I recently discovered your articles and same as other EEs on these comments, I like the way you explain stuff straight forward to the electronics “meat” whereas in EE topics usually require to dig into the math and they deep physics/chemistry why, which is fun but definelty take time
Coming from software engineering perspective, it was eye opening to discover of voltage level is kind of a function agrument to microprocessor pins. Maybe you could explore that a bit.
Similarly to someone else in the comments, I have tried reading your articles but I found them equally confusing to the material I've seen elsewhere. You have good goal but you're not where you want to be yet.
As for 'grownup calculus', yeah most STEM courses are full of condescending statements about how "it obviously follows", math being primary offender. I'm currently re-learning calculus and it's astonishing how many things were described as these arcane magic rites I'm "not supposed to understand" whereas they are elementary concepts that barely have anything to do with calculus as such.
I’m one of those “EE folks” with a matching degree (professionally a software engineer, though); never had problems with the math, mostly because I enjoy that sort of thing. I’m comfortable working in the abstract realm of formulas, but I appreciate your explanations for giving a more relatable concrete interpretation. For example, I really liked your article on signal reflections.
Personally I feel that these two perspectives are complementary and should in theory strengthen understanding. But in reality there are two problems:
* it’s a mistake to start the journey of learning electronics with the abstract perspective: it skips over something essential
* unfortunately, I agree that the concrete interpretations given are usually so poor and confusing as to be even worse than useless (eg, the hydraulic analogy).
I think this is basically what you’re saying. I think what you’re doing here fills a gap in electronics education.
My background/context: Started out in college as an EE, migrated to Computer Science after failing Differential Equations several times (I only figured out I was dyslexic two years later). My dad was an EE, so I've been soldering since I was a little kid, but building circuits from Forrest Mims was all I did; no actual design or understanding.
I've always understood things better with the WHY explanation. I teach that way too, though I'm not sure how well it carries through into other's heads. and yes, I'm not interested in math proofs, just a good generalization or demonstration. I consider your explanations to be "light math" without a deep understanding or study required, and they fit the depth that I'm looking for exactly.
RF is still black magic to me, but your pointing out that the standing wave in wire essentially acts like an inductor (and the subsequent voltage spikes) makes SO much more sense now how it might actually work.
I appreciate you doing this, but I'll have to go through a few more times and let it settle to see if this will work.
To touch on historic methods of teaching these things, you'll actually find Oliver Heaviside lectures extremely useful.
As for what happened, and how/why these types of analogies began being used, you may not be aware but there was a major shift in teaching in the late 1970s where published material and teaching pedagogy changed almost overnight following a new more modern principle of education pushed heavily by the NEA.
It is known by most under the name by-rote teaching, but follows the structure that Administrators and Teachers now call openly as early as the 90s as "Lying to Children".
Prior to that most teaching basically followed the path of the greeks, where you start with a working system, break down to first principles which are proven true in a guided manner, and then modeled the system based on those principles to predict future states in those systems. This is the western rational approach to education.
"Lying to Children" pedagogy, takes the exact opposite approach. It by design starts with a useless flawed model intended to teach some abstract concept, which includes other unrelated concepts where it fails. You are forced to unlearn some, and relearn some, iteratively over time to become useful. This naturally follows the path of gnosis in gnosticism. It is designed to utilize torture techniques derived from Mao during the 1950s to cause frustration, and PTSD, and break people when they ask questions that would be required for true intuitive understanding of the subject matter.
Through this and other strategies, failures are orchestrated to impose irrational PTSD towards math structurally at various stages (primarily), later on the same was expanded to prevent success towards obtaining a degree creating a forever student through various clever gimmicks that a student wouldn't be aware of. The student is blamed for the failure (gaslit), and that frustration and torture break the person.
The more modern principle of education is in reality the adoption of fully torturing the student. This was done systemically following the process the Nazi's and Stasi used to get people to do evil things. This process is called the separation of objectionable concerns. You separate the roles so objectionable actions take place under a minimum number of people, while everyone else contributes to the whole without their knowledge.
Some are capable of still getting to the end though its a minority, and not necessarily the most intelligent, in fact the more intelligent/rational typically fail given that rationality and its perspectives disappear under torture. The broken people can still enter such professions, but they have to blind themselves to get there. There's been a concerted effort to select out and get rid of intelligent people over time.
That is what has happened. Most people who are raised under such systems that manage to learn it to a point of semi-usefulness only have that as a reference and so naturally parrot those approaches inflicting the same on whoever they try to teach. Under Mao, they found when your perception is distorted early, it tends to stay distorted as you reach adulthood, and it takes advantage of many psychological blindspots our psychology uses to remain consistent. (Cialdini covers those blindspots in his book on Influence).
The torture elements used are covered in books by Joost Meerloo and Robert Lifton.
I love when people say "such and such was my favorite math book" when the book itself has differential equations on the first page. This is nobody's favorite book. It's not a book to begin with, it's a specification document maybe. I get how it can be useful, but the sharade of pretending you didn't read something else to understand this book was always pushing me away. It's so clearly a psychological game of some kind.
> I love when people say "such and such was my favorite math book" ...
Are you referring to the Heaviside lectures or just generally?
There were a series of three papers intended for lectures done by Heaviside. Google seems to have now wiped it off the web, and I'm not now finding these on archive.org where I previously found them.
Heaviside did write a book, but that material appears different than what I've seen. You can find a link to the book here. The material is similar, but not as succinct.
> It's so clearly a psychological game of some kind.
It is torture. Intended to keep people the most creative and intelligent people from learning usable math, trending towards learned helplessness.
I previously mentioned the books which cover this, there are elements, structures, and clustering that impact these things.
The elements (for recognition) are simple enough: isolation, cognitive dissonance, coercion with real or perceived loss, and lack of agency. Structures turn the psyche back on itself and other diabolically clever trauma loops, Clustering impacts susceptibility.
Time and Exposure with these elements present, and any one will enter a state of involuntary hypnosis before finally breaking. It is just a matter of time and exposure, and phones/social media provide that along with clustering via associative priming (dopamine hits) which make one more susceptible.
Isolation isn't necessarily a physical thing, its entirely communication based; you can be isolated in a noisy room, or when the teacher singles you out in a classroom. Thought reform is quite vile, but if you don't recognize the action you can't easily resist or defend against it.
Your articles are always something of a stretch for me (a beginner), but they are a great gateway to the more advanced explanations. The textbook stuff is, as you say, probably mostly unnecessary for the hobbyist. But I find the intuition I gain from a careful reading of your articles is a big help when I decide, out of curiosity, to dig deeper.
From the perspective of a non-EE dabbler, I think your articles fill an important void and I look forward to reading them. Thank you for your hard work on them!
I'm definitely a hobbyist and appreciate what you're trying to do, but in general I've found your articles to be just as confusing and complicated as any other source. I mean, even your summary of articles on this page is loaded with math. While they often don't get into theory, I've had better luck learning practical skills from watching repair videos on YouTube.
Are you able to explain these concepts without math?
I think these are two different things. You don't need a profound understanding of electronic theory to do household wiring or make basic repairs to household appliances (where the problem is often a loose wire, a blown fuse, or something like that). You don't even necessarily need electronic theory for hobby digital circuits - you can certainly blink LEDs or display text with an Arduino with very little prep.
That said, at some point, you start asking yourself questions. "Hmm, there's nothing blown or loose on this PCB, but the coffee maker isn't working - how do I diagnose that?". Or, "hmm, I need to amplify this signal for the Arduino, how do I do that?".
That's where you need to go that extra step of understanding the physics and the associated math. Unless someone else solved that specific use case for you beforehand, or unless you get really lucky with an LLM, there's just no way around it. Analog electronics are basically just doing mathematics in hardware. Well - digital electronics are like that too, but I guess that's more explicit and easier to grasp.
So, that's what I'm trying to address: it's that case where you want to learn more. And the contribution I'm trying to make is to explain it with math, but not the kind of math you need to go to college for. It's all basic trigonometry and arithmetic.
If you're looking for simpler recipes, then I think you're going to the right places - YouTube, or the earlier-gen websites that YouTube celebs often get their ideas from.
I detest your requirement to verification. I have never asked anyone to verify themselves. I have been teaching electronics for over 50 years with more than 25,000,000 visitors to y website.. l have never introduced a formula into any of y discussions because you instantly lose the reader. I have never found any discussion or explanation on the web for any University or individual to be helpful in understanding a topic. All the discussions are just a regurgitation of previous drivel. The only way to learn electronics is to build things. Not one article in any magazine describes how to fix the project if it does not work. That because the author does not have a clue about the project. I sent projects to an lndian magazine for 18 months at no cost to the magazine and did not get a single reply from a reader. And that’s the fact. 45,000 readers x 18 = zero. And that’s what you get from so many other countries. England has stopped producing an electronics magazine and simply uses page-ready art from Australia and delivers it 12 months later.. The US has lost all its electronics magazines and even Ekektor is struggling to find a readership. Electronics is a dying art and no-one can see a reason to study it. China has taken over the electronics manufacturing world and no-one can compete with their prices.
What can I say? *I* like you your stuff a lot. Been playing with electronics for 40 years, sometimes professionally, but not with any formal education in it. I'm pretty good with DC (have designed PCBs with microcontrollers and lots of MOSFETS...); AC is a mystery to me.
I recently discovered your articles and same as other EEs on these comments, I like the way you explain stuff straight forward to the electronics “meat” whereas in EE topics usually require to dig into the math and they deep physics/chemistry why, which is fun but definelty take time
Coming from software engineering perspective, it was eye opening to discover of voltage level is kind of a function agrument to microprocessor pins. Maybe you could explore that a bit.
Similarly to someone else in the comments, I have tried reading your articles but I found them equally confusing to the material I've seen elsewhere. You have good goal but you're not where you want to be yet.
As for 'grownup calculus', yeah most STEM courses are full of condescending statements about how "it obviously follows", math being primary offender. I'm currently re-learning calculus and it's astonishing how many things were described as these arcane magic rites I'm "not supposed to understand" whereas they are elementary concepts that barely have anything to do with calculus as such.
I’m one of those “EE folks” with a matching degree (professionally a software engineer, though); never had problems with the math, mostly because I enjoy that sort of thing. I’m comfortable working in the abstract realm of formulas, but I appreciate your explanations for giving a more relatable concrete interpretation. For example, I really liked your article on signal reflections.
Personally I feel that these two perspectives are complementary and should in theory strengthen understanding. But in reality there are two problems:
* it’s a mistake to start the journey of learning electronics with the abstract perspective: it skips over something essential
* unfortunately, I agree that the concrete interpretations given are usually so poor and confusing as to be even worse than useless (eg, the hydraulic analogy).
I think this is basically what you’re saying. I think what you’re doing here fills a gap in electronics education.
My background/context: Started out in college as an EE, migrated to Computer Science after failing Differential Equations several times (I only figured out I was dyslexic two years later). My dad was an EE, so I've been soldering since I was a little kid, but building circuits from Forrest Mims was all I did; no actual design or understanding.
I've always understood things better with the WHY explanation. I teach that way too, though I'm not sure how well it carries through into other's heads. and yes, I'm not interested in math proofs, just a good generalization or demonstration. I consider your explanations to be "light math" without a deep understanding or study required, and they fit the depth that I'm looking for exactly.
RF is still black magic to me, but your pointing out that the standing wave in wire essentially acts like an inductor (and the subsequent voltage spikes) makes SO much more sense now how it might actually work.
I appreciate you doing this, but I'll have to go through a few more times and let it settle to see if this will work.
To touch on historic methods of teaching these things, you'll actually find Oliver Heaviside lectures extremely useful.
As for what happened, and how/why these types of analogies began being used, you may not be aware but there was a major shift in teaching in the late 1970s where published material and teaching pedagogy changed almost overnight following a new more modern principle of education pushed heavily by the NEA.
It is known by most under the name by-rote teaching, but follows the structure that Administrators and Teachers now call openly as early as the 90s as "Lying to Children".
Prior to that most teaching basically followed the path of the greeks, where you start with a working system, break down to first principles which are proven true in a guided manner, and then modeled the system based on those principles to predict future states in those systems. This is the western rational approach to education.
"Lying to Children" pedagogy, takes the exact opposite approach. It by design starts with a useless flawed model intended to teach some abstract concept, which includes other unrelated concepts where it fails. You are forced to unlearn some, and relearn some, iteratively over time to become useful. This naturally follows the path of gnosis in gnosticism. It is designed to utilize torture techniques derived from Mao during the 1950s to cause frustration, and PTSD, and break people when they ask questions that would be required for true intuitive understanding of the subject matter.
Through this and other strategies, failures are orchestrated to impose irrational PTSD towards math structurally at various stages (primarily), later on the same was expanded to prevent success towards obtaining a degree creating a forever student through various clever gimmicks that a student wouldn't be aware of. The student is blamed for the failure (gaslit), and that frustration and torture break the person.
The more modern principle of education is in reality the adoption of fully torturing the student. This was done systemically following the process the Nazi's and Stasi used to get people to do evil things. This process is called the separation of objectionable concerns. You separate the roles so objectionable actions take place under a minimum number of people, while everyone else contributes to the whole without their knowledge.
Some are capable of still getting to the end though its a minority, and not necessarily the most intelligent, in fact the more intelligent/rational typically fail given that rationality and its perspectives disappear under torture. The broken people can still enter such professions, but they have to blind themselves to get there. There's been a concerted effort to select out and get rid of intelligent people over time.
That is what has happened. Most people who are raised under such systems that manage to learn it to a point of semi-usefulness only have that as a reference and so naturally parrot those approaches inflicting the same on whoever they try to teach. Under Mao, they found when your perception is distorted early, it tends to stay distorted as you reach adulthood, and it takes advantage of many psychological blindspots our psychology uses to remain consistent. (Cialdini covers those blindspots in his book on Influence).
The torture elements used are covered in books by Joost Meerloo and Robert Lifton.
I love when people say "such and such was my favorite math book" when the book itself has differential equations on the first page. This is nobody's favorite book. It's not a book to begin with, it's a specification document maybe. I get how it can be useful, but the sharade of pretending you didn't read something else to understand this book was always pushing me away. It's so clearly a psychological game of some kind.
> I love when people say "such and such was my favorite math book" ...
Are you referring to the Heaviside lectures or just generally?
There were a series of three papers intended for lectures done by Heaviside. Google seems to have now wiped it off the web, and I'm not now finding these on archive.org where I previously found them.
Heaviside did write a book, but that material appears different than what I've seen. You can find a link to the book here. The material is similar, but not as succinct.
https://archive.org/details/electromagnetict01heavrich/electromagnetict01heavrich/page/n27/mode/2up
> It's so clearly a psychological game of some kind.
It is torture. Intended to keep people the most creative and intelligent people from learning usable math, trending towards learned helplessness.
I previously mentioned the books which cover this, there are elements, structures, and clustering that impact these things.
The elements (for recognition) are simple enough: isolation, cognitive dissonance, coercion with real or perceived loss, and lack of agency. Structures turn the psyche back on itself and other diabolically clever trauma loops, Clustering impacts susceptibility.
Time and Exposure with these elements present, and any one will enter a state of involuntary hypnosis before finally breaking. It is just a matter of time and exposure, and phones/social media provide that along with clustering via associative priming (dopamine hits) which make one more susceptible.
Isolation isn't necessarily a physical thing, its entirely communication based; you can be isolated in a noisy room, or when the teacher singles you out in a classroom. Thought reform is quite vile, but if you don't recognize the action you can't easily resist or defend against it.
Your articles are always something of a stretch for me (a beginner), but they are a great gateway to the more advanced explanations. The textbook stuff is, as you say, probably mostly unnecessary for the hobbyist. But I find the intuition I gain from a careful reading of your articles is a big help when I decide, out of curiosity, to dig deeper.
From the perspective of a non-EE dabbler, I think your articles fill an important void and I look forward to reading them. Thank you for your hard work on them!
I'm definitely a hobbyist and appreciate what you're trying to do, but in general I've found your articles to be just as confusing and complicated as any other source. I mean, even your summary of articles on this page is loaded with math. While they often don't get into theory, I've had better luck learning practical skills from watching repair videos on YouTube.
Are you able to explain these concepts without math?
I think these are two different things. You don't need a profound understanding of electronic theory to do household wiring or make basic repairs to household appliances (where the problem is often a loose wire, a blown fuse, or something like that). You don't even necessarily need electronic theory for hobby digital circuits - you can certainly blink LEDs or display text with an Arduino with very little prep.
That said, at some point, you start asking yourself questions. "Hmm, there's nothing blown or loose on this PCB, but the coffee maker isn't working - how do I diagnose that?". Or, "hmm, I need to amplify this signal for the Arduino, how do I do that?".
That's where you need to go that extra step of understanding the physics and the associated math. Unless someone else solved that specific use case for you beforehand, or unless you get really lucky with an LLM, there's just no way around it. Analog electronics are basically just doing mathematics in hardware. Well - digital electronics are like that too, but I guess that's more explicit and easier to grasp.
So, that's what I'm trying to address: it's that case where you want to learn more. And the contribution I'm trying to make is to explain it with math, but not the kind of math you need to go to college for. It's all basic trigonometry and arithmetic.
If you're looking for simpler recipes, then I think you're going to the right places - YouTube, or the earlier-gen websites that YouTube celebs often get their ideas from.
I detest your requirement to verification. I have never asked anyone to verify themselves. I have been teaching electronics for over 50 years with more than 25,000,000 visitors to y website.. l have never introduced a formula into any of y discussions because you instantly lose the reader. I have never found any discussion or explanation on the web for any University or individual to be helpful in understanding a topic. All the discussions are just a regurgitation of previous drivel. The only way to learn electronics is to build things. Not one article in any magazine describes how to fix the project if it does not work. That because the author does not have a clue about the project. I sent projects to an lndian magazine for 18 months at no cost to the magazine and did not get a single reply from a reader. And that’s the fact. 45,000 readers x 18 = zero. And that’s what you get from so many other countries. England has stopped producing an electronics magazine and simply uses page-ready art from Australia and delivers it 12 months later.. The US has lost all its electronics magazines and even Ekektor is struggling to find a readership. Electronics is a dying art and no-one can see a reason to study it. China has taken over the electronics manufacturing world and no-one can compete with their prices.
I enjoy reading your articles very much even though I don't do any experiments to really learn the subject at hand. Thank you!
What can I say? *I* like you your stuff a lot. Been playing with electronics for 40 years, sometimes professionally, but not with any formal education in it. I'm pretty good with DC (have designed PCBs with microcontrollers and lots of MOSFETS...); AC is a mystery to me.