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Conundrum

Wed Feb 22 2006, 12:43PM

Registered Member #96 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4062

here are jokes, and then there are things that people did. One that a mechanic did on my ship was pretty good. The topsiders (non engineering crew) didnâ€™t know that much about the reactors. During our scram drills (simulated emergency shutdown and restart of the reactor), all non essential loads were shed, including the lights to the mess deck. (Due to a bit of illegal wiring, the coffee pot stayed on. All nukes were in agreement that coffee was essential.) The life vests came with chemical â€œglow sticksâ€ for light. Knowing a scram drill was coming up, this mechanic activated the light stick, cut it open, and smeared his face and hands with the glowing liquid. About 30 seconds after the scram, he goes onto the mess decks and asks in a loud voice â€œHas anyone seen the captain? I think we have a problem with the reactor.â€ Yeah, he got punishment for it, but it was still funny.

-A

"Bother" said Pooh, as the control rods jammed...

Madgyver

Wed Feb 22 2006, 02:52PM

Registered Member #177 Joined: Wed Feb 15 2006, 02:16PM
Location: Munich, Germany
Posts: 214

And stupid, the stuff inside is quite toxic and contains highly concentrated H2O2 in most cases.

...

Wed Feb 22 2006, 03:15PM

Registered Member #56 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:02AM
Location: Southern Califorina, USA
Posts: 2445

I don't know what kind of glow sticks you are using, but the ones here are non toxic (althogh wiping a bunch of broken glass all over you isn't the greatest idea...)

Madgyver

Wed Feb 22 2006, 03:56PM

Registered Member #177 Joined: Wed Feb 15 2006, 02:16PM
Location: Munich, Germany
Posts: 214

Most sticks around here have DNPO or TCPO which irritates the skin and the organic solvent is generelly considered harmfull for health.

You wont die from it, but it defenetly wont make live longer.

Simon Barsinister

Wed Mar 01 2006, 12:06AM

Registered Member #116 Joined: Fri Feb 10 2006, 03:19AM
Location: Erie Pa, USA
Posts: 29

When I was in the Airforce, during lunch we used to route a piece of pvc tubing into the back of a radio someone was working on . Once they were heavily into tuning or troubleshooting it, I would blow a big puff of cigarette smoke into it. They usually freaked for a couple of moments untill the odor gave the true source away.
Another one was to connect a electrolytic reverse polarity to a 40A 70V power supply. Plug in the extension cord and within a few seconds......BAM and a cloud of smoke. (The cap had to be shielded in some manner to protect the victim from flying debris.)

Dave Marshall

Wed Mar 01 2006, 12:35AM

Registered Member #16 Joined: Thu Feb 02 2006, 02:22PM
Location: New Wilmington, PA
Posts: 554

I fly on the E-8C Joint STARS aircraft as a computer and radar technician. My primary job is to turn on, operate, maintain and repair the 27 onboard primary computers, and the radar system. There are usually about 20 other people on the jet, and after 13 hours in the air, drastic measures must be taken to keep things lively.

One of my particular favorites occurred last time I was in the desert. Our system is an intelligence gathering platform, and as such stores rather sensitive data. In the event that we're ever forced to land in hostile territory there is a function called System Data Destruct that wipes the many terabytes of disk space on the jet clean. While its performing this function it displays a huge red screen on all the consoles that tells you the system is being deleted.

As the computer tech, I've got root access to all the consoles. I can make windows appear, close, move, turn the thing off and on, everything. We found this giant red screen buried in the system disk (its all actually just a gif), and after the mission, on the >90 minute drive home we made all the consoles in one part of the jet (the part where the officers sit) display this screen. There was very nearly a riot, as these young officers (all but one were Lieutenants) realized that they had inadvertently destroyed all the data we had collected. Finally one of them looked at a console in another part of the jet and realized they'd been had, but that 10 minutes of pandemonium was worth the 13 hours in the air :)

We also would pull the circuit breaker to their comm panel (a little panel with intercom and radio controls). They'd loose communication with everyone and come get the Radio tech. As soon as the radio tech walked back to the console, he'd smack it on top and we'd push the circuit breaker back in, restoring power to the panel. After two or three times doing this, we'd pull the breaker again, and almost invariably the victim would stand up and hammer on the top of his console, hoping to turn it back on. Usually when the radio tech walked back there and smacked the console again, magically fixing it, they caught on.

Good Times.

Dave

Michael W.

Wed Mar 01 2006, 02:44AM

Registered Member #50 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 04:07AM
Location: Vernon, B.C, Canada
Posts: 324

about the glow sticks, in Canada they are non toxic but a boy at a Camp I was at once Bit one open, ingested some of the liquid and became violently ill, and I think he was even hallucinating..

Conundrum

Sat Mar 04 2006, 05:42PM

Registered Member #96 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4062

During the heyday of the Monty Python craze in the mid-'70s, all Britain was overloaded with all kinds of Python-related paraphernalia.

One of these items, "The Viking Songbook", was a one-line gag that sold immensely well for a short while. It was a massive tome of over seven hundred pages of tiny, cramped script...the word "spam", hundreds of thousands of times over. It had an impressive-looking cover that made it look like a relatively authentic songbook until you opened the thing.

What was interesting about this, though, wasn't the book itself so much as, according to declassified Soviet-era records, it was used to routinely and successfully smuggle microdot data from Britain to the USSR between October 1973 and August 1982. For most of a decade, the Russian agent "Red Hawk" would place a microdot on top of one of the words in the book, coded according to date of mailing and post office of origin. Most of the smuggled material concerned European efforts at producing jet fighters, and the success in getting it to Moscow was considered quite the coup.

Although British intelligence knew that data was getting out, and were even able to track it to the mail service, they were unable to discover the microdots themselves. When confronted with a seven-hundred-page joke book that has nothing but the same word over and over and over again, perhaps even the hardiest of Customs officials could be forgiven not wanting to examine the entire tome.

And so the most successful Soviet spy operation ever conducted on English soil concluded without mishap --- because no one inspects the Spammish Repetition.

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