I guess. It's almosy guaranteed that those people don't have good ideas. Internally, they will actually reject their on.
I never said anything like that. Many of my ideas are crazy; deliberately crazy, because all idea genaration is exercize for creating and considering ideas.
Yeah, too many big companies keep buying the things I design.
If you were
But some of them really work.
Electronic design ideas don't go horribly wrong because we review and test them hard before we develop a product. There is a transition between generating many wild ideas and applying design and packaging discipline to one of them. Both functions matter; not many people can do both.
You would poison a brainstorming session. Imagine if nobody opened their mouths for fear of being called a fool.
You don't
Too many filters, applied way too soon. Idea abortion.
Only a few people matter here, and I have met and worked with and drunk beer (or sometimes rum) with most of those.
It wouldn't if you listened to and understood the reasons other people give you. Instead you either ignore them or resort to irrelevant points (e.g. "design something").
Now the reasons other people give you might be incorrect, but you are free to understand and correct those reasons. But typically you act as if you don't want to understand their reasons.
Competence in one area means zero about competence in another.
We aren't doubting or challenging that.
If the idea has demonstrable gross foetal abnormalities, it should be aborted.
Sadly, this is a lot like the Drake equation. There's LOTS of variables, including how many non-DNA life possibilities exist; if there's a billion different other candidates, that multiplies by 10**9 the probability that one of them gets explored and becomes... us. Even a smart biologist cannot have the whole equation worked out; that math tells us very little about the world, only allows us to discard an occasional set of assumptions.
I reply "yes" to most people in this kind of thread. Your posts stand out as extraordinarily silly and ignorant, so you pick up a lot of no's.
Would you feel better if I wrote "/Yes/, you failed to read the article. /Maybe/ you haven't a clue what you are writing about" ?
When you make a comment that is less sensible than "Maybe the moon is made of green cheese", the sane response is "No." If you want a "yes", write something that isn't idiotic. (And yes, you sometimes /do/ write things that aren't idiotic, and you sometimes get a "yes" in reply. It doesn't happen much in the biology threads.)
The "Genesis is a literal description of creation" is a modern idea - young earthers, like flat earthers, are not people that never left the Dark Ages, they are people who have chosen to re-enter it. Until people started finding geological proof that the earth is old, and Darwin and others (before and afterwards) began to understand evolution, few people really thought about the creation of the earth in any kind of real sense. Theologians of the day knew fine that Genesis was not a literal record of creation - they could see perfectly well that it contains two contradictory accounts and thus literalism cannot possibly make sense.
Europe was dragged kicking and screaming out of the dark ages by the Islamic scholars. India and China were /way/ ahead for a long time. But in the past few centuries the west took over.
However, it was not /because/ of the Christian church, it is mainly /despite/ it. For a long time, scientists in the west were all religious - part of that was that saying anything could get your badly burned, literally or at least metaphorically. And since education was in the hands of the church, and education is required for real progress in science, there was a strong overlap for a while. As long as the scientists did not contradict the church (this was Martin's point), that was fine.
Yes.
Science really took off in the west took off after the enlightenment, when people started questioning the church teachings a lot more. But the church still provided the backbone of higher education for a long time. (Not least was the teaching of Latin, giving educated people a common language.)
I would not say the church "stepped aside" - it would be more accurate to say they were pushed aside. It was not a voluntary process on the part of the church.
I don't come here to insult people. I sometimes call out stupid posts for what they are. Most others don't see my posts as insulting, as most other people don't post the kind of bizarre and absurd "ideas" that you are so fond of. (There are other posters here who post some far worse stuff, but they are beyond all hope of redemption. I still hope that one day you will learn to understand evolution.)
I am an interested amateur, without formal higher education in the subject. In this group, there are a fair number of amateur biologists, leading to interesting discussions.
I haven't done much electronics design for quite some time - there are others at my company who do it more efficiently, and I have more than enough other tasks (mostly software related). I rarely get involved in electronics discussions here, simply because the kind of electronics I work with doesn't come up much - control systems and digital electronics is usually quite easy. I don't have the education or interest in the kind of electronics that benefits from discussion, such as more complicated analogue stuff. I have neither the theoretical background nor the experience to contribute much. (On some electronics threads, I read with interest despite not posting.)
Like most people in this group, I come for the chatter.
The Islamic and Chinese science was not dissiminated, didn't become beneficial technology, like western science did. Partially because we printed a lot of books.
For a long time, scientists in the west were all
One reason printing flourished was to print a lot of bibles. One reason literacy advanced was so people could read them.
David Brown wasn't using "no" as a mantra. He might have explained how you got it wrong in more detail - I did - but since you don't read that kind of reaction it would have been a waste of time.
Your use of "maybe" probably does qualify as a mantra, since it has no intellectual content at all.
Except that if you actually have invented stuff, you should have got at least one patent. It's a fairly high bar - patents are expensive.
Publishing a scientific paper with enough novel content that other people have cited it might be good enough - getting a paper published takes work and you've got no control over the people who read it and may even cite it.
Pointing out that John Larkin has got oi wrong again is to easy to be remotely enjoyable.
Breeding involves selecting the parents. Your daughter reflects your choice of wife - or you wife's choice of you. I doubt if the potential "delicacy" of your offspring played any part in that.
They may read what gets posted. We don't know anything about lurkers.
When I worked at EMI Central Research one of our colleague submitted more "patent queries" in one year than anybody else in the building. None of them got patented. He clearly didn't reject any of his ideas.
You essentially do bespoke electronics. People tell you what they want and you put it together for them. Vanity published publish a lot of books. They don't tend to sell well to anybody except the authors relatives.
If your average development time for a new product is two weeks - as you have claimed - your new ideas have to look very like ideas you have had earlier, so the threshold you set for an inventive step can't be all that high.
But quite enough of them to let me know quite a few. I do have the advantage of having worked in places where there was enough new stuff being invented that they applied for patents on a routine basis.
It would cut down the number of foolish ideas. The brainstorming sessions I was involved in didn't come up with foolish ideas - they did produce a lot of odd ones that didn't go anywhere, but none of them were obviously stupid. You may have to set the bar lower.
It prevents idea miscarriages, where you spend a couple of weeks realising that an idea isn't going to go anywhere. That's expensive.
And John Larkin's criterion for "people who matter" includes the rule that they have to be willing flatter him. How can they work closely with him if they won't lie about his competence, and be very diplomatic in steering him away from his sillier ideas.
But mainly because we invented the scientific method - peer-reviewed publications in recognised scientific journals, and a habit of citing earlier publications.
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invented the moveable type printing press around 1450, and we started printing a lot of books from then on.
The Royal Society wasn't established until 1660. It grew out of Robert Boyle's "invisible college" first mentioned in 1646.
Literacy and printing will have been precussors to scientific advance, but they weren't sufficient on their own.
"Any behavior is instinctive if it is performed without being based upon prior experience (that is, in the absence of learning), and is therefore an expression of innate biological factors."
A university course can't instil instincts. It can teach people the kind of behavior they can expect from electrical circuits, but it isn't instilling any kind of instinct.
John Larkin doesn't seem to like doing conscious thought, and seems to think that there is a virtue in training the sub-conscious to do it for you. University instruction can do that, but universities like people to think about what they are doing, so that the process is accessible to introspection.
"Easily-forgotten mathematical rigor" is easy to retrieve from text-books - if you know they exist, and even easier if you know your way around a particular textbook, which is why selective entry universities tend to use "The Art of Electronics" as an undergraduate electronic text. It's not a comprehensive text - that's an impractical idea - but it is a very good start, and lists other useful text books.
Everybody has areas where they have specialised knowledge. Most electronic development forces you to expand those areas to cover new ground.
A good EE course should teach you how to do that, but there are other ways of acquiring that particular skill. I got into it via physical chemisty. Win Hill got into it via chemical physics. John Larkin sees to have missed out.
Oh, Islamic science DID become beneficial technology; wootz process for steelmaking, to start with. Latin writings and Roman numerals aren't the roots of our algebra and arabic numbers; that was Islamic work. Toledo isn't famed for cutlery because of the Christian influence.
Of course people who don't design things have different attitudes towards new ideas. They instinctively don't like them.
That would have to state reasons, something better than "you are stupid." They might even practice having some ideas of their own.
No! System dynamics transcends a lot of things. The tools that we use in electronic design (formal logic, number theory, signals and systems, control theory, thermo, optics, physics, information theory, measurement, statistics) have hard analogies to many other fields, which is why electronics is now ubiquitous. And why EEs can help others understand their own processes. That's fun, actually.
Killing ideas in 100 milliseconds is excellent practice for killing ideas in 100 milliseconds. After a while, you can do it without thinking.
The problem is that you don't have new ideas. What you come up with are old ideas, long exploded, even of they look new to you.
They do, but you can't be bothered processing them. Maybe if they were sweetened by a liberal dose of flattery you might take them more seriously.
We do, but you couldn't care less about them, and don't register their existence.
What a load of pretentious nonsense. The tools named exist in their own right, and electronics is just one of the practical arts where they find application.
John Larkin would know. He doesn't do much thinking, and imagines that everybody else is equally crippled.
And you think that means you know biology? The many years of education, experience, understanding and interest leapt out of your lunch companion's head and into yours while waiting for your order to arrive?
That reminds me of someone who claimed to have a "natural ability" for science because his uncle is a "super genius professor". Any guesses who that might have been?
I could indeed have gone into detail. I was impressed on the density of errors in John's claim - mistakes and misunderstandings are common, but it's rare to see it taken to such a high level in such a compact statement.
The Chinese were printing books in large quantities many hundreds of years before it was even imagined in Europe. Their books were in Chinese, for use in China - they did not spread.
Islamic scholarship and science formed the foundation of Western science and technology. As well as their own developments, the Islamic scholars collected, preserved and translated writings from the ancient Greeks and Romans, Jews, Indian scientists and mathematicians, and others.
European scholarship, outside of insane theological debates, started when European scholars visited the Islamic world to learn.
But you are right that the Gutenberg press meant that the new learning could be spread faster in Europe. And Europeans were much better and more enthusiastic at turning the science into practical technology for killing and oppressing other people that they viewed as inferior.
Literacy rates were much lower in Europe than the Islamic empire. It took a long time after the Gutenberg press before literacy became common in Europe - in particular, when Bibles became available in common languages rather than Latin, the Protestant Church (unlike the Catholic Church) encouraged people to read it themselves. Meanwhile, back in the Islamic world, literacy was extremely common - as it had been in Roman times prior to the dark ages.
The collapse of the Western Roman Empire ended of the supply of paper from North Africa into Europe, leading to a massive decline in European literacy. It turns out that having cheap stuff to write on was vastly more important for literacy than any old book or religion.
Bacteriophages were a big research area, especially in Russia (as far as I have heard) until antibiotics were discovered. Then we all thought we had won the war on bacteria, so there was no need to pursue the difficult work with phages. But it turns out the victory declaration was a little premature, so interest in phages is returning.
A few years ago a lab in Northern Norway was opened as the first (AFAIK) place mass-producing phages, for treatment of diseases in farmed fish. That's a stepping stone towards using them as treatments more generally.
Virophages are a bit too specialised to be practical for treatment of viral diseases.
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There is a /huge/ variety of viruses today. The genome size ranges from about 7 kbp to 1.4 Mbp. For comparison, bacteria range from about 130 kbp to 14 Mbp. (A qualitative term like "simpler" doesn't translate directly to genome length, but it is perhaps the best we can do.)
I think it is also fair to suppose that a lot of viruses have become simpler over time when they have specialised in particular hosts and environments, as well as viruses that have become more complex and sophisticated over the eons.
If you are referring to the hypothesis that viruses pre-dated bacteria in the timeline of life, then such viruses would be simpler in some ways (being few steps beyond non-biological chemicals), but would likely have additional features that have since been lost as they no longer need their own replication machinery.
One of the things I find most fascinating about tardigrades is that each species has the same number of cells all its life (after hatching).
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