Schools are removing analogue clocks from exam halls as teenagers 'cannot tell the time'

No way can you or anyone else explain how a triode works to "most 20 and

30 somethings" - they'd have to have studied electronics beforehand to have any hope of understanding it (in one minute or one hour even)
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Cursitor Doom
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Bill Sloman will be extremely pleased with himself.

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Cursitor Doom

And have you even heard the "music" the kids are into these days?! Why it's nothing but electrical beeps and toilet noises! With the occasional grunting!

Reply to
bitrex

Thou dost evoke the name of the scourge ? Art thou daft ? Does thee wish such visitation upon this, so far, inviolate thread Sir ?

If so, prepare for battle. Gather thine lance, knife, mace and shield and bring it with thee to the duel of pistols. Err, pistol...

Reply to
jurb6006

One has to wonder why Cursitor Doom would think that. The correct answer is probably that since he is total lunatic and can't construct coherent trains of thought, he never bothers connecting his bizarre observations to his demented conclusions.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Nonsense, you just use the "hydraulic analogy" that's used pretty often in introductory electronics courses as well, to start.

And also at least the young people in that demographic I've talked with who've had a high school education know perfectly well what a "filament" is (incandescent lamps are still a thing) , what an "electron" is, that like charges repel and unlike charges attract, and can therefore pretty easily understand the concept of a stream of charged particles making up a "current" that has some similarities in behavior to a stream of liquid.

They don't call them "valves" elsewhere for nothing. As I sez they're not particularly complex devices. No they surely could not actually design a functioning circuit at that point. So what. Most EEs here understand perfectly well how a four-stroke internal combustion engine works in principle but could probably not design one from scratch without further education or self-study, either.

Reply to
bitrex

A good RPN calculator (itself an anachronism) can do calcs to eight places in a tiny fraction of the time a slide rule would do them to a couple of per cent accuracy.

It's not reasonable to expect a teenager to be competent at ancient technologies... things that Fred learned when he was a teenager.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

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John Larkin

Yep. Why know anything about electronics when you can just pound away at it with a simulator and get "something" that works?

After a lull of work as I reached the age of retirement, I'm seeing a serious upturn in demand for my skills. ...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
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Jim Thompson

As my father used to assert, "Lessons that are retained are best-learned the hard way" ;-)

Maybe there will be a renaissance, maybe not :-( ...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
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Jim Thompson

I do math in my head all the time, to ballpark effects and to evaluate feasibility. I'm more like using a slide rule than a calculator... I guess things to within maybe 10 percent. I have tricks for estimating things like reciprocals and square roots, but mostly I just guess.

It's kind of a sport in our workplace to quickly estimate quantitative things to useful accuracy. Does that pad capacitance affect the time constant? Will that transistor get hot? How much current will that CMOS gate need?

Stuff like that, in a couple of seconds. Fun.

This is sort of a tradition. Google lightning empiricism

From Jim Williams' first (1991) wonderful circuit design book,

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

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John Larkin

On Friday I had a guy try to charge me $3 for a carnitas super-taco with chips. That was way too low, and I told him so. So then he asked for $5, which was still too low.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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John Larkin

Or they can't make the simplest of change :-( ...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
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Jim Thompson

Random frobbing with Spice (which a lot of amateurs do) is a sport but it is unlikely to create insight or design anything good. But Spice guided by real electronic instincts can invent great circuits. Few really interesting circuits are suited to classical math analysis, and equations never invent things anyhow.

Good analog or mixed-signal designers are a rare and valuable commodity nowadays.

I look for young intern or employment candidates that are really into electronics, and find few. I whiteboard a battery and two resistors and ask the obvious simple questions, which is sufficient to panic the average recent EE grad. If they seen to understand the basics of a transistor, they are hired.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

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John Larkin

Oh, that must be the answer then. Everyone you know in Massivetwoshits is a veritable genius and infinitely intellectually superior to everyone from everywhere else.

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Cursitor Doom

That's the thing with simulators. They won't design *anything* for you. Plugging in arbitrary values to see what the result is doesn't achieve anything other than wasted time.

I'm not the slightest bit surprised.

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Cursitor Doom

I know you've said this before, but I still find it utterly astonishing - and deeply worrying.

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Cursitor Doom

"Experience is a good school, but the fees are high."

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Reply to
bitrex

They aren't getting paid enough to care

"We're like, closed. Or something."

Reply to
bitrex

And.. from personal experience It is not reasonable to expect a 50-something to be any good at PlayStation 4.

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mpm

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