Max: Okay so well doo-doo-doo, uh, energy goes like one over wavelength so wavelength goes like one over potential and just plug a few rough numbers in here, h is about 1 times ten to the minus 34, yeah, so order of magnitude here's yer answer dude...
Bud: Hmmmmmmmmrrrggghhh energy equals Planck's constant times the speed of light in vacuum divided by wavelength, right? Lemme look that up. So h, Planck's constant, is 6.63[blah blah blah] times ten to the minus 34 power, and that's in Joules so I have to convert it to flabs per quadrupic centipedes, blah-dee blah-dee blah, where's my calculator, wait I missed a significant digit, wait how the hell does potential come into this?
Bwahaha... Engineers have no vision of the bigger picture. That's all I got to say. Thermo? Thermodynamics is PV = nRT to us, dude...
(If anyone doesn't know what any of that means, the rest won't mean anything to you so you can skip to the next post).
So my brother was getting caught up in this incredibly complex program trying to calculate the correct code for every character. Since I had already graduated he figured I would know a better answer and called me.
I told him that memory was cheap and programmer time was expensive. If he were working for me I would want him to build an indexed table in memory of all the correct codes and use the letter to grab the value out of the table and send it to the LCD. Long table. Short program that is easy to write and practically impossible to screw up. He said the prof used his homework to lecture the entire class about engineering trade-offs.
The problem with engineering courses is that they always teach the theory, but never the practical stuff. For that you have to spend about four years on the job. Then it all comes together and work can get done.
Shalom.
It's suprising when I pronounce that equation as a word and someone knows what I'm talking about... :)
How are your lawn-burrowers doing?