Wouter van Ooijen wrote:
> >> (about hich side is the cathode)
> >
>> Wouter, you keep bringing this up... memorize it already! :)
>>
>> Considering how much other stuff you keep stored in your mental attic, I
>> think it's a shame not to remember the basic stuff that we all expect 
>> first
>> year EE students to know.
>
> I certainly won't, and I don't expect anyone else to do so. The only
> situation where I need to remember this (apart from babbling on this
> list) is when I must choose between CC and CA LED displays. So I keep my
> mental attic (which is rather leaky) for other stuff!

Lots of things (not just diodes) have cathodes. I first learned about them 
at the age of 12, when I was playing with vacuum tubes, and most people 
learn about cathodes in high school physics (X-ray, electrolysis, etc). 
You're very intelligent, way more intelligent than me (I'm not a professor, 
and I don't work on space stuff), but if I didn't know you and you said you 
didn't know that "cathode" means "the negative terminal", you would make a 
bad first impression.

IMO, you're just being stubborn for no good reason (out of spite?).

On "the mental attic": IIRC it was Sherlock Holmes who had this theory that 
the mind is like an attic where you put stuff, and at some point it "fills 
up" to the point where you can't put anything else in, or find the stuff you 
need. AFAIK modern science says the opposite: the more you train your brain, 
the better it gets.

Vitaliy 

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