This is only relevant for this group because we deal with science, or at least I assume the study and practice of electronics is scientific.

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A friend suggested this book and I just finished it....I'll avoid any rants about how the left needs to get a clue.

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Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science

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Read it and cringe.....

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To me a pound is a pound, a kilogram a kilogram, numerals go from 1 to as high as you want to count, social repression has nothing to do with any of the proceeding.

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Note, I don't especially like the metric system but I accept it is real and valid.

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It is worth noting the book was written in 1994, well before the current social conflict over woke, social justice, DEI, et al.

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To me a business exists to make money, Proctor and Gamble's Gillette's "We Believe" ad campaign credited with causing a $5 billion dollar loss.

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I'd be a little upset if I were a stockholder...

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[For those who require proof, do a net search or

"A major development was reported between late July and early August, when it was announced that Gillette had lost $5 billion in quarterly sales, resulting in P&G giving Gillette an $8 billion non-cash writedown in terms of valuation."

Or look into Bud Lite....and what a debacle.]

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"Go woke, go broke." [I believe John Ringo, SF author, came up with that witicism.]

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A society that turns it's back on science or uses social criteria to decide scientific truths is in deep trouble.?I'm reminded of the Indiana Pi Bill, look it up on wiki and laugh, then look at the current social situation.

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I bet it'd pass today.

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I actually heard an English professor in college complain that "Pi should be rational, it just isn't right....makes no sense."?

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I kept my mouth shut because as an EE major I was alread on thin ice for studying something real. <you had to be there>

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Hum, reality isn't right or wrong, but it is real. [and yea Quantum Mechanics gives me a stomach ache, but it's real...for various versions of real.]

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If you can't remember 3.1415, maybe you shouldn't teach or vote.

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[If you only have a 4 banger calculator, a very close approximation to Pi can be found with 355/113. Give it a try...]

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[A friend used Pi to 25 places, backwards, as her master password to the Big Iron in college. Yea I know some odd people.]

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We have the most advanced civilization in the history of the planet, people in third world nations enjoy cell phones, computers and instant communication. One might expect this to lead to an appreciation of science.

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[When I see the ISIS or Starlink satellites I'm filled with wonder that we've come so far so fast. I remember John Glenn atop that rocket...poor BW TV in school.]

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I wonder how long before they start burning us at stake for being heretics in the current social structure because we believe 1 and 1 are 2, not the result of some inherent racial paradigm.

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[My wife read this, "Oh don't be silly, they won't burn you at the stake, they'll simply send you to a special camp to be reeducated.]

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I just heard a rant on the radio about the inherent racism in math which lead me to write this....I wanted to call in and as "so which numeral is an oppressed minority?"

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But decided against it as trying to convert a rock to life by lecturing it. Or get our cat to not twine between my legs as I try not to trip over her. Both tasks are futile.

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I know the Indians (Hindus) have advanced match, and the Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Maya, Inca, and Aztec all had relatively advanced math. However, I'm not sure anyone is willing to learn any of those languages to do advanced math.

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While societies, all societies, are racist, it's hard to make a case for math to be racist.

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Is math difficult, oh hell yea. I ran into Kirchoff's law in the 7 grade (13), a matric of parallel resistors with some resistors in series. I had no idea where to begin tackling it. A friend suggested "add the series resistors then solve for total resistance only using the parallel strings."

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Then spherical geometry....and who can forget the joys of calculus.

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Funny how none of those earlier or alternate civilizations placed a satellite in orbit, heck the Soviets beat us.

I guess I should claim racism because the Soviets beat us to orbit? Or the Germans because they invented ballistic missiles.....[oh don't get me wrong, the Nazis epitomize racism, but are their inventions?

I don't know much German but they do have a phrase something like ding in sach "Thing in it's self."

Are all the works of, is everything, created by a racists racist?]

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Look up "Equitable Math" and cringe.

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One of my wife's nieces is smart, spooky smart, she's forced to work on groups where she does 99% of the work and the loafers get equal credit, complain and she's labeled an unfair trouble maker. The school system is making a former very open and generous girl into a secretive mean spirited sociopath. Sad and frightening to watch and be helpless to do anything. The legitimate anger this kid is carrying is terrifying.

Yea I worry about a really negative outcome. Not much I can do.

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300/F=approximate wavelength in meters....so racist.

A sales tax of 5% means $.50 tax on $10.00, yea racist.

And Pi being a never ending irrational number is clearly racist.

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I don't want an DEI engineer, I want an engineer who won't design a pedway that will collapse.

At the very least I want engineers competent enough to block off traffic below a just moved bridge....

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But then I'm a 73 year old white male hillbilly so what do I know.

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Take a look at this

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Bet the people who graduate from such a math program won't be making any ground breaking discoveries or breakthroughs, hell, I'd be shocked if they could balance their checkbook, but then checkbooks and bank accounts are racist....I bet money is racist.

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I spent a lifetime learning to work with and working with 'things' defined by math.

I guess I'm beyond hope when the thought police come after me.

Just hope I don't get the cage with rats over my head.

Though rats are better then snakes.

[reference to 1984]

If you see "Ω" s you'll know instantly it's ohms, if you see β in the context of transistors you'll know they are referring to gain.

λ means wavelength

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Although I don't see how physicists got by using "C" for the speed of light and "V" as velocity.

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Astronomy has their own set of characters, one per planet, etc.

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Humans love (live) to abbreviate. LOL, IMO, IMHO, FAFO.

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In college, we were required to use the 1970 MLA (Modern Language Associates) style book. MLA pretended to be the font of all that makes English proper. Of course the AP and Hurst had their own style books....

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Most days I'm happy we aren't like the French and don't have an official organization that can legally define what is proper French.

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The purpose of language is to clearly convey ideas. Hillbilly [Appalachian] English is poorly adapted to a talk about modern electronics. I'm using Appalachian as my example because I was born in Perry County and my parents moved to Lexington when I was 3 months old. I spent the summer between 6 and 7 grade murdering my strong Appalachian accent. I couldn't sound like a hick from Cow Creek if I wanted to be taken seriously in school.

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[Cow Creek is my mythical place in the heart of Appalachia where people still speak as though it's 1800.]

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I'm so avoiding the difficulties speaking only Ebonics might impose on a kid.

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Clarence Thomas? grew up in a Gullah community, if Appalachian English is odd, the dialects spoken by the Gullah might be judged as barely English.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gullah]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gullah_language

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I can't begin to imagine the difficulties he faced as he lost his original speech and learned 'main stream" English. Worked out fairly well for him.]

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Oh, and to add to my list of oddities, I have a degree in physical anthropology, we take 90% of the same classes as the social / cultural types, and add chemistry, geology, physics, etc. So I've been through the complete liberal (1974 edition) indoctrination. Clearly it didn't take. But I do understand the orientation of the left.

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I mentioned the MLA and AP stylesheets. A former coworker contacted me today, I repaired her cassette deck a lifetime ago and and it died again. Easy peasy repair, the drive belt broke.

I mentioned MLA and she told me "MLA and AP at least make sense, try navigating the federal government style sheet."

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She's writing a grant proposal, she wants to take a group of kids to Mammoth Cave to demonstrate geology and has to comply with every little detail of the fed's style sheet. "You'd think the world would end if you misplaced a comma."

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Just in case you need to write a grant proposal...for your enjoyment I present

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Speed of light is one aspect, the other is the comparative speed of Causality hence 'c'

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I understand the issue came up regarding the math of constant accelerating spacecraft if sustained

long enough it can no longer been observed as ts red shift in comparison from the non accelerating

origin is so very long - ultra long it approaches the observed size of the universe, much like the

expansion rate etc...

The "Red shift" AKA Doppler frequency shift is quite measurable on the 136/137 Low Earth Orbit weather satellites and amateur OSCAR sats. Using a stable receiver tuned to a bird, the apparent frequency will increase as the bird approaches you then once it passes overhead (or nearly overhead) the apparent frequency starts dropping.

Antenna-preamp-stable receiver with BFO/CFO, product detector, AF output.

It's interesting for two people to tune to the same bird and feed their AF into a telephone.

Odd that the same bird produces two very distinctive AF outputs.

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I'm told back when the USSR place Sputnik in orbit, the Brits figured out the orbital height by measuring the Doppler shift with receivers located through out England. That information indirectly lead to the first US navigation sats then GPS. Odd how things work.

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I worked at a facility with an analog Ku band up/downlink. The network controllers needed a stable RF /video signal and I was allowed to play with sending a 1kHz tone derived from a crystal oscillator up and fed the uplinked audio to the vertical of a scope and the downlink audio to the horizontal.

The Lissajous pattern was fascinating. The satellite in geosynch stable stationary orbit was clearly moving around as the pattern was in constant motion.

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?I had a Betacam video I made of the project but I haven't been able to find it, and even if I do I don't have access to a Betacam video deck. Note Betacam was the professional version not the home. I wish I had digitized it when I had the chance.

The 'moment to moment random' shift of the Lissajous pattern showed second to second Doppler frequency change.

?The Doppler wasn't noticeable on speech or music, unless you mixed outgoing with incoming.

I suspect I was one of the few people with access to the equipment and silly enough to try the experiment.

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On Mon, Dec 23, 2024 at 11:28 AM, Nuno Yahoo wrote:

I’m with you my friend.

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You have no idea how much of that bullshit I’ve come across… Too much to tell, probably.

I’m in the UK, where anything out of “established rules” is immediately, and permanently, eradicated.

Anyone thinking differently here, is either insane and should be in a mental institution, or alienated good!

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Nuno T.

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Nuno T.

I'm from South Africa. If you change "UK" to "RSA" you would be describing us 100%. In my opinion, when the government and church/religion get involved in science you have shit on your hands - excuse my French.

Galileo and Kepler were interfered with; to mention only two.

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Regards,
Abes

When the state or large elements of any society start imposing ideological dogma on science and math, things go sideways.

Look up "illegal numbers" on Wiki for a glance into the upside down world of US patent law.

Certain numbers allow you to bypass the copy protection in some DVDs, hence those numbers are illegal to publish. Say 7 is illegal, I wonder how lawyers would respond if you published 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 , X, 8, 9, 19.

I went with 7 because the real numbers are quite long. You didn't publish 7 but you made it clear that X was 7.

One feminist has stated Newton's seminal work Principia ia a rape manual. I'll admit it is heavy slogging and he got some things wrong, like he failed to understand velocity increases the effective mass of an object, but a rape manual?

Basic science is under attack.

Try explaining power factor to a high school science teacher. BTDT and nearly was suspended for 3 days, a friend's father worked at the local university and had a EE professor come and explain my description of? why a shaded pole motor appears to draw ~20% more current then it does and how the proper value capacitor, which I had used to demonstrate the concept, will reduce the apparent current, which your power source has to supply. He overwhelmed the science teacher with state diagrams, phasors. etc, Stuff way over my head. I just knew, if I place a 4.7uF oil filled capacitor across the furnace air handler, my small home made generator, gas engine from a lawn mower and a 120V 5HP induction motor as a generator (yea it worked just not the best solution) I could power out furnace if the power went out, but, my generator would stop producing AC if I didn't add the capacitor.

I think Popular Electronics had a article in their "After Class" on power factor, I know one of the popular electronics type magazines did.

I found an article in a WWII era magazine about using and induction motor as a generator. While it worked it was far from an optimal solution. There are web pages devoted to various projects. It beats no AC but is finicky as heck.

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Science is hard and most people are lazy. Advanced math, heck basic math, is hard enough without troweling on useless ideology. And trying to force students to learn advanced math as a small group is insane. You bang your head against the wall of ignorance until you have an epiphany and "Oh God that's how you do it!"

I had trouble with the concept of using a letter to replace a number for a week or so, when it "hit" me what was going on I felt pretty silly. And Kirchoff's Law drove me to despair. I had no idea how to break a 20 piece resistive network down into manageable bites. And computers were interesting, they didn't (don't) care what you want to do, every line of code must be accurate or it doesn't work.

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I fear today we are too afraid of damaging little Johnny and Jane's delicate egos to insist they get their math right. Look up "inventive spelling." [Although I could go on a week rant over the silliness of English inconsistencies. House, houses, mouse mice, why not house hice? I before E except on alternate Thursdays, give me a break.]?

A friend's daughter almost had a nervous breakdown when they went from inventive spelling, ie kat for cat, when all of a sudden she had to spell words the right way. She'd spent 2 and half years inventing spelling and all of a sudden "You must spell cat cat!"?

And this prepares a child to learn how?

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As a charter member of the "I'm dyslexic, can't spell worth a hoot," at least I knew and accepted there was a proper way to spell. [and I'm sure everyone enjoys my attempts at spelling until I turned spell check back on.

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Somehow I suspect Chinese schools don't coodle little egos....not saying a beating for a mistake is the rigth way either, but American education sure appears to be headed for the rocks at full speed.

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A cousin was a teacher and "The No Child Left Behind" act inspired her to quit, go back to school, and learn a real profession.

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X-ray/radiology tech. She handled the equipment when they nuked my prostate for cancer. Piece of cake, other then sheer terror of cancer. 15 minutes of radiation for 5 days, no sign of cancer. And I bet she was a great teacher.?

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Funny/sad comment on EE....

We used students as work study labor.

One kid was an EE student and it was interesting to watch him struggle with the basics,

like parallel resistance.

He was using

1/Rt??????=1/R1+1/R2??????+...+1/Rn???? ??

He looked at me in actual horror, "I can't use that cause that's not what they taught us."

He dropped out of school at the end of the semester.

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Don't get me wrong, he was sharp, could easily have become a good EE but they were teaching him "all wrong." I was amazed because 20 years earlier I had gone through the program and we were taught both methods...the "This is the only way thou shall work the problem" was the least of the idiocracy.?

Odd ideology was at work.?

Just like? "let's build a bridge and not block traffic as we tension it."?

"Oh look we crushed a bunch of cars."

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And I'm so not going into Boeing's difficulty with air planes and space ships.

Where a week stay turns into a year long stay.......

A friend has written a song to the tune of the Gilligan's Island theme about "A 7 day tour."?

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Consider

"A pair of Maher’s speeches have been making the rounds on social media, and not without good reason. In her talking points, Maher says that? is a stuffy, antiquated, and culturally-constructed notion that must give way to the mature, enlightened view that there are “many truths.” This is pure subjectivism of a rather bland and unsophisticated flavor. I’ve definitely tasted more gourmet (though still poisonous) versions of this stale philosophical dish."

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