Re: whats with this love of kaffiene?

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On Thu, 2007-04-26 at 11:07 -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Thursday 26 April 2007, Tim wrote:
> >Tim:
> >>> Sounds like they need to, also, employ someone who used to be a teacher.
> >>> Someone who's used to the idea of having to train, as the main thing
> >>> that they do.
> >
> >Gene Heskett:
> >> On the face of it, that is a good idea.  Till that old saw about
> >> "those who can't do, teach" comes crawling up out of the back of my
> >> mind, having had it quite amply demonstrated in my nearly 57 years of
> >> chasing electrons for a living.  The other corollary to that is that
> >> those who can do, and then try to teach, have a hell of a time trying
> >> to reduce the language to something that actually works for TV-101
> >> classes.
> >
> >;-)  Generally, we had the opposite problem at college.  Teachers who
> >learnt electronics at college, then became teachers, were worse than
> >those who worked in the industry, then became teachers.  For one thing,
> >they knew the difference between theory and practice.
> >
> >I could never get any lecturer to give a sane explanation of AM.  They'd
> >tell us that the carrier was a fixed amplitude.  I'd argue that AM was
> >modulating the carrier, therefor it has a varying one.  I'd even
> >demonstrate by cranking the pot up and down to give a 1 Hertz AM.  None
> >of them could give a reasonable explanation.  Yes, they could give
> >strange ones, but none that fitted the situation demonstrated.
> >
> I suspect they got lost someplace in the vector math, or the fourier 
> transforms.  Both are damndably hard to explain to someone, like me, sorely 
> lacking in the math background to understand it.  One of the disadvantages of 
> having only an 8th grade formal education.  Beyond that, I'm self taught, and 
> have occasionally caught the teacher out & made him go back to the books. :)
>  

Aptly put.

Math was my strong point, but I began my interest in electronics 
in grade 6. I also tormented one prof who had no real world expertise 
by pointing out his errors, and disproved one of his facts with 
a demonstration when he called me on one of my objections. I did 
not sign up for any more of his classes after I finished that one.

> >Yes, I know that you can put a 1 kHz signal on top of a 1 MHz one, and
> >then filter one away from the other.  Theoretically, that's fine.  But
> >it doesn't get around the fact that I had grabbed the pot and changed
> >the carrier level.  It sure didn't have a constant carrier level in my
> >hands.
> 
> Yup, sideband analysis tends to break down when the circuit to do the analysis 
> is not physically realizable.  The hand on the pot has the final word anyway.
> 
> >--
> >(This box runs FC6, my others run FC4 & FC5, in case that's
> > important to the thread.)
> >
> >Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.
> >I read messages from the public lists.
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Cheers, Gene
> "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
>  soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
> -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
> There is something in the pang of change
> More than the heart can bear,
> Unhappiness remembering happiness.
> 		-- Euripides
> 
-- 
Guy Fraser
Network Administrator
The Internet Centre
1-888-450-6787
(780)450-6787



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