daisyace: The plan is already cleared with Mom; turns out she's waited for years to broach the topic because she figured there was no setting that would work for Mrs. R. The awww factor is undiminished -- this is an attempt to create a ring she can wear every day, rather than a special-occasions-only ring or a necklace.

Thanks everyone for the answers so far. Yay AskMe!
posted to Ask Metafilter by range at 6:26 PM on July 20, 2008

It's impossible to focus on doing a good job on the work and simultaneously focus on being a good self-critic. When it's performance time, your job is to perform. If you want to learn from what you did, record the shows and watch them later with your critic hat on.

One of the best teachers I ever had pointed out to me that if you can answer the question "how did it go?", then you probably weren't paying enough attention to doing your thing -- the best shows... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by range at 8:38 PM on July 4, 2008

It sounds like you're probably on the right track, but it depends on a number of things (which are usually true, but sometimes not).

The Casio Chord switch probably has two pins, one of which is the "output" (typically connected by a resistor to the +V supply, and also to the microcontroller in the keyboard. You're going to use the transistor to let current flow between those two pins even when the button isn't pressed. You need to know which of these pins is... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by range at 8:14 PM on June 30, 2008 marked best answer

The shop I work in has one of these installed, and I've spoken to many other folks who have them. In the field, the false-positive rate (brake firing for "no reason") seems to be kind of high, and I've never heard of a false-negative. Obviously, if false positives are the price you pay for not losing a finger, nobody's complaining.

Part of installing any tool is making sure you have a budget to keep it maintained; SawStops just come with an N * $80 yearly... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by range at 7:55 AM on June 29, 2008

If one prong went into the outlet and the other touched nothing, then (probably) nothing electrical happened but you may have torqued the outlet enough to cause mechanical damage. If one prong went into one outlet and the other into the neighboring outlet, that's actually fine, since you'd have gotten one hot and one neutral connection. (This is pretty unlikely, since manufacturers try pretty hard to space things so that it can't happen.)

If one prong went in and the... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by range at 6:11 PM on June 27, 2008

I'm also confused about what you want. If you have 4 equally-weighted categories scored 1-5, there are only 20 different possible final scores regardless of scale. You can get 100 possible final scores by scoring each category 1-25, but then you've committed the survey cardinal sin of thinking that human beings can consistently tell the difference between (say) 13/25 and 14/25.

The only other way to get more possible final scores is to weight the categories differently.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by range at 8:24 PM on June 26, 2008

Yeah, I should have clarified: You really only ought to weight the categories differently if you actually feel they carry different weights toward the final score. Note that scoring category A from 1-7, category B 1-5, category C 1-26, etc. is also applying different weights to them, if you just add up the numbers without renormalizing (in which case, there's no point in having the different scales in the first place).

Given your responses in-thread,... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by range at 2:04 PM on June 27, 2008

I teach soldering to maybe 50 4th-7th graders every year, which is probably 10% of the kids who go through our outreach class (I'm only on when the undergrad helpers don't show up). Most of what I'm about to say is just to Nth what's above, but...

* Non-crazy student-teacher ratio (I do groups of 4, could probably handle 5, maaaybe 6)
* Eye protection, wash your hands afterwards
* Soldering iron stands
* Good workspace (work benches,... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by range at 3:32 PM on June 24, 2008 marked best answer

You may safely examine the wiring behind the breaker box cover by shutting off the main supply to your house if you have access to it.

In every house I've ever lived in, the only way to actually turn off the main power to the house was by snipping the seal on your electric meter and pulling the plug. The local electric company usually gets kind of annoyed if they find out you've done this. Otherwise all you can do from inside the house is turn off... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by range at 3:29 AM on June 20, 2008

Some actual hacks:

The Fisher-Price Papasan swing is a godsend, but runs on 4 D batteries. Chopping off the end of a 6V wall-wart and soldering it into the battery holder to replace the batteries may be the single best electronics project I've ever done. (I should mention that it also introduces a strangulation risk since the swing now has a cord -- but the kid is strapped into the swing and the cord is far, far out of his reach.)

Range Jr.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by range at 10:38 AM on May 20, 2008

...or suggest another way to do it?

This all sounds way too complicated for your needs -- maybe I'm nuts, but here's a simple 1-sensor controller that would cost maybe a couple of dollars in parts (beyond the cost of a thermistor, which a quick Digikey check says is $3-5).

(Wow, this got long. Summary: make a couple of voltage dividers, one with a thermistor and another with a pot for reference; feed it into a comparator;... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by range at 7:57 AM on May 19, 2008 marked best answer

Seconding "Put it back on!" with the addition that my wife and I do have this actually engraved on our rings, and it makes me happy every time I look at it (and then put it back on).
posted to Ask Metafilter by range at 3:35 PM on May 15, 2008

Not a contractor or home inspector, but speaking just as a homeowner: If this were happening in my house, I'd be freaked out enough that I would grab a 1/2" drill bit and drill some test holes in the wall, just through the interior layer of plaster/sheetrock/whatever to see if it was wetter on the other side (holes large enough to see/feel through, but small enough to spackle over easily afterwards). Water damage is Bad News; if it's happening, you need to know now, and I'm not sure... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by range at 9:48 PM on May 9, 2008

And though it's too late to make any difference in this contest, I need to point out that you now have no options that are immune from the "unfair" label, because you know the judges' scoring and can be accused of having picked one weighting method or another after the fact to guarantee that your favorite wins. (I'm not accusing you of this myself; if that were your intent you wouldn't be asking the question.) To my mind, picking one scoring method versus another is less important... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by range at 8:48 PM on April 29, 2008

Your brother may be my clone. I'm an alum of two of the schools mentioned above (MIT and New England Conservatory) and teach at a third (electronics @ Hampshire), so I have to chime in even though I'm late to the party.

Of the musicians I know, hardly anybody who started at a "normal" (non-conservatory) school regrets it. On the other hand, plenty of people who start at a conservatory end up regretting having pigeonholed their training so early in life. This... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by range at 8:13 PM on April 29, 2008 marked best answer

Making a working ECG can be pretty challenging, and based on a student who's trying to do it for his final project, depends a lot on good electrode-to-skin contact (meaning, each user needs a few dabs of conductive goop on their skin). Have you tried to insulate your stethoscope from any noises that aren't coming from your victim's chest? (This is easier if your stethoscope doesn't have to look like the doctor's but could be, say, a tube-in-a-tube to allow for some insulating sheathing.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by range at 9:06 PM on April 26, 2008

I think a tool like that has to be provided by your school -- a number of colleges and libraries offer a customized version of the (very handy) LibX plugin, which pretty much does everything you're asking about. At MIT, our version also automates the proxy process for journal access.

Also, just as a cautionary note -- about a year ago there was a story (which quick googling isn't finding, sorry) of Harvard cutting off a student's access entirely after they discovered... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by range at 6:36 PM on April 25, 2008

nthing the above -- last time I bought a trumpet, I played through several dozen before taking two home to try in concerts for a month, then returned one. Every reputable instrument store I've ever seen has a similar policy. The only issue I can imagine is that on a $40 instrument the "restocking" fee (mostly sterilization, for wind instruments) might represent a major fraction of the recorder's price, whereas on multi-thousand-dollar instruments it's trivial.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by range at 9:21 PM on April 3, 2008

An astonishingly large number of classical musicians use beta blockers like propranolol to beat down performance anxiety. Best description of its effect might be that it knocks the peak off of the fight-or-flight response. The typical dose for this sort of use is much lower than its standard dosing for angina or hypertension -- in the 5-20mg range. Its action is somewhat different from Klonopin (and, possibly, complementary), which as I understand it calms constant anxiety (as opposed to the... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by range at 3:31 PM on March 25, 2008

Should have been clearer -- in some cases where someone is facing both the situational anxiety of the test itself and the much-longer-time-constant anxiety of dreading the test, feeling overwhelmed, etc., I've seen people successfully use Klonopin to deal with the day-to-day anxiety of studying (like the submitter, freaking out when cracking a book) and beta blockers for the situational anxiety of the test. In some extreme situations, too, "a little sedated" may be a better deal than... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by range at 4:28 PM on March 25, 2008

My wife was severely anemic after giving birth; she took Floradix (which may be what ClaudiaCenter was talking about) and reported no stomach or intestinal problems, provided she took it as indicated (I think it has to be taken w/ food). I never got a vinegar flavor from it, though; more like intense raisin-ness. She definitely preferred to take it as a shot rather than linger over it (eg, mix with OJ).

Another incredibly irritating thing we learned was that there's... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by range at 6:30 PM on March 23, 2008

Not sure there is a good workaround -- it's not Sibelius's doing; that's what your computer's MIDI voice sample sounds like (for me, Sib defaults to MIDI program 54, "Synth Voice," which, you're right, is totally atrocious for my sound card also). Because Sibelius is just telling your sound card to play sample X for Y millilseconds, there's nothing you can really tell Sibelius to make the vibrato go away other than changing to another sample via the Mixer.

I'm... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by range at 7:57 PM on March 21, 2008

Can report only as an observer (the Ergo works great for me), but my wife is somewhat frighteningly in love with her Moby Wrap. Her first reaction to the semi-origami involved was "Oh, hell no," but after a couple of times it became totally intuitive. It's light enough that she'll just leave it on for a chunk of the day, and plop the kid in there whenever she needs to. Pretty sure she could do jumping jacks w/ the kid in there, at least in some of the configurations.
posted to Ask Metafilter by range at 7:57 AM on March 14, 2008

Seconding setver -- a while back the term for this was bugging me and I cornered one of the musicology editors at JAMS; she couldn't think of the right term for it either, other than to say that it's probably Gilbert & Sullivan's fault that it's everywhere in musical theater and that it goes way, way back before them.

The earliest example (and one of the most beautiful) I've ever heard is at the end of an act of Les Indes Galantes by Rameau (starts about halfway into... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by range at 6:28 PM on March 2, 2008

After writing all of the below, a better idea came to mind. One way or another the solar lamp you have is harvesting enough energy to charge whatever batteries are inside it -- why not re-purpose the entire power system, not just the panels? You could possibly disconnect the lamp's batteries from the bulb/LED and connect them directly to your radio.

Meanwhile, here's the harder version:

A multimeter may be your best friend here -- you need to... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by range at 8:03 PM on February 17, 2008

But realistically, if he's immuno-suppressed you don't want to be monkeying with "I'm pretty sure I got the eggs up to temperature." I would imagine most people in that situation would find a polite way to decline the salad altogether. If you want to be able to offer it to him, either use one of the non-egg alternatives given above or set aside some non-dressed salad for him to eat.
posted to Ask Metafilter by range at 10:41 AM on January 25, 2008

... and to further complicate, all these solutions assume you're able to bend sharp geometric angles into your sheet metal, which in real life you can't and will approximate with arcs (this picture shows it well, along with a calculator you might use if you end up caring about this effect).

The upshot is that the length of material along the real-life arc is going to be different than the length to the (imaginary) vertex. The discrepancy might not make any difference if... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by range at 5:47 AM on January 18, 2008

Jay Lichtmann, principal trumpet of the Hartford Symphony, has a great collection of trumpet PDFs and (even better, for me anyway) MIDI accompaniments ranging from Bordogni vocalises to Arban characteristic studies -- can't tell you how many times I've done last-ditch practicing at midnight, listening to the MIDI through headphones and playing into a practice mute. Jay's site is mostly classically oriented, but ventures at least as far a Paquito d'Rivera. Some of the accompaniments are for... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by range at 9:05 AM on December 19, 2007 marked best answer

... and just looked at your profile and saw that you live about 10 miles away from me.

The Lexington Bicentennial Band and the Cambridge Symphony are the two closest groups that I know of for you. If you're willing to travel, there are a zillion of these bands in the 95/495 area (doughnut? torus?), eg the Nashoba Valley Concert Band. There's a not-comprehensive-but-good-place-to-get-started list at the NECCB site.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by range at 9:33 AM on December 19, 2007