Not to be insensitive about your injury, but I'm more curious how you got your laser eye.
How I got my laser eye injury
201–210 of 378 posts
Re: How I got my laser eye injury
#202I've touched all sorts of things in my "Maker" years, but one of the things I'm never going to touch by far is lasers. I know how bad they are, and I also know how woeful unqualified I'm for messing with lasers. Heck, I've even left a couple of dancefloors in clubs that I heavily suspected were firing actual lasers at the people, wonder how many of those were actual lasers vs light pointers and how many people got un…
Even better is when the dancefloor wants UV lighting, so they just buy some cheap UV-C bulbs
Funranium has a post about that, too: https://www.funraniumlabs.com/2023/11/ultraviolet-rant/
Re: How I got my laser eye injury
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
> hull damage being caused or not caused by a rifle being fired from the flight deck of a ship How did that happen? Our MarDet would occasionally do live-fire training off the flight deck (CVN-65); they naturally pointed their weapons away from the ship .... Or are you talking about hitting the hull of a different ship, e.g., one of the tin cans in plane guard, or alongside during an UNREP? Seems like that would ...…
Hypothetically, someone could have left a guest (like say an engineer from the shipyard doing sea acceptance testing) fire a rifle and an unlucky wave reflection might have bounced a round back towards the bow.
Seabees doing seabee things.
Re: How I got my laser eye injury
#204I've touched all sorts of things in my "Maker" years, but one of the things I'm never going to touch by far is lasers. I know how bad they are, and I also know how woeful unqualified I'm for messing with lasers. Heck, I've even left a couple of dancefloors in clubs that I heavily suspected were firing actual lasers at the people, wonder how many of those were actual lasers vs light pointers and how many people got un…
Even better is when the dancefloor wants UV lighting, so they just buy some cheap UV-C bulbs
https://kotaku.com/bored-apes-nft-blind-eye-pain-uv-light-pa...
most famous example of that.
Re: How I got my laser eye injury
#205I've touched all sorts of things in my "Maker" years, but one of the things I'm never going to touch by far is lasers. I know how bad they are, and I also know how woeful unqualified I'm for messing with lasers. Heck, I've even left a couple of dancefloors in clubs that I heavily suspected were firing actual lasers at the people, wonder how many of those were actual lasers vs light pointers and how many people got un…
Even better is when the dancefloor wants UV lighting, so they just buy some cheap UV-C bulbs
What are the implications of that choice? Safety?
Re: How I got my laser eye injury
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
My dad was such an engineer doing sales, of industrial components. Grew up on a farm, engineering degree, very honest type churchgoer and family man, and in his spare time DIY projects like a classic engineer type. I'm sure he'd know when something would or wouldn't work, and would candidly tell the customer about any problems or risks. (In this case, maybe honest as much as an engineer personally bothered by design…
Yeah, I am a bit rough on sales, but it is critical to doing business. And a good saleman is a wonderful find, talking with someone who is knowledgeable and honest about the product is great.
You're littering via middle school group stereotypes for professions.
You're walking it back a bit by saying you're a bit rough on sales, but what you actually wrote is engineers are bad at sales.
Sales engineer is a well-populated role, and they do their jobs as expected.
On average, an engineer will be worse at sales than a "pure salesman", but that's simply specialization in action. Can't get better at what you don't have an opportunity to practice. We all can do pretty much whatever we want if we put our minds to it.
Re: How I got my laser eye injury
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's pretty crazy that the sales guy was able to connect the water cooling and power with enough hosing and cables to bring it outside, as well as know how to operate the device enough to activate it - but couldn't correctly point it _at the ground_ and burn the paint off of the street without melting through a car. But forgetting that, what are the core safety issues described? I get the direct exposure to unprotect…
“Sales engineer” sounds like one of those positions that would be regularly setting up demos for customers and have access to the equipment and basic operating procedures. “Could we use this to burn paint off the road” sounds exactly like the sort of question a person doing a demo might say “I don’t see why not, let’s try it” to. While with deliberate thought about it, the fact that road markings are retro-reflective…
I think this is all a good illustration of why "Bob" was (supposedly) fired at the end of the story.
A good sales engineer knows a lot about the product within its normal operating envelope, but especially knows a lot about the boundaries of "normal operation". Bob's very first response to "can this thing do a thing [that Bob should know is outside of its normal operations]?" should have been to go ask the kind of engineer who is involved in defining "normal". And either the capability is investigated (and, if plausible, eventually a "safe" demo is put together, and maybe the definition of "normal" is expanded), or its revealed that it won't work, and that's that. In either case, the rest of the situation never happens, provided Bob is actually good at the engineering side of "sales engineer".
Re: How I got my laser eye injury
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even better is when the dancefloor wants UV lighting, so they just buy some cheap UV-C bulbs
Funranium has a post about that, too: https://www.funraniumlabs.com/2023/11/ultraviolet-rant/
> We do not want to share space with a UV-C air sterilizer because we like to see with our eyeballs
This was a good read.
Re: How I got my laser eye injury
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get laser safety curtains, but what do you do for reflections off the ceiling? Asking because our makerspace was recently donated a fiber laser welding unit and we don’t yet know best practices for not blinding our membership short of building a completely enclosed separate room for it with door interlocks.
Are lasers typically able to reflect off of surfaces that diffuse light (ie drywall)? I’m totally ignorant when it comes to laser safety, apologies if this is a stupid question .
Surfaces may produce diffuse or direct reflections (or more commonly, a mixture of both) for any light source. If you can see it, it's being reflected.
Re: How I got my laser eye injury
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Patch fiber is usually using Class 1 or Class 1M lasers which are entirely safe to look at. Also the light spreads out very rapidly at the end of an unterminated fiber because there's no lens to focus it. So don't hold it directly up against your eye but like a foot away is fine. The lasers are less focused (i.e. cheaper) and the multi-mode fiber is wide so it spreads out very quickly. You can't actually see the IR l…
Just in case, always use the same eye to look into these things.
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