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The Plumber Problem

hypercritical.co

221–230 of 253 posts

Re: The Plumber Problem

#221
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no money in unbiased news. I have to believe that's not true. When Bill Gates or Warren Buffett sit down at their breakfast table, do they get fed the same diet of pablum that I do, as an Apple News subscriber? I doubt it. They presumably pay a ton of money for access to unfiltered, unbiased global intelligence. But I have no idea how to get the newsfeed that people like that must have access to, regardless o…

Counterpoint. Trump and Musk.

Trump apparently reads at something close to a 6th-grade level, going by what his staff have said about having to simplify his briefings to the level of Saturday morning cartoons. He's not a potential customer for any premium newsfeed services.

Musk is not an apparent functional illiterate like Trump, but he unfortunately has a long history of choosing poor information sources and reacting accordingly. (The "pedo guy" case comes to mind.) He cares less about accurate news than I do, that much is safe to say. So I doubt he takes advantage of whatever higher-quality sources might be available to him. Not when the latest missive from Catturd69 is free.

Re: The Plumber Problem

#222
In the "things you didn't know you know":

I'm from Michigan, and I watched the movie "Fargo" a few years ago. In the opening shots of the movie, it is clearly actually very cold: you can tell because the snow flows like sand in the wind, rather than clumping together and sticking to things.

But in a bunch of scenes later in the movie, the actors are all bundled up and saying things like, "Wow, it's cold"; but my brain was like, "Why are they all bundled up? It's not cold at all!" I'm sure if I watched those scenes again I could tell what little things were telling me that; the lack of fog breath, the way the snow looked, etc. But clearly the weather had warmed up after they started shooting, and the directors didn't want to reschedule. "Nobody will know if it's actually cold or not!" Well, nobody from SoCal, but everyone from Fargo's latitude will, I guarantee you.

Re: The Plumber Problem

#223

Every computer movie with a hacker ever: hacker opens an excel spreadsheet and types in a bunch of gibberish "I'm in the mainframe."

In the "NCIS" series in most episodes at some point the IP address of a hacker or however of a wanted person is found and it is invariably a 192.168.1.x one.

Re: The Plumber Problem

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The movie is great fun but its accurate ASME I BPVC code compliant pressure safety valves really are limited to a single 2-second scene I am afraid.

Now I find I want you to write a review blog in the format of Old Man Murray’s crate test, but all you do is rate the depictions of steam equipment. Probably a short enough list of depictions - does IMDb list them?

All those (semi) abandoned factories where the final fight takes place should provide a lot of material?

Re: The Plumber Problem

#225
post #11

This applies to the real world as well. I've had a couple of times when I've been closely involved in an event that was covered in the national newspapers. Both times the stories were presented with major factual inaccuracies and with clear bias. I've brought this up in conversation a few times over the years and quite often a similar experience was reported by others. Yet everyone still seemed happy to trust the acc…

Just think how awful the 737MAX was reported on in the press to a 757 stabilizer trim design engineer (me).

Too bad you can't afford to comment on it if you still work there?

Re: The Plumber Problem

#226

This seems to be the case with virtually any profession. You have to just learn to live with it, mostly, maybe even laugh at it. It was damn near a pasttime when I was still in the Army to make fun of how the military is portrayed in film and television. Basic as fuck shit like almost no one even has a haircut that meets regulations. It also makes you doubly appreciate when someone gets it right. We all loved Band of…

> no one even has a haircut that meets regulations That's a sop to the actors who don't want to have their hair cut that way. You'll see the same thing in historical dramas. The hairstyles betray the time when they were filmed. And Star Trek had 1960's hairstyles and miniskirts.

>And Star Trek had 1960's hairstyles and miniskirts.

For that you have also the UFO/SHADO series:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_(British_TV_series)

Re: The Plumber Problem

#227

I witnessed the converse of this in the recent Mario Brothers movie. There is a scene where steam piping is about to overpressure and it shows a pressure safety valve lifting. Well that pressure safety valve is an accurately drawn ASME I BPVC open-bonnet PSV with test lever. The open bonnet is to expose the spring to air so it is kept cool and therefore has the correct force downwards on the seat. If you specify a cl…

> If you specify a closed-bonnet PSV (like the vast majority of PSVs) for steam service then the whole valve body can get up to the steam temperature, including the spring, and it doesn't lift until a much higher pressure than your bench test indicates.

That was surprising. With a quick search about temperature and springs I found 3 items:

1 Spring constant descreases with temperature, not much at small increases but significant at much higher temperatures (that would make it open at lower temperatures than expected)

2 Spring gets longer at increased temperatures (that would make it open at higher temperatures)

3 Durability issues

Is effect 2 stronger than 1 at the relevant temperatures?

If there's a fixed relation between steam temperature and pressure it should be possible to design one to open at the correct pressure at the temperature that this pressur occurs at?

Re: The Plumber Problem

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accusations of market manipulation are better backed up by strong evidence, because that is actually a fellony.

Illegal or not, it's defamatory if untrue. I assume that Bloomberg would sue for libel if the quote from their reporter were fabricated. (Read the quote from the reporter carefully: the market isn't what's being manipulated. The news is... and by extension, the reader. The reader is who does the market-moving.)

So, a plain statement of fact then? Your initial claim was that Bloberg rwporters are paid to manipulate / move the market. Said quote doesn't support that.

Re: The Plumber Problem

#229
post #79

In the Matrix humanity is enslaved to use them as an energy source. But the 2nd law of thermodynamics requires that any energy harvested would be, by definition, less than the energy of the food required to sustain their bodies. Therefore the plot makes no sense, because they should just shovel the food directly into the computer and skip the humans.

We use cows for the same purpose - we eat them instead of shoveling grass straight into our mouths, even though in some strict sense the grass contains more caloric energy. Or, we eat vegetables even though the energy in them is less than all the solar energy that falls on them. But of course the calories in grass and sunlight aren't accessible to us. It's not impossible to imagine some parallel situation where human…

For meat you could argue that the energy density is much higher than in veggies, so the cows do the job of concentrating it for you.

Re: The Plumber Problem

#230

Star Trek Discovery: "the Probe used a SQL Injection attack"

Knowing how legacy software lives on far past its expected lifetime, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if SQL (and services though which you could pass SQL injection) are still in use 235 years from now.

tens of thousands of years from now

Check Vernor Vinge's programmer-archaeologist profession.

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