PSU Design

It does take quite a lot of untangling.

Autism is about problems with social interaction. There's a popular delusion that if you don't use up brain power on interacting with other people, you got more to spare to devote to thinking about inanimate objects, but it's just more pop-psychology twaddle. The good electronic designers I interacted with were perfectly fine at interacting with other people, and they have to be because what they design has got to be useful to other people. The marketing clowns that sold the products weren't as good and had a tendency to warp the designs in ways that made the product easier to sell, rather than easier to use, and more reliable in use.

having those interdependencies and I don't care what the venerable piglet says to the contrary.

I course you don't. You are an ignorant idiot. Piglet is one of the more exalted electronic gurus who post here, but you don';t know enough to realise that.

If you showed any sign of excelling at anything - gullibility isn't a skill even if you have specialised in it - you might find it less wonderful.

Humans sure specialize. I think that, in a tribe, some people grow food, some make arrows, and some shoot arrows. Cows and oysters don't seem to specialize as much.

What fascinates me is how humans, hunter-gatherers, evolved to be able to do calculus and design electronics.

Haha, thanks for the accolade!

Yes, there are interactions. At a guess I'd suggest first making something come out the +130V pin, doesn't need to 130 yet, even 60-80V would do. Then work on getting the -50V section working, all the rest are keyed to that. Next the +50V regulator, then recheck the 130V is now right. Then -15V, then +15, lastly +5V and then go back and recheck all. Then reconnect to rest of the scope and see what happens.

the venerable piglet

Lithium is very specific to bipolar. One of my cousins did his Ph.D. on it's use back when I was doing mine.

My only bipolar friend won't use it because he likes being manic - when it happens.

Yes, but it can be highly dangerous (full-blown mania as opposed to hypomania - unless you meant the latter). Mania generally requires hospitalisation for the safety of the patient. I believe that's one of the key distinctions between type 1 and 2. IIRC I think type 1 is the one where they get full blown mania whereas type 2 never gets beyond hypomania. Fascinating subject. Funny thing is, she was one of the most stable people I've ever known until she got this, from of all things, a UTI at the age of 56. Who'd have thought a simple bacterial infection could have such long lasting and severe complications with mental health?

Simply by standing on the shoulders of giants. We're talking mostly small discoveries and inventions over huge periods of time, with the odd quantum leap thrown in every couple of hundred years. Now we stand on the brink of AI and that should be the new quantum leap.

Thanks for that, VP. Just what I needed: a starting point and an order of testing to follow. Ausgezeichnet!

Humans are social animals. We haven't been that way as long as the social insects so the specialistion is in a pretty primitive stage at the moment

Since you don't seem to be able to manage either, I do imagine that you do find both skills fascinating. There are other skills. Priests and administrators have been around for longer. Carpenters and masons go back even further, but metal working is more recent. Scribes came in with priests and administrators. but since you don't seem to be able to write about what you do that particular skill may not register with you.

Cursitor Doom seems to be some kind of bard - he doesn't understand anything but he does like an absurd story.

Cows and oysters don't do that.

AI will probably turn out to be nonsense. It's just some more code.

Somebody please ask AI for a circuit to parallel 7812's.

There aren't any quantum leaps. There are lots of small discoveries and inventions - more in recent years as we have developed social tools like writing and peer-reviewed publication to let us pick out the more useful ones and pass them on to other people who do find them useful.

Historians of science do like to pick out culture heroes - like Newton, even though the secretive creep gets a lot of credit for stuff that other people invented at much the same time and passed on to other people while he was reluctant to publish take the credit until he wrung every last bit of advantage out getting the idea early.

Sadly cooperative progress makes for less dramatic narratives.

We'll know that artificial intelligence has got here when Google puts in a filter that stops a a and Cursitor Doom from posting irrelevant nonsense here. I'm not holding my breath.

It solved the protein folding problem.

Real intelligence would tell you not to bother. If you need a regulated +12V output of more than 1.5A , get a bigger linear regulator or move to a switcher so you don't have dissipate as much heat. You'll need to filter the output of switching regular fairly carefully, but there are lots of options. Not having to dissipate a lot of heat helps a lot.

Is that the best you can come up with, Bill? Seriously, I could have come up with something more useful than that succession of platitudes.

No quantum leaps?? What about Pythagoras? Galileo? Newton/Leibnitz? Einstein? Gutenberg? Marconi? Nobel? Oppenheimer? Teller? Berners-Lee?

Yes, that would be a wonderfully useful tool for Socialists who can't take their crackpot theories being deconstructed by people they'd much rather execute if the possibility existed.

...

The first leap was complex speech; that was long enough ago that we have "Broca's region", a brain section for the purpose.

The second leap, going from lore in poems and tales to print, was... paper. Near-universal literacy and inexpensive reams of writing material is the basis of modern thought. My Kindle isn't as durable a reader as my old books.

We aren't finished incorporating literacy, there's too many symbol systems (and even pictograph writing, very inefficient) and that divides modern societies. It was a great leap forward when Latin, the language of Rome, was spread over the ancient world; that dominated for a millenium AFTER the fall of the empire. I'm still using the symbol set, a kind of Latin alphabet.

AI will be good for translation, I suppose, but failing to make a survival-like test for inner parts of AI construct will mean that AI is not going to get its faults pruned out; it'll grow, like redundant DNA codons, into several kinds of monstrosity.

All these scientists who've come out demanding a pause in AI development aren't concerned that AI will turn rogue and start trying to wipe us out. They're worried *humans* will take a valuable tool which has much capacity to do good, and weaponise it against the rest of humanity. I think we should listen to them and address their concerns with legislation if appropriate.

It recognised that John Larkin was making a joke, and responded in a similar vein. Your vaunted sense of humour has let you down, or maybe you don't know enough to recognise a comic exchange when you see one.

The "Pythagoras" theorem was known to the Babylonians

Galileo exploited - but didn't invent - the telescope. Scarcely a quantum leap.

Leibnitz and Newton both "invented" calculus at much the same time, which does suggest that some earlier work had given them both much the same idea. The notation we use is the one Leibnitz talked about to other people. Newton called his version "fluxions" and was much slower to tell other people about it.

Was a very clever guy, but his insights were based on earlier work. He may have invented Special Relativity, but one of it's features is called Lorenz contraction;

Gutenberg introduced the printing press in Europe, long after it has been popular in China. The Chinese writing system uses a lot more characters than European alphabets, so moveable type was rather simpler and more useful in Europe. The process by which European writing systems became alphabetic doesn't seem to have involved any quantum leaps.

Marconi wasn't an inventer, but rather an exploiter of existing technology.

Nobel made a lot of money out of the simple idea stabilising nitorgylcerin by soaking it up into kieselguhr

All three took existing technologies a little further.

I'm sure you like to think that, but then again you think that you parading your fatuous delusions here is some kind of exercise in "deconstruction".

Executing you would solve the problem, but it would be the kind of over-kill that people like you do go in for. Sensible people would prefer to see your talents exploited where they might be useful - if you actually have any kind of useful talent. You do seem to be literate, but you don't seem to be able to understand what you read - Alfred Nobel made some kind of quantum leap in technology?