Post, by one of our buddies, at The Pub:
Johnson's derivation of the noise of an RC network is taught by sophomore year, so what?
Hate to disappoint you, but not where I went!
In fact,
it was never taught.Those of you who really know me are aware that the place I went to was really awful. Despite being in the Top 50 research universities. I remember, a year or so after we made Greaser's Palace, that one guy was amazed when I said a certain subject was never taught. All those years..............of me kvetching at The Pub, how terrible and wanting my education was.................
and none of them believing me, it finally started to sink in.
So, for all the rest of us (especially since none of us went to MIT), what did you learn at university?
I learned that dielectric absorption had a name. Already knew it existed (from ham radio days), but didn't know it had a name. Other than that.......................nada.
OK, one day, about 10 years out...............someone at Collins Radio came up with an estimation of BER vs C/I. Boss asked if anyone knew how this guy came up with it. I recalled having a very obtuse course, called "Communications Theory", that had nothing to do what I was interesting in (BP filters, AGC circuits, mixer post-amp/filters/diplexers), but was full of equations that made no sense.
So...........somewhere it that book (the same one MIT used!), there was some obtuse graph of error probability to S/N. Had to do a few calculations, but somehow came to the same answer.
The boss was impressed. He was such a putz. Had no more right running our lab, than any random member of The Pub. (Supposedly, we worked at Hughes Aircraft, in the Telstar days, as a "civilian scientist". Not sure what he did, but it sure as hell wasn't anything technical. This putz could not understand my "Evaluation Reports", you know................the ones where I would investigate a new piece of gear, to see if we could use it in our network. My reports were highly technical, because their very nature meant they had to be technical. Well, long story short..............this putz would re-write my entire report, put it out,
with my name on it, having
totally changed its content. And in such a way that it made no sense! Except to my putz boss, because the work I was doing was over his head. So, he would re-write to where it made sense, to him, in the manner he interpreted it to mean. Which was, of course, wrong, because he did not understand it! Putz.)
Now you know why I also have it in for guys (with or without a PhD), who pass themselves off as scientists. Lots of book learning, yet much dumber than a guy who never learned R vs noise, at university.
