FINALLY ! Strain Gauges Arrive

I ordered these strain gauges over TWO months ago, well in advance of my stint on the shaking table, 40 of the little cretins arrived a month ago [3m cords]...I was a bit confused because I'd ordered 120 of the buggers, and to receive a small box of only 40 left me a bit bemused. Apparently, the rest would arrive 'later'...errr...how much later? 'a few weeks, I suppose'.

A few weeks MY ARSE!

I specifically ordered 'OFF-THE-SHELF' models, on the account that they would be quicker. A month MAX... and that was meant to be for the bespoke gauges, with the fancy coatings, full water-proofing, invisible force fields and all that jazz. 'OFF-THE-SHELF', 'Off-The-SHELF', 'Off the SHELF'. How hard can it possibly be to find something off a shelf, solder on lead wires (of standard length) and then post the bastards to me?!?! 2 months of pure and unadulterated Japanese inefficiency...fucking A! Well done.

The last 80 (with the more sensible and practical, 5m lead wires) arrived this very afternoon, into my grubby little paws. After, might I add, I'd just finished setting all my existing instrumentation into place in my last...yes last experiment of the current run. The next run starts after I return from Malaysia. In which time, I need to have pasted all 80 gauges on to their respective pipes, calibrated them, setup the logging files, analysed my data from the tests which I have just performed, written a short conference paper for the JGS... and all before HRH gets here.

On the bright-side, I'm busy. Which, I'm loving. I'm getting physical exercise from moving all the sand into and out of my box. I'm getting data. This is all fantabulous.

Right. I need to go to bed. stuff to do.

a simple maths test

I was just browsing the BBC news website, and came across this comparison between the questions set for a Chinese University and a English one.

So, not impossible if you did A-level Mathematics (at my age, I'm pretty sure that differentiation and 3D trig were one of the first few things on the syllabus...but, from what I could see things had been happily falling off the syllabus for many years before I got to A-levels...and I think they were about the level of O-levels when my parents did them).

Then, comes the question set for First Year Undergrads; for a science degree. A Degree, I remind...not an entrance exam for a university.

I saw this and laughed.

I must say it makes a mockery of the British educational system, mathematics wise...but then again i guess all these soft-fluffy happy subjects are all the rage now-a-days. So, it's not like there is a huge amount of prestige with being is geek.

However, I'm pretty sure that entrance exams can often be much tougher than the actual level you are taught to at entrance level. It's how they skim off the best candidates, you need something to challenge the grey matter to get an insight into how they think when they are pushed. Sooooo, maybe this is just a very biased example given by the RSC just to add fuel to a debate...

[rant: and which monkey was suggesting a couple of years ago to omit the requirement of Mathematics at A-level for entrance in Engineering degrees?! Cretins!]

The rest of the article is here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6589301.stm