Bad Decisions

     Got together with my siblings Sunday, which is always stressful, for reasons that don't have all that much to do with them; they're nice enough.  We grew up in a difficult family dynamic and it's a challenge not to revert to old patterns of though and feeling.

     It was my older sister's birthday, reason enough to mark the day.  And a nice day for it, too.  We dined outside, at a place not terribly far from my house.

     Parking is limited there.  I could have taken the bus, and walked a few blocks at each end, but with my injured knee?  No.  I'm clever: I rode my bicycle.

     Got down there okay, having dosed up on acetaminophen not long before leaving, had a fine meal and chat, and shortly into the ride home, realized it might not have been the best choice.

     By the time I got home, I was fairly well buzzed on pain endorphins, dizzy and unfocused.  I managed to get everything stowed, took more OTC pain med, iced up my knee and got horizontal.  I was zonked out within minutes, and didn't wake up until Tamara got home, around cat-feeding time.  I did a few chores, checked the clock and took more pills (I've been alternating aspirin and acetaminophen, which gives me three hours between them), iced up again and went back to bed.

     This morning, my left knee is back down to being only a little swollen and merely kind of painful.  Bicycling is off until it heals.

--

     Comments elsewhere by atomic historian Alex Wellerstein had me, once again, looking up the controls the "calutron girls" of Oak Ridge were operating.  Famously, they they were not told anything about the why of large-scale isotope separation in a mass spectrometer, just sat down in front of a control panel loaded with meters, knobs and switches, told what range to keep the readings within and what knobs affected which readings, and left to it.*

     I have never been able to find an annotated description of the controls, a photo or a drawing with readable labels.  There's an obvious intercom panel, for talking with the techs working at the "racetrack" where the actual process happens; there are a few meters that are clearly at an elevated voltage, isolated behind glass, plus a dozen or more on the front panel, but working from the sketchy diagrams of the process and assuming it's looking at voltage and current for every element of the widget, there are still about twice as many meters as I can account for.  There are hints the "tanks" may operate in linked pairs, and that would work out. (And there are some whacking big vacuum tubes behind the front panel that appear to be water-cooled.  Thyratrons?  Rectifiers?  Conventional power tubes?  I don't know.)

     But I hope you will pardon me if I don't get more specific than that; parts of the Manhattan Project hardware are still classified, and I'd just as soon not have a conversation with our country's nuke spooks over my fascination with this important (though outmoded for the original purpose) hardware that bears a slight conceptual resemblance to the last big vacuum-tube transmitters I was responsible for.
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* The classic tale is that they did the task "much better than Ph.D. physicists," who "got distracted by every flicker of the meters," and I should hope so -- that's not a job for a physicist; it's not even a job for a repair tech.  It's a production job, and "turn this knob to keep that reading between the marked limits" was a pretty normal job description before automation.  A calutron is a complicated beast, though, with over a dozen meters and plenty of controls, and the operator is tracking a changing degree of ionization in a vacuum chamber throughout each batch-process "run."