Re: OT: EV Charging Stations Stripped of Copper Cables

On Sun, 7 Jul 2024 16:58:54 -0000 (UTC), Cursitor Doom
<cd999666@notformail.com> wrote:

On Sun, 7 Jul 2024 14:31:07 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>

On 07/07/2024 14:06, john larkin wrote:

We agree that scientists present us with wonderful problems to
instrument but are generally terrible at designing electronics
themselves.

 
This supposed dichotomy between academic and pragmatic knowledge is
false.
Both are necessary Example 1.
=======
We were developing a laser rangefinder for the Army, featuring fragile
optics a ruby laser and a bloody expensive silicon photodiode.
Try as we might we couldnt get  more than just over a mile range from
the lab roof to a white painted building about a mile away.
One day a boffin with a tweed jacket and pipe came visiting, we
explained our problem.
"How much power is the laser?"
"EWhat is te noise figure on the photodiode"?
"I'll see whats what over lunch"
 
 
He came back later and sid - "Oh, well its not good news I am afraid,
with that much power and that much front end noise you will  be lucky to
get a mile put of that with a nice reflective target"
So we gave up, drained all the money out that projects budget and
cancelled it.
 
Example 2 ======
 
I was tasked with designing amongst other things a FM Hifi receiver. To
save time we imported a Japanese tuner head and I built the  IF strip
and detector.
The customer was however German, and totally chauvinistic. No Japanese
quality. We must have German  or at least European, So we got a Philips
head.
At once we had massive hiss and hum.  I didn't have time to track it
diown so a consultant was briught on who spent a fortnight calculating
the noise contribution of my IF strop and said 'well it doesn't seem to
be that'
'I could have saved to two weeks of calculation'
'How so'
'Just pull the tuner out, put in a 10.7MHz signal into theh IF strip and
look! No fucking noise'
 
(It turned out that wunderbar German tuner head was a pile of crap.
They had used a zener diode to stabilize the  VCO without seeming to
understand that a zener is an ideal noise source, and they had used
ferrite slugs in the VCO which make marvellous detectors of magnetic
fields. Germans are shit engineers. They make up for it by testing and
fiddling till stuff works. A nation of technicians)

>
On a visit to the UK some years ago I went to the Science Museum in
Kensington (or wherever it is). They had a Spitfire and a Messerschmit on
one of the floors and each had cut-away engines. The Spitfire engine was
of course a Rolls-Royce Merlin and the quality of the engineering was
staggering. You didn't have to be an engineer to appreciate it.
Beautifully polished components shining like mirrors. How the hell they
produced workmanship like that in the middle of a major war is beyond me.
It was superhuman. The German plane's engine was a pile of garbage in
comparison; very crudely thrown together with poorly machined parts.
Still, it did fair job I suppose, even though it couldn't match the
performance of the Spitfire in the air.

Some Nazi bigwig saw a Merlin engine and announced that they would
lose the war.