Thinking is the Key

While Googling the other day, I came across an interesting online article titled "Power Supply and the Thinking Engineer," co-authored in January 2005 by Bob Pease himself. After reading it, I hoped this was only done as a favor to somebody. Because I found it hard to believe that the man well-known for throwing computers off the roofs of Building D in Santa Clara had finally settled down to a day job exhorting engineers to use his company's online software simulation tools (on computers around the world of course), specifically for designing and troubleshooting switching power supplies (which I know he has no clue about)! The article says, "The company's online tools can be used to discover design problems and correct them as long as thinking is applied as well." But what about "errors" in the online tools themselves? Who's watching them?

Anyway, thinking is what I have always been recommending all along, too, so we are on the same page. But I realized I needed to really think this through for myself. Because thinking (i.e., analysis) must follow a systematic phase of data collection, not precede it. In Chapter 1, I quoted extensively from Ronald Hughes' article. In that he wrote: "Start with fact, end with fact, and what you have is fact, not supposition . Analyze using short deductive steps in logic, and then verifying at every step during the logic development process Data is definitely the key...