Posts by Mast1 206 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Oct 2019
In WW2, the second Burma expedition (beyond the Chindwin) used pre-prepared landing sites to remove wounded soldiers, and bring in supplies with (rugged) aircraft.
And that was behind (the then) enemy lines. I had the privilege of meeting someone who had been there.
Granted, drones and satellites have moved the challenge to a higher level.
Errr, embarassingly similar with my (much) younger self, but nobody to see it happen.
Working on kit with a 5V 200A power supply to power a rack that I had buit from the boards upwards, and hence written the safety and instruciton manual.
"Remove jewellery".
I thought I knew better for a brief job inside the rack: no need to remove the wrist watch with stainless steel strap, I am nowhere near the bus bars.
Bzzzt..... LEDs dim, and two brown marks appear in the steel.
Fortunately the PSU had an active overload detector, so the only other damage was to my pride, but it enhanced my wisdom.
You missed a category. Some of us "stale pale (male)" Brits may have missed the reference as well. We were at work paying taxes so that you post-boomers could sit at home watching it.
Just returning a favour to those who had allowed us to sit at home a few years earlier than that watching John Noakes, Peter Purves and Valerie Singleton, and the work of the great Gerry Anderson.
You're welcome.
In our house, the phrase "I'll open the fridge door and use the light in there." would not be seen as daft.
I have previously commented how old houses throw up hidden monstrosities.
We recently discovered that the fridge in the kitchen was not on the kitchen mains circuit, but came through from the dining room on a spur from another circuit. This despite the kitchen being re-wired about 15 years ago.
Terry Waite (held as a hostage in Lebanon for over 4 years) is a very large man, over 6 foot tall. When he was being smuggled between hiding places, he was stuffed into a fridge and put on the back of a pick-up truck. In his memoir he drily commented on this experience that "I can confirm that when you shut the door the light does go out"
"... you weren't being used as a problem test subject"
These days only "minor deceptions" tend to be allowed in ethically-approved experiments (and the deception has to be revealed at the end).
Despite these safeguards, I am still shocked by how desperate people are to appear on television "reality" shows that they will submit themselves to being a test subject in an otherwise completely unethical setting.
I appreciate your optimism but "A million pound buys you 22 postdocs for a year, " is out by at least a factor of 2, possibly nearer 3.
On the standard UKRI costing model, there are a whole load of other things that get added on automatically, such as estate costs and technician support. You also have to have a Principal Investigator and possibly Co-Investigators to academically run the project. Their billing is expected to come to a minimum of 20% of their time costs.
.... and then, if it is a commercial contract, a profit is factored in.
It is no surprise that even previously generous industrial sectors are thinking twice before placing contracts.
Been there, did not get the t-shirt......
Back in the noughties, British Airways was found guilty of price fixing transatlantic flights with Virgin Atlantic.
The compensation fund required one to provide details of any relevant travel made during that period.
Claim duly made and ...........
SILENCE
"electronics starts malfunctioning at 90 to 100 C"
It depends where are you referencing the temperature.
It's usually the semiconductor temperature that is more important/relevant to device life.
In a previous employment we had semiconductor packaging sitting on a 60C heater plate, but with intended semiconductor temp well in excess of 200C with a long MTBF.
Since we could not wait that long to measure MTBF, we ran them at higher temperatures, well in excess of 300 C where they lasted tens of hours.
But that was a slightly speicialist operation.....
Why stop there ?
You could rotate it so that at every crash it offered one from a palette.......
banana, beige, biscuit, blond, blueberry, bronze, brown, burgundy, butterscotch, byzantine
The you can have "fun" trying to guess what is its name while waiting for it to re-boot.
(or try predicting the colour that will come up next time)
Alternatively, one 'b' that possibly seems to have been overlooked....
BRICK
"Wait until he pulls medicaid/medicare and your (coming) Social Security payments.....you've been paying into your entire working life."
Why feel left out ? We have this potentially on the right side of the pond.
Our latest "government by rumour"[1] has it that the "State Earnings Related Pension", into which we have been paying all our working lives, and encouraged ("nagged") to make top-up payments for missed or under-payment years, will possibly move to being means-tested. The excuse is that the state pension was always a "benefit" not an "entitlement". (So why the encouragement to pay voluntary taxes ? )
[1] Plausible deniability by those in power: more "let's see how loud they howl before we go ahead". Brought to a new level of performance by one Mr Blair and his "kitchen cabinets" from 1997, but seemingly being "refined" by the current incumbents.
The problem reported seems to be silo-ed into a discussion about the impact on the school and its reaction.
As a society we all need to have resilience against this sort of attack.
Sending kids home for a couple of days appears an easy solution compared to planning for failure mentioned above, but it has massive knock-on costs, and not just financial.
My wife is a hospital doctor, and were I not able to work from home to supervise my children during such closures, her clinics would be cancelled: a further 15-20 people disappointed every day.
What about those people being paid piece-rate having to stay at home and losing income ?
Shoving our personal failure to plan as a cost onto everyone else turns out to be a cost back on us. We need to learn to work better to face these issues as a co-operative society.
I leave how one does that as "an exericse for the student".
True, but at my British school, well back in the last millenium, the teachers only allowed around half the population to play the game : girls.
So there is a "reason" for possible ignorance, at least among a certain demographic. Similar logic was applied to "British Basketball".
The culture has moved on a bit since then, fortunately.
"Names influence strongy how humans think about a fact, thing or situation, even themselves."
Yes, but something else has been lost in this renaming : just how devastating it often is to the victims.
So could aspects of "romance baiting" be interpreted as a variant on "Play it mean to keep them keen" and play down the harm ?
Just trying to widen the considerations.
"The third finding involves a pair of proteins generated on exposure to radiation that speed up the generation of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the energy used by all living cells"
I am only an engineer, not a biologist, but I did wonder if this could become a new doping pathway for elite athletes...... (the proteins, not the radiation exposure)
Preparing to be shot down in 3.....2.....1......
Yes, the story I heard was that it was Sylvia's hand.
"Laughed so hard". You would have been laughing even more if it had been a puppet hand doing the reaching: it was unable to grasp an object.
It worked for me as a nipper. It was "slow", but better than all the ADHD-inducing animation we get nowadays.YMMV.
"It depends on how you define 'stupid'."
Agreed. Many years ago I was optimising code for an in-PC DSP card running on real-time audio (when DSP chips out-performed x86).
The code ran standard library routines with glue logic written by me. Near the end I profiled the runtime, and found that it was only spending about 8% of the time in the library code, and the rest in my glue logic (hand-optimised assembler). The biggest culprit was in the branching. With block-based processing, the sledge-hammer approach, ie compute for all cases, was more efficient to enable the code to complete on time than putting in conditionals for edge cases, the otherwise "logical" way to save time.
In a prevoius life, we had several of that size, but with a bit more muscle than adipose tissue. Affectionately, they were known as the "sweat and groan" brigade, and they were great at doing odd jobs.
There was one time when they were moving a large bit of equipment in a lift with doors on opposite sides. Once they loaded then followed the equipment in, it was realised that they could not get out again around the equipment when at the other end of travel which would have required use of the other doors. In the interests of H&S they were requested not to travel in the lift and take the stairs.
Slightly more recently than this story, in the days when the UK mains voltage had not harmonised with Europe, so was still 240 V (later to become a nominal 220 V).
As a tech person, I worked in a non-tech department of a well-known university. Being the most computerised of the groups in the department, we had bought two UPS to support a small UNIX cluster.
After a few years, as more groups acquired more mains-powered devices, come around 11 am when the kettles went on, the UPS switch in and start beeping, but mains feed is still "live". We check with the manual. which states that trip is set at 209 V.
I found a consumer socket in the room close to the incoming feeder: yup 240 V, but 3 floors up 208 V (My reading of the then-applicable wiring regs allowed for maximum 8% voltage drop in feeders).
I sent a report to a committee to suggest we needed re-wiring, and soon. Report rejected.
Feedback received along the lines of "This person does not know how to use a UPS".
It took a few more years before it was re-wired, in the meantime we had a regular alarm clock for the morning break. UPS capacity was sufficient to cover the surge.
Agreed with you, especially "If everyone could reduce their fossil fuel usage by 2/3's whilst not requiring a fully built-out and economical public charging infrastructure then we'd be well on our way.".
But that sensible approach hits HMRC in the pocket (and already has). Watch out for the creative replacement revenue stream.
Yes, apologies, slightly mis-remembered, because it was a 2002 car bought by me before 2006. But the point still stands. The car was end of line in 2002, so effectively being punished for design decisions taken long before the tax was mooted (at least publicly) (hence also my use of the word "retrospective" rather than "regressive, which it also was). As the OP points out with the dates, moving the goalposts again while the car still had useful life. And the obsession with concentrating on CO2 to drive design decisions lead to the favouring of diesel ICE, and look where that took us. At the time we were well aware of the risks with PM2.5 emissions.
The irony is as to how brands of politicians in the UK, who are supposedly on the side of the poor, introduce taxes that are retrospective in effect, and a form of regressive taxation on the poor.
I bought a second-hand car back in 2002, with a 1600 cc engine, that was low to midsize, and fairly economical for the range available at the time. After purchase, the then chancellor introduced a new form of car taxation based on the relatively new "fairer" concept of tailpipe CO2 emissions. Rather than introduce this on all cars manufactured after a certain date, hence a market signalling and forewarning, this new set of rates applied on all cars, irrespective of age. My car just fell into an upper category of emission, so I ended up paying more tax than previously.
Although I am not "poor", it did strike me as to how the tradesman/night worker often uses a second-hand vehicle to perform his/her job, and was caught by this.
A strange definition of "fairer".
The form over function battle with the Sharpie..........
Many years ago, a group of us were overnighting at a friend's house. One was looking for a socket to plug in his cassette player (yes, it was that long ago).
Finding a seemingly "useless" plug, he removed it, and left it out overnight.
It was the greenhouse heater (other side of wall) , supposedly protecting a crop of that year's geraniums from a very chilly night.
A very glum look was on the face of the friend's mum later the next day.
".........to recover from a series of devastating engineering failures"
Apologies for being a bit wordy, but isn't that a bit of shorthand for:
".........to recover from a series of management failures which manifested as devastating engineering failures". ?
A few years later than that I worked in another UK semiconductor (attempt at) manufacturing lab.
The story I heard there was that, years before, one of the more senior members of the lab had increased the yield of his germanium transistors by taking them over the public corridor to wash them in the "washrooms" in between processing stages. Date undefined, but you could call it an early "clean room" (because everywhere else was "dirty" in comparison).
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