You probably need a sputter coating machine too for most applications, and, at least in some cases, tricky consumables like liquid nitrogen.
I'm with you in wishing that they were more accessible, though. So many people want to do skydives, bungee jumps etc. that have never experienced the thrill of exploring the anatomy of tiny insects in incredible detail. They don't know what they're missing! That's before you even get onto cool stuff like WDS/WDX which I remember thinking was like science fiction when I first saw it.
It’s the appropriate container, handling equipment, PPE, and safety technique.
Unfortunately, as some of these things get cheaper you start attracting a different level of hobbyist who are less interested in learning proper handling technique and safety precautions. Not all of them, but enough that it becomes a problem.
I’ve seen this play out across a couple of my hobbies in the past decade. When things were hard to access, the people who put in the work to get there had an appreciation for doing it properly and being respectful of the environment and community. Once it becomes cheap enough you get a lot of weekend warriors trying to run through the process as fast as possible while seeing how many corners they can cut. Things get ugly.
Fortunately dewers have become a lot less expensive too. I'm not sure that we really need to be that concerned with the safety of LN2 while cars and ladders still exist.
For a SEM where LN2 is only going to get used in a cold trap or for flash freezing a sample, I think the HV risk dwarfs the LN2. ... or maybe the risk of a vacuum mishap causing a fire in the diffusion pump.
(or, if it's using a TMP instead of a diffusion pump-- a vacuum mishap causing a rapid unplanned disassembly)
I was mildly surprised when my university supplies office offered to sell some liquid nitrogen to me, no questions asked. Which was disconcerting for few reasons: I asked for dry ice, I lacked a dewar, and I would have to transport it on a subway. All they knew was that I was collecting supplies for a science demo. Granted, a demo using liquid nitrogen would be much more fun. It simply wasn't an option on short notice.
A thermos works fine. Safer if pretty underfilled. I'm not surprised by the response, to people who work with it regularly it's not a big deal. It's not like they were offering it to kid. That you knew enough to find it concerning is good enough. :)
In Europe it is around 6-7 kWh/day. This might increase with electrification of heating and transport, but probably nothing like as much as the energy consumption they are replacing (due to greater efficiency of the devices consuming the energy and other factors like the quality of home insulation.)
In the rest of the world the average home uses significantly less.
I did a similar proctored digital coin toss type experiment at uni back in the dark ages.
In the proctored experiment the best rate of pay was achieved by those who just skipped trading for each of the 15 days and left after 2 minutes with $50 in their back pocket.
I would like to see the payout distribution graph with random trades for comparison against the students.
A similar method is handy for some mental arithmetic involving squares, e.g. it's easy to calculate 1005² because it's 1000² plus two added blocks of 5 x 1000, plus a small 5² block, so 1,010,025. Going the other way, 995² is 1000² minus those same two 5 x 1000 blocks, plus 5², so 990,025.
That is quite an offensive and uninformed comment.
I worked in that sector a long time ago and your hipshot is very far from my lived experience. If you want to educate yourself in what the large community of typically very dedicated IT workers in UK schools do to protect children from online harm, search for edugeek and take a look through their "filtering" related forum.
Back when I did that kind of work the web filtering tools were stil mostly commercial, e.g. Websense, and we maintained reasonably good control, but it was a cat and mouse effort. As just one example, for blocking games it wasn't enough just to block all game websites (new ones every day) and all "proxy" sites as they were known (new ones every hour), you'd also have to block things the kids brought in. At one point we wrote a script that scanned files to find all Excel documents with Flash games embedded within them via an activex component and nuke them.
This is all against the backdrop of maintaining an incredibly diverse IT setup where commercial software often had utterly appalling requirements but was mandated from on high. I now work in an organisation with >£1bn turnover and it probably has fewer licensed software packages than just one secondary school I used to work for.
What you realise over time is that the technical tools are not really the solution. Classroom teachers need to use their skills to keep children on task. Schools need to use their existing disciplinary protocols when children don't follow the agreed rules. IT staff need to provide a baseline level of safety to ensure that no child can accidentally or casually break the IT rules.
You know how you get it right? Either on prem, offline everything, or explicit allow lists controlled by teachers for that specific period. Disable USB ports.
That’s what we moved to for one of our kids who couldn’t handle it. Except we have to control the access because the school won’t. It works.
Is it perfect? No. Google Docs is the worst due to embedding. But it beats whack-a-mole.
I’ve now had to do the management job of six teachers because they apparently don’t have the skill to deal with 30 kids with Swiss cheese restrictions. This, despite significant investments in software.
I guarantee you that this is not an uninformed comment. Exactly the opposite.
All I'll tell you is:
a) you're failing at stopping malicious internal actors you're simply fixing tick boxes
b) most school networks are a complete nightmare or worse laughable with next to no separation of resources (marking a drive as hidden on windows isn't secure)
c) maintaining an adult block isn't something to be proud of, there's services that do that for free at the perimeter they're called firewalls, deploy and forget, if that's not the case you are doing it wrong.
d) oh fudjing wow you wrote a script. This makes you a l33t sysadmin among your peers... Try taking to someone who deploys Linux at scale, this is Tuesday morning to them.
Stop blaming the teachers, and while we're at it, train them to not get fished by the smart kids...
Not really comparable because these are 12 year old children.
Not only could the phones be put away at night, but universally available parental controls could be used to lock the phones at a specified time each night.
We do this. It is just part of parenting, like deciding the time of bedtime.
I agree that this study didn't separate the two very well, but it's a difficult task to be fair.
They found that the kids' bed times were far earlier without phones, but was that a short term effect? Was it an effect of being observed and measured? If the parents valued their kids' sleep, why was the average bed time of 12 year old kids after 11pm pre-ban? You could blame that lack of sleep on phones if it made you feel better I suppose, but it's clearly not the whole story.
I'm with you in wishing that they were more accessible, though. So many people want to do skydives, bungee jumps etc. that have never experienced the thrill of exploring the anatomy of tiny insects in incredible detail. They don't know what they're missing! That's before you even get onto cool stuff like WDS/WDX which I remember thinking was like science fiction when I first saw it.