Re: Familial tech support is still like this
Cows regard seismic data cables as edible. I once spent an afternoon in a field driving a herd of heifers away from our expensive cable!
259 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Mar 2007
"When I was a grad student decades ago, you were not considered "human" by the other grad students until you could demonstrate that you could (1) make a set of lock picking tools which these days you can just buy on Amazon (2) pick the crappy locks used in office furniture & file cabinets in under 30 seconds using a paper clip & screw driver, (3) pick the institutions door locks in under an hour with your self-made tools and (4) you have made a skeleton/master key for the institution's door locks. God only knows where my picks and master key ended up, but opening crappy locks used in office furniture & file cabinets is a skill that comes in handy once or twice a decade."
Your name is Richard Feynmann and I claim my £5!
In the post-war years, my father qualified as a Master Grocer. This included a wide range of management skills, and I don't think the accountants ever found a single thing wrong with his bookkeeping (when it became apparent that the traditional Master Grocer skills were becoming less useful, Dad went into business as a self-employed manufacturer's agent). His skills - gained through his training as a Master Grocer - included things like advertising, and creating shop displays in the days before suppliers provided their own material. So I think that being a UK Master in a trade would give the same skills as the German equivalent. However, that kind of Master's qualification has long since fallen by the wayside.
The starting point should be ensuring that NOTHING is sent up that is not recyclable. Packaging should be chosen from a short list of recyclable alternatives; and so on.
Actually, I think they're looking at the problem the wrong way on. They should ask "What can we recycle and how?" and only then say "Nothing goes on the rocket that isn't in that list"
Been there, done that! We bought two new Disc drives for our Vaxstations (a whole Gigabyte, no less!), plugged them in and saw the magic blue smoke escaping, accompanied by appropriate sound effects! Exactly the same situation - they had been supplied set to 120V rather than 240V. Fortunately, the supplier acknowledged it was their mistake and replaced them! And while not a fly-by-night outfit, they had got the contract on the basis of being cheaper than DEC.
RFI is still a problem, and 12V LED lighting is a frequent problem on boats, where it can interfere with VHF radios. Cheap LEDs use a low-cost circuit to drop the voltage from 12V to the 3V (or whatever!) voltage required by the LEDs. Many people have reported this - LEDs with decent dropper circuits are fine, but some aren't!
Of course, you're correct about the recommendation, but my EV doesn't HAVE a handbrake! At least, it does but engaging it switches the car off - it's entirely "fly by wire", and it assumes that pressing the park button means you're all done. That said, once you're stationary, it remains stationary, unlike an automatic car.
Nothing the public try on when it comes to trying to return goods surprises me. My late first wife worked first in a Consumer Advice bureau, then in debt collection at a major energy supplier and finally in the Customer service desk of a major High Street store. While she had her share of very satisfied customers who gave her nice presents (we saw the live recording of a Maureen Lipmann comedy show courtesy of one client!), she also had her share of customers like that in the story (the Consumer Advice Bureau was in SE London). Fortunately, none resorted to actual violence, but threats happened - at that point, a large male member of staff usually turned up!
One thing that really annoyed her in the last job at the High Street store was that she was directed to let people get away with things that she knew weren't legitimate, in the name of customer relations. She knew they were trying it on, her manager knew they were trying it on, but company policy... She was especially annoyed because she knew the law better than her managers!
Of course, stories about "Karens" abounded in our home.
Anyone who was active during the 70s and 80s in the UK will remember innumerable bomb scares - the vast majority hoaxes, with just enough real ones to make people take them seriously. The IRA used that tactic to waste police resources and, of course, upset a large number of people. I was evacuated a couple of times when a bomb warning was received for concerts; my sister-in-law was in a London mainline station when one of the real ones went off - fortunately, she wasn't near the blast.
More recently, the 7 July 2005 bus bombings happened when there was a conference being hosted by my organization in Cambridge. Large numbers of attendees were unable to return home as public transport through London was disrupted.
My employer had a rule that you were not allowed to drive to or from the airport if flying. We were allowed to get a private hire car (with driver) for the journey; this was routine and my employer had a contract with a local company providing airport taxi services. This was always described as an H&S issue, but I'd be interested to know whether driving while on company business is covered by rules similar to those for HGV drivers, with time in the aircraft counting as work hours. I suspect the whole thing is a legal can of worms! Even if not covered by law, I'd imagine the HGV rules would provide context for any ruling on H&S issues in the event of an accident.
As others have said, I think the real situation has been "improved" to make a good story - the police officer judged that he was too tired to drive safely and OFFERED him a bed in a cell! And as I know of at least one RTA that was caused by fatigue (a nurse coming off a long shift), I think the officer behaved correctly.
A police officer also once told me that very few vehicles - even brand new ones straight off the dealer's forecourt - were completely legal; there was almost always some tiny thing that would allow them to take it off the road. It's little things like numberplates that do it (in the UK there are strict rules about the size and shape of the letters and numerals, as well as rules regarding obstruction by fixings).
In our case, a 60" inkjet plotter. 60" was the paper width; the plotter was considerably wider; well over two metres (sorry - mixed units!). The door to the room it was being installed in opened onto a corridor just wide enough for two people to pass if they were polite about it! There was JUST enough room to turn it after we'd taken the door off its hinges!
In the distant past, I was involved in mounting electronics in aircraft. The electronics included tape drives, at least one thermionic valve in the ice-sounding radar and a hard copy device. The whole lot was fixed in a rack. The rack itself was mounted on shock mounts and the individual items were mounted on shock mountings on the rack. AFAIR (it was a long time ago!) the shock mounts were chosen with different properties - one lot to absorb landing shocks; the other to absorb vibration (this was a Twin Otter; the air mech on secondment from the RAF described it as "a bit agricultural"; it certainly vibrated!)
From 1983 to 1987 I spent many hours writing, maintaining and adapting data logging software written for a Z80 S100 bus single-card computer. I wrote in assembler, and my development system was an Osborne 1 with Wordstar for an editor and ASM and LINK to create executables. The executable was then burnt onto an EPROM for testing and deployment. My development cycles was hours long!
Main lesson was how much you could do with so little; I am left with an abiding dislike of bloated software! My code fitted into a 2k EPROM without any difficulty, and I understood how every part of it worked; no libraries, and given the nature of the editor, I needed to keep a lot of code in my head as well as on listings.
I once organised and ran an IT course for an International audience in the Palacio San Martin in Buenos Aires. I didn't choose the venue - it was my colleagues - but it must have been the grandest possible venue for a nuts and bolts course on Web Mapping and GIS!
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Mart%C3%ADn_Palace
The screens were dark at my local Hong Kong branch yesterday; but even given the language difficulties (I speak little Cantonese), I was able to place my order and get it much quicker than I expected - just long enough to move from the ordering point to the collection point!
There seems to be a fundamental assumption in Gianotti's statement that Dark Matter actually exists. While the consensus is that it does, there is a significant minority view that it's our understanding of Gravity that is incomplete, and recently that view has gained strength. There is the persistent gap between different estimates of the Hubble Constant from different methodologies, and the difference exceeds the experimental error of either technique. I may be garbling things, but I am a geologist and data nerd, not a cosmologist! But surely it would make more sense to work on investigations like the LISA probe and astrometric measurements than try to bang things together harder when we don't have a theoretical basis for doing so.
The unit I worked for had a very large library collection of maps stored flat in map presses, which were steel cabinets with large, shallow drawers to store maps, each press was about 4' wide, 4' deep and 4 ' high. The cabinets on their own were impressively heavy; when filled with maps they were immovable. We had a group of 6 of these arranged as an island in the middle of the room..
Originally our map library was on the ground floor, but the unit moved to an upper floor. We moved the map presses (or rather, a removal company did so), and all was well - until I noticed that presses that were in contact at floor level had an inch-wide gap between them at the upper surface! I made a hasty phone call to the people responsible for building services, which got a VERY long considering pause! It turned out that the floor was strong enough, but the weight of the map presses was enough to deflect the floor slightly. But I think it gave the Building Services people a bad few minutes!
As the top of the map cabinets was used as a working space (you need lots of flat surfaces when working on maps) rearranging them next to the walls wasn't an option. They were still OK when I retired, about 20 years later!
I did computing in the dark ages, working on prototype systems (there only ever was one!) based on Z80s (an S100 bus single card computer), with many interconnections with external equipment. Most external stuff was either RS232 or (rarely) IEEE-488. The latter was easy; it just worked. But I don't think I ever came across two RS232 connections that were the same! The good old break-out box was an essential tool. That and trying to work out whether it was 8 bit, 8 bit + parity , occasionally 7 bit and 7 bit plus parity, hard or soft handshaking, and MANY more combinations!
Anyone professionally involved in map-making should be well aware of the political sensitivities attached to it! The number of places around the world where the wrong name will get you into hot water is enormous. Google fudges the issue in some places (e.g. Falklands/Malvinas) but of course, that's only one of many similar issues. Antarctica is a special case with many different (and equally authoritative) naming authorities (see https://www.scar.org/data-products/place-names/) - and although territorial claims are "held in abeyance", they still exist!
Making maps of a territory is one of the ways that nations assert their sovereignty, and Foreign Offices are notoriously sensitive to such things. It's one of the very few issues where I have had to toe a political line!
I'm writing this on a Windows 11 Laptop, and I actually had to look to see what OS I'm running! In terms of my user experience, it's pretty much indistinguishable from the Windows 10 desktop machine I use at home.
I guess that's the problem: Windows 11 is "So what?" After all, what I use are applications; the OS is almost irrelevant to me as long as it runs the applications I need. I keep being a bit annoyed at the dumbed-down "Settings", but that's really all I notice!
I applaud the technical genius that has brought this sample back to earth, but there is an issue that I don't recall having seen addressed anywhere, which is, How representative is the sample of the bulk of Bennu? Bennu's surface is subject to a variety of erosional effects, such as outgassing of volatile elements, gardening by micrometeorites, and erosion by the solar wind. Surely this must mean that the surface down to an unknown depth is a sort of remanié (otherwise known as lag) deposit? So the surface layers might well be enriched in less volatile and more durable substances and depleted in fragile or volatile materials. I am sure the PIs will have considered this, but I haven't actually seen anything in a public statement.
In the 1970s I worked in the Oil business in a company that stored data - hard copy and tapes mainly - for oil companies. My job was data acquisition and data management; we used a series of computer or computer-adjacent systems to manage the catalogues. At times I had to work in the offices of our clients. The level of paranoid security the oil companies engaged with was amazing! I've been in places like Los Alamos National Laboratory and none of them have security like the oil companies did in the 1970s.
Antarctica is a special case, because there is an international agreement NOT to colonize it - The Antarctic Treaty. But creating a self-sufficient colony in Antarctica would be almost as difficult as on Mars - there is no way that crops could be grown in the open, so you'd be looking at a similar artificial environment. The Russians did make some progress in that direction on Svalbard - at Barentsburg, when I visited it, they managed to rear things like tomatoes under glass, and had a small dairy herd (walking past the bull in the confined quarters was a bit scary!). But the settlement was nowhere near self-sufficient. But Svalbard (because of the North Atlantic Drift) is much more hospitable than Antarctica, with many areas of ice-free terrain. Antarctica has a tiny proportion of ice-free terrain, and most of that is rock, often precipitous rock! (see https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/polar-record/article/abs/measured-properties-of-the-antarctic-ice-sheet-derived-from-the-scar-antarctic-digital-database/199572F09FD3F65BC24A018C46F12610) Sorry, there's no open-access version of the paper.
There is a very good precedent. Greenland was colonized by Norway in around 980 AD. The colony was self-sufficient in food and the basics of life, but it needed resupply on a regular basis for wood (there are no useful trees in Greenland) and manufactured goods (e.g. iron). It did fine for about 400 years, with regular resupply. But when the resupply stopped, the colony failed and the colonists disappeared, probably intermarrying with and being absorbed by the Inuit. It is hypothesized (but not proven) that much the same happened to the Roanoke colony in the 16th century - resupply failed, and the colony had to integrate with the native population to survive. At its peak, the population of Viking Greenland was probably around 1000. The exact date at which the last Norse settlement collapsed is unknown, but I have read excellent accounts of the archaeology of a Norse farmstead, where it is clear that the slow wearing out of essential equipment put an end to the lifestyle of the Norwegians. Of course, the Inuit were adapted to a different way of life that didn't depend on stock-rearing and farming. The Norwegian resupply voyages were probably on the same order of time, cost and difficulty as a routiine supply by spacecraft today.
Here on Earth, we have plenty of examples of the various balances that can be struck between resupply and self-sufficiency. Given the obvious difference in the survivability of the environment, it is clear that a self-sufficient Martian colony would require a large population to sustain the necessary industrial base; manufacturing (for example) electronics (which would be essential for many purposes) would be impossible without a population comparable to a city on Earth. But with resupply, it entirely depends on the level of resupply. If the colony only produces the basics (air, water, food, power), then substantial inputs of raw materials and manufactured goods are required. If the colony can source and produce raw materials, then less resupply is needed, but a larger population to sustain the manufacturing base on Mars.
I note that Viking Greenland only survived at all because there was a viable trade in walrus ivory, furs and falcons. This trade was severely limited by the development of the Hanseatic League in Europe, which restricted such trade and resulted in the slowdown and almost cessation of the resupply voyages.. SO -perhaps we need to think about what a Martian colony could trade in to ensure the resupply was cost-effective?
And what's more, they took great pride in their work on the Pyramids. I thoroughly recommend The Red Sea Scrolls (https://amzn.eu/d/ghlHk1h); an excellent account of the latest discoveries about the way the labour was organized in the time of the Pyramids, based on recently discovered papyri at an ephemeral port on the Red Sea.
By chance, my latest dog is called Tyler, following a trend set by my first dog, Jack - both are named after the leaders of the Peasant's Revolution of 1381, Jack Straw and Wat Tyler. Of course, they are revolting little animals!
Perhaps the Regomizer has a tendency to allocate "appropriate" names? The original "Tyler" caused a great deal of confusion and damage!
And the Carrington Event in 1852 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event) would have probably destroyed most satellites in orbit by frying the electronics. NASA simply state that it would be impractical to shield satellites against an event of that magnitude.
While Rule One continues to rule (the bandwidth of a pile of USB sticks in hand luggage still beats anything with wires) , it can fail catastrophically. Very many years ago, before the Internet was a gleam in anyone's eyes, I shared an office with a PhD student. Said student had recorded data in The Arctic on film (this was before digital cameras!) and then shipped it back to the UK. Unfortunately, the film went missing in transit and was never recovered. A whole season's work went up in smoke; the student was EXTREMELY upset, but fortunately managed to recover from it (she is now a respectable member of Norway's academic elite).
We very nearly suffered something similar because of the inflexibility of airport security. Again, we had a bunch of data recorded on 35mm film. At that time, you could ask for film not to be passed through airport X-ray devices; AFAIR it was guaranteed by international agreement. Also, the fieldwork had been at least partially financed by the Norwegian government, We arrived at Oslo airport, and the security flatly refused to allow the film to bypass their X-Ray machine. They were very proud that it was a model that would not fog film, and they insisted on everything going through it, despite my boss arguing about international agreements and about the cost to the Norwegian government if the film was damaged. Fortunately, the film did survive, but if it had been a more sensitive emulsion, it might not have!
A well-known effect in yacht racing. Handicap rules are devised to ensure that yachts of different kinds can compete on level terms by applying a handicap. Designers then start to work out how they can get a better handicap without reducing the speed of the resulting yacht. This was particularly evident in the 1920s, when long overhangs at bow and stern became fashionable. The handicap rating was worked out on the waterline length when stationary, so because they had a short waterline length relative to the overall length, they got a favourable handicap. But when being sailed, they heeled over, lengthening the actual waterline length. It is well-known that the maximum speed of a displacement vessel is related to the waterline length, so the longer waterline length when heeled made them faster than the static waterline length ould indicate!
There's an essential conflict between hardware and software people, which I've experienced at first hand. In the very early 1980s, my colleague and I developed this: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/annals-of-glaciology/article/digital-radio-echosounding-and-navigation-recording-system/48C0D56C413BA23F23F92996868E1E96
I developed the software; my colleague designed and built the hardware. If I had a fiver for every time we had the routine "It's hardware!" "No, it's software!" exchange, I'd own my own super-yacht! Fortunately, we were able to remain friends - just as well, as we were also the crew operating the system in the Arctic!
Of course, I only recall the occasions when it WAS the hardware! But we depended on the Z80 interrupt system, which was very sensitive to any noise on the edge that triggered the interrupt. Debouncing circuits abounded in the final system!