Back in the 80s the foreseeable future was brought to you by Delorean.
We would have moved you know. All you had to do was ask. A whole summer's worth of collecting, destroyed.
If the groundhog hadn't eaten my pumpkin, there would have been frost on it this morning. I don't think the groundhog had frost on it because it's warm blooded.
You have a coal heater in your office, I take it?
2: Oh, just because we have fleas in my building, we automatically have mice, too? Lots of things carry fleas, you know.
Earlier this fall, our building secretary was getting completely devoured by mosquitoes, sitting at her desk. The solution by the maintenance department was that everybody should stop using the door (to the outside) that is nearest to her desk. Obviously that did absolutely nothing to help, because swarms of mosquitoes don't get into a building via a door which has been used without problem for the past 80 years.
The secretary started a mosquito repellent and insecticide candle campaign in our building, which kind of grossed me out.
So do you guys have regular floors, or is it just packed dirt?
Their floor is both regular and close-packed.
It's really more of a stable. But my stall has nice curtains.
It's actually just a regular old building - actually an old dorm. The problem is that they decided 10 years ago that they'd tear it down in 6 months, and so they've been not-keeping-it-up-because-it's-about-to-be-torn-down ever since.
If your heater can start the smoke alarms, maybe somebody has been trying to figure out a way to speed the process.
12 reminds me that I'm giving a talk in a couple of days on a campus that recently tore down the building that housed all its physicists. I think that means my talk will be in a damp dark dungeon.
figure out a way to speed the process.
Maybe heebie can train the mice and outfit them with little mouse-sized torches.
12 reminds me that I'm giving a talk in a couple of days on a campus that recently tore down the building that housed all its physicists. I think that means my talk will be in a damp dark dungeon.
Either that or they will be gathering somewhere in a hollow on the moors, with sentries posted to keep a lookout for the dragoons. Covenanter physics!
Do you really need a building to do math? Sounds like more waste fraud and abuse to me.
When I was at MIT, they were still using buildings that had been put up as temporary workspace during WWII (IIRC to work on radar). They were going to tear them down and put up something permanent any day now. I wonder if they're still there.
Look, Chair, you said all you needed was blackboards and wastebaskets. A building was not part of our deal.
Do you really need a building to do math?
"All right, class. We've got 500 mL of antivenom left. How many more students can get bitten by rattlers before we have to go get more?"
There are still plenty of wartime temporary structures in use if you know where to look. A lot of temporary building in the 1940s was done to a higher standard than "permanent" buildings now.
The house I grew up in was built as a prefab after WWII and was supposed to be knocked down within a few years. It was built out of riveted steel plates, like a big shed. Eventually, in the early 80s [30+ years after they were built], the council admitted they weren't going to knock 'em down and put a brick shell around the steel and filled it with insulation. So they looked like normal brick houses, albeit with quite small windows and very thick walls.
Hanging pictures must have been tough.
24: Magnets. I imagine the entire interior was like a huge fridge door.
Didn't that mess with radio reception?
On the other hand, protects you from government mind control rays. Probably explains ttaM's politics.
23. Are there still prefabs on Barton estate in Oxford? They seemed pretty permanent last I looked.
So, it doesn't have to be an aluminum (aluminium) hat. Any metal will do but people pick stay away from steel because it's heavier?
I used to wear a gold hat, but all the high bouncing got tiring.
25: After Thatcher, the proles weren't allowed to have magnets anymore.
re: 28
I don't actually know. I'd guess they are there. I don't know the area. I always live in east or south Oxford.
re: 26
I can't actually remember it doing so. There were windows, obviously. The steel was lined with plasterboard, so on the inside it looked much like a normal house, although they were quite poorly insulated and very cold in the winter. However, on the plus side, they were pretty big inside compared to a lot of modern social housing and even 'bought' houses. On the outside, in our street they were all painted different colours with a rough textured paint. So ours was a mustardy yellow/green.
We weren't in Glasgow, but they were very similar [possibly identical as the interior rooms are the same layout] to the Weir houses described about half way down this page:
http://www.rememberingscotlandatwar.org.uk/Accessible/Exhibition/100/Health-and-Housing-in-Postwar-Glasgow
On the other hand, protects you from government mind control rays.
And bullets!
re: 34
They did look a lot like they'd been made from surplus battleship parts.
"No, young ttaM, you're not going out to play with your friends until you've tidied up your turret."
Bullets are a very crude form of government mind control.
33: I never heard of steel building looking that like. I guess I was expecting something more quonset-y.
a campus that recently tore down the building that housed all its physicists
Hmm, that might be here.
Never mind, it was our chemistry building that was torn down.
re: 33
The black and white photo makes them look a bit less prefabricated than they really did look [where the metal joins and rivets were more obvious], but yeah, apart from the relatively poor insulation, they were decent functional houses. No reason why you couldn't throw up well-thought out modern variations on the same basic idea.
40 That wouldn't be your "Old Chemistry" building, would it?
So, it doesn't have to be an aluminum (aluminium) hat. Any metal will do but people pick stay away from steel because it's heavier?
That's what they want you to believe.
Alaska has a lot of WWII-era Quonset huts still in use for various purposes.
Are some of them used for grating cheese?
I like to set scope conditions for "various".
The scope in this case would probably be something like "common purposes of medium-sized buildings in Alaska."
You can actually smoke salmon in a pretty small building.
Speaking of smoking, apparently a house that I sometimes walked by on my way home from work had eight to nine pounds of pot grown in it. Isn't it hard to keep that smell inside when you've got that much?
LB: MIT did eventually knock down Building 20 (just before I graduated, IIRC), but it was to build this monstrosity.
It looks like I have quite a few pictures of interesting Quonset huts in Alaska. I may put some on Flickr later.
I don't have much to contribute to the porn thread, but I do my part.