John Curl's Blowtorch preamplifier part III

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Aside from connotations, my understanding is cleverness and intelligence are pretty closely correlated.

Dictionary appears to agree:
clev·er
ˈklevər
adjective
quick to understand, learn, and devise or apply ideas; intelligent.

They may be correlated, but are not mutual. Also, to appear to clever one simply have to be different to another person - which can stem from anything.

If you asked any given clever word smith I went to college with how to solve a puzzle (or fix... anything of any kind), you would not expect an answer if you knew them. But to those who did not, they were often impressed with their supposid clever creativity.

As a planet we are not that good at judging how smart someone may be. We tend to applaud people that have reall put themselves out there to accomplish something. Then we assume they are smart. Both actions typically carry a lot of vanity weight, because we like to elevate people whom we assume we could be - or close to. Based on everyone I have ever met that loves Zappa (present company excluded) I find this to be extra true. Basically people that are fans have fallen heavily into the group that like to believe they are smarter than they are. And then those same people like to guess that he had a remarkable IQ, elevating themselves closer to something special. If I were to accredit Zappa with something serious, it would be his inexhaustible ability to work (generally at making music).

Any ways..
 
The best way I know of to determine intelligence is to measure it with an IQ test. Despite whatever flaws such tests may have the scores correlate pretty well as predictors of how well people are likely to do in school, not much more.

Of all the psychometric tests that exist IQ is probably the most reliable. It is hard to game, on the one hand, but people are complicated and hard to measure, on the other hand.

Anyway, people with high IQs tend to be clever. If that idea is unappealing one can, of course, think up all the reasons why it isn't true. The more good reasons someone can come up with the more intelligent, or clever, they are likely to be.
 
Regarding people who think they are smarter than they are, that would be pretty much everybody who is not suffering from depression. People, to be mentally healthy, have to live in a bit of a dream world. Just not too much of one, or it can get dangerous to their physical health.
 
Doubt anyone can hear a .01 power supply cap directly, but they might be able to hear the effects of it being present or not. Say, if there was a lot of HF junk on the rail and or if the circuit was very sensitive to HF conducted EMI on the power. If the cap substantially affected distortion related to demodulation of HF, that might be audible.
 
The best way I know of to determine intelligence is to measure it with an IQ test. Despite whatever flaws such tests may have the scores correlate pretty well as predictors of how well people are likely to do in school, not much more.

Of all the psychometric tests that exist IQ is probably the most reliable. It is hard to game, on the one hand, but people are complicated and hard to measure, on the other hand.

Anyway, people with high IQs tend to be clever. If that idea is unappealing one can, of course, think up all the reasons why it isn't true. The more good reasons someone can come up with the more intelligent, or clever, they are likely to be.

The smartest people I have ever met are usually more matter of fact than wasting time with cleverness. I once had a math teacher that had an IQ that was 178 or something really high, and no sense of humor, irony, satire, or anything of the like from her.

The one person I ever met and believed to be a complete psychopath was clever, and always trying to guess how to best entertain people - under the impression they were so darn clever they could read anyone. (I never played his games, totally creeped me out, and sadly made him fixate more on me, luckily be was doing nothing more than preparing my lunch at a health food place)
 
Okay. That was your impression of some particular personalities. But, personality is measured separately from IQ. There is probably some correlation between some personality traits and some types of genius, such as with the math teacher you mention.

In addition, psychopaths are often highly intelligent.
 
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Sure, the DAC project I am working on is probably 'resolving' enough. And sure enough, it is highly sensitive to HF hash on the power. Not talking about low-order line frequency harmonics. Possibly very HF commutation noise and ringing parasitic reactances, at a minimum.

Sounds like some combination of distortion and or maybe noise that sounds like distortion. In other words, it doesn't sound like random noise. Deterministic in some way but maybe uncorrelated with signal.
 
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Any system where that is audible is exhibiting some pathological behavior. Of course he likes to build with relatively fast op-amps and doesn't measure a thing, so he would have no idea if it's oscillating. Pretty unlikely that it would matter in any case unless there is no local decoupling. People hear what they want to hear.
 
I don't know about Robert's circuit. Agreed, sensitivity to one .01 power supply cap indicates a problem.

But, there are multiple conversations going here. There was a question that probably had to do with what people can hear especially considering the time constant of a .01 cap in a power supply circuit. I suggested that if a cap could be heard it would pretty much have to be through a roundabout mechanism.

The circuit of mine I was referring to started out as a $39 Chinese DAC that lots of people have been trying to upgrade in ways that make no sense at all. I have been trying to help, use careful decoupling and a ground plane, etc., but an off the shelf OEM switcher that produces broadband radiated and conducted EMI up to about 4MHz, and that isn't adequately attenuated in a well shielded and decoupled metal box just isn't going to work. That experiment failed, is all. Sounded ugly that way too. I commented on it being 'resolving' thinking to myself that the ugliness of the power supply artefacts was resolved in great and clear detail. There was no 'resolution' in particular of a .01 cap. Sounds great on a clean supply, by the way.
 
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