• @[email protected]
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    027 days ago

    i miss old school radioshack. i did not know what all those bins of tiny electronic hobby parts were for, but I desperately wanted to learn. I did eventually but you have to get all your stuff from some shady oligarch.

    • @[email protected]
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      026 days ago

      i did not know what all those bins of tiny electronic hobby parts were for, but I desperately wanted to learn.

      From what I understand, prior to the personal computer boom of the 1980’s, HAM radio was kind of a big deal with nerds. The parts were there for all manner of electronics tinkering, but a big mainstay was building and modifying radios. Yeah, you had people tinkering with computers in the 1970’s too, but it was more niche (until it wasn’t).

    • @[email protected]
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      027 days ago

      Yeah we’re living in the ruins of the old America already and have been for like 25 years.

      It’s dirty they just use the same business names they did in the 20th century. While making smoke and mirrors versions of the old products.

  • @[email protected]
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    027 days ago

    The only application I can think of off the top of my head that would require that precision is a R2R DAC.

    Just sort through a bin until you find one.

  • Wugmeister
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    027 days ago

    This guy looks like the dude from Programmers Are Human Too

  • @[email protected]
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    27 days ago

    Ah yes, the old “send the new guy out to buy an isotropic antenna and an electron trap” on their first day

    • @[email protected]OP
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      027 days ago

      Can we do a fraction of an electron boss? The economy is kind of rough. Guy on the phone says he can do a time share too.

      • @[email protected]
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        027 days ago

        Sorry, we need two electrons with identical spin and orbitals. Better check the place across town.

  • @[email protected]
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    027 days ago

    Numbers like that are why I quit majoring in mechanical engineering. Physics took the beauty of math and made it ugly.

    You knew something was wrong in calculus when you got a fucked up coefficient that wasn’t a nice number.

        • PropaGandalf
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          027 days ago

          the philosopher floating on a cloud: So how do you guys really know what’s real?

          • ☂️-
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            26 days ago

            “no you see, its better to just isolate yourself in a mountain. thats how you like, find out who you truly are, man”

      • @[email protected]
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        026 days ago

        I’ve heard a story (so like 4th hand at this point) where an astrophysicist was talking about galaxy rotations or something. “And for this model, we can simplify pi to 10.”

        • @[email protected]
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          026 days ago

          My thermodynamics professor made so approximations in his derivations that all of his equations had an “O” term to represent the inaccuracy. Every time he made another approximation he’d say “and, of course, the O sucks up the error”.

    • @[email protected]
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      027 days ago

      Numbers like that should have been why you kept going in mech E.

      Once you get past the educational stage, every one of those calculations becomes “OK now round to the closest whole number that gives you the larger factor of safety and move on”

      • @[email protected]
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        27 days ago

        Eh, it’s just fundamentally ugly to me and that really turned me off. Rounding doesn’t help, that’s like turning the lights off for sex to make it better. I still know the ugliness exists, even if I don’t see it.

        Engineering is still very cool to me, and I have huge respect for those who do it, but I’d never have made it. It’s physics but even further perverted by reality. Math was beautiful to me because of how “pure” it was. Just straight logic, divorced from the messy world we live in. Tidy coefficients and elegant derivations.

        • @[email protected]
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          027 days ago

          I have to hard disagree with you there. The beauty of the math equations they test you with in school is completely artificially selected. The vast majority of math does not have nice neat solutions. There is a lot of it that doesn’t have any solution at all. The beauty of engineering is figuring out how much of things you actually need. You might calculate that some quantity should be an irrational number for some design optimum, but the amount of precision you actually need will be some range around that. When you do that and see your design in the real world actually functioning, that’s the greatest feeling in the world by far.

          • @[email protected]
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            027 days ago

            Not knocking people’s choices, it just wasn’t for me. If math in reality isn’t math in education, it’s even better that I left.

            I’ll still contend math is much more elegant than physics or engineering, though. There’s no e^I*pi + 1 = 0 equivalent for either.

      • @[email protected]
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        026 days ago

        The difficult part of engineering is figuring out what number you have to round then multiply by 1.2 or 0.8

      • LostXOR
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        027 days ago

        Using π = 4 is only a 27% safety margin, better go for π = 10 just to be safe.

    • @[email protected]
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      27 days ago

      After calculus though, they just expect you to cope with fucked up coefficients. In Diff Eq, sometimes you do just get something like 3/111 cos (6/111 x). It gets harder to come up with examples that work out with nice integers.

      Physics can also have some really beautiful math, look at Lissajous figures. Once you understand the connections between e, the imaginary plane, and sine/cosine, you get some profound understandings about how electric and magnetic fields work.

  • @[email protected]
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    027 days ago

    Without using fancy components: Just simply adding a 6.2 and a 2400 Ohm resistor in parallel already gives you 6.18402 Ohm ⚡️

    • @[email protected]
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      027 days ago

      Real world resistors usually have a tolerance of ±5%, so you’ll never get anything that precise.

      • @[email protected]
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        27 days ago

        That’s why I keep a roll of 20 AWG nichrome on hand. Spool off 9.7195853528209 feet and it’ll be bang on.

      • @[email protected]
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        027 days ago

        Grab a box full and test a bunch until you find one that works well for your use case. That way you end up with a resistor that’s much better than the rated tolerance you’d get if you just grabbed one resistor at random.

      • Gordon Calhoun
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        027 days ago

        Ugh, 3 factorial is most definitely not equal to π. It’s something more like, idk, 9? Honestly I don’t even know how I got here; I majored in Latin and barely past

          • @[email protected]
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            027 days ago

            Seriously, if you’re working with analog electronics, 𝛑=√1̅0̅ is close enough. If you need more precision, use active error correction, and in the 21st century that’s easiest to do digitally anyway.

          • Gordon Calhoun
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            027 days ago

            e = π = σ = ε = µ = Avogadro’s Number = k = g = G = α = i = j = 3

            (at least that’s how they all look when viewed from ∞)

            • @[email protected]
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              27 days ago

              Shouldn’t have i in there, or j if you’re using that to represent the imaginary number. The complex plane is separate.

              Let epsilon be substantially greater than zero…

              • Gordon Calhoun
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                026 days ago

                The list of things I shouldn’t do, but do regardless, stretches past infinity.

                • @[email protected]
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                  26 days ago

                  Imaginary numbers are best understood as symbolizing rotation. If we’re imagining a number line here, “looking back from infinity” - at a scale where Grahams number looks like the mass of an atom expressed in kilograms, i would not be in that infinite set of numbers, it would be a point above that line and creating a perpendicular plane to it.

                  I hate the term “imaginary” because it’s misleading. Most high school algebra teachers don’t understand what they are either, so people learn about these things called “imaginary” numbers, never learn any applications with them, hopefully graph them at best, and then move on understanding nothing new about math.

                  Students also tend to get really confused about it as possibly a variable, (it’s really annoying with in second year algebra courses, where e and logs also show up). We say “ah yeah, if you get a negative sign, just pull it out as an i and don’t worry about it. or just say no real solutions.”

            • @[email protected]
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              026 days ago

              Erm. In what world do you live that the precedent in your expression is right?

              In all languages and countries I know multiplication binds more strongly than addition. So what you wrote would be

              n^2 - n - 2n - 3n…

                • @[email protected]
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                  026 days ago

                  No, correctly it would be n * (n-1) * (n-2) * … * 3 * 2* 1

                  Or the actual recursive definition

                  1! = 1

                  n! = (n-1)! * n

            • @[email protected]
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              27 days ago

              My high school English teacher still has night terrors about me starting sentences with conjunctions. And that was the least of their problems.

              Edit: kind of unrelated, but that song about conjunctions is now stuck in my head. 🎶Conjunction junction, what’s your function? 🎶

  • ☂️-
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    27 days ago

    best they can usually do is three fiddy, and thats usually enough.

  • @[email protected]
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    027 days ago

    That level of precision in a resistor would literally be thrown off if you breathed on it. If you actually needed that, then you need to build an extremely controlled environment around it. Even then, the heat from the electricity itself would throw it off. Maybe in a liquid nitrogen bath?

    • @[email protected]
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      026 days ago

      First, assume a spherical resistor in a vacuum, that can also dissipate heat with 100% efficiency.

      Now that we’re in physics land, anything is possible.

    • @[email protected]
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      026 days ago

      A big aspect of good design is being able to solve an issue as succinctly as possible, with as wide an operating range as possible. Lower tolerance requirements = better.

      If you need that level of precision, you might want to reconsider your career in circuit design.

      • @[email protected]
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        026 days ago

        You can’t tell me that there isn’t a good reason that 0.001% resistors exist. Otherwise why sell them?

        • @[email protected]
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          026 days ago

          4 Sig figs vs 9 Sig figs is a big gap. If you need your resistors in a circuit to be precise to 9 Sig figs, seek a new career.

          It is almost always possible to take a system and make it more precise by using more precise parts (just gotta make sure you know what part you are changing to improve what tolerance). You do get diminishing returns with that, but it beats inventing a new system if the tolerances you need are just alittle ways away.

  • @[email protected]
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    27 days ago

    Quantum Ampere Standard
    https://www.nist.gov/noac/technology/current-and-voltage/quantum-ampere-standard
    .
    there also been research for defining a quantum volt and quantumly stable resistors

    https://www.nist.gov/noac/technology/current-and-voltage
    Quantum-based measurements for voltage and current are moving toward greater miniaturization

    P.S. :
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Hall_effect
    Quantum Hall effect →
    Applications →
    Electrical resistance standards :

    (…) Later, the 2019 revision of the SI fixed exact values of h and e, resulting in an exact
    RK = h/e2 = 25812.80745… Ω.

    (this is precise to at least 10 significant digits)