Failed Electro

Bill IS bizarre.

Graham

The data I'm accepting has passed through peer-review and is cross- checked against the work of other scientists that also goes through peer-review.

John Larkin's claims about his gear don't have the same kind of built- in quality control. He may be selling to the world's most demanding customers - as was Cambridge Instruments back in the 1980's when I worked for them - but my opression is that these customers are mainly interested in getting hold of gear that they can use to solve their immediate problems; if it works, they aren't all that interested in how well it works.

At Cambridge Instrumnents I did quite a lot of work on the EBMF 10.5 electron-beam microfabricator, which is an extensively modified electron microscope which uses an electron beam to write fine patterns on a flat surface - usually a chromium mask to be used to define a layer in an integrated circuit.

It was a fine machine and worked well for a lot of customers - the first one went to Fairchild with a set of scanning boards that I'd hand-modified, and they loved it and used it to make most of the masks for their 100k ECL parts.

The European university's semiconductor lab at IMEC in Belgium bought one and set a bunch of graduate students to characterising the machine while they got their semiconductor fab up and running, and they found more minor faults than you could shake a stick at. At one point the engineers who were working on correcting these faults came to me to get hold the heat-pipe based heat-sink from my cupboard that I'd ordered and not been given the time to try out on the machine - the problem it was intended to solve was hypothetical and the guys at IMEC had taken the trouble to validate my hypothesis.

Quality control on complex machines takes a lot of work and few organisations have got the time to do it.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

to

I know stuff. Graham doesn't and he really doesn't appreciate how little he knows and how much there is to know.This makes it difficult for him to understand what I'm on about.

=46rom my point of view, it is Graham's pretensions to knowledge that are really bizarre. It is as if he aspired to compete in formula one riding a unicycle.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Like Mann's ?

Bwahahahahahahaaaha !

Graham

You talk a lot.

I've never seen you make a single decent design suggestion. Speaks volumes.

Graham

You ARE indeed quite MAD. It's time you sought treatment. Your detachment from reality accelerates every single day.

Graham

By your own admission, the data are not reviewed.

That is a baseless slander.

James Arthur

All I had to do was read your reply James at the botton of the page, to KNOW it was a post of Sloman's. What is the matter with the man ?

Graham

He just jumps to conclusions, that's all. He knows America better than Americans, from his sources overseas, John's business better than John, etc. And then he sticks to his unloaded guns and lectures us.

I've seen John's gear. It's good.

Cheers, James Arthur

As far as my claims not having built-in quality control, I freely admit that my posts to s.e.d. have not been peer reviewed, that I am not personally ISO9000 certified, and that my body has not been certified free of hazardous substances.

John

The most reliable sign of sanity is doing the same thing while expecting different results.

Cheers! Rich

This is something you misunderstand. It's not optimism at all - it's something called confidence, that comes from doing it right the first time, by distrusting everything along the way - you don't sign off on the component or subassembly until you can _demonstrate_ that it meets or exceeds the spec.

Cheers! Rich

Possibly. But I've got a long way to go before I'm as detached as the average psychiatrist, let alone you or Jim Thompson, and I'd have to be much further out of touch with reality than I am now to be silly enough to consider taking your advice.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

You ill-mannered, useless old fart. You don't work at all.

John

Graham is indulging in the fallacy of the excluded middle. Her seems to think that because one academic paper was inadequately refereed, no academic paper is to be trusted, and - in a sense - he is right.

I've published a couple of comments in Review of Scientific Instruments and a couple of other peer-reviewed journals pointing out that specific papers are inadequate, which is another aspect of the academic quality control system.

This doesn't mean that one discards every paper ever published as unreliable - the bulk of the published papers on anthropogenic global warming form a coherent and self-consistent mass of evidence supporting the hypothesis.

Graham doesn't know enough about science to understand this, and nowhere near enough about the science involved to read any of the papers and understand the evidence for himself, but he is too much of a conceited know-it-all to believe this.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

NOW it

Some residual contact with reality? I'm not less scpetical about John Larkin's fantasies tha I am about yours?

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

KNOW it

I do seem to be free of certain delusions Americans have about the perfection of their electoral system and their health care systems; I imagine I'm less exposed to the domestic propaganda machine which starts telling Americans that America is perfect as soon as they get into the education system, and reinforces the message through the mass media for the rest of their lives.

John Larkin does seem to think that anybody expressing an opinion on his business is - ipso facto - claiming to know it better than he does, which is rather silly.

It's for your own good.

Of course it is good, but mind-rippingly good, insanely priced, perfect-out-the-door good?

Some scepticism is obligatory.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

We've all got that, mostly with good reason. Even so, the evidence suggests that nobody gets everything right, every time.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

to

That's not what I said and its also quite untrue. The papers the IPCC survey and report on are peer-reviewed before they get into the published literature, and the IPCC's reporting process shows up conflicting conclusions (which is the second string of the scientific quality control process).

There's nothing slanderous about it. There's no control of any sort on what he posts here. In any event "mind-rippingly good, insanely priced, perfect-out-the-door" aren't the sort of claims that you could usefully test in a court of law.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen