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Scrounging for Fun and Profit
Guinnessy writes: "According to Toni Feder on Physics Today, scrounging used equipment is worthwhile if you can avoid the pitfalls of wasting time and compromising scientific goals. Feder interviews experimenters who have dug up everything from dewars to nuclear reactors."
When Bruno Bauer inherited Zebra, a retired 2-trillion-watt pulsed-power machine...
Man, I wish my rich uncle would die and leave me a 2-trillion-watt pulsed-power machine!
Whoohoo! Count me in!
Although...you suppose they didn't mean Scotch?
Ignorance is the root of all evil.
well, like the guy in the article, i wouldn't mind picking up a petawatt laser myself... unfortunately, i doubt my mom would let me keep it in the basement.
(some people just don't appreciate legitimate scientific inquiry!)
Think about it for a second. A whole new season of junkyard wars... With nukes...
Eric Gearman
Atomic batteries to power! Turbines to speed!
research scientists scrounge around for stuff?
It makes perfect sense, i know a few researchers who go out every weekend to scrounge for some Dewars.
Anyone else see potential for Laboratory Wars?
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
Back when I was in college I helped the physics dept. clean out their junk room. In exchange, they let me keep whatever I wanted out of the unneeded equipment. I got some really big lenses, some nice frount surface mirrors, and a tube powered oscilloscope that was originally purchased for NASA's Gemini program (and still had the appropriate labels on it). I had trouble explaining to the campus police why I was pushing a "late model oscilloscope" back to my dorm at 3am, but when they found out I was an mech. engineering major they smiled knowingly and left me alone. Among the uses I put it to was helping keep my underheated dorm room warm in the winter.
--and nobody's yet proposed taking charge of it for the sole purpose of world domination? What's wrong with these geeks??
The things I would do with a petawatt laser combined with, say, a small collection of orbiting satellites simply boggle the mind....
Before my computer programming days I worked in a biology lab.
Not only did we find a bunch of mystery chemicals with no labels, but we found herring sperm.
Unfortunately it was expired. Oh, the things I could have done with the herring sperm.
That's got to be quite a job, working in the herring sperm factory.
*wakes up in the morning*
"Dammit, If I have to whack off one more herring, I'm going to die. I'll just die."
"oh lord, when will you dry up this river of herring sperm I see before me?"
-J5K
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.