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  • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday December 14 2019, @05:33PM

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Saturday December 14 2019, @05:33PM (#932080) Homepage

    Wussup nigga, I beez Black too. Dey used to call me the "Kang of Kala-culation." (Ebonics will now be turned off for the sake of clarity).

    Nowadays it's a combination of pencil and CAS, but the pencil is used for an intermediate step that has nothing to do with calculation itself. I'll have to read an old academic paper or old corporate literature with a fuck-huge pretty-printed formula not found in "straight-line" form needed to enter into a CAS or Excel, and from a direct no-OCR PDF scan so I can't copy and paste.

    So the pencil is used with a blank piece of paper to break the pretty-printed formula into chunks and make it a one-liner that a CAS can parse. The industrial CAS has always been MATLAB, but for quick calculations involving plots or variables, Wolfram Alpha is a pretty convenient crutch for fast answers. Excel is used for reporting but it's extremely useful to have formulas translated to both MATLAB and Excel (Wolfram Alpha recognizes multiple input formats).

    One of my favorite brain/pencil and paper calculations(with no electronic calculator handy) is the idiot method to translate dB to mW and vise versa. 0 dBm is 1mW, ±3dBm doubles/halves your power, ±10 dBm multiplies/divides power by 10, ±20 dBm multiplies /divides power by 100, etc. So then you use that discrete math trick to get any value from other different values (in this case 3 and powers of 10). So using those rules and wanting to find the value of -8 dBm for example,

    - start at 0dBm (1mW)
    - subtract 20 dBm (1mW/100)
    - add 12 dBm, which is 3dBm multiplied 4 times, so you double your previous answer 4 times to get the value in mW of 8dBm. -20dBm + 12dBm = -8 dBm.

    It's easy to do these kinds of calculations completely in the head without pencil and paper if necessary.