Pigs

[juddc]

Was you system ever qualified?

[Uwe Neue]

Dear Skunked-One.

I thank you very much for your valuable, accurate, and well organized inputs.

I think pig procurement is fine. The gate also looks absolutely fine.

I agree that I must check the slop formula. I will try to eat some of the swill myself.

I suspect that the problem is related to my timing of checking for the pigs. When I come home from the pub, the pigs might be asleep. Tomorrow, I will check during day time, and maybe I will also be able to bring a mess detector.

I am considering borrowing a mess detector from my colleagues for looking for the pigs. I just need a simple mess detector, and not one for accurate mess determinations. One should be able to detect the mess of the pigs without trouble.

Dear Judd,

Thank for your input. I am working in R&D. So we do not bother with qualifying anything that we are doing. Qualifying stuff would be counterproductive to pig production.

Dear all,

I have been searching the internet about pigs. The following site has plenty of information:
http://www.ansi.okstate.edu/breeds/swine/

It includes the following very suitable information right up front:

pigs are difficult to herd and move for long distances...

[Peter Apps]

pigs are difficult to herd and move for long distances...

Time for some lateral thinking then, give up with the pigs and work on something like sheep that come in different colours and that can be moved around easily. Develop a separation on the company's latest hardware and then put out an application note claiming super speedy sensitve and repeatable analysis of medium sized domestic herbivores. Customers that buy the hardware to separate pigs can then be sold the pig-specific upgrade (under development) and a reagent kit to make the pigs behave like sheep. If in academia you can follow a similar course, resulting in an M.Sc. and a couple of papers, or you can try over and over again with pigs until stochastic processes spread them out enough to be called separated, and publish the results with a vague hint that you will be looking at doing it twice in a row at some time in the future.

Peter

[DR]

Sheep are best separated via a totally different technology...

[Uwe Neue]

I was told that a mess detector is very good in finding all the pigs. With a mess detector, you can also determine the weight of all pigs. Our specialists told me that one can find good mess detectors at the water. So tonight, I am going down to the lake and look for one.

[Uwe Neue]

To all who tried to help:

I just checked on the pigs. Right now, at lunchtime, there is plenty of light, and I can detect all the pigs without problem. I am still not yet sure what the problem was, but right now everything looks normal.

[bisnettrj2]

So, you can't see the pigs at night after coming home from the pub, but you can see them in the afternoon, ostensibly before you go to the pub.... I think there might be an operator-related detection issue at work here...

[Peter Apps]

Another thing you need to check - after being to the pub any pigs that you detect might be a specific type of ghost pig called a pink elephant.

Peter

[AICMM]

Re, the separation of pigs, I am of a mind to propose a TOF mechanism. Really a distance of flight instrument as proposed at recent conference. While a GC guy at heart, it seems to me this is more of an MS problem. All of the pigs go in a bucket at once in a trebuchet and they are released as a discrete packet. While the separation should be top notch (barring significant clustering but I don't think this will be the case here), I do still see a significant problem with detection... Please note, you did not say whether the detector had to be non-destructive.

Best regards.

[bisnettrj2]

Uwe would rather his pigs be alive - see Carl Nott's KCN suggestion. However, that is one way to make a pig fly...

[Don_Hilton]

As I was considering the effect of wind resistance on the quality of separation suggested by AICMM, and how the lower mass to cross section ratio of the ligher pigs would spoil the separation - how about a sepatation based on a wind tunnel similar to that used by people who simulate sky diving. Ramp the velocity and the smaller pigs will be lifted first. Higher up in the tunnel would be a device (moving screen) that would move the pigs out of the windstream to allow the to fall a short distance to a grid (open to allow airflow to support pigs as they pass over the edge, where they could be guided way in order of arival.

[Uwe Neue]

I love this new idea outlined by Don. Due to the favorite surface area to mass ratio of the smaller pigs, they can be collected first. When no more pigs emerge at the top, you increase the velocity in the wind tunnel, and the next larger pigs will come out. You can slowly increase the wind speed until all the pigs have been collected.

This seems to be a very nice and mild way to sort the pigs. There is always air around them, they can breath, and they are sorted properly.

Who says that you can't make pigs fly?

[Uwe Neue]

I was also wondering if there are any advantages to using micro-boar techniques?

[Peter Apps]

I was also wondering if there are any advantages to using micro-boar techniques?

[Peter Apps]

My local supplier has just informed me that due to the economic downturn and a drop in demand for sausages that there is a world shortage of pigs. They have offered to hold price increases to 200% if I can schedule deliveries. Some labs are probably stock-piling. A colleague in another lab says that they tried alternative suppliers but that the pigs had some chickens mixed in with them which invalidated their validations. Is it possible to adapt methods to run with say, warthogs which are locally available ?

Peter