Monday Links from the Bank Holiday Deckchair vol. DCCXLIX

[NickFitz]

Surprising lack of Bank Holiday rain here. Looking at the radar, I see not all of you are so lucky, so here's some stuff you can read aloud to the family as you huddle in a windswept shelter on the seafront

• The Last Shall Be First - ”A few weeks before Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Len Davis rose to face a jury. A former policeman, Davis was a big man who’d once exuded toughness and sometimes thrown himself in harm’s way on the streets… Murder is what landed Davis in court, but the victim wasn’t in the drug game. She was a single mother who had filed a brutality complaint against Davis. The next day, he ordered a hit man to kill her.”
• How a NASA Probe Solved a Scorching Solar Mystery - News from the Parker Solar Probe: ”The outer layers of the sun’s atmosphere are a blistering million degrees hotter than its surface. The hidden culprit? Magnetic activity.”
• 50 Years Ago: Solving the Pogo Effect - HT to DoctorStrangelove for this piece from NASA about an unexpected problem with Apollo 6: ”Pogo occurred when a partial vacuum in the fuel and oxidizer feed lines reached the engine firing chamber causing the engine to skip. These oscillations then traveled up the axis of the launch vehicle resulting in intense vibration in the Command Module and causing some superficial structural damage to the Spacecraft Lunar Module Adaptor (SLA). Had a crew been onboard, they would have experienced severe vibrations and even possible injury.”
• The secret lives of Shelby Hewitt, 32-year-old high school imposter - A weird story from Boston MA: ”Why did a state social worker pose as a teen in three Boston schools and a treatment center? And how could nobody notice for so long?”
• We’ll Get You Out of Here—Just Follow the Sound of My Voice - A clever trick to help lost whales: ”Two male killer whales inadvertently became imprisoned in Barnes Lake, a tidal lagoon in southeast Alaska… T051 and T049A2 like to travel with five female killer whales that are not maternally related to either of them. With help from his DFO colleague James Pilkington, Towers sourced high-quality recordings of the five female killer whales’ calls.”
• The Girl in the Kent State Photo - Four dead in Ohio, forty-four years ago last Saturday: ”In 1970, an image of a dead protester at Kent State became iconic. But what happened to the 14-year-old kneeling next to him?”
• Blowhole the Sled Dog Became a Social Media Star—But Was He a Criminal First? - ”Meet the famous Alaskan husky—and Iditarod finisher—who got miffed at a musher and chomped her truck’s brake lines. (Allegedly. Because a lot of people think this pup is innocent.)” Definitely innocent
• Sackbut - An electronic sackbut (well, an instrument named after the sackbut) that you can play online! ”The Electronic Sackbut was designed by Hugh Le Caine at his home studio in Ottawa, Ontario. It was begun in 1945 and completed in 1948… Unlike electromechanical instruments such as the Hammond organ (with which Le Caine was familiar), the Electronic Sackbut used an entirely different method of sound generation and control known as voltage control. This method later became the standard approach in electronic music. Because it pioneered this technique, the Sackbut is considered to have been the first synthesizer.”
• How to Build a $20 Billion Semiconductor Fab - Brian Potter on the amazingly complex business of building a semiconductor fabrication plant: ”A modern microchip has features on the order of 50 nanometers in width, or around 1/2000th the width of a human hair. Materials are placed in layers a few atoms thin. Creating objects this small requires ultra-precise manufacturing equipment… When semiconductors were being researched at Bell Labs in the 1940s, mysterious component failures were eventually traced to researchers who had touched copper door knobs; the tiny number of copper atoms that migrated from the door to the workers hands was enough to ruin their work material.”
• The Function Of Colour In Factories, Schools & Hospitals, and Part 2 - A book from 1950, rediscovered by the stationers of Present & Correct: ”A long time ago we had a copy of this book, scanned it but then sold it… Well, we got another copy and scanned the rest below.”
  
  

Happy invoicing!

[DoctorStrangelove]

The Fab thing: ClF3, lovely stuff, ideal for burning concrete. Also available as a rocket propellant if you are a) brave enough or b) stupid enough.

It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem.

It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured.

It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water—with which it reacts explosively.

It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals—steel, copper, aluminum, etc.—because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride that protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere.

If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes

https://www.science.org/content/blog...-save-you-time

Sounds like a good way of getting rid of asbestos. .

The Siliconix fab was 2" in the 70s, 3" when I joined in 79, then 4", and then a separate 6" sometime in the 80s. It's all gone now, the Santa Clara fab closed in ?2015?.

All those myriad FETs and analogue switches are nearly pure unobtainium, including the ones that switched off in the cold & dark on satellites unless you used white ceramic packages to let a bit of light in to up the leakage a little.

It's quite odd to think that Silicon Valley is on a shedload of geological faults that tend to rumble around now & again.

[northernladuk]

[*]Blowhole the Sled Dog Became a Social Media Star—But Was He a Criminal First? - ”Meet the famous Alaskan husky—and Iditarod finisher—who got miffed at a musher and chomped her truck’s brake lines. (Allegedly. Because a lot of people think this pup is innocent.)” Definitely innocent

Innocent!!

When I got back to my car and started it, the check-engine light came on.

Muahahahha.

Enjoyed that read. Kudos as usual to NF.

[ladymuck]

• The Girl in the Kent State Photo - Four dead in Ohio, forty-four years ago last Saturday: ”In 1970, an image of a dead protester at Kent State became iconic. But what happened to the 14-year-old kneeling next to him?”

This was a top read, really interesting.