Most of the shellfish we eat are filter feeders. If it’s in the water, it’s in them. Sadly, microplastic contamination is so universal it’s pretty much impossible to avoid, only minimize. They have even been found in fruits and veggies where plastic sheeting is used for mulch, which is most commercial farms. Like PFOA’s, we have altered our world to be unfriendly to our own survival. .
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After paying an appliance repair company nearly $600 (initial consult, parts, labor, fucking WA sales tax), I finally have a working dishwasher again.
I looked at the old control board to inspect for damage and at first I didn’t see anything obvious - in part due to the whole damn thing being encased in about 6mm of epoxy, but looking closer I saw this:
Between the transformer and two radial capacitors there’s a little TO263 IC (guessing it’s a voltage regulator) — I’m guessing it blew up. It seems to be on the path to high current motor connectors so it all makes sense. I don’t have a schematic and I didn’t feel like investigating further but it was clear that something in that general area was a culprit.
Hopefully this is the last major appliance repair of this year.
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I’m amazed you can figure that out. Bravo!
But like, I imagine, 999 out of a 1000 or so dishwasher owners, I have no idea what you’re talking about.
(As you likely know,) for the vast majority of us, repairing dishwashers and most other appliances is beyond our skill set. And bringing in a hired repair person can cost more than just buying a new one. And so, we just resign ourselves to buying a new one, even though what’sbroken might be fixable with a very minor, cheap repair. What a vast amount of waste that is, and what a damaging contribution to environmental contamination.
Fuck today!
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I was baffled initially, too. But you can see that the resin to the right of the transformer is chock full of brown burny goodness. (I hear that’s often the result of failing to deglaze every couple few wash cycles.) You might be surprised how often electronic failures can be identified simply by sight and/or smell.
Could not agree more. Spent an entire evening recently trying to diagnose/repair a powered steam mop thinger that I refer to as the Hydro Torch. Pretty sure it was a solenoid-like part that failed, but that was as far as I got. Hated throwing away the mostly functional carcass.
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Indeed! Whenever a piece of electronics dies I like to figure out why just for my own curiosity.
With many catastrophic failures it’s pretty obvious once you know what to look for - bulging or leaking electrolytic capacitors are a “go to” for me, or sometimes I’ll get lucky and see a scorch mark or burnt component. When all else fails I’ll go for the “sniff test” and see if I can detect the telltale scent of magic smoke having been released.
In this case the epoxy may have been helpful since it preserved the failure like a bug in amber. Otherwise it may not have been visually detectable.
I think for me the most frustrating thing wasn’t the repair cost - even though that well and truly sucked - it was after watching the guy do it I knew I could have easily done it myself for maybe a third of the cost.
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I actually think this is true about much of the world—how much can be diagnosed by smell. Humans tend to ignore smell as an operative sense, but it can be incredibly useful with even a bit of training.
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Oops, I may have been repeating an urban legend. Didn’t occur to me to check such an esoteric source as Wikipedia before doing so, either. But it is halfway to lunchtime and I’ve had no coffee yet, so, yeah.
Polynesians have the word ‘Ha’ which commonly translates to ‘the breath of life’. When the English made their way to Hawai‘i, the locals were baffled that these people were attempting to diagnose illness without even smelling the person’s breath. So they started calling the invaders ‘Ha‘ole’ which means ‘without Ha’. I’m not sure if that was a reference to them not knowing about Ha, or if it was believed that they lacked Ha themselves but the name stuck and I was a teenager before I found out that ‘fucking’ wasn’t an official prefix of the word.
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It’s getting harder and harder to protect democracy.
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OT, but have you got any references for that story? Sounds interesting.
(Sidenote: breath was (and is) used for diagnosis. Traditionally by smelling, but there are also GC/MS studies involving ML techniques.)
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Uhh… no, I kinda don’t.
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Oh, I saw you edited the post. Damn. I really liked that story.
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And @bryan
That feeling when you come to a thread 7 minutes after something apparently interesting has been edited away:
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I just turned it into blockquote, nothing removed.
But rereading that Wikipedia entry, combined with the bits I remember from a very rigorous Hawai‘ian History class in high school (essay exam every Friday, and yup, spelling counts), I am not at all convinced that those competing etymologies don’t suggest a pun. Especially when the version I recounted just seems so damn truthy!
Oh yeah, and the way we learned how Polynesian languages diffused was that they all(?) had a T, but Hawai‘ian changed that to a K. So rereading this is interesting.
The earliest use of the word “haole” in the Hawaiian language was in the chant of Kūaliʻi; in which a pre-European voyager from the island of Oʻahu describes Kahiki, a term used for all lands outside Hawaiʻi:
Ua ʻike hoʻi au iā Kahiki
He moku leo pāhaʻohaʻo wale Kahiki
ʻAʻohe o Kahiki kanaka
Hoʻokahi o Kahiki kanaka – he HaoleThis roughly translates to:
I have seen Kahiki
Kahiki is an island with a puzzling language
Kahiki has no people
Except for one kind—a foreign kindIn this chant, the word “haole” is a single word with no glottal stops or elongated vowels, and there is no evidence of anyone using the word “hāʻole” prior to Western contact.[12] Albert J. Schütz, former professor of linguistics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, agreed that there was no evidence that “haole” could be separated into two shorter words.[10]
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The problem is that facts about smell are harder to transmit. Long ago we discovered pictures to teach people how things look. We can mimic noises, use onomatopoeia, and more recently make recordings to teach people how things sound. But besides a few vague descriptive words, if you want to teach people how things smell, they have to actually encounter them.
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Same for taste. I’m a certified beer judge, which requires some precision descriptors. But sometimes i can only describe a favor like a color: it is “bright,” or “dark” or something like that. But even sight is varied. I’ve got about a dozen or so color descriptors. My wife has what seems like hundreds. When she points out something that’s “ecru” and something “tan” I see a difference. But I’d use “tan” to describe both.
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I was going to say the same thing, only with regards to wine. When my wife got started in the wine industry it took me a long time to really dial in on the flavours I was experiencing.
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Fuck today indeed
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Odeuropa bundles expertise in sensory mining and olfactory heritage. We develop novel methods to collect information about smell from (digital) text and image collections.
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