Open Costing

A physical chemist friend of mine (we were postdocs together long ago) used to say,

"A physical chemist is a guy who talks physics to chemists, chemistry to physicists, and baseball to other physical chemists."

;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

n what you design? I believe there are several dozen right here in this ne wsgroup.

ectronics that impresses physicists and doesn't impress electronic engineer s to make the distinction obvious. Phil is a very much better approximation to an electronic engineer than most physicists, but his judgement is still somewhat flawed by his training.

observation.

another shudder. I'd rather go back and take E&M. No, actually it wasn' t that bad, but I did read bumper stickers that said, "Honk if you passed P-chem". I had Castellan who used his own book, while others used any other book. The result was that half his class would drop out ea ch semester and in the second semester you were in a much smaller class whe re he would actually smile at you. lol

The only really difficult class was in thermodynamics - which we got as sec ond-ear undergraduates (what in America would be called sophomores, but the rmodynamics wasn't undergraduate material in the US at that time, and we we re working from a U.K. published text-book - Glasson IIRR - which wasn't mu ch help).

If you understood partial derivatives you could eventually get your head ar ound what was going on. It's notoriously difficult to teach, and while I wa s a graduate student we had to sit through a hour-long research seminar fro m one of the dimmer lecturers on educational research into teaching it - th e audience consensus afterwards was that we were glad that we hadn't had to learn it from that particular lecturer.