On Fri, 25 Jul 2008 10:18:15 -0400, Phil Hobbs
wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 24 Jul 2008 05:32:10 +0000 (UTC), "R.L. Horn"
wrote:

On Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:04:16 -0700, John Larkin
wrote:

I spent the day programming, and programming has absolutely nothing to
do with math.
Curiously, I spent the day plumbing, which ended up involving the Law of
Sines for some strange reason.

And a higher sense of accomplishment, no doubt.

John

Higher math, higher sense of accomplishment. What's not to like? Beats
working for a living. I just finished a section showing that the SNR
of a focused-beam measurement is proportional to the square of the
Strehl ratio--thereby showing how optical aberrations affect the actual
data.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

And I find that the more hairy electronics I design, the less real
math I do. Square roots now and then, logs rarely, calculus pretty
much never. Simulate and fiddle, now and then.

Electronic design is largely qualitative. Of course, one has to
understand Fourier transforms and correlations and physics and stuff,
but not actually have to do them much.

John