On the Importance of Z-transforms

A response to a comment on the Make: Blog post about my former entry:

My recommendations are made due to my experience. Physics is THE best program, from what I've seen and done, to go into if you want to make new, interesting, and useful things. Chemistry ranks a close third behind the engineering disciplines. Of course, if you just want to perpetually use technology without understanding it, you could skip the whole math-based curriculum, but to actually make something new, you need to understand the first principles behind how things work.
Or you could just make stuff that's interesting in other majors.
At this point, my physics career has taken me from making optical acoustic transducers, to building and testing medical devices, to working with cool magnetostrictive materials, to designing and building tests and test setups for machine calibrations to building custom experimental setups, to being in charge of the refurbishment of a particle accelerator, all in about eight years. And it looks like the fun isn't going to stop any time soon!