Where is the "+1 - Fucking Frightening" mod when you need it?

Disclaimer: IAAEM (I Am An Electron Microscopist). Or so it says on my business card.

The used market for SEM's and TEM's makes hobbyist ownership very possible. The instruments from the mid-90's were computer integrated, sure, running NT and later XP, but most of the manufacturers still had a 1970's mentality. Meaning: the instruments shipped with several dozen pounds of paper manuals, troubleshooting guides, full schematics, the boards were though-hole, etc.... These are very capable machines even nowadays, and if you're willing to put some time into one, most notably the vacuum systems, home ownership is really not outrageous. Almost all are 240v / 30A /1ph power, so no special phase conversion or odd voltages needed. They don't run dangerous gasses/oils; compressed nitrogen, cold water, and compressed air are about it, and you don't strictly need the nitrogen most of the time. Sure, some of the big TEM's need things like SF6 as a shielding gas, but those instruments are few and far between.

The cost is the crazy part. A SEM that's 500k USD new will go for 15k on eBay, still in working condition when the university/corporate entity sells it off. There just is no used market. When a local university sold their SEM off, it sold for 100 USD. That's not a typo. It went to a scrapyard as they figured it had some exotic metals in it that would be worth something. It was in working condition.

It is a nickname for the Boeing B-52, yes.
 
....if you were in public, it stands for Big Friendly Fellow.
 
....if you were not in public, it stands for Big Fat Fucker. :)

"As mentioned in posts below, nickel iron batteries can handle many thousands of cycles, and have the advantage of not using heavy metals."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://rarediseases.org/rare-...

Nickel is "better" than lead, but it's no angel.

This is Harley Davidson. They'll likely screw it up....

Average age of Harley Buyer? 47.
Average yearly income: 100k USD

They have tried for years to capture the younger market, bringing "cheap" bikes like the 883 to the market. Get the riders when they're young, that way when they make real money, they'll have the 25-35k to buy the classic Big Harleys. Didn't work out that well.

They fucked up big time buying Buell. Here they bought what was, at the time, one of the most wildy innovative motorcycle companies in business, nevermind that it was American, had a great starter line of bikes, amazing race bikes, and a rabid younger fan base. They bought it, then killed it. Extend, embrace, extinguish. Sound familiar? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Harley lost its way a long time ago when they pivoted from being a motorcycle company into being a Lifestyle Company. They did ok the last decade because with rising incomes, their core demographic was buying. Now they have real competition from Indian Motorcycles at the same price points for the same customers.

The LiveWire failed for all the reasons outlined earlier. Too expensive, too slow, too slow to charge. Spinning the new Brand off is an attempt to separate it from HD to gain the youth market while retaining the cash flow to the mothership. That, too, will likely fail.

Harley has been though a lot in their 100+ year history. They survived ownership by AMF (yes, the bowling pin company); they'll survive this time too, albeit in a different form.

Aside: someone asked why it mattered that the LiveWire was slow, as 95mph was well illegal. On a motorcycle, like a car, you have three options when you're in trouble: brake, swerve, accellerate. One of the first two is usually the right answer, but having the power to get out of trouble quickly, especially at highway speeds, matters. It's not something that tends to work as well with cars due to size/momentum constraints. Matters on a bike a lot more.

"...in that you cannot disable"

Let me correct you: "....in that you cannot easily disable"

Soldering iron, faraday cage, grounding the antenna, whatever. If it's RF, there's always a way to block it.

Not exactly.

The tsunami flooded the basement levels of the reactor buildings, which housed the emergency generators and switchgear. The pumps, for the most part, stayed dry, as they were higher in the building. But with no power from the generators and the busses under water, the pumps were paperweights.

They took a gamble with the height of the seawall, despite well-documented cases where that wall would be overrrun. The one reactor that survived did so because it was slightly higher in elevation than the others.

New Jersey (USA) ran into this exact problem after Hurricane Sandy in 2011.

We had mass gas shortages in North Jersey due to the grid being down. The gas stations had plenty of gas, but no generators to get the pumps running to get it out of the ground. Oddly, in a fit of intelligence, the state passed a law in the months afterward stating that all new gas stations (and old ones undergoing renovation) must have on-site generators fueled by either the gasoline or diesel sitting in the ground at that site. Since then, we haven't had a storm that caused a widespread outage like Sandy did, but from the number of stations that I've been to have have shiny generators sitting next to the building, that particular problem is fixed.

I considered this right before I installed our natural gas fired generator. In a nutshell: https://www.gti.energy/wp-cont...

Averaged across the United States, NG service is the most reliable public utility. We lost power 3-4 times a year in the 15 years I was in that home in the New Jersey (USA) suburbs. We lost gas service once, and it was such an edge case as to be impossible to predict. Even with that, it was a small outage of ~400 homes. So, yes, for a backup generator for home use, NG is a great way to go in most cases. Though you'd have to prepare for it beforehand, you can also run almost all NG generators off of propane, so it's possible to run them off of a pair of 100lb cylinders (the largest you can hand-transport and fill) for a while. Assuming, of course, the propane fill station has power to fill the tanks. It does turn into a cascade.

Commercial is a different story, as NFPA has rules about on-site fuel storage just for the reason that happened in Texas. That's part of why you see the big diesels at those facilities.

Not the Verrazanno. You're thinking of the Tacoma Narrows:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

1. I attended an American engineering school that had an Honor Code. Not West Point, certainly. We all knew the code; it was a pledge that we made in writing in the first week of Freshman year, and it was written on the last page of most exams. We had to sign it with our full name each time, too. Now....as a freshman, we treated it with the kind of disdain that you'd expect most 18 year olds to treat it with. Most 18 year olds have no idea what honor is yet, even those at West Point. It's something your learn, not something you're born with. That pledge didn't mean much to the group of dipshits hat I was in school with, until we saw people caught for cheating and their own signature became their poison. Some took the failed classes, learned, and moved on. Some left the school. Point is that seeing freshman caught for this is the only ones who would be caught for this. By the time you're a Junior (YMMV) in that kind of environment, you start to understand what honor is.
 
This is all my opinion, of course, arguable 100 ways. It was my experience with it. I didn't graduate from that school, either. Too dumb to make it.

2. What was the mistake? It had to be something obvious enough for the professor to catch, but not obvious enough for the students who at least had some grasp of the material to miss it.

And this is why I still come to slashdot.

It's not what it used to be, but every now and then, it is.

Kudos.

Wally, is that you?

"Made some drug company or ETF index rich"

Your bias was showing loud and proud before you added this. You didn't need to say it.

Do. Your. Fucking. Homework.
Vaccines aren't big moneymaker for the pharmaceutical industry. Hell, the government had to subsidize MMR2 vaccination to keep the production lines running because it was losing money for a while. Vaccines are bragging rights for who pulls it off, a lot of knowledge gained that becomes the basis for other vaccines, but a big money maker? Nope.