Today I Learned

[S.G. Janssens]

The reason is that I wasn't able to manage discipline and kids were running wild. I don't deny it, of course it is true. But the manager could at least have the decency to tell me about that.

I'm sorry to hear that. (Not that the children were running wild, but that you were sacked in such a way.) From some of your other posts I got the impression you are a kind person, maybe the children took advantage of that. In any case, good luck finding something new soon!

 

[Sophia]

Fortunately, I have other work too, making me 75% employed, so this isn't so bad. This kindergarten thing was just part time. I am not even a teacher by profession. That's why I got these problems with managing the kids. I'm just too soft. But the whole situation and manager's behaviour is kind of a shock.
Of course I am going to discuss this, even calling the authorities because there were some illegal things going on. I still wasn't paid for last 2 months. I demanded payment even before I discovered that I am fired but she told me she is in a hospital giving birth to a baby. She was really pregnant but that doesn't explain no money for November. I won't let it be. If I don't get the money next week they'll get a visit from some officials and they won't like it.

 

[Boolean Boogey]

I learned that my new jeep wrangler with small MT tires can handle insane hills and mud.

I love my job sometimes

 

[Sophia]

Crazy modern marketing art http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35320373

 

[Hornbein]

Crazy modern marketing art http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35320373

In Seminyak, Bali there's a wedding altar inside the shape of a cut diamond.

It sort of reminded me of a Star Trek space shuttle launch pad. I felt it would be way too hot inside.

But if that floats your boat, it's available. Beats the slipper, if you ask me.

 

[Sophia]

I like the diamond better, too. The slipper is too vulgar for my taste.

 

[Boolean Boogey]

I find diamonds to be vulgar. I love the idea, but I don't care for the slipper or diamond designs.

 

[OCR]

... a Star Trek space shuttle launch pad.

Lol... not even close...

 

[fresh_42]

That's why I got these problems with managing the kids. I'm just too soft.

Big, big BS. It is ok to let children run wild as you expressed it. To discipline them at this age is wrong, although widely spread.
However, it does not excuse your boss from being such an ... that he didn't tell it personally.

 

[Hornbein]

Lol... not even close...

It's a solar power concentrator. They found out that subspace drive coarsened the granularity of the Klein-Gordon field, creating long-lasting chronosynclastic infibulae. So Starfleet Command went to solar power.

 

[OCR]

So Starfleet Command went to solar power.

Dammit ... I'm always the last one to get informed! ... And they knew I'd found a work around for that...

They found out that subspace drive coarsened the granularity of the Klein-Gordon field, creating long-lasting chronosynclastic infibulae.

 

[fresh_42]

Dammit ... I'm always the last one to get informed! ...

Keep your ears open and your eyes on the mark. (Rules of Acquisition #7)

 

[OCR]

(Rules of Acquisition #7)

Lol...

 

[Sophia]

I find diamonds to be vulgar. I love the idea, but I don't care for the slipper or diamond designs.

For me building churches of such shapes is an oxymoron.
A slipper or diamond shaped church is like a hamburger shaped gym.

 

[Hornbein]

For me building churches of such shapes is an oxymoron.
A slipper or diamond shaped church is like a hamburger shaped gym.

They aren't churches, they are wedding chapels.

In Bali weddings are presided over by a priest but never take place in the temples.

 

[fresh_42]

In Bali weddings are presided over by a priest but never take place in the temples.

Seems they know why. Very cautious people.

 

[Hornbein]

According to Wikipedia, Alexander Graham Bell mistranslated a paper that had been written in German by Hermann von Helmholtz. This misunderstanding led Bell to the invention of the telephone.

 

[zoobyshoe]

According to Wikipedia, Alexander Graham Bell mistranslated a paper that had been written in German by Hermann von Helmholtz. This misunderstanding led Bell to the invention of the telephone.

Mysteries at the Museum has a segment on Antonio Meucci, who is considered one of the leading contenders for having invented the telephone before Bell. The story they tell, is that Meucci personally submitted the telephone to some engineering firm (or something) but, since he could hardly speak English, he wasn't able to make clear what it was for. He gave them a working model to examine, but they shelved it and forgot about it. However, it turns out young Alexander Graham Bell was an employee of that firm.

Unfortunately, the same story is not repeated either in the wiki on Bell or in the one on Meucci. The implication is that Bell actually plagiarized the invention wholesale from this obscure inventor. I'd like to find the original source of the story.

 

[fresh_42]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Philipp_Reis

 

[zoobyshoe]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Philipp_Reis

I have the impression that, when there's no money being disputed, the actual history probably gets sorted out. Tesla conceded that another inventor had probably beat him by a couple years in inventing the induction motor. However, the other guy was not trying to claim any of Tesla's earnings from it, and also was not claiming Tesla stole the idea. Additionally, Faraday conceded that an American inventor had demonstrated mutual inductance before he did. Here, again, though, there was no money at stake. These big invention disputes seem only to arise when the winner stands to make a lot of money.

 

[jim hardy]

Every time a man puts a new idea across he finds ten men who thought of it before he did -- but they only thought of it.
-- Anon.

it's men of action who make the world go...

 

[fresh_42]

it's men of action who make the world go...

The odds of fundraising and/or political connections might play a role as well.

 

[Trinity777]

Today I learned that a medical specialist will spend less than 10 minutes in the examination room with me. I also learned that after three minutes they start typing on the computer even if I am still talking. I did not learn if they can actually multitask.

Love the multi tasking observation, as in can they or not. Hilarious!

 

[zoobyshoe]

Every time a man puts a new idea across he finds ten men who thought of it before he did -- but they only thought of it.
-- Anon.

Yeah, I was saying this exact same thing years before Anon was born.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Today I learned that the accident at Three Mile Island was due, in part, to a valve that was stuck open. The operators had no idea it was stuck open because they had an indicator light that they believed told them when it was open or closed. In fact, the indicator light only registered whether there was current or not to the solenoid that operated the valve. It did not occur to anyone until the next shift came on, that the solenoid could be energized without the valve having been closed by it, which, unfortunately, is exactly what had happened.

It was already known that these valves could get stuck open:

The Government Affairs Vice President confirmed that the Metropolitan Edison Company, which operated the company, had shortly before received a warning from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) that Babcock & Wilcox reactor valves were vulnerable to failure under certain conditions. He said he had sent it on to the Vice President of Engineering, who confirmed that he had read it. Shortly after that, the two men met at the water cooler where the Government Affairs VP asked the Engineering VP a question. The Government Affairs VP remembered the question as "Is there a problem here?" The Engineering VP thought the question was "Have you solved the problem?" Both VPs agreed that the answer was "no." One walked away believing that the problem was solved. The other believed that he had informed his bosses that there was a problem.

-Wiki

 

[jim hardy]

The operators had no idea it was stuck open because they had an indicator light that they believed told them when it was open or closed.

I remember that morning well - it was really unnerving to hear of a plant in such trouble...
Soooo many confusing symptoms for those guys...
There's a temperature sensor downstream of that valve whose purpose is to detect hot fluid leaking past the valve.

The operators had not been trained to understand the ambiguous nature of the pilot-operated relief valve indicator and to look for alternative confirmation that the main relief valve was closed. There was a temperature indicator downstream of the pilot-operated relief valve in the tail pipe between the pilot-operated relief valve and the pressurizer that could have told them the valve was stuck open, by showing that the temperature in the tail pipe remained higher than it should have been had the pilot-operated relief valve been shut. This temperature indicator, however, was not part of the "safety grade" suite of indicators designed to be used after an incident, and the operators had not been trained to use it. Its location on the back of the desk also meant that it was effectively out of sight of the operators.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident

You'd think, releasing 2250 psi/650 degree steam through the valve, it'd get pretty hot in the tailpipe downstream of the valve.
But steam cools when it throttles.
So with tailpipe temperature gauge showing not very hot it looked as if there wasn't flow,

which agreed with the valve's indicator light !


That's because of the the enthalpy curve for steam...
http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/saturated-steam-properties-d_273.html
at 2250psi/650 degrees it's ~1114
at 15psi/250 degrees it's more , ~1164
so throttling 2250psi/650 degF steam to 15 psi you get a steam-water mix at ~250 degf

That modest temperature in the tailpipe wasn't thought unusual.

http://www.osti.gov/scitech/servlets/purl/5982361

Soooo many lessons were learned from that accident.

 

[Ibix]

So - communication failure by the VPs, failure to understand that the downstream sensor wouldn't respond as strongly to a valve failure as expected, a valve failure, user interface design failure and operator failure to put the signs together until shift change. Murphy was on top of his game that day, wasn't he?

 

[jim hardy]

Murphy was on top of his game that day, wasn't he?

There's a fascinating book i read over fifty years ago "Fate is the Hunter" by Ernest Gann.
He was a legendary airline pilot. The book is autobiographical . His investigations of airplane crashes point out that disasters always result from little insignificant things lining up like dominoes until some little something sets off a chain reaction. I believe that's how the small things of the Earth confound the mighty...

Murphy is an optimist. That's why a nuke plant is a good career for an OCD perfectionist .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fate_Is_the_Hunter
it's still a good read

 

[mfb]

So - communication failure by the VPs, failure to understand that the downstream sensor wouldn't respond as strongly to a valve failure as expected, a valve failure, user interface design failure and operator failure to put the signs together until shift change. Murphy was on top of his game that day, wasn't he?

If one of those components would have been missing, we wouldn't have heard of it.

Anyway, 14 µSv additional dose on average - about the natural radiation everyone receives in two days, or the additional dose received from one hour of airplane flight.
Even if you add Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents and the normal operation, nuclear power leads to lower radiation doses released than coal power plants during normal operation.

 

[fresh_42]

Today I learned that the accident at Three Mile Island ...

Shortly after I've seen a graffiti in a subway station here: "Chernobyl - Harrisburg 1:1"

 

[Ibix]

If one of those components would have been missing, we wouldn't have heard of it.

Indeed. I wasn't being down on them for failing to catch it (well, maybe the hidden warning light deserves a bit of a facepalm). One can always go back over any chain of events and find a point when someone could have averted the end, and I cannot claim any moral high ground here. It's just how bad their luck had to be to have so many opportunities go the wrong way.

It'd be interesting to know how many times they've added a page to The Book because of a situation like this that they caught versus the number of times they didn't catch it.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Indeed. I wasn't being down on them for failing to catch it (well, maybe the hidden warning light deserves a bit of a facepalm). One can always go back over any chain of events and find a point when someone could have averted the end, and I cannot claim any moral high ground here. It's just how bad their luck had to be to have so many opportunities go the wrong way.

It'd be interesting to know how many times they've added a page to The Book because of a situation like this that they caught versus the number of times they didn't catch it.

In the section called "lessons learned" they introduce Charles Perrows concept of Normal Accident Theory. Clicking on that leads to an article entitled System Accident:

In a December 2012 article in a popular magazine, Charles Perrow writes, "A normal accident is where everyone tries very hard to play safe, but unexpected interaction of two or more failures (because of interactive complexity), causes a cascade of failures (because of tight coupling)."[3]

There is an aspect of an animal devouring its own tail, in that more formality and effort to get it exactly right can make the situation worse.[4] For example, the more organizational rigmarole involved in adjusting to changing conditions, the more employees will delay in reporting the changing conditions, and the more emphasis on formality, the less likely employees and managers will engage in real communication. New rules can actually make the situation worse, both by adding a new additional layer of complexity and by reminding employees yet again that they are not to think but are just to follow the rules.

Indeed, the trigger of the accident at Chernobyl was a scheduled test to determine if a safety feature was working.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Soooo many lessons were learned from that accident.

I'm sure. The problem is that the next big accident, Chernobyl, arose from a completely different "perfect storm" of minor glitches, and Fukushima was triggered by forces completely out of human hands.

Nuclear power plants are just one example of a complex system that's vulnerable to it's own complexity. The example that's really through the roof is the DoD budget:
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/the-pentagons-doctored-ledgers-conceal-epic-waste.727651/
If you read the (unfortunately very long) article Greg linked to, you may come to the conclusion I did, which is that the problem there is completely unfixable.

 

[fresh_42]

What makes me angry about nuclear power plants is, that if you start to completely calculate total costs, i.e. costs for their wastes included, they immediately stop to deliver cheap energy. It's somehow unfair that profits go to the share holders and costs to the community. Am I the only one who sees this?

 

[zoobyshoe]

Even if you add Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents and the normal operation, nuclear power leads to lower radiation doses released than coal power plants during normal operation.

I've never looked into radiation released by coal power plants, but, correct me if I'm wrong, I would assume the radiation they release is very much more spread out, and that the problem with nuclear accidents is how concentrated the released radiation is.