I was gonna say. When *I* take a shower it's like 4 minutes. When *she* takes a shower it's more like 7. When both of us take a shower it never fails to be under 15.
I'd love to do something like this with a voting system. The way I see it working is: you vote someone as an asshole, and the system registers your vote against them and also a vote against you for being a pissy person. When any car exceeds five votes, the car turns off. (Or gives a 30 second warning.) Your asshole vote is signalled in both cars by a light or something so you know how many asshole points you have left. If you're consistently voting assholes that other people vote as assholes, you get more points, and vice versa. And, to prevent gangs from going out and blowing all their asshole votes shooting other cars down, probably something to detect collusion, some population-hooked system for detecting if the same group of people are asshole voting and dropping their asshole points as a deterrent.
The second Vans RV-9 (as I recall) broke up in flight because a low-time pilot yanked on the stick and exceeded the *insane* specifications on the astoundingly solid design, 12 g's. The wing spar broke. He killed himself and his passenger because he was an idiot. Likewise, it's likely the Airbus that fell apart over New York City four years ago did so because of large rudder movements. Personally, I think you shouldn't be able to snap an airplane in half through overcontrol: I think it should be built to limit what you can do. But that's an unbelievably difficult design problem in airplanes, where aerodynamic forces rise by the square of the speed, so at near-stall, when you need excellent control, you have a set of stick control forces that, when you're going at cruise, usually about three times the stall speed, you have nine times as much force exerted for the same stick movement. That's how someone can snap a plane without meaning to.
I *like* it that my Subaru has a rev-limiter on the engine RPM. It's saved my engine twice. If I ever move up to flying high-performance planes I'm going to wish they had something similar, to keep me from breaking the plane into pieces because I (or a passenger) did something stupid. Even in what I do fly, it'd be nice if I was physically prevented from dropping flaps at cruise speed: maybe it might be useful some day, but if you rip off one flap from overspeed and the other one's at full deflection you're dead. (See BD-10, unequal flap deployment, smoking-hole-in-ground syndrome.)
I'm not trying to argue with you: I'm in favor of seatbelt laws, and I'm guessing you're not, and that's fair. I'm just saying that there are good reasons to have safety interlocks on equipment and I think that for most users they outweigh the disadvantages: you can get yourself in more trouble more often without them than you can extricate yourself if they weren't there.
>>Its pretty sad when its obvious to everyone what the problem is, yet its still the same thing after what, six years? >Maybe, after six years, you could accept that, apparently, it is NOT an obvious problem to a majority of people spending time on improving GIMP?
I don't know about the people spending time on improving GIMP. I do know that *every* *single* *person* I have tried to convert to GIMP, including myself, dislikes the interface with stunning intensity. The only thing keeping about eight people I know from going linux only is Adobe Photoshop.
Pfft, there are LOTS of people who are against everyone else getting to do what they personally do on a regular basis. It isn't just liberals whose underage, knocked-up daughters are getting abortions and whose short sons are getting illegal growth hormone injections. Think about speeding: I think most people are in favor of some sort of speed limit, and most of them speed. It's quite rational to want everyone else to have to obey laws and live under restrictions that you don't have to, coz it helps your competitiveness.
One of my friends suggests that if it were him, he'd be busy tapping the phones of Administration lackeys, to stop the leaks about extradition, secret prisons, and public exposure of CIA operatives' identities, and only after the plumbers have tightened things up to stop legitimate criticism do they go after their actual enemies.
I agree: what people are telling crazy people is right, and the crazy people should listen. The point being: crazy people are crazy because they don't listen. I'm including anorexia and morbid obesity in borderline crazy, because it's self-destructive behavior, which I (as a person who's done stuff like this) consider crazy.
If I hadn't commented in this thread already I'd give you modpoints. It works the same way with anorexics as with obesity: there's probably nothing you or anyone else can tell a person that'll fix it. As one of my friends says, "you can't ever change people, you can only make them secretive and neurotic." Telling someone who is morbidly obese -- or in my case, for several years, deathly skinny -- to "just stop being stupid about food" is akin to telling a schizophrenic to "just stop hearing all those voices". And, hey, nice segue, did anyone else read about how toxoplasmosis infections may cause schizophrenia? If a disease can cause something that life-altering, it's not too difficult to believe a virus might change a person's metabolism by 50 calories a day (which is all you need to gain several pounds a year, leading, in ten years, to big problems.)
Re:But the cause of being overweight is OBVIOUS!
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Obesity Contagious?
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>I'll bet at some point there were people standing around the village square commenting on how "if that fool had just spent a little more time praying than [insert sinful activity here], he obviously wouldn't be lying on the ground hacking up a lung and burning up from fever".
I'll take it as read that you don't hang out with a lot of less-fringe-than-you'd-think charismatic Christians. I think my disenchantment with my Christian upbringing started when a good friend of my parents died of lung cancer and his children and their friends, members of a rapidly growing, 'nondenominational' evangelic church, said exactly that about him, that if he hadn't been a geologist who was employed 'betraying Christ' in teaching about, y'know, geology, he wouldn't've been struck with cancer. For that matter, Pat Robertson is saying this sort of stuff, as of two weeks ago, and two months ago, and six months ago. (Ariel Sharon, New Orleans, Hugo Chavez, among others.)
So, yes, there is a very strong tendency to find causation. In some cases, we decide viruses cause obesity, in others we decide insufficient prayer causes cancer. Personally, I have my money on the scientists.
That's kind of odd. Loveland was the first site for an HP shop outside of California back in '62, and after they moved here (to get lower-priced tech workers) they built a mini-tech economy that included LSI, Celestica, Flextronics, Advanced Energy, and scads of others in the area. But now, HP has shut the Greeley and for all intents and purposes the Loveland plants, is drastically cutting the Fort Collins plant, Celestica's been outsourced to Mexico, both Flextronics plants are long-since gone, AE is downsizing. I work right beside the big AMD design center in Longmont and we joke about how there are fewer cars there every day. I'm very surprised that they'd move into an area where high tech seems to be moving OUT as fast as it can, because they've created a localized expensive workforce exactly like they were trying to escape when they moved here forty years ago. At one of my previous jobs at a hardware place, I was working with five people I'd worked with before, every one of them at a different place, one at *two* different places, and as I was working there several other people moved through that I'd known from other jobs as all five of the people I mentioned moved on to other jobs. The nomadic tech community here is pretty cool, but feels incestuous sometimes.
I'm aware that the speed of light is a constant. My question was, basically, if two things are moving apart at very nearly the speed of light, the interchange of particles between them is going to be very slow. As far as the particles are concerned, of course, it's instantaneous. But an observer sitting between them sees them moving away and exchanging gravitons that are only going fractionally faster than they themselves are, implying that gravity is time-dependent. An AC explained that there's a difference in field behavior as compared to individual (virtual or real) particle exchange, so I'll have to go read about that a little.
I wish I'd found some good links to it, but Wikipedia has nothing really interesting under acidophile or thermophile, so I was just going on memories of my microbiology classes. I'm at work and don't have time to do a good link-search (and I keep getting bitched at on/. for not giving links that are absolutely, perfectly illustrative of the principle I'm trying to discuss.)
But yeah, there are some seriously weird things growing out there. Some of the bacteria we left on the Moon were still viable when we went back and picked stuff up and brought it back 5 years later. They were't *growing*, or even alive in the conventional sense, but they came back easily enough.
Thanks! I think? I'm going to have to read about this more, but it's nice to have at least a partial explanation. (Which is to say one that I partially understand.)
I'm neither a PhD nor an engineer. Specificity is a big problem. There are roughly 40,000 proteins in the human proteome; an average protein is roughly 450 amino acids, the average amino acid contains about 20 covalent bonds, so the proteome alone has roughly 400M different covalent bonds in it. I submit that no matter how specific a frequency you can tune, it will vanish into the overlap from other proteins. Absorption bands are pretty broad. I'm assuming you'd focus on proteins, coz we can rebuild those; there are many less RNA macromolecules so there will be less overlap (although I still think it'd be far, far too broad an absorption spectrum) but if you screw up there you'll be destroying things that are much more difficult for the cell to rebuild: tRNA is an example of a serious problem since if you don't have any, you can't make any. I've built ultrasound transducers and know a bit about their design. It's really difficult to get even relatively narrow bandwidth on the designs I've seen, when you're talking about the required specificity. Within 0.5% of a given frequency, sure, but within 0.00005%? When you're trying to wipe out just one protein or just one RNA, that's the kind of notch you'd need to hit, I suspect.
Ya know, I think like you. But one of my friends is a young gay guy who is 'in love' with a guy in California and is planning on moving out there to spend the rest of his life with this guy -- which he knows quite well won't be very long. He says, and I quote, "I will never be anything worthwhile anyway, so I might as well die happy." Unbelievable. And he's a nice guy, and not particularly stupid. He's just wired differently than I am.
note please I have no problem with his sexuality. I quotate 'in love' because A: he's gone through a dozen other boys with whom he was 'in love' in the last two years and B: the guy in California is a bit of fluff who is a male escort, and is certainly not 'in love' with my friend.
So people do, indeed, walk directly into the furnace, thinking that it's no big deal -- DYING. Not thinking "oh, I won't catch it" or "oh, it's treatable" but "oh, dying is okay if I'm not alone."
There are archaeobacteria that live in nearly boiling hot sulfuric acid ponds, stuff that has chemical activity more aggressive than batteries, and others that live near underwater volcanic vents that, because of the enormous water pressure and its increase in the boiling point of water, survive quite nicely in water temperatures far above boiling. Many of them have weird long-chain ethers and esters in their cell membranes that keep the membranes from rupturing to the outside world, in a manner similar to rivets keeping an airplane's skin on.
It was really useful to me.
So this poses another question: if gravitons move at the speed of light, two objects which are diverging at roughly the speed of light from one another (like, say, nearly everything in the universe seems to be doing with respect to everything else in the universe) do they not interact gravitationally? Is the attraction of gravity speed-dependent, like but inverse to the speed-dependence of mass?
Speaking as someone who designs power supply systems, it sounds to me like there's a market here for having two power supplies in the system: one for full-power operation and a second one that can supply stand-by power at high efficiency. Since the full-power supply is optimized for supplying, well, full power, it's going to be pretty inefficient at 1/10 to 1/100 its rating. We design chips for powering cellphones, that do a 92% efficient job of power conversion at the 1-10 watt level. That'd do a good job of running a standby system. Yeah, it'd cost more: about $0.40-0.75. Triple or quadruple that for reworking boards, extra testing, and other manufacturing NRE for the actual cost passed to the consumer. I suspect that'd be recovered in two years through power savings.
As someone who spends a decent amount of time every summer doing gold recovery, I have a pretty clear idea how much processing it takes to get pure gold from the ground. I also have a clear idea of supply and demand. Humans need air, water, and food. Those might be intrinsically valuable, although that's basically restating my 'threat of imminent death' claim. Everything else is optional -- in other words, nothing else has intrinsic value.
And, by the way, the ref to "The Pearl" was specifically anticipating the 'in a well-stocked marketplace' situation.
>By the way, I don't know what planet you are on, but gold and silver coins still have intrinsic value
If you offer a woman whose children have been starving for a week her choice of a pound of food or a pound of gold, I'll bet she'll choose the food. Did you ever read John Steinbeck's "The Pearl"? I'm not sure *anything* has intrinsic value other than the threat of imminent death. Alternatively, everything has intrinsic value, and gold's value is roughly equal to about fifty times its weight in pieces of paper with pictures of a certain US ex-president on it (currently.)
I was thinking the same thing. People are already using fiber optics and even waterjets as high-power laser waveguides. If you cap the fiber with a dispersive lens and have that hit a reflector or fluorescent screen, you've just invented a long-distance lightbulb, aka a light pipe.
I *still* do that. I just rewired my house, ripping out all the old 2-conductor wire and replacing it with 3, and all the old stuff is getting stripped and coiled for use in making chainmail and as filler for tig-welding copper sheet together to make armor. Mostly I've been building small clamp mechanisms that have an adjustable razor blade just barely penetrating into a small hole, so I can pull the wire through the clamp, mounted in a vise, to rapidly strip long sections of wire. It's a real drag, but I get great wire out of it (as opposed to burning the insulation off.)
To find the three-d structure by x-ray crystallography, you have to crystallize the protein. Actually doing so, with different proteins, is an astoundingly difficult task, so much so that something like five Nobel prizes have been given for research into crystallization and x-ray crystallography development, and another ten or so Nobels given for determination of three-d structure of various proteins were, in essence, awarded for getting the protein to crystallize.
Side story: there was a famous German chemist named Emil Fischer, who originally determined the structures of a bunch of sugars. That was, again, largely a crystallization problem. He had, as Germans did in the 1890's, an enormous beard, and was playing with chemicals all day long, which tended to condense in his beard. It was said that if you could not get something to crystallize out of solution, no matter what you did, you asked Fischer to come to your lab and fluff his beard over your beaker, and the seed crystals falling from it were of such variety that one was almost guaranteed to be correct for your particular situation and get it to crystallize. So this isn't exactly NEW technology.
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I was gonna say. When *I* take a shower it's like 4 minutes. When *she* takes a shower it's more like 7. When both of us take a shower it never fails to be under 15.
I'd love to do something like this with a voting system. The way I see it working is: you vote someone as an asshole, and the system registers your vote against them and also a vote against you for being a pissy person. When any car exceeds five votes, the car turns off. (Or gives a 30 second warning.) Your asshole vote is signalled in both cars by a light or something so you know how many asshole points you have left. If you're consistently voting assholes that other people vote as assholes, you get more points, and vice versa. And, to prevent gangs from going out and blowing all their asshole votes shooting other cars down, probably something to detect collusion, some population-hooked system for detecting if the same group of people are asshole voting and dropping their asshole points as a deterrent.
I was going to recommend the same book, given that it's *precisely* about this, but you got to it first. Great book, great recommendation.
The second Vans RV-9 (as I recall) broke up in flight because a low-time pilot yanked on the stick and exceeded the *insane* specifications on the astoundingly solid design, 12 g's. The wing spar broke. He killed himself and his passenger because he was an idiot. Likewise, it's likely the Airbus that fell apart over New York City four years ago did so because of large rudder movements. Personally, I think you shouldn't be able to snap an airplane in half through overcontrol: I think it should be built to limit what you can do. But that's an unbelievably difficult design problem in airplanes, where aerodynamic forces rise by the square of the speed, so at near-stall, when you need excellent control, you have a set of stick control forces that, when you're going at cruise, usually about three times the stall speed, you have nine times as much force exerted for the same stick movement. That's how someone can snap a plane without meaning to.
I *like* it that my Subaru has a rev-limiter on the engine RPM. It's saved my engine twice. If I ever move up to flying high-performance planes I'm going to wish they had something similar, to keep me from breaking the plane into pieces because I (or a passenger) did something stupid. Even in what I do fly, it'd be nice if I was physically prevented from dropping flaps at cruise speed: maybe it might be useful some day, but if you rip off one flap from overspeed and the other one's at full deflection you're dead. (See BD-10, unequal flap deployment, smoking-hole-in-ground syndrome.)
I'm not trying to argue with you: I'm in favor of seatbelt laws, and I'm guessing you're not, and that's fair. I'm just saying that there are good reasons to have safety interlocks on equipment and I think that for most users they outweigh the disadvantages: you can get yourself in more trouble more often without them than you can extricate yourself if they weren't there.
>>Its pretty sad when its obvious to everyone what the problem is, yet its still the same thing after what, six years?
>Maybe, after six years, you could accept that, apparently, it is NOT an obvious problem to a majority of people spending time on improving GIMP?
I don't know about the people spending time on improving GIMP. I do know that *every* *single* *person* I have tried to convert to GIMP, including myself, dislikes the interface with stunning intensity. The only thing keeping about eight people I know from going linux only is Adobe Photoshop.
Pfft, there are LOTS of people who are against everyone else getting to do what they personally do on a regular basis. It isn't just liberals whose underage, knocked-up daughters are getting abortions and whose short sons are getting illegal growth hormone injections. Think about speeding: I think most people are in favor of some sort of speed limit, and most of them speed. It's quite rational to want everyone else to have to obey laws and live under restrictions that you don't have to, coz it helps your competitiveness.
One of my friends suggests that if it were him, he'd be busy tapping the phones of Administration lackeys, to stop the leaks about extradition, secret prisons, and public exposure of CIA operatives' identities, and only after the plumbers have tightened things up to stop legitimate criticism do they go after their actual enemies.
I agree: what people are telling crazy people is right, and the crazy people should listen. The point being: crazy people are crazy because they don't listen. I'm including anorexia and morbid obesity in borderline crazy, because it's self-destructive behavior, which I (as a person who's done stuff like this) consider crazy.
If I hadn't commented in this thread already I'd give you modpoints. It works the same way with anorexics as with obesity: there's probably nothing you or anyone else can tell a person that'll fix it. As one of my friends says, "you can't ever change people, you can only make them secretive and neurotic." Telling someone who is morbidly obese -- or in my case, for several years, deathly skinny -- to "just stop being stupid about food" is akin to telling a schizophrenic to "just stop hearing all those voices". And, hey, nice segue, did anyone else read about how toxoplasmosis infections may cause schizophrenia? If a disease can cause something that life-altering, it's not too difficult to believe a virus might change a person's metabolism by 50 calories a day (which is all you need to gain several pounds a year, leading, in ten years, to big problems.)
>I'll bet at some point there were people standing around the village square commenting on how "if that fool had just spent a little more time praying than [insert sinful activity here], he obviously wouldn't be lying on the ground hacking up a lung and burning up from fever".
I'll take it as read that you don't hang out with a lot of less-fringe-than-you'd-think charismatic Christians. I think my disenchantment with my Christian upbringing started when a good friend of my parents died of lung cancer and his children and their friends, members of a rapidly growing, 'nondenominational' evangelic church, said exactly that about him, that if he hadn't been a geologist who was employed 'betraying Christ' in teaching about, y'know, geology, he wouldn't've been struck with cancer. For that matter, Pat Robertson is saying this sort of stuff, as of two weeks ago, and two months ago, and six months ago. (Ariel Sharon, New Orleans, Hugo Chavez, among others.)
So, yes, there is a very strong tendency to find causation. In some cases, we decide viruses cause obesity, in others we decide insufficient prayer causes cancer. Personally, I have my money on the scientists.
That's kind of odd. Loveland was the first site for an HP shop outside of California back in '62, and after they moved here (to get lower-priced tech workers) they built a mini-tech economy that included LSI, Celestica, Flextronics, Advanced Energy, and scads of others in the area. But now, HP has shut the Greeley and for all intents and purposes the Loveland plants, is drastically cutting the Fort Collins plant, Celestica's been outsourced to Mexico, both Flextronics plants are long-since gone, AE is downsizing. I work right beside the big AMD design center in Longmont and we joke about how there are fewer cars there every day. I'm very surprised that they'd move into an area where high tech seems to be moving OUT as fast as it can, because they've created a localized expensive workforce exactly like they were trying to escape when they moved here forty years ago. At one of my previous jobs at a hardware place, I was working with five people I'd worked with before, every one of them at a different place, one at *two* different places, and as I was working there several other people moved through that I'd known from other jobs as all five of the people I mentioned moved on to other jobs. The nomadic tech community here is pretty cool, but feels incestuous sometimes.
I'm aware that the speed of light is a constant. My question was, basically, if two things are moving apart at very nearly the speed of light, the interchange of particles between them is going to be very slow. As far as the particles are concerned, of course, it's instantaneous. But an observer sitting between them sees them moving away and exchanging gravitons that are only going fractionally faster than they themselves are, implying that gravity is time-dependent. An AC explained that there's a difference in field behavior as compared to individual (virtual or real) particle exchange, so I'll have to go read about that a little.
That's true. I wonder if, like some other fish, it can change its sex whenever it wants to, as well. ALMOST makes me want to be a fish.
I wish I'd found some good links to it, but Wikipedia has nothing really interesting under acidophile or thermophile, so I was just going on memories of my microbiology classes. I'm at work and don't have time to do a good link-search (and I keep getting bitched at on /. for not giving links that are absolutely, perfectly illustrative of the principle I'm trying to discuss.)
But yeah, there are some seriously weird things growing out there. Some of the bacteria we left on the Moon were still viable when we went back and picked stuff up and brought it back 5 years later. They were't *growing*, or even alive in the conventional sense, but they came back easily enough.
Thanks! I think?
I'm going to have to read about this more, but it's nice to have at least a partial explanation. (Which is to say one that I partially understand.)
I'm neither a PhD nor an engineer.
Specificity is a big problem. There are roughly 40,000 proteins in the human proteome; an average protein is roughly 450 amino acids, the average amino acid contains about 20 covalent bonds, so the proteome alone has roughly 400M different covalent bonds in it. I submit that no matter how specific a frequency you can tune, it will vanish into the overlap from other proteins. Absorption bands are pretty broad. I'm assuming you'd focus on proteins, coz we can rebuild those; there are many less RNA macromolecules so there will be less overlap (although I still think it'd be far, far too broad an absorption spectrum) but if you screw up there you'll be destroying things that are much more difficult for the cell to rebuild: tRNA is an example of a serious problem since if you don't have any, you can't make any.
I've built ultrasound transducers and know a bit about their design. It's really difficult to get even relatively narrow bandwidth on the designs I've seen, when you're talking about the required specificity. Within 0.5% of a given frequency, sure, but within 0.00005%? When you're trying to wipe out just one protein or just one RNA, that's the kind of notch you'd need to hit, I suspect.
Ya know, I think like you. But one of my friends is a young gay guy who is 'in love' with a guy in California and is planning on moving out there to spend the rest of his life with this guy -- which he knows quite well won't be very long. He says, and I quote, "I will never be anything worthwhile anyway, so I might as well die happy."
Unbelievable.
And he's a nice guy, and not particularly stupid. He's just wired differently than I am.
note please I have no problem with his sexuality. I quotate 'in love' because A: he's gone through a dozen other boys with whom he was 'in love' in the last two years and B: the guy in California is a bit of fluff who is a male escort, and is certainly not 'in love' with my friend.
So people do, indeed, walk directly into the furnace, thinking that it's no big deal -- DYING. Not thinking "oh, I won't catch it" or "oh, it's treatable" but "oh, dying is okay if I'm not alone."
Un
freaking
believable.
There are archaeobacteria that live in nearly boiling hot sulfuric acid ponds, stuff that has chemical activity more aggressive than batteries, and others that live near underwater volcanic vents that, because of the enormous water pressure and its increase in the boiling point of water, survive quite nicely in water temperatures far above boiling. Many of them have weird long-chain ethers and esters in their cell membranes that keep the membranes from rupturing to the outside world, in a manner similar to rivets keeping an airplane's skin on.
It was really useful to me. So this poses another question: if gravitons move at the speed of light, two objects which are diverging at roughly the speed of light from one another (like, say, nearly everything in the universe seems to be doing with respect to everything else in the universe) do they not interact gravitationally? Is the attraction of gravity speed-dependent, like but inverse to the speed-dependence of mass?
Speaking as someone who designs power supply systems, it sounds to me like there's a market here for having two power supplies in the system: one for full-power operation and a second one that can supply stand-by power at high efficiency. Since the full-power supply is optimized for supplying, well, full power, it's going to be pretty inefficient at 1/10 to 1/100 its rating. We design chips for powering cellphones, that do a 92% efficient job of power conversion at the 1-10 watt level. That'd do a good job of running a standby system. Yeah, it'd cost more: about $0.40-0.75. Triple or quadruple that for reworking boards, extra testing, and other manufacturing NRE for the actual cost passed to the consumer. I suspect that'd be recovered in two years through power savings.
As someone who spends a decent amount of time every summer doing gold recovery, I have a pretty clear idea how much processing it takes to get pure gold from the ground. I also have a clear idea of supply and demand. Humans need air, water, and food. Those might be intrinsically valuable, although that's basically restating my 'threat of imminent death' claim. Everything else is optional -- in other words, nothing else has intrinsic value. And, by the way, the ref to "The Pearl" was specifically anticipating the 'in a well-stocked marketplace' situation.
>By the way, I don't know what planet you are on, but gold and silver coins still have intrinsic value
If you offer a woman whose children have been starving for a week her choice of a pound of food or a pound of gold, I'll bet she'll choose the food. Did you ever read John Steinbeck's "The Pearl"? I'm not sure *anything* has intrinsic value other than the threat of imminent death. Alternatively, everything has intrinsic value, and gold's value is roughly equal to about fifty times its weight in pieces of paper with pictures of a certain US ex-president on it (currently.)
I was thinking the same thing. People are already using fiber optics and even waterjets as high-power laser waveguides. If you cap the fiber with a dispersive lens and have that hit a reflector or fluorescent screen, you've just invented a long-distance lightbulb, aka a light pipe.
I *still* do that. I just rewired my house, ripping out all the old 2-conductor wire and replacing it with 3, and all the old stuff is getting stripped and coiled for use in making chainmail and as filler for tig-welding copper sheet together to make armor. Mostly I've been building small clamp mechanisms that have an adjustable razor blade just barely penetrating into a small hole, so I can pull the wire through the clamp, mounted in a vise, to rapidly strip long sections of wire. It's a real drag, but I get great wire out of it (as opposed to burning the insulation off.)
To find the three-d structure by x-ray crystallography, you have to crystallize the protein. Actually doing so, with different proteins, is an astoundingly difficult task, so much so that something like five Nobel prizes have been given for research into crystallization and x-ray crystallography development, and another ten or so Nobels given for determination of three-d structure of various proteins were, in essence, awarded for getting the protein to crystallize.
Side story: there was a famous German chemist named Emil Fischer, who originally determined the structures of a bunch of sugars. That was, again, largely a crystallization problem. He had, as Germans did in the 1890's, an enormous beard, and was playing with chemicals all day long, which tended to condense in his beard. It was said that if you could not get something to crystallize out of solution, no matter what you did, you asked Fischer to come to your lab and fluff his beard over your beaker, and the seed crystals falling from it were of such variety that one was almost guaranteed to be correct for your particular situation and get it to crystallize. So this isn't exactly NEW technology.