A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
I work in manufacturing. The engineers at my plant think everything works like it does on their computer screens. I had one of them tell me the mix needs exactly 248.73kg of a product and they were shocked when I told them we just add five 50kg bags and don't actually weigh out 248.73kg.
I can tell you they're not Electronics Engineers.
Electronics Engineers are like "we have to design this so that it can handle a power source whose voltage can be between +5% and -20% of what it says on the box" or "assume the resistance of your resistors, the capacitance of your capacitors and the inductance of your inductors can be randomly off by up to 10% plus it changes with temperature".
I switched from Physics to EE at Uni and it went from "these formulas represent the world" to "here is the empirically measured curve of gain vs temperature (were the difference between extremes is over 1000%) of a common transistor you'll have to use".
Maybe it's the area within Engineering or maybe Engineers get taught differently over there, but at least half of my degree was about dealing with how the real world deviates from the "purity" of Mathematical Formulas.
Lol tell me about it, only half the time there's no datasheet and you have to kill them until you work out how the little fuckers work
Thats just the difference between a good engineer and a bad engineer. A good engineer designs things around how others are going to use them, and the design with tolerance. They would have known you use 50kg bags, and realized that's what you're going to do.
In my field, we know people are gonna put things together with a hammer if it's too tight, so if it's intentionally a tight fit, we make it so there's no room to swing a hammer
Ask them if they know what SUPAC is and when they say no just shake your head and mumble "fuckin engineers" and never explain it to them.
Scale up post approval changes allow you that 10% variance in non active ingredients.
I just pointed out that our scales are only accurate to 0.5kg. How did he think we were measuring out 0.73kg when our scales don't have that amount of accuracy? If anything I thought an engineer would know about significant digits!
The funny thing is, the very first thing engineers learn in almost any class is significant figures and to make sure an answer makes sense in a real life scenario. Obviously not everyone is the same in terms of how they apply things, but engineers are definitely taught not to do stuff like that
The engineers need a "factory day". They spend a day trying to do the work they specify and it all gets tossed at the end of the day. They learn the scale is off, shit comes in 50 kg bags, and temperatures vary.
The factory guys could have an office day to learn about the paperwork and money.
Send both groups to do something fun after.
When I was a coop (intern), and I'd run out of work assigned to me, I'd head down to the floor or a lab and just talked to people. In 6 months, I knew more about the process than people who had been there years
Engineers that make things make sense in real life scenarios cost too much
As a contract process engineer with quality background/certs, I 100% agree. I charge stupid money.
I used to run large batch bulks where the load cells were only 0.5kgs and we had "aquired" a product that was in good old English standard measurements and when they converted it, they didn't even attempt to round/floor/ceiling/common sense.
I put in purchase orders for enough equipment to get it done the way they wanted. We adjusted the batch scale accordingly.
The amount left over/wasted across the five bags is probably approximately 1.27kg so it all works out
Oh design engineers will make something absolutely functional... In theory, but the people on the manufacturing floor are scratching their head looking at a print for a perfectly hollow sphere with no blends, hole, seams, or affixes made from a single piece of steel going WTF guys? (This is an exaggeration ofc)
rotomolded steel sphere you say...
Well I did say steel so centrifugal casting may be more appropriate since rotomolded is typically a resin. However it still leaves machining to be done.
Though all this was mainly meant to be in a CNC machine shop setting where neither of those are options, hence the exaggerated impossibility of creating it
Meanwhile, me assembling IKEA furniture...
My first thought was which one is which?
This meme is dumb. They all are. Both shooters are kitted the same, with lifelong training. Stance dictates kit requirements.
Not quite, black shirt's eyewear is very different.
Edit: And interesting, it means you don't shut one eye, or squint, the squint possibly messing with the open eye's aspect ratio slightly. Olympic level stuff to deal with, I guess.
What they're saying is that the most important "equipment" they have is skill and experience.
Shooter on the let's experience includes the classes and that particular stance. Shooter on the right uses a different stance and glasses. Both are extremely skilled and have practiced in a particular way.
An IPSC shooter from the US will have a very different stance as well.
I've always wondered why chalk and blackboard are still used heavily in professions like that. Are there really no decent software options? Even a smartboard would be nice since you can save and revisit past work. Or does artisanal Japanese chalk really just feel that amazing to use?
I work in software, so I guess we use a whiteboard instead of a blackboard. There are tons of options for virtual whiteboards that have features which sound like they'd meet all your needs and more. One big plus is that you can virtually collaborate, which is a big argument for working remotely.
However, given the choice, I'll always pick a physical board to write on. This might sound like a personal preference, but there's some solid reasoning behind it.
You see, when you want to write or draw something, your brain has to do some kind of neuromancy in order to transform that thought into an idea that can be shared with and understood by other humans. When you write physically, the process is very kinetic. The idea starts in the brain, then is sent to the hand to write it out, and is verified by your eyes for correctness.
When you want to write that same thing digitally, there's more steps involved in subtle ways. You have to decide which tool is best, move things around with your mouse, know which keyboard commands will translate to the thing you want to do, etc. Many of these steps are far more abstract than picking up a marker, and for this reason there's a higher cognitive load in transcribing digitally.
Depending on what you're doing, that higher cognitive load can come back to bite you. A lot of my whiteboard time is ultimately spent on reasoning out a complicated system, brainstorming, or trying something new. In these cases, you want your cognitive load to be as low as possible because you want to be able to use it for the task at hand.
However, that's not to say that there isn't a benefit to the digital tools. Collaborating with remote colleagues is difficult without a virtual tool. You also typically benefit from having an infinite canvas, which means your board is always going to be as big as you need it to be. If you already have technical drawings or specifications or whatever you can also easily copy/paste them in.
So all this to say, I guess the way I look at it is that physical and digital boards are separate tools. You want to use the right tool for the job, and in my evaluation the physical boards are still very useful tools.
Something to try for you to make digital boards more helpful could be a drawing pad. Using one is just like a pen once you get used to it.
I don't think it's the interface that is the problem. You just don't have the bandwidth to communicate in virtual that you have in meat space
You don't hear the snort of the person who sees how your idea is ridiculous online. And they're not going to speak up unless they're called out.
I have a team member from a previous team who wouldn't use a camera in stand-up because our scrum master was not good at scrum mastering and she didn't want him to see her roll her eyes at stupid things he'd say. If we were in a room she couldn't hide; he would know he had said something stupid.
I'm just guessing, but I assume that after a certain point, what you're trying to draw is so niche and/or new that no one's bothered to make decent software for it. Like, you can do a Feynman diagram quickly on a chalk board, or spend 3x as long dragging lines in Visio or something to make a diagram diagram.
Even with CAD existing, I still always sketch initial project ideas out on paper just cause it's fast and easy.
Exactly this, there is no way to draw commutative diagrams as easily as on paper/chalkboard.
You use the tool you have. We have the luxury of whiteboards and four or five colours (and even monochrome print), but if you work in a university you may only have blackboards, and perhaps that Japanese artisanal chalk is nicer to use
Anyway you can save any *board work; you have a phone with a camera. I have so many pre-pandemic photos of sprint planning boards in my photos
I had a college professor that hid his artisanal Japanese chalk in a hole in the wall behind the blackboard so that he didn't have to carry it around (and risk breaking it).
I'm not kidding. He said it was his favorite chalk and he bought a bunch of it in Japan.