politics, sorry, but this is great (2023 Update)

That's a special case of "nobody is fit to manage a society."

People who do it tend to create megadeaths.

If you get jumped by a bear looking for something good to eat your neighbor carelessly dumped in the woods behind your home instead of theirs, you live in a society.

A society surrounded by clever bears getting smarter all the time...

That's a cause/effect inversion. People who create megadeaths often claim they had a giga-size social improvement in mind. Big ideas can be very bad ideas.

There are two possibilities here. If it is true that you cannot or will not understand, then it's not an insult - it's just a fact, and pointing it out may help you do something about it. If it is not true, then you should hardly feel insulted by it.

You take a /lot/ of things as insult. It seems you take pretty much anything that is not in full agreement of your opinions or distorted view of the world as an insult.

We shall let others be the judge of who is most childish - the people who write counter-arguments to your outlandish claims, or the person who responds to those counter-arguments with nothing but claims of childish insults.

(Yes, I am aware there is a hint of hypocrisy in that paragraph - are /you/ aware of the glaring hypocrisy in your own post?)

Quite a few of us have noted that.

I've seen it in people that are insecure, or are on the spectrum, or simply try to use it as something akin to an intimidation technique, or are trying to push their own agenda using disreputable techniques. The last is infamously in the news as Boris Johnson's "throw a dead cat on the table" technique!

I doubt Larkin is using the dead cat technique :)

What degrades the group, and drives good people away, is switching to personel insults instead of addressing the content of an issue.

That's a little rich coming from someone that usually doesn't address the content of a post, and routinely insults groups by presuming they are the same as other groups that you don't understand.

People have commented on those tendencies of yours many times.

My point perfectly made.

Have you considered doing that yourself? You start threads with totally outlandish and unjustified claims made to suggest people who don't subscribe to your political views are tribal, fearful, and poor engineers. You respond to counter-arguments by calling people "childish". In a group where many of us are engineers of some sort, was that not intended as a personal insult to many of the readers? Or do you think it is somehow much better for the group to insult lots of us at once, and it's only when /you/ feel insulted that there is a problem?

Note that I am using the term "insult" in the manner you use it - I don't think anyone here is actually going to be particularly bothered about what you say about them. Nor would anyone expect /you/ to be particularly bothered - anyone who takes posts too seriously will, I think, have left this group long ago.

(There are some regulars here who post some seriously crude and unpleasant things - they certainly degrade the tone of any thread, as do those who make pointless repetitive posts. But I assume you are not talking about folks like Phil Allison or John Doe.)

Will you stop this pointless bickering yet?

Jeroen Belleman

That's nearly what a Wilkinson ADC circuit does. But, it's not exactly the centroid, it's the peak that is detected. Current reversal into an integrating capacitor through a diode gives a nice sharp edge for timing.

More accurate is an FFT technique that samples many points before and after the peak, and deconvolves the shaggy peak shape from the sharp delta-function which is your time-of-arrival. That's not zero-delay, though.

Hypothetically, a governor claims not to be responsible for dynamics of a crowd sent to confront a legislature in session. Is he likely expert at control, and DID understand those dynamics, or is he inexpert at control, so couldn't predict a riot?

Inexpert at control :== incompetent Expert at control:== guilty of malfeasance

Not really. Electronic design does involve writing software - partitioning the solution into hardware and software elements is very much part of the modern electronic design I've been doing since the 1980's. The code has to be engineered just as skillfully as the hardware.

So Phil doesn't write any software - and doesn't have to worry about the performance of the software incorporated into his systems? I didn't write much software after I'd become a hardware engineer but I did spend a lot time talking to the software engineers about what my hardware was doing and what their software needed to do for it (and the system as a whole, wearing my systems engineer hat). Once they had real-time operating systems to play with that got to be quite productive and satisfying for both sides.

My apologies for that. You /did/ have a smiley, and John /did/ miss it, and your comment is in this same thread. But it was inappropriate for me to write in a way that appeared to be putting words in your mouth.

Sorry, but you have completely missed the point here.

First, I am an engineer - primarily software, but also electronics. I have designed many boards (or parts of boards), mostly in industrial control systems, and primarily digital parts. I do little these days, simply, because others in my company do it better and I have other tasks, but I am still involved. I don't do advanced analogue stuff or very high frequency boards, and much of the topical electronics threads here are of little interest to me. On the software side I cover a very wide span, including lots of the theory and maths that John thinks are beyond anyone who is not a analogue electronics engineer. My expert knowledge is perhaps /different/ from your and John's, but that does not make it any less expert.

Secondly, be clear that I have not been denigrating John's design abilities or his knowledge and experience at the kind of electronics design he does. I have seen nothing (significant) in any posts to suggest he is anything but an expert in his niche.

What I /have/ commented on is his wide-sweeping generalisations about what "makes a good engineer" and how that supposedly correlates to other factors. These have been made with no justification, no data, no references, no logic, no reasoning - nothing but pure prejudice and contrary to reality. He has made wild political generalisations that are equally asinine. His response to counter-arguments is to play the martyr card claiming childish personal insults, and to make ridiculous broad insults attacking my peers.

I'm sorry, but I /am/ fully qualified to reject that kind of nonsense. Everyone is - you don't need to be an electronics engineer to see the irrationality in his writings, see how blinkered and limited his understanding of the world and other people, and how little he cares for anyone outside his bubble of rich kids.

My preference is always to attack arguments, not people. When someone writes something baseless, irrational or nasty, I call it that. When a person writes enough such nonsense, and I call it out enough, it's easy for things to spill over into (perceived or real) personal attacks rather than argument attacks.

I respectfully suggest that John sticks to his electronics, where he knows what he is talking about.

In other words you know everything and are always right. People who disagree about causalities are irrational and nasty.

"Calling out nonsense" is a personal attack. And it's easier than rational debate.

That is not remotely what he is saying.

You do it all the time. Your claims about anthropogenic global warming are nasty and you cull them from the climate change denial propaganda machine despite their irrational content.

It's primarily an attack on the nonsense, rather than the person peddling the nonsense, even if they should know better (and you certainly should).

You don't respond to anything that looks like rational debate. It does seem to be easier for you to believe that Anthony Watts knows what he is talking about than it would be for you to realise that he gets paid by the Heartlands Foundation to peddle irrational climate change denial propaganda.

No. People who write things with no logic, data or justification are being irrational. People who write things that are attributing negative characteristics to a group of people, without basis in fact, are being nasty and bigoted. Get some factual basis or reasoning behind your points, and then there is something to discuss. (Look at, for example, the other thread that discussed Power Basic and programming - you were talking from a position of knowledge and there was a nice exchange of thoughts and opinions. I even agreed with you!)

It is important to distinguish between /being/ an irrational (or nasty, ignorant, or whatever) person, and /writing/ something irrational. I don't always get that right myself, but I try. (And everyone who writes a lot also writes things that are wrong or thoughtless at times.)

No, it's an attack on the argument. It might not necessarily be a helpful attack, but it is not personal. An argument that is presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence - when one is given without evidence, references, justification or rational basis, then it is often hard to give a rational and serious counter-argument. If I were to claim "electronics engineers tend to prefer green apples to red apples", how could you respond with a rational debate? Your suggestions about mixing politics and engineering are equally silly.

(Note that articles from obscure and outlying groups with a strong agenda and heavy bias are not useful as general references, especially for topics that are directly in their propaganda target. We might not agree on exactly how biased or unbiased particular media sources are, but I am sure it is possible to get better than articles from dedicated advocacy groups.)

I did, however, give quite a bit of argumentative response showing why you were wrong. You dismissed it as "childish personal insults" then accused me of doing exactly that.

However, if there is a way to leave this behind us and return to arguing the points and not the persons, I would be glad to do that. I will still cry nonsense on nonsense points - and expect you to do the same if you think it applies to things I write (assuming, of course, we are interested enough to make the effort). I will try to avoid attacking you personally - you can try to avoid taking non-personal comments personally.

Nonsense, of course. Concern about cause and effect is not irrational, and disagreement is not nasty. Disagreement responds to evidence, or argument, not arrogant dismissal.

Arrogant dismissal is just another tiresome sophistry.

That might depend on what you mean by "design engineer", but if you mean "electronics design engineer" then I disagree. Most programmers haven't a clue about electronics, and don't need a clue about it. /Embedded/ programmers - especially those working on small systems or low levels - need to understand some electronics basics and be able to read some types of schematics. They don't need to be able to design things themselves, but they need to be able to work with the designers to coordinate the interfaces between the programmable parts and the rest of the electronics. (This is also true during board bring-up and testing and debugging new cards.)

At a higher level, programmers don't need to know what is going on inside their systems to make them work (though a rough idea can help them write more efficient code).

There is /one/ thing that all programmers could learn from electronics designers. In electronics, you know that you can connect an output to more than one input, but you don't connect two outputs together without some kind of mediator (multiplexer, logic gate, resistors, etc.). Many programmers happily write to the same variable or data from multiple places in their code without considering the interaction - if they thought like hardware designers in that respect, they'd make fewer mistakes.

For some kinds of electronics design, programming skills are useful - but not for all. There can come a point when simulation, calculations of power, heat, frequency, whatever, goes beyond spreadsheets, calculators and specific tools, and is best done with more general programming. And some things can be done faster if you are already comfortable as a programmer. But I don't see it as a necessity.

It is not "obviously correct" - the answer is generally "it depends". Daring, confident and imaginative can be an important part of the process for some types of design. Being methodical and a stickler for rules and tried-and-proven concepts can be important for other things. Those that work alone can make up their rules as they go along - those that work in team need to cooperate. The best products are made by different types of people working together - you need people with imagination and ideas, but you also need people who are more concerned with filling in the details and getting things done. Everyone there is a good designer and a good engineer, despite their differences. (Some people can work well from multiple viewpoints here - just as some can be good hardware designers and good programmers.)

I think it is fine to have a solid association with a political party, but it should be rare - basically, it only makes sense if you are interested and active in politics, and helping guide or influence the party. When voting (which is when politics is important, for most people), you should be looking at the policies, personalities, track records, etc., of the candidates and parties. Make the decision based on what you think is important and will work best for the years ahead. It is ridiculous to vote based purely on the party you've always voted for, or based on myths and rumours about one or another party. It is even more ridiculous to divide a country in two based on loyalty to one of two parties, each of which is defined primarily in terms of their disapproval of everything the other party says and does. Blind and thoughtless loyality is fine for football teams, not for politics.

There are many things that bug me about political discussions. Perhaps the most annoying is how many people attribute a range of characteristics to people based purely on the party they vote for, or how left-leaning or right-leaning their political views. Being a Republican does /not/ mean you are either rich and egoistic or easily-fooled and uneducated. Being left-wing does /not/ mean you are a communist or want spoon-fed by the state. You don't have to be anti-science to vote Republican, nor do you have to vote Republican if you are religious.

And in particular, neither left-wing nor right-wing politics is about "freedom". That concept is populist propaganda from politicians who have nothing real to offer. Different positions on the political spectrum might correlate with different priorities for different kinds of freedoms - but not /less/ or /more/ freedom. Some people want the freedom to shoot anyone who they think seems threatening - other people want their kids to be free from the risk of being shot at school. Some people want the freedom to choose their health care - others want the freedom to get good health care even if they are out of work. Some people want greater freedom to spend their money as they like, some want greater freedom from worrying about paying for basic needs in life.

I have never heard anyone express a political view of saying they don't want to be free, or don't want to have rights. I have heard plenty who want political systems in which /other people/ have fewer rights and freedoms - but I don't think anyone intentionally and actively chooses to have less freedom for themselves.