You only choose the galls with the hole in the bottom that indicates that the wasp has eaten its way out and gone. It is pretty obvious which ones still have a wasp in them.
My father was involved in this, he didn’t have a choice and it was dangerous work as even then most of the munitions were unstable. Shells etc sweated tnt which got absorbed into their skin. He hated it. They also had to contend with the rolling North Sea whilst dumping live ammunition overboard.
I can't imagine having to deal with sweating explosives on a boat that was rolling on the sea. The nausea and headaches must've been epic.
Years ago I worked on land seismic crews drilling shot-holes for geophysical exploration. We drilled patterns of shallow shot-holes and loaded each hole with 1/4-1/2 pound (0.11-0.23 kg) of dynamite. We carried paper-wrapped sticks and a brass knife to cut the one pound (0.45 kg) sticks to size. There was a lot of bare-handed handling of those sticks and it was July in the desert southwest of the 4 Corners region. They sweated a lot. They had to be packed in to each shot-hole so some poor slob always had to be the guy with the backpack loaded with 35-40 pounds (15.9-18.1 kg) of sweating dynamite sticks and blasting caps. I had that duty more times than I can remember.
Backpacks were nowhere near as padded or utilitarian as those you can get today. This thing had an aluminum (aluminium, LOL) frame with a poly bag and after a few minutes carrying that pack the bearer had absorbed enough nitroglycerine to have a booming headache that was so horrible that you would spend the day trying not to lean your head off of vertical so that you wouldn't get more blood rushing to your skull. It was frigging awful. Worst headaches I have ever had.
On a funny note, those sticks of powder (dynamite) came wrapped in a very smooth, very absorbent brown paper a lot like cardboard without the corrugations. It was super-soft and a lot of guys would raid the powder boxes looking for the paper to use as toilet paper out in the field. They would try to find pieces that weren't soaked in nitro because if you wiped your ass with a nitro-soaked piece you would quickly be reminded of the close connection between your head and your asshole when the headache hit. We called it dyna-wipe.
Every so often in HN comments, one finds pearls like this anecdote. Outside the bubble of usually sterile tech narratives and uniquely, hilariously fascinating. Thanks for that... "dyna-wipe".. made me laugh right out loud.
Also, wouldn't the nitroglycerin that sweated out as you describe have constantly been in danger of spontaneously exploding, even in small quantities?
Thanks for reading. I'm glad you enjoyed it. We have a large group of people with such diverse life and career experiences that I think it adds value to give some real-life color to some of these discussions and the parent comment immediately reminded me of my own experiences.
To answer your question about volatility of the nitroglycerin I'll lean on the safety information that we were given back in the day. We were told that there was minimal danger of explosion from the sweating sticks or the materials that absorbed the nitroglycerin because it required significant energy to initiate an explosion. That energy was to be supplied by the blasting caps. They said we could burn the sticks like firewood without risk of explosion since the nitroglycerin was in a nitro-soaked sawdust matrix wrapped in durable paper. They warned against jumping on the burning sticks or throwing things on the fire if you were trying to build or extinguish the fire though since they might be unstable.
Safe handling meant that we were to keep blasting caps separate from "powder" sticks. In normal road transport that was easy since each had separate locked magazines. Once you're in the field, as in this case, you just carried both together and followed normal safety guidelines to minimize the possibility of an accidental detonation of the primer cap. That meant that you minimized impact on the backpack and the copper jackets of the caps and insured that all the cap wires were twisted (shorted) so stray static electricity wouldn't be an issue. The caps all had a two-wire conductor to the primer which needed to be twisted (shunted or shorted) to protect from stray voltages that could cause the cap to fire. They told us that the cap could fire with less than 0.5V and that in the right atmospheric conditions normal static electricity could pop one so it was critical to make sure all were twisted. Normal procedure was to leave them twisted until you were preparing to fire the charge and then you would connect them to the blaster which supplied the voltage to pop the cap.
The blasting caps had approximately the same energy as a .30 caliber bullet impact so in theory you could shoot a stick of dynamite and cause it to explode.
It's been 40+ years since I worked out there and I still wouldn't trade the experience for anything else. It was foundational experience in field operations that set me up for a long career as a geophysicist.
>We were told that there was minimal danger of explosion from the sweating sticks or the materials that absorbed the nitroglycerin because it required significant energy to initiate an explosion.
Thanks for the detailed reply! And sorry I just answered back now. I hadn't noticed it earlier. As for the above. I assumed that the sticks would be pretty stable unless detonated with something like a blasting cap, but I was referring to the liquid nitroglycerin leaking, or sweating out of them. Do you remember if that liquid was pure nitroglycerin or still diluted enough not to be in danger of just exploding suddenly?
From what I remember the nitroglycerin was held in a fine sawdust matrix and it would sweat thru the heavy paper on the sticks. Since there was dynawipe in the boxes you likely never had beads of nitro form on the outside of the sticks. When carried in a backpack they would sweat into the pack fabric and then straight into your bloodstream.
I suspect that it would be pure nitroglycerin because I heard from friends that after cutting a stick you could scrape small balls of the goo from your brass powder knife and whack them hard with a ball-peen hammer and they would pop.
We used those small paper-wrapped sticks when we drilled mini-hole programs where the shot-holes were 5' (1.5m) deep or less and could be drilled by one man or a two man crew using jackhammers or Little Beaver type augers depending on near surface conditions. For traditional shot-holes that were 80-100' deep (24.4-30.5m) or more we used 5# (2.27 kg) sticks of dynagel (seismogel?) which was a gelled nitroglycerin that could stand long periods of immersion without degrading. These sticks were plastic tubes that could be screwed together to make a charge of any size and the loader could place sets of empty tubes to space charges inside the shot-hole allowing multiple shots to be taken from a single shot-hole. The blasting caps would be inserted at the top of each charge and the loader would label them from deepest to shallowest so that the shooter, who might not get around for a month or more, could fire them from deepest to shallowest allowing the data from each shot in that shot-hole to be stacked for signal-to-noise improvement.
Yes. Causes your heart rate to skyrocket when it enters the bloodstream or it increases blood pressure. I'm not 100% sure which but it is used as heart medication.
Sadly didnt run for me on Windows on this Arm laptop although in mitigation I didnt try that hard & was in a hurry. I might have another look at it later. Uninstalled for now.
After reading about this and the methodologies many years ago I implemented many of the precepts into my practice at the time (visual programming using a variety of workflow tools) and it really helped to prevent sprawl that is common with drag and drop workflow interfaces. It helps to enforce that discipline of not straying too far away from the desired path and handling exceptions. If it strays too far to the right then you know you need to look at things again and refactor. Worth reading.
How different is something like this to say, a Jira workflow?
I know there must be many like this but I think it might be particularly robust since it helped power the Buran launch and landing - which by all accounts was a bit of a miracle it all worked so well at first go.
My partner’s great uncle Perce (Blackborow) was one of the crew. He was the one you see in the pictures with Mrs Chippy the ship’s cat sat on his shoulder. Originally a stowaway he became steward. Lost quite a few toes to frostbite. When he returned to Newport he declared that he would never leave it again and as far as I know never did.
Loved that, thanks. I had a cat that I was told it was a male when given to me only to find out it was a female when the 1st heat came :) I also kept its male name.
Wow the stowaway! That’s pretty amazing and a very unique part of the story. Perhaps more common in those times?
Read the book years ago and it’s still the most jaw dropping story.
Every time I read about the tale of Shackleton all I think about is how he risked it he lives and limbs of his crew for personal vanity. I'm sure he was charismatic but I can't help but think he was an complete asshole in absolute terms.
Really? This is the same guy that came back and rescued everyone from the Endurance.
This stuff was dangerous, I think everyone going in knew it, as no one else had done this stuff before.
From the Wikipedia entry:
> Shackleton's concern for his men was such that he gave his mittens to photographer Frank Hurley, who had lost his own mittens during the boat journey. Shackleton suffered frostbitten fingers as a result.
He was also the guy that dared to turn around and say "we'll come back another day" 180km from the south pole, a few years ahead of Amundsen and Scott.
No, you must have mistaken him for Scott. Apart from the fatal final journey, he also sent his men on a pointless trip to collect pengiun embryos during antartic night. Documented in "The worst journey in the world" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worst_Journey_in_the_Wor...
Sure. Like so many major (often crazy) milestones the human race has done.
* Climbed Everest
* Flew a plane
* Make a trip to the Titanic
* Freediving
* Swam the English Channel
* Floated across the Atlantic with no idea where we were headed
* Jumped from space without a parachute
People do crazy stuff all the time. It's sort of part of our DNA. Being the first to do something will cause people to go to great lengths and take great risks.
Happy New Year all. HN has been there for me to read, learn, get cross with comments, and generally entertaining me for several years. I may not always agree with or understand articles that are linked, but I come back every day. So Happy New Year and thanks all. Esp dang for keeping the place civil.
Many many years ago I worked for a University that had a huge stock of old 386 and 486 pizza box style PC’s and we were implementing Citrix Metaframe on Windows 2000. It was decided to repurpose the older PC’s as thin client boxes, but in initial tests the users hated seeing the older Windows 3.11 OS booting up. We were in a hurry to get rolled out so I ended up making a small GUI on VB6 with two buttons - Load Thin client system and shut down. This replaced the Windows shell and loaded almost immediately. Took me something like 10 minutes to make.
Years later I went back (like 10 years later?) and they showed me a sleek new tiny thin client box, and when it loaded there was my VB6 screen with the familiar two buttons. Apparently the users loved it and so they had ported it across to the newer devices ever since.
