quantum consciousness

If human memory is similar to anything at all in electronics design it is most nearly similar to complex resonant networks and feedback loops.

Those that fail testable hypotheses should be killed ASAP, so as to leave time for new ideas that might be valuable.

Yup, we need ideas - but that is the easy part. Filtering out the few small /good/ ideas is the other part.

Almost all ideas /should/ be killed in infancy. That doesn't mean you shouldn't have them.

Does DRAM use resonant networks and feedback loops?

Even John Larkin will know enough to be aware that it doesn't, so he's trying to be satirical. One has to wonder why.

That's only true if you assume that you have a small and finite ability to hold a few ideas in your head, if they crowd one another out. If you have to apply limited resources to think about them.

I don't think the human brain is limited in that way, unless people impose emotional limits, idea prudery.

Free-thinking people can consider and evolve a lot of approved and crazy ideas literally in their sleep. That doesn't hurt a bit and doesn't disturb sound sleep; in fact, it's exercise that builds, doesn't exhaust, creative thinking skill. I get my revelations delivered in the shower.

Electronic design isn't science and shouldn't try to be. Given 10 explanations of an observed phenom, it is the job and culture of science to destroy 9 of them, ideally humiliating 9 rivals in the process.

Electronic design is the opposite; 10 ideas profilerate into 100 and so on.

Sure, but let them multiply before filtering very hard. Whacky ideas often beget good ideas, but not if they are emotionally killed first thing.

Again, electronic design ain't science. We use science in the later stages, sometimes.

No. Plant them in fertile soil for a while and see what happens. Sometimes years later they may pop up in another context and be valuable. Killing ideas doesn't reserve valuable brain cells, it just builds opaque emotional walls around them.

Grow up!

It's in more than just your head, and testing scientific hypotheses takes more than just thinking about them.

You don't think at all, so your observations on the subject aren't really all that interesting.

But they get rid of whole lot more less useful ideas at the same time.

So does everybody else. My father got his while shaving, which is much the same. He had rather more of them than you have had - 25 patents is quite a few, and I know at least one other engineer who has done as well.

Actually the job is frequently to show that they are all basically the same idea. Erwin Schrodinger, Wolfgang Pauli and Paul Dirac built on each other's work to get our modern quantum mechanics. None of them got humiliated in the process. Serious science is a cooperative enterprise.

Chairman Larkin. "The policy of letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend is designed to promote the flourishing of the arts and the progress of science." It didn't work well in China, because Chairman Mao was as much of an egomaniac as John Larkin is.

But only they are John Larkin's ideas.

Sometimes beget good ideas, but not all that often. There's a difference between letting a train of thought run and letting some goof shoot their mouth off.

John Larkin seems to know about as much about electronic design as he knows about science - not nearly enough.

There is science underlying all electronic design - get the science wrong and the electronics doesn't work. Getting the science right is pretty small part of coming up with a good design, but it happens to be an essential part.

Fertile soil has better uses than nurturing dubious ideas.

I've done that. Filing an idea for sixteen years doesn't use up any fertile soil.

Bizarre image. The idea I had in 1976 would have required an impractical amount of discrete logic at the time. When I found a new application for it in 1992, I could fit it all into one ICT7024 programmable device - actually Paul Buggs did, but I could probably have managed it for myself - and it worked fine.

You *do* have a small and finite ability to hold ideas in your head. I'm going to recite digits. How many can you recall -- in sequence?

Of course the human brain is limited -- and in exactly this way. You can't juggle more than a handful of ideas concurrently. Folks have actually hypothesized that this number may be as small as *7*.

It takes resources ("attention") to develop an idea, work towards a solution, etc. If you can't keep "many" ideas/concepts in your head concurrently, then you can't apply them to the problem on which you are FOCUSED.

Think about the difficulty Alzheimer's pts have in handling easy tasks. If you can't remember what the hell you're doing (defective short term memory), then how can you make progress towards a solution -- even if it's not a "new" problem!?

You should perhaps get an education in these issues before "thinking" about them. This was my "freshman AI" course... (the science has advanced but the basic ideas are still useful for explaining analogs)

Answer the question.

Seven ideas is your limit? That's amazing.

I disagree. Your prespective is true only if you insist on a continuous, conscious, talk-to-yourself focus on a few ideas. That perspective forces you to cull, to ASAP, the ones that are not immediately obviously useful... or emotionally acceptable.

Let your background processes play with ideas. They are better at it.

And destroy my creativity? No thanks.

We like brainstorming with scientists, inventing new solutions to their problems. Their cultural mindset really need shaking up now and then.

Some of the circuits that they design are horrific and funny.

Academic theories about creativity are an oxymoron.

It is impressive that practically no science experiment can now be done without electronic instrumentation and computers.

See how many "things" YOU can keep in your mind!

You know, simple things -- like DIGITS. Tell us how many you can RELIABLY recall, unaided. While continuing to function as a human being.

You may be disappointed to see your limitations quantified!

Take one of your designs. Something that you have LOTS of familiarity with.

Redraw it -- one component per page. See how well you can navigate the design (that you already are INTIMATELY familiar with) when you are forced to remember the interconnects in your head (you can rely on the sheets of paper to store the component values for you).

There's a reason software tries to express a complete concept on a single sheet of paper -- because you are far less likely to remember details of page 4 while you are reviewing something on page 2.

That's also the reason computers are designed with different speeds of memory. Because the people writing the code will tend to organize their code in ways that mimic how they THINK about problems. If our thought processes were massively parallel, we would have no problem expressing algorithms that way and no problem designing hardware that exploited that sort of organization.

No, learn something. But, hey, there's a role for ignorance in the world, too! It's just not a role that intelligent, productive people cherish!

And the ideas of a self-deluded ALLEGED electronics engineeer are better?

What ideas do you have to cure cancer? Contact alien life? Prove/disprove the existence of a/many deities? Surely, you must feel uniquely qualified to handle all of these tasks...

Classic Dunning-Kruger...

Physicists are usually bad circuit designers. Chemists are worse:

Phil Hobbs is unusual in that he is a PhD scientist who can design electronics.

Modern electronics was strongly driven by radar development during WWII, and most of the inventors were physicicts. But most of them had played with "radio" as kids; they had the instincts before the academics.

Well, yeah, refresh of DRAM is feedback, and the timing usually has a resonator element (certainly for non-static RAM types).

Hundreds of thousands at least. I'd go insane if I had to keep them in conscious consideration all the time.

I've read about people with "total recall", who can't push memories below visibility. Their life is hell; just seeing a number like '12' unleashes a torrent of memories.

That's my point about electronic design; don't kill ideas on sight, tuck them away and let your brain work on them in background. The more you do that, the better you'll get at it.

Some people can repeat a hundred digits. I doubt that greatly improves their lives.

I can remember hundreds of circuits. That is good in my business.

I used to know pi to 100 places. That's wasn't actually useful.

I have a BSEE. How about you?

The key resource is /time/. My life it too short to do everything I'd like to.

A team needs several different talents. One division I've seen used is ideas man critic worker finisher chairman communicator

Only critics -> nothing new. Only ideas men -> fun, but nothing created. Only communicators -> large telephone bill. Etc

At some level that is true for any discipline and at other levels false for all disciplines.

Plant the probably valuable ones in soil. Burn the idiocies. Archive the others in case you run of of idea generating capacity later.

:D :D (Not easy to make me smile broadly nowadays but you managed it, thanks).

So, you can't THINK about them. I can recall the words and melodies to thousands of songs. For many, I can even recall the cadence of a particular performance. But, none of them are in my conscious at any given time.

THINKING requires ideas to be present in your conscious. Recalling digits is a simple, trivial way to illustrate the LIMITATIONS of yours! If the ideas are less obviously related (9, banana, Houston, Audi, twinkies, Roosevelt, muffler, Saturn, Eroica, aileron, hippocampus, chlorine...) then capacity drops off markedly.

I suspect most of us are already pretty good at it. And, we don't get distracted by "ideas" that have no real value or basis.

When I was a kid, I had an idea for a "ball point PENCIL". Feasible? Likely. Valuable? Hardly!

No, you can LONG TERM store 100's of circuits. I can recall hundreds of algorithms, lyrics to songs, directions to places I've not visited in decades, how to use hundreds of different (hand) tools, the intricacies of different software tools, different computer languages, scores of baking and cooking recipes (along with notes regarding how to optimize each), carpentry, plumbing, automechanics, etc.

What's your point?

How many things can you FOCUS on at any given time. Or, do you NOT focus on a design and hope it magically comes together while you are NOT thinking about it? (inspiration and design are entirely different issues; inspiration is easy as it doesn't have to produce results!)

Recalling *a* particular sequence of digits isn't the same as recalling a sequence of digits "heard recently". Pi gets stored in long term memory. The list of nouns I presented above gets stored in your "foreground"; where you can actively process them.

Try reciting a digit of pi followed by a digit of e -- from memory. See how quickly you can shift back and forth between the memories.

Try speaking the names of the people in the room around you at the present moment. A lot easier, eh? You're not digging back into the long term store to drag out that information (because you have already recalled their names in order to engage in conversation with them -- you've pulled those into *cache*). By contrast, the "digits" recall a fair bit of retrieval work. You can track

Yes. BSEE from MIT. The difference is that my curriculum likely included more varied subjects than yours: AI, compiler/language/OS design, analog/digital design, circuit theory, probabilistic systems analysis (think failure analysis, communications), abstract algebra (think encryption), sociological/ethical consequences of technology, etc. -- in addition to the boring things like physics, material science, "math", etc.

I got an A in Beginners Tumbling.

It was actually a very valuable course.