Concepts to improve your cognitive toolkit?

The two best programmers I know started as chemists. But they don't design electronics.

John

Maybe. But you'll never get good if you're doing it wrong.

The best ideas are the ones that initially seem to be incorrect, but aren't. They are good because other people refuse to consider them. The laser is one of my favorites: lots of grownups, including a Nobel laureat in physics, told Townes that the maser was impossible for thermodynamic reasons. Any decent neon sign shop could have built a HeNe laser in 1920.

No. I'm not competitive that way, and I'm basically unmanageable, so I wouldn't get along with a coach.

The best exercise

Sure, if all you want to do is repeat the same motion over and over. Design is doing things you haven't done before, breaking the rules.

What's the best practice for doing things you've never done before?

The worst is to do it wrong. Muscle

You don't need muscle memory to design electronics. Doing things the way you've always done them in the past can be deadly in this business, and is boring besides. Experience is the worst teacher if it bogs you down.

John

My line is from "Tiger Mothers". ...Jim Thompson

How can you learn anything if you don't start off doing it wrong? When you were a kid, did you just stand up and start walking one day?

I figure that if I ski all day without crashing, I'm not learning anything.

Ditto electronic design: if you never try stuff that doesn't work, you're not reaching out enough. Even worse is to never *think* about stuff that doesn't work.

John

I used to hang out at a local pub and play darts a lot. After some practice, practice, practice, I was able to hold my own in a dart game shooting with my eyes closed, just to show off.

Not necessarily related, but to this day I remember when my Dad taught me to ride my bike without the training wheels. I was about four-ish. At first it was crash, get up, crash, get up, crash; then Dad said, "When you feel yourself falling to one side, turn the wheel that direction." Then it was like wobble, wobble, wobble, wobble, eureka! I was riding the bike by the time I got to the end of the block!

Cheers! Rich

Totally not true! I've always stunk at "Twister," but it's still fun if at least half the players are girls! ;-P

Cheers! Rich

Electro-Magnetics is the foundation of all Reality. It's the confluence of The Great Yang and the Great Yin. Imagine oil and water in a blender. Visualize whirled peas. ;-)

"In the multiplicity of Creation it's easy to miss the fundamental fact that all of existence, each separate being and object, is dependent on the interplay of the two primary forces of Creation. These of course are the in-drawing, magnetic, feminine, Will, 'Mother' essence and the ^^^^^^^^ out-pushing, electric, masculine, Spirit, 'God' essence." ^^^^^^^^ ---

(I've provided the carets.)

Cheers! Rich

I've heard the term "control systems" - a PID is a classic (?) example - the Economy is a "control system" with about six billion summing points. Injecting signals to try to influence the outcome can very well have the opposite of the effect you want.

Next to the worldwide economy is, of course, the weather, of which climate is merely the average - there are billions and billions of inputs and summing points, which the warmingists (like BS) apparently can't comprehend, so they just dismiss it and revert to their faith, like any other religion invented to try to get a handle on reality and make it predictable.

Thanks! Rich

Heh. A map of my "career path" would look a lot like "spaghetti code." ;-)

Cheers! Rich

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Climate scientists do understand rather more than Rich thinks they do

- he thinks their brains work as badly as his.

Climate is rather more restrictd than weather, and correspondingly more predictable, a fact that farmers have been exploiting for some thousnad of years now.

Rich suffers from cognitive inadequacy. He doesn't know enough to distinguish between science and religion. Both may well be trying to get a handle on reality and make it predictable, but science has the advantage of a scheme of self-criticism whihc allows it to throw out bad dogma and upgrade under-perofming theories. We can at east predict where the planets are going to be for the next 100 million years, which is more than religion could manage.

Predicting climate in detail is trickier, but the Argo buoys do seem to be well on the way to providing the information that will move the the EL Nino/La Nina alternation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and the Pacfici Decadal Oscillation from unpredictable events to predictable features of the total ocean circulation.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

red EE

Both my parents had a bachelor degrees in chemistry, and I was remarkably good at it at school and at university. Electrical engineering - which is what I might have been offered at the time - didn't really register with me or anybody else in the family. My parents would have liked me to study medicine, which wouldn't have suited me at all. My mother's brother had a very successful career as a general practitioner, and two of his kids followed him into the profession. My youngest brother dod do medicine, as did one of my father's sister's kids - who is now a medical professor somewhere in the US.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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There are still people around who think that the 555 is a good solution to a number of problems, and some people still design in uA741 op amps.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Sure, give them another ten years.

John

That's one game that gets better the worse you are at it!

John

They are occasionally right. But they are attacking a very dull set of problems.

John

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Yeah the best learning comes from making mistakes! It's the same as my philosophy of sking, you can't get better if you're not falling down, pushing your own envelope. (I skied a lot in my youth, but soccer and moguls ruined my knees.)

George H.

Batting cages are fun. With practice, most people can get to hitting streaks of 20 or 30 balls at moderate speeds, 40-50 MPH. We have a batting cage and a Juggs machine at work, and it's fun to wail at some balls now and then. Of course, this sort of "muscle memory" skill makes you useless against a real pitcher, who will quickly figure out how to throw stuff you can't hit.

I taught The Brat, on a tennis court, in about 5 minutes. Interesting dynamics.

John

I learned a lot from skiing. Speed, risk, commitment, lots of cost-benefit tradeoffs. Knees still work, so I'm headed to Tahoe Donner this afternoon. They have a new very cool, steep, fairly dangerous terrain park, full of jumps and boxes and stuff. Some day I might get too old to take insane risks, but thankfully not yet.

Skiing over boxes is great. There's some muscle memory skill involved, but a lot more sheer estimation of speed, distance, and medical expenses.

John