How did you get into science

[dlamberth]

How old were you when you supposedly built an oscilloscope?

They had kits back in the day that you could order from Heathkit. I remember building a radio from a kit my parents ordered for me. That was when everything was tube technology. I suspect Mountainmike did something similar.

Ancient Heathkit Oscilloscope - N6CC

 

[SelfSim]

They had kits back in the day that you could order from Heathkit. I remember building a radio from a kit my parents ordered for me. That was when everything was tube technology. I suspect Mountainmike did something similar.

Ancient Heathkit Oscilloscope - N6CC

Sure .. maybe later on, in his development towards a fully fledged pseudosceptic(?)

This kit was a major culprit behind a lot of what followed, in my case .. (such a dorky cover image too .. even back in those days):

 

[Mountainmike]

They had kits back in the day that you could order from Heathkit. I remember building a radio from a kit my parents ordered for me. That was when everything was tube technology. I suspect Mountainmike did something similar.

With respect, I said what happened . In my case at least

There was an article in a magazine “practical electronics “ I think, sometime in early sixties.
It used a lot of standard valves and bits . Some could be stripped from broken valve radios.

It captured my imagination.
The expensive bit was the tube. Some kind of metal shield needed too.
But I recollect there were mail order ads for the hard to get bits in subsequent issues of PE. That made it possible

There were a couple of cheap transistors I recollect in the calibration circuits, which had to be bought, but it’s a haze now. It’s 60 years ago.

 

[Mountainmike]

I wanted to know what the stars were.

I guess we were all a product of our situation.
stars interested me, many of us bought a telescope.

But I was brought up in a city complete with smog, in the days of coal fires, haze and light pollution even then.
so I could never see what others were saying was there to be seen , so I lost interest in astronomy.

A decade later a book on black holes reawakened my interest , in last couple of school years, but it was my favourite thing - math. Schwarzchild radius etc.

 

[Mountainmike]

Sure .. maybe later on, in his development towards a fully fledged pseudosceptic(?)

This kit was a major culprit behind a lot of what followed, in my case .. (such a dorky cover image too .. even back in those days):


View attachment 363249

Yep had one of them as well. Later I think.
those springy clips were a pain in the butt.
but by then I was more into building stuff from magazine articles.
Using tag strip and solder… valves make you think like that.

Boards with matrix holes and parallel copper strip.
They were around, although later evolved..

Im No kind of sceptic. I just put science, in proper context . What it can tell you, what it can’t.

 

[Larniavc]

sci fi? Interesting.
Although I have heard Verne and HG wells inspired a few.

I’ve always been more interested in what could be and finding out new things than about what is already known.

That’s what got me into research.

 

[SelfSim]

Yep had one of them as well. Later I think.
those springy clips were a pain in the butt.
but by then I was more into building stuff from magazine articles.
Using tag strip and solder… valves make you think like that.

The clips were painful for young finger-tips but they did not deter me from finding out how the various components produced the functionality of the pre-designed circuits.

Funny how you seem to have completely missed the whole point of those kits.
(Maybe not so funny .. more like: that is the typical take-away from all our conversations).

 

[Mountainmike]

The clips were painful for young finger-tips but they did not deter me from finding out how the various components produced the functionality of the pre-designed circuits.

Funny how you seem to have completely missed the whole point of those kits.
(Maybe not so funny .. more like: that is the typical take-away from all our conversations).

By the time they had come out I had been messing with electronics a couple of years already.

I had outgrown basic - the limit and purpose of kid kits - did you never outgrow basic?
I’ll wager You could never build a superhet on a kid kit.

That’s the more typical takeaway from our conversations
.By the time you get to the far side of science you see the cracks in the dogma beginning to show. Maybe you never got there. Hawking did with “ model dependent realism “ . Listen to him.

But this thread is not about the far side of science.

It’s about how you got in.
So electronic kits are indeed a fine way in. You must be as old as I am!

 

[Mountainmike]

I’ve always been more interested in what could be and finding out new things than about what is already known.

That’s what got me into research.

They had iPhones on star wars And thunderbirds , one of my faves. They called them “ communicators”

It’s sad for the ones so ahead of their time. Da Vinci pictured a helicopter! It impresses me more because it hinted at how it could work, not just what the goal was.

We lived in the era of optimism. Anything was possible Or so it seemed.

 

[Larniavc]

They had iPhones on star wars And thunderbirds , one of my faves. They called them “ communicators”

It’s sad for the ones so ahead of their time. Da Vinci pictured a helicopter! It impresses me more because it hinted at how it could work, not just what the goal was.

We lived in the era of optimism. Anything was possible Or so it seemed.

Things seem optimistic to me. Medical health is moving in leaps and bounds. Common place procedures were the stuff of a madman's dream when I was a kid in the late 70s.

 

[Mountainmike]

Things seem optimistic to me. Medical health is moving in leaps and bounds. Common place procedures were the stuff of a madman's dream when I was a kid in the late 70s.

Wish I had got into MRI, the math of imaging was right up my street. I Never saw the chance.

Now every year they say on storage and processing “ we’ve reached the quantum limit”
then the following year Moore’s law defies them.

Superconductors and magnets are the trend that fascinates me.
Add a few more orders of magnitude and then are possibilities for crushing matter, maybe even bending space, fusion, who knows?

do you remember tomorrows world and some of the April 1st spoofs?
like pictures of rockworms on mars!

 

[Bradskii]

My job (retired 6 years ago) was a Cad Manager. Making sure the 'drawing office' for whatever company I was with ran efficiently. And a big part of that was writing code for the computer aided draughting. I was good at it. And not many others were. So I was always in demand. Now AI is meant to be able to do that. Huh, I thought. It can't be that good. So I opened up Chatgpt and asked It to write some code for a relatively simple operation. Might have taken me an hour or so to do it, plus checking and testing.

It did it in a couple of seconds. Took me quite some time to check it out. It was perfect. And was better than I would have done it.

Guess I got out of the workforce just in time...

 

[Larniavc]

Wish I had got into MRI, the math of imaging was right up my street. I Never saw the chance.

Now every year they say on storage and processing “ we’ve reached the quantum limit”
then the following year Moore’s law defies them.

Superconductors and magnets are the trend that fascinates me.
Add a few more orders of magnitude and then are possibilities for crushing matter, maybe even bending space, fusion, who knows?

do you remember tomorrows world and some of the April 1st spoofs?
like pictures of rockworms on mars!

No but I do remember a ‘baby T-Rex’ on the news one time.

 

[Larniavc]

Cad Manager

Funnily enough I used to be a Bounder manager.

 

[Mountainmike]

My job (retired 6 years ago) was a Cad Manager. Making sure the 'drawing office' for whatever company I was with ran efficiently. And a big part of that was writing code for the computer aided draughting. I was good at it. And not many others were. So I was always in demand. Now AI is meant to be able to do that. Huh, I thought. It can't be that good. So I opened up Chatgpt and asked It to write some code for a relatively simple operation. Might have taken me an hour or so to do it, plus checking and testing.

It did it in a couple of seconds. Took me quite some time to check it out. It was perfect. And was better than I would have done it.

Guess I got out of the workforce just in time...

For sure FEA has taken a lot of hard grunt work out of stress analysis , deflection etc,

But there’s always the problem which needs your Experience. AI won’t be perfect, and in essence it is just scraping what is already done, and tweaking to a present requirement it is not trail blazing. So they still need some of you!

One of the problems CAD has caused , is taking away (eg ) the tool room experience that knew what design looked right and where compromises could be taken .

An anecdote : many years ago , I had cause to go to a subcontractor which was an old world tool shop In a northern England town. I was surprised to see two million pound machining centres ( at 1990s rates) milling out a structure from solid metal leaving a formed plate and several long narrow vertical studs. The workshop manager told me the client was Ministry of defence and he was tearing his hair out trying to get 0.05 mm tolerances on the studs because material stress relief was causing them to go out of tolerance As it cooled. Because of secrecy he found it hard to discover either the application or what compromises could be made. Eventually a meeting was organised with the end user , not the intermediate client , who said “ if I’d got my way they’d have made it out of plastic” , it’s an anti rattle cage for navy pcbs!

So what had clearly happenned was the drawings , manufacturing method and tolerances had been decided by someone with a lot of CAD system experience who had spent no time in a tool room or metalworking , leaving default tolerances and had no concept of the problems he caused. And secrecy prevented the obvious conclusion!
CAD use needs experience too. That’s how military wastes a fortune!

As regards your position, doctors are forced to use a standard procedure and decision tree as a line of safety against liability. So I suspect doctors will become AI shortly!

 

[Mountainmike]

Wow , that takes me back.

Turns out the oscilloscope article is still online from mar 65!

https://worldradiohistory.com/UK/Practical-Electronics/60s/Practical-Electronics-1965-03.pdf

The valves were some of the most common. used in a lot of radios and amps.
A few years on I bought a very beaten up valve guitar amp. Used similar valves!

 

[The Barbarian]

I just wanted to know how things worked. When I found out that it was possible to investigate and learn by a rather simple process, I was hooked.

I was kind of a trial for my dad after that. Much later, he laughed about some of it, but it wasn't so funny to him when I was doing it.

 

[Mountainmike]

I just wanted to know how things worked. When I found out that it was possible to investigate and learn by a rather simple process, I was hooked.

I was kind of a trial for my dad after that. Much later, he laughed about some of it, but it wasn't so funny to him when I was doing it.

I guess I was lucky. My dad was a languages guy, but very supportive of my science obsession!

Though I managed to fill the dining room with billowing clouds of purple iodine smoke once. He wasn’t so impressed that day! Those were the days you could buy chemicals from shops , and they even had mouth pippettes . A different safety world!

 

[The Barbarian]

Though I managed to fill the dining room with billowing clouds of purple iodine smoke once.

Trying to make nitrogen triiodide? If all went well, you got an alcohol solution of triiodide that when painted on locker handles, would go off with a sharp pop and a purple cloud. More or less harmless in small amounts.

 

[SelfSim]

I got into the residue left behind after burning the matchbox striker material (white phosphorus).

When a couple of fingers were dipped into it and rubbed together, puffs of white smoke emerged from the fingertips.
(Apparently they also glow in the dark .. but I never conducted this mad experiment in the dark!)

Tell ya .. the smell it gave off was enough to make one spontaneously throw up!!