Re: good post on LinkedIn

There is a mistaken emphasis on usability and deferred error checking -- to make "coding" less difficult for the inept.

Even in languages that have scoping rules that allow you to be more pedantic in defining identifiers, people choose to ignore them as an expedient.

"The larger the dictionary, the FEWER the number of misspellings the spell-checker will find!"

Similarly, laziness in deploying invariants lets errors in

("This value can't exist here! But, once you get PAST this point, the code will treat it as valid data...")

The worst misuse (IM) of Excel is in place of a database. Yet, people seem terrified to NOT be able to see their data at a glance (really? can you SPOT an error that would merit its presentation, thusly?)

What it tests isn't.

For a rather low value of "highly". The correlation between IQ and post-employment success of university graduates is pretty close to zero.

You used to need an IQ score of about 115 to get into university - the average IQ if American university students is now 102. Your chances of actually getting a university degree don't correlated strongly with with you IQ score at university entry.

Difficult courses - mostly STEM subjects do show a stronger correlation, but about 40% students drop out without getting a degree, and it takes a IQ of 130 or better to get this down to 5%.

But they still aren't all that good.

For a linguist, the rule is what people do. When entire populations chose to a use the more regular mode of tense formation, that's language evolution, rather than misuse.

Not really. It's just another language which evolved. Imagining English was ever designed is plain silly.

Quite a lot of word meanings are context dependent. Dictionaries deal with this by quoting word use in the various different contexts.

At one level English is the language spoken in England, and the derivations spoken in the US and Australia are the weird versions.

Some of the oddities of US English reflect the fact that some of the evolution of British English over the past few centuries didn't make it across the Atlantic.

The idea that ambiguity generates creativity is one that I haven't come across. Google throw up a few examples from the past few years, so it may be currently fashionable word salad.

Ambiguity didn't feature in any of the ideas I've had that ended up patented, nor in any of the 25-odd ideas that my father got patents for. I'm not familiar with all of Alan Dower Blumlein's 128 patents, but the none of the ones I do know about had anything ambiguous about them.

A frequency divider isn't a counter. It may use the same components, but they aren't doing the same job.

And you've just produced a classic example.

Not when being used as a counter, as you'd have realised if you'd thought about what you were saying.

"productivity and success" and "actually getting a university degree" are entirely different things.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

With all the patents in your family, you must be very wealthy.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

True, but they correlate tolerably strongly. Neither has much to do with doing well on an IQ test, but the IQ test is remarkably cheap to administer and correlates well enough with the other two to be worth the effort. In a more rational society we'd put rather more effort into evaluating people than just getting them to sit an IQ test, and in fact we do - conventional education and regular examinations are more influential than scores on IQ tests - but still not all that good.

Rich people like to be able to buy their kids an unfair advantage by paying for expensive extra education, and have corresponding little interest in setting up a system that's less easy for them to game, or paying for better education for other people's kids.

Australia is surprisingly bad in this respect. About 30% of the population is Roman Catholic, and the Catholic church in Australia has a long history of setting up parochial schools where they can teach the Catholic children to read and write and to believe in Catholic doctrine.

They didn't pay the teachers much, and most of the schools didn't work too well. The obvious solution - to close them down - wasn't politically feasible, so the government subsidised them, and other religious schools, so we've now got a whole bunch of different sorts of schools with different levels of funding, and it is remarkably easy for the well off to buy better education for their kids, and it is less easy for bright kids from regular families to get the kind of education that lets them fully exploit their skills.

I suffered from this (but not much). My first year of secondary education was in a state funded local high school which happened to be pretty good, then I got sent away to a Presbyterian boarding school where the teaching was dire. Not bad enough to stop me passing all the exams I needed to, but still dire.

Three of us from my year at the local high school ended up with Ph.D.s in Chemistry. If anybody from the boarding school ever got any kind of higher degree I've yet to hear about it.

If you are an employee you don't get any extra just because you have a patent. My father did end up pretty well off, but none of it came directly from the patents.

The most significant one - for the counter-current cooking of wood chips into paper pulp - didn't earn much in the way of royalties. Kamyr, who made all the digestors used by the industry, chose not to pay royalties, and it wasn't worth suing them, or the people who used the process in continuous digestors that they'd bought from Kamyr.

Journal papers and patents are mostly vanity expenses.

Designing electronics can be a source of revenue.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

A ripple counter can be a perfectly reasonable counter.

Reset, apply input, stop, read the bits.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Chinese is worse. The same word, concept, can be an noun, a verb, and adjective or a preposition depending of context, but at least it has a written character associated with it. xia2 can mean under, downstairs or laying of eggs. But the same word, regards sound, can refer to a different character. As consequence most words are made by juxtaposition two synonyms: woud-forest dirty-sale women-chicken.

Small wonder that Chinese are so intelligent.

A fortiori this applies to Chinese.

Groetjes Albert

Except when they aren't. A friend patented an idea that he had had, and eventually got $A12million out of the patent.

Most scientific papers are intended to keep the authors visible to the rest of their academic community, but sometimes they get lucky. Brian Josephson is said have complained that he would have preferred to get his name attached to an effect that did something. That was apparently before the Josephson junction became way of establishing the value of the standard volt.

And you seem to make money out of cobbling electronics together. Electronic design is difficult, particularly if you haven't got a clue about what's involved in doing it.

Ripping up preliminary designs and starting over does seem to be an integral part of the process of actual design.

If by "stop" you mean disabling the input being counted, this could work. It all depends on what you need the counter to do.

You do need to keep in mind that the outputs of a ripple counter lag the transitions being counted by the total propagation delay through each of the series of bistables used to build up the counter.

You seem to be aware of this, but that awareness isn't obvious in the comments you have posted so far.

(In LinkedIn terminology, a "post" is the beginning of a thread, whereas LinkedIn calls a follow-up article a "comment".)

I rarely post on LinkedIn (not counting many reposts). LinkedIn frustratingly failed thrice today (before succeeding on this 4th attempt) by making webbrowser tabs say that those webpages were havings problems and to try to refresh or to return later.

All of these lame-LinkedIn failures happened when few programs ran and RAM had free gigabytes and an SSD drive had free gigabytes.

I do not know if this type of LinkedIn lameness is normal.

I do find that LinkedIn is buggy when trying to compose a post (and in other situations). (S.