Back to: "It'll all be over by Christmas" | Forward to: Cough Cough

I ain't dead

... I'm not even ill.

However, I'm unproductive because I'm mildly depressed, and mildly depressed in part because I'm unproductive. Also the world is a flaming dumpster in a toxic waste site next to a reactor meltdown and I want to get off.

I think I wrote almost a thousand words last week. (About 15-20% of my normal output.) But that may be optimistic.

On the productive side: I suddenly realized my public profile had dropped to zero these past couple of years so I've done a couple of podcast/interviews and have a couple more lined up over the next week or so.

And who knows—maybe tomorrow I'll mop the kitchen floor then write another thousand words.

(This blog entry exists to serve notice that I'm not dead, and because the comments on the previous blog entry have become way too cumbersome and slow to load. So feel free to chat among yourselves in the comments on this entry instead!)

1534 Comments

1:

First!

(Is that too old a meme?)

In possibly better news, it turns out that Lord of the Flies was overly pessimistic about human nature

Short summary - 6 (Tongan) boys got wrecked on a tiny island. Outcome: by the time they were rescued over a year later, they were well on the way to reproducing civilisation.

2:

Hope this isn't too off-topic or anything. But it makes intresting reading:

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/neoliberalism-is-over-welcome-to-the-era-of-neo-illiberalism/

Prehaps the flaming dumpster is illibrealism?

ljones

3:

You're not dead. You're still alive!

(Link is to the closing credit song of the game Portal. Song by Jonathan Coulton).

4:

Surprisingly the whole lockdown thing has made me less depressed, although I'm not sure why. It helps we live somewhere we can take long walks without feeling we're pushing the limits of what we should do.

But I also keep having to remind people who say 'it will all be OK in the end' that it doesn't say that anywhere, an in fact there's no reason to believe it will be: exponential processes (human 'progress' in various forms) in bounded systems come to an end at some point, and there's no reason to even suspect that we're not looking at the start of that process (not CV19 particularly, but other stuff), that it will be survivable for most humans or that some whacky scifi physics will be discovered which lets us carry on in our comfortable exponential ways.

But, but: there are two naked-eye-visible stars in a nested binary with a black hole being the third object. I can't see why, if they sort out the orbits, they should not be able to have a good hard look at where it is and detect it by gravitational microlensing (or perhaps it even is accreting tiny amounts of stuff so we'll be able to see the accretion disk). We live in a golden age of astronomy & astrophysics.

5:

And, by the way: if you are depressed you are ill. It took me a very long time to realise that depression, including my depression, is an illness, but it is.

Sorry for the second comment: I forgot to add this to the previous one.

6:

I thought I was doing OK until I realized that I was having severe difficulty motivating myself to do some technical book reviews -- a task I usually look forward to and can accomplish in an hour, plus however long it takes to read the book. I've been doing these for my professional society for decades, but now, I just can't get myself to focus long enough.

Having similar trouble with fiction. I can focus well enough to revise, but am having enormous difficulty ending new stories, even when I know where I want them to go. (It doesn't help that I'm still very early in my fiction career, and still a toddler/preschooler writer.

Stressful times. We need to make a conscious effort to be kind to each other, but also to ourself.

7:

I've been working from home for over a month, which means my life has been running on autopilot even more than usual, so I'm with OGH on the depression front. On the writing front (not the job, sadly) I managed to write 1/3rd of a chapter last week, but that was Wednesday. Since then…

I guess the point is that I empathize (and sympathize, which is a similar but distinct concept).

8:

So am I and so do I, despite the fact that I am retired. All we can do is bull through.

9:

One coffee later, and had a few more thoughts about my suggestion (in the previous blog entry) that we'd need to rent large monitors and keyboards if we travel and use a smartphone as our primary computer.

In hindsight, a short-sighted description. It seems likely that Apple is working on their own version of Google Glass, and that we'll soon see good-quality, highly usable virtual screens of any arbitrary size available. And there are already virtual keyboards that project the keys on a desktop and use finger-tracking software to see what you're typing. So it seems likely we'll see a powerful smartphone-based computer running some flavor of OS X paired with glasses that handle the screen and keyboard issues.

I don't expect the first versions to work well for someone like me who requires eyeglasses (me and contact lenses don't get along well). But eventually!

10:

Re quarantine.

We're doing it in Australia. Obviously it's a shit storm. They're being put up in five star hotels. So everyone thinks they're in the lap of luxury and have zero sympathy. But, it's Australia, so they're in closed five star hotels. So the air conditioning is off, the windows don't open, there's a meal 3 times a day, but no cooks, so you get a microwaved frozen meal left at you door that's still frozen in the middle. If you're vegetarian you can eat around the meat. If you have strict dietary requirements, well, it's only two weeks. No one actually dies in two weeks. No deliveries from local eateries are allowed and there's a cop in the hall making sure you don't go out.

In New Zealand they are also hosting in closed hotels, but you can order anything from the normal menu. If you ask, the staff will buy you whatever you want from the local countdown (you have to pay for that). You get an escorted walk outside every day. Laundry every day, delivered back the next day cleaned and pressed.

11:

There's another approach, which would be similar to what my office does now:

With the exception of a few developers who require heavy-duty machines for number-crunching, every employee at my office gets a laptop... and a docking station with a full-sized keyboard and 1 or 2 big flatscreen monitors.

I could easily see the same thing happening to smartphones. There was a reply on the previous thread about Nokia doing it, but I think the Appledroid phones probably have a stronger ecosystem.

12:

Glad to hear that you have not joined the Status.Dead == True ;-)

I have no wonder answers, except to enjoy what you enjoy and exercise if you can (I go on my bike...).

Read a few books? I've just read the latest Murderbot book by Martha Wells and enjoyed it thoroughly... throughout this endeavor, my washing and cleaning went to pot... definitely worth it, even if the cleaning effort is more later on. - There is a great interview with her last week on Tubby & Coos with John Scalzi... very interesting as Martha had a fallow period a while back... (I'm not linking it here - go google. This is the Blog of Stross...)

Best wishes and stay safe,

S.

13:

Carrying over from the previous thread: Was that the longest set of comments "EVAH" on this blog?

[[ No: of the three posts that got over 2000 comments, it was only the second longest, being about 100 behind CASE NIGHTMARE BLOND - mod ]]

Charlie @ old 2359 - Arianespace ... hows what-used-to-be-hotol doing? [ "Reaction Engines"? ]

@ 2352 Agree that it's meaningless posturing, but it's VERY threatening. It aso postures for the benefit of The Gammons & it worries me. Also, most places that are not the USA now have lower rates than we do, anyway!

Phones... Because I'm not going out, except to the shops & the Allotment, I'm not using the real reason I bought that fancy phone - it has a Real KeyboardTM - I had just got started to be used to be able to search for things on it & actually TYPE messaging, when everything fell apart. Bloody good camera, too - the only things it won't do is real close-ups or ultra-wide angle.

Geoff Hart & Charlie & everybody for that matter It's the lockdown ... it's getting to people - even I, who am managing 3 multi-hour excursions every week ( On the plot, of course ) am feeling it. I MISS not going to dance practice / going into town / meeting the railway layabouts in the pub, etc ... We are a social species.

14:

I had to drive 90 minutes to see my ear/nose/throat doc for a CT/culture for a sinus infection last week. Went to a big box store to pick up a pre-order: my wife said maybe 20% of the people in it were masked/gloved. She showed them my phone with the barcode, they gave her the good, then she got the hell out of there.

Here in New Mexico we're still on the upswing of exponential case growth. And I'm supposed to go back to the library in early July, though we're not reopening until late August when the fall term begins.

And yes, people are clamoring to go back to work. And die.

Morons. It's the richest of the rich who want you go get back to work, the type who could burn money and not notice it. I'm not leaving the house. But I have a strong incentive not to leave: my body stopped producing antibodies eleven years ago. We don't know what will happen if/when I get the virus: supposedly because I have a normal T cell population, I won't have an increased morbidity chance.

Eventually it'll happen and we'll find out.

15:

Not to be (too) nitpicking...

Shouldn't it be

"I ATEN'T DEAD"?

16:

Greg: Reaction Engines is in my opinion a dead end -- assuming SpaceX get Superheavy/Starship flying, which seems like a winning bet at this point (they're hot-testing tankage/motor integration right now, which means it's not a paper study any more, here's actual hardware). HOTOL/Skylon required lots of liquid hydrogen handling, expensive ground infrastructure, and has a pathetic payload (IIRC about 2-4 tons to LEO: Starship promises 100 tons per flight and a faster flight tempo at much lower cost). However RE may yet fly because they've got one very valuable capability -- they're an obvious route to high-hypersonic in-atmosphere flight, which has military implications. So lots of Pentagon money to mop up there.

But at this point SpaceX has cornered 50% of the planetary launch market by matching and overmatching the reliability of the commercial competition and massively undercutting them on price, and that's with their last-generation product. Their next-gen product is solid enough that NASA have begun talking about using it for Artemis (their next-boots-on-the-moon program later this decade) despite being heavily invested in the SLS white elephant, and Musk's actual design target is to build something that can plant a million pairs of boots on Mars within 3 decades. Even if it falls short, it's going to be spectacular.

17:

Diminishing tagline recognition, I'm afraid.

18:

Indeed. Some uses are very close to that already, especially for the people who use smartphones for work, which is increasingly common. It will be slower coming (if it does) for private users, who use the smartphone as a social media hub, camera and television (as OGH) says, plus a identification, payment and ticket/invoice mechanism.

Geoff Hart's comment may well be right, but that approach has not succeeded so far, and that's not from lack of trying. Of course, a lot of of that is because of technological limitations that are slowly being eroded. I am not holding my breath, but am not ruling it out, either.

There is another possibility, especially when people use 'the cloud' for all storage. All that the smartphone does is identify and authenticate the user to the 'desktop system', which then proceeds to establish a virtual environment for the user (whether one with a user interface like the smartphone or not). This is very plausible for Apple, who are keen on BOTH using the cloud that way AND on sticking a CPU in their screens.

In that, it's essential to note that the user neither knows nor cares where the actual processing is done: on his smartphone, on a virtual system in his screen, or in the cloud. Indeed, one docking area might do it one way, and another a different way, with the user seeing the same result. The IT world has been moving in the direction of virtuality for a long time, and that's just another step.

19:

Agreed on the moron stuff. Guess we'll need second and third waves of coronavirus for people to learn.

As noted on In The Pipeline, the whole reason there's this complex set of rules and bureaucracy around things like drug and vaccine development (and, for that matter, airplanes, spaceflight, scuba, and many other fields) is that every extra procedure was created based on someone who suffered and/or died as the result of some avoidable problem.

Looks like we're going to write our modern pandemic playbooks in the ICUs and graveyards too. And don't forget, for every person dead of Covid19, there will probably be 4 or 5 who are permanently harmed by the virus, either through stroke or loss of kidneys at the extreme end, down to heart and lung damage at the more mild end.

Which is depressing, of course. Unfortunately, being depressed in response to people in power being stupid, greedy, and cruel, is perfectly rational. Even if it is counterproductive.

And now, I return you to the ongoing American horror/reality series, Masque of the Orange Death. In last night's episode, we found out that Covid19 is probably all through the White House, who have consistently failed to practice the recommendations that the CDC proposed. What will happen after the cliff hanger ending? Something surprising, but probably not the surprise you wanted. This new horror X reality TV format and it's "semiscripted" structure doesn't seem to be very entertaining.

20:

I'm reading The Nightmare Stacks and enjoying it. Thanks for writing it!

21:

Been seeing some stuff going around from various cognitive science sorts that reading requires an effort to construct the story; you have to sub-create to enjoy it. Since many people have the same cognitive machinery stuck trying to figure out how worried they ought to be, the impulse to read and the ability to read are presently diminished.

I expect this applies to writing, too, though I am personally blaming day-job deadlines at the moment.

22:

@Graydon: That's actually very interesting. Do you have links?

23:

Already used by a Pratchett fan group on Facebook, so probably not :)

24:

Maybe the cliff hanger will be that both Trump and Pence die of the virus nearly simultaneously.

25:

In some of the previous journal entries people were talking about ticks and Lyme disease. Two (anecdotal) data points:

1: Living where I do (Dorset in southern England), this is tick season. If you're wearing trousers and in rank vegetation, expect to collect some - three or four seems normal. I'm not rash enough to try it with shorts.

2: My nephew was on holiday with us in Norway (an island in Stavangerfjord) in summer 2000; he was 8, I think. He went and jumped about in a bush there, being young and enthusiastic, for maybe 5 minutes. Sister and I took upward of 30 ticks off him afterwards.

26:

You were nearly right but, you misplaced the apostrophe...

I ATE'NT DEAD

27:
But at this point SpaceX has cornered 50% of the planetary launch market by matching and overmatching the reliability of the commercial competition and massively undercutting them on price, and that's with their last-generation product. Their next-gen product is solid enough that NASA have begun talking about using it for Artemis (their next-boots-on-the-moon program later this decade) despite being heavily invested in the SLS white elephant, and Musk's actual design target is to build something that can plant a million pairs of boots on Mars within 3 decades. Even if it falls short, it's going to be spectacular.

SpaceX is fascinating. Elon Musk is probably going to be this century's Howard Hugues. The perfect storm of technical bent, entrepreneurial chops, and the touch of batshit that you need to go from businessman to legend (the Tesla tweeting and the cant-help-myself provocation...). There's multiple books written about him already, and there will be more written, no matter what. Heck, there's a reason sci-fi authors are now putting "muskies" as names for Mars colonists in sci-fi (I'm looking at Greg Bear).

Even failure will be glorious, and told for decades to come.

The thing is, the Congress Committees pushing the Senate Launch System are becoming increasingly marginalized as it becomes more and more obvious to everyone that they are moving against NASA's interests. They keep trying to push it, but when you find out that each SLS engine will cost 146M$ (and be used for a single launch only and you need FOUR of them... plus the rocket), vs a Falcon Heavy reusable launch of 90M$ or an entire disposable launch at 150M$... it becomes increasingly hard to justify that your funding of NASA is contingent on providing hundreds of M$ to Boeing using cost+ contracts "or else".

28:

My money is on SLS flying once, or possibly twice at the most, before it's cancelled during a budget squeeze and the remaining payloads diverted to Falcon Heavy (because it exists and is flightworthy right now) or Superheavy/Starship (if SLS staggers on until Starship is also flying).

29:

I've been feeling much the same, although I'm similarly not sure why. Going out only to collect food and medicines and only at the maximum possible intervals is pretty much normal for me anyway, so personally it's made next to no difference. It's probably just down to it being springtime with the days getting longer, along with the weather happening to switch from piddling with rain nearly every day to being lovely and sunny nearly every day at pretty much the exact point things started getting serious. And as a bonus the clear blue skies don't have any aeroplane trails in them, there are a lot fewer cars buzzing about the place, and the longer it goes on for the more obvious the practical lesson becomes that most of the shit people spend most of their time doing is a pile of arse and we can get on perfectly well without it. I've thought for a long time that if I was a sufficiently powerful magic user I would wave my arms about and say "no, you all no longer have the ability to do this shit... (pause) ...and see, it doesn't matter!", so apart from the bit about the cause of the stoppage being people dying, it's like a fantasy come true.

30:

Sigh... who is ordering and buying Falcon Heavy launches? Where is the great pent-up demand for a fifty-tonne unitary payload into orbit? A quick check in the Googles says that after a decade of gestation for the Falcon Heavy, beginning in 2018 there have been a total of three FH launches -- the first was a test (Elon's Roadster), the second flight was the launch of a medium-sized communication satellite into GEO and the third an integration test carrying about four tonnes of cubesats and other small satellites.

Future planned launches for FH are all in the same size bracket -- apparently there's nothing even 20 tonnes in size like the ISS-resupply ATVs launched by the venerable Ariane V.

31:

Heteromeles The real Masque of the Orange Death would be the replacement of the Orange by the grey ( Pence ). What do the GOP do if DT keels over between now & November - especially if it's not until after the "normal" time for the party conventions ... say first week in Spetember? ...... Georgiana's take on that would be EVEN MORE FUN! Any thoughts/predictions? [ Afterthought - what do the D's do if Biden kicks the bucket? ]

Graydon various cognitive science sorts that reading requires an effort to construct the story; you have to sub-create to enjoy it. JRRT knew this & even wrote about it, with some perspicacity.

vincent.archer Even failure will be glorious, and told for decades to come. Which is why ( the younger ) Brunel is more famous than the Stephenson's, probably.

32:

Maybe the cliff hanger will be that both Trump and Pence die of the virus nearly simultaneously.

This is what I mean by "probably not the surprise you wanted," sadly.

So far as I know, there are around 400 people working in and around the White House (Google lists 377 staff, plus the President, family, and whoever currently spends their lives there but doesn't get counted as "staff.")

I'm probably wrong, but so far as I can tell, Covid19 outcomes, statistically, are about: --50% asymptomatic --40% symptomatic but not sucktastic --10% require hospitalization, of which --5% survive with major and possibly lifelong complications --1% die (I know it's probably less than 1%, but none of these figures are remotely exact).

While the Presidency is stressful and people being cooped up in close quarters with other infected people often have worse outcomes, I'm guessing that the result of the White House getting thoroughly infected will be something like this statistical profile.

So taking 400 people and running the stats:

About 40 people in the White House will go to the hospital. About 20 of them will retire/quit due to bad but nonlethal outcomes. About 4 people will die. Most likely, those dying will be ethnic minorities who are in the cleaning staff. Historically, the White House has employed a lot of African-Americans to keep the place going, and they're the ones who tend to get disproportionately hit by the bad outcomes. Which really, really sucks.

About 160 will be nonfunctional for a few weeks while they deal with the infection

And the rest will keep trundling on, quite possibly spreading the virus to others.

The odds of both the President and his Renfield kicking off look to be about 1 in 400. Since both of them, especially President. 45, have a history of taking bad bets, I can see why he thinks it's okay to not bother with a mask.

The best outcome, from a TV reality show perspective, would be if .45 took the next two weeks to fly to a bunch of campaign rallies, shake hands, kiss babies, and especially talk to wealthy backers at close quarters. Then the chance of something interesting happening goes up a bit.

33:

Heteromeles And those numbers leave out those who don't "catch" it at all, or off whom the virus simply "bounces" - who are mostly the asymptomatic ones, but there will be some whom no-one will realise have been infected, unless an antigen/antibody test is conducted. For instance, I now know that I was close to someone who almost certainly had the Corvid, back in early March. [ He had the broken-glass throat, ghastly headaches, an elevated temp ... & then it all went away. ] For me, nothing, not even a hint. Might have been something else, of course.

[ I find the report, previously, of people who have had Measles or been immunised against same having a lower susceptibility to C-19 most interesting. Might be one reason that so few young people are getting it, of course - they mostly/all have had the anti-Measles jab And - I've actually had all 3 of those, long ago: Measles & Rubella & Mumps. ]

34:

Thinking geopolitically and bloviating for a moment, I'd like to link to an interesting website: endcoronavirus.org

They've got a page up of countries that they claim are either: "beating Covid-19," "nearly there," or "need to take action."

It's far from an complete list, but the page shows running 10-day averages of new infections per country.

For the fun of it, let's assume two things: --That the categories are accurate, even if the numbers inevitably change (meaning countries that beat Covid-19 once can do it again, even if they get reinfected) --That it will 4-5 years for a vaccine to be created and for most people to get inoculated. I think this is optimistic, not because of vaccine creation, but because of the logistics of inoculating 7 billion people or so. That takes some huge supply chains, even if everybody altruistically cooperates to see this virus gone. It may well be more like 10 years.

With these assumptions, things get interesting in a geopolitical realignment sense, because of who is in the "needs to take action" category: --Most of the western hemisphere, including all three countries in North America and most of central and South America. --Russia --UK --South Asia.

In the "Beating it" and "Nearly There" categories are: --Most of the EU (except authoritarian states like Hungary and Poland) --Most of Scandinavia (except Sweden...) --Most of Southeast Asia (except Indonesia) --Australia and New Zealand --China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. --Oh yeah: Iran, Turkey, Israel...

So if the pandemic really starts reshaping who trades and allies with whom, what we may very well see is states that can control the virus working more with other countries with similarly effective controls, while countries that cannot control themselves either trade with other plague countries or get quarantined by the world.

This aligns the EU and China against Russia and the US.

It leaves control of much of the ocean in the feverish hands of the US and Indonesia (for shipping through the straits)

It also gives the EU more reason to push forward with modified Brexit to keep the infected of the UK away from the reopening states of the Continent. Not sure what's going on with Ireland, but they've effectively bent their curve, so maybe they will join the EU's "nearly there" contingent in a few weeks.

Interesting times. Of course, this is all overly-simplistic speculation. Comments?

35:

Alas, no. It went by, my confirmation bias nodded, and I didn't note the source.

Searches wander off into screens and screens about how your IT security team is being degraded by stress.

36:

Of course you're right Greg.

Thing is, I don't think anyone has good numbers on how many people can be exposed and not get infected, especially when we get into arguments about how exposed you have to be to be truly exposed and not catch it.

To keep it simpler, I assumed that in the close quarters of the White House, everyone got infected.

The bigger point was that, even if everyone in the White House does get infected, the chances of the people some hope will die actually dying are actually pretty slim. I do hate to be Dr. Buzzkill on this, but if everybody's mildly depressed now, might as well break the bad news so that we can recover from this reality failure too.

37:

Ah well. Perhaps I'll do a bit of Google-diving. Thanks for the pointer, anyway.

38:

I should point out that the odds of a Trump/Pence double payout in the Covid-19 lottery are actually 1 in 10,000 (1/100*1/100) not 1 in 400. This is why I'm not a bookie.

39:

meaning countries that beat Covid-19 once can do it again, even if they get reinfected

This will only be the case if those countries have a sufficient entirely domestic supply chain for everything they need.

That MIGHT describe China; it describes no one else. (I doubt it presently describes China, though I have no doubt at all they are working to fix it.)

That's all the PPE and all the drugs and test kits and gene analysis machinery, all the plumbing and floor cleaner and hand sanitiser and so on. There's going to be a global shortage for years even if no economic realignment events take place.

"Needs to take action" countries are headed at full-blown economic collapse. See, for example, https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2020/05/april-employment-report-20500000-jobs.html where it's quite clear that the cliff-dive is still ongoing and it's also clear from other sources that no one has even started to articulate a sufficient response.

Are they going to get there? Hard to say. The Anglosphere ruling class has had no contact with reality for three generations, which is at least loosely associated with collapse.

Anyway, the other part of this is that nobody is beating COVID-19; they're limiting the first-wave infection rate. This leaves their population vulnerable to the second wave, which is the tradeoff for "and hardly anybody died". The only for-sure way to maintain this is to test everybody at least weekly forever. (or until vaccine, but for planning purposes that isn't going to happen.) (Since the co-ordinated global response that could actually extirpate the disease ain't happening.)

40:

Not likely, and not likely to improve matters.

The confederacy is trying to take over the United States Federal government and undo all amendments to the Constitution. (At least, I can't think of any they're actually going to support.)

They've been at this for a couple generations now and have a lot of success, mostly because way more than enough Americans agree with them and the ones who don't keep bringing reasoned discourse to an ongoing genocide.

Major election stressors are much more likely to be an uncertain food supply than any of the candidates dying; I'd be delighted in a "voice of heaven, can you hear it?" way if they all did, but that's not even really unlikely. It's a pipe dream.

41:

tfb @ 5: And, by the way: if you are depressed you are ill. It took me a very long time to realise that depression, including my depression, is an illness, but it is.

Sorry for the second comment: I forgot to add this to the previous one.

The first step towards healing, overcoming depression is recognizing you are depressed. Plus, I once had a doctor tell me that when your life sucks it's not unreasonable that you become a bit depressed. It's how you react to it and how you cope that matters. Life sucks for most everyone right now. We're social animals & social distancing is NO FUN.

I'm a bit down myself right now, but I know if I just soldier on, someday I'm going to be better. I hope y'all will too.

There is after all, a reason the cliché "Where there's life, there's hope" is a cliché.

42:

"I find the report, previously, of people who have had Measles or been immunised against same having a lower susceptibility to C-19 most interesting."

It didn't say that. What they did was to hack a half-dead version of the measles virus, used to make measles vaccines, so that it expressed the important coronavirus protein, and found that mice given the hacked vaccine developed antibodies that reacted to the coronavirus protein. It wasn't even this coronavirus, it was some other one from a few years back that I'd never heard of until this one came out. So it's a promising result from a very early stage in the development of a vaccine against a different virus which died out of its own accord before they got much further, but it doesn't mean in the least that having received the un-hacked measles vaccine is any help against coronavirus.

(I never had the MMR vaccine, only the M and the M separately. R I just had the disease, and it was bloody brilliant, since I didn't feel ill at all but I still got a few days off school for it.)

The existing-vaccine result I found interesting was the suggestion that having had the BCG shot might do some good. I don't see how it possibly could, but there are certain to be lots of odd effects that I have no idea about, and the suggestion did seem to have at least some respectability behind it. We all had the BCG at school so I'd just assumed it was universal these days, but apparently it isn't, and they reckoned that both people from places where it isn't usual and people from places where it is but who hadn't had it for some reason were a bit less well off than people who had had it.

43:

No. There is an illness called depression, but depression is not, in and of itself, an illness. It can be the appropriate reaction to a situation.

44:

Georgiana @ 24: Maybe the cliff hanger will be that both Trump and Pence die of the virus nearly simultaneously.

It has finally showed up in the White House, so I think there IS some hope.

45:

Those virtual keyboards give no tactile feedback. This makes them strongly inferior to an ordinary keyboard, though I admit they're better than the smart phone keyboard emulator...if you have a flat surface with reasonable smoothness and reflectivity for them to project onto.

46:

Sigh... who is ordering and buying Falcon Heavy launches?

NASA picks SpaceX to deliver cargo to Gateway station in lunar orbit.

They're going to pay for development of a new, larger Dragon cargo ship (Dragon XL) for Lunar Gateway supply missions, launching on top of Falcon Heavy. Minimum of two FH launches guaranteed, but it's being pitched as a cost-saving measure for the Lunar Gateway program so you should probably bet on FH becoming the main workhorse for that outpost on an ongoing basis (simply because SLS is ridiculously expensive and if NASA is on a tight budget there'll be immense pressure to go with the cheaper option).

Given that the lead time for developing a new class of comsat payload is multiple years, it's hardly surprising that there aren't many payloads so large they demand an FH launch -- yet. But FH has a niche and it's going to gradually expand (unless/until Starship replaces it).

Note that various NASA outer planets science missions are also drooling over Falcon Heavy's payload capacity, and SpaceX list at least three USAF classified missions (presumably NRO spysat launches, because Falcon Heavy is a hell of a lot cheaper than Delta 4 Heavy).

47:

One point I think you've missed is that there are two screaming correlations visible in political management of the pandemic (between success/failure):

a) Female-led executives generally do far better

b) Authoritarian (especially right-wing authoritarian) male led executives in nominally democratic countries do far worse

Examples of the former: New Zealand, Germany, Scotland (relative to England -- morbidity/death rate in Scotland is about 70-80% that of England, even though England dictates travel and lockdown timing)

Examples of the latter: Brazil (Bolsonaro), the USA (Trump), Poland, Hungary, etc

Exceptions: China (but China isn't remotely a democracy, even in name or outward form: once they started to act, they acted hard), who else?

Anyway: I hypothesize that authoritarians see opposition purely in terms of zero-sum game human-to-human competition and can't comprehend public health systems (which require positive sum approaches). And women are less likely to rise to positions of leadership in authoritarian/macho political cultures.

48:

Reminder that there are (at least) two types of depression: reactive depression and endogenous depression.

Reactive depression: something bad happened, so you feel bad about it. A family member died, your fellow nationals elected a poop-flinging chimp to high office and he's shitting copiously on everything you hold dear, you lost your job: it is normal to feel bad when these things happen, and in the fullness of time you will recover. Talking about it helps, medication is probably unnecessary (but if it's so bad you have suicidal ideation, seek help immediately).

Endogenous depression: nothing particularly unusual happened but you just want the world to go away and nothing means anything and everything is terrible and you don't even have the energy to get out of bed, never mind slit your wrists. This is an organic illness, medication probably is necessary, and it's almost certainly not going to go away unless you get help.

(What I've got is the former: lost both parents and a close friend in the past three years, government hijacked by utter flange magnets bent on destroying the economy and turning the nation into a haven for dirtbag poop-flinging nazis, other governments falling to a wave of similar extremists, then a once-a-century pandemic falls on us. I think being a bit despondent right now is perfectly reasonable, and I will recover as soon as Trump's head explodes, Boris Johnson chokes on his own lies, and COVID19 burns itself out or we get a vaccine. OK?)

49:

That's not completely true. They're both over sixty, so if they get the disease they've both got at least a five-percent chance of dying even without a pre-existing condition. If either of them has some combination of hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, or respiratory problems the chances of dying ramp up heavily - somewhere between 28 - 52 percent. Furthermore, Trump may (or may not) insist on being given hydrochloroquinine, and it's also possible that one or both of them will fall into the "too badly damaged by disease to perform their duties" category.

So the odds are better than you think!

50:

Pigeon @ 29: I've been feeling much the same, although I'm similarly not sure why. Going out only to collect food and medicines and only at the maximum possible intervals is pretty much normal for me anyway, so personally it's made next to no difference. It's probably just down to it being springtime with the days getting longer, along with the weather happening to switch from piddling with rain nearly every day to being lovely and sunny nearly every day at pretty much the exact point things started getting serious. And as a bonus the clear blue skies don't have any aeroplane trails in them, there are a lot fewer cars buzzing about the place, and the longer it goes on for the more obvious the practical lesson becomes that most of the shit people spend most of their time doing is a pile of arse and we can get on perfectly well without it

The question for most of us though, is "Where do we get the money we need to pay for that food & medicine (and rent and ...) if we don't go to work somewhere?

How do we get from where we are today with a lot of people who can't get to work and are piling up debt just to keep body & soul together to a society where we can "get on perfectly well without it"?

Like you, this hasn't changed my life all that much ... other than the few social engagements I had every week are now in abeyance and I used to do my grocery shopping on a weekly basis & I could run back to the store the next day if I forgot something.

But, the only reason I'm able to stay home all the time is I worked my ass off for 50 years to pay for my home, save for retirement & earn Social Security and my Army pension. I have an income to live off of.

What are the people who haven't had a chance to acquire the level of assets I have going to do?

51:

Graydon @ 40: The confederacy is trying to take over the United States Federal government and undo all amendments to the Constitution. (At least, I can't think of any they're actually going to support.)

They revere at least a part of the Second Amendment.

This is not your father's confederacy. Much of their strength is in the Old Northwest (Ohio River watershed) and the far northwest; states that were not part of the Confederate States of America.

They're fascist Neo-Confederates and hypocristian dominionists.

52:

What are the people who haven't had a chance to acquire the level of assets I have going to do?

Take whatever job they can get under whatever terms they are offered in the hope of starving a little slower.

Die.

Possibly die because they were shot for protesting under draconian curfews instituted under quarantine laws. (Most of the existing quarantine laws are plenty draconian.)

As Charlie notes above, authoritarians are doing a really bad job of responding.

If not the reason, certainly a big reason is that they're reducing everything to a social hierarchy about who can refuse, and framing things as "refuse to work". (Which is the sort of thing that sends a slaver round the twist at the very best of times.)

Cost-benefit analysis would point out that the only sane thing to do is test-trace-and-isolate; there are big parts of the US where you can't implement that because people feel duty-bound to oppose any such program as proof they have the standing (in the authoritarian hierarchy) to refuse to do what the government tells them.

Crisis of legitimacy, in other words.

The PRC, whatever its manifest and numerous faults, is seen as legitimate by its own population. The US feds, not so much. That's pretty darn worrying.

53:
My money is on SLS flying once, or possibly twice at the most, before it's cancelled

Twice. They already have a second core under construction so they will have two available to launch. (First one ordered in 2014 and one in 2020)

However, I think that covers only one test flight and one real flight in 2023.

54:

Here's a piece in the NYT saying part of what I was trying to say a couple of weeks back: -

How Pandemics End

In the end, everyone just goes "meh, I'm tired of this". (Or in the non-US idiom, "fuck this for a game of soldiers, I'm off".

And the pandemic is quickly forgotten.

This pandemic got such a strong response because it affected, old WEIRD males with delusions of importance most of all people.

(Disclaimer: old WEIRD male, moi. Not so much of the R though, thanks to depression. And I think flying should be banned in the interests of the people alive in 2100, so I don't partake.)

55:
Sigh... who is ordering and buying Falcon Heavy launches?

Apparently, people do.

There's only one for 2020 (USSF), but 2 for 2021 (USSF/Viacom) - maybe a third (INMARSAT) - and already two scheduled for 2022 (NASA x 2). Plus the Gateway Logistics future contract mentioned by our host.

It's not the market envisioned originally, because the F9 has proven capable of being powerful enough to offer the choice between a returning falcon heavy or an expendable F9 flights. A few recents F9 flights had no attempt to recover because they were in the lower end of the range originally expected for F Heavy.

But that's relatively irrelevant. Because the F. Heavy is a variant of the F9, based on almost the same hardware. The side cores are slight variants, but the central core is apparently the same version. So SpaceX can switch from launching two heavy per year to 6 or 7 per year relatively easily if needed.

56:

Charles H noted: "Those virtual keyboards give no tactile feedback. This makes them strongly inferior to an ordinary keyboard"

Very true, and I much prefer an external keyboard to my laptop's keyboard for that very reason; better finger feel. But a friend who used a projected virtual keyboard something like 10 years ago loved it, despite the primitive state of the tech at that time, and just as I can relearn the feel of my laptop keyboard well enough to be productive while I'm traveling, I assume I could learn a projected keyboard too.

OTOH, I have a clip-on Anker keyboard for my iPad that's pretty darn good. So maybe we'll just have to use a virtual Google Glass-style display, and carry a small but fully functional external keyboard in our backpack?

57:

Charlie Stross @ 48: Reminder that there are (at least) two types of depression: reactive depression and endogenous depression.

Reactive depression: something bad happened, so you feel bad about it. A family member died, your fellow nationals elected a poop-flinging chimp to high office and he's shitting copiously on everything you hold dear, you lost your job: it is normal to feel bad when these things happen, and in the fullness of time you will recover. Talking about it helps, medication is probably unnecessary (but if it's so bad you have suicidal ideation, seek help immediately).

Endogenous depression: nothing particularly unusual happened but you just want the world to go away and nothing means anything and everything is terrible and you don't even have the energy to get out of bed, never mind slit your wrists. This is an organic illness, medication probably is necessary, and it's almost certainly not going to go away unless you get help.

(What I've got is the former: lost both parents and a close friend in the past three years, government hijacked by utter flange magnets bent on destroying the economy and turning the nation into a haven for dirtbag poop-flinging nazis, other governments falling to a wave of similar extremists, then a once-a-century pandemic falls on us. I think being a bit despondent right now is perfectly reasonable, and I will recover as soon as Trump's head explodes, Boris Johnson chokes on his own lies, and COVID19 burns itself out or we get a vaccine. OK?)

I can't tell you what you should do, and I wouldn't even try. I can only tell you what I've been told and how it worked for me.

I didn't know depression came in two different flavors, but FWIW, I've had them both. Had them both at the same time even.

I never got as far as being suicidal, because I'm afraid of dying and because it's just NOT DONE! ... at least not for me. No matter how bad it gets, I just gotta' soldier on.

But I have been to the "don't even have the energy to get out of bed" stage. And oddly enough the medicine I was prescribed (not Prozac) only made it worse. On top of the "don't even have the energy to get out of bed", I had the feeling Pink Floyd describes in Comfortably Numb.

I seem to have had some kind of rebound effect when I stopped taking the medication (after discussing it with the doctor) that not only helped overcome the "comfortably numb" symptom but also helped break the "don't even have the energy ..." cycle.

58:

On the previous thread there was a discussion about long-distance HVDC lines.

Apparently they run about USD1M per km (2007 dollars) over land.

There's nothing unsolved about laying either undersea HVDC cables or or long ditance cables, so it's just a question of money.

And not very much money at that, in the scheme of things.

This piece from 2007 calculates the gross cost of powering the world exclusively on PV with HVDC backbone distribution at around 5% of global GDP between 2008 and 2050, using 2007 prices and efficiencies for PV panels. It's probably around a quarter of that now. Hybrid perovskite/silicon panels and/or superconducting cables would lower the cost further.

That's the gross cost. There would be savings on fossil fuel extraction and the deaths and ill health arising from burning them.

59:

Re OGH @ 16: Even if it falls short, it's going to be spectacular

My understanding of rocketry is that generally, given the energies and/or velocities involved, any sort of failure tends towards the spectacular.

60:
any sort of failure tends towards the spectacular.

Or, as some say, a "rapid unscheduled disassembly".

61:

Graydon @ 52:

What are the people who haven't had a chance to acquire the level of assets I have going to do?

Take whatever job they can get under whatever terms they are offered in the hope of starving a little slower.

Die.

Possibly die because they were shot for protesting under draconian curfews instituted under quarantine laws. (Most of the existing quarantine laws are plenty draconian.)

Yeah. I know. Please note my question was a response to Pigeon's "practical lesson ... that most of the shit people spend most of their time doing is a pile of arse and we can get on perfectly well without it" and I was asking how people are going to get what they need to survive if they don't have jobs to provide an income? If they don't spend their time doing things "we can get on perfectly well without", how are they going to get the money to pay for the necessary things?

62:

how are they going to get the money to pay for the necessary things?

Socialism!

Or, well, some kind of collectivism. Keep everybody not merely alive but able to spend a bit on stuff so the "everyone's income is someone else's spending" part of the economy keeps working.

You do this for, realistically, about a year; that's how long it takes you to get test-trace-and-isolate in place at a national scale. (Taiwan, South Korea, and Vietnam had the capability in place, they just had to turn it on.) Especially since testing is something of a market failure poster child right now.

You still can't treat the disease directly; you still can't prevent the disease. But at that point you can re-open the economy because outbreaks are guaranteed to stay small.

This is obviously massively worth it; complete folly to not have it in place at least since SARS. But there's an inability to cope with risk and spending that does not drive immediate return.

63:

What I'm not seeing in the speculative launch listings for Falcon Heavy are any fifty-tonne launch into LEO deals that were supposed to be happening by now half a dozen times a year as in the Shuttle era. Instead Falcon Heavy is covering the Delta 4 Heavy segment of the market, one launch a year of a super-heavy 24-tonne NRO satellite and nothing else plus occasional launch-to-GTO of conventionally-sized (4 tonne to 7 tonne) communications satellites.

Bigger satellites are a lot lot lot more expensive than smaller ones and really big unitary items that can only be launched on Falcon Heavy don't have a fall-back if something goes wrong -- at least one early FH customer had to buy an Ariane V launch back in 2016 to get their bird into GTO because it was needed in its GEO slot desperately. For everything else there's multiple launches of smaller units and docking in orbit, a solved problem these days.

64:

The second amendment is the right to carry guns. That would certainly be retained.

65:

I find I spend a lot of time scouring news feeds for the first sign of:

1, Trump losing the election, coughing unproductively or being arrested for fraud

2, Johnson being videoed drunkenly groping Nicola Sturgeon and being put on the sex offender list

3, Putin being attacked by a duck

and...

4, a vaccine

Yep, at this stage depression is almost the most rational response. My biscuit consumption has reached heights that brings tears to the eyes of McVities shareholders.

It would also be nice if NASA did launch a SLS with solid fuel boosters as it would be good to watch something as powerful as the Saturn V head for orbit.

66:

Repairing undersea power cables:

This is more of an overview of the whole idea: https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/JRC97720/ld-na-27527-en-n.pdf

Advertorial description:

https://kis-orca.eu/subsea-cables/maintenance-repair-operations/

https://www.escaeu.org/articles/submarine-power-cables/

It looks as though there's a big jump in complexity between "we find the ends and splice in a bit of extra cable" and the full details, possibly with a big layer of commercial confidentiality and possibly just "first you buy a submarine cable repair ships, prices from $300M" which renders the details irrelevant to most people...

67:

I noticed a reference to a Tesla vehicle in a recent read by Richard K. Morgan, the book was set on Mars.

Not sure how i felt about it, sometimes i think contemporary references breaks the wall a little for me. Not sure if i would feel the same way if he had called the vehicle by some other extant recognizable brand name.

68:

One problem with Falcon Heavy is that the second stage is underpowered. It's great for getting a lot of mass into LEO, but it doesn't get that much even to GEO, much less to a TLI/TMI or other interplanetary transfer.

This is because the second stage is designed for Falcon 9. If FH was intended as a long-term workhorse (rather than the temporary stop-gap to SS/SH that it is), then they'd design an entirely new second stage - probably lengthen the one they have (to increase both payload volume and fuel tankage) and stick three Merlin engines on instead of just one.

But since SpaceX are going for SS/SH as their long-term heavy lift, FH only needs to be able to match the capabilities of other heavy-lift vehicles (Delta IV Heavy, etc), rather than massively exceed them as the raw surface thrust suggests it should be able to.

Obviously, it can be used for interplanetary launches - if NASA want to launch their next Mars rover on one, then it has plenty of power to do that - but it's not a step-change in capability beyond LEO.

Even SS/SH won't be a huge step-change beyond GEO until they get in-orbit refuelling working. All their plans for beyond-earth-orbit start with "launch a SS full of fuel, launch another SS with payload, refuel from the SS full of fuel and then deorbit and land the tanker".

Once you have a SS with full fuel tanks in LEO though, then you have an enormous amount of delta-v compared to anything that has ever been in orbit before. It's far more than even the third stage of Saturn V had (which is what was doing the TLI burns for Apollo).

And, of course, if you can do refuelling in LEO, you can do it in other places. Once you have the capability, you can fire off tankers to anywhere your StarShip can reach - refuelling in lunar orbit, or Mars orbit, or in a transfer orbit so you don't need fuel for the insertion burn on your payload starship (eg two starships do TJI, one tanker, one payload, the payload refuels from the tanker en route to Jupiter and then the payload has the fuel for JOI, while the tanker heads off into deep space - this would let you get to Jupiter a lot faster)

69:

It's not retained now.

The de facto gun laws are "only if you are male and white" and "it's OK if you are a cop". There's a death penalty for violating the de facto laws.

It's a bit like "unreasonable search and seizure"; it's a dead letter, but there's a habit of pretending it isn't.

70:

Could be. It could also be simpler: a "stay inside and wash your hands, dear" command is stereotypically a Mom command, while a "Shut up and fight on," is stereotypically a Dad command.

In this case, the Moms, excuse me, the female executives, are listened to better than the the dads are. It also turns out the Moms are more correct about how to fight this one.

The other thing is that authoritarianism (especially when it's by authoritarian strong men who have taken over weak democracies) tends to be more parasitic than mutualistic, and that doesn't help authoritarian regimes when their hosts get sick and the parasites know more about exploiting them than caring for them.

71:

Also, the "we're had to turn the machine off" has got stuck in my head. The latest "Honest Governmunt" ad covers everyone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWl7kQZHZE0

72:

Odds on Trump.

Well, if it's 1/100 each, that's 1/100*1/100 or 1/10000 for both of them winning the lottery.

If it's 5/100 each, that's 5/100*5/100 or 25/10000 for both of them submitting winning bids on their respective real estate deals.

And there's still a 50/100 or better chance they aren't noticeably affected (aside from testing), and a 25/100 chance that it's true for both of them.

It's worth being realistic about the odds, so that we can celebrate if something good does, in fact happen.

73:

Another country that is handling the pandemic well is Cuba. Of course what holds them back from being even more effective is the US embargo on Cuba for anything, including medical supplies and PPE. Nevertheless they've really kept the case load way down, and this despite the US having essentially sold Cuba back to Russia, and the vast pods of Russian oligarch plutocrat crime bosses' yachts that hang out in Cuban bays.

Cuba made a plan to deal with it, in place already early in January.

Here is more info -- though of course, since it's from mid-later April, it's already out of date:

https://www.businessinsider.com/cubas-isolation-could-endanger-its-reaction-to-coronavirus-outbreak-2020-4

In the meantime, the Cubans have faith in both their government and their medical system. (And though Cuba is prohibited from receiving medical supplies by the US, Cuba has a vital drug and medication laboratory that is both experimental and manufacturing. What they've developed they've been using in all these countries the Cuban medical industry has been helping all over the world.

Ironically, one of the places with very lowest outbreak of the virus is Haiti -- and Cuban medical teams were working there long before the coronvavirus pandemic, helping the Haitian people deal with the cholera brought to the island by UN troops out of Pakistan after the earthquake. Haiti had never had cholera before.

The western hemisphere country with the fewest cases is Jamaica, if I have that right.

74:

At the moment StarShip has flown exactly as many times as SLS has (zero). StarShip like the SLS is not a derivative of an existing flight item the way Falcon Heavy (and Delta 4 Heavy) are. The StarShip project has had some notable ground-based testing failures whereas the SLS motor tests have generally gone off without a hitch.

Scaling up to a big launcher has been a real problem in the past. The Saturn V was a technical abortion, an under-powered over-weight design only just capable of getting off the ground at launch and the Russian attempts at a similar launch vehicle, the N1 were not a success. I'm not sure why folks are so keen to build something like those dinosaurs today.

In-orbit refuelling and liquids transfer is a solved problem, thanks to the work done to build and resupply the ISS over the past few decades. It still costs at least $5,000 per kilo to get it into orbit to carry out the refuelling.

Regarding manned missions to Jupiter, the space around God's Vacuum Cleaner is not a healthy place for meatsacks given the radiation environment (from Wikipedia, Jupiter would deliver about 36 Sv (3600 rem) per day to unshielded colonists at Io and about 5.4 Sv (540 rems) per day to unshielded colonists at Europa,).

75:

Well, I still have to answer some questions about the German school system, problem is, I'm currently working in a warehouse again till I get a job in IT or somewhere related to biology. I'm not planning to stay longer than one month.

When I have time (and a computer) again, I'll answer either in the original thread or do an answer here, or just answer here if the old thread is closed; I really hate not answering if somebody posts me, especially since I have a problem procrastinating answers till heat death.

In other news,

a) I moved appartments in April and B) my cohabitant/landlord gets 2 cats at the end of May. Guess I joined the club after all...

77:

Having been involved with designing & selling bits and bobs to both Boeing and SpaceX, my money’s on SpaceX having a better chance of success. My keyhole view into a corner of the SLS’s design process has not inspired confidence.

78:

I was born in the USA in the sixties, and after the sudden cardiac arrest last year, I decided to get all the backed up stuff done. The sixties measles vaccine wasn’t apparently that effective but they can do a blood test to see if you are still protected and I squeezed that in in January and looks like I am safe from measles and hopefully there is some protective effect against Covid. The heart got a clean bill of health in January, but the train of dealing with all the secondary effects has sadly ground to a halt.

79:

Note that various NASA outer planets science missions are also drooling over Falcon Heavy's payload capacity, and SpaceX list at least three USAF classified missions (presumably NRO spysat launches, because Falcon Heavy is a hell of a lot cheaper than Delta 4 Heavy)

Just guessing, but I suspect it's now the US Space Force, not the USAF.

Also of interest: now we know what the 16 specialties are for the officers and enlisted of the USSF. The USSF is basically a satellite intelligence service. Just like the NRO, only entirely military. I'm probably wrong, but I have a weird feeling that most of the USAF personnel currently working in the NRO are being transferred over to the USSF. And the NRO is a very strange and interesting hybrid/multi organization in its own right. Saying that the NRO probably "sheep-dips" military personnel and operations into non-military and vice versa seems to be akin to saying that Circe was a decent shepherdess.

So it's Interesting what a new and independent US military force looks like, in these early days of hybrid warfare. It'll be even more interesting to see what Steve Carrell and company make of it on starting May 29.

80:

Charlie @ 48 Don't worry ( Or maybe do? ) I think we've all got the former sort of depression - I find it very hard to listen to the news on R4 any more as the idiots continue to fuck over everything...

Grant I've taken to drinking GIN ( In small quantities, with fresh, homegrown limes, admittedly ) - as opposed to mass-consuption of bikkies, that is ....

81:

The western hemisphere country with the fewest cases is Jamaica, if I have that right.

Per JHU dashboard, cases reported as diagnosed:

Jamaica - 498 Venezuela - 405 Nicaragua - 16

Leaves out some microstates.

The "reported" and "diagnosed" are important qualifiers.

82:

FH Compendium response...

55: the F. Heavy is a variant of the F9, based on almost the same hardware. The side cores are slight variants, but the central core is apparently the same version

Other way round, the side boosters are standard F9 cores with a nosecone instead of interstage. The two used for the first flight with the Tesla had both flown before. The core stage has had to be beefed up to cope with the extra stresses and would be pointless (considerably reduced payload) to fly as a single stick.

67: new second stage - probably lengthen the one they have

Aero- and other dynamics make it tricky to lengthen the second stage, the stack is already as long and thin as it can be without starting to flex excessively. More likely would be to produce a 5m diameter second stage matching the fairing diameter but that would impact the aerodynamics around the tops of the side boosters.

Another problem with both FH and F9 that also answers part of #63 (where are the payloads) is that the launches are volume limited. Each Starlink flight carries 60 satellites because that's all that will fit. Rule of thumb for a fairing is that it can be up to about 1.5 times the diameter of the stage below (3.7m and 5.1m for the Falcons) and the fineness ratio means it can't get much longer. SpaceX are buying in a slightly larger fairing for the occasional US (Air|Space) Force launch but it will be more expensive and probably not recoverable.

83:

While I'm logged in, from the previous thread the Indian PSLV is quite a bit smaller than an F9 though it can throw a payload to Mars. Their GSLV is closer although still smaller but is quite happy throwing things at the moon.

84:

Rule of thumb for a fairing is that it can be up to about 1.5 times the diameter of the stage below (3.7m and 5.1m for the Falcons) and the fineness ratio means it can't get much longer.

I presume those limits are imposed by aerodynamic stresses during the early part of flight through the lower atmosphere -- would it help to launch from somewhere like, say, the Atacama Desert (altitude ca. 3000 metres, atmospheric pressure ca. 87kPa) so the fairing could be bigger since the launch vehicle would reach near-vacuum quicker?

85:

This leaves their population vulnerable to the second wave, which is the tradeoff for "and hardly anybody died".

IIRC, the logic behind the shutdown was to protect the health care system from collapse, wo when people did catch it they weren't left on a blanket in the hallway because the hospitals were full.

Assuming that logic still holds, we should be opening/closing so that our health care system is continually treating manageable numbers of Covid-19 cases, without it getting away from us. One of the assumptions behind this is immunity, so that we aren't readmitting people who are catching it again.

I'm a bit skeptical that this is possible, because I think it will get harder to get compliance for a second lockdown if it becomes necessary. Partly because people are wanting out, and partly because it will be summer and nice weather and people want to get out and enjoy it.

86:

The confederacy is trying to take over the United States Federal government and undo all amendments to the Constitution. (At least, I can't think of any they're actually going to support.)

Oh, I think they're OK with this one:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people* to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

*Possibly with the codicil that "people" really means "white people". Because I really think that if these folks weren't white they would have been arrested or shot.

87:

I once had a doctor tell me that when your life sucks it's not unreasonable that you become a bit depressed.

Reminds me of a line from one of the Spellsinger books: "There's nothing wrong with being depressed, as long as you enjoy it."

88:

It's supposed to be keeping the health care system from collapsing while test-trace-and-isolate gets put in place.

(Note that US policy is to collapse the health care system good and hard; the proles don't deserve one and shouldn't have one and never ought to have been allowed to get the idea that they could expect medical care.)

I don't think anywhere in Canada has put test-trace-and-isolate in place in any meaningful way.

Under conditions of ideal morale -- strong social consensus, clear expectation of victory -- the Western Allies felt you could get about fifteen weeks out of combat troops during the Second World War. After that, they'd be used up; you could get some low-intensity service from them after that, but their emotional resilience and capacity to handle stress was mostly gone.

The same kind of thing is happening to medical personnel, with about the same functional limits. The capacity of the health care system is dropping and will drop further with each wave. Also note that the training time for anybody in that system is long and expensive; no province has put an accelerated or expanded training program in place, either.

I don't think the first lock-down has worked; I would not expect a second to be attempted. (At least in Ontario.) I expect we're going to see a whole lot of ad hoc social adjustments meant to reduce risk of transmission, and for nigh-all of them to fail hard, because we still don't actually know how COVID-19 spreads.

89:

Graydon @ 62:

how are they going to get the money to pay for the necessary things?

Socialism!

Or, well, some kind of collectivism. Keep everybody not merely alive but able to spend a bit on stuff so the "everyone's income is someone else's spending" part of the economy keeps working.

You do this for, realistically, about a year; that's how long it takes you to get test-trace-and-isolate in place at a national scale. (Taiwan, South Korea, and Vietnam had the capability in place, they just had to turn it on.) Especially since testing is something of a market failure poster child right now.

You still can't treat the disease directly; you still can't prevent the disease. But at that point you can re-open the economy because outbreaks are guaranteed to stay small.

This is obviously massively worth it; complete folly to not have it in place at least since SARS. But there's an inability to cope with risk and spending that does not drive immediate return.

I agree in principle. I agree with Pigeon ... I just don't see how we are going to accomplish it here in the U.S. The people who control all the money are sure as hell fight it tooth & nail.

90:

Georgiana @ 64: The second amendment is the right to carry guns. That would certainly be retained.

Not all of it. They've already managed to conveniently forget and effectively nullify the parts about "a well regulated militia" and the "the security of a free State".

91:

Robert Prior @ 86:

I once had a doctor tell me that when your life sucks it's not unreasonable that you become a bit depressed.

Reminds me of a line from one of the Spellsinger books: "There's nothing wrong with being depressed, as long as you enjoy it."

Yeah, I guess. I wasn't enjoying it.

92:

You aren't a sentient mushroom.

93:

My feeling is, at least in Ontario, the lockdown has for the most part worked. There doesn't seem to have been an crisis in any of the hospitals.

The only area that has had a real problem in Ontario is the Long Term Care homes, and the cases/deaths in those have inflated the provincial numbers.

Now, obviously it is bad and tragic for the residents of those homes, and for the families. But is is also (as long as they remain closed to visitors) a self-isolating case.

Hence the cautious start to reopening in Ontario.

As for any secondary lock-down, it all depends on if the idiots in charge pay attention to the risk factors we now have a good indication of. Thus the continued stupidity of preventing people from enjoying the outdoors when it is on the whole apparently a very low risk activity.

If the mayors/premiers/pm get their act together and allow the outdoor activities that are low risk then a secondary lock-down would (for the most part) be accepted - the biggest push-backs at the moment are coming from the inability to exercise, particularly by young kids.

94:

I just don't see how we are going to accomplish it here in the U.S.

You can't fail if you don't try.

And right now not trying seems to be the strategy. Well, it might be more accurate to say that once "make more money" becomes your primary goal the strategies to accomplish that are generally obvious, and if you eliminate any that contain words like "long term" they're pretty simple too.

95:

An exception - Australia - doing about as well as New Zealand on a comparative population basis.

96:

the outdoor activities that are low risk

They're not low risk. They're relatively high risk.

Direct transmission between decently distanced people outside is low odds.

Transmission due to gas-station bathrooms on the way up to the cottage, public restrooms in parks, etc. plus concentration around chip trucks, etc. is NOT low odds. Plus the getting-back-and-forth steps; public transportation is outright high odds, in-a-car-with-the-asymptomatic is high odds.

97:
Reminder that there are (at least) two types of depression: reactive depression and endogenous depression. Reactive depression: something bad happened, so you feel bad about it. [...] Endogenous depression: nothing particularly unusual happened but you just want the world to go away [...]

This is sort-of right, except that I would not call the former 'depression': I'd call it, I don't know, being fed up or something. I get fed up when I think about Trump, or idiots on the internet, or having to reimplement something I've implemented ten times already because computers suck and no-one learns anything, and sometimes I get so fed up I don't do much for a while and drink too much or spend my time whining on the internet.

... Except it's not really right at all. I suffer from what you call 'endogenous depression', And, sometimes, it just happens as you describe. But sometimes it doesn't: sometimes some idiocy happens and I just fall off a cliff rather than getting fed up. And sometimes I get fed up and then fall over a cliff later. And the times when it happens because of some external event or sequence of events hugely outnumber the times when it just happens on its own in my case: it's not just a thing that happens: it's a thing that is happens because of something.

So it's just complicated, but I am glad you are not suffering from what I would mean when I talk about 'depression' but, I think from what I would eman when I talk about 'being fed up'. Because the former is hugely worse than the latter.

(And I now regret having mentioned this in the first place because people who don't suffer from it (not you) are going to lecture me on what it's like and I don't have enough bad words left in my stock to waste on them.)

One internet point for anyone who knows where 'fed up' comes from as a term without searching: someone will.

98:

"I don't think anywhere in Canada has put test-trace-and-isolate in place in any meaningful way."

It was done quite well in British Columbia and is still being done, thanks. It was the main strategy and worked fine until we got cases coming over the border from Plague Central down south. Since then we've added in social distancing as a main strategy and that has worked very well so far. We have far fewer cases for our population than either Ontario, Quebec, or Alberta.

On Vancouver Island where I live we benefit from miles of ocean around us and have had only 125 cases so far, and 5 deaths in a population of around 870,000.

99:

White Man Behind A Desk "Citizen's Handbook" is also quite good. How things work, explained. Perhaps certain national leaders should be encouraged to watch it?

"And if you don't fund all of these agencies by paying your taxes the IRD will hunt you down"... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29eRJyRPJus

100:

There are signs that Trump might be losing the election. He's behind in the polls. (He was way behind Hillary in 2016, of course).

At the start of this year, I thought that Trump was nearly 100% to be reelected, with the benefit of incumbency. For example, he could have the Democratic nominee indicted on fake charges. I thought the only thing that could beat him was a "black swan" event. I stand by that statement.

However, I thought that it would be something involving foreign policy. For example, Putin invaded Ukraine and Trump sent troops in to support him. I was wrong about that.

Well, we have a black swan now, and Biden's chances are certainly respectable.

101:

BC was doing very well up to a point with tracing and has done quite well so far, no argument.

Problem is the location of the point; the test-trace-and-isolate we're supposed -- for the plan to work, supposed -- to be putting in would be on a scale to cope with open borders, regular air travel, and so on, that being the amount expected to resume the full customary range of economic activity. Several tens of thousands of people ought to just about done being trained as contact tracers, scale.

("Better than Ontario" is not so much "low bar" as "didn't fall in the pit".)

102:

JBS @50 We are in a similar position as you. We're helping out younger family members as best as we can, but also contemplating donations to our local health care district. One of our local county commissioners has promoted the idea of people who are in secure positions donate to a grant fund to help our local businesses. Not sure how well it's working as it's just started, but...we're trying to help as we can.

103:

In honor of Facebook's flagging The Lincoln Project's “Mourning in America." anti-DJ-Trump advertisement as "Partly False Information" (it is not, IMO), I've finally installed facebook tracker blockers in chrome and firefox. I won't vouch for either of these, but F-FB: Facebook Container for Firefox Block Facebook for Chrome (Facebook Container flags quite a few sites as having FB trackers not blocked by other tracker blockers.) Seriusly, I'm a bit annoyed at lazy-self for not doing this a while ago.

Found while looking for old odds and ends - arguably the very best paper figure of all time. "Woman" for the win! Agency vs Experience (For those who must see it, Dimensions of Mind Perception, Heather M. Gray, Kurt Gray, Daniel M. Wegner, 02 Feb 2007, paywalled) For those who hunger for more out-of-context images, search google images for quoted paper title. (In context, there is some scholarship involved.)

104:

Depression is a rational response to the state of affairs today. I'm in a period between books and have tackled reorganizing my library--in part because I realized I don't know what I do and don't have in stock. All the same, much of April was such that I couldn't even get motivated beyond writing Book Two and working with the horse. Everything else? Pish. I did get some masks made but that was it. I'm still amazed at the intensity with which I was writing, and realizing that yeah, I desperately need down time before I get back to writing.

Ironically, because the chiropractor in my alternative medical clinic is more comfortable working with people (and does some body work), and my massage therapist is not, I've found a gentle chiro who is finding means to address pain issues which affect my sleep. The clinic has rigorous safety protocols--I go there for acupuncture as well, and between the two (well, and about three years of previous work), it's improving. I figure better sleep means better resistance, so it's well worth the hassle of masking up, multiple hand washes, multiple sanitizing wipes (the office manager and I both manage to sanitize my credit card...it's the cleanest darn credit card around!) and all to achieve a significant pain reduction.

It works as long as I try not to think about things too far ahead, like what I'm going to do about my World Fantasy Convention membership this year. Or what happens for our son when his short-term disability expires and he still can't go back to work (he has Crohn's and is on Humira. Biologics are wonderful in many ways, but when it comes to this stuff....). Then I have panic times, and I'm having far too many panic attacks. Oh well, the Forest Service handed out free wood cutting permits for the month of May, and as soon as the snow melts on the roads (isolated snowbanks of 2 feet deep and 12 feet wide are not a good idea to haul wood through even with a big pickup and 4 wheel drive) we'll be gathering winter wood.

But I am one of the fortunate ones, and damn well aware of it. And I expect our area to be in bad shape by June, because the crazy-ass tourists are here. Militia types with New Mexico plates in one instance, otherwise lots of California, Washington, and Idaho plates. Lots of complaints from locals about all the out-of-state plates at trailheads and closed park gates. And yesterday while riding my horse, I saw some idiot in a bright red convertible flying down the two-lane road at something close to 70 mph, guesstimate. Definitely faster than any local drives it (in part because deer and an elk herd frequently cross that road and the deer, especially the whitetails, pop up fast). I'm really happy to have moved the horse to a pasture which keeps me off of the main road if I road ride...which is pretty much what I'm doing now.

At one point the creators of Sun Valley were looking at the Wallowa Valley to develop--and chose Sun Valley instead. But some still remember that, and we're getting the summer and hideout population showing up now. Hope to heck our 25 bed hospital with no ICU doesn't get flooded.

105:

Meh, Australia likes to think so, but the actual facts say otherwise.

Last figures I saw, Australia was at a daily growth rate of 1.08 (this isn't the same as the R number, but like the R number, 1 is the point where it switches from "situation is getting worse" to "situation is improving") and averaging 21 new cases a day.

Aotearoa on the other ringaringa is at 0.88 daily growth (ie, shrinking) and averaging 1 new case per day.

Australia is talking up a trans Tasman bubble, but with cases growing, contact tracing a sad joke (see meat packing outbreak) and the populace basically ignoring restrictions as of last week, I can't see that happening.

The neoliberal idiots in charge are dead keen to roll back restrictions and seem to be trying to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-10/coronavirus-data-australia-growth-factor-covid-19/12132478?nw=0&pfmredir=sm

106:

Don't recall if this has been noted here previously - side effects of COVID-19 lockdowns can be beneficial, including lower human mortality due to air pollution due to reduction in air pollution levels. (And lower vehicle-related accident deaths). Net effects on human mortality will depend on how effectively governments handle COVID-19 suppression etc. Lockdown-Driven Boost to European Air Quality Saves Thousands of Lives (May 3, 2020) Study: Coronavirus Lockdown Likely Saved 77,000 Lives In China Just By Reducing Pollution (Jeff McMahon, Mar 16, 2020) Two months of pollution reduction “likely has saved the lives of 4,000 kids under 5 and 73,000 adults over 70 in China,” he writes on G-Feed, a blog maintained by seven scientists working on Global Food, Environment and Economic Dynamics.

107:

They seem to really like the second. For now, anyway.

108:

My antidepressant dose isn't quite enough this year. I keep trying to not turn into a lump on a log, but I seem to need more human contact than I've been getting.

109:

The things that worry me are that 1) Tara Reade's accusations against Biden gain standing 2) Trump/McConnell engineers some situation to defer the election 3) a flock of black swans

110:

"Charlie Stross is Undead" strikes me a useful compromise in terms of publicity and truthfulness.

111:

I wonder how the beneficial effects weigh up against the secondary negative effects on people with chronic illnesses, cancer or others requiring frequent/hands-on treatment? Do we know anything about first responders without PPE trying to deal with people in accidents/crashes? (Noting that these incidents have decreased with fewer people out and about).

112:

Transmission due to gas-station bathrooms on the way up to the cottage, public restrooms in parks, etc. plus concentration around chip trucks, etc. is NOT low odds. Plus the getting-back-and-forth steps; public transportation is outright high odds, in-a-car-with-the-asymptomatic is high odds.

Um, kids walking to a park to kick around a soccer ball, or to their nearest playground/schoolyard to shoot some hoops, isn't high risk.

Lining up 6' apart for a chip truck is no different than lining up outside a grocery store, or inside a pizza take-out place, so is irrelevant - not to mention food trucks last I was aware aren't really considered an outdoor "activity".

In-a-car-with-the-asymptomatic - well, again reality - if you are sharing a car then you are likely to be family, and getting exposed inside the house anyway.

Nobody is saying a total return to normal, but it is easy for the leaders (whether it be PM/Premier/or health dept. head) to tell everyone to stay home when they are living in a real house, with a real backyard, and aren't suffering from the other issues that a significant part of the population living in small apartments and condos are.

And kids being kids, many of them aren't obeying the isolation anyway but instead of being out in public places where people can keep an eye on them they have just found other more private places to hang out.

Now consider, less than 2 months to July, the number of people stuck in those same apartment/condos with no air conditioning and if you don't allow them to get out there will be an outright rebellion.

It is about managing the risk, and allowing people to return to using their local parks and playgrounds is low risk. To keep pretending otherwise is simply going to make maintaining control over truly high risk activities all the more difficult.

113:

What are the people who haven't had a chance to acquire the level of assets I have going to do?

They are going to go back to work and risk death, as Trump/Wall Street/and the billionaires want.

And to be fair, as Boris wants (he appears to have caved to the extreme right in the Conservative Party, a further sign he is losing control).

Or even as most other countries seem to want, as they all have created patchwork help systems that leave varying percentages of their population in financial distress.

114:

My money is on SLS flying once, or possibly twice at the most, before it's cancelled during a budget squeeze

Sort of like the Soviet copy cat shuttle. With all kinds of interesting parallels.

115:

Don't recall if this has been noted here previously - side effects of COVID-19 lockdowns can be beneficial, including lower human mortality due to air pollution due to reduction in air pollution levels.

Substantial cost to get those limited benefits though.

The linked study claims the UK gets to avoid 1,752 pollution deaths (and it is merely a guess).

Johns Hopkins website says the UK has had 31,930 deaths from Covid.

And lets not forget to add in all the not-directly-from-Covid deaths that will happen - suicide, untreated illness, undiagnosed illness(*), deferred treatments, etc.

And the poor nutrition many will be suffering, etc. that will lead to health problems down the road.

On the whole I don't think it is a great trade.

116:

One internet point for anyone who knows where 'fed up' comes from as a term without searching: someone will.

Falconry, IIRC.

Your falcon only hunts when it's hungry, so if you give it too much food it decides not to hunt anymore — it's been 'fed up'.

Can't remember where I read that, so might be wrong. Was back in the 80s, so pre-internet.

117:

So taking 400 people and running the stats:

But to muddy the waters, those there have an age mix that might move move people in the bad outcomes categories.

118:

I wonder how the beneficial effects weigh up against the secondary negative effects on people with chronic illnesses, cancer or others requiring frequent/hands-on treatment? Don't know. I expect that statisticians and others will be quite focused on excess-deaths(/causes of death) statistics over the next couple of years. It's difficult (not impossible) to fake death statistics. India is a big set of question marks. Government can't be trusted, huge population, extremely deadly air pollution levels in many cities normally, large crowded cities and poverty (and etc) make lockdowns very difficult, etc. (It has been reported that air pollution causes roughly 7 million deaths per year in China, and India is probably similar.[1]) And then there are the long-term effects on global heating, both immediate GHG emissions reductions, and potentially, due to political changes. These could be substantial, because global heating is a major threat to human (and other) life.

[1] Air pollution in northern India has hit a 20-year low, NASA report says (Swati Gupta, April 23, 2020)

119:

Vancouverites are relaxing social distancing ahead of the official relaxation, because hey, summer weather is here!

https://globalnews.ca/news/6926887/coronavirus-metro-vancouver-social-distance-scofflaws/

120:

Much of their strength is in the Old Northwest (Ohio River watershed) and the far northwest; states that were not part of the Confederate States of America.

Yes. It is interesting that while the old business leaders of the south want the new high tech and auto plants and such to move to the south, and the engineers and other STEM people have decided to give up on northern winters and California anything and move here..

Those business leaders don't know how to deal with the demographic shifts which are also becoming R to D shifts. They can all see the numbers and realize they have a problem over the next 5 to 20 years.

121:

And lets not forget to add in all the not-directly-from-Covid deaths that will happen These are real, yes. There are also indirect reductions in deaths. For instance, it's been convincingly-documented that early 20th century US recessions reduced human mortality (in the US): Life and death during the Great Depression (José A. Tapia Granados and Ana V. Diez Roux, October 13, 2009) For most age groups, mortality tended to peak during years of strong economic expansion (such as 1923, 1926, 1929, and 1936–1937). In contrast, the recessions of 1921, 1930–1933, and 1938 coincided with declines in mortality and gains in life expectancy. (Some argue that now is a different time. True.)

122:

I'm not sure why folks are so keen to build something like those dinosaurs today.

Jobs jobs jobs jobs, jobs jobs jobs jobs

Shutting down SLS could wreak the economy of Alabama all by itself, not counting Covid-19 issues. And not be good for multiple other states. It is a money train running on a cleared track.

Richard Shelby is the primary driver behind SLS. And will continue to do so as long as he can. Covid-19 might just upend his power. Or not.

123:

At the start of this year, I thought that Trump was nearly 100% to be reelected, with the benefit of incumbency. For example, he could have the Democratic nominee indicted on fake charges. I thought the only thing that could beat him was a "black swan" event. I stand by that statement...Well, we have a black swan now, and Biden's chances are certainly respectable.

Sorry to disagree, but Covid-19 isn't a black swan event.

Heck, we even have the originator of the black swan theory, Nassim Taleb, saying The Pandemic Isn’t a Black Swan but a Portent of a More Fragile Global System. He published a warning on January 26, 2020 that said as much. Heck, the previous fall, public health officials had gathered for a pandemic exercise about how to contain a novel coronavirus that spread at about the same rate as Covid-19 did. Their scenario had it escaping from a lab in Europe. Pandemic influenza or coronavirus was the standard scenario for those studying the most likely pandemics, and they were right to be concerned.

But I think Taleb has a very good point, which is "The great danger has always been too much connectivity.” Proliferating global networks, both physical and virtual, inevitably incorporate more fat-tail risks into a more interdependent and “fragile” system: not only risks such as pathogens but also computer viruses, or the hacking of information networks, or reckless budgetary management by financial institutions or state governments, or spectacular acts of terror. Any negative event along these lines can create a rolling, widening collapse—a true black swan—in the same way that the failure of a single transformer can collapse an electricity grid."

I happen to agree with this, because of a book from (IIRC) the anthropologist William Lessa back in the 1970s. He'd published a bunch of old school ecosystem flowcharts about which Pacific islands got colonized by humans and what caused the island cultures to get into difficulty and crash, and one of the problems he found was either when they were stuck on an isolated island, or contrarily, when they had colonized all the islands in a group, and were so tightly linked that a problem that started on one island affected them all. One example was, before Europeans, a pair of islands that were inhabited alternately (one island inhabited, one left fallow). When crops failed on one island, the islanders moved en masse to the other island. When the Europeans arrived, they of course thought this was incredibly stupid, so they split the surviving population in half and had half each settle an island. Then they ran into a bad year, and a lot of people on both islands starved, because they had no place to go to either make a new garden or eat the wild foods that weren't as affected by the drought.

Islands are microcosms that can point at essential processes, and one thing they pointed out decades ago is that highly connected systems tend to suffer in synch, whatever their scale. Whether it's a pandemic or a cyberwar, we're all at risk now from stuff that happens pretty much anywhere in the world. That's what this pandemic has made obvious to anyone who will look. Rushing to try to put things back the way they were in 2019 probably isn't a great idea either, because, now that we've lost large numbers of dollars, businesses, lives, etc., we're less able to deal with the next disaster propagating too fast through our over-connected world. Taleb wants more circuit breakers, others want fewer connections. We'll see what a viable solution looks like.

Heck, OGH predicted something like this back in Halting State. His pithy phrase was "systems fail, people die." That's where we are right now.

The sad part is that Trump's had every resource to be a truly effective crisis leader and win the re-election in a landslide. He's had access to a well-rehearsed crisis play book, the ability to throw trillions of dollars at the problem, offers of aid pouring in from all over the world, warnings well in advance, a public ready to follow him, four years to learn the ways of governing the US...and he's squandered all of it. He deserves to be thrown out, not because this was a surprise, but because it is a situation that continually shows how utterly inept he and the systems he's created are, with new, often fixable problems arising every day, and him failing to rise to the occasion every single time. What a waste.

124:

Elon Musk is probably going to be this century's Howard Hugues.

He's certainly working hard at it. Local government says he can't re-open his Tesla plant yet due to Covid-19. He says he'll be open. They say no you'll not.

He throws a hissy fit and says HQ will move to a more friendly state.

Stay tuned. This soap opera has more songs to come.

125:

Let's all re-open says the politicians.

I'm curious about how this is playing out in other parts of the world.

In the US each state is doing it's own thing with lots over similarities. One is politicians, especially Rs, saying we must get economy going again. Especially restaurants as they are one of the biggest drivers of people out of work. So (with lot of variations) the rules will be to Phase 2 (25% occupancy) Phase 3 (50% occupancy) and so on if things can continue to improve in any one state. Pols says we must support businesses.

Now it gets interesting. Many/most restaurant owners (McDonald's and similar excluded) say they will loose more money at 25% and 50% occupancy than if they just stay closed and concentrate on delivery and curb side pickup.

Plus, depending on the poll wording, it seems that 60% to 80% of the US population has no interest in going to a restaurant to "dine in" just now.

Grossly over simplified but you get the idea.

Pols don't know what to say or pretend to be deaf at times.

How are other countries/areas dealing with such.

126:

How are other countries/areas dealing with such.

Finland is a cautious re-opening of some things. Primary schools and kindergartens open mostly on next Thursday, and libraries are allowed to loan books and get returns (all the library book loans were extended to June, so no hurry, and the practicalities take some time). We have now a ban on gatherings of more than ten people, but from the first of June the bar rises to fifty people, and at least some restaurants and public spaces can open then.

In most areas in Finland the number of people in hospital care for COVID-19 seems to be stable or decreasing. This probably means the actions we've taken have been effective, and we might loosen the restrictions some. As I understand it, the government is looking at the data basically all the time and are ready to tighten the restrictions again if situation gets more dire.

The school vacations begin here in the beginning of June, or this year basically 30th of May. The situation with summer camps and such weren't clear until last week but it seems most of them are okay now. We'll see what happens, but at the moment things are not as bad as they could be.

127:

NZ has just moved to "level 2". Retail, cafes, restaurants open from Thursday 15th - restos with groups limited to 10 people and 2 hours max per group. Pubs and schools, Thursday week. Gyms, etc., back open this week too.

Unashamedly stealing everyone else's good ideas, as far as I can tell. (Right, Mikko?)

128:

In Denmark we are also slowly allowing more and more things, but not the things the neoliberalist commerciocrats want, so they're throwing daily hissy fits.

It will be interesting to see if the "You cannot prove this is harmful" argument will permanently loose traction to the precautionary principle, but it is certainly not having much grip in Denmark right now.

@122: I'm ¾ certain that Trumpolino gets reelected for three reasons.

A) Because the USA population as a whole suffers from deep Stockholm-syndrome after three decades of propaganda instead of news, there is no sign of, nor indeed any chance of the "enlightened revolution" it would take to have a fact based rational election.

B) Everything that could be manipulated R/Trumps way in the mechanics of the election has been, and every federal court that had a vacancy has been stuffed with "our people" by the republicans in the senate.

C) Getting enough enthusiasm behind Biden to overcome those disadvantages just aint gonna happen. Some of my USAnian contacts are feverishly speculating that Michelle Obama as VP would seal the deal, but I dont buy it, at best it moves my odds to ⅔ in Trumps favor.

As many has pointed out, Trumpolini is just the natural progression for a trend which was set on rails half a century ago, and if you follow where it points, he will attempt to put one of his spawn on the throne by 2024 - and USAs population will allow it and their much cherished constitution will be neutered before it turns 250 in 2026.

And that is the optimistic version: The pessimistic version points out that when lobbed an easy question about mothers day, Trump launched into a long rambling monologue about all the meetings he would have with the military at Camp David this weekend.

I wonder who he is going to bomb to get reelected ?

129:

UK gets to avoid 1,752 pollution deaths Supposed / guessed / made-up / hypothetical "Pollution" deaths Don't believe a word of it. Those of us old enough to remember real pollution ( The great London Smogs ) simply don't believe it. OTOH - those smogs killed a lot more people than the official figures - certainly if you compare ( As EC does ) the excess deaths in those periods, compared to other years. Agree entirely with the lower number referred to - the excess deaths from deferred treatments / poor nutrition etc.

Meanwhile, our idiots are proposing to re-open schools - so the children will crowd together, but not restuarants & even - when restaurants open, pubs won't. Which will cause riot & revolution. I note slow rowing-back from the idiot "all nasty foregners to be quarantined" is starting, oops.

130:

I suspect you better understand the Ozzie situation being on that side of the ditch, however...

My comment was essentially that the web-site referenced in OGH's post # 47 showed the "countries doing well" - which included Australia where OGH commented that these generally also fell into his category "a) Female-led executives generally do far better".

However, I suggest that you can argue that Australia was more likely to fit more into his category "b) Authoritarian (especially right-wing authoritarian) male led executives in nominally democratic countries do far worse".

Certainly, Australian Government currently much more to the right of New Zealand's left leaning government, but of, course, from USA (especially) and UK current government perspectives probably both NZ & Oz could be considered to be fairly left wing.

Be nice of the ANZAC bubble things happens in a few months tho' if our local trends continue.

131:

Everyone under these lockdown rules is suffering from societal withdrawal symptoms, which leads to feeling more down than usual. Only those who have to keep busy don't notice them. Sending you comforting vibes...

My guess for what it's worth is that those writers with a vivid imagination are writing loads. Those that aren't are those who need an imagination refill (which is what I suspect you're also suffering from) or have very little capacity for imagination in the first place.

My further guess is that there are going to a load of stories of how lonely it is in space being written...

132:

True, but Australia is a funny system. It's really several separate countries welded together.

There's a right wing male religious nutjob in charge at the top, but while his party controls borders, laws around lockdown are run by the states. The biggest state by population is NSW with a rightwing female (who our American cousins would think was left of Chairman Mao). Victoria and Queensland both have labor (nominally left, actually right) with Queensland sporting a female head.

The feds have been pressuring the states to have minimal lockdown, particularly they want the schools open, and are quite open that they want them open so that the workers can work without being distracted by their children.

Our success is despite our federal leaders, not because. The male rightwingers are trying to undo all the good work as fast as they can.

133:

And yes, I'd love a shared bubble. Not least because I have a son who went for a month, but who is still there.

134:

It may help a bit, but probably not enough. A Falcon reaches 3km altitude about 35 seconds after launch, fairing is jettisoned around 3:50. There's also the flexing caused by the engines gimballing to worry about.

135:

I was thinking for a second of an actual falcon. They're fast, but not so much when climbing. A falcon with rocket assist would be both awesome and terrifying.

https://www.inverse.com/article/30095-millennium-falcon-peregrine-wildlife-star-wars-birds-han-solo-fastest-bird

136:

The StarShip project has had some notable ground-based testing failures whereas the SLS motor tests have generally gone off without a hitch.

Yeah, you seem to have missed the multiple announcements, up front, that Starship was pioneering a new construction technique (stainless steel is somewhat unprecedented for an orbit-capable launch vehicle) and they expected a number of "rapid unscheduled disassemblies" during development: it was factored into their methodology, and as of last week they managed to get a prototype to 150% of target pressure with cryogens on board and a working motor underneath the thrust dome.

No, Boeing/LockMart/etc don't develop boosters that way. If they did, they'd put a halt to all development for the duration of the post-explosion enquiry, then go back to the drawing board and re-design. SpaceX seem to be trying to apply agile methodology to booster development -- at least in the early stages -- with some success.

I note your "$5000 per kilogram" for payloads on orbit wrt. refueling. Musk's stated target for Starship is $10/kg on orbit, at least for fuel (probably several multiples of that for anything more complex to handle than bulk liquid methane, is my guess).

You're entirely correct about canned primates in Jupiter orbit: the only sane way to do crewed exploration there would be to build a base inside a lump of rocky space debris (for radiation shielding) and use it as a base camp for control of robots with a minimum of control lag (at least compared to the multiple hours of round-trip time from Earth). Whether it's even useful for scientific purposes is questionable.

137:

Anecdotally, the UK's ambulance services are seeing a massive spike in emergency calls where the first responders arrive to find the patient already in cardiac arrest and impossible to resuscitate. Fear of contagion is causing folks to hold off on calling an ambulance until it's much too late, and this is killing heart attack and stroke victims who might otherwise survive.

In addition a huge backlog of cancelled routine surgery is building up, and a lot of diagnostic procedures for cancer and other life-threatening conditions that require close contact have been postponed or cancelled. By some reports it'll take two years to catch up with the current backlog, and untold tens of thousands of premature deaths. (Consider the difference in prognosis between being diagnosed with cancer in stage I and stage IV, for example: most cancers identified in stage I can be cured -- definition: patient is cancer-free five years after the end of treatment, meaning it ain't coming back -- but in stage IV it's most often a holding action to buy a few weeks or months more life.)

138:

There were slaver's militias in the South to prevent slave uprisings, so this is the background to that particular amendment.

139:

I keep checking "medicalXpress" and there is some promising work on interrupting the "cytokine storm" caused by the innate and reactive immun systems interacting in a way that causes organ failure. . British news are depressing...so I watch "A Different Bias" at Youtube, the commenter Phil knows how to make sarcastic news coverage entertaining. This is the second best after Spitting Image. . Tara Reade's accusations are at least as credible as those against wossname, the beer-drinking judge appointed to the supreme court. But the worst thing is the "enthusiasm deficit" for Grandpa Simpson. The only thing on offer is the same old status quo, but with less obvious crimes. "We suck less than the other team" will not get enough young voters out to dare the virus (mail-in voting will result in up to a quarter of the votes being discarded, usually in Democrat-dominated districts).

If the Dem establishment were rational, they would switch out Biden for some other establishment democrat, possibly Cuomo. But if they were rational they would not have sabotaged the candidate with the best grassroots support. They fucked up big in 2016 and they are fucking up right now. Yes, even a once a hundred-years epidemic is not enough to guarantee that the tossers will win, not when you factor in the systemic voter suppression.

140:

Elon Musk says a lot of things.

The $5000 per kilo figure for mass payload to orbit is actually down from the old days when it was (corrected for inflation) $10,000 per kilo. I just noticed that SpaceX has put up its prices for ISS resupply flights by 50% for their new Dragon 2 capsule -- some analysts think they were previously operating at a loss per resupply flight but using the original Dragon flights to test and qualify the Crewed Dragon capsule design. I was sort-of wondering why they were flying cargo with a complete manned-flight abort system as parasitic weight on each launch, apparently the Dragon 2 cargo vehicle will have a lot of that stuff ripped out to save weight and cost.

141:

Also to Bill Arnold. The other reason that excess deaths (and similar overall measures) are the best measure of the effects of things like COVID-19, smog or the car culture is that the direct deaths and other medical harms are often dwarfed by the indirect ones.

My wife got me to listen to David Spiegelhalter on the Andrew Marr show a day or two back, and I was a bit chuffed - he both analysed and presented it a LOT better than I did, but at least I haven't entirely lost my grip! His utterances are well worth looking for, as he is excellent at making it clear what we know and don't know, and the other issues involved.

142:

As are the USA and UK, and even Germany :-) I don't know how many other countries have significant amounts of the systems of their previous components still operational, but I would be there are quite a few.

143:

re. Excess deaths: On the discouraging side, this approach probably provides an optimistic estimate because some of the excess deaths due to air pollution, street crime, car accidents, etc. have decreased under the lockdowns. How much that decrease affects the actual death rate is a tricky calculation.

144:

If the Dem establishment were rational, they would switch out Biden for some other establishment democrat, possibly Cuomo.

They are very rational.

The Dims business model is to collect money from donors for as long as possible while delivering as little as possible in return.

Donald Trump in the White House simply is the best advertising there is for "suporting the struggle", no way the consultants living off "resisting Donald Trump" want to cut that short.

They are running Ancient Relic Biden for two reasons:

First, because the guy is just a moron with lots of skeltons in his closet who will get kerb-stomped by Donald Trump so that the consultants running the Dims can go on the next four years whinging about how Hard They Tried and "Now, We only need this Final Push".

Second, if Biden finally loses coherence after being nominated as presidential candidate, the DNC can pick a successor adminstratively - and Who would they pick, given that the "DNC Services Coporation" is currently owned by Hillary Clinton (who would also lose to Donald Trump, but, nobody dares say that to her face)?

(Third), Bernie Sanders would have changed things. When you are the ones sitting well at the adult table, change is not what you want to have!

145:

-He has finally gone round the twist... ‘Oldies Will Have To Die’ Tweets Trump https://www.patheos.com/blogs/laughingindisbelief/2020/05/oldies-will-have-to-die-tweets-trump/

146:

From that, not really. He merely does regard getting his hair cut as being of more importance than the deaths of a few hundred thousand other people.

147:

Have you finally drunk all that bleach? -Before you die, you might want to cheer yourself up with this article. "Channel 5 launches new series of Coastal Ramblings with Nigel Farage" http://www.newsbiscuit.com/2020/05/10/channel-5-launches-new-series-of-coastal-ramblings-with-nigel-farage/ In a new series for Channel 5, self-appointed UK Coastguard in Chief and Immigrant Finder General, Nigel Farage, is to set off on the walk of a lifetime along Britain’s south coast....

148:

I think you will find that that URL (www.patheos.com) is a parody/comedy site and the supposed tweet by President Trump is a hacked-up image. Besides, "Demokraps"? That's not one of his standard slurs, it sounds something like what a Sanders supporter would call the sixty million folks they want to vote for their Godhead to get elected Space President.

149:

Combining two comment streams, I see following the adventures of Elon's Rocketeers a suitable antidote for the depressing stupidity and backwardness of so much of the rest of the world (reopening things when you still have thousands of deaths a day? Nuts)

I think one of the things most people don't get about Starship etc. is they aren't building spaceships, they are building a machine to churn out spaceships, at pace, and low cost, week after week. They are iterating designs at the moment, but only doing a few tests with each before moving onto the next. Currently SN4 is getting ready to hop, SN5 is getting ready to be stacked into the next version, and SN6 pieces are coming together - all at the same time. If they didn't blow them up they would end up with issues of what to do with the cast offs.

Once they have something that works, they won't have any hassle churning out a spaceship a week from a production line, one after the other, a few million a shot. In comparison they will be turning out engines at $143m a piece, at a rate sufficient to build one SLS per YEAR, with a price tag measured in the multiple billions per launch. It's a whole different ethos.

It's entertaining, and it's a positive programme to follow as an antidote for the usual pain of anything big and positive happening at all, let alone fast. Their bid for the NASA lunar lander is supposed to have a demo landing on the moon in 2022. That's a 15 storey tower, in two years.

Win, lose or draw, it makes you feel positive about a balls to the wall attitude.

150:

I think you will find that that URL (www.newsbiscuit.com) is a parody/comedy site.

You might want to engage your critical faculties sometime, preferably before the election in November (assuming you're actually an American citizen and entitled to vote rather than a Russian disinfo troll).

151:

On the other hand, it's horribly difficult to tell that its articles ARE satire :-( I could easily believe that some television channel would produce something on coastal ramblings by Farage, mostly about the need to defend ourselves against an EU invasion and bemoaning the closed pubs.

152:

I know this is a satire site. I thought most Britons knew about satire sites like Newsbiscuit and The Daily Mash. Jeez I will add "satire" to all such links in the future.

153:

Patheos: This is the site that tricked me

− MayraMM • 18 hours ago "I checked the Twitter archives. This isn't real. It needs to be labeled as parody."

In my defense, this is only marginally worse than the reality.

154:

Reading the text accompanying the Newsbiscuit article it was incredibly obvious to me, at least, that it was satire, and bad satire at that, even before I read other parts of the page like the strapline, "the news before it happens". Your Mileage May Vary, but as Barnum never actually said, "there's one born every minute".

These sorts of supposedly-humourous webpages often appeal to people's fixed ideas and canalised thought processes, the credulous reader will agree with the tone and flavour of the writing and hence accept the incredible and often impossible claims of fact made, and so the circle of confusion and delusion makes another turn. See also Qanon et al.

And for God's sake don't mention closed pubs, that will set Greg off again...

155:

"The sad part is that Trump's had every resource to be a truly effective crisis leader and win the re-election in a landslide. He's had access to a well-rehearsed crisis play book, the ability to throw trillions of dollars at the problem... ...and him failing to rise to the occasion every single time. What a waste."

My view exactly. He's a gigantic, colossal, unrelenting screwup (I literally haven't seen him do one thing right about COVID-19.) Are you tired of winning yet?

156:

Men's blood contains greater concentrations of enzyme that helps COVID-19 infect cells
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-05-men-blood-greater-enzyme-covid-.html
This is sufficiently boring to be a bona fide article and not satire. -So, can we block this enzyme? Or will people die if the enzymes are too efficiently blocked?

157:

"Getting enough enthusiasm behind Biden to overcome those disadvantages just aint gonna happen. Some of my USAnian contacts are feverishly speculating that Michelle Obama as VP would seal the deal, but I dont buy it, at best it moves my odds to ⅔ in Trumps favor."

Hopefully Biden will have the good sense to pick someone like Warren, who appeals to the Democrat's Left Wing, as his VP candidate.

Otherwise, I'd think you were utterly correct in any other election year. This year, however, the real driver will be the economy and the number of deaths. I think it's perfectly reasonable to imagine that if Trump keeps screwing up where the COVID is concerned he won't make it through this term. (That's not an optimistic assessment, but a cynical one - once the rural Grandparents start to die Trump's support will tank very, very badly.)

158:

Re. canalised thinking; This is what brought us "Death panels". Because everyone knows libruls want to kill grandma. -In regard to Trump, things are not so easy. He tends to "say the quiet part loud". and also say things like "can we drink bleach?" . With BoJo it is easier to spot satire. he generally thinks a bit before delivering lies, unfortunately he does not think enough, but that is another matter.

159:

The Democrats are definitely disappointing. I'm not sure Tara Reade is credible - she's made a number of posts on Twitter praising Putin, among other things - but the Democrats were perfectly capable of screwing up an election against Donald Trump, so who knows how badly they'll do running Biden?

160:

"Virus mutations unlikely to mean stronger strain: experts" https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-05-virus-mutations-stronger-strain-experts.html I certainly hope this interpretation is correct.

161:

But I didn't! I read the 'tweet', thought "Oh, God!" and did something more interesting. And, like so many 'world leaders', past and present, he has made it clear that he is a sociopath.

162:

Possibly and yes, respectively. Blocking it is contra-indicated for anyone with hypertension, anyway.

163:

B.C.'s approach is working as well as it has due certainly to local situations that are unlikely to be fully replicated elsewhere. Most of our cases are in crowded institutions such as nursing homes and meat packing plants that can be dealt with by aggressive government intervention including but not limited to contact tracing. We have a government at the moment which is willing to do those interventions.

Social distancing has very high compliance even after a couple of months. The economy was never totally shut down, either, yet our case loads continue to fall.

We have only 73 people currently hospitalized with 20 in ICU, mostly frail elderly people (like me except I'm in my own home). That's for a pop. of about 5 millions.

Our chief medical officer is a superb communicator and people are listening to her advice, which of course based on the actual science. The government understands that science is pretty well the only available tool at the moment and is following the advice of the C.M.O.

The hot spot in Canada, BTW, is Quebec, not Ontario.

The question here is of course how long this can last, and the jury is out.

164:

I would prefer if this was satire... "New Covid Formula Doesn't Actually Work" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGyPIj0JvnA

"A Different Bias" has a good track record, so I am not afraid of forwarding the link.

165:

Charlie @ 137 At which point one starts to wonder, seriously, maybe, if simply taking reasonable precautions, but opening "society" up ... might, just might be the course with the lowest fatality numbers. Um / err / maybe / maybe not / dither etc ...

145/146 But doesn't DT realise that HE is one of those "older people" - hge's 73 ffs... Assuming it's not a spoof, of course? Also "newsbiscuit" is a spoof site.

166:

ATM Falcon 9 is aimed mainly at the commercial launch market plus Dragon plus internal use for StarLink. Falcon Heavy is mainly aimed at NRO/USAF/Space Force and NASA lunar stuff, you are correct to say that there is not currently a large commercial market for FH.

But SS/SH is trying to be orders of magnitude more efficient and capable than the Falcon family. If it succeeds then its revolutionary nature makes it very difficult to predict what the launch market will be like in 10 years time.

167:

At which point one starts to wonder, seriously, maybe, if simply taking reasonable precautions, but opening "society" up ... might, just might be the course with the lowest fatality numbers.

If you are willing to tell anyone with Covid to skip the hospital and just die, perhaps.

There is no escaping the reality that enclosed spaces are where Covid spreads - pretty much all the data and case studies so far demonstrate this.

South Korea allowed night clubs to re-open, and very quickly they have had to shut them down again.

The page linked to at the end of the previous topic was the same - the spreads were all enclosed spaces where people remained for extended periods (restaurant, call centre, etc.). The call centre example was particularly notable because despite having a large number of infected people, in didn't spread to other floors of the building via the lifts/elevators/stairs - so brief contact doesn't appear to create much of a threat.

So we can't just say whatever and re-open society without either telling Covid infected to die elsewhere, or crash the health care system.

Oh, and China is now getting new infections in 2 cities...

168:

Gotta watch the confirmation bias there; notably, that you're emotionally convinced you live a healthy life and won't get it.

We know three things about transmission; the mechanism hasn't been identified, enclosed spaces bad, aerosols very bad. (As in, environments which produce aerosols are worse than environments which don't irrespective of what's getting turned into the aerosol.)

"Regular life" depends on a whole bunch of enclosed spaces. (public transit! restaurant kitchens! garment manufacturing! hotels! et multi cetera) Food processing, lots of cleaning (pressure washers, carpet steam cleaning), and various industrial processes involve aerosols.

The only way to do "open society up" involves accepting that we'd be shovelling people into environments where they've got this expanded threat surface and (apparently) greater risk of serious infection and thus death. Plus "recovery" is not "fine now" and we don't have the stats for that yet; who gets the systemic damage, what kind, and how much are unknowable today.

There are two things going on with greenfield diseases; one is how an immune response gets developed. Two is how it functions as a selection mechanism. We don't have facts about either. The breadth of responses to COVID-19 and the uncertainty of the results of both single infections ("did you get kidney damage?") and multiple infections (no-one knows) strongly suggest it will have selective effects.

"Selective effects" = "some portion of the population will die if they get this", and we only just maybe sorta know how many people that could be; those are the six and seven percent prompt mortality rates. We don't actually know the excess death rates; we would be looking at 20% of infected slowly succumbing to kidney failure over the next five years. (There's no particular expectation of that, but again; we don't know. We're going to find out.)

The only responsible approach at this time is to minimise the rate of infection and to try to keep the total infected low until effective treatment or prevention or ideally both are available.

Since that would involve some economic reorganisation and doing much less capitalism, it isn't going to happen in the UK, the US, or (probably) Canada.

169:

Getting enough enthusiasm behind Biden to overcome those disadvantages just aint gonna happen.

As has been pointed out, to an extent it isn't a question of getting enthusiasm behind Biden - much of the enthusiasm in voting for the last 3 years in the US has been to thwart Trump.

Some of my USAnian contacts are feverishly speculating that Michelle Obama as VP would seal the deal, but I dont buy it, at best it moves my odds to ⅔ in Trumps favor.

Michelle Obama as VP would guarantee a Trump re-election. There is nothing that would energize the racist GOP/Trump base more than a black woman as VP, with the Obama name as a bonus. And more importantly the DNC would throw away any chance of taking the Senate.

Birger: "We suck less than the other team" will not get enough young voters out to dare the virus

The young voters are unlikely to turn out regardless, so pinning hopes on them to win an election is a good way to lose.

If the Dem establishment were rational, they would switch out Biden for some other establishment democrat, possibly Cuomo

Cuomo, like Giuliani before him, is getting a crisis surge. It is equally as likely that the popularity surge won't last, and won't translate federally - and certainly Cuomo "abandoning" NY to run for President wouldn't play well.

But if they were rational they would not have sabotaged the candidate with the best grassroots support.

Did the DNC sabotage Bernie in 2016 - yes.

But 2020 has been fair, with the DNC being hands off. The reality, hard as it is to accept for his die hard supporters, is Bernie's popularity was largely that he wasn't Hillary. Without Hillary, and with more competition, he did worse on his second round than his first attempt.

170:

So we can't just say whatever and re-open society without either telling Covid infected to die elsewhere, or crash the health care system.

I expect to get Covid-19. I just want it to be later rather than sooner. And maybe by then they will know how to treat it better than the somewhat educated guesses that are being used now.

Of course a miracle could happen and we get a vaccine in 6 months. But that is a bad bet if the goal is to stay alive or not live the rest of your life crippled.

171:

Um, kids walking to a park to kick around a soccer ball, or to their nearest playground/schoolyard to shoot some hoops, isn't high risk.

There will be physical contact. Of course it's high risk. You can't play anything two metres apart. You could maybe get big into heavily ritualised lawn bowling two metres apart. Archery? But not anything recognisable as sportsball.

Now consider, less than 2 months to July, the number of people stuck in those same apartment/condos with no air conditioning and if you don't allow them to get out there will be an outright rebellion.

Which is why Her Majesty should be buying a whole lot of people air conditioners (and billing their landlords for them). Anybody running this is heavily committed to the status quo and hasn't managed to internalise that we're just not going to be keeping it.

172:

Meanwhile, our idiots are proposing to re-open schools - so the children will crowd together, but not restuarants & even - when restaurants open, pubs won't.

As previously mentioned, any solution to improving the economy needs to at it's foundation deal with the problem of childcare.

We will likely see the authorities accepting the reality that kids say 13 and older will need to be left alone in some cases, and obviously teenager are easier to deal with from a home schooling and forced to work at home parent circumstance.

But those younger kids need to be dealt with, whether it is so the parent(s) can return to work outside the home or even to become more productive in the forced to work from home - parents simply can't be productive with constant interruptions.

But the good news is not only do young kids not typically die from Covid, but it also appears from what has been reported that they aren't typically spreading Covid either. Limited public info, early days, etc. but it may well mean that opening schools to younger kids may not pose a Covid spread threat.

On the other hand, we do know that restaurants/pubs/bars/night clubs spread Covid so they are dangerous to re-open. As noted the industry is already indicating that partial re-openings won't work - the economics don't work - and the ventilation systems demolish social distancing anyway. So they will be among the last to reopen I would guess.

I note slow rowing-back from the idiot "all nasty foregners to be quarantined" is starting, oops.

More than an oops, further indication that Boris has lost his authority. For all his faults if the Conservative Party returns to be at civil war within it can't be good for the UK at this time.

173:

More than an oops, further indication that Boris has lost his authority. For all his faults if the Conservative Party returns to be at civil war within it can't be good for the UK at this time.

One thing that's been mentioned in the news but not prominently is the fact that both the Scottish and Welsh government high heid yins have come out and stated publicly that a) they weren't consulted on Boris' great announcement of the five-level virus alert thingy and b) they aren't going to go along with it. Unless the PM of Englandshire gets his act together then it's one more splitting wedge in the cracks in the Union and there will be a reckoning after the effects of this virus die back enough for regular politics (Hi Brexit!) to come to the fore again.

174:

There will be physical contact. Of course it's high risk. You can't play anything two metres apart. You could maybe get big into heavily ritualised lawn bowling two metres apart. Archery? But not anything recognisable as sportsball.

But it's not.

The evidence is all pointing to Covid requires extended aerosol exposure to transfer to a new host.

The South Korean call centre outbreak was in a 19 story building - yet despite that 97% of the people who tested positive for Covid (out of testing 1,100+ people) were the 94 people working in the same area of the 11th floor. That tells us that brief contacts with infected people in a hallway/etc. don't present a significant risk of transmission.

This thus tells us that periodic contacts in the wide open outside world is a low risk activity.

So yes, rugby and American Football will remain a problem, as will any formalized team sports.

But a small group of people kicking/throwing around a ball? Not a problem. Neighborhood kids having an informal game of soccer/football? Likely not a problem.

On the other hand, indoor sports like curling or hockey - a problem.

Which is why Her Majesty should be buying a whole lot of people air conditioners (and billing their landlords for them).

Sadly a lot of those building are old enough the electrical supply to individual apartments likely can't handle the AC load, nevermind the building as a whole handling a building full of AC units.

Anybody running this is heavily committed to the status quo and hasn't managed to internalise that we're just not going to be keeping it.

True. But it is equally true that those who think we are all going to hide away from physical contact in our home (whether a nice large house with large yard, or a tiny studio apartment) for 12, 18, 24 months hasn't accepted the reality that we are (as a society) going to demand some outside activity.

175:

Singles tennis and badminton, bowls and even fencing.

176:

"C) Getting enough enthusiasm behind Biden to overcome those disadvantages just aint gonna happen. Some of my USAnian contacts are feverishly speculating that Michelle Obama as VP would seal the deal, but I dont buy it, at best it moves my odds to ⅔ in Trumps favor."

Enthusiasm is irrelevant.

We're firmly in the negative partisanship phase.

All the available voting evidence indicates you're wrong about point one, as well.

177:

This thus tells us that periodic contacts in the wide open outside world is a low risk activity.

If you can get there by teleporting and never use a bathroom outside your home.

The problem is not the outside, especially; it's the to-and-from and ancillary services. Those funnel people into high-risk places like public transit and public washrooms.

As far as the entirely real "old building" problem, there's going to be a short shedload of medium-rise office space going begging. Her Majesty could be converting that into public housing and arranging to take over the portion of the rental market presently inadequately served, too.

None of this is difficult in principle; it's very very difficult under "landlords lose nothing" rules, but we aren't obliged to use those.

178:

I have my doubts about fencing; corps-a-corps involves breathing on your opponent, and vice-versa.

But, yes, badminton or tennis or bowls could be done fine.

I am oddly reminded of the venerable brick badminton club a block or two south of here, which has rented one wing to an axe-throwing league. One would have to hope that the axe-throwing would also permit adequate social distancing.

179:

True. I should have said foil or (I believe) epee.

180:

Re: 'But the good news is not only do young kids not typically die from Covid, but it also appears from what has been reported that they aren't typically spreading Covid either.'

Kids are not being spared nearly as much as we'd like to think. Kawasaki disease is showing up in kids who've tested positive for COVID-19. The description below suggests it's very similar to the vascular inflammation older COVID-19-positive patients have died of. I'm not a medico but think that anyone - any age, gender, race, etc. - with any of the COVID-19 (increasing) range of symptoms can shed/spread this virus.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/09/children-coronavirus-death-kawasaki

'Kawasaki disease, which mainly affects children under five, can cause the immune system to go into “overdrive”, causing fever, severe diarrhea, rashes and conjunctivitis. In more severe cases it can inflame the walls of the arteries, affecting bloodflow to the heart and is potentially fatal.'

181:

If you can get there by teleporting and never use a bathroom outside your home.

There is a large part of the population who could walk 10 minutes or less to a park or schoolyard to sit in, or play safe activities in - no public transit required, no public washrooms required.

Except that is currently against the rules, and can result in getting a fine.

That needs to change if the authorities expect the public to continue with the truly necessary steps to maintain this for the 12, 18, or many more months.

182:

Real-world vs. SF/F

Anyone know of any SF movies or TV shows that came anywhere close to describing the level of dis-unity, insanity, pigheadedness, anti-science, etc. that we've seen to COVID-19? I'm thinking that an alien invasion scenario would be closest to a pandemic as it'd be a novel situation to all countries.

For any visiting SF/F authors reading this blog: how has the real-world response changed how you're writing/going to write your next story?

New interviews/podcasts

Hey Charlie,

Would you please post links to your most recent interviews and podcasts?

Thanks!

183:

Hi guys, long time no chat. Sorry, but my days have gotten busier since the lockdown started (to my surprise). I'll expand on it after work, but right now, I'd like to pose an interesting question that a bunch of us raised during our remote happy hour. I thought it would be fodder for you guys as well.

First the background:

The workforce has now been divided into 3 categories in the developed world: the work-from-home (WFH), Essential workers (EW), and non-essential non-WFH (NEW). This analysis will be limited to the US.

Depending on what methodology you use, 35-42% of the US workforce is WFH, and a further 30% is EW. In FY2018, 80% of the workforce was working in the service sector.

From this we can assume the following:

  • Assuming that the WFH workforce is almost exclusively in the service sector, this means that 40-50% of the service sector is WFH

  • This is wild guessing on my part, but I'm assuming that EW are evenly split between the service sector and the other 2 sectors.

  • Given all that above, which of the three job categories are the most likely to see technological innovation post-COVID?

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/25/covid-19-pandemic-shines-a-light-on-a-new-kind-of-class-divide-and-its-inequalities https://www.businessinsider.com/how-many-jobs-can-be-done-from-home-other-countries-2020-5

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States

    184:

    "Singles tennis and badminton, bowls and even fencing"

    I take it you have never sat near a tennis court, especially on a hot day.

    Things would have to be adapted for play to be safe for the officials. Or for the other players (opponents or doubles partners.)

    Sweat control is always an issue. Players sweat profusely and the sweat is projected as they hit the ball. They handle the balls with their sweaty hands and a residue will be left everywhere the ball hits.

    Linespeople are 'moist' from the player's sweat. Ball boys and girls handle the balls, hold the towels for the players and are, so as to speak, directly in the line of fire.

    Tennis would have to move to all electronic line calling and players retreiving their own balls and towels.

    Spectators would have to be kept at a distance. Standing around the practice courts or sitting near the court during play involves a certain degree of 'being sprayed.'

    And from my experience of having attended many a tennis tournament in the extreme summer heat you would have to find some way of protecting spectators from each other. The spectators' seats are often soaking with sweat as the day goes on.

    And the washroom facilities are a long wait on most days for women attendees. Imagine what would happen if the number of people allowed in the washroom at one time was severely limited and if the washrooms had to be sanitized regularly.

    185:

    Actually, they are being spared, at least in the UK. Up to April 24th, 2 people under 15 had COVID mentioned on their death certificate - that's a piffling proportion of the usual death rate. What you are hearing about is the exceptions, precisely because they are rare.

    186:

    I didn't say PROFESSIONAL tennis - and the context was sport as recreation and exercise.

    187:

    But they would have been far further along if they'd had the Junior Woodchuck Manual.

    (For the non-USans, who never misspent part of their youth reading Donald Duck, his three nephews were Junior Woodchucks (think Cub Scouts). As far as I could tell, if a UFO kidnapped you and dropped you on an uninhabited but habitable planet, and you had the Manual, in five years you could recreate civilization, and in ten, build a copy of the UFO so you could get home.

    I always thought that a definitive collection of usenet FAQs would be the first cut at a Manual.

    188:

    Well, yes, because there's no way to distinguish the folks who crossed the street to get to the park and the folks who came sixteen subway stops. And the later absolutely shouldn't, and the former might-maybe could.

    Can't make rules you can't enforce, and we've thankfully got at least that much competence involved.

    I would expect there's a slightly-larger-group administrative solution to a lot of this (though the kind where "you will stagger your hours" gets explained to employers as non-optional), but there isn't a non-redevelopment fix for the lack of green space in many neighbourhoods.

    189:

    While fencing could conceivably be done with longer weapons (mock spears, quarterstaffs, bayonets, jousting...), probably if you want combat games where social distancing is maintained, I think you've got to go for things like laser tag and paintball. Both modified with standoff/NBC emulator rules, of course.

    Or you could go for Highland Games. I think social distancing is maintained during the caber toss, isn't it?

    190:

    Now, I am never going to buy anything from Apple (well, Apple Records, but not the computer company) if I have any choice.

    But: if I could get a Virtual Display (let's drop the VR crap until you can at least feel, if not smell or taste, shall we), with a projectable keyboard that's real sized, that would be something I'd look at.

    EXCEPT I want at least a five year warranty on the pricey VD.

    And people keep talking about docking stations. Yeah, about that... even Dell would roll out new docking stations with each new model (2xx, 4xx I mean), and they were not compatible. Same reason that where I was working, we didn't like blades: two or three years later, you've got budget, "oh, sorry, the new blades don't fit the old container."

    191:

    Until they lose signal, and then they have a brick.

    192:

    Kids are not being spared nearly as much as we'd like to think. Kawasaki disease is showing up in kids who've tested positive for COVID-19.

    Direct quote from the American Heart Association press release mentioned in the Guardian article regarding Kawasaki disease and Covid:

    "We want to reassure parents – this appears to be uncommon"

    Nobody is saying the young kids have zero risk, but the risk is very low - and low enough that keeping kids isolated is likely more damaging than Covid would be.

    I'm not a medico but think that anyone - any age, gender, race, etc. - with any of the COVID-19 (increasing) range of symptoms can shed/spread this virus.

    The data available to date appears to indicate that younger kids are very low risk of spreading Covid.

    As I posted to the previous thread an Infectious Diseases / Virology Clinician & Researcher from University of St. Andrews posted a twitter thread summorizing a bunch of studies. The highlights from a kid perspective:

    1) "The fact that an infected child did not transmit the disease despite close interactions within schools suggests potential different transmission dynamics in children." https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa424/5819060

    2) 31 household transmission clusters, only 9.7% (or 3/31) had a paediatric index case (compared to say H5N1 influenza where kids are the index case 54% of the time). https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.26.20044826v1

    3) Iceland study, children under 10 had lower incidences of Covid https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2006100

    4) and her summary, "Although limited, these studies so far indicate that susceptibility to infection increases with age (highest >60y) and growing evidence suggests children are less susceptible, are infrequently responsible for household transmission, are not the main drivers of this epidemic." https://twitter.com/mugecevik/status/1257393264967274497

    So yes, kids can spread Covid. But despite the prevailing wisdom (based on other viruses like the flu and cold), Covid is different and young kids do not appear to be spreading it significantly, either amongst themselves or to older people.

    Thus it would certainly appear on the risk/benefit equation that allowing younger kids to return to school provides notable benefits with minimal increased risk.

    193:

    Can't make rules you can't enforce, and we've thankfully got at least that much competence involved.

    So far the weather has essentially done most of the enforcing.

    But as examples elsewhere demonstrate, as soon as the weather turns nice the inability to enforce the current restrictions gets demonstrated very quickly.

    And once one set of rules gets mocked, you risk other more important rules getting mocked and ignored.

    194:

    So some anecdotal stuff:

    Here in the deep red, I've noticed something, which I cannot remotely prove is representative but I actually hope IS.

    So the people I know who voted for Trump and I would, outside of that, classify as assholes? Still in for Trump.

    But I've talked to a couple of GOP voters who I think (or know) to be decent people in temperment and day to day life, and they pretty much all regret voting for Trump and are currently not planning on doing so again.

    These are people who've looked at Trump, who they weren't thrilled with in 2016, and said the polite version of 'oh, he's a fucking moron' which they hadn't actually internalized pre 2016.

    And there's a whole lot of 'well, if it hadn't been Hillary' which is it's own thing.

    195:

    Same thing applies to any form of tennis other than played in your back yard. I was seriously injured playing tennis when I skidded on a wet part of the court. And around where I live all the tennis courts are public and people stand around the outside watching each other and retrieving balls for each other.

    196:

    Same thing applies to any form of tennis other than played in your back yard. And around where I live all the tennis courts are public and people stand around the outside watching each other and retrieving balls for each other.

    There will be less of that in the current situation.

    But so far the major clusters of Covid transmission all require extended indoor exposure to aerosol.

    A small number of people standing around outside of an outdoor tennis court are going to be low risk, even more so if they observe a 3 to 6' separation which seems to have become a built in response these days - almost everyone avoids other members of the public when out walking unless there simply is no room to avoid each other for example.

    197:

    My wife used to be a keen tennis player before her knees gave up and, no, it doesn't. People don't HAVE to watch (I didn't) or stand close to each other, and the players could wear gloves. It's possible.

    Whether it would be done is another matter, and not the topic under discussion.

    198:

    The problem with "looking at the data all the time" is the two week delay between infection and symptoms...during part of which you are contagious.

    You've got to factor that delay into your calculations...and when you notice that the cases are rising, they've already been rising for two weeks.

    199:

    @79: The USSF is basically a satellite intelligence service.

    There's a lot more to space operations than "spy" satellites. DOD currently lists eleven space missions in Joint Publication (JP) 3-14, Space Operations, 10 April 2018: - Space Situational Awareness: Knowledge of what's happening in the space environment; includes the former mission of space surveillance - Space Control: Offensive and defensive operations during a conflict to assure friendly use of space and deny use of space to opponents - Positioning, Navigation, and Timing: Precision movement and weapons delivery require knowing where you are and when. The USAF didn't develop and field the GPS constellation for Garmin's benefit. - Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance: Pretty self-explanatory. I can provide way more discussion than most folks can bear on the differences between the three. - Satellite Communications: Global, real-time, secure, jam-resistant comms give a commander a real advantage in a conflict. - Environmental Monitoring: Both terrestrial and space weather. - Missile Warning: A subset of surveillance, called out separately due to the short flight times of missiles, especially tactical ballistic missiles, and the magnitude of the threat posed by strategic ballistic missiles (nukes). - Nuclear Detonation Detection: Another subset of surveillance called out separately due to its importance. - Spacelift: The ability to launch when and where needed - Satellite Operations: Self explanatory.

    I very much doubt that the U.S. Space Force will long survive the administration of El Cheeto Grande; it has not to date absorbed the space functions of the U.S. Army or Navy, and doesn't have much support outside the space cadets. U.S. Space Command, on the other hand, as a combatant command, undoes a mistake Rumsfeld made in 2002 by reestablishing a central proponent for the coordination of the Services space operations (again, I was in USSPACECOM from 1994-2002).

    200:

    mdive If you are willing to tell anyone with Covid to skip the hospital and just die, Which is so far off the mark as to be ridiculous. What is the percentage of deaths of those known to have been infected? Somewhere between 2% & 7% ( ish ) - yes? And, we know that a lot of people get or are infected by Covid & don't even know they have it - also yes? Now then, please rephrase your statement so that it makes sense. Infection DOES NOT MEAN DEATH - OK?

    • & @ 172 - re "childcare" It's not child care - it's education. I know that a huge amount of early so-called "schooling" is licensed child-minding, but even so, you are correct that the models currently in use are not fit for purpose in a post C-19 world. Assuming that children are vulnerable, of course. Are they? Do we yet know if any of the current crop of childhood immunisations are, as a side-effect providing some measure of protection against C-19? We damned well need to find that one out & soon.

    & @ 181 Yes People should be allowed to sunbathe in the parks I couldn't see the problem in the first place, but the fuckwits have ignored that one, it seems

    Graydon All too aware of that, since by a.n.other metric I'm "vulnerable" - being male & over 70, though slim & fit & eat very well & my medical condition(s) are physical, not chemical if you see what I mean.

    David L Me too - or rather I expect to be exposed to C-19 { I may have been already, as stated } & ... What I'm looking forward to is not a vaccine, though that would be very nice to have, but a treatment or set of treatments that turn, even a serious attack by this virus, into something manageable, with a decent recovery. That should be less of an ask than a vaccine ( I think ) & both more generally applicable across any victims.

    Nojay Already started The wreckers & English-Juche enthusiasts are amongst those pushing for "Brexit at ANY cost" - they are quite, utterly, stark raving bonkers, most of them, blinded by theor own propaganda & groupthink.

    Ioan Those categories fit the UK as well. But your numbers/percentages don't seem to add up ... um.

    201:

    whitroth noted: "I am never going to buy anything from Apple... if I have any choice."

    Fair enough. Different strokes and all that. I'm just guessing Apple will be the company that delivers the elegant solution first, shortly followed by a batch of companies who provide their own (less expensive and probably better performing) equivalents. Recent examples of this include laptop form factors and the iMac line of desktop computers.

    whitroth: "if I could get a Virtual Display (let's drop the VR crap until you can at least feel, if not smell or taste, shall we), with a projectable keyboard that's real sized, that would be something I'd look at."

    Me too. I'd love to have a virtual monitor I could expand from 17" (for writing) to 34" or more for page layout. I predict one to be available "real soon now", and not necessarily from Apple. I expect that the first models will benefit from having a white screen that you can mount behind the keyboard to block out background noise.

    whitroth: "And people keep talking about docking stations. Yeah, about that... even Dell would roll out new docking stations with each new model (2xx, 4xx I mean), and they were not compatible."

    My bad for choosing overly specific terminology; I didn't mean those older docks that were designed specifically for each new model of laptop. I'm currently using a USB-C dock with something like a dozen ports of various descriptions, daisy-chained with a 6-port USB-3 hub. Works a treat, and will transfer elegantly to my next computer. The various peripherals will stay put; the new laptop will simply plug into the dock, and away I go.

    Re. Space Force: We're not talking Star Trek here, folks. Most developed nations have significant commercial and military assets in orbit, and these need to be protected. Doing so requires specialized expertise and tools. So creating a space force as a branch of the military makes a lot of sense, and in the context of Trump, falls under the category "even a stopped clock is right twice per day".

    202:

    For tennis, the locker rooms would be questionable. Perhaps if you're playing badminton you wouldn't need them. If you could avoid the locker room, even doubles tennis might be reasonable.

    Note that golf should be reasonable, but in the examples I've seen golfers tend to cluster in tight groups. So maybe limit that to threesomes or less, and close the locker room. (And the bar.)

    203:

    Sports The evidence is all pointing to Covid requires extended aerosol exposure to transfer to a new host.

    What sports don't require physical exertion to the point of panting. And in each others faces or next to each other.

    Maybe track for some events and if you separate as soon as a race is over. But soccer(European football), basketball, field hockey, lacrosse, etc... all wind up with people panting and in each others faces at time.

    Baseball might work if the batters and fielders wear masks. But ...

    Want to risk it?

    204:

    Most offices would require a very large amount of work to convert them to plausible apartments, especially if you didn't want shared rest rooms.

    205:

    Travel to the tennis court wearing a tracksuit or similar over your kit, play, put it on and travel back, and clean up at home.

    And, to David L: cricket.

    206:

    Anyone know of any SF movies or TV shows that came anywhere close to describing the level of dis-unity, insanity, pigheadedness, anti-science, etc. that we've seen to COVID-19? I'm thinking that an alien invasion scenario would be closest to a pandemic as it'd be a novel situation to all countries.

    Real life in the US. 1968-69.

    But the dividing lines were very different. Well mostly. Sort of.

    207:

    For any visiting SF/F authors reading this blog: how has the real-world response changed how you're writing/going to write your next story?

    Huh. Funny you should ask: I'm currently turning round the edits for "Escape from Puroland" (coming to Tor.com sooner than I expected, apparently) and large chunks of it are set in hotels and public spaces that are simply unavailable right now.

    Story was written in September-October 2019 and sold in January. It's unthinkable how much has changed.

    (When I finish I'm going back to the second half of "Flesh Lies Bleeding" and wondering how much of it remains relevant to the present. And I began writing that last November.)

    Would you please post links to your most recent interviews and podcasts?

    I will, when they're public!

    208:

    IIUC, Heinlein had a story planned for "the Crazy Years", but never wrote it. Possibly he couldn't make it plausible. You could consider his "I will fear no Evil" as a rewrite of that story outside the bounds of his "future history" series.

    "An Enemy of the State" has some degree of the disorganization that you want. So does "The Warlock Wandering" about the collapse of PEST. (PEST means something like Proletarian Eclectic State of Terra.) Miller's "Canticle for Leibowitz" is all about aftermath. There is a chapter in Stapledon's "Last and First Men" about collapse. (Well there are several, but one sort of fits.) And, of course, there's Robert Anton Wilson's "Illuminatus", though that's more about chaos than collapse. Generally authors don't feel they can depict the government as as narrow minded and foolish as it often is. They feel it lacks plausibility.

    209:

    And people keep talking about docking stations. Yeah, about that... even Dell would roll out new docking stations with each new model

    Not any more.

    Remember I mentioned USB-C? The USB-C connector is black magic; if you buy a new iMac today it'll have only USB-C ports (plus ethernet, SD card, audio) on the back -- but those ports auto-detect and switch between: USB 3.1 (backward compatible all the way to USB 1.0), Thunderbolt 3, DisplayPort, HDMI, and a bunch of other standards. (If you need Firewire? That's a dongle on a TBolt cable.) Thunderbolt, as I noted, exposes the PCIe bus to the CPU and provides multiple channels at up to 40GBps -- enough that you can put multiple GPUs in a backplane at the far end of a TBolt cable and drive them from a laptop as if they're bolted to the motherboard. USB 4, due RSN from Intel et al, is a superset of all of the above -- basically all the protocols wrapped up in a bundle with a single cable.

    So there's a burgeoning market these days for "docks" which basically have a single USB-C connector at one end of a lead, and all the trimmings -- ethernet, HDMI for monitors, DisplayPort for other monitors, USB in various speeds -- at the other end. You can buy them sized to sit permanently on a desk with a keyboard and monitor hooked up, or to slip in your pocket or bag of cables for travel. And outfits like Dell and Lenovo have quietly stopped rolling out a new and expensive dock with every laptop.

    So the future you've been waiting for arrived while you weren't paying attention.

    210:

    Re the WH being infected, one thing that's wrong with your later in the thread back of the envelope calculations is what you missed: age an health is a factor. I'd gues that at least half of the WH is < 40, and the number of folks > 60 is a lot lower - probably under 50 people. Given the Orange One's germaphobia on one hand, and his diet on the other....

    211:

    almost everyone avoids other members of the public when out walking unless there simply is no room to avoid each other for example

    Relatively small data sample, but in my part of Richmond Hill Ontario that's not true.

    I've been getting less exercise than I should because about 20% of the people I encounter walking around the neighbourhood don't give 2 m of space, even when there's room. Couples that step sideways a bit giving you an extra 6" to pass. Pensioners walking right up the middle of the path and not moving for anyone. Families walking line abreast across the path. Young mothers pushing SUV-prams beside each other while they enjoy a gossip-and-latte.

    So when I can get motivated I get up in time to be out at sunrise so I only pass (on average) one person who's not social distancing rather than almost a dozen.

    212:

    So there's a burgeoning market these days for "docks" which basically have a single USB-C connector at one end of a lead, and all the trimmings -- ethernet, HDMI for monitors, DisplayPort for other monitors, USB in various speeds -- at the other end.

    Totally. I have one for my 15" laptop[1] that has all my bits attached. Including 4K display. When I want to be at my desk with it, it is closed and works great as a desktop. When I leave I just pull out 1 connector and go. Cost $50 on sale. Under $100 normally. (My power feeds through it so only 1 connection.) And I have a smaller one with Ethernet and 4K video in my travel bag.

    [1]For those who claimed a 15" laptop was nuts. Well for many it might be. I have 2 11" ones sitting unused just now but that's another story. When your normal desktop is 27" and you're doing CAD many times with a second display on that setup opening stuff up on less than 15" can be a complete PITA. But for other uses 13" or smaller is great. My point is for some non trivial use cases a 15" or 16" laptop makes sense. (A lot of architects and similar would like a 17".)

    213:

    Several things. First, after my late wife dropped dead, when my doctor asked what I wanted, I said a wall between me and the world. Later, it was give me something that will let me get a solid night's sleep, and I'll be able to deal with the world better in the morning.

    After a few years or more modern drugs, I went to trazadone, and only got off that early this year (because I've got Ellen). The first four-five years, pay attention to the label, because it's not "may cause drowsiness", it's "take before bed", because you'll be asleep in 20 min.

    Consider that, Charlie.

    And my response to the idiots who come by and say, CHEER UP!!!" is the one I came up with as my second marriage was failing in the mid-eighties: the sign I put on my cube wall over my desk read, "If I am depressed, it may be for good and sufficient reasons, and if I wasn't depressed, I wouldn't be facing reality", thereby using everything they could possibly say against them.

    And one last thing, and if you have never heard it, you should, Charlie: Stan Rogers' Mary Ellen Carter.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQpf0aCj-64

    "And you to whom adversity has dealt the final blow With smiling bastards lying to you everywhere you go, Rise again, rise again, Though your heart it be broken and life about to end. Turn to and put out all your strength of heart and mind and brain And like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again."

    True fact: singing that song, over and over, once kept a sailor whose ship went down in the North Atlantic alive for 10 fucking hours.

    214:

    Y'know, I think I've seen something just like that, long ago, in a galaxy far away.

    In Hardware Wars.

    215:

    But that was how management treated us for so many years....

    216:

    SFReader said: "Anyone know of any SF movies or TV shows that came anywhere close to describing the level of dis-unity, insanity, pigheadedness, anti-science, etc. that we've seen to COVID-19?"

    Nothing in the movies or TV, but John Brunner's 'The Sheep Look Up' springs to mind (and is recommended). 'The Jagged Orbit' might also be useful.

    217:

    I need to get on her social media, and demand that she demand that the Orange One resign, given the TWENTY-FOUR WOMEN accusing him of everything from molestation to rape, including an ex-wife, and some of them are in court, and so a HELL of a lot more believable than her.

    And there's this: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/04/29/joe-biden-sexual-assault-allegation-tara-reade-column/3046962001/

    218:

    I'm happy to leave it to the US electors to choose for themselves in November, but look at how we got here.... an accurate view based on hard facts ....

    Re: previous prez, Malia's grandparents met at The Agency Russian language training in Hawaii; He himself did some missions in Afghanistan, or holidays, speaking Pashto, the prez, Pashto? then almost last duty as prez was that meeting on 5th Jan 2017 with Bidden, Rice, Yates, Comey, Brennan, and Clapper. Setting up the talking points, keeping it in the family?

    Our excellent host's blogness does have a reasonably accurate view of the incumbent Amadán Trumpy, so I can't see how any of the contingent choices can get worse.

    Why can't you just 'elect' the respected Paul Nakasone or the slightly less respected Gina Cheri Walker Haspel directly, and cut out the distracting figurine, it's working fairly well in some other nations.

    219:

    Let me know when he becomes a hermit and starts growing out his nails.

    220:

    I am, of course, instantly reminded of the old usenet story of the guy who stole a RATO bottle, and attached it to his car.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JATO_Rocket_Car

    221:

    The rest of the Amendment indicates that's wasn't vaguely the only reason. #1 reason was the intent of the Founding Fathers, as I learned in school, NOT TO HAVE A STANDING ARMY, and so armed citizens, at the call of the governor, could be called out.

    222:

    when he becomes a hermit

    With valet staff?

    223:

    Nojay, fuck off. "Space President"? And you are suggesting that the overwhelming majority of Bernie supporters are extremists?

    After (and this has got to be at least the fifth time I've said this on Charlie's blog) 91% of us voted for Hillary?

    224:

    Great. So I need to build new armor (I left mine behind in Philly in '86), and go back to fighting SCA heavy, with my shield and mace?

    225:

    Well, I've got it in a trilogy of short stories. Unfortunately, they're set about 60-75 years from now, and they're also not yet published (I'm waiting to hear from the editor of the Grantville Gazette, who's looking at them for the Universe Annex....

    226:

    Re. Space Force: We're not talking Star Trek here, folks. Most developed nations have significant commercial and military assets in orbit, and these need to be protected. Doing so requires specialized expertise and tools. So creating a space force as a branch of the military makes a lot of sense, and in the context of Trump, falls under the category "even a stopped clock is right twice per day".

    Agreed. I can see the strong feelings from a SPACECOM vet, and they're understandable, even if I as a lifelong civilian don't know the proper and military way to differentiate between intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance, and tend to lump them, as the NRO does, into intelligence rather than physical "boots in the sky" operations.

    That said, I'll be mildly surprised if the USSF gets folded back into the USAF, and the reason is the eternal tussle of the high echelons for status. Currently, the Secretary of the Army has as deputies the civilian under-secretary and the military chief of staff. The Secretary of the Navy has as deputies the civilian under-secretary, the military Chief of Naval Operations, and the Commandant of the Marine Corps(!). The Secretary of the Air Force has the civilian under-secretary, the military Chief of of staff, and the Chief of Space operations.

    So basically, in the eternal squabble about who gets more whatever, the Secretary of the Air Force is now in command of two forces, just like the Secretary of the Navy.

    And the Chief of Space Operations (Jay Raymond) is also concurrently the head of US Space Command, and he reports to the Secretary of the Air Force.

    So yes, the USAF currently looks like it has control of US military space assets, so long as it minds its manners and doesn't try to actually assimilate the NRO, elements of the US Navy Cybercommand that are in orbit, or the US Army Defense and Missile Command. And since the space and surface-based elements of the latter two appear to be rather intertwined (by design?) I'd speculate that the USAF wants to disentangle them in any case.

    But what do I know? I'm a civilian.

    227:

    This is not your father's confederacy. Much of their strength is in the Old Northwest (Ohio River watershed) and the far northwest; states that were not part of the Confederate States of America.

    The states carved out of the old Northwest Territories not only weren't part of the Confederacy, they were staunch Union supporters. Even at that time the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers were an import export route for those states and they knew that would get at least expensive if a CSA controlled the Lower Mississippi.

    Your view of "far northwest" is apparently different than mine. Oregon and Washington are heavily Democratic. Montana is an odd place, but will likely come out of this November with Democrats for governor and both US Senators. Idaho fits, I suppose, but that's also changing rapidly: the California Diaspora has been a thing for 30 years.

    The entire 11-state contiguous American West is changing, in the opposite direction but about the same pace as the Midwest has gone Republican. Democratic trifectas in state government in California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington. It's looking like post-November Democrats will hold 16 of those 22 US Senate seats.

    The American Great Plains are a terrific cultural divide. Five times the area of the UK, average population density of 3.7 people per square km, 222 of 362 counties with a population density below the traditional 7-per-sq-mile (2.7-per-sq-km) definition of frontier. There are a lot of people with no idea of the scale of that enormous empty chunk in the middle of the US.

    228:

    And since the space and surface-based elements of the latter two appear to be rather intertwined (by design?) I'd speculate that the USAF wants to disentangle them in any case.

    Rather: And since the space and surface-based elements of the latter two appear to be rather intertwined (by design?) I'd speculate that the USAF DOES NOT WANT to disentangle them in any case.

    But I'm still definitely a civilian.

    229:

    That said, I'll be mildly surprised if the USSF gets folded back into the USAF, and the reason is the eternal tussle of the high echelons for status.

    Creating the USSF created slots for more generals and so on all down the line. Folding it back in would force those folks to find new jobs, replace others currently in jobs, or retire. Not as big a fight as closing bases but still.

    230:

    In Denmark we are also slowly allowing more and more things, but not the things the neoliberalist commerciocrats want, so they're throwing daily hissy fits.

    Can you elaborate on this? What exactly is being slowly allowed, and why are neoliberalist commerciocrats throwing hissy fits?

    231:

    There are a lot of people with no idea of the scale of that enormous empty chunk in the middle of the US.

    Just stick them in a car and let them drive for 2 to 4 hours and maybe see 3 cars coming the other way.

    A bit more west I drove to Monument Valley from the east to west and if the world had depopulated during the drive except for my wife and I, we would not have noticed for a couple of hours.

    232:

    How are other countries/areas dealing with such.

    Apparently I wasn't all that clear. My question was more about are the politicians in other countries saying "you can open now but at reduced seating" while the owners are saying "we can't make money at that capacity".

    All on top of people saying "we'll just stay home a while longer thank you very much".

    233:

    I think you perhaps have a distorted view of the West, and indeed, of much of the US.

    Here's a map of the way the counties voted in the 2018 election: https://www.brookings.edu/research/a-vast-majority-of-counties-showed-increased-democratic-support-in-2018-house-election/

    It is, basically: --urban areas (80% of the US population) --coasts --major rivers (especially the Mississippi) --the Mexican border counties --Major Indian reservations in Arizona and New Mexico

    Notice that contact with tourists and diverse people tends to blue things?

    I don't disagree that there's a big lot of unbuilt land in the Midwest, although I think that has as much to do with Big Ag and ecology as anything else.

    But the white supremacists' present locations don't readily map onto the confederacy, and there are a lot of them in very blue counties (https://www.splcenter.org/hate-map), as well as in the current Rust Belt of the Old Northwest.

    For example: if you've been paying attention to the news in the last week, the Klowns who wore the KKK hood and the swastika face masks to the grocery store and became Facebook famous did so in Santee, a "nice" little 'burb immediately east of increasingly democratic San Diego. This didn't surprise anyone who's lived here for awhile and heard Santee's nickname of "KKKlantee."

    234:

    For SF film or tv, I would recommend "Children of men". It's that very rare thing, a film that is better than the book. It also has a virus, chaos, right wing idiocy, xenophobia etc. If anyone hasn't seen it, you should.

    235:

    Anecdotally, the UK's ambulance services are seeing a massive spike in emergency calls where the first responders arrive to find the patient already in cardiac arrest and impossible to resuscitate. Out of curiosity, are these cardiac arrest deaths being tested (after death) for SARS-CoV-2? The virus is known to cause strokes and to affect the heart. Not saying I don't believe that there is an effect, just wondering (assuming real) about causes.

    and a lot of diagnostic procedures for cancer and other life-threatening conditions that require close contact have been postponed or cancelled. By some reports it'll take two years to catch up with the current backlog, and untold tens of thousands of premature deaths. This particular effect is very concerning, thanks for the reminder. [1]. The longer term increases and decreases in mortality rates (per cause of death) will play out over many years. (as Elderly Cynic notes (I think), finding the signals in the statistics will often be difficult. Also futures reshapings like altered risk of nuclear war, a more competent response to a future more-deadly pandemic, different probabilities of averting severe global heating scenarios, etc, are hard to evaluate.)
    In the UK, with decent universal health care and environmental conditions (e.g. already clean air), but with a dysfunctional government-level response to the pandemic, the excess deaths will at least medium term be (optimistically) net high 10s/low 100s of thousands extrapolating from what's seen so far. Similar for the US scaled for a larger population, perhaps (depending on how reopening plays out) not quite as bad because of lower population density. The worsening economic collapse will make this all much worse and harder to evaluate.

    [1] Sample article: Coronavirus is pushing the UK towards a cancer crisis - Urgent referrals for cancer tests and diagnoses have fallen as people have stayed away from the NHS. Now doctors are worried these late diagnoses could lead to a spike in cancer deaths (Chris Baraniuk, 8 May 2020)

    236:

    RCT David - I agree, completely. I figure an actual vaccine is years away. I just want an effective treatment that reduces the effects by an order of magnitude.

    237:

    Ok, wait, I think we're running at cross-discussions here. I was thinking of docking stations for mobiles, not laptops.

    238:

    Be careful with this study, because it is not yet peer-reviewed and because it is only looking at hospitalized COVID-19 cases, but it is quite interesting. (e.g. it is another study showing slightly lower COVID-19 risk of death while in hospital for active smokers.) Risk factors for COVID-19 death revealed in world’s largest analysis of patient records - The largest study to date, analysing NHS health data from 17.4 million UK adults between 01 February 2020 and 25 April 2020, has given the strongest evidence on risk factors associated with COVID-19 death. (7 May 2020, https link broken) Figure 3 in the paper is the interesting one. The axis is estimated risk ratio vs a baseline for various subsets of the population, with error bars. OpenSAFELY: factors associated with COVID-19-related hospital death in the linked electronic health records of 17 million adult NHS patients. (May 7, 2020, preview, not peer reviewed)

    239:

    Re reduction in air pollution in Europe (&UK): Clean air in Europe during lockdown ‘leads to 11,000 fewer deaths’ - Study into effects of coronavirus curbs also finds less asthma and preterm births (Jonathan Watts, 30 Apr 2020) Health experts said the findings echoed their experience during the pandemic. “We have seen many fewer patients admitted with exacerbations of asthma and COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease] over the last month and there is no doubt that a fall in air pollution is part of the reason,” said Dr LJ Smith, a consultant in respiratory medicine at King’s College hospital in London. 11,000 air pollution-related deaths avoided in Europe as coal,oil consumption plummet (Lauri Myllyvirta and Hubert Thieriot)

    In some large cities in China and India and other countries, air pollution (pre-COVID-19) is really severe. Search google images for "air pollution" for examples of visibility in the 100s-of-meters range. If you've never experienced it, don't.

    240:

    I can dock my mobile with the same USB-C docking station I use for my laptop - it then gets me screen, keyboard and trackpad from the docking station.

    Not sure exactly which protocols it's using on the wire, but it works.

    241:

    For example: if you've been paying attention to the news in the last week, the Klowns who wore the KKK hood and the swastika face masks to the grocery store and became Facebook famous did so in Santee, a "nice" little 'burb immediately east of increasingly democratic San Diego. This didn't surprise anyone who's lived here for awhile and heard Santee's nickname of "KKKlantee."

    I don't deny that there are nuts everywhere. Prevalence is another thing. I responded to a comment that talked about states. And in particular, "far northwest" states as part of the new Confederacy. Metro Seattle, which dominates the state politically, would be surprised to find themselves classified that way.

    I'm well aware of voting patterns in the West. Of the four Census Bureau regions, the West now has the smallest percentage of rural population. Those vast red areas don't add up to all that many voters. And most growth in the West is happening in the metro areas, so things will likely continue in the direction they're headed. The real action is in the suburbs, of course. California went Democratic when its suburbs did. Ditto Colorado, 15-20 years later. It's happening in Arizona as we type. Utah is probably still 20 years away.

    242:

    Out of curiosity, are these cardiac arrest deaths being tested (after death) for SARS-CoV-2?

    In much of the US, no. Testing is mostly reserved for saving live bodies.

    Which is why the stats for deaths by, was sick due to, and infected but no symptoms are all light. In the US and I suspect most of the world.

    The excess deaths stats the US can produce (and I suspect a many other countries also) is the best way to estimate how many have died from Covid-19. With a somewhat reasonable error rate.

    But even this misses people who got sick and either didn't notice or had mild symptoms and now get to start the remainder of their life with kidney and/or other organs reduced in capacity by 10% or 30% or we just don't know.

    243:

    Can't make rules you can't enforce, and we've thankfully got at least that much competence involved.

    Not so much anymore.

    In the news today, Ontario Premier violated the rules and had family visit for Mother's Day.

    And that is his (sort of) second violation of the rules - several weeks back he visited his cottage.

    So when the nice warm weather returns the public is going to say if the rules don't apply to Ford, then they don't apply to us.

    245:

    Now then, please rephrase your statement so that it makes sense. Infection DOES NOT MEAN DEATH - OK?

    Bad wording.

    "anyone with Covid to skip the hospital and just die" = "anyone with serious enough Covid symptoms that that need hospital/icu/ventilator care should skip the hospital and die."

    The point of the current mess isn't to prevent people from catching Covid, it is to slow the spread to the point where the health care system doesn't collapse (with a failure to do that apparently happening for various periods of time in places like Italy and maybe NYC).

    Yes, that unfortunately means heart/cancer/other things are falling through the system and causing death.

    But simply opening "society" as you suggest, while it would return all those people (and deferred surgeries/treatements) back into the system that can only be done if you prevent the Covid patients that result from opening society from blocking up the hospitals again - hence the just go away and die comment.

    We know what ignoring Covid and just opening up society does - Italy was covered well, and Spain, and now parts of the US, Russia, etc.

    I think one of the things that many are forgetting/overlooking as various countries start to return to normal is that the Imperial College paper suggested we were heading for an alternating periods of opening things up, and then closing them down again, until a vaccine or other stabilization happens. So the fact that Denmark / Germany appear to be returning to normal doesn't mean that Covid is over in those countries - again, see South Korea who had to backtrack quickly on allowing night clubs to open.

    I can't comment on the UK as I am not close enough to follow all the small details, but here in Ontario the government has started the process to reopen hospitals to outpatient surgeries/etc - that while the economy won't have fully reopened the demand on the health care system will have dropped to a level where we can return to doing more routine stuff.

    So we will (hopefully) be able to have those additional non-Covid deaths be a temporary blip in the statistics while continuing Covid precautions.

    It's not child care - it's education.

    In the current world it is child care with education thrown in as a bonus.

    The world many/most of us on this board grew up in where mom was home all day is long gone, and thus by necessity school has become "child care" to the extent that school holidays are a problem (often financially) for parents as some alternative must be arranged and frequently paid for.

    So in addition to the education part (because most indications are the kids at home are not receiving a full education even when the social aspects are ignored), for parents to either return to work - or even to become effective work at home people - the younger kids at least need to be removed from being distractions/time sinks. Hence a return to school, given the usual holiday day camps are currently unavailable.

    Assuming that children are vulnerable, of course. Are they?

    See my post #192 where initial indications are not only are they for the most part not appearing to be effected by Covid, but they also don't seem to be a major problem in spreading it (which goes against our experiences of kids and colds/flu/etc.).

    Do we yet know if any of the current crop of childhood immunisations are, as a side-effect providing some measure of protection against C-19?

    Not a doctor/expert, but I doubt it.

    One, unless they really become less effective with age then the adults should also be protected by those immunizations (unless there is a non-obvious vaccine the current generation get) but -

    Two, there are far too many kids getting no vaccines today, and so far at least they aren't showing up as getting Covid either in any great numbers.

    246:

    What sports don't require physical exertion to the point of panting. And in each others faces or next to each other.

    ad-hoc games in a community park to pass the time?

    To repeat the now frequent refrain, we aren't talking about professional or even organized sports here, just fun stuff for kids to gather in the park, or some young adults to pass the time while being outside.

    And even brief panting next to each other doesn't appear to be a significant risk - again, casual interactions in lobbies/lifts/elevators don't appear to have had any effect in the spread of Covid - the spread happens when people are exposed, via an enclosed space (where AC/heating/air circulation systems contribute significantly) for periods of say 30 minutes or more.

    247:

    Re: 'Generally authors don't feel they can depict the government as as narrow minded and foolish as it often is. They feel it lacks plausibility.'

    Agree! Even more so in the older TV and film SF/F worlds. Even the post-apocalyptic hits don't portray the leadership as moronic: selfish, yes; stupid, no.

    Heinlein has proven quite prophetic (Interregnum - If This Goes On) in describing a likely facade under which the US could be led down the autocratic path.

    248:

    Charlie’s point is that these are converging on being the same thing .

    When I started at my second last job, I was assigned a brand new Dell Surface clone, basically a tablet PC with a snap-on magnetic keyboard+trackpad “cover”, and along with it a “dock”, which you connected with a single USB-C cable, providing multiple USB-A, Display Port and other jacks for connecting the things you need to do work. But such a dock would work with a USB-C equipped phone too.

    Actual (40 Gbps)Thunderbolt 3 docks are still priced outrageously, but USB-C has basically democratised, it’s everywhere now. And I’m seeing some interesting devices: all the Thunderbolt 3 connected external RAID enclosures seem to offer a Display Port jack, for instance.

    249:

    I'd amend that very slightly. Outdoor is a lot less risky, but the vigorous exhales common in many sports (hard style martial arts being a particularly obvious example) are probably probably spraying as many droplets or more as the loudest talking or singing. Thanks for the paper links on children; the "Children are unlikely to have been the primary source of household SARS-CoV-2 infections" preprint is large enough and suggestive enough to be worth tracking.

    250:

    Re: "Children of men"

    Thanks! - Just read the Wikipedia write-up, sounds worth watching.

    251:

    I recently read the blood thinners are very useful once COVID-19 starts causing blood clots.

    252:

    And to no one's surprise (well, most reasonable people's surprise?), the GOP has rediscovered their religion and are now claiming that the US cannot afford the massive deficits helping people/companies/states survive Covid would require, and thus they aren't planning any more help from Washington

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-11/gop-finds-deficit-scold-voice-again-adding-snag-to-talks-on-aid

    253:

    Ooo, one of the podcast interviews OGH mentions was Trashfuture, that's cool! (The episode isn't out yet, they just mentioned talking to him in passing in the newest ep.)

    254:

    @fajensen at 144: Sorry to disagree. Bernie would have changed very little, as his time in the Senate shows. He would be just like Trump, unable to get a majority to do anything significant, since he's cast aspersion on all of Congress and forced to do whatever he could with executive orders. I think Biden can win with the pro-Biden vote and the anti-Trump vote and I expect to see a better healthcare situation in 4 years. No Medicare-for-All, but that would never have happened without 60 votes in the Senate. No Green New Deal as envisioned by AOC, but a strategy that goes in the same direction and gets more done by avoiding the political roadblocks inherent in the GND. You're free to disagree. I'm only laying out a representative viewpoint from someone in that mass of people that you Bernie supporter think are so stupid.

    255:

    "A Different Bias"

    I find he gets tedious and depressing if I watch too much, one every couple of days is enough. It's the tone, it's always "sigh, more bullshit from the useless numpties". Sure, it is probably accurate, but I don't need that.

    This is one reason I think Jacinda Ardern and her team have done so well. It's not "brain the size of a planet" territory, it's slightly upbeat "we have a problem. Here is what you can do to help. Please help".

    The trouble with the various authoritarians is that they're not being successful and the message doesn't really work in this situation "obey or die"... "bruh, people who obey you are dying anyway"

    256:

    To repeat the now frequent refrain, we aren't talking about professional or even organized sports here, just fun stuff for kids to gather in the park, or some young adults to pass the time while being outside.

    Have you ever raised kids? Pre teens down to toddlers in such a situation is like herding high energy cats.

    We would take them to such situations as they would run around like crazy till collapse then back at home give them a quick rinse in the shower then to bed.

    But organized "play" like you describe only happens with "Sheldon Cooper" type. And they are a rare breed indeed.

    257:

    There are a lot of people with no idea of the scale of that enormous empty chunk in the middle of the US.

    Yeah, nah. A quick glance at the map says I once rode slightly further than RAAM and the biggest town I went through (and I went through all of them) had about 5000 people. Between Darwin and Perth there just isn't a lot of people, things to support people, things for people to do, or indeed, people. The 'natural' population is probably somewhat less than it is now, because right now they're digging up the country and sending it to China. Once that's done* those people will leave.

    Straya has also got a dirty big hole in the middle (for reasons it's called "Olympic Dam", but trust me, when Australia farts that's where it comes out).

    Anyway, just how many parts of the US do you drive through desert for 1000km as the only land-based way to get from here to there? We have the somewhat misleadingly named No Tree Plain" which is flat and has shrubs but it's not really habitable because it's more of a limestone plateau. US style "great plains" it is not. North of that is the more accurately named "Little Sandy Desert" which is next to (wait for it) the "Great Sandy Desert" (although that is a bit meh, as deserts go). The reason they can have such big text on the maps is that there's nothing else there.

    The point is that between Adelaide and civilisation you have 500 miles of walking, and another 500 miles of walking, and then you're in the exciting metropolis of Alice Springs or, if you go the wrong way, Perth. If you go even more wrong you're in the sea part way to Aotearoa or Antarctica.

    • A fair bit of WA is made of haematite. Literally made of it. If they run out then somewhere there will be a US-sized area with 2m of steel plate over it.

    [[ odd link fixed - mod ]]

    258:

    Yes. AU is a big big island of no one sane would live there with some living space around the edges.

    259:

    Oz also enjoys the presence of all 11 of the top 10 most dangerous creatures on the planet.

    260:

    A fair bit of WA is made of haematite. Literally made of it. If they run out then somewhere there will be a US-sized area with 2m of steel plate over it

    Yeah, and I've heard that out in the Blue Mountains there are koalas the size of actual, northern hemisphere bears that will drop out of trees and savage passersby unless they wear sprigs of gum nuts behind their ears. And the Yowies keep them as house pets?

    Since the US is 3.79 million mi2 with 331 million mostly odd people, and Australia is 2.97 million mi2 with 25.5 million people (about the same as North Korea)...yeah, I'll give you that it's pretty empty. I mean southern California has about the same population as all of Australia. But fit a US-sized area into it? That's not a hole. (hauls out the Grand Canyon), now this is a proper hole.*

    As for big empties, take the train from Seattle Washington to Minneapolis or Chicago. Fargo North Dakota is about the biggest town on that route. That's some good chunk of 3,000 km of topographically diverse but very sparsely populated land.

    Or if you want a mostly rural road, look up US-50, which is a bit shy of 5,000 km and mostly rural. Especially the part through Nevada.

    Now we sit back and wait for the Canadians to start giggling about us short distance haulers and our silly ideas about what a lonely highway is. Then sleepingroutine can chime in about the Trans-Siberian Railway (about 9,300 kilometers) and that will be us properly told off.

    261:

    a big big island of no one sane

    Whaddaya mean? We got a sane guy, name's Dave, lives out west somewhere.

    262:

    Australia is 2.97 million mi2 with 25.5 million people (about the same as North Korea)...yeah, I'll give you that it's pretty empty

    It's more that the population is overwhelmingly concentrated along the east coast, with a few scattered buboes across the rest of the country. The population density in what you could reasonably call the inhabited parts is not so bad, which leaves a lot of "technically got Australians in it". Or technically Australians, I suppose, since they suffer a bit from white men running round like children who got a Dymo Labeller for Christmas.

    "what do you call this place? I name it King's Crossing" "Bidyadanga" "King's Crossing it is"

    263:

    "Been seeing some stuff going around from various cognitive science sorts that reading requires an effort to construct the story; you have to sub-create to enjoy it."

    Mimesis as Make-Believe My wife wrote her master's thesis on it back in the 90s - tying the philosophy-of-art ideas about it to the representational-theory-of-mind ideas about it.

    The theory applies not just to reading but to all representational art.

    I liked it - it explains much about what people do with novels and other art works. I also like that it suggests we should give more respect to kids' make-believe games as an art form, which I think they deserve.

    But yes, partaking in a novel is work. Which is why a lot of us like rereading an old favorite when we're sick and down.

    264:

    "What sports don't require physical exertion to the point of panting. And in each others faces or next to each other."

    Our perceptions of people moving outdoors and people walking slowly or standing still indoors are very different. Soccer players who you perceive as "very close" mostly aren't. Yes, they get close at times - but not mostly.

    Compare the air-circulation in an elevator, or even an apartment building staircase, and the number of people who breathe each cubic metre of air, to a soccer field.

    Sunshine and wind are your best virus-destroying buddies (them and soap and 80% alcohol hand disinfectant).

    The real risk with social sport isn't the sport. It's the hanging out together chatting before and/or after and/or on the sideline.

    (I'm currently working on our protocol for a team sports practice that will meet the NZ covid-19 level 2 sports practice guidelines - they're quite concerned about things like instantly accessible contact details for everyone involved, hand washing, disinfecting equipment, it's going to be a bit of work)

    265:

    I'm only laying out a representative viewpoint from someone in that mass of people that you Bernie supporter think are so stupid. I am not a Bernie supporter. I am giving people the benefit of doubt here: Corruption and Stupidity looks about the same from some distance! But, lets just go with Corruption then:

    I think some people may well vote for Biden in the earnest hope of getting rid of Donald Trump, but, "their team", the Democrat establishment will quite deliberately do whatever it takes to give their "Rain Man*", Donald Trump, four more years.

    Starting with running the most fragile candidate they could possibly find out of thousands of at least equally qualified people and putting Hillary Clinton's face on the fundraiser (Just so you know what your gonna get when Old Joe keels over and retires for 'health reasons'):

    https://twitter.com/SavionForUS/status/1259110551235579907 - 2500 USD Zoom sessions for "The People", one hopes that there is some decent tranny pr0n injected or it wouldn't be value!

    Bite back the bile, Vote for That and get Four More Years of The Donald in return!?

    *) The guy who brings in the Big Money!

    266:

    The thing that people seem to miss is that the populated areas in Oz are still on a large scale (SE-to-Central-QLD for instance is about the size of Great Britain), it’s just that most of the population lives in cities. So there are mostly uninhabited areas*, there are areas where the population is spread pretty evenly but still sparsely by world standards, and there are medium-to-high density urban areas.

    I’ve come across some odd positions related to density. I have happened upon Americans who insist, when arguing with Europeans, that universal healthcare can’t work for them because of geographical size, but then the same people arguing with Australians insisting that in can’t work because of population, without any apparent irony about the two positions being logically incompatible.

    Of course, while Queensland has (for instance) the best cancer survival rate in the world*, it tapers off sharply with linear distance from a major hospital. There are tertiary hospitals every 100km or so up the coast, so it’s mostly inland rural and remote (but see also *) that suffer this issue, but it’s quite real.

    Point is that we manage with some quite remote populations, and some quite dense ones, as do (say) places like Norway, Sweden and Finland.

    • I say mostly - certainly pre-European-settlement even the least hospitable (to Europeans) areas had some population, who managed the local ecosystems to suit themselves in practices passed along the milleniae.

    ** Close to or level with it, not claiming anything major here, but the healthcare system here is certainly among the best for outcomes. But the thing to take pause about is that if you consider only first-peoples’ health, it’s nowhere near as rosy a situation and there is a gap in life expectancy along with general experience of any sort of system that, as much as we’re generally pretty committed to fixing, still suggests there things are not all great.

    267:

    Re: '... GOP ... now claiming that the US cannot afford the massive deficits helping people/companies/states survive Covid'

    Unfortunately the graphs in the article below do not identify the specific countries but maybe there's an academic here that could take a close look at the data and let us know how the type and size of the economic stimulus package correlates with what sane and mature society members would consider 'helpful'. (I.e., identify which countries are which dots/data points.)

    https://voxeu.org/article/economic-policy-responses-pandemic-covid-19-economic-stimulus-index

    'In a recent paper (Elgin et al. 2020), we conduct a comprehensive review of different economic policy measures adopted by 166 countries as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic and create a large database including fiscal, monetary and exchange rate measures. The economic policy package database we created includes six policy variables classified under three categories: fiscal policy, monetary policy, and balance of payment/exchange rate policy.'

    Probably the only good coming out of this pandemic is the amount of research being done across academic and scientific fields all focused on the same topic. COVID-19 because it's novel, global and being documented in close to real-time makes for an ideal test scenario for an examination of what our world is actually like, how and how well various academic, scientific, technological and political disciplines engage with and describe the same event, and how the various disciplines mesh with each other.

    268:

    whitroth Yes, that is what we want & ought to be achievable. Meanwhile, everyone is screaming "Vaccine - now!" But we migth get lucky, but that's not the way to bet, is it?

    Bill Arnold Did you miss the bot where I said something like: "Those of us who remember real polution, the London Smogs of the 1950's" ??? My road is about 10 metres across to the school fence opposite. In 1955, during that year's smog, I could not see that fence, at mid-day .... The "air" was yellow/brown.

    mdive Corrections noted - much better, if a little wordier! e were heading for an alternating periods of opening things up, and then closing them down again, until a vaccine or other stabilization happens. This, yes. Hence my plea, earlier for some form of effective treatment, never mind a wonder vaccine, of course. What "social aspects" of supposed education would they be then? All I learnt was that Team Games are an excuse for fascist bullying & thuggery, that actual education is frowned on by the other children & that interacting with other people is DIFFICULT if you have already been labelled as an "other" - even if you are a WASP like me ...

    & @ 252 The opposite of what a supposedly-tory guvmint is doing here - in spite of theor other neoliberal fantasies. Wierd

    SFR Yes. One could easily see DT going down with C-19, Pres Pence taking over, seguing easily into a theocratic state, somewhere between Gilead & the Scudder/Prophet's

    timrowledge Please enumerate? I assume saltwater croc is on the list? Funnel-Web Spider? And?

    269:

    There are a lot of people with no idea of the scale of that enormous empty chunk in the middle of the US.

    Moz is right. Eucla in Western Australia, with a population of 53, is on a lot of globes of the world because it's all there is for a very long way.

    But at risk of playing the 4 Yorkshiremen: Canada can see you guys and raise. As a kid I lived on a Chipewyan reservation - the Northwest Territories could swallow the USA, and half as big again, with a total population of 45k. Roads? Luxury! We didn't have a road in. Trucks would drive in across the lakes in winter, but never on their own.

    270:

    "Unashamedly stealing everyone else's good ideas", otherwise known as "best practice" :)

    271:

    Hi all,

    Hope everybody is still well. Glad to hear OGH is alive even if a bit down. I think most of us have that sort of feeling at the moment. I'm hoping you're right that, once we're no longer in full-lockdown and have a bit more freedom to get out and about, our moods will improve. I wouldn't say I was feeling depressed per-se, but definitely a bit out-of-sorts.

    Rather than comment on the commentary, I thought I might ask a question since I think some of the commentariat might be able to give me some hints.

    I want to write, but not fiction, about mathematics. I can write mathematics for mathematicians at the level I'm at quite well, but I want to write about mathematics for humans, not mathematicians. Specifically, I want to tell a story. I have an idea of where the story will start, and I have a vague outline that will flesh out as I get going. (As per https://sites.math.washington.edu/~lind/Resources/Halmos.pdf - 7. Write in spirals.)

    I'm a native English speaker, but by accident of time of birth and multiple school changes, went through school in a period where English grammar wasn't really specifically taught. I'm feeling self-conscious about whether my grasp of grammar is good enough for what I want to do. For most things, that wouldn't be a problem - get an appropriate book, teach self. The problem I've run into is that most English grammar guides seem to be written for English as second-language learners rather than as guides for native speakers. I wondered if people might be able to suggest some resources that would help get me going? British English by preference, but if the American English resources are better then I'll go with those.

    Also, what sorts of reference works do you writers use and find helpful from time to time? I have my trusty Oxford Concise English Dictionary and Thesaurus which I find useful for some of the things I read with unusual/specialised vocabulary. I also have a copy of Roget's Thesaurus, because I find the listing of synonyms and antonyms helpful. The Oxford Concise English Thesaurus doesn't do this - it only lists synonyms.

    272:

    The big shifts since the 1950s are in the size of particulates (smaller, so harder to see), and the almost complete removal of sulphur (causes yellowish-brown appearance) from fuels. This results in "smogs" that are nearly invisible while being at least as unhealthy as 1950s smogs.

    In other words, what we've done is hidden the problem, not solved it.

    273:

    Another question - what do people use for keeping up with new stories and comments on here? I get a notification from Goodreads of new stories once a week I think. By the time I get that notification you guys are often several hundred comments in. Plus, the comments can grow quite quickly!

    274:

    This site is a pretty good notification in its own right. I think it's worth scanning for news as well as reading in detail.

    275:

    No, people dying from 'other' causes are not tested - or weren't, the last I heard. Talking of excess deaths, here is your weekly statistical fix:

    Deaths registered in England and Wales for the week ending; current death rates as ratio of week average; cumulative excess and covid-assigned deaths as numbers and their ratio. 20 Mar 20: 1.01 -3659 108
    27 Mar 20: 1.08 -2814 647
    03 Apr 20: 1.59 3238 4122 0.79 10 Apr 20: 1.78 11364 10335 1.10 17 Apr 20: 2.17 23424 19093 1.23 24 Apr 20: 2.17 35277 27330 1.29 01 May 20: 1.82 43387 33365 1.30

    Together with the official figures, they ate'nt lying that we are over 'the peak', but it's only a shallow slope and may not be the last peak. If all goes well, we may get away with no more than about 100,000 excess deaths for 2020 in the UK (at a wild but not completely unsupported guess), but there's many a slip between cup and lip.

    276:

    Yes, but that's just alleviating the symptoms, and introducing quite severe risks as a consequence. I have a friend who is on those, got an intestinal bleed, and almost died - without massive blood transfusions, she would have done, and those are in short supply at present.

    An effective treatment would need to stop things getting to that point, or at least reduce the risk of that sort of thing considerably.

    277:

    Not in The Smokes - Greg is right there - and some of the other big cities were nearly as bad. In most of the UK, definitely - and it's quite possibly worse than it was in 1950.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_1952

    278:

    Ok, wait, I think we're running at cross-discussions here. I was thinking of docking stations for mobiles, not laptops.

    They're the same thing!

    Modern mobile phones (Apple excluded) use USB-C and do basically everything I mentioned earlier over it except Thunderbolt. So a laptop USB-C dock will also work with most modern high end phones.

    As Qualcom's latest phone chipset (for 2021) boasts 8-16Gb of RAM -- yes, RAM, not SSD/FLASH -- and can cope with up to 1Tb of FLASH storage, these gizmos really are getting into desktop equivalence, albeit with a different UI and display/I/O.

    As Android is basically a hacked Linux with a JVM running a variant multitouch GUI on top (and happy to deal with external keyboards and mice), it's no surprise that desktop-like overlays are available: see for example Sentio Desktop, which seems to be pivoting to position itself as a gateway drug for this piece of hardware (go on! Take a look!). Here's a link farm listing more Android desktop-like launchers.

    Right now this is all kinda hacky and DIY-ish -- the only polished version is Samsung's DeX -- but it's do-able and a sign of where things are going.

    279:

    Eucla? That's a decent size population compared to Cook, 5 hours drive away, which claims 4½ - the half being the dog. I think Eucla is the closest sizeable population centre to Cook. Contrariwise, Cook is the closest railway station to Eucla.

    Yes, I have a fridge magnet I bought there. They have a souvenir shop for the twice weekly arrivals of the Indian Pacific train.

    It used to be a sensible size settlement, with school and hospital and stuff, but now it's the next thing to a ghost town. Only the train stopping there gives it any semblance of life at all.

    To the north of Cook? That's where it gets empty

    280:

    My wife has looked at the names, and said that they are all respected people. I have briefly looked at the paper, and have the following comments:

    It is strongly age-linked, twice as dangerous in men than women, implies there is an odd interaction with smoking, but otherwise pretty well all of the risk factors seem to be the ones that apply to many diseases, with one exception. Note that I have NOT looked at the risk factors for other diseases, but am basing that on 'common knowledge'. I was a little disappointed that they didn't look at ARB and ACE inhibitors, but they may not have had the data.

    The big exception was race, where it is clear that being in the 'white' subpopulation is protective - that isn't all that surprising, because of our evolutionary history and known adaptations, but is definitely a political hot potato.

    281:
    People may grow so tired of the restrictions that they declare the pandemic over, even as the virus continues to smolder in the population

    Smoulder?

    Shitty writing, with no trace of understanding that real reality is what makes history.

    282:

    Meanwhile - refewrring back to the comment about a world-wide effort by scientists & medical researchers - what a contrast to the politicians!

    EC Yes, the lower-level of infection/fatality amongst us pinkoes is interesting. FUCK "political hot poatao" find out what is happening - almost certainly inherent genetic difference of some sort or another ....

    283:

    This piece from 2007 calculates the gross cost of powering the world exclusively on PV with HVDC backbone distribution at around 5% of global GDP between 2008 and 2050, using 2007 prices and efficiencies for PV panels.
    So, the question is what percentage of current global GDP is spent on fossil fuel extraction and the damage caused by fossil fuel extraction and burning.

    284:

    Oops Two very depressing snippets of news, indicating that the ideologues of the right, all the way out to actual racist fascists are really on the loose. - C-19 being used by the Brexshiteers as an excuse for the British Juche and what looks like actual Nazism Euw.

    285:

    Aus isn't just a "big island", it's a land mass approximately the size of the continental USA, with a population of 25 million, of whom 16M live in just five cities (Sydney: 5.3M, Melbourne: 5.1M, and 5.7M between Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide).

    Think of "land area of the United States; population 9 million".

    To get any emptier than that you need to visit Antarctica, or maybe the Atacama or Gobi deserts or the more remote parts of Siberia.

    286:

    You may not be up-to-date with what's happening in desktops recently -- hardware that matches the cost of a high-end phone in the 500-buck price range vastly outperforms any fondleslab in terms of graphics and processing capability. I'm only seeing support for USB3.1 in the current high-end 5G-capable offerings from Qualcomm for example and there's no mention of PCIe lanes to support high-speed nVME storage.

    There's also the weird idea that folks should bring their phone to work to be ABLE to work -- they are fragile devices both in terms of attack surface when away from a secure corporate network as well as mechanically (very few folks will ever drop a desktop or even a laptop down a flight of stairs in their day-to-day affairs). Laptops have the ability to do content creation on-the-road in a unitary piece of hardware that can be locked down to a corporate VPN at all times when away from the office, a personal phone used for Facebook and Twitter should never be allowed anywhere near business operations.

    287:

    Also, what sorts of reference works do you writers use and find helpful from time to time? I have my trusty Oxford Concise English Dictionary and Thesaurus which I find useful for some of the things I read with unusual/specialised vocabulary. I also have a copy of Roget's Thesaurus, because I find the listing of synonyms and antonyms helpful. The Oxford Concise English Thesaurus doesn't do this - it only lists synonyms.

    A lot of US publishers try and nail everything down with Strunk & White or the Chicago Manual of Style.

    I'm currently happy to simply agree on a dictionary with my editors. Typically, as I write primarily for the US market, we use whatever version of the Oxford Dictionary ships on my Mac, with appeals permitted to Urban Dictionary and/or the Jargon File for special cases -- just cite a source and stick to the established usage. Oh, and the copy editor should compile a style sheet with character names and non-standard or made-up words alphabetized, to aid the typesetters and proofreaders.

    But as my current editor for the Laundry Files puts it, in any SF or fantasy novel it is normal for the author to re-invent the grammar and vocabulary of the English language to suit their needs. So internal consistency is more important than sticking to the prescriptions of some manual designed for academic or technical pieces.

    288:

    Yes, the lower-level of infection/fatality amongst us pinkoes is interesting. FUCK "political hot poatao" find out what is happening - almost certainly inherent genetic difference of some sort or another ....

    Consider social factors too. Jobs, households, incomes, even customs — all will impact health outcomes, and are often correlated with so-called "race".

    289:

    A general rule of thumb is:

    • The larger the device, the more useful it is for content creation

    • The smaller the device, the more portable it is, hence useful for communication/remote working

    Also there's a pronounced bias towards smaller devices for content consumption except in special cases (games that support multiple monitors/high-end GPUs: movies designed for cinematic performance).

    If I was speccing out a business's internal operations, then for office workers I'd expect everyone to have a phone (as point of contact), a laptop[*] for ability to work on documents/spreadsheets/powerpoints and/or to telecommute, and a desktop dock with monitor, mouse, and keyboard in the office (optionally replicated at their home) as a productivity multiplier (wider spreadsheets).

    [*] "laptop" includes things like a Surface Pro with keyboard -- anything that runs a desktop-class OS. This doesn't include iPadOS yet, although there are Signs and Portents about the next couple of years.

    290:

    They've tried to correct for that, since earlier papers have mostly just said "that's probably the reason, it usually is" and left it at that. They reckon there is probably something more fundamental, but they don't know what.

    291:

    As the researchers said, the race factor remained after they had allowed for most of that. Yes, it was larger before, but not that much larger, and the error bounds went down following the adjustment.

    Researching this needs to go on the back burner, because it's a very slow process going from racial differences to any kind of treatment, but it's politically correct bigotry not to regard race as a risk factor and protect BAME people appropriately. Regrettably, that form of bigotry is almost universal among the politically correct, at least in the UK :-(

    292:

    Soccer players who you perceive as "very close" mostly aren't. Yes, they get close at times - but not mostly.

    Silly me. I was basing my point on watching my daughter play.

    I feel that many here are conflating that statistically you need to be close for a while with since they only breath into each others faces for a moment they are not really in danger.

    I don't buy it.

    294:

    Don't forget storage - even when used only for caching, local (preferably fast) storage makes a HELL of a difference when working on bloated files, such as are so common nowadays. But that could be stuck in any of the devices, even the mouse (!), as 1 TB doesn't need much space (or power) any longer.

    Similarly, many workers will need extra CPU power either in their dock or in a server with a fast connection to it. An increasing number of people use applications that use complex 3-D graphics, sometimes finite-element modelling and other CPU-hungry tasks. One example is civil engineering, including architecture and even things like plumbing and electrical work on larger buildings.

    Currently, I am trying to something very like the dual of this for my desktop (really, a server with graphics card, screen, keyboard and mouse), running Debian 10.3. I need to try videoconferencing, so am looking for a Bluetooth dongle to connect to my hearing aids, and (what seems to be a bigger problem) a simple USB 3.0 or Bluetooth microphone. While it's still a headache, it's immensely more feasible than it was even a decade ago, and the interconnectivity problems are much the same as for docking stations.

    295:

    big island

    I should have used a [sarcasm] tag. I know it's freaking big and very unpopulated.

    I took geography before my teen years.

    296:

    A lot of US publishers try and nail everything down with Strunk & White or ....

    I wish that thing would go away or admit that it is not 1856 anymore and the goal is to reduce pen strokes. Its rules for punctuation make a shambles of technical works at times by creating associates and removing some which are critical to meaning.

    297:

    Please read this piece https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/05/the-attacks-on-tara-reade-are-unbelievable-bullshit It takes a sledgehammer to the horrible USA todat hitpiece.

    298:

    An increasing number of people use applications that use complex 3-D graphics, sometimes finite-element modelling and other CPU-hungry tasks. One example is civil engineering, including architecture and even things like plumbing and electrical work on larger buildings.

    A current trend in CAD is to move to a server/cloud DB oriented system and away from the "file" system. So you do transactions against a CAD data set. Be it local, on your LAN, or in the "cloud".[1]

    [1] Cloud - most abused and overloaded term in IT. Well utill we pick a new winner for that award.

    299:

    Yes. I don't really "get" why the second amendment still exists. Well I do, but I think it's another thing... I believe it is:

    "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

    Yes, at that time, to protect the security of your state, you needed some form of a militia. A standing army would probably not have been desirable/feasible. But it does say that the militia needs to be well regulated. I put it to you that the number of gun-related deaths in the USA per annum does not constitute your "militia" being well-regulated! Quite the contrary in-fact. So does that mean that current gun ownership in the US is actually in breach of the constitution until such time as it becomes well regulated again?

    The other thing is, you now have perfectly adequate militias that are, on the whole, well regulated - they're called the United States of America armed forces, and your various armed law enforcement bodies. Don't they swear to protect the country from all enemies foreign and domestic? Seems like protecting the people from a corrupt government is built into their job description.

    So I don't see how private ownership of guns on the level that it currently is in the US is in any sense a good idea. Certainly not open or concealed carry by private citizens on a daily basis. In the UK, I wonder if the gun laws are now a little too strict? Many years ago I worked with someone who was into target shooting and used to compete at Bisley etc. After Hungerford or Dunblane, not sure which, he was saying that a lot of recreational shooters, including himself, were having to give up because they couldn't afford regular travel to the continent to practice. For example, could you have private guns kept securely at a club, only issued for use on the premises and checked they were returned before anyone left?

    The hunting thing is not such an issue in the UK, but maybe you could do something along those lines as well?

    300:

    I'm not going to name any names, this being a blog under UK law, but the latest rumor in Democratic circles is that Biden's favorite VP candidate is the woman I'd picked as "most likely to be a sociopath" during the Democratic Primary. I'm not happy over this.

    301:

    The other thing is, you now have perfectly adequate militias that are, on the whole, well regulated - they're called the United States of America armed forces, and your various armed law enforcement bodies. Don't they swear to protect the country from all enemies foreign and domestic? Seems like protecting the people from a corrupt government is built into their job description.

    Legally they are not the same. And the bar for removing or adding an amendment is very very high. So they tend to stick unless you have something like 80% sentiment to add or remove one. (It is state by state so the popular sentiment is an indicator of the situation.)

    James Madison, who in many ways was the author of the Constitution and the first amendments, realized that the militia model just didn't work after the pounding we took in what we call the "War of 1812". But by that time the amendment was "there". (The main reason we came of that that fight mostly intact was that the British were too busy dealing with the French to treat us as more than a side show.)

    302:

    A couple notes on this. First, that in the last 5-10 years they have created some blood thinners which are much more stable. Second, that taking blood thinners should only be done in the hospital, with suitable monitoring, (or by three visits a week from a home-health nurse) and if your friend suffered from bad side-effects I'm guessing their blood was not properly monitored.

    Meanwhile, my anti-COVID routine involves a multivitamin with D-3 and zinc, plus an aspirin every day - to help avoid clotting.

    So what you're looking at with blood-thinners as a palliative is that you'd go into the hospital with COVID and you'd get a blood thinner and daily tests of your blood-thickness (I forget the technical term.)

    Here's a couple links, to a news article and journal pre-print respectively:

    https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/blood-thinners-may-be-linked-reduced-covid-19-deaths-study-n1201276

    http://www.onlinejacc.org/content/accj/early/2020/05/05/j.jacc.2020.05.001.full.pdf?download=true

    303:

    That is true, but there are also very strong reasons why many people and companies don't do it. One reason is that serious bandwidth still costs real money and, if you have a hundred people doing such work in a building with a server somewhere else, you need serious bandwidth! Another is the serious security and legal problems with allowing the cloud server to export your data to an unknown country - or from the EU to the USA.

    None of that has changed significantly in the past decades, so I expect to see both practices continue for at least my lifetime.

    304:

    No, that was NOT the case. She was using the modern, 'best' one, which has the problem that it doesn't have an antidote - so, if you get a bleed, it's hell to stop, even in hospital.

    305:

    "Right now this is all kinda hacky and DIY-ish -- the only polished version is Samsung's DeX -- but it's do-able and a sign of where things are going."

    Even the DIY version doesn't look too bad. The worst I can say of them is that they have too much of the Windows 10 design aesthetic. They're not what I want yet, but at least someone is thinking about the problem.

    306:

    Bandwidth is actually less in most cases except for a single user on a single computer. The vendors who have been working on this for a while (years) have gotten good and only moving back and forth the model bits you need.

    AutoDesk has jumped on this with Revit (along with rental instead of purchase). And they show no signs of going back. At all.

    And AutoCAD is slowly being abandoned. But slowly is a relative term. They keep changing the licensing options such that you really are pushed to Revit. (You get AutoCAD for free when licensing Revit.)

    There is a country's count of people upset at this but AutoDesk seems to be unmoved. Profit growth and all that. So there are now a LOT of people with AutoDesk perpetual licenses who say they will never upgrade.

    I'm not saying I (or my clients) like this or not but it is reality.

    307:

    I pretty much thought we were there when Republicans started talking about how old people needed to sacrifice themselves for the economy.

    308:

    Are there any forensic statisticians in the house?

    One thing that's getting occasional mention is that, no surprise, certain governments may fiddling with the reported numbers of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths. Add to that differences in capabilities/resources and sampling policies across different polities, and I'm led to wonder if there are any methods to spot suspicious data sets.

    To be a bit concrete, take the data sets in

    https://covid.ourworldindata.org/data/ecdc/total_cases.csv

    and

    https://covid.ourworldindata.org/data/ecdc/total_deaths.csv

    We have other reasons to suspect that the data for, e.g., Nicaragua might not be reported in quite the same way as Canada. I'd suppose there established ways to spot that just from the numbers, but could our statistically savvy readers say what those are?

    309:

    I think there are some other things built into the modern second amendment.

    Since I'm white, I'll point out the comments that the best way to get gun control in the US is for every black man to apply for a concealed carry permit. There is certainly a white supremacist element to gun violence that's extremely dangerous, as Greg and others have pointed out.

    There are a couple of other things going on with gun sales in the US.

    One is that the NRA is effectively the advertising arm of the American gun manufacturing sector. If you think of it this way, it makes a lot more sense. Their funding is primarily from the manufacturers, and their job is to maximize gun sales by any means.

    A second was that, until the gun manufacturers came up with the infinite customization model (using plastic parts, no less), they were going out of business. Why? They made these lovely guns that lasted for 50-100 years with proper maintenance. Everybody who wanted one had dad's hunting rifle(s) and shotgun, and they weren't buying new ones. Heck, even the push to outlaw lead shot for hunting (due to widespread lead contamination and poisoning) was a blessing, because it meant they had to sell new rechambered shotguns to handle the new (longer) cartridges coming out.

    Anyway, the last bit of the puzzle is that the US is a global hegemonic power, and one of the core industries we want to keep onshore, no matter who's in charge, is our small arms industry. I suspect this is one reason why democrats (let alone republicans) have had such a hard time stamping down, hard, on the NRA: without the NRA, our gun industry contracts, and then we have trouble making sure we have enough guns for our troops overseas. I mean, yes, we've certainly tried both legal and illegal exports of guns (the latter as part of the drug trade), but keeping our gun manufacturers open for business has turned out to be hard, at least until they started making plastic guns that don't last for decades.

    So we've been stuck, where American desire to be able to jump on people's heads around the world to Keep America Great (or whatever) seems to be linked to a need to keep selling similar guns at home, no matter what the cost.

    Fortunately for the world, the NRA seems to be in the process of self destructing, and the US military is massively overstretched as it is. So this era will end eventually and you'll simply be stuck with a glut of American guns washing around the world, rather than a glut of American military washing around the world.

    Unfortunately for the world, we're seeing the gun equivalent of fentanyl hitting the market, especially with the pandemic. By this I mean the ghost guns, where you buy the precursors to parts for a gun, plus the drill bit and jigs that you need to turn those parts into a working firearm. You use these to make a gun without a serial number, one that cannot be traced through existing databases. These were apparently hot sellers this spring, and they're likely to spread quite widely, and not just in the US.

    310:

    It's not the exact degree of empty of the Great Plains; I know there are bigger, emptier places. Even in the US, Alaska beats the heck out of the Great Plains for empty. (By gross numbers Alaska makes the Great Plains look crowded.) It's what the Great Plains empty is in the middle of. On either side of the Plains is the equivalent of a big country: 75M people to the west, 250M to the east, both growing, both of those in the top five or six countries by GDP in the world, both in the top ten or eleven by area (ignoring Alaska). Then there's this very large frontier-like area in between them. And getting more frontier-like -- the Great Plains population peaked around 1930, and continues to shrink in absolute terms today.

    311:

    I have experienced this for myself while visiting Australia in the 1980s. I decided that I wanted to see the "real outback" for myself* so I rented a jeep in Brisbane and headed east down a little highway that soon turned to a dirt road, which I followed for several days, seeing all kinds of wildlife, but never, ever another human being. And after a week or two of this I found that I was terribly, terribly lonely. So I got out the map and discovered that there was a town called "Mercy" which was only two-days drive away (driving sanely on dirt roads.) So off I went.

    Mercy turned out to be an entirely typical outback town; a general store, bar, and post office, all in one building, and a couple houses nearby, with some cleared dirt as the "parking lot."

    So I walked into the bar and asked the bartender for a beer. And he said, "No beer mate."

    So I asked for a soft drink.

    He said, "We've got no sodas neither."

    I asked what he had.

    He said, "we've got tea."

    I'm not a fan of tea, but if it was what they had... I ordered the tea.

    So the bartender leaned out the window and he whistled, and a koala bear came to the window. He pointed up a nearby tea, and the koala climbed it and brought back some leaves, which the bartender used to make tea. I took one look at the cup and said, "Excuse me, but there's fur in my tea."

    And the bartender said, "That's right mate. The koala tea of Mercy is unstrained."

    • Yes, I've been "Back of Berke"
    312:

    The larger the device, the more useful it is for content creation

    Hear, hear! I wish more people appreciated this.

    313:

    The whole militia thing wrt the 2nd Amendment has been made into a hopeless can of worms, of course. An interesting look into how it was evolving just three years after 1789 is at

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militia_Acts_of_1792

    And it kept going from there.

    314:

    Oh, that's nasty. But read the study, it looks very promising.

    315:

    I can tell you that tying down such shenanigans is hard, especially if the supplier is not being fully open about what it is up to. There are statisticians who are expert in such detection, but I was never one.

    Even in the UK, which SHOULD be respectable, the initial data was only people admitted to hospital with COVID symptoms who ALSO tested positive for it. After a fuss, it was then extended to deaths in care homes, but we have very little idea of the actual number of cases, and there's a potential underestimate of up to 30% in the number of deaths. After pressure from the (real) experts, the gummint finally commissioned a VERY limited investigation into its incidence, but that told us only how many people had it at the time they were tested, not how many had had it and recovered.

    Some places will be better, but many others will be much worse.

    316:

    Rbt Prior "Social factors" are part of "What is happening", surely/perhaps? Though I suspect it is a very small factor, given the much greater genetic & social variability amongst the non-pinkoes. We are a remarkably uniform set, genetically speaking, compared to the rest of the planet, yes? See also EC's actually cynical & true comment @ 291

    Charlie The Boss has her works-provided iPhone & her laptop ( Now sitting to the side of my screens ... ) & for mosty of her working from home is using this machine with its two large (23" disgonal) screens + failry secure wi-fi between the two & som bespoke software on her laptop. When at work normally ( WHat's that? ) she would also dock the laptop into a n other screen & bee linked into tohe inhous corprate network. Secure logged-in-&-monitored link here to do most of her works stuff.

    Allen Thomson The fascinating thing about that is how empty most of "Tas" is, as well ....

    Windscale THAT could actually be a serious challenge to the "2nd Amend" nutters:: "Is your militia well-regulated? Are you even part of a Militia"? NO? Tough, take his guns away!

    Troutwaxer @ 307 DON'T bet on it, given what they've got away with up to now. @ 311 ARRRGH! 💩

    Back to C-19 In Britain, the number of cases per day seems to be level, but not dropping significantly, but number of deaths seems to be in a steady (slow) decline. Better treatment(s) being arrived at? [ I note the comments on blood-thinners in the discussion ]

    317:

    THAT could actually be a serious challenge to the "2nd Amend" nutters:: "Is your militia well-regulated? Are you even part of a Militia"? NO? Tough, take his guns away!

    As Allen Thompson indicated, there is well over 2000 years of court cases and precedent about what those terms mean. And your or my 2020 reading of them don't count all that much.

    Gun control cases before the Supremes tend to be avoided by both sides. Each is afraid they might win short term but lose long term due to the details of a particular ruling.

    The latest fight involved a NYC law that was about to get in front of the SCOTUS. NYC repealed the law as they were afraid they would loose and the loss would involve setting rules worse than exist now. In their opinion. So the fight turned into a "was the case moot" as the law now longer existed. The anti-controls side wanted to keep going. They just recently got turned down and told to go home.

    318:

    I'm not betting on it. My opinion is that once your politicians start talking about how grandma has to be willing to sacrifice herself for the economy you've arrived at some kind of fascism, at least on the part of the political party which is talking that way.

    319:

    Ahmmm. 200 years.

    320:

    A long time back, in the days of Usenet no less, a discussion of "how empty is the middle of the CONUS" came up. Eventually someone with access to seriously large GIS data files came back with an answer, the most remote location in the CONUS. It was, if memory serves, about 20 miles or so from a road. That road was, again if memory serves, a logging road, unimproved and unmaintained but it was driveable by someone knowledgeable in off-road driving in a medium-sized or larger truck and it probably got more than one vehicle a year on it.

    There are probably places in central Australia that are 100 miles from the nearest road, maybe more.

    321:

    You can be getting on for 5 miles from the nearest road in a few places in the Scottish Highlands, and the nearest road is pretty similar. This often surprises people :-)

    322:

    I have a cousin in his early 80s who when he retired he moved to Idaho. He was a good old boy at heart even though was a jet pilot for his working career. My dad said to get to his house you drove 5 miles down a gravel road, then turned off for a mile or few down a dirt road, then you turned onto his property.

    323:

    I did, but 'promising' is a bit strong - 'deserves further investigation' is closer - which is essentially what they said. I agree that it's interesting, and is an example of how to publish such observational data and not mislead people.

    324:

    "They revere at least a part of the Second Amendment."

    Actually, no. The whole point of constitutional rights is that they are universal. The New Confederacy's view of the US second amendment is that it only applies to white right-wingers (like all other rights).

    325:

    GT: You might consider that 'team games' culture and practice have changed since the mid-50s. I played some team sports in the late 70s/early 80s and left them for similar reasons to your own.

    That being said my sprogs both thrive in team games, and I am closely involved in organizing the leagues and/or coaching. There is a great deal of effort, education and policy involved in ensuring that bullying does not happen, and when it does it is dealt with quite harshly.

    Sports are not for everyone, but they are really excellent ways for kids to learn to cooperate, to fail better, and to challenge themselves and each other in healthy ways. I'm sorry that your experience was unpleasant, but I must note that it was over a half century ago and perhaps things have changed in many ways since then?

    326:

    "The sad part is that Trump's had every resource to be a truly effective crisis leader and win the re-election in a landslide. "

    Trump's whole life is being subsidized, connected and privileged, screwing it up, and walking away while others suffer.

    Just like Boris Johnson, it's almost like he was groomed from birth to meet a moment of national crisis and fail.

    327:

    Greg: "At which point one starts to wonder, seriously, maybe, if simply taking reasonable precautions, but opening "society" up ... might, just might be the course with the lowest fatality numbers."

    mdlve: "If you are willing to tell anyone with Covid to skip the hospital and just die, perhaps."

    Agreed. First, letting the 'wave wash over us', a la BoBo (and really, Trump) would shut down the health system in each country. Supplies will have run out, personnel out of action due to disease or burnout, and facilities becoming COVID infection cesspools.

    The in-hospital death rates would skyrocket, and patients would be turned away unless on the edge of death, many to die at home.

    Anybody needing non-COVID healthcare would almost certainly be infected if they went to a hospital. And once there, they'd encounter horrible staff, equipment and supply shortages.

    The end result would be in the US several million additional deaths this year.

    328:

    "Anyone know of any SF movies or TV shows that came anywhere close to describing the level of dis-unity, insanity, pigheadedness, anti-science, etc. that we've seen to COVID-19? I'm thinking that an alien invasion scenario would be closest to a pandemic as it'd be a novel situation to all countries."

    The producers of the movie 'Contagion' said that they had talked with a lot of experts and experienced people, and the idea that the US government would simply not do their job was never brought up.

    329:

    "Yes, the lower-level of infection/fatality amongst us pinkoes is interesting. FUCK "political hot poatao" find out what is happening - almost certainly inherent genetic difference of some sort or another ...."

    Gaaaaaaaaaaaaawd, but it does get boring explaining life to some people.

    Greg, in the USA at least, non-white people have lower incomes, are less likely to be able to work from home, live with more people/square foot, will have jobs which are dirtier and more crowded with worse ventilation. If they get sick, they are more likely to simply have to go to work. They are going to hold off on hospital visits, and will get less treatment. There was a recent article looking at treatment for COVID symptoms; IIRC black people were several times less likely to be treated.

    330:

    Thanks for the comment. I'll have a look at Strunk and White and the Chicago Manual of Style. CMoS sounds like the sort of thing that would be written by an East coast version of Victoria Beckham or something :-). I guess, as you say, these sorts of things are less important for sci-fi/fantasy as long as you are consistent. If you are someone like J.R.R. Tolkien some of your languages are completely cut from whole-cloth!

    331:

    (a) This was the UK with our 'socialist' health care system and (b) the Oxford report adjusted for social deprivation, and found that it made only a little difference.

    332:

    Re: '... the idea that the US government would simply not do their job was never brought up.'

    And then the unthinkable happened.

    I've noticed on the couple of sci/med video/podcasts that I watch semi-regularly that the host and sci/med guests seem very hesitant to criticize official WH COVID-19 related policy on-air. While I understand that academics/scientists are required to be impartial -- speak to the data and only to the data - I wonder whether this level of hesitancy isn't being construed as tacit agreement with the powers-that-be thereby leaving the general public feeling that maybe "It's true that scientists are unable to come up with a rational/good argument against POTUS and his inner circle and that's why scientists aren't saying anything." As the death toll rises and long-term misery piles up, maybe it's time to figure out a way to be more assertive while maintaining the appropriate academic/scientific mien. This isn't 'only politics', it's everyone.

    333:

    I've noticed on the couple of sci/med video/podcasts that I watch semi-regularly that the host and sci/med guests seem very hesitant to criticize official WH COVID-19 related policy on-air.

    Today's Senate hearing has just ended. The summary might make for an interesting read/watch.

    334:

    Re Tolkein and 'whole cloth'. The interesting thing about natural languages is how similar they are in structure and some other aspects - there has been speculation over whether this is because our brains are 'hard-wired' that way, they all derive from a single ancestral root, or what.

    I have personal experience of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis applying in mathematics - until I learnt the 'language' of axiomatic theory, I couldn't grasp the concepts AT ALL, and after that I couldn't understand what my problem was. Conversely, I had no trouble with the concepts of measure theory (a thing that defeats many people) even before I had encountered it as such. Yes, just anecdata, but that's why I am interested.

    I have done thought experiments of what communication might be like if that were not so, with the 'intent' of having a language that couldn't easily express concepts that we can in normal English, and conversely. As far as I can see, this has been done in computer languages (e.g. Brainfuck (**)), but I would be interested to hear of any artificial pseudo-natural languages that tried it. It's a fairly standard trope in science fiction, of course.

    I thought of the following possibilities:

    One with no 'concretes' (think verbs or nouns), but only multiple 'qualifiers' (think adjectives and adverbs) and 'binders' - think Lisp, but with a few more parenthesis types. This would make it easier to express universal truths but harder to express things like 'the cat sat on the mat'.

    One where the basic concepts are those of measure theory and quantum mechanics, but my brain rapidly failed to get around that one enough to think of how you could extend it to everyday life!

    The above made me think of qualifiers indicating properties such as certainty, probability (which is NOT the same), directness of knowledge, specificity vs universality, all of which I miss in everyday life. Some postings in even this thread shows why :-)

    But, really, I never did much more than that, so please don't ask me for more.

    () https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesis (*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck

    335:

    And there's those of us well over 50 who are taking the low-dosage aspirin as a matter of course.

    336:

    a) You're full of it. b) thanks for deciding that all Bernie supporters are identical, and as naive as you.

    Oh, and you seemed to have missed that Bernie has done a lot in the Senate, including across the aisle (e.g. Sanders-McCain VA bill).

    337:

    The cheapest, and hence most common form of blood thinner is Coumadin/Warfarin (aka rat poison), and they aren't really blood thinners but anticoagulants.

    The drawback of Warfarin over newer drugs is that need to monitor the patient's INR and adjust the dosage as necessary. The newer drugs are more of a take and forget routine.

    My guess is that in a Covid case Warfarin would be the option chosen - cheap, easy to reverse, hospital will be testing blood anyway to adding INR non-issue.

    338:
  • May I suggest that you do NOT feed small children Calvin's favorite cereal, Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs, unless you have a way for them to sweep and mop the ceiling while they're running on it.
  • I've said for a long, long time that soccer (aka football) is a WONDERFUL sport for kids. Unlike most American games, the kids RUN for almost an hour straight, no long breaks in the middle. And sometimes, there are two games in a row. And then you take them home, wake them up to get them out of the car, feed them, wash them and carry the sleeping kids to bed.
  • 339:

    The Dems do not need Trump as a fund-raiser, the GOP does that quite well as a whole.

    And the Dems are always looking for money... but, kindly note, they have NOT sold out to the majority of the ultrawealthy, who range from right wing to Rupert Murdoch.

    The real issue with the Dems is the difficulty they're having realizing what's happening, like a lobster slowly being boiled.

    People like Bernie and AOC were wake-up calls, and they're still half asleep.

    340:

    Given that kind of smog growing up, I suspect that makes you a higher risk than your current smoking. (Do you smoke ciggies, or a pipe?)

    I am reminded of the doctors who kept telling my late mother-in-law that her years of smoking damaged her lungs... until the last one she had, who did an actual history... and noted that aluminum dust would be a real base cause for some of the damage.

    Before she was, literally, Rosie the Riveter, riveting wings onto Spitfires during the Battle of Britain, she was drilling the holes for the rivets in the aluminum wings.

    341:

    Here's a suggestion after you finish the first draft: read my article that was published in SysAdmin magazine about 14 years ago: http://www.24.5-cent.us/egoless_docu.html

    342:

    One wonders whether the higher number of deaths among males outside Europe is related to the work places with the greatest density of infections due to the nature of the work and the workplace, like many construction sites, where, I think ... the majority of the labor is male. Many of these are living in less than optimum conditions in the first place, with less than optimum nutrition.

    I haven't seen this gender break mentioned that much for the largest number of infections and deaths are in facilities for the elderly and long term incapacitated, and other facilities such as meat processing -- though the US meat plants' seem to have more migrant labor than native born. But both employ poor people and pay shyte and treat the labor like shyte too.

    ~~~~~~~~~

    In the meantime one is filled with bitter amusement at the irony that the EU, working out its guidelines for travelers who will be allowed into its member nations, will not be allowing those from either the UK or the US in. Only those travelers from places that have dealt meaningfully, and decreased the rate of death and infection to very low levels will be allowed. The US and Brits are on the list of nations that haven't dealt in any meaningful way with the disease, so we are most def not wanted, and who can blame the EU? Cubans, however, will be allowed. Take that Bolton. Raul. Not YOU.

    343:

    I'm looking at ycts in relation to where I worked before retiring. Users were told DO NOT run stuff on your workstations, run them on the servers. (Trust me, your mobile, or laptop, is a joke compared to real servers....)

    I was considering the idea of a dock, with monitors, keyboard and mouse, and then that for more storage, as well... but then, what's the point of the mobile at all?

    344:

    Yeah, the cloud underwhelms me. As someone who started programming for a living in 1980 on a college's time-shared mainframe, I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me the real difference between that, and the cloud... except that you have next to zero control over where in the world (and under what laws) your data is.

    345:

    EC #334. Chine Mieville does a fantastic attempt at alien language with "Embassytown".

    "The Hosts' Language does not allow for lying or even speculation, the Language reflects both their state of mind and reality as they perceive it; they create literal similes by recruiting individuals to perform bizarre ordeals that can then become allusions in Language."

    Much story is made of the introduction of 'lying' to the Language. An excellent read.

    Suzette Haden Elgin also tried to create a 'women's language' in her novel 'Native Tongue'. Her explicit goal was "to provide a more adequate mechanism for expressing women's perceptions". She went so far as to design the entire language and produce instructional tapes. The book itself was excellent, I can't speak (or speak for) the language.

    346:

    Robert Prior @ 92: You aren't a sentient mushroom.

    I have been kept in the dark and fed only horseshit.

    347:

    EC & Nojay: Try This area - central Cairngorms. The squares are 1km a side. Roads?

    Rocketjps About 15 years ago, I was walking through Cambridge, between pubs ( As one does ) & passed a moving, thin line of people, who were, apparently, heading for a footie match. Now, I'm just J Random Bloke, walking along. The insults & derision hurled at me, simply for "fun" were ... illuminating. Oh & I finally escaped from "team games" through a fortunate change in my (Grammar) school's streaming system, which meant I could drop the fascism at the end of the third form ... age 14 in my case that is, so September 1960 - effective July of that year, of course. The moronic & violent behaviour of any football crowd does not seem to have changed, one little bit. My local tube line has to be avoided if Arsenal are playing Spurs at home, or the other way round, for that matter.... No, not changed, one little bit.

    What my school did NOT realise, nor do the fuckwits pushing games "to keep fit" right now, is that spurts are completely un-necessary. I cycled 5 miles a day, every day, to & from that school. When they sent a walking-group to the Lake District , I volunteered, immediately. I was told by two members of teaching staff that someone had put my name down as a joke & I had to correct them. At the end of that time away, who was the last one standing, who had gone out every single day? Me, of course - even the super-fit games hero called off the day after ( A "free day" ) some of us went straight up the front spur of Blencathra.... And, of course, I've learnt to ride, shoot the bow & fence ... but they are neither "team games" nor official spurts, so they don't count, Bah.

    Barry I am quite aware of the disadvantages that "Black" people have in the USA. Their overall disadvantages in this country are nowhere nearly as bad, but they are there. STILL does not explain the difference - which is visible here, where unlike the USA we actually have a Universal Health System, which works, more-or-less. You get sick, you go & see the doctor &/or go to hospital. IT COSTS YOU NOTHING. Haven't you got that, yet? STOP projecting the USA's total lack of civilised care for its own citizens onto other countries. OK? See also EC @ 331

    SFR & David L Maybe the scientists are afraid? Trump & his goons can be vicious. Funding? Smear tactics & false allegations? They are quite capable of doing a Vavilov, in terms of social reputation & livelihood to anyone really getting up theor corrupt noses.

    EC I think that Sapir-Whorf ( Which I had never heard of until now ) is a weak guidance - it's true that some things are much easier or harder to say in some languages, compared to others, but ... As for axiomatic theory - I would have thought, that post-Aristotle & post Copernicus, it was "obvious" - but that is apparently not the case? You cannot express some mathematical concepts in "normal English" or normal any-non-mathematical language, surely?

    whitroth @ 338 NO First you have to pick up a frightened, trembling-all-over & mud-covered child, get him home, remove his clothing, wash him, treat the bruises & maybe cuts as well .... Probably give him, if over 12, a stiff drink. Or, if he has staggered home from school, where he has been subjected to the joys of a cold, windswept muddy field, populated by violent morons & then more-or-less changed back into normal clothes, simply help him get changed & then wonder about the stiff drink ... The ONLY running he will have done is to avoid being beaten up by the licensed thugs on the field, as he is never near the fucking ball, doesnt know what to do with the fucking ball, & hasn't got a clue what the fucking rules are, anway. HINT: I was forced into this for 2.4 years (complicated ) & I still haven't a fucking clue what "offside" is - oh & I don't want to know, OK? Be prepared to cope with screaming nightmares, wher you have to sit by him to get him to go back to sleep. This is only a very slight exaggeration, actually.

    HOWEVER @ 339 Yes, you've noticed. Similar here, especially with Labour under CorByn ... Starmer realises what's happening, but the "new tories" have a ridiculous majority [Note: "old tories" included people like Ken Clarke & Nicholas Soames & Ted Heath - now kicked out by the ultra-rights & the opportunists - Mogg & Patel & D-Smith as the former & BoZo as the latter ]

    @ 340 It was only for a couple of months & not every year & we took some precautions. No, I don't smoke, the fire risk is too great!

    348:

    Assuming you're being sarcastic in point 1.

    My wife and son kept getting into cereal aisle debates till I figured it out. I did a quick survey and told him he could have anything cereal he wanted. 2 rules. First it had to have less than 10 grams of sugar per serving (my survey was to pick a number that would eliminate the worst which was at least a third). Second he had to finish the box before he got to pick another.

    Ever seen a 6 year old rapidly looking at nearly every cereal box reading the nutritional labels? Well first he had to learn how...

    He had a sister 2 1/2 years younger. As she got older she was also a part of the decision as they both had to agree.

    Not too long ago she told me that a few times they had to eat what tasted like a box of dirt. But the both learned to read nutritional labels before everyone else their age. And that just maybe those ads really were not all that accurate. And this made it THEIR choice. Not mine or my wife's.

    As to your second point, we did year round schools and were in school most of the summers when they were pre-teen. We were also members of the local neighborhood pool. So after school/homework/dinner we would go to the pool for the last hour before they closed. Water would suck all the energy out of them. Bring them home, rinse off the chlorine, throw them in bed and have a quiet evening to ourselves.

    349:

    _Moz_ @ 94:

    I just don't see how we are going to accomplish it here in the U.S.

    You can't fail if you don't try.

    And right now not trying seems to be the strategy. Well, it might be more accurate to say that once "make more money" becomes your primary goal the strategies to accomplish that are generally obvious, and if you eliminate any that contain words like "long term" they're pretty simple too.

    Not trying IS failure. It's the only failure. Like Thomas Edison, I've never failed, I've just found 10,000 ways that didn't work.

    350:

    The New Confederacy's view of the US second amendment is that it only applies to white right-wingers (like all other rights).

    Not even that.

    Their view is that the US constitution only conveys rights to citizens, and citizenship is limited to white Christian[*] property-owning males. Property consists of land, plus chattels -- women, children, livestock. And livestock includes slaves (human beings not falling into the previously enumerated categories).

    If you view Republican judicial appointments going back 40 years through the lens of "this is where they want to take the US legal interpretation of the constitution" it makes total sense. And is deeply scary.

    [*] Catholics not included. Nor Jews, Muslims, atheists, or anyone else, really. Just the white male protestant patriarchy.

    351:

    Re: race as a comorbidity

    Yes. But there doesn't need to be any biological component to that. Poverty is probably a comorbidity. I haven't seen that analyzed. The only thing I've seen indicates the homeless people who show up at a shelter tend not to have serious cases of COVID, but one can think of all sorts of reasons, like, if they were sick enough they'd go to an ER.

    More specifically, I think living in crowded quarters is a big part of the reason why minority groups might have higher levels of infection. I suppose there could be cultural and biological factors on top of that, but they'd be "on top of".

    352:

    The problem is that Tara Reade isn't particularly credible. She's changed her story several times. And she didn't pop up with this until after Biden had nearly cinched the nomination.

    There's plausible explanations for every step along the way, but a long concatenation of plausible explanations loses plausibility.

    And even if she'd been consistent in her story it would have been a "he said/she said" kind of situation. No evidence is cited.

    So we start of with an uncertain accusation and then multiply it by a chain of "plausible explanations for the unexpected event". The witnesses are only witnesses that she told them a particular story, and they're remembering from a long time ago. And that's presuming that they're all honest, which is plausible, but not certain. The records that exist don't say anything that would allow one to justify any conclusion.

    So. Maybe she's telling the truth, but that's not the way I'd bet.

    353:

    I've also coached, and I can safely say that sports culture in the U.S. is completely different than what you're describing - and I'm very sorry you had to go through that!

    354:

    The problem is that they don't have a single, fucking, solitary clue about the actual demographics of the U.S. If, at some point they manage to arrange the country as they'd like it they'll find themselves in a civil war against approximately 70 percent of the population - and this time there will be no mercy to the racist side!

    355:

    "CMoS sounds like the sort of thing that would be written by an East coast version of Victoria Beckham or something"

    Fairchild/RCA, wasn't it? :)

    Me, I'd refuse to open either of those books. I'm only aware of the existence of such things through the occasional negative comment from someone on the internet who has to use them and is fed up with their shit. And they are American. They almost certainly contain a not insignificant amount of stuff which is ugly, clumsy or just flat out wrong (cf. Wikipedia's "style rules" which create spurious and confusing hyphenated compounds by demanding the omission of necessary spaces), and it would be wrong in infuriating ways which would then niggle at me and bugger up my own style by compelling me to silence the niggles by hypercorrectively going too far in the opposite direction.

    Certainly on the odd occasions I've used some word processing software that has a grammar correction feature, I've discovered its existence through it popping up to moan about things that are perfectly OK and making me wonder what the fuck it's on about. And if I bother to figure it out it always turns out to be some obscure American idiosyncrasy which has no relevance, which I wasn't previously aware of but which now jumps out of the page at me all the time when I'm reading an American book and pisses me off. Then I turn the feature off, and while I'm at it I make sure the spelling checker and any other automatic checking features I can find are also turned off, which I'd have done before I started if I'd remembered such things exist.

    See also David L @296. I've heard enough remarks in the same vein to conclude that the only reason to apply them to technical writing is compulsion applied by people who won't read it themselves anyway and wouldn't understand it if they did no matter what the style so are unable to appreciate the inappropriateness.

    I was never formally taught any English grammar either but I don't let it worry me. I've read enough books old enough for the authors to be competent users of grammar and/or the editors competent correctors of grammatical mistakes to pick up what appears to be a better than average command of it simply by assimilation. From reading your posts it seems to me that assimilation has worked fine for you too, and you would only do yourself a disservice by consulting formal texts. Especially American ones. Maybe you just need to jam a few pages down, for no-one's consumption other than your own, as a kind of warm-up exercise to get your self-confidence up.

    356:

    If, at some point they manage to arrange the country as they'd like it they'll find themselves in a civil war against approximately 70 percent of the population

    As long as they've got all the guns and money, they don't care. (And as long as they can deny guns and money to the other side, who's going to stop them?)

    This is not positive-sum thinking. It's not modernist in outlook. It's really, really primitive -- but it's how the beneficiaries of an authoritarian/aristocratic slave-state think.

    357:

    No, blood thinners are dangerous, even when necessary. They tend to make one subject to strokes and other internal bleeding problems in ways that are not readily noticeable.

    That said, they're necessary in the case of COVID, as part of what the thing does is cause blood clots. But that means you've got to balance dangers. My wife was on warfarin (cumoden) and switched to apixaban because she wanted to eat green vegetables, and that caused oscillations in the effectiveness of warfarin. Apixaban was problematic because (at that time) they didn't have an easy way to turn it off if needed. (I think they do now.) Well, this resulted in continual bruises as capillaries leaked blood, but it was necessary. She didn't develop a stroke or at least not one that was detected, though I haven't been sure.

    That said, she was on low doses of blood thinner. Outpatient treatment, and it continued for years. COVID requires more emphatic thinning of the blood, and thus is more dangerous. But it needs to be balanced against the danger, and sometimes they back off on the blood thinners, even as the risk of clots forming.

    358:

    Yes, Embassytown is a good example of using it in SF. Thanks for the other reference.

    To Greg (#347): that is part of my point that all natural languages are very similar. But, in addition to my personal experience, I have several items of observational evidence that there's at least some truth in the hard form of Sapir-Whorf (especially in the mathematical area). No proof, of course.

    And, as far as the Cairngorms goes, where you you think I was thinking of? I have spent some time there, getting away from people ....

    359:

    See #291 and #331.

    360:

    Yes. Would you prefer a bleed or a clot in your brain? Pick one :-(

    361:

    At least some of the doctors I've met have been switched on enough not to stop looking when I confirm I smoke. There are plenty of other contributing factors. Huge quantities of pigeon feather dust, various industrial particulates, the occasional lungful of chlorine or sulphur dioxide or other unheavenly gases and vapours. And an interesting one I discovered a little while ago which is some fungal thing you can get from aerosols of stagnant water, which I could well have done, and seems to match the damage pattern. This is on my list to mention when I see them next.

    362:

    "The interesting thing about natural languages is how similar they are in structure and some other aspects"

    Yes. I know no Chinese (I might recognise the character for "fuck", but that's it) and I am told that it has "no similarity" with the way Western languages work, but even so, if I come across some piece of Chinese with a translation which is annotated to explain what the mappings are, I can feel the usual pattern recognisers pinging vaguely at various bits of what's going on. Same with other totally unfamiliar languages - there's pretty well always something that rings a bell. Though I haven't seen any such translations of any of the really weird ones yet.

    "I have done thought experiments of what communication might be like if that were not so, with the 'intent' of having a language that couldn't easily express concepts that we can in normal English, and conversely. As far as I can see, this has been done in computer languages (e.g. Brainfuck (**)), but I would be interested to hear of any artificial pseudo-natural languages that tried it."

    You don't have to go very far to come across minor examples of that. Welsh and I believe Gaelic don't allow you to say "I like bicycles"; you have to say what amounts to "I am in a state of liking bicycles". They also don't have words for "yes" or "no" so you have to use workarounds like "very much so" etc. It's surprisingly common for languages to not have words for "yes" and "no", which you'd have thought were fundamental enough ideas that not having words for them was unthinkable.

    But there are South American languages with much weirder oddities. Like no concept of number; not in the "one two three many" troll language style, but not having any way to express the concepts of "one two three many". Or no concept of past/future or, I think, cause/effect. It would be interesting to see how these dudes got on with functional programming languages :)

    "One with no 'concretes' (think verbs or nouns), but only multiple 'qualifiers' (think adjectives and adverbs) and 'binders' - think Lisp, but with a few more parenthesis types. This would make it easier to express universal truths but harder to express things like 'the cat sat on the mat'."

    Newspeak. For a sinisterly twisted version of the second sentence.

    "The above made me think of qualifiers indicating properties such as certainty, probability (which is NOT the same), directness of knowledge, specificity vs universality, all of which I miss in everyday life. Some postings in even this thread shows why :-)"

    They're not unavailable, they're just unsupported. I sometimes find myself spending ages choosing words and rearranging sentences to convey such shades of meaning, and then having to explain each such instance one by one to people who have totally failed to pick up on it...

    363:

    You... didn't used to read Calvin and Hobbes?

    Trust me, you don't want to be a teenager and try to play Calvinball, it would be at least as bad, if not worse, than Greg's description of football (soccer) hoolligans.

    364:
  • Race: the question there is whether it's genetic, or due to most Blacks in the US having worse healthcare over their lifetime.

  • Homeless... a lot of them seem to stay fairly far apart.

  • 365:

    Yep. In the US, the hooliganist are probably (American) football fans.

    Our son was, I dunno, 9 or 10, and mostly it was parents and coaches, an umpire or two, in the park.

    366:

    Those were the kinds of choices we got to make with my mother in law in the last few years.

    Rectal bleeding. But mild. And intermittent. One of the daughters wanted to remove the cumoden and get her a colonoscopy. But she DID have clots in her legs and as the internist said "So we give her the full anesthesia, do the colonoscopy, then find something. What then?" Assuming the colonoscopy doesn't make her in general worse were we going to do abdominal surgery that might put her on a poop bag? Assuming she survived the procedure?

    She was 88 at the time. And obviously nearer the end than the daughters wanted to admit.

    367:

    The problem with invented languages is the barrier it puts between your story and the reader; the same is true with trying to write real, as much as they can be, aliens. Caroline (Cherryh) walked the line between wow and what?

    368:

    I was thinking of rather more fundamental issues than being unable to express a concept in a single word, or having a concept that exactly matches what you mean. I know about the languages with no tenses or numbers, but know nothing about them and how their speakers think.

    English and similar languages lack any method of binding many qualifiers (such as uncertainty) to specific parts of the sentence. Yes, you can do it, as you can express arbitrary mathematics in English, but may have to write an essay to do it - and, as you say, it will then still be misunderstood by many people. I miss the facility :-(

    369:

    he question there is whether it's genetic, or due to most Blacks in the US having worse healthcare over their lifetime.

    Or those are those just two of the major factors in an 8 variable equation? Well 8 major variables with a few dozen (hundred?) minor ones. Human health care is hard. Even for the best docs with huge resources there are lots of things where they can't do much.

    370:

    I took a look at the map ref you gave (it's the Cairngorm National Park if anyone else is interested). There are main roads (B roads but metalled surfaces) on either side of the park about ten miles apart so in the middle of that desolate wilderness the nearest actual road would be five miles away. That's not counting maintained forestry tracks and dirt-track roads accessible by 4WD vehicles which thread through the park, usually up river sides.

    The American location I made reference to was for somewhere (in the eastern Rockies, I think, up close to the Canadian border but my memory of the discussion is faint) where the only way in to that point is twenty miles on foot or horseback. Nobody had bothered to put a road in anywhere closer since no-one wants to go there on a regular basis. Twenty miles is about how wide the Cairngorm National Park is, pretty much so double that for side-to-side isolation of the most remote point in the US, assuming the GIS database wrangler was correct back then.

    As an aside I once tried to find the settled location in Scotland furthest from the sea, using maps and some graphics tools. Surprisingly it's only about forty-five miles or so, a surprisingly short distance. It's a small hamlet in the eastern Cairngorms (I forget the exact name of it). I had to guess where the saltwater tideline ran in the Tay estuary as a starting point.

    371:

    You... didn't used to read Calvin and Hobbes?

    My fav comic strip.

    Just wasn't sure of your level of satire / sarcasm so I prefixed my comment.

    Every first time parent needs to get a book of C&H comics before their child gets to the age of 2.

    372:

    20 years ago (at least) I read an article where someone/group did an analysis of the US and came to the conclusion that there was no where than you were more than 5 miles from human "stuff". Road, trail, regular path, etc...

    373:

    Birger Johansson @ 138: There were slaver's militias in the South to prevent slave uprisings, so this is the background to that particular amendment.

    I've always wondered why The Minutemen fought the Battles of Lexington and Concord and why The Green Mountain Boys captured Fort Ticonderoga? Now I know.

    Just so you know, chattel slavery was introduced into North America by English and Dutch Colonists. In the south that was primarily fortune seeking second sons of the English aristocracy and "City of London" merchants. When the English Parliament outlawed slavery in the U.K., they specifically exempted territories controlled by the East India Company.

    So, before y'all start your "slavery" bullshit, just remember we didn't create the problem, YOU DID. We're just left to deal with the legacy. And your record on the subject is no better than ours. If anything, it's worse because of the additional layer of hypocrisy.

    374:

    Let's just say you'd be surprised at how many American Liberals are "tooled up" or have the ability to be "tooled up" quickly and leave it at that.

    375:

    Nojay @ 150: I think you will find that that URL (www.newsbiscuit.com) is a parody/comedy site.

    You might want to engage your critical faculties sometime, preferably before the election in November (assuming you're actually an American citizen and entitled to vote rather than a Russian disinfo troll).

    With the nom de guerre "Birger Johansson" I'd suspect a Norwegian disinformation troll.

    The Russians don't have a monopoly, even if they have managed to take disinformation trolling to a whole new level.

    just my 2¢

    376:

    Minor example of global insanity:

    My cousin is a medical doctor back in Russia. She told me today that someone she knows managed to catch malaria (it happens in southern Russia sometimes), and now cannot get any Hydroxychloroquine because it is all reserved for COVID-19 patients.

    Hydroxychloroquine does not even work for COVID-19!

    377:

    I don't think that's entirely correct. Once they'd passed laws against slavery, the British (particularly their navy) did a great deal of work to make sure that slavery wasn't practiced anywhere. There may have been an element of hypocrisy (they were human, after all) but angrily blaming U.S. slavery on the British... it doesn't quite work. We practiced it too enthusiastically for too long not to take full responsibility. (The revolution could have freed everyone.)

    378:

    I don't recall writing that blood thinners weren't dangerous. I said that they "are more stable now." I also noted that they should only be taken in a hospital, or when monitoring through a home-health agency is available. But yes, they are bloody dangerous, and I know because my wife was also on them for years!

    379:

    The unorganized militia in the US consists of all able-bodied men ages 17–45. So that won't fly.

    380:

    Troutwaxer @ 159: The Democrats are definitely disappointing. I'm not sure Tara Reade is credible - she's made a number of posts on Twitter praising Putin, among other things - but the Democrats were perfectly capable of screwing up an election against Donald Trump, so who knows how badly they'll do running Biden?

    There's also "credible" evidence Reade has a problem with financial irregularities (the leader of a horse rescue group Reade "worked with" has accused her of embezzlement and has the receipts to back it up). And there's also some evidence (court records) she wrote bad checks at about the time she was let go from Biden's staff.

    She may have been let go before her "lifestyle" could blow up on Biden's Senate office. She can say anything she wants to about Biden secure in the knowledge that her personnel records will remain confidential. Biden couldn't release them even if he wanted to no matter what they show.

    381:

    The Second Amendment was the fallout from a debate between the federalists and the anti-federalists over who defeated the British: was it the Continental Army (funded by the Continental Congress and led by George Washington), or the individual colonial militias (e.g. the Minutemen in Boston)? (All participants ignored the major role France played in winning the war).

    The federalists mostly won the argument, but 2A is a concession to the anti-federalists that the militias did play a helpful role in the Revolution and that the states should be able to maintain their own militias after the war.

    That OG debate from the 1780s echoes ever so faintly in modern views about individual firearm ownership being essential for self-defense and as the "final bulwark against tyranny" - but in their current hypertrophied form, those views have twisted the original 2A out of all recognition and pushed it to a place the Founders would find horrifying.

    The true modern expression of those colonial militias is the National Guard system. They're nominally under the control of each state, and the governor can call out their state's National Guard to respond to emergencies etc. But they can also be called up by DOD in times of national need.

    Regarding the NRA as principal sales rep for the arms manufacturers: as recently as the 1960s, the NRA advocated restricted gun licensing, arguing that guns needed to be kept out of the hands of irresponsible, inner city, slum dwellers who couldn't be trusted with firearms. Which of course is code for "anyone who isn't Caucasian." It's ... interesting ... to contemplate how they evolved from that position to their modern "pry it from my cold dead hands" stance, and why they no longer feel the need to legislate against people of color owning guns.

    382:

    Charlie @ 350 Including, of course, removal of voting ( & all other rights) from WIMMIN - yes? Do they really think they can get away with it? I suppose the answer is yes, given The Handmaid's Tale

    Troutwaxer Sorry, but you really have no idea of what vicious little sub-teenage ( 11-14) yr old thugs can get away with when teacher isn't directly watching! In the short time I was teaching, I was all-too-aware of this & watched it like a hawk & I'm still sure some little arseholes managed to get away with it. @ 354 Who will have tje local guns & organisation? Probably the fascists ... um.

    See also Charlie saying: As long as they've got all the guns and money, they don't care

    JBS Stop it! We also got rid of slavery, long before you. Ruled, defintively illegal in England in 1772, trading ruled illegal in 1807 & finally, everywhere in 1832/3 ( By which time, practically, only the W Indes had it. ) YOU COULD HAVE DONE THE SAME, but deiberately chose not to. Also: And your record on the subject is no better than ours. Bollocks - it's a YouTube video - Wwatch it? As Troutwaxer also points out - do watch that video?

    383:

    Elderly Cynic @ 175: Singles tennis and badminton, bowls and even fencing.

    And if you're really slick, you can get them to pay YOU to allow them to paint that fence.

    384:

    Yes. Would you prefer a bleed or a clot in your brain? Pick one :-(

    Blood thinners don’t reliably prevent clotting in people with COVID-19 (article in 8-May Nature).

    I'm not a hematologist. The basics I found out are: --There's no prevailing hypothesis for how the virus is causing blood clots in 20-30% of seriously ill patients. --Blood clots are the result of signalling cascades in at least three separate systems within humans, so there appear to be well over a dozen possibilities where a biochemical screwup might cause a clot. --Anticoagulants interfere with specific steps in specific cascades. Again I'm not a hematologist, but I can easily see an anti-coagulant being utterly ineffective if it blocks the wrong step in the wrong cascade from where the virus is causing trouble.

    I'd hypothesize that, without knowing how the virus is triggering coagulation in some detail, figuring out which anticoagulants might be effective will take a lot of experimentation. The fact that medical researchers who actively work in this field haven't solved the problem yet STRONGLY suggests to me that the answer isn't obvious or easily determined, especially given that we're talking about tens to hundreds of thousands of people dealing with clotting caused by covid-19.

    385:

    Heteromeles noted: “Now we sit back and wait for the Canadians to start giggling about us short distance haulers and our silly ideas about what a lonely highway is.”

    It me. Three anecdotes (with all numbers rendered approximate by age and passage of time): First, in Forestry grad school, we took our Korean student with us from Toronto to our study site in northern Ontario. We warned him we’d be driving 10+ hours straight, and he didn’t buy it. He did the “are we there yet?” thing every couple hours. Finally, he sighed and said that had we been doing this from his home town, we’d be in Beijing by now. Second, we once took a Belgian forester up a firewatch tower in northern Ontario, with nothing but trees to every horizon. He grinned and noted that what he could see from the tower was larger than his country. Third, I fondly recall the “you are now entering Iroquois Falls -- city center, 118 km” road sign. Yeah, a regional municipality.

    Pigeon noted (about style manuals): “Me, I'd refuse to open either of those books. I'm only aware of the existence of such things through the occasional negative comment from someone on the internet who has to use them and is fed up with their shit.”

    I’ve been editing professionally for something like 33 years now. My heretical opinion? If you edit a manuscript so that the words are clear and well organized, and you make a reasonable effort at consistency, you don’t need a style guide. Nobody except an editor will ever notice. (Though as Charlie notes, good authors and editors both make “style sheets” to list all the style decisions they made. These help editors figure out what the author did and help proofreaders impose consistency by figuring out what the editor did.)

    Pigeon ralso noted “I know no Chinese (I might recognise the character for "fuck", but that's it) and I am told that it has "no similarity" with the way Western languages work”

    Nonsense. (And I say this as someone who does speak a bit of Putonghua.) Pretty much any Terran language shares the concepts of nouns, verbs, adjectives, tenses, and on and on. But there are always quirks. Like Chinese uses particles (e.g., “ma” at the end of a sentence to indicate a question), and has 4 to 8 tones, depending on the dialect, that change the romanized pinyin spelling to a different meaning. My daughter once showed me a ca. 200-word story composed exclusively of the word “ma”, but with different tones to distinguish 8 different meanings. (I have a terrible time with Chinese because I have the Canadian end-of-sentence uptick, which is a Chinese tone and changes the meaning. I used to order tea in a restaurant and get handed a fork: both words are “cha”, but with different tones.) My recollection is that Chinese verbs tend to come at the end of the sentence, but I’d have to confirm that, and there are other words (I’m blocking on the technical term) Chinese uses to describe objects that are (for example) like a sheaf of paper (e.g., in English, a piece of pizza) and so on. But the larger point is that there are almost always similarities between languages that give you a hook to learn the language. I say that as someone who speaks English natively, French with reasonable fluency, Italian competently (after I brush up on my verbs and disentangle the conjugations from the French conjugations), Japanese a little when I freshen my memory, Chinese enough to be polite, and a smattering of a handful of other languages.

    386:

    Hey, we devious frenchies managed to sell most of our slavery problem to USA in 1803.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Purchase

    ( and we are also the proud creators of the "code noir" )

    ( and we forced haiti to pay for their hard won freedom )

    ...

    387:

    "Republican judicial appointments going back 40 years" - cf. the idea of the "Constitution In Exile" (https://www.constitution.org/cons/exile/0409.sunstein.html).

    388:

    20 years ago I worked in the Northern reaches of Alberta and BC as a treeplanter (for about a decade). Even in the most remote areas it was difficult to find a spot where you could not at least see or hear some kind of human machinery.

    Great circle aircraft navigation was a part of it, but at least in summer during the day I could usually hear truck, saw, plane, helicopter or other machine somewhere in the distance. This was in places that were often an half hour helicopter ride away from the nearest viable logging road.* **

    *Said helo rides being billed at $750 and $1200/hr so great effort and offroad navigation went into ensuring that the actual flight was as short as possible.

    **Viable meaning non-reclaimed. Current policy was for roads to be dug up and returned to something resembling a state of nature after industry was finished in the area, as a part of the conditions of the lease.

    389:

    whitroth @ 213: And one last thing, and if you have never heard it, you should, Charlie: Stan Rogers' Mary Ellen Carter.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQpf0aCj-64

    "Three dives a day in a hardhat suitand twice I've had the bends"

    I don't just know it, I've sung it many, many times.

    It's in Rise Up Singing which I just happened to have out and laying here on my desk, open to page 203 (which also has Jamaica Farewell and The John B. Sails on the same page.

    I also have a genuine Reader's Digest Flag Decal sticker paper-clipped to page 6 in honor of John Prine.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlofnxJxMIQ

    390:

    I'm not so sure about how many similarities there are among human languages.

    For instance, there are languages (especially among Native Americans) where a sentence can be one compound word. There's an African language with 11 "genders" (categories that would be gendered in other languages. There's Piraha, which the linguist who studies it swears has no recursion, although the followers of Noam Chomsky say that's impossible. There's Korean, which has relative levels of honorifics as verb suffixes and pronouns, but mostly lacks gender and gets weird about whether sentences should have subjects or referents. And so forth.

    Human language may well be one of those things where it will turn out, if anybody does sufficient analysis before they commit theories like Sapir-Whorf, that there's a fairly large possibility space that languages occupy. It's bounded by human anatomy and physiology in one set of dimensions, sensory abilities in another, and cognitive diversity on a third set. The known human languages (including, of course, sign languages, musics, and mathematics) pretty much fill that entire space. Theorizing about which of the dimensions is primary or essential will misclassify a good chunk of the diversity, no matter what the theory happens to be.

    For example, it's probably possibly to create a non-recursive conlang that can get people through life. It's certainly possible to create a nonverbal language with which to communicate, and it's entirely possible to create concepts (as in math) which cannot be readily communicated in spoken English, quantum theory being one of the most notorious we've run into here.

    391:

    whitroth @ 220: I am, of course, instantly reminded of the old usenet story of the guy who stole a RATO bottle, and attached it to his car....
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JATO_Rocket_Car

    Back in August 2000, Wired Magazine had an entertaining, plausible article from an anonymous guy who thinks he and his friends may have been responsible for the origin of that story.

    https://www.wired.com/2000/08/rocketcar/

    It's well worth reading even if you don't believe a word of it.

    392:

    Not trying IS failure.

    To Trump, which is the context I was discussing, failure is only possible if you are seen to try. And then only if you can't blame someone else.

    Especially in this case, where the alternative to a "not trying state" is a "failed state"... how many mass graves do you need before we can start calling Trump a "man of steel" as well?

    (Viz, there was that Georgian guy, and then Shrub called John Howard that during the Crusade Against Terrorism. And now this)

    393:

    And here was me just enjoying the thought of a falcon using rocket boosters to climb faster. Now you mob are all "but what if there was a cop car with bigger rockets chasing the falcon" and presumably then "what if there was a big truck, with even bigger rockets, coming the other way" or something.

    "I dunno why she swallowed the fly, I guess she'll die".

    394:

    whitroth @ 221: The rest of the Amendment indicates that's wasn't vaguely the only reason. #1 reason was the intent of the Founding Fathers, as I learned in school, NOT TO HAVE A STANDING ARMY, and so armed citizens, at the call of the governor, could be called out.

    See also: Constitution for the United States - Article 1, Section 8, paragraphs 14, 15 & 16: (Enumerated Powers of Congress)

    1: The Congress shall have Power ...
    14: To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;
    15: To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;
    16: To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

    Emphasis added by me. The Second Amendment does not over-ride or annul these Constitutional provisions, it amplifies them.

    The regular army has wanted to disband the National Guard even before it became the National Guard. Congress won't let them do that because the Constitution & Second Amendment says they can't.

    395:

    The novel To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee, 1960, is a school staple in the US and is (also) about accusations believed unquestioningly for sub-cultural vs other-sub-culture reasons. Well, used to be a staple; less so since complaints that the novel indulges in classist stereotyping and demonization of poor rural "white trash" the treatment of racism in Maycomb was not condemned harshly enough. After reading that currentaffairs job, one might be left with the impression that the author, if on the jury in the Tom Robinson trial in the novel, would have vehemently argued for the veracity of Mayella Ewell's account (she being female (and white)), and for the guilt of Tom Robinson (he being male, and black).

    396:

    Michael Cain @ 227:

    This is not your father's confederacy. Much of their strength is in the Old Northwest (Ohio River watershed) and the far northwest; states that were not part of the Confederate States of America.

    The states carved out of the old Northwest Territories not only weren't part of the Confederacy, they were staunch Union supporters. Even at that time the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers were an import export route for those states and they knew that would get at least expensive if a CSA controlled the Lower Mississippi.

    That's my point. These NEO-Confederates are NOT from the old south. The largest contingent of the KKK during it's resurgence in the nineteen-tens & ninteen-twenties was in Ohio & Indiana; states that were NOT part of the former "Confederacy".

    Your view of "far northwest" is apparently different than mine. Oregon and Washington are heavily Democratic. Montana is an odd place, but will likely come out of this November with Democrats for governor and both US Senators. Idaho fits, I suppose, but that's also changing rapidly: the California Diaspora has been a thing for 30 years.

    They're also home to some pretty scary White Nationalist extremist organizations.

    Northwest Territorial Imperative
    White Aryan Resistance
    Wotansvolk
    White Order of Thule
    Aryan Nations
    The Order

    These organizations do not control the far northwest, but they do have considerable portions of their strength located there.

    Again, these are NEO-Confederates who have nothing to do with the former Confederate States of America. We have our own problems with race relations down here, but these scheisskopfs are NOT OUR FAULT!

    397:

    as recently as the 1960s, the NRA advocated restricted gun licensing, arguing that guns needed to be kept out of the hands of irresponsible, inner city, slum dwellers who couldn't be trusted with firearms.

    I don't know your age but I remember the Black Panthers "patrolling armed" in open carry jurisdictions during that time.

    398:

    Michael Cain @ 241: I don't deny that there are nuts everywhere. Prevalence is another thing. I responded to a comment that talked about states. And in particular, "far northwest" states as part of the new Confederacy. Metro Seattle, which dominates the state politically, would be surprised to find themselves classified that way.

    Metro Seattle is not the whole of the state of Washington. Nor did I claim that the states of the "far northwest" are any kind of new Confederacy. I only stated that the extremist minority NEO-confederates have much of their strength GEOGRAPHICALLY located there.

    They've got to be somewhere & that's where they chose to be.

    399:

    and it's entirely possible to create concepts (as in math) which cannot be readily communicated in spoken English, quantum theory being one of the most notorious we've run into here.

    Heck. Anything past first year calculus.

    "e i omega j" in no way replaces the equation unless you both know exactly what you're talking about.

    400:

    David L @ 296:

    A lot of US publishers try and nail everything down with Strunk & White or ....

    I wish that thing would go away or admit that it is not 1856 anymore and the goal is to reduce pen strokes. Its rules for punctuation make a shambles of technical works at times by creating associates and removing some which are critical to meaning.

    Ha! That was the required text for "English" classes at NC State (circa 1968). I'm pretty sure I still have my copy around here somewhere.

    401:

    Uncle Stinky @ 297: Please read this piece https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/05/the-attacks-on-tara-reade-are-unbelievable-bullshit It takes a sledgehammer to the horrible USA todat hitpiece.

    I read it. It's as much (if not more) an unbelievable bullshit hitpiece as the USA Today article you claim it refutes.

    402:

    Windscale @ 299: es. I don't really "get" why the second amendment still exists.

    Constitution for the United States: Article V
    The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress;

    Simple answer - It takes a 2/3 majority in BOTH houses of Congress to pass an amendment (which repealing the 2nd Amendment would require) and then that new amendment has to be ratified by 3/4 of the states before it becomes part of the Constitution.

    Yes, at that time, to protect the security of your state, you needed some form of a militia. A standing army would probably not have been desirable/feasible. But it does say that the militia needs to be well regulated. I put it to you that the number of gun-related deaths in the USA per annum does not constitute your "militia" being well-regulated! Quite the contrary in-fact. So does that mean that current gun ownership in the US is actually in breach of the constitution until such time as it becomes well regulated again?

    Arguably. But I doubt the courts, especially the current Supreme Court will accept that interpretation.

    The other thing is, you now have perfectly adequate militias that are, on the whole, well regulated - they're called the United States of America armed forces, and your various armed law enforcement bodies. Don't they swear to protect the country from all enemies foreign and domestic? Seems like protecting the people from a corrupt government is built into their job description.

    No. The standing Army is NOT the militia. And it's not the Army's job to decide when the government is corrupt.

    So I don't see how private ownership of guns on the level that it currently is in the US is in any sense a good idea. Certainly not open or concealed carry by private citizens on a daily basis. In the UK, I wonder if the gun laws are now a little too strict? Many years ago I worked with someone who was into target shooting and used to compete at Bisley etc. After Hungerford or Dunblane, not sure which, he was saying that a lot of recreational shooters, including himself, were having to give up because they couldn't afford regular travel to the continent to practice. For example, could you have private guns kept securely at a club, only issued for use on the premises and checked they were returned before anyone left?

    I don't think the current state of private ownership of guns is such a good idea, but the courts disagree and under our system of government they're the ones who get to decide.

    The original justification for members of the militia having their guns at home was because they could be REQUIRED to do so in the case a rapid call-out was needed. It also meant that the state government did not have to buy & store arms for the militia, nor did Congress have to appropriate funds for that purpose. Additionally, the "Founding Fathers" had recent experience with a central government (i.e. King George & Parliament) attempting to confiscate the arms & ammunition the Colonists felt they needed for their own defense, which is why the chose to decentralize military might throughout the states - to prevent some future central government tyranny.

    I just don't think requiring all personal guns be kept secured at [licensed] private clubs would work here in the states. What you're proposing is pretty much exactly what the "Founding Fathers" feared which is why they insisted on the 2nd Amendment in the first place.

    403:

    No, blood thinners are dangerous, even when necessary. They tend to make one subject to strokes and other internal bleeding problems in ways that are not readily noticeable.

    We need to be careful of over broad generalizations that aren't true.

    Yes, for some people blood thinners can potentially cause strokes.

    But one of the most common uses of blood thinner is to prevent strokes - specifically patients with AFib take blood thinners specifically to reduce the risk of stroke.

    And not to minimize the risk, but for many people they aren't inherently dangerous.

    My mother ended up on warfarin for 10 years (blood clot risk due to paralysis from chest down), and my father was on/off warfarin for a period of 10 years (blood clot risk from AFib). In both cases, while monitored by family doctor they were both stable enough on their dosage that they only needed monthly tests of their INR, and it rarely required a dosage change after their initial 3 months.

    That isn't to say everyone is that stable on blood thinners, but it isn't as dangerous for many as being made out.

    404:

    The problem is that they don't have a single, fucking, solitary clue about the actual demographics of the U.S. If, at some point they manage to arrange the country as they'd like it they'll find themselves in a civil war against approximately 70 percent of the population - and this time there will be no mercy to the racist side!

    Demographics is a large part of what is driving them though - they can't accept that they are a minority in the US.

    405:

    Oh & I finally escaped from "team games" through a fortunate change in my (Grammar) school's streaming system, which meant I could drop the fascism at the end of the third form

    Yep, we know your school was run by a bunch of bullies.

    The world has (for the most part) moved on and that sort of behavior by staff isn't tolerated anymore.

    The moronic & violent behaviour of any football crowd does not seem to have changed, one little bit. My local tube line has to be avoided if Arsenal are playing Spurs at home, or the other way round, for that matter.... No, not changed, one little bit.

    It is something that is unique to UK sports supporters (and perhaps European football supporters, not sure).

    Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, fans of different teams quite safely intermingle both in the stands, stadiums, and roads/public transit before and after games.

    So it is not something that is inherent to team sports, but rather a problem with British culture...

    406:

    Hope I'm not double answering as I haven't read all the intervening comments yet.

    Currently 6.5% of GDP is spent on subsidies. So if a full PV supply cost 5% of GDP that basically means that if you redirected subsidies to PV you'd have money left over and wouldn't even need to charge the end user to make ends meet. (you'd probably need to charge to limit consumption)

    https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subsidies-a-closer-look-at-tax-breaks-and-societal-costs

    407:

    I agree that demographics are driving the GOP. For the last 20 years and more, they've tried to become more multi-ethnic, at least superficially. Remember the Bushes speaking Spanish and welcoming a hispanic son in law?

    Problem is, it mostly didn't work, because a coalition of the wealthy and the white supremacists don't seem to make a good coalition for more than a bunch of token Others.

    So what they're doing now is an attempt to cling to power by all means, something started by Newt Gingrich in the 1990s. It's not about the art of governance, it's about winning elections by all means necessary. It's nihilistic and evil, and also, of course, very sad.

    One problem not brought up yet is the way the US Congress is set up, with 2 senators per state and 1 Congressm member per 485,000 people (more or less). Since the US is about 80% urban, and the big cities are concentrated in a handful of states, what this means is that the demographic shift of America is more an urban effect that's happening in a minority of places, while the rest of the country is increasingly aging, increasingly unequal (due to Big Everything), and their only source of sociopolitical power is the whiteness of their skin. That's a brutal environment, and it's being exploited by the party of the rich and the supremacists to let them keep power in the Senate. Barely.

    I suspect the problem they're going to have now is that Covid-19 will be still spreading through the deep red rural areas when Election Day rolls around in November, and the failure of the Republicans to do anything about it will be on full display. There will of course be protests and efforts to stop the election, because that's pretty much all they'll have left, after they impoverish, cripple, and kill their base.

    What's sad is that it may still work. I kind of doubt it, but I didn't see the pandemic coming either.

    Biden's best tactic is to keep a fairly low profile, draw a line in the sand that includes behind it the vast majority of people who want to social distance and continue other measures until there's a treatment or vaccine for the virus (https://xkcd.com/2305/), to work hard to simply unify the US with the rest of the world in fighting the coronavirus and building a new economy that's a bit more resilient to the next one. Then all Biden really has to do is to keep acting as a reasonably sane unifier while Trump does Trump, and he'll probably win, so long as he survives until the election.

    408:

    I have done thought experiments of what communication might be like if that were not so, with the 'intent' of having a language that couldn't easily express concepts that we can in normal English, and conversely. As far as I can see, this has been done in computer languages (e.g. Brainfuck (**)), but I would be interested to hear of any artificial pseudo-natural languages that tried it.

    Well, you don't have to go as far as Brainfuck to say that about computer languages. Brainfuck is basically a very reduced instruction set assembler (a RISC thingie in the jargon), and while it uses single characters as the mnemonics, there's nothing inherent in them. You could write Brainfuck more easily like this (opcodes invented just now):

    ADD STARTLOOP PTRL ADD ADD ADD PTRR DEC ENDLOOP PRINT

    And that's much more readable than straight Brainfuck code but functionally the same, with the benefit of being readable more easily by humans.

    INTERCAL, on the other hand, was a quite good attempt to mix things up, and I've never really spent the time to really grok it, and I think that wasn't the point anyway.

    409:

    About natural languages: I can speak languages of a couple different language groups at least on a basic level (Fenno-Ugric, some Germanic and Romanic from the Indo-Europeans, a bit of Mandarin and Japanese, and Finnish Sign Language). They're mostly "big" languages, as in millions of speakers, thriving culture and a written language, the exception being obviously the Finnish Sign Language. Small languages which might never have been written down and which are spoken by small groups could a very different thing from the big languages.

    My impression is that all of them can express the same things, even though some things are harder in some languages and easier than in others. They don't map to each other one-to-one, even the closely related ones, but then you can just elaborate and explain.

    The most interesting of these is the Finnish Sign Language, which is very much different from the spoken ones. It's more spatial than spoken languages, but of course has the time aspect, too. That is, many if not most sentences are just signs one after another. It plays very heavily into the thing that in spoken languages would be called 'non-verbal communication,' but I wouldn't perhaps call it that when it's a part of basically everything you speak.

    I learned it as an adult. My personal feeling is that it uses still the same language structure in my brain as spoken languages. The strangest effect of this is that I have a personal 'voice' for every sign language speaker, even I might never have heard them speak out loud. I can't describe this voice in any real respect except it's different for each person and feels like spoken voices in my head. At some point in the fluency I didn't even think about the different aspects of sign language but just spoke and understood it. It's still hard to translate to spoken languages or to writing.

    Of course also written language is kind of an add-on. It's recent enough an invention that I don't think we have inherent structural capabilities for it in the same way we do for spoken languages (or signed ones), and it's a skill that most people spend a lot of time learning. In the most formal forms, like legal text, in my opinion it kind of approaches the completely structured languages, like programming languages.

    410:

    fajensen @ 265 Your assumption is that the Democratic establishment doesn't care who wins, but only cares about the money. I think you're wrong. There's a lot more power and prestige in holding the White House and for lobbyists, the ones connected to the party in power do better by far. There are a lot of K Street people who work both sides, and they just change the mask there wearing this time.

    Biden isn't the ideal candidate, but he's the one that all of the Klobuchar, Buttigeg, Harris, Booker, Warren and other non-Sanders supporters could agree on. Individual voters in the states made choices, and Biden is what we got. I'm sure that the party leadership would rather have had someone with someone younger, with more charisma and less gaffe prone.

    whitroth @ 336 a) My opinions may differ from yours, but I'm rarely full of it.

    b) The Bernie supporters I met at the 2016 precinct and county caucuses were arrorgant, sure they were right, and cast aspersions on anyone that didn't agree with them. It was truly a disagreeable experience. To be fair, they were all under 35, and I may have been that way at that age too. You suggest that I'm naive. Please tell me how you make Medicare-for-All happen without 60 votes in the Senate. 3 months ago, I would have said, and against the wishes of all those who have employer-paid healthcare that isn't the best but who find it preferable to a non-existent pie-in-the-sky program. A lot of those people may be having second thoughts now, but 60 votes is 60 votes and even with Covid-19, I don't think that's doable. Please tell me who in the Senate you think would be eager to carry Bernie's agenda.

    c) According to the Center for Effective Lawmaking, in the 115th Congress, Sanders was less effective than the other Senator from Vermont, Patrick Leahy, who ranked 46 out of 48 Democrats in the Senate. These people layout their criteria for measuring effectiveness, and I do question it somewhat, but nobody else is making an equivalent effort. They ranked Klobuchar and Grassley as the most effective Dem and Rep in that Congress.

    d) I agree with you about the GOP's fund raising motivation for Democrats. When I make a contribution, it's usually right after an extra stupid utterance on the part of my Congressman, my Republican Senator or someone like Mark Meadows or Jim Jordan.

    411:

    Tell me alllll about it. And then there's things that they might be able to find... if they knew they needed to look for it.

    412:

    I think I prefer something further, like rockets.

    Alternatively, I think I could weld or bolt some hooks for a steel plate over the front of my minivan.

    "I love it when a plan comes together", he says, pulling the large pretzel stick out of his mouth.

    413:

    Beats head on desk

    And one reason that I REALLY HATE that sonofa bitch squatting in the WH is that that, or one of the others, is also used for treatment of lupus.

    I lived with a woman for almost three years in the late seventies, who died, early in '86, from complications of lupus.

    I donate to the Lupus Foundation occasionally in her memory.

    414:

    It's been a long time since I read it, but I have my copy of S&W.

    I got one, after I found out that my old, late friend, George Scithers (who won Hugos editing Asimov's the first six years it existed, before Gardiner), for folks who sent really bad manuscripts, he had that as part of his std. rejection postcard.

    415:

    Goddess, I can't believe how long it's been since that last time I saw Stan Rogers live.

    It also kept me going, as my second marriage ended (with kids more kids...), and before I moved to Austin.

    Yeah, I still have the copy of Rise Up Singing that K8 (my late wife) and I bought, after we learned of it at the Kerrville Folk Fest.

    416:

    By Klono's gadolinium guts... this one, I actually believe. There's enough details that it makes sense.

    417:

    A sentiment I've heard lately is the idea that the fastest way to get genuine gun control in America is simply to ensure that all the non-white non-protestants legally have guns and carry permits. Concealed ones would be even better.

    Things wouldn't be safer, but you'd certainly see rapid action in terms of laws.

    418:

    JBS That list of "White Nationalist" groups is scary ... reminds me of Germany 1919-25 (approx) WHen there were multiple such groupos, ultra-nationalist & xenophobic & militarist. Until one man took over a pre-existing oarty & started his march to domination, especially after relesae from prison in late 1924. Do those groups yet have someone to fill that role? Couple that with the aLREADY-DRAWN PARALLEL WITH hEINLEIN'S "pROPHET/sCUDDER" PREDICTIONS & ONE STARTS TO REALLY WORRY.

    mdive No, it was not. Outside the games area, the bullying was possibly less than in other places, from what I've been told. The control inside the buildings was, in fact quite tight. Which made the contrast even more stark, of course. And it seems to be confined to football. A few years back, the big stadium in NW London - "Wembley" - was rebuilt. Whilst this was going on, big footie matches were played in Cardiff. Now, for big rugby games, Cardiff Plod usuall had 150 extra cops on the street & usually about 15-20 arrests for drunk & disorderly. They had been known to manage with as few as 95 extra police on the streets .... For the big footie matches: ALL POLICE LEAVE over the whole of Wales was cancelled & there were lots of arrests. I've walked into a pub in London, to find it full of very pissed rugby fans ( It turned out "the Barbarians" were playing the S Africans ) People were slowly sliding down the walls, huge rugby fans fell over themseleves to let the nice young lady ( The Boss ) get to the bar, because she wanted another beer ... yes, really. As for "british culture" yes, there's the enforced masochism part of it ... the revolting Coe & the Olymic fascist movement are part of that of course.

    Mayhem Like it

    419:
    There are probably places in central Australia that are 100 miles from the nearest road, maybe more.

    Almost all of Guyane (French Guiana) that is more than 100 miles from the coast is over 100 miles from the nearest road.

    420:

    Indentured servants from the British isles were a big part of the workforce on many plantations and worked beside black slaves (I am told some peculiarities in "african-american" English can be traced back to English dialects instead of Africa). Of course, it was easier for an indentured White servant to escape.

    421:

    Thanks, I will check out Jacinda Ardern. .

    .Languages: The Aleutians have some unique feature in their language that was assumed would never exist in a natural language, but I do not recall the details. .

    Contamination: In Washington State a single choir member infected 52 others. Sars-CoV-2 is very infectious. .

    Re. trolls, -As I have mentioned before, I forwarded a link fron a source in Patheos (Dispatches From The Culture Wars) that usually is reliable. When they discovered it was a bogus story, I forwarded the retraction to those I had contacted, exept to those that had already discovered it. Also; after the "let's inject bleach" story there is no simple way to spot American-themed satire anymore. It is possible some AI might do it if you trained it on a million Tea Party/Trump stories. . Separately, I sent two links from the two British humor sites Newsbiscuit and The Daily Mash, which I assumed were as well-known to Brits as The Onion is to Americans. .

    422:

    One way to locate very sparsely populated regions is to look for artificial light on nighttime satellite photos -a simple way to find places suitable for amateur astronomy. Such places are increasingly rare in continental Europe ouside Russia. . I have one question about the wide plains in Australia; do the prevailing summer winds favor some particular direction, like the Santa Ana in California? If they do, it might be possible to create firebreaks perpendicular to the summer winds, planted with succulents cacti or other plants that do not dry out completely and thus resist fire. The introduction of such non-native plants would be a lesser evil than the uncontrolled wildfires.

    423:

    To get any emptier than that you need to visit Antarctica, or maybe the Atacama or Gobi deserts or the more remote parts of Siberia.

    You've been on your way to somewhere else like that.

    You drove through the Rockies past Banff on the Pan-Canadian Highway. And got to these allegedly empty "great plains" on the eastern edge of the Rockies.

    Then you turned left and drove North-North-East to Edmonton.

    So...

    Drive that same distance North-North-East again one and a half times. That's a fair distance.

    Now you're in Fort McMurray. Welcome to Northern Alberta!

    Then do it again.

    Now you're in Fort Chipewayn. Better be winter, because the "road" in isn't a road, it's driving along ice on the rivers. Watch out for the wildlife - when my dad drove that route, the car leading their convoy hit a moose - wrecked the car, the moose ran off.

    You've been driving on a river than runs along the edge of Wood Buffalo National Park, which has half the land area of Scotland.

    But we want to go further into the wilderness than that.

    So drive 200km across the lake, on the ice truckers' route. I hope you brought a compass, Lake Athabasca is big, you'll be out of sight of land in the middle. 200km will get you to Uranium City, population 73. There are roads here! It was a bustling town once! But not now.

    So head North up the rivers again, another 70km will bring you to Southern border of the NorthWest Territories.

    And now you've reached the extreme Southern edge of something that's going to get quite empty.

    424:
    Actually, no. The whole point of constitutional rights is that they are universal. The New Confederacy's view of the US second amendment is that it only applies to white right-wingers (like all other rights).

    But from their point of view only right wing white males are human, so "universal" means "for all right wing white males".

    425:

    The point of my original posting was that people think of the UK as a small, densely-populated country (because it is), but don't realise that part of it is sparsely populated even by global standards.

    426:

    Oh, I agree with that - my remark was about the general approach to 'preventing' strokes - because there are two kinds, it would be a balancing act even if there was only a single mechanism involved. And, as you say, it's not that simple.

    427:

    It is something that is unique to UK sports supporters (and perhaps European football supporters, not sure).

    Not "sports supporters", not European, not even UK: it's a very specific cultural thing relating to English mens' football (soccer) fan culture.

    Womens' football? Civilzed. Scottish football? Rowdy but not scary-violent. Rugby? Loud and friendly (happy singing drunks, not mean drunks). Cricket? Don't even go there.

    But English mens' football has had scary-violent fans for as long as I can remember. Some teams are (much) worse than others, and there are non-English exceptions (you don't want to wander around town in the wake of a Rangers/Celtic match in Glasgow -- there's tribal bad blood there), but in general it's the one specific sport and one particular demographic of fans.

    428:

    Oops. Thanks for the correction. I was really thinking of that, but 'reminded' myself off the net, and didn't check up carefully enough.

    429:

    Most of those things are details, though they do include the cases where things that are simple in one language are complicated in another. The thing that really interested me (and still does) is where a language can express concepts that WE can't express in any of our natural languages, because that is fundamental to the Shapir-Whorf hypothesis. Note that, as Pigeon said, you can express a lot more when you write an essay than when you write a sentence.

    I have many times observed the way that 'verbal' people are constrained by their language, though they can almost always be broken out of that box if you tie them to a chair and beat them over the head for half an hour :-) But I have also observed that phenomenon in mathematics and science many times - one classic example being the concept of a variable - if you compare mathematics before the 17th century with that afterwards, you will see a major shift. And I have seen what difference the lack or presence of that concept makes.

    The issue here is that it is relatively easy to extend the known boundaries of your conceptual universe, within its own restrictions, but incredibly hard to break out of it even to a modest extent. And, because many people think verbally, the language they use is an important part of that universe and its restrictions.

    430:

    Actually, there are some of us who find written language easier and more natural than spoken (and not just because of deafness). We tend to be well out 'on the spectrum' and sometimes more at home with computer languages and mathematics than natural ones. And, as far as I know, almost none of us think or dream verbally.

    431:

    This will only be the case if those countries have a sufficient entirely domestic supply chain for everything they need.

    NZ, Australia, Japan, and various other places are islands. They are vulnerable to strategic blockade. It turns out that they each had some very pessimistic strategic planners who long ago that lack of PPE, etc, is a problem in a war or disaster. And planned for it.

    As a New Zealander I was gobsmacked to discover that we've a chap in Whanganui who makes surgical masks, and has for decades been funded to have the ability to scale up production at need. Likewise other parts of PPE. And test swabs. Converting our local vodka distillers to make hand sanitizer turns out to have been in our pandemic planning for many years, and happened smoothly and quickly. The Australians are quietly doing similar.

    Strategic planning. It turns out that it's not just a business wankword. Who knew?

    It isn't perfect - pharma and testing needs to much, we're too small. But Singapore and NZ have some complementary strengths and in the first week of their lockdown signed a trade treaty guaranteeing no restriction on flow of medical goods, PPE, etc, both ways. China's still running an export-focussed economy. Trading nations are doing what they do - trading.

    Yes, there are shambling debacles - and your nation is unfortunate enough to border one. And the debacles make the news. But the world's not all like that. In lots of countries some fairly boring well-laid plans have been brought down, dusted off, modified to suit, and implemented. Many countries are co-operating.

    And the global scientific co-operation is truly extraordinary.

    There's an awful lot to be pessimistic about. But there's a lot of people doing the right things, too.

    432:

    The revolution could have freed everyone
    As it did in France. Until that cunt Bonaparte reestablished slavery.

    433:

    and why they no longer feel the need to legislate against people of color owning guns.
    No need to legislate against people of color owning guns when you can just shoot them.

    Black people have been shot to death for the crime of holding a toy gun in an open carry state.

    434:

    Yeah, people are different. There is also the way you learned the language. English is obviously not my native tongue, and while I did learn it in school, I mostly learned it by reading. I like to think I'm quite fluent when speaking English, but I'm still more comfortable with the written word.

    I tried to say that when 'writing is not innate' most human children learn to speak 'just' by listening and mimicing at a very early age. Learning how to read and write comes years later and many people live full lives without knowing how. I still suspect people on the spectrum usually learn the spoken language first, and then the written, although there are probably exceptions to this. Also, defining 'written language' gets a bit fuzzy, like using printed out symbols to communicate with people who do not speak.

    435:

    Hey, we devious frenchies managed to sell most of our slavery problem to USA in 1803.
    Well, that little part of the "problem" that Louverture and Dessalines hadn't taken out of your hands.

    There were about 30,000 slaves in the Louisiana purchase and about 452,000 on Saint-Domingue.

    And of course the whole reason for the purchase was that Louisiana was unsustainable without Saint-Domingue.

    436:

    I certainly learnt to speak first but, as soon as I learnt to read, I found it more natural. I suspect it's a repurposing of the high-level pattern-matching mechanisms in our brain, but have never seen a more informed opinion on that.

    437:

    Thanks all for the comments on 2nd amendment, I think it's all very interesting. That known paragon of scholarly authority, Wikipedia, seems to suggest that the modern equivalent of the original militias is the National Guard and a few others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Guard. I imagine that the National Guard is well regulated? Not too many National Guardsmen/Guardswomen going off the reservation and gunning down crowds of people with gay abandon?

    Maybe that's closer to the solution? Yes, you can get to play with guns. Yes, your gun comes with a commitment to the National Guard at no extra cost. In return, the National Guard is pleased to securely look after your guns for you when you are not using them for National Guard training purposes. If there is ever a need for the militia to be mustered, you will be issued your guns with your orders.

    438:
    INTERCAL, on the other hand, was a quite good attempt to mix things up, and I've never really spent the time to really grok it, and I think that wasn't the point anyway.

    COMEFROM considered harmful.

    439:

    The challenges of developing a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-05-safe-effective-covid-vaccine.html “We are encouraged by the evidence supporting the likelihood that immunizing against the spike protein’s receptor binding domain represents a realistic and viable vaccination strategy.

    440:

    I don't know your age but I remember the Black Panthers "patrolling armed" in open carry jurisdictions during that time.
    Which prompted Ronald Reagan, governor of California, to introduce gun control legislation, with the support of the NRA.

    (As I suppose you were hinting at, just wanted to make it explicit).

    441:

    Yup. There's a reason that the very specific phrase "football hooligan" exists, in UK English.

    Greg may be able to put a better recollection on this; I am certain that supporters of one of the London clubs were claimed to have trashed a railway carriage to the point where it was cheaper to write it off and buy a new on than to try and replace it. My memory says about 1981.

    442:

    COMEFROM considered harmful.

    Hey, extending the specification to allow multiple COMEFROMs from the same address easily added multiprocessing to INTERCAL!

    443:

    More good news… "2000-2010 drought in Upper Missouri River Basin driest in 1,200 years" https://phys.org/news/2020-05-drought-upper-missouri-river.html

    444:

    I've written a fair amount of documentation and explainers in my time and I've tried what you mentioned. My experience was it's hard to get people to really give you the in-depth and thoughtful feedback that you need to improve the stuff you've written.

    The people who were capable just ran with what I'd done. There was however, usually a vocal majority who would complain "I don't understand." When you asked them, "OK, what specifically don't you understand so that I can improve that?", you wouldn't get anything useful out of them. My impression was they usually were CBA and just wanted you to do their work for them. I got bored of people who had that attitude.

    445:
    Hey, extending the specification to allow multiple COMEFROMs from the same address easily added multiprocessing to INTERCAL!
    And any attempt to access the specifications or implementation if threaded INTERCAL comes back with:
    Access Forbidden This is an "Error Code 403" message. You were looking for the file /~malcolmr/intercal/ which you do not have permission to access.

    I suspect it has been classified as a weapon of mass destruction.

    446:

    I don't see that "the cloud" is really anything new. After all, John Gage said in the '80s, "the network is the computer". It's just client/server computing - wowwee - nothing new at all. The whole IoT thing is just a busted flush. "Oh, you're going to connect things to the network so you can access them? Yes, we've been doing that since the ..."

    The other thing is, bandwidth is not just the only limitation. If you take your thing and place it several hundred or several thousand miles away, the packet round trip time is a lot higher than the low or sub-millisecond response time that you're used to on your LAN. I've worked on a few things where bandwidth was not a problem at all, the limiting factor was getting responses back quick enough.

    447:

    It isn't. Before there was The Cloud, there was The Grid, and there was at least one other such marketing term before it but I can't remember the marketing term (possibly The Network?) Running applications on multiple computers, without the user knowing, is old hat and has been SOP for at least 30 years.

    The reason that there is so much fuss and bullshit is (a) the usual culprits want control of everyone's data, (b) the monetarist approach that outsourcing is always better, and (c) you can get moderately fast and reliable wide-area network connections cheaply.

    But good luck if you want the sort of serious bandwidth needed for complex modelling by a large number of users, or the reliability (and guaranteed low latency) needed for absolutely critical tasks. And good luck negotiating a contract with the usual culprits if you have serious security constraints. The UK gummint solved the last by effectively saying "any USA-based multinational is hereby deemed absolutely trustworthy."

    448:

    Maybe we need to have fund-raisers and organise arms shipments for the non-WASP communities in the USA :-D? Just to return the favour for the funding and weapons supplied by certain segments of the US population to the IRA.

    449:

    Your link suggested that complement activation by the roughened lining of blood vessels is involved. Complement activation can involve platelets. Asprin irreversibly inhibits platelet activation so maybe it will help with the clotting problems found in Covid-19 patients. I cling to this hope because I've been taking low dose asprin for years on the advice of the local eye clinic.

    450:

    I only have a sample size of one, but whilst I was in the US for work I went to an Oakland Raiders and whatever the North Carolina professional team was. The guy I went with was from just outside Charlotte and a big fan of the local team. He turned out with a team shirt on.

    The atmosphere outside the stadium was totally different a lot of my football experiences in the UK. Before the game everybody had the tailgates down on their monster trucks in the car-park and were busy barbecuing and shooting the breeze. AFAICS there was no crowd segregation. The only "negative" experience was when we were heading into the stadium to take our seats one of the female stewards told my colleague he couldn't take his beer into the stadium and that he had to leave it with her. He was a bit confused and after a bit of back and forth she said to him "Nah, I'm only joking with you Carolina, of course you can take your beer into the stadium!"

    451:

    and there was at least one other such marketing term before it but I can't remember the marketing term (possibly The Network?)

    "The Network Is The Computer" - Sun Microsystems, 1980-whatever.

    452:

    Sounds like I've been walking in a lot of the same places as you in the UK - Dartmoor, Brecan Beacons, Snowdonia, Lake District, North York Moors, Cairngorms, ... The only places where I really felt like I was in any way remote were in chunks of Scotland.

    453:

    Greg may be able to put a better recollection on this; I am certain that supporters of one of the London clubs were claimed to have trashed a railway carriage to the point where it was cheaper to write it off and buy a new on than to try and replace it.

    While I was growing up we had a collection of Giles Annuals*. (My immigrant parents missed the UK.)

    In one of them was a cartoon showing a flatbed railway car with a guard standing on in in front of a crowd of surly football fans lined up on the platform between rolls of concertina barbed wire. The guard is saying "Management apologizes for the lack of pull-cords, seats, and other amenities, and hole syou will occupy your tiny little minds with holding on."

    The comment below mentioned a trashed train…

    I read this in the 70s, so I'm guessing at least one train car was trashed in that decade.

    *Giles was an editorial cartoonist for the Daily Express, one of the British papers.

    454:

    hole syou

    Hopes you…

    Time for a cup of tea to wake up :-/

    455:

    I worked for a UK water company in the late '80s after school, and briefly (and not extensively) worked with some Programmable Logic Controllers/Telemetry Outstations that kind-of had a "come from" statement. They were made by a company called "Seprol" and you programmed them in a language called "Sercal." The company whose SCADA software we were using was called "Servalec". I'm fairly sure the SCADA software was called "Se-something", so there was something going on with the "Se" prefixes but I don't really know what!

    The language was quite a lot like BASIC. From what I can recall, you had eight programs and the way you task-switched between them was with an instruction that said: "When you run this program next, start at this line number." I guess now I would say it was a task-switch-goto-primitive, but at the time it always seemed like a "come from" because you had to bear in mind where you were coming from to know what you were going to do next.

    (This article https://www.environmental-expert.com/articles/servelec-s-technology-journey-with-wessex-water-over-thirty-years-case-study-836145 tells me that actually the SCADA software was called SCOPE, so not quite SE-something." The S50 and S200 outstations referred were the ones I had some exposure to.)

    456:

    Heteromeles disagreed with my comment about human languages being mostly similar: "I'm not so sure about how many similarities there are among human languages. For instance, [list of details]"

    You're getting lost in the details, and arguing from the assumption that I'm advocating strong Sapir-Whorf. I'm not. There's no question there is a deep underlying grammar common to all human languages: we all use nouns and verbs, and most of us use adjectives and adverbs. All the languages I'm familiar with (a small but multicontinental sample of the total) have verb conjugations or equivalent gimmicks to communicate tense and intent*. Were it not so, there would be human groups that became linguistically isolated and would be unable to learn to communicate with each other. Which isn't the case.

    • For example, if a language lacks tenses and verb conjugation, it will use the same root (e.g., I go) combined with a time identifier like "yesterday" or "now". For another example, my Chinese colleagues tell me that putonghua doesn't use articles much, but they're still part of the language -- just deprecated and thus uncommon.

    Some things become more difficult to communicate in certain languages; some things don't. But all the languages I've studied are close enough in their underlying skeletons that I've found hooks on which I could hang comprehension. Some of those skeletons are inverted compared to others, but the headbone is still the headbone. For example, Quebec French uses a lot of passive voice where English would use active. Some languages have clear and direct correspondences (e.g., verb conjugations in French and Italian); others require more memorization because of the differences (e.g., Italian vs. Japanese). Like chicken, it's all the same underlying meat, but what makes it worth eating is the diversity of ways to spice and cook it.

    457:

    I ATEN'T DEAD

    He remains with us.

    459:
    "Oh, you're going to connect things to the network so you can access them? Yes, we've been doing that since the ..."
    See rfc2324:
    418 I'm a teapot Any attempt to brew coffee with a teapot should result in the error code "418 I'm a teapot". The resulting entity body MAY be short and stout.
    460:

    It's horses for courses, really. I became closely acquainted with CMoS during my undergrad because its citation style is favoured by history faculties and journals. In that context it's indispensable. But otherwise, I haven't found myself referring to it that often. Although I do enjoy the monthly Q&A on the website – gives you a bit of the flavour of what distinguishes professional editors from the armchair prescriptivists (i.e. Lynne Truss).

    [[ html links require quotes: now added - mod ]]

    461:

    "Setting ethical guidelines for controlled human COVID-19 infection studies on human volunteers" https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-05-ethical-guidelines-human-covid-infection.html

    462:

    Laughs I kinda like it.

    463:

    If it had only happened once I think BR would have been overjoyed... or something. Football supporters used to do that all the time. They would smash all the windows and throw the seat cushions out onto the track, and repeatedly pull the communication cord for no reason even on the way to the match. BR used the oldest and grottiest carriages for football trains because they knew they were going to get wrecked. It's not entirely clear why they bothered to run them at all - maybe they reckoned that if they didn't they wouldn't be able to keep the football crowd off the ordinary service trains and all the ordinary passengers would be furious.

    464:

    I remember using a Basic dialect in the mid-70s where a RETURN n statement returned control to the statement n lines before or after the line following the matching CALL statement. Always seemed a tad counter-intuitive to me.

    465:

    That's the "humans are religious argument," which boils down to "religions are enormously diverse, mutually contradictory, and many societies integrate them into other practices, but every society has them." Well, no, that's an unproven assumption.

    Turning to linguistics: For example, one of Chomsky's rules is that languages must have recursion. Piraha shows no signs of it, but so few people were multilingual in that and English that more linguists chose not to believe the people who were reporting lack of recursion, even to the point of currently working to stamp out Piraha by modernizing the tribe with a clinic and lessons in Portuguese for the tribe's children.

    If a language is so into compounding words that a single word can be a sentence, is that word a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, or all of the above simultaneously?

    I've struggled and largely failed to learn Korean, but I do know that they have the habit of using verb replacements to a far greater degree than English does. A lead in sentence may introduce the noun of the conversation, which is then referred to subsequently by everyone else without repeating it. These can get into sentences without nouns. Which suck for learning.

    That's the point of the details: if you're saying about anything that there's no question that it's true, just ignore all the details until it fits, that's not a good argument.

    What is a better argument is that there are thousands of languages in the world, most of them spoken by small groups of people. No one can communicate with everyone on this planet, even imperfectly, without lots of help from intermediaries. We (most notably, Christians and Muslims, among others) have made a mighty effort to force everybody to communicate using a handful of languages, as part of this whole colonial imperialism thing. Yet despite might, bloody, and ongoing efforts, we're still regularly confronted with slang, jargon, and other exclusionary structures normally arising as people work to establish unique group identities and exclude others from their conversations. Note how these are regarded as either substandard or signs of stupid elitism by the language mavens? Is the argument for universal language good science, or an attempt by linguists to follow imperialistic norms and to exalt the importance of their field? As a far outsider, I simply can't tell.

    That's why I'm suggesting that language may be a the result fairly random walk through multidimensional space, rather than something that we've got "deep brain structures" that force us to communicate in certain ways. And again, if you enlarge that space by including signs, music, and math, the whole deep brain structure thing goes sideways. Where are the nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in a pointing finger, Mozart's Ode to Joy, or the equations of quantum mechanics?

    Here are some biology analogies that might help: --All life uses DNA. Well, some biologists are arguing that, since all life is interdependent on other life forms for day to day existence, we might as well include viruses in life. And some of viruses, as we all know, use RNA. --Well, fine, but those that use DNA or RNA use the same genetic code, right? Umm, there are some weirdos that have some mutant versions of a triplet codon here and there, so it's not entirely a universal code. Mostly universal perhaps. --But they all use the same four nucleic acids? You meant five, because of RNA? Not quite. There are some weirdos that use variants, which may be where people started getting the idea for drugs like remdesivir. --Okay, fine, I'll get out of the prokaryotes, but all eukaryotes have mitochondria...Oh, don't tell me no. Okay, I won't tell you, but some don't, or have replaced that organelle with other things. Or became parasites and lost them (e.g. Microsporidia) --Fine, but we all certainly evolved from one common ancestor. Well, yes and no. Eukaryotes formed from multiple fusions of archea and bacteria, so there's a big ol' set of cross-domain fusions rooting the base of the eukaryotic tree. --But we all evolved on Earth, right? That seems to be true, although we really don't know how to look for soil organisms that don't use our standard DNA code, so that might be our ignorance speaking.

    Sucks when the details get in the way of some glorious theorizing, but the case for there being a tree of life is far sturdier than the one for language commonalities in humans. And when it's easier for some people to communicate with dogs or honey bees than other humans, it's really worth thinking about the whole universality of language thing.

    466:

    Oh, come off it! That's sloppy thinking, at best.

    Firstly, bugger eukaryote evolution, and thrice bugger the myth / straw man of 'a single common ancestor' - you know very well that's not how genetics works, let alone social inheritance. We know that Homo sapiens has been through several very tight bottlenecks, and such things have an almost identical effect.

    Secondly, the fact that it is almost certainly the result of a random walk doesn't change that one iota. The same is true of our visual system, and we know that a lot of that is hard-wired. Interestingly, our auditory system is almost entirely 'soft' (i.e. learnt), as I know full well.

    Thirdly, I learnt that there were equivalents to nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions and conjunctions in mathematics when I was 14 - and I learnt many of the conventional symbols later. "For all X not equal to zero, X multiplied by Y and then divided by X is equal to Y." I can't be bothered to write out the TeX to do that in symbols, but I assure you that it is trivial. Quantum mechanics is less trivial, but no different.

    Fourthly, nobody has been claiming that the restrictions of our languages and thought are hard-wired, though there are almost certainly SOME that are. The issue is how much our linguistic experience affects how we can think, and how feasible it is to break out of that box. I don't know the answer, and I am damn sure that anyone who claims that they definitely do is bullshitting.

    467:

    A good friend of Charlie's came up with the concept of Quantum INTERCAL since, he claimed, it made more sense. It allowed RETURN before GOSUB, for example and computed-RND COMEFROM among other useful features.

    468:

    To expand on my earlier comment. The "militia" is defined by Congress as divided into the organized militia and the unorganized militia. The former is comprised of the National Guard, Reserves, etc. The latter consists of every able-bodied male between the ages of 17 and 47, plus some special cases like military retirees.

    469:

    Please don't read Strunk and White. They are entirely unreliable and often even contradict their own advice within the advice they give on a topic. This is a good paper kicking the shit out of them - http://ling.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/LandOfTheFree.pdf.

    Stephen King's book, On Writing, is terrific and Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style, is, despite how annoying he is elsewhere, also very good.

    470:

    I will note that said friend wrote his own INTERCAL compiler ... in INTERCAL.

    Some people question his sanity. I think it's just misunderstood genius, and one of these days I'm going to have to write him into a novel as the Mad Scientist.

    471:

    Did you read the somewhat of a polemic from Current affairs? https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/05/the-attacks-on-tara-reade-are-unbelievable-bullshit.

    Some key extracts

    "Tara Reade has witnesses—multiple people she told, contemporaneously, about her experiences of being sexually harassed and assaulted by Joe Biden in 1993. As many people have pointed out ad nauseam, Reade has more corroboration than Christine Blasey Ford ever did, when she accused federal appellate judge Brett Kavanaugh of attempting to rape her when they were both teenagers in 1982. (In her testimony before Congress, Blasey Ford said, “I had never told the details to anyone, the specific details, until May 2012 during a Couple’s Counseling session.”)"

    "Everybody already knows that Joe Biden is a notorious creep. It’s a punchline. The Daily Show joked about his gropery in 2015. Former Nevada Assemblywoman Lucy Flores has written that Biden planted a “long slow kiss” on her against her will. Female Secret Service agents complained that he swam naked in front of them even though it made them uncomfortable. Many people have known about Biden’s behavior for years, and they don’t care"

    "Extensive delays in publicly reporting serious cases of abuse are very common, especially when the abuser is a prominent person. Blasey Ford waited 36 years to accuse Kavanaugh. Leigh Corfman, who accused former judge and politician Roy Moore of assaulting her when she was 14 years old, waited 38 years to come forward. According to the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape, “it is important to remember why victims of sexual assault, especially when victimized by celebrities, wait to report, if they choose to report at all… Victims often struggle with fears that other people will judge, blame and disbelieve them.”"

    "Why make the whole story public NOW, when Biden is poised to become the Democratic nominee? It’s precisely because he’s about to be the nominee. As Anita Hill has since confirmed, the urgency of the nomination had everything to do with the timing of her allegation. When Senator Alan Simpson asked why she hadn’t come forward earlier, Hill answered, “That is a very good question, and I am sure that I cannot answer that to your satisfaction … I was afraid of retaliation. I was afraid of damage to my professional life.” (But why don’t women just report…sigh.)

    Christine Blasey Ford also came forward when Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court. She was asked why she had waited until that moment, and many liberal publications admired her “perfect explanation.” Blasey Ford said she “had a sense of urgency to relay the information [of the assault] to the Senate and the president.” In other words, it was information they needed to know before they chose to give Kavanaugh a hell of a lot of power."

    Please read the whole thing and the links in the piece, if you have time. Despite an evidence-free dismissal from JBS it's a reasonably compelling case, at least as much so as others against Kavanaugh, Trump and co.

    Of course, we can never know with absolute certainty. It's definitely a shitty look, though, to choose to disbelieve the reasonably credible person who aligns with ones political preferences. And it hands a really big stick to some horribly unscrupulous shitbags on the Republican side.

    My opinion? The Democrats are just banking that their lying gropey perv is a lot less bad than their opponents'. Which is cynical and awful.

    472:

    Rugby... my late ex bought me, one time we were at a con, a book, an anthology of horror stories. Now, I don't like horror, but, well, this was a little unusual: the theme was rugby.

    473:

    "Reading and writing later"... that's for some folks.

    My mom used to tell me how, when I was three? Four? that she read me a book one night, and in the morning, she heard me talking, and came in, and I was "reading", presumably having remembered the words that went with the picture on the page, the book to myself.

    Some of us are really wired to read.

    474:

    Reminds me of the day, after I'd been working as a programmer for 7-8 years, when I discovered the ALTER command in COBOL. Chatting, later, with my boss, I asked, "Would you fire or defenestrate someone who used that?", and he replied, "Both."

    475:

    Regarding the discussion here about languages, the vastly large number of them, and their differences anf commonalities:

    At this point there is this discipline that can loosely be called linguistic forensics. Languages follow migrations. Migrations of homo sap's variety of multiple groups have gone in many 'non-intuitive' directions, which always bring one form of communication into communication with another variety of communication.

    So a scholar can backtrack via phonemes, vowels, tone etc. to go ever further back in time to where migrations (perhaps) originated.

    A wonderful study, with really fine graph - maps going back as far as archeologists and linguists have been able to get is this one -- Ancestral JourneyL The Peopling of Europe From the First Venturers to the Vikings (2013 - 2015) by Jean Manco.

    One of its lacks, however, is that it leaves out everything and anything about Africa, which particularly for Spain and the Ibercelts is a significant hole.

    I didn't learn this from Manco's work, but because I was specifically interested in the entire, ancient, vast network of mongol-turkic languages, is that all languages do not include gender indication:

    "Turkish does not have grammatical gender, human nouns and pronouns usually do not indicate whether the person referred to is female or male, e.g. doktor '(female or male) doctor', sekreter ' (female or male) secretary', yolcu '(female or male) traveller, passenger', o 'she, he', gitti 'she went, he went'."

    Other languages do not include pronouns at all, or else have non-gendered pronouns, very different from the European Romance language networks, for instance.

    476:

    Tara Reade has witnesses—multiple people she told, contemporaneously, about her experiences of being sexually harassed and assaulted by Joe Biden in 1993.
    This seems to be untrue.

    477:

    Absolutely. You notice that I explicitly say "the folks who say 'oh, it's great' are useless. I hadn't considered the ones who say "I don't understand", because my reaction to that would be "great, what part don't you understand?"

    And offer to go through it with them.

    478:

    sigh

    I so much wanted to walk up Snowdon, when my recent ex and I were in the UK for Loncon. But a) the next two years were when I had each of my knees partly replaced, and I couldn't do the mountain when we were there, and b) no freakin' time....

    479:

    ROTFLMAO!!! I've never seen that one.

    And now, having seen it, I am deeply perturbed that all these stupid IoT things don't use existing protocols....

    480:

    "Breaking out of the box."

    The really, REALLY hard one is where you and someone else are speaking the same language, but have different definitions of some of the words.

    The first time that happened to me, I was about 17, and having a political argument with my father, when I got the brilliant idea of using something I'd just learned, Venn diagrams... and we discovered we were saying pretty much the same thing, but using different words, each hearing the other saying something different than we meant.

    I've had that a few times since, and that's REALLY hard to recognize.

    481:

    Which leaves us a simple solution to the gun nuts: the President can call up the "unorganized" militia - I believe the law says in any quantity up to 100%, and if they don't show, they can be courtmartialed.

    482:

    Heteromeles noted: "That's the "humans are religious argument," which boils down to "religions are enormously diverse, mutually contradictory, and many societies integrate them into other practices, but every society has them." Well, no, that's an unproven assumption."

    No, it's not. The equivalent for religion would be "all humans seem to need to explain where we came from and where we go; some infer a deist explanation, some infer a mechanistic explanation, but they're all comparable in their basic goal". Everything else is variations and elaborations on that underlying them. Obviously too simplistic, but I'm not writing a journal paper here.

    H: "Turning to linguistics: For example, one of Chomsky's rules..."

    Chomsky is deeply problematic, and you brought him up, not me. Perhaps I shouldn't have referred to deep structures in the brain, since that's one of his notions. But it's the right terminology for what's going on in language acquisition. Again, you're getting lost in the details. I didn't bring up recursion, but are you trying to tell me that native Piraha speakers can't handle recursion if that understanding is necessary for them to learn another language? Don't think so. All of your examples fall into the same trap. They miss the point, which is that the mechanics for learning any language rely on the same brain structures, which have evolved to flexibly handle a wide range of language structures.

    H: "If a language is so into compounding words that a single word can be a sentence, is that word a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, or all of the above simultaneously?"

    You're describing German (humorous exaggeration!), and German speakers appear to have little difficulty figuring out which parts are nouns and verbs. Are you telling me that you couldn't read an English sentence without the spaces between words? Of course not. You'd have more difficulty, but you'd still end up parsing the sentence the same way you would with spaces present.

    H: "No one can communicate with everyone on this planet, even imperfectly, without lots of help from intermediaries."

    On the contrary, I had no trouble getting by in China without an interpreter because I had a few basic words of Chinese, most of my conversation partners had a few basic words of English (or more), and I was not ashamed to use pantomime, sound effects, and drawings to make my meaning clear when neither of us could come up with the right word. Often, my conversation partner would provide the correct Chinese word, and I'd repeat it several times until I'd added it to my vocabulary. No angel with a fiery dictionary required to intermediate for me.

    H: "That's why I'm suggesting that language may be a the result fairly random walk through multidimensional space, rather than something that we've got "deep brain structures" that force us to communicate in certain ways."

    And yet every human save those with some form of brain damage learns, without any external coaching or grammar guides, that objects are nouns, and changes in the state of those objects are verbs. You don't get any deeper structure than that, and it's not even remotely random. Maybe assigning "mom" and "dad" to genders is random, but that's irrelevant.

    H: "All life uses DNA."

    Nobody would say that. Substitute "genetic code" and you've got a stronger case, though it's tautological because it defines life as "things what got a genetic code".

    Nobody's saying the differences aren't important, least of all me; I spend my days intermediating between people who don't speak English natively and their eventual audiences. But I think you're missing the important point, which is that language is universal among humans, that it has more similarities than differences at its roots, and that were it otherwise, nobody would ever be able to learn another language.

    Nobody's saying all languages are equally difficult either; Chinese drives me mad with the tones, yet people born to that language have no trouble learning, but do have trouble learning English. Yet both groups can succeed.

    483:

    Which leaves us a simple solution to the gun nuts: the President can call up the "unorganized" militia - I believe the law says in any quantity up to 100%, and if they don't show, they can be courtmartialed.

    Sadly not.

    While the militia concept may have been the original writers intention, it also may not have been. The wording, the commas, in the 2nd amendment are such that it is difficult to parse what it means.

    Over the last 40 years the courts have been tending to the interpretation that it doesn't mean arming a militia, but rather just anyone can be armed.

    Thus your idea would fail in the courts.

    484:

    But English mens' football has had scary-violent fan

    There are multiple instances in South American countries of stadiums with 10' fencing between the fans and the field. Separate entrances on opposite side of the stadium and such. And at times the "loosing" crowd has torn down the fencing and rioted.

    Which is one reason when various people around the world complain about US football being violent we tend to think "well even if so we keep it on the field".

    485:

    How did they ever get the 18th amendment passed?

    486:

    The thing that really interested me (and still does) is where a language can express concepts that WE can't express in any of our natural languages

    Saw a talk years ago when a Supreme Justice was talking about needed reforms in the US system. One thing he talked about was the frustration of a judge when translators were involved and the language wasn't know by all that many people in the court system. So the lawyer asks a yes/no question of a witness. The translator says a sentence of two to the witness. Then the witness and translator engage in a dozen or so sentences back and forth and at the end of it turns to the court with a "no".

    487:

    Actually, there are some of us who find written language easier and more natural than spoken

    In a similar vein if you read a transcription most spoken conversations they are incredibly bad in terms of grammar, sentence completion, run on sentences, etc... Which can drive some of us literal folks nuts.

    Successful politicians tend to have the innate or learned ability to speak more like a well written essay that most of us.

    488:

    The atmosphere outside the stadium was totally different a lot of my football experiences in the UK. Before the game everybody had the tailgates down on their monster trucks in the car-park and were busy barbecuing and shooting the breeze. AFAICS there was no crowd segregation.

    This is typical. And both the pro and college and even high school level. Well at the high school level we get teens acting like teens at time. Even when fans hate each others teams it is more about insults than any blood letting. (Says a Kentucky basketball fan for years who observed the interaction with Louisville, Indiana, and Tennessee fans.)

    Not that I'd recommend visiting a bar in Boston wearing a Yankees shirt... You'd likely get no physical violence but might have a lot of beer spilled on your as people walked by.

    489:

    My opinion? The Democrats are just banking that their lying gropey perv is a lot less bad than their opponents'. Which is cynical and awful.

    The DNC is in a bind.

    The US government calculation for the Democrats is, thanks to the way the Republicans now operate, anything but control of all 3 parts (House, Senate, President) is the same as a loss.

    Having the House is largely meaningless - as seen currently Pelosi and colleagues can write and pass as much legislation they want but if the Senate won't consider it then who the President is doesn't matter.

    Getting the House and the Presidency improves things marginally(). The DNC then gets to play around with the capabilities of the executive order, but as Trump has demonstrated what the executive order gives can easily be removed by the next toddler. The two offices don't provide the ability to pass legislation that can be difficult to reverse - thus the DNC taking the House and Presidency while the GOP retains the Senate is a GOP win because they can block everything(*)

    Which brings us to the reality - that the DNC goal needs to be winning all 3(*) so that they can actually pass long lasting legislation.

    Which brings us to Biden. Yes, almost all of the people who run in the DNC primaries could likely beat Trump (the polling, flawed as hypothetical, showed almost all of them managing to beat Trump).

    But most of them, even if they survive Trump's attacks (and I certainly think for example either Warren or Sanders likely could have), can't create the circumstances that allow the DNC to win the Senate - there is simply too much opposition against most of the non-Biden candidates to be turned into actual votes against the DNC candidates.

    And Bernie can't be Bernie without the Senate, etc.

    So the DNC's hand is forced - they can be noble and investigate the claim and perhaps disqualify Biden, but in doing so throw away the election in November and hand the next X Supreme Court justices to the following Republican President.

      • yes, a sane President is a significant improvement on its own, it just regrettably in the grand scheme of things doesn't change much. Even foreign relations are largely going to remain on hold until the rest of the world sees who the next GOP President is.

    ** - and as we have seen, this is key to getting qualified judges blocked, so vacancies remain for the next GOP President to fill instead.

    * - the realities of American politics, where Senators aren't forced to vote by party lines (or House members for that matter), means the DNC likely needs either 70 DNC Senators or several GOP Senators to pass really controversial stuff like single-payer healthcare - note the inability of the State of Vermont to take advantage of part of the ACA legislation to implement single-payer at the state level due to the onslaught of vested interests that fought it.

    490:

    Oh, yes, that's extremely hard. But. actually, I will raise you trying to describe something where the other person not merely lacks some of the essential concepts, but is unaware that they might exist, and keeps trying to fit what you say into their mental framework. Been there - done that!

    491:

    I remember using a Basic dialect in the mid-70s where a RETURN n statement returned control to the statement n lines before or after the line following the matching CALL statement. Always seemed a tad counter-intuitive to me.

    I can only imagine the mind set of a contractor tossed some code 5 years later and asked to make a change.

    492:

    My mom used to tell me how, when I was three? Four? that she read me a book one night, and in the morning, she heard me talking, and came in, and I was "reading", presumably having remembered the words that went with the picture on the page, the book to myself.

    My daughter (now 28) used to baby sit a boy when he was around 5 to about 8. He had taught himself to read and at the age of 3. One of the standing instructions was to keep the phone book away from him as he like to "read it". He would devour anything written. High on the Asperger scale. Saw him a few years back with his mom and he was a bit shy but seemed to be OK. Both parents were psychologists and worked hard to deal with his needs and make him into a functional adult.

    493:

    Oops! Aplogies for finger problems in # 418 - not meant to read like that with reversed upper-case ....

    Birger Johansen C-19 is very infectious ... in the right circumstances: A choir? All standing close together for anextended period with theor mouths open & singing & emitting water droplets ... yes, well ...

    Charlie Milwall ... Aresnal vs Spurs, Everton - Celtic are evil bastards - I watched & shuddered as they terrorised a whole tube carriage or two [ Before 7/7 - it would not be tolerated, now ]

    icehawk The USA HAD stategic planning ... & Trump trashed it ... because Obama That level of spiteful-stupid is extremely dangerous

    alcytes Happened more than once, actually. Railways used to run "football specials" - until that started happening. They re-started, but with the "away" clubs were required to post a huge bond to cover the damages, which slowed it down. Even now, it can be awkward at times. - - Robert Prior - I saw that "Giles" cartoon as well ....

    Pigeon Your last was the reason. Now we still get footie-fascists on trains & LOTS of Plod And usually a late final arrival, bacause the train has been stopped,so that some wanker can be hauled off to the slammer ...

    whitroth "wired" to read? Probably. It helped that there were quite a few books at home ... but I mayu have had one reading test in infant's school & they didn't bother after that, as I was well away.... This, of course led me to reading the books at home, which inmcluded "Last & First Men" which introduced me to the idea of a "different future than the one we are living in" [ My father started explaining it, when I asked him, & about 2/3 of the way through I went "Big lightbulb! - GOT IT!" ] I was almost 9 at the time. At about the same time, he bought the first volume of Sayers' translation of the first book of "The Divine Comedy" - which I promptly read. I've always been fascinated by the failed renaissance of approx 1300, as a result.

    • @ 480 I had that in the viva for my MSc - I was being asked a question, which I answered several times & the examiners didn't grok what I was saying. Until I reliased that I knew more about that oarticular sub-subject than they did AND that they realised that I was heading orthoganally to them... Instant answer, which was correct, of course.

    Windscale Madness, a refusal to see that the cure was worse than the disease, religious fervour, coupled with puritanism (Shudder)

    494:

    How did they ever get the 18th amendment passed?

    The US had a problem with public drunkenness for a while.

    And taverns became get drunk and stumble home more than social clubs in many cases.

    That also turned in to wife beating and such.

    A group of the protestant side of the religions in the US decided that the alcohol in the Bible wasn't really and thus alcohol was evil.

    Is was a rare moment and lot so things came together in the society for a brief time that allowed it to happen.

    495:

    How did they ever get the 18th amendment passed?

    Different era.

    But also the usual, particularly if Wiki is correct(*)

    Decades long efforts by true believers, ignorant voters, etc. See also - Brexit.

    496:

    No, it's not. The equivalent for religion would be "all humans seem to need to explain where we came from and where we go; some infer a deist explanation, some infer a mechanistic explanation, but they're all comparable in their basic goal". Everything else is variations and elaborations on that underlying them. Obviously too simplistic, but I'm not writing a journal paper here.

    And this is the fundamental mistake, because that's the modern Christian notion of what religion is ,assumed wrongly to be a universal.

    What evidence tells you that this is universally true? I'd submit there is none. Here's one cogent counter-example:Taoism, arguably one of the world's great religions by western standards. Even though Taoism has been around for some 2400 years, it took until the 19th (20th?) Century to come up with a word to translate religion: purportedly: tsung-chiao, "sectarian doctrine." So we have here a central part of Chinese culture, that nonetheless failed to create a concept for "religion." What's going on? This argument is from Kristofer Schipper, who's both a professor of religious studies and an ordained Taoist priest. According to him, a reasonable translation of "Tao" isn't "God," or "religion," it's "the Way the universe works." In Taoism, gods are an epiphenomenon of the Tao, and source of the universe is something known in English "the mysterious feminine," that is not worshiped and rarely mentioned. While I won't go so far as to say that a theory based on chi is equivalent to physics, it's fair to point out that if Taoism is considered a religion, you'd better consider western science to be a religion too, because both are about studying the way the universe works and using that knowledge to try to improve human life.

    The problem is that most religions as we define them aren't. Not every society cares much about where they came from. What they care about, intensely and universally, is surviving, or in "spiritual" terms, "living a good life." Many societies have "supernatural figures," who are not gods by our standard (creator sky fairy), but are "beings whose stories we tell." (that per Lynne Kelly, who studies memory systems). Why do these god stories matter, if the gods didn't create the world? They matter because, especially in non-literate societies, stories pass on information, and the easier they are to remember (like the Greek myths) the easier they are to pass on. But a set of memory palaces, songs, epics, folklore, and such that tells a group of people how to live from birth to death and to pass it on to their kids is not a religion. It is a way of life. It only becomes a religion when some missionary comes in, writes down the stories and songs they share with him, compares what he's written down to Christianity, then teaches them what he thinks is The Truth to make them part of western civilization.

    There's a similar problem with linguistics, where we're trying to map every form of human communication onto European models and claiming they're universal. The claim for deep structures in the brain is that there's some sort of neuronal map for nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and (per Chomsky) recursion. So far as I can tell, the deep structure hypothesis argues children learn by mapping the language they're presented with, and that every language therefore has these structres due to biology.

    The simpler explanation is that children come hardwired with drives to communicate extravagantly, to mimic what they perceive around them, not just human-made noises, but gestures and everything else, and to join social groups by learning to act in ways that are praised. As children grow, they learn how to act and talk in specific situations, and as they mature, they are exposed to more and more complex situations. In these interactions and in play, they generate internal sets of rules, with constant feedback from those around them. Language is part of this routine, and children are constantly trying to figure out when to say what, how words relate to each other, what they are allowed to do, and what they are not allowed to do.

    The categories of noun, verb, adverb, and so forth are emergent from this process, not intrinsic in people's brains. They emerge because they generally, but not universally, work. That's why there's so much linguistic diversity in the world, as well as songs, poetry, gestures, math, dance, and so on. And these all blend into each other (sign language, whistled language, words with songs, etc.)

    There are many ways to see this. I'll pick three examples.

    One is to simply look honestly at English. It's a freaking creole, notorious for its exceptions and contradictions. Rule set? Yeah right. We can all agree, I think, that it's a trade language, where the core of it is maintained in a fairly standardized state because, as an international language, people who don't speak English as their first language have to communicate with each other using it. That keeps things like verb conjugations fairly regular. Then there are the native speakers, whether they're in a ghetto or a lab, who are constantly coining new terms and usages, trying to change and diversify the language, mostly in ephermaral ways. And that doesn't even count the teenage girls who are apparently a major source of always-mutating teen slang. But it's all English, even when some part contradicts another part.

    Now let's try to learn English. You can do it the way children do, by learning, situation by situation, what the appropriate things to say are, in a loving environment that more often gently corrects you rather than harshly punishing you. Or you can learn the way languages are taught in school, with tables of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, rules for how to conjugate verbs, and situational cues. Obviously the child's way of mimicry and feedback works better, and most language classes fail. Why? Because the rules are emergent, not intrinsic. If people did have good structures for classifying words, getting word lists fed into our brains would be the ideal way to learn new languages. Instead, people taught that way generally stumble by trying to search for the appropriate noun, the appropriate verb, and so forth. Our brains don't string deep structures together. Rather, we generally engage in fairly standardized conversations where some words are appropriate and other words are not. What to say when is learned through mimicry and feedback, more than learning tables of words and quickly recalling them.

    This doesn't mean that people shouldn't try to figure out the structures of language. Rather, I'm arguing that it's simply a mistake to assume that the structures derived from that study are structures that appear in anyone's brain. It's an analogous mistake to assuming that DNA encodes genes that encode maps of parts of organisms.

    Oh, and words having intrinsic categories: they don't. Let's use the classic example: set, which is a noun, verb, and adjective. That points out that context matters sometimes more than the word. Or how about a noun phrase, like "ivory-billed woodpecker." That's collectively a noun, but it's composed of ivory, which is also a noun, here used as an adjective alluding to color, bill, which is a noun, but here also used as a modifier that's modified by, ivory, and woodpecker, which is a noun composed of a compound of a noun and a verb. All this together, in that one context, is a noun in English. Indeed, it's such a well known noun that I could say "ivory bill" and you'd likely know that I meant an extinct bird, not new form of currency or an act of congress. But saying "woodpecker," the core noun, doesn't automatically bring up an image of the ivory-bill, because there's a whole family of woodpeckers out there. Which is the critical part of the noun, the apparent adjectives or the core noun?

    498:

    Windscale @ 437: Thanks all for the comments on 2nd amendment, I think it's all very interesting. That known paragon of scholarly authority, Wikipedia, seems to suggest that the modern equivalent of the original militias is the National Guard and a few others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Guard. I imagine that the National Guard is well regulated? Not too many National Guardsmen/Guardswomen going off the reservation and gunning down crowds of people with gay abandon?

    Something most people do not understand about the 2nd Amendment is the actual meaning of "well regulated". "Regulated" does not have the same meaning today as it had at the time the Constitution was adopted. In the context of the 2nd Amendment "well regulated" means organized, equipped, properly trained & disciplined. It actually refers back to the "Enumerated Powers" of Congress:

    Constitution for the United States: Article I, Section 8, paragraph 16:
    [The Congress shall have Power] To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

    The State militias derive from the Colonial militias which in turn derive from the way England reorganized its land forces during the Great Muster of 1588 when they were facing invasion by the Spanish Armada. That's where the idea of the "Citizen-Soldier" comes from; that the "defence of the realm" is properly the responsibility of the people, loyal to the nation rather than mercenaries loyal only to the King (or Queen as it happened to be in 1588) and only loyal so long as they get paid.

    Under current U.S. law, the militia has evolved into two parts ... the Organized militia the state's trained force, aka the National Guard and the UN-organized militia (more properly as we've seen in recent days the DIS-organized militia) that theoretically includes every able-bodied man between the ages of 17 & 45 who is NOT a member of the National Guard.

    This dual track militia came about because even before the ink was dry on the Constitution there were shirkers who refused to meet their militia service obligation. There were draft dodgers long before the U.S. had to resort to a draft to fill the military ranks.

    The gun nuts get really annoyed when you ask them when was the last time they attended a muster to have their arms inspected? They've completely forgotten the parts of the Preamble to the Constitution about "provide for the common defence" and "promote the general Welfare"

    I was in the National Guard. I attended muster at least once a month for 32 years (except for the periods when units I belonged to were "employed in the Service of the United States" on four occasions to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;) - [Art.1,Sec.8,Para.15.] One of the stories we used to tell ourselves was that the National Guard was different from the Boy Scouts because the Boy Scouts had Adult Leaders.

    Maybe that's closer to the solution? Yes, you can get to play with guns. Yes, your gun comes with a commitment to the National Guard at no extra cost. In return, the National Guard is pleased to securely look after your guns for you when you are not using them for National Guard training purposes. If there is ever a need for the militia to be mustered, you will be issued your guns with your orders.

    That's pretty close to what the Founding Fathers had in mind for the militia, although instead of issuing guns upon muster, you were supposed to bring your guns to periodic musters so they could be inspected, verified & registered1 and so that you could be organized and drilled to know your place in the military organization.

    One problem with today's DIS-organized militia is that everyone thinks they're supposed to be the fuckin' general.

    1 How is the state supposed to "regulate" i.e. organize, equip, train & discipline the militia if they don't know what weapons the members of that militia have?

    499:

    [G] German.

    Old joke: the German professor spends 20 years on his book, anf finally turns all 800 pages in to the typing pool at the university. A couple weeks later, the lead in the typing pool comes to him, to tell him that the last 200 pages of the manuscript had been lost.

    "Mein Gott! All the verbs!"

    500:

    Nope. After someone further up in the thread pointed to it, I looked at the Militia Acts of 1792, 1795, and 1908. "the Unorganized Militia, which included all able-bodied men between ages 17 and 45,"

    From what I can tell, that the governors can call them up is not overturned.

    501:

    The VA legislature, currently in Dem hands after many years, with a Dem gov, just became the last required state (sorry, "commonwealth") to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, passed in the seventies, and they're arguing over whether the original Amendment law was allowed to set a limit as to when it needed to be authorized by the states....

    502:

    Heh, heh. I think I was about 9 or 10 when I was in my parents bedroom, and talking to my father, and I found? he pointed out? Three Men In A Boat. I got about 10 pages in, and couldn't read any more, as I was literally rolling on the floor laughing. 20 or so years ago, I finally bought a copy and read the whole thing.

    503:

    John Hughes @ 476:

    Tara Reade has witnesses—multiple people she told, contemporaneously, about her experiences of being sexually harassed and assaulted by Joe Biden in 1993.

    This seems to be untrue.

    Yep. At least one of the "witnesses" has admitted she didn't recall being told about sexual harassment until after she was been reminded of it when Tara Reade contacted her on Facebook.

    504:

    With 6 months to go before the election in the USA (presuming that even happens) we do not have any surety that either the current incumbents in any elected position nor any of their opponents will even be alive. Given the total cock-up in the response to COVID in the country to my immediate south there seem to be long odds that not all (and maybe most) of the present protagonists will be in the land of the living by then.

    505:

    "Religions". Back in the early nineties, we wrote a FAQ for alt.pagan (and in the older copies, not the newest, I am credited as a contributor, not author), we distinguished between "theological" religions and what our authors called "tribal" religions. To the former, what you believe matters, while to the latter, what matters is how you live your life in the here and now, and treat others.

    So, where we came from isn't necessarily that important to a religion.

    Of course, I need to end this post with the Ancient Response of Pagans to evangelicals: "Ger reborn? Why? My Mother got it right the first time."

    506:

    Actually, I think this idea of what constitutes well-regulated is pretty much what I expected. With all the gun-violence going around it seems pretty obvious that your unregulated militia completely lacks even the most basic discipline, such as, never point a loaded (and probably even perceived to be unloaded) weapon at a person, unless your RoE and orders permit you to engage them. I can't imagine the unregulated militia has RoE and orders to go gun down kids at school, for example.

    These days everybody expecting to truck up with their own weapons I would expect to be a non-starter unless they all met and were confirmed to meet very specific standards, such as cartridge sizes etc. Your unregulated militia all turning up with at least .303 because 5.56mm NATO is for wimps would be a bit of a disaster.

    507:

    Windscale @ 485: How did they ever get the 18th amendment passed?

    Same way they got the 17 amendments that preceded it or the 9 subsequent amendments were passed. Two thirds of both houses of Congress voted for it & three-quarters of the states ratified it.

    The fun one is actually the 27th Amendment which was one of the original "Bill of Rights" amendments passed by the First Congress in Sept 1789, but only reached the three-quarters threshold (38/50 because they missed Kentucky's June 27, 1792 ratification) on May 7, 1992.

    It originally needed 9 states to ratify it, but only got 6 before more states joined the union and the required number went up.

    Because there was no expiration date set for the ratification process, a whole slew of states ratified it in the 1980s & early 1990s and was finally certified on May 18, 1992 by the Archivist of the United States that ratification was completed. If they hadn't missed counting Kentucky's ratification, it would have been certified when Alabama ratified the amendment on May 5, 1992. It has subsequently been ratified by 7 more states giving it a total of 46/50 states.

    508:

    Just a couple of things I ran across this morning:

    Malaria 'completely stopped' by microbe https://www.bbc.com/news/health-52530828

    Would it be possible to introduce the microbe directly to humans to stop them from getting malaria? I'm guessing probably not because if it could they'd have said so in the article.

    Hoping Llamas Will Become Coronavirus Heroes https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/science/llama-coronavirus-antibodies.html

    Is there a way to grow these antibodies in a lab (or a factory) or are they going to have to make a lot of llamas sick to extract them?

    509:

    Or as my tai chi teacher said in the early 90s, "why brag about your past lives. You obviously didn't get enlightened..." There are some other fun responses, like being descendants of the people who provided Cain and Abel their wives...

    But I think, for someone who's been in pagan culture, it's worth reading Schipper's Taoist Body. Not that it'll convert you to Taoism, but I definitely got the sense of "wow, it would be so totally cool if someone instantiated this in a more modern, western context." If it helps, right now I read Taoism as China's 2,400 year-old+ indigenous counterculture, now mostly alive in Taiwan.

    But getting to your original point, the distinction between tribal practice versus theological belief doesn't actually hold, sadly. Christianity went through a long phase (as Medieval Catholicism, at least) where the practice was critical. You didn't have to be in a state of grace to pray, sinner that you are. If you prayed properly, your prayer would be answered. This followed Roman religious practice. Later on (IIRC after the reformation) what you believed became more important than how you practiced. Hutton's Triumph of the Moon talks about this in gory detail, from a pagan perspective.

    Something analogous certainly happened in Chinese and especially Japanese Buddhism. There were both fights over those who performed dead rituals and didn't get enlightened, versus those (Chan/Zen) who practiced the disciplines to get enlightened and not the rituals. There was(is) also something very much like Fundamental Christianity (get saved by Baptism, even if you don't show your faith in your works) in Buddhism, where those who practiced a specific mantra with full faith would be reborn in a realm where they could attain enlightenment in one lifetime. This opened up Buddhism to all those who couldn't, for reasons of occupation or gender, become monks or lay practitioners. It also led at one point to the fairly vicious Ikko Ikki rebellion in Japan, but that's a side story that has no bearing on what's going on in the US right now. Really........

    Anyway, back to Taoism: their primordial practice is to do both the ritual and the belief: some of the crew performing are doing the external ritual, while the senior Taoist is doing the chi manipulation internally. IIRC, something similar probably went/goes on in some Hindu practices, and possibly in old Babylonian practices. So the whole internal practice/external ritual split may well come from antecedents that did both exoteric and esoteric actions simultaneously.

    Taoism, incidentally (and Schipper's not the only one saying this), started and continues as a "folk religion." Practitioners are concerned with things like faith healing, praying for good crops, and the like. The whole idea that it was a philosophy that corrupted itself to become a folk religion was ginned up by one of those Bright Young Literati who apparently didn't know what he was talking about, but whose wrong interpretation became gospel for the literati thereafter, especially after he died at a tragically young age. That said, Taoism's also about internal alchemy (perhaps the originator of alchemy?), meditation, and other stuff, so there's layer upon layer inside it, in the style of any good mystery religion. And there's a couple thousand years of accreted countercultural praxis too. Fun stuff if you're into that sort of thing.

    510:

    Heteromeles: Your argument does not persuade me. Rather than wasting bandwidth here, why not contact me privately if you want to continue the discussion?

    511:

    Nope. After someone further up in the thread pointed to it, I looked at the Militia Acts of 1792, 1795, and 1908. "the Unorganized Militia, which included all able-bodied men between ages 17 and 45,"

    From what I can tell, that the governors can call them up is not overturned.

    The Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that gun ownership is an individual right, not a militia right.

    With no burden to be part of a militia to own guns, there is no ability for any level of government to call them up.

    https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91911807

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller

    512:

    Folks.

    The 200+ years of legal history, the tangle grammar and punctuation, and history of the country make any non US reading of just the amendment and making a rational statement about how it should work today pretty much impossible.

    No matter what you might think about how it SHOULD work, it works the way it does because of all of the above.

    513:

    Exactly. What matters isn't what we, with our biases, think it all says but rather how the courts have recently ruled.

    The 2008 ruling says it is an individual right, and there is no indication that the makeup of the justices of the court has changed in any way that would see a difference of opinion today.

    514:
  • You're telling me I should look into the Tao? But I can't do that, since the Way that can be spoken about is not the Way. (Yes, from memory - I've always had Tao, and some Zen, sympathies).
  • But what you're saying about old Christianity is still "if you pray the right way" is still about belief, and not about "what you do".
  • sigh I have friends who are into Nichirin Shoshu Buddhism, and a late lover was, too. double sigh I'm told there was a lay revolt in the early nineties, which took a lot of control from the priests, but still... there's insignificant difference, IMO, between that and the "gospel of prosperity".
  • 515:

    And there is NO ONE to the left of Atilla the Hun who doesn't consider that an abortion, that it goes against all precedent, done by extremist right-wing Justices, and the first time we have a majority of liberals on the Court, it will go away.

    I was so happy when Scalia smothered in that pillow.

    516:

    @515 & mdive @489: Fully agree with both your statements. Really, Moscow Mitch is arguably a bigger threat to the republic, what with being competent at his job, and having an avowed goal of packing ALL federal courts, up to and including SCOTUS.

    The Greedy Oligarchs' Party has been publicly angling to permanently sew up the federal governments for rich old white men since at least the 1990s, and as several works I cited in the previous blog entry, arguably since the 1960s. We might as well face up to the idea that Eisenhower was a statistical liberal outlier for these folks. The GOP MUST be booted out of power in the Senate!

    Biden is the consensus candidate for the Democrats - all the other choices alienated too large a percentage of the party. With or without Tara Reade's accusation, he's 1) too old; 2) too friendly with big business; 3) a serial losing candidate; 4) at least too "handsy", and possibly a sexual predator; and 5) possibly well along the way to senile dementia. And with all those issues, he's still MUCH better suited to the Oval Office than El Cheeto Grande!

    I have serious doubts about Ms. Reade's accusation for one fundamental question - why now? I can understand that facing down a sitting Senator as a 20-something was too hard, but why stay silent in 2008? She was OK with what she described as a rapist being the Vice President of the United States?

    517:

    Heteromeles IIRC, ancient & up-to-the PRC China had three competing philosophies - joined by a fourth, later: The Dao ( Tao ), Confucianism, Legalism & later - Bhuddism. Yes/No?

    Medieval christianity's emphasis on the practice is "legalistic" for instance. OTOH the question in xtianity about "Pure in heart" is very Daoist - except that it was/is perverted to/by Calvinist perceptions of "purity"

    518:

    It's a wee bit more complicated than that.

    China, over it's history, has given rise/made space for/dealt with: --Taoism --Confucianism (pretty much contemporaneous with Taoism) --Neo Taoism and Neo-Confucian revivals --Shamanism (currently the Red Turban Taoists) --Shinto (Shen Tao, aka the Way of the Gods, aka folk spirit practices, currently under Taoism/Buddhism) --Moism (lost, but interesting) --Legalism (Qin emperor liked this one) --Christianity (at one point around 800 CE(?), the Archbishop of the Church of the East/Nestorians was Chinese) --Islam --Manicheaism --Buddhism, including but not limited to: ----Tibetan Buddhism/Vajrayana (currently gone, still in Japan, Tibet, Mongolia) ----Chan/Zen Buddhism (an indigenous version, combining Buddhism and Taoism. The best known temple is the "Little Forest," aka Shaolin) ----Pure Land Buddhism (which gave rise to Nichiren and other schools in Japan and Korea).

    and several others I can't quite remember (example, I'm not sure where the Fangshi fit into this).

    As far as Christianity's "pure in heart" being very Taoist, that wasn't my reading. The "beginner's mind" of Taoism doesn't really mean "beginner's luck." Instead it means you practice something so many times that it's ingrained in you, and it's something you just do without thinking about it. If people lived their Christianity this way, their works would show their faith. Assuming that a sprinkling of magic water will grant you eternal life, because God is ever merciful, is something else entirely.

    As for Calvin and the Select, why did God give free will to people if God was preprogramming them to end up in heaven or hell?

    IIRC, Taoists believe that humans have seven good souls and three evil ones. Without work, they all go their separate ways at death and get shunted off to ghosts, etc., or they can be remade as ancestors, guardian spirits, or even gods through proper ritual action. The path of immortality involves fusing all ten spirits into one and joining that one to the great chi flows that make up the universe, and that's where all the woo (wu?) of alchemy gets going. Taoist spirituality gets pretty trippy, pretty fast.

    519:

    he 200+ years of legal history, the tangle grammar and punctuation, and history of the country make any non US reading of just the amendment and making a rational statement about how it should work today pretty much impossible.

    That seems to be more generally true of law and legal systems.

    I was thinking this morning that one key difference between the study of law and, say, electrical engineering, is that the latter is understood to derive from fundamental discoveries about how the universe works, mostly expressible in mathematics. Legal systems are a collection of arbitrary statements made and modified by governments. They don't have first principles, only history.

    That is to say that if someone asked me "do solar panels use more energy to make than you can get out as useful electricity" I can, if necessary, keep digging right back to the photoelectric effect, Maxwell's equations and so on to explain exactly why.

    When I ask my solicitor "why do I have to attest that my (ex)partner has received independent legal advice" there is no such chain of statements leading back to first principles. In fact, the reply "the law requires it" can only be restated more verbosely, or a history given, it cannot be proved in any meaningful way. That awful admission of defeat "it is what it is" entirely summarises the situation.

    So "what does the 27th amendment mean" is exactly a cultural and historical question, not a scientific or logical one.

    520:

    1. You're telling me I should look into the Tao? But I can't do that, since the Way that can be spoken about is not the Way. (Yes, from memory - I've always had Tao, and some Zen, sympathies). 2. But what you're saying about old Christianity is still "if you pray the right way" is still about belief, and not about "what you do". 3. sigh I have friends who are into Nichirin Shoshu Buddhism, and a late lover was, too. double sigh I'm told there was a lay revolt in the early nineties, which took a lot of control from the priests, but still... there's insignificant difference, IMO, between that and the "gospel of prosperity".

    As for 1), of course you should read Taoist books. They're fun. I'm a big fan of Burton Watson's translation of Chuang Tzu, for example (the oldest known book in Taoism, Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching being the second oldest). I mean, who could resist a spiritual practice where the first line of the foundational text is literally "The Tao that can be Tao'ed is not the real Tao", while the first chapter of Chuang Tzu is a metaphorical discourse on relativity and scale variance from 400 BCE. And even though the oldest copy of the Chuang Tzu is considerably older than the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu is a character in the Chuang Tzu (so which came first?). Oh, and Lao Tzu usually gets translated as "old master." However, if you run the characters that compose it (老子) through a translator, you'll find it literally means "ancient child," and there's ample reason to think he wasn't a real person. It's fun stuff, especially in the original.

    With 2) (and for the other people in the peanut gallery), effectively we're arguing about what makes the magic happen in a performance, whether it's a magic spell, a prayer, a game, music, or a stage performance. Is it that touch of divine inspiration? Is it endless hours of rehearsal? If we're talking about music, the inspired crew are the punk rockers, while those who rehearse are in an orchestra. The Taoist answer (as I noted with Greg) is that lots of practice, done properly, enables a magical performance, and I tend to think this is the right answer. But as we know from bad punk bands and brain-dead, listless rehearsals, it's possible to screw up at either extreme. And that's kind of where philosophical arguments in religion go, too.

    3) If you're referring to my comment about the Ikko Ikki, that wasn't Nichiren's sect in the 20th Century but Jōdo Shinshū in the 16th Century. That rebellion started during the Japanese civil war and ended when Oda Nobunaga burned the last fortress temple in 1580.

    I tried to work it into a story once already, and I still think that it would be interesting to take the story of the Ikko-Ikki uprising(s), do a Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven transmorgification on it, and set it in the near future US. "Bloody mess" pretty much covers what happened, if you spread it thinly enough. And there are indeed parallels between what some of the megachurches of today preach and what the leaders of Jodo Shinshu preached back in the day. Turn those churches into armed compounds, rally the faithful to march on their behalf, and you've got a modern parallel with the Ikko-Ikki.

    521:

    I have one question about the wide plains in Australia; do the prevailing summer winds favor some particular direction, like the Santa Ana in California?

    In general the wind blows from west to east, and there are seasonal variations as the Hadley Cells shift. In the north that brings the wet season and dry season, further south it changes the "likely weather". But in general, bicycling from Adelaide to Perth (heading east) is an ugly experience while riding the other way is much easier. Sadly the same is true heading north from Perth, so the ride from Darwin to Perth also involves many headwinds. The wind wants you to leave Perth.

    If they do, it might be possible to create firebreaks

    Most of the areas where big fires occur have enough hills, and are often also coastal enough that sea breezes and local weather are more important than any theoretical "national prevailing wind". The Sydney Basin, for example, is both tidal as far as Cabramatta, and dominated by the sea breeze. Melbourne has worse weather in many ways because it is further inland (the bay is large but shallow so heats up with the land), but also exposed to the south so gets icy storms from Antarctica at times.

    Secondly, the fire-encouraging vegetation that we have fostered for the last century or so means we get fire-driven weather events. Both from the smoke preventing sea breezes, and from the straight up firestorms.

    The stupid thing is that we know exactly how to deal with the man-made landscape that occupies most of Australia because we have spent 50,000 years building the landscape so that it works for us. Then 200-odd years screwing that up because white people are inherently, unchallengeably superior in every possibly way to the primitive indigenous tribes and can learn nothing from them*.

    • you might think the latter part of that statement contradicts the rest, but you are wrong. You just are.
    522:

    The stupid thing is that we know exactly how to deal with the man-made landscape that occupies most of Australia because we have spent 50,000 years building the landscape so that it works for us. Then 200-odd years screwing that up because white people are inherently, unchallengeably superior in every possibly way to the primitive indigenous tribes and can learn nothing from them*.

    I'm shocked, shocked, that you think this way.

    Actually, the other answer to Birger's question is that the winds in fire weather, and often the winds generated by large fires, can pitch embers up to 10 kilometers. There's nowhere in the world that's willing to annually clear to bare ground out past the horizon from every house, just on the off-chance that this year's going to be a bad fire year.

    523:

    And there is NO ONE to the left of Atilla the Hun who doesn't consider that an abortion, that it goes against all precedent, done by extremist right-wing Justices, and the first time we have a majority of liberals on the Court, it will go away.

    Which will be when? 2030? 2040? 2050?

    Or, more to the point, which to you is more important:

    1) getting liberals appointed to the Supreme Court

    2) getting progressives "paid off" by choosing someone like Warren to be VP?(*)

    As long as it is 2 Senators per state regardless of population, progressive / left wing tickets for the White House will lose the Senate as you will scare too many voters in centre or right wing states.

    Obama/Biden won the Senate because a bunch of Reaganites rode their coattails, given the DNC the Senate (briefly).

    That is the only way, barring an earthquake of a shift in US politics, for the DNC to take the Senate.

    There are currently 2 justices in their 80s, both liberals, one of whom is unlikely to make it another 4 years if the Democrats blow this election.

    If the GOP gets to appoint replacements for 1 or both of those old liberal justices, that makes it even harder for the DNC to create a liberal court.

    Thus it is critical for the DNC not just to take the White House, but to take the Senate.

    524:

    Re: 'That's why I'm suggesting that language may be a the result fairly random walk through multidimensional space, rather than something that we've got "deep brain structures" that force us to communicate in certain ways. And again, if you enlarge that space by including signs, music, and math, the whole deep brain structure thing goes sideways. Where are the nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in a pointing finger, Mozart's Ode to Joy, or the equations of quantum mechanics?'

    First - how about reading up on Broca's area - it's real and testable/measurable - just try to talk to anyone who's had a stroke that cut off their blood supply to that area.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s_area

    Based solely on my own personal experience with 'language':

    Lower case 'l' language exists in multiple 'forms': oral/spoken, written, physical (facial/bodily) expression, sign, rhythm and probably a bunch of other ways. And that's for each 'formally recognized [upper case L] Language': English, French, Dutch, Mandarin Chinese, etc.

    Each language 'form' seems to end up with slightly different rules so that knowing one form doesn't automatically mean you know any of the other forms. Especially true with French - the spoken form can get quite informal; the written is almost always very stilted and formal in comparison. Ditto for physical movement - the French-Parisian shrug and moue became 'speech/language' stereotypes because they're real, and they do convey/modify meaning.

    Music - Music shares some things with language including Broca's Area: it's universal (all cultures seem to have developed music of some sort) and as seen from the popularity of pop, opera and musical theatre, audience reaction tends to be pretty consistent across cultures. Example: Les Miz was a huge hit in over 70 countries and I bet most audiences had next to no knowledge of the June 1832 Student Rebellion in Paris. Yes - the lyrics were translated but most of the audience were reacting to the emotional meaning implied by the tone and cadence/rhythm. Hamilton is far wordier but has superb rhythm-lyric matching that conveys the story esp. the emotional associations really well. BTW - Hamilton's supposed to air sometime on TV in the next few months - watch it, it's brilliant!

    https://www.ucf.edu/pegasus/your-brain-on-music/

    525:

    At some point I want to see a conversation on the bridge of a Star Trek style starship, with the Spock-alike being asked, "What language is your ship's computer programmed in?"

    "Intercal, of course. What else would we use?"

    526:

    I just looked up the ALTER command, (I was a little too late for COBOL) and firing and defenestration together aren't nearly enough!

    527:

    Mozart's Ode to Joy

    Not to take anything away from your comment-- but I would like to hear this piece--you know, from the alternate timeline in which W. A. lived to a good age, and composed this as the final movement of his magnificent Second Requiem, which he wrote to commemorate the death of his young friend Beethoven.

    528:

    I like this alternative timeline. I wonder about the famous comparison of Goethe meeting Napoleon with Beethoven meeting (or rather refusing to meet with) Napoleon, and the story of Beethocen’s third symphony (‘Eroica’) which he “undedicated” to Napoleon when the latter declared himself emperor. I wonder whether Mozart, and a Mozart history has never known, having survived past the life stage of adapting to misfortune.

    529:

    (Went off on a tangent and didn’t complete the last sentence).

    Whether Mozart, having survived, could have set a totally different start the 19th century, classicism not so sedate and romanticism not so cluttered. He was still younger than Goethe after all...

    530:

    My mom used to tell me how, when I was three? Four? that she read me a book one night, and in the morning, she heard me talking, and came in, and I was "reading", presumably having remembered the words that went with the picture on the page, the book to myself.

    My now 16 year-old daughter was the same, she would take the book from my hands and "read" it to me from memory.

    She now reads poetry, mainly modern stuff, but some older. :-)

    531:

    Oh yes, you're 100% right. But it's a fascinating exercise to try and understand what the original drafters might have had in mind and how the interpretation has drifted over time. It's a story right?

    One of the interesting things is how politically polarised your judiciary is. I'm sure there are political influences in our judiciary, but I don't think it's anything like as extreme as the situation in the US now. The separation and independence between the judiciary and the executive seems more complete.

    532:

    I would like to live in the timeline where Beethoven inexplicably lived long enough to witness the invention of the electric guitar and exclaimed: That's the instrument I wrote string-quartets 127-135 for!

    I once heard four young germans pull 133 off on electric guitars and bass, and they left absolutely no doubt that was what Beethoven had in mind.

    533:

    Fourthly, nobody has been claiming that the restrictions of our languages and thought are hard-wired, though there are almost certainly SOME that are. The issue is how much our linguistic experience affects how we can think, and how feasible it is to break out of that box. I don't know the answer, and I am damn sure that anyone who claims that they definitely do is bullshitting.

    To be entirely fair, I think some people (including Chomsky) really are claiming that some linguistic structures are hard wired. I think that some other people overstate the importance of counter examples to the way the Chomskian model works, and like everyone who talks about edge cases “disproving” certain theories (rather than, say, forcing a rethink or extension, as per Einstein versus Newton) there is a lot of stuff out there that is overblown and silly.

    Totally agree with the rest of what you say after this. The canonical example being Guguyimidjir, which has words for absolute direction (like north and south) but not relative direction (like left and right), with the result that every Guguyimidjir speaker knows which way is north pretty much all the time (though taking one to a context where this is challenging could prove very confusing).

    That famous essay by Geertz about time in Bali is interesting too.

    534:

    Heteromeles Oda Nobanunga was ... interesting. IIRC he had strong connections with RC christianity. He would have made a fascinating Shogun, had he not got unlucky

    Moz CORRECTION from Adelaide to Perth (heading eastwest)

    PHK @ 533 There's a very late Ludwig v B piano piece that was very little played in the C19th. He was on record as saying: "This is not for you, it is for future generations" - which is so true. It starts out more-or-less normally for the period & then turns into something that could easily have been written in 1930, or later.

    535:

    Quite a bit of the Schubert collection of Lieder is also amenable to the rock band treatment, consider ‘Der Erlkönig’.

    536:

    could easily have been written in 1930, or later.

    All the harmonies we mostly learned about in Jazz were already there in the mid-Romantics, just distributed a bit differently as they say. A lot of Schubert to Liszt could be called Jazz, it just didn’t have that name yet. Likewise consider taking something like ‘The Entertainer’ to 1820s Vienna. Or ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ to late 19th century Berlin.

    Serialism, post-Schönberg counterpoint and different, novel formalism that come up in the mid 20th century was pretty new though.

    537:

    "What language is your ship's computer programmed in?"

    Ada, with bits in COBOL and a few assembly routines. But we've got a project underway to replace it RSN all in a high level language.

    538:

    You and I think alike on this topic. But we tend to get shouted down by others here. Mostly from the US but with some from across the big waters.

    539:

    “Actually the engines are programmed in LISP, which is why there are so many crew in the engineering space all the time: their job is to count and double check parentheses...”

    540:

    @Damian

    "What language is your ship's computer programmed in?"

    Sindarin, although some of the modules are ported from Quenya.

    @Heteromeles

    My intro to Taoism was Benjamin Hoff. I've no idea if he has a good reputation in the Taoist community or not.

    541:

    A positive development in the COVID-19 outbreak -- the UK has finally qualified a serum antibody test, from Roche Pharmaceuticals.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52656808

    I read elsewhere the Roche test has an 99.8% positive result accuracy which is remarkable given the haste to develop such a test kit. Kudos to the meditech folks in Switzerland and you can expect Roche's stock price to go through the roof any time now.

    542:

    But does it work on cats?

    (A second cat has just been tested positive in France, bringing the world total up to something like 10, probably not counting the tigers and lions which have been tested positive in the Bronx zoo).

    543:

    0.2% false positive and 0% false negative (according to that article now, no need to go elsewhere) is pretty damned good.

    The next question is how fast Roche can crank up production. They're not a small company - their campus in Basel includes Switzerland's tallest building and the Tinguely kinetic art museum (well recommended if you're in town, the museum, I've not been up the tower yet) - but there's going to be huge demand.

    544:

    The other questions are how indicative it is of immunity, and how long that lasts. It isn't a lot of use if it merely says whether you have had it, but next to nothing about whether you are at risk.

    Roche could licence the test, and I hope will either do so or be pressured into doing so.

    545:

    Bad news about virus transmission: "These observations confirm that there is a substantial probability that normal speaking causes airborne virus transmission in confined environments."

    https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/05/12/2006874117

    It's a theoretical study (i.e., they didn't tag viroids with radioisotopes and document their transfer from one person to another person, causing an infection), but the logic seems clear.

    546:

    This is important news but the test can only be done on a Roche analyser. Hospital labs are usually equipped with analysers from a single manufacturer, usually Roche, Abbott, Bayer or Beckman-Coulter. Roche have a history of patenting assays and preventing their use by other manufacturers or adaptation for use in other analysers. The classic case is troponin T which is used as a marker for myocardial infarction. Other manufactures were forced to use the slightly less specific troponin I.

    547:

    True: it'll only be indicative of immunity if reinfection doesn't take place. Last I heard the tests that appeared to show reinfection turned out to be false positives, so there's hope.

    (Lack of evidence being, as always, not evidence of lack.)

    And yeah, the human coronaviruses may turn out to be reinfectors. However it may be that reinfections end up being mild — there is some indication that HCoV-OC43 (one of the 4 coronaviruses that make up a significant number of common cold infections) entered the human population about 1890 and may in fact have been the Russian 'Flu of 1889. So we may have something that we recatch every year or two, when our immunity has dropped enough not to be able to totally repel it but is still strong enough to fight it off with symptoms of a cold.

    That's an optimistic take of what 'herd immunity' might end up as. Problem is, that first infection is the killer, unless we have a vaccine or some way of better supporting patients who've caught it the first time.

    548:

    I am pretty confident that Roche will licence out their analyser/test tech rather than fight knockoffs and workalike kits in the patents courts over the next decade or so -- they're looking at tens of billions of tests over the next couple of years (folks who test negative will need to retested later, possibly multiple times) and a ten-buck licence fee per test that someone else makes is free money as far as they're concerned. Governments will pay any reasonable price, if Roche try and play funny buggers a la US pharma dudebros like Martin Shkreli then they'll get eminent-domained out of the money trough.

    Playing dog-in-the-manger for tests that are only used a few thousand times a year is cost-effective, when it's raining money like now it's time to grab a bucket.

    549:

    DigiCom I will add that to my Book of Commonplaces .....

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ P.S. Fucking MS have "update & improved" ( NOT ) Word ... & it now presents without all the useful commands visible, or the sheet I'm reading as I want it & left it last time ... they can obviously be found but - arseholes Trouble is I for equally valid reasons point-balnk refuse to use Apple & theor walled garden. [ I found out, putting DigiCom's piece into my "Commonplaces" grrr ....

    550:

    And some good news about treatment: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/health/coronavirus-proning-lungs.html

    (This may have been mentioned in the previous blog post, but worth reposting here.)

    551:

    Greg Tingey noted: "Fucking MS have "update & improved" ( NOT ) Word ..."

    It's past time for a really nasty class action lawsuit over how many hours Microsoft costs us each year with not-ready-for-prime-time updates, not to mention interface changes that undo years of learning and customization. Arrogant assholes. Don't get me started on how often Windows updates crash Windows and force me to reboot. Guess I need to invest a couple hundred bucks in Windows Pro so I can upgrade Windows Home and tell Microsoft to fuck off with their updates instead of having them rammed down my throat.

    GT: "Trouble is I for equally valid reasons point-balnk refuse to use Apple & theor walled garden."

    It's actually worse on the Mac side. Much though I love my Mac, I consider MacWord unusable for anything other than light work. (I literally wrote the book on using Word for editing.) I live in WinWord, since it's what all my clients use, and generally love the experience. I run it under Parallels, which is generally flawless. An impressive feat of engineering.

    I occasionally wonder whether MacWord isn't Microsoft's top secret plan to force Mac users to migrate to Windows.

    552:

    Well, you could always switch to LibreOffice and then have a new set of developers to moan about.

    553:

    Word updates...it gets worse

    couple of days ago I updated my Mac MS apps, early in the morning as the ISP doesn't allow updates during peak netflix time.

    As everytime I update stuff, I then look for the bugdoors (Chrome: recent 'edit files on your device' permission y/n? and 'sneak a look at your Clipboard' y/n? etc)

    well Word 16.16.x came up with a changed Word/Preferences/Security & Privacy pane/ "Help us Improve [x] Send full diagnostic date: Share information about how you use apps, features and devices. This includes basic diagnostic data and enhanced error reporting".... We may leave this, your data, lying around on an open server somewhere in Maryland, which the Chinese and the Russkies will eventually steal from 5VEY . Have a nice day.

    So I was able to remove the [x] from Word, Excel, Outlook... but it's staying grey-ticked in Powerpoint, due to my licensing, apparently.

    it's nice to have a litte raspberry Pi acting as a local DNS sink, https://pi-hole.net/, for trying to prevent data-loss

    I agree that serious long, chapterised docs are better written on a Win instance - that CTRL+S reflex is automatic after every few seconds.
    Yes, Mac Word probably has deliberate - delete the thesis - timers, tho' I quite liked Word on Mac OS 6, inbetween OS freezes.

    554:

    Word - Macs

    You DO know that MS is working hard at making all the office bits work the same on both platforms.

    They've seen you coming and boxed you in. :)

    555:

    I'm 300-plus pages into a novel on LibreOffice and having remarkably little trouble. I'd strongly suggest it unless, like OGH, you need to be perfectly matched with some publisher's workflow. If you need to share work it will output, without problems, work in multiple Word formats, as well as .rtf, .pdf and docbook formats, plus it's own .odt format. I've never had problems with it that I can't fix with a couple minutes on DuckDuckGo.

    556:

    Researchers discover potential targets for COVID-19 therapy https://phys.org/news/2020-05-potential-covid-therapy.html “…These results now enable the search for an active substance to be narrowed down to a small number of already approved drugs. ”

    557:

    I would strongly caution against people putting too much weight on decisions made by "The Democrats", the Democratic establishment, and the DNC, especially if you're from a country with a stronger party system. The DNC in particular has a very limited function related to the presidential elections only and almost no power beyond organizing the debates and the national conference. (The last of which is also called the DNC because why not.) There's very little ability to say "no, you can't run", hence why there were the herd of no-chancers like Tulsia Gabbard and Marianne Williams, along with Bloomberg's hijack attempt. Frankly, I imagine that if the party leadership had a choice they'd have preferred to see neither Bernie nor Biden running either.

    It's much better to think of party as a network of inter-faction relationships built up on soft rather than hard power. Biden built up those relationships over a long time while Bernie, who framed himself as an outsider, was left gambling on motivating youth turnout for a 'revolution'. In this case, after the muddled showings on all sides in the early primaries, well-respected figures like James Clyburn were willing to throw support behind Biden and in turn core Democratic factions came with them, creating the overwhelming victories that put Biden securely in front. When people say "the Democrats" or "the establishment" chose him, functionally that meant black voters, not a vague cabal of shadowy DNC figures.

    What's a good sign is that despite the acrimonious debates and fights between the candidates, they seem to have exited the primaries unified. The more centrist candidates like Buttigieg and Klobuchar put aside their differences to join with Biden after South Carolina. Biden in turn has brought first Warren and then Bernie on side as well, with the latter getting unprecedented concessions on policy and committee staffing. They also seem to all get along very well personally. The Twitter-sphere may be raging dumpster fire still, but all indications are the actual candidates are united and it turns out that screaming on Twitter counts a lot less than actual votes.

    559:

    Aaargh... your tweet feed handle.... aaargh. Please change it back, the aesthetic assault is just one thing too many....

    560:

    Re: 'Governments will pay any reasonable price, if Roche try and play funny buggers a la US pharma dudebros like Martin Shkreli then they'll get eminent-domained out of the money trough.'

    Yes - if Roche doesn't play nice then it's open season for some generic outfit elsewhere to come up with something remarkably 'similar' and probably end up being big heroes for putting lives ahead of profit.

    561:

    There are (at least) two kinds of stroke. One kind is caused by blood clots in the brain, the other is caused by blood leaks in the brain. They can be equally devastating.

    If you're in danger of blood clots, then you need blood thinners...but the blood thinners can increase the probability of the blood leak kind of stroke, and you can't tell ahead of time whether that's going to happen. Of course, they also increase the probability of blood leaks elsewhere, say the intestines. My grandfather reportedly died of anemia caused by a very large number of small blood leaks into his large intestine. (Well, it's more complicated, but skip that.)

    The thing is, internal blood leaks can be very difficult to detect. And even more difficult to predict. But blood clots need to be avoided.

    OTOH, a poster above indicated that blood thinners don't prevent COVID from clotting the blood. Whoops! Perhaps that isn't true of all of the current ones...but perhaps it is.

    562:

    That is a brilliant observation, and not one I have seen at all: why did she not come forward in '08 or '12?

    And where's her facepalm page, so I can ask her to demand that the Orange Psycho step down, with TWO DOZEN accusations, some in court.

    563:

    mdive I found that lots of people's systems wouldn't accept "Libre Office" files. This may have changed by now of course. However, about an hour ago, I had another try, the files came up, wobbled, I hit "refresh" - & they were back to the way they should be. Uh?

    564:

    Wait, say what? Shinto is Japanese, and from reading what, as of 25 or so years ago, was considered the one and only book in English on Shinto worth reading (which I have), 1) "this is our belief system, no, converts are NOT welcome, go find your own roots" 2) I was seriously not familiar with them trying to make converts outside of Japan.

    565:

    I think you need to mix threads here - you're in a box. You're assuming that a) the political alignment of a lot of sections of the country remain static, as fixed about 20 years ago. This is not the case.

    Note the election of 2018, where a lot of conservative Dems were out.

    In addition, the major new outbreaks of C-19 are in "the heartland", and as more and more bodies pile up, including grandma and uncle Sam, while McConnell and the Psycho shake rattles and roll about, that may well change. Given the liberal/left themes that have run through that area, on and off, for the last century and more, this could be a sea change.

    In addition, even the moderate media have started declaring the Senate in play.

    And I think even Moscow Mitch would have trouble not passing any judges, esp. a Supreme Court justice, for 4 years.

    566:

    @#$%^&(#$%^&($%^&*()

    Unlike, apparently, anyone else, a year and more ago, I started looking to another source of understanding: LANGUAGE USAGE IN 1790. Gee, the first dictionary was Johnson, around 1770. And ALL of the Founding Fathers would have been familiar with it.

    According to Johnson (you can find it online), commas were used, not (or not only) to distinguish clauses, but as pauses, for reading. Change all of those commas to pauses, and it's perfectly clear, and not to the advantage of the gun nuts.

    567:

    Troutwaxer notes: "I'm 300-plus pages into a novel on LibreOffice and having remarkably little trouble. I'd strongly suggest it unless, like OGH, you need to be perfectly matched with some publisher's workflow."

    I've heard good things about Libre, but have mostly used it to open "corrupted" documents that Word couldn't open, for which it works better than Word. Go figure. But I do heavy substantive editing, and can't risk format conversion problems between Microsoft's and Libre's interpretation of the .doc/.docx formats. Tested file conversions several years ago and found enough unpleasant surprises that I decided it's just not worth the risk. Also, I've spent 30 years wiring Word's way of working into my neurons, and it would be at best painful to change now.

    In terms of working with a publisher, you can still do all your writing in Libre and copy/paste the result into a Word document, or just open the file in Word. Last I tested this, all the important stuff (paragraphs, formats) transferred just fine. Only when it's time to do havey revision tracking is it necessary (for my "I'm paranoid and don't trust Word" values of necessary) to pour the text into Word for editing. So you can have your cake and eat it too.

    568:

    Don't be silly. The ADA part is still in development. Starfleet need the ship to go out, so they bit the bullet, and used what they had.

    Which, of course, was written in C.

    569:

    Back in the nineties, someone posted to usenet that he'd hacked into the Pentagon's computers, and found the source code for all of SDI, and found it written in lisp. For national security, he couldn't post all the source code, but he did post the last five lines.... ))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))....

    570:

    Wait, say what? Shinto is Japanese, and from reading what, as of 25 or so years ago, was considered the one and only book in English on Shinto worth reading (which I have)

    Heh heh. I thought the same way. Let's translate some romanized words from Japanese into Chinese:

    Shin=Shen To=Tao

    Basically, Shinto means "the way of the gods," with gods being a bad translation for kami.

    When you translate "way of the gods" into Chinese, you find it is, surprise, shen tao, and if you search on that, you'll find all sorts of stuff.

    I'm not claiming that Japanese Shinto is Chinese animist practices with the serial numbers filed off...exactly. However, a lot of what passes for indigenous spiritual practice in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and other places nearby is based on things that were practiced first in China and to some degree still are practiced there, albeit suppressed by communism, modernism, and scientism.

    Even more, a lot of the terminology for spiritual practices in that part of the world uses local transliterations of what were originally Chinese terms, just as much of what passes for European spiritual practice uses a base of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern ideas. Shinto is simply one example of this, where local animist practices in Japan (some unique, some imported) were shaped into something resembling a unified whole using an elite term (Shinto) that had its origins in Taoist spiritual terminology. And so it goes.

    571:

    As I've said before, in the mid-to-late nineties, every secretary (that's "underpaid hourly administrative assistant" to you young'uns) I knew that knew both Word and WordPerfect hated M$, and loved WP. WP's ad department should have been given some of the settlement money they won in the lawsuit against M$ over unfair competition... but they can't market their way out of a wet paper bag.

    Yes, I have both my legal copy of WP for DOS 6.0.c, and somewhere, I think I have my Corel Linux with WP... but there's no way I want to try to find all the compatability libraries, and it will be 32 bit, anyway. I'd rather try WP for DOS under wine.

    Dirt for WinBlows really, really sucks dead syphilitic right-wing roaches.

    572:

    re: Is the argument for universal language good science, or an attempt by linguists to follow imperialistic norms and to exalt the importance of their field? As a far outsider, I simply can't tell.

    I'm equally an outsider, but I do have a definite opinion here. I think a universal language is possible, in a sense, but there will be a large number of places where it's not optimal. And the universal language won't be used, in its entirety, by anyone. As a simplified example I offer C++, which is, admittedly, simpler than any natural language, and already only useful in restricted circumstances. But it's gotten so large and complex that almost nobody knows the entire language. Most people work with "useful subsets". And, of course, this will mean the people who know one subset of the universal language will have a hard time communicating with people who know a different subset. This comes in degrees, and shades all the way down to idiolects.

    573:

    It's also worth noting that the Democratic Party controls a shitload of money, gobs of information, and the capability to either have a locally or nationally important person endorse you or not. And also that they're shit-stupid when it comes to any kind of competing or marketing.

    574:

    re: Interestingly, our auditory system is almost entirely 'soft' (i.e. learnt), as I know full well.

    That's false. Perhaps you mean phonemic recognition or some such, but the basic auditory system is more hardwired than the visual system. It's got a more specialized area of the brain, i.e. one that's more separated, and doesn't do anything else, than does the visual system. And it's less amenable to being trained. The higher levels of the auditory system are soft, but no more than the visual system. Recognition of cartoons as representations of 3D isn't hardwired. But the same is true of photographs. For that matter, in most people reading combines the higher levels of auditory and visual processing.

    575:

    You're assuming that a) the political alignment of a lot of sections of the country remain static, as fixed about 20 years ago. This is not the case.

    In Senate terms, it is roughly static and very slowly changing - if it wasn't the same as 20 years ago then McConnell would not be Senate Majority Leader.

    The GOP playbook is based on the fact that flipping entire states is hard

    Note the election of 2018, where a lot of conservative Dems were out.

    Yep, in nice safe small House seats in DNC heartlands.

    Flipping an individual House seat is easy, flipping an entire state is something else.

    In addition, the major new outbreaks of C-19 are in "the heartland", and as more and more bodies pile up, including grandma and uncle Sam, while McConnell and the Psycho shake rattles and roll about, that may well change. Given the liberal/left themes that have run through that area, on and off, for the last century and more, this could be a sea change.

    So what you are saying is ignore the evidence, and instead count on the voters of entire states to suddenly get enlightened and vote for the DNC candidate.

    As the saying goes, and I have a bridge to sell you.

    I would like nothing more than for that to happen, but the odds are terrible.

    The right wing media will spin it, and spin it well - look what those liberal elites did in Italy! note how the big outbreaks are non-whites! (already happening in the meat plant outbreaks, where local whites are blaming the "immigrants" and not the working conditions and poor pay for Covid spread), they will note how Covid came to the heartland from "liberal" NYC, how it is a Chinese plot, etc, etc.

    Not to mention that when being threatened we often double down on our existing beliefs.

    And thus at the end of the day most of those states will remain loyally GOP.

    In addition, even the moderate media have started declaring the Senate in play.

    Old news. This has been part of the story since the DNC primay process started, with an analysis of how each potential candidate would influence the ballot beneath them to create either a DNC gain or a GOP hold.

    And I think even Moscow Mitch would have trouble not passing any judges, esp. a Supreme Court justice, for 4 years.

    Really, after all these years of obstructing anything a Democrat does you think McConnell is suddenly going to see the light and cooperate?

    While anything is possible, if Trump loses the GOP will view (likely correct) that Biden is a one term President and will be viewing 2024 as a restoration of a GOP President to the White House as god intended - and the ability to stack the Supreme Court 7-2 is far too tempting a target.

    The only thing that would stop him (on the assumption the GOP is still Senate Majority after November) would be if the 2022 midterms took away that majority - but a campaign to protect the court from liberal heathens would work wonders to get out the vote in 2022.

    Look, I hope all that I typed is wrong. It would make me very happy to see the US join the 21st century. But your arguments remind me of 6 months ago, when the Corbyn supporters kept insisting despite all the evidence that he was going to lead Labour to a glorious win. And in the end, the UK wasn't prepared to be that radical and I doubt the US will be either.

    576:

    People that she told don't count as witnesses. Witnesses are people who witnessed it happening.

    There are several other problems that make her story...uncertain. Maybe it's true. I'd give it a 50% chance that something happened, and perhaps a 5% that it matches her latest version of the story.

    Even so, however. Even were I convinced that her latest version of the story is correct, I'd still pick Biden over Trump, and not find it a contest.

    Biden is nobody that I would have chosen, given a free choice. But he's better than Trump, though that's quite a low bar.

    577:

    The DNC in particular has a very limited function related to the presidential elections only and almost no power beyond organizing the debates and the national conference.

    The DNC has more power than that - there is after all a reason that nobody serious other than a then independent candidate ran against Hillary in the 2016 primaries - the fix by the DNC was in.

    They control money, they control databases, and they have influence.

    It may not be strictly organized in an official small company way, but it is organized enough.

    They did sort of learn their lesson, and were hands off this time. But I wouldn't expect the temptation to not return in the future.

    578:

    "Language" appears ( to me ) to be ( at least ) a 3-dimensional Phase Space, with axes of Time, Sound ( frequency/combinations) & Tone ( pitch ) Even mathematics can ( I think ) be fitted into this frame of reference? Discuss ....

    579:

    And for the UK people on here, look - despite the Boris bluster the UK government has put into writing that they will be building physical border posts for NI <-> rest of UK trade

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/may/13/brexit-will-mean-checks-on-goods-crossing-irish-sea-government-admits

    580:

    Several thoughts:

    First, that voting for Joe Biden (or, a lot of the time, a lot of other people - like Bill Clinton) is a soft version of military disipline, especially at Staff level. Basically, me the Field Marshall has to think on the lines of:

    'Well, if I do this that is likely to kill a million people, but if I do that - sent a twentythousand force to there, all to get killed, and another forty thousand to some other horror space, then the likely result will be only seven hundred thousand of us dead. So that is what I am going to do.'

    I think it was General Montgomery who said, more or less, that it is no suprise a lot of Generals are stupid becase just doing the job is so very, very difficult.

    We are only trying to do the soft version now, but staring fascistic horrors in the face means our only choices are more or less evil.

    581:

    Well, actually CDC 3600 Fortran had a somewhat similar capability around 1980, though I think it could only skip the statement following the call. (Can't quite remember the details, because I never used it.)

    Now that I think a bit more I think I've run across that several times, but it was always "skip n statements after the call", and I think n was always a small integer, but the only bound that sticks out in memory is < 10, though I don't think I ever encountered that high a value.

    That said, I've never had to deal with code that used the capability, though at one time I thought of writing some...I forget why.

    [[ html less-than character fix - mod ]]

    582:

    mdive WHat a suprise! Not BoZo has turned out to be a deliberate , public liar - again. [ He knew, all along that it wasn't going to be possible to fudge it ] Simply trying to bullshit your way out of problems like that, isn't ever going to work .... I look forward to Starmer slowly dissecting him on that one!

    583:

    Then you just save the file as an RTF, which works with pretty much everything.

    584:

    I downloaded LibreOffice this year, and it saves and opens in as far as I can tell every kind of Word file type. It also doesn't have the fucking Ribbon.

    It's got some issues, but it's generally a big improvement over Word.

    585:

    "As long as it is 2 Senators per state regardless of population, progressive / left wing tickets for the White House will lose the Senate as you will scare too many voters in centre or right wing states."

    That's certainly the received wisdom.

    Frankly, I don't know that it's actually true. The Dems haven't actually run a particularly left wing or progressive candidate in my life time to actually demonstrate this is the case, and I also think the establishment is very committed to the idea of swing voters that I think is generally not the case anymore and specifically in this election.

    And I say that as someone who for four years has been pretty sure Bernie's 'revolution' was a fantasy.

    586:

    The Crazy Years indeed. [ Anti-vaxxers threatening "war" in the US of arseholes ]

    587:

    I have a question about "electrosynthesis", maybe there are chemists here.

    Let's assume that unsubsidised solar-farms-in-the-stinking-desert will soon get to a penny per kilowatt-hour. *

    So, an interesting question is whether that price level changes things. Nature seems to be saying that three cents is a threshold for electrical production of hydrogen. What would it take for renewably powered electrosynthesis to displace petrochemical processes? seems to think four cents is a threshold.

    So: apparently it's easy to find articles about creating CO, H2, ethanol, ethylene, formic acid, ethylene glycol, propanol, urea, polyols (whatever they are), polymers, methanol, ether and "fuels". What I don't have is a picture of what super-cheap electricity will be used for first, and how much research is needed to get there. For instance, do we need a particular price threshold for CO2 capture?

    *To defend that penny per kWh number:

    One, there is already a project priced at 1.135 cents. Two, last year's Lazard report claimed solar farms were getting cheaper by 13% per year, from a baseline of 3.6-4.4 cents. That puts the one-penny level less than a decade out. Three, a 50 billion dollar high-tech industry is capable of a lot of R&D. Four, a whole lot of academic research groups are publishing about solar cells, mostly perovskites and tandems.

    If all four points are cogent, we'll blow past the one penny level. So I think one-penny by 2030 is a really safe bet.

    588:

    The DNC has more power than that - there is after all a reason that nobody serious other than a then independent candidate ran against Hillary in the 2016 primaries - the fix by the DNC was in.

    Well, apart from Lincoln Chaffee, O'Malley and a few others, absolutely no-one other than Hillary Clinton and the "then independent" not-a-Democrat Senator Sanders ran for the nomination. By the way Senator Sanders is still independent and proudly not-a-Democrat and has been for forty years and more, he was just intending to use that all-encompassing Democratic Party machine his supporters despise and wish to see destroyed to hopefully get himself elected in both 2016 and 2020 as the first and only independent President of the United States in recent times. Maybe he should try for the Republican Party nomination in 2024 instead.

    They control money, they control databases, and they have influence.

    Ah, yes, databases. I remember the interesting scandal in 2016 when the Sanders organisation was caught rifling through Democratic Party databases owned by the Clinton campaign. Senator Sanders wagged his finger VERY vigorously on that occasion while his supporters tried to flim-flam and deflect blame.

    The party's real influence consists of having hundreds of thousands of active supporters working hard every election to get more than 60 million voters to support Democratic Party candidates. Senator Sanders got 183,000 people to vote for him last time he stood for election to the Senate in 2018.

    But I wouldn't expect the temptation to not return in the future.

    True, but Sanders is up for election to the Senate again in 2024, it's going to be difficult for him, he's got to be tempted by the idea of making another attempt to try and hijack the Democratic Party nomination but that would mean not running for the Senate as well. Oh my daughter, oh my ducats, as Will Shakespeare once wrote.

    589:

    "polyols (whatever they are)"

    Things with multiple alcohol functionalities in the same molecule. Ethylene glycol and glycerine are familiar examples. Thing is you're using CO2 as a feedstock and trying to reduce it to something more useful, and it's a lot easier to pull just one of the oxygens off and stick the remaining bit onto something else than it is to pull both of them off.

    590:

    If you're copy/pasting to move the contents of a LibreOffice document into a MSWord document, I think you're doing it wrong. You should export the file into a word format. (Well, I call it export. LibreOffice calls it "Save As" with a specified format.)

    OTOH, I've got to admit that I've never opened one of those in MSWord, as I don't have any Microsoft programs on my computer.

    591:

    Polyols are also frequently used as artificial sweeteners -- non-glycemic, so safe for diabetics (although they can act as osmotic laxatives if you chow down on too much).

    592:

    Whether it's in a separate area or not is irrelevant. But phonemic recognition includes whether you can actually hear such things AT ALL - not just whether you can distinguish them. I gave up trying to learn to speak French when I realised that some of their vowels come across as silence, no matter how much I amplify them. Truly bizarre.

    You may be right that some aspects are hard-wired but, by that, I am referring to things like you can spot one anomalous shape or one anomalous colour in a set of objects almost instantly, but have to search each one to find the one that has an anomalous shape AND colour. That's part of our 'fixed network' and has nothing to do with learning.

    593:

    LibreOffice is happy saving files in .docx (Word XML) or its native format, ODT (Open Document Format, an actual ISO standard for XML word processing files). Microsoft word is happy reading .docx files from LibreOffice, and can be configured to read/save ODT files by default (never mind importing them) because some governments mandate an open file format.

    Where stuff gets tricky is anything involving macros, much less embedded complex objects. But if all you're doing is processing words, with styles and tables and maybe a ToC and index, Word/LibreOffice portability should be acceptable.

    I still have a Microsoft Orifice license though, because I work with editors who like to apply change tracking to novel-sized word documents and make thousands of changes before they throw them back at me. Grr. (Even though I've told them repeatedly that I work in Scrivener, and unlike LibreOffice, Scrivener is incompatible with Word's entire concept of "what constitutes a document" -- it generates a .docx or ODT file as a final export step, like a PDF or dumping postscript to a printer. It's not meant to come back again and get merged or tracked!)

    594:

    Supreme Court Republicans Of The United States.

    595:

    Excuse me but English / Literature majors even as undergrads learned quite a bit about Johnson's Big old Dic. It was standard even in the second semester of the required Survey courses.

    But there aren't any English majors in politics now in any place, and hardly any, anyway, anytime, ever. Except for a few who switched to Law when they realized there was no money that could be called MONEY involved with a graduate degree even, and that became more so as the 20th C evolved.

    And now the universities have pretty much dropped the English major all together, along with most of what was labeled as 'The Humanities.'

    BTW, "Hamilton" may be considered brilliant by some musically -- but its history is, let us say, for shyte.

    ~~~~~~~

    It occurs that if Our Host is still wondering what his next challenge for fiction should be, it could be a series in which American Becomes Great Again, after a century or two of being not only the world's pariah, but the world's most broken down cruel and hideous locked down prison in global history -- even surpassing, at least in geographical scope, the old plantation Dixie.

    Our host would have to show the stages that this happens -- and against the backdrop of ongoing global climate catastrophe change too.

    It's always given me buggies, all the sf / f worlds that begin after the catastrophe, with some kind of order and even progress restored, and how horrified the later generations remain at the crash having happened, while constantly stumbling upon remnants of the old order. But the writers have never shown the new world got from the old world of cruel terrorism to the present one which allows for Our Protagonist to be Great his or her self!

    596:

    Any book writing I do will be LaTeX and github. My editor can raise a pull-request with his suggested changes!

    597:

    "I am quite aware of the disadvantages that "Black" people have in the USA. Their overall disadvantages in this country are nowhere nearly as bad, but they are there. STILL does not explain the difference - which is visible here, where unlike the USA we actually have a Universal Health System, which works, more-or-less. You get sick, you go & see the doctor &/or go to hospital. IT COSTS YOU NOTHING. "

    "Haven't you got that, yet? STOP projecting the USA's total lack of civilised care for its own citizens onto other countries. OK?"

    I'm not.

    As for 'STILL does not explain the difference...', I'd like to see that. It's a strong statement, and I would spend a lot of time with very good data before I'd sign my professional name as a statistician to such a report.

    I will bet that due to work situations and other factors, non-white people in the UK will not access health care as readily, and that when they do, they'll be treated more poorly.

    Remember that in the USA at least, one big question is whether or not to admit upon presentation or send home with instructions to come back (or call an ambulance) when they are worse.

    I've seen two articles where doctors are saying that they were shocked by how fast patients could crash with COVID (moving to 'sick enough to admit' to 'ICU NOW!'). I've seen one statistic that a large percentage (maybe the majority) of patients were dying in the ER or in hallway awaiting treatment.

    In NY City at one point the daily 'dead at home' count went from the usual 20-25 to 200-225. Given any disparity in access or treatment, and a disease like COVID, who would be surprised at racial, ethnic and class disparities in outcomes?

    598:

    Charlie @593: Re: Scrivener

    I got Scrivener for my Win 7 desktop, now ten years old, that will NOT be "upgraded" to Win 10, thankyouverymuch. I have not yet worked with it at length, but I certainly see why it's your preferred software. At some point this year I'll buy a new desktop with Win 10, as my prior upgrade efforts have been, to say the least, painful.

    It appears that the current version is 1.9.16, released 14 November 2019. I'll have to check with them to see if my license is transferrable between machines, or if I have to purchase it anew. What has been your experience with updating Scrivener?

    599:

    The link was posted. I can't be bothered to search for it, but I commented on it, saying that it strongly indicated that 'whites' have developed a partial immunity - not exactly surprising, given our evolutionary history.

    600:

    "It occurs that if Our Host is still wondering what his next challenge for fiction should be, it could be a series in which American Becomes Great Again, after a century or two of being not only the world's pariah, but the world's most broken down cruel and hideous locked down prison in global history -- even surpassing, at least in geographical scope, the old plantation Dixie."

    How about just using a 'dead anglosphere' as a word-building back drop?

    A world where the EU, non-imperialized Middle East, China and Africa[1] deal with each other, and the Old Empire(s) is(are) dead?

    [1] I know that I'm taking a continent with 1 billion people and treating it as a country.

    601:

    There is the interesting question of how the USA deals with being a collapsing power with several thousand nuclear weapons + a crazed minoritarian governing faction?

    The emerging powers will have priority #1 not being nuked, and a collapsing US makes that a higher-occurrence risk.

    602:

    Indeed, some of the longer-chain versions are produced specifically for use as laxatives. I hate the stuff because it makes me want to kill people. Apparently that is a recognised side effect.

    603:

    ["How about just using a 'dead anglosphere' as a word-building back drop?

    A world where the EU, non-imperialized Middle East, China and Africa[1] deal with each other, and the Old Empire(s) is(are) dead?"]

    I like that one a lot -- better than mine! Seeing the pathetic attempts to escape from North American to lands of more opportunity -- and always being turned back because "Those People" carry not only c19 now but more recent emergent diseases, though never treated quite as horribly as ICE treats Latin Americans.

    Talk about warning. Except, of course, it's waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too late.

    604:

    Re: ' ... doctors are saying that they were shocked by how fast patients could crash with COVID (moving to 'sick enough to admit' to 'ICU NOW!').'

    Can't find it now but read/heard that Day 8-10 post-positive diagnosis appears to be a hump: things can go from sorta okay to needs ICU STAT!

    This timing though isn't engraved in stone esp. for kids - some apparently can harbor and shed the virus for more than 2 weeks before symptoms appear. Once symptoms appear, the kids get progressively worse fairly fast.

    Speaking of symptoms - I'm expecting more symptoms to be added to the test-for-COVID-19 list just based on where ACE2 (and TMPRSS2) target cells are located:

    brain eye nose lungs heart pancreas kidney liver bladder ileum prostate & testis placenta

    https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/receptors-for-sars-cov-2-present-in-wide-variety-of-human-cells-67496

    605:

    I get it. But thanks for your wonderful books! I can't wait for the next Laundry Files and Merchant Princes books. I'm freighted (fraught?) with anxiety and out of love with America™. Doing preliminary research on my father's citizenship to see what I might be entitled to. I know, why isn't it obvious? Thanks, WWII. Anyway, I'm glad you're well and sorry you don't feel well.

    606:

    you could always switch to LibreOffice and then have a new set of developers to moan about.

    Only for reading, and then not always. Some formatting gets screwed up and you end up with tables across the top of text with both wrapped in funny ways. This happens absolutely consistently with one of the specifications I use regularly.

    But the chances of MS-Word being able to open and edit a "MS-Word" document edited by Libre Office is slim to none. If you create the document in Libre Office it is slightly better, but really, they're not meaningfully compatible once you get past a short email with paragraph breaks (people who use Word documents as email bodies should be shot).

    607:

    Barry That quote is from one of my posts, not JBS' Your bet would be wrong though, if only for the number of non-pinkoe people working in the NHS, including the last specialist who saw me about my back/joint problems...

    Remember that in the USA at least, one big question is whether or not to admit upon presentation or send home with instructions to come back (or call an ambulance) when they are worse. That doesn't mean a fucking thing to me. You are ill - you go & see your GP, or you go to "A&E" - not a problem. What are you talking about?

    Foxessa & Barry Already been done John Wyhdham - "The Outward Urge"

    608:

    Really? The governor and the lege of Virginia were "small safe Dem states"? Oh, btw, there is a socialist (DSA) in the VA lege at the moment.

    The Orange Psycho, and the complete "ignore the law", and C-19 certainly look like game-changers to me.

    Oh, and remember, we're only talking about 4-5 Senators.

    609:

    emerging powers will have priority #1 not being nuked, and a collapsing US

    We already have a system in place for that. Another nuclear power comes in and helps the collapsing one isolate and remediate an weapon-useful material, including actual weapons if required. It's what the US did in The Ukraine and Russia, probably other places. They also did it involuntarily in Iraq.

    So there is very strong international precedent for the US to request and be given whatever help it needs to safely remove its nuclear arsenal.

    610:

    Nojay, I'm sorry, but you don't understand that part of the US politics.

  • As Bernie said, the state laws are written in such a way that it is next to impossible for a third party to get on the ballot in one state. (Tens of thousands of signatures, we're talking about, in each state).
  • Bernie also said, in so many words, which too many people ignored, that he explicitly joined the Dems to run as a Dem, and not a third-party run because he was not going to be a spoiler the way Ralph Nader was in 2000? 2004?
  • 611:

    Back in '08 and '09, when I was applying for jobs, I was sending resumes by exporting from OpenOffice to doc. These days, I'm submitting stories that way, and have had no one complain about it. (Well, there was one - I'm sending docx - and I resent as .doc, and he had no issues.)

    612:

    Are you claiming that Senator Sanders is now a member of the Democratic Party? If so why is he listed on the US Congress website as an independent Senator for Vermont and not affiliated with the Democratic Party?

    https://www.congress.gov/member/bernard-sanders/S000033?

    At the moment the placeholder filing for Senator Sanders intention to run for the Senate in 2024 indicates he is intending to run for the Senate again as an independent candidate -- it's not likely the Democratic Party will put up a candidate against him but we'll see.

    https://docquery.fec.gov/pdf/416/201903049145600416/201903049145600416.pdf

    613:

    If you want to understand Sanders' political position, I'd suggest reading:

    https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/mar/02/how-can-bernie-sanders-run-democratic-primary-when/

    Questions?

    614:

    There is the interesting question of how the USA deals with being a collapsing power with several thousand nuclear weapons + a crazed minoritarian governing faction?

    There's a bigger context problem: climate change. If we continue on with business as usual, by 2030 we should be seeing a real, paleontology-level Mass Extinction starting. The reason is that this is when tropical temperatures are predicted to start consistently exceeding lethal levels (occasionally) for a wide variety of tropical species. The reason it's a formal mass extinction event is that the paleontologists define these events by the disappearance of coral/biogenic reefs from the fossil record and sometimes, the reappearance of stromatolites. This is already starting to happen, but if it gets too hot for coral reefs to survive, that's the real start of the extinction event.

    By 2050, the lethal heat levels should reach the temperate zone. Note this is for wildlife, but you can add in massive crop failures, huge migrations of people who used to depend on tropical crops and coral reefs for food, and other chaos.

    So in this situation, the US may be a collapsing superpower, but the question isn't who will take its place. Rather the question is whether it's collapsing more slowly than the other nation states. If we pull that off, we're stay #1.

    Personally, I suspect that a large number of billionaires, republicans, and white supremacists are basing their strategies on just this world.

    Now, this isn't the only conceivable world, even with all the crap that's going on. For example, one can imagine a world where the US and other great powers really and truly bungle their response to covid19 and whatever zoonotic pandemics are unleashed by deforestation, and as a result, we accidentally trip our way into flattening the curve on climate change too. It's possible! (release smallpox in Wuhan instead of covid19, for example).

    In this case, the US would be a collapsing superpower and there would be chaos and tremendous reorganization.

    However, despite mass casualties from pandemics and the loss of superpower status in the anglosphere and russosphere worlds, this is more a utopian than dystopian vision, because (surprise!), climate change is being dealt with decisively as a consequence of all this horrendous suffering.

    And I want to highlight this: you can write a really grim utopian novel about the near future, because successfully dealing with climate change will cause as much disruption as not dealing with it and ending civilization. The difference is in the type of suffering and who wins and who loses.

    So if you're stuck on writing a grimdark future, why not make it grimdark because the heroes are suffering for a better tomorrow, instead of trying to be the last rooster crowing atop the ash heap of what used to be a vibrant world?

    615:

    the reappearance of stromatolites

    At least we have a soundtrack for that (listen to track 10):

    https://www.iantamblyn.com/epic-rock

    (Actually, I recommend the entire album.)

    616:

    “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me." But, LOL, they have their own problems. :-) Super-Rich Stranded by Lockdowns Face Higher Tax Bills (Benjamin Stupples, Devon Pendleton, May 12, 2020) “It’s not coming to an end any time soon,” said Simon Goldring, a London-based partner at law firm McDermott Will & Emery. “There’s going to be people stuck in different jurisdictions who inadvertently become residents there.” Spending more than six months in a country typically makes someone a tax resident, although the location of permanent homes and family links, travel histories and income sources are also factors. Determining tax residency is complicated -- even more so when each nation applies different criteria.

    617:

    Re: writing software and its discontents. And riffing on the title of this post: -

    These days, looking at the prospect of Word and its ilk, I more and more find myself thinking "I can't be having with that, at my time o' life"....

    And find myself in a terminal, typing

    cat > essay.txt words words words ... ...

    [Ctrl-D]

    (That would be Ctrl-Z if you're on Windows. And I think 'cat' would be 'type', but who knows?)

    618:

    A couple of noteworthy pieces elsewhere today.

    One in nymag points out the Biden is going to have to do much better than he is doing in the swing states, because people who say 'Democrat' when polled mostly live in "tuit deserts", and can't get round tuits on voting day. Democrats taking the Senate seems less and less likely.

    The whole Clinton-Bush-Obama-Trump story seems very Greek Tragedy to me. No shortage of hubris anywhere.

    The other is a guest post on FT Alphaville (free but mandatory registration) by Big George, about China's Covid problems. It probably doesn't make a heap of sense if you don't have the back story, in which case his book is probably the quickest way to get it.

    In brief: much hidden unemployment, huge debt everywhere, aging population, weak health and social security systems, obstructive and grasping vested interests, traditions and methods that have long outlived their usefulness, and obliviousness at the centre.

    All in all, Axel Oxenstierna is more relevant than ever. ("Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?")

    So is Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly. Well worth a skim.

    619:

    One in nymag points out the Biden is going to have to do much better than he is doing in the swing states, because people who say 'Democrat' when polled mostly live in "tuit deserts", and can't get round tuits on voting day. Democrats taking the Senate seems less and less likely.

    OK. Deep into US politics here.

    I'm in North Carolina.

    We are basically 50/50 depending on the poll and news of the day. And have been for a while but are creeping D. But Rs have been much better at the last 2 weeks electionering and such for most of the last 20 years. It allowed them to take the NC legislature for the first time since reconstruction (when the definition of R wasn't even the same thing).

    So our previous R governor teed off so many people that a popular District Attorney (D) beat him even though Trump won the Pres vote and incumbent Senator Burr (R) also won.

    Now we have incumbent Senator Tom Tillis (R) running this year as maybe a very vulnerable R Senator. And his opponent is a somewhat unknown state level D. Tillis is stuck between not being enough supportive of Trump and at the same time needing to distance from him for a lot of "middle" voters. Some of his ads look as if he's running as a D. We'll see.

    Now Senator Burr has stepped into it with both feet and no boots on. But no matter what he will likely not resign. I suspect not even if charged with crimes. Because that would allow a D governor to appoint his replacement for the next 2 years. (I may be wrong here as each state can have byzantine rules for such things.) Which might help flip the Senate. Or allow the R's nationwide to weaponize via "they got one unfairly, don't vote in more" kind of thing. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-burr/us-senator-steps-aside-as-committee-chair-as-fbi-probes-stock-trades-idUSKBN22Q0NB

    Of course the Senate Intel Committee was the one that released a report a few weeks ago that said Russia DID interfere with the 2016 election. (R controlled committee) Of course the current Trump deflection rant is that the entire Russia thing was a Hoax.

    And so on.

    And I thought the politics of 1968 and 1974 in this country were convoluted.

    620:

    "Language" appears ( to me ) to be ( at least ) a 3-dimensional Phase Space, with axes of Time, Sound ( frequency/combinations) & Tone ( pitch ) Even mathematics can ( I think ) be fitted into this frame of reference? Discuss ....

    Wrong level of description, I think.

    Because there's an analog-to-digital move in language. Even a badly formed letter A is still a letter A.

    That type of move - the analog-to-digital - gets you out of the space you describe and into something else. You've got a 26-character "alphabet space" already that isn't part of what you described and that's really low-level compared to syllables or words and a long way from grammar.

    621:

    Greg VP That Oxenstierna quote is already in my Commonplaces book ....

    icehawk Nice try, not even wrong "Alphabet" - what this alphabet long-nose? As in Chinese, Hang-Gul, Cuneiform, Heiroglyphic ...

    622:

    "I remember using a Basic dialect in the mid-70s where a RETURN n statement returned control to the statement n lines before or after the line following the matching CALL statement. Always seemed a tad counter-intuitive to me."

    This was a very common idiom in programming until semiconductor memory relieved the memory-squeeze in the 1980'ies.

    The optimization inherent in variant returns, is that you spend fewer instructions if you put the "switch" examining the nature of the return value in the called function, rather than the calling function.

    It was very common that you would call a function to do I/O, and it would return to one of the next three instructions for 'timeout', 'error' and 'success' respectively.

    Again the order is optimized: 'timeout' and 'error' would be one instruction jumps to common exception handling functions, possibly even generic ones in the "kernel" reachable through a page-zero jump and 'success' being last allowed you to continue the normal program flow directly.

    623:

    Not the same, but also weird: the Microsoft Basic where a subroutine call didn't use the CALL instruction, it pushed firstly the required continuation address on to the stack, and then the address of the subroutine. It then executed a RET, which meant it jumped to the subroutine.

    And when the subroutine did its RET, it returned to where the caller wanted.

    I never did find out why they did it that way.

    624:

    My guess, although I haven't actually done a side-by-side comparison is that the two PUSHes and RET took fewer clocks and memory accesses than CALL, saving a bit of time. Remember the original IBM PC was an 8-bit bus device, everything took longer because of that.

    625:

    Of course the Senate Intel Committee was the one that released a report a few weeks ago that said Russia DID interfere with the 2016 election.
    And yesterday the republican chair of that committee, Richard Burr was raided by the FBI, had his phone seized and resigned from the committee.

    Over insider trading allegations of course, nothing to do with the report. Nothing at all. Promise.

    626:

    Oh, you already said that. Sorry, misread your comment.

    627:

    On 80386 and earlier models in the series, the integer multiplication instruction IMUL took something like 40 cycles. I coded a bit with the 8086 assembly, and I remember doing some multiplication by constant by shifting and adding, because that took the multiplication to something like 20 cycles. I found the code some years later, and while it was obvious what it did, it took me like half an hour to decode how it did that.

    Fun times. Then we got 80486 processors and integer multiplication was on the order of one cycle. I had moved on from assembly at that point, so didn't really code anything for that.

    Now I'm learning 65c02, because there are some retro-computing projects which use that processor and it could be fun to make something on them.

    628:

    It appears that the current version is 1.9.16, released 14 November 2019. I'll have to check with them to see if my license is transferrable between machines, or if I have to purchase it anew. What has been your experience with updating Scrivener?

    Scrivener 3 for Windows (they're skipping entirely across Scriv 2 and going straight from 1.9 to 3.0) is in very late public beta -- I think currently at Release Candidate 5. It's free, although the betas typically expire after about 2 weeks and you need to grab an update. If you bought it in the last 3-6 months you're probably in line for an automatic license upgrade when 3.0 drops (they don't want to annoy the folks who bought 1.9 expecting an imminent 3.0 release all of a year ago -- it's quite late.)

    Scriv 3 uses a different file format from Scriv 1.9, but automatically upgrades your projects when you first open then, and it can export a Scriv 1.x format file if you need backward compatability for another device.

    You can install a Scriv 3 beta alongside Scriv 1.9 on a Windows machine. I think you'll be impressed by how much bigger and more complicated the newer release is: be sure to run through the tutorial!

    629:

    How about just using a 'dead anglosphere' as a word-building back drop? A world where the EU, non-imperialized Middle East, China and Africa[1] deal with each other, and the Old Empire(s) is(are) dead?

    My problem is that I'm too embedded in anglophone culture to be an effective commentator. Despite originating within a minority within a minority (reform jewish, in the UK) I'm too male, white, and monoglot to do the story justice.

    The space-opera-on-pause has zero surviving elements of anglosphere, but mainly because it's so far in the future that it also has zero surviving elements of H. Sapiens Sapiens, whose existence is inferred (in the protagonists' era) by genomic studies that look for the last common hominid ancestor species. (We are their australopithecines.)

    630:

    There is the interesting question of how the USA deals with being a collapsing power with several thousand nuclear weapons + a crazed minoritarian governing faction?

    Two (or more) points.

  • Nukes need regular maintenance, and not just "replace the AA cells"; compact warheads require high isotope purity, and normal radioactive decay will gradually poison them with contaminants -- for "maintenance" we're talking "dismantle, recycle the pit (never mind the tritium booster), and run it through first chemical then isotope separation lines before remanufacturing". In other words, it's a back to the bomb factory job and the probability of an H-bomb factory remaining operational during a civilizational collapse are low. Russia managed it -- more or less -- but only because it was a major political priority; I suspect the reason Ukraine surrendered its nukes was that they were nearing the end of their maintenance-free life and the facilities to rebuild them simply weren't available (they were best used as one-off negotiating tools).
  • Yes, the ability to make crude A-bombs will last a lot longer (and especially "dirty" bombs that don't require a chain reaction). But that's not the same level of destructiveness.

  • Delivering a nuclear weapon requires a working delivery system, and all the stuff about maintenance I mentioned above applies in different form to just about any post-1945 weapons delivery system. Otherwise you're down to putting a bomb in a truck and driving into an enemy stronghold.
  • Which leads us to 3 ...

  • Who is the enemy? The red state/blue state discourse in US politics obscures the fact that there are enclaves of each tendency scattered throughout the other. There are no pure blue cities and pure red suburbs. Even if there were, nukes are of limited utility in a civil war: they destroy territory you want to take and occupy. (The USA had mostly dismantled anything below tactical/theatre level by 2010: it's not like there's a bunch of Davy Crockett jeep-mounted nuclear rocket launchers sitting around in a warehouse, or nuclear artillery -- it's all long range stuff designed for use in a superpower conflict, or worse, strategic weapons.)
  • The worst case is a collapsing/separating US and a crazed minoritarian administration who order the USAF to send a B-52 to drop some free fall bombs on a secessionist state: assuming the B-52s (and the fuel refineries and the bomb maintenance facilities) are loyal to the regime, don't have friends and family in the target zone, that the secessionist state doesn't have any working Air National Guard assets (B-52s aren't expected to go up against F-15s in normal circumstances!) ... and assuming the minoritarian regime is a monolith with a maximum leader who can't be deposed, and is willing to cut its own throat diplomatically.

    No, my money is for the nukes to stay on the shelf, decaying slowly, while the civil war is fought with more reliable/familiar tools like AR-15s and some light artillery.

    631:

    Back when I was writing 8080A Assembler for robotics and machine control I was constantly on the lookout for shortcuts to shave a few cycles off the critical deep loops. It was easier to implement dedicated signal processing hardware externally but we were trying to cut the ticket price of a robotics controller and doing as much of the signal/data crunching in the CPU was the aim of the project.

    632:

    So if you're stuck on writing a grimdark future, why not make it grimdark because the heroes are suffering for a better tomorrow, instead of trying to be the last rooster crowing atop the ash heap of what used to be a vibrant world?

    I have a worst-case outcome for the current mess. (Well, worst case FSVO "worst case" that includes "technological human civilization survives"):

    1) Elon Musk succeeds, Starship/Heavy works, his "build them like landing craft for D-day, not airliners, never mind Saturn V's" plan is viable, and by 2028, when the collapse is in full stream, we have a working interplanetary heavy lift capability. That's good, right?

    2) But this capability exists in a USA in the grip of a slow-motion civil war, and the folks who end up owning the working Mars colony toolkit are a white supremacist/Republican faction.

    3) They colonize Mars, but as a settler slave-state (taking involuntary non-ubermensch along as disposable labour who can be sacrificed for the greater good of the purebred Aryan future).

    4) On their way out the door, they expend the remaining nukes on North America, to own the libs (and stop them coming after).

    5) 50-100 years pass. Tech civilization on Earth coheres, probably around a centre of gravity completely unpredictable from present conditions. (Not Beijing: demographic collapse plus black flag climate days. Not the smoking wreckage of the USA or the cannibal-haunted ruins of Englandshire. Maybe sub-Saharan Africa if they jump fast enough to PV-powered airconditioning everywhere and indoor high-intensity agriculture. Remember, 50 years is a long time.)

    6) Anyway, the post-catastrophe people of Earth begin to re-emerge and look around the universe, only to discover that Mars is occupied by Space Nazis, the idiot cousins of S. M. Stirling's SFnal Draka. And Mars isn't going to be terraformed any millennium soon, so they're looking for lebensraum ...

    633:

    That's how you did a computed subroutine call on the 6502; it looks something like this:

    LDA high byte of subroutine address from a table or whatever TAX LDA low byte JMP callcomputedentry .frig PHA TXA PHA RTS .callcomputedentry JSR frig (rest of code starts here)

    I can't remember if the Microsoft Basic on the PET did that anywhere, but I do remember it having some routine which did different things according to what constant you had in the accumulator at the start, and three different entry points that would set that constant to particular values before carrying on, which it did like this:

    LDA #aa BIT $bbA9 BIT $ccA9 (rest of code...)

    The first entry point was the LDA instruction, the second and third were the first operand bytes of the two BIT instructions. A9 was the opcode for LDA immediate, so calling the second entry point got you:

    LDA #bb BIT $ccA9 (rest of code...)

    and similarly for the third. The BIT instruction was in practical terms a complicated NOP; it did something like AND the accumulator with the operand, set the N and V flags to bits 7 and 6 of the result, and throw the result away; which wasn't very useful, and I don't remember seeing it used for its intended purpose, only for doing frigs like this.

    634:

    In brief: much hidden unemployment, huge debt everywhere, aging population, weak health and social security systems, obstructive and grasping vested interests, traditions and methods that have long outlived their usefulness, and obliviousness at the centre.

    Which is very much like the USA, minus the USA's issue with the young being ethnically diverse so unacceptable to the old white racist billionaires running things. (The Chinese equivalent would I guess be the Uighurs, who are similarly unacceptable ...)

    635:

    Unfortunately, there is a very likely alternative where the USA does use some its nukes.

    The USA upgrades from waging economic and political war on and occasional minor skirmishes with Iran (or some other second- or third-tier country that it promotes to being Most Favoured Enemy) to a significant attack or actual blockade. Iran responds, the USA ups the stakes, Iran's defences get lucky and inflict significant damage. Whereupon the order is given to nuke somewhere in Iran, to make an example of anywhere that dares to defend itself against the USA.

    636:

    Did anybody but me find the Trump "answer" to a question about Mothers Day worrying ?

    Instead of saying something sensible, he started a long ramble about all the meetings he would have with the military at Camp David over the weekend.

    I was left with the uneasy feeling that he is looking for somebody to bomb so he can claim to be a "War President" before the election...

    I wonder who it will be...

    637:

    I wonder if the first rule of nuclear weapons club is, if you use them aggressively, everybody else in nuclear weapons club is going to glass carpet you?

    This I think might be my approach to nuclear weapons proliferation. You want nukes Mr. Whoever? Well sure you can have nukes if you're willing to spend the money required to develop and manufacture them yourself. You should be aware that doing so is very expensive, and this isn't nice stuff we're talking about. You should also be aware, c.f. Windscale/Sellafield, Hanford, Chernobyl, etc. etc. that clearing this stuff up is also nasty and horrendously expensive. But if you want to have nukes, sure have nukes, welcome to nuclear club. Now you're in nuclear club you need to learn the first rule of nuclear club - you can never use them. This is because if you do, everybody else in nuclear club is going to glass-carpet you.

    638:

    Did anybody but me find the Trump "answer" to a question about Mothers Day worrying?

    https://www.businessinsider.com/an-ai-bot-unlearned-english-grammar-to-better-understand-trump-2020-5

    TLDR: to understand Trump the AI had to ignore grammar. And when he stops gesturing he's truly angry (as opposed to acting angry).

    639:

    Trump's "mother's day" answer screamed "dementia" at me. It's like he forgot the question he was answering midway through his second sentence and kept ad-libbing, hoping to bluff his way through.

    640:

    "I wonder if the first rule of nuclear weapons club is, if you use them aggressively, everybody else in nuclear weapons club is going to glass carpet you?"

    It has been theorized that there could be very unique situations where a couple of nations would lob a single nuke at each other and then call it quits, but nobody seriously belive that.

    A less incredible scenario is the warning shot: Somebody recieves a telegram saying "Look at theese coordinates at this time", and an ICBM flies across your territory impacting that point at the lowest possible yield. Precisely who would be the first party and second party is never detailed.

    In the highly readable fictional "2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks..." written by Jeffrey Lewis, aka "ArmsControlWonk", he posits an all too credible scenario but let it result in less than dozen nukeclear detonations. He and others have pointed out that this presupposes a restraint nobody expects the USA to have.

    Overall the assumption is that who-ever press the button, destroys civilization as we know it, probably for good.

    641:

    That was the 'theory' of MAD :-( But it ignored two facts: (1) that the USA has always been able to glass-carpet everyone else with militarily survivable damage (a pity about the ensuing nucear winter, but you can't make omelettes etc.) and (2) a significant number of wars are caused by crazed loons reaching the 'top' and seizing autocratic powers (indeed, many countries including the USA and UK, are largely elected autocracies).

    I agree with OGH in #639, which is one of the things that scares me. I doubt that anyone in a position to do so would also have the ethical integrity to refuse the order to bomb even, say, Tehran or Qom. I don't THINK that the UK is quite that far gone, but I wouldn't bet on it.

    642:

    I'm pleased to see you are not dead. I have vague feelings of contentment, staying quietly around home. But worrying about the overlapping catastrophes and glitches.

    643:

    I wondered how long it would take that shit to come out in his true colours. See "Update to Public Appearances in a time of pandemic" #78 :-(

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/london-tube-public-transport-price-sadiq-khan-deal-a9515446.html https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/breaking-grant-shapps-coronavirus-travel-22028571

    Pigeon and I, at least, are NOT going to be happy bunnies with some of the medium-term effects of the response to this epidemic.

    644:

    Nice try, not even wrong. "Alphabet" - what this alphabet long-nose? As in Chinese, Hang-Gul, Cuneiform, Heiroglyphic ...

    Embarrassing when you realize that Hangul is a perfectly good alphabet that made its syllables look like Chinese...

    Still, I agree with your point, for different reasons.

    Most languages are spoken, not written, even now in this era of mass language extinction.

    I have no idea how many dimensions are needed to code a language. There's obviously some set of dimensions based around the sounds humans can make. Since the current International Phonetic Alphabet has 107 letters, 52 diacritics, 4 prosodic markers, various affricates, digits for tonal phonemes, digits for tonal levels, and so on, the palette of possible sounds is fairly large. Natural languages range from a minimum palette of something like 11 or 12 phonemes (Piraha and Rotokas) to perhaps 141 in !Xu. How many dimensions are needed to code this diversity? I don't know.

    As for the dimensions around how the language codes information? We do know there tend to be words classified for content (thing, action, descriptor) and function (preposition, conjunction, etc.), because damage to Broca's area radically impairs the ability to use function words. But are function words inherent in human speech, or is this notion just an artifact on Broca's work with a French speaker who had that area damaged, magnified by neuroscience's tendency to focus on people who speak languages from industrialized countries? And further complicated by the apparent fact that injuries to Broca's area tend to be rare? I don' know that either.

    I suspect that content and function words are not anatomically separated as much as we might naively expect. The reason is that there are agglutinitive languages that put German to shame, such as Navajo. In Navajor, sentences don't require nouns, because verbs are (per WIkipedia): "the main elements of their sentences, imparting a large amount of information. The verb is based on a stem, which is made of a root to identify the action and the semblance of a suffix to convey mode and aspect; however, this suffix is fused beyond separability.[58] The stem is given somewhat more transparent prefixes to indicate, in this order, the following information: postpositional object, postposition, adverb-state, iterativity, number, direct object, deictic information, another adverb-state, mode and aspect, subject, classifier (see later on), mirativity and two-tier evidentiality. Some of these prefixes may be null; for example, there is only a plural marker (da/daa) and no readily identifiable marker for the other grammatical numbers."

    "Navajo does not distinguish strict tense per se; instead, an action's position in time is conveyed through mode, aspect, but also time adverbials or context. Each verb has an inherent aspect and can be conjugated in up to seven modes..."

    What would damage to the Broca's area of a Navajo speaker even look like? Total aphasia, because content and function are so completely intertwined in their langauge? I have no idea if it's ever been seen.

    My point isn't about alphabets, hieroglyphs, synthetic or analytic languages. Rather, it's the question of whether, as people like Chomsky insist, various parts of speech are genetically and automatically expressed in the anatomy of human brains, so that human languages must have these parts, or whether our language treats our brain like a neural net, where the anatomy of the brain is created through language acquisition and practice (as with any other skill). In this model, the features we see in many languages are the emergent result of those features being functionally more versatile or easier to acquire in a wide variety of contexts, so languages independently converge on them. Because of the diversity of human languages, I suspect the latter.

    The discussion of dimensions is basically a biological metaphor for language being equivalent to the adaptive landscape that species explore, generation by generation, through evolution. How many dimensions does that landscape have? It depends, and it's partly metaphorical. Using this metaphor for language, I'm suggesting that people create the languages they need, and their ability to use these creations to communicate cause them to "move" across an adaptive landscape. That landscape isn't flat, and so languages, even if they move randomly, may tend to end up with common features, simply because those features work better and people like them.

    If something like this model is true, what we'd expect to see is a lot of unrelated languages doing somewhat similar things, but each with its own bizarre characteristics, like the English word "set" or Korean honorifics. Then there languages that went a different route, like Navajo or Piraha, that are really bizarre.

    This view contrasts with the idea that brains are hardwired with the characteristics of language, and that therefore all languages must express those characteristics. That's where languages like Piraha, which apparently lacks one of those essential characteristics, spark such controversy.

    645:

    "Rather, it's the question of whether, as people like Chomsky insist, various parts of speech are genetically and automatically expressed in the anatomy of human brains, so that human languages must have these parts, or whether our language treats our brain like a neural net, where the anatomy of the brain is created through language acquisition and practice (as with any other skill)."

    No, it's not a simple dichotomy. We also have abilities that are learnt once, never forgotten, and can be masked but not changed - reflexes are like that, but I have read that quite a lot of the auditory system is, too, and it fits with my observations. Also, most of our social inheritance is Lamarckian, not Darwinian - there doesn't have to be a genetic factor to (say) require verbs - all it has to be is something that we learn as a child from our elders and thereafter becomes a fixture.

    646:

    From Nature: "Dozens of coronavirus drugs are in development — what happens next? -Drug manufacturers face supply-chain weaknesses and sourcing issues as they ramp up complex production processes to meet global demand". https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01367-9

    647:

    Really? The governor and the lege of Virginia were "small safe Dem states"? Oh, btw, there is a socialist (DSA) in the VA lege at the moment.

    The switch to the DNC by Virginia has been in process/expected/predicted for the last 10 to 15 years, based on the population boom (up 38% since 1990).

    And that population boom is being significantly driven by Washington DC as it's employment numbers drive the population beyond it's district boundaries into neighbouring Virginia.

    And thus Virginia is changing from rural white to ethnically diverse urban with a lot of educated high tech workers, with the corresponding switch to be DNC leaning.

    648:

    Well, apart from Lincoln Chaffee, O'Malley and a few others, absolutely no-one other than Hillary Clinton and the "then independent" not-a-Democrat Senator Sanders ran for the nomination.

    And the response to those names is who???

    You will always find the delusional and crackpots who will run, and they can be useful idiots to be pointed to to say "see, it was a contested primary".

    But no serious DNC candidates contested against Hillary because it was obvious to everyone in 2008 that Hillary was convinced to withdraw against the upstart Obama with a promise that in 2016 the nomination was hers.

    Yes, nothing was said publicly, or likely put in writing. But as the saying goes actions speak louder than words.

    649:

    A world where the EU, non-imperialized Middle East, China and Africa[1] deal with each other, and the Old Empire(s) is(are) dead?

    Can we include South America there? At least the Cono Sur?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Cone

    650:

    "Can we include South America there? At least the Cono Sur?"

    Good point, and an indicator of my bias.

    651:
    That was the 'theory' of MAD :-( But it ignored two facts: (1) that the USA has always been able to glass-carpet everyone else with militarily survivable damage

    Both the UK and France have enough nukes to put a warhead on every American and Russian town of over about 130,000 people. Is that "militarily" survivable?

    (That's assuming launching the whole stock, if we're just talking about the one SMNLE (Sous-marin nucléaire lanceur d'engins) on patrol we're only talking about every town of over around 200,000 people. Obviously smarter people than me would be working on the targeting, but in any case second strike isn't going to be aimed at "military" targets.)

    652:

    (Small error, I meant every American or Russian town... If there was a need to hit both it would need to involve Franco-Anglais cooperation -- "You take the Yanks and I'll nail the Russkis").

    653:

    Charles H noted: "If you're copy/pasting to move the contents of a LibreOffice document into a MSWord document, I think you're doing it wrong."

    Which is why I concluded that sentence with "or just open the file in Word". My point was not to recommend copy/paste as the best solution, but to note that it's available as an option if you don't want to deal with import/export, and it works just fine if the document is filled with text. Complex things like fields and tables are trickier. (Word's underlying architecture for tables is a nightmare, even in .docx. I frequently encounter problems with even moderately complex tables.)

    Charlie noted: "Microsoft word is happy reading .docx files from LibreOffice"

    Yes. To clarify the problem I described with exchanging .doc(x) files: I did a test where I did some simple revision tracking on a document, passed it to a couple colleagues, reopened the files they sent me to review their edits, made additional edits, returned the files to them... TL;DR: After 2 rounds of back and forth, edits started being lost for the files returned by both colleagues. This was a good 10 years ago, so I really need to find time to repeat the experiment. What I hear from editor colleagues is that 1 round of exchanges causes no problems. But if you're going to be doing multiple exchanges, the precautionary principle suggests that it's safer to work within the same program and version that your colleagues are using, "just in case". I'd hope that file compatibility has improved in the last decade; I just wouldn't bet the farm on it.

    Charlie: "I still have a Microsoft Orifice license though, because I work with editors who like to apply change tracking to novel-sized word documents and make thousands of changes before they throw them back at me. Grr."

    Repeating what I said earlier: MacWord isn't an acceptable tool for heavy editing. It's inefficient, buggy, and just plain annoying compared with WinWord. Bade enough that imho, it's worth installing Parallels just to be able to use WinWord for serious editing.

    I've spent up to 8 hours per day over the past 30+ years editing and reviewing edits in Word, and I can't imagine living without it. But if you're being edited reasonably heavily, you need to learn how to use the tools efficiently. (I'm not suggesting that Charlie doesn't know how, but in my experience (several hundred authors over the years), most people who are primarily authors never bother to learn those tools. One of the biggest efficiency tips for heavy edits is to not accept/reject each edit one at a time. Instead, review the edits without accepting them, and reject only the errors (with an explanation to the editor why you did that, if required). If the editor is good, you'll reject fewer than 5 to 10% of the edits. Then click the "accept all" button. This can (at least in my edits) save thousands of "accept this one too" clicks. That also reduces the error rate; it's easy to accidentally double-click accept and accept two edits instead of only the first edit.

    I've written a free primer on using Word's revision tracking for those who want to get up to speed quickly: http://geoff-hart.com/resources.html#downloads

    654:

    Lincoln Chaffee is a long-time Democrat, unlike Independent-for-life and never-a-Democrat Senator Sanders. He was a Senator and later the Governor of Rhode Island.

    Martin O'Malley was Governor of Maryland and a long-time Democrat, unlike Independent-for-life and never-a-Democrat Senator Sanders. There was also Jim Webb, another ex-Democratic Senator unlike Independent-for-life and never-a-Democrat Senator Sanders.

    There were a few others but the thing for ten or more Democratic candidates as well as the perpetual candidacy of Independent-for-life and never-a-Democrat Senator Sanders at the start of a nomination race is quite a new thing.

    As for "You will always find the delusional and crackpots who will run," that's a terrible thing to say about your boy Independent-for-life and never-a-Democrat Senator Sanders.

    655:

    @641: MAD Ah, I miss the good old days when all we had to worry about was global thermonuclear war.

    I don't want to get into an extended discussion on deterrence theory, or what I sometimes think of to myself as "nuclear theology." However, I will say that the use of nukes is considered the most dangerous course of action by those in DOD whose job it is to plan for that eventuality, called, with great gravity, "crossing the nuclear threshold." Do plans exist to use nuclear weapons short of a massive exchange? Sure, it would be pretty silly to have a capability without planning how and when it would be appropriate to use it. But the use of those weapons is mostly considered a last resort, in particular due to: 1) The danger of escalation of their employment by both sides, and 2) The catastrophic impact of them on the operating (and inhabited) environment.

    The threat of the use of nuclear weapons does not lie primarily with the U.S., however. Look at the situation between India and Pakistan, where two nuclear powers share a contested border, and have ongoing low-level hostilities in Kashmir. Those states, with relatively small nuclear arsenals, the general location of which is known to both parties, could easily be in a "use it or lose it" situation if major hostilities broke out between them. Or look at Israel, with its assumed nuclear capability as a deterrent against another attack aimed at destroying the Jewish state, and Iran, which at least began a nuclear weapons program in response (to be continued?). Or North Korea, "sending a message" to the U.S. if the Kim regime felt imminently threatened.

    @640: In the highly readable fictional "2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks..." written by Jeffrey Lewis, aka "ArmsControlWonk", he posits an all too credible scenario but let it result in less than dozen nukeclear [sic] detonations. He and others have pointed out that this presupposes a restraint nobody expects the USA to have.

    The government of the Republic of Korea (aka South Korea) GREATLY expects the U.S. to react with restraint on the use of nukes on the Korean peninsula. So does that of Japan, and for that matter the Peoples' Republic of China and the Russian Federation.

    656:

    Charlie/Barrie Isn't "Tales of Rice & Salt" based on a to-all-purposes-dead Anglosphere?

    C 632/5\ Australia/Aotearoa + possibly SA A revived EU?

    EC @ 635 horribly plausible, esp if DT is still "In Charge"

    636/638/639 Trump & dementia How bad does it have to get, before even Pence & the R's "section" him - amendment 25 IIRC?

    PH-K @ 640\ Even in the most likely scenario: India/Pak ??? And ... Dave P @ 655 "Improved" of course by bitter religious rivalry in both & a posturing populist leader in India

    Ec So, Schapps is a shit, so is Khan & as for BoZo ... Nor am I at age 74. either. Oh yes See Also

    657:

    @655: (continuing)

    Russia has also promoted the idea of the limited use of nuclear weapons, in part at least as intimidation to the west. In a 2018 speech, Putin announced a range of new "invincible" nuclear weapons and implicitly threatened their use in regional conflicts.

    658:

    Repeating what I said earlier: MacWord isn't an acceptable tool for heavy editing. It's inefficient, buggy, and just plain annoying compared with WinWord. Bade enough that imho, it's worth installing Parallels just to be able to use WinWord for serious editing.

    I believe this has changed with the Office 2019 iteration. (MS Office version numbering could be a blog unto itself.) I think they claimed the same code base for core document processing at that point.

    659:

    Your mention of the Russians is a straw man - it's the USA I am talking about. You are (a) changing from what I said, which implied the USA would strike first and (b) assuming that all of those warheads get through, which implies that the USA's anti-missile defences are complete crap. To take the UK as an example:

    We typically have one (1) nuclear-armed submarine at sea, which the USA may well know the location of, with 8 missiles and 40 warheads. A first strike would take out everything else and it is unlikely that more than a few of the missiles would get through, especially since they were made in the USA. France might do a little better. Yes, militarily survivable.

    660:

    @659: Your mention of the Russians is a straw man - it's the USA I am talking about.

    I respectfully disagree. My entry @655 was in response to your assertion @641: I doubt that anyone in a position to do so would also have the ethical integrity to refuse the order to bomb even, say, Tehran or Qom.

    I am, by choice, NOT going to take that as an insult to my profession and my brothers in arms. But I have participated in the planning for such scenarios and I can assure you they are considered with the UTMOST gravity.

    I'm not privy to internal discussions at USSTRATCOM, but folks like General Buck Turgidson are not allowed in the nuclear execution chain of command. There's a very real question if a unilateral decision to nuke someone by El Cheeto Grande would be considered a lawful order.

    My entry @659 was to point out that you need to think about more than just the U.S.

    I'm not going to assume you are talking from a position of ignorance on language development. Don't assume I'm talking out of my ass on the potential use of nukes.

    661:

    I'd point out, on the "dead anglosphere" line, that use white, middle-aged, privileged anglophones have to tread just a little carefully, so that a story in this vein doesn't simply degenerate into wholesale cultural appropriation or just-another-dystopia.

    That doesn't mean that it can't be done. It just can't be done easily, especially in a story written in English for an Anglosphere market.

    662:

    But the ACE the virus latches onto is the ACE on the cell membrane, not in the plasma. If the virus would kindly grab on to a circulating ACE molecule and not let go, that'd seem to be good.

    663:

    It has been theorized that there could be very unique situations where a couple of nations would lob a single nuke at each other and then call it quits, but nobody seriously belive that.

    India and Pakistan kind of did that in the 90s.

    Surprise twist: rather than flattening each other's cities, they fought a tit-for-tat nuclear proxy war on their underground test ranges. Each nation could prove to the other that they had a bigger and nastier bomb without actually killing anyone, which is an unexpected happy outcome, I guess.

    664:

    Are you part of the competition for second place? It sounds very odd.

    665:

    Trump & dementia How bad does it have to get, before even Pence & the R's "section" him - amendment 25 IIRC?

    It's gotten this bad: I don't think they ever will.

    Having a demented premier makes for great deniability ("oh, we nuked Antarctica? Never mind, POTUS thought it was an appropriate way to celebrate mother's day"). Not just for wars, but for asset-stripping/looting: if anyone gets too blatant, throw 'em under the bus and allow as how it was POTUS's job to stop them but nobody home, eh, what're you going to do.

    (See also Ronald Reagan and Iran/Contra investigations during his second term when he clearly had Alzheimer's.)

    They'll drop him only when he's a mindless husk who can't be propped up in front of a microphone on TV any more -- and we've seen that he's already so far gone he can spout word salad and the press will write earnest op-eds explaining what he really meant, rather than demanding that he stand down. He'll have to be doubly incontinent and unable to utter fragmentary words before they admit that he's served his purpose.

    666:

    This just appeared. Based on initial impressions, it seems to be fairly good.

    https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer

    667:

    Back in the late seventies, I was at a Balticon? Disclave? and Sunday evening, the con was about wound down, while a geological convention was starting for that week.

    The banner across one hall could have come from either con: Reunite Gondwanaland - (signed) the Pangaea Liberation Front

    668:

    One of the biggest efficiency tips for heavy edits is to not accept/reject each edit one at a time. Instead, review the edits without accepting them, and reject only the errors (with an explanation to the editor why you did that, if required). If the editor is good, you'll reject fewer than 5 to 10% of the edits. Then click the "accept all" button. This can (at least in my edits) save thousands of "accept this one too" clicks. That also reduces the error rate; it's easy to accidentally double-click accept and accept two edits instead of only the first edit.

    That advice is of course entirely incompatible with my publishers' workflow, which sends me a locked copy-edited document with change tracking enabled: if I don't like an edit I have to re-type it (so it's flagged as coming from me), I don't get to accept/reject changes.

    But that's at the CE stage, when the book is officially in production. Don't get me started on what it's like to deal with an editor who works in Word and who's making substantive edits/adding marginalia to a document you sent them when you work in Scrivener and can't import their modified version back into your original project because a Scrivener project is structurally incompatible with a Word document.

    I mean it. Word at least pretends a document is a single stream of styled/formatted text with included objects. Scrivener in contrast works with a project (like an IDE) that has resources which include rich text documents and subfolders, and associated metadata, all in a tree-structure, with additional subfolders for research notes (web pages and PDFs and other attachments). When you've finished working in the IDE you hit "compile" to export a finished Word document (or epub file), just like compiling a bunch of source code to build a binary application. Trying to take an annotated Word document back into Scrivener is like trying to decompile a hacked-around application ...

    669:

    About being "white" - according to a lot of the racists, you know, Jews aren't really "white"....

    I know that I've said before that, given how one black grandparent makes you black, or native American, or whatever, the US should, perhaps, set up a reservation (preferably by Ft. Stinkindesert) for Pure Aryan, er, White-gene people, since Pure White genes are so recessive. I can see the tour buses, with signs reading "do not breed with the natives".

    670:

    It's been around for a while. It's not bad, as a representation of Official Data, but that's pretty unreliable.

    671:

    US civil war: for one, I can easily see a minoritarian whacko sending B-52s. However, I'm remembering the films from 'Nam, with the huge numbers of bombs they can drop.

    And then we're talking 'Nam comes home, with New! Improved! IEDs from Afghanistan.

    672:

    I do have problems with the ultra-wealthy going off to Mars, I mean, real lack of Luxury.

    The ubermensch, bringing untermensch, however... gee, I have a short with that (no nukes, other targeted nastiness as they leave). And I think I just finished a short, 800 or so years from now, last night.

    For pure amusement value, someone mentioned a writing track at ConCellation, and I decided it was a challange, and so the title is, The Dark and the Storm Knight....

    673:

    The nominal purpose of the British nuclear deterrent is to ensure that Russia thinks twice about following a strategy to win a nuclear war in Europe using battlefield/theatre nukes then present the USA with a fait accompli: they still get to lose Moscow (and probably St Petersburg as well).

    But I think since the early 1980s this is pants; the real purpose is to provide a subsidized annex of four extra SSBNs carrying Trident D5s and aiming at the same target as the USA's Trident fleet, which are accounted for separately under the START treaty limitations. Insofar as British use of nukes against a target unapproved by the White House is unthinkable (and would at a minimum cost the UK its deterrent immediately insofar as access to the Trident stockpile would instantly be cut off) it's an undeclared transfer payment in return for shelter behind the broader US nuclear curtain -- or at least that's what HMG rationalizes it as.

    Similarly the QE and QM carriers are useful adjuncts to the US Navy, which is rather stretched in attempting to maintain worldwide coverage with only 12 (or is it 10?) CVNs -- they're big-ish fleet carriers, can operate anything the USMC expects its own assault carriers to carry, and can integrate with other NATO battle groups. Why the UK should need two near-supercarriers in this day and age is unclear (it's not like they're needed to defend the Falklands now that Port Stanley has an airport capable of taking A-330M Voyagers and C-17s and hosting a Typhoon squadron), unless you view it as payment-in-kind for US support.

    674:

    I didn't hear the whole thing, just sorta comments about it, but his "C-19 is just going to go away" is completely in some other reality.

    675:

    It's problematic in marketing terms because it'll stir up the Puppy Rage/culture war nonsense again: also, you've got to be very careful about alienating readers by excluding them from narrative. This used to be a problem with women/LGBT/disabled/ethnic minority readers in particular (no fiction describing people recognizably similar to them) but you can inflict it on your regular readership by accident.

    It's much safer to go with "no modern humans survive in this era" in SF than with "modern humans survive, but not your type". Readers find it easier to relate to aliens or sentient robots than to different human cultures!

    676:

    Birger seems to be more right on this. The problem is (AFAIK, and I am NOT an endocrinologist, merely someone who's dinked around with cascading consequences in various systems) is that ACE2 catalyzes the hydrolysis of a vasoconstrictor into a vasodilator.

    This alone should give engineers pause, if you realize that this bit of bionanotech decided to assemble two signals and a system for chopping a bit off one to convert it into the second. It's sort of a physical instantiation of spaghetti coding, but that's how cells tend to evolve.

    Anyway, if you flood the bloodstream with mock receptors, they're going to attach to everything that can fit in them, and that blocks the conversion of a vasoconstrictor signal into a vasodilator signal. So blood pressure goes up, and can't come down without some other mechanism. Not necessarily a good thing.

    The good news is that there's an alternative that's already in production: antibodies. The Spike on SARS-CoV-2 is what fits into the ACE2 receptor, and it turns out that apparently a lot of human antibodies that are naturally produced during Covid19 infection target the spike. There's already a LOT of RAPID research going on to isolate the most effective spike antibodies (aka monoclonal antibodies) produce them in mass quantities, and use them as a drug to bind to the virus in early stages of infection. This is a well-known technology, and a lot of very popular and very expensive drugs right now are antibodies. (Anything where the chemical name ends in an "-ab" suffix is an antibody).

    So unless a miracle happens and some drug or drug combo turns out to be more effective against Covid19 than remdesivir, the next drugs rolled out against the virus are very likely to be artificially produced antibodies to the spike protein, for injection use in hospitals. In the meantime, if you happen to know people who were infected and survived, you can encourage them to donate blood plasma, because hospitals are using plasma from people with antibodies against Covid19 to treat patients with the disease. It's a fairly wasteful treatment (1 donation=1 dose, and it's temporary immunity, not a full cure), but it's what we have. Type O- survivors are really sought after, apparently.

    677:

    Blow the doubly incontinent - there are pads for that, which would be invisible under his paunch. He is already covering up serious difficulty walking and handling objects - while still being "the healthiest president ever".

    679:

    @673: I wonder about the cognitive dissonance implicit in the UK withdrawing from the EU while remaining in NATO; the only even tentative explicit rationale for the QE class is meeting NATO defence objectives. I do not discount your implicit rationale at all.

    680:

    B-52s: during the Gulf War, about 8-9% of the bombs dropped were laser/GPS guided ... they caused 90% of the damage. During the Iraq Invasion a decade later they went with about 80% GPS-guided bombs (JDAMs were suddenly cheap upgrade kits for WW2-stockpile iron bombs, rather than bleeding edge technology). And modern bombs are not only "smart", they have crossrange -- in some cases able to independently attack different targets 50km to either side of the bomb truck's flight path, so that a single B-52H can make the equivalent of fifty high-precision air raids during previous wars on a single flight. (Targets can generally be destroyed by a single munition, if it hits the target: in previous wars, they had to shotgun the area rather than using a sniper's rifle.)

    And then here's the Cold War era AGM-69A SRAM and the destruction of enemy air defenses mission profile. Shudder. (It's a very good thing the AGM-69 was decommissioned and scrapped due to reliability concerns: a single B-52 with 20 of the things on board could flatten every city in a large European country on one flight.)

    681:

    For pure amusement value, someone mentioned a writing track at ConCellation, and I decided it was a challange, and so the title is, The Dark and the Storm Knight....

    That is obviously a superhero fic: only it's Kid Dark and the Storm Knight, together they fight nocturnal crime.

    682:

    David L noted: "I believe this has changed with the Office 2019 iteration. (MS Office version numbering could be a blog unto itself.) I think they claimed the same code base for core document processing at that point."

    All I can tell you is that I'm using Word 2019 on both platforms, and I've lost count of how many things work differently (whether subtly or dramatically) between the two versions. Very frustrating. When I update my editing book, I have to review every function and document most of them twice to account for Mac vs. Windows differences.

    Charlie noted: "That advice is of course entirely incompatible with my publishers' workflow, which sends me a locked copy-edited document with change tracking enabled: if I don't like an edit I have to re-type it (so it's flagged as coming from me), I don't get to accept/reject changes."

    I didn't know anyone still worked that way; last I saw that approach was several years ago at a university press. Sympathies. The Compare Documents function would make things easier if they were willing to send you an unlocked version of the edited file along with the locked version. (That function won't work with a password-protected document.) But if you have to work exclusively in the locked Word file, comparing files won't help.

    Charlie: "Don't get me started on what it's like to deal with an editor who works in Word and who's making substantive edits/adding marginalia to a document you sent them when you work in Scrivener and can't import their modified version back into your original project because a Scrivener project is structurally incompatible with a Word document."

    Understood. I've occasionally had to work with documents edited in PDF files, so that you have to manually copy all the changes into Word. Painful.

    683:

    It's been around for a while. It's not bad, as a representation of Official Data, but that's pretty unreliable.

    The pieces have been available, but this is claimed to be a new tool to help combine and compare the pieces.

    From the email they sent two hours ago:

    We have a large number of charts on the COVID-19 pandemic. To switch between metrics you had to move from one chart to another. Until now. We have built a tool to make this easier: our new Coronavirus Data Explorer. You can switch from one metric to another seamlessly: transition from confirmed cases to deaths to tests; cumulative to daily; total to per capita; daily to weekly averages all in one place. You can also add any combination of countries you want to compare.

    The comparison bit is relevant to the reliability question, at least in a relative sense; everybody's data is unreliable, but some are more unreliable than others. I charted the Central American countries' total reported deaths per million population, and the curve for Panama is way above the others. Which, IMO, reflects the considerable effort Panama has been putting into testing and reporting.

    684:

    Some fairly good news on the Covid19 immunity front: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/05/15/good-news-on-the-human-immune-response-to-the-coronavirus

    It looks like people who survive the disease get immune, tend to get immune to the same bits of the virus, including the spike (meaning that a vaccine that uses the spike may well work), and (per a radio story I don't yet have a link to), there's evidence for immunity lasting at least as long as the study has been going on.

    So short-term reinfections seem to be increasingly unlikely, and a vaccine based on the Spike and a couple other viral proteins that generally get targeted seems possible.

    In other good news, so far no one's seen the antibody-dependent response that cropped up in some early SARS vaccine trials. That's where, perversely, giving someone an experimental vaccine ends up making them more susceptible to the infection. It's been a huge worry about Covid19 vaccines, that if we rush untried vaccines into production, we may end up making people more susceptible rather than immune. The worry hasn't gone away yet, but there are signs that it's not inevitable. A vaccine may be possible.

    Yay(!)(?)

    685:

    Well, I suppose the Star Trek Federation arose out of a nuclear war, so stuff's possible. Or was possible 50 years ago, but may not be any more.

    Anyway, I do agree with you. I'd sooner go publish a story set in Wakanda than try to publish a "'Murrica goin' DOWN!, from the foreign invader's perspective" novel in the US at the moment.

    686:

    Y'know, I'm really tired of this - now you're calling Bernie a crackpot.

    Charlie, please excuse me for getting this much into US politics, but....

    Look, you and I have met each other, long ago, in a galaxy far away (Magicon, the 92 Worldcon, to St. Charles) and you were good company, so answer me.

    First: How many parties are in Parliament - 4? 5? (I don't remember if UKIP still has any seats). The US has two, count them.

    As I've said before, the ways each individual states' laws are written, it's almost impossible for a third party to get on the ballot in all 50 states. Back around the time we gave you that lift, Ross Perot, ultra-rich - think of Bloomberg, now - tried to do that, and couldn't get on the ballot in all the states, with all his money.

    For that matter, did you see how well Bloomberg did, spending well over $100M USD?

    Now, the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) have grown by an order of magnitude or more since Bernie's run in '16... but a couple-three years ago, when I joind (the first and only socialist party this red-diaper baby has ever joined), someone at a meeting, where were were looking at county and state candidates, asked "what about Congress", and the person running the meeting responded (and this is why I'm a member0) "maybe in ten years".

    So, that's why Bernie ran as a Democrat.

    But wait, there's more: second: realpolitik: IMO, Bernie originally ran in '16, talking about being the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.

    He was, and is. Compare him to, say, LBJ (minus the disaster of 'Nam). When Raygun won, the Dems decided the country was going right, and followed, to try to pick up people for whom the GOP had gone too far (include Barry Goldwater, who was appalled). They ignored their base - unions, working class. They kept doing that, until Bernie.

    I think his intent, originally, was to push the Dems back to their original, and real, base. I think he was surprised when he took off, and had a shot at the nomination. His original idea worked - Hillary did move left. And he's done it again - Biden is moving "left", back to things that would actually begin to help the rest of us.

    So, he's been canny, and effective.

    Why do you dislike him so much?

    687:

    Well, no. I went elsewhere. The stories I've been working on fit into the framework of my future universe.

    Superheroes? Nahhh, I'm on another world, the Dark is, um, er, an extension... and throw in a heavy dose of realy Zelazny, as in, say, Lord of Light, or Creatures of Light and Darkness.

    Be careful, or I'll offer to email you the draft.

    Oh, crap, I just pulled it up, and it's just over 7900 words. I'm going to have to cut it by at least 500 words....

    688:

    I've still got that headache. Yesterday I had the headache, but it was bearable enough I didn't have to take acetaminophen. It's back today, and it's bad enough I did have to take acetaminophen.

    It worries me that I'm having to take acetaminophen every day. I'm still waiting to hear from the VA Hospital about scheduling the CT scan my doctor ordered.

    I worry about long term side effects even though the dosage isn't that high. The bottle doesn't say how much is in there but it does say not to take more than 4,000 milligrams and in another place on the label it says not to take more than 8 per day.

    I'm guessing that means it's 500 milligrams (or less) & so far I'm only having to take 2 except for one day when I had to take a second dose in the evening.

    689:

    In part 5 of "loud talking considered harmful", loud talking is found to be a mortal threat in areas with a significant percentage of (unmasked) asymptomatic or lightly symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infected individuals. Shush, you psychopaths! :-) The airborne lifetime of small speech droplets and their potential importance in SARS-CoV-2 transmission (Valentyn Stadnytskyi, Christina E. Bax, Adriaan Bax, and Philip Anfinrud, May 13, 2020) Highly sensitive laser light scattering observations have revealed that loud speech can emit thousands of oral fluid droplets per second. In a closed, stagnant air environment, they disappear from the window of view with time constants in the range of 8 to 14 min, which corresponds to droplet nuclei of ca. 4 μm diameter, or 12- to 21-μm droplets prior to dehydration. (TBH it shows droplet sprays, not transmission. Close enough for me. :-)

    690:

    RE: Acetaminophen. It's possible to take more than labeled, but you run the risk of liver damage, so it requires a prescription.

    Unfortunately, long-term headaches can be symptoms of something other than sinus problems, so they really do need to get checked out. Keep track of symptoms, and if you start having neurological problems, get to an ER ASAP and damn the Covid19.

    I say this because my father left an eye infection untreated because, you know, pink eye? It turned out to be bacterial, he got bacterial encephalitis when it went up his optic nerve. This caused gnarly headaches until he went into convulsions. When he finally went to the hospital, they had to cut the infection out of his brain. Bad news. He had headaches thereafter, along with a number of other problems, which is why I know a bit about dosing with acetominophen, even though I am NOT a pharmacist.

    691:

    As Graydon said in an earlier thread, paraphrased (because I haven't found it), the correct response to a pandemic always looks like an overreaction. This is a rare case where the overreaction is being judged correct in retrospect by at least part of the media. Coronavirus: How 'overreaction' made Vietnam a virus success (Anna Jones, 15 May 2020) When the first virus case was confirmed on 23 January - a man who had travelled from Wuhan to visit his son in Ho Chi Minh City - Vietnam's emergency plan was in action. "It very, very quickly acted in ways which seemed to be quite extreme at the time but were subsequently shown to be rather sensible," says Prof Guy Thwaites, director of Oxford University Clinical Research Unit (OUCRU) in Ho Chi Minh City, which works with the government on its infectious disease programmes. Vietnam enacted measures other countries would take months to move on, bringing in travel restrictions, closely monitoring and eventually closing the border with China and increasing health checks at borders and other vulnerable places. Schools were closed for the Lunar New Year holiday at the end of January and remained closed until mid-May. A vast and labour intensive contact tracing operation got under way.

    692:

    @684: Frank, thanks for this and your other related posts. I'm learning a lot more about COVID-19 from this blog than I am the mainstream press sites. I've gotten really tired of the "but how does this make you feel?" tendency of the press these days. I read the news for facts, not feelings. Also, /rant, why does EVERY CNN article have to have video?!? /rant.

    693:

    I think some people may well vote for Biden in the earnest hope of getting rid of Donald Trump, but, "their team", the Democrat establishment will quite deliberately do whatever it takes to give their "Rain Man*", Donald Trump, four more years. You are asserting complete collusion at the highest levels between the two major US political parties, without a shred of evidence, or even an outline of a (set of) plausible motive(s). You'll need to work a bit harder at this to be taken seriously.

    694:

    I'd be interested in theoretical use scenarios. I suppose one possibility is still Russian invasion into Europe. Nuclear weapons have become kind of funny. Specifically that your strategic nuclear weapons system has failed its intended purpose the moment you actually have to use it. On the low-end, it seems things like precision delivery of something along the lines of BLU-82 / GBU-43/B are probably preferable to a low-yield airburst nuke because of the contamination that comes with the nuke.

    695:

    @691: Re - Vietnam response to COVID-19.

    My current agency had a field team in Vietnam in February of this year, working with their Vietnamese counterparts. We were given a heads up of the VN government's response and shut down the investigations and returned home. We are currently on hold in large part due to the (effective) restrictions still in place there; for example, anyone flying into Vietnam must immediately go into a 14 day isolation, similar to what New Zealand is doing. Sometimes, authoritarian governments ARE more efficient than democracies, especially when they're rationally run.

    696:

    Yeah. People don't have a lot of every-day experience of the implications of exponential growth. I did the figures a few days ago, and assuming each person infects three others it only takes about 250 generations (IIRC) for a single person to infect everyone in the UK. (Obviously, that's a massive simplification but I just wondered what the number would be.)

    Pretty much any good intervention looks like a massive over-reaction. By the time people realise there's a problem it's already too late :-(.

    697:

    David L @ 554

    Word - Macs

    You DO know that MS is working hard at making all the office bits work the same on both platforms.

    They've seen you coming and boxed you in. :)

    I know that at one time Micro$oft was the world's largest supplier of software for the Apple Macintosh.

    698:

    I worry about long term side effects even though the dosage isn't that high. The bottle doesn't say how much is in there but it does say not to take more than 4,000 milligrams and in another place on the label it says not to take more than 8 per day.

    I'm guessing that means it's 500 milligrams (or less) & so far I'm only having to take 2 except for one day when I had to take a second dose in the evening.

    The dosage should be somewhere on the bottle, usually in the main label - or/also can be found in the medicinal ingredients section.

    That said the standard North American dose for Tylenol/Acetaminophen is the extra strength pill at 500mg, taking 1 or 2 pills at a time every 4 to 6 hours as necessary, not to exceed 8 pills in 24 hours.

    https://www.tylenol.com/products/tylenol-extra-strength-caplets#directions

    As noted by Heteromeles if this is an ongoing issue then consider pushing the issue - at least call your doctor for a re-evalution (even if by phone). A doctor may be able to get a faster answer out of the hospital than you can, or can get you bumped up the priority list when the restart outpatient testing if necessary.

    699:

    EC @ 677 Following up on that ... he's visibly falling apart. Is he actually going to be even nominally alive & capable of anything by either November or January? What do the R's do then?

    Whitroth Tories Liebour Lem-0-Crats Snottish Nastionalists Welsh-as-above Demon Onionist Groan Party Sin Independants Another lot of independants ( ex-Liebour ) Which I make as 10....

    700:

    How many parties are in Parliament - 4? 5? (I don't remember if UKIP still has any seats).

    Wiki reveals UK currently has 9 parties and 1 independent, plus the absent Sinn Féin

    Canada has 5 plus 1 independent.

    As you say, not really possible in the US system without a lot of time and effort given how the system has been rigged to be 2 party.

    701:

    All I can tell you is that I'm using Word 2019 on both platforms, and I've lost count of how many things work differently (whether subtly or dramatically) between the two versions. Very frustrating.

    Oh, I'm sure there are still a few 1000 details (big and small) floating around.

    The head of the Mac Dev team gives (well did until they all got cancelled) talks at some of the seminars I would attend. It used to be that the Win team did things then tossed it at the Mac team who tried to implement as much of it as possible.

    Now both teams work together a lot more often such that code under the UI is the same. Of course if you've ever been involved in big multi-platform projects this can at times be an aspiration more than a fact. But they claim, and really do seem sincere that they are getting better at a single code base with each release.

    Now for added fun are you on the Office 365, oops sorry, Microsoft 365 subscription versions and signed up for the Insider Fast release/preview cycle? It's fun for things to stop working for a few hours once or a few times per week. For those who don't know you tend get updates daily on that cycle. Sometimes when they break something more than once in a day.

    For those who don't know, with the subscription to Office there is a mostly monthly update that give new features. Supposedly when they are complete. [grin] At times they will push out a hot fix. There is an Insider Slow cycle where you get to play with new features that are most likely mostly bug free but ... And then there is Insider fast were you get the daily builds that pass the daily testing process. On the last one it is buyer beware.

    702:

    How about just using a 'dead anglosphere' as a word-building back drop?

    A world where the EU, non-imperialized Middle East, China and Africa[1] deal with each other, and the Old Empire(s) is(are) dead?

    "Blue Remembered Earth" by Alastair Reynolds is arguably that.

    In "Blue Remembered Earth" China is old and sclerotic, nobody even remembers that Europe and North America used to amount to something, and Africa is the rising star. And the reader can easily tell what will be the next rising star, which in the story nobody is taking seriously.

    703:

    How many parties are in Parliament - 4? 5? (I don't remember if UKIP still has any seats).

    9, plus the Speaker of the House (independent by constitutional convention) and Sinn Féin who won't take the oath of allegiance and hence can't take their seats.

    704:

    @694: I'd be interested in theoretical use scenarios.

    Speaking STRICTLY hypothetically, and NOT in reference to any plans I might or might not have seen, or written, or spent hours arguing over as they were developed, there are a number of considerations on the use of nuclear weapons outside of a massive exchange between the U.S. and the USSR Russian Federation (oops, inadvertent time travel). - Applicability to target: Nukes are not, in the larger scheme of things, precision weapons. Precision of nukes is a consideration when attacking hardened targets (command and control bunkers, ICBM launch silos, etc.), but in a regional conflict, those targets are few and can be attacked with conventional precision weapons. Nukes ARE good at attacking: massed ground forces; large critical infrastructure (ports, refineries, factory complexes) IF you never want to use them again; and, oh yeah, cities, if you're into mass murder. - Environmental effects: Prompt radiation & fallout. An area suffering a nuclear attack is going to be uninhabitable for a period of time, but not permanently. Nagasaki and Hiroshima are still cities, but they paid a horrible price. The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is still uninhabitable for more than short visits 34 years after the meltdown. - Political effects: Potentially devastating for the first to use nuclear weapons in a contemporary conflict. Likely to result in global condemnation, and possibly disrupting/destroying your coalition/alliance.

    So, nukes are a LAST RESORT. The best use of them is to never use them.

    705:

    UK Parliament (translation - I think) Tories - Conservatives Liebour - Labour Lem-O-Crats - Liberal Democrats Snottish Nastionalists - SNP (Scottish National Party) Welsh-as-above - Plaid Cymru (Wales) Demon Onionist - DUP (Northern Ireland) Groan Party - Green? Sin - Sin Féin (Northern Ireland) Independent - only 1 person this time

    Missed: Alliance Party (Northern Ireland) Social Democratic and Labour Party (Northern Ireland)

    Not-Missed: Another lot of independants ( ex-Liebour ) - didn't survive the election

    706:

    "the correct response to a pandemic always looks like an overreaction. "

    May I (highly) recommend this piece by Bent Flyvbjerg about "regression to the tail":

    https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/regression-tail-how-mitigate-pandemics-climate-change-bent/

    707:

    Charles H @ 576: People that she told don't count as witnesses. Witnesses are people who witnessed it happening.

    There are several other problems that make her story...uncertain. Maybe it's true. I'd give it a 50% chance that something happened, and perhaps a 5% that it matches her latest version of the story.

    Even so, however. Even were I convinced that her latest version of the story is correct, I'd still pick Biden over Trump, and not find it a contest.

    Biden is nobody that I would have chosen, given a free choice. But he's better than Trump, though that's quite a low bar.

    There's also the problem that at least one of the people who say she told them about "harassment" years ago has admitted she didn't remember it until after Reade contacted her on Fakebook.

    Biden's not my guy either; Warren was. But as I said early in the selection process I'm going to vote for the Democrat in the fall, even if it IS Bernie (with the possible exception that if Bloomberg had bought the nomination I might have stayed home).

    I'm still kind of pissed off about Bernie's attitude (and even more the Berni-Bros attitude) that somehow the 2016 nomination was supposed to be Bernie's and that the DNC/Clinton somehow cheated him out of it ... even though I did vote for Sanders in the 2016 NC Primary.

    It was clear that Clinton was a party stalwart who had worked within the existing rules for years to build up her delegate count while Sanders was a johnny-come-lately who wasn't even a registered Democrat. She deserved the nomination because she EARNED it.

    708:

    is completely in some other reality.

    His reality is to talk to his base in a way that makes them happy TODAY.

    And if he can't make them happy TODAY, come up with a boggy man to blame something on TODAY.

    Almost everything he does fits under that banner.

    709:

    Makes you wonder if they're surreptitiously testing him by sticking a safety pin in his arm, then telling him 15 minutes later that he still tests negative for Covid19.

    I doubt it, of course. Too many people still take pride in doing their job right.

    But I suspect there's an, erm, surprisingly diverse contingent of people who wouldn't be too upset to see him crash on Day 12 of a bad infection, and then have to shuffle by the coffin in the Rotunda some time thereafter.

    710:

    Nojay @ 588:

    The DNC has more power than that - there is after all a reason that nobody serious other than a then independent candidate ran against Hillary in the 2016 primaries - the fix by the DNC was in.

    Well, apart from Lincoln Chaffee, O'Malley and a few others, absolutely no-one other than Hillary Clinton and the "then independent" not-a-Democrat Senator Sanders ran for the nomination. By the way Senator Sanders is still independent and proudly not-a-Democrat and has been for forty years and more, he was just intending to use that all-encompassing Democratic Party machine his supporters despise and wish to see destroyed to hopefully get himself elected in both 2016 and 2020 as the first and only independent President of the United States in recent times. Maybe he should try for the Republican Party nomination in 2024 instead.

    I'm pretty sure Sanders changed his party affiliation to Democrat around the time of the 2016 Democratic Nominating Convention. But he changed it back after the election.

    The thing about "the fix by the DNC was in" is that organizing the Democratic Party on the national level IS the DNC's job. The nominating rules the DNC put in place for the 2016 election were the result of years of negotiation & input from Democrats on all levels National, State & Local. In essence, the Sanders supporters argument was that the Democratic Party should have thrown all their rules & procedures out the window and anointed Bernie as their savior.

    And the Bernie-Bros appear to be using that same bullshit argument again in 2020.

    711:

    he's visibly falling apart. Is he actually going to be even nominally alive & capable of anything by either November or January? What do the R's do then?

    It's been obvious for a while that he health, both physical and mental, isn't what one would want in either a President or a Presidential candidate.

    It's also obvious that he isn't the President or candidate that the GOP wants - from a GOP perspective he has been a spectacular failure with only judges and a massive tax cut to the rich amongst he GOP accomplishments.

    Much of his other stuff his anti-GOP (trade wars, anti-Nato) and thus they likely would have been much happier to be gone with him and his family and have President Pence instead - and then have had the ability to run a proper primary to replace Pence.

    But the current 40% of the population who votes GOP is loyal to Trump and not the GOP at the moment, so Trump for the most part is able to keep a tight leash on the GOP (hence why they haven't either outright gotten rid of him, or let the DNC do it via impeachment).

    It is likely a safe bet that the stress of the moment (Covid and it's economic fallout - he doesn't seem care about the deaths) and its negative effects on both his self-esteem and his re-election chances are putting a great deal of stress on him.

    So, there is likely a secret small group in the GOP wargaming options (they would be stupid to not be).

    The problem, as you ask, is what do they do?

    Post November, it is Pence unless there is a constitutional issue that says the elected person must make it to inauguration. If Pence, the GOP celebrates as they get to do some housecleaning, restore a bunch of stuff by executive order/policy (pro-nato, end trade wars). Bonus for appointing judges if they keep the Senate.

    Pre November, the obvious/easiest is throw Pence to the wolves and have him replace Trump - though this likely means losing the election. They will take the hit because they will view Biden as one term, and they can mount their comeback in 2024 (and perhaps 2022 if they lose the Senate).

    Harder to replace Pence. Would depend on the GOP rules, and the logistics of the time left. The Trump/Pence ticket at this point has 1,550 delegates and only needed 1,276 to win. So unless the death/removal allowed those delegates to be free agents your stuck with Pence. And if you are close to November, you don't have the time to do the necessary media blitz.

    712:

    Forgot, the obvious is the GOP, if Trump is removed, would likely prefer someone other than Pence as (to me) it is doubtful Pence can win though surprises happen - perhaps they wrap it up as elect Pence to honour Trump?

    713:

    it is doubtful Pence can win though surprises happen

    There are a non trivial number of R voters who will NOT vote for Trump but will vote for any other R. So Pence will get their vote. Even if they don't like him they dislike the Ds more.

    For them the order of dislike is.

    Trump D any R any other than Trump

    714:

    Glad to help. That, Skeptical Raptor, 538 and Talking Points Memo are where I scan for quick updates on science and decent science/politics fusion.

    715:

    Have you tried ibuprofen? When my wife had sphenoid sinusitis and was waiting for surgery she found that ibuprofen was better for the headaches than paracetamol (acetaminophen).

    716:

    On a lighter front.

    One things I did was move my bird feeders so I can see them when sitting on the couch. This is where I hang out when I don't need to be at my desk, need a 24" display, etc... Or just realize I've spent 12 hours in that room and need a change.

    And the last few weeks they have been very busy. I'm wondering if it is the time of year or no one nearby has any feeders. (I've only had them up for a year and half.)

    717:

    Barry replied to this comment from JBS @ 597:

    Are you sure you're replying to one of my comments? I don't recognize anything I've posted in that.

    718:

    Never mind the nominal number of parties - the effective number is two - in Westminster, the ONLY function of the smaller parties (including the SNP) is to support one or other of the two dominating ones. The LibDems were starting to build up to be a third possibility, but Clegg destroyed that.

    719:

    Welp, I am about to rename a couple of Home Office capes in my current work in progress as Lady Darke and the Storm Knight. So that I can throw in a gratuitous "it was a Darke and Storm Knight" pun.

    720:

    Nojay @ 612: Are you claiming that Senator Sanders is now a member of the Democratic Party? If so why is he listed on the US Congress website as an independent Senator for Vermont and not affiliated with the Democratic Party?

    https://www.congress.gov/member/bernard-sanders/S000033?

    At the moment the placeholder filing for Senator Sanders intention to run for the Senate in 2024 indicates he is intending to run for the Senate again as an independent candidate -- it's not likely the Democratic Party will put up a candidate against him but we'll see.

    https://docquery.fec.gov/pdf/416/201903049145600416/201903049145600416.pdf

    Sanders was criticized in 2016 for not being a Democrat even while he sought that party's nomination. He changed his party affiliation to Democrat just before the Democratic National (Nominating) Convention in July 2016. He changed it back after the election. I'm not sure if/when he changed it to Democrat again before seeking the nomination in 2020.

    721:

    https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/

    Somewhere I have a book of various entries which were winners when it was the "Dark and Stormy Night" contest.

    722:

    This is not true of the SNP, who are a natural enemy of the Tories (the Conservative and Unionist Party) and a rival for the ecological niche Labour used to occupy in Scotland. They generally oppose everything the Tories do or say in Westminster, but they'd be unlikely to support Labour in government either because Labour have spent a decade pursuing an anti-SNP scorched-earth policy in Scotland. (Upshot: cooperating with Labour would play badly with the SNP base.)

    The Greens ... have a couple of seats at most, but are much stronger at a local level. Sinn Fein won't take their seats (something about not being willing -- as Republicans -- to swear an oath to the Queen), the DUP are (flails wildly), and the LibDems seem to be positioning to be the Tory party's natural successor, once the Tories implode (they've been holding their breath since the 1920s: it's sure to happen sooner or later).

    The problem with Westminster is that it sidelines smaller parties -- worse: it makes it possible for the government to marginalize them. Hence the SNP, with 90% of the Scottish seats, only getting 25% of the seats on the Scottish Affairs Committee (the majority going to Tories, with some Labour and LibDem representation). It all runs on patronage, and the winner-takes-all model hands a huge amount of power to the Prime Minister -- arguably more than the US POTUS gets under their system.

    723:

    John Hughes @ 625:

    Of course the Senate Intel Committee was the one that released a report a few weeks ago that said Russia DID interfere with the 2016 election.

    And yesterday the republican chair of that committee, Richard Burr was raided by the FBI, had his phone seized and resigned from the committee.

    Over insider trading allegations of course, nothing to do with the report. Nothing at all. Promise.

    Well, since the insider trading allegations (over Covid-19 data shared with his committee) & FBI investigation predate the Russia Interference Report by a couple of months, I think you're right that it doesn't have anything to do with that report.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51976484

    Dateline: 20 March 2020

    724:

    Elderly Cynic @ 641: That was the 'theory' of MAD :-( But it ignored two facts: (1) that the USA has always been able to glass-carpet everyone else with militarily survivable damage (a pity about the ensuing nucear winter, but you can't make omelettes etc.) and (2) a significant number of wars are caused by crazed loons reaching the 'top' and seizing autocratic powers (indeed, many countries including the USA and UK, are largely elected autocracies).

    Leave out the parts about "always been able to" and "militarily survivable damage" and you've got it about right.

    The U.S. didn't actually have that level of capability until the early 70s and the window within which it would have been possible to do so without it becoming a world killing exchange lasted maybe 15 minutes after the U.S. did achieve that level of capability. The two key points to understand about MAD are Mutual and Destruction.

    No one "wins" a nuclear war. This was known while Eisenhower was still President.

    725:

    the winner-takes-all model hands a huge amount of power to the Prime Minister -- arguably more than the US POTUS gets under their system.

    It has always seemed to this outside observer that compared the POTUS the British PM had almost dictator like powers as long as he held his coalition together.

    726:

    "No more than 20-30 million tops... depending on the breaks!"

    727:

    It had it in 1962, which is why the Cuban crisis erupted. At that time, the USSR nukes were essentially immobile, needed a long time to be prepared for launch, and the USA knew where they were. Both sides have always had their own reasons for accepting the USSR's grossly over-inflated claims of their capability, just as they do for Russia's today.

    728:

    There is some suggestion which I find credible that Ibuprofen is specifically unhelpful in COVID. So given a choice, Diclofenac may be a better choice.

    (The idea that a modern state allows medicines to be dispensed with the amount of drug not specified is one I find curious and alarming.)

    729:

    Your last paragraph is precisely why I said that their sole function is to support one of the two dominating parties. I accept your point that, in the case of the SNP, their 'support' is in the form of opposition to the other one. But, in terms of Westminster politics, what effect do they have other than doing that?

    730:

    Charlie Stross @ 665:

    Trump & dementia
    How bad does it have to get, before even Pence & the R's "section" him - amendment 25 IIRC?

    It's gotten this bad: I don't think they ever will.

    Having a demented premier makes for great deniability ("oh, we nuked Antarctica? Never mind, POTUS thought it was an appropriate way to celebrate mother's day"). Not just for wars, but for asset-stripping/looting: if anyone gets too blatant, throw 'em under the bus and allow as how it was POTUS's job to stop them but nobody home, eh, what're you going to do.

    (See also Ronald Reagan and Iran/Contra investigations during his second term when he clearly had Alzheimer's.)

    They'll drop him only when he's a mindless husk who can't be propped up in front of a microphone on TV any more -- and we've seen that he's already so far gone he can spout word salad and the press will write earnest op-eds explaining what he really meant, rather than demanding that he stand down. He'll have to be doubly incontinent and unable to utter fragmentary words before they admit that he's served his purpose.

    Y'all don't understand what the 25th Amendment is for. It's for what happens when the President dies in office & the Vice President becomes President and for situations like Eisenhower's heart attacks or when that idiot attempted to assassinate Reagan (and he was incapacitated while he was in surgery)

    What it is NOT for is removing a President who has gone off his rocker. Pence et al couldn't use it to remove Trumpolini even if they wanted to. Especially if he's going to fight tooth and nail to stay President.

    4: Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

    Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

    As soon as Pence et al notify the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House that Trumpolini is "unable to discharge the powers & duties of his office" and Pence becomes "Acting President", all Trumpolini has to do is notify the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House that he IS able "to discharge the powers & duties of his office" and he takes the Presidency right back.

    Pence et al would have to notify the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House AGAIN that Trumpolini is "unable to discharge ..." and this time BOTH houses have to assemble (in 48 hours if in session or 21 days if not) and then it takes a vote with a 2/3 majority of BOTH houses to uphold Pence's declaration ... otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

    And it's not clear who would exercise the powers of the Presidency while all this was being debated.

    The 25th Amendment is good if Trumpolini strokes out & ends up in a coma in ICU, but not if he just loses his fuckin' mind.

    731:

    Not sure what you mean when you say "generations".

    Ever heard the ancient story, about an Indian? Chinese? ruler, who offer a wise man a reward. The reward he asked for was rice. How much? On a chess board, one grain on the first square, two on the second, four on the third.

    The 64th square, of course, had 2^64. Ruler killed him for asking a little too much.

    732:

    Thank you.

    We, on the other hand, have effective NO choice. Even the Libertarians, with some Money behind them, and over 20 years, aren't on the ballot in every state.

    733:

    Interesting, though pretty much what I figured.

    However, I realized a 2020 effect of use of nukes: with the globalized economy... the rest of the world cuts off ALL trade with you, and cuts ALL transit from you.

    Economy? What economy?

    734:
    Your mention of the Russians is a straw man

    Huh? These deterrents were specifically designed to be used against Russia (or more exactly the USSR), it's just an interesting coincidence that the population distribution comes up with remarkably similar effects against the US and Russia.

    it's the USA I am talking about. You are (a) changing from what I said, which implied the USA would strike first

    No I'm not, I specifically said second strike, you'd have to be an idiot to use the one patrolling boomer as a first strike weapon.

    and (b) assuming that all of those warheads get through, which implies that the USA's anti-missile defences are complete crap.
    The US doesn't have any anti missile defences. It has a boondoggle. Unless you've moved your boomer to North Korea (and even then I doubt they'd be able to stop much).
    To take the UK as an example: We typically have one (1) nuclear-armed submarine at sea, which the USA may well know the location of. with 8 missiles and 40 warheads.
    So the UK doesn't know how to run a nuclear deterrent, just like it doesn't know how to run anything else. Tough to be you. That's still every US town of over 470,000.
    A first strike would take out everything else and it is unlikely that more than a few of the missiles would get through, especially since they were made in the USA.

    Oh come on, American missiles aren't that badly made.

    France might do a little better. Yes, militarily survivable.
    Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops! Uh, depending on the breaks.

    Except going toe to toe with 2020's France (or even the UK) would be way, way more than a mere 20 million killed. Against Russia it would be more or less everyone.

    735:

    Now wait one minute! Them's my characters!

    And just wait till I get to a story where I can add two new characters. Yesterday, I was listening to WQXR (NYC classical), and the dj read a letter, "blah, blah, but truth and beauty are forever...", so I've got two characters to go in a story, who's lifestyle makes sure they're not going to be around forever, and they're named Bouth and Trudy....

    736:

    Heteromeles @ 690: RE: Acetaminophen. It's possible to take more than labeled, but you run the risk of liver damage, so it requires a prescription.

    Unfortunately, long-term headaches can be symptoms of something other than sinus problems, so they really do need to get checked out. Keep track of symptoms, and if you start having neurological problems, get to an ER ASAP and damn the Covid19.

    I know about the risk of liver damage. That's why repeatedly taking the labeled dose over a long period bothers me.

    Just a couple of days wouldn't bother me, but I've taken it almost every day for two weeks now. So far this does seem to be a sinus problem. I've had the symptoms before, several years ago and the symptoms now are the same as they were then and that was a sinus problem. There's really nothing new to suggest it might be something else.

    But if I don't hear from the VA about scheduling a CT scan today, I'll be calling them first thing Monday morning.

    737:

    It was clear that Clinton was a party stalwart who had worked within the existing rules for years to build up her delegate count while Sanders was a johnny-come-lately who wasn't even a registered Democrat. She deserved the nomination because she EARNED it.

    And that is the DNC problem - the view that the candidate who earned the position should get it rather than the candidate who can win (not that I am saying that Bernie could have beat Trump, but it was obvious from the outside that Hillary couldn't).

    738:

    Blow the doubly incontinent - there are pads for that, which would be invisible under his paunch.
    Well there are some suspicious bulges in some photos...

    739:

    But that was a really long time ago. There have been developments since that he didn't imagine.

    For that matter, the first time I saw in SF a hint that the USA could have a future as a nothingberger was in some Heinlein juvie, which I read as a juvie, in which there was a galactic? UN type of gathering to discuss the future of something or other -- maybe even of the earth? And out of a nostalgic/historic sense, the wimpy little rep of the US was given a seat when by rights it didn't have one. I was probably 8 or 9 when I read that. Which rocked me back and I sat and thought about it for a while, including, well Rome fell . . . .

    740:
    Pretty much any good intervention looks like a massive over-reaction. By the time people realise there's a problem it's already too late

    An expert said (and I quote from memory):

    In a pandemic any action you take seems like it's too soon or too big, in retrospect it will be seen as too late and too small
    741:

    According to the TV ads no one will notice them.

    742:

    mdlve @ 698:

    I worry about long term side effects even though the dosage isn't that high. The bottle doesn't say how much is in there but it does say not to take more than 4,000 milligrams and in another place on the label it says not to take more than 8 per day.
    I'm guessing that means it's 500 milligrams (or less) & so far I'm only having to take 2 except for one day when I had to take a second dose in the evening.

    The dosage should be somewhere on the bottle, usually in the main label - or/also can be found in the medicinal ingredients section.

    That said the standard North American dose for Tylenol/Acetaminophen is the extra strength pill at 500mg, taking 1 or 2 pills at a time every 4 to 6 hours as necessary, not to exceed 8 pills in 24 hours.

    https://www.tylenol.com/products/tylenol-extra-strength-caplets#directions

    As noted by Heteromeles if this is an ongoing issue then consider pushing the issue - at least call your doctor for a re-evalution (even if by phone). A doctor may be able to get a faster answer out of the hospital than you can, or can get you bumped up the priority list when the restart outpatient testing if necessary.

    The bottle doesn't say how much acetaminaphen is in each caplet, just not to take more than 4,000mg and not to take more than 8 caplets in one day. I arrived at the 500mg guess by dividing 4,000 by 8.

    My doctor is at the VA, so it can take some time for things (like scheduling a CT scan) to get done. If I don't hear from them today, I'll be calling them on Monday. My doctor said the EEN&T clinic would need the CT scan before they would see me about my sinus problem. Seems like nowadays a CT scan is the first step in treating everything.

    I was on active duty when I had the problem before, so it's somewhere in my military medical records (which were sent to the St. Louis records depository when I retired). The VA should have a copy of them because I signed the request that they be provided to the VA.

    743:

    [shakes head] Just have your cat walk on you, and then you can tell them were it hurts. Why wait for an electromechanical CAT scan?

    744:

    Mike Collins @ 715: Have you tried ibuprofen? When my wife had sphenoid sinusitis and was waiting for surgery she found that ibuprofen was better for the headaches than paracetamol (acetaminophen).

    Other than some stuff they gave me in the hospital (which I think was straight up morphine) the best pain reliever I've ever used is regular aspirin. Several years ago when the doctors told me not to take aspirin for pain relief any more, they suggested ibuprofen, naproxen and acetaminophen.

    Ibuprofen didn't do anything for me other than give me heartburn (as I remember) and naproxen didn't work as well as acetaminophen.

    I had internal bleeding at the time - not caused by the aspirin, but the doctors told me not to take aspirin because it might make the bleeding worse. Maybe I should ask my doctor if it's OK to take regular aspirin for pain again. They already have me taking the low dose 81mg baby aspirin every day.

    745:

    The bottle doesn't say how much acetaminaphen is in each caplet, just not to take more than 4,000mg and not to take more than 8 caplets in one day. I arrived at the 500mg guess by dividing 4,000 by 8.
    WTF!

    746:

    City of Toronto's medical officer of health is quoted as saying the following today (from the Toronto Star website):

    "De Villa spoke about the availability of testing for Torontonians. She said that it was first thought that COVID-19 presented in symptoms of fever, coughing and difficulty breathing. It is now known, she said, that it can reveal itself in headaches, sore throat, runny nose, nausea, diarrhea and abdominal pain."

    747:

    mdlve @ 737:

    It was clear that Clinton was a party stalwart who had worked within the existing rules for years to build up her delegate count while Sanders was a johnny-come-lately who wasn't even a registered Democrat. She deserved the nomination because she EARNED it.

    And that is the DNC problem - the view that the candidate who earned the position should get it rather than the candidate who can win (not that I am saying that Bernie could have beat Trump, but it was obvious from the outside that Hillary couldn't).

    I think you misunderstand. Clinton "EARNED" the nomination by all the work she did for the Democrats during the 8 years of the Obama Presidency to insure she won the most votes at the nominating convention. How is it that the candidate who wins a majority of the votes at the convention under the previously established rules is a "problem"?

    If there had been no superdelegates; if the contest had been decided completely by primary & caucus voters - the so called "pledged delegates" - Clinton would still have won the nomination (2,842 to 1,822.5, with 2,026 pledged delegates required to win). Hillary Clinton won the nomination because she won the most votes in the primaries and caucuses.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries

    Also, Clinton DID beat Trump. Any way you slice it, she got 65,853,514 (48.2%) to Trump's 62,984,828 (46.1%). She should have won in the Electoral College as well if it hadn't been for James Comey's interference two weeks before the election.

    748:

    Charlie: Which is very much like the USA .. racist billionaires, unacceptable minorities ...

    You spotted it.

    My brother spent a decade or so in East Asia, years each in Japan, Viet Nam, and China. One day after returning, apropos of nothing, he said "Han Chinese are by far the most racist of anyone".

    I thought that itself was possibly more than idle racism, since he had the famously xenophobic Japanese as his yardstick. And his own culture too, of course.

    749:

    John Hughes @ 745:

    The bottle doesn't say how much acetaminophen is in each caplet, just not to take more than 4,000mg and not to take more than 8 caplets in one day. I arrived at the 500mg guess by dividing 4,000 by 8.

    WTF!

    WTF WTF?

    IF (according to label directions) you can take a max of 4,000mg in 24 hours AND you an take a max of 8 caplets in 24 hours without exceeding the 4,000mg, simple math (4,000mg ÷ 8 = 500mg) suggests each caplet contains 500mg of acetaminophen.

    750:

    A while back I saw a synopsis of an essay by some historian who explained the US constitution in terms of the period it was written in, the era of kings and emperors. The US needed a government so it needed a king to run things so they decided they would elect one every four years and grant them wide-ranging powers of patronage, be able to appoint judges and other posts with little or no supervision, command the military etc. Since that Constitution is still in force you have an elected king, you just call him Mister President.

    In the UK the PM is First Among Equals, a serving member of Parliament who happens to be PM because they have the current confidence of enough MPs at any given time. Lose that confidence and they're out, no need for impeachment for 'high crimes and misdemeanours'. They also don't get to appoint judges, command the military, hand out patronage etc. to anywhere the same extent as elected US Presidents do.

    751:

    From another side of it:

    In the US the legislature enacts laws much of the time to limit the powers of the Pres. Or spell them out.

    In the UK the legislature enacts laws to do what the PM wants. Until they decided he isn't the one to be PM.

    752:

    "Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops! Uh, depending on the breaks."

    Except going toe to toe with 2020's France (or even the UK) would be way, way more than a mere 20 million killed. Against Russia it would be more or less everyone.

    It's a quote from the movie "Dr. Strangelove." If you haven't seen it, you must, particularly if you were born before 1985 or so.

    753:

    And that is the DNC problem - the view that the candidate who earned the position should get it rather than the candidate who can win (not that I am saying that Bernie could have beat Trump, but it was obvious from the outside that Hillary couldn't).

    Yup. Buggins's turn. And that was her whole campaign too. And it's about to be repeated with Biden.

    If your winning depends on getting people who don't bother to vote, to vote, then you'd better be charismatic and energising.

    There is a piece in the nytimes on the by-election in Calif District 25. Everyone got mailed voting forms, but overwhelmingly only grumpy old white buggers filled them in and mailed them back. Blue -> Red.

    754:

    The Space Force[2] flag was presented to us today, with an impressively predatory fake D.J. Trump smile[3]: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/MSoMqEfUCf2hjNnN42GNsW.jpg I are disappoint! The head of the giant space spermatozoon in the logo has been slimmed down[1], a lot: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/66164477/space_force_logo.0.jpg I think the idea is that that low-polygon shield(?) is to prevent that spermatozoon from fertilizing the Earth. Why that would be bad is not made clear. Apparently space-contraceptives (a space UID?) are a good thing in their belief system.

    [1] The flag's spermatozoon's elongated and very very skinny head and long tail (60K+ kilometers) suggest extremely strong sperm competition (not settled science, and an interesting field): Sperm competition: linking form to function (Stuart Humphries, Jonathan P Evans, and Leigh W Simmons, 2008) (There is a resemblance to the sperm of a species of polyandrous bat.) [2] Some day we may find out why D.J. Trump was so interested in a Space Force in 2018/2019. :-) [3] Seriously; have a look.

    755:

    Actually, to be fair to the logo designers, it's basically the old USAF Space Command logo stripped of an orbit, but with more added stars. There's probably some esoteric meaning behind the number of stars and the loss of a sperm, but I don't have clearance to know it.

    The humorous part is that, by having one "space sperm" orbiting the face of the Earth instead of two, it now looks like those face masks improvised using jock straps, although I suppose one might argue that the old USAF logo was even more appropriate, given the number of straps involved.

    Of course, there's some reference to the whole meatball vs. worm fight over the NASA logo over the decades.

    756:

    Nah.

    It's not obvious Biden can't win, and it wasn't obvious Hillary couldn't win - which even a cursory look at the results would make clear, since the idiot in chief won by 100,000 votes in three keys states. Hillary Couldn't Win is some retrospective gibberish. As is Biden not being able to win.

    757:

    Re: Tylenol

    Depending on where you look, the maximum safe dosage has been reduced to 2000 mg/day. Also - all of the sites I checked said 'use for short term only' [undefined]. And, most sites said that if after taking Tylenol at the maximum allowed dosage for several days your pain persists or gets worse, you should call your doctor! So, yeah, the responsible thing on your part is to call the VA.

    https://reference.medscape.com/drug/tylenol-acetaminophen-343346

    May be a good idea to also check drug-drug* and drug-food interactions.

    https://www.drugs.com/drug-interactions/acetaminophen,tylenol.html

    https://www.drugs.com/food-interactions/acetaminophen-caffeine.html

    Herbal remedies can also interact with a drug - unfortunately I'm not aware of any convenient drug-herbal interaction data base. So if you're taking any herbals including teas and massage lotions/oils, you might want to do a search for each herbal. German Commission-E is the most reliable herbal reference and The American Botanical Council has summaries of key info.

    http://cms.herbalgram.org/commissione/HerbIndex/approvedherbs.html

    • Includes checks vs. OTC drugs.
    758:

    The biggest herbal remedy to worry about with acetaminophen is...alcohol, but I suspect that anything that might strain your liver functions probably should be avoided.

    And yes, I strongly advise to check for interactions as suggested.

    759:

    Re: Sinus headache

    Dumb comment(s) time ...

    Several years back I booked an urgent visit to my dentist because of a severe toothache. Nothing wrong with the teeth, so my dentist said I probably have a really bad sinus 'headache' which for some reason (i.e., Trigeminal neuralgia) I was experiencing as a toothache. However my dentist did say that I made the right call because a tooth infection can cause a sinus infection/headache.

    https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/trigeminal-neuralgia/symptoms-causes/syc-20353344

    Then there was a young colleague who had a very severe toothache-headache after getting a molar (wisdom tooth?) extracted: x-ray showed an abscess which apparently happens fairly often with that type of extraction.

    760:

    OGH: re: British Nuclear Deterrent & Trident- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyJh3qKjSMk Note when Sir Humphrey indicates the Soviets would be able to stop Polaris (around 0:16-0:28).

    Also: Sir Humphrey Appleby : [talking about nuclear fallout shelters] Well, you have the weapons, you must have the shelters.

    James Hacker : I sometimes wonder why we need the weapons.

    Sir Humphrey Appleby : Minister! You're not a unilateralist?

    James Hacker : I sometimes wonder, you know.

    Sir Humphrey Appleby : Well then you must resign from the government!

    James Hacker : Ah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not that unilateralist! Anyway, the Americans will always protect us from the Russians, won't they?

    Sir Humphrey Appleby : Russians? Who's talking about the Russians?

    James Hacker : Well, the independent deterrent.

    Sir Humphrey Appleby : It's to protect us against the French!

    761:

    Happens. When I got my wisdom teeth pulled, I had to take a course of antibiotics, because one of the tooth roots had penetrated my sinuses and I had a "whistling hole" between my mouth and my sinus that really did whistle for a few days until it closed up.

    There's a lot of stuff in there.

    762:

    Re: '... because one of the tooth roots had penetrated my sinuses and I had a "whistling hole"'

    Oow! - I can only imagine how that felt. How were you able to sleep, drink, eat with that 'whistling/whistling hole'?

    763:

    JBS: Also, Clinton DID beat Trump. Any way you slice it, she got 65,853,514 (48.2%) to Trump's 62,984,828 (46.1%).

    It is always amusing when this gets brought out, as if somehow Trump cheated to get into the Whitehouse.

    The fact that Hillary racked up the points (votes) from a couple of very populous states was irrelevant when instead of playing to win the popular vote the DNC/Hillary should have been playing to win the electoral college.

    Which is, of course, why the GOP concedes the popular vote - they are playing to win the electoral college. If they had to win the popular vote they would pay more attention to and spend more money in places like NY and California, thus changing the popular vote (and more Republicans in those states would actually get out and vote if their votes mattered).

    She should have won in the Electoral College as well if it hadn't been for James Comey's interference two weeks before the election.

    Yep, lots of excuses. It was Comey's fault. It was Bernie's fault. etc. etc.

    The fact of the matter is she ran a poor campaign and didn't connect with the public at large and was saddled with the hatred that her name had. She, and DNC, assumed that the demographic changes in the US meant the GOP could no longer win the Whitehouse, that they just needed to show up to win. And when the doofus was chosen as their opponent they figured the election was in the bag. And in the end all of those bad choices and assumptions put Trump into the Whitehouse instead of Hillary.

    Oh, and like Labour who took their northern voters for granted "because they'll never vote Conservative", the DNC did the same with areas of the US and Trump, like Boris, took advantage of the arrogance.

    Justin: It's not obvious Biden can't win, and it wasn't obvious Hillary couldn't win - which even a cursory look at the results would make clear, since the idiot in chief won by 100,000 votes in three keys states. Hillary Couldn't Win is some retrospective gibberish. As is Biden not being able to win.

    First, I have not said that Biden can't win - I actually think he stands a chance, and more importantly I think unless he makes a stupid VP choice he can drag along enough new DNC Senators to take the all important Senate.

    But, sorry, it was obvious to at least some of us that Hillary was in trouble and likely wouldn't win. Bernie took 2 of the important swing states, and early indication that she wasn't connecting with voters in those states - and then there were the media stories about voters switching to Trump in places like Pennsylvania, add in her lack of charisma and it didn't take much more than accepting the possibility of a Trump win to see that she was in trouble.

    764:

    Oow! - I can only imagine how that felt. How were you able to sleep, drink, eat with that 'whistling/whistling hole'?

    Very carefully...with lots of extra strength tylenol.

    766:

    US system without a lot of time and effort given how the system has been rigged to be 2 party.

    One more than China! Twice as democratic!

    767:

    I'm wondering if it is the time of year or no one nearby has any feeders

    From a completely different environment, I see birds feeding at any place that has anything that looks like food. Even the dumbest birds (ie, the ones who can't survive in urban areas) will try just about anything to see if it's edible. So if you have a feeder out I'd expect you to see just about every seed-eating bird in the area pass through.

    Feeding nectar eaters is harder, and not necessarily a good idea. Corvids and other preferential carnivores will steal your meaty pet food if leave it where they can see it.

    I'm deep in suburbia (~30km to the nearest vaguely wild area as the crow flies) so mostly what we get are pest species - bin chickens, corellas and noisy miners. Bin chickens are notorious for eating anything and everything, but while they visit my lawn occasionally they mostly stick to the neighbours (there's a few hundred in the trees at the bottom of the street though).

    But smaller birds, miners and so on, will raid the chicken feed if they can and also go through the compost/dumpster dive when the chickens aren't looking.

    768:

    I was expressing my amazement that anybody would be allowed to sell a potentially lethal drug without clearly writing the dosage on the packaging. That you can work out the dosage is nice, that you have to is insane.

    The box by my bed says on the fron in big letters:

    DOLIPRANE Paracetemol 1000mg Adulte Douleurs et Fievre 8 comprimes

    And on the side: Mise en garde spéciales: Lire notice Attention: Cette presentation contient 1g de paracétemol par comprime: ne pas prendre 2 comprimes à la fois TENIR HORS DE VUE ET DE LA PORTÉE DES ENFANTS Mode et voie d'administration: voie orale. Le comprimé est à avaler tel quel avec un boisson (par exemple eau, lait, jus de fruits).

    Inside, the 4 page notice is pretty exhaustive,and full of warnings: NE JAMAIS PRENDRE PLUS DE 4 GRAMMES DE PARACETEMOL PAR JOUR (en tenant compte de tous les medicaments contient le paracéteol dans leur formule).

    Actually you can read it here: http://base-donnees-publique.medicaments.gouv.fr/affichageDoc.php?specid=69309629&typedoc=N if you want.

    769:

    It's a quote from the movie "Dr. Strangelove." If you haven't seen it, you must, particularly if you were born before 1985 or so.
    My favorite film, I've lost count of how many times I've seen it.

    770:

    Note when Sir Humphrey indicates the Soviets would be able to stop Polaris (around 0:16-0:28).
    Well, the Soviets, unlike the Americans, actually did have a missile defence system. No idea whether it would work, and it only "protects" Moscow.

    Sir Humphrey was apparently not in the loop about Chevaline, or Hacker didn't have clearance.

    (Well the Americans had one for, what a couple of weeks? Protecting some missile silos).

    (And Hacker's faith that the Americans would back up the UK is touching in the Trump era).

    771:

    I first saw it in the 80s. It was on as the second part of a double feature at the cinema in a community arts centre in Brisbane, though I think we hadn’t realised it was a double feature. The two friends I went with and I walked around the block smoking a huge joint before going in to the first act, which turned out to be Colpoola’s then recently release, achingly serious Gardens of Stone, something we were utterly unprepared for and found enough unintentional comedy to giggle all the way through, since we were expecting to be seeing a legendary comedy movie, and I’m sure this was to the confusion and/or chagrin of other cinemagoers that evening. Dr Strangelove came as a huge relief, and is one of my favourite movies to this day.

    772:

    It has always seemed to this outside observer that compared the POTUS the British PM had almost dictator like powers as long as he held his coalition together.

    That's kind of true, providing the party in government has a sizable majority and they can keep most of their MPs voting along party lines. They basically have no problem passing whatever legislation they like. Also, I think the opposition MPs in the UK tend to be less "cut your own nose off to spite your face" than the Dems and Reps seem to be - there is probably more cooperation when there's consensus with what option is in the national interest.

    Technically, Parliament is sovereign, not the government (executive). But since our system tends to return a party with a big-enough majority, the government appears to have no problems. The Parliament before the last election was interesting precisely because the Government didn't have a majority for its Brexit position. As a result, the fact that Parliament not the Government is the sovereign power actually came into play.

    Also because our judiciary appears to be less politically motivated, it's not that unusual for them to tell the Government to "stick it up your jacksie, you can't do that, it's unconstitutional." e.g. https://www.supremecourt.uk/watch/prorogation/judgment.html

    773:

    Where we are in Brisvegas, there is quite a bit of old growth forest within 5km or so, though the main feature affecting our birdiness is the golf course a couple of hundred metres away. We get all the usual, noisy miners and common mynas, cockies (a few hundred live in the golf course), kookas, various-faced honey-eaters, crows, currawongs, magpies and butcher birds, loads of rainbow lorikeets and a couple of families of king parrots. The cockies are the one as who’ll come demand seed. One of the regulars, who we call Professor Surly, given his/her propensity to bite iPhones when you wave them too close trying to photography him/her, is clearly able to distinguish words and while he/she does stand off when you move around too much, there’s no discernible fear of humans (not a great selective trait but there you go).

    The common mynas are the ones who’ve worked out how to open the dog door and come in to raid the dog biscuit bowl. Our dog doesn’t really care about this, there’s no impact on him really, and the only birds he takes any interest in are bush turkeys (which are about his size). But I have caught a common myna sitting on our dining table, and while I was able to chase it out it didn’t seem all that scared when I did.

    774:

    This is a Separation of Powers question. It actually goes both ways here. In theory the US system has a stronger separation between the executive and the legislature. With the Westminster system, you have to form the executive from the legislature and this is a big deal, a serious Known Problem. The trade off is with this concept of Responsible Government, that is the executive is “responsible to” the legislature, which in turn is “responsible to” the electorate. It is argued to be a hedge against the way that if you elect an executive for a 4 year term, and they go off the rails in year 2, you can exercise this reporting relationship to relieve the executive and fix things before then become irreparable. It’s one of the reasons Australia, Aotearoa, Canada and others regard having an absentee head of state as an advantage. A PM can be a virtual dictator, but never an actual one... though that becomes a constitutional question and a bit problematic as most Westminster countries have their constitutions spread across a range of documents.

    775:

    Mike Collins SLIGHT problem for over 65's in the UK Ibuprofen is OK & over-the-counter. I used to be on "Diclofenac" - until "NICE" banned it for older people - fuck knows why as I was getting zero side-effects. I'm now on Naproxen, which does not seem to be as effective, probably. [ Diclofenac & Naproxen are prescription drugs, here - free to me, of course ] NOTE: Tylenol = Parcetamol DO NOT leave around if you have cats.

    David L It's late Spring - birdies will have young fledglings to feed. The Robins on our plots are even "tamer" than usual, if the humans are conveniently disturbing insect/worm type snackables.

    "As long as he held his (internal) coalition together" - exactly. Look what happened to May, or Thatcher, for that matter.

    Greg vP Han Chinese are by far the most racist of anyone With the Japanes a very close second .... They are still The Central Kingdom, everything revolves around them, troublesome minorities on their borders must either be absorbed () or subjugated. The Uighurs have long been in the latter class, as have the Tibetans. () And, what we now think of as essential "China" - basically the entire area S of the Yangtze - was't assimilated until the Song/Tang period.

    Moz "Bin chickens" ... w.t.f?

    Birdies generally I may have mentioned, that I've seen a Buzzard flying ovehead - in Walthamstow (!) Yesterday I saw a Jay & heard a "Yaffle" ( Green Woodpecker ) whilst on the plots.

    776:

    ... not that I am saying that Bernie could have beat Trump, but it was obvious from the outside that Hillary couldn't...

    I think you're projecting later knowledge back to contradict previous understandings.

    During 2016 there was a strong front runner and she was obvious to everyone. The angry clown had angry supporters (and we didn't find out until too late how many of them were foreign saboteurs) but they were clearly a vocal minority. Multiple unlikely things had to happen for The Donald to get in.

    777:

    "Bin chickens" ... w.t.f?

    I wondered too, but Google knew. This is common slang for the Australian white ibis, which looks more dignified than anything I've caught going through my garbage. (Which isn't saying much; BoJo dangling in mid-air is more dignified than a possum.) Their long beaks evolved to dig food out of mud or shallow water, and work just as well to extract food from human garbage piles and crisp packets.

    Apparently it's only in the last few decades that the white ibis has become an urban species.

    778:

    Yeah Ibises are amazing and graceful birds. But they are also wetlands-foragers and when the wetlands are replaced by an urban environment, they become scavengers hence the “bin chicken” description in much of Oz.

    While most people in Oz would not call them beautiful, the Australian white ibises are not noticeably different to the Egyptian royal ibis, and they don’t really deserve the “bin chicken” label. They’re like any other species whose habitat has been destroyed by expanding snivelisation, and who have found a workable niche within Ecosystem 2.0, in fact that one major draw card which is the public rubbish bin.

    779:

    In some parts of the USA, I am surprised that they haven't started a campaign to arm their sperm - after all, it fits with both of their principal bigotries.

    780:

    Interesting. Very much the analogue of British foxes, then.

    781:

    The MedCram doc (Roger Seheult) is taking the usual Vit-D(0), and a bit of Zinc etc...he’s apparently trying to fill himself with antioxidants

    He introduced a , new to me, couple of extra daily “food supplements” for preparing body defences against SARS-Cov-2, the first was the antidote(1) to that paracetamol/Tylenol ‘four grammes maximale per dia’, NAC, N-Acetyl-Cysteine at 600mg.

    Second newbie from MedCram was Quercetin antioxidant (500mg), US FDA shows no evidence that this plant derived chem neither helps anything nor is that much of a hazard at these doses. Buckets of these are arriving today, neatly timed with new freedoms in Italy(2). I can drive anywhere local, Vò, Codogno, beautiful Bergamo even. But only out-of-region by 3rd June, and I might be able to make a day-trip to Nice or Antibes, might-not too, depends on R0. Switzerland is NOT opening up to Italy, but might be to France, Germany. I might have to take a longer path. (Switzerland sells an Apple TV remote that works, licensed product, in their phone shops)

    (0) The dangers of the press, I saw this week in a UK tabloid an article suggesting that prophylactic Vitamin-D was now being encouraged by UK PHE (Porton Down or wherever) the article suggested a daily dose of ten milligrammes[NO!], so I emailed the editor, no response, emailed the journalist - and she corrected away from the slowly lethal dose to a more reasonable ten microgrammes within minutes.

    (1) There was a campaign a few years ago to increase the cost of “Lemsips” etc (OTC meds containing paracetamol) by a few percent by including NAC, hence sensibly combining a potential accidental deadly overdose path with its own oral antidote.(1.1) (Professional IV NAC is obviously better, as NAC high dose has caused anaphylaxis on its own)

    (1.1) I did actually try to buy paracetamol with NAC in Boots the Chemist in Leeds, years ago, was met with uncomprehending blank stares. Seems it might be available as a prescription, if you have someone at home who might accidentally take too much?

    (2) the recent NHK video of a simulated restaurant, with one diner ‘labelled’ with UV flourescing dye; combined with the similar Adam Savage Mythbusters “contamination” episode, suggests that staying healthy and be a germaphobe, could be best. https://www.oversixty.com.au/health/caring/contamination-experiment-shows-why-social-distancing-is-important

    782:

    analogue of British foxes

    Well, except that they honk when nesting rather than screaming when enjoying adult time. At least that's relatively rare, the screeching of corellas and cockatoos is their way of saying "it's daytime" and they travel in gangs. At least they're small gangs - in the wheat country you get thousands of the screaming fuckers and it is no fun.

    I'd rather have kea, if that was an option. They have many desirable characteristics, being cute, friendly and taking great delight in making motor vehicles safe.

    783:

    It had it in 1962, which is why the Cuban crisis erupted. At that time, the USSR nukes were essentially immobile, needed a long time to be prepared for launch, and the USA knew where they were.

    Nope.

    What triggered the CMC was a Soviet countermove to a US opening gambit.

    ICBMs had been around since roughly 1957, albeit not usable in their current modern form at the time -- they were cryogenic liquid-fuelled things that mostly sat exposed on an above-ground pad while being prepped for firing, like the V2 and a modern space launcher. Silo-based missiles with hypergolic (storable at room temperature) fuels were still in development. The backbone of both sides' deterrent was still the manned bomber, although ICBMs were clearly the wave of the future.

    In the late 1950s the US developed a new toy: the IRBM. Like a short-range ICBM: smaller, cheaper, easier to deploy and prep for launch (even the first-gen cryogen-fuelled ones like Thor). Trouble was, they had to be based close to the target -- within about 2000 miles. This led to Thor launchers in the UK, and, later, in Turkey circa 1961-62.

    The Soviet problem with IRBMs was the loss of warning. An ICBM takes 30+ minutes to reach its target; a bomber strike may give as much as 4 hours notice, but an IRBM has a flight time of less than 15 minutes, which opened the possibility of an unheralded first strike with no time for a response. It broke Mutual Assured Destruction in other words.

    So in 1961 the USSR began moving their own rather crappy short-range nuke-capable missiles to Cuba, as a counterweight to the US IRBMs in Turkey and the UK (the UK ones were going away soon, to be replaced by the RN's Polaris force).

    Of course both those on-the-border IRBM forces were destabilizing: it's no accident that as the Cuban Missile Crisis calmed down the US withdrew those IRBMs hastily (not mentioning it in the western media, which was trumpeting instead their triumph over Kruschev for doing exactly the same thing).

    Then Reagan put the forward-based theatre nukes back in the early 80s (in the shape of GLCM and Pershing-II) but that's another story.

    784:

    What's needed (but won't happen -- the barrier to new constitutional amendments being so high) is an upper cut-off age for Pope-emperor President. The Catholic college of Cardinals has an order such that only Cardinals aged under 80 get to vote on the new Pope. (My preference would actually be to shift the average age of US politicians downwards hard, with mandatory retirement from all elected offices — including POTUS — at 70, but that's just me. If a politician has to retire? Either their vice-POTUS takes over for the rest of their term, or -- in non-deputized posts -- there's a snap election.)

    785:

    The Turkish Missile Crisis, yes. With an American ("NATO"??) fleet dropping explosives from above nuclear-weapon-armed Soviet conventionally-driven submarines. I hope some of them still wake up in a cold sweat having realised what they were playing with.

    786:

    That said the standard North American dose for Tylenol/Acetaminophen is the extra strength pill at 500mg, taking 1 or 2 pills at a time every 4 to 6 hours as necessary, not to exceed 8 pills in 24 hours.

    Yes, standard dose in one caplet (tablet that's capsule-shaped, basically) is 500mg.

    Paracetamol (acetaminophen in the US) is hepatotoxic, but the liver has good regenerative ability and it's a metabolite of paracetamol that does the damage. There's a threshold effect: your live will be fine as long as the concentration of the toxic metabolite in your blood stays within the capacity of your liver to buffer it.

    Problems: if you have alcoholic cirrhosis or some other cause of impaired liver function, your tolerance for paracetamol will be right through the floor. At that point, 4000mg in 24 hours can potentially nuke your liver completely. For someone with a young healthy liver it's possible to survive a larger dose -- possibly 10,000mg (20 extra-strong caplets in a day). But it's still the most widespread cause of liver failure and drug overdose in the USA today and death from acute overdose can take weeks.

    A less-recognized problem is chronic overdose, in which someone takes paracetamol regularly at or just below the maximum dose. Over time their liver doesn't eliminate it fast enough, so toxic metabolites build up gradually: rather than a sudden overdose with symptoms appearing within a few hours, it can take weeks.

    787:

    We remain amazed.

    The general principle of expressly labelling items with what is in them and how much is a good one.

    788:

    ACE inhibitors and Agniotensin receptor blockers (eg Ramipril and Candesartan) are two major treatments for hypertension - along a single axis, not combined. Ramipril has some other useful actions, heart failure became suddenly more treatable and survivable with it.

    So the presence of those drugs may lead to up-regulation of the receptor expression on the cells. Does that matter? Not known AFAICS.

    789:

    Another one bites the dust. Seemingly for looking into whether members of the Trump administration are doing dodgy things again:

    Steve Linick: Trump fires state department inspector general https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-52688658

    I can't see how anyone can take those jobs anymore.

    790:

    That was a large part of my point, combined with the fact that the USA knew where the USA's launch bases (including for bombers) were, as a result of the B-52 project. 30 minutes is enough to scramble only bombers and crews that are essentially ready to fly, and a 'first-striker' would have had time to position and prepare all of its its interceptors to take out as many of the enemy's bombers as possible. I can't remember which officially-approved book had it, but it stated that the USA, UK and USSR governments estimated that a USA first strike would take out at least 95% of the USSR's retaliatory capability, and the USA would suffer no more than 30% damage (in terms of lost industrial capacity), quite possibly a lot less, and all parties knew that the other parties all knew.

    Combined with the influence of the "Wow, wow, nuke 'em now" brigade" in the USA, the USSR was seriously worried that might actually be ordered. As you say, the trigger for the crisis was the missiles in Turkey.

    From what I have seen, if you consider the actual capabilities of the two sides (rather than the bluster), the USSR and now Russia have never had a genuine capacity for mutual assured destruction of the USA (in the short term) against an all-out USA first-strike initially targetting their retaliatory capabilities. In the long term, of course, the ecological damage would have finished what we are pleased to call civilisation.

    791:

    Yes. Many of us are on both. I have tried to find out if I am more or less at risk, and failed, but there is plenty of speculation.

    792:

    Sigh. Sorry. Some minor corrections, because some of the usual trolls will doubtless use them to post abuse:

    "the USA knew where the USSR's launch bases"

    "the USA and UK governments estimated ... all of the USA, UK and USSR knew that the other parties all knew."

    793:

    I used to be on "Diclofenac" - until "NICE" banned it for older people - fuck knows why as I was getting zero side-effects.

    YOU were getting zero side-effects: other old folks were dying (sudden heart attacks at a frequency considerably above the baseline for people not taking diclofenac).

    It worked for me but I switched to naproxen, which is available as a cheap OTC import from the US if you know where. Best used judiciously as it doesn't play well with one of my antihypertensives, but that's a judgment call I'm willing to make if I'm in bad enough pain that I can't sleep. (Doctors tend to err on the side of the precautionary principle.)

    794:

    Charlie Thanks - because no-one would tell me why it was suddenly banned. That makes sesne, I suppose. Pity. ( I, too have an emergency outside-the-UK-supplied dollop of Naproxen, just in case )

    795:

    But you reacted to it above as if you were making a serious reply... oh well.

    The weird thing about Dr. Strangelove is that a lot of younger people, those raised after the Berlin Wall fell, don't get the movie. They've never had a nuclear nightmare and didn't live under MAD the way we did.

    796:

    Steve Linick: Trump fires state department inspector general https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-52688658 I can't see how anyone can take those jobs anymore.

    Isn't it obvious? He's a grifter with decades of not going to jail and only sometimes getting caught; anyone in his orbit can tag along and pocket lots of money, either by skimming off his scams or running their own under his umbrella.

    For scammers, con artists, and grifters it's a golden opportunity to jump in, pocket easy money from suckers, and get out without law enforcement able to touch them.

    Trump is a much less attractive ally to anyone else.

    797:

    NAC with paracetamol was licensed as a prescription-only analgesic in the UK from the mid-1980s. Prescribable specifically for patients who were considered at risk of a suicide attempt (presumably those on heavyweight antidepressants -- this was before SSRIs were a thing) and who didn't rate a stronger painkiller.

    The stuff cost the earth (roughly 100x as much as basic paracetamol on its own) and didn't catch on; it was discontinued some time in the 90s and never went non-prescription, which is kind of self-defeating.

    In the 2000s as a measure to lower the overdose rate the government cut the maximum size of paracetamol available to buy in the GSL and P categories to 32 x 500mg under Pharmacy supervision and 16 tablets (General Sales List). This worked, due to some quirk of shaved-ape psychology: most folks don't hoard meds, so not having more than 16 tablets to hand reduced the rate of accidental overdoses by about 70% (even if it didn't stop the truly determined).

    798:

    Note that topical diclofenac is still available in UK pharmacies. Look for Voltarol Gel -- it's 1% or 2% (extra-strong) diclofenac in an alcohol-based gel, works wonders on muscle pains/cramps/achy joints. There's also ibuprofen-based gel for the same purpose. (Weirdly the USA only allows aspirin-based pain-relief gels on sale in pharmacies.) The oral version is still prescribable, but you need to convince your GP it's a good idea and unless you've got some variety of diagnosed arthritic condition and a clean bill of cardiac health that ain't going to happen.

    799:

    Oh yes, I can see why people would want to be in his inner circle. I wouldn't personally want to be there, but I can think of the sort of people who would.

    I meant that I don't see how anyone can seriously take any job now where they are responsible for ensuring that the operation of US government departments is within the law etc. I'm assuming that's the sort of thing an inspector general is supposed to do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Inspector_General_(United_States) suggests that's the case.

    800:

    And some of us responded to all that bureaucracy by starting to hoard, not least because using the just-in-time model for prescriptions means that we can't decide to go away for more than a few days at short notice. And, for us retirees, that's a perfectly reasonable thing to do (pre-COVID).

    I am suspicious of whether it reduced the suicide attempts or merely displaced them, anyway - and, as far as I could discover, the data were never collected to answer that question. Do you know the answer to that?

    801:

    There are of course workarounds for things like paracetamol that are common enough that everywhere sells them. Go round all the local corner shops and newsagents and buy 2 packets in each, for instance; there's a cluster of shops my way where I could get 6 packets for basically the same effort as getting 2. Or go to the supermarket and put them through the self service checkout in multiple transactions.

    Prescriptions are rather more awkward, especially when you have one which is unstable and only has a shelf life of a few weeks.

    802:

    And the last few weeks they have been very busy.

    Just so people know what I'm talking about.

    For the last few weeks in a typical afternoon hour I will see blue jays robins cardinals 2 or 3 kinds of woodpeckers pigeons (walking around with the squirrels) some yellow breasted things I can't remember the name of blue birds An assortment of wrens and starlings

    And every week or few a blackbird/crow will show up, perch on top, yell at all the others for a while, then leave

    Plus the odd rabbit and/or chipmunk at times

    And we have various kinds of falcon/hawks that rotate above. Wingspans from 1/2m to 2m. You rarely seem them up close but the other day a smaller sized one came around the house near where I was standing at high speed. I suspect it was checking out the lunch prospects at the feeder.

    803:

    Oh, yes, but the only over-the-counter drugs I use are 75mg aspirin, loperamide when needed, and loratine in June, and the bureaucracy causes trouble only with the first - and even that wasn't too bad before Boots took over everything locally :-( Not even diclofenac and codeine work on me as painkillers, so I never use them. It's mainly my anti-hypertensives and PP inhibitor, all of which keep, and the former I really don't want to run out of!

    I agree that it's the people with unstable prescriptions who really have the problems.

    804:

    I'm assuming that's the sort of thing an inspector general is supposed to do. An inventory, organized in reverse time order, of the 4 (so far) fired IGs. You might notice a recent Friday evening pattern: State Department inspector general Steve Linick, at about 10 p.m., Friday, May 15 Acting Health and Human Services inspector general Christi Grimm, shortly after 8 p.m., Friday, May 1 Intelligence community inspector general Michael Atkinson, Friday, April 3, around 10 p.m. Acting Defense Department inspector general Glenn Fine, Tuesday, April 7

    Two reasons; obviously a blocking of accountability for malfeasance by DJT administration actors, but also, their replacements will be acting as commissars to root out those actively disloyal to POTUS D.J. Trump and destroy their government careers (and personal lives).

    Charlie asked for no WaPo links, so if one wants details, search on "Trump’s slow-moving Friday night massacre of inspectors general" (Aaron Blake, May 16, 2020), privacy-shields-up and enabled in private browsing/incognito, and open in a private browsing/incognito window.

    805:

    Yes, it had to do with the report. Trump regards Burr as an "enemy" because of the report. So he didn't get the "protection" that a member of the President's party would usually get.

    806:

    Charlie Thanks - I wondered what was in "Voltarol" I also have an ancient tube of Diclofenac-containing gel from a previous injury ... Might try that last, as I'm beginning to suffer from arthritis in finger joints, bugger it.

    EC Diclofenac, like Ibuprofen is an anti-inflammatory, not a painkiller. I try not to take any painkillers, unless I really need them.

    Bill Arnold Assuming Biden wins, will there be investigations into the events that the fired Inspectors-General were looking into? If not, why not? DT has thrown the rule-book away ... The trouble about that is that, then, the "other side" can also throw the rule book away. The US in particular, is very bad at remembering this. I mean, it's why we have "Rules of War" & Law in general, isn't it?

    Meanwhile .... Not quite another Ötzi, but global warming reveals many artifacts from many ages in the past

    807:

    Bill Arnold There's a way round that problem. A lot of news stories are, now, repeaed on "MSN" So, you can "Read all about it" HERE without all the shields up, fortunately. Link is via MSN to the "Friday Noght Massacre" article at one remove.

    808:

    As far as I know, ALL of the UK over-the-counter painkillers except for acetaminophen ARE anti-inflammatories, and most of those issued on prescription, too: diclofenac was prescribed for me (against my request, actually) specifically as a painkiller that was stronger than anything I could get over-the-counter, and I was instructed to take it for just that purpose. I could add acetaminophen and whatever panadol used before it was banned (and it converted to acetaminophen) to that list. As I said, codeine doesn't work on me, either, though it's a reasonable antitussive (which is what I have some for, but almost never use).

    809:

    Re: Multi-nukes response

    You need to read up on Nuclear Winter/Autumn. That's a very bad approach. But I'm not sure that there are any good ones.

    810:

    No. What you're showing is some of the nature of the stuff underlying the "universal grammar", even though it's at a much lower level than Chomsky thought. There is a universal grammar, and one of it's basic concepts if "object persistence". There are pieces of it that relate to aural perception, too. It's NOT the kind of tree structure that Chomsky was trying to create, as it's an evolved construct based around a neural net that connects to certain processed perceptual features. But even with that behind it, it's learned, probably in the first couple of months. And since it's learned, calling is "universal" is a bit of an overstatement. Those born blind probably have a significantly different model...though I don't know how to predict the difference. FWIW, those "speaking" sign language seem to handle grammar a lot differently from those using aural language...but this is true even of those who become fluent as adults.

    811:

    SFReader @ 757: Re: Tylenol

    Depending on where you look, the maximum safe dosage has been reduced to 2000 mg/day. Also - all of the sites I checked said 'use for short term only' [undefined]. And, most sites said that if after taking Tylenol at the maximum allowed dosage for several days your pain persists or gets worse, you should call your doctor! So, yeah, the responsible thing on your part is to call the VA.

    I'm not taking the maximum dosage it says on the package. If I needed anywhere near that much, I'd already be off to the Emergency Room. It's the undefined meaning of "short term only" that's got me concerned. But this is going on long enough that I'm sure "short term" no longer applies.

    Heteromeles @ 758: The biggest herbal remedy to worry about with acetaminophen is...alcohol, but I suspect that anything that might strain your liver functions probably should be avoided.

    I'm not using ANY alcohol while taking acetaminophen. I already knew about that.

    I'm a social drinker on rare occasions. I've been asked before about alcohol use (by the doctors) and honestly had to tell them I couldn't remember the last time I had a drink. It's probably been a year or more, since the two spring social functions where I might have had a cocktail this year have been canceled. For me alcohol is a social lubricant, and without the social interaction it's no fun. I have alcohol here at the house, but no visitors to share it with, so it's going to stay in the cupboard.

    Besides, I'm worried enough about what just the acetaminophen can do to my liver and I'm not going to risk compounding it. I'm not quite a hypochondriac YET, but I do find that I'm becoming more mindful of my body as I get older. Mainly because I'm hopeful that I'll be able to get a lot older and still able to function independently.

    And yes, I strongly advise to check for interactions as suggested.

    I did discuss possible interactions with my Doctor when I talked to him, but none of the possible interactions we identified seem likely based on the pattern.

    I did finally take a good look [with my magnifying glass] at the label while my head was not killing me & my eyes could focus so the extra-fine print was not a blur ... each caplet is 250mg Acetaminophen, 250mg Aspirin and 65mg caffeine. I'm taking 2 caplets, with only the one day when I had to take a second dose of 2 after six hours.

    PS: It's not teeth. It's the upper sinus above my eye with the pain descending into the eye socket. Plus, those teeth are gone. I broke them on Army chow in the Army Mess Hall while I was in Iraq and the Army wouldn't pay to have them fixed when I got home (because I was National Guard) so I had to have them extracted (paid for out of pocket). I have a partial plate up there because I didn't have enough money for implants.

    And the VA does NOT provide dental care either. Bastards!

    PPS: I do appreciate y'all putting up with my whinging about this. Y'all probably don't know how much it means to have this forum where I can unload about it.

    812:

    There's a substantial difference between 'couldn't win' and 'likely in trouble'. The election as it played out as as close to an actual coin toss as it's possible to guess in national politics.

    At the time, I was one of the very few people in my extended circle who thought Trump had a real shot at winning, so it's not as if I thought Hillary had it as a lock.

    But as someone else mentioned in this thread, a lot of unlikely stuff had to happen for the election to turnout as it did. A fairly large one, and one that distorts the conversation, is that Trump actually outperformed any GOP candidate in history (albeit not by much) - if he had performed like McCain or Romney, Hillary wins easily.

    The other crucial aspect that actually relates to Hillary is that she did not actually perform badly in the swing states she lost. Take Pennsylvania (my state) - she lost by 54,000 votes out of six million cast. And as compared to Obama 4 years before, she trailed him by about 74,000 votes. She would have handily beaten ANY GOP candidate in history in that state.

    On an even more microlevel, she performed as well or better than 2012 Obama in almost every county he won. She lost votes as compared to him in the places that went red, and Trump picked up votes as compared to Romney, and that pattern was more or less the mirror image - Trump did a little worse than Romney in the blue places and a little better in the red.

    And that same pattern is broadly true in the other key swings states, except the margins are ever tighter. That's not to say that Hillary, from a getting elected standpoint, was a great candidate. She was bringing 25 years of consistent smearing with her, and she's not generally rated as being super charismatic. She ran a campaign that largely ignored some areas that proved to be critical places in retrospect.

    But there's not a rational argument that she didn't have a good shot at winning or that her defeat was the likely outcome. Not from voting data, not from polling, not from recent electoral history.

    813:

    I've done it - but I save in Word format. (I'm using Word 2007. I have Word 2010 available, but I don't like to upgrade it without actual necessity.) LibreOffice is better with large files than MSOffice.

    814:

    I'd give it about a 1% chance that it happened. She has a long history of stories that aren't actually truthful, and get increasingly embellished in her favor over time, among other problems.

    815:

    They're generally fairly hands-off anyway. They have far less control than the conspiracy people want you to believe. What they have are database, money, and structure that candidates can access.

    816:

    The final volume of that report hasn't been released yet (supposed to be out in July). Their proposed "unclassified" version is about a thousand pages.

    817:

    mdlve @ 763:

    JBS:
    Also, Clinton DID beat Trump. Any way you slice it, she got 65,853,514 (48.2%) to Trump's 62,984,828 (46.1%).

    It is always amusing when this gets brought out, as if somehow Trump cheated to get into the Whitehouse.

    Yeah, it's so amusing that it only hurts when I laugh. Trump did cheat to get into the Whitehouse even if it doesn't reflect in the narrow victories in the three or four states that Clinton lost in the last week of the campaign.

    Trump's cheating is a whole separate issue. Basically, Trump can't feel like he's winning unless he cheats to do so. His (political) cheating only BEGAN with the 2016 election

    If you ever shake hands with the man be sure to count your fingers when you get your hand back to make sure they're all still there.

    818:

    OK. But most Jews in the US at least really are "white". Their ancestors were force converted to Judaism by a Czar back a long time ago, and stayed converted when the Czar changed his mind. But they had no Semitic ancestors.

    I know that this won't change the minds of racists, of course.

    819:

    There's a question about what kind of testing is being done - if it's the fast-test kind, the results are, um, less than reliable. And Himself would cheerfully lie about his results, because he believes he's perfect in every way. (I notice he doesn't understand flu shots: he's complaining about having to get one every year, as if he believes it's a one-and-done thing.)

    820:

    John Hughes @ 768: I was expressing my amazement that anybody would be allowed to sell a potentially lethal drug without clearly writing the dosage on the packaging. That you can work out the dosage is nice, that you have to is insane.

    Turns out it was on there, just in such fine print I couldn't see it without a magnifying glass and especially not when trying to read the label while I had a splitting headache.

    "Each caplet contains: Acetaminophen (250mg), Aspirin NSAID (250mg) and Caffeine (65mg)" ... It was the numbers in parenthesis I was blind to. I could see the word "Acetaminophen" well enough to recognize it. And I could tell there were two other ingredients.

    I took another look at the label this morning WITH the magnifying glass BEFORE the headache started.

    821:

    I checked the bottle that I have, and that's correct for 500mg tablets/caplets. (The only time I've come close was several years ago when I had shingles and was alternating acetominophen and ibuprofen, every two hours. I Do Not Recommend Having Shingles.)

    822:

    L.A. County is locked down until August. They sent everyone ballots because they didn't want people to have to go out to "voting centers" where they'd be around others. Voting by mail is easy, here. (I signed up for vote-by-mail back in January, when the state and county decided to use voting machines that are notorious for changing votes. And "voting centers" are far less convenient than the precincts were.)

    823:

    The only reason I can see is that Biden is a horrible candidate. I'll probably vote for him, but that depends heavily on who he selects as his vice-president. I don't expect him to last out the term, and to be ineffective while in office.

    That said, ineffective is a lot better than what we've currently got.

    824:

    Election scientists have found that two-party systems are a misfeature of FPTP voting. I can see that if the GOP party in the US collapses, or becomes more of a minority party than it already is, the Democrats would split into two.

    825:

    Greg, Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs (NSAIDs) like aspirin, diclofenac, and ibuprofen are painkillers. They work by reducing inflammatory response, which causes pain. They don't work against all types of pain, and they work via a different mechanism from opiates, which tackle the pain circuit directly: which is why they're best for inflamed joints, bruises, muscle aches, and so on.

    826:

    My personal experience is that it made a big difference. At the time I was working in an NHD biochemistry lab doing R&D but participating in the out of hours emergency service. We could expect a positive paracetamol from A%E every few days and a really high overdose, occasionally involving death from liver failure every few weeks. At one time a non fatal overdose was a way for psychiatric patients to jump the queue for treatment. The problem with paracetamol was that unlike an aspirin overdose there are no immediate side effects and the person would wake up the next day, feel OK then go into liver failure later when it was too late for parvolex to work. When the packaging rules changed there was an immediate drop in salicylate/paracetamol requests and most of the samples received were low or negative. This fall in testing became so obvious later on that I had trouble introducing an improved salicylate assay in my Norfolk NHS lab that we couldn't find any positive patient samples to compare salicylate results between the old and new methods. After several weeks of this I and several of my staff suddenly developed unexpected 'headaches' and had to take aspirin to relieve the pain, giving us positive samples for comparison.

    827:

    AIUI, he was looking into Pompeo and his wife using his staff for doing personal errands - personal corruption.

    828:

    John Hughes @ 770:

    Note when Sir Humphrey indicates the Soviets would be able to stop Polaris (around 0:16-0:28).

    Well, the Soviets, unlike the Americans, actually did have a missile defence system. No idea whether it would work, and it only "protects" Moscow.

    Sir Humphrey was apparently not in the loop about Chevaline, or Hacker didn't have clearance.

    (Well the Americans had one for, what a couple of weeks? Protecting some missile silos).

    Both the Soviet & American systems were built AFTER the ABM treaty was negotiated. Make what you will of the choices each made in what they'd "protect" with their one installation permitted under the treaty. The Americans chose to "protect" a retaliatory capability and the Soviets chose to "protect" the "leadership". I guess they didn't think they were going to need to preserve any capability to retaliate.

    (And Hacker's faith that the Americans would back up the UK is touching in the Trump era).

    And that was what? ... 30 years before the Trump era? When this aired (1986) Trump hadn't even declared bankruptcy for the first time. He was still married to his first wife.

    829:

    [citation needed] because the "forced conversion" seems to have been court-only and people reverted as soon as possible.

    830:

    Acetaminophen doesn't do a thing for me, but I was told that Ibuprofen thins the blood, though not as much as aspirin does. Still, avoid it before surgery.

    831:

    Interesting. Aspirin sorta-kinda works; acetaminophen seems not quite as good to me, but ibuprofin actually works for me.

    Aspirin and ibuprofin are both anti-inflammatories and anti-pyretic, but ibuprofin is also a pain killer.

    832:

    Elderly Cynic @ 779: In some parts of the USA, I am surprised that they haven't started a campaign to arm their sperm - after all, it fits with both of their principal bigotries.

    How would they do that? I'm not saying they wouldn't ... IF they could ... but I'm a lot smarter than most of these yahoos and I don't see how you could accomplish that.

    833:

    re: "No more than 20-30 million [dead] tops... depending on the breaks!"

    I think you are either being very optimistic, or are only counting very immediate deaths. Give it a year or so and you'll easily quintuple that number.

    834:

    Yes, and now with Less Oversight and Extra Takeithome!

    835:

    Arm their sperm.... You do not want to see a couple of pics I've seen just yesterday.

    Maybe saltpeter?

    836:

    AFAIK, they were not "forced" to - that is, assuming you're talking about the Khazars of Kievan-Rus. I just did some research on them several years ago for a story, including pulling in a Russian co-worker to find stuff.

    I forget if it was the Eastern Orthodox or the Catholics who were rather perturbed that they didn't want to be "saved".

    Oh, and as I have said over the years, speaking of "Caucasion", my ancestors are from closer to the Caucuses Mountains than theirs have ever been....

    837:

    Scott, fuck off. As I was voting for Bernie in '16, this is a personal insult, calling Bernie an "angry clown".

    Can it, or I'll complain to the moderators.

    838:

    Charlie Stross @ 783: The Soviet problem with IRBMs was the loss of warning. An ICBM takes 30+ minutes to reach its target; a bomber strike may give as much as 4 hours notice, but an IRBM has a flight time of less than 15 minutes, which opened the possibility of an unheralded first strike with no time for a response. in other words.

    The only thing I would disagree with was "It broke Mutual Assured Destruction ..." That didn't exist yet.

    Soviet fears about the first strike capabilities represented by IRBMs in Turkey were rational even if we know from hindsight that the U.S. never intended them to be used that way. The US had it's own rational fears of what the Soviets were capable of (despite what we now know about Soviet intentions at the time).

    Then Reagan put the forward-based theatre nukes back in the early 80s (in the shape of GLCM and Pershing-II) but that's another story.

    Which was a NATO decision that came in 1979 while Jimmy Carter was still President. It was a response to NATO's rational fears of Soviet intentions in beginning forward deployment the SS-20 "Saber" IRBM in 1976 . Reagan just carried forward the pre-existing NATO plan after he took office.

    It should also be noted that the dual deployments ultimately resulted in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty ratified by the USSR and the US in 1988.

    By May 1991, the nations had eliminated 2,692 missiles, followed by 10 years of on-site verification inspections.
    839:

    maybe tomorrow I'll mop the kitchen floor then write another thousand words.

    The kids have it tough. They're finding motivation very, very hard.

    They're restarting school here tomorrow, after two months of working from home, via google hangouts, zoom, assigned homework. Or not working from home.

    The pandemic will make inequalities worse. Millions of kids are going to be having it tougher than others. And "tougher" is really fucking hard when you're a teenager trying to motivate yourself to work from home.

    My daughter's had a desk next to mine, gentle encouragement to keep to her school timetable, support in her subjects, and a dad who could buy her a nice laptop the day before lockdown when her old one was dying and the cheap ones were sold out. Not so easy for some of her friends: if you're sharing a bedroom with your younger siblings, have no quiet study space at home, don't have the same university-educated-parent-support when you get stuck on physics. Not to mention the whole IT side of it, that just adds more and more friction.

    Then there's the difference in what the well-heeled private schools are able to do regards IT Support for teachers and students. Engines of inequality, fuelled by subsidies and tax breaks. I could rant.

    It's a depressing time.

    840:

    did actually try to buy paracetamol with NAC in Boots the Chemist in Leeds, years ago, was met with uncomprehending blank stares. Seems it might be available as a prescription, if you have someone at home who might accidentally take too much?
    Acetylcysteine is commonly prescribed to fluidify gunk in your lungs in case of bronchitis. It's available in France off prescription. Usualy comes mixed with aspartame and horrid fake orange flavour.

    841:

    Georgiana @ 805: Yes, it had to do with the report. Trump regards Burr as an "enemy" because of the report. So he didn't get the "protection" that a member of the President's party would usually get.

    I think you're still missing the fact that the investigation predates "the report".

    That report may be an additional reason why the Trumpolini Department of INjustice under COVERUP General William Barr is piling on now, after the fact, but it was not the reason for the investigation. There may be some career officials from the days when it was still the "Dept of Justice" who have not yet been purged.

    842:

    But you reacted to it above as if you were making a serious reply... oh well.
    If you didn't understand that Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was a very serious film you missed the whole point.

    843:

    P J Evans @ 821: I checked the bottle that I have, and that's correct for 500mg tablets/caplets. (The only time I've come close was several years ago when I had shingles and was alternating acetominophen and ibuprofen, every two hours. I Do Not Recommend Having Shingles.)

    I've been trying to get the shot and it's just not available. Not even the older shot that the new one is supposed to be better than; not even if I pay for it out of pocket because I have to go somewhere other than the VA to get it.

    844:

    Ok, let's stop right here with the US as ultimate, in the sixties and seventies.

    So, the Soviets could have gotten 30% of their off?

    Let's look at this: 1. in the sixties, Philadelphia was the SECOND largest city in the US, after NYC.Sorry, but Chicago was either 3rd or 5th, I don't remember. 2. Where was the immense major industrial base of the US: in the East. Get NYC, Philly, Boston, Norfolk, Detroit, Chicago, Allentown/Bethleham (together, about 120k in '77-78) and a few others, and there is NO US industrial base, and you've also just taken out a major part of the population.

    No, it really was MAD.

    845:
    Soviet fears about the first strike capabilities represented by IRBMs in Turkey were rational ... [ ... ] Which was a NATO decision that came in 1979 while Jimmy Carter was still President. It was a response to NATO's rational fears...

    That's the whole problem with nuclear weapons. Rational decisions lead to insanity.

    846:

    Charles H @ 833:

    re: "No more than 20-30 million [dead] tops... depending on the breaks!"

    I think you are either being very optimistic, or are only counting very immediate deaths. Give it a year or so and you'll easily quintuple that number.

    Are you still unaware that's a line from a scene in Stanly Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuP6KbIsNK4

    ... at about 2:13

    And you should know that the film ends with all life on earth being wiped out by a doomsday machine.

    847:

    John Hughes @ 845:

    Soviet fears about the first strike capabilities represented by IRBMs in Turkey were rational ...
    [ ... ]
    Which was a NATO decision that came in 1979 while Jimmy Carter was still President. It was a response to NATO's rational fears...

    That's the whole problem with nuclear weapons. Rational decisions lead to insanity.

    No. Using nuclear weapons is insane. Policies that ultimately lead to them not being used, however loopy or based on misapprehensions are not.

    848:
    And you should know that the film ends with all life on earth being wiped out by a doomsday machine.
    Dr. Strangelove: Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you *keep* it a *secret*! Why didn't you tell the world, EH? Ambassador de Sadesky: It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises.

    Cobalt Thorium G for the win.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik

    849:

    I ran across this a couple of days ago. Seems like good information in a form a lay-person like me can use to know where there are high-risk situations so I can avoid them. I found the diagrams most enlightening.

    https://www.erinbromage.com/post/the-risks-know-them-avoid-them

    850:

    The game show of the year!

    It’s time to play “What Was Trump Asked About”! We give you a Trump rant and you guess what he was asked about in the first place.

    https://twitter.com/TheDailyShow/status/1261763604141035520

    851:

    Loved how the novelization ended with "And so ends another chapter in our series,"Dead Worlds of Antiquity"". And my neck of the woods, Kansas City could easily merit more than one warhead, even now.

    852:

    Oh, one more leetle detail: I remember being at the NYC World's Fair in either '64 or '65, and hearing the world had just hit 3B people. Meanwhile, the US population was just under 192M.

    Meanwhile, NYC metro was what, "There are 8M stories in the Naked City...."

    853:

    She has a long history

    My wife read the "Politico" story about her and it was full of people saying her life is one of victimhood.

    Much like my mother.

    Took a while for my wife to get used to hearing my mother's version of anything and then discounting 90% of it.

    And as a side note my wife did a lot of fund raising as a board member of a rape crisis center back in the day.

    854:

    EC & CHarlie Yes, but ... Anti-inflamatories work as piankillers at one remove - by reducing/removing the inflammation, they remove the pain - understood. But, IIRC, "Aspirin is a pure painkiller - is Parcetamol the same? I think it is, but could easily be wrong. best for inflamed joints, bruises, muscle aches, - which is a good description of me, some of the time!

    Testing Yet again - if you can get a copy of this weekend's edition of the "FT" - BUY A COPY Article on Trump & disaster mismanagment in the magazine & other useful - very socially liberal stuff elsewhere

    855:

    and a dad who could buy her a nice laptop the day before lockdown when her old one was dying and the cheap ones were sold out. Not so easy for some of her friends:

    Our school system went out and bought 10K hotspots and I think 30K chromebooks to give to the kids without such.

    We are I think the 15th largest district in the country. So about 160K kids.

    Of course there were some logistical headaches dealing with numbers like this for something planned with a week or few of notice.

    The issues/fights in most of the US are going to be about the next school year. People want the kids in school. But Trump and his fans think it will cause no medical issues. Or so they claim. And so what if it does. We need the economy back open. [sarcasm]

    And sports. Oey Veh.

    856:

    I was prescribed naproxen for gout attacks but I got urticaria and the skin on my feet peeled off so they temporarily prescribed prednisolone for gout instead before moving onto permanent allopurinol which has stopped the attacks for eighteen months or so. I think between the naproxen and the prednisolone they tried another NSAID which I also reacted badly to. I don't think I can take ibuprofen any more either. More recently I was prescribed simvastatin for high cholesterol and that gave me the symptoms of peripheral neuropathy so I had to stop taking that.

    857:

    Infighting inside the tory party It appears that Patel's vicious proposed purge has produced a reaction - also against BoZo ... who can, of course, now blame Patel, sack her & "modify" the rules. How convenient, maybe.

    858:

    Were I an USian citizen I would vote for Biden because sometimes grownups have to pick the less-worst option. I would have campaigned hard for (probably) Warren, but in a democracy you don't always (ever) get what you want.

    The whole 'Bernie bros' never Biden thing seems like such a perfectly tuned message to progressives to 'NOT VOTE' that I can't help but speculate that it is at least encouraged if not promoted by external or internal disruptors - the end result of progressives not voting en masse is no progressive candidates winning. A lot of the messaging seems to come through social media...

    Here in Canada I've been a member of the somewhat social democratic NDP for decades, but often tend to actually vote for the candidate most likely to defeat the local Tory. In the last election the NDP candidate was a personal friend but running a no-hope campaign, and I had to tell him I was voting Liberal just to keep the Tory from winning. (It helped that the Libs ran an excellent candidate in our riding).

    859:

    Soviet fears about the first strike capabilities represented by IRBMs in Turkey were rational even if we know from hindsight that the U.S. never intended them to be used that way.

    Some folks who were involved in similar systems a decade later in Europe have said that many in the military and high levels of the US government was glad to get rid of those missiles. They were maintenance hogs, unreliable to launch and had a terrible aim if they did launch. Trading them under the table as a part of the deal to get the missiles out of Cuban made all kinds of people happy.

    Typical for a v0.9 of something complicated.

    860:

    My kids have been responding quite differently to the enforced lockdown.

  • Teen has been doing quite well. He is a highly motivated member of the (apparently) much hated by GT and EC group of 'Sportsball players' with a chance to go play at a very high level next year. If he does make that team he will be 'home schooling'. I've let him know that this is an early preview of what his life will be like, and his grades must stay at their current high level if we are to countenance him doing such a thing next year. So he is keen and motivated, if while living on a teen schedule (2 pm-330 am).

  • Ten year old is miserable without his friends, routinely depressed, resisting the homework every day without some careful support/carrot and stick processes. School can't open soon enough for him to begin feeling normal again.

  • 861:

    I don't know about zinc, but several different sources have reported that low levels of vitamin D correlate with worse outcomes if you catch COVID. Overdosing is, of course, bad. D accumulates.

    862:

    We shouldn't rule out the possibility of preserving a small nucleus of human specimens. It would be quite easy at the bottom of some of our deeper mine shafts.

    863:

    re: The weird thing about Dr. Strangelove is that a lot of younger people, those raised after the Berlin Wall fell, don't get the movie.

    They've stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb.

    864:

    "Their ancestors were force converted to Judaism by a Czar..."

    I'd also like a cite on this one.

    865:

    Yeah. I'll hold my nose and vote for the dude. Of course, I'm in California, so if I really hate the VP I might vote for someone else just to tell the Lamo-crats to fuck themselves. California is heavily Democratic so it won't affect the national election results.

    866:

    Sigh. See multiple notes above about Dr. Strangelove. (Hint: that was a line by the over-eager Airforce general who was almost certainly a parody of Curtis Lemay!)

    867:

    So he is keen and motivated, if while living on a teen schedule (2 pm-330 am).

    My senior year of high school the "old" building had a fire. So after a few days it was decided the across the street grade school and middle schools would operate from 6:00am till 12:30pm and high school (using the remaining new building and the middle school) would operate from 1:00pm till 7pm.

    We loved it. Got to sleep in if we wanted. Sewed up all the teen summer jobs in the area since we could start in Feb in the mornings and then switch to full time in the summer. And go to after school events after last class.

    868:

    RE: [citation needed] because the "forced conversion" seems to have been court-only and people reverted as soon as possible.

    Quote (from http://factsanddetails.com/russia/Minorities/sub9_3b/entry-5097.html) In the 9th century the Khazars, a Turkic tribe in Russia, converted en masse to Judaism. The Khazar Khan Turk Bulan underwent a ritual circumcision. Some say the conversion was as much of political move by the Khazars---to distance themselves from the Christian Byzantines and Muslim Arabs---as a religious one. Some attribute the Khazar's conversion to the influence of the people that became known as Mountain Jews of the Caucasus. There were many Jewish aristocrats, merchants and advisors from the Caucasus in the Khazar court before the Khazars converted. [end quote] That wasn't my original source, which wasn't online, but it's the best I was able to find quickly. I note that Czar was possibly the wrong word, but I believe that's the term my original source used.

    869:

    Re: Dr. Strangelove was serious.

    Yes, it was/is serious. It was also extremely funny, and that was intentional. Without the humor nobody would have been able to watch it.

    870:

    parody of Curtis Lemay!

    George C Scott.

    Best scene was of him in the war room, arms out, as if a B-52 flying evasively like a 5 year old kid.

    871:

    No. I didn't remember it at the time.

    P.S.: I still don't believe in the "doomsday machine", but I do believe that any major exchange, say between India and Pakistan, would be civilization ending. More would be worse, and it's quite possible that humanity would not survive. But there are bacteria that live down around the moho layer, and some of them live on radioactive substances rather than using oxygen power.

    872:

    "If you didn't understand that Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was a very serious film you missed the whole point."

    John, how can you possibly imagine that I'm that fucking stooooopid? I've seen the film multiple times, I understand that the General who said that line was intensely non-clueful, I understand why the movie was both hilarious and deeply serious at the same time, and my quote was meant very much as snark!

    873:

    Then there's the difference in what the well-heeled private schools are able to do regards IT Support for teachers and students

    Very much this.

    Lecce (Minister of Education in Ontario) has been making headlines because "lazy" teachers aren't providing synchronous video lessons for their students, which is apparently why they're unmotivated. Bloody annoying, as the first we knew that this was a government objective was when he castigated the profession in a Friday afternoon press release for not doing what he intended but never told us.

    No guidance from the Ministry of Education previously. No direction given to the school boards. No funding for equipment (cutbacks to education budgets still in force, as a matter of fact). No thought that, having previously announced that no marks would be lowered based on work done (or not done) remotely, many students have decided there's no point in doing boring lessons when they could be on social media.

    It's almost as if the Ontario Conservatives want to see public education fail…

    Not as bad as Trump, I'll grant you. But expecting your employees to read your mind isn't the mark of a great leader…

    874:

    JBS :841

    Yes, you are correct. What I meant was that if the intelligence report had been more favorable to Trump, then Burr's problems would very conveniently have been overlooked.

    875:

    Here in Canada I've been a member of the somewhat social democratic NDP for decades, but often tend to actually vote for the candidate most likely to defeat the local Tory.

    I've been an NDP supporter since before I could vote. Of course, in those days in Saskatchewan it was the NDP who ran balanced budgets — province didn't have a deficit until Grant Devine's Tories got in.

    But since my 20s my voting has pretty much been ABC*, like your's.

    *Anyone But Conservative.

    876:

    On a different note, the Rijksmuseum has posted a hyper-resolution copy of Rembrandt's The Night Watch online:

    http://hyper-resolution.org/view.html?pointer=0.361,0.011&i=Rijksmuseum/SK-C-5/SK-C-5_VIS_20-um_2019-12-21

    877:

    Re: 'I do appreciate y'all putting up with my whinging about this ...'

    As long as you're willing to put up with unsolicited 'advice'. :)

    Speaking of which ... ever hear of aerosinusitis? It was the first item to pop up when I looked up the description you gave re: pain location. Hmm ... includes a reference to Boyle's Law which to me (non-medico layperson) suggests a non-pharmaceutical possibility for a bit of pain management.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerosinusitis

    The above article mentioned that divers and fliers were most likely to suffer from this. Below is what the American Society of Aerospace Medicine Specialists says:

    http://www.asams.org/guidelines/Completed/NEW%20Sinusitis.htm

    878:

    Re: ' ... almost as if the Ontario Conservatives want to see public education fail…'

    OOC, is there any coordination between teachers in various provinces in terms of figuring out what works and what doesn't for distance/on-line education? Ditto for international. Everybody's in the same boat. Somebody somewhere is probably looking into this.

    I'm guessing Finland might have come up with some ideas. From what I've heard they seem to be pretty progressive wrt their approach to education. And their students get good results despite having the least 'homework'.

    https://mms.is/sites/mms.is/files/structures_of_finnish_and_icelandic_mathematics_lessons.pdf

    'Finnish 15-year-olds have excelled in all areas of the PISA studies. In PISA 2006, for instance, Finland had the highest scores in mathematics and science among the OECD countries, while ranking second in reading after South Korea.'

    879:

    You cannot know just how fed up I am with "Bernie bros".

    My SO, and one of my Duly Appointed Nieces say they've been bothered by them, but they're folks they know.

    I, personally, am waiting actually meet (at least online) and talk to ONE SINGLE ONE.

    So, if anyone knows any, point them to me.

    This dragon hasn't had a chance to flame someone personally in far too long.... (Why, yes, I am the Silverdragon).

    880:

    couple of extra daily “food supplements” for preparing body defences against SARS-Cov-2, the first was the antidote(1) to that paracetamol/Tylenol ‘four grammes maximale per dia’, NAC, N-Acetyl-Cysteine at 600mg.

    It's also used as a nootropic[1], and some psychiatrists are playing with it off-label: NAC: The Amino Acid That Turns Psychiatry on Its Head (David Hellerstein, Posted Oct 31, 2018)

    And as you point out, of immediate COVID-19 interest, there's also a cluster of papers starting with this one investigating N-acetylcysteine and influenza Attenuation of influenza-like symptomatology and improvement of cell-mediated immunity with long-term N-acetylcysteine treatment. (1997) Administration of N-acetylcysteine during the winter, thus, appears to provide a significant attenuation of influenza and influenza-like episodes, especially in elderly high-risk individuals. N-acetylcysteine did not prevent A/H1N1 virus influenza infection but significantly reduced the incidence of clinically apparent disease. No studies specifically for COVID-19 (that I found), though (found a review saying as much) (It's already part of my daily ... brew, whew. Dodging SARS-CoV-2 is annoying.)

    [1] Typical biohacker article, with some paper links: https://medium.com/@jonathanroseland/n-acetyl-cysteine-1ca09f0d6a1f

    881:

    In more bird-related news, my "chicks" are now big enough to be happy outside but not quite heavy enough to use the autofeeder yet (pushing down on the plate lifts a cover over the trough). So I have half a brick on it and the local noisy miners greatly appreciate my kindness.

    882:

    Having studied nuclear physics in my college days, considering how easy it would be to make a world-burner type doomsday device (just build a hydrogen bomb then surround that with a bunch of additional 3rd stage capsules of lithium deuteride with tampers of uranium, no need to enrich it), I do wonder if any of the nuclear powers have taken the obvious step of spending the relatively cheap black-ops budget on making such a device. I would hope not, but stuffing an abandoned mine with the necessary ingredients would be so simple, so easy that it seems almost inevitable that someone decided to make a "just in case we lose" spoil-sport last resort.

    883:

    What's the point of a true doomsday device? War is politics by other means. The weapons we have now are sufficient to destroy civilization, if not our species. Better yet, they're fungible, in that you could theoretically, use a single one if there was an overwhelming need (for example, to stop an alien invasion).

    The bigger problem is that if you have a true doomsday device, what do you do with it, aside from ending the world?

    It makes a problematic threat. For example, you build a doomsday device, proclaim that you are king of the world, and in response, everybody boycotts you. Unless you're suicidal, you've just lost, since the only way to rejoin civilization is to disassemble the doomsday device, and then you're worse off than you were before, because it's now known that you chose do be a monster and failed.

    Or worse, you build the device for extortion purposes (as above) and an apocalyptic cult decides to build their own and set it off. You've not only failed in your extortion attempt, you've showed some suicidal maniacs how to destroy your world.

    As for a last strike as a deterrent to someone else nuking or invading you, we've had that ability for decades, both the US and Russia. Why add to it, when you can upgrade it piecemeal as weapons hit their lifespans and have to be decommissioned?

    I have to agree that the plans for a nuke are easy. I used to have a commercially published (nonfunctional) blueprint lying around. Assembling the ingredients is much harder, and that's generally the infrastructural bottleneck that allows for what nuclear controls we have in this world.

    884:

    Re: NAC - '(It's already part of my daily ... brew, whew. Dodging SARS-CoV-2 is annoying.)'

    There's also a potentially bad side to NAC that showed up in rat research -- similar to over-doing VitA.

    https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/10/04/n-acetyl-cysteine-a-warning-shot

    Although I've used supplements on and off, I've a major issue with them: they're unregulated. There's no FDA monitoring to ensure that what's on the label is actually in the pill/capsule you're taking. The only outfit that I'm aware of that checks the ingredients of vitamin/supplement brands sold in the US is pay-walled (annual subscription required: ConsumerLab).

    An alternative to supplements is adjusting your diet - mostly meat proteins - which unfortunately won't work for vegetarians. However a few of the articles described NAC foremost as 'a precursor to glutathione' and listed these foods: asparagus, potatoes, peppers, carrots, avocados, squash, spinach, and melons. Other articles zeroed in on the sulfur: broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, and Brussels sprouts, garlic, and onion.

    BTW - great articles - thanks!

    885:

    In North Carolina, the rule is that if a Senator resigns in the middle of his term the Governor (who is currently a Democrat) gets to appoint his replacement - but the replacement must be a member of the same party as the Senator who resigned and chosen from a list provided by the party.

    So, if Burr resigned before his term was up, the seat would remain in Republican hands.

    (Burr is unlikely to resign anyway unless convicted.)

    886:

    Ross Perot was on the ballot in every state. Given enough money or support, getting on the ballot in every state is not a serious obstacle. In 2016 the Libertarian Party was able to place Gary Johnson on the ballot in all 50 states. Bernie, Bloomberg or Howard Schultz could have easily surmounted that challenge.

    The problem is that the Democratic [not "DNC"] and Republican (or GOP) candidate will always be supported by enough of the electorate that in the event there is a serious third party candidate none of them will receive a majority in the Electoral College.

    The result of that is that the President is chosen from among the top three finishers by the House of Representatives - which is composed almost entirely of Democrats and Republicans, most of whom are in safe seats where they have much more to fear from a primary challenge than a general election race.

    Notwithstanding various conspiracy fantasies, the Democratic and Republican nominees are ultimately chosen by the primary voters of those parties. As a result, the Democratic and Republican members of the House will vote for their respective nominees and the third party nominee will have no chance.

    That is why both Bloomberg and Bernie chose to run as Democrats.

    887:

    No, it doesn't.

    The DNC has literally no power. It's chair is usually a second or third level figure and its members are mostly mid-tier players. That is the situation when the Democrats don't have the White House. When they do, the DNC is a subsidiary part of the President's political operation and of even less significance.

    In 2016, Hillary Clinton had the unified support of the Democratic establishment, to a level usually only granted to an incumbent President or Vice President. That is a different group of people than the DNC and quite a bit more significant.

    Importantly, it is the result of a number of independent decision makers deciding that for whatever reason (having a woman as President, favors done for them in the 90s, personal relationships with the Clintons, having supported Obama in 2008 and feeling like they owed her, her having supported Obama in 2008 and feeling like they owed her) they wanted Clinton as President, not some organizational conspiracy.

    And in 2020 to the extent that there was intervention by the Democratic establishment, it came from Obama and Reid and Clyburn and Pelosi, not the DNC.

    888:

    Hillary Clinton could have won. (With a race that close that her victory was possible should be obvious.)

    In fact most people and most political pundits expected her to win. If you were, in the spring of 2016, to choose between Sanders and Clinton solely on the basis of who was more likely to win, you would have chosen Clinton, hands down.

    889:

    Who, other than the Prime Minister, has ultimate authority over the British military?

    890:

    Biden didn't win the nomination because it was his turn, but because he was the most acceptable candidate to the largest part of the Democratic primary electorate.

    Biden did motivate significantly greater turnout that usual in the Super Tuesday primaries. In any event, people are usually motivated to turnout against as opposed to for. It is part of why Hillary lost and part of why the President's party usually loses seats in the mid-term. Biden (unlike Hillary or Trump) isn't hated by anyone. And, if hating Trump doesn't motivate the Democratic base to turnout (as it did in 2018) nothing else will.

    Finally, keep in mind that pulling suburban voters or Obama/Trump voters into the Biden camp may be the more effective strategy as compared to motivating those who don't usually vote to do so.

    891:

    The idea that winning or losing the primary in a state is indicative of general election performance in that state is unsupported by data and given the difference in electorates.

    Also, the DNC is not responsible for the Presidential campaign of the Democratic nominee. The DNC is effectively taken over and used by the winning campaign because of quirks in the Federal election laws.

    892:

    I used to think that the odds of a British PM being able to be a dictator was lower than a US President being able to do so. (Keeping half the House of Representatives or a third of the Senate on your side should be easier than keeping half the House of Commons on your side.)

    But, given that Boris Johnson was able to deselect members of his party it goes the other way. In either case, the executive is effectively able to control the legislature and make themselves immune from removal.

    Parliament has the power to cancel elections (while Congress doesn't) and there are no term limits on British PMs while Presidents are subject to them. Fifty percent plus one vote in the House of Commons may also change the judicial system as much as it wants, whereas in the US, depending on the change may require a majority of both houses of Congress or possibly much more. At the moment, therefore, it would appear that the President is somewhat less likely to be a dictator and his term is much more likely to end constitutionally.

    893:

    Burr's actions were sufficiently egregious that being a member of the President's party would normally not be protective. And, neither Congressman Hunter nor Congressman Collins (who was an early and key Trump loyalist and subject to somewhat similar charges) received protection from the normal process of law enforcement.

    So, I think I have to conclude that this is not about the report.

    894:

    Not even. They are fairly lacking in money as a rule and pretty limited in structure and they are notoriously lacking in terms of data, though they are trying to remedy that. Generally, the nominee's campaign takes over the DNC after clinching the nomination.

    What the DNC has, basically, is the ability to raise soft money, which the campaigns can't legally do. That is really only useful in the general election though, not in a primary.

    895:

    Charles H Inda/Pak nuke elimination Pak would be wiped off the face of the planet India would be ... wrecked But - would that actually be enough to induce a serious nuclear winter, lasting several years, really?

    Publius Jay The PM is advided by the Minister of Defence & the miltary, of course. Parliament can over-ride the PM ( And has, in other matters, recently. ) Our Commander in Chief is ... Her Majesty

    And remember - her father & Grandfather were both serving Naval Officers, before they became heirs to the throne ... The future Geo VI was at the Battle of Jutland. Her husband served in the RN throughout WWII - he's probably the last living survivor of the Battle of Matapan. Charlie-boy has commanded a (small) ship, his sons are both qualified & experience helicopter pilots. But - they will NOT intervene, except as a very last ultimate resort - see the award-winning Norwegian film: "The King's Decision"

    It seems, that ( As mentioned before ) - if you throw the rule book away, then the other sode can do the same. Obama has directly critisied DT & his goons for incompetence. They asked for it.

    896:

    Our Commander in Chief is ... Her Majesty

    Yes, however this power is actually handled by “The Queen in Council” which is how we refer to Cabinet. In Australia, this is “The Governor in Council” at state level or “The Governor General in Council” at federal level. The actual involvement of the figurehead is not required, Cabinet itself takes the role of the Monarch (or Viceroy, who represents the Monarch anyway. Yes, Australia, Canada and NZ have Viceroys).

    In relation to Cabinet, the PM is (“merely”) “the first among equals” - this is the literal meaning of the term, which applies to the leaders of Cabinet governments in parliamentary democracies. So the individual in charge of the armed forces is the defence minister, but they still report to the prime minister. By convention, Cabinet ministers must be elected members of parliament. Cabinet is the elected leadership team (“caucus”) of the party with a majority in the House of Representatives/Commons. This makes Cabinet “responsible” to parliament, as it is always sensitive to a confidence motion.

    This is in contrast to one of the weirdest things in the US system. The yanks elect their dogcatchers and sewage managers, but don’t elect their federal Cabinet. Instead, it’s directly appointed by their directly elected President. Cabinet is responsible only to the President, and that’s already by design already verging on autocracy by Westminster standards.

    897:

    No, aspirin is an anti-inflammatory - indeed, it's a derivation of one of the oldest ones (willow-bark tea).

    898:

    Scott, fuck off. As I was voting for Bernie in '16, this is a personal insult, calling Bernie an "angry clown".

    You badly misread what I wrote.

    If it's still bugging you, scroll back and read again.

    (And I like Bernie, too.)

    899:

    RE:[quote] Inda/Pak nuke elimination Pak would be wiped off the face of the planet India would be ... wrecked But - would that actually be enough to induce a serious nuclear winter, lasting several years, really? [/quote]

    The study I saw was back around 1985 +/- a decade, and decided that the exchange would probably set off a nuclear autumn. Famines worldwide for a year or so, etc. I presume that their arsenals aren't a lot worse than then.

    900:

    The trouble is that, in the UK itself, that is constrained purely by custom and convention, which has been very badly eroded by the daemonic duo (Thatcher and Blair). We have thus got a serious division between de jure and de facto procedure.

    Foreign relations (including treaties and waging war) are 'reserved matters', which the Prime Minister handles (personally) on behalf of the Sovereign (*). Yes, convention says that he or she should consult the cabinet, and often Parliament, but neither the cabinet nor Parliament powers to demand that - and there are regular rows and resignations when the PM refuses to allow those to see essential information, or sometimes just plain ignores them. Worse, the convention is that the courts can rule against the government, but their SOLE power is to request the government to correct its misbehaviour - and we have several recent examples of the latter simply ignoring the courts.

    In extremis, all the cabinet can do is to refuse the PM's orders or resign, and the PM can and does then simply take over their roles. Parliament (the House of Commons in this context) can request the Sovereign to override or replace her Prime Minister, but that is about all. And even that is made worse by the House of Commons procedure. In theory, the Leader of the House represents the commons to the government but, in practice, it manages the business of the commons on behalf of the government (including suspending it). So, in order for the commons to do that, the Speaker has to override the Leader of the House, recall Parliament, it has to pass a Humble Petition, and the Sovereign has to act.

    The upside is that, if the PM ordered a nuclear strike on (say) Iceland, the military could refuse and take the matter directly to the Sovereign. And, despite how badly our systems have degraded, I am pretty sure that they would. That's different from the USA, where the President is Commander in Chief, and we all know what collective disobedience of military orders is ....

    (*) There are persistent rumours of (and some evidence for) a treaty with the USA giving USA government staff, military personnel etc. immunity from UK laws, over and above those implied by diplomatic immunity. If that exists, it is so secret that only a small minority of the cabinet even knows of its existence.

    901:

    Re: 'Our Commander in Chief is ... '

    Other differences between the US and the 'British Crown Colonies' govts that immediately pop to mind:

    Number of real Parties:

    US - 2-party system is historical and entrenched with very rare 'independents' elected so most voters ignore this as a viable possibility therefore vote for someone likely to win which serves to reinforce their beliefs therefore election results. Also reinforces a fundamental(istic) 'us vs. them' mentality that spreads throughout that society.

    BCC - multi-party Parliaments are common and every decade or so a new Party shows up along with one or two 'Independents'. This means and re-inforces the belief and reality that any candidate can and sometimes does win, that it IS possible to change one's gov't, and that alliances/cooperation between the different groups/individuals must always be considered/required in order to govern. Fewer stalemates, less likelihood of derailing the entire gov't including the Civil Service.

    Who actually elects the Head of Gov't ...

    US - Perception is that the POTUS is directly elected by the 'People' - no, it's always been by the Electoral College: [Wikipedia: The Electoral College is a body of electors established by the United States Constitution, which forms every four years for the sole purpose of electing the president and vice president of the United States.] This continually reinforced 'misreading' of the Constitution appears to be a deliberate misrepresentation to pacify 'the people'.

    BCC - The candidates for PM (Leader of the Party) are directly elected at Leadership Party Conferences by members of each Party. And these leaders can be booted out if at any next conference he/she does poorly in the 'confidence' vote.

    Gov't term ...

    US - you're stuck with 4 years no matter how crappy, incompetent, loony-tunes, vile, egregious your POTUS turns out to be.

    BCC - if the PM does poorly at the next 'confidence', he/she would have to run for party leadership again to win back party and - to a lesser extent - public approval/backing.

    Cabinet ...

    US - any shyster, incompetent family member with zero to lose, zero personal/professional responsibility to the electorate can be appointed to the Cabinet.

    BCC - mostly elected MPs - therefore already known to/vetted by the electorate. Also, appointments to Cabinet tend to be to MPs who specifically addressed that Cabinet portfolio's area of responsibility - therefore often have both a personal/political job and professional stake in doing a good job. [Wikipedia: It is not legally necessary for Cabinet members to have a position in parliament although they are almost always selected from the House of Commons. From time to time, a senator may be included.]

    I'm most familiar with the Canadian version of gov't - not sure how other BCCs might differ vs. the US. However - I have great confidence that folks here will correct, amend, add, etc. :)

    Political contributions ...

    Not sure about what (if any) 'spending caps' on elections or who can/cannot contribute to a candidate/party but pretty likely that this would also influence results. That said - have a feeling that because the terms are fixed in the US and there are fewer/higher (?) limits, plus few if any spending (high) caps that elected Reps end up spending as much time trying to finance their next election as actually doing the job they were elected to do. Basically - total misuse of a publicly elected position.

    902:

    This is an interesting question. What would happen if one morning the President woke up, had breakfast reached for the football and ordered up a nuclear strike on Syria?

    In 1974, during the later stages of the Watergate scandal, the story is that the then Secretary of Defense issued orders that the military was to refuse Presidential orders to launch a nuclear strike. Of course, the Secretary of Defense can be removed by the President and the President and not the Secretary of Defense is Commander in Chief of the military, so it is not clear how useful that was.

    There has been no hint that the current Secretary of Defense (who, unlike some of his predecessors, does not have any independent political or military stature) has issued any such order.

    At the end of the day, some generals and officers might view the order as unlawful and refuse it. This might delay the launch but, again, the President may fire (and court martial for insubordination) those who do so. Eventually, he will find someone to carry out the order.

    The only things that could stop this are (1) Congress passing, by a veto proof majority, a law clearly indicating that this act is illegal (2) a court enjoining the strike or (3) Congress impeaching and removing the President.

    While (1) might work, it technically requires 10 days for this to go into effect during which time the President can keep trying. (2) is highly unlikely; courts would probably view that kind of case as non-justiciable and other than Congress as a whole it is not clear who has standing to bring such a case. So you are down to 3 - and that process is not quick either.

    So yes, at the end of the day, one not necessarily stable individual in the United States can start a nuclear war. (If it is any consolation [it isn't], the leaders of Russia, China, France, Pakistan and India can do the same thing. If you think the UK PM can't I won't dispute you, but I will note that any time a discussion about British politics comes down to "the Queen will save us" it seems that the person saying it is doing a lot of wishful thinking and grasping at straws..)

    903:

    is there any coordination between teachers in various provinces in terms of figuring out what works and what doesn't for distance/on-line education? Ditto for international. Everybody's in the same boat. Somebody somewhere is probably looking into this.

    No coordination that I'm aware of. That would require time and money, both of which are in short supply right now. Given that education is a provincial responsibility there are no real national-level organizations for teachers. I should also note that teacher-driven professional development and training is almost entirely funded by teachers themselves.

    Here's a timeline to give you an idea of how disorganized things are in Ontario right now.

    Just before March Break the government announced it was extended by two weeks. I'd been telling my students to take their schoolwork home because that might be extended (looking at BC) but right at the end of the day Friday my principal told the kids to relax and enjoy an extended holiday so many didn't take work home.

    I spent the first of the two extended weeks trying to source masks for my niece in NYC* while I waited for direction on what was happening. Also communicated with colleagues to figure out what to trim (on the assumption that we were losing two weeks of school). Began thinking about remote learning as BC had announced it. Word from the school board was we had to be 'available' and to wait for further instructions.

    The second week we were informed that we would be starting on-line instruction the week after and we were to begin preparing for it, as well as contact all our students to inform them of this. So that week was spent frantically trying to learn enough about the two official platforms to decide which one to use, as well as trying to contact 120 families to see if they had access to a computer and internet.

    The third week online instruction commenced, although we had no direction as to what was expected. During this week training was made available in how to set up and use the online classrooms that we were required to learn and set up the previous week**. Everyone was scrambling, and many were still trying to contact families (I know I was) — some of whom were just getting back from extended vacations. Still no word on what was expected — how much material to cover, how to evaluate, etc. I decided to go with the Ministry-supported platform and stick fairly closely to the textbook so that students (at least those who had taken their books home) could work while someone else in their family used the computer.

    I think it was the fourth week that the Director announced that no students mark would drop based on what they did or didn't do in the online classes. Participation dropped after this. Workload was to be 12 hours a week for each class at the high school level, split between their classes. That's total time, video lessons, reading, and homework. So for my classes 1.5 hours a week total student engagement.

    Fourth or fifth week we were told that there were no deadlines because students were having anxiety issues, so we weren't to do anything to make them feel pressured. We were also informed that many students were sharing devices with family members so we couldn't assume that they could be online at a particular time, and anything done in a synchronous online session must also be done in an asynchronous fashion.

    Last week we were finally given direction as to how end-of-year evaluation was to be handled — subject to change, of course, as the Minister of Education makes new announcements weekly.

    I'm covering about one lesson's worth of material a week — all I can do in the allotted 1.5 hours. I'm working as many hours a week as I usually do*, because (a) doing things online takes a lot longer, and (b) this is all new so figuring it out takes time.

    Could I be doing a better job? Definitely. Not only do I not have experience doing this, but I haven't had planning time or consistent directions as to what is expected.

    Will there be national coordination? Unlikely. Provincial-level, maybe. Ontario physics teachers will probably do something before September, but at the moment we're swamped trying to deal with our classes (plus keep home life running).

    I'm guessing Finland might have come up with some ideas. From what I've heard they seem to be pretty progressive wrt their approach to education.

    From what I've seen, they seem to view education as a field where you hire good professionals and trust their judgement. They also seem to have a consensus on what "good education" means.

    In the three decades I've been teaching in Ontario I've seen a new fad for education pushed top-down every 4-6 years, with virtually all professional development time and money sucked into paying outside consultants to sell the fad. I've also seen money sucked out of the system every year. This seems to be almost the opposite to what Finland does.

    *Because the Greatest Country in the World™, run by a very stable genius, couldn't manage to equip its doctors with more than two masks a week.

    **So the bureaucracy will say they made training available, but it wasn't there when we really needed it.

    *So 40-50 hours a week.

    904:

    COVID-19 'test' - dogs

    If this works - fantastic!

    https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-52686660

    'A UK trial to see whether specialist medical sniffer dogs can detect coronavirus in humans is set to begin.

    The dogs are already trained to detect odours of certain cancers, malaria and Parkinson's disease by the charity Medical Detection Dogs.

    The first phase of the trial will be led by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, along with the charity and Durham University.

    It has been backed with £500,000 of government funding.

    Innovation minister Lord Bethell said he hoped the dogs could provide "speedy results" as part of the government's wider testing strategy.'

    This could also make it a helluva lot easier and cheaper for many countries to get COVID-19 testing done. Maybe even use the rats that sniff out TNT/land mines.

    https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/10/151006-giant-rats-landmines-cambodia-science-animals/

    905:

    Re: Ontario - post-secondary teaching during COVID-19

    Both surprised and unsurprised. Surprised because kids have been using laptops for decades now. Unsurprised because there's usually a lot of inertia when dealing with any large 'professional' body that for some reason nevertheless chose to remain de-centralized without any professional accrediting body. And, please don't tell me that it's because each province/city has its own district/rules because this is also the case for MDs, CPAs, and other 'professionals'. They work in a particular province but most also belong to/follow a centralized national accreditation - therefore have a core of best practices to draw from. (Ahem - family in three provinces and three states: every one of them complains about their public education system. The Ontario family member opted to send their kid to a private academic/IB curriculum school because 'bugger the changing curriculum - I want my kid to get into a decent/top-tier uni'. Mission accomplished.)

    Re: ' ... also seem to have a consensus on what "good education"'

    I first heard about Finland's education system/philosophy at an SF/F convention - one of the panelists had just prior to the convention spent several months there studying and evaluating their education system.

    About their 'consensus' - this may be related to how many years of education the average Finn has (20 years) - much higher than most countries. So it seems that Finns also embrace life-long learning. And because of the number of years, it seems reasonable to assume that at least some education was done online. It's pretty difficult to drop everything, commute to class, listen to a 1.5 - 3 hr lecture, commute home, do readings/assignments, etc. once you're working full-time and/or a parent.

    906:

    But, IIRC, "Aspirin is a pure painkiller - is Parcetamol the same? I think it is, but could easily be wrong.

    Nope.

    Aspirin -- acetyl salicylate -- is the first of the NSAIDs to be discovered (it's a derivative of salicylic acid, found in the bark of the willow tree and used since antiquity). It turns out that it inhibits thromboxane and COX production, hence its use in low doses to reduce risk of heart attacks and in higher doses as an anti-inflammatory and painkiller.

    Paracetamol ... is the joker in the pack: it's not a COX-inhibitor so not an anti-inflammatory, but is thought to activate the endogenous cannabinoid system, hence fever/pain use. So it's the one widely-used painkiller that is neither an NSAID nor an opiate, cannabis and derivatives thereof being treated as taboo subjects in medicine until relatively recently (the TRPV-1 and endocannabinoid system (ECS)) weren't really known about -- outside of specialist research labs, anyway -- back when I was studying pharmacology in the mid-1980s.)

    907:

    Greg: I dislike Boris Johnson intensely, but Priti Patel is much, much, worse: Boris is a bullshitting clownish impresario who's only in it for Boris, Patel is a dead-eyed sociopathic objectivist xenophobe who would be clearly identified as an alt-right racist if it wasn't for her ethnicity.

    908:

    "If you think the UK PM can't I won't dispute you, but I will note that any time a discussion about British politics comes down to "the Queen will save us" it seems that the person saying it is doing a lot of wishful thinking and grasping at straws..)"

    I agree there, but that's not what I said. The Chiefs of Staff and officers under them swear their allegiance to "Her Majesty, her heirs and successors" or some such wording, NOT the government nor any member of it (Promissory Oaths Act 1868). If they believe that the Prime Minister is ordering something so harmful to the realm as to be essentially treason, in the general sense, I believe that they have an actual duty to refuse. My reading of the situation MAY be wrong, but I don't think so.

    What the Queen would do in such a situation is almost certainly replace the Prime Minister with a caretaker, publish why, and demand that Parliament (i.e. the Commons) resolve the matter. God alone knows what would happen if the same loon got reselected.

    909:

    As you say. She compares unfavourably with Howard, May and Javid combined.

    910:

    In extremis, all the cabinet can do is to refuse the PM's orders or resign, and the PM can and does then simply take over their roles. Parliament (the House of Commons in this context) can request the Sovereign to override or replace her Prime Minister, but that is about all.

    Yes, but there are Other Mechanisms.

    For example, when it's a Conservative and Unionist led government, there's always the 1922 Committee, who can fire the Prime Minister and appoint a new one if they get sufficiently pissed-off. And the PM can't dismiss the 1992C short of calling a snap general election and deliberately losing.

    (I'm not sure what the Labour equivalent is -- I don't think it's a clear-cut -- but the head of the PLP is still vulnerable to internal party action.)

    The upside is that, if the PM ordered a nuclear strike on (say) Iceland, the military could refuse and take the matter directly to the Sovereign.

    Actually, I'm pretty sure the PM can't do that, on pain of being arrested and thrown in the slammer for a life sentence: the Nuclear Explosions (Prohibition and Inspections) Act (1998) makes it a criminal offense to knowingly procure the detonation of a nuclear weapon for any purpose -- presumably with a very limited exception for a lawful retalliatory strike in event of [nuclear] war.

    (Parliament can of course amend, repeal, or pass new legislation to supersede that, but I'd like to think that the idea of being asked to authorize a pre-emptive nuclear attack might make even the more rabid Tory back-benches think long and hard about the wisdom of that course of action.)

    Also, the PM can't declare war any more: IIRC that power got clawed back by Parliament thanks to Blair's excesses. NB: there is the Duke of Cornwall's loophole, so if Boris can somehow convince Prince Charles to sign off on it he might be able to legally order a nuclear strike -- the Duchy of Cornwall has exemptions from various bits of legislation grandfathered in, including the nuclear explosions act -- but (a) I'm pretty certain the Supreme Court might be persuaded to intervene before any such batshit insanity could go critical, and (b) persuading the 70-yo heir to the Crown to permanently tarnish the name of his royal house by going Full Doctor Strangelove is probably a bit of a reach.

    911:

    No, they can't - all that the 1922 Committee can do is to replace that person as leader of the Conservative party. Until the Queen dismisses him, he remains Prime Minister. I agree that his position would then be untenable, but he would still hold the reserved powers, which are external to Parliament.

    I agree that he would then face charges up to and including treason, but the law isn't that clear:

    "1 Causing a nuclear explosion.

    (1)Any person who knowingly causes a nuclear weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion is guilty of an offence and liable on conviction on indictment to imprisonment for life.

    (2)Nothing in subsection (1) shall apply to a nuclear weapon explosion carried out in the course of an armed conflict.

    (3)If in proceedings for an offence under this section any question arises as to whether a nuclear weapon explosion was or was not carried out in the course of an armed conflict, that question shall be determined by the Secretary of State; and a certificate purporting to set out any such determination and to be signed by the Secretary of State shall be received in evidence and be deemed to be so signed without further proof, unless the contrary is shown."

    Yes, he needs such a piece of paper, but he can always fire the Secretary of State, take on the role himself, and sign one. Also, Wikipedia says "The final section of the Act states that the Act does not come into effect until a minister signs an order declaring the date on which it is to become effective. This has not yet been done. - and, as far as I can discover by searching the online legislation database, that's true, so it is not in force :-( That offers 'interesting' scope for conspiracy theories, which might even be correct.

    I would be extremely interested to see a reference to where that restriction against waging war is enacted. I have read about it many times, but have never been able to track it down. I fully agree that Charles would say "sod off", probably using naval language learnt from his father, not least because he is genuinely an environmentalist.

    912:

    There are persistent rumours of (and some evidence for) a treaty with the USA giving USA government staff, military personnel etc. immunity from UK laws, over and above those implied by diplomatic immunity. If that exists, it is so secret that only a small minority of the cabinet even knows of its existence.

    Treaty is a special thing in the US. Until publicly agreed to by the Senate they are non binding nice pieces of paper that an administration may or may not follow.

    What you might be referring to are things than in the US are called something like "Status of Forces Agreement". Which is a contract of sorts that is done when the US puts troops into a country with a functioning and recognized government. And I'm sure there are bits of those things that both governments keep classified.

    913:

    The downside of NSAIDs is of course their tendency to attack the stomach lining over time; some people seem more susceptible to this and cannot take NSAIDs without a buffering additive (which reduces the stomach pain and extends the period over which they can be taken). Time to stop taking them is preferably before your GP looks at your blood iron count and tells you they're calling an ambulance.

    914:

    Charlie ( @ 907 ) Yes. BoZo is almost entirely self-interested...BUT ... he also recognises that the "public" have to be pleased & that certain things might or might not be "good policy" - he wants to stay in power & therefore, pace not Machiavelli - he needs to be "Loved" - a little at any rate. Patel ... Well maybe she IS an alt-right racist. In spite of her name I think she's an "aryan" (oops) - i.e. Indo_European - yes? Complete & utter shit. EC - you forgot to add IDS to that list, another nasty piece of work. probably using naval language learnt from his father, Oh, come now ... there is an attested evidence that someone dropped a horrid mistake & said "fuck" in front of HM & then started grovelling. Her reply was along the lines of: "My Grandfather & Father were sailors, I'm married to a sailor & two of my Sons are/were sailors - I've heard them all .... "

    915:

    [ "Obama has directly critisied DT & his goons for incompetence.

    They asked for it." ]

    They've also asked, nay they are begging, for this:

    "How can Trump opponents take on people who will stop at nothing?"

    According to the writer, Roger Cohen, of all NYT columnists, and the vast majority of the nearly 1500 comments that came in before being closed, the only sane answer, is to "Gun Up."

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/15/opinion/coronavirus-democracy.html

    Frackin' about time someone honestly expressed the truth in the NYTimes regarding what the nation is up against.

    Biden sure as hell isn't. Instead this little politically and morally and ethically and culturally bankrupt pure distillation of the DEM establishment tries to play tougher than Trump on ... Cuba. Also, btw, then trashing one of the jewels of the Obama administrations, along with ACA.

    916:

    With apologies for a double post, however, reissues of inflammation-pain reduction remedies -- my own experience with the high end medical cannabis -- for which one needs to be licensed to create and dispense within an individual state, and the patient needs to be certified as authentically in need -- by a state certified physician to do this -- i.e. restricted just like alcohol licenses, i.e. licenses to print money --

    that all said, the remedies are highly effective. My own choice is 1THC to 20CBD. Works miracles on my chronic pain due to damanged sacral, lumbar and cervical vertebrae, without any hint of getting high or whatever. There are other dosages and all sorts of products from sublingual tinctures to topical creams, salves and lotions.

    Also as in states like California, where both medical and recreational cannabis are legal, a friend, who is a chemist and has her own from field to lab to manufacture, to retail -- and it's made her a multi-millionaire, and business has never been better than in These Times -- periodically sends CARE packages that includes loads of rec for partner, as well as what works for my pain. (I have zero interest in the rec, and I do mean zero -- recreational and I do not get along.)

    917:

    There are definitely such agreements, but they do NOT do provide any such immunity.

    https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06808/SN06808.pdf

    Sorry, I was being unclear. I was talking about the situation as it affects the UK, and using the term "treaty" in its common, not specialised, meaning - i.e. as a commitment between states - if it exists, it will be in the form of a binding "memorandum of understanding" or something, and probably bind only the UK, not the USA. For the record, I neither believe nor disbelieve the theory that such a thing exists - while there is evidence for it, that evidence could be due to other causes.

    918:

    No, I didn't. IDS is a nasty piece of work mainly because of his stupidity (he literally cannot imagine how the other 99.9% live) - the others were deliberately malicious.

    If you insist, I will accept that he might have learnt that language from his mother, though I rather doubt it :-)

    919:

    The study I saw was back around 1985 +/- a decade, and decided that the exchange would probably set off a nuclear autumn. Famines worldwide for a year or so, etc. I presume that their arsenals aren't a lot worse than then

    There are simulators kicking around. A quick Google found this comment (https://weather.com/en-IN/india/news/news/2019-03-01-nuclear-winter-from-an-india-pakistan-war-could-kill-2-billion), which cheerily forecast 5-10 years of famine from the nuclear winter, and as noted, at least two billion people dead as a result. In other words, somewhere north of 25% human mortality globally from this limited nuclear exchange. And that's from using less than 1% of the global nuclear arsenal.

    While we're still as much in danger from nukes as we've basically ever been, I find myself vaguely hopeful that they never get used until the degrade into uselessness. With climate change, we're basically coming into a period where the best we can do, with climate change and a full-on nuclear war in coming decades, is to do a clumsy knockoff of the Chixculub asteroid strike during the ongoing Deccan Traps mass volcanic CO2 outgassing. And that was a pretty bad mass extinction event. I much prefer cyberwar to that.

    920: 873 - " But expecting your employees to read your mind isn't the mark of a great leader…"

    On the other hand, being able to make your employees read your mind....

    921:

    Secondary, not post-secondary, in my case. Post-secondary would be easier because the students are legally adults, rather than minors.

    On Ontario there is an accrediting body: the Ontario College of Teachers. It's actually the largest self-regulating body in Canada. Although responsible for certification it doesn't offer professional development itself. It publishes standards and advisories but, as always, they leave a lot of wiggle room subject to interpretation. I don't know how much it coordinates with other provinces but I do know that if you are a certified teacher somewhere else in Canada and move to Ontario you can automatically get certified here, so there must be some level of commonality.

    The last OCT advisory on electronic learning was in 2017, with a video conferencing supplement that may be recent (it's undated):

    https://www.oct.ca/resources/advisories/use-of-electronic-communication-and-social-media https://www.oct.ca/resources/advisories/video-conferencing-guidelines

    As you can see, both are pretty straightforward, but also are basically warnings of what not to do rather than recommendations of how best to implement distance learning.

    Curriculum is set by the province — the OCT has no control over that and is not consulted when the government of the day decides to change the curriculum. (This may be different in other provinces, but I doubt it.) During the time I've been teaching, curriculum changes have rolled out all-at-once, every grade at the same time, which has made the first few years difficult as an assumed pre-requisite under the new curriculum wasn't taught the preceding year in the old curriculum. (Order of topics changed so, for example, one cohort studied ecology twice and missed organ systems entirely*.) Also, textbooks and other resources typically aren't available the first year as they are still being written. This is the wrong way to do things, I think, but it isn't something that teachers or their professional bodies have control over.

    And as a note: while kids may have been using laptops for a long time, about half my students are sharing a computer with a family member right now. About 3% didn't have a computer at home at all (they were using a phone) and required a loner from the school board — in some schools that figure was closer to 50%.

    *Assuming that their teacher followed the orders of the principal and stuck to the curriculum, of course.

    922:

    Sadly, school curricula are low hanging shiny baubles for politicians to fiddle around with so as to be seen to be "do[ing] something Muttley!"

    I can't see how you can realistically change school curricula without starting at the lowest age-group and rolling forward from there year-by-year. You might be able to do slight amendments to an in-use curriculum but you can't make wholesale changes to it without screwing things up.

    The problem is, doing a proper job takes too long for any politician, hence all the screw-ups.

    923:

    Assembling the nuke... around 1979, I think it was, one of the left wing magazines, possibly Mother Jones, published a version of how to do it that a literal high school student had come up with, based on published documents, not secret (and the FBI did show up at the kid's family door).

    The really hard part was, in place of a centerfuge, putting the uranium slurry in a bucket and spinning around in your living room, with the bucket at arm's length, for half an hour....

    924:

    Please note: 1. Sanders says his supporters will vote for Biden but he needs to court the https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/17/bernie-sanders-supporters-vote-biden-defeat-trump 2. Biden and Sanders Announce Task Forces to Find Party Unity Over Policy https://www.npr.org/2020/05/13/855203151/biden-and-sanders-announce-task-forces-to-find-party-unity-over-policy

    So, Bernie's momentum is pushing policy.

    925:

    Or, as I just thought, it could be that because of the report, they refused to protect him.

    926:

    Political contributions... you've no idea how long I've thought of suing the US Supreme Court for $1B USD, since a) they decided in (78? 76?) that money was free speech, and b) corporations were people, and could contribute... and I want the same freedom of speech as Rupert Murdoch.

    927:

    Feel free to use my renaming of them - they're not alt-right, they're all-wrong.

    928:

    What I want to ask Biden, question #1: when, not if, the Orange Thing-packed Supreme Court of the US kills the ACA, what is he going to do, on day 1 of his presidency, to replace it, that will cover most, if not everyone, ASAP?

    929:

    @901: SFReader, you're missing an important part of the U.S. government's control mechanisms, part of the concept of separation of powers, purposefully enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. The framers of the Constitution were determined NOT to recreate a monarchy, as inaccurately claimed elsewhere. Separation of powers explicitly sets the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the U.S. government in tension, with specific powers reserved to each.

    Relevant to your opinion on Cabinet appointments, this opposition of powers is set out in Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the Constitution under what is commonly termed the Senate's power of advice and consent. Appointees to high positions in the Federal government are nominated to the Senate by the President, and then must go through a confirmation process, normally including public (and often private) hearings. These nominations also normally face extensive press investigations. The President does NOT get to install "any shyster, incompetent family member with zero to lose, zero personal/professional responsibility." The Senate, under the same article, votes to uphold or deny draft treaties negotiated by the executive. There is NO TREATY with the United States without Senate approval.

    Granted, the weaponization of the confirmation process by "Moscow Mitch" McConnell as Senate Majority Leader has seriously damaged this process, as can be seen by the confirmation of beer bro Brett Kavanaugh, and McConnell's publicly announced goal of packing the Federal courts with conservative justices. This is, along with his determination to simply ignore vital legislation passed by the House of Representatives, why it is arguably more important to remove the Republican majority in the Senate than it is to replace the President. But both are essential if the USAian representative democracy (you really need to use both words in tandem) is to survive.

    Re: Political Contributions

    Money and power are, and have always been, attracted to each other, and a potential for evildoing. Nationwide, and even statewide, elections in the U.S. are increasingly dependent on advertising spending. The Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010 was a historically damaging decision by the court that prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for political communications by corporations, including nonprofit corporations, labor unions, and other associations. It loosed the purses of what's commonly called "dark money" to attempt to sway elections. Senator Bernie Sanders has filed a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court's Decision (still pending action).

    930:

    Foxessa Sounds that's what I need ( Medical Cannabionoids ) for my blower back - my second joint in my lower spine (lowest two separate lumbar vertebrae ) has, effectively, no disc & the dsicomfort is - mostly "Managed"

    EC Possibly. IDS owns lots of land - I've walked over ( al little bit ) his & the land to the immediate S - guess which is better-managed in terms of the environment, wildlife & ease of walking supposedly legitinmate rights-of-way?

    Heteromeles So, significantly worse than the Mt Tambora eruption fo 1815, whic gave us "The year without a Summer" in 1816? Given the volume said volcano produced - are they sure - why is said nuke-exchange worse than the 1815/16 event? Not that there would not be many "suprlus" deaths, apart from those killed in the exchange ....

    whitroth BUGGER "Health insurance coverage" ... make it single-payer UHC & be done with it.

    931:

    @908: The Chiefs of Staff and officers under them swear their allegiance to "Her Majesty, her heirs and successors" or some such wording, NOT the government nor any member of it (Promissory Oaths Act 1868). If they believe that the Prime Minister is ordering something so harmful to the realm as to be essentially treason, in the general sense, I believe that they have an actual duty to refuse.

    Officers in the U.S. military have a very similar oath of office:

    I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.

    Note that the oath is to the U.S. Constitution, NOT to the President or a specific administration.

    This is NOT something I or others take lightly - it is one of the core tenets of U.S. military service. It's directly relevant to the discussion of El Cheeto Grande deciding, on a whim, to launch a nuclear strike one fine day. Part of the discussion within the military is the issue of whether, when, and how to disobey an illegal order. U.S. military debate on this topic is informed by the Nuremburg Trials, the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, and the concept of command responsibility.

    Disobeying a direct order is, under the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice, a court martial offense. However, U.S. military officers are also informed by the concept of command responsibility that they are held responsible for following unlawful orders. It is extensively discussed in the professional education required of all serving officers.

    Obeying or disobeying an order one believed to be illegal would be a life-defining situation for any officer facing the circumstance. I hope I would make the right choice, and I believe the overwhelming majority of my colleagues would do the same.

    For nuclear weapons, also note that under U.S. command and control, no single person can launch. All U.S. launch mechanisms operate under the two-man rule, requiring simultaneous actions by two persons to activate a weapon. While there is no computer or physical restraint on the President to order a launch, it would have to be validated as coming from the President (or successor) using the nuclear "football". Although the Wiki article claims neither the Secretary of Defense nor his/her subordinates have any authority to deny the order, one would hope that those involved are intensely aware of their responsibilities.

    In the end, we are all dependent on the responsible actions of a few.

    932:

    Justin:

    Ihave never said Biden couldn't win, just that he's making it unnecessarily difficult for himself.

    Deities know, the US could use some substance at the top, instead of the current Punch-and-Judy show.

    It seems that the D Establishment is finally coming round to my way of thinking.

    nytimes reports on a shift from "back to BAU" to "bold new ideas" as Biden's campaign strategy.

    P J Evans: That's what I said: they sent everyone ballots. But in the main, D voters didn't get around to sending them back. That is the problem.

    Publius Jay: the research that I have seen reported indicates that R voters would vote for a used Kleenex, if that was the R candidate, rather than anyone else, and that there are far fewer swing voters than people seem to think. Motivating the base is the way.

    (Come to think of it, a used Kleenex would be better than the current incumbent.)

    933:

    I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic

    support the Constitution defend the Constitution enemies foreign enemies domestic

    Can you recommend any discussion of what the various parts of that mean in practice? In particular, how is a domestic enemy to be defined/identified, but also how is the Constitution to be defended?

    934:

    There's a whole bunch of stories like that. It looks like they originate from an actual official experiment that was done where they got a group of (I think) first year college students, gave them a library containing only ordinary public sources, and told them to get on with it. Most of them did come up with something that was judged to be functional, and nobody was particularly surprised. That was back in the 60s or possibly even the 50s, and there's been a trickle of high-school-project city feet ever since.

    Dunno what that bucket trick is supposed to achieve, apart from making you dizzy. If it was for isotope separation, the Manhattan Project would have been over the moon to be able to do it that simply.

    935:

    Re: ' ... both are pretty straightforward, but also are basically warnings of what not to do rather than recommendations of how best to implement distance learning.'

    Interesting articles - thanks!

    Guess the school board is relying on their teachers' creativity and dedication to figure this out.

    I also read the anti-bullying article on that site including % of offenders/incidents/complaints (?) vs. survey reports of bullying. While the official statement reads well and noble, the reality is that there's still a lot more to be done. Serious question: Do the kids know that their teachers, principal etc. professionally and legally bound/compelled to intercede on their behalf re: abuse, bullying? Because that large gap suggests some teachers/principals are doing their best to not see any problems.

    936:

    "The only reason I can see is that Biden is a horrible candidate. I'll probably vote for him, but that depends heavily on who he selects as his vice-president. I don't expect him to last out the term, and to be ineffective while in office."

    After three years of Trump, anybody who still thinks this deserves Trump. The problem is that the rest of the world doesn't.

    937:

    Urrgh, "bin chicken"

    One of the terms I hate the most. Something that reinforces how inherently, casually, awful Australian society is.

    Here's a magnificent bird.

    White fella turns up.

    Steals their land.

    Then not content with theft, destroys the land that supported them for thousands of years.

    Then shoots a lot of them.

    Then drives the remainders away.

    Yet being strong, resourceful and having strong group connections and support, the birds manage to survive on the fringes of civilisation. Managing with the scraps that the white fella throws their way.

    White fella then applies derogatory term, that implies they're not as worthy as other birds, further marginalising them.

    Remind you of anything?

    Dog I hate this country sometimes.

    938:

    isotope separation

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6374374/ Evidence of microalgal isotopic fractionation through enrichment of depleted uranium
    939:

    Guess the school board is relying on their teachers' creativity and dedication to figure this out.

    Not just the school board. Also the provincial government (although they are also blaming teachers for not figuring out the solution they wanted but didn't articulate). Although I think that in the Ontario government there's some factions that want public education to fail, because then some people will make more money from private education.

    They are also assuming that teachers will go the extra mile to do their jobs — just as they assume for nurses. During the last Ontario Conservative government this was actually explicitly stated: that both professions would do extra work for free so their students/patients wouldn't suffer, so it was OK to increase workloads and cut resources. That was half a generation ago, but some of those people are still influential in the Ontario Conservative Party.

    Do the kids know that their teachers, principal etc. professionally and legally bound/compelled to intercede on their behalf

    They should. It is explained at the beginning of every year in mandatory assemblies and during classroom visits by guidance counsellors. It is in every student handbook.

    OTOH, how much that sinks in is anyone's guess.

    940:

    Re: '... the U.S. government's control mechanisms, part of the concept of separation of powers, ...'

    Appreciate the info ... however ... present day reality (how stuff is actually working in the US gov't) doesn't show this to be true because any one of the three branches have the tools to recreate/delay/obfuscate the other so that they are able to do whatever they want. This includes bringing all of gov't to its knees - idle and unpaid - as has already been demonstrated. What I'm seeing is winner-take-all-for-self gamesmanship, not representative politics.

    Re: ' ... why it is arguably more important to remove the Republican majority in the Senate than it is to replace the President.'

    Nope! Maybe on paper. But as you've argued/pointed out: what's writ/true on paper ain't being followed at all. The POTUS has veto power and given DT's wildly swinging moods and outright lies - videotaped/documented by dozens of domestic and foreign media companies - such continual disruption can do great damage across the board including confidence in the very notion of a gov't. At this point, you need all three because present day pols don't seem to know how to negotiate which includes listening to and understanding an other's point of view. (How many times did the GOP walk out of the room during hearings?)

    Re: 'Senator Bernie Sanders has filed a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court's Decision (still pending action).'

    Yeah - good luck with that given how the other two autonomous 'branches of gov't' have managed to stack this deck too. Not at all kosher according to 'separation of powers'.

    941:

    Re: Bernie's amendment

    I just looked this up and according to what I found, it appears that this amendment was filed a few times but failed to clear the Senate even when the Senate was controlled by Democrats.

    One of the articles included some history on why 'yes, corps can donate to pols': such donations are premised on 'personhood' which goes all the way back to 1886. So let's see who's managed to successfully get before the highest authorities of the land to argue for their rights to be 'persons':

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_reform_amendment

    'In the 307 Fourteenth Amendment cases heard by the Supreme Court in the years following Santa Clara County, 288 cases involved corporations compared to 19 cases involving African Americans, its intended recipients.'

    942:

    You wrote: BUGGER "Health insurance coverage" ... make it single-payer UHC & be done with it.

    Well, fuck yes. My take is that the only way he can do it, without going through the Senate, is to open Medicare - set a premium/copay such that anyone, say, under 2x the poverty level is free, then slowly to premiums, and co-pay as your income goes up.

    Given that my former co. was paying over $12k/yr, and I was putting in another $1k or $2k for "gold", and I looked it up - medicaid (under 65), for men it costs about $7.2k, and women $8.3k, companies would dive at it to save paying $4k or $5k/per employee, and the insurance companies would crash and burn.

    943:

    I have never been a fed - never got offered. But I supported the NIH for 10 years, and though I've never been asked to take the Oath, I DO BELIEVE IN IT.

    Don't give me some religious document to swear on, I'll pull out my personal copy of the Constitution, that I carry in my bag, and swear on THAT>

    944:

    You're centerfuging the slurry, wasn't that obvious?

    Geez, guy, you're old enough, did I have to explain that the magazine was being facetious?

    945:

    Btw, a comment about humor: as the ethnic descendant of 1500 plus years of oppression, Jewish humor falls into the category, often, of "your choice is to laugh or cry, and you can't live your life crying all the time."

    946:

    COVID-19: Hyper-clotting risk (new test)

    Past the pre-print stage but might be edited further. Anyways, looks as though it's possible to quickly identify one group of at-most-risk patients and start appropriate therapy early enough to save lives.

    https://www.journalacs.org/article/S1072-7515(20)30400-2/pdf

    'Fibrinolysis Shutdown Correlates to Thromboembolic Events in Severe COVID-19 Infection

    Background:

    Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) predisposes patients to a prothrombotic state with demonstrated microvascular involvement. The degree of hypercoagulability appears to correlate with outcomes, however optimal criteria to assess for the highest risk patients for thrombotic events remain unclear; we hypothesized that deranged thromboelastography (TEG) measurements of coagulation would correlate with thromboembolic events.

    Results Forty-four patients with COVID-19 were included in the analysis. Derangements in coagulation laboratory values including elevated D-Dimer, fibrinogen, PT, and PTT were confirmed; viscoelastic parameters showed an elevated maximum amplitude and low lysis at 30 minutes. A complete lack of lysis of clot at 30 minutes was seen in 57% of patients and predicted VTE with an AUROC of .742 (p=0.021). A D-Dimer cutoff of 2600 ng/ml predicted need for dialysis with an AUROC of .779 (p=0.005). Overall, patients with no lysis of clot at 30 minutes and a D-Dimer of greater than 2600 ng/ml had a rate of VTE of 50% compared to 0% for patients with neither risk factor (p=0.008) and had a hemodialysis rate of 80% compared to 14% (p=0.004).'

    947:

    Thanks for the info about THC/CBD. Ellen's got fibro, and I found this link from an NIH study.... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6616435/

    948:

    Of course, I'm in California, so if I really hate the VP I might vote for someone else just to tell the Lamo-crats to fuck themselves. California is heavily Democratic so it won't affect the national election results.

    Just ask all those people who used the Brexit referendum as a chance to voice their displeasure with the Conservatives "because remain was going to win anyway" the risks of that attitude.

    Not saying you aren't correct, but it can be dangerous position to take if a lot of others take the same position.

    949:

    It's almost as if the Ontario Conservatives want to see public education fail…

    Not to dismiss that, but their more immediate problem is parents venting their frustration at the government for their kids not being in school, and not getting a replacement education.

    Thus the Minister is doing the usual shifting the blame.

    950:

    You're centerfuging the slurry, wasn't that obvious? Geez, guy, you're old enough, did I have to explain that the magazine was being facetious?

    Sure. As someone where the house hold income was based on separation of U235 and U238 in a production line I view all homemade ways to do it with a bit of suspicion. Well substitute "mountain of doubt" for "bit of suspicion".

    And as Sheldon said several times, when you call people asking about buying yellow cake the FBI shows up wanting to talk to your parents.

    951:

    BCC - multi-party Parliaments are common and every decade or so a new Party shows up along with one or two 'Independents'. This means and re-inforces the belief and reality that any candidate can and sometimes does win, that it IS possible to change one's gov't,

    The biggest factor is the public can make their wishes known in a very obvious way - and face with that reality one or more of the big parties can then "steal" the appropriate issues to maintain power (of course resulting in the die hard members of the minor party crying foul...)

    Perception is that the POTUS is directly elected by the 'People' - no, it's always been by the Electoral College: [Wikipedia: The Electoral College is a body of electors established by the United States Constitution, which forms every four years for the sole purpose of electing the president and vice president of the United States.] This continually reinforced 'misreading' of the Constitution appears to be a deliberate misrepresentation to pacify 'the people'.

    Not as clear cut - yes it's not a direct popular vote, but 32 states (plus DC) have laws that state the electors in the Electoral College for their state must obey the wishes of state voters. So within the limitations of the Electoral College system at least for those states there is a reason for the confusion. (and it is also being challenged at the Supreme Court currently, decision expected this summer - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/17/us-election-2020-rogue-electors-supreme-court )

    US - you're stuck with 4 years no matter how crappy, incompetent, loony-tunes, vile, egregious your POTUS turns out to be.

    Um, maybe difficult to actually do, but Impeachment and the 25th Amendment both offer options if enough people agree.

    BCC - Also, appointments to Cabinet tend to be to MPs who specifically addressed that Cabinet portfolio's area of responsibility

    Failing Grayling rather proves this to be false - and he appears to be failing upward yet again.

    More generally, cabinet positions are awarded for various reasons including rewarding loyalty, creating balance (most recently the UK needed a 50/50 split of Brexiters/Remainers, Canada generally sees choices such that all parts of the country are represented, etc.) Experience in the area of responsibility is more of a lucky coincidence than anything.

    952:

    I saw this photo on Twitter and thought, wow, it's the sort of thing that the late(?) lamented Angleton would have sent Bob to check out before everything went pear shaped: This power line happened to be laid straight through the skull of an Anglo Saxon woman buried in a previously undiscovered 6th century graveyard.

    953:

    Yellow-cake? Heck no, you corner the market in uranium yellow pigment. You'll need to process rather a lot of it, really. But you tell the FBI when they knock that you're planning on cranking out victory posters for El Cheeto 2020. They'll certainly believe you.

    Getting the heavy water isn't that hard either. Piece of cake. You just distill tap water over and over and over and over and over again. And make sure you've got lots of solar panels on your roof, so that the local power company doesn't complain about the power draw needed for all this distillation and centrifuging.

    Getting the plutonium is merely an adventure on the dark web, while any hobbyist in a garage can mold the high explosive lenses in inert atmosphere. I mean, we've all got all that plastic sheeting for social distancing, what more do we need? Fire insurance?

    954:

    What I want to ask Biden, question #1: when, not if, the Orange Thing-packed Supreme Court of the US kills the ACA, what is he going to do, on day 1 of his presidency, to replace it, that will cover most, if not everyone, ASAP?

    And the only correct answer is don't know.

    It will depend on a number of issues:

    • why does the Supreme Court throw it out - any replacement law will need to avoid the reason/excuse the SC rules the ACA unconstitutional - can't come up with a replacement until this is known

    • depends on if the DNC takes the Senate, and even then that may not be enough. If they don't take the Senate then the answer is he won't be replacing it (yes, he can propose something, but without the Senate he can't do it).

    • depends on the Senate and the House - they are the ones who actually write and pass the laws, and while he can try and influence them at the end of the day they are independent of him. So perhaps you should be asking Pelosi?

    Greg: BUGGER "Health insurance coverage" ... make it single-payer UHC & be done with it.

    Biden, like Obama didn't, wouldn't have that sort of power.

    Given that not every DNC Senator would support single-payer the DNC would need to get at least 70+ Senators, and that isn't going to happen. Even with what the DNC in theory can pick up in November a new ACA style law could still be a struggle.

    The thing to remember is that the ACA allows states to implement single-payer - none have done so, which indicates the level of opposition to the concept in the US. It's not rational, but it's reality.

    955:

    mdive I REALLY fail to understand how US voters consistently vote against thier own interests in health, when a clear, working set of models is openly visible around the planet.

    956:

    "Under present constitutional arrangements, a government that is elected has virtually dictatorial power for the next three years." - Substitute the relevant term length as appropriate for your specific place. (See also Hungary, which has apparently been moving towards greater dictatorship for the last ten years or so.) Really, if the parliament is willing to throw convention out the window, they could easily destroy what little democracy is around, while continuing to have elections. (See also Singapore.)

    On the subject of paracetamol, I'm still pissed off that I can't buy paracetamol+codeine without a script any more (used to be able to buy it in the supermarket, but a few idiots means the government ruins it for the rest of us; c.f. guns).

    957:

    I have the impression that one of the reasons is that much of the media in the United States doesn't really have stories abou other countries that much or objectively even if they do have them. It's not all the media, and of course people can read stuff from abroad, but many do not. It's hard to compare the systems if you never hear of the other ones. I think there is also biased reporting, like saying that "Canada has very long waits to get into treatment" and it would require fact checking to see that these stories are not true.

    Hearing stories from my US friends, I also get the impression that the news coverage for the domestic things is not that great. For example, the hideous costs associated with taking care of even well-insured people seem to come as a surprise to many. I'd think there could be some grounds for a change looking even at only the US things, but people don't seem to think about the system until they get caught in it.

    Take this with a grain of salt: I'm an observer in an another country and have never really visited the US. This is what I've been told.

    958:

    In vary rounded numbers, the US health care system does very well for 1/3 of the people. Mediocre for 1/3. Not good at all for the last 1/3.

    The top 1/3 don't want change for obvious reasons. Many of the middle 1/3 are afraid of a change that moves them down. And many of the bottom 1/3 don't vote or participate in the debate for various reasons.

    Add on top of it a distrust of government that places like the UK can't comprehend (distributed across all income levels) and you can see how the numbers don't add up to "let's dismantle the current system and start over".

    Obama set things back a long way with his famous statement about the ACA. "If you like you're doctors you get to keep them." Which was just not true if you were picking up an ACA plan. So now the opponents of changing the current system have a great TV/Radio/print ad.

    And if you can't understand why this is this way, well welcome to the US health care system.

    959:

    The top 1/3 don't want change for obvious reasons

    I was confused, until I remembered previous discussions that public healthcare in the USA also goes to slaves and dirt people so cannot be permitted.

    960:

    Having come across Stirling in another blog, I don’t rate his opinion on any subject highly. But that might be a context thing, I haven’t read his stuff and probably never will.

    961:

    Elon Musk's recent announcement that, like Trump*, he is happy for peasants to die if it means he makes money, was not exactly surprising but still disappointing. It puts him squarely in line with the result of the US ruling class despite what some of the propaganda would have you think.

    It did give some useful context for his push to sell self-driving cars. Yeah, they're sort-of-automated, and they will definitely kill people... which is ok, as long as he makes a profit.

    Given that context... I am less keen on self-driving cars than I was before.

    • and Pence, Bezos, I'm sure there are many more.
    962:

    And as Sheldon said several times, when you call people asking about buying yellow cake the FBI shows up wanting to talk to your parents.

    It's not that difficult to make your own yellowcake. There are places around the world where you can find interesting rocks that make a Geiger counter click just lying around -- they contain low-grade uranium ore since virtually every other radioactive isotope is quite short-lived (well, apart from K40). Crush the rocks, dissolve them in a strong acid and go through a series of known extraction steps and reform the uranium ions into U3O8. It won't make a lot of the stuff but it should be enough to get you extra credit in your Chem Eng course.

    963:

    It's not that difficult to make your own yellowcake.

    But it's still harder than a whole lot of other ways to kill people. Especially if you're being as non-specific as a home made nuclear bomb, and you can afford to build the sort of large industrial plant that you need to turn uranium ore into enough enriched uranium to make a bomb. I suspect you could make AK-47's and kill more people. Or for that matter just set up in somewhere unregulated and run a profitable factory in a nasty way.

    The tricky part would be deciding which exact form of mass murder accidental death you want to perform. Self-driving cars or fracking? Genetic modification of human embryos or breeding drug-resistant diseases? Poison in the water or starvation in the streets? So many choices, so little time...

    964:

    As a niggle, there is more thorium than uranium, and it is also radioactive and long-lived. That doesn't change your point.

    965:

    For some reason Voltarol gel makes my skin fall off. I'm pretty sure it's not the diclofenac as I have had that before with no ill effects.

    A pity as I could use something stronger than ibuprofen for the first aid kit.

    966:

    It actually happened, if the report I read on a now-defunct site, Depleted Cranium (it's now a spamhaus after the domain name was let go by the original bloggers) is correct. Someone in the US doing a Chem Eng degree went out into a desert area with a basic Geiger counter, collected a number of mildly-radioactive rocks, brought them back to the lab and processed them to produce a gram or two of yellowcake. He got the extra credit, not surprisingly.

    The problems started when he gave a vial with some of the yellowcake to a friend who was doing another course in a different university. The school authorities there found out about it, there was a great amount of fuss and the friend got thrown out of school.

    It would have been easier to buy it -- the spot price for yellowcake is currently $36/lb or about $80/kg.

    967:

    The magazine was the November 1979 issue of The Progressive, and the article was about building an H bomb, not an A bomb.

    968:

    On the subject of paracetamol, I'm still pissed off that I can't buy paracetamol+codeine without a script any more

    If you're in the UK, you can buy paracetamol and dihydrocodeine tablets (500mg/8mg) in any pharmacy.

    However, you get more dihydrocodeine per tablet if you buy ibuprofen and dihydrocodeine tablets (200mg/12.8mg), also available in pharmacies.

    (In both cases it's safe -- absent liver disease or other medical complications -- to take two at a time, i.e. 1000mg paracetamol/16mg dihydrocodeine, or 400mg ibuprofen/25.6mg dihydrocodeine. Just don't mix with other medications containing either substance.)

    NB: don't, REALLY don't, ever ever ever take such bought-without-a-prescription medications out of the country you bought them in. In many parts of the world having opiates without a prescription -- even wimpish extremely weak ones -- is an instant ticket to a multi-year stay in jail. Having a prescription and preferably a letter from your doctor will help, but it varies from country to country.

    969:

    Charlie Stross -- eldritch monsters and pharmacy hints.

    Best make sure not to take my cough medicine on trips. Not that I'm going to be taking any trips for a while...

    970:

    Take this with a grain of salt: I'm an observer in an another country and have never really visited the US. This is what I've been told.

    As someone who has visited the US (cumulative time: somewhere in the range 1-2 years spent there), my impression of US media is that it treats the world as if there are two planets: Planet USA, and some other planet where strange people live and do things that doesn't really affect us.

    To some extent this reflects geographical realities -- the USA is pretty vast and very introverted -- but it's also affected by the way their media ecosystem is structured around entertainment without any kind of mandated public education remit (as Europeans would understand it). US news media are basically entertainment, because they're funded by advertising.

    971:

    When I was at school, someone from some UK gummint laboratory gave a talk, and started by plunking a 1 Kg cylinder of metal down on the desk, saying "that's uranium". Knowing what I know now, it was probably depleted and covered or coated with something more inert, but it was interesting. Making a fuss about yellowcake is completely stupid - at least in less than ton lots.

    972:

    Having come across Stirling in another blog

    BZZZT! Spelling mistake!

    You are thinking of S. M. Stirling.

    Be very very careful not to ignore the writing of Bruce Sterling, who is very, very different and an Object of Emulation of mine. (And it's probably time for another re-read of "Holy Fire", in view of current events ...)

    973:

    Not in the UK, I'm on the big island north of Tasmania. As of December 2016, all codeine containing products were re-scheduled to "prescription only" from February 2018. (Also, paracetamol only products become much harder to buy in bulk somewhere before 2007, though I can't remember when.) Turns out people were using the codeine "to treat long term conditions" https://www.mips.com.au/Articles/scheduling-changes-for-codeine .

    Anyway.

    974:

    Given that context... I am less keen on self-driving cars than I was before.

    The problem is not with self-driving cars in principle, but with the value system of the people who make/promote them.

    (Really, you can substitute "Christianity" for "self-driving cars" and this statement still makes sense. Or "computer games" or "lobotomies" ...)

    975:

    To be fair, you were the one who mentioned Draka on Mars, with reference to Stirling, and Damian's comment does appear to refer to that.

    At just under a thousand comments on this iteration alone of the never-ending thread, it's easy to lose track.

    976:

    Cool! Now I can make an enrichment cascade in my back garden and keep ducks in it and no-one will ever know it isn't just a set of duck ponds. Well, at least until two of the ducks from one of the later pools try mating.

    977:

    I know someone who's got a couple of hundred kilos of depleted uranium metal in his garage (junked balance weights from an early-model Boeing 747). I asked him about getting a small scrap as a pocket piece but he pointed out the cost of getting it cut up, the pyrophoric properties of the metal (combustion in air) meant it needed to be cut or machined while submerged in a bath of 'milk', a special mixture of water and lubricants.

    Uranium doesn't really need to be coated or otherwise shielded from handling, it's not particularly toxic as a solid metal or in simple compounds like oxides despite what the Chicken Littles claim. It's certainly radioactive but again as a solid piece of metal only the outside mm or so of thickness emits radiation into the environment.

    Here's some pictures of technicians examining an unused nuclear fuel assembly, taken from the spent fuel pool of No. 4 reactor at Fukushima. That LEU fuel assembly contains about 5kg of U-235 and another 90-odd kg of U-238.

    https://www.tepco.co.jp/en/nu/fukushima-np/images/handouts_120828_01-e.pdf

    979:

    It's arguably easier than nearly every other metal precisely because you have that ability to distinguish a stone from an interesting stone by pointing a magic wand at it. And if you're not trying to reduce it to elemental uranium, the chemistry isn't hard. There's some bloke out there with a website giving detailed instructions for how to do it in your kitchen.

    Me, I have the luxury of the choice between different kinds of awkward factors. Do I go and mine the deposit of soft easy-to-process stuff which is just down the road but is a crappy deposit so I need to do lots of it, or do I go all the way to Cornwall and grab a lesser amount of hard rocks which send the Geiger counter mental? Decisions, decisions...

    980:

    Never heard of it... but I shall definitely read it now!

    981:

    I had the most horrible nightmare this morning. Started with a piece of misdirected mail and when I went to look up the address so I could walk it over to their house someone had remapped my keyboard & then rearranged all the key caps.

    982:

    David L @ 855:

    and a dad who could buy her a nice laptop the day before lockdown when her old one was dying and the cheap ones were sold out. Not so easy for some of her friends:

    Our school system went out and bought 10K hotspots and I think 30K chromebooks to give to the kids without such.

    We are I think the 15th largest district in the country. So about 160K kids.

    Of course there were some logistical headaches dealing with numbers like this for something planned with a week or few of notice.

    The issues/fights in most of the US are going to be about the next school year. People want the kids in school. But Trump and his fans think it will cause no medical issues. Or so they claim. And so what if it does. We need the economy back open. [sarcasm]

    And sports. Oey Veh.

    I think this might be a problem:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/17/health/coronavirus-multisystem-fnflammatory-syndrome-children-teenagers.html

    Looks like it affects school age kids the worst. They can have the SARS-CoV-2 virus without getting Covid19 and then a couple weeks later this shit hits them.

    983:

    Rocketpjs @ 858: Were I an USian citizen I would vote for Biden because sometimes grownups have to pick the less-worst option. I would have campaigned hard for (probably) Warren, but in a democracy you don't always (ever) get what you want.

    The whole 'Bernie bros' never Biden thing seems like such a perfectly tuned message to progressives to 'NOT VOTE' that I can't help but speculate that it is at least encouraged if not promoted by external or internal disruptors - the end result of progressives not voting en masse is no progressive candidates winning. A lot of the messaging seems to come through social media...

    Here in Canada I've been a member of the somewhat social democratic NDP for decades, but often tend to actually vote for the candidate most likely to defeat the local Tory. In the last election the NDP candidate was a personal friend but running a no-hope campaign, and I had to tell him I was voting Liberal just to keep the Tory from winning. (It helped that the Libs ran an excellent candidate in our riding).

    Biden is apparently "pivoting left" (at least a little bit) to attract Sanders supporters.

    https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/joe-biden-is-pivoting-to-the-left-what-why.html

    984:

    Troutwaxer @ 872: ... and my quote was meant very much as snark!

    Just FYI if anyone cares, the <code> tag that is usually used to indicate sarcasm (IAW Poe's Law) doesn't work here, but the older teletype tag <tt> does and give the same font effect.

    At least, I can see it reading the blog in plain vanilla Firefox on Windoze. YMMV ... all I know about HTML (and that ain't much) I learned from looking at the blog "source" here when I wanted to know How did he do that?.

    985:

    That sounds like they were distracted by the annual paperclip audit!

    986:

    My reference to the coating was for stopping it oxidising, NOT as protection against its radiation - which, as far as I can recall, is almost entirely alpha particles. B

    987:

    On-topic The Guardian piece, which some of you have already seen, worth a skim: Coal industry will never recover after coronavirus pandemic, say experts - Crisis has proved renewable energy is now a safer investment, and accelerated the shift (Jonathan Watts and Jillian Ambrose, Sun 17 May 2020) Rob Jackson, the chair of Global Carbon Project, said the pandemic was likely to confirm that coal will never again reach the global peak seen in 2013: “Covid-19 will slash coal emissions so much this year that the industry will never recover, even with a continued build-out in India and elsewhere. The crash in natural gas prices, record-cheap solar and wind power, and climate and health concerns have undercut the industry permanently.”

    It's a fight (lots of money and power involved) but at least a lower-coal-using future is in political play around the world.

    988:

    Quoting from Dr. Strangelove is its own snark tag.

    989:

    Knowing what I know now, it was probably depleted and covered or coated with something more inert, but it was interesting. Making a fuss about yellowcake is completely stupid - at least in less than ton lots.

    Cascade plants in the US used to store yellow cake leftovers in huge casks in the open. Well behind a fence but on a big lot. It all kind of vanished after Israel showed the effectiveness of using U238 in armor piercing shells in either 67 or 73.

    And no this is not classified information. It was obvious what was happening to the U235 yellow cake. Or very apparent if you drove by the plant. Then all of these casks vanished within a year of the Israeli conflict. So a lot of people put 2+2 and got 4.

    990:

    It's a fight (lots of money and power involved) but at least a lower-coal-using future is in political play around the world.

    Well there's India.

    991:

    SFReader @ 877:

    Re: 'I do appreciate y'all putting up with my whinging about this ...'

    As long as you're willing to put up with unsolicited 'advice'. :)

    The thing about advice is that sometimes it contains new information or information that I hadn't given sufficient consideration. If the advice works, it works, if not I can add it to my Edison list (T.A. Edison is reputed to have said he never failed, only found 10,000 ways that wouldn't work).

    Speaking of which ... ever hear of aerosinusitis? It was the first item to pop up when I looked up the description you gave re: pain location. Hmm ... includes a reference to Boyle's Law which to me (non-medico layperson) suggests a non-pharmaceutical possibility for a bit of pain management.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerosinusitis

    I was vaguely aware of something like that in relation to things I read years ago about people who flew down to the Bahamas for a skin-diving vacation and got on a plane right after getting out of the water on their last day having in-flight emergencies. The article advised people to take a couple of days to adjust without diving before getting on the plane to fly back home.

    I hadn't connected that to my symptoms, but I can see how they might relate. Looking back at the weather, we had a damp, dearie early spring which helped to tone down my seasonal allergies. But about the time I started having problems the weather changed to bright & sunny and maybe the pattern of onset had something to do with changes in barometric pressure during the day.

    The weather is changing back to damp & dearie today, so I'll pay attention to see if it has any effect on the headache.

    Barotrauma located in the maxillary, ethmoidal, or sphenoid sinuses is observed less frequently and appears when the ostia are blocked

    Looking at the accompanying diagrams, that's where my pain is located. I'm pretty sure the "ostia are blocked" describes what I was told is a "deviated septum". I have been told I have the loud snoring and have had what sounds like "sleep apnea" described.

    I looked up sleep apnea in Wikipedia and I understand how it might cause all of the problems listed (heart attack, stroke, diabetes, heart failure, irregular heartbeat, obesity) but motor vehicle collisions?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_apnea

    How would sleep apnea increase the risk of motor vehicle collisions?

    992:

    whitroth @ 879: You cannot know just how fed up I am with "Bernie bros".

    My SO, and one of my Duly Appointed Nieces say they've been bothered by them, but they're folks they know.

    I, personally, am waiting actually meet (at least online) and talk to ONE SINGLE ONE.

    So, if anyone knows any, point them to me.

    This dragon hasn't had a chance to flame someone personally in far too long.... (Why, yes, I am the Silverdragon).

    One thing I've read about is that on line among the "Bernie bros" true Sanders supporters are vastly outnumbered by trolls intent on sowing the seeds of dissension within the ranks of Sanders supporters to split them off from the Democrats while trying to to piss off other Democrats at Sanders' supporters.

    Flame them if you must, but be aware that burning the world down is what they want.

    993:

    "How would sleep apnea increase the risk of motor vehicle collisions?"

    Being tired is as harmful to your reactions, observation and judgement as being over the limit on alcohol. It causes a lot of accidents and deaths on the road.

    994:

    blackanvil @ 882: Having studied nuclear physics in my college days, considering how easy it would be to make a world-burner type doomsday device (just build a hydrogen bomb then surround that with a bunch of additional 3rd stage capsules of lithium deuteride with tampers of uranium, no need to enrich it), I do wonder if any of the nuclear powers have taken the obvious step of spending the relatively cheap black-ops budget on making such a device. I would hope not, but stuffing an abandoned mine with the necessary ingredients would be so simple, so easy that it seems almost inevitable that someone decided to make a "just in case we lose" spoil-sport last resort.

    Yeah, but as the movie points out, what's the point of having a doomsday device if you don't tell the world you have it? That's just STUPID! The whole concept of a doomsday device is stupid, but having one and keeping it secret is stupid with compound interest.

    I don't think even Cheatolini iL Douchebag is that stupid, and he's the stupid which all other stupid is measured against ... the Gold Standard for stupid.

    Plus, if he did have one, he couldn't wait to tweet about it. He couldn't keep it a secret even if he wanted to.

    995:

    Re: The framers of the Constitution were determined NOT to recreate a monarchy, as inaccurately claimed elsewhere.

    That's what it says on paper, and that's what they claimed. Patrick Henry thought otherwise: "I smell a rat. It squints towards monarchy."

    There was a lot of stuff going on then, and not all parties were in agreement, but certainly many of the founders had monarchist sympathies. They just had to compromise with those that were strongly opposed.

    996:

    How would sleep apnea increase the risk of motor vehicle collisions?

    At a guess, because it interferes with sleep so you are tireder than you think you are. Most Americans are apparently sleep-deprived anyway, so sleep apnea probably makes it worse.

    Maybe Netflix should have an "increased risk of motor vehicle collisions" warning label too?

    997:

    I'm not sure it would require a law - it might be only a regulation change, and that is the province of the agency.

    The plan I advocated would do it all, without one big lump.

    Oh, and Obama and Biden not liking it? Please, let's not forget former Dem Sen Max "never met a campaign contribution from a medical insurance company (Aetna, and another, for example) that I didn't like","Single payer is off the table" Baucus.

    998:

    SCREAMRANT%^&%^&(%^&()$%^&()

  • Most doctors accept most medical insurance.
  • How many times have you changed jobs, or had your company change the offered medical insurance plans, and this year didn't offer the one you had last year, and you had to change doctors?
  • Furthermore, if single-payer/Medicare-for-all was widespread, most doctors would accept it for the same reason there are far more exploits of M$ WinDoze than anything else: there's where the numbers are.

    And then, of course, there are those weird doctors, the ones who got into it to do MEDICINE, as opposed to "my mommy told me I'll get rich by becoming a doctor".

    999:

    Heteromeles @ 883: I have to agree that the plans for a nuke are easy. I used to have a commercially published (nonfunctional) blueprint lying around. Assembling the ingredients is much harder, and that's generally the infrastructural bottleneck that allows for what nuclear controls we have in this world.

    John McPhee's book The Curve of Binding Energy is a fascinating read.

    Ted Taylor was the guy who did the research for the U.S. Army's "atomic hand-grenade"

    1000:

    Well there's India. India is in major churn/chaos politically and COVID-19 is increasing the churn/chaos. Many possibilities, but e.g. BJP has lost some elections at the state level. Meanwhile, there is this: Coronavirus lockdown speeds India’s shift from coal to solar power - Renewable energy sources are proving resilient in the Covid-19 crisis, while analysts say coal power capacity could peak this decade (07/05/2020) IEEFA piece: IEEFA update: Who would still fund a new coal power plant in India? - Coal power generation has worn 100% of the COVID-19 power demand drop (Tim Buckley, May 4, 2020) Actual IEEFA note: Who Would Still Fund a New Coal Power Plant in India?Stranded Asset Risks Continue to Rise as Solar Deflation Continues (Tim Buckley, May2020) This is a very clear lesson in the implications of the merit order effect (in India, this is phrased as renewables having “must run” status), where the low marginal cost sources of supply get priority (once built, renewables have a near zero marginal cost of generation), and the high marginal cost producer loses out (in this case, coal) See Figure 3; coal took the entire hit for the roughly 30 percent (number in flux) reduced demand.

    India has a lot of sun; estimates are 240-300 days per year (regional effects as well).

    1001:

    "self-driving cars", aka "still fewer non-college-required jobs.

    Says the one-time cab driver.

    1002:

    Re: After three years of Trump, anybody who still thinks this deserves Trump. The problem is that the rest of the world doesn't.

    Did you read the post I was replying to? If so, then you need to explain which part of my answer you object to, because it sure isn't clear. Are you denying that Biden is a horrible candidate, perhaps?

    1003:

    No, thank you. I'll take hydrocodone only when I have to (like, right after my knee surgeries), and even then, I'll go to prescription-strength ibuprofin asap.

    1004:

    Oh, yes. Bruce's writing I like, and he actually does research to know what he's writing about.

    First time I met him was around '93, when I was in the Unix users' group in Austin, which he joined and attended meetings, and talked to people.

    1005:

    How many times have you changed jobs, or had your company change the offered medical insurance plans, and this year didn't offer the one you had last year, and you had to change doctors? That's just Freedom and Capitalism, and therefore Good, and obviously not comparable to bad socialized universal health care.

    (Yeah, I've had to change doctors even within a span of employment with a single employer.)

    1006:

    Re: And as Sheldon said several times, when you call people asking about buying yellow cake the FBI shows up wanting to talk to your parents.

    I don't know why. It makes a beautiful yellow ceramic glaze.

    1007:

    Risk of falling asleep, even if only for a moment, at the wheel.

    1008:

    PubliusJay @ 885: In North Carolina, the rule is that if a Senator resigns in the middle of his term the Governor (who is currently a Democrat) gets to appoint his replacement - but the replacement must be a member of the same party as the Senator who resigned and chosen from a list provided by the party.

    So, if Burr resigned before his term was up, the seat would remain in Republican hands.

    (Burr is unlikely to resign anyway unless convicted.)

    Under Federal Law any vacancy in the Senate must be filled by a special election. It's up to the states whether they allow their Governor to appoint an interim replacement, but whoever that replacement was would have to stand for election themselves. If it was an "off" year the state would have to schedule the special election, but this close to the general election, they'd probably just add the special election on to the general election. Which would put BOTH NC Senate seats up for grabs.

    I agree it's unlikely Burr will resign. Hell, I don't think he will even be charged. But IF he was and IF he did ...

    1009:

    I'm NOT against single payer. And I suspect we'll get there at some point. But the path is going to be ugly. And may require things to get much worse for a lot of people before it happens.

    Most people are more afraid of change that MIGHT not work out for the better than keeping the same mediocrity.

    Applying logic to a problem filled with emotions many times gets you less than nowhere.

    1010:

    That's assuming that your neighbors weren't bothered by the glow of the ducks at night.

    1011:

    India has a lot of sun; estimates are 240-300 days per year (regional effects as well).

    Yes. But they also have a very huge growing demand. Incredibly huge. And lots of cheap coal[1]. And habits can be hard to break.

    [1] Especially when miners and consumers exist in incredibly large numbers and are considered disposable.

    1012:

    Most doctors accept most medical insurance.

    Very US based comment.

    More and more doctors work for a larger health care systems. Which in many cases are organized around hospitals. This process has been going on for 10 years as hospital system economics stopped working a bit before then.

    And more large insurers now align with a plan and you have the preferred provider issues and out of network issues.

    So while a doctor may process your insurance you out of pocket can run from $0 to $200 for an office visit. Is he in network or out? And why are you there? And ....

    This all comes from decisions made back in WWII involving unions, tax policies, large companies making war stuff, and price controls. (Ain't it grand!)

    And even with hospitals you have most ER docs now don't work for the hospitals but for a few hedge fund controlled companies that sell their services to the hospital.

    A friend who is a cardiologist has gone from being a partner in a practice with 8-10 other docs to selling out the practice to a hospital system to now working for a different hospital system as an LLC with just himself as the only employee. And this is how this last system does it for all docs. All in the last 10 years.

    1013:

    Charles H @ 899:

    RE:[quote] Inda/Pak nuke elimination
    Pak would be wiped off the face of the planet
    India would be ... wrecked
    But - would that actually be enough to induce a serious nuclear winter, lasting several years, really? [/quote]

    The study I saw was back around 1985 +/- a decade, and decided that the exchange would probably set off a nuclear autumn. Famines worldwide for a year or so, etc. I presume that their arsenals aren't a lot worse than then.

    That presumes there is no escalation beyond what India & Pakistan can do to each other. Would there be no escalation?

    What would China do in the face of India triumphant? And if China used nuclear weapons against India, how would the other nuclear powers (declared & undeclared) respond?

    Once started, I don't see how it would stop until no one had "delivery systems"1 left. And I don't think "Nuclear Winter" is anywhere near sufficient to describe the aftermath. Compared to what would come after a global nuclear war, the dinosaurs got off easy.

    1 I suspect there might be warheads left over when the nations of the world ran out of missiles and bombers, with no way to deliver them to the target.

    1014:

    That sounds a little weird, storing surplus yellowcake on-site at enrichment plants. What did happen, and still does happen to some extent, is the storage of UF6 tailings from enrichment lines (gaseous as well as centrifuge). Rather than produce depleted uranium metal from processed UF6 it's stored as uranium hexafluoride as it can be re-used for other purposes in that form, for mixing and downgrading MEU and HEU for example, rather than having to reconvert uranium metal into UF6 again. The highly successful Megatons to Megawatts project used stocks of existing UF6 in the ex-Soviet Union for that purpose.

    There are quite a few images on the web of UF6 casks stored at places like enrichment and reprocessing plants.

    UF6 is a volatile solid at atmospheric pressure, it starts to sublimate at about 55 deg C so storage is a question of using lightweight casks rather than pressure vessels capable of withstanding hundreds of atmospheres. The main danger from UF6 leaks seems to be contact with moisture which produces HF as well as a uranyl compound, both highly toxic.

    1015:

    Actually, that's not totally unreasonable. Not trusting Congress to pass a sensible law in an area that's heavily lobbied is actually fairly reasonable, even when the current situation is rather bad. Then there's the "single point of failure" problem. I always prefer to have the option of multiple suppliers, even for staplers, much less for medical care. The problem is that medical care, especially in an emergency, is always a monopoly, and I don't see any way around it.

    1016:

    Well, yes, it is the US health rentier system.

    I'm well aware of what's going on, and some of it isn't around hospitals, it's around hedge fuckers buying systems.

    When I retired last year, I had a lot of choices, since I was going onto Medicare, and I chose Kaiser-Permanente. Ellen's on that, there's a large facility just over a mile away

    And then I could FIRE my old medical profider. The doc was ok... the practice, on the other hand... it is my considered opinion (here we go, Charlie, no legal basis to sue because I say that), that they were GUILTY OF UNBUNDLING. "Oh, during my annual physcial, my doc found something last year, and sent me immediatley to a cardiologist (other practice)... but she spent "extra time", and so it was an "additional encounter", for which they wanted to bill me over $200 more.

    That's redefining "annual physical". Crooks as owners.

    1017:

    "There are quite a few images on the web of UF6 casks stored at places like enrichment and reprocessing plants."

    Indeed there are. Complete with rust, and holes, and horrible toxic puddles. Considering it only actually needs to be in the form of hexafluoride for gas phase isotope separation, and it's a horribly nasty substance whereas all the other forms it might be in are reasonably or thoroughly benign, it seems utterly perverse to store it in the most hideous form they've got rather than as a nice inert solid oxide.

    1018:

    "Most Americans are apparently sleep-deprived anyway"

    So is any population that makes customary use of alarm clocks. Because if you had had enough sleep, you would be waking up naturally without needing a machine to wake you up. (Note: learning to wake up five seconds before it goes off does not count as "waking up naturally".) Funny how it counts as torture when you do it to prisoners of war but it's considered acceptable for people who have to wake up and go and make other people money.

    1019:

    Troutwaxer @ 988: Quoting from Dr. Strangelove is its own snark tag.

    As long as the reader has a clue where the quote comes from.

    1020:

    Oh, and Obama and Biden not liking it? Please, let's not forget former Dem Sen Max "never met a campaign contribution from a medical insurance company (Aetna, and another, for example) that I didn't like","Single payer is off the table" Baucus.

    Um, I never said Obama and Biden not liking it - in fact I deliberately ignored it because I have no idea what their personal opinions on the matter are.

    The only thing that mattered was whether the votes, particularly in the Senate, are there. And given that a DNC Senator can't be forced to vote for the DNC position you need that factored into the equation, hence needing more than just the minimum of 60.

    1021:

    whitroth @ 1010: That's assuming that your neighbors weren't bothered by the glow of the ducks at night.

    https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-glow-in-the-dark-kitty-77372763/

    1023:

    I REALLY fail to understand how US voters consistently vote against thier own interests in health, when a clear, working set of models is openly visible around the planet.

    I don't understand why people continue to start smoking when the science is known.

    I don't understand why people deny global warming.

    I don't know why UK voters keep voting in Conservative governments that are privatising the NHS by stealth and crippling it with budget cuts.

    etc. for almost any issue you can think of.

    At least (depending on ones definition I guess) 1/3 of the population is stupid.

    Now add in vested interests making a lot of money off the current (choose your choice), who can spend money to preserve it - and in the US consider just how cheap many of the Congresspeople are to buy. And how throwing a few million around can create lapdogs willing to peddle any pseudoscience nonsense to fool the public.

    Then throw in the distrust of the government, the "government is the problem" junk started by Reagan - and how the public has bought into and yet is blindly oblivous when they got worse service from the private sector.

    I would guess if other western country of choice hadn't switched to single-payer/government health care 50+ years ago they also would find it impossible to switch now. There is simply too much money slushing around a private system. The only way the US changes is if the current system collapses.

    1024:

    How would sleep apnea increase the risk of motor vehicle collisions?

    (I have a close family member who suffered from sleep apnea for years and now uses a CPAP machine.)

    Turns out that sleep apnea can lead to sleep deprivation by stealth -- you keep snoring and waking yourself up momentarily, so you never get enough consecutive hours of sleep to go into REM sleep. So you go to bed and get up 8-10 hours later but don't feel properly rested. After a while this becomes a chronic condition ... and you doze off momentarily, in micro-sleeps, several times a day, often when driving (long stretches of over-trained behaviour, not much happening).

    My relative found that positive-pressure assisted breathing enabled them to suddenly get a proper night's sleep and feel frisky in the morning, and all the inexplicable close calls in traffic stopped overnight. (They managed not to get in any fender-benders before getting diagnosed and starting treatment, but as their daily commute involved rush-hour motorway traffic it was only a matter of time -- and a likely high speed at that.)

    1025:

    There was a lot of stuff going on then, and not all parties were in agreement, but certainly many of the founders had monarchist sympathies.

    I suspect it's not that they were closet monarchists so much as they didn't have a good model for how a totally non-monarchist system would work. The nearest thing they had to it within the previous century was the English Commonwealth which lasted from 1649-1660 and basically replaced the king with a weird hybrid parliamentary/military rule, primarily run by the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, from 1653 to 1659.

    Note:

    In 1657, Oliver Cromwell was offered the crown by Parliament as part of a revised constitutional settlement, presenting him with a dilemma, since he had been instrumental in abolishing the monarchy. Cromwell agonised for six weeks over the offer. He was attracted by the prospect of stability it held out, but in a speech on 13 April 1657 he made clear that God's providence had spoken against the office of king: “I would not seek to set up that which Providence hath destroyed and laid in the dust, and I would not build Jericho again”.

    So yes, Cromwell was a bastard (see also Ireland), but he was a principled bastard. And this approach might have had some influence on the US' founding fathers.

    1026:

    Ted Taylor was the guy who did the research for the U.S. Army's "atomic hand-grenade"

    An "atomic hand grenade" is impossible with any isotopes we're able to produce a critical mass of.

    The Davy Crockett is as close as anyone ever got. It was one of four weapons to use the W-54 physics package:

    All four variants share the same basic core: a nuclear system which is 10.75 inches (273 mm) diameter, about 15.7 inches (400 mm) long, and weighs around or slightly over 50 pounds (23 kg).

    That's ... pretty terrifyingly small/light, frankly: there was indeed a backpack-portable version for demolition applications.

    The Davy Crockett was tested and worked -- there's film of a test shot and infantry maneuvers using it on Youtube -- but was probably an all-around bad idea in practice: it had no permissive action lock and there was a proposal to hand hundreds of these to German troops in the 1960s, many of whose officers had matriculated on the Russian Front 10-20 years earlier. (Also, it was a very dirty bomb in relation to its yield -- not much of the plutonium in it underwent fission so it scattered bomb juice all over the landscape, as well as producing a hard neutron pulse.) ((Also-also, the initial version had a range of 1.5 miles and lethally irradiated anyone within about 1.2 miles -- it was proposed to be fired over a hill, or from a jeep and the launch crew would dive underneath the chassis for shelter after they lit the blue touch paper.))

    1027:

    whitroth @ 998 1. I agree, but recently I did have an oral surgeon make me sign an agreement that I would not file a claim with Medicare for any services he provided. My neighbors have also mentioned doctors who don't take Medicare due to the reimbursement rates.

  • I went on Medicare this year. I had employer-provided healthcare for basically 37 years and didn't ever encounter that problem.

  • If single-payer/Medicare-for-all was widespread, a lot of doctors would accept it. There are also a lot who would retire and close their practices simply because their cost structure is too high to make a (to them) acceptable income on what Medicare pays. That's partly because almost all parts of the US medical system are grossly inefficient and work badly. That would have to change and the govt could help, but it would be painful. Probably more painful in the mountains of Colorado than in the DC area, but noticeable in both places.

  • There are those doctors, although the current system seems to be set up to drive them out.

  • If it could actually be pulled off by Executive Order, that might make it happen, especially after a good many of the people reluctant to lose their employer-provided healthcare have already lost it. Unfortunately, anything that can be done with an EO can be undone with another EO. By then the insurance companies would be gone though. The other issue is what to do with or for the ~2M people you make redundant. Not doing anything might be bad for the 2022 election.

    The other solution might be changes in Senate rules. Some have suggested abolishing the filibuster. It might be enough to simply require that someone who wants to filibuster actually has to do it, rather than the current situation where they just say they are.

    1028:

    Yes. I was mixing the two terms. It HAS been 40 years since I was in that household. :)

    And there were a LOT of us who saw some red/orange dust growing up but most didn't understand what it was. In small quantities but it did stick to shoes and clothes. Hard to avoid it at the quantities involved at the start of the process.

    1029:

    EC @ JBS Being ill, or coming down with a bad illness is even worse. Once I had to drive back to London from Shropshire ( a long time ago, now ) ... I had to stop on the way for an hour's kip in the back of the car, then drive, concentrating REALLY HARD, until I made it safely. I was going down with the 'flu - last time I had it actually. Nasty.

    JBS What would China do in the face of India triumphant? NOT going to happen, because India is, wrecked, remember? Back to about 1860 in fact if not worse. China has zero to fear from an India in that state.

    mdive The only way the US changes is if the current system collapses. Which is very likely going to happen this very year, maybe.

    Charlie often when driving (long stretches of over-trained behaviour, not much happening). Here's a really horrible example of that happening - 7 killed, 19 seriously imjured.

    1030:

    Then throw in the distrust of the government, the "government is the problem" junk started by Reagan

    Nope, nope, nopity nope nope. (To near quote Charlie from the past.)

    Distrust/dislike of the US federal government goes back 200+ years. Our dust up 1860-1865 only entrenched it in the minds of many and most of their descendants.

    Much of the western migration that wasn't tied to gold and money was about getting away from the governments of the east.

    Of course the governments followed much to the displeasure of many of the descendants of those.

    1031:

    Which is very likely going to happen this very year, maybe.

    Nope. Not at all. This year I mean.

    As to driving I'm looking at a 1100 mile drive somewhat soon. When I do these things I prefer to drive at night so sleep in till 8 or 9pm then drive until tired and sleep during the day. This time I'll be sleeping in the car at rest stops. About 19 hours driving time. One good sleep plus a nap or few should do it.

    1032:

    During the conquest of Iraq back in 2003 the American forces bypassed Tuawaitha, the location where the IAEA had secured Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons precursor materials back in the mid-90s, stuff such as yellowcake as well as HDX and RDX explosives as used in implosion lenses.

    When eventually the IAEA got back in to Tuawaitha months later they discovered the Iraqi guards had buggered off and the American forces still hadn't secured the site. The locals had looted the accessible bunkers and storehouses and stolen the yellowcake, tipping out the useless powder to use the plastic bins it had been stored in for drinking water.

    American troops had actually visited the site in April, a few months after the invasion kicked off. They did nothing except break the IAEA seals on the bunkers where the HDX and RDX was stored then buggered off again without securing the explosives. The soldiers who did this posted selfies of themselves doing it...

    1033:

    How would sleep apnea increase the risk of motor vehicle collisions? Tiredness. I have severe sleep apnoea. My CPAP machine uploads treatment records to my respiratory medicine clinic via the internet. If I drop below a threshold percentage treatment record I will lose my driving licence. Since beginning CPAP several years ago I no longer have interrupted sleep and I have fewer apnoeic episodes than normal people.

    1034:

    I’m a bit confused - I did mean S.M.Stirling, and I was sure I’d written Stirling with an I. Maybe you mean that it’s incorrect to omit the leading initials?

    I haven’t read any of Draka, but when referred to it I did read the Wikipedia and TVTropes pieces about it and some reviews. I poked about in virtual worlds when they were a thing, and you would occasionally encounter avatars that presented as lipstick lesbian women, whose profiles proudly declared they were straight men in RL. They would present a view where their role play affairs with each other are morally equivalent to “using porn”, which they also apparently felt was self evidently totally unproblematic in itself, despite being married to partners who object to this behaviour. My perspective on S.M.S places his form of storytelling in the same basic category as these men/boys. Life is a rich tapestry. If that’s what you’re into and so long as you aren’t hurting anyone, sure go for it. But it’s not my thing, and I’m not really interested in the what someone like that has to say on other topics, albeit if they are discrete about it I’d never know (spoiler: I prefer not to).

    In total contrast I’m familiar with Bruce Sterling and I really like his stuff. I first encountered him on the steampunk thing he co-authored with William Gibson. You could pretty much tell which bits were written by which author just by tone. Very different, not related in any way and I had not meant to make any connection.

    Homonyms are fun, no?

    1035:

    Quite so - my remarks relate to an incident where S.M.Stirling himself turned up on the comments thread of an Australian author's blog. Clumsy thinker, lots of assumptions, holds tenaciously onto the egregiously wrong-headed "objecting to one ideological position automatically means you subscribe to (what I think is) its opposite". Look I'm sure he's fine for the people who like the sorts of things he writes, and I'm sure his form of argument works for some people.

    I don't mind Charlie's interjection though - I haven't read Holy Fire and I realise I haven't read nearly enough of Sterling. This is fortuitous as I've fallen into re-readings lately, actually just finished both Delirium Brief and Labyrinth Index back to back, was about to start on China Mieville. Instead, I can see a Kindle binge on Sterling occupying this niche in my time for the next few weeks quite nicely.

    1036:

    David L That reminded me of something ... then I remembered The "Dutch Settlers" in S Africa undertook theor "Great Trek" to avoid intolerable (Brit) government interference - the abolition of slavery in the colonies in 1833, oops.

    1037:

    You said "For that matter, the first time I saw in SF a hint that the USA could have a future as a nothingberger was in some Heinlein juvie, which I read as a juvie, in which there was a galactic? UN type of gathering to discuss the future of something or other -- maybe even of the earth? And out of a nostalgic/historic sense, the wimpy little rep of the US was given a seat when by rights it didn't have one. I was probably 8 or 9 when I read that. Which rocked me back and I sat and thought about it for a while, including, well Rome fell . . . ."

    The bit you recall was in "Stranger In a Strange Land", which was not by any stretch of the imagination, even with the assistance of psychotropic drugs not yet discovered, one of Heinlein's juvenile novels.

    1038:

    39 years as a computer professional. Every job offered different insurance. Several companies, including my last one, changed plans, because one company or another jacked their rates up so high the company couldn't afford it. The last company I worked for dropped Cigna one year, for that reason.

    One smaller company I worked for, I heard the insurer they'd been with had jacked it up 20% or 30% in a year.

    We won't even mention how Aetna, when I was on COBRA for years, I finally had to drop, because, in FL, in 13 months, jacked my rates up 100%. ($355->$575->$725, so yes, I really did mean 100%).

    A lot of those that leave will be the bad docs, and the ones who were in it to get rich.

    1039:

    Sorry, nope yourself. During 'Nam, we saw plenty of reason to not belive the government.

    BUT I didn't start hearing the drumbeat of "don't trust the government, the government is the problem until St. Ronnie".

    1040:

    Yeah. To be clear, the joke I was given in the form of a blue print was for a "simple, overbuilt" nuclear bomb that was about 1 x 3 meters and weighed I don't remember how many tonnes. Just to make sure it worked. I don't think even a brontosaur could have fit it in a backpack.

    IIRC the firing circuit diagram had something like eighteen short circuits in it, too. Maybe that was how it was supposed to fire?

    In other words, it was an engineering joke, and indeed it did recommend processing a rather large amount of uranium yellow pigment and tap water to get the right isotopes of uranium and hydrogen. The instructions for safely machining the plutonium were of the "be careful until you get it right" variety.

    It also recommended being on the other side of the planet from where you decided to test detonate it.

    1041:

    Yeah, the ongoing surface storage of massive amounts of UF6 in large yards gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies, because many of the yards are within smoke plume distance (or even just in) densely populated areas, and if you were to say, drop a fueled up airliner on it, the resulting fire would give a good plume of HF-compound material laced with uranyl compounds, over a wide area.

    1042:

    Maybe that's a feature, not a bug...

    Actually, I was thinking the same thing, and wondering why something horribly toxic would be stored in a way that it was handled minimally and couldn't leak into, say, an underground storage facility that someone would have to enter to clean up. And that might have given me an answer, in the old "the solution to pollution is dilution" sense of problem-solving.

    But no doubt I'm wrong.

    What I'm surprised about is that no one's done a Godzilla movie where that big radioactive fire breather and cohorts don't run on a bioradiological physiology that utilizes fluorine to as part of an internal isotopic separation system. Then they could make the movies R, rather than PG, and show the misery left behind any time one of the daikaiju had to defecate... It would have made the last two movies that much more entertaining, I think.

    1043:

    I belong, for varying values of "belong", to a fannish group call GT, which is heavily techie. About a dozen years ago, we came up with a GT system equivalent to defcon. Let's see, I think it was... 1. "Is it supposed to do that?" 2. "I'm not sure about this", over the phone. 3. "This is not a good thing" from the other side of the country 4. "Oh, oh, " from the other side of the planet 5. "This isn't going well...zzzzz" via ansible from another solar system.

    1044:

    Well, Ellen and I are having "fun". Our absentee ballots for the MD primaries, and several elections, came in the mail today, and we're filling them out, so I can drop them, along with some bills, at the Post Office tomorrow.

    Voting for school board candidates, well, I tend to lean towards who the teachers' union supports (unless, of course, they've not endorsed someone).

    Judges. I hate trying to select judges. I never really know enough about them - not just who's endorsed them, but how they've ruled on the bench.

    Bleah.

    1045:

    Well, it's not like Texas where the zoning regulations allowed the building of a high school right next to an never-inspected ammonia fertiliser plant.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Fertilizer_Company_explosion

    Fifteen dead, over a hundred buildings demolished.

    There are dozens, hundreds of similar disasters from chemicals, explosions and toxic chemical releases (Bhopal, Brent Alpha, Deepwater Horizon, Aberfan etc.) At least the containers of UF6 aren't going to spontaneously explode unlike billions of tonnes of fertiliser, petrochemicals, military weapons etc. around the world. The "crashing airliner" scenario would be a lot worse if, for example, it hit a pesticide plant or an oil refinery or many other high-energy chemical facilities around the world.

    1046:

    There are probably websites for that, since lawyers appearing before a new judge for the first time always want to come up to speed on their history pretty quickly. Otherwise you are left with reading law reports, which are not the most entertaining thing, nor I imagine especially edifying.

    The Maryland Bar Association might have resources (assuming that is where they have done their judging)? And I suppose election tracking sites.

    1047:

    I'm still working as a contractor, with Medicare. I had issues too, just different from yours. I was a contractor from 1998 - 2008. When I lived in Washington State, I got insurance from the Washington Software Association which had a group plan for independent contractors. I was paying about 1K per month for 2 adults and 2 children. When we moved to Colorado, the cheapest I could find was $1.5K and so we did without insurance for about 5 years. Ten years of working for a small self-insured company. I learned a lot about how hard it is to get estimates for procedures. One anesthesiology practice never responded to about 5 queries. For a procedure I needed, the local hospital said $16K total, the hospital 2 hours down I-70 said $12K and the ambulatory surgery center about 10 miles from the first place said $8K. The $8K version was fine.

    You could be right about which ones get out. I think though that the current medical training regimen is set up to give the medical graduate the mindset that "you suffered so much, you deserve to be rich".

    Regarding you absentee ballots...Colorado has had totally by mail elections since 2013. The part I like best is that, when you come to the judges or the U of Colorado Regent candidates or initiatives, you're at home with access to the net, so you can spend as much time as you want reading about Judge Smith or Prop 105. Colorado at least has a website where you can find out if the judge did something that he or she got scolded for or worse. Still not enough though.

    There have been very few problems with voter fraud, except for a Republican party official who also voted his ex-wife's ballot. When she went to vote (there are polling places for those who didn't get a ballot) she was told that she had already voted. She ended up casting a provisional ballot and he ended up embarrassing the party and in legal trouble.

    1048:

    One that was topical again recently due to a significant anniversary that non-UK people may not have heard of:

    Aberfan The mistake that cost a village its children https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-150d11df-c541-44a9-9332-560a19828c47

    1049:

    She ended up casting a provisional ballot and he ended up embarrassing the party and in legal trouble.

    We beat that easily.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Harris_(North_Carolina_politician)#Investigation

    During the hearing Harris's son, who was(is) a prosecutor determined his dad was likely going to perjury himself on the stand and told the lawyer running the hearing. As soon as Harris's lawyer realized what was going on he asked for a recess, people talked behind closed doors, then Harris announced he was withdrawing from the election and the matter was closed.

    Well except for the hired get out the ballot guy and his minions who are currently accused of several crimes.

    1050:
    Well, it's not like Texas where the zoning regulations allowed the building of a high school right next to an never-inspected ammonia fertiliser plant.

    Um, I've worked with HF, the stuff is absolutely terrifying as a direct contact poison and as a metabolic inhibitor, and, as a geologist, am familiar with the effects of the 1783 eruption of Laki, that kicked out around 8 million tonnes of the shit - that killed 25% of the population of Iceland, and had severe effects on the population of europe (combined with the weather effects and the sulphur dioxide plume). The concept of a fire or intentional terrorist attack on any of the large (circa .5 to 1 or 2 million tonne size) hexafluoride storage yards, and the damage the HF containing smoke plume from that would do, make unregulated nitrate plants a walk in the park.

    1051:

    Most people are more afraid of change that MIGHT not work out for the better than keeping the same mediocrity.
    Nah, the biggest problem with single player is that it would be available to black people too.

    1052:

    I would guess if other western country of choice hadn't switched to single-payer/government health care 50+ years ago they also would find it impossible to switch now.
    Probably. The two systems I know (UK, France), required a world war to give people incentive to change. Germany needed Bismark.

    1053:

    Germany needed Bismark.

    Reminder that Germany as Germany (in the modern sense) didn't exist before Bismarck; Bismarck was engaged in high-level nation-building and wanted a healthy conscript army available.

    Not so much later, circa 1900-1902, recruitment drives for the British army during the Third Boer War had to reject about 50% of applicants due to bad dental health. The British army got religious about dental hygeine during that war -- it was costing them lives and damaging operational efficiency.

    1054:

    Ummm, you realise that if a million tonnes of UF6 was released and most of that formed HF then it would NOT produce a million tonnes of HF? Most of the atomic mass of the UF molecule is in the uranium atom, to start with. After that you've got reaction dynamics yadda yadda...

    An operational enrichment plant usually has a lot of highly concentrated hydrofluoric acid in stock, it's used to produce UF6 feedstock for the enrichment process (pro tip, if you're trying to hunt down a Sekrit Weapons-grade Enrichment operation somewhere look for a bunch of shady guys buying lots of HF.) Targetting those storage tanks at an enrichment plant would be simpler and provide more bang for the buck, but then again that wouldn't be a nuclear incident, quite so it wouldn't get the press that a regular chemical incident that kills dozens or hundreds of people gets.

    1055:

    Deaths registered in England and Wales for the week ending; current death rates as ratio of week average; cumulative excess and covid-assigned deaths as numbers and their ratio. 6 Mar 20: 0.96 -3673 0
    13 Mar 20: 1.00 -3712 5
    20 Mar 20: 1.01 -3659 108
    27 Mar 20: 1.08 -2814 647
    3 Apr 20: 1.59 3238 4122 0.79 10 Apr 20: 1.78 11364 10335 1.10 17 Apr 20: 2.17 23424 19093 1.23 24 Apr 20: 2.17 35277 27330 1.29 1 May 20: 1.82 43387 33365 1.30 8 May 20: 1.31 46388 37295 1.24

    We are definitely over the first peak for deaths.

    1056:

    There was more to it than that, including replacing Dutch with English for official uses, though slavery was a major factor.

    1057:

    Not quite universal. From memory most of the Scandinavian countries got theirs in the 60s and 70s. Australia tried under a Labor govt in the late 40s, failed, tried again next time there was a Labor govt in the early 70s, succeeded but the conservative govt elected controversially in 1975 neutered it. When we elected the Hawke Labor govt in the early 80s, we managed to finally bed it in properly, so much so that the (pretty unambiguously evil) Howard govt elected in 1996 felt unable to go there, despite a heartfelt expression of belief in the American way by some individual members of it.

    1058:

    You don't need a million tonnes, in a built up area, a few thousand kilos aerosolised would be plenty unpleasant for anyone in the way of the smoke plume. The main problem is the way it hoons through your nervous system collecting up calcium and Mg ions, and aerosolised you get pulmonary oedema and respiratory failure. Because we use it for dissolving rocks, it's a regular hazard in my line of work, and every palynologist has some HF horror stories. I once spent a very informative hour or two with a process engineer from BNF, with 50 years experience, detailing all the places he'd had to come down hard on people storing stupid quantities of UF6 in inadequate storage, and 30 years of contaminated site cleanup. The best one was the stockpile directly under a flightpath for an international airport.

    1059:

    Yeah, HF is why I never went into palynology, even though I worked on arbuscular mycorrhizae. I had enough horror stories from using 30% H2O2 on soil particle size analysis.

    Changing the subject slightly to palynology, I've got to sing the praises of the stuff that makes up the coats of pollen grains and (IIRC) glomalean spore wall: sporopollenin.

    It's so inert that the palynologists use HF to dissolve the rock around it, and after the acid bath, microscopic details are still visible. I know for a fact that it can last 420 million years in mycorrhizal spore walls. It's a polymer of...organic stuff, and because it's so hard to degrade, they're only now starting to figure out what goes into it.

    As a durable biological super-material, especially on the micro to nano scale, it's got a lot going for it. I'd recommend it as a replacement for plastics, except that a) it would be a royal pain to get rid of instead of just the pain of current plastics, and b) there are a fair number of people who are allergic to versions of it (I think), which is where hay fever comes from.*

    Still, if you're writing SF, look it up. It's neat stuff, and it make palynology and a lot of cool science possible. That includes paleoclimatology, incidentally.

    *alternatively, hay fever sufferers may be allergic to what's inside pollen grains. Perhaps having a pollen grain trying to hook up with your sinuses makes you sneeze?

    1060:

    There must be SOME ecological mechanism for breaking down sporopollenin, or else we would be up to our necks in it! My impression of pollen allergies is that it's not the material, but the structure/shape, though I don't know for sure.

    1061:

    Definitely time to reread "Holy Fire." For the monthly SF book club I organize, I pick one book a year (usually I put together a slate of 4 per month based on theme, geography, etc. to vote on) and next year it'll defintiely be "Holy Fire."

    1062:

    I'm going to risk looking stupid here, so here goes. I don't understand what these numbers are. The 'legend' above is for how many columns?

    Deaths registered in England and Wales for the week ending; current death rates as ratio of week average; cumulative excess and covid-assigned deaths as numbers and their ratio.

    There are 3 semi-colons, so is that for 3 columns? And if so, why do the values post 27 March have 4 columns, those before only 3? The first values for each is said to be deaths registered in England and Wales -- I think there were more than 2 for each week.

    I am not trying to be snarky, just trying to make sense of what the numbers presented mean.

    1063:

    Nah. I am too lazy to learn modern HTML tabulation, so it's not clear; I will try to improve it. Here is an explanation:

    Each row starts with a date, up until the colon. After that, there are four numbers, though the last is omitted for March (because it is statistically meaningless). They are: deaths registered in England and Wales for the week ending current death rates as ratio of week average for last 5 years cumulative excess deaths (as counts) from start of year cumulative covid-assigned deaths (as counts) from start of year ratio of the last two figures

    1064:

    Damn. Sorry - scratch that. It's twadddle. I shall start again

    Each row starts with a date, up until the colon. After that, there are four numbers, though the last is omitted for March (because it is statistically meaningless). They are:

    ratio of deaths registered in England and Wales for the week ending to current death rates as ratio of week average for last 5 years

    cumulative excess deaths (as counts) from start of year

    cumulative covid-assigned deaths (as counts) from start of year

    ratio of the last two figures

    1065:

    Apropos of nothing, an interesting read about a bloke trying to bag all five deepest points in the oceans. Long but well-written. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/18/thirty-six-thousand-feet-under-the-sea

    1066:

    Those are hard to find. I was searching for a while last night, and found one news site, "oh, the two people running against the four seated judges, they didn't get all the way through the vetting process of x number of hoops, and they're trying to get around that...."

    Maybe I should have called my recent ex, who is a lawyer, and lives in the county.

    Chose to vote for one of the ones running; the other three seated I said "ok" to.

    1067:

    Charlie Stross @ 1024:

    How would sleep apnea increase the risk of motor vehicle collisions?

    (I have a close family member who suffered from sleep apnea for years and now uses a CPAP machine.)

    Turns out that sleep apnea can lead to sleep deprivation by stealth -- you keep snoring and waking yourself up momentarily, so you never get enough consecutive hours of sleep to go into REM sleep. So you go to bed and get up 8-10 hours later but don't feel properly rested. After a while this becomes a chronic condition ... and you doze off momentarily, in micro-sleeps, several times a day, often when driving (long stretches of over-trained behaviour, not much happening).

    I thought REM sleep was when you dreamed. Can you dream without REM sleep? I mean VIVID, really weird dreams? Lots of them. The one I mentioned about someone remapping my keyboard was one of the milder ones.

    I had nightmares almost every night when I got home from Iraq. Sometimes multiple times per night. I thought it was just a symptom of PTSD. They have tapered off over the years since then, but the recent discussion of malaria drugs caused me to look up the one they gave us and one of the side effects is "sleep disruption" and I wondered if THAT was why I have so many bad dreams?

    1068:

    Hmmm... "it'll all be over by Christmas..."

    But it will. Whether that's 25 Dec 2021 or 2022 or 2023 is the question.

    1070:

    Charlie Stross @ 1026:

    Ted Taylor was the guy who did the research for the U.S. Army's "atomic hand-grenade"

    An "atomic hand grenade" is impossible with any isotopes we're able to produce a critical mass of.

    Yeah, that's what Ted Taylor showed the Army with his research. It's another iteration of Edison's "I found 10,000 ways that won't work."

    The Davy Crockett is as close as anyone ever got. It was one of four weapons to use the W-54 physics package:

    Ted Taylor helped develop the W-54. The Davey Crockett was what eventually resulted from the "atomic hand-grenade" project; the 10,001st way they tried. He reportedly told the Army "one the size of a watermelon would definitely work; one the size of an orange would definitely NOT work; and one the size of a grapefruit might work, it was 50-50".

    The Davey Crockett was about the size of a watermelon. I've heard it described as looking like a "pumpkin on the end of a broomstick". I've seen one up close enough to touch it. Of course, it didn't have a real bomb inside the warhead.

    The Curve of Binding Energy isn't even about nuclear weapons development. It's about how inadequately nuclear materials were protected in the U.S. and how easy it would be for [domestic] terrorists to steal them to build a "dirty bomb". IIRC, he was mostly worried about criminals building one to use for extortion, but he was already aware of what would grow into the white supremacist militia movement.

    Hopefully at least some of the things he worried about have been addressed since then.

    1071:

    A quote from my MP - whom I know as you also know ...

    “Take, for example, the immigrant who came to us having failed his exams with a patchy work history and no ties to the UK. His name was Albert Einstein. Even then, in the 1930s, the UK border authorities misplaced his papers. His landing card was only found in a trawl of old paperwork in Heathrow in 2011.

    “Back then, the Daily Mail urged readers to avoid him and boycott his lectures raising money for other refugees from Nazi Europe. Back then, another MP, Oliver Locker-Lampson, tried to sponsor his British citizenship and help Jews fleeing the Nazis. Back then, we said no and we lost Einstein to America.”

    Thats' right, the Daily fucking Hate Mail didn't want Einstein in this country .....

    1072:

    David L @ 1030:

    Then throw in the distrust of the government, the "government is the problem" junk started by Reagan

    Nope, nope, nopity nope nope. (To near quote Charlie from the past.)

    Distrust/dislike of the US federal government goes back 200+ years. Our dust up 1860-1865 only entrenched it in the minds of many and most of their descendants.

    Much of the western migration that wasn't tied to gold and money was about getting away from the governments of the east."

    Of course the governments followed much to the displeasure of many of the descendants of those.

    Plus corporations have been spreading anti-government sentiment since at least the early 1800s. Seems like there are always two competing groups of corporations; those on the inside looting the treasury and those on the outside bad-mouthing government until they can kick the current group of thieves out and replace them at the trough.

    1073:

    OTOH There's today's Google Doodle & the statues I walk past every time I go through Liverpool St station. And the Winton train - yes, I was there ......

    1074:

    There must be SOME ecological mechanism for breaking down sporopollenin, or else we would be up to our necks in it! My impression of pollen allergies is that it's not the material, but the structure/shape, though I don't know for sure.

    Actually, there are two reasons you're not up to your neck in it. One is that you're standing on it, a second is that the stuff you're standing on can erode, and a third is that stuff that gets eroded can, in some circumstances, be deposited in places where it gets subducted, and thereby heated and pressurized to the point that it does break down.

    But yes, there are a lot of pollen fragments in the dirt at your feet. Among other things.

    1075:

    Damian @ 1034: I’m a bit confused - I did mean S.M.Stirling, and I was sure I’d written Stirling with an I. Maybe you mean that it’s incorrect to omit the leading initials?

    I haven’t read any of Draka, but when referred to it I did read the Wikipedia and TVTropes pieces about it and some reviews. I poked about in virtual worlds when they were a thing, and you would occasionally encounter avatars that presented as lipstick lesbian women, whose profiles proudly declared they were straight men in RL. They would present a view where their role play affairs with each other are morally equivalent to “using porn”, which they also apparently felt was self evidently totally unproblematic in itself, despite being married to partners who object to this behaviour. My perspective on S.M.S places his form of storytelling in the same basic category as these men/boys. Life is a rich tapestry. If that’s what you’re into and so long as you aren’t hurting anyone, sure go for it. But it’s not my thing, and I’m not really interested in the what someone like that has to say on other topics, albeit if they are discrete about it I’d never know (spoiler: I prefer not to).

    I looked at the Wikipedia bibliography For S.M. Stirling, and I guess I've read quite a few of his books, although the "Draka" books passed me by. I've read his Nantucket series, The General series he wrote with David Drake and the Falkenberg's Legion books he wrote with Jerry Pournelle and I didn't get any of that. At most some of his characters are despicable people who don't get the comeuppance they deserve. Maybe that's different in the "Draka" books.

    1076:

    Re: 'Can you dream without REM sleep? I mean VIVID, really weird dreams? Lots of them.'

    Yes - Non-REM (NREM) dreaming is a thing. Not common/typical but does happen.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rapid_eye_movement_sleep

    1077:

    Specialist @ 1037: You said "For that matter, the first time I saw in SF a hint that the USA could have a future as a nothingberger was in some Heinlein juvie, which I read as a juvie, in which there was a galactic? UN type of gathering to discuss the future of something or other -- maybe even of the earth? And out of a nostalgic/historic sense, the wimpy little rep of the US was given a seat when by rights it didn't have one. I was probably 8 or 9 when I read that. Which rocked me back and I sat and thought about it for a while, including, well Rome fell . . . ."

    The bit you recall was in "Stranger In a Strange Land", which was not by any stretch of the imagination, even with the assistance of psychotropic drugs not yet discovered, one of Heinlein's juvenile novels.

    Might have been Have Space Suit—Will Travel. It's one of Heinlein's juveniles that has an intergalactic tribunal judging the human race & the teenage protagonist makes a stirring speech that leads the judges to grant earth a stay of execution & decide to bring the matter up for reconsideration in another 200,000 years.

    1078:

    whitroth @ 1039: Sorry, nope yourself. During 'Nam, we saw plenty of reason to not belive the government.

    BUT I didn't start hearing the drumbeat of "don't trust the government, the government is the problem until St. Ronnie".

    Right back atcha ... I remember the Army-McCarthy hearings being on TV when I was a child. Looking it up, that was in 1954. "St. Ronnie" was still a Democrat.

    ... and the John Birch Society was formed in 1958.

    1079:

    "An "atomic hand grenade" is impossible with any isotopes we're able to produce a critical mass of."

    First: Ted Taylor's limit pertains only to U235 and Pu239 and any mixture thereof.

    But second: It is not really about isotopes anyway.

    There are about a dozen isotopes in that neighborhood, which by definition must have a critical mass, and you will be very hard pressed to find numbers for that anywhere in open literature.

    If you look specifically at isotopes of Americum, there are both raw cross-section numbers, and a few odd reseach papers, which more than hint at a particular low critical mass.

    IAEA's "shitlist" of "special nuclear materials" used to contain only U235 and Pu239, but somewhere in the aftermath of Chernobyl and the fall of the Wall, it suddenly grew "a lot", and that was the sudden end of smoke-detectors based on Americum.

    If you posit an hypothetical isotope with a critical mass of a 1cm diameter sphere, and then simulate the smallest realistic implosion mechanism, the result is "very underwhelming": There is neither enough mass nor inward momentum to hold things together long enough for the chain reaction to really get going before it blows itself apart.

    In other words: The lower limit on "useful" fission bombs seems to be about much heavy metal and high explosive your wrap around it, more than which isotope and how much of it you use.

    This might also explain why the W54 is the least efficient fielded nuclear weapon, in terms of kilotons per kilo of special nuclear material.

    But an "atomic handgrenade" as such is probably not impossible, and we can certainly produce the isotopes in question in the required amounts, but you would probably do more damage with the same amount of high explosive in a conventional handgrenade.

    1080:

    Windscale @ 1048: One that was topical again recently due to a significant anniversary that non-UK people may not have heard of:

    Aberfan
    The mistake that cost a village its children
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-150d11df-c541-44a9-9332-560a19828c47

    I knew about that. Might have been mentioned here sometime since I started reading Charlie's blog, but I had read about it.

    1081:

    Colchicine is another option, very effective.

    1082:

    David L @ 1049:

    She ended up casting a provisional ballot and he ended up embarrassing the party and in legal trouble.

    We beat that easily."

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Harris_(North_Carolina_politician)#Investigation

    During the hearing Harris's son, who was(is) a prosecutor determined his dad was likely going to perjury himself on the stand and told the lawyer running the hearing. As soon as Harris's lawyer realized what was going on he asked for a recess, people talked behind closed doors, then Harris announced he was withdrawing from the election and the matter was closed.

    Well except for the hired get out the ballot guy and his minions who are currently accused of several crimes.

    For some reason I thought "the hired get out the ballot guy" had already pleaded guilty in order to get a lighter sentence, but apparently not:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_North_Carolina's_9th_congressional_district_election#Election_board_hearings

    1083:

    I thought REM sleep was when you dreamed. Can you dream without REM sleep? I mean VIVID, really weird dreams?

    Yes, REM sleep is when you experience dreaming: to the best of my knowledge, you don't dream during other phases of sleep.

    For real nightmare juice, look into fatal insomnia, a prion disease that (as the name suggests) has the main symptom of insomnia (leading to waking hallucinations, delirium, and dementia-like symptoms) and is invariably fatal in around 18 months on average.

    1084:

    Colchicine also causes peripheral neuropathy if you over-do it, IIRC. (I ... memorably ... spotted it via the prescription chart of a hospital admission in the mid-80s; they were being prescribed peripheral vasodilators for cold extremities and were on a maintenance dose of colchicine that the house officer had just copied down from the prescription meds they'd brought in when they were admitted, and one thing led to another and it turned out that, welp, that was the problem right there.)

    It was already deprecated in the UK by the late 80s. Side-effects were too dangerous (and permanent).

    1085:

    Re: 'How would sleep apnea increase the risk of motor vehicle collisions?'

    Sorry - I missed this comment earlier.

    Anyways, it's mostly what Charlie and other commenters said. If you'd like more science-y/technical detail, see below.

    This article basically says ‘yes’ – sleep apnea = higher accident rate:

    ‘Obstructive Sleep Apnea and Risk of Motor Vehicle Crash: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis’

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2792976/

    This article does a slightly better job of answering your question of how/why:

    ‘Sleep apnoea and driving risk: the need for regulation’

    https://err.ersjournals.com/content/24/138/602

    This article is the most technical and in-depth as to the mechanics:

    ‘Pathophysiology of Sleep Apnea’

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3970937/

    Learned a bit about sleep apnea after my mother’s second series of strokes affected her autonomic breathing/swallowing controls. Mostly learned that -- same as other taken-for-granted basic biological functions --- sleep is complicated and so is breathing. Lots of different little piddly things can go wrong. And it can be hard to identify exactly what’s wrong or not working quite as it should/used to without an extensive checklist and possibly some pricey-ish diagnostics. There’s also: what non-Rx/medical device can I do/use that will help and not harm. The hospital's occupational therapist and physiotherapist provided us with some general info pamphlets as well as specifics of what to watch for and some recommended do’s/don’ts. I didn’t keep any of that material after my mother passed away but I imagine they’re pretty standard and commonly distributed patient pamphlets.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5700252/

    This article discusses the relationship between sleep deprivation (apnea) and heart attacks. Has a few diagrams to assist comprehension. Impressive author list and highly cited. Every once in a while there's a headline about someone who had a heart attack while driving and causing massive damage/injury.

    'Sleep Apnea and Cardiovascular Disease'

    https://www.onlinejacc.org/content/52/8/686.abstract

    1086:

    Have Spacesuit, Will Travel was the one I was thinking of, as well - I just forgot about posting it.

    I'd read stuff like The Spaceship Under the Apple Tree, and a year or two later, Red Planet Mars, but the one that lights up in my memory was being about 12, and reading HS,WT.

    Just struck me, of course, that he might have been playing the title on Have Gun, Will Travel, which was a really good western TV show, where he rarely used his gun. (He was actually more of a fixer.)

    1087:

    Sorry, but I don't buy that. Plants produce a lot of pollen (even enough to be a food for humans in some cases), and a lot of places have had a long time since subduction. If those were the only mechanisms, high-humus (say, peat) soils that have been subject to extensive oxidisation would have it as a major constituent, and it would accumulate in all soils not subject to significant erosion. At least some bacteria and fungi do attack it:

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780121357504500237 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780121357504500225

    1088:

    Poul-Henning Kamp @ 1079:

    "An "atomic hand grenade" is impossible with any isotopes we're able to produce a critical mass of."

    First: Ted Taylor's limit pertains only to U235 and Pu239 and any mixture thereof.

    But second: It is not really about isotopes anyway.

    There are about a dozen isotopes in that neighborhood, which by definition must have a critical mass, and you will be very hard pressed to find numbers for that anywhere in open literature.

    [...]

    But an "atomic handgrenade" as such is probably not impossible, and we can certainly produce the isotopes in question in the required amounts, but you would probably do more damage with the same amount of high explosive in a conventional handgrenade.

    "An "atomic hand grenade" is impossible ..." was Charlie's statement, not mine. I'm not a nuclear physicist. I was an NBC (Nuclear, Biological & Chemical) specialist in the National Guard.

    I picked up odd bits of lore along the way, including that the Army did try to develop an "atomic hand-grenade", but were unsuccessful for "reasons" illustrated in the apocryphal statement about watermelons, oranges & grapefruits. Seems like anyone who ran across those odd little bits of lore just couldn't wait to share them with me so I could add them to my collection.

    Another apocryphal story about the project was they managed to develop a weapon with a blast radius of about 300 yards, but the farthest anyone was able to throw the prototype mock-up was around a hundred feet. That was why they ended up with the Davey Crockett as a projectile fired from a reconciles rifle, to get it far enough away from whoever was using it so that it wouldn't kill them outright.

    I also had a class on how to fire the 8 inch round from a howitzer (charge 9, 100' lanyard and the recoil mechanism is condemned so that the gun has to go back to depot to be rebuilt before it can be used again). I have no idea why the Army thought I needed to learn this since I wasn't in the artillery, but maybe it was because I was assigned to a helicopter unit & part of the class was how to properly secure the crate for the round in a UH-1 so that it wouldn't accidentally trip any of the safeties if the helicopter crashed with the round on board.

    There's a declassified video on YouTube about how to prepare the Atomic Demolition Munition for parachute delivery by special forces Parachutist/Swimmer.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kw576WppJfw

    There's another film I've been looking for that I haven't been able to find. After the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty went into effect the Army still needed to test effects of an atomic blast. Since they couldn't use an actual nuke, they built a 1Kt conventional explosive ... a stack of conventional high explosives the size of a McMansion. Then they set it off.

    The 1988 PEPCON explosion was estimated to be approximately 1Kt. It's amazing it only killed two people. The West Fertilizer Company in West, Texas explosion in 2013 was only equivalent to 7.5-10 tons of TNT.

    1089:

    whitroth @ 1086: Have Spacesuit, Will Travel was the one I was thinking of, as well - I just forgot about posting it.

    I'd read stuff like The Spaceship Under the Apple Tree, and a year or two later, Red Planet Mars, but the one that lights up in my memory was being about 12, and reading HS,WT.

    Just struck me, of course, that he might have been playing the title on Have Gun, Will Travel, which was a really good western TV show, where he rarely used his gun. (He was actually more of a fixer.)

    Yep, Paladin was a Paladin.

    1090:

    Me @ 1088: That should be "recoilless rifle".

    1091:

    The Earth scenes in Citizen of the Galaxy with the corrupt judge and the power of the corporate executive and litigation grinding down ring unfortunately true to life today. If there is a second term then perhaps Revolt in 2100 will need dusting off. Generally for me his early work dates better than the later stuff (probably the Moon is a Harsh Mistress is the latest one which I would recommend to people younger than me).

    1092:

    We are definitely over the first peak for deaths

    It sure looks like it and those are encouraging numbers. Fingers crossed that it isn’t 1918 again.

    It occurs to me that there is now enough data to do 3-week average plots for these, and national comparisons would be possible. Also possible would be a Poisson distribution model which could yield a threshold figure that could accurately tell when the trend toward the next peak has started, and that would be the final trigger (as in “you don’t need more evidence than this”, doing it with less evidence might still be indicated) for reinstating restrictions (assuming they are relaxed at some stage). I’m not a statistician, but this is in public health 101 to some extent.

    1093:

    A good short cut might be to avoid voting for any judge who doesn't have experience as both a prosecutor and a defense attorney.

    1094:

    A better long term solution would be to remove electoral calculus from judicial and prosecutorial offices and turn them into impartial non-partisan civil service jobs. So that prosecutors aren't grandstanding by hanging folks out to dry every election year, and judges aren't running in a popularity contest with points scored for brutality.

    (But then, the entire US electoral/civil service system is hopelessly compromised by corrupt lobbying money and party politics.)

    1095:

    Yes, and some people (not me) are doing that. The problem about predicting the next peak is that you need up-to-date measurements of people infected, not fortnight-old death rates, and the former is horribly dependent on artifacts of measurement. For example:

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/coronavirus-testing-uk-hospitals-who-nhs-scientific-advice-a9522956.html

    1096:

    you need up-to-date measurements

    Who in government wins when those are produced, and who wins if they're published?

    As the UK government said just recently: ████████████████████████████████████████████████ ████████████████████████████████████████████████ ████████████████████████████████████████████████ ████████████████████████████████████████████████ ████████████████████████████████████████████████

    1097:

    (But then, the entire US electoral/civil service system is hopelessly compromised by corrupt lobbying money and party politics.)

    The general problem is that we want a system, any system, that promotes virtuous behavior and punishes corruption.

    There are three general classes of models for doing this. They are not mutually exclusive: 1) Let the strongest people run things, because a virtuous strong person can accomplish more good faster than any group government can. 2) Set up a meritocratic system, wherein people are tested on skill and virtue, and the best are promoted and the rest weeded out if they become a problem. 3) Set up a system that allows people to vote/weigh in, in order to provide group feedback from the governed on the performance of those in charge. 4) Set up a term-limited system using 1-3 above, to force turnover, so that incumbency doesn't incentivize corruption.

    We've also tried rule by the dangerous, the charismatic, the intelligent, the skilled, or the rich. And indeed, I think we've got examples of all 15 systems, term-limited or not, in history if not in current practice. And if every one of these has been tried, and I don't think any has proved to be idiot-proof, let alone villain-proof. Certainly none are failure-proof or catastrophe-proof.

    The term-limits failures are particularly interesting. We have term limits in California, in large part the result of a black man (Willie Brown) being in power long term in the state legislature. The result is that the expert knowledge and long-term memory tends to come to reside in the bureaucrats, lobbyists, consultants, and activists. They either can become the unelected rulers of the system, or get ignored, while those in power tend to gravitate towards preparing themselves for their next job more than doing their current one. Worse, with extremely complex systems like California, those elected under term limits often don't learn to do their jobs competently before being termed out, due to the length of the learning curve.

    On the other hand, our species survived with band-level social structures for 300,000-odd years. If you're in a really bad mood, you may think that this, with a few million humans as a global population, would have been optimal for our species long-term resilience. Unfortunately we've screwed up in our quest for "more" and "better," and now we're stuck trying not to kill billions of people with our brilliant innovations.

    1098:

    You may be. But in the next few weeks, the US is reopening, and we're already seeing all them white* states doing it first and stupidest... and the new cases are headed upwards.

    • They're not RED, dammit, I'm a red.
    1099:

    If, by party politics, you mean the GOP rules to outsource EVERYBLOODYTHING*, you're right.

    • Note I worked for 10 years, in the same job, as a "contractor". There was a woman I worked with who was there 27 years, doing the same thing, as a contractor....
    1100:

    impartial non-partisan

    No such thing.

    1101:

    The Manhattan Project built and set off a large pile of high explosives shortly before the Trinity test in July 1945, something like several hundred tonnes or so. It was actually intended to calibrate blast and overpressure instruments and damage sensors.

    A conventional chemical explosion is actually very different to an atomic explosion -- most of the chemical blast results in rapidly-cooling hot air travelling at the speed of sound[1] with only some of the energy radiated as heat at the speed of light whereas it's the other way around with a nuke with the added bonus of X-rays, gamma radiation and nuclear particles. There's no real point building a "chemical" version of a nuke if you want to gather data about the nuclear part of the deal and the damage it does isn't the same either.

    [1] The speed of sound depends on temperature, not pressure and it doesn't scale fast -- the speed of sound in air at 1000 Kelvin is only double that at room temperature.

    1102:

    Agreed completely. My other fantasy is that someone makes service on both sides of the system a requirement rather than merely a good idea, but I don't have any expectations that it will happen.

    1103:

    'Distraction'

    Randy Rainbow's got a new YT video out today sung to the tune of 'Tradition' (Fiddler on the Roof).

    1104:

    There's no real point building a "chemical" version of a nuke if you want to gather data about the nuclear part of the deal and the damage it does isn't the same either.

    True, but the post-nuclear part is of interest and, besides, the relevant tests are just a lot of fun to carry out. I used to have a picture of some people standing grinning in front of the huge dome of explosives used in Minor Scale.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_Scale

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misty_Picture

    https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/ops/minor-uncle.htm

    1106:

    "There are about a dozen isotopes in that neighborhood, which by definition must have a critical mass, and you will be very hard pressed to find numbers for that anywhere in open literature."

    It can't be that hard, because I've looked them over. Might well have been on wikipedia, but if it wasn't it wasn't anywhere much more exotic.

    "IAEA's "shitlist" of "special nuclear materials" used to contain only U235 and Pu239, but somewhere in the aftermath of Chernobyl and the fall of the Wall, it suddenly grew "a lot", and that was the sudden end of smoke-detectors based on Americum."

    Yer wot? You can still get them. And there's no fission-related reason why you shouldn't. 241Am is not one of the isotopes with a particularly low critical mass, indeed I'm fairly sure it's one of the rather high ones. And there is such a tiny amount in each one that you'd have to collect several billion of them to get enough to make a nuke with. Even David Hahn would be hard put to get enough of them.

    But in any case there's no real point in trying to make a bomb with one of the notably small critical mass isotopes. They're not that small. Even the good ones are still comparable with 239Pu, but a flaming sight harder to get hold of. And you still get the problem that the implosion system inevitably dwarfs the actual fissile bit. You're better off using readily-available plutonium inefficiently and skimping on the implosion system; something like imploding an annulus with a bit of extra help from the alpha/delta phase transition. And use a stick grenade pattern to make it easier to throw a long way. To be sure only a tiny bit of it will actually go, but that's still enough to give you grenades with the power of giant shells, and certainly plenty to have a big problem with not blowing yourself up with it.

    1107:

    re: [quote][quote]impartial non-partisan[/quote]

    No such thing.[/quote]

    Not quite true, but if you find that person you also find not interested.

    1109:

    New L M Bujold Penric/Desdemona short out a day or so back ..... "The Physician of Vilnoc" [ Kindle ]

    1110:

    Dreams can occur in all stages of sleep. They are easier to recall from REM sleep. But dreams in REM sleep are weirder than those in NREM sleep leading to suggestions that the more structured dreams of NREM sleep may be more important to memory consolidation.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC534695/

    1111:

    Charlie: “impartial non-partisan” David L: No such thing.

    This isn’t really true. It has been claimed that facts are partisan. But that’s only true when one (or more) partisan group declares anything that isn’t biased towards them as biased against them. Such a declaration automatically declares any inconvenient facts as biased to the other side.

    Most highly partisan groups perceive media bias against their point of view, by the way. Highly partisan people may (and very likely do) perceive the exact same report on some topic that part of their ideological position as biased to the other side, most of the time.

    In contrast professional practitioners are usually somewhat removed from this stuff, their subject matter is usually regarded apolitically, or at least historically this has been the case even if the current trend toward disrespect for specialist knowledge is changing the situation now. I think that to get this properly, you need to consider your own professional expertise that you use to achieve certain outcomes on behalf of your clients, employers or whatever. Sure sometimes the outcomes are political, but usually you’re on someone else’s dollar and you work toward their objectives. Consider being told that the only way to ensure your work outcomes are fair is to require elections and limit your tenure. How would that affect your work?

    Bias is stuff like opposing the CDC studying gun violence as a public health issue. Supporting such a study is in general is a matter of supporting a professional approach to how to handle leading cases of death and reduce them. If you think that it’s “political”, simply because someone has made a political stance against it, you’re engaging in a pretty classic logical fallacy and it’s not possible to argue this position with good faith (it’s not possible that you really believe what you are arguing).

    1112:

    Highly partisan people may ... perceive the exact same report on some topic ... as biased to the other side ...

    I remember Linda Ellerbee (an American TV journalist) writing of a high profile piece on abortion, "We got equal amounts of hate mail from both sides, so I suppose we covered it fairly."

    1113:

    Yeah - there’s a lot to be said for an editorial policy to offend everyone.

    1114:

    (replying to myself: it occurred to me that this is once again not directed entirely fairly by responding to David L. David, where I say “if you do this or that” above, I’m not literally meaning you, it’s a figure of speech and I haven’t been as careful with it as I should. I realise you’re not making the sort of argument that I describe here, and apologise if it comes across as antagonistic... it wasn’t supposed to be).

    1115:

    It isn't just not true - it's demonstrably false. Facts are never partisan, though the selection and presentation of them very often is - the people who claim that the facts themselves are partisans are the 'post truth' brigade who want to be able to deceive people without being contradicted.

    To make official posts impartial and non-partisan is tricky, but not impossible. The key is that the entirely of the organisation must be free of partisan control, and set up to jealously maintain its independence. Its remit must be clear and open, and any external enforcement of that must ALSO be free of partisan control.

    The UK used to be better in this respect, though the police and judiciary have never been shining examples - despite the frequent claims that they are - but they are one hell of a lot better than most of those in the USA, even now. The scientific civil service (in all its aspects) used to be much closer, but the Blessed Margaret authorised the mandarinate to effectively eliminate it - and things have got worse since, with all senior scientists being political appointments, and often more politician than scientist themselves.

    1116:

    No such thing.

    You're a USAn; I could pass comment about how fish are unable to perceive water as wet, but it'd be redundant.

    (There are things wrong with the British judicial/prosecutorial model, but they're much less wrong overall than the USAn model. Hint: in particular, which party you're a member of doesn't have any impact on promotion of judges or prosecutors. If it did, it'd be a major scandal and quite likely illegal.)

    1117:

    Meanwhile ... W.T.F?? And, incidentally, 50/49 years since Black Arrow - killed by the madwoman ...

    1118:

    Indeed. As I understand it, 250 km is about the lowest useful orbit; other than being a stealth test of a ballistic missile, I can't see the point in one with a limit of 100 km.

    1119:

    and apologise if it comes across as antagonistic... it wasn’t supposed to be

    Not a problem at all. You stated your point and got no where near the "Jane, you ignorant slut" type of comment that others here do.

    1120:

    100km, the Karman Line, recognised by everyone except the US Air Force as the edge of space. There's a small but regular market for sub-orbital launches for science packages, not much observation time but you usually get your payload back for possible reflight. I was mildly surprised that after its X-Prize flights Spaceship One didn't go for that market, but it had some viscious spin problems on a couple of flights which may have proved to be a fundemental flaw.

    1121:

    You're a USAn; I could pass comment about how fish are unable to perceive water as wet, but it'd be redundant.

    Back at you. Totally.

    We're similar but different paths to the same destinations. We're just closer to the bad end point that you are.

    Fish in water indeed.

    And I'm formed that opinion reading what you and the other UK folks have written here over the last 10 years.

    1122:

    An interesting and probably quite important paper in Nature Climate Change. It has a few dry but overt notes to policy makers and activists (nice to see). Temporary reduction in daily global CO2 emissions during the COVID-19 forced confinement (Nature Climate Change, 19 May 2020) [1] Our sensitivity tests do not attempt to quantify the effects of multiple confinement waves, or of deeper and sustained changes in the economy that could result from either the collapse of tens of thousands of small and medium businesses or government economic stimulus packages. ... Still, opportunities exist to set structural changes in motion by implementing economic stimuli aligned with low carbon pathways. ... Our study reveals how responsive the surface transportation sector’s emissions can be to policy changes and economic shifts. Surface transport accounts for nearly half the decrease in emissions during confinement, and active travel (walking and cycling, including e-bikes) has attributes of social distancing that are likely to be desirable for some time27 and could help to cut back CO2 emissions and air pollution as confinement is eased. ... The extent to which world leaders consider the net-zero emissions targets and the imperatives of climate change when planning their economic responses to COVID-19 is likely to influence the pathway of CO2 emissions for decades to come.

    Their most plausible sensitivity test is this one IMO: In the third sensitivity test, we made the same assumption as in the second test, but further assumed that confinement level 1 remains in place in all the countries examined until the end of the year. ... In this case, the decrease in emissions from the COVID-19 crisis would be –2,729 (–986 to –4,717) MtCO2 or –7.5% (–2.7 to –13%).

    But as they say, it does not cover a multiple (or rolling) peaks or the some of the downstream effects (business failures, economic stimulus packages) to the global economies, or ... [other unmodeled downstream effects]. And the error bars allow for a 13 percent reduction (roughly within my back-of-the-envelope estimates range). (I am still digesting the methods part of it; the uncertainties in the estimates in the paper are large.)

    [1] Author list, since it is an important paper: Corinne Le Quéré, Robert B. Jackson, Matthew W. Jones, Adam J. P. Smith, Sam Abernethy, Robbie M. Andrew, Anthony J. De-Gol, David R. Willis, Yuli Shan, Josep G. Canadell, Pierre Friedlingstein, Felix Creutzig & Glen P. Peters

    1123:

    Nuts.

    that -> than

    I'm - I've

    And I had decided as a teen I could never type then computers showed up and I was able to use the backspace key every 5 keystroke or so.

    1124:
    And, incidentally, 50/49 years since Black Arrow - killed by the madwoman ...

    Margaret Thatcher, UK PM from 1979 somehow managed to cancel Black Arrow in 1971, do tell.

    Apparently the Secretary of state for Education had more powers than I understood, able to boss around the DTI.

    Black Arrow was cancelled for a reason. It was a dead end, HTP as an oxidiser was superbly efficient but there was just no way of scaling it up.

    It does leave the UK in the special position of having launched its only satellite using a launch vehicle from a project that was cancelled before the launch.

    1125:

    According to that article, it's being claimed to be a low earth orbital launcher! That was why I boggled.

    Incidentally, what does the USAF regard as being the edge of space?

    1126:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n_line

    Interesting that both choices are round numbers in a measuring system. 100km and 50miles.

    1127:

    Incidentally, what does the USAF regard as being the edge of space?
    Low enough for the X-15 to count.

    50 miles.

    1128:

    Incidentally, what does the USAF regard as being the edge of space?
    Low enough for the X-15 to count.

    50 miles.

    1129:

    USAF claims space starts at 50 miles which is why some of the X-15 pilots get listed as astronauts.

    The Skylark-L being tested is only a sub-orbital launcher, the Skyrora-XL is the orbital vehicle and is considerably bigger. Terrible website, but see https://www.skyrora.com/ for a comparison.

    1130:

    The Madwoman was Secy of State for Education & Science - she made absolutely no secret of her loathing for anything at all to do with space or launchers, as, quite obviously, there was no money to be made from it ....

    1131:

    Re: 'Scheiss Corona'

    Yep!

    And thanks! At some point I'll have to compile a multilingual playlist of musical/comedy/satire COVID-19 videos as a reminder of the emotional roller-coaster of this moment.

    1132:

    COVID-19 Contact Tracing

    Interesting article about what contact tracing is and a bit about how a few states are approaching this. Also mentions a free 'contact tracing' online course.

    https://www.wired.com/story/i-enrolled-in-a-coronavirus-contact-tracing-academy/

    'Absent a national plan, epidemiologists at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health stepped in to create a crash course that they hope will help public health departments rapidly expand their workforce. Their first remote students will be the thousands of people who’ve already applied to be contact tracers in New York state, the American epicenter of Covid-19. “To be honest, we’ve never done contact tracing at this scale in our living memory,” says Emily S. Gurley, an infectious disease epidemiologist who is leading the program. “So a lot of this is brand new.”

    The free six-hour course, which teaches a mix of virology, epidemiology, medical ethics, privacy, and interview techniques, opened for registration on the online educational platform Coursera. Though it’s geared toward people with ambitions of joining the ranks of tracers, it’s open to anyone.'

    Curious about how contact tracing is being done elsewhere. If contact tracing becomes the standard practice for any/all communicable diseases (not just the socially stigmatized ones) it could really impact community health care delivery and costs - as in, better planning for what health care is actually needed and lower health care costs overall because medical conditions would be spotted and treated sooner, less invasively, requiring mostly cheaper generic drugs, etc.

    1133:

    Not sure of the meaning of "back at ya", but we really didn't hear the drumbeat of "Government is the problem" until the very late seventies.

    Before then, it was "we need to fix government so it works right".

    Trust me, in the streets in the late 60's/early 70's, what we wanted was a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

    1134:

    How do you get "auto-English" closed captioning?

    And y'know, I do prefer "shit corona", rather than "fuck corona"....

    1135:

    but we really didn't hear the drumbeat of "Government is the problem" until the very late seventies.

    Not many of us were into our teens or even alive in the 1800s.

    But even after that watching some US western movies made in the 30s-60s had a subtext about government interference was wreaking the west.

    But if you think it all started in the 70s, so be it.

    1136:

    a subtext about government interference was wreaking the west. Like murdering "niggers" & "Indians" wasn't allowed, because pure white men will always do right, or some such sheiss ... guk.

    1137:

    Pounding that square peg into a round hole?

    Much more about open range and such. Think horse drawn libertarians. Our history is way more complicated than you might think.

    1138:

    she made absolutely no secret of her loathing for anything at all to do with space or launchers, as, quite obviously, there was no money to be made from it

    And she was correct for once -- at least, during the 1970s. Nobody made money at space back then. IIRC it wasn't until INMARSAT pioneered commercial satcoms for shipping that there was a significant commercial space market, and that kicked off in 1979. DBS satellite TV was touted as a big thing during the 1980s but really only got significant in the 1990s. And GPS was pretty much exclusively military until the late 1980s.

    By the time space was becoming commercially interesting Thatcher was on her way out of office.

    Arguably, she could have encouraged investment in the space side of the aerospace sector via BAe, which would have put the UK in a much better position: that, and active partnership in Arianespace during the 1980s. Although Ariane only really began to make money in the later 80s/early 90s ...

    See the problem here?

    1139:

    Charlie SHORT TERM, yes. It was obvious at that time, that there was no short-term or immediate pprofit in "space" It was equally obvious that, if one got one's feet under the table, there was mountains of money to be made - 20 or so years down the line, maybe sooner. A C Clarke, as usual saw this - as some of his stories predicted.

    1140:

    Maybe because they're not sure if the US will launch UK satellites, because they may accidentally say something science-based, and the Orange Snowflake might prevent it?

    1141:

    Y'know, it strikes me that one way to lower emissions is to defenestrate all house-flippers and real estate agents whose income is based on them, and then perhaps people could live near where they work, and wouldn't have to travel an hour or more to get to work every day....

    1142:

    Maybe that's what you heard. Growing up and living more than half my life in Philly, I never heard it.

    1143:

    Actually, you've got to defenestrate the urban planners of 50 years ago. I'll get you a time machine any day now.

    The problem is that it was fashionable decades ago to have single use zones: industrial, commercial, mercantile, residential. Because of cars and cheap gas, people could commute between them. Also, infrastructure could be built to support the requirements of separate zones (especially power, water, sewer) and the dangers of some zones (like putting the fertilizer factory next to the housing) could be avoided.

    This was never fully implemented. For example, there's a lot of industrial mixed use in poor neighborhoods, less so in rich ones, except for the hobby farms.

    Nowadays, with climate change biting down and the soullessness of suburbia and long commutes on full display, there's a big push to build commercial high rises in well established neighborhoods. The theory is that it will provide jobs near people, so it's good, right? Actually, it extends commutes even more, because unless the homes go in at the same time as the jobs, there's little incentive for people to switch careers simply to commute closer to home. So the end result is, instead of having a freeway system that moves people to and from work, that gets jammed and pumps out huge amounts of greenhouse gases, we have the same transit system repurposed for moving people every which way, which unfortunately just makes for different jams, not fewer.

    The best thing we've had for urban planning is Covid-19, because it highlighted how many useless trips we take by forcing people to cut back on unnecessary travel. Sadly I think this will be evanescent, and people will hit the road again until increasing climate change creates a city-killer storm and/or crop failures force people to move out of cities that have become worse food deserts than the Sahara.

    1144:

    "Not many of us were into our teens or even alive in the 1800s."

    There's quite a lot of literature from that era. For a starting point, look at Mark Twain.

    1145:

    No, she wasn't correct, nor in the many other nationally important industries she destroyed because (a) they were unprofitable and should be outsourced or (b) were profitable and should be sold off (preferably to foreign ownership). The point of such a capability was NEVER to make money at it directly, but to maintain the ability to create and maintain strategically important infrastructure. As a result of her policies (and every government since them has followed them), we are now in a position where all of the USA, EU and China have us by the short and curlies - and are pulling in different directions!

    1146:

    Preprint, but interesting and maybe rather important if it's a good analysis. N=212, but results are(look) statistically significant. I will note the obvious "dark skinned African-(recent-)ancestry populations of the US and UK have average lower-Vitamin-D levels and this might be why that cohort (some genetic subset of it) has a higher rate of severe COVID-19 cases" hypothesis. (For which people get labeled or chided as racist. Hypothesis is circulating in paper comment threads.) Also Spain and Italy populations are know to have lowish Vitamin D levels. Also, please y'all make sure that you have adequate Vitamin D levels. It appears that it might be important for COVID-19. (A highish daily dose for a week then backing off would work for most, probably.) Vitamin D Supplementation Could Possibly Improve Clinical Outcomes of Patients Infected with Coronavirus-2019 (COVID-19) (9 Apr 2020 Last revised: 7 May 2020, (Mark Alipio, Davao Doctors College; University of Southeastern Philippines) (Alt link for full pdf without creating a free ssrn account) See table 1 in the full pdf. Basically, Vitamin D insufficiency and deficiency are strongly correllated with ordinary/severe/critical COVID-19 cases, and a decent level of vitamin D is strongly correlated with mild COVID-19 cases. Where classifications are: serum 25(OH)Dlevel: (1) normal -25(OH)D of >30 ng/ml, (2) insufficient-25(OH)D of 21-29ng/ml, and (3) deficient-25(OH)D of < 20 ng/ml.

    Using the database of three hospitals in Southern Asian countries, I conducted a retrospective multicentre study of 212 cases with laboratory-confirmed infection of SARS-CoV-2. Data pertaining to clinical features and serum 25(OH)Dlevels were extracted from the medical records. No other patient information was provided to ensure confidentiality. I classified the cases as follows: (1) mild–mild clinical features without pneumonia diagnosis, (2) ordinary –confirmed pneumonia in chest computer tomography with fever and other respiratory symptoms, (3) severe –hypoxia (at most 93% oxygen saturation) and respiratory distressor abnormal blood gas analysis results (PaCO2>50 mm Hg or PaO2< 0mm Hg), and (4) critical –respiratory failure requiring intensive case monitoring. ... A total of 55 (25.9%) cases had normal Vitamin D status, majority of which (85.5%) were identified mild. A total of 80 (37.7%) cases had insufficient Vitamin D status, majority of which (43.8%) were ordinary. Cases identified as Vitamin D-deficient were 77 (36.3%), majority of which were severe(40.3%). Vitamin D status is significantly associated with clinical outcomes (p<0.001).

    1147:

    Not sure about the US having you that way.

    For example, as far as I can tell, no one in the US manufactures webcams. None have been available for a week, and if I'd ordered weeks ago, one shipped from China might show up next month some time.

    Dell has a nice one, but that's not available until August.

    1148:

    Had the CT scan today. Should have the results to my doctor in a couple of days.

    It's looking more and more like some variation on Aerosinusitus like SFReader suggested I look into. Thinking about it we had a rainy late winter/early spring and my symptoms started until early May when the weather became bright & sunny (high pressure system?).

    The weather turned cloudy on Monday and yesterday & today have been rainy again. Monday's headache was not much only took a single acetaminophen and yesterday's headache was bearable without taking any pain medication.

    Today I've barely had any headache at all.

    I combined my trip over to the VA Hospital in Durham with my now bi-weekly shopping. Didn't actually need that much, just replaced a few items (couple cans of soup, some rice mixes - New Orleans style Red Beans & Rice; a new bottle of acetaminophen ...) I'd used since the last trip. I should be set for the rest of the month.

    My little doggy is in MAXIMUM cuddle-puppy mode right now because I left him here alone for 4 hours. And I guess that's today's news from lake wobegon ..."

    1149:

    I think one of the big problems was that she was a crap scientist*, who hated Civil Servants, thought the unions were manifestations of the anti-Christ, distrusted anyone with a triple digit IQ and was just one step away from thinking Ayn Rand was Mother Theresa.

    She lacked any vision beyond making the state small, destroying any industry with strong unions, privatising anything not actually nailed down and marrying a millionaire. Why would you need technology when her friends in The City can save us all?

    That said, she did actually help BAE. She sold them the Royal Ordnance Factories for £184M when the real value of the sites and assets was of the order of £1B - Waltham Abbey site (252 acres non-green belt adjacent to M25) alone was valued at £225m. For the next 2 years the majority of the BAE profit came from the ROFs - which BAE then asset stripped with Trafalgar House.

    • And knew it
    1150:

    50/49 years since Black Arrow

    The satellite BA launched, Prospero, is still in a 1300x525 km orbit and should last a good while longer. Also the BA upper stage.

    Current-ish orbital elements for Prospero:

    1 5580U 71093A 20140.83676470 +.00000170 +00000-0 +32067-4 0 9996 2 5580 082.0435 064.1529 0530157 065.4478 300.0987 13.94532493438650

    1151:

    and the soullessness of suburbia and long commutes on full display

    My brother, who spend the first 10 years or so after college in Mananas VA (suburban heaven). He used to tell people that it was impossible for everyone to live on a cul-de-sac, 1/2 mile drive from the freeway interchange, 5 minutes from work. And a grocery store and assorted shops that no one would live near but be 5 minutes away also. It didn't make him popular. Blunt that he could be.

    1152:

    Nojay @ 1101: The Manhattan Project built and set off a large pile of high explosives shortly before the Trinity test in July 1945, something like several hundred tonnes or so. It was actually intended to calibrate blast and overpressure instruments and damage sensors.

    I know the film I'm looking for isn't about that Manhattan Project explosion, because they didn't have any UH-1 helicopters at Trinity, and one of the tests they did was blast effect on a hovering UH-1 (flown remotely with a big damn cable dangling from it connected allowing the "pilot" to fly from a remote simulator - could the pilot maintain control?).

    A conventional chemical explosion is actually very different to an atomic explosion -- most of the chemical blast results in rapidly-cooling hot air travelling at the speed of sound[1] with only some of the energy radiated as heat at the speed of light whereas it's the other way around with a nuke with the added bonus of X-rays, gamma radiation and nuclear particles. There's no real point building a "chemical" version of a nuke if you want to gather data about the nuclear part of the deal and the damage it does isn't the same either."

    Yeah, well it was THE ARMY. Pointless or not, they had something they wanted to find out and since they couldn't set off a nuke, they built a big-ass pile of "TNT" (actually, I think they used RDX or something similar that's more powerful than TNT so they could build a smaller pile).

    I don't think they cared about "X-rays, gamma radiation and nuclear particles" from this test. The Army brass are NOT so stupid they'd think they could get data on "X-rays, gamma radiation and nuclear particles" from setting off conventional explosives. The test was all about blast damage.

    That's what "kilotons" and "megatons" is all about whenever they're used to describe nuclear explosions. It's about comparing how big the bang is compared to conventional explosives; how many tons of TNT would it take to make a bang that big.

    [1] The speed of sound depends on temperature, not pressure and it doesn't scale fast -- the speed of sound in air at 1000 Kelvin is only double that at room temperature.

    1153:

    I was referring to a comment that tied a mindset to being around when it formed. Yes, all kinds of literature, political statements, books, journals, etc... that point to anti-government being a big deal for most of the history of the US.

    And to piggy back onto this comment, I didn't really see it where I grew up (no where near the east coast) as my parents and social circle were not a part of that. But as I became an adult and rubbed elbows with people from all over the country I saw this was there and in reading a lot of history saw it was around for a long time.

    To be honest I suspect a lot of people in the UK moved to the various colonies at times to "get away" from the government centered in London. For the UK they had to sail. For the US many could just[sarcasm] walk.

    1154:

    we are now in a position where all of the USA

    Trump wants the US to be there with you. He doesn't understand the concept of paying for something you might (well will likely) need in the future. To him all services are like a plumbing contractor. Call them up when you need them.

    1155:

    To be honest I suspect a lot of people in the UK moved to the various colonies at times to "get away" from the government centered in London.

    Or because they supported the wrong government.

    It's worth reminding Americans that the UK went through a period of civil wars in the 1630s, ending in 1649, which generated a lot of exiles: then another acrimonious change of government in 1660, a revolution/invasion/leveraged buy-out in 1688-90, then two attempted coups/civil wars in 1715 and 1745. Each time, this generated a wave of folks who really really didn't want to live within range of a hanging judge with a noose, and the colonies were the obvious get-out clause. Which is why a lot of the southern planters were former Jacobites (leaving aside the issue of the Mayflower settlers up north being such buzzkill fundamentalist asshats that they had to get away from the other puritans running the government because they weren't puritanical enough for them).

    1156:

    It regularly becomes borderline naked eye visible, but is an easy spot in 10x50 binoculars - if you know the constellations. Worth spotting for fun - real space history.

    1157:

    SFReader @ 1103: 'Distraction'

    Randy Rainbow's got a new YT video out today sung to the tune of 'Tradition' (Fiddler on the Roof).

    I love Randy Rainbow. He's about the only good thing to come out of Trumpolini's Presidency. There should be a special Tony Award just for the BEST Randy Rainbow video.

    1158:

    Mayflower settlers up north being such buzzkill fundamentalist

    Very few people in the US who read past the holiday headlines have much in the way of warm fuzzies for those folks. Being the first to mostly survive did give them a place in the history books and thus the myths and legends.

    As a side note the survival rates of people coming over to the Massachusetts area are dismal for the first 100 years or so. Maybe that's where "Live Free or Die" came from. [grin]

    1159:

    It regularly becomes borderline naked eye visible, but is an easy spot in 10x50 binoculars - if you know the constellations. Worth spotting for fun - real space history.

    I wonder if its beacon is still transmitting. Several ancient and presumed dead satellites have been spotted:

    https://www.npr.org/2020/04/24/843493304/long-lost-u-s-military-satellite-found-by-amateur-radio-operator

    1160:

    Well, they did give us the Adams family, for better or worse.

    My favorite Adams -- besides Abigail -- is John Quincy Adams. My least favorite is Henry Adams, who was such a shytehead and whiner, because, as he did nothing to make it happen, never got his birthright as POTUS. O. Dear. But his histories, like his grandfather's, John Quincy's Diaries, are all essential to understanding history, and not only US history. But JQ also made history, participated in it -- as did his father -- as well as meticulously observe and record it.

    Yet, what JQ always yearned to really be, was a poet, to have the career of Sir Walter Scott. O ""the melancholy madness of Poetry without the inspiration"" -- something all writers of the imagination can sympathize with.

    http://foxessa-foxhome.blogspot.com/2020/05/part-1-john-quincy-adams-on-melancholy.html

    http://foxessa-foxhome.blogspot.com/2020/05/part-2-john-quincy-adams-on-melancholy.html

    1161:

    As a side note the survival rates of people coming over to the Massachusetts area are dismal for the first 100 years or so. Maybe that's where "Live Free or Die" came from. [grin]

    Bear in mind that until the germ theory of disease came along (and brought with it public sanitation measures) cities were generally population sinks -- more people died than were born in them -- as were overseas colonies (for those countries which engaged in colonization). The life expectancy of a British settler in Africa in the 19th century was something like two years: the British in India did slightly better (especially once they took to guzzling quinine in tonic water -- an antimalarial), but? There was an awful lot of dying going on along with the living free.

    1162:

    Supporting such a study is in general is a matter of supporting a professional approach to how to handle leading cases of death... {of opponents} not possible that you really believe what you are arguing

    Which is not to say that a good faith counter-argument is impossible, just that they're very rarely seen. Most of them concede the point of the study and argue "we don't want to have that confirmed by experts".

    But a perfectly reasonable explanation for why such a study should be supported is "we are not going to change the law or our behaviour, so the study would be a waste of time and money for everyone involved". Which is completely accurate for gun violence in the USA, as well as a bunch of other hobby-horses that various groups have. First you need a mass political movement to change public opinion... at which point politicians who oppose studies/law changes will not be elected... so by selection, there will be political will to perform the studies or even direct experiments (viz, "if we change the law what happens").

    1163:

    Allen Thomson @ 1104:

    There's no real point building a "chemical" version of a nuke if you want to gather data about the nuclear part of the deal and the damage it does isn't the same either.

    True, but the post-nuclear part is of interest and, besides, the relevant tests are just a lot of fun to carry out. I used to have a picture of some people standing grinning in front of the huge dome of explosives used in Minor Scale.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_Scale

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misty_Picture

    https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/ops/minor-uncle.htm

    Cool. I didn't even know about those. The film I remember was about a test that was done some time in the 60s or early 70s. I saw the film around 1979 or 1980 before those later tests were made.

    But that was what the test in the film I saw was about, trying to replicate a nuclear weapon sized BLAST with conventional explosives.

    1164:

    How do you get "auto-English" closed captioning?

    Turn on closed captions and you get what I think is Swiss German, then the settings cog thing lets you choose auto-translate to Africaans of whatever language you can find in the list of Languages Recognised By Google

    1165:

    Heteromeles @ 1105: Thank you! It's at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d02A9nmJxcM

    I'll put that up there with an old favorite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CK0fhl00QjY

    Which leads to a random walk through virtual choirs on YouTube. There are some good ones.

    1166:

    EC @ 1145 Absolutely SPOT ON. "Outsourcing" only works if you have control, even if indirectly of the outsourcer - contract law is very good at this, I'm told ... SEE ALSO Grant @ 1149

    Bill Arnold I've gone over to taking Vit-D since this started ...

    David L Or the UK equivalent Maximum of 30 mins to any long-distance rail terminus in London, living in the outskirts of a Medieval village ( with Roman remians, we've recently discovered ) which has pubs & local shops of good quality & also only less-tan 10-mins drive to an M-way escape by road into E Anglia. And nobody fucking noticed until about 1998 .... ( After which property prices went bonkers ) - but I've been there the whole time, oh dear. Or as The Boss said, before the lockdown: "Every day I commute from the Mediaval village to the Roman city, crossing the wildife refuge in between" Said wildlife refuge contains, amongst other things: Weasels, Kingfishers, Common Terns, Herons, Little Egrets, Kestrels, all the small rodents that Kestrels & Weasels live on, Gt Crested Grebes, lots of species of Dragonfly & of course, Gt Crested Newts ....

    1167:

    Pigeon @ 1106: But in any case there's no real point in trying to make a bomb with one of the notably small critical mass isotopes. They're not that small. Even the good ones are still comparable with 239Pu, but a flaming sight harder to get hold of. And you still get the problem that the implosion system inevitably dwarfs the actual fissile bit. You're better off using readily-available plutonium inefficiently and skimping on the implosion system; something like imploding an annulus with a bit of extra help from the alpha/delta phase transition. And use a stick grenade pattern to make it easier to throw a long way. To be sure only a tiny bit of it will actually go, but that's still enough to give you grenades with the power of giant shells, and certainly plenty to have a big problem with not blowing yourself up with it.

    Guys. The atomic hand-grenade was loony-tunes even while the Army was actually researching it; a 1950s version of the internet-of-things Smart toaster.. They spent millions of dollars to develop something they already knew was a stupid idea, and nobody really cared when it turned out to be impossible.

    Y'all completely missed the important part, the book John McPhee wrote about Ted Taylor & his concern with the U.S.'s loose control of nuclear materials

    Theodore Taylor was one of the most brilliant engineers of the nuclear age, but in his later years he became concerned with the possibility of an individual being able to construct a weapon of mass destruction on their own. McPhee tours American nuclear institutions with Taylor and shows us how close we are to terrorist attacks employing homemade nuclear weaponry.

    1168:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1125: According to that article, it's being claimed to be a low earth orbital launcher! That was why I boggled.

    Incidentally, what does the USAF regard as being the edge of space?

    I'm not sure about the "edge of space", but to win Astronaut wings it's 50 miles. That was established for the X-15 "space plane" program. There were 13 flights with 8 pilots where the X-15 exceeded 50 miles.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_X-15#Highest_flights

    To earn an astronaut badge, a U.S. Air Force or U.S. Navy and Marine Corps officer must complete all required training and participate in a space flight more than 50 miles (80 kilometers) above the Earth.

    See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_astronaut

    1169:

    Re: Randy Rainbow

    Agree - he's really good.

    About a Tony ... well, the Tony's eventually did create a special category for best 'revival' because it turned out that older shows (esp. musicals) could sell tickets. And - some opera performances have been live-streamed for 10 or so years without killing or diluting or doing anything vile to grand opera. Plus Netflix has proven that people are willing to pay for exclusive-to-video 'TV series' type programming. Given the above, maybe 'Broadway' would consider the same if there's sufficient demand. And if that happens, then we might get a new Tony category. 'Might' because Broadway is 'live'. Not sure that the Tony's would be willing to break from their all-live (no studio editing, retakes, CGI enhancements, etc.) performance tradition. If yes - then performers/producers like Randy would get a shot at the Tony's.

    COVID-19 has hit stage folk hard (like a lot of other occupations) and there's at least one Broadway couple who've been trying to raise funds to help via YT. Most of the videos are informal chats/interviews but occasionally there's a performance thrown in.

    https://www.youtube.com/user/actorsfundorg

    BTW - Randy did get nominated for an Emmy last year.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primetime_Emmy_Award_for_Outstanding_Short_Form_Variety_Series

    1170:

    cities were generally population sinks

    When I read about this years ago it wasn't so much about settlements but fortune hunters and such who didn't understand when they left merry England that their supply chain was basically non-existent. It took over 100 years for the folks to figure out how to get enough food throughout the year to keep from starving. And even if that wasn't the CAUSE of death the effects of too little food led to a lot of the other causes. From too weak to hunt to other diseases to freezing to death.

    A lot of ideas and habits from England just didn't work all that well. And the "locals" quickly realized that these folks "were not our friends".

    1171:

    whitroth @ 1133: Not sure of the meaning of "back at ya", but we really didn't hear the drumbeat of "Government is the problem" until the very late seventies.

    Before then, it was "we need to fix government so it works right".

    Trust me, in the streets in the late 60's/early 70's, what we wanted was a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

    Trust you? You obviously didn't get out onto the same streets I did in the 60s, otherwise you'd remember "Never trust anyone over 30!"1

    The hippies & the yippies did have a vision of fixing the government "so it works right". I was there, I remember it.

    But even then we knew the Birchers, the Klansmen, the Neo-Nazis and the Silent Majority ... and all the other right-wingnut rats were already gnawing at the foundations of democracy, because the "problem" with "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" is that some of those people were Black2 or Hispanic or Native American or had long hair or wanted to join a Union.

    Maybe you didn't hear the drumbeat ... or see them goose-stepping along to it, but it was there. I heard it. I saw it. Trust ME! It was there even if you didn't hear it or see it.

    1 And what a surprise that was when we finally realized WE had lived long enough that we were no longer worthy to be trusted.

    2 Although that wasn't the word the haters used, THEY had another word starting with 'N'. And anyone who objected was a 'N' lover.

    1172:

    Whew Really glad it happened.

    Ah, I see you have a dog. Now, as I told my old oncologist, I didn't see why he had to have me schedule a CAT scan, he could have just told me where to look, and I could have had my CAT walk all over me, and I could tell the doc where it hurt....

    I don't know why my doctors laugh at me, but Medical Professionals have no respect for Feline Professionals....

    1173:

    How odd. My twins - one has a house in Manassas, and the other and her extended family have one in the "suburbs" of Manassas."

    1174:

    Ellen, my SO, can trace one side of her family back to John Alden (yes, the Alden). Her take is that the first trip of the Mayflower, they were ok people, got along with the Native Americans. The second load of colonists, on the other hand, were shits who started attacking the Native Americans, among others.

    1175:

    Weasels and little egrets? I thought the weasels and the huge [r]egrets were down in London....

    1176:

    Hey! Randy's got a bit part/screen in this one - 'You Can't Stop the Beat' (Shampoo):

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEgIJLlBFUI

    'Stars in the House' is the chat/interview/fundraiser show:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN-z-jKMCK0

    1177:
    she made absolutely no secret of her loathing for anything at all to do with space or launchers, as, quite obviously, there was no money to be made from it

    And she was correct for once

    Three things:

    1.the assertion that Thatcher, secretary of state for Education and Science, had anything to do with shutting down Black Arrow, a MoD and DTI supported project is entirely unsupported.

  • Black Arrow was a dead end. If the UK did anything wrong it wasn't shutting down Black Arrow, it was not going in strong with ESA.

  • Maggie was right about a few other things: the IPCC, the Single Market and, arguably closing down the coal industry (classic example of right decisions for wrong reasons). Oh, and Sizewell B (although she fucked up by letting ideology get in the way of the follow ons).

  • 1178:

    Also Spain and Italy populations are know to have lowish Vitamin D levels.
    Which explains why Spain an Italy have lower death rates per capita than the UK. Wait, what?

    1179:

    Charlie Stross @ 1155:

    To be honest I suspect a lot of people in the UK moved to the various colonies at times to "get away" from the government centered in London.

    Or because they supported the wrong government.

    It's worth reminding Americans that the UK went through a period of civil wars in the 1630s, ending in 1649, which generated a lot of exiles: then another acrimonious change of government in 1660, a revolution/invasion/leveraged buy-out in 1688-90, then two attempted coups/civil wars in 1715 and 1745. Each time, this generated a wave of folks who really really didn't want to live within range of a hanging judge with a noose, and the colonies were the obvious get-out clause. Which is why a lot of the southern planters were former Jacobites (leaving aside the issue of the Mayflower settlers up north being such buzzkill fundamentalist asshats that they had to get away from the other puritans running the government because they weren't puritanical enough for them).

    The colonies in Virginia and the Carolinas were commercial ventures, owned by London investors and run for their profit. Many of the colonists were down-n-outers who signed indentures to get a new start. The early mortality at Jamestown exceeded that of Massachusetts Bay. The Mayflower colonists planned to join the Jamestown colony, but somehow ended up a leetle bit off course and didn't have everything they needed to survive where they ended up because they expected to join an established colony.

    My own great-great-(11x)-Grandfather came to Jamestown on an indenture. And one of my college room-mates was Flora MacDonald's great-great-(probably something like 11x as well)-grandson. The Flora Macdonald Highland Games were held on the farm where he grew up.

    1180:
    Maybe that's where "Live Free or Die" came from.

    Tu veut dire "Vivre Libre ou Mourir"?

    (It's use in the French revolution appears to predate it's use by John Stark in 1809, the source of New Hampshire's motto).

    1181:

    My brother moved 20 years or so ago to a mailing address of Haymarket VA. But not in the "town". Google maps always has us take a gravel road for about 1/2 mile between 2 paved roads to avoid an extra 5 miles on all paved roads.

    He's trying to convince Comcast to run the fiber down his driveway for less than $2000. The Verizon DSL he has now is so far at the end of the run he seems like dial up at times.

    1182:

    Foxessa @ 1160: Well, they did give us the Adams family, for better or worse.

    My favorite Adams -- besides Abigail -- is John Quincy Adams.

    Gomez is my favorite, although Morticia is Ok.

    1183:

    I should have included a sarcasm tag.

    But most of the early people showing up in New England were looking for gold and silver. Like the Spanish found in Central and South America.

    Something like 90% of the first 1500 didn't make it. Sort of like Charlie's comment about the folks who headed to Africa in the early days.

    1184:

    Well, they did give us the Adams family, for better or worse.

    I suspect their ancestors on the ships would have considered them heretics.

    1185:

    On my most recent visit to Jamestown, about 4 years ago, I noticed an exhibit that suggested the during "The Starving Time", the winter of 1609 - 1610, there may have been some cannibalism. The exhibit included human bones with teeth and knife marks on them. In the 60's when I was growing up, the story given to tourists was that the triangular original Jamestown was now out in the James River. Since then, archaeological research has determined the actual location and unearthed a lot of interesting artifacts. If you Virginia guys haven't been there, or haven't in a while, the museum on the site is well worth a visit.

    1186:

    I think I need a variant on that: moi livres ou mort!

    (Loose translation: you'll get my books away from me when you pry them out of my cold, dead hands!)

    1187:

    My Eldest took her husband's last name. She's not built for Morticia, but she like the attitude....

    1188:

    JBS @1008: The Federal requirement for a special election to fill a vacant Senate seat doesn't specify a time frame, thus permitting interim appointments by Governors in states that permit that. Most, including North Carolina do.

    In NC, the Senate seat is always filled at the next general election for members of the State Legislature occurring at least 60 days after the vacancy (i.e. there is never a special election). See NC Gen Stat Section 163-12 and Section 163-1(d).

    The election to fill a vacant Senate seat can be up to 26 months later, giving the appointee as significant advantage in the race and allowing the party of the retiring Senator to potentially continue to control the seat for an entire Congress before facing the voters.

    1189:

    Mildly concerning: same information on a linear graph produces different policy preferences to the log graph more commonly used

    https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/covid19/2020/05/19/the-public-doesnt-understand-logarithmic-graphs-often-used-to-portray-covid-19/

    1190:

    Which explains why Spain an Italy have lower death rates per capita than the UK. Wait, what? Not sure this is snark, so, paper is about how many COVID-19 cases are worse than "mild" (vs vitamin D levels).
    The UK is (has been) mishandling non-pharmaceutical interventions badly, and arguably badly relative to Italy and Spain. I'd point and mock, except I live in the US[1], which overall has been doing horribly.

    [1] NY State to be specific. Doing OK after the state level lockdown started, but it started a couple of weeks late; NY City in particular is a human (including infected humans) transportation hub that had a lot of traffic from Europe and should have had plans to lockdown early (i.e. "overreact"). And Trump (incorrectly; he misspoke IIRC) announced a lockdown on travel from Europe that panicked a bunch of people into scrambling home, packing the airports with long lines(/queues) of people breathing each others exhalations. Anyway, we're on universal mask wearing (since 17 April) while inside public places in NY, and the new infection positive test numbers have dropped a lot; interesting to look at the graphs.

    1191:

    I don't think there's any way of presenting information on a way that most people can understand.

    Two reasons. Most people are as thick as two short planks. Most people, having decided something, are utterly totally completely impervious to the simplest of facts, even if they're not thick.

    I recently had an online discussion with someone absolutely convinced that the growth of the virus wasn't exponential at that time. As proof, he trotted out that the doubling time had been 3 days, but was now nearly 5. The trouble was that the dates he was using were in fact, a period of 3 days. No amount of saying "the first figure on the 11th, that's the start of the period, so the second figure from the 12th is one whole day, the 13th is two whole days, so the 14th is three whole days" and variations of that, could convince him that the period from the 11th to the 14th was 3 days. They weren't thick. They are a programmer by trade and they've written some stuff that's useful in the electric motorcycle community. Yet, once convinced that the "curve is flattening" all by itself without any government intervention, he lost the ability to count to 5.

    1192:

    Yeah, well, two things I really fucking hate are dates and fence posts, and when I'm coding I hate them even more.

    1193:

    Sure. I'm basically saying that if you're going to be stupid, at least be simple stupid, because being complicated stupid would be really stupid...

    1194:

    One place I worked - the only professional job I actually hated - I found, in an online program (after the other online programmer had been fired, after 10 years there) his "algorithm" for leap year: if it's 1976 or 1980 or 1984 or 1988 or 1992, it's a leap year.

    No, I'm not joking. This was in 1987 or 88. I went to my boss, the VP of DP and showed him this, and he said, and I quote, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

    But, I said, it is broke...." and he said we'll fix it when it breaks.

    Did I mention this was a MORTGAGE BANKING COMPANY, WITH 30 year mortgages?!?!?!?!?!

    1195:

    Hahahaha.

    I hope you fixed it by writing something that trawled the IOC website to find the date of the Olympic opening ceremony.

    1196:

    we'll fix it when it breaks.Did I mention this was a MORTGAGE BANKING COMPANY,

    You don't want to be the customer in that situation. Not the specific "leap year? Yerwotnow?" one which, hey, you don't wanna charge me an extra day's interest for a leap year I'm into that. But the general case of "you charged me this, but I can't see how you're allowed to" or "your calculations seem to be subtly wrong, can you explain".

    You end up, if you're persistent, down a rabbit hole of innumerate muppets saying "computer says it, so it is correct". Eventually i changed banks. Not because I thought the new one would be better, but just because I had completely got the shits with that particular bank.

    Mind you, I had also only just moved to the land of the $6/month "account keeping fee", albeit I hadn't yet discovered the (compulsory) superannuation fund "we have taken all the money in your account and now you have to pay us". That one even the neo-liberal government decided was a bit over the top so they introduced a free "consolidate your super" system that let people like me open a new account with a new provider and close the other by "consolidating" the two.

    It's enough to make me want to keep all my money under the mattress

    1197:

    I was shocked by how useful the google time service is. We use it for regular "what exactly is the time" questions, but also for more general "when is the end of the month" and "what day is it in Germany" type stuff.

    1198:

    Yeah, but that would actually fix the issue.

    I thought after being told "if it ain't broke" the "fix" should be as weirdly broken as possible, but still work (for now).

    1199:

    PS ...and have untraceable failure modes, like when the IOC decides to have the winter Olympics out of phase with the summer ones, you suddenly get a leap year every two years.

    1200:

    Whitroth About 15 years back, for "reasons" I was cycling acroos that reserve area & came face-to-face with a weasel Spotting Little Egrets from the train is a good sport!

    1201:

    Not sure this is snark, so, paper is about how many COVID-19 cases are worse than "mild" (vs vitamin D levels).
    It certainly was snark. The paper sounded interesting, but throwing in the little factoid about low vitamin D in Italy and Spain was just silly. what was it supposed to "explain"?

    Italy, Spain, France, the UK, Belgium, New York and some others all look to be roughly similar, places where the lockdown was started too late.

    https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countries&highlight=United%20Kingdom&show=25&y=fixed&scale=log&data=deaths&extra=France,Spain,Italy#countries

    1202:

    The "fix" should be as weirdly broken as possible,

    Bah, leap years are far too rare to be a problem. With mortgages you want something like calculating the interest weekly and either not counting or double counting weeks that span years (using the Julian calendar, of course)

    Or if you can get away with it, single precision doubles for discount rates even though you very carefully use integers/money everywhere else. "your interest rate is 3.95% less the 0.3% discount, so .... about 3.8something" would make for great discussions about mortgage repayments.

    1203:

    Half of the inhabitants of the town I live in left for Massachusetts for religious reasons. The Puritan rector was one of the leaders. They moved to Hingham Massachusetts. A few years later after the civil war when there was a Puritan government in power, he returned to England. After the first exodus the town had to petition the government for aid.

    http://hinghamhistorycentre.co.uk/the-american-connection/

    1204:

    Africa depended a lot on where. The Cape and White Highlands were pretty healthy places, the areas around the bight of Benin was one of the world's health hellholes - it didn't get the nickname The White Man's Grave for nothing, and was pretty bad even when I was there (before air-conditioning, modern anti-malarials and modern antibiotics).

    1205:

    Actually, no. Outsourcing for commodity items and services is straightforward, but leaves you at the mercy of 'the market' - as we have seen with clinical PPE. Outsourcing for anything complicated requires an in-house team with enough technical expertise to specify and check the product (and detect snake-oil salesmen) AND enough managerical clout to put teeth into the contract and enforce it. Been there - done that - and often seen it fail when those conditions were not met.

    1206:

    "2. Black Arrow was a dead end. If the UK did anything wrong it wasn't shutting down Black Arrow, it was not going in strong with ESA."

    I agree there - my point wasn't that Black Arrow should have been continued, as such - we should either have joined the ESA or, if the politicians believed a UK-specific solution was essential, the error was not setting up a replacement project. Back in 1971, we knew that satellites were strategically essential for weather forecasting (especially critical to the UK), even ignoring telecommunications.

    1207:

    Violent agreement.

    As of 2018, the United Kingdom is the only country to have successfully developed and then abandoned a satellite launch capability. All other countries that have developed such a capability have retained it either through their own space programme or, in the case of France, through its involvement in the Ariane programme.
    -- Wikipedia.

    1208:

    Given the way the Zircon affair unravelled in the mid-1980s, I'm pretty certain that the lack of a British space program in the 1980s was quid pro quo for cheap access to USAF/NRO assets, including launch capacity where needed, via the Five Eyes. The timing fits for a secret treaty between the Reagan administration and Thatcher.

    Thatcher would have seen ESA (founded in 1975) as a bureaucratic pure scientific research boondoggle of the kind she had zero time for. Ariane 1 first launched in 1979, had an epic series of failures, then got the bugs ironed out and began launching small commercial payloads from 1984 -- but wasn't nearly big enough for spysats or the sort of military stuff that might have enabled the MoD to run it past Thatcher.

    1209:

    There was an interesting article in the Economist about the trials and tribble-ations of COVID related PPE:

    The great PPE scramble Why countries can’t meet the demand for gear against covid-19 https://www.economist.com/international/2020/04/19/why-countries-cant-meet-the-demand-for-gear-against-covid-19 (This one isn't paywalled)

    The TL;DR is demand surged so much, so quickly, that it greatly exceeded supply. Supply couldn't be instantly ramped up.

    That's one of the problems of capitalism I think. You size your production lines for expected average demand and to cope with expected peaks (e.g. Christmas). If there's an expected initial peak of demand, then you build up a stockpile to get you through that peak of sales so that you can size your production line for expected average demand. I understand this is what Apple does for new iPhones for example. Building a production line that can manage a 20 times surge in output is just wasted capital. It seems none of the medical PPE industry was prepared for this sort of widespread pandemic.

    Being prepared for this sort of thing needs a particular type of mindset that's not suited to a profit-motive type of person. Unfortunately, current dogma seems to favour putting profit-motive people in charge. You reap what you sow.

    1210:

    "Back in 1971, we knew that satellites were strategically essential for weather forecasting (especially critical to the UK), even ignoring telecommunications."

    In 1971 weather-forecasting was already on rails to become a pan-european colaboration, as a direct result of the 1962 hurricane and flooding and both ECMWF and EUMETSAT were for all practical purposes agreed, as soon as the diplomats and politicians would stop wranging about money.

    1211:

    That is very likely. I have fairly direct knowledge of two other areas from the same era, where such 'arrangements' effectively handed over important British capabilities to the USA and we stopped competing with it and became (largely) dependent on it. In one case, we had previously been a clear world leader and, in the other, our IP was second to none. What quid pro quo there was, if any, I never discovered. I have strong suspicions in those cases that the prime mover was not Thatcher, but the DTI, and they merely found Thatcher a cooperative PM. Just as with the mandarinate and the scientific civil service.

    To Poul-Henning Kamp (#1210): yes, but my point stands. The UK was a sleeping partner in the (failed) Europa project and not much more in the ESA one, despite the fact that we knew that the key to weather forecasting was satellites and not supercomputers. The latter were another strategic capability we had handed over to the USA :-(

    1212:

    Oh, yes, but my point was that we had (and have?) no capability to be ramped up, so are extremely vulnerable to such peaks in demand, not least because we are (at best) just another customer and (at worst) a low-priority one. This point has been made and ignored several times about several key capabilities, including steel.

    1213:

    "despite the fact that we knew that the key to weather forecasting was satellites and not supercomputers. The latter were another strategic capability we had handed over to the USA :-("

    UK never had a relevant or credible "strategic capability" in supercomputing as anybody has understood that word.

    Mainframes, yes(-ish) but supercomputning, absolutely not.

    ATLAS was a big(ger) computer, but it had none of the attributes which came to characterize "supercomputer" as a concept.

    By and large, supercomputing was a one-man-business through all of the 1960'ies, 1970'ies and 1980'ies, and that man was Seymour Cray.

    1214:

    I think it's really difficult to know what you might need for any upcoming unexpected occurrence. Even if you have some idea of what you're trying to meet, getting the right amount of capacity in place in time is still very hard - c.f. Nightingale Hospitals.

    These days, in order to have a globally competitive industry, you need:

    • economies of scale,
    • a low overall cost base,
    • the investment required,

    to minimize unit costs at the lowest acceptable quality. If you have an industry that apparently isn't globally competitive, how much are you prepared to spend to subsidise that industry on the off-chance you might need it?

    I think there's a saying in military circles along the lines of "you tend to prepare to fight the war that's just passed, not necessarily the war that's coming next." For example, I wonder if investment in main battle tanks that have to be shipped by sea in any quantity is still a good investment? I wonder if something smaller/lighter that can be rapidly air-freighted in reasonable quantities might be more appropriate in a more uncertain world? Of course, if you went that way, then perhaps we'd see Russian tanks streaming through the Fulda gap...

    We seem to be having big difficulties trying to maintain a UK military shipping and submarine industry. The industry needs nice regular profitable orders with little to no fallow periods. That doesn't seem to mesh with the way government works anymore. Because the time between orders for classes is very long, we tend to want step changes in capability between each generation when we do order them, not incremental improvements on the earlier class. This makes each new class a research project. Then we get upset when there are cost overruns because we've asked someone to build something they've never built before. Let's not mention that we're not exactly spoilt for choice between UK suppliers, cough BaE Systems, cough. I think our problem is our domestic market is now too small to maintain many industries and anything that's currently profitable everybody wants in on.

    I think we should accept that we are no longer a world power and stop pretending to try and be one. We're just one of many countries that are in long-term decline. I include the USA in the list of declining powers. Without unfettered access to the resources of the Empire, we don't have the clout anymore. The USA seeking to vassalize the UK and stop us competing with them hasn't done us any long-term good either. We probably need to pick a few things and really specialise on getting damn good at them. Then maybe we could flog those things world-wide and it not be worth anybody else putting in the investment to compete with us.

    1215:
    It has been claimed that facts are partisan

    About 30 years ago, I heard of a short book containing two biographical essays about Bonnie Prince Charlie, he of the 1745 fame.

    Two historians of the period, given an identical long list of primary source materials that they could use. One was told to write a hatchet job - don't lie, but make BPC look as stupid/evil/out of touch as possible. The other was told to be as hagiographic as they could be- once again, don't lie, just pick your sources to back your point of view.

    So you had two accounts, both true, both lies, agreeing (mostly) on the events and their timing, but vastly differing on motivation. (Although I think that the historian who was told to do the hatchet job would have the easier time of things).

    A cursory Google search can't find any trace of any book matching this. So this is probably the classic "friend of a friend" story. Still, the notion of such a book has stuck with me.

    1216:

    I think our problem is our domestic market is now too small to maintain many industries and anything that's currently profitable everybody wants in on. I think we should accept that we are no longer a world power and stop pretending to try and be one. We're just one of many countries that are in long-term decline.

    Which, parenthetically, is why BREXIT WAS REALLY FUCKING STUPID AWFUL LONG-TERM POLICY (in industrial policy terms). The EU as a single market of 500M people has far more scope for economies of scale and stuff like procuring aircraft carriers, fighter jets, and hunter-killer submarines than the UK on its own.

    (About 5 years ago, the USA accounted for 50% of global military spending; the EU nations including the UK accounted to another 30%, with 20% divided among everyone else, including Russia and China. That's the sort of scale to operate on.)

    (NB: this isn't an endorsement of military spending, it's a point about economies of scale. It's equally applicable in biomedical, in smartphones, automobiles, sewing machines ...)

    Of course Brexit made economic sense to a different type of revenue stream -- forget all that old-hat boring nonsense about making things and instead become a hyper-specialized global money laundry, right? Pure profits with no overheads, just externalities to dump on the heads of the little people who'd be running around on zero-hours contracts delivering goodies for the Masters of the Universe.

    (All of which looks as quaint as the European order of May 1914, as seen from the perspective of Europe in August 1914, thanks to COVID-19.)

    1217:

    All of which looks as quaint as the European order of May 1914, as seen from the perspective of Europe in August 1914, thanks to COVID-19. Yes, but a huge number of dim tories haven't realised it yet ... Though there are signs - as in the revolt over charging health workers for the "privelige" of coming here... Open hints that Brexit deadline actually is going to be extended, etc ... And, of course, Starmer opposite BoZo in PMQ's - delicious.

    1218:

    You could consider the entire literature concerning Douglas Haig (and other WW1 generals, but especially him) to be a real example of that. You get the Haigiographers saying "he did X, Y, and Z, which shows how great he was", and the hateiographers saying "he did X, Y, and Z, which shows what a bell he was", for the same X, Y and Z. And every shade in between. Thing is, you could say they are all right.

    1219:

    ""we have taken all the money in your account and now you have to pay us"... It's enough to make me want to keep all my money under the mattress"

    It's why I do. (Well, not literally, but...) It's safer. The significant threat is from computers that have no physical agency. If I store it as cash then no other fucker can decide to grab it without my approval.

    1220:

    Indeed.

    The Pilgrim and Puritan colonies really did come to NA for religious and political reasons. They came, also, intending to stay. Thus they brought entire families and implements for building, and for making communities, including books.

    The Virginia colony oth, as you point out was a company, established for a single purpose, to extract. They mad for the gold and silver that the Spanish found and dominated in South America, and expected to find the same here. They also expected to find am emerald boulder in the Mississippi (which river wasn't where they thought it was either). They came as single males, without a clue. And far to many of them were of 'gentleman' extraction, lacking all useful experience and skills, or indentured urban convicts, ditto. Neither of them expected to work with their hands, and just refused to, which was a huge reason for the starving times.

    There was only two solutions: murder Natives and steal their food; get slaves! Both worked well for the descendants of the Virginia colony -- even though fairly rapidly, much more so than with the East India Company, the British government took over due to the utter feckless behavior and death toll, making the VA territory government, i.e. British. However, the original Venturers's Company charter ran across the entire continent, from as far north as what is New York, to California. Which is why to this day Virginia has this attitude that the USA is actually -- Virginia. The triumvirate of Jefferson, Madison and Monroe certainly believed it. So did Robert E. Lee and his ilks in 1860. So he was really committing treason, he was fighting to reestablish 'orginal intent.'

    1221:

    A perfect illustration of my immediately preceding comment about simple stupid vs. complicated stupid. He could have just used !(year & 3) and it wouldn't break until 2100.

    1222:

    RE: "can the President just decide to launch a nuke": this topic has been covered at great length by the nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein (this link is to the fourth part, but it can be read in isolation). In short, the entire system is designed to give the answer 'yes', for speed reasons.

    1223:

    RE: "why build a doomsday device and not tell anyone".

    Well, the Soviet "Dead Hand" aka "Perimeter" system fits that description: when armed, it would trigger nuclear retaliation strike automatically on detecting attacks. The USSR kept it top secret.

    The intention, counter-intuitively, was that it would reduce the pressure on the leadership; since it would retaliate if they were killed, they wouldn't need to act hastily to avoid decapitation. It would "cool down all these hotheads and extremists. No matter what was going to happen, there still would be revenge." More information in this Wired article.

    1224:

    I suspect we're probably both very close in terms of thoughts on Brexit. The EU/Europe is currently problematic though. The main problem is that it's not close enough to really get a lot of the potential benefits, but the members aren't ready for the required integration. Rhetorically, if European integration was really a driving factor, then why haven't we seen already seen unilateral mergers such as France and Germany?

    At the moment all the EU members are trying to maximise the benefits of their membership whilst minimising anything they don't like or don't perceive to be in their own best interests. You have n countries all trying to play M?GA. Until people start thinking about what's best for the group as a whole that's just asking for plenty of trouble. I also wonder if the pace of growth of new countries into the EU was too fast.

    My guess is that by continually banging on the drum of European integration, and trying to rush it, the EU and its architects have put that project back a very large number of years. Had they taken a less pressured approach and let things take their course it probably would have proceeded a lot quicker because it ultimately makes sense.

    For the military-industrial complex for example, choosing that as an example since I'm interested in it, each country trying to do their own thing and competing against each other isn't working. There are lots of European military projects that have gone badly wrong and didn't really achieve anybody's aims. There have also been a few successes. But the Horizon frigate project for example:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon-class_frigate

    Too many competing requirements, everybody wanted to build it in their country etc. etc. I think the F35 project has had similar problems.

    Another thing I've come to perceive as a failure of the EU is that they really need an active and good public relations, advertising and fake news combating outfit. If every time there was a negative article in the UK press, it was followed by an EU rebuttal and UK wide charm offensive then maybe that might have helped stop the rot. Obviously a lot of the "hater press" would've refused to publish, but that's just why you have to try so much harder to spread the good news...

    1225:

    Being prepared for this sort of thing needs a particular type of mindset that's not suited to a profit-motive type of person. Unfortunately, current dogma seems to favour putting profit-motive people in charge. You reap what you sow.

    Not sure about that. For one thing, we've got huge chunks of the military industrial complex (those related to nuclear war and fighting the next world war) that generally stand useless and get retired, but on which billions are spent.

    There are multiple problems with PPE. For one thing, there are supply chain issues, because you don't just conjure N95s and gowns out of thin air, you need materials to make them. Those materials are in finite supply, and they do get used for other things, so there's an upper limit on how many you can make, however you're making them.

    One place where things get extraordinarily interesting is that there was a general switch from cleanable PPE to single use PPE. It saves on costs, because there's less going into the hospital laundry, and there's allegedly less risk of contamination if the protective gear is disposed of. And it's also plastic, which means there's the political economy of the oil industry favoring it. But in a pandemic situation, not being able to clean and reuse parts of kit as normal procedure meant that it's getting cleaned and reused on an ad hoc basis, with resulting loss of life. This would argue that the problem with PPE isn't the lack of ability to ramp it up, it was the whole decision to make it completely disposable to save costs in hospitals. And we like medical costs low, do we not?

    And then there's the capitalist response to this, which is that companies that design protective gear for other uses are getting very interested in designing hospital PPE. They make a very good point, that disposable PPE is not designed for comfort, recleaning, or more than minimal protection, because it was designed to be disposed rapidly. If the need is for gear that's durable, cleanable, and for long-term wear, then it needs to be comprehensively redesigned, which is something they're working on now.

    Since we're years away from getting widespread deployment of a Covid-19 vaccine, and since hospitals will be dealing with patients largely using current methods for this long (*), it's faster to design new PPE that better meets the challenge, so we don't burn through too many nurses and doctors in the process of trying to save at least some of the pandemic's victims.

    Oh yeah, if you want another example of capitalism in action on Covid-19, one of the local hospitals bought this cleaning robot to rapidly disinfect ICU beds. It's only US$100k, but hopefully it's effective.

    *The problem is that the development paths for safe, effective drugs and safe, effective vaccines are pretty similar and take about the same amount of time. Barring a miracle, and we could certainly use one of those.

    1226:

    My hot take is that the EU expanded eastward prematurely, under pressure from the USA to integrate the former Warsaw Pact states after 1991. This was in part motivated to lock the eastern bloc into the western system, and in part to sabotage further moves towards tighter EU integration (which threatened to create a rival to the USA).

    It worked on both counts.

    Upshot: it looks likely that the USA is going down within the next 30 years ... and in the process, will have prevented the EU emerging as a logical democratic successor, handing the playing field to autocracies like China. Well played.

    (I note that a lot of the EU hater press in the UK is owned by conservative media barons who aren't even UK residents for tax purposes, but align with right-wing American oligarchs like the Koch family.)

    1227:

    Someone else gone who should be remembered: Ann Mitchell, Bletchley Park codebreaker who helped change course of World War II dies aged 97

    https://www.scotsman.com/news/people/bletchley-park-codebreaker-who-helped-change-course-world-war-ii-dies-aged-97-2855511

    1228:

    And then there's climate change. 30 years out, with business as usual, is when the mass extinction event that starts this decade reaches the temperate zone...

    There are multiple issues at work here. One is that it's a mistake to say that the US is further down the road than the UK. Since 1945, the US has lost the Philippines and Cuba, while having military bases in most countries worldwide. In the same period of time, the UK has gone from one of the world's greatest empires to an archipelago and a few islands. If ER II hangs around long enough, she may preside over the loss of Scotland and Northern Ireland after Brexit. That imperial shrinkage is, I think unprecedented in modern times, perhaps ever. I think even the Mongols did better, though I could be wrong.

    For the US to do something similar, it would have to lose all of the continental US and Alaska, except basically Maryland and Virginia. While this could well happen with climate change and enough crop failures, we're not on that road yet.

    China's got it's own problems, as does Russia. Indeed, nation-states of all stripes have problems. We've got a plethora of country types, from the remnants of colonial empires (primarily now Russia, the US, and China with Tibet), nation-states that are a combination of old states and nation-states left from the rubble of the contraction of colonial empires, and super-state systems (the EU, the African Union, perhaps the Tasman Bubble if that gets set up).

    If you want the trend-lines, here are the two I'd watch, in addition to the nation-states.

    One that's already causing huge amounts of trouble is the rise of the aristocratic super-rich. Call the plutocrats or aristocrats, it doesn't particularly matter. What does matter is that there are a number of individuals out there whose individual wealth is greater than that of many nation-states. They're not citizens in the traditional sense, they're effectively autonomous powers. Worse, they include people who run major states, including the US, Russia, and Saudi Arabia among others.

    One titanic fight that's shaping up is whether the world is controlled by nation-states or plutocrats, and it's a pretty even match at the moment. The critical point is that you can look at El Cheeto Grande's performance, not as a typical president, but as what billionaires do to corrupt countries. Ditto Putin, and something similar is happening in the UK without a plutocrat in charge. China and the EU are both fighting against this kind of corruption in their own ways, and I think that's the more critical fight than whether the EU or China dominates the world.

    Going forward, I do expect a Fourth Way to emerge: organized climate migrants. Right now, climate migration is largely ad hoc and often illegal. As more people move and nation-states and plutocrats struggle against them, I would not be at all surprised if we don't see migrants organize to protect themselves and then to take the territory the need to survive.

    Obviously the idea of Huns 2.0 pouring over the Southern Border of Anywhere is bait for xenophobes everywhere. On that basis alone, I'd advocate for really working to make migrants welcome, rather than repelling them until they organize for sheer survival and have real grievances. Given the way the world works though, since we've been unable to do the right thing and control climate change, and we're struggling to do the humane thing and curtail wars and make life bearable for migrants, we may be stuck with organized migrant hordes in coming decades.

    Now, given what happened during the Age of Migration, where there were some innovative tactics used by the migrating tribes, I can only hope that the weapons of the migrant hordes won't be AK-47s, but innovative mass non-violence. I'm not sure how a city would deal with hundreds of thousands of non-citizens doing a peaceful occupation that entirely clogged its downtown, major roads and all. For example.

    1229:

    I hadn't thought of that - and I've read a fair amount about WWI. Talk about not putting two and two together!

    1230:

    Not sure about that. For one thing, we've got huge chunks of the military industrial complex (those related to nuclear war and fighting the next world war) that generally stand useless and get retired, but on which billions are spent.

    I think there's some context here that's interesting. If we talk about strategic nuclear weapons - your Trident D5s and the like, then their stated purpose is deterrence. Specifically, they are your last-gasp gambit for "you do not want to try and invade me Mister - you will really not like the consequences." Seen like that they are actually designed to not be used. The moment you have to use one, they've failed in their purpose because they failed to deter what they were supposed to. So I see personally "that generally stand useless and get retired" as meaning that they achieved their desired result - you weren't invaded and you didn't have to use them. Really, the question about these weapons is, how do their costs and downsides stack up against what you would need to achieve the same outcome by other means?

    I'm not a fan of these weapons, but having let the genie out of the bottle, or opened Pandora's box, I can't see any realistic way of reversing that. Ultimately they are just basic physics, and everyone who can have one will want the big stick or will desire coverage under someone else's big stick. I wonder whether one possibility is that the EU decides NATO and the USA are no longer reliable that they start making a plan for some sort of wider-spread European deterrent.

    One place where things get extraordinarily interesting is that there was a general switch from cleanable PPE to single use PPE. ...

    When I was studying Electronics Engineering we had a lot of interesting discussions around this sort of thing with the chaps from the Business school. From a capitalist point of view, long-term reusable products that don't break are a bad idea. Once everybody has enough, there's no incentive for anybody to buy any more so you go out of business. Someone mentioned this recently in the context of guns and US arms manufacturers. Single-use, or don't last very long, or break the day after the legally required warranty period expires, are a never-ending revenue stream.

    1231:

    Pigeon yues, well. I always had this problem, when that period came up in "History" at school. It was very fashionable, then the decry anything at all that "Our" military leaders did ... And I always asked - "If they were so bloody awful, how come Imperial Germany didn't win?" Espescially as I didn't know - as I do now - that the major army with the lowest casualty rate was ... The British Empire's ... oops.

    Windscale Here the problem is/are the loonies ( Including the Daily Hate Mail ) who simultaneously describe the EU as: "The EUSSR" & "Der vierte Reich" - without any justification or evidence to back theor claims - they simply SHOUT LOUDER ...

    Heteromeles there was a general switch from cleanable PPE to single use PPE Profoundly stupid & regressionary & expensive & self-defeating ... It took me some time to realise that all those "gowns" were SINGLE USE - what a Waste! The need is for gear that's durable, cleanable, and for long-term wear, then it needs to be comprehensively redesigned...,?i> Right, bloody get on with it.

    Later: If ER II hangs around long enough, she may preside over the loss of Scotland and Northern Ireland after Brexit. In which case, BoZo will be in The Tower - bet on it.

    Charlie CORRECTION "(I note that a lot of the EU hater press in the UK is owned by conservativefascist media barons who aren't even UK residents for tax purposes, but align with right-wing American oligarchs like the Koch family."

    1232:

    No, I left it - he gave me an order, and he's the VP, so it's on his head.

    It didn't take more than a month or two to understand why DP and IT (they were separate, and literally, my boss told me not to get too friendly with them!) folks would leave ASAP - I was there 18 months, which was as fast as I could find another job.*

    Note that before I left, turnover was 10%-15%... A MONTH.

    I have pages of reasons I have always referred to them as the Scummy Mortgage Co.

    • Austin was hard about that - as a friend with a Masters put it, it was the most paper-snob town he'd ever seen.
    1233:

    Oh, hell, yes. Why wouldn't the ultrawealthy want the EU to expand east ASAP. I mean, this is what they wanted all along, ripping it all up. I mean, they thought that, like the Ottoman Empire, they'd get Russia and parts east after WWI, and how dare these bolshies take it over and keep them out....

    1234:

    whitroth @ 1194: One place I worked - the only professional job I actually hated - I found, in an online program (after the other online programmer had been fired, after 10 years there) his "algorithm" for leap year: if it's 1976 or 1980 or 1984 or 1988 or 1992, it's a leap year.

    Do you mean it was just a hard coded list of leap years ending with 1992? I am not a programmer, but even I could write a simple leap year algorithm.

    You should have just told him the company was going to start losing money "REAL SOON now"! He might have understood that. No need to mention "real soon" was 4 - 5 years in the future.

    1235:

    Windscale Here the problem is/are the loonies ( Including the Daily Hate Mail ) who simultaneously describe the EU as: "The EUSSR" & "Der vierte Reich" - without any justification or evidence to back theor claims - they simply SHOUT LOUDER ...

    Yes absolutely. But where the rebuttals from the EU saying:

    "No that's actually not right, actually I think you'll find... Plus, by the way, here's all the brilliant things we've done in the UK and the rest of the EU."?

    I guess they were hoping that the UK government would be doing that but, for large chunks of the time, I think it suited various UK governments to let the EU-hate-press savage them unopposed. Which I why I've come to think the EU should have been doing it itself, including using judicial means as necessary.

    1236:

    _Moz_ @ 1196: You end up, if you're persistent, down a rabbit hole of innumerate muppets saying "computer says it, so it is correct". Eventually i changed banks. Not because I thought the new one would be better, but just because I had completely got the shits with that particular bank.

    Years ago I had an account at a bank and when I checked my monthly statement I found there was roughly $1,000 more in the account than I had deposited. I spoke to someone at the bank and was told their computer didn't make mistakes. I even wrote them a letter about it. After that I opened a new account at a different bank and took my business there with the extra thousand stashed in a separate savings account. (I knew I'd eventually have to give it back.)

    When the first bank finally discovered their computer had made a mistake they wanted their $1,000 back, which I was happy to give them, but they also thought they were were going to charge me interest on the "loan" which I refused to pay.

    There's principal, and then there's principle. It was their mistake and they blew me off when I tried to correct it and then they wanted to charge me for that. Fuck 'em. The interest I earned at the second bank was only a couple of dollars, but still ... I did earn it.

    1237:

    Yes. Literally, the code read that.

    shakes head

    1238:

    It took me some time to realise that all those "gowns" were SINGLE USE - what a Waste!

    Bear in mind that if you go for reusable PPE, then you need a supply chain that can return dangerous contaminated waste to reprocessing sites (laundries) where they can be rendered safe before being recycled for reuse.

    Bear in mind that laundry work is low-paid, low-status, and labour-intensive -- we can barely build a robot production line for t-shirts, never mind robots that can fold cloth: just identifying a garment from images of a crumpled chunk of fabric is a "hard" problem in computer science/AI. Also, most laundries are cramped, because social distancing wasn't an issue and real estate is expensive: they were build to accommodate the washer/drier plant and just enough space for the workers to move stuff around them.

    So cleaning PPE requires human beings (in their own PPE) to dismantle dangerously contaminated equipment and clean it. Which is problematic, because nursing home and hospital laundries aren't equipped to do that stuff any more -- it used to be A Thing, but with the threat of lethal bloodborne diseases that emerged in the 1980s (hint: HIV, and why your dentist wears protective gear these days) it was cheaper to switch to disposable scrubs/masks than to risk the lives of the laundry workers.

    If COVID19 turns out to be a long-term problem (my guess is, >2 years) then we'll doubtless see the re-appearance of hospital laundries and nursing home laundries that can do more than wash/dry/fold residents' clothes and bedding. But it's actually going to take physical build-out to get there.

    (One possibility: autoclavable fabric. If you make 'em out of that, you can run dirties in a skip straight into an autoclave for a brisk pulse of 3 bars/120 celsius saturated steam before it is cooled down and shoved in a regular washing machine. By the time it gets anywhere near a human, it's biologically safe. Problem is, most fabrics really don't like that kind of treatment. Another possibility: radiation sterilization, as is already used for food and pharmaceuticals. Problem is, that requires construction of specialized plant with shielding for a big-ass Co-60 source. And so it goes ...)

    If ER II hangs around long enough, she may preside over the loss of Scotland and Northern Ireland after Brexit.

    NI might merge with the Republic of Ireland, but Scotland will keep the monarchy around -- after all, England only "borrowed" the monarchy in 1606, they can bloody well give it back. (At least, that was official SNP policy in 2014: on independence it'd become the Kingdom of Scotland and a constitutional monarchy, unless and until a separate referendum on becoming a republic happened.)

    1239:

    Glad to hear you are not dead. Too many good writers have dropped off their perches leaving me with less to read. This is bad.

    Treat it as burnout, a phenomenon you are familiar with no doubt. My treatment, it happens to me around once a year, is a day with a good book and then actually taking time to cook something. It does take me a few hours to stop panicking that I am not working.

    You could also take a walk and smell the flowers....

    Ah - how much are the police tickets these days?

    1240:

    @1097said "On the other hand, our species survived with band-level social structures for 300,000-odd years. If you're in a really bad mood, you may think that this, with a few million humans as a global population, would have been optimal for our species long-term resilience"

    Unless civilization is just a temporary intermediate stage in the evolution of larger life forms, like stromatolites before the emergence of multicellular organisms. For all we know, earth development could be well within an expected range of outcomes known by alien observers to lead, in most cases, towards a pretty standard metamorphosis. Could even be wagering quatloos on it.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quatloo

    Just don't ever accept squat-loos in an exchange, especially not if they say they made them themselves.

    1241:

    Charlie Stross @ 1208: Given the way the Zircon affair unravelled in the mid-1980s, I'm pretty certain that the lack of a British space program in the 1980s was quid pro quo for cheap access to USAF/NRO assets, including launch capacity where needed, via the Five Eyes. The timing fits for a secret treaty between the Reagan administration and Thatcher.

    There were probably secret agreements, but never a "treaty", because treaties have to be ratified by the Senate.

    1242:

    One possibility: autoclavable fabric. If you make 'em out of that, you can run dirties in a skip straight into an autoclave for a brisk pulse of 3 bars/120 celsius saturated steam before it is cooled down and shoved in a regular washing machine. By the time it gets anywhere near a human, it's biologically safe. Problem is, most fabrics really don't like that kind of treatment. Another possibility: radiation sterilization, as is already used for food and pharmaceuticals. Problem is, that requires construction of specialized plant with shielding for a big-ass Co-60 source.)

    Oh Lordy, you don't know...

    Speaking only for a local Nameless Hospital that I know quite a bit about.

    --There is no autoclave on premises to my knowledge. They buy their pre-sterilized stuff in bags from companies that specialize in sterilizing stuff. I got some neat forceps that they were going to throw out, because they hadn't used a sterilized, bagged forceps by its expiration date. Best sewing scissors I ever got.

    --I think there's still a laundry, because of bed sheets and linens. I also think they have various ways of handling hospital waste that minimize contact, again because of sheets on beds.

    --They don't have the cleaners on staff. The cleaning function is subcontracted from an internationally known firm that does stuff like that, that we won't mention. This has proved problematic recently, because the hospital wants staff to be regularly tested for Covid-19 starting soon (yay!), but cleaners and others aren't on staff, so they're not to be tested (boo!). Except maybe they are?

    Now, why not an autoclave? When I was in grad school, I worked with a number of autoclaves, and the damned things were always breaking down. The normal problem is the seals. They're basically oversized pressure cookers, and if the seal doesn't work, things get interesting, especially in a confined space.* And also, there are various and sundry ways to screw up autoclave processing, and you need a source of steam (UW had steam pipes on campus, so linking into the radiator feeds to power the autoclaves was really easy. Here in San Diego, you need to make steam at the hospital campus power plant, because no one uses steam heat).

    So going forward, it's possible to adapt the hospital laundry to take robes and some parts of face masks, although the filters will have to be discarded. It will take longer for face shields and tools to be autoclaved, because they'll have to build those systems in buildings where they were discarded.

    Rubber gloves and similar will always be discarded, unless someone figures out a quick way to use an autoclave to remanufacture the latex and a really cheap way to make gloves in industrial countries. Unfortunately, a lot of latex gloves are made by hand in places like Malaysia using, erm, really problematic labor, so there are lots of problems (technical, social, and other) that automation might not be able to solve easily.

    So while I'm sympathetic to outsourcing sterilizing procedures to companies that either are willing to autoclave or play with belt-feeds and gamma ray emitters, it obviously does leave hospitals under-prepared for dealing with any emergency, whether it's an earthquake or a pandemic. Of course being prepared for these is a money loser until a disaster hits, so the solution is less than obvious.

    *The biggest autoclave I used could do over a ton of soil, and at one point I used that much for an experiment. It was a tube about three meters long and a meter in diameter, and it had rails inside to take the carts that you put the autoclaved soil mix on, and loading and unloading the carts was real fun. I was warned repeatedly never to wear wellingtons when using the machine. One of the ways it could catastrophically fail was to not drain the boiling water. If that happened, when you opened the hatch, hundreds of gallons of boiling water would pour out. If you had boots on, said boiling water would pour into your boots, and you'd lose your feet the hard way. That never happened while I was there, but the guy in charge always wore sandals for a reason. What did happen was that the freaking enormous gasket that let the thing build up pressure occasionally failed, necessitating the autoclave being shut down until they could get a new gasket and get it mounted properly.

    1243:

    I accept your correction, and I should have checked my throw-away remark more carefully :-( I meant the ability to design (and, together with a fabbing partner) make mainframes up to supercomputers. Even by 1970, the UK's lack of advanced fabbing (for reasons OGH gave in #1216) meant that ICL's products were trailing, at best. But their design and software were a full decade ahead of IBM; and the DAP (which I was thinking of) would have been a viable supercomputer if made on a suitable scale in a suitable process. What I was referring to was that all of those patents were sold off to the USA for a song.

    1244:

    "If you have an industry that apparently isn't globally competitive, how much are you prepared to spend to subsidise that industry on the off-chance you might need it?"

    Yes, that's the question, and what I was railing against was that the dogmatic answer was "Nothing, so we aren't even going to assess the risk of that happening." As a statistician (i.e. applied game theorist), that really sticks in my craw.

    1245:

    The government can. They can demonetarise what you hold. That's a standard trick.

    1246:

    And in part to turn the EU into a Russophobic organisation. The USA and NATO did not stop waging the cold war when the USSR dissolved.

    1247:

    Windscale @ 1209: There was an interesting article in the Economist about the trials and tribble-ations of COVID related PPE:

    "The great PPE scramble
    Why countries can’t meet the demand for gear against covid-19
    https://www.economist.com/international/2020/04/19/why-countries-cant-meet-the-demand-for-gear-against-covid-19
    (This one isn't paywalled)

    It effectively was for me. I was going to have to subscribe or provide an email address so they can SPAM me.

    The TL;DR is demand surged so much, so quickly, that it greatly exceeded supply. Supply couldn't be instantly ramped up.

    That's one of the problems of capitalism I think. You size your production lines for expected average demand and to cope with expected peaks (e.g. Christmas). If there's an expected initial peak of demand, then you build up a stockpile to get you through that peak of sales so that you can size your production line for expected average demand. I understand this is what Apple does for new iPhones for example. Building a production line that can manage a 20 times surge in output is just wasted capital. It seems none of the medical PPE industry was prepared for this sort of widespread pandemic.

    Being prepared for this sort of thing needs a particular type of mindset that's not suited to a profit-motive type of person. Unfortunately, current dogma seems to favour putting profit-motive people in charge. You reap what you sow.

    Being prepared for "this sort of thing" is why governments stockpile emergency supplies and replenish those stockpiles after they're used to bridge the gap in such an emergency.

    The reason there was none to be had in the U.S. was because the Obama administration had to use it 2013-2016 African Ebola epidemic and Moscow Mitch (Putin's Bitch) and the RICO Greedy Oligarchs' Party refused to appropriate funds to replenish the stockpile just to fuck Obama (and fuck over the country).

    And then Cheatolini iL Douchebag "won" the 2016 election (with a little help from his "friends") and he couldn't see a way for him and his grifting family to profit from replenishing the stockpile, so we end up with the situation we're in today.

    1248:

    I can assure you that being taught in a school that followed the other approach was no better.

    1249:

    The biggest autoclave I used could do over a ton of soil, and at one point I used that much for an experiment. It was a tube about three meters long and a meter in diameter

    I think I worked with larger, on occasion. (Back when NHS hospital regions had their own manufacturing suites for stuff that was too expensive to buy in at market rates but too cheap for generic suppliers to bother with -- dialysis fluid for continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis, for example, which is basically sterile isotonic fluids in multi-litre quantities per kidney failure patient per day.)

    Not cylindrical, but designed to take carts loaded with ~100-200 litre glass bottles at a time, in batches. Access from the class 1 aseptic manufacturing suite, c/w boot barrier and bunny suits for the staff.

    1250:

    whitroth @ 1227: Someone else gone who should be remembered: Ann Mitchell, Bletchley Park codebreaker who helped change course of World War II dies aged 97

    Still, 97 is a nice long run if you don't end up bed ridden or in a wheel-chair. I hope her later years were good ones and she didn't lose herself before she went; that she was able to enjoy those years.

    1251:

    p>Windscale @ 1230: When I was studying Electronics Engineering we had a lot of interesting discussions around this sort of thing with the chaps from the Business school. From a capitalist point of view, long-term reusable products that don't break are a bad idea. Once everybody has enough, there's no incentive for anybody to buy any more so you go out of business. Someone mentioned this recently in the context of guns and US arms manufacturers. Single-use, or don't last very long, or break the day after the legally required warranty period expires, are a never-ending revenue stream.

    Two thoughts on that ...
    1. IF Sony was going to manufacture guns (that break the day after the warranty expires like every one of their consumer electronics products I've ever purchased), what kind of guns would they manufacture?
    2. Sometimes "What's good for General Motors is NOT good for the USA!".

    1252:

    What should have been "stockpiled" was the means to build the machinery to make fresh PPE as well as manufacture the raw materials they are made from. Any stockpile of goods gets depleted rapidly if called on, it should only be there to bridge the interval until the new production lines start operating and then we start building more production lines.

    Instead the world spent March and April this year rummaging through cupboards for old overlooked boxes of out-of-date and/or inadequate PPE for medical use and flying transport aircraft hither and yon to collect a few measly tonnes of supplies from somewhere, anywhere. By the time COVID-19 is backed into a corner late next year my guesstimate is that we, the world that is, will have burned our way through the best part of a trillion N95 medical-grade masks. After that we need gloves, lots of gloves, and coveralls too, and booties and swabs and many other items that we, the world needs to produce now and for the next year and more. Stockpiles are an irrelevance.

    1253:

    If I was designing a facility to irradiate clothes I would use an electric source rather than muck around with radioisotopes.

    Safer to handle and arguably cheaper to run once you account for security and disposal costs.

    1254:

    Last I heard, a few years ago an effort was made to send the instructions Prospero required to turn it on, but they had a couple of problems:

    Most the documentation stored at RAE/DERA was lost/binned during the drive to privatisation as QinetiQ - they threw out skip loads of books from their library and shredded huge amounts of old reports.

    Not many steerable dishes worked at the right frequency. I assume it was never achieved or I might have heard, but unless the environment has really messed with late 1960s circuitry theres no reason someone else couldnt try sometime.

    1255:

    A radioisotope decontamination system has the advantage that it doesn't heat the materials in the clothing, masks etc. while penetrating all the fibres quite thoroughly, (assuming gamma radiation as from a Co-60 source) killing bacteria and, hopefully, a significant amount of viruses. Heating the structured materials in masks and other PPE to decontaminate them can cause macroscopic changes to the meshes of the fabric that permit breathing but will trap virus-laden droplets.

    1256:

    Charlie Stross @ 1238:

    It took me some time to realise that all those "gowns" were SINGLE USE - what a Waste!

    Bear in mind that if you go for reusable PPE, then you need a supply chain that can return dangerous contaminated waste to reprocessing sites (laundries) where they can be rendered safe before being recycled for reuse.

    Bear in mind that laundry work is low-paid, low-status, and labour-intensive --

    When I first went to University (straight out of high-school) it was still barely possible to "work your way" through school; i.e. hold a "full-time" minimum wage job and afford tuition & fees & dormitory rent at one of the State Universities ... that's how I ended up in Raleigh; because I went to "NC State University" ...

    The first job I found when I got to school was working in the University Laundry (because you could work there at night & go to classes during the day). I worked there for two semesters.

    During that period, students living in the dorms could rent bed linens from the University - two blankets, two sheets, a pillow & a pillow case. Students could turn the sheets & pillow case in nominally once a week to receive freshly laundered replacements - 15,000 male, mostly engineering nerd students between the ages of 17 - 21 (there were also 1,500 female students the year I started). The only "PPE" we had in the laundry was the kind of rubber gloves you can buy in the grocery store for washing dishes.

    I looked it up recently in Google Street View. The University Laundry building has been renovated and turned into the "Language and Computer Laboratories" building.

    There were no computer laboratories when I was in school there, although there was a place for CompSci students to go punch their programs into their card decks & hand the deck in for the program to be run ... and then come back a day later to get a printout to see if the program had run. I only knew about it because at the time telephone bills included a similar punch card that had to be returned your with payment and having become a wild student radical by that point I'd take mine up there to type obscenities (and punch them into the card).

    1257:

    I love it: planned obsolescence for guns.

    Plus, they could do what software houses do: that old .38 is wimpy, you should buy the brand new, improved .39.... You will, of course, have to buy bullets from us, too....

    1258:

    Simple question: in the UK, irradiated milk is common, and needs no refrigeration. How do they do that in that kind of quantity, and couldn't an identical facility be used to sterilize PPE?

    1259:

    p>Elderly Cynic @ 1244:

    "If you have an industry that apparently isn't globally competitive, how much are you prepared to spend to subsidise that industry on the off-chance you might need it?"

    Yes, that's the question, and what I was railing against was that the dogmatic answer was "Nothing, so we aren't even going to assess the risk of that happening." As a statistician (i.e. applied game theorist), that really sticks in my craw.

    But if it's a critical industry (i.e. one that it would be disastrous for the nation if access to that industry's output was cut off), doesn't it make sense for the government to invest at some level to make that industry "globally competitive"?

    Again, why else would you have any government if it wasn't going to do that?

    1260:

    Another thing I've come to perceive as a failure of the EU is that they really need an active and good public relations, advertising and fake news combating outfit. If every time there was a negative article in the UK press, it was followed by an EU rebuttal and UK wide charm offensive then maybe that might have helped stop the rot

    Speaking from the US side of the pond that just tends to drive people into being convinced the other guys are just lying.

    1261:

    With Blue Streak as a first stage, as was used for ELDO:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Launcher_Development_Organisation

    we had all the bits needed for a launcher even without HTP.

    It was just a lack of ambition - rather like these days actually.

    1262:

    One place where things get extraordinarily interesting is that there was a general switch from cleanable PPE to single use PPE.

    I suspect that some of this is related to the move to outsourcing disinfecting things after hospitals continued to mess it up. I think the peak of this issue was at Duke (local to me) when someone at the bottom of the pay scale put elevator oil fluid where it was mistaken for disinfecting solution. (Similar barrels and storage and such).

    After all the law suits took off nearly everywhere I've been all the metal hand tools used by doctors and dentists now come in sealed packages that are opened at the time of use. After use they are toss (placed gently?) into a bin and sent out to be cleaned and packaged back up.

    I wonder if the in house cleaning of PPE went away at the same time.

    1263:

    Nope. Lead's toxic, so you have to buy these new tungsten/steel/copper/whatever bullets. But since these are less dense, the bullet is bigger, so the chamber has to be longer not wider, and probably the barrel has to be tougher because the bullet deforms less.

    This has been the argument for dumping old hunting rifles in California for decades now: the new bullets and shotgun shells, all of which are lead free, don't fit the old guns.

    So not stupid, exactly, just handy for the gun industry.

    1264:

    Two very good questions.

    1265:

    From a capitalist point of view, long-term reusable products that don't break are a bad idea. Once everybody has enough, there's no incentive for anybody to buy any more so you go out of business.

    In the US Dewalt is THE brand for prosumer and even contractor battery powered hand tools.

    But without a lot of money in my pocket I bought into the Ryobi line which in someways is a house brand of Home Depot. And I tended to buy during "Black Friday" says where things were 1/2 price or even less.

    Well it turns out that DeWalt is on their 3rd or 4th physical battery layout and voltage change. So that NiCAD powered drill you bought 20 years ago will not longer work as the batteries have not be made in well over a decade.

    Ryobi, on the other hand, started out with 18v NiCAD battery setups and have kept the same physical battery attachment up through their varied sized LiIon current designs. You can currently get LiIon batteries ranging from 2Ahours to 6AHours all at 18 volts that fit all of their battery tools made in the last 25 years or so. I'm loyal to them now and even give Christmas gifts of their tools to my son and son-in-law so we can trade tools and batteries. And I have every single tool bought in the line since day one. My only real failure is the drill I jambed hard and will no longer reverse. But it's only 20 years old. Oh well.

    I even borrowed my son-in-laws Ryobi 16" electric mower last week as it also takes these batteries and used to to mow my yard while I decide what to do with my broken gas unit.

    1266:

    Nojay @ 1252: What should have been "stockpiled" was the means to build the machinery to make fresh PPE as well as manufacture the raw materials they are made from. Any stockpile of goods gets depleted rapidly if called on, it should only be there to bridge the interval until the new production lines start operating and then we start building more production lines.

    Instead the world spent March and April this year rummaging through cupboards for old overlooked boxes of out-of-date and/or inadequate PPE for medical use and flying transport aircraft hither and yon to collect a few measly tonnes of supplies from somewhere, anywhere. By the time COVID-19 is backed into a corner late next year my guesstimate is that we, the world that is, will have burned our way through the best part of a trillion N95 medical-grade masks. After that we need gloves, lots of gloves, and coveralls too, and booties and swabs and many other items that we, the world needs to produce now and for the next year and more. Stockpiles are an irrelevance.

    No, stockpiles are NOT an irrelevance. They do need to be properly managed so that items approaching use by/discard by dates are replaced before they become "out-of-date". That's simple, competent logistics management. Stockpiles should get used up when called upon. That's what they're there for.

    Replenishing those items in a timely manner before they go "out-of-date" helps to keep the manufacturers production lines open. If additional production capacity is needed, stockpiles are a reasonable way to bridge the gap while that capacity is brought on line.

    The reason we didn't have adequate current stockpiles for Covid-19 was that they did not get replenished after the last time they were called upon ... and that was because of POLITICAL obdurance that had noting to do with competent logistics management.

    1267:

    Scummy Mortgage Co.

    As to your travails with this company it still happens. And to some degree I see it with my clients and many other companies.

    Your mortgage company likely was run by folks with a mindset of "things were so much better before all these computers showed up".

    Or more typically these days is the older generations that are now on top still think of automation as something you bolt on after everything else is done and all the decisions are made. And thus IT is the bad guy as they get to point out the PLAN AS SPEC'D will just not work. And at times not even "older" folks.

    I see it all the time in companies ranging from 1 person up to 100,000K+ employees.

    1268:

    Do you mean it was just a hard coded list of leap years ending with 1992? I am not a programmer, but even I could write a simple leap year algorithm.

    My position is that 80% to 95% of the people writing code are coders. Start with blank slate. March to specified end point in straight line at fastest speed possible. Pull next assignment down from the list. Rinse Lather Repeat.

    Programmers who think things through are rare. Those who can see the entire picture are rare indeed.

    1269:

    Are you sure your memory isn't going and you're riffing an episode of "Friends"?

    GDRFC

    1270:

    I was referring to electrically powered radiation sources. X-rays and neutrons can both be produced fairly cheaply, as can various flavours of fast moving electrons etc.

    Actual physical radioisotope sources are dreadfully 20th century.

    1271:
    Simple question: in the UK, irradiated milk is common, and needs no refrigeration. How do they do that in that kind of quantity, and couldn't an identical facility be used to sterilize PPE?

    AFAIK milk is not a food that can be irradiated in the UK. You may be thinking of UHT milk — where the liquid is raised very briefly to a high temperature. Not something that would be useful for PPE.

    1272:

    And programmers who write a list of leap years are just plain incompetent. That doesn't mean that incompetents aren't common - after all, they are cheaper.

    1273:

    It is?

    Heat treated milk is available everywhere, and there is filtered stuff that adds about a week to the (refrigerated) shelf life but I don't recall ever seeing anything irradiated in the shops.

    1274:

    And programmers who write a list of leap years are just plain incompetent.

    My point is they are NOT programmers. They are CODERS.

    A job where you are surrounded by programmers can be a great place to work. CAN!!!

    A job where things are so big that they require coders to get things done is usually misery.

    1275:

    Does the phrase:

    "Match book school of computer programming"

    resonate with folks around here?

    1276:

    David L @ 1266:

    From a capitalist point of view, long-term reusable products that don't break are a bad idea. Once everybody has enough, there's no incentive for anybody to buy any more so you go out of business.

    In the US Dewalt is THE brand for prosumer and even contractor battery powered hand tools.

    But without a lot of money in my pocket I bought into the Ryobi line which in someways is a house brand of Home Depot. And I tended to buy during "Black Friday" says where things were 1/2 price or even less.

    Well it turns out that DeWalt is on their 3rd or 4th physical battery layout and voltage change. So that NiCAD powered drill you bought 20 years ago will not longer work as the batteries have not be made in well over a decade.

    I'm pretty sure my 25+ year old DeWALT 18V battery powered drill doesn't have a NiCAD battery. The battery pack has sealed Lead-Acid cells inside (I'm sure because I've had the old one apart to replace cells). Those batteries are only good for 5 years or so & I had to rebuild my drill batteries several times over the last 25+ years.

    I'm currently on my second set of DeWALT batteries because when I most recently (2018) needed to rebuild them I found I could buy a new DeWALT battery set that fit my old drill for slightly less than the cost of replacing the sealed Lead-Acid cells.

    I did have a first generation Makita portable drill that I think had a NiCAD battery when I worked for the alarm company.

    1277:

    As to the speed of the switch to outsourced sterilization and disposable PPE I suspect it was related to liability insurance.

    Any time a new wave of claims show up the insurance trade groups take notice real quick and figure out how to stop big payouts. I suspect they told the health care industry "if you want us to keep covering you come up with a replacement to in house cleaning that can be certified and tested so we don't have to deal with every single location in the US separately."

    1278:

    I'm basing my comments on visiting workshops with a various collection of DeWalt tools and having 3 differing sets of batteries to keep them all going. Mostly depending on age.

    One thing that happens is I go shopping on sales to buy batteries. Most of the times the tools wind up being nearly free if I wait to snag a good "This tool or tools with 2 included batteries."

    I now have 4 or 5 drills/drivers, 3 small saws, and an assortment of other things. It IS nice to load up drills with the needed bits and drivers and just switch drill instead of bits. Even with fast change bit adapters.

    1279:

    We, the world that is, needs five hundred thousand tonnes of medical-grade PPE over the next 18 months or so. The world's stockpiles that were supposed to get us through the first couple of months of a world-wide pandemic like this one wouldn't amount to more than ten thousand tonnes or so, a fraction of what's needed over the longer term.

    I'm not seeing much evidence of factories being repurposed to make the billions of masks needed each month, new production line machines being manufactured and the feedstock supply chains being ramped up, instead we're still getting news stories about miniscule amounts of PPE being transported, bartered and sequestered and hidden from other agencies to cope with local demands.

    If we had started building the factories, the machines, the feedstock supply chains two months ago then we'd probably be in the situation with PPE now that Boeing was when they produced 300 B-29 bombers in October 1945, a month after the Japanese surrendered i.e. we'd have too much PPE and hospitals would be complaining about running out of storage space for the extras.

    This far into a pandemic like this one has turned out to be, stockpiles are irrelevant.

    1280:

    I have three different cordless drills, all of which use the same 12V Ni-Cd battery pack design. One of them is an Elu, about thirty-five years old which still works but doesn't reverse any more. Elu was eaten by DeWalt and rebadged to form their original cordless tool line. I have a DeWalt drill as well. I also have a Black and Decker drill which licenced the same battery pack design.

    The Usual Sources offer replacement Ni-Cd batteries for these drills at very reasonable prices but I've been looking at 3-D printing an adaptor that would allow me to use 18-volt Li-ion packs plus a buck converter to get them to supply 12V to the drills.

    Best cordless tool EVAR! is this:

    https://www.screwfix.com/p/makita-dcm501z-18v-li-ion-cxt-lxt-cordless-coffee-machine-bare/673hf

    1281:

    David L @ 1270: Are you sure your memory isn't going and you're riffing an episode of "Friends"?

    GDRFC

    I don't think I've ever seen an episode of "Friends". I've run into snippets of it on the internet, so I understand some of the references. I do know the bit about no one who had their jobs in real-life could afford those kind of apartments in New York City.

    But if you mean about the bank computer not making mistakes, no, it happened. It's not the only run-in I had with that particular bank because of their arrogant stupidity, although the others occurred after I was no longer one of their customers. Didn't lose any money, didn't make any money, but they annoyed me enough I swore I'd never accept a personal check drawn against that bank.

    I have pretty good memory, especially for little piddling shit. Sometimes I wish I could forget it, 'cause it clutters up my brain. I used to be a whiz at "Trivial Pursuit" and I wowed most of my friends when we watched Jeopardy. It's part of the reason why I'm so uptight about "losing myself" to dementia if/when I get old.

    I suck at remembering people's names, but I never forget faces & can usually remember where I first saw someone; when, where, what we were doing, what we said to each other.

    Who are you?

    1282:

    Ok, I misremembered. But in the US, you just do not see milk that doesn't require refrigeration now.

    And if someone in the US says "oh, but we have it...", kindly point to one national chain of stores - supermarkets, quick stops, anywhere.

    They ain't here.

    1283:

    David L @ 1276: Does the phrase:

    "Match book school of computer programming"

    resonate with folks around here?

    No, but I did learn to draw.

    1284:

    Also: IIRC, the "ultra-heat treated" (UHT) milk sold in the UK is what the US refers to as pasteurized; pasteurized milk in the UK is heated to a lower temperature and isn't as long-term stable, but tastes better.

    Also: US 2% milk is UK full-fat; US 1% milk is "semi-skimmed"; not sure what UK skimmed milk is in US terms.

    Milk standards aren't portable across the Atlantic. For example, the US allows a lot of hormone treatments in cattle, not to mention routine antibiotic use in feed, that are illegal in the UK and EU (although not for much longer in the UK once Boris Fucking Johnson finishes gutting our food standards in hope of getting a trade deal out of Donald Trump).

    1285:

    I don't think I've ever seen an episode of "Friends". I've run into snippets of it on the internet, so I understand some of the references. I do know the bit about no one who had their jobs in real-life could afford those kind of apartments in New York City.

    As to cost of living in NYC, well yes and no. One of the apartments was rent controlled from an aunt who lived in it starting way back when. So the rent was stuck. But it required them to lie to keep it. The other main apartment was rented by a guy who had a well paid job in a tall tower in accounting. So he could afford it also. But typical people of that age group moving to NYC then would wind up in Brooklyn. Maybe. And today way out in Queens. I knew someone who got an offer out just out of college to go work for Chase in Manhattan in 82. She figured she could do it with a 1 hour subway/bus commute from an apartment in Brooklyn shared with 3 or 4 other people. She decided to take a job in Pittsburgh. :)

    As to the plot I referenced one character saw $500 show up in her bank account. She went in and explained. Then got a letter thanking her from reporting their mistake and that her account was now being credited with another $500 plus a gift of a football telephone to correct the mistake. And so on.

    1286:

    They ain't here.

    Well it is but it is in cans or in boxes containing powder.

    1287:

    Windscale @ 1235 Unfortunately, very true. And Liebour are as guilty as the tories ( think, if you can bear it of the CorByn who hated - Still hates?) the EU & was & is a Brexiteer, for opposite "reasons" to the tory right

    Keithmasterson @ 1240 Unfortunately, that's already been thought of by "James Tiptree Jnr" ( Ms SHeldon ) Where the humans are mere spermatozoons - once one lans on the alien planet he's absorbed ( Meiosis ) & the next stage of the cycle commences ... Can't remember the name of the story, sorry.

    JBS @ 1251 Geo Bernard Shaw "Breakages, Limited" in his play "The Apple Cart"

    1288:

    Also: US 2% milk is UK full-fat; US 1% milk is "semi-skimmed"; not sure what UK skimmed milk is in US terms.

    Close.

    "Whole" milk is 3% which I think you call full fat. But maybe not. Then you have 2%, 1%, and skim with the later basically being fat free. And to me is like drinking white water with an add after taste.

    I've gotten used to 2% and whole milk tastes "thick".

    Then you can head down the rabbit hole of organic, natural, whatever. And you need to look up the definitions yourself to know what exactly you are paying extra for.

    1289:

    Keithmasterson @ 1240Unfortunately, that's already been thought of by "James Tiptree Jnr" ( Ms SHeldon )

    Also Childhood's End.

    In a non-SF version, we've also got Teilhard de Chardin and Vernadsky's noosphere.

    Unfortunately, we have an instantiation of the noosphere known as the interwebs, and it does not appear that building a perfectly logical system to connect the majority of humans results in an increase in human rationality.

    Instead, it seems Nassim Taleb got it right when he noted that too much connectivity can be an extremely bad thing, whether it's the internet or international commerce favoring rapid pandemics.

    And so it goes.

    1290:

    [g] When I took my first programming class, lo, these many years ago, there were 36? 39? in the class to start.

    13 of us took the final, 10 people barely treading water, and the three of us looking at it as a Mickey Mouse class.

    A lot of them, I think, came in "Ah read you can make big money by becoming a computer programmer" on a matchbook cover.

    1291:

    Congratulations, glad to meet you, Mr. Stross, my name's Fuddled, Be Fuddled.

    UK heats it lower? I thought you did it higher in the UK? Certainly, you can't leave US pasteurized milk out overnight, much less on a store shelf.

    In the US, there's "whole" (which may be 3%), 2% low fat, which I can drink, 1% low fat, which I can't, and skim milk, which is 0% fat, and is unpleasant-tasting water to me.

    1292:

    we like medical costs low, do we not?

    That's maybe #5 on the list. Profitable is far more important (Martin Shkreli, anyone?), especially when discussing medical supplies. Then there's availability, which today means "available to the (very) rich" and ideally enough for the peasants to stop them revolting.

    The single-use PPE thing is at least as much a problem of advancing technology as cost optimisation. It's surprisingly hard to make a cleanable filter for small particles, even if you don't care about size or pressure. Washable cloth masks definitely fall into the "better than nothing, probably" category.

    I think the only real experimental test of the latter would be to make masks with either a wool pad in the middle or a series of silk ones, so they felt the same to the wearer but one had larger holes than the other. Current observational studies seem to conclude that "of the five or six major behavioural differences, at least one is very useful in stopping the virus"... but there don't seem to be any places that are, say, using masks but not social distancing, so the actual elements are hard to tease out.

    1293:

    The government can. They can demonetarise what you hold

    India just did that, and it fucked a lot of people. They withdrew the high-value banknotes in a country that has a long history of limited banking availability and shitty banking behaviour. They also limited the amount of cash people could deposit before the deadline.

    Note the lack of "they made banking available to everyone" in that list. India is a place where some people have to walk for days to get to the nearest bank... in this case, while carrying enough for a dowry, at a time when everyone knew people were doing that.

    So as expected there were a variety of very lucrative opportunities for middlemen in "laundering" that money, helping people get rid of that money, and so on.

    But as far as the elite was concerned that was a price they're willing to pay for force everyone to use the banking system and be tracked accordingly.

    (similar thing happened in the UK with the conversion from real money to paper, and again with old to new pounds. It's pretty common. No doubt Pigeon is well acquainted with the process for spending gold sovereigns).

    1294:

    Hospital that I know quite a bit about. There is no autoclave on premises to my knowledge

    The path lab will have one, if they have a path lab... which they probably don't. Labs typically run a bunch of machines that take fiddly little bits which cost a lot of money so are reused. Like pipettes, where the tip is likely disposable but the actual device that sucks on the tip is a precision machine that gets exposed to whatever is in the tip, or at least does often enough that no-one wants to play that game. So it goes in the autoclave.

    But that's a wee box one a desk somewhere that can do one small drawer full of bits every 15-30 minutes. Plugs into a standard 2400W wall socket size. Even surgical masks would probably have to go through one at a time...

    1295:

    IIRC, the "ultra-heat treated" (UHT) milk sold in the UK is what the US refers to as pasteurized

    I don't think so. In Canada, at least, pasteurized milk is standard, and it requires refrigeration. We used to be able to buy tetrapack boxes of UHT milk that didn't require refrigeration, but I haven't seen those in decades. You can't sell raw (unpasteurized) milk legally.

    More information here than you probably want: https://www.dairyinfo.gc.ca/eng/acts-regulations-codes-and-standards/?id=1503082953507

    1296:

    Re: PPE -- ' ... the only real experimental test of the latter would be to make masks with either a wool pad in the middle or a series of silk ones'

    According to the gov't funded study a mix of fabrics is the best option. (One of the nylon fibers is hard to source but apparently replacing it with the 'fabric' used to make women's pantyhose might work. The trick here I suppose is for the cut off piece not to run -- singe-cut maybe?)

    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200424081648.htm

    Excerpt:

    'The best material for homemade face masks may be a combination of two fabrics

    ... Supratik Guha at the University of Chicago and colleagues wanted to study the ability of common fabrics, alone or in combination, to filter out aerosols similar in size to respiratory droplets.

    The researchers used an aerosol mixing chamber to produce particles ranging from 10 nm to 6 μm in diameter. A fan blew the aerosol across various cloth samples at an airflow rate corresponding to a person's respiration at rest, and the team measured the number and size of particles in air before and after passing through the fabric. One layer of a tightly woven cotton sheet combined with two layers of polyester-spandex chiffon -- a sheer fabric often used in evening gowns -- filtered out the most aerosol particles (80-99%, depending on particle size), with performance close to that of an N95 mask material. Substituting the chiffon with natural silk or flannel, or simply using a cotton quilt with cotton-polyester batting, produced similar results. The researchers point out that tightly woven fabrics, such as cotton, can act as a mechanical barrier to particles, whereas fabrics that hold a static charge, like certain types of chiffon and natural silk, serve as an electrostatic barrier. However, a 1% gap reduced the filtering efficiency of all masks by half or more, emphasizing the importance of a properly fitted mask.'

    Here's the research paper:

    https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsnano.0c03252

    I wanted to learn more about the electrostatic properties of various fibers/fabrics and found this gem published in 1974:

    https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00022470.1974.10470030

    If the home-made face masks made from the above materials can consistently perform as well as N-95s then I expect that all the Pakistani/Indian (child-employer) clothing manufacturers might opt to switch their production away from t-shirts and to face-masks.

    Dumb question time:

    I've seen a fair bit of mention about using a particular very low UV light to disinfect surfaces in hosps, etc. My question: If this works, why are folks here talking about 'radiation' and not ultra low UV wavelength light? And if such a thing works - couldn't it be used to clean re-usable PPE? (If I'm missing the point, please explain - thanks!)

    1297:

    In the US, there's "whole" (which may be 3%), 2% low fat, which I can drink, 1% low fat, which I can't, and skim milk, which is 0% fat, and is unpleasant-tasting water to me.

    That's right, and agreed about less than 2% (ick). I haven't noticed UHT milk-in-a-box on US shelves, but then I haven't been looking for it there. It's common in the Latin American countries where we've shopped -- we use it for baking and it does ok for that. Forget about drinking it.

    1298:

    I've seen a fair bit of mention about using a particular very low UV light to disinfect surfaces in hosps, etc. My question: If this works, why are folks here talking about 'radiation' and not ultra low UV wavelength light? And if such a thing works - couldn't it be used to clean re-usable PPE? (If I'm missing the point, please explain - thanks!)

    That $100k Xenex machine I referred to above (xenex.com) is a UV cleaner.

    It won't get light into the pores of a break mask, so it's not perfect, but for surfaces that can tolerate that much UV, it works okay.

    As for masks, I think the current consensus is that they're generally good at keeping people from infecting others, less good at keeping people from being infected. The problem with fabric tests is that they tend to look at stuff getting through the mesh, with the idea that this is the most important. Which it is, in hospital situations. If you're out at the store or walking, distance and air turbulence are pretty good at knocking down viral load, and putting a mask on will help to keep other people from getting infected by whatever you're carrying. It may be less useful keeping you from getting infected, but that's the social aspect of it.

    1299:

    Re: Home-made masks - pantyhose

    Just recalled seeing an article about how pantyhose worn over a home-made or store-purchased cloth face-mask could eliminate gaps for a better overall fit.

    https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/22/840146830/adding-a-nylon-stocking-layer-could-boost-protection-from-cloth-masks-study-find

    1300:

    we use [UHT 2% milk] for baking and it does ok for that

    Having said that, I think I'll try making a batch of yogurt with UHT 3% milk. Don't see why it wouldn't work, but one never knows.

    1301:

    UHT

    Is making yogurt depend on bacteria IN the milk?

    1302:

    The paper I linked at #689 asserts that droplets dehydrate and shrink fairly quickly after leaving the mouth. This means that for outgoing droplet sprays, the source's mask is contending with much larger droplets than the receiver's mask. In the example given, from (12-21 μm) to (4 μm) within a few seconds. If true, this means that for source control, masks/face coverings that only capture larger particles may be viable. At the relative humidity (27%) and temperature (23 °C) of our experiment, we expect the droplets to dehydrate within a few seconds. A dehydrated particle of 4 μm corresponds to a hydrated droplet of ca. 12- to 21-μm diameter, or a total hydrated volume of ∼60 nL to 320 nL for 25 s of loud speaking.

    Some Americana about roads emptied by COVID-19, and people with spare time, perhaps un/under-employed due to COVID-19. An unexpected side effect of the pandemic. :-) America’s most illegal record has been obliterated (Cameron Kirby, 15 May 2020)

    All the pearl-clutching about the morality of performing a Cannonball Run during a global pandemic seems to have been for nothing, with Ed Bolian reporting America’s most illegal record has been beaten seven times in the span of just five weeks. According to Bolian, who has been in contact with the new record holders, the time to beat is now less than 26 hours. A sub 28-hour Cannonball Run was once unthinkable. While he has not disclosed the exact time, that frame of reference means the drivers would have had to achieve an average speed of at least 173km/h for the 4507km journey. ... To set a Cannonball Run record, you must traditionally start at the Red Ball Garage in Manhattan, then traverse the entire United States of America as fast as possible to finish at the Portofini Inn in Redondo Beach, California,

    1303:

    And if someone in the US says "oh, but we have it...", kindly point to one national chain of stores - supermarkets, quick stops, anywhere.

    Well, I'm not in the US, but does Walmart count?

    https://www.walmart.com/ip/Parmalat-Shelf-Stable-UHT-Whole-Milk-1-Qt/151857624

    Robert: We used to be able to buy tetrapack boxes of UHT milk that didn't require refrigeration, but I haven't seen those in decades.

    Haven't checked lately, but Metro at least used to carry it about 5 years ago. But you would need to search to figure where they shelve it.

    1304:

    but does Walmart count?

    In the US the top 3 grocery/food sellers to consumers are Walmart, Costco, and Kroger. With Walmart including Sam's Clubs and Kroger having a dozen or so store brands.

    1305:

    Also: IIRC, the "ultra-heat treated" (UHT) milk sold in the UK is what the US refers to as pasteurized; pasteurized milk in the UK is heated to a lower temperature and isn't as long-term stable, but tastes better.

    Search online reveals no differences in how milk is pasteurized, US and UK both seem to use 71.7C for 15 seconds.

    The shelf-stable UHT, which while available isn't all that common, is 135C to 150C for 4 to 15 seconds.

    Also: US 2% milk is UK full-fat; US 1% milk is "semi-skimmed"; not sure what UK skimmed milk is in US terms.

    Appears not.

    Dairy UK says UK milk is Whole milk (3.5), Semi-skimmed (1.5 to 1.8), skimmed milk (does not exceed 0.3) and 1%. https://www.milk.co.uk/hcp/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/woocommerce_uploads/2016/12/Milk_consumer_2016.pdf

    So pretty close to the US (Whole - 3.5, 2, 1, Skim - 0) and Canada (Whole - 3.25, 2, 1, Skim - 0.1)

    Milk standards aren't portable across the Atlantic. For example, the US allows a lot of hormone treatments in cattle, not to mention routine antibiotic use in feed, that are illegal in the UK and EU (although not for much longer in the UK once Boris Fucking Johnson finishes gutting our food standards in hope of getting a trade deal out of Donald Trump).

    This appears to be the one area where the US is the outlier.

    Canada also does not allow the hormone treatments or routine antibiotics.

    1306:

    Ok, well, that explains it. I was in a Walmart once or twice while I was living in a motel room (working on a contract) for seven months or so in 2006 in the middle of nowhere (JBS: North Wilkesboro, NC), because there was nothing else.

    Otherwise, I refuse to give one bloody bent penny to those motherfucking Waltons.

    Haven't been in a Kroger in about 3-4 years (they're not on the east coast). Giant, nor Safeway, nor, from what I remember, Jewel or the now-devoured Dominick's, in Chicago, carried it.

    And you won't see it in a any quick stop.

    1307:

    but throwing in the little factoid about low vitamin D in Italy and Spain was just silly. what was it supposed to "explain"? Fair point, at least until it is clear whether or not the case severity bucket distributions are outliers for those countries. (And how deficiencies are distributed in various countries and their percentages.)

    A brief BMJ review noticed today: appears to have been written because some people have been seriously megadosing, and worse advocating for same, supplemental Vitamin D. Seen my bold. Basically, keep it at or under 4000IU (100 µg/day). (Probably can back off from that after a week or two.) And seriously consider avoiding deficiency. It does not ref the Philippines (not yet peer reviewed) study linked in #1146. They say "(in some reports, 10 000 IU/day (250 µg/day) of vitamin D are being promoted)" which is too much. Vitamin D and SARS-CoV-2 virus/COVID-19 disease - Brief report (13 May 2020) In conclusion, we recommend appropriate vitamin D RCTs to evaluate the effects of vitamin D supplementation on COVID-19 infections. Until there is more robust scientific evidence for vitamin D, we strongly caution against the use of high vitamin D supplementation (greater than the upper limit of 4000 IU/day (100 µg/day)). Rather, we strongly endorse avoidance of vitamin D deficiency in the population (as per the six points above) and complete adherence to government’s advice worldwide on the prevention of the spread of COVID-19.

    1308:

    Is making yogurt depend on bacteria IN the milk?

    Yes, but the way I make it uses a starter culture of bugs (store-bought yogurt usually) introduced into scalded milk. The scalding presumably discourages previously present bugs, much in the manner of UHT.

    E.g.: https://www.momontimeout.com/how-to-make-yogurt-in-a-slow-cooker/

    1309:

    Re: banks were dismissive when I found their error.

    I've been on the other side. I tried not to be dismissive and take each query seriously, but....

    The commentariate here isn't typical of the sort of consumer that rings an organisation. There would probably be on the order of a thousand idiots who can't add or subtract, let alone multiply and divide for every one caller with an actual issue. In a typical day I'd deal with 2 or 3 callers who thought rounding was us stealing from them, who wanted to argue the toss over 1 or 2 cents on a quarterly bill (having paid 25 cents to the telephone company for the fun). A couple of times a week I dealt with people who thought they had discovered that we'd stolen the GST (the concept that when they sold stuff to us, it didn't mean that they were exempt from paying sales tax on what we sold to them, was literally impossible for them). Servicing a call in a contact centre costs the company about 2 dollars a minute, and there's a lot of very sensible pressure to get these time wasters off the phone. (without telling them, or giving the impression, that you're doing that)

    In 8 years there were probably 3 customers who actually had something wrong that needed addressing.

    1310:

    Is making yogurt depend on bacteria IN the milk?

    Usually I add cultures. You can buy them online, or you can get cultures off your favorite plain yogurt.

    I've made my own for years, because a yogurt maker pays for itself in under 6 months.

    1311:

    If you been in one of these you've been in a Kroger store.

    Kroger, Ralphs, Dillons, Smith's, King Soopers, Fry's, QFC, City Market, Owen's, Jay C, Pay Less, Baker's, Gerbes, Harris Teeter, Pick 'n Save, Copps, Metro Market, Mariano's, Fred Meyer, Food 4 Less and Foods Co.

    1312:

    My mother cure me and my brothers of being able to eat yogurt or anything similar. She did her own home made stuff starting in the 60s and kept telling us it was like warm ice cream. My stomach flips if it even THINKS I put it in my mouth. My brothers are similar.

    And yes this is purely a mental thing. Implanted distaste can be very strong if started early and re-inforced.

    1313:

    I feel for you. My wife spent 18 years in an airline call center.

    As I'm sure you can imagine many of the despised things about air travel come from people expected stupid to be OK.

    Her last 8 years "on the phones" were in baggage. NO ONE calls that number unless something is wrong. But many calls would go like:

    Was there a name tag? Maybe, let's see, it might have one of these 3 addresses on it.

    What color is it? Dark. I think. HEY BILL WHICH BAG DID WE LOSE?

    What was in it? I don't remember? or The crown jewels of England? When can I get a check?

    Anything special we should know? It has 4 quarts of sour krout in a Tupperware container with a broken seal that I scotch taped up.

    And on and on and on...

    And these people were bookended by the too much money to care. $4000 sets of golf clubs that are never claimed and similar. The best one she told me about was a mast for a small sailboat. How do you not claim that and it not be matched up with the claim. It's not like they have few 100 of them to sift through to find the right one.

    1314:

    Do you mean it was just a hard coded list of leap years ending with 1992? I am not a programmer, but even I could write a simple leap year algorithm.

    It might be harder than you think!

    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/wrongly-assumes-1900-is-leap-year

    1315:

    That's appalling. There's a fairly simple set of rules for calculating leap years.

    1316:

    Just don't ever accept squat-loos in an exchange...

    It's not hard, you merely need to calculate the recycling value of a metal coffee-can and plastic bag in quatloos, at which point you can compute the exchange rate. Simplicity itself!

    1318:

    JBS :

    Two thoughts on that ... 1. IF Sony was going to manufacture guns (that break the day after the warranty expires like every one of their consumer electronics products I've ever purchased), what kind of guns would they manufacture?

    Hmmm. How about:

    • taking a leaf out of the food industry and having ammunition that goes off and has a "best before" date? (Is that a thing in the US or is that only us pinko-commie socialists?) Clint Eastwood: "My bullets are six or seven months beyond their best before date - do you feel lucky punk?"

    • It's always good when you can produce a less than ideal product and then get paid again to make them all work better. That's not quite what happened here, but I give you the LA85A2:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SA80#Design_flaws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SA80#A2_upgrade_programme https://www.arrse.co.uk/wiki/SA-80

    If it had been Sony they've had been paid to make them, then paid to fix them. They've still not fixed the "you can't fire it left-handed", and "you can only go round left-hand corners or shoot from the right-hand side of cover" problems but hey ho!

  • Sometimes "What's good for General Motors is NOT good for the USA!".
  • Agreed. But who makes that determination and has the position where they can turn round to people like GM and tell them to like it or lump it? In late-stage democracy and capitalism I don't see how you can do that. The cancer has spread too far.

    1319:

    Is that a thing in the US or is that only us pinko-commie socialists?

    For sure. Most anything meant to be metabolized by your body has some kind of date on it. I have constant arguments with my wife over these. She wants to toss anything past a "sell by date". I keep telling here these are really "you can't win a lawsuit if you use this after this date" not it will kill you after this date.

    1320:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1244:

    Yes, that's the question, and what I was railing against was that the dogmatic answer was "Nothing, so we aren't even going to assess the risk of that happening." As a statistician (i.e. applied game theorist), that really sticks in my craw.

    JBS @ 1259:

    But if it's a critical industry (i.e. one that it would be disastrous for the nation if access to that industry's output was cut off), doesn't it make sense for the government to invest at some level to make that industry "globally competitive"?

    Again, why else would you have any government if it wasn't going to do that?

    Those are both valid viewpoints, but as the title of the book says (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Think-Youll-Find-More-Complicated/dp/0007505140):

    "I Think You’ll Find It’s a Bit More Complicated Than That"

    A topical one in the UK is the steel industry. AFAIUI the UK steel industry has struggled to make a profit for god knows how long. It has gone-bust, been sold, broken up, resold, gone-bust again, resold again, ... We just don't seem to be able to make it globally competitive and profitable. "But", you say, "steel production is a strategically important military industry. We must have the ability to make our own steel, because ..." So the question is, could we have a self-sufficient steel industry for military purposes at any cost?

    One of the major inputs for steel production is iron-ore. I think we exhausted most of our viable iron-ore deposits during the industrial revolution. So, if we want to make iron and steel, we need to import iron-ore. To import iron-ore we need to buy it on the international market. This will need the appropriate international currencies unless they need UKP for some reason. Also, in a war, we need to be able to reliably get that iron-ore here without someone sinking it. (I'm assuming air freight of bulk iron-ore is not viable.) This needs a navy to escort the freighters carrying the iron-ore. Our navy has been downsized massively since the end of WWII. Do we even have enough escorts to be able to maintain a steady flow of iron-ore into the country for our steel industry to process so that we can manufacture our own military hardware? I suspect the answer to that is no. Also, I suspect that the steel industry is not going to be at the top of the pile, because we aren't self-sufficient for food, so that's probably more important.

    So, should we spend money to maintain a steel industry for its military importance? I don't think it's as clear-cut as everybody thinks.

    1321:

    Lithium is a key component of most tech going forward. And it is very unevenly distributed around the world. The US and Canada have found moderate deposits. (I guess it helps to have a vast land area.) Oz has a bunch. But outside of China and an area of South America is is somewhat rare and/or hard to get to. At least so far.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Production

    1322:

    There was a reason for that. It was a deliberate decision to reproduce a bug in lotus-123 for compatibility reasons.

    https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/

    1323:

    I have three different cordless drills...

    I hadn't really expected a drill sub-thread but it's a good excuse to share that after too long of not being able to find one I recently acquired an old hand drill, a Stanley Handyman of the 'eggbeater' style with a crank on the side. It's comforting to know that between this for light drilling and a push drill for very light work that I never have to worry about battery charge again. I don't have a bit and brace, which might be excessively retro, but it's nice to have tools that won't stop working just because they're ten years old - or a hundred...

    Yes, the workshop has a bunch of battery driven drills already; that's not the point. Those are still very handy for anything requiring lots of drilling, screw driving, or brute force.

    As a kid I learned to use drills like this in my dad's wood shop so I'm comfortable with the tool. It's also nice to be able to really control what the bit is doing, which doesn't come up a lot but which is precision option I miss. Very few seem to be made any more.

    1324:

    Then you can head down the rabbit hole of organic, natural, whatever. And you need to look up the definitions yourself to know what exactly you are paying extra for.

    Organic certification in the US tracks international standards. No artificial fertilizer (bullshit is fine) used on pasture, no herbicides or insecticides, antibiotics only under vet supervision for a diagnosed illness (not in feed), no hormones to induce lactation, that sort of thing.

    When visiting the US I drink tea by the gallon (I usually bring a travel kettle), and buy only organic milk for it -- because non-organic in the US permits a whole bunch of stuff that's considered dubious or actually harmful to human health in Europe. And most hormones and animal drugs, and many pesticides and herbicides, tend to accumulate in fatty tissue and then get excreted in the lipid phase of milk.

    1325:

    SS I have a slightly more modern version, with two driving pinion wheels from the main crank... And three small hand augers + a bradawl And a big hand-held electic drill ( mains powered ) And a small battery-powered on on the allotment, which hasn't been used for over 4 years & anither hand drill, there ... And an actual Brace-&-Bitt arrangement

    1326:

    And most hormones and animal drugs, and many pesticides and herbicides, tend to accumulate in fatty tissue and then get excreted in the lipid phase of milk.

    Now that this is a long thread, this comment got me thinking how this relates to lead in the gasoline, which we did get rid of?

    That is, how much those things affect people who drink them in the milk?

    1327:

    old hand drill

    That's something I would kind of like, but have not seen at a reasonable prive vs quality level. But I have also recently slimmed my collection of battery drills by my ex taking the Panasonic 14V one with her, and me finally admitting that the Panasonic 12V NiMH drill batteries are a sad joke these days and I should give up. So now I own two Makita drills, despite the older of the two being well on the way to stripping a pinion only two years after the warranty expired. I dislike the Ryobi etc very very cheap ones although the Aldi one I bought to try is ok (cheaper than Ryobi, not noticeably worse), and don't want to spend for the better ones. Albeit next time Aldi have their battery junk I will probably buy another drill because like grinders and sanders, you can never have too many drills.

    OTOH I normally work with two grades of material - cardboard and steel. For the former spinning a drill bit between my fingers works surprisingly less in a pinch (ie, too lazy to find drill), and for the latter a hand drill ain't really going to cut it. The brown carbohydrate my garage is made of has dried and hardened over the years to the point where the main difference between it and steel is that there's no sap in steel so the shavings come out more easily. The bricks the house is made of mostly drill like cardboard, hammer drill not necessary.

    1328:

    Hand drills and bit-and-brace drills are readily available, and I do have some in the workshop's tool cabinet but I almost never use them. They require both hands to use and are less precise as the effort of cranking causes the entire drill to wobble meaning it's more difficult to drill straight into something. I also have a breast drill which provides a bit more stability and more pressure for drilling but again it's not something I actually use.

    https://oldtoolheaven.com/related/goodell-pratt-breast-drills.htm

    Saying all that, one thing I have used a bit-and-brace (A Stanley ratchet) for within memory is driving screws into tough and composite materials -- the extra torque and leverage is handy but it's slow compared to a cordless drill. You can clamp 1/4" hex screwdriver bits in the brace-and-bit's adjustable chuck which is actually intended for square-section drill augers but it will take the screwdriver bits quite nicely. You have to use good-quality ones though as the extra torque busts up the cheapo bits.

    1329:

    The point is that someone or something translated "test if it is a leap year" into using a list, and that is programming, whether it is done by a human, AI or lemur. And whoever or whatever did that was incompetent (in the strict meaning of the word) at that task, whether they were called a coder, programmer, analyst or what.

    1330:

    I have a slightly more modern version, with two driving pinion wheels from the main crank...

    Yes, that's it; the Stanley Handyman model looks like this on the business side of the crank. I read that the eggbeater style hand drill is called a 'wheel brace' in the UK but that would only confuse me and make me think of an actual brace.

    How well does your brace work for you? I like the hand drill style with which I'm familiar but it's true I mostly do small holes and rarely need high torque.

    1331:

    Some of you might find this interesting

    https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/12-05-2020/a-modest-defence-of-the-coronavirus-contrarians/

    The neuroscientist Hannah Critchlow has this theory about contrarians. She argues that they might be an evolutionary strategy, that social insects like bees often have population subsets that are “socially unresponsive” and reluctant to go along with whatever the rest of the hive is doing. This pays off on the rare occasions when the rest of the hive does something dumb and gets wiped out. Maybe our own contrarians fulfil a similar function: wrong most of the time, correct occasionally when it counts. It’s a more generous way to think about a group who are often a bit tedious and cranky.

    1332:

    Air temperatures in the summer and in UK houses in the UK are generally lower than the USA but, more importantly, milk is actually kept from going off by the bacteria in it - yes, raw milk lasts longer than pasteurised which lasts longer than UHT if all are left open in the dame conditions. It starts to go sour, which isn't unpleasant, and the increase in acidity discourages more harmful organisms. Try the test someday :-)

    1333:

    That's something I would kind of like, but have not seen at a reasonable prive vs quality level.

    It turned out that once I thought to look on ebay there were plenty. Not new, but old hand tools turn out to be among the things that were both made by the millions and designed to last indefinitely.

    For steel, I don't know but will guess you probably would want a breast drill or brace; ideally you'd make an electric motor do the hard work. Nojay points out above that it's easier to hold a breast drill steady, geometry permitting.

    Too, I hope your house bricks are different from cardboard in other ways. There are limits to how cheaply housing should be made...

    1334:

    I am not surprised, given the ignorance of the populace :-( The best approach for almost everybody is to get enough sunlight on your skin, but that conflicts with deeply-entrenched medico-political and religious dogmas, and doesn't work in places like the UK in the winter. I take 35 mcg/diem in winter, which I regard as giving a good engineering margin of error from both the minimum and maximum :-)

    1335:

    "So, should we spend money to maintain a steel industry for its military importance? I don't think it's as clear-cut as everybody thinks."

    Eh? You are thinking like a goddamn politician! What I said should have been done is a proper risk assessment. Inter alia, that would mean considering questions like "If we do this, and then that happens, what would we be able to do about it, how likely is and what would it cost?" That is done in ALL competently-managed planning, whether national economics, military strategy, or even IT systems management.

    When the earlier attempts were made to close the industry down, pressure was put on the politicians to preserve the high-tech. end of the business, because SOME people had done just such planning. But, as far as I know, neither Whitehall nor Westminster ever did.

    1336:

    I saw something that claimed that almost all people on the USA were unsafe to eat - and that was using even the low food standards of the USA :-)

    1337:

    OMG That sounds soul crushing. At least 99% of my customers were just fine. Connect/disconnect electricity, pay a bill, change a postal address, ask for a payment extension.

    This discussion has got me ruminating. There was one customer with a genuine complaint that turned out not to be our fault. They had a high electricity bill. I went through the usual things, but it wasn't that. Lots of trouble shooting later.... It tuned out that they had an electric barbeque in the back yard. Some workers had dug up the cable leading to the barbeque. They'd cut the cable. So they'd twisted the wires back together, reset the circuit breaker and buried the evidence. There was enough power leaking to ground to make for a big, but not outrageous bill, but the worst thing was the chassis of the barbeque was now live at 240 volts.

    1338:

    The microbiology and associated labs (virology,mycology) will have autoclaves for infected waste. The other labs won't. In my old hospital (Norfolk & Norwich - 1,000 odd beds) microbiology was off-site and there were no autoclaves in the labs. Pipettes are almost entirely Eppendorf type and would be destroyed by autoclaves. Particularly the powered types. Pasteur pipettes are disposable plastic except for the occasional use of glass ones for solvents. The stereotypical glass pipettes are less often used and outside microbiology are not autoclaved. Waste is mostly incinerated. It wasn't always like this. In 1969 I worked in the lab of a small children's hospital. The multidisciplinary workload in the pathology lab was low and the "autoclave" was a domestic pressure cooker.

    1339:

    Being Russophobic isn't totally unreasonable as long as the place is run by Putin, or someone similar. Unfortunately, the competition isn't trying to look much better.

    1340:

    Canada also does not allow the hormone treatments or routine antibiotics.

    Which is, according to the US, an unfair restraint of trade.

    Something that the UK should get used to, now that they no longer have the EU to hide behind for enforcing safety standards…

    1341:

    During the past couple of years I've begun taking 25mcg/day of VitD supplements during those months when the central heating is on (this past year: that's early October through early May).

    In view of the guesswork around COVID19 I've continued to take this dose even after I'd normally have stopped for summer. I'm not getting out as much as usual, anyway.

    1342:

    re: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/wrongly-assumes-1900-is-leap-year

    The ACM published a simple algorithm back in the 1960s or 1970s that included the division by 400 rule.
    This is a recent restatment of it from https://www.tutorialspoint.com/cplusplus-program-to-check-leap-year

    if (((year % 4 == 0) && (year % 100 != 0)) || (year % 400 == 0)) cout &lt&lt year &lt&lt " is a leap year"; else cout &lt&lt year &lt&lt " is not a leap year";

    N.B.: It's not quite the same, as the ACM algorithm returned true or false, but the logic is the same.

    1343:

    Time and hence causality flows forwards, not backwards. I suggest that you look at the dates of the breakup of the USSR, the expansion of NATO (in breach of the promises to Gorbachev), (*), and the rise of Putin, and consider whether, just possibly, he might have been elected precisely BECAUSE the Russians realised they needed a strong man to defend themselves against an implacable enemy.

    (*) There were plenty of other anti-Russian moves by the USA in the period 1991-1999, but they were less publicised and are less commonly known.

    1344:

    SS Usually used for drilling pilot holes for wood-screws, or clearance holes for the same &/or counterskinking a small amount. - Used it 3 days back making up an extension fo a stand-top on one of my greenhouse stagings, so that the plant-trays don't tend to fall off any more .... Said stagings having been made out of (mostly) useful scrap large timber, with "bespoke", but removable opne-grid wood shelving fitting into the slots. Currently holding: Tomatoes, Beans (4 sorts) Origanum syriacum, Gherkins half the sweetcorn seedlings ( The other half went into the ground yesterday ) Pelargoniums ...

    1345:

    That's what I do, but there is also 10 mcg in the (probably pointless) multivitamins that I started taking when I turned 70. As you say, it's not just the time of year but whether you spend time outside with exposed skin (and the colour of your skin).

    1346:

    As Pigeon pointed out in #1221, "if N is a multiple of 4" would have been good enough, and it's SIMPLER than using a list!

    1347:

    It strikes me that as much as losing it's Colonies, this is responsible for the destruction of the British economy. It took me awhile to see it, just because it's very much counter to any idea I've ever had of how to make capitalism work, or of how someone else might want capitalism to work, but if the U.S. government were ever to say to one company "You must sell out to this other company, we don't like you" it would probably cause a revolution. That this can work is utterly batshit policy!

    1348:

    That's what they say now... and it might be true, but a "what do you want to do with this badly formatted date" dialogue would have been much better!

    1349:

    "Oh look, someone's in trouble, let's take advantage!" is not a good long-term policy, because it will eventually turn around and kick you in the ass!

    1350:
    I saw something that claimed that almost all people on the USA were unsafe to eat

    "Dear Sir, I am glad to hear that your studio audience disapproves of the last skit as strongly as I. As an American naval officer I abhor the implication that the United States Navy is a haven for cannibalism. It is well known that we have the problem relatively under control, and that it is the U.S.A.F. who now suffer the largest casualties in this area. And what do you think the 86th Airborne ate in Afghanistan? Arabs? Yours etc. Captain B. J. Smethwick in a white wine sauce with shallots, mushrooms and garlic."

    [with apologies to Monty Python for the nationality change]

    1351:

    Nope. Certain dates ending in "00" aren't leap years. The problem is that a year is very approximately (and not exactly) 365 1/4 days. The "not exactly" part is why every once in awhile you need to skip a leap year, and there are rules for that which are invoked at 100 and 400 year intervals.

    1352:

    You have missed Pigeon's point, which was that WAS a viable algorithm in the 20th century for any purpose that did not require dates from before 1901 or after 2099 - as in the case described. Try it on the year 2000 and see :-)

    1353:

    Re: ' ... eat yogurt or anything similar'

    My mother used to make 'butter milk' in the summer. An acquired taste but very satisfying and thirst quenching in the hot summer months. Her recipe: quart of whole milk, half cup of sour cream/plain yogurt, mix/shake then let stand on the counter at room temp for 3-4 hours to get the fermentation going and refrigerate. Adding some heavy cream increases the richness enough to make this a good substitute for sour cream/yogurt.

    Since the lock down I've tried to bake bread a few times. Pretty dismal results but will keep trying now that I've found some oldish recipes for how to make a sourdough starter. Biggest challenge is finding the right type of flour. The usual all-purpose wheat flour that the major grocery chains sell is useless - almost no flavor and not enough protein. 'Bread flour' is almost always out of stock or sold in very small amounts. Anyone have any suggestions for how to enrich/modify regular AP wheat flour into 'bread flour'? The objective is to get a sourdough type bread and not the white marshmallowy textured no-flavor bread typically used for toast.

    1354:

    Yes. It followed on from an equally ghastly protectionist model, which led to the demise of much of British industry's domestic sales (e.g. most bicycles and cars) as soon as we joined the EEC, and we could buy stuff that wasn't such crap without jumping through the most incredible hoops. Thatcher blamed the unions, and started her rule with some much overdue (but overdone) reforms, but they were an unimportant factor compared to the management. No, Greg, please do NOT start on an anti-Labour diatribe, because this was the fault of both parties.

    But also, she (and the DTI) flagrantly broke the law in privatising several charitable and non-profit industries, which was in its way every bit as harmful. Some trustees took the DTI to court and survived (e.g. Rothamsted), others didn't (e.g. the Plant Breeding Institute). That process has continued since, and is one of the two main reasons (*) that we are no longer a leading country in 'IP' areas where we were in 1980 - which sits very badly with the politicians' claim that our future is IP.

    "The Delirium Brief" is, unfortunately, not really even satire - merely fictionalisation of what really goes on, though in the current era not that of the 1980s.

    (*) The other being the hammering of our educational system, and the deliberate dumbing down of the population.

    1355:

    Except, correct me if I'm wrong, this goes back even further than Thatcher, as I recall reading about government decisions about "who will get sold to who" going back as far as the aftermath of WWII.

    1356:

    One thing I think it's worth discriminating between is the difference between individual citizens of the country, and "the state/government" of that country. I've had dealings with a couple of Russians, and they have been perfectly fine people. But I don't have a great perception of the Russian state/government.

    Similarly I've had a lot of dealings with a lot of Muricans and generally they have been fine. I do wonder how they can apparently always be EXCITED! about EVERYTHING! ALL THE TIME! without dying of some sort of adrenal gland overload, but I can mostly tune that out. My perception of the US state/government however is not great these days.

    Pretty much similar experiences with citizens of a lot of other countries. Well, with the exception of South Africans, of course, because:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NTcndxuwOA

    :-D.

    1357:

    You are correct, but the decisions then were to minimise the harm that such selling off did - remember that the UK was completely bankrupt, and up to its eyeballs in debt to the USA, which was major factor in the USA getting preference. Thatcher's decisions were dogmatic, and often had the effect of increasing the harm compared to just putting the business on the market, as were others, later. In between, there was the period of protectionism I described.

    1358:

    Elderly Cynic 1354:

    (*) The other being the hammering of our educational system, and the deliberate dumbing down of the population.

    What changes were made, and how do you perceive they had the effect you talk of? This is an area I'm particularly interested in.

    1359:

    "The Delirium Brief" is, unfortunately, not really even satire - merely fictionalisation of what really goes on, though in the current era not that of the 1980s.

    The original (pre-Brexit referendum) draft of "The Delirium Brief" focussed much more tightly on the whole corrupt privatisation process; the original pitch for the novel was "HMG discovers a rare, unprivatised department: the Laundry is set up for privatisation and of course the leading contender for the outsourcing contract is an Elder God cult".

    Only then reality one-upped me and I had to make everything far more dramatic and elded up with "A Very British Coup (Nyarlathotep remix)". Which slightly submerged the message, but came up with a viable replacement theme.

    1360:

    Ah. Thanks. I knew about your replotting, but not what the original plot had been. But my point was mainly about the extreme difficulty of satirising the process without making it completely unbelievable (though not necessarily implausible). You have made such remarks before, if I recall!

    1361:

    Increasing bureaucratisation and politicisation, and the de-professionalising of teaching as a profession, except for the school heads (which has become an increasingly administrative role). Imposing a largely political national curriculum, which fills up the time and concentrates on teaching facts, not thinking. Reducing standards to maintain pass rates, abolishing technical teaching and qualifications, encouraging more people to build up debts by obtaining qualifications above a level they are suited for, and employers to use higher qualifications as a winnowing process (irrespective of the job requirement), so as to be desperate for jobs. And, comcomitantly, excluding technical staff from promotion to higher levels of management, which encourages the brighter students to avoid technical subjects.

    Yes, not all of that is education, as such, but it's all linked.

    1362:

    Anyone have any suggestions for how to enrich/modify regular AP wheat flour into 'bread flour'?

    Wheat Gluten, comes in various names depending where you are. In Canada called gluten flour and available at Bulk Barn.

    This discusses briefly:

    https://www.seriouseats.com/2020/05/vital-wheat-gluten-bread-flour-hack.html

    1363:

    Didn't know all those. Let's see, I was in a payless about 3-4 years ago, and a couple of times in the 3-6 year ago range for Harris Teeter.

    Can I tell you about this supermarket I go to, esp. for fresh veggies, called "Korean Corner"? Or how about the middle eastern and the Indian importers.

    Safeway, meh, yes.

    Aldi? Hell, yes.

    1364:

    "More complicated"

    Let me ask one more question: how many times the minimum wage did the execs get, and did they get annual (or more frequent) bonuses? And how big were the dividends paid out?

    In the US, all of these are major costs, and that's not even talking about the CEO's stock options (ALL of them have them), and their playing games with the company to maximize the value of those options.

    1365:

    My electric drill is at least 30 years old. My electric mower is only about 8 or 9. I never worry about batteries.

    Why, no, I can deal with a CORD plugged into an OUTLET.

    Damn, raining today, and I was going to do more on cutting down that volunteer weed/bush/tree with my electric chainsaw. (Of course I got it when it showed up, last fall, in the Weird Aisle at Aldi.)

    Not over the weekend, though: it's Memorial Day weekend, and Balticon has gone virtual (anyone here, feel free to come https://balticon.org though they do want you to register for some of the programming. We're using zoom and discord.

    1366:

    Sour milk? Um, thank you, no. The closes I get is linguini with lemon-pepper white sauce, make the white sauce, then, after it thickens, add the lemon juice.

    1367:

    I demand Real Barbecue (Texas style, of course) and bbq sauce.

    1368:

    Ellen brought some when she moved in last year. In addition to vitamins and iron, I see "malted barley flour".

    shrug I make it with partly unbleached white flour, and some whole wheat flour. Maybe sift it, if you have issues.

    1369:

    Since the lock down I've tried to bake bread a few times. Pretty dismal results but will keep trying now that I've found some oldish recipes for how to make a sourdough starter.

    I have also recently started making bread, though not yet sourdough.

    Some random hints that may help:

    1) weigh the ingredients (and use recipes with weights) - most people don't measure using "cups" properly

    2) I use city tap water, have found the yeast much prefers I use day old water (simply put into an old glass food container and left out for 24 hours without a lid.

    3) temperature really helps with the rise - the oven I am using a "proof" setting and it works far more reliably than leaving it on the counter (can also apparently use an oven that is turned off with the light on)

    1370:

    SFR "Instant buttermilk" - for putting into drop-scone mixes, etc 150ml milk, approx 1/4 tsp citric acid crystals drop the later into the former & stir - it instantly semi-curdles. The nadd to the flour & any flvourings, plus the Bicarbonate/cream if tartar mix that I have also just put in for the self-rise( I used to use 1/2 a tsp of paprika ) a pinch of salt, beat with a whisk, then start spooning the mixture into a HOT griddle/fry pan OINK As for baking, use either dried yeast, or better, if you can get it live yeast As you say decent flour is - presently - a bastard to get Really good quality "hard" flour is the secret; Sainsbug's/Waitrose own label isn't bad, but Shipton Mill & Doves' Farm are really good... My standard loaf is 350 g hard flour, of which 100g is white spelt, 15g live yeast, approx 200-210 ml of water 1 tsp salt, olive oil to be added "to taste" to render the mix non-sticky ... rise, beat back, put in laof tin, rise again - 25 mins Gas Mk 6. "Fake wholemeal" the same, except 1/3rd of each white spelt, dark spelt & white rye flours Soft baps ( for filling with hot crispy bacon ...) 500 g flour half-&-half hard white & French Baguette flour ( v. finely milled ) 20g live yeast, pinch of sugar, just under 300 ml water, oil to render smooth, divide into 12 bunlets after 1st rise - put on baking trays ... 20 mins gas mk 6. Oh & focaccia - which I'm making tomorrow ....

    Look around, "hard" white flour is now re-appearing in the shops, slowly.

    EC Aagreed - the mutual incompetence & cooruption was guyed very well in the film "I'm all right, Jack" - where, if you looked, the mis-management were shown to be just as bad as the supposed onions..... You have forgotten (?) that needed reforms were tried by Heath & Calor-=Gas, stamped on byt he idiot union leadership & then got the Madwoman's medicine - idiots.

    Troutwaxer Yes, the forced merger of all the aircraft firms into one conglomerate ( BAE ) rather than 2 or 3 or 4 was a disastrous example

    mdive YUCK ABANDON "cups" it's a totally wanked non-system only in the USA of course ... WEIGH the 'greedyments, carefully - it matters. At the moment, of course with ambient at approx 22°C it doesn't matter In winter, I turn the oven on minimum & crak the doooor open & put to rise on top, with improvised "draught screens"

    1371:

    Oh yes, those are certainly things. I'm sure there are lots of others factors - that's my point. It's not the straight-forward decision that it's often portrayed to be in the media. Western Europe is big enough to make strategic decisions like this, the UK hasn't been big enough since WWII bankrupted us and we let the Empire go. (Note, I'm not saying we should've made an attempt to keep the Empire - I think there are moral reasons alone which justified not doing that.)

    1372:

    My partner had success with lockdown sourdough. Her first attempt "sagged", but second attempt was good.

    https://www.yeovalley.co.uk/recipes/recipe/plain-white-sourdough/

    And she found this website helpful:

    https://www.culturesforhealth.com/learn/sourdough/troubleshooting-free-form-sourdough-loaves/

    Apparently the first attempt was too damp, don't put all the water in at once with the yeo valley recipe. Start with only putting half the water in and then slowly add it. Also, don't put it in the airing cupboard overnight to rise (with the water boiler) like you would with normal bread - sourdough doesn't need it. Also it takes about a week for the sourdough starter to really get going.

    Second attempt was really nice :-).

    1373:

    No, I haven't forgotten, but he didn't attempt to control the mismanagement any more than Thatcher did.

    1374:

    I get your point. You are totally missing or ignoring mine. So be it.

    1375:

    If you can get proper bread flour and yeast, ordinary British bread is trivial to make - it is incredibly forgiving - and the only thing I bother to read a recipe for or measure is the amount of salt. Using a measured amount of water (i.e. no more, no less) can cause failure, because flours vary considerably in how much they absorb, though is OK as a guideline - I do it entirely by feel. It will rise between about 5 and 40 degrees Celsius, though very slowly at low temperatures. Fancy breads are trickier, but not as much as cakes. I have no experience with making bread out of anything less than 50% bread flour, and can believe it is much less forgiving.

    1376:

    I can deal with a CORD plugged into an OUTLET.

    And to all the others about battery tools.

    As someone who has had to deal with a lot very short term (an hour or few) projects on houses (mine and others) cords are just a big PITA. Especially since with batteries I can be up on a ladder with a tool caddie with one drill with a 1/8" bit and the other with a Phillips driver and not have to deal with cords.

    I'm sold.

    As to Ryobi being cheap junk. I feel not. If I had a shop with bench tools I'd get better. And yes doing much steel needs higher quality stuff but for doing home fixups, minor remodels and such Ryobi is just fine. My sliding compound miter is Ryobi. My table saw is Dewalt.

    When I want disposable tools I got to Harbor Freight. Which I suspect is a US/NA only thing. Cheap crap from China. Buy it for the one project. When it lasts past that you are ahead of the game.

    1377:

    whitroth @ 1282: Ok, I misremembered. But in the US, you just do not see milk that doesn't require refrigeration *now*.

    And if someone in the US says "oh, but we have it...", kindly point to one national chain of stores - supermarkets, quick stops, anywhere.

    They ain't here.

    Wegmans has it. At the store I shop it's on the same aisle as the juice boxes & baby formula. I currently have 3 - 32oz cartons in the cupboard. If I know I'm not going to be able to get out to buy fresh milk I like to mix the shelf-stable milk in when my usual 1/2 gallon of milk gets down to half full,that's mainly because the shelf-stable stuff is whole milk and I usually drink 1% milk.

    I say "drink" but I mean about a 4oz glass of milk to help me swallow my morning medications & supplements. I put the carton in the refrigerator the day before opening it.

    I also checked online and once I figured out how to see if specific stores (the ones nearest my house) have it, I found it at both Target & Walmart. Or you can shop "Big River" and they'll deliver it overnight.

    I don't know if there's a "national chain" grocery store. They all seem to be regional. Wegmans is new around here. They moved in when Kroger closed all their stores around here (although Kroger owns Harris Teeter and those stores are still open). There's supposed to be a new Publix in the Glenwood South area, but I don't know when it's going to open. Once it does I'll have Wegmans 2 miles from my house one way and Publix a mile from my house in the other direction.

    1378:

    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/may/21/australias-iron-ore-exports-hit-by-rule-change-as-china-escalates-war-of-words

    China has a large steel industry, but it imports its iron ore from Australia and Brazil among others.

    The RN has:

    Two fleet carriers (at some point). But probably only one will be usable at any one time. Two assault ships. (Which have been under threat several times.) Six area air defence destroyers. (Of which probably two are not available at any one time, plus they all need to be gutted and have additional diesel generation added at some point due to problems with the main turbine generator sets.) Fifteen frigates. (Which are old in the tooth and probably well past their sell-by date.) Seven fleet submarines (SSNs).

    Getting together a battle group to protect one carrier is problematic for the RN these days (let's not talk about filling the carrier up with planes):

    https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/hms-queen-elizabeth-carrier-strike-group-to-deploy-in-2021/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/29/uk_taskforce_south_china_sea/

    Are we really going to be using our minuscule navy escorting iron-ore from Canada, Australia, South Africa or Brazil (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_iron-ore_exports) so that we can maintain an indigenous steel industry?

    Now Europe, if it wanted to, could have a navy up to the task. If they could stop trying to play national games. But the UK, no chance.

    We lost five naval ships in the Falklands war:

    2 x Type 42 destroyers, 2 x Type 21 frigates, 1 x Landing ship, Logistics. (I think the assault ships are the closest remaining comparison.)

    By comparison, the Falklands war used (https://www.naval-technology.com/features/featurefalklands-war-uk-navy-argentina/):

    • 43 Royal Navy vessels,
    • 22 from the Royal Fleet Auxiliary,
    • 62 merchant ships.

    We may be able to find the merchant ships, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Fleet_Auxiliary says:

    • As of 2019, there are 13 ships in service with the Royal Fleet Auxiliary

    Now, the current ships may be better than the Centaur class HMS Hermes, the through-deck-cruiser (light carrier) Invincible class HMS Invincible, the type 42 and county class destroyers and the type 21/type 22 frigates, but we have a lot less of them, so we can less afford to lose them.

    1379:

    "Dismal results"?

    These days, when I get to making bread (not often), I pull out the breadmaker and set it to dough, since I like a real crust.

    If I use half whole wheat flour, it does need more water, but this is add what it calls for, wait a few minutes while the maker mixes it, then feel the dough, or see if it's not coming together, and add a little bit more, until it's enough.

    Yeast: got ok results with a packet that was "best by" '16, (it's sealed, aluminized packets...) but I put it in warm water, added a couple drops of honey, and let it sit 10 min or so before it went into the mixer. After the dough's ready from the breadmaker (aka mixer, first warm rise), I take it out, knead it, and then on a stone I have, after the oven's been on long enough to warm, and stick a damp paper towel or cloth towel over it for the second rise. I think I left the one with the out-of-date years for almost two hours, another hour would have been good.

    I need to make some again. Most recently, I made a couple of French baguettes (water, salt, flour, yeast, no, nothing else the French say) to finish up some wonderful brushchetta I got at Aldi, fresh.

    1380:

    Ok, there are Wegman's somewhere - they're not all over.

    Point being, you just do not see the UHF milk in the US, it is very much not commonplace.

    1381:

    "cords are just a big PITA"

    They are, but principally because they are always much too short to reach the socket no matter what you're doing. Often they're only about 1m long and it's next to impossible to find any kind of tool with more than 1.5m. Even if you're using the tool at a bench with sockets along the back you still need to use an extension lead so you can route it around the bench top instead of trailing it through whatever you're doing. One of the most useful modifications I have ever done was to replace the useless original cord on my soldering iron with one 5m long.

    I have heard that the stunted cords are imposed by the EU for some bollocks health and safety reason, in which regard it is counterproductive anyway. I don't know if this is true. My personal suspicion is it's just the manufacturers cheaping out by doing only the minimum necessary to avoid people complaining that it doesn't have a cord at all, although it's odd that expensive ones are just as bad as cheap ones for it.

    Cords are useful on ladders because you can just loop them over one arm, climb using both hands, and then haul the drill up by the cord, which is a lot easier than trying to hold a drill with one finger and hold on with the rest. Then at the top you can drape the cord round your neck or something so you don't have the weight pulling at the drill, and don't have to mess about trying to find somewhere to put it down in between times either.

    I do have a cordless drill (De Walt, from when they were decent before they sold out to whatever rubbish lot it is they're a name of now) but it shares the general characteristic of all devices with rechargeable batteries that when I want to use them the batteries have gone flat. So I get to drill maybe 2 holes in thin plastic and then another 2 holes with the spare battery and then sit down for a couple of hours until at least one of them is recharged. It's handy mainly because it has a keyless chuck and a variable speed trigger and my mains drill doesn't.

    1382:

    Charlie Stross @ 1284: Also: IIRC, the "ultra-heat treated" (UHT) milk sold in the UK is what the US refers to as pasteurized; pasteurized milk in the UK is heated to a lower temperature and isn't as long-term stable, but tastes better.

    In the U.S. regular "pasteruized" milk is heated almost to boiling to kill germs just like Louis Pasteur invented in 1864. That's the milk sold in the dairy case at the supermarkets.

    "Shelf-stable" milk is UHT (Ultra High Temperature) pasteurized; flash heated to 130 to 140 °C (266 to 284 °F) and then flash cooled. The process was invented in 1893. What kept it from being useful was a lack of aseptic packaging which the Swedish company Tetra Pak introduced in 1952. The Italian company Parmalat introduced shelf-stable UHT milk into the U.S. in 1993. Our shelf-stable milk is just like your shelf-stable milk.

    Also: US 2% milk is UK full-fat; US 1% milk is "semi-skimmed"; not sure what UK skimmed milk is in US terms.

    In the U.S. 2% milk is reduced fat milk.

    Milk in the U.S. is available as whole milk (~ 3% milk fat), 2% reduced fat milk, 1% low fat milk and skim milk (less than 0.5% milk-fat). I've seen shelf-stable UHT milk in whole milk, 2% & 1% varieties here in Raleigh. I have not seen shelf-stable UHT Skim milk. The only thing I've ever seen is non-fat dry milk, which I have not seen in a local store since the whole Covid-19 thing started.1

    Milk standards aren't portable across the Atlantic. For example, the US allows a lot of hormone treatments in cattle, not to mention routine antibiotic use in feed, that are illegal in the UK and EU (although not for much longer in the UK once Boris Fucking Johnson finishes gutting our food standards in hope of getting a trade deal out of Donald Trump).

    Funny thing about that. The U.S. "allows" hormones & antibiotics in feed, but there's a strong movement AWAY from doing so. I'm guessing because the "organic" craze is costing them market share.

    All of the packaging for milk or meat I've seen in the last several years specifically states that the milk comes from cows that have not been fed with hormones1 and the beef is labeled Raised Without Antibiotics & No Added Growth Hormones.

    1 I looked because it turned out the box of non-fat dry milk I had on hand when this whole mess started was YEARS out of date and grossly unusable.

    2 ... although right under the notice that it is from cows NOT treated with hormones there is a notice that says "The FDA has found no significant difference in milk from artificial growth hormone-treated and non-treated cows." So, I'm guessing you could find milk from hormone-treated cows if you wanted to look hard enough for it but it's not the regular thing around here ... based on I make no effort to find non-hormone milk, it's the stuff that's most easily reachable from the dairy case when I need to buy milk.

    And I don't see why any trade deal between the U.K. and the U.S. couldn't specifically specify that ONLY non-hormone & non-antibiotic dairy and beef can be exported to the U.K.

    1383:

    EC Yes - the rule of thumb is Weight = Volume of water = 60% weight of flour.... BUT - for instance a brown spelt flour is usually much more coarsely milled than "OO" flour or French Baguette flour - which, being very finely milled, absorbs much more liquid

    1385:

    And I don't see why any trade deal between the U.K. and the U.S. couldn't specifically specify that ONLY non-hormone & non-antibiotic dairy and beef can be exported to the U.K.

    But why would the US (and more specifically the US dairy and beef industries) accept such a limitation?

    Boris/Gove/the other Brexiters all need the US more than the US needs the UK, which means the US is the one dictating terms.

    Hence the chlorinated chicken, selling off the NHS, and the long laundry list of things the US private sector wants and that the EU has thwarted.

    1386:

    Troutwaxer @ 1314:

    Do you mean it was just a hard coded list of leap years ending with 1992? I am not a programmer, but even I could write a simple leap year algorithm.

    It might be harder than you think!

    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/wrongly-assumes-1900-is-leap-year

    Are you saying I'm stupider than Micro$oft?

    1387:

    Meanwhile... Oops ... The N Magnetic pole is wandering a lot & accelerating .... At the same time as the S Atlantic Anomaly is also behaving oddly & apparenty, growing. Are we heading into a field-reversal? See also... That could be "fun" for various values of ...

    1388:

    I find much the same using a bread machine. I don't have any kitchen measuring devices, but it comes out fine just using the "yeah, that looks about enough" principle. No idea what grade the flour is supposed to be; it's just what the corner shop has, apart from plain vs. self-raising you don't get a choice. It does have a picture of Mr Benn on the packet so I suppose you can dress it up as anything.

    The problem is that I start eating the loaf (tearing chunks off and plastering them with butter) as soon as it comes out of the machine, while it's still hot, until I'm full; the next day I can't really face any more bread yet; and the day after that it's gone stale...

    1389:

    "I have heard that the stunted cords are imposed by the EU for some bollocks health and safety reason, in which regard it is counterproductive anyway."

    You shouldn't read the Daily Wail, even by accident, as it's bad for your mind :-)

    The cord on my Bosch Professional drill is 3m long - admittedly, it is fairly ancient, but I have just checked and that seems to still be the case. You are probably thinking of electric kettle flex lengths, when there was a fuss about children pulling on them, so they are now very short - but, whether the EU specifies a length or the countries, I can't say.

    1390:

    Cthulhu awakens...

    1391:

    I don't know if there's a "national chain" grocery store. They all seem to be regional. Wegmans is new around here. They moved in when Kroger closed all their stores around here (although Kroger owns Harris Teeter and those stores are still open).

    Costco, Walmart, and Kroger are national. Wegmans is close. They would be considered such in most countries.

    Kroger closed all of their branded stores in NC after the purchase of Harris Teeter but about 1/2 re-opened as Harris Teeter as they were more profitable. Go figure.

    1392:

    Windscale @ 1320: JBS @ 1259:

    > But if it's a critical industry (i.e. one that it would be disastrous for the nation if access to that industry's output
    > was cut off), doesn't it make sense for the government to invest at some level to make that industry "globally
    > competitive"?
    >
    > Again, why else would you have any government if it wasn't going to do that?

    A topical one in the UK is the steel industry. AFAIUI the UK steel industry has struggled to make a profit for god knows how long. It has gone-bust, been sold, broken up, resold, gone-bust again, resold again, ... We just don't seem to be able to make it globally competitive and profitable. "But", you say, "steel production is a strategically important military industry. We must have the ability to make our own steel, because ..." So the question is, could we have a self-sufficient steel industry for military purposes at any cost?

    One of the major inputs for steel production is iron-ore. I think we exhausted most of our viable iron-ore deposits during the industrial revolution. So, if we want to make iron and steel, we need to import iron-ore. To import iron-ore we need to buy it on the international market. This will need the appropriate international currencies unless they need UKP for some reason. Also, in a war, we need to be able to reliably get that iron-ore here without someone sinking it. (I'm assuming air freight of bulk iron-ore is not viable.) This needs a navy to escort the freighters carrying the iron-ore. Our navy has been downsized massively since the end of WWII. Do we even have enough escorts to be able to maintain a steady flow of iron-ore into the country for our steel industry to process so that we can manufacture our own military hardware? I suspect the answer to that is no. Also, I suspect that the steel industry is not going to be at the top of the pile, because we aren't self-sufficient for food, so that's probably more important.

    So, should we spend money to maintain a steel industry for its military importance? I don't think it's as clear-cut as everybody thinks.

    How critical is your steel industry to your survival as a nation. How critical is steel to the survival of the realm? How badly will the U.K. be hurt if you can't get steel? There are other things that need steel besides warships.

    And if a domestic steel industry is not viable, maybe y'all could make some kind of treaty or trade agreement with other countries to make sure you can always get the steel you need?

    1393:

    I was unaware that the piracy of iron ore carriers was so serious that they all need escorting by naval gunships. Please tell me more!

    1394:

    "cords are just a big PITA"

    They are, but principally because they are always much too short to reach the socket no matter what you're doing.

    You're talking to the wrong person. I have a 100' 12 gauge grounded cord on a hand reel. Rated to 15amps. I have an assortment of 25' and 50' 14-16 gauge cords. 8-15 amps depending. Plus multiple short zip cords and a few what we call appliance/AC cords. Basically 12gauge to get from an outlet to where you have the appliance. Flat and 6' to 10'.

    I still prefer cordless. If you don't see it so be it. But for me it works better. Especially having multiple drills on a ladder.

    1395:

    Now that some airplanes are made of composite materials, autoclaves have gotten a lot bigger. Here's a picture of one: http://www.boeing.com/company/about-bca/washington/first-777x-autoclave-busts-a-move-to-the-future-at-everett-site-09-08-2015.page

    1396:

    The N Magnetic pole is wandering a lot & accelerating ....

    My recently retired pilot friend talked about the fun up doing paper updates of some the world's airports when the pole wandered enough to change their runway numbers.

    He is slightly sorry he missed the transition to iPads from the 40+ pounds of paper they used to carry on each flight.

    1397:

    And here I heard that the stunted cords were US-imposed "for safety".

    Riiiight.

    Meanwhile, when I was getting servers for the US gov't, and we had 5,509 power cords from surplussed servers, the one time I tried ordering one with no cords from Dell, they sent us a server that had to be wired in to 48V in the rack.... (that was replaced).

    And all of their bloody power cords were like 3m long. My manager had me make an order for 40 3' cables, which didn't need cable management arms....

    For the mower and chainsaw, no problem, my son, a few years ago, got me a 100' cord.

    1398:

    Hehe :) It was from a conversation which must have been well over 20 years ago, me and another chap having a moan at each other about how you always get the big heavy lump of drill plug + extension lead socket dangling around your legs somewhere pulling on the drill and catching on things. The general mindset in plant hire, construction, garage work etc, certainly at that time, was pretty much that any petty annoyance of that kind was the fault of health & safety and/or the EU. Some of it probably even was, but there was neither the motivation nor the means for anyone to actually find out one way or the other.

    1399:

    On milk in the US: In west Texas, we could get whole milk (homogenized), as well as 2%, 1.5%, 1%, and 0.5%, but not skim (non-fat). 0.5% has enough fat to taste okay.

    I have powdered milk for my sourdough starter (non-fat milk gives it better flavor). At one time there was a brand that was very low fat - 0.3 or 0.4% when reconstituted, but it's disappeared.

    1400:

    Scott Sanford @ 1323: I hadn't really expected a drill sub-thread but it's a good excuse to share that after too long of not being able to find one I recently acquired an old hand drill, a Stanley Handyman of the 'eggbeater' style with a crank on the side. It's comforting to know that between this for light drilling and a push drill for very light work that I never have to worry about battery charge again. I don't have a bit and brace, which might be excessively retro, but it's nice to have tools that won't stop working just because they're ten years old - or a hundred...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmCVBQNMyJs

    Somewhere around here I think I may still have the first several seasons of that show ... all on Beta tape.

    1401:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1345: That's what I do, but there is also 10 mcg in the (probably pointless) multivitamins that I started taking when I turned 70. As you say, it's not just the time of year but whether you spend time outside with exposed skin (and the colour of your skin).

    How many mcg is 2000 IU? That's the dosage the doctor has me taking every day.

    1402:

    Iron ore: either you need a domestic steel industry, or you don't.

    If you don't, no problem.

    If you do ...

    a) Subsidize a domestic specialist production facility by placing orders for slightly non-standard exotic steel for submarine hulls or reusable Mars colony landers or something.

    b) Assign a disused quarry somewhere to serve as a strategic iron ore reserve: buy a few megatons or tens of megatons of decent quality ore and dump it into the quarry over a couple of years, then for every tonne that comes out (for domestic consumption), import another tonne.

    Remember, a cubic kilometre of rock weighs about 3-4 gigatons. You're going to be in a very long war indeed before you make a dent in even a fraction of a cubic kilometer of ore.

    Yes, this goes agin' the whole just-in-time fetish that has overrun us in the past few decades, but iron ore is cheap (per unit weight, compared to smartphones or jet fighters): the real obstacle is concealing the strategic stockpile and subsidized domestic industry from attack by interested parties under WTO rules.

    1403:

    We had an ICL mainframe with a DAP at my first job. Later, ICL sold us a DAP that could plug into a Sun workstation. It was pretty amazing. Of course later some smart-ass visiting scholar rewrote the thing we were running on the DAP to use a better algorithm, and it ran nearly as fast on a single workstation with no attached processor. D'oh!

    1404:

    whitroth @ 1367: I demand Real Barbecue (Texas style, of course) and bbq sauce.

    The ability to cook real barbecue is inversely proportional to the distance of the pit house from the intersection of U.S. Hwy 301 and U.S. Hwy 264 in Wilson, NC. We are barely on the edge of the acceptable range here in Raleigh, NC.

    And that Texas stuff .... pffffft! They put ketchup in their "bbq sauce".

    1405:

    David L @ 1376: As someone who has had to deal with a lot very short term (an hour or few) projects on houses (mine and others) cords are just a big PITA. Especially since with batteries I can be up on a ladder with a tool caddie with one drill with a 1/8" bit and the other with a Phillips driver and not have to deal with cords.

    Never put tools up on top of a ladder. Put them down on the floor where they're going to fall anyway. It takes a lot less time climbing up & down the ladder than it does driving over to Home Depot to replace a broken drill ... or waiting in the Emergency Room 'cause you lost your balance while trying to switch the batteries from one tool to another and busted your ass when you fell off.

    This is not theoretical knowledge BTW ... I did it for a living for 15 years & BTDT-GTTS for both (more than once).

    1406:

    How many mcg is 2000 IU [of vitamin D]

    https://dietarysupplementdatabase.usda.nih.gov/Conversions.php

    sez

    Vitamin D 1 IU = 0.025 mcg

    Which agrees with the bottle of D3 I have, which says "25 mcg equivalent to 1000 ICU"

    So 2000 IU of D is 50 mcg.

    1407:

    whitroth @ 1380: Ok, there are Wegman's somewhere - they're not all over.

    Point being, you just do not see the UHF milk in the US, it is very much not commonplace.

    Maybe not commonplace at the 7-11 or QuickieMart, but I expect you can find it in any regular supermarket in the U.S. I avoid trying to buy groceries at the 7-11 or QuickieMart. Their prices are way too high on even the limited selection of items they might have.

    1408:

    Never put tools up on top of a ladder.

    You assume facts not in evidence.[grin]

    A tool bucket or similar hanging from a ladder makes the spouse happy and the tools don't fall up and over the sides. And I'm only dealing with one tool at a time. And when you're up 18 feet, going up and down is more dangerous that such.

    I'm not crazy safety conscious but I do now make sure someone is down below when on the roof. Especially on the side where the drop is 20 feet. If for no other reason than it's safer for them to bring me something to the top of the ladder when needed rather than repeatedly getting on and off the roof.

    1409:

    It takes a lot less time climbing up & down the ladder than it does driving over to Home Depot to replace a broken drill

    Anyone who does much involving wood around the home these days uses what I call "Deck Screws" and they work best most times with a 1/8" drilled hole. So I and others I know buy this size in bulk at Harbor Freight. (See earlier comments about Harbor Freight.)

    1410:

    mdlve @ 1385:

    And I don't see why any trade deal between the U.K. and the U.S. couldn't specifically specify that ONLY non-hormone & non-antibiotic dairy and beef can be exported to the U.K.

    But why would the US (and more specifically the US dairy and beef industries) accept such a limitation?

    Why shouldn't they? If that's what the market wants, that's what the market gets. If the U.S. dairy and beef industries don't want to sell to the U.K. market under the U.K.'s terms, I'm sure there are others who do.

    Boris/Gove/the other Brexiters all need the US more than the US needs the UK, which means the US is the one dictating terms.

    Hence the chlorinated chicken, selling off the NHS, and the long laundry list of things the US private sector wants and that the EU has thwarted.

    AFAIK, the U.K. doesn't allow imports of chlorinated chicken1. Sounds to me like your problem is with "Boris/Gove/the other Brexiters" rather than with the "U.S. private sector". There are plenty of vendors in the U.S. who will gladly sell you what you want. All you have to do is stand firm and insist on getting it.

    Just don't let "Boris/Gove/the other Brexiters" sell you out. You going to just roll over and let them sell off the NHS? Or are you going to stand up and fight for your rights?

    1 I still haven't seen any evidence that "chlorinated chicken" is any less healthy than the E.U.'s NON-chlorinated chicken, but if you don't want it, don't buy it. Stand firm and don't allow it to be imported.

    1411:

    1 x Landing ship, Logistics. (I think the assault ships are the closest remaining comparison.)

    The closest remaining comparison to the Landing Ship Logistics would be the Bay Class Landing Ships, operated like the preceding LSLs by the Royal Fleet Auxiliary. More capable as you'd expect but we have three Bay Class (so assume likely two available at any one time) whereas we had six Round Table class LSLs.

    1412:

    Charlie Stross @ 1402: b) Assign a disused quarry somewhere to serve as a strategic iron ore reserve: buy a few megatons or tens of megatons of decent quality ore and dump it into the quarry over a couple of years, then for every tonne that comes out (for domestic consumption), import another tonne.

    I wonder if maybe scrap steel might be more cost effective & more quickly available in a crunch? I don't think you'd have to go the full route India & some other countries have done of accepting old ships for wrecking, but I bet you could buy some of their output at reasonable cost to fill up your old quarry and you wouldn't have the problem with disposing of all the parts of the ore that isn't iron?

    1413:

    I still haven't seen any evidence that "chlorinated chicken" is any less healthy than the E.U.'s NON-chlorinated chicken,

    It's why the US producers need to chickens (and other poultry) with chlorinated water to begin with that worries us. You could raise healthy poultry and process it cleanly to start with but that would involve Big Government regulation which is Bad.

    I recall reading the reported levels of cases of salmonella in humans was over ten times higher per capita in the US than in the EU. Those salmonella cases in the EU are mostly tied to eggs rather than poultry though.

    1414:

    50 mcg, if I have it right. A high but not excessive value.

    1415:

    Better still would be to buy cheap foreign steel of known quality and alloy type in ready-to-process billets and rounds and stash it somewhere under cover. Converting iron ore or even scrap steel[1] into usable iron/steel requires a lot of energy and we don't have much coal left any more, never mind the good sort that can make metallurgical coke for higher-quality steel. Electromelting works but it needs lots of electricity so we wouldn't be able to prosecute a war properly if the wind didn't blow. It's a bit like the days of sail and the Royal Navy's mighty three-deckers becalmed in the Doldrums.

    We could cut down the National Forests and make charcoal but that wouldn't last very long.

    [1]Scrap steel is a witch's brew of contaminants and differing elements, it requires a lot of processing, testing and alloying to make anything better than jobbing rebar for concrete or basic hot-rolled bar.

    1416:

    Yes. A more interesting question is whether we needed the capability to produce advanced steels, where Thatcher was (eventually) persuaded that we did, but more recently her successors have decided that we don't. Probably because we can always buy them from Germany :-(

    1417:

    I can believe it. As I used to teach (and may do so again), the ranking is program optimisation (including parallelism), to algorithmic improvements, to using better mathematical approaches - and, of course, the skill and effort needed goes up correspondingly fast! But that has little to do with the merits of the DAP, because things like QCD (which have no known algorithmic improvement) ran extremely well on it.

    1418:

    Charlie @ 1402 Certainly, about 10 years back, Sheffield was making as much steel as ever ... bu ALL OF IT was "specialist" small-lots of various exotic compostions for different. also-specialist purposes ...

    OTOH, I can remember going along the old "GC" route in N Sheffield, when they were slag-tipping at night ... the heat at the open train window was like a v warm Summer's day & the "light-show" !

    1419:

    Why shouldn't they? If that's what the market wants, that's what the market gets.

    If the market doesn't want what you're selling, obviously the market is wrong and needs fixing.

    A few years ago the US argued that forcing foods that possibly contained GMOs to be labelled as such was an unfair restraint of trade, because European customers would buy less of them and thus hurt sales of imported American foods that, because of the way the American food stream is organized, couldn't easily be separated into GMO-free and possibly-congtaing-GMOs.

    Whether or not you agree that GMO foods are potentially dangerous, the argument was that enough people would to hurt sales, so the labels had to change.

    In Canada we're facing the same thing as the UK — arguments that our food safety standards must be changed because they are acting as a trade barrier to American companies. It's been happening for years, and it's got worse under Trump.

    1420:

    I take 35 mcg/diem in winter, which I regard as giving a good engineering margin of error from both the minimum and maximum :-) Thanks. Some people here have me killfiled[1], but I wanted to get the message to them, and they hopefully saw Charlie's reply to you. That dosage seems about right; it appears to be important, from the evidence currently available, to not be Vitamin D deficient (or insufficient), especially during a deadly respiratory virus pandemic.

    [1] For talking with the one(s) with many names. (Trying hard to not be annoyed at OGH. His writing has been inspiring. :-)

    1421:

    Britain makes a lot of specialist steels -- we pioneered the mass-production of vacuum-electromelted steel, for example. What we don't make any more is ten million tonnes of hot-rolled steel a year for grilles, fenceposts, rebar etc. Places like Malaysia, a lot closer to the big iron ore producers like Australia can deliver that sort of steel to our docks cheaper than we can ship iron ore and coke to the same docks plus the energy cost of converting it into steel, processing it etc. If shipping stopped for some reason we'd still be short of the raw materials needed to make steel and probably constrained for energy too.

    1422:

    Being a somewhat small island nation that can't feed itself makes me wonder just how it should work post empire. Seems like you've been on that journey for decades with no one admitting to it. Well most not. And having a faux empire for much of that time.

    1423:

    but there don't seem to be any places that are, say, using masks but not social distancing, so the actual elements are hard to tease out.

    Do you or Heteromeles or anyone else have any references to "readable" reports on infection rates related to % of mask wearing?

    I'm looking for something I can point mortals at.

    1424:

    Re: '[1]Scrap steel is a witch's brew of contaminants and differing elements, it requires a lot of processing, testing and alloying to make anything better than jobbing rebar for concrete or basic hot-rolled bar.'

    Interesting - I was wondering why recycled steel wasn't considered worth the bother.

    Wonder if anyone's considered GMOing the biofilm producing bacteria that corrode steel into bacteria that could 'organically' separate ore/materials out of steel into their component metals, i.e., iron, molybdenum, manganese, chromium, or nickel, and misc. At some point when mining iron or related metals becomes too expensive or environmentally/ecologically hazardous we will need an option. Unless graphene and other new non-ferrous materials completely replace steel.

    'Analysis of Bacterial Community Composition of Corroded Steel Immersed in Sanya and Xiamen Seawaters in China via Method of Illumina MiSeq Sequencing'

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5601074/

    1425:

    NuCor might have a different opinion on the issue of dealing with scrap steel.

    While the US steel industry was trying to figure out how to deal with competition around the world NuCor showed up and kicked them in the teeth.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_steel_producers

    1426:

    Recycling steel can be done better than it used to be. A long time back I worked on a metal analysis spectrometer system for a foundry in Bolton. They would melt scrap, pour test bars for stress testing and spark analysis then add bars of pure metal or oresands to the melt to bring it to the required alloy composition. This is done a lot faster and better these days.

    It's still possible for things to go wrong -- the foundry made SG (Spheroidal Graphitic) cast iron rather than steel for paper-making machinery and one large melt for a 160-tonne paper roller went badly wrong while I was contracting there. They had bought a lot of scrap worn-out railway track cheap and put about fifty tonnes of it into the crucible for this big casting. When it was tested the manganese content of the melt was way off the scale because of the railway track and they couldn't compensate by adding extra steel or burn out the excess Mn so they had to pour the 180 tonnes or so of melt into pigs for future remelting rather than casting the roller they intended. That cost them a lot of time and money.

    1427:

    Re: 'NuCor showed up and kicked them in the teeth'

    Read the Wikipedia article and was thinking 'Hey! Nice job' until I got to their environmental record. Wonder which presidential candidate they're supporting this November.

    'Environmental record

    In 2000, Nucor paid $98 million to settle with the U.S. Justice Department and the United States Environmental Protection Agency to resolve allegations that it had not adequately controlled the emission of toxic chemicals into the air, water, and soil of Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Nebraska, South Carolina, Texas, and Utah. The settlement was "the largest and most comprehensive environmental settlement ever with a steel manufacturer."[31][32]

    In 2012, as part of a settlement with the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the company agreed to reduce air pollution at its plant in Marion, Ohio.[33]

    In 2016, the company unsuccessfully filed a lawsuit to block the Environmental Protection Agency from adopting a plan to control visible pollution in Arkansas.[34]'

    1428:

    Re: 'It's still possible for things to go wrong -'

    Understood. Personally know of one industrial accident that resulted in very serious personal injury (3rd degree burns to a large part of the body) to two long-time employees who had been operating that equipment for forever. Also know that the maintenance of that equipment was performed regularly and correctly - and documented along with costs, down-times, etc. This was a freak, one-of accident. The engineer supervising this crew was devastated and kept reviewing everything about that particular operation and incident for months to the point that his co-workers and manager felt he needed a few months time off with counselling.

    1429:

    Have you ever been around a steel mill.

    I'm not saying NuCor is good better or whatever but steel mills be definition are bad for the environment.

    Says he who lived in the Pittsburgh area for 7 years. Just over the hill from the Edgar Thomson Works.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Thomson_Steel_Works

    1430:

    In Canada we're facing the same thing as the UK — arguments that our food safety standards must be changed because they are acting as a trade barrier to American companies. It's been happening for years, and it's got worse under Trump.

    Yep, certainly it was likely one of the reasons for Trump declaring NAFTA dead.

    The only thing that saved us (and Mexico) was that given an existing long term free trade agreement business supplies lines were such that the pain of not conceding was worse than conceding for Trump.

    The UK would have no such card to play.

    1431:

    Absolutely not!

    1432:

    "OTOH, I can remember going along the old "GC" route in N Sheffield, when they were slag-tipping at night ... the heat at the open train window was like a v warm Summer's day & the "light-show" !"

    It's something of a sobering thought to look around you in a city and consider that nearly everything you can see has been in that state through artificial means at some point. And then imagine that it still is like that. All the concrete, all the steel (including the cars), all the glass (including the pint pots), all the aluminium (including the drink cans), all the brick, all the tiles. The tarmac hasn't, but it still contains enough chemical energy that it could heat itself that hot, so it basically counts. About the only things that don't are any buildings made of stone (geological processes aren't artificial), and if all the artificial things were still in the most energetic phase of their manufacture the stone buildings would all melt too.

    1433:

    look on ebay there were plenty

    Sadly for me that is "from international sellers". Locally nothing, in Australia a few but the only useful one is "local pickup only" about 1000km away. I expect to have more luck with garage sales and random local markets once those open again. But in my experience those sellers who have tables of old-but-working hand tools value them as though they're being bought by people who want them because they're better than the modern hand tool. Which is accurate, but I'm still not keen to pay $100 for an old chest press hand drill.

    The local "gumtree.com.au" (which is now owned by ebay but still free) has one, four year old, ad for something useful but the seller is not responding to messages so I suspect it's a "lost interest, did not take ad down".

    The general standard of brickwork in 1950's cheap tract houses in Australia is ludicrous. You get whatever the guy on the day felt like. When we bought the place I ran round adding shelves into the brick walls and mostly that was fine... but one brick in the laundry I started the drill and the whole brick fell out of the house. So I vacuumed up the sane, washed it, bought some cement and cemented it back in with new mortar.

    I am absolutely serious when I say that one 6+ earthquake would level half of Sydney, and a chunk of the rest would sink into the swamp it's built on. I hope that the post-1980's 6+ storey buildings would stay up, but given that some of them fall apart all by themselves I'm not especially optimistic.

    1434:

    "Wonder if anyone's considered GMOing the biofilm producing bacteria that corrode steel into bacteria that could 'organically' separate ore/materials out of steel into their component metals"

    I'm pretty sure they already do that, although without the genetic engineering bit. Pile up a big heap of ore and let the bugs eat it. They certainly do it with bacteria that eat sulphides as a sort of organic version of acid leaching, and incidentally also a reminder that just because a process is "organic" it still isn't necessarily nice.

    1435:

    > does not allow the hormone treatments or routine antibiotics. Which is, according to the US, an unfair restraint of trade.

    That would be kind of OK except that they also object vigorously to any requirement that food be labelled accordingly. Even requiring country of origin labels can be controversial, I expect because it has a similar effect (it's hard to sell US-labelled milk products outside the US).

    If I could visit the supermarket and be faced with "grapes (product of USA, treated with pesticides that are banned in Australia)" that would be one thing, but instead we get "DELICIOUS FRESH GRAPES $9.99/kg" then on a small sign next to the display "grapes (product of USA)" and it's on us to know that not only are they fumigated on their way in with SO2 but they're almost certainly treated with banned pesticides before being exported.

    It is in that sense unfair competition, and we should be able to ban that crap as dumping.

    1436:

    Do you or Heteromeles or anyone else have any references to "readable" reports on infection rates related to % of mask wearing? Analysis of actual COVID-19 statistics from the various (ethically problematic) natural experiments being run? I'm not aware of any yet. Probably start seeing them within a week or three. What looks like a mask signal (mandatory face coverings indoors in public starting April 17 + 5-10 days) is now visually clear in the NY State statistics including at the county level, i.e. seems to work even when contact tracing etc are logistically impractical due to community spread involving thousands of cases. Various countries have had mandatory masking for a while. Hong Kong from the beginning because of their SARS experience, and practice at organizing protests transferred to near-universal public anti-COVID-19 action well prior to action by the local government. Czech Republic, Slovakia are European examples.

    From 1918/1919, and I didn't try to find the original sources: In 1919, the Mayor of Oakland Was Arrested for Failing to Wear a Mask - John L. Davie was a larger-than-life politician, but during the influenza pandemic, even he wasn’t above the law (Erika Mailman, May 21, 2020) The Sacramento Bee said the police “espied the Mayor of [Oakland] sitting in a chair, with his mask gracefully draped over one ear. As they approached, Davie put the mask in place, probably noting that the men had the air of officers.” Three of the officers admonished him to wear it properly, but when they had turned away, according to the newspaper, he pulled it off and resumed a perhaps-cheeky inhale of the cigar he’d been smoking. When the officers glanced back and saw the mask again out of place, they arrested him.

    but includes this, about the apparent effects of universal masking for "source control" to block sprays from influenza-infected individuals.

    It seems Mayor Davie’s vehement rejection of the mask was ill-thought-out. Across the bay, San Francisco’s public health officer noted that in his city, within three weeks of general adoption of the mask, the number of cases were cut more than half – and that within one week of its being cast aside after the disease being virtually wiped out, a marked increase began. Sacramento, too, reported cases dropping to a minimum after mask use was mandated.

    Note that they were using multi-layer gauze masks in 1918/1919; not very good by current standards and even worse than typical current cloth masks. Another story, with some local colour about some freedom-loving anti-maskers of yore. https://www.influenzaarchive.org/cities/city-sanfrancisco.html

    From a modeling study[1] (Jeremy Howard, who, with others, is on a anti-anti-masker crusade), this 2D figure is mask compliance vs mask efficacy for mandatory masking, with colors for estimated R0 reduction. (I don't know if it covers infection within households where people are generally unmasked and in close contact; probably not.) It's a pretty effective visualization. No masks is the lower left corner. Fig. 1. Impact of public mask wearing under the full range of mask adherence and efficacy scenarios. The color indicates the resulting reproduction number R0 from an initial R0 of 2.4 (7). paper has a bunch of regs Face Masks Against COVID-19: An Evidence Review (Revised May 12, 2020)

    1437:

    "I read that the eggbeater style hand drill is called a 'wheel brace' in the UK"

    I've always just called it a hand drill. I have occasionally seen "wheel brace" but at sufficiently long intervals that I've always forgotten what it means and wonder what the fuck they're on about with talking about one of those cruciform things with four different socket ends for getting the wheel nuts off cars. I always thought the reason for it being a rare and confusing expression was that it was an Americanism...

    I'm not convinced that the versions with an idler pinion on the proximal side of the crank wheel are an improvement. I can see the idea, but in practice the increase in frictional loss from the extra gear whizzing round all the time greatly outweighs the reduction from eliminating the twisting load on the centre spindle of the crank wheel over part of the revolution. I've used otherwise identical Stanley models both with and without the idler pinion and it's definitely easier to turn the handle without it.

    1438:

    it's just the manufacturers cheaping out by doing only the minimum necessary to avoid people complaining that it doesn't have a cord at all

    At the bottom end of the market this is very true. I've received Cinese LED floodlights with 15cm cords that were epoxy potted inside the light so I couldn't even change the cord. But with drills and stuff I just habitually put on 5m cords because those are cheap and easy to fit to most non-trash tools (beware molded-on strain relief!)

    Battery tools cost a fortune per kilowatt-hour (my mower is more than $5/kWh) because the batteries are generally junk or undersized or both. My Ryobi 5AH/36V battery lasted less than 200 cycles in the mower because the longest discharge time it ever experienced was under an hour. That's kind of just a fact of life, but of course you can't buy a 10AH or 20AH battery, they don't make them. Drill batteries tend to be similar except that you can generally cheat because bigger batteries are available. The cheap joke kit I got from Makita has 1.5AH batteries, good for about 3-5 minutes of use in the inpact driver and twice that in the drill. New drill has 3AH batteries, and I'll buy 5AH or 6AH replacements when they die.

    But I'll very probably buy a cheap corded SDS drill shortly, because somehow I don't think my 30 year old Bosch corded hammer drill is going to like cutting a 50mm hole through the foundation wall of my house (running conduit to the garage). But I am willing to risk it because that drill has other problems caused by age (can't buy new brushes, or even find ones that can be cut to fit because the base mounts are failing after only having new brushed mangled into them twice).

    1439:

    in practice the increase in frictional loss from the extra gear whizzing round all the time greatly outweighs the reduction from eliminating the twisting load on the centre spindle of the crank wheel

    They can generally be lubricated, and the better ones use a bronze bushing if not actually oilite. One cheat you can do now is buy bicycle chain "dry lube" that has some kind of UHMW plastic powder suspended in it (PTFE or "wax lube"). You could just buy PTFE powder and suspect it in meths or something but I find that messy and not great. A bit of wax in the mix seems to help it along. Or maybe that's just me using what I have lying round...

    Oz Cycle has more detail (muuuuch more detail) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHr9znwpwmQ

    1440:

    I have occasionally seen "wheel brace" but at sufficiently long intervals that I've always forgotten what it means

    The hand drills I used as a kid were called a "brace and bit". So I assume the brace part was what you held and used to drive the "bit". Take a rod. Make an offset in it. Put a spinning handle on the offset and a flat rotatable palm rest on one end. Then a way to mount a bit on the other.

    https://www.google.com/search?q=brace+and+bit&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X

    1441:

    NOW we're gettin' into a Religious Argument. I spent 7 mos, about, in N. Wilkesboro, NC, tried bbq, and no, thank you, I don't care to drink that much straight vinegar.

    An' I like brisket, like the two I did (first time ever, came out *perfect, took 19 hrs, 14 in the bbq over charcoal, w/ mesquite chips for smoke) I did last Labor Day, and I'll do the third one, that's sitting in the freezer, when we can have a party again.

    1442:

    I refer to them as drywall screws. They've a narrower shank, and much sharper threads, than traditional wood screws.

    1443:

    Sure. I had one, too. I've probably still got it somewhere. The crank is the brace and the pointy thing you stick in the end of it is the bit. Very popular with Victorian burglars (and the occasional pirate) because they drill big holes in wood with near-complete silence, so you could get through a locked door quickly and quietly by stitch-drilling around the latch. Next to useless to me, though, because I nearly always just wanted to drill small holes as pilot holes for screws and all the bits I had for it were far too big. So the hand drill with the bevel gears was what I used, with ordinary twist bits.

    Thing is while I do know that combination is called a "brace and bit" I don't readily recall that, and I'd probably call it "one of those old crank-type hand drills" or "a centrebit, as in "here's your crowbar"". I recall even less readily that the crank on its own is called a brace; to me "brace" on its own is a static member added to improve the integrity of a structure. And a "wheel brace" is a big iron plus sign for taking the wheel nuts off four different size cars, because that's what a lot of people do call those things, but nobody calls a hand drill that so on the rare occasions when I do encounter that meaning I've always forgotten the previous occasion and it takes a while to work it out.

    1444:

    So that chain stuff works then? I've always been a bit suspicious of it, as I am of any magic jollop that claims to be an improvement over oil or make oil work better.

    What I usually do with moulded-on strain reliefs is slit them down one side with a Stanley knife, peel them off the cable, fit them around the new cable and then put a bit of tape or a couple of cable ties round it. Or heatshrink if I'm feeling posh.

    1445:

    It's still possible for things to go wrong...

    Oh, yes. And it can happen in much smaller melts:

    A friend who's a science fiction fan for cons and an engineer in real life has several interesting hobbies and got into doing sand casting. For those watching from a safe distance, this is melting metal and then pouring it into hollows in fine sand; the crucible can be the size of a large bucket and you can do this in your back yard or driveway, neighbors permitting. It's pretty easy once you get the specialized gear. Aluminum is cheap and melts at relatively low temperatures too.

    One day he was loading the crucible with small bits of scrap aluminum, piece by piece so they could melt before the next bit came along, when he dropped in an ounce or so of what turned out to be magnesium.

    Gosh.

    Magnesium meeting molten metal is as dramatic as any one could ask for, and a good reminder to always wear a face mask.

    1446:

    Never put tools up on top of a ladder. Put them down on the floor where they're going to fall anyway. It takes a lot less time climbing up & down the ladder than it does driving over to Home Depot to replace a broken drill ...

    Good advice. Happily the various problems of my most recent ladder involved project didn't involve any people falling off but project parts did. We were up and down a lot anyway as the one simple job turned into two simple jobs for which we often had the wrong materials at hand.

    Apparently thinking that electronics work better with enough brute force, my friend tried to over-tighten an antenna mount, breaking it and causing various bits to fall into the grass. The broken connector did mean driving to the store and replacing; the hard-to-replace adapter pin I eventually found in the grass.

    (I omit the loose vent pipe story.)

    At the end of the process, this being the point at which it was too late to do things right, I went to put away the rather wobbly ladder and noticed it was rated to only 200lbs (90kg, for people in the real world). Two hundred pounds is not very much. I weigh more than that naked. Why do we even have this ladder?

    1447:

    The general standard of brickwork in 1950's cheap tract houses in Australia is ludicrous.

    I keep hearing horrible things about Australian construction. It seems an odd thing for the country to not be good at; don't people who write building codes have homes themselves? (Rhetorical question.) Here in the US we've got plenty of crooked contractors and home DIY guys who don't know what they're doing - but they're criminal and incompetent respectively, not the expected state.

    1448:

    So that chain stuff works then?

    Wax lube is one of those old ideas that used to be too much hassle for the benefit to most people, most of the time. Old road racers used to use sewing machine oil if they were especially fussy. But mounting biking in sandy/dust any kind of wet lube will turn to mud, so wax lubes have been a thing since MTBing started. Significant PITA to use, "every 200-300km" is a week commuting for me, so yeah nah.

    PTFE makes it more effective, because it's basically heavy wax that's still slippery. Lasts longer, in other words.

    Once you have a bottle of it in the shed it's becomes really easy to sprinkle it on things to see what happens. Stuck threads that won't shift if you spray WD40 on them and wait 10 minutes... drizzle your PTFE lube into them and it soaks in leaving behind a slippery residue. Do that a few times and oooh look, it's not so stuck after all.

    Ditto for replacing grease on hard to reach or grit-attracting plain bearings.

    1449:

    The other thing is that it's $10 to see if it works for you... albeit if you are using it on a bike chain you also need to remove and clean the chain. One trick, btw, is to use an old meths bottle, thread a string through one end of the chain and feed the chain into the bottle with ~200ml of meths in it. Trap the string in the cap (a knot in the end is useful), then shake. Pull out, dry... repeat until clean enough for your liking.

    One somewhat random option: https://www.amazon.co.uk/TF0021060-Tri-Flow-Superior-Lubricant-Teflon/dp/B003L9K9HQ

    https://www.amazon.com/Tri-Flow-TF0021060-Superior-Lubricant-Bottle/dp/B003L9K9HQ?th=1

    1450:

    ...one of those cruciform things with four different socket ends for getting the wheel nuts off cars.

    In America it's called a lug wrench, used on the lug nuts (but "wheel nuts" is self-explanatory). Wikipedia says that in the UK they are also called "wheel braces," just like had drills. Two nations divided by a common language, indeed.

    1451:

    but they're criminal and incompetent respectively, not the expected state.

    You know how you don't need a criminal conviction to come here any more? Well, the country's attitudes were formed when most of the invaders were either criminals, guards, or aristocrats. So there is a huge element to the general culture that it's not what the law says that matters, it's what law is actually enforced that counts.

    With buildings that means it's up to local councils to decide what's allowed, and... the extra cost of building properly is a lot more than most councillors get from any part of being a councillor. So Australia has a long (long) history of council corruption. Oh, and also state government corruption because the cost argument also applies to large developers. That's one reason why property developers are legally banned from donating to political parties in some states, and by some parties (The Greens).

    But it goes right down to the individual level. I have a shed in my back yard that exceeds the 10 square metre limit on sheds without building permits, but since I live in it it needs a permit anyway. But, like two of neighbours over the back fence with similar "sleepouts", I don't have a permit. The neighbours who can see it from their non-permitted rear verandah-with-roof don't care, so why bother going through the expensive, tedious process?

    I've lived in a "garage conversion" (according to the council it was a single story double garage) that was basically a small two storey house, lacking even a decorative garage door. Unlike another room I rented where the "garage" had a wall immediately inside the garage door so there was a 10cm wide space not accessible from inside. There's a huge amount of that in Australia.

    I hate the stupid system, but I'm also not going to pay $15,000 to get permits for a $5000 structure. When/if I build a proper granny flat I'll get permits and pay professionals, because that's also $15,000 in permits but for a $150,000 structure.

    1452:

    Pfft. Batteries, cords...

    The proper power for tools is hydraulic. I used to wield an earlier version of this fitted with a six foot blade. It would chew through a 5 foot thick, 100 year old wharf pile in seconds. We drove it with a big 3 cylinder diesel powerpack that was a trailer by itself.

    Fantastic thing, and they work underwater.

    https://www.stanleyinfrastructure.com/products/chain-saws

    1454:

    I am currently using a mixture that is roughly 50% beeswax, 45% paraffin wax and 5% marine grease - clean and dry the chain thoroughly, melt the wax, submerge and jiggle the chain, pick out, drain and wipe. It lasts pretty well (2,000 km at least), including when it gets dusty, muddy or stays very wet for days (which most 'dry lubes' fail at), but I have not yet exposed it to extreme conditions (such as sea-spray). And I probably won't get the option this year :-(

    1455:

    It used to be standard for bikers to hard-lube the chains on their bikes, especially before winter. The solid chain lube came in a big flat round can. You took the bike chain off the bike, flushed it with petrol then put the coiled chain on top of the lube in the can and then put that on the stove to warm up until the chain sank into the softened lube. Leave it on low for a while then fish the chain out with pliers and allow it to drip back into the can. The result was a hard waxy lubricant inside the rollers of the chain that would keep moisture and road salt out while being resistant to being displaced.

    1456:

    For those looking for nasty predictions above covid, you might want to look at Ramadan. If Lakemba is anything to go by a lot of official stuff has been cancelled but there are still an awful lot of people packed together in the main street right now all socialising and eating together. In theory NSW allows gatherings of no more than ten people from the 1st June, right now I think it's five.

    Mind you, I saw two games of cricket on my travels, and an awful lot of people out and about. Like me :) Except I was by myself, going to work in order to get time in the office when no-one else was there. Because sadly I needed to actually poke the hardware, repeatedly, in order to find and fix the latest bug.

    1457:

    NOW we're gettin' into a Religious Argument

    Of course. Who said discussions (fist fights) over BBQ styles in the US was anything but.

    Of course the only good BBQ is actually meat hickory smoked for at least 36 hours to the point it will fall off the bone. Sauce is what you add to it as you like. Like we do in western Ky.

    1458:

    I refer to them as drywall screws

    Ah, nope. I have both in my screw/nail drawers. Drywall screws, as you say, are narrower, and typically only come in 3 lengths sized to match up to standard dry wall thicknesses. (USA) What I call deck screws come in lengths ranging from 1" to 4" maybe more. And over the years my collection has built up to where I have most lengths.

    Actual deck screws these days typically have a star drive to make it less likely you'll strip out the head when using them. And come in colors to allow you to match your look and cost more.

    1460:

    Now you're talking!

    The right tool always makes the job easy.

    1461:

    I keep hearing horrible things about Australian construction. It seems an odd thing for the country to not be good at; don't people who write building codes have homes themselves?

    Nah, you’re seeing people complaining about specific things and treating those as representative. Most likely most Australian jurisdictions have stricter building codes than the one you live in (though not the thermal performance standards common in the EU, we’re pretty shit about that). Likewise because the local code might give certain standards it doesn’t mean that these are not routinely outperformed. However that is inevitably dwarves by the vast construction project based on population growth that is down to the last dollar, nail and plastic reo positioner.

    Queensland has traditionally been excellent at timber structures, reasonable at stone and concrete but just okay at brick (depending on the place and style... I was admiring a 50s phone exchange in neo-deco brick while stuck in traffic today).

    1462:

    Nojay @ 1413:

    I still haven't seen any evidence that "chlorinated chicken" is any less healthy than the E.U.'s NON-chlorinated chicken,

    It's why the US producers need to chickens (and other poultry) with chlorinated water to begin with that worries us. You could raise healthy poultry and process it cleanly to start with but that would involve Big Government regulation which is Bad.

    We already have government regulation. I could equally wonder why the EU won't take the extra step of washing poultry with chlorinated water.

    I recall reading the reported levels of cases of salmonella in humans was over ten times higher per capita in the US than in the EU. Those salmonella cases in the EU are mostly tied to eggs rather than poultry though.

    I recall looking it up the last time this came around and the per capita levels of salmonella traced to poultry are about the same. And the U.S. appeared to have a lower incidence of salmonella from eggs. Most of our cases appear to come from leaf vegetables irrigated with sketchy water and then not washed properly before packaging.

    1463:

    Because sadly I needed to actually poke the hardware, repeatedly, in order to find and fix the latest bug

    Cool bananas. I’ve been technically unemployed since the end of April, as the unsinkable toxic project I was working on and determined to stick with to make darn sure it sank, so the unworkable solution which would kill people would never go live, was cancelled as a COVID-19 re-prioritisation thingy, thank goodness. Oddly I’ve been if anything busier with stuff around the house and study than ever, so I haven’t really noticed and the financial impact is months away. I’m looking, of course, and this week is the first week I’ve had agents actively putting me forward. But it’s an interesting view for the future: I would happily do consulting gigs for maybe 6 months of the year and have the rest as free time for my own projects, most of which don’t make a profit, but maybe make enough not to require too much active subsidy.

    1464:

    Yeah, I've complained on here about thermal performance. I doubt many northern Europeans have had that experience of waking up and seeing the dawn light coming up between the floorboards.

    1465:

    Robert Prior @ 1419:

    Why shouldn't they? If that's what the market wants, that's what the market gets.

    If the market doesn't want what you're selling, obviously the market is wrong and needs fixing.

    A few years ago the US argued that forcing foods that possibly contained GMOs to be labelled as such was an unfair restraint of trade, because European customers would buy less of them and thus hurt sales of imported American foods that, because of the way the American food stream is organized, couldn't easily be separated into GMO-free and possibly-congtaing-GMOs.

    Whether or not you agree that GMO foods are potentially dangerous, the argument was that enough people would to hurt sales, so the labels had to change.

    I do remember some "U.S." multi-nationals making that argument, but to the best of my knowledge E.U. labeling requirements were NOT changed, so I don't think that's a very good argument that U.S. producers won't meet market demands.

    In Canada we're facing the same thing as the UK — arguments that our food safety standards must be changed because they are acting as a trade barrier to American companies. It's been happening for years, and it's got worse under Trump.

    I'm aware of the complaints made by U.S. companies, but again, to the best of my knowledge Canada has not changed their food safety standards to comply.

    And many of the trade barriers U.S. companies complain about don't have anything to do with food safety standards. They're simply protective tariffs by another name

    1466:

    Ontario has seen a spike after Mothers Day (a day when our premier broke distancing rules to gather his family together).

    "Our analysis thus far suggests that people may have acquired the virus during recent events where people traditionally spend time with their families, like Mother's Day, said Toronto's Medical Officer of Health Dr. Eileen de Villa.

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/covid-19-coronavirus-ontario-may-22-update-1.5580107

    1467:

    "I could equally wonder why the EU won't take the extra step of washing poultry with chlorinated water."

    Because: https://xkcd.com/463/

    1468:

    I’ve been technically unemployed ... I would happily do consulting gigs for maybe 6 months of the year and have the rest as free time for my own projects

    I spent the best part of a decade doing that, when work was easy to find an d ludicrously overpaid (as long as you weren't trying to buy a house). It is very easy to find yourself too busy to take that next bit of paid work :)

    Like being bored, being unemployed requires a set of characteristics that I understand exist, but have no experience of. I understand that being poor cuts down options as well as costing money, but I have never been poor (and would really rather not).

    Right now I am torn between dumping my spare cash into the sharemarket and dumping it into a granny flat shell. I should find a builder or two and have a chat I think, just to see what the costs look like. My goal there is a kind of "minimum habitable finish", ideally with the interior cladding not on, that I can complete myself. Partly because I enjoy that and partly to save money (some of what I want is labour-intensive... but also fun).

    1469:

    SFReader @ 1427: Re: 'NuCor showed up and kicked them in the teeth'

    Read the Wikipedia article and was thinking 'Hey! Nice job' until I got to their environmental record. Wonder which presidential candidate they're supporting this November.

    I think if you were to look at the environmental records of any of the other steel manufacturers listed in the second Wikipedia article, NuCor's record compares favorably ... although I don't know how many of the Wikipedia articles will actually have the environmental records for those other companies, so you might have to do a bit of digging on your own.

    Their environmental record is no worse than the others and better than some.

    1470:

    whitroth @ 1442: I refer to them as drywall screws. They've a narrower shank, and *much* sharper threads, than traditional wood screws.

    Drywall screws are different from deck screws although they are similar in appearance. Drywall screws won't take as much torque before snapping and they don't weather as well.

    1471:

    thermal performance.

    Ah ha. Hahahaha. The shack I rented in Blacktown had so much dust coming up through the floorboards that I was mopping the floors at least once a day. But my brick house is alternately cooler than outside in the winter and warmer in summer. Dunedin in Aotearoa is also notoriously full of older houses on hills with gaps between the floorboards that let the icy gales blow through.

    In both countries there are houses that perform really well in a variety of ways, including the one my parents built. That wasn't great, but by 70's standards was unusually comfortable. It was also relatively cheap, being a fairly boring wooden box on concrete slab setup, just with a tiny bit of insulation under the concrete (rare at the time) and more than the legal minimum insulation in the walls. But what made it work was passive solar design and heated underlay - you could get warm carpet floors in key bits of the house quite quickly. And in winter the wide equator-facing verandahs let sun in to hit those carpet-over-concrete floors so heating was a lot less necessary despite the aluminium single glazing.

    My preferred granny flat concept is a heavily insulated box sitting on a double garage with a north-facing single pitch roof covered in solar panels. That also gives a usable "attic" space. But I will give that to some builder-type who will no doubt argue about cost to build and difficulty of council approval and we shall see what happens.

    1472:

    "We already have government regulation. I could equally wonder why the EU won't take the extra step of washing poultry with chlorinated water."

    It's a near-irrelevance, anyway, because there are FAR more important regulations that are at threat. The chlorination of chicken is merely the aspect that the blithering classes have got latched on to, because it was made much of in the tabloids.

    You have much, MUCH weaker regulation that allows a lot of harmful practices and substances that we don't (and our regulations and enforcement aren't great), as stated in #1284 and #1413. The main reason that the EU doesn't allow it is that it makes it harder to detect bacterial contamination, and is used to hide unsanitary practices.

    Also, in the past, such 'deals' with the USA have often led to the USA being able to offload things on to the other party which would be illegal to sell for that purpose in the USA, at least in most states. There is an obvious advantage for the USA suppliers in such arrangements, and I don't trust our arse-liking toadies an inch (based on experience, unfortunately). The leaked proposals for the TTIP contained just such conditions, and were being backed by the UK - luckily, then, the EU was in charge and we were merely one vote.

    1473:

    _Moz_ @ 1468: Right now I am torn between dumping my spare cash into the sharemarket and dumping it into a granny flat shell. I should find a builder or two and have a chat I think, just to see what the costs look like. My goal there is a kind of "minimum habitable finish", ideally with the interior cladding not on, that I can complete myself. Partly because I enjoy that and partly to save money (some of what I want is labour-intensive... but also fun).

    I looked into that. I thought about tearing this place down and replacing it with a "Jim Walter Home". The problem I ran into is I didn't have quite enough money to finance it out of pocket and I couldn't borrow money on an unfinished house. I could hire a contractor to do the work and he could borrow the money, but there was no way (financially) for me to do it on my own.

    That's why this place is in the shape it is now and why some things that need to be fixed have not been.

    1474:

    Well, some people used to swear by that stuff (some still do), but others reckon that while it does work as a crap excluder it's not that great as a lubricant and you're better off just oiling the chain often. It's one of those topics where there are lots of opinions about how to do better than standard but very little proper experimental data.

    Or you could just ride an MZ. The rear sprocket is enclosed in a plastic housing which is connected to the gearbox output sprocket cover by two big rubber tubes, through which the chain runs. So the chain is completely enclosed, never sees the outside and remains clean as a whistle regardless of mud and salt and crappy weather. And there is always a spot of weeping from the gearbox output shaft oil seal, which gives the chain a constant supply of fresh lubricant. You get to laugh at everyone else fretting over chain life and maintenance. It's a super design and ought to be a feature of any "utility" motorcycle.

    1475:

    Give me a blank sheet of paper and I'd design a motorbike these days with a toothed-belt final drive rather than a chain. There are pluses and minuses but it's a better solution than even an encased chain which does have a downside, it's a lot more difficult to check the chain for wear and stretch and hence it tends to get ignored until it's so loose it eats its way out of the chain case. See also Honda OHC engines and their infamous chain tensioners which, uh, don't. Most uninformed folks only discover this when the chain eats its way out through the wall of the alloy engine block.

    Toothed belts have the added advantage of wearing out to the point where they MUST be replaced as opposed to chains which stretch and stretch aaaaand stretch while the owner/rider tries to pretend it doesn't need replacing quite yet, to save money and downtime and getting their fingers filthy. Ditto for front and rear sprockets, I've seen more than one rear sprocket on a motorbike that could be used as an Ork-boy weapon in a Warhammer 40K campaign.

    1476:

    Drywall screws won't take as much torque before snapping and they don't weather as well.

    At all. They are indoor use only.

    1477:

    There are a number of motorcycles with toothed belt final drive these days including Hardly-AbleTo’s and some small Japanese bikes. Very few big sport bikes though, probably partly fashion and certainly partly potential issues with handling 220+ hp in a practical size belt. 220hp is not a typo either; 1300cc V4 motors revving to 12000rpm will do that. I think several of the nice EV bikes are using belts too. All helps keep things quieter.

    1478:

    The earliest belt-driven motorbike I ever got close to was a fellow club-member's 1923 Lewis (the same people who made machine guns in WW1) which had a leather belt connecting the one-pot engine with the back wheel. Our ad-hoc biker's club met at a little hardboard-shack cafe at the top of a hill and the Lewis rider sometimes didn't make it on a Sunday if it was raining because the belt would stretch and slip on the pulleys and climbing the hill just wasn't going to happen.

    He still turned up more times than the Ducati owner on his Ducati because well, Ducati. The Ducati owner had a CZ350 so we did see him occasionally and we could listen to him telling us how the engine rebuild of his Ducati was progressing.

    1479:

    I believe Harleys, of all things, do have belt drive these days, and there was at least one Kawasaki with it back in the 80s. As you say, there are good and bad points, and never having had such a bike myself I'm not convinced either way, but I would like to have the little Kawasaki and see how I get along with it.

    "it's a lot more difficult to check the chain for wear and stretch"

    True of the bent tinplate type chain enclosures you usually come across, but the MZ design has the opposite effect. The rubber tubes the chain runs through are flexible, so you can do the usual wiggle it up and down and see how much wiggle there is procedure without even getting your fingers oily.

    It also takes a very long time for the chain to accumulate excessive stretch, because the casing is very good at keeping it clean. The biscuit tin types help a lot, but they still have enough cracks and holes that when you take them off the oily muck inside has a fair bit of grit in it, whereas the MZ ones are better sealed and the muck is mostly just old oil and grease.

    If you still do neglect it to the point where the chain becomes excessively slack, what happens is that when you push the bike backwards, the slack hanging off the bottom of the rear sprocket catches and jams inside the sprocket enclosure. Then if you don't realise what's happened and just push harder, the enclosure bursts. If you do realise, and push the bike forward a little to free it before you carry on, the slack mills a neat rectangular hole in the bottom of the sprocket enclosure as you ride along. But it almost requires a deliberate effort to neglect it that badly because the snatching and jerking and the rotten gearchange will be too much to ignore; it's more likely to happen as a result of taking the bike apart and forgetting to adjust things when putting it back together.

    "Toothed belts have the added advantage of wearing out to the point where they MUST be replaced"

    Ah well, I don't consider that an advantage. That's the kind of thing which is likely to leave me in a hole when it suddenly needs replacing and I don't have any money. I'd much rather have something that fails slowly enough for the awareness of the need to replace it to overlap with a point when I do have some money.

    1480:

    Hahaha, that final paragraph is thoroughly hilarious. Just brilliant.

    1481:

    Re: '... bacteria that eat sulphides ... a reminder that just because a process is "organic" it still isn't necessarily nice.'

    Interesting - I looked up 'bacteria that eat sulphides' and recognized 3 of the 4 listed as dangerous/toxic to humans. Even so, isn't there some way of taming, caging or breeding these microbeasts into doing something we need but doing it harmlessly? If there isn't a way yet maybe we should develop it while we still have a civilization.

    1482:

    Re: 'Their [NuCor] environmental record is no worse than the others and better than some.'

    What really got me was their lawsuit against the EPA. I can accept that screw-ups happen, get found out and orgs get fined for being lax or lazy. I cannot accept an outright attempt to disarm a public agency whose primary function is to protect the public and the environment against organizations/people who don't give a sh*t who gets hurt just as long as they hit their financial targets.

    If the rest of this industry is similarly amoral and technologically still operating according to industry and market standards set down 150 years ago (pre standards re: harms to people, environment), then clearly they've zero interest in real substantive innovation. Sound brain-dead, zombie-like - so why should I bother supporting the undead.

    1483:

    Nojay@1415

    Are you suggesting buying semi-finished products (Slabs, Blooms, Billets) and stockpiling them until needed, then re-heating and rolling to final specification when needed?

    There are 2 major problems with that: 1. The number of different steel chemistries you would need would be large, and probably outdated by the time you required to roll them. 2. For high quality product, it is essential to be able to tightly control the steel-making & casting. There are many classes of defect that can be introduced in those upstream processes that are impossible to remove subsequently.

    The scrap-only electric-arc process route is in many ways preferred, because you do not have the cost, safety & environmental problems of the sinter plant, coke-making, hot gas stoves, blast furnaces and off-gas washing. Removing these greatly reduces the capital required and the carbon emissions directly attributed to the plant. All the steel made in Sheffield has been made by electric-arc furnaces for over 45 years.

    1484:

    Re: 'There are 2 major problems with that:'

    Out of curiosity, how does the complexity of steel-manufacturing using these methods compare with 'manufacturing' a smartphone or laptop? (In non-tech language please.)

    And what would be appropriate substitute materials for these types of steel?

    I'm just wondering whether it's a case of: 'Well, we've always used an abacus, people are used to abaci, so there's no need to develop an electronic calculator/computer.'

    1485:

    No, I'm suggesting buying bar stock, beam, rod, tube and pipe which comes in standard sizes. It gets machined and processed like that into essential items, not blooms and billets which are feedstock for rolling mills, wire drawing etc. Plate is something else but again we don't make Krupp-style face-hardened armour plate thirty or forty centimetres thick for defence against plunging armour-piercing battleship shells any more (Drachinifel on Youtube has a really good video on Naval armour development around the turn of the 20th century as well as many examples where the finest capital-ship armour didn't do that much against aircraft bombs, torpedoes, kamikaze attacks and early guided missiles).

    The QE carriers and other modern warships have quite light armour compared to even their WWII counterparts on the basis that if they're hit by a modern anti-shipping missile like an Oniks then extra metal won't stop a lot of damage whereas the weight savings can go into defensive countermeasures, extra stores, more aircraft fuel etc.

    1486:

    So Biden's accuser has been dropped as a client by her (now previous) lawyer.

    https://twitter.com/scottwongDC/status/1263854296895897600

    1487:

    I had one of those MZs and the well designed chain case was the only thing about it that was good. Horrible, horrible, bike to ride. I replaced it with a very lightly caféd Yam RD200 for a short while until my CB400F was back in usable condition. Now that was a nice bike that I had for years and years - until moving to Silicon Valley. Where I had a couple of VFR750s, a VTR1000F and an RC51. And even that (a race homologation special by Honda) was barely half the power of current top-end sport bikes. Quite insane.

    1488:

    So Biden's accuser has been dropped as a client by her (now previous) lawyer.

    Obviously, Deep State got to him!

    /sarcasm

    1489:

    Haha, I guess it was a 250?

    I had a 125 as a stopgap once and it was entirely unexceptionable; perfectly adequate in much the same way as a CG125 is perfectly adequate. Then someone borrowed it and drove it into a car or some bloody stupid thing that had the police knocking on my door asking about it, and buckled the frame at the headstock. To fix it I had to cut out the buckled bit altogether and weld in a new bit of metal to replace it, but I didn't manage to get it quite in the original position and it ended up with the headstock angle a few degrees steeper than standard. That basically made it irresistible to ride the crap out of, with decent tyres on, and very soon the ends of the footpegs were neatly shaved off at a forty five degree angle. It was also pretty much bombproof, continuing to run and even be startable after it shat the entirety of both its piston rings down the exhaust one day.

    Eventually, however, it did what they all do eventually, which is spin the one bearing in the gearbox which is a plain bush rather than a ball race and chew the hole for it in the casing oval, at which point I gave it to someone who pushed it five miles home, took it apart, told me it was like new inside, and never mentioned it again.

    But I enjoyed it so much that when I came across someone selling a 250 cheap I bought that thinking it would be even better. What I actually found was that the top speed was improved from 68mph flat on the tank to 80-odd, but in every other respect it was worse. Sluggish acceleration, cumbersome, weird and disconcerting handling that switches from "doesn't want to go over" to "doesn't want to stop going over" at a particular angle of lean. So I am currently in the middle of a project to completely redesign the frame and suspension (both ends) because even if it turns out to be no better it is still fun to do.

    1490:

    Belt driven bicycles is a fad that passes through every now and then. One issue is that it's hard to design a structure that is both light and strong enough while also allowing belt replacement (without a welder or composite shop, anyway). The challenge bultding a removable section into a bike frame that weighs 2-3kg.

    Bicycles experience similar crankshaft torque to ~70kW motor vehicles, just at much lower rpm. A cyclist will typically have peak torque at zero, just like most DC motors, and tail off to zero at about 120-150rpm (pro sprinters might hit 200rpm). What gives motor vehicles their much higher power is the same torque at 100x the rpm.

    One challenge is efficiency. Cyclists will pay good money for less than 0.1% efficiency gains, and modern chain drives are 97% efficient at worst. So a belt that's only 95% efficient needs to sell itself to non-competitive cyclists who run fully enclosed chains... on the basis of being at least one of cheaper, lower maintenance (less that zero!), longer lasting ("5x the life of the bike!") or magic ("doubles your speed for no extra effort").

    1491:

    "One issue is that it's hard to design a structure that is both light and strong enough while also allowing belt replacement"

    Nah, not really... all you have to do is reposition the diagonal compression member that runs from the saddle mounting point to the rear axle mounting point on the chain side, so that it runs inside the chain line instead of outside. Consequence is at worst that it has to join the horizontal member part way along and the rearmost few centimetres of that member end up as a beam instead of part of a triangulation, but it's such a short bit that it can easily be stiff enough with only a trivial weight increase.

    (Not sure where you're at with "without a welder"; if you're thinking of doing any kind of modification to the frame you're going to need welding or brazing kit unless you're happy to bodge it, and if you're building frames from scratch you'll have all the kit as a matter of course.)

    A somewhat less tractable problem may be that a belt is both wider than a chain and less tolerant of misalignment; the usual principle of changing gear by abusing a chain doesn't really translate to belts. A hub gear is therefore a requirement, and the expense goes up accordingly.

    Thing is though with a bicycle the all-important thing is to minimise the losses and everything else pales into insignificance. Any possible alternative drive system has to be at least as efficient as a chain otherwise it will make it harder to pedal and I'm not interested no matter what else it does. But as far as I'm aware about the only thing more efficient than a chain is a direct connection...

    1492:

    the diagonal compression member that runs from the saddle mounting point to the rear axle mounting point on the chain side, so that it runs inside the chain line instead of outside.

    So when it gets close to the rear axle it kind of hooks down and runs close to the wheel then out onto the horizontal member? I think the clearances would be tight and I wouldn't want to be the one to try it. A more common solution is to cut a gap in that tube and bolt the missing segment in place. Or just bolt that member onto the rest of the frame with one bolt, so you flex it a little to get the belt out (only for steel frames).

    But yeah, the trick is to find a market where efficiency and cost aren't critical... upmarket "Dutch bikes" being the classic location. "it's clean and lasts forever" but then the first buyers discover than clean is relative and they actually notice the efficiency after all. But it does mean you can sometimes pick those bikes up really cheap second hand.

    By "without a welder" I meant replacing the belt without one. I've built one or two bikes where some bits you needed to un-braze and re-braze to replace stuff like headsets. It can make off shaped bicycles much simpler to design, and one was after the bolts holding the removable section failed a couple of times (two 6mm bolts in shear at each end... it takes a lot of force to snap those).

    1493:

    Yeah, an MZ250. The very Definition of a two-smoke. Poor handling, dismal brakes, nasty noises, etc ,etc. Although I enjoyed my fast Vs, the 400-4 was possibly the best fun one could have. It wasn’t actually a 400 for one thing; Yoshimura race kit pistons and cams etc made it a bit faster than standard. It was a hand-made equivalent of today’s mid-range sport bikes, just 20 years before the manufacturers got there. I only ever got stopped by Mr Plod once and the conversation was along the lines of “Why yes officer I know I was doing triple digit speeds” “Yes indeed I know that is over the lim” “How about you call in my registration and this code word and see what they tell you?” “Thank you officer”

    1494:

    Yes, my electric motorcycle has a toothed belt. The bike was originally designed with a chain in mind and so the belt is about the same width as a chain. I think the makers looked at the maximum torque the motor puts out, looked at the strength of the belt, smiled and went ahead. Sadly they forgot about shock loads, so the belts snap at essentially random intervals. The later bikes get a belt that's 50% wider, but they still snap, though less frequently. A cush drive in the wheel would probably solve it, but replacement belts are a good little moneyspinner for a bike that has few factory supplied consumables.

    1495:

    Toothed belts are not all made the same, but they are usually made to the same geometries (width, length, tooth pattern etc.). You might like to check to see if there's a higher-spec belt with the same geometry available from engineering supply stores and the like.

    When Harley Davidson started building belt-driven motorbikes they made a big thing about the belts having Kevlar fibres which carry most of the torque. Toothed belts used for timing purposes and light drive usage don't need to support that sort of load so they don't go the Kevlar route.

    1496:

    No there's not (sadly). Lots of people have looked for an alternative. It's a top quality belt, but just too narrow.

    Thanks though.

    1497:

    I have one of these: https://www.myride.co.nz/shop/bikes/road-bikes/avanti-inc-3-urban-bike purchased a few years ago as a birthday present to myself to replace my old road "commuting" bike (with 9sp rear cassette and 3sp front derailer) after about 15 years use when and I discovered a small crack in the frame after (I think) someone backed their car into it whilst in a bike stand at work. However, I kept my old bike seat! Whilst it might not suit everyone, is ideal for my use - approx 8km commute each way too/from work.

    The "Gates Centre Track" drive belt has a "centre guide" to stop it coming off and the 11sp rear hub has proven to be virtually maintenance free (so far) and no issues after three years use, and not too inefficient nor heavy.

    And if you look at the picture on the link, you can just make out the small removeable section on the backstay just above the rear cog.

    They (avanti) appear to use the same belt drive on some of their electric bikes.

    Plus I also have a mountain bike for recreational/off road use.

    1498:

    SFReader@1484

    Steel production is nowhere near the complexity of mobile phones; basically just one main element with plenty of alloying additions. This may go into just one minor component in the phone, e.g. the spring contact on the 3.5 mm jack. The phone factory has to integrate a huge number of products and IP from many suppliers to get a final product. The main problem is that iPhones sell for £4.5 million per tonne, compared to the approx £1k per tonne for steel.

    In general manufactures have eliminated steel wherever possible for cheaper materials that can do the same job. This is one of the reasons for the contraction of the industry; steel survives because nothing else has the properties required for that job; e.g. locking lugs on a laptop dock (hard, relative strength), railway rail (hard, ductile, 125 m long before welding), turbine shafts (in cases where strength/volume is more important than strength/mass).

    Nojay@1485 " I'm suggesting buying bar stock, beam, rod, tube and pipe which comes in standard sizes": Unfortunately, most customers want the exact size, specification and surface condition/coating their application requires. The other issue is the heat treatment; careful control of the rate that the steel cools at the end of rolling affects the amount & type of transformation. This is popular because it is cheap, and very easy to vary on a customer-to-customer basis. Rod that goes into valve springs is treated very differently to rod that will be drawn down to wire for suspension bridges, for example.

    You do not mention steel strip, that is supplied to cutsomers in coils 2m wide and 30 tonne mass, with precisely controlled thickness & properties. These properties are normally set in the cathedral-sized continuous annealing and bright zinc coating plant. Again, normally the plant is dynamically set for the requirements of each order as it goes through. A major customer is the automotive sector, and the message is quite clear: either supply exactly what they want, or do not bother at all. About half of all world steel production is steel strip.

    1499:

    SFReader @ 1482:

    Re: 'Their [NuCor] environmental record is no worse than the others and better than some.'

    What really got me was their lawsuit against the EPA. I can accept that screw-ups happen, get found out and orgs get fined for being lax or lazy. I cannot accept an outright attempt to disarm a public agency whose primary function is to protect the public and the environment against organizations/people who don't give a sh*t who gets hurt just as long as they hit their financial targets.

    If the rest of this industry is similarly amoral and technologically still operating according to industry and market standards set down 150 years ago (pre standards re: harms to people, environment), then clearly they've zero interest in real substantive innovation. Sound brain-dead, zombie-like - so why should I bother supporting the undead.

    ALL corporations are "similarly amoral". The whole purpose of the limited liability corporation is to privatize the profits while socializing the costs. Filing lawsuits against regulatory agencies is fairly routine. NuCor may be on the lower end of the scale with regard to this particular manifestation of corporate evil. Or they may not be. I don't really know, but they're not unique in suing the EPA to block regulation.

    Again, their "environmental record is no worse than others". I'd focus more on the entirety of corporate malfeasance. The one company needs to change, but ALL companies need to do so as well.

    1500:

    Yes, pretty much. I've considered doing it to my own bicycle when I discovered it had a fully riveted chain without a split link; it would have been possible to fit it in, but I didn't have a welder at the time.

    I'm tempted to try it right now, just for the crack, but I'd have to hack my way through 3m of bramble thicket to get to the bicycle; it's got like Sleeping Beauty...

    1501:

    JBS Filing lawsuits against regulatory agencies is fairly routine In the US of Arseholes, yes ... maybe .... elsewhere not so much, if at all. Another indication that you are even further down the road to vanishing up your own posteriors than we are ( so far )

    1502:

    Tweet!

    Flag on the statement; poster evidencing signs of Dunning-Kruger Syndrome!

    Lead-free ammunition is a thing nowadays, both for shotguns and rifles. Many states in the US have banned bird hunting with lead shot. Some older shotguns cannot handle the higher chamber pressures that steel-shot cartridges use, but there are (more-expensive) alternatives that can be purchased instead for your vintage Holland & Holland or Purdy shotguns.

    Ammunition makers can balance bullet size & weight/type & amount of propellant to prevent excessive pressure in the chamber from damaging guns; entirely new guns are not required, contrary to the OP's assertion. Older guns designed for lower chamber pressures may be damaged if higher pressure cartridges are used, but that's on the user since ammunition matching the original pressures is still available. Forex, high-velocity +P+ 9 mm ammunition shouldn't be fired out of an older pistol designed to lower-velocity ammo, though the risk isn't high. Unlike old guns designed for low-pressure black-powder ammo which are at considerable risk if fired with high-pressure ammo intended for use by modern reproductions with better metallurgy.

    Lead-free ammunition is also available for rifles in many calibers. The US Army went to a mixed copper/steel bullet in 2010 in both 5.56 and 7.62 mm, but they work perfectly fine in rifles of those calibers as no alterations were made in cartridge size.

    1503:

    Probably right, but you've got a witch's brew of carefully curated different uses to justify your comments that I don't know what I'm talking about.

    Here's where I'm coming from.

    At one point over a decade ago, I was seriously considering deer hunting in southern California, which is kind of a mug's game in any case. During deer season here (unlike the north), the weather is hot, so you've got to rapidly kill and process your deer or it goes bad. Hunting ranges are extreme, in the hundreds of meters, due to the generally open nature of the terrain. And most deer areas here are mountainous. I was considering hunting on Catalina, where the deer are an introduced pest and recreational hunting is the only allowed way of controlling them.

    I had an offer from an uncle to give me his old hunting rifle. It would not accommodate the copper bullets needed for the kind of hunting I was considering doing, and the cost of a new gun, plus $5/shell, plus the fees to hunt on Catalina, plus the time and range fees I'd need to figure out how to hit a deer over 100 meters away, made it not something I wanted to do.

    As for shotgunning, I worked on duck conservation during the 90s, when they were experimenting with non-lead ammunition. I wasn't a duck hunter, but I certainly got an earful of complaints about how old guns didn't work any more, because the range on non-lead shells sized for the old guns was drastically shorter than the old ammo was, and anyway, steel shot was hard on guns and less effective on ducks.

    So what I suspect is going on is that we've got different time references. I'm thinking about the time period from 1990-2010, and you're thinking post 2010, and assuming I have no clue. And you're correct. Now.

    1504:

    Well, obviously what you need is a smart cartridge that monitors the deflection of the walls of the chamber in real time while the propellant is deflagrating, and switches it off if it detects too much deformation. Then you can piss people right off, worse than inkjet printer cartridges.

    1505:

    I'm presuming this Strategic Steel Stockpile we are considering is meant for a war or other Black Swan event, not a Business As Usual situation where the car plants will be producing SUVs and hatchbacks for consumer use and requiring a million tonnes of plated sheet steel for body parts every month delivered to the press shop on a just-in-time schedule.

    The stockpile is meant to cushion a massive uptick in steel requirement for, say, tanks, trucks, warships, engine parts etc. A lot of that steel requirement is for standard alloy composition steels like 4140 or EN1A, D2 tool steel etc. which are heat-treated, surface-hardened and coated after they have been machined to size from standardised-dimension stock from the stockpile while the producers of such stock ramp up their own downstream production of such steels.

    1506:

    Here's a video from Discovery UK of a shotgun that does just that. This was a kinetic weapon (not a pepperball or taser), and the gun was designed to basically punch someone hard with a bullet without penetrating.

    Anyway, the prototype had a large rangefinder on the barrel, and a system to bleed off gas from the chamber based on the range to the target. If the target's closer, the bullet comes out slower, if it's more distant the shell is faster, so that it hits the target with the proper, non-lethal force no matter what. I wonder if anything could possibly go wrong with this setup? (/sarcasm)

    There's also a less lethal gyrojet out there (the pogojet), which somehow uses a piston internal to the bullet (which is basically a 50 caliber rocket) that is set inside the gun on firing to throttle how fast the rocket goes, meaning it can hit lethally or non-lethally.

    I have a fondness for reading about less lethal weapons, mostly because they're such wonderfully idealistic gizmos. Most fade without a trace after a few years, and we're left with the old standbys (sticks and smallish stones) for the majority of us proles to use as less lethal weapons. Also, the height of the less lethal weapons wave was about a decade ago, and we've gone more for out-and-out violence and/or nonviolence since 2016. The crazy middle is phasing away...

    1507:

    Drachinifel on Youtube has a really good video on Naval armour development around the turn of the 20th century as well as ...

    I'll second checking out Drachinifel's Youtube channel for anyone into period naval things. Doubly so when feeling bored in isolation; he's got many hours of historical commentary and a range of subjects (evolution of naval boilers, history of ship's cats, etc.).

    The QE carriers and other modern warships have quite light armour compared to even their WWII counterparts ...

    I expect you've seen Drachinifel's video on WWII British armored carriers versus American unarmored carriers and the reasons why designers made the choices they did. (For anyone who hasn't but is curious, it's here.) He makes a good point that they were designing for different kinds of engagements.

    1508:

    Quite some time ago I came up with the idea of a "smart" baton round (aka rubber bullet). It has a Doppler radar in the front of the baton continuously calculating the closing speed to target and it would deploy air brakes if it was going faster than the required impact velocity. The idea was that it could be used over a greater range than a standard baton round with similar (hopefully) non-lethal effects. It would cost a lot more than a regular lump of plastic though, it might fail and not brake to a safe speed etc. and it would also encourage the use of baton rounds in situations which might not actually require them since it's "safer".

    1509:

    That's almost worth inciting riots to get hold of - the tech in that could be worth something.

    (Perverse incentives and all that.)

    1510:

    ...deploy air brakes i...

    I suspect he injuries from the air brakes slicing bits off people might make it a bit too lethal...

    1511:

    shrug I've got a chain cleaner, really need to a) dig it out;b) clean my bike; c) get a chain for the other bike* for Ellen to use; d} use the SAE 80/90 gear oil to lube. I wasn't 30 before I stopped most biking in the winter in Philly. I REALLY was unamused by trying to deal with hills with ice.

    1512:

    Actually, in the US, all lug wrenches, including the lug wrench/crank for the screw jack are lug wrenches. The four-armed ones, that deal with four different size lugs, are star jacks (as I type that, probably as in jacks, the game) or star wrenches.

    1513:

    Oh, yeah? Well, my chainsaw is wimpier than your chainsaw....

    If I need to cut something thicker than 3"-4", I'll pull out my double-bitted axe.

    Yes, I have one. Back in the seventies, a tree came down in an ex's backyard. I was living nearby, and it took me aweek - I was in REALLY good shape, from jobs, not workouts - to take it apart enough to deal with... and I'm talking a maple that was maybe almost a yard thick in the trunk, and that was using the double-bitted axe and a camp saw. (Triangle - frame-frame-blade).

    1514:

    Humph. I did two whole brisket in my now-broken-in Oklahoma Joe bbq, 14 hours, then another 5 in the oven... and then the two of them, still wrapped in foil, in a "cooler" for another 8 hours. WONDERFUL brisket. Oh - hardwood charcoal, soaked mesquite chips.

    Ah say mahn's better'n yores.

    1515:

    Right, of course. The Home Despot near me seems to be shorter on drywall - this is all inside, model train framing, and bookcases. And the last time I picked up a box, the damn things have square holes, not Torx, not Phillips.

    1516:

    Eggs - a lady I lived with in the late 70's got me into rinsing the eggs off before breaking them. Still do it.

    1517:

    @1388 writes: "The problem is that I start eating the loaf (tearing chunks off and plastering them with butter) as soon as it comes out of the machine, while it's still hot, until I'm full; the next day I can't really face any more bread yet; and the day after that it's gone stale..."

    To really defile myself with hot fresh bread, I need a dipping sauce blend of half olive oil and half peanut butter, of the 100% peanut variety which in the U.S. would be Smuckers brand. A liquid mixture even when refrigerated, it's thin enough to penetrate and cover the porous bread surface, as well as my tongue, for maximum flavor intensity. Hedonistic indulgence need not be expensive, but still requires effort to stop. Try freezing bread leftovers and then microwave to recapture the elastic resilience of fresh baked.

    Truffles occur as wild fungal outgrowths on oak roots, and natural scarcity means they command an astronomical price, but if peanut butter was illegal people would pay a hundred bucks an ounce to savor its incomparable richness. It's yet another question arising from the labor theory of value, how to account for satisfaction inherent in a product independent of the ease or difficulty in its production. Not an impossible question to answer, though. Opinion surveys, taste tests and cross referenced comparative indices could be set up to establish consumer preference gradients, for weighted averages allowing production quotas to reach price targets, in some future digital Ministry of Food Distribution.

    Or just keep doing like now, and charge whatever the traffic will bear, redistributing excessive profits to the public by way of taxation and subsidies in order to reignite stalled economic activity. That way the remaining variables to be solved are reduced down to just this one, how low can profits after tax be squeezed before producers exit the market from lack of incentive. Based on all the trillions shoveled in to bond and treasury bill markets now, just to get tiny fractions of one percent or even negative returns, I'd think the number would be pretty low, way lower than recent after tax profit margins. The fact that 1950s taxes were a lot higher, without discouraging global expansion of modern capitalism, also argues against libertarian scaremongering about lost incentives for entrepreneurs.

    Maybe one way to test for optimum profit level would be to ratchet up tax rates until producers actually start curtailing their operations, and then easing the tax back down again until needed supplies are once more made available. Kind of like a centrifugal governor on a steam engine, feeding output information back in with system inputs to attain a self-regulated level of operation. Lots faster than trying to create from scratch a virtual model of world economy.

    And it wouldn't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, either, it's just ensuring maximum gold eggs out (benefits to citizens) for minimum goose feed in (profits to business owners). Because entrepreneurship really is just another factor of production. Farmers, shippers and labor unions never got to run the whole world, why should business owners get away with it.

    So vote for me for comptroller of global trade, you'll be glad you did.

    1518:

    Must be a nice market.

    Between the end of July, '01 and mid-Jan '06, I worked a total of, I think, FIVE MONTHS, one of which I never got paid for. That's sending out anywhere between 1 and 10 resumes per week. Had a BS, and a lot of years of experience.

    Here, the longer you're "between positions", the less they want to hire you. "You're not fresh", one idiot recruiter literally told me.

    1519:

    Hmmm. What I'd suggest, without almost no sarcasm, is instead of a rubber bullet, use a drone with caged propellers and some sort of bumper to focus the force without penetrating. If the technology exists to do swarmbots, then for riots you simply swarm the crowd with basher drones.

    Another possibility is a play on the taser XREP technology, which they fielded back in 2012 and later abandoned. The XREP/X12 is basically a mini-taser fired as a 12 gauge shotgun slug. Apparently it works, but at over $100/shot, it wasn't cost effective.

    Load something like this technology on a cheap drone with shrouded props, and maybe it would work, especially if the drones could swarm. Probably it's still more expensive than hosing someone with irritant chemicals. But I suppose it could be worse: they could deploy drones to deploy sticky foam in some vaguely useful (hah!) fashion.

    1520:

    Saw that. One wonders even more... and he'd represented other women.

    1521:

    Back in '75, I rode away from work, north side of downtown Philly, and was turning the wrong way onto a small one-way street, to get over to where I needed to be.

    Unfortunately, a couple pulled out of the parking lot on the far corner as I turned. I wound up on their windshield. They were more upset than I was. My frame, though, was gone - front fork bent. They gave me $20, I think, and I walked the bike like 30 blocks home.

    I was living in a house full of bokers (bicycle, two with trophies, more bikes than the five of us). I got a booklet, which I still have, and was thinking of brazing a frame together, when a friend of a housemate told me of someone selling a frame. Went, bought it. Starting around 15:30, I began moving everything I could from my old cheap bike to this DROP DEAD GORGEOUS frame, white, chromed front and back forks. Stopped for dinner, had to stop to go buy a head set for the... handlebars? 'cause the one I had didn't fit. Was cleaning up around 02:30 or 03:00. Then, a couple years later, bought this fabulous hung leather quilted seat.

    And the next year, the house I was sharing was broken into, and they took the prettiest bike, though all the others were lined up - someone must have been coming down the street.

    Since 1990, when we got me one to replace the one I got after that one was stolen (rusting), I ride a Miyata.....

    1522:

    Ok... can you tell us what the officer saw that they let you go? Or is that you'd have to kill us if you did?

    1523:

    Several hunters were bragging about how far they'd been able to bag a deer. One was saying 100 yards, another 200, and a third, half a mile. Finally, they turned to the old man. "And how about you?"

    "I load my bullet with salt, so that by the time I reach the deer, it's already cured."

    1524:

    Forgot to mention: the only things wrong with my current bike are a) I needed a larger frame - I think it's 19", and I need 21", and 2) it's a racing frame.

    For those who don't know, front fork is at 75 degrees, while a touring frame, which I'd have preferred, is at 72 degrees.

    1525:

    It probably depends on how angry you are at the time it takes for the same parts to arrive from China after you bought them on ebay for a quid a pop...

    1526:

    whitroth Number of DAYS of paid employment from my MSc in Engineering ( Plus my BSc in Physics ) ... Zero "We can't get the trained staff" - LIARS, the lot of them.

    1527:

    You've said that several times. What work did/do you do?

    1528:

    I rather figured that you were mainly basing your original comment off the bird-hunting transition from lead to steel or more exotic materials. I'm not a bird hunter myself, so I'm surprised to hear that people were complaining about inferior range with steel shot, though it makes perfect sense once I think about it. The recent sources that I consulted didn't mention that, possibly because people have become used to the difference and there's no point in complaining about it any further. It's also possible that the initial fears over dangers to the guns from the new-fangled ammo were overblown with more recent experience proving otherwise, although I suspect that would depend greatly on the age of the weapons involved.

    I'd be very curious to know what kind of rifle your uncle wanted to give you that couldn't fire modern copper ammo as that's not a problem I've heard of for most rifles as one ammo company or another would generally continue to make ammo suitable for the older guns. Though I'll admit that I'm more familiar with military rifles which generally don't have those sorts of problems. I'm unaware of any commercially available ammo for my M-1903 .30-'06 rifle which it cannot safely fire, regardless of the material of the bullet.

    1529:

    Troutwaxer 18 years in Industrial/Scientific research / 2 years ( plus odd months thereafter ) Secondarty School Science ( GCSE ) + some Physics & a tiny bit of Maths to "A" level / Transport Planner / Total of about 8 years unemployment.

    1530:

    I'd be very curious to know what kind of rifle your uncle wanted to give you that couldn't fire modern copper ammo ...

    I don't know about his uncle's rifle but that was the situation for my grandmother's shotguns. They'd been tucked away in the attic for many years when I finally discovered them, both out of lack of need and lack of ammo; they were too old to handle the more energetic modern shells. That was the late 1980s and they'd been unused since my grandparents moved into town from their farm, so probably around WWII.

    What was going on with shotgun shell technology in the 1930s I couldn't tell you.

    1531:

    Thanks for adding your experiences, Scott. I was by no means a shotgun guy back in the then, so I'm just presuming that it was much harder to find down-rated ammo to fit your grandparents weapons, not that it didn't exist. Nowadays it ought to be pretty easy to find ammo suitable for those shotguns.

    1532:

    Andy Anda in MN says "hi" and apologizes for not answering your question.

    1533:

    OT: Some good news: "Proteins in the blood of COVID-19 patients could help predict how ill they will become" https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-06-proteins-blood-covid-patients-ill.html

    1534:

    Surely, they cannot be this cynical ? (Just kidding. Of course they are.) "What is the Plan to Get Away With a Hard Brexit?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9qKumDInb8&t=50s

    Specials

    Merchandise

    About this Entry

    This page contains a single entry by Charlie Stross published on May 10, 2020 1:09 PM.

    "It'll all be over by Christmas" was the previous entry in this blog.

    Cough Cough is the next entry in this blog.

    Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

    Search this blog

    Propaganda