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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.

Very important habitat restoration for electric eels, actually.

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...).

This is a real worry? Don't you just not go to meetings but otherwise solemnly swear that you're working on the plane?

Machine shops actually used whale oil until quite late. Much better than equivalent petroleum products until the '50s or later.

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.

So many don't buy an LVDT, I guess.

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.