I believe there is no scenario where opening the door would lead to a proper resolution. Neighbor Karen was looking for satisfaction, not fixing the alleged problem and that is Ego-led behavior which never ends well for somebody.
And again, get yourself at least a doorbell camera which not only can provide advanced warning, but evidence in your defense. Knowing what’s outside your perimeter is as important as noy breaking it.
According to my sources, “Dude” is non-gendered, so according to my sources this is not a sexist rant.
I’m an old fart. I do “dude stuff”. I’m no longer shocked when other people can do the same things I can do, but I do have certain expectations, and I’m continuously let down.
“Dude Stuff” is when the boss comes over to you and asks “Can you open this?” and shoves a taped up package at you. You are the dude, so you flick your wrist and a 3.49in blade pops open for you to cut the tape. The boss looks in shock at the “huge knife” and tries to figure out where it came from, so fast.
“Dude Stuff” is your daughter coming to you with a necklace, hopelessly tangled and twisted, knowing that the dude in her life will just fix it. And you do.
“Dude Stuff” is the dishwasher that is getting water flowing back into it from the sink. Knowing that there should be a check valve or something else to keep that from happening. Seeing the water flow into the dishwasher sump when a pot is emptied into the sink, but not when water is just running.
Oh, the discharge hose needs a blight ABOVE the outlet to keep the bad water from flowing downhill into the dishwasher.
“Dude Stuff” is going out to do a safety inspection on the roof rack that your child just installed and instantly seeing that the cross bolts aren’t tightened, looking for why they came from the factory like that, and knowing that the rack needs to be adjusted for size and knowing how to do that.
“Dude Stuff” means you get handed the Fitbit to change the band because they “couldn’t figure out how”.
All of these and 1000s more are “dude stuff”. It is that ability to look at something and know what should be done next. Or to know how to figure it out.
I was speaking with Hagar, and we were talking about the rape statistics in this country. This is something we’ve talked about before.
As I see it, there are three or four different types of rapists out there. The first is the “accidental” rapist. These are the situations where a man and a woman are interacting, and the situation is such that she only decides it was rape the next day. Those situations where she is a little too drunk to consent. It is the situation where she thought she was saying “no” and he didn’t hear “no” but “I’m not on any birth control.” He takes out his condom and thinks it is ok to proceed, while she doesn’t actually say anything, he should have just known.
Hagar inserts the “Yesterday it was ok, today it is rape” situation. Those situations where one of the two had a birthday and turned 18. They do the same thing after his birthday as they were doing before and suddenly, he’s guilty of statutory rape.
The next situation is what I call “One and done.” It is rape. The rapist should be caught and, when found guilty, properly punished. This is a horrific crime and should be treated as such. The difference is that after that one time, the rapist never rapes again. One rapist, one victim.
The final group is what I call “serial rapists”. These are the monsters that have raped somebody, decided they liked it and then rape more. One rapist, multiple victims.
It is my unfounded belief that these serial rapists are what account for the majority of victims.
It is no less horrific if a rapist only has one victim one time, or one victim multiple times, it is a crime for which proper punishment should be given.
These are the monsters that haunt people’s nightmares.
In a bar, a woman is speaking with her friends. A man walks up and quietly asks if he can buy her a drink. She looks him up and down and tells him to get lost. He leaves, rejected.
Shortly after, another man walks up. He’s carrying a drink for her. He hands it to her and talks her up. He doesn’t really take her simple brush-offs. She has a short relationship with him. Maybe as short as the one night.
She gets bitter and posts to social media about how all men are just creeps. How all they are interested in is her body, and she’s never found a man who wasn’t shallow and crass.
She’ll never find a good dude because it is the man who takes “no” for an answer and leaves that is much more likely to be the good man she is looking for rather than the one that held his ground.
The men and women of today are not going through the same dance as 50 years ago. What they are looking for is different from their parents. YOLO is something that happened in the past, but it was the unusual, not a life philosophy.
We aren’t bringing up our children to be able to do “Dude Stuff”. We are lucky if they can tie their own shoes. Not a joke. My grandson is likely to never have to tie his shoes. Even the shoes he has with laces are really Velcro.
Somewhere our society lost something small yet important. How to do “Dude Stuff”.
A ‘brilliant’ cardiothoracic surgeon has died two weeks after he was knocked down to the ground in a brutal road rage attack in Brooklyn.
Dr. Jaime Yun, 56, a beloved married father of two, died on June 16 from a traumatic brain injury he sustained due to a violent brawl that took place on June 8 just miles away from the hospital where he worked.
Yun, a respected and gifted surgeon, was in his vehicle around 11:30am at the corner of Schenectady and East New York Avenue in Crown Heights, when a verbal dispute took place between him and motorist Dexter Alexander, 31.
According to police, Yun hit the side-view mirror of Alexander’s vehicle with a stick, and that is when Alexander reportedly punched Yun in the face causing him to hit the pavement, Daily News reported.
When medics arrived they found Yun on the ground with a massive head injury. They transported him to King County Hospital where he was initially expected to survive until his health grew more dire and he died days later.
This fits the pattern I keep pointing out in other one punch kills.
The victim gets punched in the head, not expecting it, and generally not ready or knowledgeable about how to take a punch.
The victim loses consciousness and topples over, hitting the hard ground with their head.
The secondary impact causes a traumatic brain injury thar leads to swelling and death. Sometimes days or even weeks later.
This is a horrific way to die.
There are few critical lessons here.
Just because someone is unarmed, doesn’t mean they are not dangerous or their attack isn’t potentially fatal.
Distance is your friend, especially with an unarmed aggressor. Keeping out of sucker punch reach during an argument is a good idea. Even if they attack, you will have warning time to react.
Lastly, in a road rage incident, don’t get out of your vehicle. This is probably rule number one we discuss all the time on this blog, don’t breach your own permiter. You’re safer in your car. If the other asshole is attacking your car, call the cops, record it, but don’t get out of your metal and safety glass box. Let your car take the damage, it’s better than your head taking the damage.
Avoid taking a punch to the head. They can be fatal.
I haven’t written about the Titan sub yet, because I’ve been busy and didn’t want to go off half-cocked.
I will fully admit that I’m not a maritime engineer, but I am a materials engineer, and that should count for a little bit.
I also had a good, long conversation with a buddy and co-worker who was a mechanical engineer with Scaled Composites. Pretty much the best composites engineering firm on the planet.
Here are some things that came of that conversation and stuff that I have seen online.
First, a video on the carbon fiber wrapping of the sub body.
Next is the attachment of the body to the titanium collars for the end caps.
Carbon fiber is very strong, both in compression and tension. But the fiber itself is only part of the composite. The remainder of the composite is an epoxy matrix. The wrapping of the fiber is very important, as the compressive strength in the composite comes from keeping the fibers linear in the direction of loading. Both the fiber wrap and the epoxy matrix are necessary to keep the fibers in line with the direction of the load (compressive hoop). When that fails, the result is interlaminary shear and buckling of the fibers.
This video shows exactly what that looks like.
This article from Composites World describes the manufacture of the sub body.
The biggest challenge, Spencer reports, was developing a manufacturable design that “would produce a consistent part with no wrinkles, voids or delaminations.” And without use of an autoclave. Spencer opted for a layup strategy that combines alternating placement of prepreg carbon fiber/epoxy unidirectional fabrics in the axial direction, with wet winding of carbon fiber/epoxy in the hoop direction, for a total of 480 plies. The carbon fiber is standard-modulus Grafil 37-800 (30K tow), supplied by Mitsubishi Chemical Carbon Fiber & Composites Inc. (Irvine, CA, US). Prepreg was supplied by Irvine-based Newport Composites, now part of Mitsubishi Chemical Carbon Fiber & Composites Inc. The wet-winding epoxy is Epon Resin 682 from Hexion Inc. (Columbus, OH, US). The curing agent is Lindride LS-81K frLindau Chemicals Inc.cals (Columbia, SC, US).
Initial design work indicated that the hull, to be rated for 4,000m depth with a 2.25 safety factor, should be 114 mm thick or 4.5 inches, which OceanGate opted to round up to 5 inches (127 mm) to build in an additional safety margin.
After layup and winding was complete, the cylinder was bagged with cellowrap and then cured in an oven at 137°C for 7 days. There was no postcure. Spencer says initial assessment of the cured cylinder shows that it has porosity of <1%. As CW went to press, the cylinder was being prepared for machining to cut it to length, square up the ends and bond it to the titanium end caps.
This was very much a first-of-its-kind sub.
The CEO, Stockton Rush, bragged about how he liked to break the rules of what has never been done before.
The design worked. At least a few times. The evidence is there, the sub made several dives to depth.
This is where I believe the problem lied.
The sub was cyclically loaded to 5,500 psi. The epoxy matrix has, effectively, no strength. Under cyclic loading, interlaminary shear allowed the fibers to move within the epoxy matrix so the poxy was no longer supporting the carbon fiber. During the final dive, the lack of support of the fiber caused it to buckle and the sub to crush in the middle. Literally, as the sub was repeatedly squeezed, the individual layers of the carbon fiber began to separate.
This is the big advantage that metal has over composites, the predictability of fatigue in metal.
My buddy who was at Scaled Composites told me that they worked on a lightweight composite sub for emergency rescue and military applications that could be flown in, in much less time than it took other subs to deploy from the back of a ship.
The project was canceled because their sub could only be guaranteed as a one-time-use-only vessel, and the cost was too high.
Leaving behind material science, the design seems sketchy.
If you watch this video on the making of another DSV, you will see how the crew capsule is perfectly spherical. As perfectly spherical as can be machined to that size.
The famous Alvin sub, the one that discovered the resting place of the Titanic, used a spherical compartment.
All of the deep diving DSVs use a spherical crew compartment, as that is the strongest shape in hydrostatic compression.
The cylindrical body of the Titan sub was a weak point.
The other DSVs also use a metal (Titanium) crew compartment. Titanium is used for weight, not strength. There are many steel alloys that are stronger, but they want light weight to minimize the amount of flotation ballast needed to maintain neutral or positive buoyancy.
The result was a less than optimal design made from a less than optimal material.
That seems likevan extraordinary amount of rist to take by a small company.
Why do that?
Apparently, the CEO wanted inspirational, outside-the-box, thinking.
The CEO of OceanGate, which is operating the missing Titanic tourist submarine, explains that the company didn’t want to hire any experienced “50 year old white guys” because they weren’t “inspirational.” pic.twitter.com/kxXkhBn7oL
His inspirational rule breaking worked, until it didn’t, and he didn’t have the experienced, knowledgeable people on hand to tell him why that might not be the best of ideas.
I’m not against being groundbreaking. But this was groundbreaking failure.
They demanded more from the design than it was capable of delivering repeatedly.
The cyclic loading of the carbon fiber, and subsequent failure of the matrix to support the carbon fiber led to the crushing of the sub.
