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Topic: Your today in pictures..
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Steve Klare
Film Guy
Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003
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posted October 26, 2015 01:45 PM
I’ll ride with you, Graham!
(…virtually!)
For a bunch of years after I got a driver’s license, my bike sat in my parents' garage with flat tires. At about 25 I pumped them up again and discovered why I always liked riding a bike!
I have a 32 mile drive out here to Brookhaven Labs: that’s a lot of gas, and in the long term a lot of tires, oil changes and ultimately cars, so I joined a carpool. The Lab decided to maintain my car-less mobility around our 2,500 Acre campus by assigning me a bike.
Who was I to argue?
The choices were “Mountain Bike” or “Road Bike”. I chose “Mountain” because we are mostly on wooded property and there are some really nice trails. Later on I actually saw the road bikes: mint green with white wall tires and a basket, the kind of a bike that will get you beat up even at a national physics lab! (My bike is BLACK: no chemist or materials scientist dares mess with me!)
I decided to “join” Graham during lunch today. It’s a wonderful Fall day here: the trees have turned and there is a nip in the air. I rode with a sweat shirt and was a little bit cold at first, but was fine a mile or so down the road as my ancient metabolism started to speed up.
We do alternate energy work here and have the largest solar farm on the East Coast. I ride down a road that goes right through the middle of it.
We have a railroad siding of about a mile in length off the Long Island Railroad mainline. Weather permitting I drop by about once a week to see if there is anything interesting going on over there. (That I would probably is surprising very few here!)
I’ve never seen a locomotive since they move freight at night here to avoid messing up commuter service. The railroad is kind of like Santa Claus!
-I show up the next day to see what they’ve left me!
These are dwarf pines. This part of Long Island has thousands of acres of them in protected forests. They make for interesting neighbors since they require fire to release their seeds. To local homeowners forest fires are potential disasters, for these trees the lack of them is extinction in progress. The Forest service has to tread the fine line between these two concerns by having regularly planned burns with a lot of precautions.
In 1995, we had a drought and major forest fires out here. Fire departments from four counties battled a big one 24 hours a day for about two weeks before that first rain settled it all in a few hours.
I have not looked out the window on a rainy day the same way since!
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All I ask is a wide screen and a projector to light her by...
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Steve Klare
Film Guy
Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003
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posted November 14, 2015 10:22 PM
November 2015 is the 20th anniversary of the release of Toy Story.
I happen to have the Derann feature length print, so I decided to do something about it tonight.
We emailed an announcement out and had some friends over to see it theatrically as possible: trailers, newsreel, cartoon and then feature. We even went old school and did an intermission after the second reel.
-At the snack bar (kitchen counter): soft drinks and nachos with mozzarella!
I invited Steven to get in on the act and he showed his R8 Castle "Three little Bruins in a Canoe" (Which is much, much older than he is!) at the close of the intermission and before reels three and four.
Our audience was amazed at seeing such a modern film on Super-8, and we had a great time.
I was in full Projectionist Mode: normally I'd sit up on the couch. Until I got well into the first reel of the feature and had the second hanging ready on a supply spindle, I didn't even sit down!
My co-projectionist, his Yelco and my two Elmo STs: ready for action!
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All I ask is a wide screen and a projector to light her by...
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Steve Klare
Film Guy
Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003
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posted November 17, 2015 03:46 PM
Nitrous Oxide: How the dental industry made us want to go!
Hot Time at the old Lab tonight!
We're taking it in a whole new direction today: from the visible to the infrared to be exact!
We have this vast machine here. It's a half mile circumference stainless steel pipe with an electron beam inside it under high vacuum. There are several hundred electromagnets all the way around to keep the beam inside the pipe and in focus with a power supply for each magnet, and many, many miles of fat copper cabling connecting it all together and a central computerized control system making at all work in harmony. This was as simple as it could possibly be done, but there are a lot of chances for our old friend Murphy to work his Law!
Unfortunately any one of those magnet circuits can take the beam down if it goes dead. When that happens, several hundred scientists who may have come all the way around the world to use the beam and have time reserved at any of 24 hours a day, seven days a week will be left twiddling their scientific thumbs!
(Ever been yelled at by someone working towards a Nobel Prize? They yell just as loud but use much bigger words!)
So how do you stop this? Well...one way is you assign Steve Klare a thermal camera and send him out looking for connections that are in the process of failing.
As the bolts slowly loosen, the resistance goes up, and so does the temperature. Long before something overheats, it starts to run just a little warm.
-That's where I come into the (thermal) picture.
This connection has about 100 Amps flowing in it:
Notice how the side going out is gray, but the side coming back is white. This raised a flag that something was coming undone, and sure enough they found the bolts on the return side just barely tight.
A couple of minutes with a torque wrench took us from a potential multi hour failure to a non-issue.
-so we managed to intercede and keep the Scientists going without them ever even realizing there was ever a problem.
Of course if someone gives you a multi-thousand dollar camera to play with you just have to take an infra-red selfie:
(I mean, how often does that opportunity come up?)
If anyone thinks I lack personal warmth: here's scientific proof!
(Actually 34.2C is a little on the cool side! I must need a new thermostat!)
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All I ask is a wide screen and a projector to light her by...
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UBBFriend: Email this page to someone!
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factor. It really does show how film can "kick butt" with picture and sound over any home theatre video system, well worth the time setting things up. The 5:1 multi channel sound was amazing, compared with any Blu-ray/DVD fed into the same amp.
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