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Don't worry, the first body or two will take care of it!
jadero
joined 1 year ago
Yes, or come to a halt. You'd be surprised at how little it takes to reduce the already low friction to nothing. A bit of blood and a bit of resistance will bring it to a halt pretty quickly.
It's always better to gain a full understanding of the system when trying to make important decisions.
The trolley has two sets of wheels, leading and trailing, both of which must remain on the same set of tracks.
The switch is designed to enable the trolley to change course, moving from one set of tracks to the other.
Throwing the switch after the leading set has passed, but before the trailing set has reached the switch points will cause the two sets to attempt travel on separate tracks. The trolley will derail, rapidly coming to a halt. If the trolley is moving slowly enough to permit this action, nobody dies.
Source: former brakeman (one of the people responsible for throwing switches), section hand (one of the people responsible for installing switches), and railroad welder (one of the people responsible for field repairs of switches).
Interesting. One of the chemicals they reference is tetrachloroethylene. According to this Wikipedia article:
Perhaps the greatest use of TCE is as a degreaser for metal parts. It has been widely used in degreasing and cleaning since the 1920s because of its low cost, low flammability, low toxicity and high effectivity as a solvent. The demand for TCE as a degreaser began to decline in the 1950s in favor of the less toxic 1,1,1-trichloroethane. However, 1,1,1-trichloroethane production has been phased out in most of the world under the terms of the Montreal Protocol, and as a result, trichloroethylene has experienced some resurgence in use as a degreaser.[17]
My grandfather had Parkinson's. I would imagine that he had plenty of exposure in his work as a mechanic from about 1925 on.
So is it merely a lame joke to compare this to two's complement math or is there something fundamental to be learned?
Isn't it sad that certain negative outcomes can be easily predicted by anyone bothering to think things through, yet no effort ever seems to go to mitigation, only spin and crocodile tears after the fact.
Thanks! My first thought was "hey, what about HPV?"
I think of my username as being like a lock on the door. It's not going to stop someone who is dedicated to fucking with me, but it keeps the opportunistic fuckery at bay.
I agree with everything you've said, but modern technologies aren't the only issue. The fact is that many food crops are hybrids that don't breed true, and it's been like that for many decades. That is, you can save seeds, even legally, but within one or two generations the plants revert to form, losing their desired characteristics and "hybrid vigour".
To the best of my knowledge, there is no such thing as a GMO wheat. Yet saving seed at scale hasn't been viable since at least the 1960s.
There was a recent post asking what the self-taught among us feel we are missing from our knowledge base. For me, it's being able to calculate stuff like that for making decisions. I feel like I can spot an equivalence to the travelling salesman problem or to the halting problem a mile away, but anything more subtle is beyond me.
Of course, in this situation, I'd probably just see if I could find a sufficiently large precalculation and just pretend :)
What you are describing is a failure of education. Maybe not at the university level, but somewhere. When I taught at an adult vocational school in the 1990s, every course started with the same material: how to use a keyboard and mouse, how to use the operating system, how to navigate and use network resources, and how to use foundational software like word processors, spreadsheets , and data entry systems. And how to set up email clients.
We ran our own email server out of the networking class. Yes, it could be a bit flaky, but that just exercised their backup and recovery skills and kept all the email users on their toes. :)
Thanks. This is the first time I've seen a jokey enough presentation to feel comfortable in treating it as a hypothetical reality rather than a moral/ethical exercise.