Why are people stupid? Coilgun != crazy.

[x88x]

So, I get everything I order online delivered to me at work because, well, the one time I got something delivered to my apartment when I wasn't there...let's just say by the time I was there...it wasn't. Anyways, so I got a package (http://www.thebestcasescenario.com/forum/showthread.php?t=23469) today with stuff for the coilgun I'm planning, and ended up getting into a discussion with some of the guys I work with about it. This drew something strange to my attention...apparently the fact that I'm building a coilgun kinda freaked some of them out. -_^ Something about why I'm doing it (is 'because I want to' not an acceptable reason?), what I plan on doing with it (well..nothing really, but that's hardly the point, now is it?), and whatnot. This got me thinking, because I got a similar reaction from someone else I was talking to about this a few days ago..I expected it from him, but the guys today surprised me.

Like I said, that got me thinking, and made me wonder why there's this double standard with stuff like this these days. Particularly, the concern of what I plan on using it for, as if I were planning on hurting someone or something. -_^ I can buy a gun, nobody bats an eye. I can buy a bow, nothing. Knives.. nothing. But because I'm building this thing that could conceivably be a weapon (so could my car for that matter), suddenly it seems suspicious? My first thought was maybe because it's not traceable to me, like a gun is, but then I thought of bows. A bow is just as, if not more, deadly in the right hands as a gun is, but it's completely untraceable too, since you don't have to register them and there's really no way of tracing an arrow back to a specific bow. Heck, even a crossbow. Almost as easy to use as a gun, but just as untraceable as a bow. So why is it that building a far less lethal science project draws so much more suspicion?

For the record, I'm building it because I think it's an interesting physics and electronics project and I want to brush up on my electronics skills.

Then on the other side of the matter, why I want to build it, like it's a waste of my time or something. Setting aside that it's my time and I'll use it how I damn well please, how is it less of a waste of my time to spend it playing a video game or getting drunk at a bar? (examples of typical behavior that these people would not consider a waste of time) But then, that may just be the people I work with.. every time I talk to them about an interesting project I'm working on, they treat it like it's a waste of my time because I'm not making money off it or something? Then on their own part, they seem to be so focused on anything they do outside work 'having a point', as they put it, that they never actually do anything.

Sorry if this is a bit of a rant, but people frustrate and confuse me sometimes...

[Diamon]

Feel the same way sometimes. Some people just can't appreciate the value of learning things. Like in class when people ask "Is this gonna be on the test?" It annoys me that people can't learn things out of interest rather then because they have to in order to be able to get a decent job in the future.

[altec]

Next time tell them what they want to hear. That you plan to go postal and take them all out. :D:up:

Ok, not really...

[dr.walrus]

"I'm building a Tesla Coil. Have you ever played C&C Red Alert?"

[Airbozo]

"I'm building a Tesla Coil. Have you ever played C&C Red Alert?"

lol

I worked with a guy in Colorado that wanted to "get even" with the company that laid him off. He built a tesla coil and installed it in a power pole in the company parking lot. The noise caused problems with the test equipment we used to calibrate the electronics in a tape drive controller and for about a week they could not figure out what the problem was. The problem was fixed, when the Feds came looking for the source of the noise. It was wreaking havoc with the flight control systems at the small airport across the highway. They were not amused and prosecuted the guy and he went to jail for several years...

[artoodeeto]

you know X88X, your entirely understandable rant reminds me of a thread I think i started awhile ago, basically why is it that when we tell Joe Q. Public about our casemodding and/or show friends, family, etc our cases, they all seem to act like we've lost our minds and are completely wasting our time. Oh that's right, it was the "you have too much time on your hands" subject. Like if it's totally impractical and we're just doing it because we want to, it's somehow bad or ridiculous. Well, ok. I've seen some ridiculous mods, my own could easily top that long list. But they're all COOL. :D

Similar situation in your post. I think to a certain extent that's how people react when they just can't understand the motivation to do something they perceive as pointless. Kind of like how I can't understand how anyone in their right mind would want to spend an entire weekend chugging beer straight from a keg. But plenty of people do. Not me though. Couple glasses of wine and I am haaaaaaappppyyyyy........
Anyway. That's just the way people are. Maybe you should, progressively as you work on the coilgun, alter your appearance to look more and more like a mad scientist. See what the guys say then....

[x88x]

I worked with a guy in Colorado that wanted to "get even" with the company that laid him off. He built a tesla coil and installed it in a power pole in the company parking lot. The noise caused problems with the test equipment we used to calibrate the electronics in a tape drive controller and for about a week they could not figure out what the problem was. The problem was fixed, when the Feds came looking for the source of the noise. It was wreaking havoc with the flight control systems at the small airport across the highway. They were not amused and prosecuted the guy and he went to jail for several years...
See, now that is an example of what not to do with cool tech. Pretty inventive way of getting back at them, but no, bad idea. Now I bet at least half of the people involved in that (tape driver company, feds, airport, etc) think that's the only thing that a Tesla coil can be used for. :facepalm:

[x88x]

Kind of like how I can't understand how anyone in their right mind would want to spend an entire weekend chugging beer straight from a keg. But plenty of people do.
I completely agree with this. I've never really understood the appeal of drinking that much. I've gotten drunk once, and that was plenty. Ok, yeah, it was an enjoyable experience at the time, but as a result I said some things I probably shouldn't have, strained some relationships that shouldn't have been strained, and cannot remember about 4 hours of that night clearly, if at all. That combined with the hangover the next morning convinced me that it's just not worth it. I still drink not-infrequently, I just don't get drunk. I guess you could say I think "there's no point". :P

[Oneslowz28]

So, I get everything I order online delivered to me at work because, well, the one time I got something delivered to my apartment when I wasn't there...let's just say by the time I was there...it wasn't. Anyways, so I got a package (http://www.thebestcasescenario.com/forum/showthread.php?t=23469) today with stuff for the coilgun I'm planning, and ended up getting into a discussion with some of the guys I work with about it. This drew something strange to my attention...apparently the fact that I'm building a coilgun kinda freaked some of them out. -_^ Something about why I'm doing it (is 'because I want to' not an acceptable reason?), what I plan on doing with it (well..nothing really, but that's hardly the point, now is it?), and whatnot. This got me thinking, because I got a similar reaction from someone else I was talking to about this a few days ago..I expected it from him, but the guys today surprised me.

Like I said, that got me thinking, and made me wonder why there's this double standard with stuff like this these days. Particularly, the concern of what I plan on using it for, as if I were planning on hurting someone or something. -_^ I can buy a gun, nobody bats an eye. I can buy a bow, nothing. Knives.. nothing. But because I'm building this thing that could conceivably be a weapon (so could my car for that matter), suddenly it seems suspicious? My first thought was maybe because it's not traceable to me, like a gun is, but then I thought of bows. A bow is just as, if not more, deadly in the right hands as a gun is, but it's completely untraceable too, since you don't have to register them and there's really no way of tracing an arrow back to a specific bow. Heck, even a crossbow. Almost as easy to use as a gun, but just as untraceable as a bow. So why is it that building a far less lethal science project draws so much more suspicion?

For the record, I'm building it because I think it's an interesting physics and electronics project and I want to brush up on my electronics skills.

Then on the other side of the matter, why I want to build it, like it's a waste of my time or something. Setting aside that it's my time and I'll use it how I damn well please, how is it less of a waste of my time to spend it playing a video game or getting drunk at a bar? (examples of typical behavior that these people would not consider a waste of time) But then, that may just be the people I work with.. every time I talk to them about an interesting project I'm working on, they treat it like it's a waste of my time because I'm not making money off it or something? Then on their own part, they seem to be so focused on anything they do outside work 'having a point', as they put it, that they never actually do anything.

Sorry if this is a bit of a rant, but people frustrate and confuse me sometimes...

I get these looks from time to time and I live in a solid red state where we have no emission laws, no gun registration, no 3 day waiting period, minors can purchase all ammo but handgun ammo, 18 to buy a long gun, 21 for a handgun, no age limit on bows, cross bows or pepper spray. When I was kitting out my .17 HMR for target shooting people would look at me weird when they saw my scope or I told them I could hit an aspirin at 200 yards. Or when they come over and see my computer. One older lady actually asked me if I was a hacker or something because of the dual screens and blue glowing PC. :facepalm:

I think it all boils down to the media, they train John Q Public to be suspicious of anyone who has a life or hobby less mundane than their gardening or scrap booking fun. Every time someone is shot the media conjures up a profile of gun owners, that is designed to instill a sense of suspicion and great fear. Sure bad people do bad things with weapons but how many good people use those same weapons for the right reasons and never bother a soul? 1 bad apple can spoil the whole basket.

The same thing applies for Computers, Gaming, Modding, model building, rockets, trains, electronics, and any other "geeky" hobby. It is the few people who play WOW so much they lose their jobs, wives, kids. Or the D&D guys who have no idea when they should leave the game at home and join the real world. Its all about what society has turned into. If you follow any
path other than the same path the Jones are on then you must be a weirdo.

Hell I had to get a license this year to photograph in a botanical gardens that my tax dollars pay for. I was photographing my little 8yo cousin in a summer dress for her grandmothers Easter present. My aunt had walked to the rest room and some damn nosy woman came over and actually asked the little girl if she needed help and if I had been bothering her. When I tried to tell the woman I was her cousin and a professional photographer she just yelled at me to STFU and threatened to call the cops. It took my aunt coming back and my cousin repeatedly telling the woman that my aunt was her mom before the woman would leave. I was not dressed like a low life, I had a very expensive camera and lens in my hand and even a polo with "Charles J Gantt Photography" stitched in it. But because some low life photographed a little girl at a park and it was on CNN this woman felt obligated to make sure I was not a pedophile.

These things make me feel like Darwinism is not working any more and nature is playing a cruel joke on us by letting the dumb live.


Next time tell them what they want to hear. That you plan to go postal and take them all out. :D:up:

Ok, not really...

Don't do this! I once spent a few hours in a police processing room for this very thing. I was young, dumb and made a joke that an adult did not think was funny. ( All charges were dropped and I was completely cleared a year later. So no record for me)


lol

I worked with a guy in Colorado that wanted to "get even" with the company that laid him off. He built a tesla coil and installed it in a power pole in the company parking lot. The noise caused problems with the test equipment we used to calibrate the electronics in a tape drive controller and for about a week they could not figure out what the problem was. The problem was fixed, when the Feds came looking for the source of the noise. It was wreaking havoc with the flight control systems at the small airport across the highway. They were not amused and prosecuted the guy and he went to jail for several years...

I swear to god that if you were to write a book of all of you and your friends adventures I would by 10 copies even if they were $100 each!

[Oneslowz28]

So, I get everything I order online delivered to me at work because, well, the one time I got something delivered to my apartment when I wasn't there...let's just say by the time I was there...it wasn't. Anyways, so I got a package (http://www.thebestcasescenario.com/forum/showthread.php?t=23469) today with stuff for the coilgun I'm planning

We need to chat on MSN or the site chat one night about coil winding. When I made mine there were a few things I found made mine more powerful.

Oh and be careful.... Remember this pic I took....

http://i152.photobucket.com/albums/s187/CJGanttphotography/Coil%20Gun/IMG_5054.jpg

[x88x]

[photos in the park stuff, cut to save on quote space]
I think this is a result of the media over sensationalizing everything, and the whole panphobic attitude that society in general has taken over the last century. Working in the security field, I see this every day. A fine line has to be drawn between being suspicious enough to keep everyone safe and being so suspicious of everything and everyone that you alienate yourself from the world. It is a truly exhausting task both mentally and emotionally, and I hate that any of it is necessary.


These things make me feel like Darwinism is not working any more and nature is playing a cruel joke on us by letting the dumb live.
When we stopped letting nature take its course, it stopped working. I know it sounds harsh, and there's no really 'humane' way to go back, but when you have hundreds of thousands of people living off the state and contributing nothing to society but their genes, any and all necessity for survival instinct or anything that brought us to where we are is removed.

Larry Niven wrote a short story once that took this to an interesting extreme. Basically, the human race had let so many detrimental traits continue to be passed on, as a result of the removal of necessity, that they eventually started devolving, and in a single generation civilization fell. Granted we're nowhere even remotely near that, but it does make you wonder how much of an affect stuff like this will have on us as a species and society in the far future.

[mDust]

You're straying from the herd and the herd cannot comprehend it. People only know what their TVs tell them. "...everyone else is a pedophile, people with guns are criminals, and sober people are not as cool/fun as their trashed counterparts..." This is obviously not a comprehensive list...mainstream society is much too quirky for that. They watch a lot of TV as it is where all of their 'knowledge' comes from... Oh, you thought that Idiocracy (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/) was just a movie??


These things make me feel like Darwinism is not working any more and nature is playing a cruel joke on us by letting the dumb live. Your feelings have merit, sir. I've tried explaining the following to some friends and they just referred me to text books arguing that 'it does exist' amongst other irrelevant arguments. I don't think they even tried to wrap their mind around it.

I believe our own ability to solve problems led to the end of natural selection for our species. For example, a 'handicapped' lion would not survive very long if it couldn't hunt or defend itself. Handicapped humans in developed nations can easily survive in the societies that we've created. We have 'bad' genes circulating freely in our gene pool with little consequence. Do you have poor eye sight, asthma, diabetes, or any of the other numerous genetic disorders? (I'm blind as a bat and had terrible asthma when I was younger, for the record.) The genes that are responsible for these ailments would never have been passed on to successive generations if we hadn't invented society, which protects the weak and helps keep us on top of the food-chain. We are NOT the fittest, and yet, here we are.

[dr.walrus]

For example, a 'handicapped' lion would not survive very long if it couldn't hunt or defend itself. Handicapped humans in developed nations can easily survive in the societies that we've created. We have 'bad' genes circulating freely in our gene pool with little consequence.

Sounds familiar... wait... what?


The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel.

Sorry, couldn't resist. Godwin's law to the rescue!

[x88x]

Sorry, couldn't resist. Godwin's law to the rescue!

Haha, yeah. The thing is though (and I'm sure this is very controversial), that from a purely biological point of view, the Nazi eugenics program was actually not a bad idea (their eugenics program, not the concentration camps. two different things). Morally and socially it was horrible and I would never support such a thing, but biologically it saw the problem of Natural Selection being voided by Man's societal progression and sought to fill that void. I hate to say it, but I wonder if we might end up implementing an eugenics program of some sort at some point in the future just to keep the human genome from degrading. Either that or genetic engineering will be improved such that such a thing is never necessary. Personally I favor the latter.

[dr.walrus]

Haha, yeah. The thing is though (and I'm sure this is very controversial), that from a purely biological point of view, the Nazi eugenics program was actually not a bad idea (their eugenics program, not the concentration camps. two different things). Morally and socially it was horrible and I would never support such a thing, but biologically it saw the problem of Natural Selection being voided by Man's societal progression and sought to fill that void. I hate to say it, but I wonder if we might end up implementing an eugenics program of some sort at some point in the future just to keep the human genome from degrading. Either that or genetic engineering will be improved such that such a thing is never necessary. Personally I favor the latter.

I would actually argue the opposite. We still DO have natural selection, haemophilia sufferers for example can live full lives now but are still less likely to live to reproduce.

Morals and socials are themselves biological fact. Humans couldn't have become what they are without society, and arguing them as distinct is a fallacy.

I understand that might be a bit of a lateral answer to the issue you;ve raised, so I'll attempt to address it more directly. The 'weakening' of the gene pool is often cited as being a natural outcome of modern medicine. HOWEVER, in order for the scenario you're hinting at to be true, medicine would allow those with very severe genetic disorders to survive to reproduce, and this would be commonplace.

The truth is, if we have good enough medicine to allow these children to be born, we have good enough medicine to treat them. It's a given.

Eugenics is not viable or neccessary and to implement such a scheme would wind back our own evolution; only those willing to commit genocide would survive.

[mDust]

Haha, yeah, that's not the first time someone has compared something I said to a Hitler quote. I haven't studied him specifically, so I must think on a similar wavelength...scary, huh? To avoid assumptions, I don't agree with what he or the Nazi's did. They took their ideology WAY too far. I would never persecute anyone for something beyond their control.


Either that or genetic engineering will be improved such that such a thing is never necessary. Personally I favor the latter.Yeah, I can see genetic engineering saving individuals from genetic disorders, but it shouldn't be used beyond that to avoid a Gattaca-like scenario.

[Drum Thumper]

We are NOT the fittest, and yet, here we are.




I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.

Nuff said.

[dr.walrus]

Nuff said.

Reference that in APA and it'd go lovely in an academic paper

[artoodeeto]

Amazing how we went from coilguns to Hitler and Agent Smith, cancer, gene pool weakening, eugenics, and the way we treat ourselves and our planet. I love this site.

[x88x]

Yeah, I can see genetic engineering saving individuals from genetic disorders, but it shouldn't be used beyond that to avoid a Gattaca-like scenario.

IDK, personally I didn't find anything particularly wrong with the tech in Gattaca. The problem arose in society's reaction to that tech, and unfortunately, I think a lot of it is a fairly accurate prediction of what the reaction would be. :( Again with much of society's rejection of anything that isn't like them. Personally, I would love to have been able to have my genome tweaked. ...then again, I would love to replace or augment parts of my body with mechanical parts, so I may not be the best judge... :whistler:


Amazing how we went from coilguns to Hitler and Agent Smith, cancer, gene pool weakening, eugenics, and the way we treat ourselves and our planet. I love this site.
Hahaha, yeah...not many places I've seen where that could happen and we aren't cursing each other out. :D

[mDust]

So, about that crazy coilgun...:)

[x88x]

Hahaha. I'll be starting work on it soon. :D

[Drum Thumper]

Reference that in APA and it'd go lovely in an academic paper

Yawn. Did that already. Aced that course to boot.