And speaking of simple all those human ancestors with well-defined names, like Homo habilis and Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis. They never really existed in a well-defined way, there was just life, some of it intelligent life, some of it different kinds of "humans" living at the same time evolving and doing their thing over millions of years.
There was never any specific time one human-ancestor species with one well-defined name became another the whole concept is silly.
Nature doesn't care if humans are able to easily categorize what it does in a way that makes logical sense to humans, not one bit. And a lot of times it's much easier to say what something isn't than what it "is."
Where do you get ideas from? Do you invent new circuits or signal processing algorithms?
Some EEs don't. But this is a design group.
Science analyzes circuits. Something else invents them. Yes, it is magic. Good magic takes practice.
Various possible
Sometimes that works. Lucky is good. I can fiddle Ls and Cs up to a
4th or sometimes 5th order filter, for example. Futzing works for simple things but the solution space explodes past a few parts, and fiddling gets "lost in space."
But sometimes it works. And sometimes we automate the fiddling and run a billion cases over the weekend, which can work too.
One chore is to make, say, a voltage divider from parts already in stock, or already on the BOM to save loading feeders. That requires fiddling. I have a program that helps with that, but need a better one. I'm still thinking about that.
No, I do my projects from paper scribbles to final product, and sometimes do the PCB layout too. But I do help spin off architectures and circuits for other people's projects, and I troubleshoot for them a lot. We brainstorm and design review a lot.
No.
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Some fraction of the ICs that you buy are fabbed with my boxes controlling the lasers. Probably 100% of the below 7 nm parts.
Ideas come from somewhere mysterious. Sometimes important things (like saving your life in a fraction of a second) happen without conscious thought. I go to sleep with a problem and wake up with the answer. Most people can do that if they let themselves, and don't instinctively stomp on strange ideas.
Really, the math and physics are rote. You just repeat what they taught you in school, or let a computer do it for you. There's no creativity and little value-added in repeating that stuff. Too many people can do it, and that is a race to the bottom on price.
Academia naturally teaches that solving provided equations is what really matters. It makes it easier to grade tests.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
The best designs are necessarily accidental.
Accurate equalising pre-amplifiers and playback machinery for historic recording formats. Analogue computers for de-clicking coarse-grooved discs in real time. Steerable stereo and mono microphone arrays for special applications. A recording machine for making wax calibration cylinders. A playback machine for de-wowing oval cylinders in real time. Playback machines for Recordgraph and Dictabelt formats. Professional P.A. amplifiers with extremely low battery current for unattended operation. High quality loudspeakers for studio monitoring. Acoustic horns. Amplifiers with special protection circuits for driving historic transducers without risk of damage. A few other fun projects such as cable tracers, underground communication devices and other transmission equipment.
For 27 years I worked as designer of biological research instrumentation (hence my rather incongruous qualifications in biology and electrical engineering) and before that I was a very junior designer in a communications receiver factory.
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~ Liz Tuddenham ~
(Remove the ".invalid"s and add ".co.uk" to reply)
www.poppyrecords.co.uk
We have a friend that, as a young boy, wanted to play with dolls. His dad built him a doll house because "I don't want him to grow up to be an axe murderer." He's happy and gay now.
There was a lot of pushback against Einstein. Moderate skepticism of new ideas is reasonable.
Spice and breadboarding often let us try weird ideas quickly, at least for small circuits. A grand architecture is scarier.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
The best designs are necessarily accidental.
Sometimes the problem isn't exactly defined, nor are the target specifications. Or the specs are confining. Stay confused about them for a while, too.
Most engineers and all managers dislike uncertainty. So they usually lock things down too soon, before they explore possibilities. Locking down asap and jumping to implementation can make a project take longer and build mediocre stuff.
The concept is simple: take a while to think about what's possible, and impossible. Train your team to embrace strange ideas, not squash them.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
The best designs are necessarily accidental.
The stereo coincident crossed pseudo-ribbon mics had 24 capsules and gave accurate phase coincidence between L and R channels up to about 15 Kc/s.
The extra low noise mono version had 32 capsules in two back-to-back vertical stacks of 16, giving a horizontal diffraction pattern almost as good as a narrow ribbon (at the expense of a wider vertical aperture, just like a ribbon). The capsules were powered from a constant-current source for low noise, which was then regulated by a slow feedback loop to stabilise the voltage across them.
Both types had simple analogue control with no need for DSP.
They, and their prototypes and derivatives, have done a lot of commercial work over the last 10 years and proved easy to use - as long as you understand how to use ribbons.
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~ Liz Tuddenham ~
(Remove the ".invalid"s and add ".co.uk" to reply)
www.poppyrecords.co.uk
The press wants to convey an idea, not all ideas simultaneously. One subject at a time is a good strategy.
Politicians more like to keep things VAGUE, not simple; trying to get a simple statement from a politician is... like pulling teeth. "Obama was born in the United States" took 4 YEARS of Donald Trump's lifetime.
The sensible order is to understand the science first, then do the engineering. The magic is for the people who don't understand what is going on. Our /customers/ may think what we do is tantamount to magic - some of them understand electronics, but many have no idea about it.
I really have a hard time figuring out what you actually /do/, and what you are trying to say that you do. From what you write, you seem to be proudly claiming that you don't understand what you are doing (and your ignorance is wilful), you just randomly mix a pinch of this with a dash of that, say some meaningless gobbledygook that you call an "idea", and then sell it for as high a price as you possibly can. You are like a homeopath or a "crystal healer", and so far you've got lucky (just as some homeopath's patients get better on their own).
I doubt if that is /actually/ how you work. But it is what you say you do.
I think it is more likely that you are an okay engineer, and a rather poor communicator. You have found that your customers are impressed by baffling and confusing sales pitches - they think that they don't understand you because you are so much smarter than them and your devices and development methods are far more advanced than they could possible comprehend. You've pulled this con so often that you believe it yourself. You don't even seem to realise what a load of drivel you write, and how silly it comes across.
Change MEMS to piezoelectric, and you've got imaging ultrasound. It's well-studied.
It'd need a hundred known positions, too; and unlike ultrasound, audio in air travels FAR before thermalizing, so you'd need plausible models of reflectivity to sound of all the studio surfaces. The only easy way to do that is a tent over a uniform (sand or salt flats) surface extending tens of meters... there's probably easier ways to capture a musical performance.
On Sunday, 7 February 2021 at 13:17:03 UTC-8, jla...@highlandsniptechnology .com wrote: ...
But that's exactly what you seem to be doing - looking at solutions too ear ly.
It's iterative; think of the problem, think of possible solutions, then the n go back and see how they fit the requirements and maybe modify the proble m statement as necessary in light of your new understanding. If the solutio ns seem to have applications in other areas, then file them for investigati on later.
Sounds to me like the usual scientific method. State the problem, hypothesi ze solutions then go back to the problem.
And regarding "Most engineers and all managers", you are continually making absolute statements as if you know every engineer and manager on the plane t - you've only been exposed to a very small subset. That may be true in yo ur experience but your's is not necessarily the same as others.
On Sunday, 7 February 2021 at 16:09:16 UTC-8, jla...@highlandsniptechnology .com wrote: ...
ing absolute statements as if you know every engineer and manager on the pl anet - you've only been exposed to a very small subset. That may be true in your experience but your's is not necessarily the same as others.
... "all managers" - seems pretty absolute to me.
Even "Most" is too extreme, you haven't experienced "most" engineers; you c ould say "many" or "most in your experience" and it would be reasonable. Mo st implies a majority.
And solid brown cats are actually rather rare so even that statement is pus hing it.
Cathedrals, animal breeding, aqueducts, hydro power, metallurgy, ships, steam engines, light bulbs, vacuum tubes, even transistors were invented first, and the science woke up and caught up later. There was usually an engineering phase in the middle.
Science studies what is. Most of those things already exist in nature. But sometimes science has to be prodded by invention, which tends to not be done by scientists. Steam engines first, thermodynamics after. Vaccination was discovered before viruses.
It's rare that original science produces inventions. Or that the science is even original.
We design and sell electronic instruments. Put parts on boards and boards in boxes.
We do all the routine electronic stuff they teach in EE school, and the stuff they don't teach too, like packaging and thermals and such. But we pause and explore ideas first. Is that hard to understand? Or just uncomfortable?
We don't make sales pitches. We listen and collaborate. We swap ideas with customers.
Some potential customers are put off by expressions of uncertainty, by offering more than one idea for consideration. We seldom sell to them, and they're not much fun anyhow.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
The best designs are necessarily accidental.
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