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Ben Johnson Profile
Ben Johnson

@snvboy

Followers
434
Following
11K
Statuses
14K

I bengineer things. DTO at @bpcreates, recovering journalist, passionate @UVAWomensHoops fan, amateur chef. Native fluent in Minnesotan.

Charlottesville, VA
Joined February 2009
Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.
@snvboy
Ben Johnson
10 months
My brain will randomly go nooo-ner-nooo-neeee-noooo from time to time.
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@snvboy
Ben Johnson
2 hours
@PenguinSix White car with the USSS badge was classy. This looks like every third ring suburban DARE cruiser.
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@snvboy
Ben Johnson
11 hours
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@snvboy
Ben Johnson
19 hours
@brilewerke @ArtButSports And generally just a good dude, too. Did me a solid over the holidays that was very much appreciated.
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@snvboy
Ben Johnson
1 day
How terrible do I think Tom Brady is doing commentary? So bad that I've been watching most of the game on Telemundo. Which interestingly is using the regular Fox score bug.
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@snvboy
Ben Johnson
1 day
@brilewerke And it was AWESOME!!!!!
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@snvboy
Ben Johnson
2 days
@timfarmer Grandpa Brrrrrrrrrrrrt.
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@snvboy
Ben Johnson
2 days
If anyone needs me I'll be cowering under the covers and probably not coming out for a few days.
Tweet media one
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@snvboy
Ben Johnson
2 days
@nathangray_1 Well..... the halftime show was pretty darn good.
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@snvboy
Ben Johnson
2 days
@nathangray_1 Me walking out to my car
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@snvboy
Ben Johnson
2 days
@OldSchool80s I suddenly need a Pepsi.
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@snvboy
Ben Johnson
2 days
@dawnstaley Yes!!!!!!! Let's beat the Hokies (again)!!!!!!
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@snvboy
Ben Johnson
2 days
@JamesSurowiecki When some novel blight emerges from the ceaseless March of evolution, we will rue this day that we got rid of all the soybean scientists. Programs like this are a pittance and their dividends in economy and lives saved is massive. But those efforts can take decades.
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@snvboy
Ben Johnson
2 days
@nathangray_1 Well, I'm still confused about Big10 hockey, the death of the WCHA, and how Alabama has a D1 program. And get off my lawn!
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@snvboy
Ben Johnson
2 days
@ralphstrangis @DallasStars @LAKings It's "make your own shirt night." Head down to the concessions, get some ketchup and mustard, and go to work. Or for old style hockey use blood.
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@snvboy
Ben Johnson
2 days
@ericward_7 @ericward_7 needs a photo credit so we can get on the @ArtButSports radar
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@snvboy
Ben Johnson
3 days
@BrianRoemmele You want to pay more than ten cents for those. Here's why (and there are additional reasons) why these cost so much. And God help us if we loose the talent to make them ourselves.
@gak_pdx
Greg Koenig
3 months
Fun fact; In the outskirts of Portland is a nice little shop in an anonymous industrial park. You walk in to a little foyer with a folding card table and 9 thick, vacuum sealed Mylar bags, each about 1' long and 4" in diameter. They are sitting on top of about 70 pages of paperwork. This is the entirely daily production of this facility. Inside are a bunch of old Mori Seiki NLX lathes - the old ones, before Mitsui bank let Dr. Mori train wreck the company with the DMG merger. Aside from a little wear on the interior paint, the 7 lathes look like they just came out of the showroom. In fact, the whole place looks like a machine tool showroom - spotlessly clean, with a thick, perfectly level urethane floor that a product photographer could use as a mirror white background plane in an Apple ad. There are a few big things in our lives that are literally held together with a couple of fasteners. One example; every Boeing and Airbus engine is held onto the wing by only 2 bolts, and this is the shop that makes them. Boeing and Airbus both require multiple suppliers for critical components, so this is not the only shop that makes these bolts, but the nearest competitor is in Seattle (close to Boeing, but far enough away that the Cascadia Subduction Zone quake won't take both out). The shop bay next door is equally clean, but contains a vacuum furnace and the most through inspection lab I've ever seen. X-ray and magnetic particle inspection, CMM, optical comparators. In the corner is a cherry red custom painted Lista cabinet where raw blanks are stored. An identical Lista cabinet in Green is at the opposite side of the shop. Raw material comes in, gets inspected, heat treated, inspected again, and moves from the Red to Green cabinet, collecting about half the paperwork along the way. The blanks take about 3 days to go from a cylinder of Sandvik or Thyssen-Krupp steel into a bolt. One machine, the oldest, is used to rough the blank into a pair of concentric cylinders, the second oldest machine roughs the hex head, before the bolt is stress relieved and allowed to rest for 36 hours. Another machine finishes the hex and applies chamfers, these are final surfaces. The final step is the threads, where things get interesting. They are cut in 3 steps; roughed, semi-finished, and finished. The secret sauce here is that a new insert is always used as the semi-finisher, and the semi-finished state is very very carefully measured to compensate that exact insert. The final finishing pass is taken in one (surprisingly healthy) hit using the data from the semi-finishing pass to be on-dimension within about 2µm. The key insight they had is that you get a better surface finish off of a tool that has already taken a couple of cuts. The threads look like you wrapped a mirror around a spiral staircase; their process is so dialed-in that their work competes with thread-grinders for dimensional and surface quality. Even so, just before inspecting with old-school thread wires at the machine - the guy running the lathe spins it at about 500rpm and reaches in with a Bright Boy stick and touches them up, runs his fingers over them, and gives them the most important QC they'll receive. This guy has been on this machine for 15 years; nearly every aircraft passenger aircraft in the sky is held together by at least one bolt that has passed his touch inspection. Of course, the engineers in Renton or Toulouse won't just accept that Mitch in Gresham touched this bolt so it is good... so whole reams of paperwork are geared by regularly calibrated Zeiss metrology gear that does a complete dimensional inspection, another magnetic particle inspection (3 in total), and an X-ray. Having said that, Mitch rejects more than Zeiss does (about 2-3%). You want to pay more than $45 for each of these bolts.
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@snvboy
Ben Johnson
3 days
@AU_MBasketball There's no line on the box score for pretty. 8 is bigger than 5, that's what matters.
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@snvboy
Ben Johnson
3 days
@TaliaGoodmanWBB OSU's Alexia Smith was one of my favorites at UVA, and it's great to see her thriving at OSU. You'll have a hard time finding a harder worker on the court.
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