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From: Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: CO2 Funny
Date: Sun, 26 May 2024 15:38:11 +1000
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On 26/05/2024 4:38 am, Edward Rawde wrote:
> "Bill Sloman" <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote in message news:v2na16$1nvei$1@dont-email.me...
>> On 23/05/2024 3:52 am, john larkin wrote:
>>> On Wed, 22 May 2024 18:10:58 +0100, Pomegranate Bastard
>>> <pommyB@aol.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Wed, 22 May 2024 07:54:30 -0700, john larkin <jl@650pot.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On Wed, 22 May 2024 13:58:13 -0000 (UTC), jim whitby
>>>>> <news@spockmail.net> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> On Wed, 22 May 2024 14:36:00 +0100, Pomegranate Bastard wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> <snip>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Who says I don't? Unlike you, an odious little narcissist, I don't feel
>>>>>>> the need to show everyone here how clever I am.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Spoken like a true liberal.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> When things don't go your way... start name calling.
>>>>>
>>>>> Exactly. Cheap insults are, well, cheap.
>>>>
>>>> Indeed.
>>>>
>>>> 9djf3jlovr2bmpkn03e18237njtcorg9rj@4ax.com
>>>
>>>
>>> That was, in my opinion, a reasonable observation. Nasty humorless
>>> people DO usually design nasty electronics. Or no electronics.
>>
>> John Larkin doesn't seem to 'design" anything. He throws together the stuff he sells like every other tinkerer.
>>
> 
> Why does that matter to you so much?
> 
> I have two books in front of me.
> One is "Introduction to Solid State Physics, C. Kittel"
> The other is "FET Circuits. Rufus P Turner"
> 
> If I open the physics book at a random page I find a contour integral.
> I wasn't bad at math and can handle contour integrals but it is also true that I grew up in a very practical electronics environment
> where getting things working was way more important than understanding every little detail of the theory of how they worked.

I got into electronics while a I was doing a Ph.D. physical chemistry. 
Win Hill started a Ph.D. in chemical physics, but had better advisors.

Getting things working is always important, but understanding the detail 
of what's going on can be vital to getting them to work well.

When I was working at Cambridge Instruments (1982-1991) it was mostly on 
projects,but between projects I'd get stuck with "mods" which was 
looking at what production was complaining about and reworking the 
circuit that they were complaining about to make it better behaved. A 
lot of that was correcting the original designer's minor mistakes.

One of them wasn't all that minor - somebody has used a 741 in a place 
where it's pop-corn noise got amplified to the point where the heaters 
in our GaAs single crystal puller were effectively pulse width modulated 
with a cycle time of about a minute or so. Replacing the 741 with a 
marginally less ancient part with a pop-corn noise spec meant that the 
heaters ran continuously at something like 30% of full capacity.
It made the operating environment a lot more peaceful and may have 
produced more-nearly-strain-free single crystal GaAs.

> If I open the FET book at a random page I find a circuit which may be usable as the basis of something I want to "design".
> This isn't true of the physics book but that doesn't mean I don't find it to be interesting or useful knowledge.
> 
> Human psychology obviously plays a big part in electronics design as it does in electronics designers.
> 
> It does seem to be a trait of many (not all) electronics designers that if another designer isn't doing it the way they would do it
> then they must be doing it wrong.

It usually takes a while to work out why they did it that way, and it's 
pretty much essential to spend that time before you start fiddling with 
the circuit. That wasn't true of the guy who'd put in the 741. He was 
very much in the John Larkin "if it sort of works, ship it" camp.
Management liked him because he was quick. Production was less 
enthusiastic.
> Would you be kind enough to give your opinion of John Larkin once per month instead of twice per day?

When he starts claiming to do electronic design once a month rather than 
twice a day.

-- 
Bill Sloman, Sydney