Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[tautech]

That didn't take long 
Here ya go:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/forum-update-new-ignore-topics-feature/
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/how-to-disable-notificationsv-in-show-new-replies-to-your-posts/

[0culus]

One thing that does tickle my fancy, is trying to make a Weston cell.

Need to brush up on my chemistry...

First find a supplier of Hg, Hg₂SO₄, CdSO₄.

Speaking as someone who was seriously considering a career in chemistry for a while, and still is interested:

I'd only venture down this path if (1) you are able to access some proper chemistry lab space with fumehoods and PPE and the like and (2) you really know what you're doing. You do NOT want that mercury chemistry in your home. Wet chemistry anywhere near where you eat is a bad idea, doing it with mercury containing compounds is an even worse idea.

[worsthorse]

That didn't take long 
Here ya go:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/forum-update-new-ignore-topics-feature/
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/how-to-disable-notificationsv-in-show-new-replies-to-your-posts/

that fixed it. thank you! quick moderation turned on seems to be the key: once it was turned on, the ignore checkbox was on the updated topics pages and a list of the threads that i had posted on appeared on the notification page in profile. i marked them "unnotify" and it looks like they disappeared.

much mahalo!

[BravoV]

Incoming & unpacking. promise, will do TEA's eyes candies shots ... yes, it has top handle. 

Here we go, latest addition to the d'Arsonval gang in the family.

YESS !!!  all feet are intact    , and no peeling at the meter face too. 

Btw, attached the inflation adjusted price for the HP 3400A at many decades ago. 

[AVGresponding]

One thing that does tickle my fancy, is trying to make a Weston cell.

Need to brush up on my chemistry...

First find a supplier of Hg, Hg₂SO₄, CdSO₄.

Speaking as someone who was seriously considering a career in chemistry for a while, and still is interested:

I'd only venture down this path if (1) you are able to access some proper chemistry lab space with fumehoods and PPE and the like and (2) you really know what you're doing. You do NOT want that mercury chemistry in your home. Wet chemistry anywhere near where you eat is a bad idea, doing it with mercury containing compounds is an even worse idea.

Yes, I'm aware of some of the dangers; as I said I'll need to brush up on my chemistry.

I've no need for an improptu syphillis cure     and I remember reading about this, in New Scientist I think, though this link was first up:  https://www.livescience.com/26017-kilogram-gained-weight.html

[mnementh]

It's Oh-Dark-Thirty in the Fukkin' Morning and I'm Still Working on a New Project...

            


Here's a few TEAsers before I crawl off to bed.     

mnem
*the scrubbulous world of Dr. Agon*

[tautech]

Cooked shunts from a moving coil meter ?

[Cubdriver]

I can relate to up too late.  Just ordered electrolytics for an HP 6920B Meter Calibrator, a 735A DC Transfer Standard and 10,000uF to replace a dead 8500uF 4.4V power supply filter in a 4350A DMM.  Finally getting in gear and trying to fix some of the stuff in the repair queue.






5340A gallery link:  https://pmanning.smugmug.com/Electronics/HP-3450A-

And on that note, it's past time to hit the sack.

-Pat

[tggzzz]

One thing that does tickle my fancy, is trying to make a Weston cell.

Need to brush up on my chemistry...

First find a supplier of Hg, Hg₂SO₄, CdSO₄.

Speaking as someone who was seriously considering a career in chemistry for a while, and still is interested:

I'd only venture down this path if (1) you are able to access some proper chemistry lab space with fumehoods and PPE and the like and (2) you really know what you're doing. You do NOT want that mercury chemistry in your home. Wet chemistry anywhere near where you eat is a bad idea, doing it with mercury containing compounds is an even worse idea.

... and then someone mentions amalgam dental fillings

I don't disagree with your points, but I will note that as you get older the micromorts associated with simply living will overtake those with other hazards. Yes, it is rational to take more risks as you get older.

[Zucca]

Fucking hells bells bastard cunting schools giving me a headache. So I'm going through mathematics homework with one of the kids and they have managed to typeset the exponent values badly like this:

6.21795x1010

When it should be

6.21795x10¹⁰

Not only that they taught her ass about face way of getting values into standard form. Not a single fucking mention of mantissa and exponent. Soo I just spent 2 hours doing it from the ground up.

Cue page long rant via email to the head of the school on the homework about Edexcel being a Pearson turd factory and the teaching being substandard.

This is how society falls.

Edit: oh it gets worse. The textbook actually has lots of typos in it. Fucking Pearson shit mongers!!!!

Do not let it go, show up at school with a german tank, make clear what they are doing wrong and why you are pissed.

I still remember at high school one day when the teacher shut me down, and it did not feel right. Only 2 years later at the university I understood I was damm right and he was a stupid muppet that day.
When I remember it my blood pressure goes up, even today.

I do not want you to regreat it like I did.
 

[Cerebus]

I still remember at high school one day when the teacher shut me down, and it did not feel right. Only 2 years later at the university I understood I was damm right and he was a stupid muppet that day.
When I remember it my blood pressure goes up, even today.

I do not want you to regreat it like I did.

Remember the old aphorism:

* Those that can, do.
* Those that can't do, teach.
* Those that can't teach, teach teachers,
* Those that can't teach teachers become an education officer.

Inside every English teacher is a frustrated novelist.
Inside every physics teacher is someone who feels unfairly denied a Nobel prize.
Inside every physical education teacher is a wee grudge-bearing bastard with no more right to walk on God's good Earth than a plague bacterium.

[bd139]

So true. Doesn't help in this case that the school is an academy school which means it's a private limited company in disguise so the entire top tier are marketoids running a cargo cult. Fortunately spending years ripping new arseholes in enterprise software companies comes in handy there. 

[BU508A]

Fucking hells bells bastard cunting schools giving me a headache. So I'm going through mathematics homework with one of the kids and they have managed to typeset the exponent values badly like this:

6.21795x1010

When it should be

6.21795x10¹⁰

Not only that they taught her ass about face way of getting values into standard form. Not a single fucking mention of mantissa and exponent. Soo I just spent 2 hours doing it from the ground up.

Cue page long rant via email to the head of the school on the homework about Edexcel being a Pearson turd factory and the teaching being substandard.

This is how society falls.

Edit: oh it gets worse. The textbook actually has lots of typos in it. Fucking Pearson shit mongers!!!!

Richard P. Feynman has fought a similar battle back in the sixties:

https://rangevoting.org/FeynTexts.html

So you are in really good company.

[tggzzz]

Fucking hells bells bastard cunting schools giving me a headache. So I'm going through mathematics homework with one of the kids and they have managed to typeset the exponent values badly like this:

6.21795x1010

When it should be

6.21795x10¹⁰

Not only that they taught her ass about face way of getting values into standard form. Not a single fucking mention of mantissa and exponent. Soo I just spent 2 hours doing it from the ground up.

Cue page long rant via email to the head of the school on the homework about Edexcel being a Pearson turd factory and the teaching being substandard.

This is how society falls.

Edit: oh it gets worse. The textbook actually has lots of typos in it. Fucking Pearson shit mongers!!!!

When my daughter was being taught arithmetic in junior school, I was impressed by the methods taught. Basically they didn't teach a single algorithm, but did show multiple ways of manipulating the operands to come up with the result. Much better than "thou shalt do it this way" I was taught.

I was less impressed with GCSE, where they seemed to take a very roundabout route towards calculus, in easy very tedious steps. Much better to have just jumped in and done it directly.

[Brumby]

I still remember at high school one day when the teacher shut me down, and it did not feel right. Only 2 years later at the university I understood I was damm right and he was a stupid muppet that day.
When I remember it my blood pressure goes up, even today.

ARRGGHH!!!  You dredged up a similar memory ... which causes a similar response!

Again, in high school.  A science teacher (the Master, actually) marked my answer to a test question as wrong.  I supplied an example of resonance of which he had obviously never heard.  He wasn't interested in discussing how he was wrong.


My BP just went up 20 points.   

[bd139]

Damn I seem to have caused a positive feedback loop here and increased a lot of people's blood pressure including my own. Sorry  . Replies I sympathise with. Had some issues during education as well along the same lines.

I've been invited to discuss this issue with the school which is an offer I can't possibly resist

[Zucca]

I've been invited to discuss this issue with the school which is an offer I can't possibly resist

Can I come too?

[Specmaster]

Damn I seem to have caused a positive feedback loop here and increased a lot of people's blood pressure including my own. Sorry  . Replies I sympathise with. Had some issues during education as well along the same lines.

I've been invited to discuss this issue with the school which is an offer I can't possibly resist

Boy, I'd love to be a fly on thee wall at that meeting, could get kind of interesting 

[tggzzz]

Again, in high school.  A science teacher (the Master, actually) marked my answer to a test question as wrong.  I supplied an example of resonance of which he had obviously never heard.  He wasn't interested in discussing how he was wrong.

When I was at school, the answer to "who is the best composer?" was "Beethoven".

Peter Ustinov recounted being asked for the name of a Russian composer, and gave "Rimsky-Korsakov". Wrong! The answer was Tchaikovsky.

[BU508A]

Damn I seem to have caused a positive feedback loop here [...]

bd139, when he wants to build an amplifier and all he got is a power oscillator.   

[Cerebus]

Again, in high school.  A science teacher (the Master, actually) marked my answer to a test question as wrong.  I supplied an example of resonance of which he had obviously never heard.  He wasn't interested in discussing how he was wrong.

Something like that has happened to everybody who was smarter than at least one of their teachers (except teachers who studied geography with PE as a subsidiary subject, they don't count - they probably can't count beyond 10 without taking their socks off).

The most egregious example that ever happened to me was when I was about 11. My form teacher was getting us to colour in maps. I coloured my maps in and put a blue line around the coast. The Gorgon tells me off for only colouring in a single blue line around the coast and tells me to draw another second blue line (she had initially omitted to tell us to draw two lines). But it's already blue, quoth I, why do we have to draw two lines? Cue fit of rage from the Gorgon. It's only in later years that I realised two things, firstly that the two lines were to represent the separate foreshore and shore lines, secondly that the poor dear didn't know "why" you drew two lines and threw a paddy to disguise her ignorance and was teaching as she'd been taught - by rote and with no understanding possessed or imparted.

My realisation of her ignorance and the bad behaviour that followed it convinced me that I should never fake knowledge, if I don't know something I should admit it

[tggzzz]

My realisation of her ignorance and the bad behaviour that followed it convinced me that I should never fake knowledge, if I don't know something I should admit it

Sounds like she was a good teacher, albeit not in the way she intended.

[bd139]

Indeed. Being accidentally effective is not being effective 

Edit: As for faking knowledge, in the "IT trade" it's normal to play this off against the old idiom that in the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed man is king. Thus I got a Perl job once having never written a line of Perl and learning enough of it to look professional in relation to the rest of their staff in the weekend that elapsed between getting the job and starting there. 

[tggzzz]

Indeed. Being accidentally effective is not being effective 

Oh, that's getting deep into philosophy!

If you do the right thing for the wrong reasons, does it become a wrong thing? You probably won't get the good karma brownie points, but that's a different issue.

[bd139]

Indeed. Being accidentally effective is not being effective 

Oh, that's getting deep into philosophy!

If you do the right thing for the wrong reasons, does it become a wrong thing? You probably won't get the good karma brownie points, but that's a different issue.

Philosophically speaking you always have to separate the intent from the outcome and define the causality carefully and where credit is due. I always work on the basis that I should never take credit for a good outcome if it wasn't intended, always take negative credit for a bad outcome if it wasn't intended and when things just work, ignore them because they're not very interesting