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Cake day: August 4th, 2024

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  • So I can’t help with exact physics too much or exact electrical. Just a manufacturing engineer with too many hobbies.

    At a basic level, you’ll want to decide what you’re making. While similar, the specifics will decide what you need exactly. A coilgun or mass driver uses electromagnetic coils in a series, 1 -> 2 -> 3 ect. Each coil is powered one after the other, with sufficient uptime and delay before the next to pull a ferrous carrier or projectile forward. Moments before it reaches the powered coil, that coil should shut down, moving the field further and continuing the acceleration. Note, as you accelerate the payload you will see a shorter uptime and delay at subsequent coils.

    Of note: How you’re moving the payload is important. If you’re using a carrier, you will need to either account for its separation from the payload (consider a sabot in a shotgun shell, though many other designs likely exist) or its deceleration before the end of the line to avoid its self destructive impact. A carrier less payload needs some means of moving along with minimal friction, and must be ferrous so that the induced fields will interact with it. Most I’ve seen made used a non conductive tube polished smooth inside with each coil wound around the tube itself. Electronics on the outside, launching a steel ball bearing. Easily procured capacitors from cameras set up to each coil and confirmed to pop off in series. Either a LONG tube, or potentially hazardous electrical charges. Please consult a real electrician or engineer before using higher power inputs.

    It’s certainly been done quite often, but doing anything particularly impressive will be a bit of a feat without significant input.

    A rail gun is actually far easier to make, if even less impressive without massive power inputs (potentially millions of amps to achieve the theoretical velocities a railgun is associated with) and precision manufacturing. Instead of creating a coil, a neat bit of physics is abused. Functionally, your design will resemble an elongated H, with the bottom legs extending as long as you’d like. Power source wires to the tops of each leg. The center portion serves to bridge the rails and complete the circuit and will also need to move up and down them freely. What this creates is a magnetic field between the center bridge and the power inputs on top. This field will propel the center down the rails. Every bit of rail behind the connection will generate a magnetic field as it does so. No need to time coils.

    Sled is a must, as the center must contact the rails the whole time. The more magnetically reactive you can get the sled/payload, the easier acceleration becomes. Adding magnets to the sled isn’t uncommon.

    As with the coil gun, getting anything impressive becomes quite a feat. A demonstration of what’s happening is fairly easy.

    We’ve done childrens demonstrations as part of the company outreach like this. A magnet and paperclips will suffice. I would suggest a railgun and you start there, as the demonstration is easily found online and scale up from there. Uni project, not Naval bombardment being your goal.

    I cannot stress enough. Please consult with someone knowledgeable in electronics if you start moving into higher power inputs. A demo model mishap with 9V is a tingle. Running 120V gets serious very quickly.






  • Not typically, as they’re normally pretty comparable between people. I’m sure specific exceptions exist based on hygiene and other external factors. In general, skin’s made of the same thing and the amount of sun and moisture and types of fluids excreted by our pores tend to be similar in the same areas.

    Your friends armpits vs their ex’s are probably similar, pending they live in a similar area. Same would go for the genetials of their ex vs any of their other partners. Differentiating members of the opposite sex is important here: the biome of the vagina is drastically different than that the surface skin of a dick. However, a bacterial infection from one to the other wouldn’t be common.

    The biomes are “contained” by your physiology and your environment. In the same way you wouldn’t normally find a fish (a wet biome like water with plenty of food) chilling in a tree (a dry, exposed to the open air location with little for a fish to eat) you don’t normally find yeast (common in dark, moist biomes with skin excretions to eat like armpits or the groin) on the back of your hand (bright, arid, with minimal excretions). Your environment can change that. See athletes foot or diaper rash. Normally dry skin being saturated for too long can allow yeast to proliferate.

    Does/did your friend pee after every encounter? Not doing so does drastically increase the risk of UTIs, as the biome of the vagina and the urethra are not exactly the same, but similar. The biome of the outer area divides these areas normally, but during sex there’s quite a bit of fluid moving organisms about.

    Also, as above, hygiene can play a factor. Clean your external skin periodically. Particularly after sticking it anywhere. New organisms and potentially new resources can be introduced to the biome. Soap and water are more than enough for normal hygiene, don’t get crazy. You can alter the biome or kill off the native organisms, which isn’t optimal.

    Were they using a condom or some other form of external object for protection? Anything on the inserted, artificial object could absolutely alter the biome for someone. Probably not organisms (I’d hope it’s a fresh out of the package item or at least cleaned) but chemicals that might be feeding or killing native organisms.


  • I have a biology degree, but am A: plant focused and B: now a manufacturing engineer, because of you wanna do plant biology in the Midwest it’s corn or soy time. And those are boring. So only marginally more applicable.

    You’re pretty spot on. The vast range of skin biomes directly impacts what sorts of organisms can live there. Even between a human arm, armpit, nose, and intestines you’ll have different organisms making up the majority of the biome, and potentially even organisms unique to that biome.

    Changes to the region or loss of competitors in other connected biomes can allow normally less dominant organisms to gain a foothold. Absolutely how one gets a yest infection. You can even just KILL EVERYTHING and still different organisms might colonize the area faster, resulting in a difference that’s noticeable even at our comparably massive scale.

    I didn’t particularly know what organisms prefer the fur, feather, or scale coated regions of animals, but they very much would have the same type of dynamic populations.

    Ballpark guess, given how there’s a Salmonella risk associated with reptiles, I’d assume they have some biome that allows Salmonella to survive, if not directly thrive. Similarly with some varieties of Armadillo carrying leprosy.


  • Is your site currently losing about 1/3 of it’s area to an outside company who bought a division and the apparently completely sane plan is to seperate off that area and duplicate prexisting structures (HR, Warehouse, Quality) for the new company?

    But yeah Patient safety comes first. As long as the lines don’t go down. Or too slow. Or don’t get stopped from speeding up at the planned rate.

    For a business where the FDA WILL show up unannounced and audit, we sure do love to push back against quality.



  • As a manufacturing engineer, I’m mostly in an office when I’m not actively dicking about on the production floor or talking with my production operators. Most of my desk time is

    1. Answering questions from people who aren’t me about my manufacturing lines: specifications, output, inputs, could I do experiment XYZ if they sent me info. Subject Matter Expert is the term the company uses. Debatable if it’s accurate, but it’s the expectation.
    2. Answering stupid questions for people who could absolutely open an app or walk and look in person but would rather be handed the info.
    3. Collaboration with other employees: be it Quality as to what hoops I need to jump through to do something, providing process data relevant to a manufacturing defect they were alerted to, pestering other engineers to see if they’ve done anything like what I’m up to because it’s a good shortcut, or trying to work out how to use a system I’m unfamiliar with.
    4. Tracking output metrics: Management loves the same numbers tracked 5 different ways and having them reported to them constantly.
    5. Meeting prep: either making a slideshow, crunching data to present, updating a project tracker (see above), or reading all the relevant emails associated with the meeting because earlier I super just skimmed them for anything I was required to do urgently. 7: Tinkering on things at my desk: familiarizing myself with new equipment/parts, testing an idea out of scraps/easily sourced parts before I ask our Tool and Die team to draw up a design for something sturdier/more expensive, or rooting through boxes for things I inherited relevant to that manufacturing line when I was assigned to it.
    6. Messaging folks on teams: lunch plans, thoughts on recent events, or even just sending memes, gifs, ASCII middle fingers to people I like. General screwing around.