Stub 5.2: Contaminated Product

Nick Spada was not comfortable talking to the sketchy guy in the park. It all seemed too much like spy-vs-spy.

“The information you are asking for is expensive.” The man said. “And managing it as a project is even more expensive. Are you sure you have the bank-roll to swing it?”

“I am sure.” Spada said.

Marie Spirochete had given him the rough edge of her tongue when he reported his findings. He had reported that contamination was what kept everybody in the pharmaceutical industry awake at night. He told her about a simple incident with a burst filter that had shut down the factory for 72 hours and cost nearly seventy million Callors.

He expected to be patted on the head and given direction to dirty-up Azrael’s factories.

The ‘tune-up’ Spada was on the receiving end of convinced him that Aestral was to be thoroughly destroyed, not just inconvenienced or beaten into poverty.

The man’s proposal was simple. Contaminate Azrael products. Create evidence that suggested that Azrael had knowingly been shipping contaminated product for years. Ensure that the contaminated products killed dozens of high-profile people and then connect the dots so investigators could not help but track it back to Azrael’s facilities.

Next Installment

Basic blocking and tackling, electric fences

Sixteen seconds.  Testing an electric fence with a weed cutter.

One of the best electricians I ever worked with is named Javier.

We had a spot weld gun that had a top-end of 15.5 thousand amps.  Since the weld schedule started at 13 thousand amps and we added one amp for every weld to account for cap wear, the gun ran into problems after two or three thousand welds.

The issue is that the transformer ran into saturation problems.  That means that when the controller modified the input to ask for one more amp, the output was less than the "requested" additional amp.

In point of fact, any weld engineer who has a system where the "degrade" mode is to run on the stepper is never comfortable unless the "top end" is 2X the base amperage.

Since these guns were asked to make 12-to-15 welds per job and we made over five hundred jobs per shift, you can see we had a problem.

One way to squeeze more capability out of your weld gun is to "double jumper" it.  That is, where the design calls for one jumper (a REALLY thick wire) you install two.  Jumpers are cheap.  That is what we decided to try.

Javier and his crew worked third shift.  They had just enough time to do the work.  They checked their work and the current meter told them they had bumped the gun from 15.5 thousand amps to 32 thousand amps for a 100% shot.  They high-fived and started production at 5:30 in the morning.

Two hours later the weld checker wandered over and checked his first job of the day and there were no welds!  What happened?

If you think of a weld gun in the simplest possible terms, it is your thumb and index finger pinching together.  In their haste, Javier and his crew had run both sides of the transformer to the same finger.  There was NO current passing through the metal that was to be welded.  The current went up through the double jumpers on one side and down through the double jumpers on the other.

The electricians had checked their work but they made the mistake of putting the current meter around the jumpers and not the arm of the weld gun.

Electric fences
I installed the lightning choke and air-gap device.

I replaced the main feed to the fence.  The original feed was 17 gauge (0.95 sq-mm) steel with two splices.  I replaced it with a single run of 14 gauge (2.0 sq-mm).

Coat-hanger wrap connections were replaced with double cable clamp connections.

The final check was to turn on the fence and go to the nethermost reaches.  There, I took my Canadian Thistle weeder and I shorted across the hot wire and the woven wire fence behind it.

It made a satisfying "Snap!"

When they say to "Lubricate liberally"

Source

Blocking and Tackling

I had a boss in the mid 90s named Jim Zubkus.  Actually, he was the boss of the entire facility and I was about six levels lower in the organization.  That may sound like a lot of layers but you have to know that the facility employeed 17,000 people at the time.

Mr Zubkus was a member of the 1959 - 1961 University of Michigan football team.  He played defensive end.

One of Mr Zubkus's duties was to hold meetings that are akin to the coach's half time pep-talk. Sometimes it was to steady the team.  Sometimes to give them a pat on the back. Sometimes to kick ass. Usually, it was a mix of all three.

Invariably, the meeting would conclude with Mr Zubkus reminding us to focus on the basic "blocking and tackling" of our daily jobs.

I thought all "big bosses" spoke that way but I have rarely heard it since.

Blocking and tackling
Blocking and tackling is work!  It takes effort.

Blocking and tackling is not glamorous.

Blocking and tackling is not "creative".

Blocking and tackling are impact events.  They make your body hurt for days afterward.

Blocking and tackling must be done perfectly on every play.  Sloppy or "tired" blocking or tackling on one play has dire consequences.

Even though it is boring. Even though it hurts. Even though it rarely wins applause. Failure to block or failure to tackle likely means that the other team will score and that might be the balance of the game.

I suck at blocking and tackling
I suck at weeding my garden.

I suck at keeping vegetation off my electric fence wires.

I suck at maintaining things.

I have a lot of room for improvement.

Is there a link between acne treatments and teen obesity?

One of the beauties of blogging is that the writer can float highly speculative ideas and nobody takes them too seriously.

It occurred to me that one of the reasons that teenagers used to watch their diets back when stegosaurii roamed the earth was that everybody knew that greasy foods like chocolate and double-cheese pizza caused acne to break out.

There are now many effective treatments for adolescent acne, including maintenance doses of antibiotics and Isotretinoin.  These treatments are so popular that many patients, and their parents, gloss over the fact that some of them increase the risk of suicide by a factor of six.

It also means that teens can gorge on pizza and taquitos dipped in ranch dressing, and other fatty foods without the near-real-time feedback of their face breaking out.

Proving once again that it is not nice to fool Mother Nature.

Laying out an orchard

I laid out part of an orchard today.  The rows are 20 feet apart and the flags are 6 feet within the row.  That is about 360 trees to the acre.  A commercial orchard would run over 1000 trees/acre, typically planting 4' within the row and as tight row-to-row as their mowing equipment allows.

Then I sprayed glyphosate to kill the grass to prepare for early April planting.

An imaginary conversation between a Libertarian and a Statist

"How would you achieve your goals?" the Libertarian asked the Statist.

"That is simple.  We will have total control the parameters that are truly important." the Statist replied.

"And everything else?" the Liberatarian asked.

"Inconsequential." the Statist said said with a dismissive wave of the hand.

"You sound very sure." the Libertarian said.

"We have given this a great deal of thought and have total understanding of the issues." the Statist said smugly.

"That would mean, of course, that you have considered and dismissed every parameter that you chose to not, or cannot afford to control." the Libertarian said.

"Well, of course." the Statist agreed, puzzled.

"Would you mind sharing that?" the Libertarian asked.

"Sharing what?" the Statist asked.

"The list of everything 'else' in the universe that you are not controlling." the Libertarian said.  "The list of everything...you must have a list if you considered everything."

"That is clearly impossible." the Statist retorted.

"Then it is clearly impossible for you to 'have total understanding' and you are doomed to fail." the Libertarian replied serenely.