Confess Your Stupidity: Tales of Mishandled Tech & Awkward Experiments

[Hobin]

The irony of all this is that presumably you didn't realize eels are amphibians. It would have been quite happy out of water for a few hours while mom admired it. In fact in the UK some eels migrate quite long distances (i.e. miles) overland - presumably to get back to the pond they or their parents were born in after their early development at sea, though the complete life cycle of eels is still pretty mysterious.

The principle that "If it's not moving then it's dead" doesn't work very well for eels. Often they keep twitching for a few hours even after they have been chopped into pieces small enough to cook.

 

[PAllen]

Turbo, you just made me remember something. When I was 10 years old we had a Geography test. I remember 2 questions:
"The continents are:
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"The oceans are:
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I answered "soil" and "water". I knew the names of the continents and oceans but I didn't realize they asked for them. I got a 3/20.

This calls for repetition of the famous:

Teacher: "How can you tell the height of a tall building with the aid of a barometer?"

Student: I would go to the superintendent and say: "I'll give you this nice barometer if you tell me how tall this building is"

Teacher: I was thinking of a method that involved some technical understanding.

Student: I would wait for a sunny day, and measure the ratio of the barometer's height to its shadow; pace off the shadow of the building; and use proportion.

Teacher: Actually, I wanted an answer involving physics, not just math.

Student: I would go to the top of the building, throw the barometer off the building, and from the time of fall, compute the building's height.

Teacher: jumps off building in frustration with the student's success in avoiding the 'right answer' while always being right.

(My variant of a famous parable with many versions).

 

[Ivan Seeking]

The message here is that you have to risk being an idiot to grow and move forward. At least I've gotten good at immunostaining...

You wouldn't believe some of the risks I've taken as a contractor. But every single major success in my career was the result of high risk - what some people might call nuts! At the end of the day, either you're a hero or the village idiot.

Simple mistakes can actually result in the most memorable and fun moments, though they may be somewhats painful at the time. Not my fault, actually, but while working on MRI systems I had one rather memorable moment. Everything in the MRI room was supposed to be stainless steel [my tools were made from beryllium]. But someone had inadvertantly left a regular chair made with ferrous materials sitting next to otherwise identical chairs made of stainless, in the control room [a big no-no!]. Not knowing this, as I often did, I grabbed a chair to go behind the magnet to make an adjustment but never made it that far. With my arm slung firmly through chair's frame, I only felt the tug of the chair torquing my shoulder for a moment before I was airborn and crashing into the magnet. When that field takes hold, the strength is incredible. There was nothing I could do but go along for the ride.

 

[Danger]

When that field takes hold, the strength is incredible. There was nothing I could do but go along for the ride.

It's a good thing that tooth fillings aren't ferrous.

I was kidding earlier about the church. I didn't actually blow it up; I just set it on fire. Also, it wasn't exactly on purpose. After all, I lived in the damned thing, and I certainly had no desire to lose either my Teddy bear or my Penthouse collection. I'm going to explain this, even if it bores you to tears.
My father was a preacher, and our house was part of the church. The front porch was a concrete pad about 7-8 metres wide by 2 long. The roof/canopy of it was supported by the building on the inboard side and by 3 hollow rectangular wooden pillars outboard. For some totally unknown reason, the genius who built the thing (in 1881) set those hollow pillars atop small blocks. That left 4 openings of about 2 x 1 cm around the base of each. That presented no problem whatsoever, until one spring when our bee-keeper neighbour's hive decided to bud off a new colony which set up housing inside one of those pillars. So here I was, in my full bug-phobia glory, with 5,000 armed enemies literally on my doorstep. In those days, one of my little fun devices was a (potentially lethal) stink-bomb. It was a medicine bottle (about the same size as an old photo-film canister), lined with aluminum foil for safety reasons. (That was certainly a misguided precaution.) Anyhow, the inside consisted of a 70/30 % mixture of pure sulphur and medium-rate shotgun powder, with a firecracker fuse for ignition. So, I figured that a snootful of sulphur trioxide might indicate to the little bastards that they might possibly be more welcome elsewhere. I set the stinker right beside one of the openings in the base of the column, lit the fuse, and deeked back into the house to watch through the front window (because I didn't want to be in the company of a garbageload of irritated things with stingers.) Wait for it... wait for it... ignition! The problem was that either I got a load of a faster-burning shotgun powder or the proportions were off. What was supposed to be like a toy stink bomb to flush the buggers out decided to go up like a Roman candle.

 

[DaveC426913]

And??

Did they get the message?

 

[turbo]

I used to make rockets out of match-heads and tightly-rolled tubes of aluminum foil as a kid. I'd usually launch them from the sill of the shed connecting our house to our garage. Luckily, I never burned the place down.

Come on! I know all of you older guys know exactly what I'm talking about.

 

[Danger]

Hi, Dave. No, I don't believe that they did. The end result of that little exercise was a 2-metre scorch scar up the side of the pillar. The church board was somewhat dismayed with me for having taken the initiative, but that was neither the first nor the last time that I pissed them off.
The next (should have been first) move was to hire the pro beekeeper to come and save them from themselves and us. He carefully disassembled the pillar, to find the lower 2 metres crammed with honeycomb and the more disgusting bits of a colony. He scooped it all up, with the aid of his little smoke puffer thingie, and took it home. Someone else took it upon himself to reattach the side of the pillar, but I don't know whether or not it was ever repainted.
Turbo, damned straight on the match rockets. We escalated things a bit after the initial experimentation, but they sure were fun. Hard as hell to aim, though. We used to try to shoot flies with them, but the closest that we ever got was about 2" from the target, from a range of 10-12'.

 

[Kholdstare]

I promised two more stories, and here they are:

In another thread I talked about a failed experiment of mine which involved a capacitor. I was probably about 14 years old, and I was very interested in electronics, but I knew very little about it. I tried to build my own supercapacitor; I used some construction made out of two plastic tubes, where one tube was firmly fitted inside the other (the tubes were some distance apart). I attached foil to the inside of the outer tube and to the outside of the inner tube, nice in theory, not in practice. I tried my "supercapacitor" by connecting it to a 12V car battery charger. For a second or so, it seemed to work fine. But then it suddenly exploded, and blew out a fuse in our house. Luckily, nothing worse happened. I haven't tried building any capacitors since.

Another stupid thing I've done involved a firework rocket. I was probably about 13 years old and I thought I was young Wernher von Braun. I wanted my rocket to launch, explode and then return to Earth safely. I selected the biggest rocket I could afford, made a parachute out of a plastic bag and attached and "secured" it to the rocket in some way. I don't think I expected the thing to work, but I was determined to find out. On New Year's Eve it was finally time for launch. At T minus 5 seconds we had ignition, and at T minus 0 we had launch. Off it went, so far so well. At about T plus 3 it started to look like "Houston, we have a problem"; the force from the drag must have pulled the parachute loose, making it unfold during mission. Rocket+parachute=unknown trajectory. My spacecraft then took some weird turns, and then started to prematurely head back to base. This forced me and my friends at Houston Control to hastily search for cover. Finally the craft "landed" in a garden some 10 meters away from us, and then it exploded into a large number of green and bright objects on fire. The garden lit up like a scene from Star Wars. Nothing worse happened though, but I gave up my rocket building career.

I've also been shocked twice by 230V (AC standard in Sweden). Both times involved repairing a mains distribution block with the cord still connected to the power outlet. This taught me to always check if power cords are connected or not.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

It's a good thing that tooth fillings aren't ferrous.

Actually, there have been incidents involving metal implants. I was directly aware of one case where a WWI vet had a very low-grade stainless pin in his leg, from the war. While I didn't see the extent of the injuries directly, I got there shortly after it happened. I was told by the techs involved that the pin was pulled right out of his leg by the field.

 

[DragonPetter]

Actually, there have been incidents involving metal implants. I was directly aware of one case where a WWI vet had a very low-grade stainless pin in his leg, from the war. While I didn't see the extent of the injuries directly, I got there shortly after it happened. I was told by the techs involved that the pin was pulled right out of his leg by the field.

I don't know why, but freak accidents like that fascinate me. Do you know what the magnetic field source was? That's actually kind of amazing.

 

[Danger]

Actually, there have been incidents involving metal implants.

Having heard of that was actually the basis of my joke. It's tough, as an outsider, to discriminate between fact and urban legend. You and Tsu being experts is very beneficial. As an example, I had no idea until now that the field extends beyond the imaging chamber. I always thought that was focused upon a central area.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Having heard of that was actually the basis of my joke. It's tough, as an outsider, to discriminate between fact and urban legend. You and Tsu being experts is very beneficial. As an example, I had no idea until now that the field extends beyond the imaging chamber. I always thought that was focused upon a central area.

As I understand things, they do have better control of the field on the newer technology. I was involved back when the very first MRI units, then still called NMR, were coming onto the market [coming into general use]. The area affected by the magnet was pretty large... I think we had about a fifteen-foot boundary around the magnet. Just walking near a unit could erase all of your credit cards. And on one occassion, something like a D8 Cat working near a unit ended up merging with the magnet! But in any case, for a patient going into the hole, the field is incredibly intense and far beyond our normal range of experience.

I was probably about five feet away from the center of magnet when it grabbed my chair. This immediately lifted the chair and tugged me closer to the magnet, and it was all over. As I said, there was absolutely nothing I could do.

I'm not sure about field strength. We had magnets ranging from about 0.7 to 1.2 T, IIRC. I know they were trying to drive the required field strength down but have seen even more powerful magnets referenced. It seems that I saw a 1.5 T magnet for MRI mentioned somewhere.

http://mrimetaldetector.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/mri-scanner-eats-patient-bed.jpg

 

[Danger]

something like a D8 Cat working near a unit ended up merging with the magnet!

 

[BobG]

One other story where I belonged in the Hall of Shame, but fortunately no knew it.

I was taking a class html and web design, and were supposed to build a web page using frames that advertised a zoo. All the graphics were already created and we just had to organize them into the web page. The procedure was to copy the graphic files to the same directory as our html file so our web page could access them, and then create our web page.

Unfortunately, I misread the instructions and I tried to place my "Welcome to the Zoo!" message in the skinny frame running down the left side of the web page. The message was too wide to fit, so I edited the image to rotate it so it would appear sideways in the skinny frame.

First problem is that even after editing, the message still ran horizontally. I reopened the image and, sure enough, the message was running vertically, so I wasn't sure what was happening. I resaved the image, just to make sure, but it still appeared horizontally in my web page.

So, I decided I'd better reread the instructions and realized the message was supposed to be in a different frame that was wide enough to fit the message horizontally. That solved the problem and I didn't have to worry about the fact that the message still appeared horizontally, even though I'd edited it to appear vertically. That was just an unsolved mystery that didn't need to be solved.

That web page was part of our end of course presentation, where we had to make a mini-website that linked to the various projects we'd done during the course.

I was shocked how many people's presentation included a "Welcome to the Zoo!" message that appeared sideways in one of the wide frames for no apparent reason! Apparently, I'd edited the master copy of the image instead of the copy in my directory, so everyone that was making slower progress than me inserted the sideways image in their web page and most had absolutely no clue what to do about it! Enough people had the sideways image that the instructor finally just stopped asking people why they put the image in sideways ("and how did you even manage to do that, by the way?")

I could barely keep from laughing during the presentations, but I had to, because I certainly didn't want the class to know who'd trashed the image they inserted into their web page! (Especially since my presentation and my mini-website was so cool that no one wanted to be the next person after me to present their web page with the sideways image.)