251–260 of 331 posts
“GFCI” is maybe a bad name because it describes what the system is supposed to accomplish but not what it does. It interrupts the circuit in response to a current imbalance between hot and neutral. Kirchoff’s laws… if the current is imbalanced, it must be going somewhere else .
Please, please, clarify this bit for me. > All that day, kids got to see Mr. Stillwater’s hair dryer running under water in a fish tank. I thought I knew about electricity and water, but what I possessed was Conventional Ignorance posing as Conventional Wisdom. Humbling. Should I put the wifes running hairdryer into our fishtank to entertain our child?
On a related note, I wonder if people around the world are familiar with electric showers. Essentially, it's a resistance similar to the one found in a toaster, placed right inside the showerhead. It heats the water as it flows through. People hearing about it for the first time are usually shocked that we don't die from electrecution.
I was literally shocked at a hostel in Nicaragua because whoever installed the heater didn't ground it. Those electrons wanted that sweet, positively charged earth and I was the fastest way to get there. I don't know if the circuit was through the running water or if it was the metal tap handles, but it was quite a jolt. edit: Now that I try to remember it, it was definitely either the tap handle or the metal pipes.…
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Electric showers are very common in the UK - although the heater is in a wall-mounted unit, with the head on a hose, rather than the heater being in the head itself. The heating element has three layers - innermost, a wire that gets hot. Around that, a ceramic insulator. And outermost, a metal cover to protect the ceramic insulator. Then the heating element is mounted in a small water tank. And that, along with some…
A lot of things involving electricity in places with type-G plugs seem more dangerous if you don't know/assume that almost everything is grounded. Took me a while to realize that hairdrier he mentioned in the blogpost likely didn't have a ground connection in the plug. In the case of a toaster with a grounded frame, the most likely route for a short is straight to earth which will trip the RCD on that set of plugs.
Not all parts will survive this. Microphones and MEMS devices tend not to do well. Motors and transformers with paper insulation don't do well. Most modern electronics goes through a dishwasher-like process after assembly, to remove any excess solder and paste. A few parts have to be added past that point.
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Taking ownership of decisions in this way breeds another problem: people love to police when they perceive other people taking authority that's not rightfully theirs. I had your view until 7 years at Google. Showing this to 80% of people there would garner tsktsking and quips about delusions of grandeur and seeming unbalanced. In performance reviews, you could count on this person saying you collaborate poorly and do…
Interestingly, I was at Google during I think the very end of its golden years (2011-2016). I loved it and when I heard about how sclerotic it had gotten was pretty surprised. Looking back, IMO the seeds of its downfall had already been planted by the time I was there, including the culture of blameless postmortems. There was this idea that any problem—any outage or whatever —reflected not stupidity on the part of th…
To make the problem worse, nobody dares to remove from a process as that would mean they would be accountable for the consequences of the "missing steps", and at the same time adding to a process is almost always safe - another step in a process to clarify or verify can't really fail and having contributed to the process work in a process driven organization looks fantastic on your yearly review. So we get more and more processes that are perpetually growing in scope.
The long term damage that heavy processes do, what I've seen first hand, is extreme stagnation. Even simple and straight forward improvements are avoided if it means that you need to produce ridiculous documentation that nobody will ever need, or seek approval from a (very busy) group of people who contribute nothing other than checking that you followed the processes.
> They are intellectually secure in the center of a vast mob; their wisdom was received, not crafted.
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A lot of things involving electricity in places with type-G plugs seem more dangerous if you don't know/assume that almost everything is grounded. Took me a while to realize that hairdrier he mentioned in the blogpost likely didn't have a ground connection in the plug. In the case of a toaster with a grounded frame, the most likely route for a short is straight to earth which will trip the RCD on that set of plugs.
Toasters (usually?) don't have RCD (what they call GFCI in the UK) in the US. Maybe your circuit will have a GFCI, but it depends where you put your toaster. Do all circuits have RCD in the UK?
While you can have a separate RCD for each circuit, and the newest installations do, it's more common to have two RCDs in the panel/fuse box/consumer unit, with each circuit on one or the other. This arrangement is known as a 'split load consumer unit'. The intention of having two instead of one is that plugging in faulty electronics at night not plunge the entire house into darkness. These RCDs usually have a trip current of 30mA, making them less sensitive than American GFCIs which trip around 5mA.
In my past experiences, most stuff that got unusable was because water got inside the LCD display, and left some debris that was impossible to remove.
I decided to put my toaster in the dishwasher after that.
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Few things in my career have granted me more power faster than taking ownership of decisions. Some people are so terrified of having to say "I was wrong" that they either will do nothing, or just happily follow decisions that someone else makes. It's one thing when that's a line employee behaving that way, but there are managers so terrified of making a mistake that all they really are is scribes, tracking who said w…
Taking ownership of decisions in this way breeds another problem: people love to police when they perceive other people taking authority that's not rightfully theirs. I had your view until 7 years at Google. Showing this to 80% of people there would garner tsktsking and quips about delusions of grandeur and seeming unbalanced. In performance reviews, you could count on this person saying you collaborate poorly and do…
Your average person doesn’t even take authority.
The next “level” per se (not that you have to take authority — only if you want to) is the person taking authority.
Then the next level above that is the person that takes authority but understands how it looks to other people, so they sure everyone else understands that they are taking authority to make things move along, not because they are entitled to it. They attack the problem head on.
My goal is to get good engineering done while also making sure everyone feels included and good about being at work.
If you’re about good engineering and respect for other people, you can get things done however you want.