a dangerous positive-feedback loop

The need for fear is nothing new. It's a survival strategy for a dangerous precivilised world, human minds ever on the lookout for a possible threat. It's well known that the fear system is very overactive.

NT

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tabbypurr
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It really isn't. We evolved in a world without police, jails, doorlocks, wh ere we lived among large predators that ate us, and everything was high ris k by today's standards. No medical care, no welfare, no farming, not enough food, no insect repellant or insecticide, no understanding of infection, e tc etc etc. People didn't live very long, not surprisingly.

We have a very easy safe life. We also face an assortment of daily risks, b ut they're orders of magnitude lower. But our fear system hasn't changed mu ch.

NT

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tabbypurr

There are social fears as well as physical ones. Fear of not belonging to the group, fear of being ridiculed, fear of being wrong, all keep prople from having ideas. That's bad for electronic design, where there is such fertile ground for ideas.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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John Larkin

Yes, no surprise that EEs have traditionally contained a high percentage of people that largely sit outside main social groups, ie dropouts. Social fears are all ancient survival strategies.

NT

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tabbypurr

ars or a vast expanse of ocean opens up, there is little chance of the Eart h entering a new ice age.

The "little ice age" wasn't any kind of ice age, and seems to have been cof ined to the periphery of the Atalantic ocean. The most likely explanation i s ocean currents moving around. We now know about the El Nino/ Le Nina alte rnation, and are starting to get a grip of the Atlantic Multidecadal oscill ation.

See the note at the bottom of the page - David H. Koch fund for science. which probably explains why the section on CO2 in the atmosphoere doesn't m ention the fact that there more of it now than there has been for some 20 m illion years, and that it has higher because we've been digging up and burn ing lots of fossil carbon recently.

The real point is that denialist web sites are great at creating the state of mind they want to generate, and lying by omission is still lying.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
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bill.sloman

I hadn't considered the relationship between engineering social awkwardness and design creativity. The best way to evaluate that would probably be to research the private lives of some great scientists and engineers. Tesla, Edison, Pease, Feynman, were flamboyant characters. Shy, quiet characters don't seem to create a lot of ideas, or at least don't expose them well.

I still think that, to a useful extent, electronic design creativity can be taught, but there seems to be no academic consideration about how this could be done. I manage to do it to some extent, but not systematically.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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John Larkin

Of course, NT swallows Vitamin B-17. He hasn't heard of vitamins B-29 and B-36, but would probably swallow them too, if they were offered by moderately persuasive rip-off artists.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

e:

fraid

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erous precivilised world, human minds ever on the lookout for a possible th reat. It's well known that the fear system is very overactive.

of people that largely sit outside main social groups, ie dropouts. Social fears are all ancient survival strategies.

They don't get a lot of publicity after they have created them. Some Americ ans do seem to feel the need to have a public image.

Pease wasn't in the same ball-park as Bob Widlar, but Pease wrote a column in Electronics, so John Larkin knows his name. Jim Williams wasn't all that creative, but he did write a lot of good application notes.

Alan Dower Blumlein didn't write applications notes, but he was English.

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The academics would need to work out some consistent way of measuring creat ivity. Being named as an inventor on a patent would imply a creative contri bution, but places like IBM, Bell Labs and EMI Central Research did encoura ge people to apply for lots of provisional patents, and rather devalued the currency. I think that krw has five patents, from his time at IBM.

If you can't measure creativity, teaching it would be difficult. You'd have to winnow out the people who were convinced that what they did was creativ e, and worth teaching, when this was in fact a narcissistic delusion.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
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bill.sloman

aid

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There's nothing funny about phobia's, and the fact that 97% of the top 300 clinate scientists think that the case of anthropogenic global warming is p roven does suggest that this isn't a phobia-driven opinion.

George Herrold thinks that this is group-think, and he's right - science is a mechanism that allows a group to make up it's collective mind on the bas is of careful data-collection and equally careful data analysis.

Popper makes the point that they can still be wrong, and need to keep in mi nd that they might be wrong, but in this particular case the envidence is v ery persuasive (if you can understand it) and should be generating a lot mo re action to minimise the problem while we still can.

Action to minimise global warming would - of course - make the oil industry a lot less profitable, so they are paying for quite a lot of counter-propa ganda which goes down well with the gullible, who post links to it here.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
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bill.sloman

Is there *any* truly innovative electronic design left to do, though? Today all it seems we do is select the most appropriate 'someone else's breakthrough' as a 'template' and interconnect it with other such templates. Sometimes these 'templates' are discrete sub-circuits in their own right, other times they're just ICs. Is the age of true innovation in electronic design over? Aren't EEs nowadays merely 'hook-up technicians' who ensure the interconnections' signal levels are optimised between 'templates' and that each 'template' has an appropriate power supply?

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Cursitor Doom

e:

erous precivilised world, human minds ever on the lookout for a possible th reat. It's well known that the fear system is very overactive.

of people that largely sit outside main social groups, ie dropouts. Social fears are all ancient survival strategies.

What do most people do with their free time? They socialise. They watch tv, mostly social programs. And they socialise more. To get good at electronic s you have to choose to spend a good bit of time away from people developin g the skills. Electronic engineering is hence primarily an introvert's game , and often a dropout's game. Same goes for invention, to get there takes a lot of time & skill development, and that runs counter to the average pers on that thinks only of socialising in their free time.

Of course introverts innovate, more so than extroverts on average. But they 're generally not as good at promotion & teambuilding. Most EEs aren't soci ally awkward, but aren't as socially focussed as the average.

Tesla may have been flamboyant but he said he had no time for girls, he put his energy into electrical stuff. But he was an odd bird, not the typical EE of today.

Creativity is grossly undertaught imho. Instead doodling & similar things a re usually regarded as creativity. I call them major & minor creativity to distinguish the 2 things, perhaps there are better phrases/words.

From what I've seen fear plays a big part in people failing to be creative, failure of logic/reason plays another big part, and the fixed belief that one can not do anything good or succeed in anything seems to be another big player for most.

NT

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tabbypurr

Wow, there's masses of innovation ahead. Huge amounts. Most engineering has always been re-using known circuits & methods.

NT

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tabbypurr

Most electronic design engineers spend their time interfacing one black box with another, extracting the information they need from 200+ page datasheets.

Until recently I might have agreed with you, but silicon capability is stagnating. Much of my earlier work has been superseded by new silicon devices but I now don't see much further evolution.

I'm surprised you think otherwise, when was the last time you carried out any innovative electronic design?

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Mike Perkins 
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Mike Perkins

n

Cursitor Doom channelling Lord Kelvin. Meanwhile, at the University of New South Wales they are putting together a quantum computer, where the active elements are single phosporus atoms embedded in a micron thick layer of alm ost pure Silicon-28 (normally the dominant isotope at 92.2%).

The spin state of the phosporus atom is the qbit, and you can flip it with right microwave frequency.

Try putting that together out of "templates".

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

ote:

ngerous precivilised world, human minds ever on the lookout for a possible threat. It's well known that the fear system is very overactive.

ng

ge of people that largely sit outside main social groups, ie dropouts. Soci al fears are all ancient survival strategies.

v, mostly social programs. And they socialise more. To get good at electron ics you have to choose to spend a good bit of time away from people develop ing the skills.

That's why you go in to work. That does involve some socialisation, but if you are hired to develop new or improved products,learning about the area i s part of your job.

If you make a false assumption about when and where the skills are develope d.

You don't have to drop out to find time to study electronics.

ment, and that runs counter to the average person that thinks only of socia lising in their free time.

People who think of themselves as inventors may not socialise in their free time. People who have stacks of patents to their names tend to look rather more normal, but inventions are mostly new ways of solving familiar proble ms, and people who do that for a living prefer to adapt existing solutions, rather than devising patentalbe new ones, because new solutions often have new difficuties.

You've got evidence to suppor this claim?

Most people aren't. They are particular skills that can be learnt, and if y ou need a team to realise your invention, you are well advised to hire some body who is good at team-building, and somebody else who is good at promoti on.

average.

You've got evidence to suppor this claim?

ut his energy into electrical stuff. But he was an odd bird, not the typica l EE of today.

Tesla seems to have been a trifle crazy.

are usually regarded as creativity. I call them major & minor creativity t o distinguish the 2 things, perhaps there are better phrases/words.

e, failure of logic/reason plays another big part, and the fixed belief tha t one can not do anything good or succeed in anything seems to be another b ig player for most.

Creativity strikes me as seeing a possibility that isn't obvious. Fear of s aying something that might be seen as stupid will discourage people from me ntioning something that strikes them as potnetially plausible, and the conv iction that if nobody else has admitted to seeing the possibility it can't possibly be real would also be a problem.

Brain-storming is a technique to get around these particular limitations.

Not liking transformers can blind you to possiblities invovling transformer s, and not knowing about them is even more limiting. There are lots of ways of being less creative than you might be.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
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bill.sloman

Plenty, more than ever, and there are fewer "real electronics" guys to do it.

We have moved up the abstraction stack, using opamps and ADCs and switcher chips instead of making them out of parts. FPGAs let us move formerly impractical analog algorithms into VHDL. But the basics of EE

- physics, circuit dynamics, signals-and-systems, domain transforms, control theory, electromagnetics - are more important than ever, and we have fabulous toys that let us use them all. Those subjects are often college electives now, and they are hard, so kids prefer to take sociology courses or type Python.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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John Larkin

Yesterday, Sunday. I haven't had enough coffee yet today.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

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John Larkin

I have no doubt in your case.

I was replying to "Wow, there's masses of innovation ahead. Huge amounts."

And attempting to endorse the statement, "Is there *any* truly innovative electronic design left to do, though?"

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Mike Perkins 
Video Solutions Ltd 
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Mike Perkins

Dropouts often do great things, but a compete EE education pounds in a lot of math and concepts that few people would ever acquire on their own. Jim Williams was a brilliant dropout, but his lack of some basics was obvious in a lot of his work.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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John Larkin

Op-amps have been in general use for decades, similarly for FPGAs.

I accept there is a big learning curve, but when is the next invention like 'negative feedback' going to be disruptive to electronic design?

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Mike Perkins 
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Mike Perkins

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