I've rebuilt several motors, transmissions, various other mechanical contrivances. Sometimes with decent documentation, sometimes not so much. Also done a bit of amateur machining, and worked as an engineer on physical products.
Under no circumstances would I claim that rebuilding a motor was essentially figuring out how to build one from scratch. In software, maybe that's like claiming that figuring out how to configure a new Linux box is essentially the same thing as figuring out how to write an OS.
yes, i agree. what i was trying to express is that rebuilding a motor is generally strictly easier than building one from scratch, because it's building a motor from something more than scratch. i don't think i expressed it very well
(i mean, if all the parts of your engine are trashed, you are going to have to machine replacements for them, and that might actually take you longer. but it's clearly achievable given that people have built internal combustion engines without a working example to take measurements from)
It's a bit academic, but set theory doesn't really apply to such fuzzy human things as knowledge and experience. Repairing and designing are different pursuits which might have a lot of similarities, but I wouldn't presume that a design engineer could competently do the work of a technician.
Just consider that any particular field of engineering as might be described by a lay person, can be far too broad and deep for an individual to be competent in all facets of it. I'm reminded of my neighbour asking for some help configuring email for her new iPhone, because she knows I do computer work. Mainly firmware.
there's something to that, for sure; there are plenty of design engineers who don't know nearly as much as they think they do, and who depend heavily on the expertise of their technicians to get anything done in the real world. they could never build an engine on their own! but there are also others who are eminently capable at the technical level, and i think their designs benefit from that
repair and design have in common that they require a lot of hard thought about the causal relationships involved in making the artifact work, tracing the causal chains through until they break, then patching them up. but they both also certainly involve other skills that the other does not; design also requires figuring out how to make new things happen, which involves imagining things that have never happened, while repair also requires knowing how not to bust your knuckles or spill the gasoline
Directly, the temperature isn't as big an issue for operating tapes/drives/computers, since they are inside temperature-controlled buildings. There are indirect problems though; the incredibly low relative humidity that results from heating outside air - that dryness leads to problems with static. Various solutions were tried to keep the tapes humidified, but in the end I think everyone was relieved to switch to hard drives :). South Pole is also fairly high elevation, which combined with the low humidity makes air cooling work a lot less well than it might in other places - the air just doesn't have as much heat capacity as in more moderate environments.
As far as transport, it's about a km (in winter, typically a walk) from the main station to the "dark sector" where the CMB telescopes and IceCube Lab are. As another comment points out, there are cables between the main station and the dark sector so typically data flows through them. When you do need to move equipment, it's usually not too big of a deal to carry it inside a parka or something if it's smallish, or arrange a vehicle for bigger items.
Things like cables can be a bit of a learning experience; a friend hand carried a PVC-insulated monitor(?) cable outside, coiled up, then promptly tried to uncoil it and found that PVC gets quite brittle at low temperatures...
If by "station wagon" you mean LC-130 ;) IceCube switched from tapes to hard drives I think in 2015 or 16.
In 2014 we spent a lot of time fiddling with tapes and drives... At that point, all the data was recorded to tape and flown North in the summer. Additionally, software at Pole filtered out the more interesting events to upload over satellite within hours. I assume it's still basically the same.
Imagine an elevator that moves up and down its shaft with a sinusoidal elevation over time. Riding in that elevator, one could detect frequencies with quite long wavelengths compared to the size of a person.
> It it goes wrong, you cannot buy a new one or hire repairperson at a sane price. If it has a software side, it will probably need maintainence.
It's not clear to me that the alternative provides these either. Just thinking about some of the appliance-type things I've had issues with lately: my oven would've made more sense to replace than hire a repair person, and my ISP-provided router is running their latest firmware which is horribly out of date...
Yeah, but your ISP router does work, and you could replace it if it didn't. Oven repair might be expensive but it's possible (Usually, some places you might have to wait a month, like I did when the heater went out), and not that expensive.
With DIY stuff, sometimes you can't replace it because there's no equivalent, you've invented novel functionality, and bought other things that depend on it.
Like, one time, when I had a very different mindset, I made a controllable light that used a non-DMX protocol, and took power over XT60. I don't know where the special USB adapter for it is.
If "Number of direct dependents" and "Total of all dependents that are in some way customized" are more than just a few, then it's pretty nice to have standard stuff.
Building things that are effectively clones of what you could just buy isn't that interesting to me, but making novel things comes with future unpredictability.
I like to look for projects where there either just isn't any commercial thing at any reasonable price that would work, or the thing is non-critical, or there aren't many design decisions in other things based on the custom thing I'm doing.
I think that's shifting the goalposts a bit - one can buy weird proprietary stuff from a company or product line that disappears, or build stuff that uses standard interfaces.
This sort of approach seems common in the Rust community, it's so much more professional/humane/sustainable/performant than any other corner of the industry that I've come across.
Under no circumstances would I claim that rebuilding a motor was essentially figuring out how to build one from scratch. In software, maybe that's like claiming that figuring out how to configure a new Linux box is essentially the same thing as figuring out how to write an OS.