Wiggle and watch

Via RealClear, a small Vermont college was closed for the usual reasons, and now a Brand New Unprecedented Innovative Foundation is taking over the campus for a wildly experimental sci-fi approach to education.

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Many renovations are complete, including the transformation of one building into shop rooms full of tools that students will use to work on real-world projects under faculty supervision.

The project tested its model in the spring semester of 2025 on four college sophomores from other schools, which gave them academic credit for coming to the Greenway campus and doing hands-on work with faculty supervisors in a prototype semester. Instead of sitting in conventional classes and lectures, the students designed wind turbines and solar-powered traffic signals.

“Basically, they learned electrical, mechanical and some controls by doing, versus somebody standing at the front and saying, ‘All right, you know, this is Norton’s equivalent theorem [of electronic circuits]’ that you’ll never use in your life,” said Troy McBride, co-founder of a Vermont-based solar panel manufacturer and chair of Greenway’s board of directors.

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Sarc off. Trade schools have been doing it this way for 150 years. And before that, parents and offspring, masters and apprentices, were doing it this way for millions of years.

The Norton’s Theorem ref hits home. In fact you WILL use Norton and its converse Thevenin every day, but you WON’T use them as numbers and goddamn motherfucking Euclidean devilproofs. You’ll use them every day as muscle memory, like the feel of ice skating or turning a bicycle.

Thevenin is a special type of Wiggle And Watch, another name for the universal Carver method.

LOOK ABOUT YOU.
TAKE HOLD OF THE THINGS THAT ARE HERE.
TALK TO THEM.
LET THEM TALK TO YOU.

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Rehashing from a couple items where I was applying the Thevenin black box to politics, specifically to Greece in 2015 when Syriza was promising populist reform. The odd circuit shape was a map of Greece, which is L-shaped like the usual Thevenin schematic. I’ve skipped the specific Greece part and left the more general parts.

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When I’m doing my technician thing with a circuit or a program, I like to Wiggle And Watch. Apply a periodic or predictable input (sine wave, numerical pattern, etc) and see what the output does. Pull out or replace various components, as appropriate, and see how the output changes.

Thevenin’s method is a foundation of practical electronics. When you hook up your stereo system, you may notice indications like “1 volt 8 ohms” on an output plug. This tells you that the output could provide one volt of potential under ideal circumstances, and that the output has an impedance of eight ohms. The impedance describes how the ideal potential drops when you connect a speaker or other load to take energy from the amplifier.

Obviously this tells you nothing about how the internal circuitry is arranged. It does tell you all you need to know about connecting this plug to a speaker.

Similarly when designing or repairing a device, Thevenin helps to reduce various parts or main modules to simple terms, so you can build or check the next part in line without having to think about the fine details of the previous one.

There is a similar pair of ‘black box’ measurements for cars, which doesn’t show up as a label on the car but is useful in road tests: How fast can it go under ideal conditions, and how much of a hill can it climb without stalling?

That’s the key to Thevenizing a device. You reduce the thousands of internal components down to two basic measurements for an output:

How much potential difference can it provide in ideal load-free circumstances,

and

How susceptible is the device to stalling? How much opposition or impedance can it stand before the potential drops to zero?

Then, after connecting the load and using or enjoying the result, you ask the most important question:

How much actual work gets done?

This can be predicted from the potential and the impedance.

You could also treat countries as economic black boxes. The periodic input is already there: seasons and generations. So you pull out or replace various components and see what happens.

With countries like Germany or Turkey or Belarus, pulling out the working class brings the value to zero, and pulling out the governing class increases the value. This tells you that the country is MAKING THINGS. With Turkey, reducing the land to zero decreases the value somewhat. This tells you that the THINGS are partly agricultural. With Germany or Belarus, zeroing the land wouldn’t make much difference because industry is the main active component.