Sirotan posted:

It's Michigan. That would potentially exclude 10 months of the year to ship hazardous materials. Yes we've had documented snowstorms as early as September and as late as June.

Sirotan posted:

It's Michigan.

chitoryu12 posted:

Okay. The sheave is the wheel that the wire rope ( the metal cable cranes use to lift things) runs in to keep it centered as it reels in and out. The jib is a foldout extension to the crane boom, that you can unfold when you need some extra length on the arm (the blue lattice in the picture). When you unfold the jib and lock it in place at the end of the boom, you need to take the wire rope out of its sheave on the end of the boom and toss it onto the top of the jib so it runs down the whole length, then put it in the sheave at the end of the jib. This is done just by pulling out two large pins (basically just metal rods about an inch thick and seven or eight inches long), putting the rope in the wheel, and putting the pins back in to hold it in place. When you want to fold the jib back up against the side of the boom, you pull the wire rope out of the sheave and let it flop onto the ground so you can swing the jib back around (the tag line is just a rope you tie to the load you're lifting or part of the crane you're moving to let you pull it around by hand as it swings).

Dunderhead who works with nothing smaller than a 60-ton crane and usually works 150+ feet up on wind turbines forgot to put the jib's sheave pins back on after we took the wire rope off and folded the jib back up. Nothing would fall off the crane and kill anyone if he did (though there's plenty of other stuff he touched that could have if he forgot about it), but he had just tossed them on the ground and left them. If he hadn't noticed them, since the crane is a rental, it would have gone back to its owners 45 minutes away and nobody would likely realize that the jib was unusable until someone rented the crane for another job and had to pull the jib out. Or worse, he could have tossed the pins onto the crane and they probably would have tumbled off onto the interstate where they could strike a car or something and nobody would ever recover them.

One old contractor who's no longer allowed to run practical exams was worse, though. All of the giant pins and rods and whatever that hold stuff together on cranes have little pins that keep them in place. He had a tendency to put them in his pockets for safekeeping and not realize it until he got home and tossed his pants in the laundry. Would be a fun time explaining exactly why a 3 pound rod fell off the end of the boom and struck someone on the head while he was standing by the barrel it was lifting, or why this was followed by the rope pulling out of its sheave and getting caught somewhere that it would snip in half and drop whatever it was holding.

Edit: To clarify exactly what we were doing, the as-of-now remaining unnamed place I work at provides training for crane, forklift, aerial lift, service/mechanic truck, etc. operators and inspectors to get their OSHA certification. Along with newbies, we also train people who are already working or have jobs lined up but need their certification or qualification first. Part of the reason is that OSHA redefined its training requirements, but delayed the deadline for certification until November 2017. So companies that aren't in compliance are trying to get their guys trained and certified. OSHA also doesn't cover self-employed or government-employed workers, but sometimes they want to get their training and proof of it to do better work or for future job opportunities. And of course, there's a disturbing number of companies that simply hire people without OSHA training and send them out after the fact before anyone catches on.

Working at this company means that I get to see a lot of very, very bad operators who already have jobs. Some of them seem to just panic when put in a testing environment, but others seriously lack skills when pressed. Our tests are relatively difficult compared to what many jobs require in their routine work, and a lot of crane operators basically can't do anything but routine. Some of them can't even read a load chart, because they've done everything by rules of thumb or instinct. There are guys who are naturally great operators, but can barely read and/or can't do math. Or they're undisciplined and show up drunk or tired and promptly make a mess of everything they touch. One guy I had was someone who bought a crane to start up his own business, but had only occasionally been behind controls a few times in his life and didn't actually have any formal training. He didn't do too well.

spankmeister posted:

I think race bikes are supposed to have wrist band dead man's switches but I'm not 100% on that

simplefish posted:

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-30737064

I don't understand how you can not inform authorities of deaths... what did they do, get a work buddy to drive the corpse home to the widow?

quote:

A farmer in Devon has been forced to slaughter half his herd of Heck cows after they repeatedly tried to attack his farm workers.
Farmer Derek Gow said that the Heck cow descended from cattle specifically bred by Nazi scientists between the world wars. The Heck cow was renowned for its fearsome horns and extremely aggressive nature.
Fearing for his life, Mr Gow said that he had no choice but to destroy 20 of his most aggressive cattle

VectorSigma posted:

nazi cows

didn't see that one coming

D1Sergo posted:

The Nazi ubermensch fantasies are kind of fascinating for how.... fantastical they are. Is like a bunch of LARPers deciding they want to genetically engineer a dragon just to be able to put on the map "HERE BE DRAGONS" and hunt it down and slay it. Except with cows.

Say Nothing posted:

Yawgmoth posted:

"HERE BE COWS" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Snowglobe of Doom posted:

They started out as an experiment in the 1920s by some German zoo directors to recreate Aurochs but one of them later got chummy with Goering and talked them up as a metaphor for the Aryan race (Strong! Proud! Aggressive!) and arranged to have them re-introduced to the wild as a sort of non-human lebensraum. Apparently they were used in some Nazi propaganda.

So yeah, Nazi cows.

Powered Descent posted:

Nazi cows are what supplies the milk for the Dairy of Anne Frank.

Powered Descent posted:

Nazi cows are what supplies the milk for the Dairy of Anne Frank.

Powered Descent posted:

Nazi cows are what supplies the milk for the Dairy of Anne Frank.

Powered Descent posted:

Nazi cows are what supplies the milk for the Dairy of Anne Frank.

Powered Descent posted:

Nazi cows are what supplies the milk for the Dairy of Anne Frank.

DiHK posted:

Combine a Nazi cryogenics lab and a forced labor carrot farm: Frozen Orange Jews

Wall Balls posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGC8FuHMbBY

D1Sergo posted:

The Nazi ubermensch fantasies are kind of fascinating for how.... fantastical they are. Is like a bunch of LARPers deciding they want to genetically engineer a dragon just to be able to put on the map "HERE BE DRAGONS" and hunt it down and slay it. Except with cows.

Darkman Fanpage posted:

Do some research into the SS. They had all sorts of weird rituals and ceremonies that were intended to link them with their ubermensch Germanic forebears but were actually just made up poo poo.

CampingCarl posted:

Was it in this thread someone was describing how part of the outside of a rocket being on fire is a safety feature?

GWBBQ posted:

The Delta IV rocket is one of the two rockets that came from the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program (aka "If Boeing and Lockheed Martin won't stop suing each other, we'll make them work together!")

For those not familiar with rocket science, the simple way to increase payload mass is to use more rocket to lift it. The first stage of the Delta IV is called the Common Booster Core.


The Delta IV has variants that use anywhere from 1 to 5 strap-on solid rocket boosters to boost larger mass payloads to orbit. Here's one with two solid rockets


In its largest form, the Delta IV heavy leaves those boosters behind and simply uses 3 Common Booster Cores. The outside ones run at full throttle and the center one is throttled down to conserve fuel for when the weight of the extra two boosters has been thrown off.


In its Heavy configuration, the Delta IV prepares for launch by, at T-7, purging and cooling the engines with a burst of hydrogen fuel (going from cryogenic to gaseous takes a huge amount of energy and cools everything around it.)

This leaves the problem of a massive cloud of hydrogen gas around the rocket; the gas is ...


Promptly


Burned



Off


The orange paint on the fuel tanks is formulated to attract free hydrogen in the atmosphere and to hold it there burning in a controlled manner rather than risk forming bubbles or pockets of hydrogen in the atmosphere that could explode.

The rocket is supposed to be on fire. It's a safety feature.

GWBBQ posted:

I've posted it a few places. Here's one for this thread

Powered Descent posted:

Nazi cows are what supplies the milk for the Dairy of Anne Frank.

DiHK posted:

Combine a Nazi cryogenics lab and a forced labor carrot farm: Frozen Orange Jews

gender illusionist posted:

that is a cool fact, thanks! Was that the case for the space shuttle fuel tank too?