Re: Nannies want to stop you from building mains-powered projects

The long-running process of buying black slaves in Africa and shipping them across to the USA to be sold to white men to work on plantations was run by white Europeans and Americans.

It was recent and is very well documented. The white abolitionists who eventually managed to end the trade were pretty good at advertising how bad it was, and how virtuous they were in ending it.

Nobody has any trouble in remembering other instances of slavery, but those instances didn't get publicised with the same enthusiasm.

On the other hand, a lot of people who aren't snowflakes, pansies or nancy-boys suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, and wouldn't appreciate Cursitor Doom's ill-informed insights into the condition.

Some might be tempted to add some traumatic stress to Cursitor Doom's life to improve his grasp of the subject.

Academic skills and practical skills aren't the same thing.

Physicists get divided up between experimentalists and theoreticians.

Fermi was both, but Pauli was strictly a theoretician.

:)

Are trolls even susceptible to PTSD?

Cursitor Doom is technically clueless. He's never posted anything technical here, and his opinion of recent graduates probably reflects the fact that they don't share his particular sort of clueless ignorance.

Sixty years ago is 1959 - which is when I matriculated. I started at university in 1960. The last time I did any tutoring at a university was in Southampton in 1972, in the chemistry department as a post-doc.

Cursitor Doom probably isn't aware of this, but quite a lot has been discovered in the last sixty years, and anybody who tried to avoid teaching any of that would look very odd at any university that I know about.

Curiously, Peter Baxandall's class-D oscillator paper was published in 1959 and there's a copy of it up on my web-site.

If Cursitor Doom's fatuous allegation was correct, I'd have settled for putting up the paper, but the link is embedded in text that does add more recent knowledge.

He really is a twit.

Perhaps not, but Cursitor Doom would be an excellent experimental subject, even if repeated trials didn't produce a conclusive result.

At least when working with mains electronics or high power tube hear keep your other hand in the pocket. This avoids large shock currents through your heart and you still have a functioning hand to disconnect the power, if your other hand has cramped due to a shock.

Your nose is also sensitive to heat and also senses different odor from even slightly warming components. However, please do not use your nose, if there are high voltages present on the PCB. I once got 230 V mains from transformer primary directly in my nose, which was very painful and it was very hard to concentrate on anything (such as walking:-) for hours,

That is a good decision if you have rings on your fingers and even worse if you have rings or other metallic objects _through_ your fingers. o On a PC card, the CPU switcher will generate very low voltages but huge currents. If you short this with a ring, you can get serious burns. Of course this applies to other high current systems, such as car batteries, not to mention EV batteries,

Assuming the fingers were clear of any metallic object, you should have given the intern a 4.5 V flash light battery and ask to put your fingers across the terminals.

You might perhaps not ask the intern to put his/her tongue between the electrodes :-). This was the old standard method for checking if the flashlight failed due to empty battery or faulty lamp.