Sudden Confusion

ll a

Retirement benefits aren't handouts - they've been paid for by pension contributions throughout working life.

The attitude that make a pension paid to a retired worker a "handout" has to be seen as thoroughly toxic.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Arguing with the instructor was a waste of time. You may not like the particular theory that she fancied, but she was there to tell you how such theories were constructed and tested. You show a continuing lack of appreciation of the fact that scientific theories are constructed to motivate experimental investigations and stand - and fall - on their being capable of being falsified by observations and not yet having been so falsified.

By concentrating your attention on disagreeing with a particular theory, you failed to appreciate what you were actually supposed to learn from the course. My wife didn't much like the psychology she was taught as an undergraduate in the early 1960's but had the good fortune to run into a - pioneering - text on cognitive psychology in the university library. It interested her enough that she eventually made a rather successful career in the area. Not the sort of experience to which you were open.

The guys who invented the first practical NMR imaging system were working at EMI Central Research when I was there - the team got sold off as a group when EMI went bust a few years later. I had the pleasure of having them tell me why you couldn't use superconducting magnets for NMR imaging - apparently they changed their minds later.

If you produce stuff in large volume, you can afford to spend design time aggressively minimising parts costs. You can also afford to have lots of people working on the project in parallel, so that you can expend man-years of effort in months.

Since you never seem to have worked on large-scale projects, you may not be aware of this. It's not me who has got this backwards.

Of course. But it does produce sub-optimal designs - something that is going to be more expensive and less good than it would have been if you could justify putting more man-years into the development. This isn't a sub-optimal approach for your market segment, but don't fool yourself into thinking that you can come up with a perfect design in two and a half weeks,

ough it

Actually, I say quite a bit, but you aren't interested. Perceiving me as competent would damage your self-image, and you couldn't cope with that.

LTSpice's inductor-with-hysteresis model was new to me - apparently it comes from

John Chan et la. in IEEE Transactions On Computer-Aided Design, Vol.

1. No. 4, April 1991

I got onto it by googling magnetic hysteresis which took me to it - rather indirectly - via the Preisach-Neel model and the Jiles- Atherton model to

It struck me as not only useful but interesting, but you've managed to ignore it.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

It's a mess - that ends up being a debate about "what's a handout". I was trying to exclude things that work more like subsidies or "insurance". Those distinctions aren't very clear, either.

I'd call food stamps or Section 8 housing subsidies. And never mind all the tax credits... are those really a cost?

WIC, for example, "only" costs a nominal 7,170.4 $M US but the price distortions probably cost much more.

-- Les Cargill

They don't want buildings or bridges to collapse where they can be killed. There are a lot of critical properties affected by the way the metal is alloyed and heat treated. Or would you prefer a wood wagon with leather straps for springs, pulled by an ox, to your car? How many different types of steel do you think are in it?

Why do you care what alloy solder your company uses? Why not just use anything that melts?

What would "psychology" and "scientific theories" have in common?

Your unconditional admiration for authority and degrees is amazing, and clearly self-serving. It never occurred to me that being a university instructor, or having a PhD, kept anyone from being an idiot.

So, if a super-magnet is dissolved in acid, where *does* the stored magetic energy go?

There's more to life than austenitic and martensitic.

It was, when I lived there in the '70s. I couldn't wait to get the hell out of there. Alaska was better, even when it was below -40. It was full of rednecks, carpetbaggers and idiots who couldn't drive when it snowed. I turned down a civil service job at Ft. Rucker, since it was second on the list of places that was difficult to be transfered away from. The top was D.C.

OTOH, the roads were a lot safer with hundreds of them stuck in the ditches, leaving them open for people who knew what an Ice Scraper was made for. :)

ll a

So if the federal budget is 16% of GDP (asserted upthread), and handouts are at least 13% of the federal budget (asserted here), then handouts are .16 * .13 =3D only 2.1% of GDP

Not bad, not bad at all.

I only want .1% of GDP.

Absurd!

OK, they can't drive when it snows. The entire South is that way. So? They simply close everything, the one day in three years it does snow. BFD.

Or even have one. Again, BFD. I bet your pals in FL wouldn't do very well in ice, either.

On what basis?

how would we know a good number from a bad number?

-- Les Cargill

I completely agree -- welfare should be about job training and getting people back to becoming productive members of society. I was talking just about the general concept of welfare; I certainly agree that there's plenty of bits of it, as-implemented today, that could stand some reform.

That being said, the 1996 welfare reform laws changed the landscape a lot: It's next to impossible, these days, to remain on welfare indefinitely unless you have a certifiable physical or mental disability; there are millions fewer today on welfare than there were in

The hardest situation is when you have an able-bodied mother with young kids where the father is nowhere to be found: Sure, she can and is generally more than happy to work, but near-minimum wage jobs can't begin to pay for the childcare that would be needed while she's at work.

---Joel

on,

ey

the

re he

That's a fairly idiotic argument, even for you. Some of the stuff I designed did get to production, and it did sell. The 15% was the ball- park figure talked about at the various places I worked, and wouldn't have been much influenced by my contributions.

A bizarre misinterpretation. It's more about avoiding taking risk that might screw things up, but appreciating that may take a more intellectual approach to circuit and system design than you seem to be equipped for.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

s all a

ed

It helps if you cite your source.

James Arthur does it regularly. He does tend to misinterpret what he cites, but one can see where he's coming from. Of course there's no difficulty in predicting where he's going to end up.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

d,

fers

sing

used

on,

If you'd been paying attention in psychology 201 you might now know enough to be able to answer your own question.

The usual definition of an idiot is someone with an IQ of less than 30

It's difficult to get into a university with an IQ of less than 110. The IQ isn't a a particularly reliable measure of anything much, but university admissions systems do tend to take it seriously.

Having said that, I'm probably at least as well aware as you are that academics vary in competence, and that some of them are a waste of space.

But you want to tell us that your chemistry, physics and psychology instructors were all incompetent and your materials science instructor was hung up on steel alloys to a disabling extent.

You may have been remarkably unlucky in your choice of university, but it seems more likely that you weren't a particularly receptive student. They are a good deal more prevalent than incompetent instructors.

It does take work to magnetise a permanent magnet - the individual magnetic domains are more highly ordered after magnetisation than they were before, which lowers the entropy of the magnet. That order is destroyed if you dissolve the magnet in acid, so the solution will end up warmer than if you dissolved an identical magnet before it was magnetised. You'd be hard pushed to detect the difference at room temperature.

The effect is more obvious close to absolute zero.

as you'd probably know if you'd paid more attention during your physics lectures.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Intellectual? My stuff works, most always on the rev A boards. And sells. Today's Gerber release is a USB-interfaced-and-powered small-box pulse generator with widths programmable down to 100 ps... or maybe 50 if I get lucky, and got the e/m simulations right.

Any you've been futzing with a silly oscillator for years now.

My physics prof was great. Chemistry was boring and, to me, useless. The materials science wasn't especially appropriate for EEs... some bigger-picture stuff would have been better. I didn't help that it was an 8AM class.

I learned a lot of great stuff. Since I was already designing electronics professionally, the good stuff meant a lot to me. I had revelations, where most of the class just plodded along.

That wasn't discussed.

ation,

they

how

n.

are

of the

m to

where he

ials

If you average two and half weeks per design, you aren't exactly pushing the envelope. If you are going push stuff through at that rate, you have to keep it simple and reliable. Finding stuff that that's that easy to develop, which nobody else has bothered to put together before must be a little more demanding. Maybe you've found a stock of undemanding customers - or perhaps a group that isn't too good at finding out what's available off the shelf.

Between 1982 and 1991 I did a couple of narrow pulse generators - we were quite pleased to get the minimum pulse width down to 500psec, and we wouldn't have been able to power the ECL we using from a USB interface. It was tricky stuff back then, but now you can churn it out in two and half weeks.

No customers. And it's not all that silly. We may be able to match Jim Williams's Wien bridges for harmonic content and amplitude stability, and make the frequency electronically tweakable, if only by a few percent. It's hard to imagine that many potential customers would want this feature, but it falls out of the design, and it's sort of cute.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

education,

the

where he

You got it half right, the reliable part.

Finding stuff that

Yup. The biggest hassle was coming up with the correct footprint and pad stack for the edge-launch SMA connectors.