[xyzzy21]

When I was young I loved magazines like Popular Electronics.

After getting my EE, I looked back at those magazines in my collection I immediately thought "That's so wrong!" or "That omits so/too much" or "I can't believe I thought this was electronics" or "Baby project! How lame!".

:-)

So it's very much about what can be absorbed and tailoring to the audience. You can't start with the math load that an EE student gets with a broad, general audience.

You see the opposite of this with academic papers - either the level of assumed audience is stratospheric OR it's clearly wording to keep the riff-raff out of the field. Mostly the former but sometimes the latter. You often also see this in STEM textbooks - the audience isn't even freshmen oriented!

[samhw]

> You can't start with the math load that an EE student gets with a broad, general audience.

Yeah, it's Wittgenstein's 'ladder', from the Tractatus:

> My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has climbed out on them, over them. (He must - so to speak - throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)

[buescher]

One of my mentors said "read all the hobby magazines, you never know what you might learn, sometimes they pick up new technology faster than industry". So did Bob Pease in one of his columns. But yeah, there's a lot of groaners in them.