Recent content by gmax137

I must be missing something here. If IQ follows a normal distribution wouldn't 50% be average or above (not 80%)? I know this is a tangent, but have you taken the MMPI* test? That's a doozy. I've taken it as part of getting unescorted access in nuclear power facilities. They don't provide...

My thought was, as a young person comes up in grade school and through high school, the "smart kids" are pushed into the sciences - either by their parents / teachers or by themselves. I think this might have been even more true back in the 1950s and 1960s when the public's image of "smart...

Ugh.

A few questions in no particular order. So it makes me wonder: the guys that were buying Cray computers in the 1980's (let's just say the NSA), what are they buying and using today? Another question I have is about the input/output metrics. Not a computer guy so I don't know the terminology...

I didn't realize that, I just assumed ... EDIT: wait: TIL

Yeah, no. Still too soon.

I had that experience with the first of the "Feynman" videos I watched. I went from "oh cool - a Feynman talk I haven't seen" to "OMG" in a matter of seconds. It took a few weeks of my ignoring them for the other "not Feynman" videos to disappear from my utube feed.

I have a printer connected directly to my desktop computer. It worked fine for years, then one day the computer couldn't see the printer. If I needed to print, I emailed the doc to my wife's laptop and printed from there. Over our wifi, to the same printer. I've been doing this for over a...

Well, only us old-timers (get it?) can read those confounded analog clocks anyway...

I wouldn't be happy if the company I worked for laid off 8000 employees. To me, that shows a lack of serious planning. But, I worked for the same outfit for over 40 years. So I'm probably the one with unrealistic expectations. Wiki says Meta has 77,986 employees (March 2026).

I have seen maintenance failures where the equipment vendor document said "clockwise," meaning "clockwise from above" whereas the tech doing the maintenance thought "clockwise from below." This was vertical shaft machinery removed for servicing (so the "from below" view is in the tech's face)...

CW/CCW isn't so simple, because you need to distinguish between looking at the face of the clock, or looking from the backside.

The barber I used to go to had a clock in his shop with the hands going backwards (counter-clockwise) and the numbers reversed. So he could see what time it was by looking in the mirror. That might be a "trick question" EDIT

Here's a BWR vessel in the fab shop, showing off its CRDM housings. Note this is a very early vessel, much much smaller than the Fukushima units. (I believe this is Big Rock Point, a 67 MWe unit from 1962).

You might find this discussion of fit tolerances interesting / enlightening https://www.engineersedge.com/bearing/bearing_shaft_and_housing_16016.htm