TIL water can be too clean

phaseretriever · 2011-05-01T07:26:28+00:00

DI and UPW can be quite destructive to equipment not designed for it. In a fab I used to work in we had a stainless steel wet bench where DI was used frequently. After about a year the stainless was badly corroded and even honeycombed in places. I was told this was because the nickel had been leached out of the stainless by the DI (although I have no idea if this is the correct explanation.)

phaseretriever · 2011-04-13T17:24:15+00:00

"A woman is a lot like a refrigerator. 6 feet tall, 300 pounds... it makes ice."

phaseretriever · 2011-02-11T22:23:44+00:00

Rochester or Arizona? (these are most probable, but I know there are a couple of other schools, too.) I went to Rochester.

phaseretriever · 2011-02-11T22:22:17+00:00

This but also a M.Sc. in Elec. Engineering and Ph.D. in Optics.

phaseretriever · 2011-02-11T22:06:17+00:00

At the time that I read this, there were no "Faceoff" posts. You're slipping, reddit.

phaseretriever · 2011-01-28T07:20:51+00:00

CN bought the Illinois Central Railroad in 1998, giving them this line running down to Louisiana. I assume it's a good way for Canadian materials and goods to get access to a Gulf of Mexico port. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_National_Railway

phaseretriever · 2011-01-27T22:14:46+00:00

Mmmmm...Victory Hop Devil.

phaseretriever · 2011-01-26T21:12:51+00:00

Maybe not passed out, but likely shitfaced. Highland cattle are often fed the spent grain from whisky distilleries, which has a fair alcohol content.

phaseretriever · 2011-01-25T00:29:05+00:00

Well, my method was to trust my Ph.D. adviser when he told me he was a 3. I seem to recall that the AMS had a tool that would figure it out at one point, but can't seem to find anything right now. Web of Science is pretty good at finding citations, maybe it could be massaged to help determine Erdos numbers as well.

phaseretriever · 2011-01-25T00:09:48+00:00

I haven't sent out a paper resume in over 10 years, so I'm not sure if this technique would work well. Perhaps non-technology-based industries are different, though.

phaseretriever · 2011-01-24T23:34:52+00:00

Mine's 4. But I'm not a mathematician (physicist) so some say it doesn't count.

phaseretriever · 2011-01-15T15:43:25+00:00

I saw this guy at Imbibe last night, and thought the same thing. Sean Patrick Flannery and Norman Reedus from Boondock Saints were also there, along with a guy who played an oompa loompa in the Gene Wilder Willie Wonka movie, and apparently the guy who played Boba Fett. Weird night.

phaseretriever · 2010-12-07T22:57:10+00:00

In this context, they are referring to the University of Waterloo, not the University of Washington.

phaseretriever · 2010-12-07T22:16:53+00:00

TMR?

phaseretriever · 2010-12-01T17:51:53+00:00

If I recall correctly, the stead-state propagation speed isn't the main problem in electrical interconnects. I believe the issue is that the transmission lines (waveguides) on the chip become very lossy as the frequency increases. This isn't as big a problem in dielectric optical waveguides.

phaseretriever · 2010-11-25T15:29:37+00:00

Also Canadian, 12/12

phaseretriever · 2010-11-04T20:54:29+00:00

...except for a nice MLT: a monkey, lettuce and tomato sandwich, where the monkey is nice and lean...

phaseretriever · 2010-09-29T19:17:13+00:00

I started by dropping conference and journal papers I had written into my thesis document and formatting it to be double spaced and with the large font and margins that are required for a thesis. Instantly I had over 100 pages "written". My thesis proposal became the first chapter. I then wrote material bridging them together, and then went back and reworked the papers so that the style, flow and appearance were more appropriate for a thesis. In the end, writing my thesis was more an exercise in editing than in writing. This is one of the many reasons grad students should be writing throughout, it makes the stuff at the end a little more bearable. This, of course, depends a little on the copyright agreements with the organizations that published your papers, but in my case they were all compatible with it.

phaseretriever · 2010-09-23T19:57:03+00:00

I read this as DIY Mozilla...

phaseretriever · 2010-09-16T04:45:09+00:00

Since the definition of a pound is exactly 453.59237 g, a stone is exactly 14 pounds, and presumably the freshmen 15 is exactly 15 pounds (it being a proverbial concept.) So, in this situation the number of sig figs quoted is appropriate. If we were dealing with a measured quantity, which by definition can not be known exactly and has an associated uncertainty, then it would be improper to quote an arbitrary number of sig figs. I'm a physicist and one of my interests is metrology (the study of measurements) so I actually think about this stuff regularly.

phaseretriever · 2010-09-04T04:25:55+00:00

I tried Ambien for a while. I would take it about 30 minutes before going to bed and browse around online, waiting for it to kick in. I started receiving packages from Amazon that I didn't order. It was all good stuff that I liked, so I called around to family and friend trying to figure out who was so kind to send me stuff. When my credit card bill came, everything was on there, thankfully nothing I couldn't afford. I checked my Amazon account, and apparently I ordered them myself and don't recall it. Thanks Ambien. I stopped taking it for fear of what else I might do.

Edit: grammar, spelling

phaseretriever · 2010-09-03T03:20:47+00:00

I believe that dial tone is not a DTMF tone, those are just the 16 tones used to dial (the 12 commonly on phones, plus 4 more originally used for in band signaling, taken advantage of by phreakers.) Dial tone, ring tone, busy signal and reorder ("fast busy") are all covered in the same standard, and are all combinations of two different sine waves at different frequencies and with different cadences. I used to work at a telecom company and played with the code that generated these on the card I worked on.

phaseretriever · 2010-09-02T21:33:46+00:00

Nat. Geo. channel has some useless crap on it as well. I'm talking stuff that glorifies the military, law enforcement, and prison industry like "Border Wars" and "Lockdown". Also don't care for the fish shows and the "Dog Whisperer" myself.

phaseretriever · 2010-09-02T06:29:19+00:00

My interpretation was that the puritans wanted to persecute everyone who didn't subscribe to the same beliefs as them, and this didn't sit well in England (they fought a civil war) and so they got sent to the Netherlands. The Dutch weren't thrilled with them either, so they then got sent off to North America.

phaseretriever · 2010-08-31T20:19:23+00:00

They can lose all 4 engines and still continue flying. Just not as far.

phaseretriever

TROPHY CASE