Gadget Show audio test (on UK TV last night)

Yes, that is what I saw. BTW, I served while there was a war going on.

Never was offered the opportunity to test out of anything.

Aced Hawk Radar school, and got the highest proficiency rating in the Army for my MOS while I served, the first time they tested me for anything like that. They never got a second chance! ;-)

Again pretty well mirrors what I saw.

The Army had a number of beneficial effects on me, because when I returned to University after serving, I became an ace student there as well.

That was an amazingly large part of my basic training platoon - guys who the judge told: "Jail or Army" Lucky us!

Ditto for Vietnam.

I avoided those kinds of situations.

They thought they couldn't lose, or they wouldn't have offered me the chance. Of course, ever soldier who ever changed a fuse in something electronic thought he was an expert in the '70s. :)

I forgot to mention I was loaned to the RADAR techs when they were shorthanded. By the end of the day they were trying to get me permanently transferred from the WeatherVision system.

They were phasing out my MOS to civilian contractors when it was time to 're-enlist'. I had a VERY interesting talk with the re-enlist office about two weeks before I was to leave. In fact, when I had to clear his office all he did was turn quite pale, say "You're NOT going to re-enlist, are you soldier" tell me to enjoy life as a civilian and sign my papers. :) I also turned down an electronics civil service job a year earlier. I would have had to spend the next 20 years at Ft Rucker, Al. if I had signed.

I ended up in Alaska, walking over two miles to and from work at -40 or colder, and in the dark. SOme of the guys who saw combat wanted f to go back. They told me they preferred to be shot at, than a slow death by freezing.

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Sporadic E is the Earth's aluminum foil beanie for the 'global warming'
sheep.

Quite a few years ago I went to an "Evening with Quad" in a church hall somewhere. The fairly elderly presenter gave an interesting and instructive talk, and at one point went into the wings and returned with a tenor sax on which he played some very good jazz. After a minute or so a couple of stage hands came on carrying the cling-film dust cover from an ESL63, which they slowly raised in front of him until he and the sax were isolated from the audience. They then slowly took it away; the presenter stopped playing after another minute or so, acknowledged the applause and explained that the object of the exercise was to demonstrate that the film was absolutely acoustically transparent, which was why there was no difference whatsoever in the sound. Cue oohs and aahs from the audience, and more applause. Well, most of them, anyway. I and a few others sat looking puzzled. To me, it was as if he had been playing in a room, and someone had shut the door then opened it again. OK, that's an exaggeration, but to me there was a very noticeable difference. When I got home I took the film covers off my own ESL63s (the metal protection covers had already been removed once my daughter was old enough to be trusted not to poke sharp metal objects through the cloth, and that made a huge difference) and on a variety of sources confirmed to my own satisfaction that I preferred the sound "without".

I did try going the whole hog by removing the "socks" - very little audible difference, but (a) they looked hideous in a listening room which doubled as a living room and (b) every fly in Surrey immediately developed Kamikaze tendencies. Anyone remember those strange frightening blue devices that butchers used to hang on their walls to attract then zap bluebottles...?

The presenter also talked about the huge range of the Quad speakers, from DC to light, and why there was absolutely no need to use any form of sub, but the examples he gave were frankly ridiculous and bore no relation to my own experience - but that's a whole 'nuther story. I concluded that he was a "Quaddie", the anditote to the "Linnies" who were just becoming famous.

Geoff MacK

As I recall, Richard Feynman was rejected by the US Army after failing an IQ test. He did not reach the minimum entry levels on anything. Don't know the US nomenclature at the time, but it boiled down to "too dumb" even for a grunt In due course he won the Nobel Prize for Physics, among other things in a spectacular and often extremely funny career.

Geoff MacK

The easiest way to flunk a multiple-guess test is to know the material

*better* than the author of the test. You spend so much time trying to guess which wrong answer the author thinks is right that you don't finish. It's even worse than total ignorance, where you could give random answers and score about 1/n, where n is the number of alternatives per question. For most people, it's only a problem on narrow, single- subject tests, but I can imagine Feynman getting bogged down in a standard IQ test.

I don't recall taking an IQ test before entering the Army, or afterwards.

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Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

WTH are you babbling about, now: "the 40+ sensors that had failing grades" ?

I have never heard of anyone scoring 70 or lower being allowed to the next grade, or to graduate. If 60 was the level at your school, it explains a lot. It had nothing to do with people pushing you down the stairs. Or did it?

--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida