Instead scopes

You're impossible to talk too. Your only motivation is to insult.

Hmm, how much did you get paid for that ringing endorsement? :-)

Three bags of Scopie Treats. Mmm—mmmm. ;)

I’m not at all against cheap scopes with fancy specs. For most of my stuff, I need something faster than 1GSa/s, but a 12 bit digitizer could certainly come in handy.

Thing is, if I have to average 16 or more traces to get the noise floor down far enough for that resolution to be meaningful, I really haven’t gained that much.

By Widrow’s theorem, if there’s at least an LSB or two worth of real noise, quantization noise averages out the same as any other sort.

So the ENOB spec is key.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

We were allowed mechanical calculators (Facits etc.) but there were only enough for half the candidates. Half of us were locked in a room with a spare envigilator acting as a guard while the other half sat the exam then we swapped places and the ones who had taken the exam were locked in while the second group sat the exam.

Electronic calculators did not exist, but we did learn to program an analogue computer where 100v = 1 Machine Unit.

Yeah, I have one each of the 20 GHz SD-48 and SD-46, and two of the slower (6 GHz) SD-42s. They're great except that they're blind north of

I also have an SD-51 trigger head, which is a tunnel diode gizmo that improves the high-speed triggering, and an SD-20 loop-through head, which lets you sample the input signal to some gizmo as well as its output.

The 2-meter extender cables are super useful because you can bring the sampler to the gizmo rather than the other way round.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

The extender cables cost more than the heads nowadays.

They were trained on some other version of Spice? Or some other simulation program?

I'm treasurer of the NSW branch of the IEEE. I get to met a few from time to time. One had just finished a Ph.D. on a flexible implantable liquid crystal electrode for nerve cells (which you interrograted with a laser). I passed on one her papers to Australia's then chief scientist (whom I happened to know) who made his money out of measuring nerve cell potentials exactly. He liked the paper, but said it was thirty years too late for him.

Or your version of the basics, which seems to be odd enough that they might take a year to find out what kind of responses you expect to get.

They've got my sympathy.

Heaviside is where it starts to get interesting. William Thompson - later Lord Kelvin - was directly involved with the early transatlantic telegraph links. Heaviside came later.

What are you doing about the math? - not that I ever needed to get into that though it did prompt me to go for calculators that could handle hyperbolic trigometrical functions.

If your idea of a conversation is one where you get flattered nonstop, I'm not the ideal conversational partner.

Most people have lower expectations when it comes to uncritical flattery, and some of them can even earn just approbation.

Sure, but if I wake up at 3AM in Truckee, I can Spice an idea and go back to bed.

SpaceX is having trouble with helium leaks too. Helium is the chemical equivalent of slippery eels. It will leak though almost anything, even solid metals. If they need an inert gas, why don't they use argon or neon or nitrogen?

Musk is cool. He annoys a lot of fatheads.

What a creationist would call intelligent design. The rest of us call it evolving your circuits, rather than designing them, and you have described that as insanely inefficient.

Argon and neon aren't all that inert, nitrogen even less so. For thrusters, helium's low molecular weight is a real advantage. Hydrogen would be about the same, but it is anything but inert, and leaks almost as fast a helium, and atomic hydrogen can produce hydrogen embrittlement.

My idea of good conversation is a group of people playing with ideas and inventing stuff together. "Egoless" is the word, as in "egoless programming."

It's not inefficient if it's done insanely fast, in parallel, preferably asleep.

It doesn't matter how you describe the process. It works better if you don't.

Efficiency is the ratio of how long something actually takes compared with the time taken by some sort of ideal process. We don't know what the ideal process might look like, and have no idea how long it would take, so talking about the "efficiency" of the process is mere illiterate bullshit.

You brain isn't wildly different from any other human brain and isn't going to do anything insanely fast, even when you are asleep.

What makes you think that? I suspect the claim reflects the fact that you aren't good at explaining things and want an excuse to avoid trying to do so.

Your opinion is noted. I doubt if the people with whom I have collaborated would agree.

Sloman A.W., Buggs P., Molloy J., and Stewart D. “A microcontroller-based driver to stabilise the temperature of an optical stage to 1mK in the range 4C to 38C, using a Peltier heat pump and a thermistor sensor” Measurement Science and Technology, 7 1653-64 (1996)

Jim Molloy has died, but Paul Buggs and Doug Stewart are still around. You could ask them.

I knew some ego-driven engineers who tried to patent every bright idea that they though that they had had. I've only got three patents and one of them had struck me as obvious, so I hadn't thought to patent it until I'd had to explain it to enough people to let me realise that it wasn't all that obvious.

If paying way too much for Twitter and halving its value after getting control of it is actually cool, you may be right. More rational observers see that as evidence that Musk is an ego-driven fathead.

People, especially people with advanced degrees, who can't invent things, often resent people who do invent things. We just fired one case.

They should accept that people are different, and pitch in to develop the new ideas that others invent. Their resentment often stops them from helping, so they become useless.

I suppose this could be a new idea to you.

You did one academic, unremarkable temperature controller, published in a journal, and have cited it here maybe 50 times now. Do something new.

Here's my millikelven temperature controller.

This is part of the modulation system for a big laser.

I really over-did it on the enclosure. It's a lot heavier than it really needed to be.

A lot of current engineering practise is left over from the days when computing was expensive or non-existant. Things like s-parameters and Smith charts.