[rescue] Cooling (Long Message, sorry)

[Jochen Kunz]

On 2002.04.17 00:05 Dave McGuire wrote:

>   Most of my electronics work in recent years has been with
> microcontrollers, though I do some RF and basic analog stuff here &
> there.  
Ahh, OK. You don't need to know Mr. cos(PHI) in the digital part of the
world and RF electronics is somthing beyond maths. It is simply black
magic. (At least for me. ;-)

> I don't have a college background, 
That is good. No geek survives that without damage. 

> so if making
> something work (for example) can be done by either an hour of
> calculations to figure out the correct value of a fixed resistor or
> five minutes of using a variable resistor then measuring its value, I
> will choose the latter.
The same for me. I don't like maths much. The problem comes when you
have to work on xx resistor values that depend on each other...
Sometimes I was tweaking a circuit for an hour, gave up, thought about
it, used some math and it worked 20 minutes later. 
Not to talk about nice things that can be done with e.g. Matlab... 

>   The tendency to reduce all things electronic to overcomplicated
> mathematics is irritating at best and counterproductive at worst. 
But it is nice to apply overcomplicated mathematics to generate some
input for e.g. a Cray. ;-)

> > ??? You don't learn basic trigonometry at scool?
>   No, as a matter of fact, I didn't. [...]
Holy Daemon. Now I know why the US school system is called rotten. 

>   Geeks also try to impress each other a little too much by pointing
> out the things that other geeks don't know.
Ohh, yes. I have that "You didn't know that? Shame on you!" attitude, as
it makes me feel superior. ;-)

See it that way: When I logged into a UNIX system for the first time in
my life (fall of 1993) you where already working as a UNIX admin. 
-- 



tsch|_,
         Jochen

Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/