discharging caps

You may fancy yourself a a political censor. Nobody sane is going to take you seriously in that role.

Your idea of what constitutes an insult is pretty strange too. I'm not going to waste my time thinking about whether you would approve of what I might be thinking about posting.

Probably quite a few more of them than you realise.

I once worked via an agency several month in a university hospital here one of the things I was tasked with was keeping that stuff running. We had all sorts of stuff, mass spectrometers and super conducting stuff too. Interesting DNA stuff, all sorts of stuff the students came up with and that needed electronics too.

Do you?

The path to good ideas is often through crazy ideas.

Or through ideas that other people think are crazy.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Universities often have an electronics shop. It ususlly doesn't get a lot of respect but does get a lot of interesting problems. The Art Of Electronics came out of such a shop.

In high school, I worked summers at the physics-electronics shop at LSUNO. It was a great experience.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

I had to look that up: LSU New Orleans - Wikipedia LSU New Orleans (LSUNO), known from 1974 to 2026 as the University of New Orleans (UNO), is a public research university in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. First opened in 1958 as Louisiana State University in New Orleans (LSUNO), it was renamed the University of New Orleans in 1974 until reverting to its LSU name in 2026. 

As to that original 

The campus was on the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain, near the Pontchartrain Beach amusement park. There wasn't a lot of stuff out there in those days.

I wasn't a student so they couldn't pay me. So they faked my student registration number, 20000. I guess some real student also go that number some day.

They did have a library that had a set of the MIT RadLab books. I read them all.

That was the first time I saw a Tektronix scope or a spectrum analyzer.

Really? How?

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Obviously not.

Not often.

Even rarer. Some people do get attached to their silly ideas, and tout them as if they were good ideas. Donald Trump and tariffs do come to mind, despite your enthusiasm for censoring my thought processes.

It didn't. It was written as the text book for a course on electronics for physicists at Harvard taught by Paul Horowitz. I spent a couple of year working in a science faculty workshop at Nijmegen in the Netherlands and the electronics there were a lot more advanced.

But a high school trainee wouldn't have got at the cutting edge stuff. As a graduate student I had to discourage a colleague from dismantling a Varian vibrating reed electrometer to dig out the 1 gigohm resistor. He was planning to measure the voltage drop across it with a regular multimeter. It took a while to get him up to speed on the input impedance of a vibrating reed electrometer.

Stark effect microwave spectrosopy, Mössbauer gamma-ray spectroscopy, some superconductive stuff, played with a very early ruby laser. I was just a kid.

What did you do when you were in high school?

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Somehow it draws a picture in my mind of you, your attitude, your personality Same happens when just meeting a new person, but this was a bit wider. Of course I have more data from all your postings and stuff you created.

'How' is a good question. Been reading minds of people all my life, maybe it has to do with doing a lot of meditation? That is a bit like cleaning the mirror / glass you see the world through, getting the noise level of your own brain down, better observation?

And was entertained as a kid would be.

Survived. My first year of high school was local in Burnie, Tasmania which is still a very small town, but back then it only had 15,000 people and was dominated by the pulp and paper mill, now closed down. There were some bright kids in my high school class, and some good teachers. Two of the kids in my year went on to do Ph.D.s in chemistry at the University of Tasmania. Then the paper mill paid my father to send me off to a boarding school in Launceston which was crap and heavily infested with farmer's sons, some of whom were quite bright, but only interested in farming.

The theory was that since the boarding school was expensive it had to be good, but it wasn't. I did well enough on the external exams to qualify to get into the University of Melbourne (which was a much higher prestige institution than the University of Tasmania) where I did pretty well, but high school was pretty much a missed opportunity.

More like scrubbing out the stuff you can't understand in order to let you feel better about the stuff you think you can understand

Somebody who prefers the Le Sage theory of gravity to Albert Einstein's general relativity has to have scrubbed out a lot of stuff that he should have understood.

There's a free phone app, Free42, that's great. It even looks right.

True. Not many engineers are willing to allow crazy ideas into their heads. And not many engineers invent things.

Yikes. Everything is Trump to you.

That's a valuable skill, reading peoples' minds.

Some people are convinced that they have mastered it.

I've known several. They didn't go in for crazy ideas. Sometimes they'd have to put in some work to get other people to understand what they were proposing.

A crazy idea, and not remotely productive. Trump is a widely advertised horrible example of a lot of intellectual errors, and gets cited as prominent example for a lot of mistakes. Get used to it. The mid-terms may put him back in his box, but sadly he's unlikely to get thrown out of office, or out of his bully pulpit for broadcasting his lunatic delusions.