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From: Cursitor Doom <cd@notformail.com>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: OT: Covid's True Origins
Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2025 22:02:32 +0100
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On Mon, 21 Apr 2025 15:02:17 -0700, john larkin <jl@glen--canyon.com>
wrote:

>On Mon, 21 Apr 2025 22:23:03 +0100, Cursitor Doom <cd@notformail.com>
>wrote:
>
>>On Mon, 21 Apr 2025 08:26:40 -0700, john larkin <jl@glen--canyon.com>
>>wrote:
>>
>>[...]
>>>Sine waves are boring.
>>
>>Well, square waves give rise to lots of harmonics which can be useful.
>>But what about triangles and sawtooths. Any interesting properies
>>hidden away in those?
>
>Periodic waveforms are all boring. They just do the same thing, over
>and over.
>
>A complex pulse can do interesting things. Spin an airplane. Fuse
>deuterium-tritium. Trigger a megaton boom.
>
>I wish the world would move on from the slide rule and graph paper
>days, narrowband s-parameters and Smith charts and load pulls. We have
>computers now.

It's dumb *not* to use computers for the complicated and trap-ridden
calculations relating to impedance transformations, filters and
transmission lines. *However* if someone using computers for this
purpose hasn't been schooled in the derivation of the calculations by
learning how the Smith Chart was developed and how it got that scary,
warped shape, then they're going to be too far abstracted from the
underlying physics to be able to understand fully what's going on
under the hood. And they'll be that much poorer for it. Like people
who use rules-based calculus to solve problems because they have
little understanding of the nuts and bolts of derivatives and
integrals. Ask them to solve a new problem and they're lost!