{"id":4589,"date":"2010-01-19T03:00:10","date_gmt":"2010-01-19T08:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/?p=4589"},"modified":"2010-01-19T03:00:10","modified_gmt":"2010-01-19T08:00:10","slug":"the-replacements","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/4589","title":{"rendered":"The Replacements"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>If it sticks, force it.  If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2010\/01\/eucatastrophe_in_physics.php\">Uncertain Principles:  Eucatastrophe in Physics<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nSometimes, an equipment failure can be the best thing that happens to an experiment. This is particularly true in labs that rely on short-term labor like post-docs (who are generally hired for about two years) and graduate students (who are in a given lab longer, but typically in charge of the experiment for only a few years), where kludgey short-term solutions implemented in order to get fast results can become locked in as new experiments build on the first one.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I&#8217;m proud to say that there is no duct tape in the devices we&#8217;ve built.  It exists in one or two places in the lab (even involving ductwork).  When you&#8217;re in it for the long haul, there&#8217;s more incentive to do things right.  But I remember at TRIUMF, we needed a variable voltage reference, which ended up being a 2 9V batteries in series discharging slowly through a MegaOhm-ish potentiometer acting as a voltage divider.  Dial up what you need, and it lasted long enough that it was easier to replace the batteries than do up a proper circuit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If it sticks, force it. If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway. Uncertain Principles: Eucatastrophe in Physics Sometimes, an equipment failure can be the best thing that happens to an experiment. This is particularly true in labs that rely on &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/4589\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-experiments","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4589\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}