I'm out - closing my account

te:

es. If you don't "do" engineering, you're not an engineer. There's a shocki ngly large number of people holding EE degrees who are not employed as engi neers (to include being unemployed) mainly because they're worthless. A big reason for this waste of resource is the sorry-assed self-styled academics are in the same boat, they can't do engineering themselves so how on Earth could they possibly teach others to be useful.

Academic engineering is all about teaching students how to look up what the y need to know, and where to look it up.

Academic exams don't test your engineering skills, they test to capacity to take advantage of the academic studies on the subject.

Academic engineers are teachers, not engineers, and there capacity to do pr actical engineering isn't a good indicator of their usefulness as teachers.

Having said that, a lot of my job as a senior engineer was teaching junior engineers how to get things done. Part of that was getting them to take adv antage of academic information, but a whole lot more involved getting them to document what they were doing so that the rest of the organisation had a n unambiguous and more or less complete idea of how to implement the soluti ons that they had come up with.

This was lot more fine-grained detail than university teachers are inclined to ask for - marking is tedious enough without getting the students to pro vide complete documentation.

Cursitor Doom - who doesn't seem able to think for himself at all - being t ypically rude, and imputing to lonmkusch the kind of groupthink that Cursit or Doom regularly exhibits.

If I wanted to find out what Cursitor Doom claims to be thinking, I know ex actly which right-wing sources I'd have to check. I really don't need to kn ow what any of them are thinking - it's worthless self-interested rubbish - but it is sometimes worth the trouble to find out whose interests are bein g pushed.

A few points;

Rule #1 of the internet:

Ignore it and it will go away.

You gave in to the trolls, and failed to ignore them. You are suffering the consequences.

Most of the active posters here, don't seem to have that will power, either. Or they enjoy it (you know what they say about fighting a pig).

Such is life.

If you can practice your mental filter and exclude those unpleasant personalities (or get a real newsreader and killfile them, so you don't have to), you will find very little traffic here, but it will be of palatable quality at least.

1. There ever was?

People are lazy. People don't want to think.

This applies to 90% of all people, in all groups, period.

It is very difficult to find a class or group or subculture where this ratio is different.

And that's just on-the-face basics. The next 90% (of the remaining 10%) don't want to think about things, say, outside their area of study.

To find people who well and truly do want to, and actively attempt to, think critically about the world around them, you have to filter 10% of 10% of 10% of all people away.

It's a very rarefied selection indeed.

Just because you go somewhere there's a concentration of technical knowledge, doesn't mean that knowledge itself, or any peripheral or unrelated knowledge shared in that group, has seen any critical analysis whatsoever.

Within EE, EMC is a classic example. No one wants to think about it. So maybe they read books. But they don't want to think about what they've read. They pick out quick rules-of-thumb, ignoring all the exceptions that the book tried to tell them about (or didn't, as the case often may be!). And thus you get zillions of differing opinions on how to treat an EMC problem.

On the upside, it's good for the testing labs. More billable hours.

I repeat this frequently, and, to no surprise, never seem raise a response with it:

"That we should be so fortunate, to work within a field were /every single possible statement is testable and provable!/ Every voltage, every current, every field can be measured. Why leave to speculation, that which can be proven conclusively?!"

When time and budget are included, the set of things which can be proven does shrink, but it does not go to zero. Why not measure even just the simple stuff? And yet, they [the irrational types] never do, and then they post at places like here to get a quick fix, ignoring any attempts at getting them to understand the problem.

As for society related information, there can be no absolute truth. The state variables are far too numerous, hidden, and dynamic. A leader might change their mind daily about things. Society is a complex, chaotic, multivariate system, which admits no analytical prediction. Most players succeed in spite of their ideas, not because of them.

This is why I make no attempt to understand the overall operations of national and international politics. (Besides which, the subject is rather repulsive to begin with.) I keep up on what actions I can, and consider them critically: what is this a distraction for? (NFL being the distraction du jour.) Why does this bill sound like a good thing, but it's actually a bad thing -- has anyone actually read it? Why is the opposite often true, too? (Most people -- including politicians themselves -- remember the 10% of 10% rule -- don't give a shit about reading what a thing actually is, they'll happily take it at face value, reading books by covers!)

That sort of thing.

Wherever you find yourself, good luck,

Tim

I've had moments when I've thought that s.e.d. was a complete waste of time - often when readings posts by Mark L. Fergerson - but I'm comforted by the thought that I can royally piss-off a few right-wing nitwits.

I've tried a bunch of them but can't stand their UI. None seem to be threaded, at least in any obvious way, and it's impossible to carry on a conversation.

You'd have to pay me that much just to find it. Even then, it would probably work out to less than minimum wage. I think I've seen it once in the last fortysomething years.

Sad, wouldn't it be better to pass on wisdom to the next generation. (I skip most your posts.)

GH

I don't see how you can call BS on anything in this group. Technical threads devolve into arguments over nothing and political threads develop technical discussion hidden in the bowels. But never knowing when you are going to be attacked because someone thought your comment or question is the worst part. This group may have some useful insights, but it is not a place to expect to learn anything. Any learning that happens is accidental, squeezed in between the huge egos and interpersonal ignorance.

You don't need the brightest or the best to learn. Sadly nether is really what you can call the denizens of this group. Mostly what are seen here are miscreants.

Said the queen of S.E.D!

s/most/all/

They are all the same: senile, ritual third-person insults.

John Larkin interprets anything less than fulsome praise as an insult. He doesn't read beyond the point where it becomes obvious that he isn't being idolised, so each "insult" look the same to him - the senility isn't in the "insults", but in his ritualised preservation of his somewhat over-blown self-image.

On 2017-10-01, John Larkin wrote: [on the content of Bill Sloman's rebuttal posts]

That's all your ill-conceived off-topic posts merit.

You have my permission to ignore my posts. That's what I do with people like Sloman and Rickman.

Who post rather less than you do.

Go to EEV blog forum dude. Tightly moderated.

Just don't always expect the level of technical competence at the device level you get around here.

Steve

OK we just have different experiences. I find SED to be a good resource. Problems answered, things understood (learned.) Of course learning is a matter of how much I put into it.

All the OT stuff doesn't help though. George H.

Well, there is another way of looking at it. The only thing worse than low S/N is no S. MANY other groups have failed this way.

I'm happy to learn tech stuff from anyone.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs