Electrical Engineering

The Photon

06:20

Just won a tin-foil hat

MLM

06:52

@ThePhoton Cool!

I gtg, night

jippie

09:19

morning

David

13:31

Afternoon @jippie

jippie

4 hours ago, by jippie

morning

David

Is it now afternoon where you are?

jippie

14:46

RegDwigнt

13:55

Hm. I've never seen this notification before.

I wonder what triggers it.

jippie

@RegDwigнt it is there every saterday around this time (EST I guess)

RegDwigнt

Yeah, but I never saw it before.

jippie

some of us used to do a google hangout on saturday

RegDwigнt

I get notifications for other rooms, like Writers, say, but not for EE.

jippie

@RegDwigнt at the wrong place at the wrong time ;o)

RegDwigнt

13:58

And I've been a registered user for three years, too. So that can't be it.

So I wonder if it has to do with my collecting hats here or what.

Speaking of which, we are like 30 hats behind the pesky cooks.

That should be totally doable.

jippie

nope, nothing to do with hats

RegDwigнt

Hm.

Well, some byte somewhere did something to make me see the notification.

I shall hunt it down.

jippie

you have to be in EE chat for the notification

RegDwigнt

But I wasn't.

I was in the Incomprehensible Room.

And no other rooms at all.

jippie

m

RegDwigнt

14:00

I mean, that's the point of the notifications in the first place, to get people join a room who currently aren't in it.

jippie

/me shrugs

RegDwigнt

Yeah that sums it up I guess.

RegDwigнt

14:18

Hah.

I'm getting you some hats for reviewing.

You should be thankful, grammar jews.

As I said, we are but 29 hats short of overtaking Seasoned Advice.

2

Robocop is insanely hard to get, BTW. They probably only ever looked at SO when inventing it.

PeterJ

@RegDwigнt, I saw and epic fail on cooking.se from someone trying to get the hat for a self-answered question.

RegDwigнt

@PeterJ oh haha, yeah linky please.

I've seen a couple of those last week, across the network.

Always fun.

I only remember one from ELU, because it was myself who rained on that poor sod's parade.

3

Q: Is "may the force be equal to mass times acceleration" proper English?

There is a meme going around in which a game-show contestant is given the phrase: May the force … And they finish the phrase with: … be equal to mass times acceleration. My question whether the sentence May the force be equal to mass times acceleration is grammatically cor...

PeterJ

@RegDwigнt, don't have it, but it was a lame question (got a few downvotes) followed by pretty much a link-only answer that didn't really match the made up question, so if you put the two together implied 450F was a moderate temperature.

RegDwigнt

And the question (and his self-answer) weren't actually too bad. I've seen much worse stuff, but I can't find it right now for the life of me.

@PeterJ bravo. That is masterful.

jippie

@RegDwigнt wrong. It should be "May the force be with you."

RegDwigнt

14:24

Well. That is the joke.

It is not my joke, don't sioux me.

jippie

oh it is in the question already

RegDwigнt

Aye capt'n.

PeterJ

I've never actually looked at ELU before, just off looking at the australian-english tag.

RegDwigнt

Hm. I am not even sure we have decent questions in that particular one.

We don't have that many Aussies, you see. Perhaps two dozen active ones. Even fewer Kiwis.

PeterJ

2

Q: Do Australians say "down north"?

I noticed some maps from the southern hemisphere are "reversed" with the south pole on top. Which makes me wonder, are there places in the southern hemisphere where the concept of "down" is presumed to mean north instead of south? For example, would someone say: "Yea I went down north for a bit ...

australian-english geography

Can't say I've heard of that one lol

RegDwigнt

14:34

Well, you could be a trendsetter.

File a patent, even.

Funnily enough, the answerer is from Auckland.

Did I mention we could always use more Australians?

But now I shall be AFKish as I have to cook soup.

T's been a pleasure, CU around, folks.

PeterJ

@RegDwigнt, catch you later I'm about to head of soon as well, will take a better look around ELU.

RegDwigнt

15:17

@PeterJ Oh yeah, by all means do. It's not Yet Another Grammar Nazi site, it is specifically the exact opposite. It is more like Mythbusters for English.

Many people, many native speakers in fact, do not realize that it is perfectly fine to end a sentence in a preposition, or to begin it with a conjunction. Or that "an SQL database" and "a SQL database" are equally correct. Ot that singular they is perfectly grammatical, and has always been. Or that the distinction between less and fewer is not a rule of English grammar, but a style preference of just one guy of whom we know the name and the exact year he invented it in.

David

@RegDwigнt Do you have a link for the last one there?

RegDwigнt

Sure. In fact it's even up on Wikipedia. Hold on.

54

A: "Less" vs. "fewer"

Ah, less vs. fewer. Another arrow in the prescriptivist’s quiver of pointless pedantry. There's even a Wikipedia article about the dispute. There is also a Language Log entry about the matter too. According to Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, a usage guide that looks carefully at ...

David

@RegDwigнt Cool thanks

RegDwigнt

Do note that the guy who invented it was perfectly honest about it being his own style preference and nothing more.

What nobody really knows is how we got from there to here.

David

As English is a language that is defined by usage it's a bit odd to think that people would bother for too long about "rules".

RegDwigнt

15:21

Why teachers in classrooms all over the world teach native speakers, who instinctively know better, a rule that is completely bogus.

David

If it were French we'd never have words like "twerking" or "selfie" :P

RegDwigнt

@David any language is defined by usage. Or more accurately, usage follows grammar, but grammar also follows usage.

If we collectively decide that "them's nice cats" is Standard English, then it is.

If we collectively decide that "cat" means "orange car", then it does.

@David hah. Yeah. French is an interesting beast.

David

I thought most of the south of the USA had already decided that "them's nice cats" was acceptable.

RegDwigнt

Oh, and we're not just boring linguists. We're programmers and mathematicians and designers and everything. We have answers with epic graphs, for example. Like this one (not mine), or this one (mine).

David

I like that you accept that you are boring linguists, but saved by having other attributes also :P

RegDwigнt

15:25

So in short, if you want to be reprimanded by Grammar Nazis, there are zillions of places all over the Internet for that. But if you are looking for something cool and informative, that's what ELU is there for.

@David well frankly, pretty much any discipline is boring to outsiders. Otherwise they'd be insiders, no?

David

I find it interesting, but perhaps not enough to make graphs about. Speaking of which, is that Excel or what?

RegDwigнt

I don't know what nohat used. I use Google Spreadsheets. So yeah, Excel for the poor.

There's also Google NGrams that does this stuff automatically. But their corpus is not always accurate, so you should take them with a grain of salt.

David

ngrams is fun

What is their corpus composed of?

RegDwigнt

Beer vs. vodka

@David it's hard to tell, really. They started off by having a very similar corpus to the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus, but then they kept adding things. Like, the books they scan in (complete with OCR errors).

David

The ones we all fix through CAPTCHA?

RegDwigнt

15:30

Hah.

If only we finally fixed them all.

David

But then how would we create new accounts on pointless websites..

RegDwigнt

Right. Never can have enough of those...

David

Write, thyme two go drawer a block diagram for my current project.

RegDwigнt

Sounds like fun!

(No snark there, I work in graph visualization.)

CU around.

David

Thanks for pointing out the ELU site, looks fun.

RegDwigнt

15:32

Moi, je have to go check my soup.

@David thank you for saying that. You can even get some free hats by dropping by in our chat some time!

Lators gators.

jippie

15:49

172

Q: Trolling homework questions - sorting

I am intending to make this a new category of programming puzzle (let's call it "code-trolling"). So you could expect this to be the first question of the series. The idea of this category is: Suppose that some lazy guy in StackOverflow or elsewhere, asks a homework give-me-dah-codez questio...

code-challenge popularity-contest code-trolling

@angelatlarge will like that question :o)

David

18:50

I'm creating a BCD to 14 segment decoder in VHDL, does it matter if it is not clocked? I'm confused a little about when things absolutely must be referenced to a clock.

MLM

20:04

@David Just synchronize everything to the clock

David

@MLM Hrm, why is that though?

The Photon

@David What MLM says is more or less right --- in the end you should have everything sync'ed to a clock.

David

@ThePhoton I kinda thought that, but wasn't sure why

MLM

@David so that you have a definitive knowledge when everything updates

The Photon

But if you are desinging your coder as a module to be used in several places, you might want it to be unclocked and do the sync'ing elsewhere

Your general structure is registers-->combinatorial logic--> registers.

MLM

20:06

Separate it as a module and put clk in the port definition ^^

The Photon

The big question of piplining is how much functionality you can fit in each stage of combinatorial logic.

David

That's where I'm unstuck @ThePhoton. For example my BCD to segment module just takes 5 bits and outputs the right segment data. Right now it has no clock input.

The Photon

@David That's okay (but not the only choice). But what will you do with the outputs? Most likely connect them to the inputs of some registers.

David

Actually straight to pins

The Photon

@David Well, that's okay for this example (7-seg decoder).

But in most other cases you'll connect to other registers (or feed back to the same ones)

David

20:09

But where the output port of a module is connecting to the input port of another module, the signals should be synchronised on a clock, yes?

The Photon

@David Usually.

But it's an architectural decision.

MLM

You can see a bcd to sevenseg in my pong game:. Check out the scoreToSevenSeg process in this file: github.com/MadLittleMods/VHDL-Pong/blob/master/Pong2/…

The int_bcd2 function is in this file: github.com/MadLittleMods/VHDL-Pong/blob/master/Pong2/…

David

@ThePhoton Thanks, that's good enough for now until I understand a bit better.

@MLM I read through that the other night, but decided to start mine from scratch so I actually understood what I was doing ;)

I'm actually quite sure I'll run out of macrocells in my CPLD trying to implement the whole project, so I'm just trying to get a generic start in the right direction

MLM

@David If you are using integers, make sure to contrain them to a range you are going to use. That will save a lot of space: variable currAn: integer range 0 to 3 := 0;

David

@MLM I'm using numeric_std right now, rather than integers

@MLM Although I notice you are too, hrm. Time to read up

MLM

21:19

On this power supply there are two common ground and +V terminals. Are they probably just connected together or separate rails (spd-240-24, 24V DC 10A Switching)

David

21:30

Check with a multimeter?

MLM

@David I guess. If separate rails, would it give continuity on both grounds?

I just checked continuity and both coms are connected and both +V connected. So it looks like they just split it out to two terminals

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Electrical Engineering