Tell me about your favorite special interest fact
Mine is that some people don't consider viruses alive. These people are fucking stupid because giruses exist as do virophages. Like yes unalive things literally hunting other unalive things totally makes sense.
I don't know if my degree counts as a special interest, but electrical engineering is full of wild things.
My favorite part about electrical engineering history is something I found when I was writing a paper on electromagnetic coils.
Predicting the inductance (the characteristic we use the coils for) and self capacitance of such coils as it turns is a very complicated topic. The math for calculating the field in the coils is very difficult, so many engineers have come up with formulas for approximately predicting the inductance.
Now it turns out that one of these formulas (for the self capacitance of coils), which is still used relatively often, was created by a guy called J. Palmero. His formula is simple and elegant. Unfortunately, if you dig through the data he used to provide evidence that his formula worked, it turns out he SEVERELY "massaged" the experimental data he had gotten from a well respected engineer (Feiedrich Grover) at the NIST. He used this to build reputation for his formula. Throughout my entire research,I only saw basically 2 people (Medhurst* and David Knight) who even seemed to know about this.
The only way I ended up finding about any of this is because I dug through obscure research papers and data published in the early 20th century.
Now imagine being a 16 year old doing a school project about coils and then uncovering decades old obscure scientific fraud. I felt like Indiana Jones finding abandoned ruins.
*the autocorrect seems to have beef with this guy, since it keeps changing his name to "Midhurst" for some reason.