[OT] Interesting trip

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Mar 15, 2007, Alma J Wetzker wrote:
>Chong Yu Meng wrote:
>> On Wed, 2007-03-14 at 12:49 -0700, Bill Campbell wrote:
>>>  Their first attempts failed because the
>>> automatic safety features shut things down so they disabled five safety
>>> systems in order to make the tests.
>> 
>> There's a lesson in there somewhere! My first job was in a factory -- a
>> wafer fabrication plant to be precise -- and we had all kinds of safety
>> features on some of the more complex machines. Some of the safety
>> features made no sense to me last time, but our overseas vendors used to
>> warn us that we'd better know what we were doing before we turned some
>> of them off. Some horrific injuries can result from carelessness -- and
>> sometimes from a bit of unthinking ambition.
>
>Warning:  Do not look into laser with remaining eye.

A friend worked at Fairchild outside of D.C. years ago, and they
were using some very high-powered lasers in their research.  One
of Larry's co-workers reached across a bench to pick up a pack of
cigarettes, losing his hand as he reached through a laser beam.

I car-pooled with a man who worked at Los Alamos on the Manhattan
project. Art and I had many interesting discussions about the
engineering problems and mistakes that were made while people
were learning how to deal with radioactive materials.  Often they
simply didn't realize how dangerous things could be such as the
toxicity of shavings and dust from machining operations.

Bill
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