Path: news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: The Physics Behind the Spanish Blackout
Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2025 20:40:28 +1000
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On 11/06/2025 3:07 am, john larkin wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Jun 2025 02:29:47 +1000, Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>
> wrote:
> 
>> On 11/06/2025 12:55 am, john larkin wrote:
>>> On Mon, 09 Jun 2025 16:02:19 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Mon, 09 Jun 2025 09:49:24 -0700, john larkin <jl@glen--canyon.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On Mon, 9 Jun 2025 11:34:08 -0400, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> On 6/9/2025 10:14 AM, Joe Gwinn wrote:
>>>>>>> On Sun, 08 Jun 2025 17:16:09 -0700, john larkin <jl@glen--canyon.com>
>>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> On Sun, 08 Jun 2025 19:15:57 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net>
>>>>>>>> wrote:

<snip>

>>> Some people enjoy working with money. There are even people who like
>>> being accountants. Electronics is much more fun to me.
>>
>> Think how much more fun you could have if you actually understood what
>> you were doing.
> 
> Quite the opposite. Fully understanding blinds one to possibilities.

Possibilities you don't appreciate because you don't understand what's 
goig on?

> I was just a few minutes ago discussing that with a couple of my guys.
> 
> We don't have to understand it, we just have to make it work.

That does involve understanding why it is isn't working, and changing it 
so that it can.

> Ultimately, nobody understands how the universe works. So inventions
> lurk.

We aren't talking about the whole universe, but rather the bit we need 
to manipulate.


> And being unsure, staying confused, is the way to invent things.

Not in my experience, or the experience  of those of my acquaintances 
with a couple of dozen patents to their names.


> Rigid theorists, equation slingers, often get locked inside their
> restrictive world, which explains why so many important things are
> discovered by amateurs.

You clearly don't know any. "Rigid theorist" is a contradiction in 
terms. The most beautiful theory can be slain by one inconvenient fact.

My wife and her colleagues did manage to construct quite a useful theory 
in psycholinguistics, and found it easy to write up because all the 
unsuccessful experiments they'd done to test the precursor theories had 
dealt with pretty much all of the alternative explanations.

Most of the patents I know about were seen as obvious ideas by their 
inventors, and patented because nobody else had seen them.

One of the three patents I've got only got patented because I'd had to 
spend so much explaining how obvious it was that it finally struck me 
that it might not be obvious to those skilled in the art.

> I'm about to Spice a neat circuit that we don't fully understand.

Easier than building it, if less reliable. My 1kV at 10uA to to 1mA at 
3.3V converters works fine in LTSpice, but the ferrite would almost 
certainly saturate in real life, and it took my subconscious about a 
week to get me to check the relevant equations. LTSpice can use the John 
Chan model to simulate real inductors, but not coupled ones (or at least 
it couldn't the last time I looked).

-- 
Bill Sloman, Sydney