engineers' brains

I was once dating a gal who had her own house, with a fenced back yard, and the gate was sagging, and scraping on the concrete walkway. I said, "Well, why don't we fix it?" It was trivially simple - I levered it up and nailed a strut across it. Even lined up the latch. :-) She was flabbergasted. For the next couple of days, on the phone, she would rave to her friends: "He DOES Stuff!"

Made me feel kewl. :-)

(unfortunately, she finally got tired of my BS and tossed me out. )-; )

Thanks! Rich

"=2E

More to the point - were his directions accurate or not?

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I read somewhere that newborn fetuses have 2-3 times as many neurons as they're going to need as adults; that's why you can drop them and stuff and they just bounce right back, so to speak. (I think it's an evolutionary thing.)

But the secret is, anyone can grow new synapses, which is where the brain power actually is. The neurons are essentially comparators and switches - it's _how they're arranged_ that supports all of that learning stuff.

1000 NAND gates in parallel is a big NAND gate, but you can make CPUs and cache memories and all kinds of stuff, depending on how the interconnections are arranged.

Cheers! Rich

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I'm a perfect counter-example. If you go by the accomplishments of my relatives, I should be fairly slow-witted, but Mom set me in her lap and read to me for the first 4 or 5 years of my life, so I became quite the smart-ass. ;-P

Cheers! Rich

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Actually, it was Original Desire that created God in the first place.

Cheers! Rich For further information, please visit

Hmm... should I be happy I get kudos just for loading the dishwasher and making it go, then? :-)

Whose?

John

N's father ran a machine shop and was doing plasma machining in the late '50's.

A remarkably well-read man with only a high school education.

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

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Despite my stepmother's best attempts to the contrary, my sister also ended up in engineering and my brother pursues an active hobby interest in it.

Graham

I've never met a female circuit designer; have you?

John

I have never met a male circuit designer either...

i

That's a puzzling point... I haven't either and I've been at this biz for 44 years (not even counting my teenage tinkering).

...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | | | E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat | |

| 1962 | I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Given the low numbers of women in engineering as a whole I'm hardly surprised.

Graham

But there are lots of women programmers and lots of women scientists; just very few circuit designers. None in this ng for a long time!

John

I have heard a woman say: "To you, it's doing the dishes; to me, it's foreplay".

Actually, I saw that as a joke in Playboy, but in a discussion group I recently attended, a woman did say that.

Paul

I have seen several female circuit designers at a Mentor User's Group meeting, and there are some who are active on the forum listserver.pads.com/talk. I assume you are talking about PCB layout.

My opinion is that genetic influence is at least 50% and probably 75% responsible for aptitudes and sociological tendencies, which explains why criminals and sex offenders are very difficult to rehabilitate, and their offspring often have similar problems. Of course, this is probably not a politically correct statement. There are those who insist everyone is born equal, and it is society's fault if they turn out bad.

Paul

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She insisted that the hot water be heated be heated only for about four hours every night, so that it was hot when we took our showers in the morning, rather than letting the central heating boiler keep the hot water up to temperature all the time.

She had found this to be a good scheme when living on her own in a house with a very poorly insulated hot water tank, and insisted on sticking to the strategy in a house with a double insulated hot water tank that had an thermal time constant of three days.

She was right, in the sense that her strategy did save us about ten dollars a year, but it meant that if I came back from hockey practice soaked with sweat, I had a significant chance of getting stuck with a cold shower. No amount of arguement would persuade her that my calculation of the magnitude of the saving involved was to be relied on.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

PCB layout isn't circuit design, and calls on different skills. I've known at least one good female layout person, and a number of very good female programmers, but no female circuit designers and no female assembly language programmers

That is the "blank slate" hypothesis, and Steve Pinker has written a very readable book attacking this particular straw man (The Blank Slate : The Modern Denial of Human Nature ISBN: 0142003344 available on Amazon for $10.40). Steve Pinker goes along with your 50% genetic component - 75% is not just politically incorrect but also unsupported by the available evidence. Whether this has much to do with the incorrigible nature of sex offenders and other criminals is still an open question - Steve Pinker does claim that 5% of the population is sociopathic, and will resort to criminal violence whenever it is to their short term advantage, but this ignores the sociological problems involved in rehabilitating convicted criminals after release, when few non-criminal employers are willing to take them on.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Ah, so her plan was indeed implemented. How unfortunate.

Any chance of installing an on-demand electric water heater for when you come home from hockey?

Or maybe a solar water preheater...? (On second thought, the capital cost for that would be significant.)

I liked your comment so much that it's now part of my sig collection. ;)

Thanks,

Michael

-- "She doesn't understand the engineering involved and isn't in a postion to appreciate the depth of her ignorance."

- Engineer commenting on his wife's criticisms of the central heating system