Honesty I know a bunch of people who are burntout climbers and burntout geologists - sounds like a blast. Fun mineralogy with climbing that’s not…super exotic but still fun? I’d pay for it.
No, good thermal management with a chiller, active thermal compensation, and glass scales make um precision on that scale reasonable. 10-100x better? Sure, you’re getting into machines where the room to keep them happy is significantly more expensive that the machine…
Ok but my neighborhood children have started using electric leaf blowers as jet propulsion on skateboards. I have insisted they use hearing protection, but the rest of us are shit out of luck…
It’s fun seeing an uptick of rhino/grasshopper content here lately - two articles in a week?! The McNeel extended universe is a fun place to play around in, and I’ve met lots of great people since I started working on Rhino.
You've got the heat cycles for annealing, hardening, and tempering confused. The slow cooling is for annealing, hardening requires a fast cool from rather hot and is a very different process from tempering, which is a short soak at a comparatively low but tightly controlled temperature.
It doesn't really detect stringing together latinate nonsense, so all of my coinages got perfectly coherent definitions. On the flip side, I guess if you're erudite and willing to butcher other languages for sport, nothing has ever stopped you from making up perfectly quasiaryiumaryesque words.
I'm not running the show, but I am working at a place that does this. One time fee for a perpetual license for the current major version, free support, and historically ~6 years of updates per version.
Users tend to be quite happy about it, and we're profitable enough to pay comfortable salaries and have...a lot...of runway.
Of course, this model is possible because there was never any outside investment.
Turns out you can take out a driver side mirror by putting most of your weight on it and bouncing a few times. But that's reserved for drivers that have made contact with me...
If we're "unbundling"/giving into "free market" nonsense in a highly regulated area, I just want to be able to pay reasonably proportional fee for musical instruments and get a guarantee that they'll be carry-ons, and not destroyed in the cargo hold. My only other alternatives are buying first class tickets or flirting with the gate agent (...works remarkably well...).
I was using it to build a dilatometer - an instrument for measuring thermal expansion curves of materials. Theoretically simple, in that you take a sample of something and measure how long it is while sweeping the temperature around. In practice, you need very stable ~um measurements and lots of care to make sure all other length changes around the sample cancel.
In the real-world, they're often used for precision gauging for in-process metrology.
LVDTs are fun! I bought one for a project a few years ago (since abandoned), and have been slowly designing my own readout electronics for them. Three revisions later, and the performance is very good - to the point that I've bought more increasingly precise measurement gear to benchmark how it's performing. Currently, I'm testing it against some good glass scale linear encoders, and a capacitive gauge with a single-digit nm noise floor.
As a consequence of the aging members, a lot of churches (particularly the less virulent mainstream protestant flavor) around here are merging congregations and getting demolished, to be replaced with more apartment buildings. Sometimes the parishioners will fight the good fight and get concessions made for affordable housing or other social goods.
Don't worry, if you don't know what BIM is, you don't need BIM and you should be thankful about your previous life choices. Weirdly, no one in BIM really seems to agree on what BIM actually is either.
"Droplet superpropulsion in an energetically constrained insect"(https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36376-5 ) is a great paper from the same authors - I came across it last year when I was deep in a project involving droplet manipulation on superhydrophobic surfaces. Nature is wild!
I second this; this is super bad advice. CO2 systems are comparatively safe from an eye damage perspective - unless you take a direct hit, (...don't, seriously, that's what interlocks are for...), 10.6um is strongly absorbed by your eye and you'll get superficial thermal damage, maybe cataracts or a corneal burn, but it won't get focused on to your retina so serious vision loss is unlikely. Polycarbonate safety glasses have a crazy high optical density at 10.6 and are suitable protective eyewear.
The situation for visible diode lasers is much worse. Sure, the power tends to be lower, but they're still powerful enough that looking at a diffuse reflection will result in dangerous power densities on your retina. Unfortunately, the brain is really good at hiding this sort of damage, so it's possible to not notice until it's too late.
1.064um fiber lasers are the worst of both worlds. Very high powers, invisible so you have no idea how much stray light is getting out or if you're staring at a reflection, and expensive + hard to verify safety glasses.
I like doing things with high power lasers (next up for the collection is probably a 355nm ns system?), but am glad that I had to take a lot of laser safety training before I bough my first big laser source.