4 ms·

A lot of the stuff you learn in school is basically just a peek under the hood of how something works. So in the best case you leave with kind of a shallow samp

A lot of the stuff you learn in school is basically just a peek under the hood of how something works. So in the best case you leave with kind of a shallow sample of quite a few really deep subjects. This shallow knowledge is fairly useless by itself, for sure, beyond the very practical basics, but it gives you a bit of a hook into a variety of core disciplines that you can later - maybe much later - use to connect to other things you do go deep on, even and perhaps especially in completely unrelated fields. I think really this is the value of an education done right, almost making you aware of what you don't know and giving you just enough context on it that it's not a completely unknown unknown, or unapproachable or unknowable 'magic'. So by itself any one thing you learn might be pretty useless, all together as a big picture it starts to get a lot more useful. But to get to that big picture you just have to grind through the hard, small, useless seeming stuff piece by piece!

adhesive_wombat 4y ago
I still remember the lecture when it all lined up, like the Omega molecule in that Star Trek episode. Everything from Newton's laws, the quantum mechanics of a single electron, bulk materials (Ohm's law), semiconductors devices, communications theory (esp. Shannon's limit, Nyquist etc), Norton and Thévenin models, logic gates, ALUs, frequency domain operations, state machines, coding theory, all of it. It was a lecture where we basically figured out the required ADC clock jitter upper limit to get a certain number of bits at a certain sample rate[1]. At some point something fundamental like conservation of energy was invoked and I had a holy-shit moment when it all made sense. However, I do question how much of the grinding away at the maths is necessary and how much is tradition that may have made sense in slide rule and table days. Perhaps a more holistic and intuitive method with an emphasis on "if you need to do this in detail, remember this is where you go". Personally, I can barely remember any domain equations at all, other than Ohm's law![2] [1] It popped out as something like femto or attosecond and the lecturer said something like "and consider this when buying expensive audio files" (this was back when they were hard to get). [2] as the same lecturer as above told us on the first day in campus: "honestly, all you need is Ohm's law, everything else we're going to teach you is just that in a dress, you just need to know how to get back to it".

adhesive_wombat 4y ago

I still remember the lecture when it all lined up, like the Omega molecule in that Star Trek episode. Everything from Newton's laws, the quantum mechanics of a single electron, bulk materials (Ohm's law), semiconductors devices, communications theory (esp. Shannon's limit, Nyquist etc), Norton and Thévenin models, logic gates, ALUs, frequency domain operations, state machines, coding theory, all of it. It was a lecture where we basically figured out the required ADC clock jitter upper limit to get a certain number of bits at a certain sample rate[1]. At some point something fundamental like conservation of energy was invoked and I had a holy-shit moment when it all made sense. However, I do question how much of the grinding away at the maths is necessary and how much is tradition that may have made sense in slide rule and table days. Perhaps a more holistic and intuitive method with an emphasis on "if you need to do this in detail, remember this is where you go". Personally, I can barely remember any domain equations at all, other than Ohm's law![2] [1] It popped out as something like femto or attosecond and the lecturer said something like "and consider this when buying expensive audio files" (this was back when they were hard to get). [2] as the same lecturer as above told us on the first day in campus: "honestly, all you need is Ohm's law, everything else we're going to teach you is just that in a dress, you just need to know how to get back to it".