I was happy to find that Chicago’s extravagant food hadn’t affected my waist line as much as I thought so in victory I put on the new pair of paints a size smaller than I normally wear and smiled confidently as I brought them through my normal range of standing motion. The waist was comfortable and the legs had enough space as I did a few kicks and steps. I ended with a pants-testing maneuver I call “The Crucible” where I squat down and then lean forward as if grabbing something from the floor. About 1/2 way through this maneuver a tear propagated like a lightning bolt from crotch to knee with an almost Marvel Comic-esque “RIIIP” noise. Barring kevlar pants, I shall remain at my current pants size.
Tag: testing
Problem Solving Experience
Joe Naylor recently started to work at my firm in the testing area and was looking for advice is stress fracturing a device used to keep little pieces of you in place while you’re suppine after surgery. He has somewhat powerful thumbs capable of delivering a near lethal nipple-ectomy, but even they couldn’t produce the simulated breakage requested. I tried to think of what a person recovering from surgery could reasonably do and came up with the following:I placed the testing rig in a bench vice and using one dead-blow hammer as a landing zone on the part normally held with your thumb, I smashed that dead-blow hammer with another dead-blow hammer. Strangely enough, the 1/8″ column of plastic held against the stainless steel wedge impacted by a hammer hitting another hammer broke under these totally reasonable real-world conditions…
Please note that in the context of medical device testing “reasonable break method” is defined as “anything doable to the device even if it requires invoking super-mutant powers or the phrase ‘so Hercules needs a colostomy’ regardless of the currently applicable laws of physics.”
Coke/Pepsi Challenge Results
New Years Eve held the Coke/Pepsi 3-shot challenge pitting the discerning palettes of my guests against a gauntlet of samples. The preponderance of guests stated they’d be able to tell them apart at a statistically significant level.
Purpose: Determine if a tester can accurately identify samples of Coke or Pepsi when presented in lots of three. Success will be defined as properly identifying all samples in six of nine lots of three.
Protocol:
- A pseudorandom sequence of ones and zeros were generated as the seed data. Zeros were Coke samples and ones were Pepsi samples.
- Cups were numbered sequentially and filled with approximately 1-2 oz of the appropriate beverage as listed.
- Testers were allowed to take calibration samples of each beverage from a control bottle.
- Each tester received 3 sequential cups and after sampling, received a data sheet requesting the cup number and the corresponding observation.
- To be statistically significant, each tester had to consume 9 sets, but after much bitching and complaining, we stopped at 7.
Results: After 108 samples tested, approximately 50 samples were properly identified breaking the Colobus Barrier. Of the 36 lots tested, only 3 went 3 for 3 correctly identifying samples, once again doing worse than chance. No tester was able to identify samples at a level above chance.
Considerations/Stuff People Bitched About: The soda was flat; each specimen was poured from a bottle that had been open within the previous 30 minutes. The soda was warm; this was done specifically at the request of Pat Toye and may have partially caused the previous accusation of flatness.
Interlab Repeatability: If anyone would like to stage a repeat under similar conditions with a changed variable of temperature, brands, specimen (cup) size, participants or tester, please contact me.