Posts by Richard Pennington 1 382 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jun 2009
... is October (an hour longer than the others with 31 days).
Incidentally, the USA runs a research station at the South Pole. Can anyone tell me which time zone it is in? (and does it have Daylight Saving Time?) ... given that in the southern summer they have 24-hour daylight.
Many years ago (early 1990s), I worked in a small firm in Cambridge (small enough that generators were not an option). One evening, all the lights and power went off., and stayed off.
I had done a PhD in astronomy, one of the benefits of which is that I know how to move around safely in the dark. When I got to the front door I observed that the street lights were off - there was a power cut to a significant portion of the city. I made my way back to the working area and let the team know that the problem was outside, not inside.
I still refuse to have Alexa or any of its relatives in the house. I don't want any of them triggered by a "wake word" turning up in the middle of my opera.
Incidentally, I am on stage soon in "The Sorcerer" (Gilbert & Sullivan). One of the main protagonists is named Alexis...
I have an old Canon A3 printer which has just achieved end-of-life (persistent and repeated paper jams). But before I perform the experiment to find out whether WEEE really is the sound of an A3 printer dropped from several tens of metres until just before it hits a hard surface, I need to source a replacement.
A3 printers aren't standard consumer fare ... the choices are limited and the prices are (with a few exceptions) high. At the moment the leader is one by Brother.
Any other suggestions?
We had our local gas supplier dig up all the gas pipes across $TOWN a couple of years back ... they were replacing the old cast-iron pipes with new yellow plastic ones. The result was a network of molehills, tunnels and so forth right across town, for several weeks. And, by and large, the contractors were obvious cowboys.
[1] As part of the operation, they turned off my gas, took the meter out, put the new pipework in and replaced the meter. So far, so good. But when they did the leak test, it failed, and they were about to walk away (leaving me with no gas heating, in November ...) when I suggested that they might like to try tightening up the meter connection *that they had just re-installed*. Yup, that was where the leak was.
[2] A few houses up the road, they had a fault with an electrical earth. The electricity supply was earthed to the gas pipe, and the new plastic pipes do not conduct electricity. The result was that one house got a 400V+ surge which destroyed every appliance in the house, the owner was bodily thrown off the ladder he was half-way up at the time, and half of the estate lost all its electrical power (and random appliances were destroyed in several other houses). The electricity crew turned up and restored power after about 6 hours (at about midnight!), by somewhat unconventional means (some houses, including mine, were supplied via a bypass cable running *above ground* through several front gardens).
Many years ago, there was a story about a computer running the late-night TV schedule on one particular channel. It was a Saturday evening in late March, before the era of 24-hour broadcasting.
As Saturday night rolled over into Sunday morning, the channel was showing a late-night film. As it reached 0200 hours, the system clock moved over into BST and jumped ahead an hour. At this point the logic realised that it was past closedown time and abruptly shut the channel down for the night, in mid-film.
There were no anguished calls to the TV channel. Apparently the late film's audience consisted entirely of video recorders.
Many years ago, I went on a couple of Inter-Rail holidays around Europe with my brother. Essentially, we had the run of the trains all around Europe for a month. Coming to a new city, we always had the same routine: pick up the local map, visit the local tourist information centre, and see what we could find. Mostly, this worked.
But at Skopje, we hit a problem. We picked up a map at the station, went out through the station entrance, turned left ... and we were immediately lost. We were walking out of town, and that should not have been happening.
It turned out that the station was brand new (in its first week of service) and the map showed the location of the old station.
Cranking up the cycle speed introduces another limiting factor.
At 1GHz, the cycle time is 1 nanosecond; 1 light-nanosecond is about 30 centimetres.
At 10GHz, the cycle time is 100 picoseconds; 100 light-picoseconds is about 3 centimetres.
Eventually you get to the point where the light travel time across your machine is longer than your cycle time. Beyond this point, you cannot keep the cycle synchronised across your machine.
My late father, a school headmaster, once (1970s?) attended an interview for a position as a lecturer at a teacher training college. While looking around the place before the interview, he decided that he didn't actually want the job. This gave him a certain amount of freedom during the interview ...
A bit of background ... my father had a master's degree (MEd) in the philosophy of education. During the interview, he noted that "philosophy of education" was one of the subjects taught by the college. So he asked a sequence of increasingly searching questions on the subject. Eventually the interviewer bit: "Mr. Pennington, do you really think that our students could handle the kind of philosophy of education you are talking about". To which he replied: "If they can't, why are you awarding them degrees?".
There was a component which would regulate voltage at a particular level. It was called a Zener diode. There would be a resistor in series for the voltage to drop across.
For power applications (such as here) you would probably use an integrated-circuit voltage follower feeding off the output of the Zener diode.
For space applications, you would need to shield against cosmic ray hits (which is why satellite installations use weirdly-shaped bits of tantalum).
For myself (now in retirement), I am looking forward to a future "On-Call" column.
Should we have a dinosaur icon?
Back in the 1970s, my late father was a school headmaster (hence the icon) in Leicester. At the time, there was a considerable debate about the merits or otherwise of comprehensive education. And there was a strange situation in the local education authorities.
The City of Leicester had its own council and education authority, which was Labour-controlled and was one of the last hold-outs to retain grammar schools (against the Labour party's national policy). The County of Leicestershire (Conservative controlled) was one of the first to introduce comprehensive schools (against their national policy). And then the two authorities (together with a third authority covering Rutland) were merged.
Before the merger, supplies for City schools were organised by a lady with a spiral-bound notebook. If a school phoned her, she could immediately tell them how much budget they had spent, and how much budget they had committed but not yet spent (and hence how much budget they had remaining). The County schools used the newer computer system at County Hall.
Custom and practice differed between schools in the two (former) authorities. County schools were in the habit of ordering supplies "little and often", whereas City schools tended to order a complete year's supply in one go. So the first time an order from a City school bubbled to the top of the queue, it cleaned out the supply chain. So for several weeks no school supplies were available at all.
The other issue was that the two (former) authorities used different units for supply orders. In particular, County schools ordered pencils by the number of individual pencils while City schools ordered by the number of boxes. Similarly, City schools ordered paper by the number of sheets, while County schools ordered paper by the number of reams. And so it didn't take very long for a City school to put an order in (failing to read the instructions carefully enough), and for the County Hall supplies people to fail to sanity-check the results. The school duly received a delivery of a hall-full of paper and one pencil.
Many years ago, I went to university and studied Natural Sciences - a sort of mix and match of subjects of which my choices included chemistry in the first year, and (totally unnecessarily, as my main subject was physics) also chemistry in the second year. In year 1 I was introduced to a demonstrator - a cheerfully insane type who seriously considered standing for Parliament as a Scottish Nationalist (in Cambridge). His job was to supervise the students during the practicals and intervene if something goes drastically or dangerously wrong. Like the young lady at the end of my row who was evaporating off petroleum ether (think: 4-star ...) over a naked Bunsen flame.
Fast forward a year. I am now in the second-year lab, and the demonstrator has a new batch of students in the first-year lab next door. And then we heard the bang. It turned out that a student had (correctly) used a steam bath to evaporate a solvent away, but had then spoiled things by dropping the product into the hot water in the steam bath, where it had promptly dissolved. Enter the demonstrator, coming to the rescue of the student and the product. His strategy was to extract the product from the water in the steam bath with an organic solvent (ether), and then evaporate the ether away. The trouble was that he had had to use rather a lot of ether - several bottles of the stuff.
Now, each bottle of ether is supposed to have a strip of magnesium in it while it is in storage. Apparently, one of the magnesium strips was missing. The reason for the magnesium strips is to prevent the formation of peroxides in storage. When the demonstrator evaporated the ether away, the peroxide concentration went up, until ... BANG. It shattered the glassware, and left the demonstrator with a cut to the chin (from flying glass fragments).
... is for the local substation to go on the fritz and plunge the entire estate into the pre-electric era.
In one go, it takes out the internet, desktop machines (laptops and phones survive thanks to local batteries), room lighting, mood music ...
Yes, it's happened.
... but I did have one previous employer who sent out a set of performance objectives which had nothing to do with my job function (I was an out-and-out techie, and the objectives had no technical content). I refused to sign them, thereby touching off all sorts of fireworks at the next performance review.
The same employer, after a successful project to do with the 2011 (UK) Census, set my team leader a sales target of getting another UK Census project the following year...
My late father claimed the record for the fastest demolition of a pair of Jehovah's Witnesses. His opening line was "Hi, I'm Jehovah. How are we doing?"
There wasn't a second line.
It helped that he looked the part - big, and with a beard. And he saw them coming.
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