OT: How life came to Earth

Tom Gardner snipped-for-privacy@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote in news:suirv5$oe9$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

And now as an old man, I use a Hadron collider ring...

I think that the math should be immediately connected to lab experiments. Kids should solve the differential equations and immediately see the solutions on oscilloscopes, from circuits that they build themselves.

Nobody that I know actually solves differential equations or computes Fourier series. The interesting de's are nonlinear anyhow. We should

*feel* the equations. You can feel the solution to a nonlinear de a lot faster than you can solve it.

We actually simulate everything. The design methodology becomes instinct and simulation, and the kids aren't getting much instinct these days.

But then many kids are getting EE degrees these days.

Sloppy slide ruling slinging was great for plotting "lab" results with a nice scatter of experimental error.

We went to afternoon EE lab.

Dr Seto, the lab instructor, left after 5 minutes

We left after 6 minutes

The night before all the lab results were due, we faked them.

We and only we got all A's.

All you want to do is insult. Jerk.

So you know everything (including electronic design and biology) and you're always right and you have no tolerance for non-standard ideas. You supress your own ideas, if any, for fear of being shown to be wrong.

Great, I can compete with that.

What kind of misreading could lead you to that conclusion? Do you bother paying any attention at all to things people write? You apparently don't read posts here, nor do you read any articles on the web (even the ones you link to yourself). I think you just skim posts looking for trigger words or phrases so that you can tell people how wonderful you are and how bad others are.

Read again. If you are having difficulty, find a grandkid to help with the big words.

Compete at what? This is a Usenet group, not a competition.

I take that means you prefer to wallow in your ignorance.

What a surprise!

I used to think Bill's (automated?) comments were OTT and unjust.

Having seen John's responses recently, the "skim looking for trigger phrases" concept does appear to be accurate.

Shame.

Where did you take your PhD in biology?

Good point. I design electronics and you don't.

All your insults are of course made with the best of intent.

Is Bill still being Bill? I don't read his posts.

Well, it is easy to spot "wrong" and "stupid" and "ignorant" on a few screens of off-topic text.

What a crock! Suggestions about physical reality are everyone's business, there can be no 'admitted amateurs' on such topics.

The above articles are very interesting.

But I'd suggest that everybody drop the ad hominem arguments and passing digs - it prevents persuasion of both opponent and audience. Not effective.

Joe Gwinn

I sense a continued pattern here. Playing loose with facts is a lifelong habit of yours.

"But then how many kids are getting EE degrees these days"

Well, I dunno.

How many of the kids in your days got EE degrees without earning them?

Getting stuff done, actually.

We earned ours. Faking the data required more understanding of the circuits than taking actual data.

The lab equipment was terrible. The shared B+ power supply had 50 volts p-p ripple, which made for the other guys getting some interesting frequency response graphs using their voltmeters.

I noticed the strange, flat amplifier frequency response immediately, so checked it on an oscilloscope.

It's normally called lying and cheating.

It's actually creating the impression that you did get stuff done, which isn't quite the same thing.

Then your instructors were criminally incompetent.

Clearly true. That doesn't mean that you earned your degree, and it clearly means that it wasn't worth having - not that potential employers would be aware of that.

It does look as if your instructors really were criminally incompetent.

The correct response is to fix the lab equipment, rather than fake the results. If your instructors really were criminally incompetent this might not have played out well, but it is still the correct response.

They aren't automated, but John and I have been posting here for some twenty five years now, and John keeps on posting the same kind of nonsense, so my responses are well-practiced. I do look for ways of varying them a bit, but the information content has remained depressingly constant.

I think "gullible twit" covers more of John Larkin's output.

Arthur C Clarke accused Hollywood PR droids of having a single key that generated "never in the history of motion pictures". That's the level of "automation" I had in mind.

Having said that, your ripostes are sometimes amusing, the content usually refers to the previous content. Not all posters manage to achieve that.

That's would be the consequence of skimming and reacting to phrases. "Confirmatory bias" springs to mind.

I find that nowadays there is too much /stuff/ competing for our eyeballs, and that encourages skimming. In that sense it was better a few decades ago, when you devoured any data you could get your hands on to extract useful information.