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From: Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: Visualizing
Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2024 14:54:07 +1000
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On 9/09/2024 2:35 am, john larkin wrote:
> On Sun, 8 Sep 2024 16:55:55 +1000, Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>
> wrote:
> 
>> On 8/09/2024 2:15 am, john larkin wrote:
>>> On Sun, 8 Sep 2024 01:46:45 +1000, Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 8/09/2024 12:50 am, john larkin wrote:
>>>>> On Sat, 7 Sep 2024 10:03:51 -0400, Ralph Mowery
>>>>> <rmowery42@charter.net> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> In article <vbgm7r$16mcv$1@dont-email.me>, bill.sloman@ieee.org says...
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> I think the original IQ test was for the military.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> Baloney.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Thank you for your thoughtful insights.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> He happens to be right. The idea was invented in France in 1904 and used
>>>>>>> to sort educationally sub-normal kids so that they got the kid of
>>>>>>> educational help that they needed and could get some advantage out of.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I wish that school when I went had a way to educate children in what
>>>>>> they were interested in.  I was great in math and science but could not
>>>>>> remember the people's named or dates in history and did very poor in
>>>>>> English.  I did go to two sumers of what was called enrichment studies
>>>>>> where we did not get graded but was exposed to many things that came in
>>>>>> hand in later life such as speed reading and general information about
>>>>>> other countries and some science. I really enjoyed those two years.  The
>>>>>> ones in that program were ones that seemed to be at the top of the
>>>>>> school class.
>>>>>
>>>>> I went to one of the first fw "magnet" schools in the USA, with IQ and
>>>>> achievment  tests to get in and they required minimum grades (72
>>>>> average) to stay in.
>>>>>
>>>>> The freshman washout rate was about 20%.
>>>>>
>>>>> I was great at math and science, terrible at English, and basically
>>>>> helpless in French.
>>>>
>>>> But you can make yourself understood here, which doesn't entirely work
>>>> to your advantage.
>>>
>>> ?????
>>>
>>>> Your English expression is fine, but what you have to
>>>> express is somehwat superficial.
>>>
>>> I design electronics and sell it. Is that superficial?
>>
>> Your contributions to that aren't remotely fundamental.
>>
>>> What do you do?
>>
>> Nothing that you could make any sense of.
> 
> Try me.
> 
>>> NIF just discovered a new fusion trick, inertial confinement in a
>>> diamond sphere. Maybe we helped.
>>
>> The standard NIF implosion capsule is already extremely expensive and
>> very small. Making it spherical and out of diamond wouldn't make it any
>> more expensive.
>>
>> You contribution to that will have been exactly zero. This suggests that
>> you may be barking up the wrong tree,
>>
>> https://lasers.llnl.gov/news/magnetized-targets-boost-nif-implosion-performance
> 
> Our second-generation modulators greatly improve the beam modulation
> precision and s/n, which turns out to be valuable.

So the first generation was perfectly useless?

> The NIF folks are great to work with. They are collegial and fun and
> have interesting physics problems but they aren't very good at
> designing electronics. Ideal customers.
> 
> It's weird how some very intelligent scientists are not good at
> designing electronics. Maybe because electronic design is not a
> science.

There's nothing weird about it at all. Science involves getting deeply 
involved in a particular problem. Designing electronics is a different 
kind of problem, and they haven't put in the time to learn what has been 
done with electronics in the past, or the new components that make it 
possible to do better now.

When I ended up writing a guide to which op amp to use at Cambridge 
Instruments in 1988 I listed 159 different devices, all of which I'd at 
least thought about using practical projects.

There nothing to stop them acquiring the knowledge, except the time it 
takes.

When I was working at Nijmegen University we got a query from somebody 
having trouble with the LT1028 (which is a great op amp, but with a 
slightly cranky output stage), so I suggested that they try the AD797 
which has got ion-implanted PNP transistors in its output stage, and is 
correspondingly more expensive and better behaved. It worked for them.

-- 
Bill Sloman, Sydney