My unusual collection

[chuckchuckit]

Ooops - I'm too slow on that. diddi just posted that before I looked.

...beware of fur hats...

 

[diddi]

i have had a fascination with mercury since childhood and been collecting it ever since. i store it carefully and havent "played" with it for 20+ years.

in recent times i have had 2 odd experiences with 'alternative medicine'. one involved holding an electrode in one hand and having another pressed against my toe, and the other... wel it was odd, where the practicioner held my hand and could detect changes in my energy whatevers (some sort of quackery, that somebody else paid for on my behalf)

but the upshot was, that they both detected mercury poisoning, without any prior knowledge. it was quite unnerving to a sceptic.


@chuckchuckit
being too slow might be a sign of mercury abuse in childhood

 

[chuckchuckit]

Lol – I still think that might be why my hair is falling out... It seems to be holding it’s own past few years though.
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Of the two PHD Chemists that owned the company I worked for back in the 1970’s one was an MIT graduate, youngest PHD graduate from MIT up to that point anyway. I wouldn’t say he was a mad hatter but quite interesting. I worked closely with him for years before he left the company. Even though he was a chemist, I learned a lot from him about analog circuits etc as they were just finishing up the final circuit designs then on the Oxygen Analyzer we made. He didn’t want to be responsible anymore for circuit designing or any production at all, and one day just turned the whole thing over to me so he could do other development things. But I really liked the circuits and getting it all production ready, QC etc. We built it all there, circuit boards too. We did a fair amount of modifying sometimes for different University customers and research facilities. Think we had over 10 units we sold just to SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) alone. Had to do with their laser glass containment sections filled with argon gas if I remember right, that any oxygen leak at all would cause oxidation of the glass or something like that. Our unit would find the smallest of oxygen leaks right away. Was all fascinating to me and I liked the QC and Production responsibilities. One of our customers was putting tarantulas on treadmills and measuring how much oxygen they used.
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We never got bigger than around 15 employees, so our electronics assembly area actually looked more like a chemistry lab as they were always working on new potential products and testing things in the production area. I did the circuit bread boarding and we even made some of our own 2 sided crude PC boards there for a while (acid etched them etc). They would bring in these other Chemists, Scientists and Physics friends etc from various areas of expertise. They often were from Stanford, SLAC, Lockheed etc as they would talk about potential products and actual do experiments and basic circuit designs for potential devices. That company in Sunnyvale was literally right in the middle of the start of the electronics boom of silicon valley. A lot of them rubbed shoulders back then as the “valley” really wasn’t that spread out then in the early 1970’s. It was a small world then. I didn’t even have a College degree so it was a whole new thing to me that was a lot of fun at times. I really liked talking with those people as I liked how they would think. Some were very inquisitive and it perhaps was like exploring to them as they did different experiments and designs there in that lab/assembly room.
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[PaddyD]

"Those school chemistry labs can be more dangerous than one might think."

About the only thing I remember fondly about my organic chemistry A-level was the approach taken to waste disposal.

As it was obviously a bad idea just to tip the stuff down the sink we collected the day's efforts in 'Oswald the Organic Waste Bottle'. Probably had a capacity of about 25 litres. We'd keep filling it up with whatever mix of highly-reactive compounds we'd been working with and when it got full we'd take it out to the back of the playground area and set light to it. Unsurprisingly, that didn't always go quite as planned

 

[diddi]

'Oswald the Organic Waste Bottle' oh dear...

i only ever tipped 1 nasty down the sink and the result was potentially very bad. i tipped a small amount of bromine down the sink, and the person before me had used hot water... the bromine burst into a furious rush of swirling red gas and attacked my nose and eyes. a most unpleasant experience. never did it again, tho.

 

[Atroxell]

@chuckchuckit

We have something in common. Where I did all my silly work with laser pumping flashlamps and high intensity light source manufacturing was literally right next to 101 in Mountain View behind FMC. Like your company, we never got more than about 13 or 14 employees, but we had some ridiculously good times doing our thing.

I grew up just north of there. I can't tell you how many times I was chased out of SLAC when I was a kid. Maybe it was you yelling at us a couple of times. Mostly it was guys in security uniforms.

Page Mill Road and the back of Stanford's property were among our favorite places to go "exploring" on our bicycles because you could ride for miles and never see much in the way of civilization. I have no idea what might be out there now. I think HP has (or had) a campus up there somewhere. I moved out of the Bay Area almost 25 years ago.

I can remember Silicon Valley when it was mostly empty. Back in the days when going to Los Gatos was a drive through the orchards and 101 was a 4-lane highway and El Camino was just starting to expand to more than 2 lanes in many places. Or when Great America was built and you could watch the 4th of July fireworks from the empty fields along highway 101. Then came ROLM, LSI, Crystal Technologies, the monster tech firms, etc. <SIGH>...memories...

 

[chuckchuckit]

Atroxell - Yes, that was quite an era then. Just a few square mile area there in Mountain View and Sunnyvale with all those “tip-up” buildings they made then was where so much technology first started. Almost all the big names later started from there or spun off from just that few square miles and some in Palo Alto just a few miles away.
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Very crowded here now, but a lot of your old stopping grounds around behind Stanford and Page Mill Rd is still a bit remote. Stanford still owns a lot of the barren hills there. Huge satellite on top of one of them though now. The rolling hills around Page Mill have some nice campus’s now with HP, SAP, VM Ware, Tesla etc that they developed those hills for nice work campus’s. I currently do machine repair etc work inside many of those as even yesterday I was at one for 3 hours they are “modernizing” a couple of the buildings back there. I always like going back there in those hills since I am originally from Minnesota and still like to migrate to the remoteness whenever I can.
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Always wanted to go inside that literally “mile long building” at SLAC where you got “chased” around - lol. We had a lot of analyzers there, but I never got to go inside that one. But interestingly just 6 months ago or so I got to go inside the original linear accelerator that literally runs under the Stanford campus. Think it was the world’s first but now it is just an empty tube about a quarter mile long under Stanford. I was there doing some equipment work for them and one of the guys there took me into the empty tube where that original accelerator was, and we walked the quarter mile all the way to the end and back. That was a real treat for me to be able to do that! Only a few scientist types in that fascinating building now as they are doing some things along the lines of galaxy and stars research etc in it now. Some satellite people are also affiliated with those workers there etc as I also got to chat a bit with the head of a satellite group (while doing a repair for him too) that years before they built a satellite there at Stanford. So this area here is still very interesting, and I still sometimes seem to get to somehow be involved with the fringes of it to some degree anyway. I’m still sort of like a kid in a candy store when it comes to things like that.

 

[Sandeep Warrier]

I remember from my college chemistry, we had to identify salts in a mixture. One of the tests was a smell test - to check for ammonia. In testing one of the salts, I took a couple of sniffs, couldn't smell anything. Then I inhaled deeply, the mixture decided to react at that moment and I got a huge dose of ammonia

I could feel my eyes watering cuz of the smell...

Those were the days!!! ahahahahahahahahahha

 

[T. Valko]

I remember from my college chemistry, we had to identify salts in a mixture. One of the tests was a smell test - to check for ammonia. In testing one of the salts, I took a couple of sniffs, couldn't smell anything. Then I inhaled deeply, the mixture decided to react at that moment and I got a huge dose of ammonia

I could feel my eyes watering cuz of the smell...

Those were the days!!! ahahahahahahahahahha

Ah, the smell test...

Some of my buddies were over and we were partying (this was the mid 80's). So I decide to give them a little demonstration how nitric acid can dissolve a penny. I also had a jar of hydrochloric acid and was explaining to them what we use this for at my job.

I told them that this stuff will take your breathe away. Of course one guy had to try it and takes a gigantic snort even after I warned him not to.

Needless to say, he'll never do that again! I thought he was gonna die!

 

[chuckchuckit]

Clues and patterns… - One of the fringe Scientists there at that company once said something to me that I have remembered ever since. It affected my thinking in ways I still apply in my work today. He was a man that had retired, but was healing from a bad leg break before leaving to Spain. Trying to find something to do, he would spend some days at that Oxygen Analyzer company dabbling in a new product they were developing that was going to be a CO2 analyzer based on infrared light, as infrared is absorbed by CO2. He was working on a potential gas flow sensor design for it and was using a manomiter to see if the design might have some “Venturi Effects” that might be trouble. He couldn’t see the water level easily during testing so since we didn’t have any colored water, he added coffee to it so he could see it better from a distance. I was curious what he was doing when I saw him pouring his morning coffee into one of the tubes. So I asked him if it was possible that the coffee might outgas of sorts to interfere with the rest of the testing’s? And he said, nope, just working on the sensor flow characterizes at this point. He called it the “Coffee Manomiter” - lol.
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Anyway, one day he said that he had been recently hired by a cancer research company to look into why their cancer culture experiments (or whatever they are called) were not going well. As the cultures were giving erratic results and there was no consistency in the experiments due to the cancer cells they wanted to do experiments on were not growing consistently. So he determined that the room lights were affecting the cancer culture cells. And now they were asking him what would be the best way to go about shielding the cancer cultures from the various light sources. And what he said next is what I have always remembered:
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He said in effect, “So I said to them, it seems to me that you are asking the wrong question. Instead of asking how can we grow the cancer cultures better, shouldn’t you be asking the question: Why are the lights killing the cancer cells?”
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He said he tried to get them interested in that approach but no one was even remotely interested. And he was baffled and actually a bit appalled at their disinterest in that obvious fact. He kept saying that he couldn’t get even remote interest from them in that fact. Not necessarily that lights will cure cancer, but perhaps if they looked into it more, they might find out what it is in the atmosphere of lights that doesn’t allow that cancer type to survive very well. It was that type of thinking he was trying to get them interested in. But they were not even the least bit interested, and he was bothered by their attitude about it.
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I’m not so sure I thought a lot along those lines before he said that, but it was like the “lights” went on for me about what he was saying. It is kind of like: Can you help us cut down all these trees that are in the way of our trying to find the forest? – That old saying “Can’t see the forest because all the trees are in the way.”
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Just because almost everyone says: something must be done a certain way, or it is always done like this, or my job only involves this part here, doesn’t mean that is the best way to do something to benefit others, or will reveal the truth or the right answers.
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Like the guy who invented the microwave for cooking food. He was working on the early radar during WWII I think, and he noticed that the chocolate in his pocket melted when he was near the radar when it was on. If he had then asked himself something like: How can I keep the chocolate in the room from melting when the radar is on? we might never have had the microwave to cook our food. But he instead asked a different question from what he observed, and many people have benefitted from it since.
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Seems a lot of things are like that. I certainly have been blessed to be able to have done something like 25,000 to 30,000 machinery repairs in my business over the past 25 years. I have had to apply what that Scientist said all the time or I won’t see the “truth and facts” of what is really going on when I am trying to diagnose a problem. It is easy to get diverted away from solving the problem, as many irrelevant things will tend to look like the cause or the way to solve the problem, but they are not. But they sure seem like they are at first. And paying attention to the irrelevant and not the bottom line on things, is a quick way to go broke when self employed. Perhaps only bureaucracies and non-profits can ignore the bottom line and “the truth” of what is really going on, and instead focus on everything else. But for those willing to look at the clues and patterns, much might be discovered when taking time to investigate where that leads.
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Here is another clue and pattern I just noticed today! – When a person’s hair starts to fall out, they start to reminisce and turn into a Story Teller - lol. I just finished my morning coffee, so back to work for me now.
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