Re: Visualizing

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:
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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...

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I think the original IQ test was for the military.

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Baloney.

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Thank you for your thoughtful insights.

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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.
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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.

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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.
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The freshman washout rate was about 20%.
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I was great at math and science, terrible at English, and basically
helpless in French.

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But you can make yourself understood here, which doesn't entirely work
to your advantage.

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?????
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Your English expression is fine, but what you have to
express is somehwat superficial.

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I design electronics and sell it. Is that superficial?

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Your contributions to that aren't remotely fundamental.
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What do you do?

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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.

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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.
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You contribution to that will have been exactly zero. This suggests that
you may be barking up the wrong tree,
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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