cool book

The guys who made relays and carbon comp resistors didn't know what we'd do with them either.

Some of us still work with electricity and solder transistors to boards. New toys just give us more options.

Opamps and FPGAs certainly allow us to move up the abstraction stack, but that's not confining, it's liberating. We can still use resistors and diodes and pcb trace delay lines. But if we need 800 multiplies or

EE basics like physics and control theory and signals&systems are even better with more resources.

Name one. The odds are that somebody here will know it's ancestors, even if you don't.

John Larkin's idea of "fundamentally new" needs to be defined.

They aren't there to be copied - you almost always have to vary something to get a standard circuit to do it's thing in your application. this may constitute "practice in thinking" in the sam way that chopping up wood constitutes exercise.

Why? About the only one of my instincts it trains is the one that says simulations are rarely complete enough.

Not by anybody sane.

Some people have less to be anxious about here than others.

It is just one of those things. It should not surprise us that the building blocks for life are present in our universe since we are alive.

Fred Hoyle should have got the Nobel prize for his work on stellar nuclear synthesis and the resonances in triple alpha fusion so important in hotter heavier stars. But he rubbed too many people up the wrong way.

He's a conman presenting a fabricated just so story that you like.

Valence will explain it as an ad hoc pre quantum mechanics rule.

That is simply explained by atomic wave functions and taught these days at a hand waving level in high school chemistry. SP3 hybridisation. That simple model also explains the shapes of HF, H2O, NH3 and CH4.

You really are devoted to your superstitious anti-science aren't you!

There was a science fiction book you may like. It was called "Darwin's Radio":

I read a lot of SF when I was a kid, but outgrew it. The plots are generally silly and the writing bad.

Generalizing like that is a guarantee to get it wrong. Of course there is plenty of sci-fi garbage, like anything else. Then authors like Asimov, Lem, Clarke, Strugatski have written

Dimiter

OK, never be amazed. Yawn your life away.

I'm not arbitrarily generalizing. I pick up sf books in bookstores and skim a few pages [1]. Most are terrible writing. Looking back at the classics, most of them were terrible writing too. I guess I've become too picky about that sort of stuff.

Terry Pratchett was fair but got old fast. Not the stuff to save to re-read.

Small bookstores seem to happen close to pastry and chocolate shops too. No accident.

There is a difference between thinking something is amazing, and thinking it is proof of magic. H₂O is amazing. So is DNA and life in general. That does not mean it was all made by a god or designed by magic DNA in order to create humans. Conversely, understanding (at least partially) why chemistry, physics and biology work they way they do does not stop rational minded people from admiring the universe and its workings, or thinking it is amazing, beautiful and a wonderful place.

Just because you seem convinced that ignorance is bliss, and are determined to stay as blissfully ignorant as you can, does not mean other people are equally retarded. The rest of us find pleasure in knowledge and understanding, and opening our eyes to reality instead of hiding from anything that threatens your little make-believe world of magic.

One of my favourites, when I was about 9 years old was "Time For The Stars" - Robert A. Heinlein.

-- Kevin Aylward

For my current ASIC design, I have around 8 different opamp variations. Different parts of the circuit have different loads, so the output devices are individually sized for the specific worst case load. This saves space. Some op amps are running low and high voltages which needs a special class AB output stage using feedback to fix the bias current. Some can't be in summing configuration so need a different input to accommodate the common mode. Some require large feedback resisters so that a small cap can be used for filtering. These ones need additional bias compensation to reduce base current errors etc... There are only a couple of truly new configurations in he system.

Thus there are several topology types, and variations of those 3 topologies. All of the topologies were derived from existing topologies going back to the 60s. Indeed, some of them use the Jim Thomson originated diff pair with current mirror load.

-- Kevin Aylward

Sure, that's the *random* generator part. The random bit is *anything*

The random "variation" bit is a misnomer. Its ANY *randam* process is part of evolution. The fundamentals of Evolution don't depend on *minor* or

Everything a brain can do is resolvable to Selection, Random Generation, and Replication.

I only quoted the variation bit for the sake of consistency with standard descriptions, but its not a requirement for the Darwinian Evolution algorithm to be valid.

Well... it does do that, but Spice is absolutely indispensible in ASIC design for far more than that, so the limit implied by "true" isn't really accurate.

A small ASIC of 100 transistors per block, 100 blocks, needs 100,000s of sims before it can go to fab. There is *zero* chance of designing an ASIC today without Spice.

-- Kevin Aylward

Yep....one can get really excited when one believes they have come up with some great idea, but realise that the reality is, if it is truly new, it must have been a random neural connection in the brain, that an "I" couldn't possible have had any part in, as it was er.... randam....

What we actually are, is really quite sobering. A machine.....

-- Kevin Aylward

Indeed.... an "accident" is called a random process...that's still part of the evolution algorithm.....

The random "variation" is a misnomer. Its ANY *random* process is part of evolution. The fundamentals of Evolution don't depend on minor *variations*. A completely new random trait is fully compatible with evolution. Minor variations are just the most probable way of getting new information into the system to create something new.

I agree, I certainly don't understand the details of that circuit you posted. As to seeing in before...ahhmmmm.....

As for complexity, what matters is how stable is it , what supply current and what distortion , phase noses etc. Whether that topology is optimum for a given spec is unknown...

I guess you missed the selection bit of the algorithm ..... random white noise passed through a filter weights the output possibilities. Thus one only considers the random ones that pass through the selection process. Chess players do this. They rule out the no hopers, then do the trial and error bit.

You brain was shuffling through 1,000,000s of options, you just were not aware of the ones it rejected. Its how thinking is actually done. There is simply no other way for the brain to work. Over time, the selection process produces subroutines to do specific tasks, these subroutines give the illusion that that there is something more intelligent going on.

The reality is, researches have indeed used genetic algorithms to design filters that produce better result than systematic filter they does. They can generate really weird topologies.

This is only achieved after throwing away 1,000s times more bad ideas

Of course its relevant to invention. Invention don't need free will. We exist from a Darwinian processes, that's all there is to it, that is all there is. There is no magic designer that gave as a brain algorithm that wasn't descended from an evolutionary process. Everything we think do and say is a result of Selection, Random Generation and Replication.

-- Kevin Aylward

Gosh, you will fabricate all sorts of nonsense if it helps you be obnoxious.

That's dull too.

Star Trek had too much lib stuff in it like that time the girl alien and the other girl alien kissed. The wingnuts threw a fit and then watched the scene again five times.

They wanted to make sure how disgusting it was

The people who wrote that book also have reasons for fabricating all sorts of nonsense, you know. But they aren't trying to be obnoxious. They're trying to be friendly and helpful. They understand that this gets them closer to their goal, which is a world enlightened only by faith and lit only by fire.

Talk about dull!

-- john, KE5FX

You seem convinced that everyone who doesn't believe in the same dancing pink unicorns (sorry, magic DNA and "intelligent designers") that you do are "dull". It may disappoint you to hear that most of us can find life interesting without having to believe outdated fairytales wrapped up in a thin veneer of pseudoscientific gibberish.