engineering is hard

I think EE education is too hard. Too much math, too much homework, too many washouts made to feel like failures. Engineering educators are academics and rarely engineers.

Roger psychology. I have a relative that got an ivy league psychology degree but actually majored in softball and beer pong.

Sociology might be even sillier.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

I like to have an occasional intern and show them how electronics is designed, documented, manufactured, tested, and sold. Engineering schools don't do that.

I try to give them some technical instincts too, give them some vision of what all those equations really do.

I learn from them too.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

But that doesn't stop them doing the job. University courses are difficult. People who do very well at secondary school tend to do well at university - about 95% of them graduated, and the 5% who didn't had developed drastic psychological problems. Australian university graduated about 40% of the people who started the course, and about 30% of the people who barely made it into university still graduated.

The others may have felt like failures, but the fault isn't in the courses but rather the selection criteria tat let in people who won't make it

John Larkin knows very little about psychology. My wife studied it and went to become an Fellow of the Royal society of London, and a foreign member of the US Academy of Science. It is a serious science. Newspapers go in for "popular psychology" which isn't.

Another one of my female friends - and somebody I might have married - end up as professor of sociology. There wasn't anything silly about what she did.

Geert Wilders has the same kind of personality defects as Donald Trump. He is a lot smaller and his family wasn't nearly as rich, so he is less florid.

It never is in the Netherlands, but the coalition governments you get tend to work pretty well. The lunatic fringe elements tend to isolate themselves at the end of the political spectrum rather than forming factions inside mainstream parties.

Autocracies don't tend to deliver for the bulk of the population, as Donald Trump is demonstrating in the US at the moment. Putin is conscripting lots of cannon fodder to get them killed off in the Ukraine. China has raised living standards for the population as whole over the last thirty years, largely by catching up with the rest of the world, much as Japan did about a hundred years ago but even the most benign autocracy finds elements of their population to abuse.

And neither do your posts here.

But you don't understand what emitter-coupled monostable does.

Not all that much, from what you post here.

In my day 1968 the Engineering dropout rate at Glasgow University was

Brian

Of course not. We can barely show this stuff to an intern in three months.

I understood that your circuit didn't make sense.

I prefer a modern design: a 1 ns 12 cent edge-triggered D-flop that resets itself and makes clean complementary sub-ns CMOS outputs.

The "123" series one-shots, even the Tiny versions, are almost as bad as your discrete thing.

My latest intern does the computer and electro-hydraulic automation of the animated floats in the Rose Bowl parade. He knows all about using JLCPCB for PCB design and 3D modeling, and buying both bare and stuffed boards from them. We learned a lot from him.

He also did some awesome fast kilovolt pulse generators with GaN parts and planar magnetics. Not bad for three months.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Tulane, in 1969, was similar. The flusher course, by design, was freshman chemistry.

I thought that was cruel. There should be a gentle off-ramp for the kids that can't solve differential equations. Steer them towards something that they can do.

How many people here have solved a differential equation lately? Excepting Phil Hobbs, who does that sort of stuff naturally.

I actually did an integral once, about 20 years ago, to calculate a mosfet power dissipation, but it really confirmed a simple rectangular estimate. Nowadays I'd use Spice.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

That strikes me as a pretty nonsensical thing to say Bill. How much design all the way through to manufacturing are you doing these days?

You clearly get much pleasure telling others what they don't know or can't do Bill.

On 4/11/2025 3:56 am, john larkin wrote: > On Tue, 4 Nov 2025 02:48:00 +1100, Bill Sloman snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org > wrote: >

Other people can do better.

It wasn't my circuit. It's been around for more than thirty years - there's a reference to it in my 1979 paper

Ghiggino, K.P., Phillips, D., and Sloman, A.W. "Nanosecond pulse stretcher",Journal of Physics E: Scientific Instruments, 12, 686-687 (1979).

and the referees didn't object to it back then.

It made perfect sense back when it was invented

Google says it was in Millman and Taub's "Pulse and Digital Circuits" back in 1956.

Of course you do. You don't have to think about what the circuit is doing. Once we got broad-band transistors, you could get that sort of performance out of a discrete transistor circuit, if you knew what you were doing. You don't seem to.

The 123 monostables are re-triggerable. The 121 isn't and it is a much better monostable, but it is build with much slower transistors than the board-band part I used in my Spice model.

Really? This was new to you?

Planar magnetics was a 1990's thing - some printed circuit manufacturers worked out how to get enough copper into a printed circuit board to make a respectable transformer winding. I never found a project that needed it, much as I would have liked to.

It would. Your reactions are predictable and not all that edifying.

None. I do apply for jobs from time to and get a very occasional interview, but I'm well aware that it isn't a profitable investment of my time.

I feel compelled to correct errors. It's probably a personality defect. It isn't in the least rewarding.

Tulane was never a prestige university.

You don't "solve" differential equations. You exploit them - if you can. Chemistry isn't usually mathematically demanding - physics is worse. I'd done Tasmanian math at secondary school, so the Melbourne physics department put me into the non-calculus first year physics course, which I found terminally boring, so I didn't do second year physics, though I did fine on the first year exams.

Nobody "solves" differential equation. Some people are better at abstract math than others, and they mostly become mathematicians. More people are good enough at math to be able exploit it for solving real-life problems. Phil Hobbs does seem to be one of them.

Lots of differential equations can't be transformed into simple integrals - I did 2nd year pure mathematics at Melbourne which concentrated on teaching you how to find the integral forms of those that could - but numerical integration is usually practical and pretty straightforward. My Ph.D. project had me running the university computer (an IBM 7040/44) on my own for hours in the middle of the night, doing mostly that. The results of each integration were compared with my experimental observations and a nonlinear multiparameter least squares curve fitting program adjusted three parameters at once to get the integrated results to fit my observations. The numerical integration process I used was simpler than the one Spice uses, but not all that different.

The reading I had to do to let me write the program meant that I knew exactly what Spice was doing (and how it could go wrong) when I first got exposed to it some ten years later.

So are yours.

Correcting errors is fine, but not the way you correct what you think are errors.

Probably best to stop it then.

They might want to work on their personality defects first.

Your chances of edifying anybody aren't great. Your claimed capacity to predict my posts seems to be an unverified claim . My capacity to predict your posts isn't great - you can be relied on to post something rude but inconsequential, but that isn't all that specific

So do tell me how I should do it.

Compulsions are hard to stop. John Larkins attitude to the emitter-coupled monostable is bizarre. It's been in at least one textbook since 1956, but he seems to want to tell us that it is my invention and that it can't work.

In your case I think it would be best not to do it at all.

Yours is more bizarre. You mention it in every other post. It's almost like you believe that the world would be so much better if only John would use an emitter-coupled monostable.

The ones I knew went elsewhere, and that seemed to be the norm. The ones that made it into year 2 generally ended up with a degree .

I shared a flat with one guy who switched from Agricultural Zoo-ology to Psychology and Sociology. That's the most extreme switch I'd heard of .

Brian

Of course you think that. You may have noticed that I don't think highly of your opinions. If you went to the trouble of trying to justify them you might be able to work out why, but it's fairly clear that you wouldn't bother even if you knew how.

I very much doubt if it would be. The point is that he doesn't seem to understand how it works, and is happy to ignore that fact that people seem to have been using it since at least 1956.

We know his grasp of reality isn't great - he thinks that Donald Trump has common sense, and he has yet to find a chunk of climate change denial propaganda that he can't believe - but he really should know about the emitter-coupled monostable. It's an obscure circuit, but it has been around for his entire professional career, and yet he is still willing to post nonsensical claims about it.

He seldom makes quite such dramatic pratfalls.

It's worth jeering at.

Sounds like a farmer's kid. Farmers aren't usually into education, and expect their kids to study stuff that would be useful on the farm. Once the kids get away from the farm they can acquire a wider perspective.

My mother's brother was a doctor, and invested in a farm, and got his oldest son to study agriculture so that he could take over the farm. The son got involved with computers early on and spent most of his career as a computer manager. All the other kids got degrees of some kind or another - two became doctors, one became a vet and one got Ph.D. in economics and ended up as a Marist monk.

One of my brothers kids did physics (and was pretty good at at it) but got persuaded to do a two years masters course that should have turned him into a quant, using math to predict where the stock market was going to go. He passed, but hated the work, and did a six months course on video editing and ended up editing the news for a Sydney TV station, but married a rather clever wife whose parent were both medical professors at one of the local universities. She got him to do a part-time computer science course to make him look more attractive as a mature age entrant to medical training. It didn't work - he was good at it and got head-hunted by Yahoo for a video-based service that got taken over by Google.

People do have a tendency to end up doing stuff that they are good at, but didn't know about when they first got into education.