'Xtreme' Equipment That You Have Borrowed? 216
djupedal asks: "What's the most extreme type of equipment you've used from the lab/office/university, etc. for your own projects, etc.? Have you ever taken a piece of unknown lint into work just to check it out under the nuclear microscope? Ever used the UV curing oven on the production line to make custom wheels for an R/C car? Ever used the 100,000 ton press in the lab to meld a dime into a nickel just to have a present for your gf/bf on Valentine's Day?"
"Ever drop by the house on the way home from work and use your company's nuclear density gauge to check for hardpan in the backyard?
Was that you I saw driving a 50 ton crane into the sub-division just to have a platform to install a 3 meter dish on the roof of the garage?
Ever hog a T-3 so you could loop-logon on to your own box....after networking thru a minimum of 25 repeaters near the equator...just to see how much delay there is when going around the planet?
To get you started -- we used to work the night shift at a ski area - and when we found spare time, we would fire up a few of the $200,000.00 Kässbohrer PistenBully's and run off into the trees and play hide & seek in the dark, when it was snowing heavy and your tracks would be covered quickly. All lights out and nothing but iPods online, we would play tag until we either got lost, stuck, bored or the sun came up.
What's your best example of trivial use of some very expensive gear that wasn't yours?"
freeze drying (Score:3, Interesting)
Compute power count? (Score:4, Interesting)
Back when it used to seem like a lot (~1997?), we used to "steal" all the processing time on 4 Sun E10Ks and 7 frames of IBM SP/2 nodes and do SETI and Distributed.Net work on them when they idle between real projects.
What about cool home science gear that doesn't belong in a home? A guy at my office has 2 and a half electron microscopes in his garage he uses to peek at anything and everything that interests him around the house. I believe between the 2.5 microscopes worth of parts, one is actually running at the moment.
Re:Compute power count? (Score:1, Interesting)
To be honest I thought they pretty much sucked performance-wise. I mean, they had lots of processors (32 or 64 each, I can't remember) but each processor was slow as hell. My regular PC was as fast as like 5 of those SPARC procs. Pffft, all that money. Sun will say it's all about I/O performance not CPU performance.
Re:Well.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Careful! There was a story here a few years back about a guy who installed SETI on a network. He was then billed for all the run-time SETI used. The owners of the network used math a lot like yours to arrive at an outrageous number.
My advice? Watch your ass. I was nearly fired from a job once simply because I sent a text message over the network.
SPE meter (Score:3, Interesting)
Not as much "borrowing" as "hijacking"... (Score:5, Interesting)
More than 20 years ago, a $MAJOR_CLASS1_RAILROAD celebrated it's 100th birthday. To celebrate, they borrowed one of their old steam trains from $MAJOR_SCIENCE_MUSEUM.
They had to ferry the train about 200 miles each time. Luckily, they sold tickets for those ferry trips, so we could enjoy riding the train.
At that time, my grandfather died; he lived in $RAILROAD_TOWN about 1/4 of the way between the museum and the rail office. He was a civil engineer, and one of his pet peeve was about railroaders calling themselves "engineers" because they ran the engines...
The day of his funeral, there was a steam trip scheduled. I was on the inbound trip a few days earlier, and I went to see the museum director (whom I have known for years before), and I told him that when they'll get back home, at $RAILROAD _TOWN, there would be my grandfather's funeral.
"We'll take care of it", the director said.
So, when the funeral procession went out of the church, there was the steam train, with crew at attention, saluting my grandfather... Later, at the cemetery, everyone was suspecting that I had a hand in that...
"It's a huge frickin' LASER!" (Score:3, Interesting)
very cold ice cream (Score:4, Interesting)
RF Home cooking (Score:4, Interesting)
Moral of the story,800+ watts = burnt hot dog in under 1 sec.
Remember those old SGI o2... (Score:2, Interesting)
Su root, uncomment the entry in /etc/services and lo ! Friday night were turned into combat-mode flight simulator lan parties.
That was of course 10-15 years before lan parties were invented, of course.
Heavy trucks... (Score:2, Interesting)
Cryo - for real. (Score:3, Interesting)
As the one who first brought the graham crackers, I have a bit of a reputation now. Of course, this past week one of our eager young participants was on the news statewide, appearing to exhale clouds of smoke while to munching an unusually cold cracker.
The hard part arises when we're asked to explain the scientific relevance of this. We can, of course, but we're more getting the kids interested in astro as a field where they can do crazy weird cool stuff.
I still have to learn to run an instrument or two on the scope I operate, so I can get some actual images of stuff in the very rare spare moments.
Solid Vodka = Vodka + Liquid Nitrogen (Score:3, Interesting)
At the laser lab... (Score:3, Interesting)
...where I used to work, I borrowed their huge laser powersupply to try experiments with nonstandard lasing devices.
I also borrowed a toothbrush, some of the boss' expensive pens, his chair, and his desk lamp.
We discovered that, given enough energy, you can make just about anything lase.
Back in 96 I acquired a very sophisticated (Score:0, Interesting)
Long story short.
It could do things that commercially available products of today can't. Two agents flew out from Langley and collected it from me.
They were very surprised that I'd figured out to operate it well enough to pick individial phone calls off commnications satellites.
If I told you any more, I'd have to kill you.
Navy Helicopter (Score:3, Interesting)
After hitching a ride to the pier, I walked up behind friends and family waiting for me while the ship was still tieing up.
My ship, USS America, was towed out to sea last week and will be sunk this week [navy.mil].
Try this one on... (Score:3, Interesting)
We also use the laser for demonstrations for visiting high school students (etc) to carve hot dogs and to engrave names on tongue depressors. I think it is fairly memorable for the students to see a building-sized apparatus used for this. The only hope is that it gets some of them excited about science.
Re:very cold ice cream (Score:3, Interesting)
I used to run a "test chamber" at work. A few wees after we started the lab, it was time for the Christmas party for the department I had just left. In that day and age, a gift of a bottle of "booze of bosses choice" was a normal thing, and it was opened AT work
So we bought the manager of bottle of vodka. He promptly opened it. One of the guys said "I really wish the vodka was cold". I smiled, and asked "How cold do you want it?" He made a mistake, and said "as cold as you can make it" My reply was "frozen Vodka, coming up". He proceded to say that "You can't freeze Vodka - it won't freeze" - I ended up taking him for $10 on a bet - I ran the chamber down to -88c and left it there for about an hour, with a dixie cup of Vodka in it, but the fun was I put a popcicle stick in the middle - made a vodkacicle
Re:Not as much "Stole" as "Borrowed" an Army M915 (Score:2, Interesting)
We have that tunnel under downtown, which has TV cameras mounted on the side.
One night, each TV monitor went out, one by one.
Turns out that there was this guy with the shovel on a flatbed. Every week, that shovel was brought somewhere else through the same tunnel. But that week, another driver was doing it.
He had loaded the shovel "backwards"...
Something was protuding that knocked-off the TV cameras off the wall.
"10 Wheeling" in Army Tractor Rigs (Score:4, Interesting)
On the way we would get a buzz on and take the things off-roading in the desert hills on base. Wonderful US Army 5-ton ten-wheel-drive tracter trailer rigs [airfieldmodels.com].
First gear on a good incline and these beasts would just dig straight down.
The conceit was we had to warm them up to get the oil flowing
Peace,
PFC Burton (ret)
Card-Access Door (Score:3, Interesting)
At work, they had me clean up a card-access system (Northern Win-Pak 2.0, yuck...) and I still have admin access on it since it's still messed up
So, now I walk in and out with no card, with the door sliding just as I walk up to it, without even breaking my stride. Our fridge and microwave is right next to the door, so I can't wait to mess with people's heads. Maybe I'll tell them we just installed retina scanners
Stadium Sized Radio Antenna (Score:1, Interesting)
Not quite taking the kit home, but rather bringing your own kit in to use the work kit 'at home'.