Schools are removing analogue clocks from exam halls as teenagers 'cannot tell the time'

The only thing my father was wrong about was my marriage... he thought I was foolish to marry at 20 years of age.

-- | James E.Thompson | mens | | Analog Innovations | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | STV, Queen Creek, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at

Thinking outside the box... producing elegant solutions, by understanding what nature is hiding.

"It is not in doing what you like, but in liking what you do that is the secret of happiness." -James Barrie

I don't think it's just kids. My doctor, (actually the assistant) implements a cognitive function test. It's a few trivial questions. One is a blank clock face. The test is to put the hands in the right place for 2:30. She said that I was the first person she'd ever tested who put the small hand half way between 2 and 3. I think I'm experiencing diminished capacity...and I'm the only one who can tell time?

I do that all the time... just to annoy them ;-)

I really threw the nurse with the proper placement of hands for 4:20 ;-) She wanted to argue. I said, "Go get Dr. Rodriguez". She shut up. ...Jim Thompson

Reminds me of the stuff I liked as a kid - early Tangerine Dream and Walter Carlos' Sonic Seasonings amongst others.

Mainstream music eventually cottoned on a decade or so later.

tic.

ay."

afaiu 420 is code for smoking weed ....

I wouldn't know... I'm of a different era... "weed" and other such crap fogs your mind. ...Jim Thompson

You can use whiz-bang tech to make interesting combinations of old and new:

Well for a 30-something both songs are old to be honest.

Sometimes when people say "a decade ago" I think they mean 1997 and not

Is this normal

Also I guess it's 2018 now if you want to be technical. oh well.

Indeed, but often far less precision is sufficient.

The old joke is that a schoolboy/undergrad needed a 12" slide rule, a grad student needed a (much longer) cylindrical slide rule, and his professor needed a 6" slide rule.

Depends on the technology; some are still relevant, e.g. transistors and resistors :)

Just so.

And, arguably, it is more than mere fun since it can enable possible/impossible results/options to be quickly selected/discarded.

Yup. I still have some of the numbers in my head from stuff I was taught as a schoolkid. Plus, of course, some of the acceptable approximations such as pi*pi = g = 10.

It just raises the price for good analog design.

Original design is mystical and qualitative. A skilled brain can explore a universe of possible circuits, mostly stupid, and find a few good ones.

Equations don't design things either. Given an idea, from somewhere, Spice lets one try it out quantitatively. Playing with Spice helps me evaluate and evolve ideas.

Well, don't plug in arbitrary values. Sitting in front of a PC, running Spice, doesn't forbid you from thinking. I usually guess values and iterate, but the guess isn't arbitrary. (Well, unless I normalize to 1 ohm and 1 farad and 1 Hz to start.)

Read Barrie Gilbert's excellent essay "Where Do Little Circuits Come From?" in Jim Williams' first analog circuit design book.

It's not useful, either.

It was the owner of the place; I think he likes me. I told him, when he first opened, that his prices were too low, and eventually he raised them. The posted price for the super taco with chips is $6.50.

Right. If something is four orders of magnitude away from mattering, you don't need to know that to much accuracy.

Pi=3, usually.

Stewie Griffen sums it up nicely in less than one minute:

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Trial-and-error in a digital computer simulator is sort of the equivalent of using a digital computer to simulate an analog computer which is surely faster than using an analog computer to simulate an analog computer.