Re: Visualizing

d
On 2024-09-06 19:21, Joe Gwinn wrote:

On Fri, 06 Sep 2024 08:59:06 -0700, john larkin
<jlarkin_highland_tech> wrote:
 

On Fri, 06 Sep 2024 11:27:38 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net>
wrote:
>

On Fri, 06 Sep 2024 07:53:46 -0700, john larkin
<jlarkin_highland_tech> wrote:
>

>
>
I was driving and listening to the local mostly-annoying NPR radio
station, but they had an interesting interview with a book author. It
was about his novel or some poetry or something.
>
What was interesting was his recalling a conversation that he'd had
with his wife. She was takling about a plant or something and asked
him to visualize it. He was astounded that she, or anyone, could close
their eyes and *see* something they were thinking about.
>
I was shocked to learn that there are people who can't form a mental
visual image.
>
Close your eyes and consider a nice white ceramic dinner plate with a
beautiful deep red apple sitting in the center. Can you see it? From
the side and from the top? Do you see the stem? The colors? Imagine it
slowly rotating? See the fruit fly?
>
If the world is divided between people who can visualise and people
who can't, that could explain a great deal.

>
There are definitely such people, and I've met them.  The example that
springs to mind was a History Teaching Assistant I met in college in
the 1960s.  It turned out that he had been an EE Undergrad, and
discovered that he could not visualize the electrons in motion, unlike
his colleagues.  This TA was wise enough to know that this was
crippling - he would never be able to compete with those who could
visualize electrons.  So he switched to History.
>
Joe Gwinn

>
The statistics would be interesting, whether the non-visualization
thing is common or maybe very rare. I'll have to google that some
time.
>
There is a small fraction of the population that don't like music, for
example. That includes me. Some people absolutely can't remember
faces. I know a guy who can only recognize people by their hair.
>
I'd expect that among CE/EE graduates, good visualizers would tend to
be more EE and less visualizers more CE. Things vs words.
>
That would suggest a good interview question.
>
I was drafted once (never served) and took a test to join the Marine
Corps. One part involved looking at a flat thing with various squares
painted with patterns, and then imagining a box that was folded up
from the flat thing. I guess that visualizing things would be useful
to a Marine.
>
I think the original IQ test was for the military.

 It was.  Staring in WW1, when there were millions of new recruits to
sort into jobs.
 There is another kind of visualization that is very common and quite
useful:  Most people who take an internal combustion engine apart and
reassembles it can diagnose mechanical problems from the sound made by
the engine as a vehicle drives past - one can "see" the moving parts
as they are making the noise in that engine.  Most auto mechanics can
do this, and so can I.

So can I, as long as it's rod knock or a hard miss. ;)
Telling a plugged cat from clogged injectors from retarded timing, not so much.
I've taken two engines apart to varying degrees.  One was a complete rebuild (oversize pistons, align bore, half-race cam) of a 1973 Fiat.(*)
The other one was a 1978 Triumph that needed a head gasket.  It was a lot easier back when you could open the hood and see at least a bit of pavement.

As for the EE who went into History, the usual path for people who
cannot visualize is Mathematics.  But even that benefits from
visualization.
 My father was a degreed aeronautical engineer.  But he really didn't
visualize things like auto engines and cooling systems at all
specialty was theory, and aeronautical engineering has far more
complex math than EE.
 .<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier%E2%80%93Stokes_equations>
 Plus lots of classical physics.  I never asked him if he could
visualize fluid flow from the math, but I bet he could.
 

And the Navier-Stokes equations are for incompressible flow, which is only the first-order model for aeronautics.  (Jet engines need thermodynamics, which N-S doesn't do.)
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
(*) No, it wasn't the good one, i.e. the 124 Spyder--it was a 1100 cc Model 128 sedan.  Yes, that's completely stupid, but hey, I was 18, so cut me some slack. Nowadays my stupidity comes out in far more sophisticated forms. ;)
--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
http://electrooptical.net
http://hobbs-eo.com