down.


Check out some of the Roman structures in Germany. I lived there and
participated in events in some. Amazing. 1500+ years old, rock-solid,
where "modern" buildings are generally gone in less than 200 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias#In_architecture_and_construction

Most buildings in the past were disgusting hovels and fire traps.



--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

Science teaches us to doubt.

Claude Bernard

 

[Phil Hobbs]

On 2020-03-29 18:35, Joerg wrote:

On 2020-03-29 12:53, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 2020-03-29 15:24, Joerg wrote:
On 2020-03-29 09:17, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 29/03/20 16:36, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 07:39:16 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 2020-03-28 23:31, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 00:55:47 +0000, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 28/03/20 22:48, Phil Hobbs wrote:
Instinct is super useful for generating ideas.  We come up with
some scheme by
instinct, but then test it by math.  The math involved is super
familiar--what's
the noise floor, the bandwidth, the settling time, and so on.
It's the
familiarity that makes that seem like it's the same as design
instinct, but it
isn't.

Very true, IMNSHO.

Practice without theory is blind fumbling.

It built aqueducts, ships, roads, cathedrals, all sorts of stuff.

Not by fiddling, though--experience accumulates.  Even a pyramid will
fall down if you build it too steep.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meidum_Pyramid

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Sure, fiddling evolved and techniques were passed down and evolved.
But as long as we don't already know everything, some occasional
fiddling can discover stuff.

It is often said that the most exciting sound in science
isn't "eureka", but is "that's strange".


Or "Shazam!"

An example was a weird EMI case.

"The processor hangs it up once in a while, mostly every few seconds,
but never if we close the blinds on the windows. We can't understand
how this can have anything to do with daylight."

"Hey, what's that thing there in the distance, on the mountain top,
that glistens every few seconds?"

"That? Well, that's just a military radar .. oh, OH! DANG!"

(the blinds were aluminum)

[...]

Speaking of fiddling, when I was a postdoc, a good friend named David
Abraham came into my lab to ask me to make him a notch filter to knock
down the 30-kHz resonance of the piezo tube in his tunnelling microscope.

As a first try, I pulled out a largish Pulse Engineering transformer
from my drawer, put a 100 nF monocap across each side, and (iirc) wired
the windings in series.  (I might have used just one side, but
definitely resonated both.)

Then I stuck it between a sweep generator and an HP diode detector,
connected to a scope synced to the sweep.  (The normal scalar network
analyzer setup.)  It displayed a beautiful two-peaked notch response
centred exactly at 30 kHz, with a Q of about 20.

So I smiled sweetly, handed it to him, and refused to tell him how I did
that.  Poor guy, I never did tell him that it was a total fluke.


That probably made you the hero of the day because you fixed a nasty
problem.

I dined out on the reputation that got me for some time.

In Germany they have the saying "The purpose blesses the means [to get
there]". My dad used that a lot when I did something because there was a
lot of McGyver style involved.

There's a story told about Roy Cohn. He was giving a speech at a
convention for magicians. At the end of the speech, he asked somebody
to shuffle a deck of cards, and announced that he would pull out the
jack of diamonds. He cut the deck, and some other card came up.

A friend asked him later, "Why did you do that, Roy?" Cohn replied, "I
had one chance in 52 of becoming a legend among magicians."

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

 

[Joerg]

On 2020-03-29 12:53, Phil Hobbs wrote:

On 2020-03-29 15:24, Joerg wrote:
On 2020-03-29 09:17, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 29/03/20 16:36, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 07:39:16 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 2020-03-28 23:31, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 00:55:47 +0000, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 28/03/20 22:48, Phil Hobbs wrote:
Instinct is super useful for generating ideas. We come up with
some scheme by
instinct, but then test it by math. The math involved is super
familiar--what's
the noise floor, the bandwidth, the settling time, and so on.
It's the
familiarity that makes that seem like it's the same as design
instinct, but it
isn't.

Very true, IMNSHO.

Practice without theory is blind fumbling.

It built aqueducts, ships, roads, cathedrals, all sorts of stuff.

Not by fiddling, though--experience accumulates. Even a pyramid will
fall down if you build it too steep.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meidum_Pyramid

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Sure, fiddling evolved and techniques were passed down and evolved.
But as long as we don't already know everything, some occasional
fiddling can discover stuff.

It is often said that the most exciting sound in science
isn't "eureka", but is "that's strange".


Or "Shazam!"

An example was a weird EMI case.

"The processor hangs it up once in a while, mostly every few seconds,
but never if we close the blinds on the windows. We can't understand
how this can have anything to do with daylight."

"Hey, what's that thing there in the distance, on the mountain top,
that glistens every few seconds?"

"That? Well, that's just a military radar .. oh, OH! DANG!"

(the blinds were aluminum)

[...]

Speaking of fiddling, when I was a postdoc, a good friend named David
Abraham came into my lab to ask me to make him a notch filter to knock
down the 30-kHz resonance of the piezo tube in his tunnelling microscope.

As a first try, I pulled out a largish Pulse Engineering transformer
from my drawer, put a 100 nF monocap across each side, and (iirc) wired
the windings in series. (I might have used just one side, but
definitely resonated both.)

Then I stuck it between a sweep generator and an HP diode detector,
connected to a scope synced to the sweep. (The normal scalar network
analyzer setup.) It displayed a beautiful two-peaked notch response
centred exactly at 30 kHz, with a Q of about 20.

So I smiled sweetly, handed it to him, and refused to tell him how I did
that. Poor guy, I never did tell him that it was a total fluke.

That probably made you the hero of the day because you fixed a nasty
problem.

In Germany they have the saying "The purpose blesses the means [to get
there]". My dad used that a lot when I did something because there was a
lot of McGyver style involved.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

 

On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 17:58:26 -0400, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 2020-03-29 17:16, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 15:09:08 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 2020-03-29 11:26, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 08:47:23 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 2020-03-29 07:59, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno@decadence.org wrote:
Phil Hobbs <pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote in
news:fd467d02-06d6-78e5-bd05-d420a9f8948f@electrooptical.net:

On 2020-03-28 23:12, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno@decadence.org
wrote:
George Herold <ggherold@gmail.com> wrote in
news:494f975a-54da-46d1-bdfb-9eaeb783919b@googlegroups.com:

Designing something cool with a few smart people at a whiteboard
is the

most fun you can have standing up.
Amen,
George H.

Barefoot water skiing.

Running off a whole rack at pool.


You've apparently never done it.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs


Going over my design ideas with supportive co-engineers is one
thing. Having one or more unable to see what you've come up with
'providing' stupid input is entirely another, and therefore is not a
favorite thing to do. I'll design it, they'll do their pieces. No
need for a white board discussion, just a white board project
declaration, and any issues they have can be brought up while they
are doing their assigned part.

Which is not what I was referring to, at all, and sounds boring, I agree.

Collaborative design at a whiteboard may go something like this example
of a phase-sensitive laser microscope. Somebody says, "How about using
a heterodyne interferometer with an acousto-optic cell and a Wollaston
prism to recombine the beams? That way we can make the whole thing
common-path so we can use normal galvo scanning." (A real example from
long ago--an English guy improving on an idea of mine.)

Then everybody chimes in with questions such as the following.

"You'll need at least a milliwatt of laser power to get to the shot
noise in that bandwidth. That's about 200 kilowatts per square
centimetre--will your sample stand that?" (Leading to a discussion about
3-D heat conduction in solids.)

"The topological phase shift in the galvo scanner will screw up the beam
recombination in the return path, won't it?" (This is a real issue that
constrains the scan range.)

This isn't rock-throwing at all--everybody wants the thing to work, and
ideally they're all friends. After half an hour or so, everybody has a
much better idea of whether the scheme can be made to work, and the
final version probably doesn't look much like the initial proposal.

It's better if there are two or three schemes being discussed, along
with lots of ideas for improvements. You also need a few harebrained
notions tossed in. (*)

It only works if nobody minds having their pet ideas demolished, because
that's definitely going to happen. Personally I'm very glad when it
happens to me, because it may save a lot of wasted work. I have lots of
ideas, so I'm not at all attached to the bad ones.

You've apparently moved toward the Larkin attitude of presumimg
things which you know no facts regarding as it relates to me. That
is a character and integrity hit you do not want. But you live as
you like.


Not intending to be insulting at all, but as your first paragraph
suggests, you've probably never done what I'm attempting to describe.
(Or perhaps I just didn't describe it well enough initially.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

(*) The use of helicopter propwash to knock ice off high-tension wires
allegedly came out of a discussion like that.

We did a brainstorm session once, with DR, about reflections off a
liquid metal sphere. That was wonderful. You and DR did, in about 20
minutes, astounding math. My function was just to make a lot of random
noise that could be filtered.

Pretty good quality noise, that.

I have a really big bag of tricks for doing those sorts of calculations,
mostly consisting of amusing facts, such as that in the ray model, a
shiny sphere scatters parallel light exactly equally into 4 pi
steradians, and that the scattering cross section is twice its projected
area. (This is easy to show for a plane obstruction--the hole it
punches into the plane wave scatters just like the obstruction, except
180 degrees out of phase. Add them back together and you get the
original beam.)

That's how I do photon budgets for instruments all the time, but it's
way more fun doing it live.

How's DR doing? Have they started paying him what he's worth?


Old cars, like MGs, and old Honda motorcycles, had carburetors that
obviously couldn't work. There was way too much static friction for a
little bit of differential air pressure to move the needle valve. But
there was a lot of engine vibration too.

There's a recent physics coinage for that: "stochastic resonance". Like
that famous remark of Voltaire's about the Holy Roman Empire, of course
stochastic resonance is neither stochastic nor resonance.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Sounds like a fancy name for dithering. I used to do that to make a
really bad 6-bit ADC do street-legal electrical metering. I used a
triangle instead of noise; that has some virtues.



Yeah. You have to be willing to give up a major fraction of the ADC's
range to the dither, though--a few LSBs won't fix it. Of course modern
architectures don't seem to have the huge DNL glitch at the major carry
(half scale) that lots of old ones did.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

My metering ADC was single-slope, with a uP timer. So it had near
perfect differential linearity, and didn't need a lot of dither.

There's a cute trick used in scintillator pulse-height spectroscopy.
Single-slopes have excellent differential linearity but are slow. So
use a DAC to add a random analog offset ahead of a fast ADC. Dither a
bunch of bits, like 10% of full scale. After the ADC, subtract out the
DAC code. That makes the histogram bins pretty much exactly equal.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

Science teaches us to doubt.

Claude Bernard

 

[Phil Hobbs]

On 2020-03-29 17:16, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 15:09:08 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 2020-03-29 11:26, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 08:47:23 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 2020-03-29 07:59, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno@decadence.org wrote:
Phil Hobbs <pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote in
news:fd467d02-06d6-78e5-bd05-d420a9f8948f@electrooptical.net:

On 2020-03-28 23:12, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno@decadence.org
wrote:
George Herold <ggherold@gmail.com> wrote in
news:494f975a-54da-46d1-bdfb-9eaeb783919b@googlegroups.com:

Designing something cool with a few smart people at a whiteboard
is the

most fun you can have standing up.
Amen,
George H.

Barefoot water skiing.

Running off a whole rack at pool.


You've apparently never done it.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs


Going over my design ideas with supportive co-engineers is one
thing. Having one or more unable to see what you've come up with
'providing' stupid input is entirely another, and therefore is not a
favorite thing to do. I'll design it, they'll do their pieces. No
need for a white board discussion, just a white board project
declaration, and any issues they have can be brought up while they
are doing their assigned part.

Which is not what I was referring to, at all, and sounds boring, I agree.

Collaborative design at a whiteboard may go something like this example
of a phase-sensitive laser microscope. Somebody says, "How about using
a heterodyne interferometer with an acousto-optic cell and a Wollaston
prism to recombine the beams? That way we can make the whole thing
common-path so we can use normal galvo scanning." (A real example from
long ago--an English guy improving on an idea of mine.)

Then everybody chimes in with questions such as the following.

"You'll need at least a milliwatt of laser power to get to the shot
noise in that bandwidth. That's about 200 kilowatts per square
centimetre--will your sample stand that?" (Leading to a discussion about
3-D heat conduction in solids.)

"The topological phase shift in the galvo scanner will screw up the beam
recombination in the return path, won't it?" (This is a real issue that
constrains the scan range.)

This isn't rock-throwing at all--everybody wants the thing to work, and
ideally they're all friends. After half an hour or so, everybody has a
much better idea of whether the scheme can be made to work, and the
final version probably doesn't look much like the initial proposal.

It's better if there are two or three schemes being discussed, along
with lots of ideas for improvements. You also need a few harebrained
notions tossed in. (*)

It only works if nobody minds having their pet ideas demolished, because
that's definitely going to happen. Personally I'm very glad when it
happens to me, because it may save a lot of wasted work. I have lots of
ideas, so I'm not at all attached to the bad ones.

You've apparently moved toward the Larkin attitude of presumimg
things which you know no facts regarding as it relates to me. That
is a character and integrity hit you do not want. But you live as
you like.


Not intending to be insulting at all, but as your first paragraph
suggests, you've probably never done what I'm attempting to describe.
(Or perhaps I just didn't describe it well enough initially.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

(*) The use of helicopter propwash to knock ice off high-tension wires
allegedly came out of a discussion like that.

We did a brainstorm session once, with DR, about reflections off a
liquid metal sphere. That was wonderful. You and DR did, in about 20
minutes, astounding math. My function was just to make a lot of random
noise that could be filtered.

Pretty good quality noise, that.

I have a really big bag of tricks for doing those sorts of calculations,
mostly consisting of amusing facts, such as that in the ray model, a
shiny sphere scatters parallel light exactly equally into 4 pi
steradians, and that the scattering cross section is twice its projected
area. (This is easy to show for a plane obstruction--the hole it
punches into the plane wave scatters just like the obstruction, except
180 degrees out of phase. Add them back together and you get the
original beam.)

That's how I do photon budgets for instruments all the time, but it's
way more fun doing it live.

How's DR doing? Have they started paying him what he's worth?


Old cars, like MGs, and old Honda motorcycles, had carburetors that
obviously couldn't work. There was way too much static friction for a
little bit of differential air pressure to move the needle valve. But
there was a lot of engine vibration too.

There's a recent physics coinage for that: "stochastic resonance". Like
that famous remark of Voltaire's about the Holy Roman Empire, of course
stochastic resonance is neither stochastic nor resonance.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Sounds like a fancy name for dithering. I used to do that to make a
really bad 6-bit ADC do street-legal electrical metering. I used a
triangle instead of noise; that has some virtues.

Yeah. You have to be willing to give up a major fraction of the ADC's
range to the dither, though--a few LSBs won't fix it. Of course modern
architectures don't seem to have the huge DNL glitch at the major carry
(half scale) that lots of old ones did.

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

 

[Phil Hobbs]

On 2020-03-29 16:28, Rick C wrote:

On Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 4:24:10 PM UTC-4, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 2020-03-29 16:15, Rick C wrote:
On Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 4:05:05 PM UTC-4, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 2020-03-29 15:34, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 15:09:08 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

I have a really big bag of tricks for doing those sorts of calculations,
mostly consisting of amusing facts, such as that in the ray model, a
shiny sphere scatters parallel light exactly equally into 4 pi
steradians, and that the scattering cross section is twice its projected
area.

No, that's impossible. It defies all common sense.

That's why it's an amusing fact, and therefore memorable. The law of
reflection tells you that tipping a mirror by an angle theta steers the
beam by 2*theta, so going from the centre to the edge, the reflected
angle rotates through 180 degrees. So you do illuminate all 4 pi
steradians. The growth of the circumference with radius is exactly
balanced out by the obliquity of the surface and the solid angle vs.
deflection, so the illumination is uniform.

The moral of this story is to not trust Larkin's "common sense".


You're being a moron again.

Hey, Larkin is the one who touts the value of "common sense". Then he gets it completely wrong because of it.

That is a valuable lesson which only some will appreciate. Certainly not Larkin and apparently not you.

You're the one that took a perfectly good technical thread and barfed
your bile on it, apparently out of pure spite. That makes you a moron.

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

 

[Tom Gardner]

On 29/03/20 20:14, Joerg wrote:

On 2020-03-29 02:54, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 29/03/20 04:31, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 00:55:47 +0000, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 28/03/20 22:48, Phil Hobbs wrote:
Instinct is super useful for generating ideas.  We come up with some
scheme by
instinct, but then test it by math.  The math involved is super
familiar--what's
the noise floor, the bandwidth, the settling time, and so on.  It's the
familiarity that makes that seem like it's the same as design
instinct, but it
isn't.

Very true, IMNSHO.

Practice without theory is blind fumbling.

It built aqueducts, ships, roads, cathedrals, all sorts of stuff.

Er, no.

Wells cathedral is near me. There are strange additions
that became necessary because it rapidly started falling
down.


Check out some of the Roman structures in Germany. I lived there and
participated in events in some. Amazing. 1500+ years old, rock-solid, where
"modern" buildings are generally gone in less than 200 years.

As a side note, some of the best engineers I worked with have no formal academic
education.

We have structures more than a millennia older than that.

But that's a classic case of "selection bias" or
"survivor bias, as I'm sure you are aware

 

[Rick C]

On Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 7:15:29 PM UTC-4, Phil Hobbs wrote:

On 2020-03-29 16:28, Rick C wrote:
On Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 4:24:10 PM UTC-4, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 2020-03-29 16:15, Rick C wrote:
On Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 4:05:05 PM UTC-4, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 2020-03-29 15:34, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 15:09:08 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

I have a really big bag of tricks for doing those sorts of calculations,
mostly consisting of amusing facts, such as that in the ray model, a
shiny sphere scatters parallel light exactly equally into 4 pi
steradians, and that the scattering cross section is twice its projected
area.

No, that's impossible. It defies all common sense.

That's why it's an amusing fact, and therefore memorable. The law of
reflection tells you that tipping a mirror by an angle theta steers the
beam by 2*theta, so going from the centre to the edge, the reflected
angle rotates through 180 degrees. So you do illuminate all 4 pi
steradians. The growth of the circumference with radius is exactly
balanced out by the obliquity of the surface and the solid angle vs.
deflection, so the illumination is uniform.

The moral of this story is to not trust Larkin's "common sense".


You're being a moron again.

Hey, Larkin is the one who touts the value of "common sense". Then he gets it completely wrong because of it.

That is a valuable lesson which only some will appreciate. Certainly not Larkin and apparently not you.

You're the one that took a perfectly good technical thread and barfed
your bile on it, apparently out of pure spite. That makes you a moron.

That is an interesting response. It was a simple observation of the inconsistencies of Larkin's "common sense" approach until you responded with *your* bile.

Larkin is very good at invading threads and changing topics, then even criticizing others for exactly that. Yet you only jump to his defense and never call him on it.

Please spare me.

--

Rick C.

--+ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
--+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Joerg]

On 2020-03-29 13:47, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 12:42:10 -0700 (PDT), Lasse Langwadt Christensen
langwadt@fonz.dk> wrote:

sřndag den 29. marts 2020 kl. 21.14.13 UTC+2 skrev Joerg:
On 2020-03-29 02:54, Tom Gardner wrote:
On 29/03/20 04:31, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 00:55:47 +0000, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 28/03/20 22:48, Phil Hobbs wrote:
Instinct is super useful for generating ideas. We come up with some
scheme by
instinct, but then test it by math. The math involved is super
familiar--what's
the noise floor, the bandwidth, the settling time, and so on. It's the
familiarity that makes that seem like it's the same as design
instinct, but it
isn't.

Very true, IMNSHO.

Practice without theory is blind fumbling.

It built aqueducts, ships, roads, cathedrals, all sorts of stuff.

Er, no.

Wells cathedral is near me. There are strange additions
that became necessary because it rapidly started falling
down.


Check out some of the Roman structures in Germany. I lived there and
participated in events in some. Amazing. 1500+ years old, rock-solid,
where "modern" buildings are generally gone in less than 200 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias#In_architecture_and_construction

Not so much with Roman stuff. This Aquaduct is over 1900 years old, well
past its warranty and still good:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pont_du_Gard#/media/Dateiontdugard.jpg

I think it was used for about 900 years, sometimes gravely neglected but
it even survived that, plus numerous wars.

Most buildings in the past were disgusting hovels and fire traps.

European ones, especially southern European, fared quite well. Unless
they were stuff with content that could feed a carelessly started fire
or ignite when shelled.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

 

[George Herold]

On Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 8:47:30 AM UTC-4, Phil Hobbs wrote:

On 2020-03-29 07:59, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno@decadence.org wrote:
Phil Hobbs <pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote in
news:fd467d02-06d6-78e5-bd05-d420a9f8948f@electrooptical.net:

On 2020-03-28 23:12, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno@decadence.org
wrote:
George Herold <ggherold@gmail.com> wrote in
news:494f975a-54da-46d1-bdfb-9eaeb783919b@googlegroups.com:

Designing something cool with a few smart people at a whiteboard
is the

most fun you can have standing up.
Amen,
George H.

Barefoot water skiing.

Running off a whole rack at pool.


You've apparently never done it.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs


Going over my design ideas with supportive co-engineers is one
thing. Having one or more unable to see what you've come up with
'providing' stupid input is entirely another, and therefore is not a
favorite thing to do. I'll design it, they'll do their pieces. No
need for a white board discussion, just a white board project
declaration, and any issues they have can be brought up while they
are doing their assigned part.

Which is not what I was referring to, at all, and sounds boring, I agree.

Collaborative design at a whiteboard may go something like this example
of a phase-sensitive laser microscope. Somebody says, "How about using
a heterodyne interferometer with an acousto-optic cell and a Wollaston
prism to recombine the beams? That way we can make the whole thing
common-path so we can use normal galvo scanning." (A real example from
long ago--an English guy improving on an idea of mine.)

Then everybody chimes in with questions such as the following.

"You'll need at least a milliwatt of laser power to get to the shot
noise in that bandwidth. That's about 200 kilowatts per square
centimetre--will your sample stand that?" (Leading to a discussion about
3-D heat conduction in solids.)

"The topological phase shift in the galvo scanner will screw up the beam
recombination in the return path, won't it?" (This is a real issue that
constrains the scan range.)

This isn't rock-throwing at all--everybody wants the thing to work, and
ideally they're all friends. After half an hour or so, everybody has a
much better idea of whether the scheme can be made to work, and the
final version probably doesn't look much like the initial proposal.

It's better if there are two or three schemes being discussed, along
with lots of ideas for improvements. You also need a few harebrained
notions tossed in. (*)

It only works if nobody minds having their pet ideas demolished, because
that's definitely going to happen. Personally I'm very glad when it
happens to me, because it may save a lot of wasted work. I have lots of
ideas, so I'm not at all attached to the bad ones.

Awesome! (Maybe you've had some better, 'standing at white board
sex' than me... I'm jealous. :^)

A lot of my memorable times are sitting in a bar or restaurant,
after a conference day. And it's almost always with my peers,
so grad students and/or post docs*. Someone saw/understood some new thing at
a talk, and wants to apply it to our research. Wild ideas
fly about and even if nothing new comes out of it,
it is intellectually stimulating.

George H.

*there's something about a sense of equality, that let's everyone
share their silly ideas... have them get shot down for 'real'
physics reasons. And not take offence, but they/we learn something.
Everyone gets to skate at the edge of their own understanding.
It takes the right group too, (no pissing contests)
which might favor small numbers.

You've apparently moved toward the Larkin attitude of presumimg
things which you know no facts regarding as it relates to me. That
is a character and integrity hit you do not want. But you live as
you like.


Not intending to be insulting at all, but as your first paragraph
suggests, you've probably never done what I'm attempting to describe.
(Or perhaps I just didn't describe it well enough initially.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

(*) The use of helicopter propwash to knock ice off high-tension wires
allegedly came out of a discussion like that.

--
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

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Monday, March 30, 2020 at 10:38:27 AM UTC+11, Rick C wrote:

On Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 7:15:29 PM UTC-4, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 2020-03-29 16:28, Rick C wrote:
On Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 4:24:10 PM UTC-4, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 2020-03-29 16:15, Rick C wrote:
On Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 4:05:05 PM UTC-4, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 2020-03-29 15:34, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 15:09:08 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

I have a really big bag of tricks for doing those sorts of calculations,
mostly consisting of amusing facts, such as that in the ray model, a
shiny sphere scatters parallel light exactly equally into 4 pi
steradians, and that the scattering cross section is twice its projected
area.

No, that's impossible. It defies all common sense.

That's why it's an amusing fact, and therefore memorable. The law of
reflection tells you that tipping a mirror by an angle theta steers the
beam by 2*theta, so going from the centre to the edge, the reflected
angle rotates through 180 degrees. So you do illuminate all 4 pi
steradians. The growth of the circumference with radius is exactly
balanced out by the obliquity of the surface and the solid angle vs.
deflection, so the illumination is uniform.

The moral of this story is to not trust Larkin's "common sense".


You're being a moron again.

Hey, Larkin is the one who touts the value of "common sense". Then he gets it completely wrong because of it.

That is a valuable lesson which only some will appreciate. Certainly not Larkin and apparently not you.

You're the one that took a perfectly good technical thread and barfed
your bile on it, apparently out of pure spite. That makes you a moron.

That is an interesting response. It was a simple observation of the inconsistencies of Larkin's "common sense" approach until you responded with *your* bile.

Larkin is very good at invading threads and changing topics, then even criticizing others for exactly that. Yet you only jump to his defense and never call him on it.

Please spare me.

Phil Hobbs makes money out of collaborating with John Larkin - collaborating with an egomaniac isn't easy.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Clifford Heath]

On 30/3/20 6:10 am, Joerg wrote:

That's where the right feel for Maxwell's stuff needs to come in. If
someone can't develop an understanding of electrical, magnetic and
electromagnetic fields it may be better to pick another career. Maybe
sales, makes more money anyhow

I think the idea of a field is the difficult one. Maxwell's is the
important application of it here, but it's not difficult once you know
what a field is.

It needs to be taught by expanding dimensions. We all do graphs at
school (e.g. how many infected with COVID against time, etc). Some would
do graphs in two dimensions. Few schools if any expand that to three
dimensions, because there's no good way to depict them visually. As a
result, students don't have a visual (or other!) metaphor for starting
to understand fields, and so find Maxwell hard.

That's my take on it anyhow.

Clifford Heath.

 

[Clifford Heath]

On 29/3/20 4:42 pm, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 2:31:56 PM UTC+11, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 00:55:47 +0000, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 28/03/20 22:48, Phil Hobbs wrote:
Instinct is super useful for generating ideas.  We come up with some scheme by
instinct, but then test it by math.  The math involved is super familiar--what's
the noise floor, the bandwidth, the settling time, and so on.  It's the
familiarity that makes that seem like it's the same as design instinct, but it
isn't.

Very true, IMNSHO.

Practice without theory is blind fumbling.

It built aqueducts, ships, roads, cathedrals, all sorts of stuff.

Most of which fell down several times before the builders fumbled into rules that worked.

Math is a much cheaper way of finding out that something isn't going to work.

The required math was only invented after folk got tired of paying for
bridges that fell down.

CH

 

[Clifford Heath]

On 30/3/20 6:10 am, Joerg wrote:

On 2020-03-28 15:47, Clifford Heath wrote:
On 29/3/20 7:23 am, Joerg wrote:
On 2020-03-27 12:29, blocher@columbus.rr.com wrote:
A topic to elicit some thoughts....
How important is mathematics to you as an engineer?
It ranks surprisingly low on the pecking order.
 ...  Do you consider yourself an applied mathematician? ...
Definitely not. My sister (has a mathematics degree) is razzing me
about that all the time but that's just how I am. IMO engineering is
mostly instinct. People who don't have them can't be good engineers.
Instinct comes with practice, lots of practice.
By definition, anything that only comes with practice is *not* instinct.

You are correct, though it is rather muddled in scientific literature:

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11453

Also, that article relies on some basic fallacies. The most obvious one
is this:

"the capacity to learn that language is a human instinct, something that
every normal human child is born with, and that no chimpanzee or gorilla
possesses."

Clearly false, since there are chimps who have been taught complex sign
language (hundreds of words), who converse. and who invent new words and
teach their children to do the same. A rather strange error for a
"Professor of Cognitive Biology" to have made.

Cats don't need to be taught to hunt - but they do need to be taught
*how* to hunt. People don't need to be taught to invent - but they can
be taught *how* to invent.

CH

 

[Clifford Heath]

On 30/3/20 9:43 am, Phil Hobbs wrote:

There's a story told about Roy Cohn.  He was giving a speech at a
convention for magicians.  At the end of the speech, he asked somebody
to shuffle a deck of cards, and announced that he would pull out the
jack of diamonds.  He cut the deck, and some other card came up.

A friend asked him later, "Why did you do that, Roy?"  Cohn replied, "I
had one chance in 52 of becoming a legend among magicians."

Similar story (probably apocryphal) about a kid who wanted to get hired
as a stockbroker.

He made a list of 4096 broking companies, and sent half of them one
prediction, the other half the opposite prediction.

When the outcome was decided, he did the same with the 2048 companies
he'd sent the correct answer to.

After repeating 12 times, he had one company left, and they offered him
a job. Right twelve times in a row, that has to be worth something, no?

Sort-of how JL "designs" electronics

Clifford Heath.

 

[Phil Allison]

Bill Sloman wrote:

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Please spare me.

Phil Hobbs makes money out of collaborating with John Larkin - collaborating with an egomaniac isn't easy.

** I was unaware of that - explains a lot of the crap going on here.

So Hobbs is not just an arrogant prick Septic, he's a paid cock-sucker too.

Maybe they need to get a room....



..... Phil