Invisible wrote:

> I actually have no idea what you're talking about - although spending 3 
> years evaluating the intelligence of a half-mouldy cup of yogurt does 
> seem like an amusing prospect. ;-)

That could be your dissertation. :-D
-- 
~Mike

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andrel wrote:

> John had some problems with below average IQ and EQ people when he was 
> teaching, that is why he isn't anymore.

My wife is a teacher (elementary students) I seriously don't understand 
how she keeps from going homicidal. She's a very patient person.

-- 
~Mike

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>>> Proposition #6 from my thesis: the use of FFT to extract clinically 
>>> relevant parameters should be forbidden in the field of cardiology.
>>
>> Uh... I was under the impression that most of the useful information 
>> in a cardiagram is in the time-domain anyway...?
> 
> Spot on.

Uh... so you're telling me I know more about cardiagrams than the people 
attempting to interpret them? o_O

> I once saw this procedure to find a phenomenon that occurs every other 
> beat.: Find the time instant in every beat where you expect the change. 
> Create a time series of that. Do an FFT. look at the amplitude of the 
> center frequency. Ok, I admit it works and you can include a spectrum in 
> your paper...

I have a vague recollection that somebody designed an ANN that worked on 
ECG data in the frequency domain and was reputedly quite accurate. OTOH, 
the details were sparse. (It was an introductory text on ANNs, basically 
it had a section on "hey, look how useful these are! You should learn 
about them.")

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> My wife is a teacher (elementary students) I seriously don't understand 
> how she keeps from going homicidal. She's a very patient person.

...so she teaches Boron and Lithium who to do their ABCs?

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>> I actually have no idea what you're talking about - although spending 
>> 3 years evaluating the intelligence of a half-mouldy cup of yogurt 
>> does seem like an amusing prospect. ;-)
> 
> That could be your dissertation. :-D

...and now I'm thinking about the "Ode to a lump of putty I found in my 
left armpit". :-S

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>> Estimate the mass of air in this room.
>
> 3 grams?

Estimate, not guess! You'll never make an Engineer if you can't tell when 
your calculations are off by several orders of magnitude.  BTW a cubic metre 
of air is about 1kg, so you must be in a very small room.

>> Would birds be hotter or colder with fur on their legs?
>
> Presumably this varies depending on the external temperature?

I think it's safe to assume the external temperature is lower than the 
internals of the bird, but anyway the point of this one was that for 
cylinders below a certain radius lagging them actually makes them release 
more heat rather than less, because the surface area increase has more 
affect than the lagging.  Useful to know if you ever think about insulating 
thin pipes :-)

> ...oh, wait, maybe you meant the *graph* of this?

Har har.

> Hmm. Well two cubed is 8, while three squared is 9, so I'm going to go 
> with pi^e being larger.

Wrong!

> Presumably "proving" this would simply involve slightly more arithmetic. 
> :-P

http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/53916.html

> quantity. I don't know why it took me so long; it's really quite simple 
> when you look at it. I think I just confused myself too much to see it...

That was the story of my whole thermodynamics course at university!

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Invisible wrote:

> The question is: Do you think I should do a PhD?
> 
> Yes?
> 

Yes!

> 
> Why?
> 

What do you have to lose? You could always become a professor at the 
university, teaching people signal processing theory or some such.

> 1. I am insufficiently intelligent to actually acheive a PhD. (I nearly 
> failed my BSc as it is!)

I call BS on this one.

> 2. I have insufficient money. (I'm still paying for my BSc. Very slowly.)

Possible, but there are loans and grants.

> 3. I don't think I can spare the time. (I have a job to do, sucky as it 
> is.)

Make time!

> 4. It is *highly* unlikely that having a PhD will make any kind of 
> positive change to my employment situation. Nobody is impressed by a 
> BSc, and I doubt a PhD will be any different. Everybody wants 
> "experience" and/or "people skills".

It couldn't hurt.

> 5. Presumably a PhD is a serious amount of hard work. It's not exactly a 
> pleasure cruise. So I'd need a good reason to do one.

Right lots of work, but you'll learn a lot and could be an interesting 
journey.

> 6. I rather doubt that you can get a PhD in "doing cool stuff". 
> Presumably it must be something rather more specific than that.

Depends, You'd need to do lots of research and such. But, you could pick 
something that interests you and pursue that.

> 7. Where the hell am I going to do a PhD anyway?

At a university, of course!

> 8. Are you mental?

Yes, yes I am.

-- 
~Mike

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>>> Estimate the mass of air in this room.
>>
>> 3 grams?
> 
> Estimate, not guess!

Well, with no actual data to estimate with, it's kinda hard. :-P

> You'll never make an Engineer if you can't tell 
> when your calculations are off by several orders of magnitude.

Heh. Well, I have no idea what the volume of this room is. I don't even 
"really" know how big a meter is. It used to be the length of my arms, 
but they're a tad bigger now. ;-)

> BTW a 
> cubic metre of air is about 1kg, so you must be in a very small room.

Really? I was under the impression that all gasses are absurdly light. 
(E.g., off the top of my head Oxygen is supposed to be something silly 
like 0.000004 g per cubic meter or something.)

> I think it's safe to assume the external temperature is lower than the 
> internals of the bird, but anyway the point of this one was that for 
> cylinders below a certain radius lagging them actually makes them 
> release more heat rather than less, because the surface area increase 
> has more affect than the lagging.  Useful to know if you ever think 
> about insulating thin pipes :-)

Now, see, I was under the impression that lagging traps air, and hence 
the "effective" surface area would still be the same.

>> ...oh, wait, maybe you meant the *graph* of this?
> 
> Har har.

Aww, c'mon! I thought that was a really neat drawing! :-D

>> Hmm. Well two cubed is 8, while three squared is 9, so I'm going to go 
>> with pi^e being larger.
> 
> Wrong!
> 
>> Presumably "proving" this would simply involve slightly more 
>> arithmetic. :-P
> 
> http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/53916.html

...OK, I am now completely bemused. Apparently e^3 is roughly 20. I 
cannot work out how that can possibly be. 2^3 is clearly 8. My head 
hurts just thinking about it.

As an aside, I notice the difference turns out to be especially tiny. :-P

>> I don't know why it took me so long; it's really quite 
>> simple when you look at it. I think I just confused myself too much to 
>> see it...
> 
> That was the story of my whole thermodynamics course at university!

I think you need... THERMITE!! 8^D

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> Yes!

o_O

>> Why?
> 
> What do you have to lose?

My mind? My livelihood? My youth? My virginity?

Oh, wait...

> You could always become a professor at the 
> university, teaching people signal processing theory or some such.

LOL! As if anybody would care...

>> 4. It is *highly* unlikely that having a PhD will make any kind of 
>> positive change to my employment situation.
> 
> It couldn't hurt.

There is such a thing as "over-qualified". Apparently.

>> 5. Presumably a PhD is a serious amount of hard work. It's not exactly 
>> a pleasure cruise. So I'd need a good reason to do one.
> 
> Right lots of work, but you'll learn a lot and could be an interesting 
> journey.

Well, I guess it depends on finding a good subject.

>> 6. I rather doubt that you can get a PhD in "doing cool stuff". 
>> Presumably it must be something rather more specific than that.
> 
> Depends, You'd need to do lots of research and such. But, you could pick 
> something that interests you and pursue that.

Certainly all the stuff the OU is looking at seems to be socially based. 
"How can we make computers more cuddly?" I really don't give a fig.

>> 8. Are you mental?
> 
> Yes, yes I am.

Ah, I'm glad we sorted that one out. :-)

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> Well, with no actual data to estimate with, it's kinda hard. :-P

The point is you are meant to have a rough understanding of density of 
gases.

> Heh. Well, I have no idea what the volume of this room is.

Usually best to simplify it to a shape that it is easy to calculate the 
volume of, ie a cuboid.

> I don't even "really" know how big a meter is. It used to be the length of 
> my arms, but they're a tad bigger now. ;-)

You can estimate though, I suspect you can tell if your room is 2 metres 
long or 10 metres long, or 50 metres long.  Remember you are about 2 metres 
tall...

> (E.g., off the top of my head Oxygen is supposed to be something silly 
> like 0.000004 g per cubic meter or something.)

Wikipedia tells me it's 1.429 kg per cubic metre...

> Now, see, I was under the impression that lagging traps air, and hence the 
> "effective" surface area would still be the same.

No, because the lagging has thickness, and the outer surface of the lagging 
is the effective surface area for radiating the heat.  Even though the 
surface temperature will be less with the lagging, for small radii the 
surface area increase is enough to overcome the effectiveness of the 
lagging.  Obviously the exact radius depends on the situation, but there 
will always be a minimum value where lagging works (below that it has the 
opposite effect than you probably imagined).

> Aww, c'mon! I thought that was a really neat drawing! :-D

Yes I have to admit it was pretty cool.

> ...OK, I am now completely bemused. Apparently e^3 is roughly 20. I cannot 
> work out how that can possibly be. 2^3 is clearly 8. My head hurts just 
> thinking about it.

Think about 2^3 and 3^3, then e^3 doesn't seem so bad.

> As an aside, I notice the difference turns out to be especially tiny. :-P

Would have been cool if e^pi = pi^e

> I think you need... THERMITE!! 8^D

Unfortunately this was one of the few lecture courses with no fun examples 
shown off by the lecturer - we had boomerangs, magnetic guns, launched 
ping-pong balls etc, but sadly no model jet engine :-(  The whole course was 
spent studying the thermodynamic cycles of various types of heat engines, 
combined cycle power stations, pressures, velocities, energies argghh my 
head hurts just thinking about it.

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