[TheForge] Re: The "tick stick."

[Mike Spencer]

Bruce wrote:

> ...while I was inventing dirt.

Hey!  I think I remember the invention of dirt!  Was that you and
Frosty?  Gosh.

> Other tricks?  Worth hashing out:
>
> When reassembling anything,...

I was in my local electric motor shop recently, awaiting diagnosis of
genset failure.  This shop does motors that have to be unloaded with a
bridge crane and/or are so old that they have to make the parts.  I'm
totally ignorant of their kind of magic but the guys there have the
right attitude to make me feel at home.

So I was swapping small talk with a guy who had some parts off a
(guessing) 20 HP motor.  He was taking photos.  "Just like to have
photos of your good sork to show the grandkids?"  Nah, they photograph
every step of disassembly of everything, small parts included in the
frame.  Helps to avoid spending hours bolting something up only to
notice that this-here widget should have gone *inside* or that
internal chunk there is upside down.

> Right now, the only other tricks I can think of are related to my
> field -- analytical chemistry.  I don't suppose anyone else would be
> interested that citric acid gives a linear titration "curve", rather
> than the more usual sigmoidal ones?

Actually, I *do* find that interesting.  I, too, am a retired
biochemist.  The big difference, however, is that I retired after one
year of actually doing it.  I built a molecular sieve column with a
total volume of 50 micro-liters to separate proteins, built paper and
gel electrophoresis gear from junk, aimed at analyzing 1 micro-liter
samples of perilymph. (Yes, it all worked.)

But the cockroaches crawling around my infant boys' cribs (only a
couple or three blocks away from the Kennedy pied a terre on Beacon
Hill) triggered a move.  A few years learning to be a mechanic and
getting infected with blacksmithing led to homesteading here and
eventually a blacksmith shop. [1]

So I could be said to have retired at 27 (shortly after the invention
of dirt).  But I still find the thing about citric acid interesting.

For those readers here who are unfamiliar with the importance of
curves, linear & sigmoid inter alia, they're the things you use to get
a PhD.  Frivolous science lesson on the subject appended. :-)

- Mike

[1] http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/temp/shed.html
--------------------------------------------------------

Want a PhD and don't know where to begin?  Here's a starter outline:

   1.  Everything is normally distributed   (The Bell Curve)

   2.  Everything is sigmoid     (Diminishing returns)

   3.  Everything is sinusoidal  (Goes in cycles)

   5.  Everything is stochastic   (Completely random and unpredictable)

   6.  Everything is fractal      (It's turtles all the way down)

   7.  Everything is chaotic      (Deterministic but unpredictable)

   8.  Everything is a metaphor   (The PostModernist option, for the
                                    math challenged)


None of these universals is true, of course, but you can write a nice
academic paper on almost anything assuming one of them and then
demonstrating that the assumption is or is not justified.  If you can't
spin a PhD thesis out of one of these, you may need to invoke:

   9.  Shit happens               (The Dada, holistic, artistic option)


-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^