<div>I was a little dismissive of the Emergency Stop topic. In an ideal world, a team from the law faculty and the engineering (both civil and electrical) and...yeah it's a mess.</div>
<div>Peter<br><br> </div>
<div><span class="gmail_quote">On 4/17/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">David Mathog</b> <<a href="mailto:mathog@caltech.edu">mathog@caltech.edu</a>> wrote:</span>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">"Peter St. John" <<a href="mailto:peter.st.john@gmail.com">peter.st.john@gmail.com</a>> wrote:
<br>><br>> 4. Physicist who builds his own damn Supercomputer agonizes for days over<br>> the emergency shut off switch wiring, because he can, he teaches<br>> electricity; but he could just walk one hundred yards down Science
<br>Drive and<br>> get an EE grad student to do it for him.<br><br>The problem with the Emergency Stop switch is not designing or<br>building the electrical wiring to implement it, it's interpreting<br>the electrical code to determine if one is required. Parts of the
<br>code were apparently written by a Zen master so that the answer to<br>what seems like a straighforward question "do we need an<br>Emergency Stop switch?" depends on the answer to "is this room full<br>of machines a machine room"? The latter is apparently an
<br>electrical code koan, as only the enlightened can divine the answer.<br>And maybe not even then - there seems to be room for considerable debate<br>on the issue. Indeed, the answer may depend not so much on what<br>the room holds, but rather on how it was wired, as certain sections
<br>of the code may be "relaxed" in machine room construction.<br><br>Suffice it to say that a definitive "required" or "not required"<br>has not yet been obtained from the folks in charge of the room's
<br>construction.<br><br>Regards,<br><br>David Mathog<br><a href="mailto:mathog@caltech.edu">mathog@caltech.edu</a><br>Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech<br></blockquote></div><br>
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