msds

Wouldn't the input impedance be annoyingly variable?

Depending on the glass chemistry, Europium is either a hot pink or a blue.

And steal office chairs/break campaign finance laws, but I'm not sure if he does that for the notoriety or just can't help himself...

I recently read "Tom Crean: Unsung Hero of the Scott and Shackleton Antarctic Expeditions" - very good, exactly what it says on the tin - and was shocked about just how much of a leadership and planning failure the Scott expedition was. Ignoring all strategies for efficient polar transit (man-pulled sledges??), severe issues with scurvy, scope creep, etc... Insanity, with lots of opportunities for heroism. Very "British empire".

The writeup of the Shackleton expedition was also very good. Truly amazing how close they had to cut it at every stage.

> I dislike the idea that we should know the future of weather

Whaaaaaat? Is this some aesthetic preference, or a "humans weren't meant to share this knowledge of the divine", or are you trying to sell more weather resistant clothing? And if you wish to practice weather agnosticism, why is your preference so strong that you view the overall human lack of weather-knowledge positively? What do you think of meteorologists? I have so many questions...

> 1. Just look around you: Where do...

I mean, I actually see quite a few, but none of them are things that I would ever bother printing since I can just pop around to the store and buy a new garbage can etc...

> 3. FDM printing is inherently an unreliable process

Yeah, I have a well-tuned and reliable machine and it's not really cut out for long stretches of lights-out operation. Worse, most failures are at the bed/plastic interfaces. If you're printing conventionally, that's great because things fail early - but this belt process manages to stretch out the process of making that interface throughout the entire print.

> FDM based printing is a dead end in the history of 3D printing

I don't think so. It's a mature technology, and is already quite useful. It's not going to radically improve in terms of geometric accuracy/feature size, but materials are constantly improving and I'm excited for stuff like ASMBL, tool changing printers, and more multi-material/multi-process integration in general. I don't really see 3DP ever getting to "magical replicator" levels, so if FDM is a dead end, it has found a nice little cul-de-sac in the same neighborhood as the eventual end-game printing process.

I really don't understand the appeal of this sort of machine. I have a pretty big (300x300x300mm) and very fast printer, and large prints are still annoyingly slow and expensive. I can't ever imagine FDM printing (especially with a small, filament-fed hotend) being an appropriate way to make "arbitrarily long" objects. Other people have scaled the platform I have up to 500mm and 700mm, and get great results on genuinely large objects too, not just on long things.

Furthermore, the volume production stuff is just silly. If I'm printing a bunch of small objects, I'd rather fill a build tray with them, and then swap it out every 8 hours when it's done. The belt release stuff really seems to have reliability issues. Or, just use an appropriate manufacturing technique for high volumes...

Maybe I'm just a curmudgeon with bad memories of belt build surfaces from a Thing-O-Matic.

>visit farm shops

And come up with a good estimate for their production capacity vs sales...

I do this too, but split between 5 weeks in the summer for PNW alpine climbing and 5 weeks in the winter for desert stuff in the SW, plus normal vacation for long weekend climbing trips and the obligatory holidays.

If I had children, taking the summer off with them seems great - it's a shame their vacation policy isn't flexible...

Yeah, some degree of isolation is probably a good idea. The issue wouldn't be an accident due to plugging into an output, but issues with bad grounding or a short to mains. It's unlikely, as it would be a failure condition for the modular synth too, but better safe than sorry. I'd personally like 2-5k kV of galvanic isolation between me (and my $$$ prosthesis!) and the wall.

Plugging into an output would merely make some op-amps unhappy. Maybe a little magic smoke, but nothing lethal...

(Not a real EE and I'm definitely not confident enough to design interfaces between fleshy bits and mains-powered hardware.)

Perhaps reasonable regulations involving extensive pre-street testing and solid public documentation of ML design decisions and training data sources before allowing use in uncontrolled environments? Also, criminal liability during initial deployment?

Of course, real responsibility is probably unfashionable...

(edit: I'm personally in high-stakes time-sensitive diagnostic ML development, so...)

For the banjo, that's redundant.

The mere appearance of impropriety may encourage others to actually commit the impropriety.

(Not Jewish, but I find Talmud very interesting.)

No, a linear voltage regulator is well understood as something with a transistor pass element in linear mode and a (probably dumb) control loop.

Definitely not a switcher or module, could be an LDO.

I guess I don't spend enough time laying out tedious-but-straightforwards PCBs to appreciate this. Almost everything I do has some important layout considerations like "this loop inductance should be tiny" or "this section needs guard rings" etc. Also, placing components is non-trivial, if you're doing anything dense, fast, or sensitive. I find that's like 90% of layout work: guess where the components should go, try to route the tricky bits, move the components around a bit, route again, etc...

Eh, with a big enough laser, I'll guarantee a 100% success rate at killing any bacteria infecting you.

> traditional vendors aimed for the too high end product

Even when traditional vendors like 5.10 were really pushing the limits of sole thickness with stuff like their "Project" (2mm sole and unlined upper - my favorite performance shoe ever) they didn't seem to abandon the lower performance/more durable side of the market. Also, durability vs performance is a pretty reasonable tradeoff to make, as long as people who can't take advantage of the high-end shoe aren't getting mislead into buying them. Same thing with ropes - offering an 8.9mm isn't a sign a company doesn't care about durability, it just means they're selling gear to climbers who want to be on one side of the performance/durability tradeoff.

(edit: Also, not to sound preachy, but if you're having rubber-wear issues at a casual level of climbing/training, work on your foot technique! You'll climber harder, use less energy, and save money on resoles! My favorite exercise for that is long gym traverses during which I focus on making as little noise with my feet as possible.)

Just to piggyback off this, one should be very careful combining techniques with PCA. One error I see a lot in biostatistics is people running statistical significance testing to select variables before running PCA. It's a super cool exercise to do that on datasets, because something WILL show up, and it's very often misleading.

At least we're not Tacoma or Bellingham? Plus, as someone who's always really been into volcanoes since early childhood being able drive two hours and climb multiple volcanoes with exciting fumaroles and weird geology is pretty great...

What column do you mean? They are in different rows and columns of the periodic table, and have rather different chemistry.

Wax is a very good material for modifying/smoothing prints pre-casting, and doesn't mess with the casting process. UV-cure resin is also a good choice, as you can set it fully, sand it down, and apply a gel-coat for a shiny finish.

ABS is a very bad material for casting if you're planning on burning it out, but vapor smoothed parts do make very nice plaster molds if you can remove them. Chloroform works very well for PLA, but it is much much nastier.

Yes, your surface finish is limited by your print quality - but smoothing surfaces post-print goes a long way. "a lot more difficult" doesn't mean impossible at all, but you will have to remove more material to flatten the surface before you can start polishing. Coldworking (cutting and polishing glass) is a field in of itself, and requires some non-trivial equipment to do efficiently, so I would recommend designing your initial pieces to avoid much coldworking. Don't expect an optically clear surface anywhere the glass touched the mold - the default for investment cast surfaces is matte, and clear surfaces either need to be polished with abrasives or HF+H2SO4, or were the top of an open-face casting.

Unfortunately, most kiln-casters prefer very high lead glass (40%+), because it flows very well and doesn't devitrify easily. This, however, makes coldworking an environmentally-dicy proposition, as it generates lots of micron-scale lead dust.

A microwave may suffice to fuse small glass jewelry (...kinda, the annealing will be pretty horrid...), but isn't going to cut it for casting. Stuff at the scale presented in the article would require firing times of at least 12 hours, with much better temperature control than a microwave can provide.

I taught a similar course at Pilchuck in 2015, which was the first 3D-printing/digital fabrication course taught there, and was also up there taking a flameworking course when Amos was TA'ing for Yoav and Angela.

First off, Pilchuck is amazing, and if you're at all interested in glass, you should seriously consider taking a course there.

Second, modulo a few tricks for clean burnouts, if you can print it, you can investment-cast it in whatever material you want. It's amazing how powerful cheap printers become when you combine them with a little casting skill - you can access nearly arbitrary geometry in some useful, high-performance materials without a $100k printer.

Well, specifically it said he "attempted to immunize himself against 13 diseases", which isn't equivalent to actually doing that. Furthermore, I get the sense that his isolation was primarily to avoid the authorities ("he stayed not at the Lalaji but secretly—and illegally", use of the word "safehouse"), and not due to biological concerns. If anything, that was a second order benefit in his mind - "The benefit of that is that I was essentially in quarantine"...

Having tried this, with some fancy measurement tools and a pretty custom and high-performing control systems, I've concluded that it's a route to madness. Fancy software and feedback turn out to be a very hard way to emulate large, straight pieces of cast iron, and there's no substitute for rigidity once you actually start cutting - vibration is a huge issue, and very tricky to actively damp. Essentially every machine tool that does have crazy accurate realtime feedback (diamond turning for optics, ultra precision milling, etc) starts with a rigid and long-term stable frame and adds the $$$ controls.

Granted, my switch over to "more rigid more better" may have gone a bit too far - I now own a 10ee (3200lbs), and am looking for a good jig borer (2400lbs+).

I recently saw (1) and this brought it to mind - as someone who has written a few funded $250-500k grants, it's a very familiar feeling, and I assume it only gets worse when you get to RO1 and "infinite euromoney" levels.

1) https://www.reddit.com/r/chemistry/comments/cgy6uz/comment/e...

Much more likely to unfold like https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/PUB1776_web.p...

I was unaware that there were high-speed digital circuits that weren't also radios.

3K in the RF world is cheap... I've watched as more than that in chips fried with a bad reflow profile, and that was with some very very cost-efficent people.

If you're lucky enough to have a supernova, it's also probably a good idea to be very very patient while you wait for the various radioisotopes to calm down before you use your nice shiny new REEs.