OT: I'm sorry to report...

Only for the richly deserving.

Translation: I have ideas and you don't, and you don't like ideas. Recall that one word in this ng's title is "design."

But don't feel alone: most people don't like ideas. Most people don't design electronics either.

work.

on the >origins of circuits and the mental processes of design. You wouldn't be interested.

You don't have them because you're not interested in electronics.

Can I get you gentlemen some prune juice, or maybe some shawls for your knees?

The guy tells folks (some idiots among which actually believe him) that I cannot 'do math'.

I was doing fractals before he even knew what fractals were. I think I can handle electronics. We were not allowed to use our calculators until after we learned how to work with slide rules when I studied in one class. It really does give one a feel for relationships and "guesstimates".

Some folks can 'work' imagined slide rules in their head, whether it is a visual manipulation or what, I do not know.

You're confusing me with JT. He always does that. He did it for a week in the bicycle alternator thread, and then posted junk.

Do most people apply for patents?

Oh, you must be another of those Master Circuit Designers.

And i was thinking that it was the other end of his digestive tract.

?-)

Moron. You launched the first insult in the zcd thread.

And you still haven't posted anything that's right.

=A0 =A0...Jim Thompson

How would John Larkin know? He posts too much off-topic nonsense that is clearly wrong to be able to pose convincingly as any kind of authority. Not that Jim-out-of-touch-with-reality-Thompson gets all that much right himself.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

One guy who taught me physics, in the 1950s carried seven-figure log tables in his head.

Apart from that ability, he was a lousy teacher.

I do a lot of math in my head (which annoys the kids who pull out their calculator to compute stuff like the reciprocal of 6) but it's not digit manipulation, it's more analog. I seem to remember a miscellaneous lot of cardinal points (some recips, a few square roots, things like that) and sort of wild-guess interpolate around those. It usually hits to maybe 5-10% accuracy, plenty good enough for whiteboarding ideas, or calculating pullups or things like RC time constants that don't matter too much. I think most people can do that with a little practice, inspired by misplacing calculators pretty often.

I was at a big meeting at a BIG laser company, and a Fellow Of The Corporation said "the laser will fire every 25 microseconds, which is... how many kilohertz?" and about 20 guys reached for their calcs and cell phones to work it out. I instantly said, without thinking, "40 kilohertz." That probably impressed them that I'm smarter than I actually am.

When I was in college, almost everyone (likely everyone who made it through) could do that. It took about two years with a calculator to kill that ability, though. It was a decent trade-off.

That's pretty bad. Recpricals I don't have any problems with, OTOH, I often off by orders of magnitude on problems involving time-of-flight, particularly when the distances are large.

Too much clutter.

It was Einstein who said "One should never commit to memory that which one can look up in a book or table. It clutters the mind..."

In 1971, I needed the CRC handbook for a simple log table.

Now, I need it for physical constants, etc.,(I can google them faster) but no longer need it for all the things one used to use it for before scientific calculators.

Wow. He made a post about electronics. AND there was no math, and there was no asshole stalking his post accusing his of having no math aptitude because the post wasn't filled with "the numbers". Oh... that's right... HE is the stalking asshole. Were I to use your rule-set, I would be accusing you of having no math ability right now. After all, that is what you do to people.

That's OK, John. I know what you're about, So it is pretty easy to ignore you and any pathetic message you happen to spew in any given post, that isn't civil, on topic, and NOT derogatory to someone.

We do seem to be getting closer, however.