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[Hansontoons]

So that's how that word is spelled... Yeah, my brother showed me a video of that. I'd rather not have to put up with that squealing.

Also, on an unrelated note, I may have an ingrown nose hair. Hurts a bit, and I can't quite identify which one it is.

Well, grab tweezers (zircon encrusted if you have them) and start probing. When you grab the one that hurts like like your eyeballs are attached, yank. When you come to, it should feel better.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Personally I would rather do it from a tree stand, with a rifle. A bullet to the side, just a little behind the shoulder blade should be sufficient to drop it. That's about where the lungs and heart are.

If you've got a 45-70 maybe. Anything that doesn't come in at LEAST .308 and it's going to get REAL pissed. Not only is pigskin very tough and durable (hence why footballs are made of them... makes pretty good boiled leather armor as well), but you've got almost a half a foot of pork between the skin and anything vital. You're going to need AP rounds or something in a HEAVY caliber to pull this off.

Better shot is right between the eyeballs in the sniper's triangle. Or, if he lifts his head, through the throat into the spine. Temple shot is risky since you've got a small target surrounded by dense bone, but it's a guaranteed kill.

I remember I was once going deer hunting with my bow, and a wild boar came into view. The neighboring farmers were complaining about some porkers, so I very carefully put my bow down (since it was going to do jack squat to a pig unless it was an actual eye shot), picked up my Browning BAR 30-06, scoped in right between those beady little eyes, and dropped a hollow-point right into the sweet spot.

I then had to convice the local fish and game warden that I shot a pig with my rifle, not a deer, because I had a bow-hunting license and there wasn't supposed to be anything going bang at the time. I pointed out the quarter-ton boar with the head... creatively rearranged... and the warden complimented my shot placement.

If it had been anything other than a face-on shot, I would've had to load AP and tried for something more risky like a neck shot. Putting it into a pig's side is a good way to really piss it off. Deer? Sure. That's a perfect heart-shot, work nearly any time. But I wouldn't want to try to put it in the side with anything less than a brush gun. Preferably an M82. Screw the Geneva Convention, that pig's tough enough I'm going to classify it as materiel.

[GlytchMeister]

Wild boars are a weapon of ecological mass destruction. I've heard the term "pig bomb" several times.

Maybe use a partition bullet? They tend to work well... Quick mushrooming but the protected core at the back end ensures good penetration.

They are recommended for killing Kodiak bears. If it is good at killing a 1,500 lb predator, it can certainly kill a pig.

[Sgt. Howard]

A Mosin-Nagant with standard 7.62x54 surplus ammo is just this side of armor piercing- a decent head shot with this and it's all over.

[Jabberwonky]

Nah, we'll be using shotguns and rifles. Plus, we're gonna trap them, and shot them at close range.

Apparently in Arkansas, you can do whatever you want to kill the pigs. Some use explosives.

There's better ways of making pulled pork...

... but whar's th' fun in THAYT?

I'll freely admit the pyrotechnic method is LOTS more fun. It's just harder to gather enough product to make a decent sammich...

[Jabberwonky]

Wild boars are a weapon of ecological mass destruction. I've heard the term "pig bomb" several times.

Man, you are giving me some unhealthy ideas for out at my buddies hunting lease...

[AnotherFairportfan]

Something like fifty years ago (or maybe forty, depending if it was while we were in high school or after i did the Navy and he graduated Georgia Tech) my best friend and i were in a sporting goods store somewhere, and he spotted boxes of twelve gauge tracer rounds.

We speculated for a while as to why anyone would need twelve gauge tracers, and finally concluded that they were for impatient hunters who wanted the goose cooked before it hit the ground...

[GlytchMeister]

Wild boars are a weapon of ecological mass destruction. I've heard the term "pig bomb" several times.

Man, you are giving me some unhealthy ideas for out at my buddies hunting lease...

Ain't it great?

[Sgt. Howard]

Wild boars are a weapon of ecological mass destruction. I've heard the term "pig bomb" several times.

Man, you are giving me some unhealthy ideas for out at my buddies hunting lease...

Happy to be of service...

[Alkarii]

My brother and his father-in-law said that a .22LR can do it, but only if you shoot right behind its ear, towards the brain.

Regardless, I'm gonna have the corral trap between me and the pig, and by that time I'll be using something with a bit more punch. They're gonna have me do a lot of shooting until I can hit a moving target, apparently. Which is understandable.

There's a few other traps a person can make with a bit of cordage and the environment.

Nah, I'll stick with the corral trap, since it'll be easiest to make, and safest.

For people, I mean, not the pigs. Obviously we intend to kill them, so it doesn't need to be safe for the pigs.

[Dave]

Nah, I'll stick with the corral trap, since it'll be easiest to make, and safest.

For people, I mean, not the pigs. Obviously we intend to kill them, so it doesn't need to be safe for the pigs.

Probably a good choice. The fancier you get with your design, the more chance for something to go wrong.

[GlytchMeister]

Nah, I'll stick with the corral trap, since it'll be easiest to make, and safest.

For people, I mean, not the pigs. Obviously we intend to kill them, so it doesn't need to be safe for the pigs.

Probably a good choice. The fancier you get with your design, the more chance for something to go wrong.

TRUTH

You just earned some engineering points, Dave.

[Jabberwonky]

Nah, I'll stick with the corral trap, since it'll be easiest to make, and safest.

For people, I mean, not the pigs. Obviously we intend to kill them, so it doesn't need to be safe for the pigs.

Probably a good choice. The fancier you get with your design, the more chance for something to go wrong.

TRUTH

You just earned some engineering points, Dave.

I don't know. That looks a lot like the same ending as the pyrotechnic method...

[AnotherFairportfan]

Nah, I'll stick with the corral trap, since it'll be easiest to make, and safest.

For people, I mean, not the pigs. Obviously we intend to kill them, so it doesn't need to be safe for the pigs.

Probably a good choice. The fancier you get with your design, the more chance for something to go wrong.

TRUTH
You just earned some engineering points, Dave.

Heh. Micromeritics (where i worked in the first half of the 80s) does high-precision materials evaluation instrumentation, including high-pressure liquid chromatography.

Get set for a sea story*.

They developed a new HPLC detector.

Digressing just a bit, for clarity for those not familiar with the concept, in HPLC, you pump the liquid you want to analyse at high pressure {duh} through a column packed with a material that adsorbs and releases the different constituents of the liquid at different rates, which causes them to spread along the column and emerge at different times from the far end. Since you know {or should} the rates at which the different components move along the column, you can determine how of each is there by monitoring the outflow of the solvent/carrier liquid involved, and detecting when and how much of other substances come out. {You can also slice the stainless-steel column lengthwise with a bandsaw and see where bands of the different materials remain in the packing, but we're not interested in that right now.}

Okay.

To detect the {frequently visually colourless} stuff as it flows out, you use an LED emitter that operates in bandwidths that the stuff isn't colourless in - usually, if not always, ultraviolet. You can select the precise wavelength you want by using a diffraction grid set at an angle to the beampath; since part of the procedure is based on the fact that different solutes absorb different wavelengths of UV more or less strongly, there is a high-precision mechanical vernier that lets you choose the exact angle of the grid to favour one wavelength or another. {Well, it was mechanical in 1986; quite probably digitally-controlled these days.}

Taking into account time, UV absorption numbers at different wavelengths, etc., you can get a pretty damn good idea of how much sugar, cola extract and cocaine is in your soft drink sample.

You probably have to make several runs using different wavelengths, to get the full breakdown.

"Well, by golly," thought the Micromeritics Brain Trust, "what if we could build a detector that could use more than one wavelength at once? That would speed things up. And we have access to new types of components - we could make it more sensitive, too!"

And the fun began.

The detectors used a photo-diode that generated a current when illuminated by the beam. The current was proportional to illumination strength, of course. The diodes were mounted in a block machined from brown Delrin, which is a REALLY good electrical insulator. The current is then fed to a current-to-voltage converter which isolates the measurement components from the detector, because loading effects of attempting to measure a current at that low level would cause the incorrect readings, big time.

The current-to-voltage converter uses {well, did use, thirty years ago} an operational amplifier, whose input impedance is, for most practical purposes, infinite. Since no current flows into or out of the op amp input there is no loading on the diode's output. {This is, as i said, "for all practical purposes".}

SO, one of the IC makers had recently brought out Field Effect Transistor {FET}-input op amps, whose input impedance was one or more orders of magnitude greater than that of conventional-transistor-input op amps. This allowed them to make the current-to-voltage circuit more sensitive, because they could detect smaller currents, so they did.

Boy howdy, did they.

And the trouble started.

They had designed a current-to-voltage converter that was sensitive to current variations in the femto-flippin'-amperes.

We discovered that, unlike previous designs, the photo-diode leads had to be soldered {i THINK previous designs used sockets, but the variable resistance of the lead-to-socket contact caused detectable current fluctuations, which varied with, among other things temperature and humidity}.

And you couldn't just do a conventional wire-joining solder joint, wrapping a wire around the diode peg and soldering; you had to lay a perfectly-straight tinned piece of wire-wrapping wire alongside the tinned diode lead, making sure that they were in contact for the entire length of the junction, then apply JUST Geno heat to join them.

Without bumps in the solder, because bumps - like bends and wraps - cause shot noise in the current.

And THEN they discovered that brown Delrin (remember the brown Delrin blocks the diodes were mounted in?), which effectively has infinite electrical resistance in applications up through kilovolts and probably even megavolts ... leaked enough current to throw off the readings. At effectively zero voltage, the carbon black {i think it is} that gives the stuff its colour leaked a few femtoamperes of current.

They had to make the mounting blocks out of virgin white Teflon.

==============

And, possibly because of that, possibly because of other "innovative" design choices, the damned things were unreliable. They sold two to Coca-Cola for its syrup lab in Hapeville, on the south side of Atlanta {based on the specs, before we'd ever actually turned one out, i suspect, remembering other fiascoes perpetrated by Marketing selling things it turned out we couldn't deliver}. Which wound up involving three or four machines and some field-service techs on a regular basis for i-don't know-how-long, because the things kept drifting out of spec and would have to be replaced with a freshly-calibrated one and hauled back to the plant thirty miles away, in Norcross, on the north side of Atlanta, every week or so.

====================

But it won a prize for innovative design from an engineering magazine that year.

================

* You quickly learn to tell the difference between fairy tales and sea stories because fairy tales begin "Once upon a time..." and sea stories begin "Now, this is no s**t, but..."

[AnotherFairportfan]

Probably a good choice. The fancier you get with your design, the more chance for something to go wrong.

TRUTH

You just earned some engineering points, Dave.

I don't know. That looks a lot like the same ending as the pyrotechnic method...

The ending may be just as messy, but the interim events won't be.

[AnotherFairportfan]

Nah, I'll stick with the corral trap, since it'll be easiest to make, and safest.

For people, I mean, not the pigs. Obviously we intend to kill them, so it doesn't need to be safe for the pigs.

Probably a good choice. The fancier you get with your design, the more chance for something to go wrong.

Always endeavour to minimise the number of Murphy-field inflection points in your designs.

[Catawampus]

So that's how that word is spelled... Yeah, my brother showed me a video of that. I'd rather not have to put up with that squealing.

Also, on an unrelated note, I may have an ingrown nose hair. Hurts a bit, and I can't quite identify which one it is.

It might not be totally unrelated: explosives can help deal with both of those problems!

Better shot is right between the eyeballs in the sniper's triangle.

I was invited once to go moose hunting by some Canadian acquaintances. I didn't really have any desire to do so, but it was one of those situations where it would have been socially awkward to turn down the offer. We were wandering around through the woods, and lo, we beheld a moose. One of the other guys raised his rifle (I forget the type, but it was a big-game calibre) and shot the moose right between the eyes. The bullet just bounced off. The moose was highly annoyed, and chased them up a tree and kept them there for a good half hour or so.

We speculated for a while as to why anyone would need twelve gauge tracers, and finally concluded that they were for impatient hunters who wanted the goose cooked before it hit the ground...

They're supposedly for when you're adjusting your sights or just learning to shoot, so that you can see where your shot is going in relation to the target, and adjust your sights accordingly. Of course, simply looking to see where the shot hits around your target tends to be a more effective way of doing that. So really, they seem to just be "because they look cool!!!".

[GlytchMeister]

As the size of an explosion increases, the number of social situations it is incapable of solving approaches zero.

[Dave]

I don't know. That looks a lot like the same ending as the pyrotechnic method...

The end result is equivalent... the order of events is reversed.

Teb: "But, the animal is inside out... and it exploded."

With Tannerite, the explosion comes before the restructuring, not after.

[scantrontb]

Get set for a sea story*.

* You quickly learn to tell the difference between fairy tales and sea stories because fairy tales begin "Once upon a time..." and sea stories begin "Now, this is no s**t, but..."

heh... MY sea story begins with: "I was still in the Navy..." i'm a retired Navy Electrician's Mate (EM1) and back when i was a third class on my first ship, The USS Dubuque (LPD-8) we had a 16000 Lb Cargo-Weapons Elevator that went from the lowest Ammo Magazine up to the Main Deck (also the same as the Flight Deck) and all the decks in between EXCEPT for the 2nd deck where Medical was... the Big-Brass decided that they were going to modify the elevator so that in the event of a Mass-Casualty (a helo blows up or something like that) where a LOT of people need to get to Medical right away, they could use the new stop in the elevator to go there direct, instead of the deck above or below, then have to get people on stretchers down/up one deck on the regular stairwell with the bottle-neck and the possibility for further injury from slips and falls... OK, Good Idea, that makes sense, even for the Government...

SO... this elevator was a very old style of controller, it used MAGAMP'S (MAGnetic AMPlifiers) to determine which button was pushed to send the elevator platform to that deck (six original decks, seven after the mods)... for those that don't know already, a magamp is basically a transformer that has multiple sets of winding's on it and depending on which sets have current flowing thru them (and even which direction it's flowing) it will either allow or not allow an output current to flow and to accomplish this, all those windings make it so that EACH of the six original magamps had (if i remember correctly) at a minimum, at LEAST 18 wires (maybe MORE)... OK, so the engineers that came out to do the upgrade did all the mechanical stuff: they put in a new door in the bulkhead on the second deck where Medical was, new limit switches and new control station's with the new deck button throughout, etc... and they added another magamp into the circuit and rewired everything according to the specs/wiring diagram, etc... cool so far... THEN, when they did the full op-test for the first time the platform went to a different deck than the button they pushed... we thought "hmm, OK, it's probably a swapped wire somewhere..." so they dug into the guts of the controls and came up empty... so they tried again, this time it went somewhere else...then they tried AGAIN... and it went somewhere ELSE!!... by now they are getting worried, so they dig into the guts AGAIN and and literally hand-over-handed EVERY cable and wire in that elevator controller and could NOT find ANYTHING AT ALL wrong!... this stumped them, so they had to call out for the big brains back in DC. so after a tech rep finally arrived and we demonstrated the random operation of it, he went thru everything we just did just to verify, and sure enough it STILL did the random deck instead of where we wanted it to go thing... so he finally dug out his MICRO-Ohm and MICRO-volt meters and such and finally found that just by adding that seventh magamp into the circuit in PARALLEL with the other six magamps originally in the system, it caused the resulting impedance to be EXACTLY the impedance value required to activate any given magamp... the reason it was going to a random deck was that RANDOM TEMPERATURE FLUCTUATIONS were giving a random magamp the needed oomph to activate THAT magamp at that specific time!!! once they figured THAT out, they had to rip out the new magamp, redesign the brains of the controller to use solid-state relays as a second layer of control between the old and the new logic.... AARRGH!!... and to top it all off, the reps took ALL of our tech-manuals and pubs for the system "so they can update them with the NEW drawings, etc..." Yeah, Right... after 3-4 MONTHS of no communication what-so-ever, even through "official" methods, and we REALLY NEEDED a diagram for it (troubleshooting a problem on that was almost a constant thing because of it's age), my boss finally ended up having me spend almost a WEEK of 8+hr days of doing NOTHING else (except for standing switchboard watch) in order to make a new wiring diagram AND schematic diagram BY HAND... JUST so we could do basic troubleshooting on it again... even after the three years i was on board, we never did get our tech manuals back...

THAT right there made me appreciate the notes i had taken (and still HAD on me) from my Elevator Maintenance School that i attended just prior to reporting aboard...