Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Neomys Sapiens]

thanks everyone ...

@Wolfgang Ultralight at Gießen Lützelinden last week end. He was the flight instructor. No idea yet what happened, most likely nasty error during take off and not high enough to launch the parachute. They are investigating, the trainee survived.

Suspected that one already. Adding my condolences.
Somehow it hits everywhere at the moment.

[mnementh]

It's also worth mentioning that there's a good reason for having one standard way to define how binary operators work...without a standard way of doing things almost nothing mathematical would make any sense.   

 

Jeezus... that's completely unrelated to the intent of that strip...  You're using it to support "That's the way it's always been done" logic.

Take that to it's logical conclusion; we should never have started using notation and powers, and we should have killed Brahmagupta lest his heresy poison the world with numbers you cannot SEE.   

mnem
 

[0culus]

It's also worth mentioning that there's a good reason for having one standard way to define how binary operators work...without a standard way of doing things almost nothing mathematical would make any sense.   

 

Jeezus... that's completely unrelated to the intent of that strip...  You're using it to support "That's the way it's always been done" logic.

Take that to it's logical conclusion; we should never have started using notation and powers, and we should have killed Brahmagupta lest his heresy poison the world with numbers you cannot SEE.   

mnem
 

WTF are you on about? That xkcd literally illustrates my point. There is a damn good reason there is a specific (mostly) agreed upon order of operations and associativity. Otherwise, we have 15 competing standards and no one knows what the hell is going on.   

[Cubdriver]

And thanks for prompting me to dig - these are probably from about 1978 or so.  I may have to play with the SLR and macro lens later...       

-Pat

Please do! I love your Macro photography! It puts my pathetic efforts with my old faithful DSC-H2 bench camera to shame; but I'd rather see the results than have my pride any day. 

mnem
 

Thank you for the compliment.  I haven't done much macro lately - may need to put the 100mm aside and break out the MP-E 65!  Haven't used that one in a looong while.

-Pat

[Cerebus]

just heard that a friend of mine died in a plane crash. Apparently stalled and went straight into the ground.
Bloody hell. I'm pissed. RIP Lutz.

That happened to a friend of mine, although technically it was a spin-stall. We were sad, but consoled ourselves with the thought that he died quickly doing something he enjoyed.

I want to "go out with my boots on", too.

My immediate thought on reading Saskia's post was to hope that this was the case (as opposed to being a mere passenger).

@Saskia Condolences.

[Kosmic]

just heard that a friend of mine died in a plane crash. Apparently stalled and went straight into the ground.
Bloody hell. I'm pissed. RIP Lutz.

My Condolences 

[Mr. Scram]

Applying logic is aa appropriate and useful as applying emotion.

If you want to change 400 years of maths, fine. But you will have difficulty convincing other people to change.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_operations
http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/58237.html

The point is that it's not a part of maths. It's a part of culture which is exactly why people fight holy wars over it. Maybe introducing that one thing which can't be constructed wasn't the best idea.   

[ArthurDent]

Looks as if Meds early experiments may have come home to roost, or of course maybe his obsession with blue has been spreading to others 

Indeed.  Some have even made a career from it.....

That's me on the left.

[Wolfgang]

thanks everyone ...

@Wolfgang Ultralight at Gießen Lützelinden last week end. He was the flight instructor. No idea yet what happened, most likely nasty error during take off and not high enough to launch the parachute. They are investigating, the trainee survived.

Suspected that one already. Adding my condolences.
Somehow it hits everywhere at the moment.

Thanks god I'm way to massive to fit in an ultralight. These parts really scare me, and when I see how many pilots die with them I feel really sad. I am not so sure
if the relaxed standards the state is asking for ultralight plane safety, construction, maintenance and whatnot is a good idea. It makes flying affordable to many, but the death toll is huge. Anyway, play safe !

[ArthurDent]

And thanks for prompting me to dig - these are probably from about 1978 or so.  I may have to play with the SLR and macro lens later...       

-Pat

Please do! I love your Macro photography! It puts my pathetic efforts with my old faithful DSC-H2 bench camera to shame; but I'd rather see the results than have my pride any day. 

mnem
 

Thank you for the compliment.  I haven't done much macro lately - may need to put the 100mm aside and break out the MP-E 65!  Haven't used that one in a looong while.

-Pat

I really like macro photography, especially nature or designs. Here's one of the innards of a watch that someone gave me.

[med6753]

In ref to the math debate....

I know if I have one item and if I buy an identical item I now have two. If I buy another identical item, three. One more, four. In my entire simple life this has served me well. I see absolutely no reason to say, start with 8...sell 2.....add 3 and then wonder how many I have.     

[cyclin_al]

So far I have selected (remember this is on a budget):

• AMD Ryzen 5 3600X 3.8 GHz 6-Core Processor (received)
• ASRock B450 Pro4 ATX AM4 Motherboard (only way I can find this is if I convince a buddy to buy it and reship to me)
• G.Skill Ripjaws V Series 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory (can only find the 32 GB version at the moment; forced upgrade  )
• Western Digital SN750 500 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive (pickup tomorrow)
• Western Digital Blue 4 TB HDD (received)
• EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 6 GB KO GAMING Video Card (or a MSI GeForce RTX 2060 VENTUS XS for $10 more)
• Deepcool MATREXX 55 ATX Mid Tower Case (2nd pickup tomorrow)
• EVGA GD (2019) 500 W 80+ Gold Certified ATX Power Supply (2nd pickup tomorrow)

Availability of parts keeps diminishing and I am really not sure if I can get a B450 motherboard at all;

get the TridentZ Neo 3600 RAM if you can afford it. It REALLY shines with the Ryzen Zen 2 (I tried it with the 3600x myself, very nice indeed)
The EVGA KO uses a slightly stripped down chip out of the 2080. It outperforms other 2060s by a fair margin on certain loads.
It is said to be quite noisy though.

Thanks for the advice, a good excuse to upgrade and it is actually available at the moment! 

@mnementh & @Kosmic, if you are looking for more gear, there is this Kijiji ad ID 1486743331 in the Montreal area.  I have not had the chance to go through the list; it is quite lengthy and I do not know if anything there matches my needs.  Of course, there must be lots that matches my wants 

You should avoid him. I went there it's a dump. Electronic (networking, video, some TE) from floor to sealing randomly organised in huge piles with just enough place to circulate between them. All the lights are broken so it's mostly dark. Everything is broken, dirty and in really bad shape. Each time you want to buy something the guy go on ebay and match the price of the highest seller.

I should go back there just to make a video.

Thanks for the caution!  I will pass that along to the person who first gave me the link.

Staying far away from this conversation is always a good idea. 

That sounds similar to stepping in poo.  Sorry, my mind tends to think that way with a new puppy in the house.  Blaming the mother of SWMBO.  She used to be a breeder and had kept a sample from one of the males.  Of course, payment for the sample from the other breeder was first pick of the litter.  However, mother of SWMBO is too old to handle a puppy.

It really bugged me at the time, but in hindsight it was a great meta-lesson about how authority and incompetence interact, and the meta-lesson has been far more important to my life than deciding whether 1/2*3 is 1/6 or 3/2.

Hmmm, my father was one of those school teachers 

I also now understand the references to Gorillas.  I was asked to look at a computer build done by the local cleaning lady's kid.  It was rather sad as I was disguising my cringe and trying to politely explain what was wrong.  All the screws were torqued so tight that the threads were stripped.  Brand new case and the glass is about to fall out.  The actual reason for the request was the front case fans would not shut off.  That was innocent enough as no cable had been provided to connect the fan hub board to the motherboard.  The side request was why the SSD did not work.  It turns out the cables to the SSD were pulled so tight that the connectors on the SSD were cracked and sitting at a 20 degree angle.   

[cyclin_al]

just heard that a friend of mine died in a plane crash. Apparently stalled and went straight into the ground.
Bloody hell. I'm pissed. RIP Lutz.

My Condolences  as well

[xrunner]

In ref to the math debate....

I know if I have one item and if I buy an identical item I now have two. If I buy another identical item, three. One more, four. In my entire simple life this has served me well.

  Waaaaaaay too simple of an approach. No one could make a career out of such teachings.

[mnementh]

A little father/son time; fixing up a basketball goal "inherited" from a neighbor. Poor boy hasn't gotten his hoop fix for weeks since a windstorm blew the neighbor's goal over and smashed the backboard; before that we had him a membership at the local Civic Center until they shut that down. 

We thought about getting him one of his own but couldn't justify spending ~$400 when we don't even know where we'll be in 4 months; but $40 for paint & plywood and a couple afternoons of DIYing is a win/win and then we all get some more exercise... win again! 

mnem
*tinker-tinker*

[jxjbsd]

I don't remember that shabby and dirty 485 anymore.  Who put this pretty guy on my bench.   
Who can find the difference between it and other 485?

[Cubdriver]

I don't remember that shabby and dirty 485 anymore.  Who put this pretty guy on my bench.   
Who can find the difference between it and other 485?

Looks great!!   

It's nice that Tek started to anodize the markings into the front panels rather than screen printing them; makes them much more robust.  Some of the really early ones are engraved and paint filled, which is almost as good - my 545 no suffix oldie, for instance, but later they went to the anodized markings on the aluminum panels.

-Pat

[jxjbsd]

Yes, the front panel of this series of oscilloscopes is rarely corroded. It is still brand new after 40 years, but the aluminum frame is often corroded.

[URI]

just heard that a friend of mine died in a plane crash. Apparently stalled and went straight into the ground.
Bloody hell. I'm pissed. RIP Lutz.

Sorry to hear. Adding my condolences.   

[tggzzz]

Also known as operator precedence and associativity in virtually every programming language ever! See the C precedence and associativity rules for example: https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language/operator_precedence

Computer languages are free to adopt any convention that is suitable for their purpose - and they do. Iverson's APL (A Programming Language) is my favourite in that respect.

Some calculators do arithmetic in the same way that mathematics has been doing it for 400 years.
Other calculators do it a different way. Once upon a time that was because the computing power in them was too limited[1], nowadays it is because people got used to the simple way.
Guess which type of calculator is required for use in schools.

[1] Famously one typical chip for mid-70s calculators had only 3 registers and a ROM that could hold 320 instructions used for absolutely everything. For a simulation, see http://files.righto.com/calculator/TI_calculator_simulator.html

[BU508A]

@mnem: Try 7353      

Unfortunately, I had to look that one up on translate... 

mnem

Sooo cute!   

Reminds me somehow to this scene from the Shrek documentation:



    

[tggzzz]

Applying logic is aa appropriate and useful as applying emotion.

If you want to change 400 years of maths, fine. But you will have difficulty convincing other people to change.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_operations
http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/58237.html

The point is that it's not a part of maths. It's a part of culture which is exactly why people fight holy wars over it. Maybe introducing that one thing which can't be constructed wasn't the best idea.   

You're going to have difficulty convincing mathematicians it isn't "part of maths", whatever that might mean. If you choose to use terms in a non-standard way, either define that way every time you use it or expect people to be confused.

As one mathematician famously put it...

Humpty Dumpty took the book, and looked at it carefully. ‘That seems to be done right —’ he began.

‘You’re holding it upside down!’ Alice interrupted.

‘To be sure I was!’ Humpty Dumpty said gaily, as she turned it round for him. ‘I thought it looked a little queer. As I was saying, that seems to be done right — though I haven’t time to look it over thoroughly just now — and that shows that there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents —’

‘Certainly,’ said Alice.

‘And only one for birthday presents, you know. There’s glory for you!’

‘I don’t know what you mean by “glory,”’ Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you don’t — till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”’

‘But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument,”’ Alice objected.

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’

[tggzzz]

I don't remember that shabby and dirty 485 anymore.  Who put this pretty guy on my bench.   
Who can find the difference between it and other 485?

You put a very pretty guy on your bench!

To complete the picture, push the "freq" button and put the timebase on 1ns/div 

[tggzzz]

It's nice that Tek started to anodize the markings into the front panels rather than screen printing them; makes them much more robust.  Some of the really early ones are engraved and paint filled, which is almost as good - my 545 no suffix oldie, for instance, but later they went to the anodized markings on the aluminum panels.

Just so.

Shame the buttons still had decals on them; that's caught me out before 

[BU508A]

Speaking of nice bubble and pointy LEDs:

There is a broken counter from Racal Dana in the bay (NAWTS),
showed up a few minutes ago:

https://www.ebay.de/itm/1-Stuck-RACAL-DANA-Series-9000-defekt-/402289777390

Photo from the auction:


Edit:

Wow, there is also a Keithley and a 34401A from the same seller:

Keithley 2000:
https://www.ebay.de/itm/1-Stuck-KEITHLEY-2000-Multimeter-sehr-guter-Zustand-Anzeige-hell-/133433708242


Agilent 34401A:
https://www.ebay.de/itm/1-Stuck-Agilent-34401A-6-5-Digit-Multimeter-sehr-guter-Zustand-Anzeige-hell-/133433711327