snow!

Um, that was humility. I don't want to lead anybody. Good thing, because the kids I work with pretty much won't let me.

I talk about things that might be interesting. If you feel like being subservient, enjoy. But with someone else; I'm straight.

Electronic design discussion groups need discussing. You could contribute a little more, instead of my-o-my-ing and clucking about people who do. You sit out all sorts of good threads.

How's that 555 thing coming along?

John

reality

s are

ather

I'd have to be a moron to think that you take that idea seriously - I'm not the one that starts threads about his latest recipe.

Not an opinion shared by any of my employers - I was always one of the better electronic designers at the places where I worked.

Because I'm not willing to think the same way as John Larkin does - badly.

They forgive a lot if you give them stuff that works and keeps on working.

And if you did your fatuous self-satisfaction would prevent you from ever coming to grips with the idea.

Exactly the same amount. I didn't go out of my way to get my patents - in one case my name ended up on a patent without my knowing that I'd been named as one of the inventors. I was always careful to point when a proposal did include an idea that might be patentable, because I considered that to be part of my job.

This lead to one comic situation, where my reading a paper on the process of pulling a gallium arsenide single crystal from the melt prompted me to send my boss a memo on a possibly patentable aplication of the idea. Some four months later, my boss called me in to a conversation with guy who had - ten years earlier - invented the control system for the GaAs crystal puller that Cambridge Instruments sold at that time, and I listened while he described the scheme I'd outlined. He turned out to have been the action editor of the paper I'd been impressed by, so he'd had the same idea about six months earlier, long before the paper had been published.

A good lawyer could have argued that my reaction meant that the idea was obvious to someone skilled in the art, except that I wasn't all that skilled in that particular art.

I haven't designed anything much recently, but I certainly did in the past. I don't like my chances of getting back into circuit design, but I'll be back in Australia from the end of 2012, and I might have more opportunities there.

e or whatever.

And moving house - all part of the process of moving back to Australia.

You obviously haven't read the clinical defintion of a moron.

"mo=B7ron (m=F4rn) n. A person of mild mental retardation having a mental age of from 7 to

12 years and generally having communication and social skills enabling some degree of academic or vocational education. The term belongs to a classification system no longer in use and is now considered offensive."

It's difficult to get into a university with a mental age from 7 to 12 years, and even more difficult to get into graduate school. There's a fairly sharp cut-off below about one standard deviation above the mean. Someone who could think might be aware of that.

It isn't much above average - maybe one standard deviation above the mean, and not all that well educated. A moron would be about two standard deviations below the mean.

If you'd paid more attention to the tertiary education you were exposed to you might be aware of these kinds of concepts.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

How could I think that? They haven't been around long enough for serious testing.

That's even sillier. What they are is more useful than reality. If you are in a speeding car heading towards a cliff edge, you are better off relying on crude mental model telling you that the car will crash is you don't stop now than you would be if you delayed doing anything until had a thoroughly tested and reliable physical model to tell you the same thing.

Sure. And you can't ever rely on simulations to be 100% accurate - a point I've made here from time to time. They can still be very useful.

You keep on making this claim, but whenever you are asked to come up with a real example you drag up something that makes it perfectly clear that you don't know much about science.

Like astronomy and evolution ...

You'd be thinking of the Barents and Kara Sea ice-cover story.

Note that the paper was submitted on 16 November 2009. The winter of

2009-2010 was unusually cold in Europe, but the paper had been submitted before the snow started to fall.

Many of the examples of unusually cold winters associated with low sea ice cover in the Barents and Kara Seas given in the paper were decades old - 1966, 1969, 1976, 1984 - and the study was probably inspired by the cold winter of 2005/6.

The point was not that AGW was creating cold conditions. Their claim was more that AGW, by reducing sea ice cover in the Barents and Kara Seas, was increasing the incidence of a particular weather pattern associated with exceptionally cold winters in northern Europe.

Once again you've made it clear that you don't understand the science.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

You look pretentious when you go around telling others "this is an electronics group," like that ever meant anything to you. It's obvious it doesn't, by your actions. By your words, we might guess otherwise. Being two-faced isn't pretty. It's disturbing.

And there you go, again, with your pretentions. Practically in the same breath. In response to me painting your portrait from your own pretentious words ("this is an electronics group") while in the same breath you talk about climate, you once again just continue the very same behavior you cannot seem to see, saying now "post some electronics." How bizarre that you cannot even see yourself.

The best you come up with in the end is "boredom is worse."

I really do get a kick out of you. And I guess it goes take that kind of blindness sometimes to let things slough off of your back like water off of the back of a duck in order to avoid reality. I have to recognize it has value.

That said, I will also take you at your two-faced value and actually respond to your comment as though I did imagine you actually cared and weren't just piling on more pretention.

...

I've no training; merely a hobbyist. But I have done my part. Not only, but recently too. If you look at sci.electronics.basics you will see quite a lot from me last month.

I guess I should feel honored you feel I am as able to hold up the electronics conversations as well as you feel able, though. I accept your respect as an elecronics peer, though I don't feel at all deserving of it.

...

Meanwhile, we all will just have to expect more of the same "this is an electronics group" and "post some electronics" from you, over and over and over again, directed at those you converse with on climate, all the while you yourself persist on the very same subject about which you really have no clue. It's ignorant, repetitious, and pretentious -- and luckily harmless.

Your behavior sure leaves me a lot of elbow room, anyway. I can't consider that bad.

Jon

It isn't? Check your headers.

like that ever meant anything to

Most of what I post is electronics-related.

By your

What's wrong with asking people to address the group's topic once in a while? I don't criticise people who post sincere issues that are on-topic. I try to help.

The most annoying thing about you climate geeks is how enormously much drivel you post. Which is why I'm going to snip the rest of your extended whining.

John

--
Nonsense.

Humility generally manifests itself as quiet dignity, while you're
always gadding about pressing hard to present yourself as being at the
top of every imaginable heap.

Now, now, JF! JL IS on the top of the heap... the kind that dogs and cows leave behind ;-)

[snip]

But JL proves, as I've maintained all along, that he's an egomaniac trying to compete with Slowman for that top-of-the-heap position.

Or maybe manic depressive is the proper term?

[snip] ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     |

      Remember: Once you go over the hill, you pick up speed

I have opinions, ideas, tangents. You don't, and you don't like people who do.

How victorian. Or Marxist. And I don't write paychecks. The reality is that the people who work for me are very, very good. Every one of them has skills that are, in various areas, much better than mine; and we all know it. It's usually obvious when they are more right about something than I am, and I'd be an idiot to override them. They also know that they could find another job, maybe one that pays better, and will walk if they aren't happy here. I never say "do this or I'll fire you." Never have, never will. That would be incredibly stupid... think about it.

I do sometimes have the last say when there's no obvious "right", or when my experience and instincts convince me that a certain way is better, even thougg I can't prove it. Somebody has the be the tie-breaker in cases like that.

My job is to present them interesting problems and enable them to design and manufacture outstanding electronics, as best I'm able. And to teach them what I know. And to deliver all the pay, benefits, and advantages that we can afford. And to design stuff myself, as time allows.

Of course, if the electronics would be affected. The Brat has a psychology degree, so can't get every clock termination right. But she also worked in manufacturing summers, and has pretty good visual senses, so if she insists on certain layouts for manufacturability, or for aesthetics, or desides to use four layers instead of my suggested six, she wins. I'd have to be an idiot to want to make every decisuin myself, or to prevent people from trying things, and maybe making mistakes; they'd never learn anything that way, and neither would I.

Ever been a boss? Ever run an engineering organization? I don't want to do either. I want to design wild electronics with smart people.

Absolutely not. It's a discussion group. We discuss things. Some people don't.

I can't read all of his enormous rants, as I can't read all of Sloman's endless drones. Or of yours. Too much pecking and clucking.

We had an interesting situation on Thursday. Two of my people were working on calibration test sets and software for new VME module, and it had a weird current-measuring offset in just one zone of current/voltage output. They struggled with it for a while and then came to me to consult. We talked about it for a while and it occurred to me that a source-follower mosfet might be oscillating at high frequency and getting into an opamp front-end. The error was clearly somewhere near the current signal conditioner, and it was big... actual current 24 mA, measured current 22. I told them to poke a finger onto the mosfet gate and see if the offset changed. Bingo.

The schematic looks fine. But the trace from the gate resistor to the fet gate is about 3" long, on an inner layer between planes. I missed the implications of that when I checked the layout. I can't imagine the frequency, but it doesn't show on a 200 MHz scope. We should have pulled up a spectrum analyzer before they fixed it, just to know. I'm gratified when people come to me to discuss stuff like this.

John

I don't normally wish people ill, but if anyone is going to be afflicted with deafness, crippled by polio, live in a hideously decorated house full of kitch crap and broken appliances, in a bleak isolated hellhole of a landscape, have redneck senile delusions about slaughtering people they don't like with Glocks, and be out of touch with 90% of modern electronics, it may as well be Jim.

John

It there weren't a context about your own behavior exposing your ignorance on climate science with abandon and merely using those comments as a cheap way of putting others down abruptly rather than educating yourself, it would be fine. However, there is that context.

Why would you criticize someone posting on topic? I never accused you of doing that.

Please don't imagine anything I say takes away from that. Yes, you do try to help. (Not all of it is intelligently made, though. I have personally had to carefully separate the wheat from the chaff.)

More importantly, you sustain some with employment or else are wise enough to surround yourself with those who can and accept their advice. That's probably the thing I respect most about you. I have a small idea what that is like, having been there.

Jon

You are an expert on climate science? If so, why do you want to post it here? I know that Sloman wants to save the world, by insulting it first, and get people to cut their CO2 emission, even though he won't do that himself.

How about you? What are you personally doing to prevent AGW, I mean aside from preaching here?

I'm helping with the GTF, an aircraft engine with 15% fuel savings. And I do utility end-use survey instruments. And other stuff. I just might save a million times more CO2 emission than I make myself.

Ideas are like that. I've spent my life learning how to do erratic, tangential, near-schitzophrenic thinking, prowling the wilds of the solution space, then filtering out the occasional good stuff. That sort of activity disturbs most engineers; they feel uncomfortable with uncertainty, want to get past that fuzzy stage ASAP, so wind up doing sound implementation of bad ideas.

I'm an engineer. I have a compulsive need to make things work, and to make them work better. Not much else matters; "winning" over other people certainly doesn't. I don't like competitive sports, or award ceremonies, or anything like that. There's not many things more fun than designing cool stuff with a bunch of smart people, where egos don't matter but the thing does.

John

I have frequently claimed just the opposite. However, I know enough of it to know you haven't a clue here. I write, "climate is not an initial value problem." It goes right over your head. Von Neumann understood how that applied to climate, more than 60 years ago, and wrote extensively on it. You might try catching up.

Well, since your conditional is false, the question is meaningless.

Talk to Sloman about Sloman. Not me.

Another deflection, again. Does it really matter to the issue at hand -- your pretentious behavior here posting ignorantly on climate and simultaneously out the other side of your mouth, "this is an electronics group" and "post some electronics?" It doesn't, in fact.

If you were sincerely interested, I would respond and tell you some details. But your query is entirely disingenuous and you know it just as well as I do. Besides, I've already written some about it. You can google it on the groups, if you care that much.

I'm not going to allow you to change the subject from you and hook me on the horns of your trumped up dilemma.

Maybe so. And I could respond with things I've done in the medical, military, space, and local community, too. But it would change the subject -- your pretentious behavior. And that doesn't make you an expert I should listen to about climate. You are still just as ignorant.

It doesn't entitle you to be two-faced and pretentious here.

Jon

[snip] [snip]

Let Slowman talk to Larkin, and Larkin to Slowman, but ignore both, and respond to neither.

Then there'll be two less village idiots visible on this group.

Shunning is the ultimate punishment for asininity ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     |

      Remember: Once you go over the hill, you pick up speed

How do you know that it isn't? Weather sure is. The IPCC assumes a raft of positive feedbacks in order to manufacture a crisis. The last few hundred years of ice core data sure look chaotic to me.

Von Neumann understood how that applied to

How good were his weather forecasts?

I'll take all that to mean "about as much as Sloman."

Write to the President of Usenet and complain.

John

It's a socially acceptable target, but I'm more interested in pointing out mis-information, of teh kind you make a habit of posting.

The initial corrections are rarely insulting - except to those people who keep on posting the same mis-information time after time, where a cerain measure of exasperation does tend to leak through.

Voluntary restraint on an individual basis isn't going to do anything like enough to slow down anthropogenic global warming before it gets far enough to get into the area where the climate can get seriously deranged - by destabilising methane hydrates or stopping the Gulf Stream, to take two examples out of the geological past.

It would be a lot of work and would have no perceptible effect. I'm not into futile gestures.

But since you go around recycling denialist propaganda that you don't actually understand, you are standing squarely in the way of the society-wide technological changes that represent our only means of doing anything effective about the problem.

The human race burns enough fossil carbon every year to inject about

10 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere. The US is responsible for roughly a quarter of that

Your individual contribution is probably somewhere close to the US average of 20 tons per year. If your - fatuous - claim that you might be saving a million times more emissions than you generate were in fact true, you'd be saving 20 megatons a year, 1% of the US total. There are probably more than a hundred people in the US who could make the same claim, but they'd pretty much all be claiming the credit for roughtly the same 20 million tons (or whatever) of savings.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

You just have no clue at all and are too blind to even know it. It all just goes right over your head. I'll leave it there as flogging a dead horse is a waste of time.

You sure wouldn't know, because you have never bothered to inform yourself. I do know much of the details, in contrast.

Just to give you a glimmer, he worked on both weather _and_ climate, though on that score his interest was climate and not so much weather. He paid for his real interest in climate and computer technology by selling weather control to the military, to start. And to do that, he _had_ to be sufficiently successful in a trial experiement. He was, and the next year the gov't "bit" and gave him a fair piece of change to work with. But weather wasn't his interest. It just paid the bills.

Since the details are by now obviously over your head, take a lot of room for discussion, and frankly you aren't interested anyway, I won't belabor any more of it here.

You can take it any way you like. Your posturing is still exposed and your misdirection/attempt to hook me on an irrelevant dilemma just as useless.

I am sure it would be equally effective.

Jon

a

Von Neumann demonstrated the point with his first climate model. It converged to a more or less realistic imgage of the atmopshere from a range of intial starting conditions. Weather models don't behave this way.

True - but, as we keep on pointing out to you - totally irrelevant.

Since the Milankovitch cycles only explains the ice ages if we "assume" several positive feedbacks, the IPCC's assumptions are not so much defensible as unavoidable. Admittedly, the biggest single positive feedback in the ice age story are the northern hemisphere ice sheets, and the Greenland ice sheet isn't anything like as big and further from the equator, but on the other hand increased water vapour levels in the atmosphere are going to be even more important than they were for glacial-interglacial excursions.

The IPCC was put toghether because politicians had been persuaded - by the scientific evidence then available - that there was a crisis in prospect. The IPCC didn't "manufacture" the crisis - they were assembled to review the scientific evidence available on the prospective crisis and present it to the political world in a form that politicians could understand.

Your claim the problem is "manufactured" reflects your uncritical acceptance of deceptive denialist propaganda, which you are exposed to by your enthusiasm for getting your information exclusively from the right-wing media. If you had any grasp of the science involved you'd be aware of the mindless gullibility that your attitude betrays.

Anything irregular or complicated looks chaotic to you.

No better than anybody else's. Predicting weather is a different kind of problem from predicting climate - climate may only be weather averaged over the seasons, but that long-term averaging constrains climate in a way that weather isn't constrained.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

"The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible."

Guess who said that?

John

Googling in the quote suggests that it came out of a draft of an IPCC report. The full text was apparently

"In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. The most we can expect to achieve is the prediction of the probability distribution of the system's future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions. This reduces climate change to the discernment of significant differences in the statistics of such ensembles. The generation of such model ensembles will require the dedication of greatly increased computer resources and the application of new methods of model diagnosis. Addressing adequately the statistical nature of climate is computationally intensive, but such statistical information is essential. "

You seem to have picked up a "selective quotation" spread around by the Heartlands Institute aka denialist propaganda machine, and available on Anthony Watts' denialist web-site.

The original text seems to have been saying that the weather - which averages out to climate - is chaotic, but that if you generate enough esembles of possible states you can find which states are more probable, which is climate.

It seems an odd way of getting to the point. John van Neumann was happy to distinguish between weather and climate models.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen