Vegetal Studies

Hi Xin Wei,

As you know, the emphasis on linearity in electrical engineering is there so that we can be precise about what kinds of non-linearities we are introducing. It's about minimizing unknowns, not eliminating them.

My argument is only that if we use analog components, there is no possibility to design the behavior of f. Instead, f is effectively linear, by which I mean, it's roughly a straight line and we just have to deal with it as it is (we are at the whim of the non-linearity of the measurement, or the lack of meaningful correspondence between the measurement and the salient 'parameter', which is whether the plants should be watered or not and how much).

Of course, when we consider the whole entangled system, the LED will not vary linearly with the salient 'parameter' even if the system is "linear". But since we're going into the design without any knowledge of any of the functions except for f, it's wise to make sure that f is manipulable so that we can adapt it to the situation. In this case it's actually less labor intensive and possibly less energy/material intensive to design the system such that f is manipulable, though less elegant.

See my response to Michal Re: ambiguity.

Re: photocells, that's a great point. It's too bad we're not going with distributed, wireless acquisition nodes because there's going to be a lot of wiring involved (like 20 feet per sensor).