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A death in the Firm

TITLE: Someone died

So, a rather famous old man died yesterday. I'm not going to say any more about him, for reasons that'll become obvious below: instead I'm going to talk about the vile media feeding frenzy we're about to be subjected to.

Compulsory mourning for a stranger sucks--especially when it's performative Victorian-style royal mourning.

The past century has seen a huge cultural flip-flop so that death and mourning are as inadmissible/peripheral to public life today as sex was in the 1890s, and vice versa.

Back in the 1890s, at least among the upper classes sex was spoken of elliptically or not at all, carried out furtively and in private, and not admitted to in polite society. Everybody did it, but nobody wanted to be known for it, and the taboos surrounding it were many and punishment for infractions could be savage. But mourning was a huge social spectacle, acted out in public: there were special clothes, ritualized stages of mourning with defined time frames within which certain behaviours were expected and other normal activities suspended. The funeral cortege was a public procession through the streets, sometimes with hired mourners to indicate the degree to which the deceased was respected: monumental architecture sprouted in graveyard.

Then the 20th century happened.

Today we're relatively open to discussions of sex--at least to talking about it and portraying it openly in the media. (I'm not sure we're having more of it--the Victorians were hyperactive furtive shaggers--but we're not trying to hide it, for the most part.) However, death isn't something we're routinely exposed to. The demographic transition from a high birth rate/high death rate society to a low birth rate/low death rate culture has resulted in death becoming something that mostly happens behind closed hospice and hospital doors. Funerals still happen, and act as an excuse for reunions of far-flung families ... but then we resume everyday life immediately. Employers grant a week off for the death of a spouse, parent, or child: more distant relatives are ignored. The idea of women going into seclusion at home, wearing only black clothing (and a veil if venturing out in public) for six months, would be a jaw-dropper. Grief and bereavement is a very private thing these days, not a fit subject for sharing. The normal thing to do this century is to leave the bereaved family decently alone with their grief in private.

But then the Queen's squeeze died, and the national discourse is suddenly dragging us on a 150 year deep dive into the unfamiliar territory of archaic public mourning rituals. And the vultures are circling ...

I never met Prince Philip, or his wife and kids. My only interaction with the royal family ever was to walk across a stage during a graduation ceremony attended by a bored minor royal--the patron of the university I attended. They are, in a very real sense, strangers to me: no more familiar than Kim Kardashian or Elon Musk.

And yet I'm expected to join in an orgy of vicarious synthetic grief and mourning and wrap myself in either a flag, or a black armband, or both (I'm unclear). The sanctimonious right wing tone police are already out in force, marching in columns in every newspaper. On top of the normal stentorian roar of monarchist calls for obedience, this time round we also have moralistic finger-wagging injunctions to observe social distancing because of COVID19: to remain silent behind closed doors, the royal funerary rites to invade our private spaces.

The UK is ruled by a monarchy-obsessed reactionary Party (and by Party I do not mean to identify the Conservatives: rather, it's the Party of the Establishment as embodied by the state itself). The media aligned with the monarchy-obsessed party can--and will--use this event to bury bad news or manufacture pretexts (Look! They're not wearing black! Or genuflecting obediently to power!) attack the usual targets. Expect the government to use this grim-reaper-delivered opportunity to the max to bury bad news (renewed rioting in Northern Ireland, the Scottish election, Brexit, COVID19 vaccine shortages, corruption) and demand that we focus on the ritual of royal mourning instead of paying attention to current events.

The cultural dynamic of celebrity drags the unthinking and unaware along with it. Humans like to watch the powerful (we're descended from primates who live in troupes, after all), and the death of a member of the royal family is very much like the death of a film star, musician, famous-for-being-famous celebrity--it's ripe for exploitation for commercial or political ends.

Worse, looming on the horizon is the spectre of another royal funeral. The Queen is 94 years old and presumably a grieving widow. Losing a spouse after more than 70 years of marriage is like suffering an amputation of the soul, according to my mother, after a similar bereavement. She's probably not going to last out the current decade, even though her family is famously long-lived. Indeed, widows or widowers often follow their spouse relatively rapidly after such a long relationship: codependency withdrawal can kill. And the usual vultures are circling.

Shorter summary: the royal family is institutionally resistant to change, this means its death/mourning rituals are increasingly out of touch with contemporary cultural norms, and the cognitive dissonance between what they tell us is expected of us and what we know to be true will be exploited by manipulative and malignant political actors.

1829 Comments

1:

The wall-to-wall media coverage reminds me of Princess Di's death and the media feeding frenzy that got sparked off by it. Even my partner's mother is annoyed by the coverage (at least we're spared her soaps for a few days).

I'm guessing this is going to be a dry run for the next major death in the firm which will involve enforced public mourning and a state funeral. At least there's not to be a state funeral this time; I'm old enough to remember Sir Winston Churchill's funeral on the TV, and my mother's reaction (she'd been a serving WRN - called up in 1940).

2:

From a US perspective, the odd thing about all this is that many of our own so-called conservatives expect performative grief (similar in nature, but less in intensity) of the type expected in the UK. This is particularly odd given that the Republicans are the political party who claim most loudly to revere "the Founding Fathers", meaning men like Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and Adams who pretty much devoted their lives to the struggle to make it possible for Americans to not GAF about English Royalty.

And, as for me, I seriously don't. Philip was 99 years old. This is not a tragedy. People I care more about die every day.

3:

Yes. As I said in the previous post, I have met him - but only once and very briefly. Despite being a monarchist, I agree with everything you say - with one exception, where I go further and one slight niggle.

Condolences are one thing, but mourning by anyone not immediately affected? My father in law (died at 96) had a fairly jolly funeral, and everybody there was saying something like "he was a good old fellow and had a good run for his money".

By all accounts, he (the D of E) agreed with you, too, and requested a simple funeral, even before COVID. The demand for a week's ritual is not being driven by the monarchy, but by the 'monarchical establishment'.

4:

Well, he fought against the Nazis, unlike his uncle-in-law, and his mother is honored at Yad Vashem, so by the dismal standards of monarchies, he was woke, no matter how archaic some of his attitudes. Even staunch republicans like Scottish nationalist Craig Murray have good words to say about him. It's clear this will be used to further the English gutter press' not-even-disguised racist campaign against Meghan Markle. After all, hasn't an official government commission cleared the UK of any institutional racism? Move along, nothing to see here, not at all.

5:

One: The Guardian's Obit was remarkably sympathetic ... pointing out that, unlikely as it seems now - he was at one point a dynamic reformer. I'm reminded of the fictional character, Count Piotr Vorkosigan. Two: Very few of that WWII generation, who actually fought are now left. As I said yesterday "the last survivor of the Battle of Matapan has died" ... now I wonder how many other survivors are left who witnessed the formal surrender of Japan on 2/9/1945 are now left? ( Yes, he was there, too. )

6:

I had to travel by bus yesterday, and noticed that all of the video advertising screens at the bus stops were showing RIP Prince Phillip messages constantly instead of the usual rolling ads. And Waitrose sent out obit messages to everyone who has a store card, which is just crazy.

Like you I've never met any of the royals - they're pretty much irrelevant to anything in my life. I bear them no ill will, and I'm sure that they're good for tourism or something if that ever resumes, but I could really live without the press obsession on them and everything that goes with it.

7:

... and one of the nicest comments was made by Barack Obama.

I saw some of his sketches and notebooks at an exhibition in BuckHouse when tourist ing in London; quite a polymath. and possibly not given credit for being confident enough in himself to marry a monarch, and not complain about it. Rather ahead of his time.

I just wish that the “professional monarchists” would shut up and stop trying to make a buck from the event, as OGH pointed out.

8:

When I heard yesterday morning that Prince Philip died, I didn't think much of it - "that's too bad" and "well, he was 99" were about the limit of things.

When Princess Diana died in 1997, it was a shock coming down in the morning to the big headlines of her death - but then she was 36 and could have had many years ahead of her. I was surprised that I was moved. I didn't follow the performative mourning though.

So: elderly veteran dies. Fought the Nazis in WWII. Had a worldview not-uncommon to those who were born in 1921. Rest in peace.

Can we have the Republic of Canada when his widow dies1?

1 Almost certainly not. Thanks to Canada's Constitution, that kind of major change is basically impossible.

9:

He was an interesting bloke with many good and bad points, and deserves a lengthy obituary.

But our celebrity culture and royalty-obsessed media will inevitably make this a totally over the top event which I shall do my best to ignore.

10:

men like Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and Adams who pretty much devoted their lives to the struggle to make it possible for Americans to not GAF about English Royalty

The US founding fathers were all white male landowners, 80% of them were slave owners too, and the Declaration of Independence was signed two years after a famous English legal case ruled that it was unlawful to possess slaves on English soil (Scotland took another couple of years).

TLDR is, "no taxation without representation" was a smoke-screen for "nobody's gonna take my slaves away", which wouldn't have been anything like as popular a rallying call with the too-poor-to-own-slaves classes.

I'm going to go with the hypothesis that now they have no direct power over any American citizens, the UK's Royal Family possess all the perceived glamour of celebrity status without the actual drawbacks (i.e. having a government and an army on their side), hence their being at least as -- if not more -- popular among USAns than among their own citizens.

11:

From a broadcasting point of view things have changed drastically since Diana. We are already back to some kind of normality on the BBC albeit with quite a few replacement programmes for tonal reasons. Sporting events are going ahead as scheduled with extended coverage forming some of the replacement TV.

I'm mildly interested to see how this was handled by the networks, the last major incident I was on duty for was Lockerbie and that had half a dozen of us (Master Control, tech area and the late night journalist) scrambling to check the rest of the evenings programmes and adverts and sort out replacements. These days network monitoring is a much more junior position with someone keeping half an eye on the playout server and needing to pass things upstairs to someone who probably isn't even working in the building currently.

12:

Apparently those TV/radio channels covering the royal death noted drops of on the order of 15% of audience ratings as soon as the royal programming came on, and the BBC got so many complaints about excessive coverage that they had to put up an abbreviated form saying "add your email address to the existing complaint".

So there's that.

13:

The thing is, this is a very UK take on how funerals and mourning is a private affair. It doesn't even hold across the Irish sea. Irish funerals are a very very different affair and mourning is a very social thing still. Simon McGarr (he of the Google right to be forgotten case and other notable legal activities) wrote up the process very well for UK readers in the early days of the pandemic, as an explanation for why restricted attendance at funerals was such a massive blow in Ireland, it's worth reading: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1238607085820153858.html

All that being said, the UK is looking really weird from over here at the moment. It's all a bit much even for us :D

14:

The US founding fathers were all white male landowners

Not all. Hamilton was not (except under a very broad definition of "landowner"). He also (to your other point) fought against slavery all his life.

15:

Is there any difference between Scotland and England in their reactions to the passing of the Duke of Edinburgh?

16:

JReynolds @ 8 :"Can we have the Republic of Canada when his widow dies... ... Almost certainly not."

You're right because according to the constitution of Canada, we have a constitutional monarchy and changing the constitution would be hell because of political circumstances.

On the other hand there is nothing in our constitution to hold the house of Windsor in there. Once the current monarch leaves, the government in power can name any individual as the monarch of Canada.

The current Queen of Canada is currently moderately popular, outside of the province of Québec. Her son is absolutely not popular, inside or outside the province of Québec.

17:

Whenever he was mentioned in the media, I thought, oh hey, he's still alive. After all, he was at an age where one could expect his death every day.

That said, it's weird to see his death here in German TV news as lead-in. Normally, celebrity deaths are announced towards the end of the program. As far as I am concerned, his public role was not important enough to move him to the front.

18:

Does price philips' death simply move us all more quickly along in one future direction along with brexit and covid 19 ?

With what has happened it is tempting to think what will happen over the very existance of the union, aka the UK itself. Does the UK now start to crumble more quickly?

Prehaps the UK is now in this position -- the UK; the union is now one of those "baddies" you've seen in half a dozen films whereby they are hundreds of years old and are undead but get killed at the end of the film but they then turn to dust and immediately blow away in the wind.

Maybe that's the UK's fate now; it happens quicker and the future monarch, they are the monarch of ?

Random thought: If Prince charles becomes the king after the current queen dies, what will be his role? His reign will be one of the shortest of all (he'd potentially be well into his 80s). What would he have to rule over? There might not be much of a union to rule over.

ljones

19:

The US founding fathers were all white male landowners, 80% of them were slave owners too, and the Declaration of Independence was signed two years after a famous English legal case ruled that it was unlawful to possess slaves on English soil (Scotland took another couple of years).

TLDR is, "no taxation without representation" was a smoke-screen for "nobody's gonna take my slaves away", which wouldn't have been anything like as popular a rallying call with the too-poor-to-own-slaves classes.

As described in Gerald Horne's book The Counter-Revolution of 1776. Which I think I've mentioned here before, but in case I haven't:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qg0bm

20:

The current Queen of Canada is currently moderately popular, outside of the province of Québec. Her son is absolutely not popular, inside or outside the province of Québec.

Harry would have won the vote in english Canada, I think, if monarch was an elected position. How was he seen in Quebec?

21:

TLDR is, "no taxation without representation" was a smoke-screen for "nobody's gonna take my slaves away", which wouldn't have been anything like as popular a rallying call with the too-poor-to-own-slaves classes.

Whatever their motives, it is still true that "men like Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and Adams ... pretty much devoted their lives to the struggle to make it possible for Americans to not GAF about English Royalty."

I think it is fair to say, more generally, that "white male landowners who were also slave owners" is a good description of the Virginia roots of the Revolution. But there was also a northern (Boston and New York City) wing of the revolutionary agitation. Many of them were merchants, did not own slaves, and were disturbed by the repressive economic policies of the British Empire.

The statement '"no taxation without representation" was a smoke-screen for "nobody's gonna take my slaves away"' oversimplifies a more complex reality, as such statements almost inevitably do.

22:

Robert Prior @ 20: "Harry would have won the vote in english Canada, I think, if monarch was an elected position. How was he seen in Quebec?"

Harry is far behind the contestants of the hit TV show "Star Académie" and the regulars of the talk-show "Tout le Monde en Parle". In other words he could walk in the streets of Québec City without the fear of being mobbed.

24:

Can we have the Republic of Canada when his widow dies1?

1 Almost certainly not. Thanks to Canada's Constitution, that kind of major change is basically impossible.

I don't give it more than six months -- and so long only if the formalisms are observed -- after Nigel Farage is crowned King of England.

It is absolutely the case, and has been going on these seven centuries, that the sole disposition of the Crown rests with Parliament. They can make anyone, or anything, King. Putting Farage in would be a nice hack for the oligarchs in the UK, especially since this present sequence of Tory governments have dragged Great Harry's god-king autocracy back into legal meaning. And it's not like Farage isn't auditioning for the job, or that the tragic helicopter crash wouldn't be easy to arrange.

(Charles->William->offspring->Harry->offspring->Andrew, right? Charles can have COVID again; William and offspring are the tragic helicopter crash. Harry's (by careful media work) unacceptable; Andrew's unacceptable. And there'd certainly be a crisis. The present pro-Brexit Tories wouldn't even have to pretend they thought it was a good idea, they would think it was a good idea.)

In Canada's case, as there's a Commonwealth agreement to use the same succession rules, simply not having a change of monarch -- no succession! -- would be an obvious fix.

Stick the crown and sceptre on a chair; we've already got a Governor-General. Elizabeth the Second remains Her Boreal Majesty in perpetuity, or at least until she should come again. Start circulating the full age range of official portraits on the coinage.

25:

Interesting summary of Operation London Bridge.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ht8D7Q31P3c

26:

Members of the royal family live a very long time (Queen Mum was 104, Prince Philip was 99) Liz is 94.

If she live to be 100 Charles would become king at age 76.

And rule for another quarter century.

So what will the second quarter of the 21st century in the UK look like with Charles as king?

(P.S. sorry about the in video ads)

27:

The statement '"no taxation without representation" was a smoke-screen for "nobody's gonna take my slaves away"' oversimplifies a more complex reality, as such statements almost inevitably do.

Simplification indeed, considering that (apparently) some of the colonists were protesting a tax cut, which cut into their smuggling business :-/

29:

Elizabeth the Second remains Her Boreal Majesty in perpetuity, or at least until she should come again.

The Norstrilians of Cordwainer Smith's "Instrumentality" stories, set far in the future, regarded Elizabeth the Second as their rightful Queen.

30:

In utterly off-topic news, the world's biggest ship is currently visible from my bedroom window, in the Firth of Forth!

31:

I've long held a suspicion that he'll follow the Belgium/Netherlands example and put in a few years and then hand over to William. I don't expect him to duck out altogether, but also don't expect him to cling to the job.

Graydon @24: You can carry that on to ->offspring->Edward (now DofE IIRC)->offspring->Anne. If they started skipping steps Anne would have a lot of support, and if the rules change had been retroactive she'd now be ahead of Andrew.

32:

Wonder if Elon has seen that one...

33:

Not. Happening.

Farage isn't part of the Ruling Party, he's an insurgent outsider -- a grifter in a suit more at home in the BNP (which he modelled UKIP on: UKIP is just the BNP with better tailoring).

Yes, the Brexit ultras in the conservative party agree with him on some stuff, but the key detail -- "is he one of us??" -- is answered unequivocally in the negative.

Also: yes, the crown in parliament is sovereign, but they don't get to rewrite the law of succession without a very important signature at the bottom of the Act, and I suspect an Act amending the royal succession is the one type of Act of Parliament that the monarch could openly and publicly veto without creating a constitutional crisis, because it doesn't affect them personally, nor does it affect the general public, but it concerns the institution they're in charge of.

(Also: the Firm are generally careful not to put all the heirs in one flying egg-beater simultaneously. Or even in the same building, unless it's for a heavily secured photo-op like a wedding or a funeral.)

34:

"The Norstrilians of Cordwainer Smith's "Instrumentality" stories, set far in the future, regarded Elizabeth the Second as their rightful Queen."

Not surprising since Norstril = Northern Astralia

35:

They believed she was still around though, thousands of years from now.

36:

I never met him, but two of my very best experiences as a teen were in pursuit of the 'Duke of Edinburgh Awards'. These had 3 levels and required an increasing amount of community service, adventure and activity.

When I did my 'adventure' part of the Gold award a friend and I were dropped off in West Central Alberta in the middle of nowhere (near Medicine Lake if you must look at a map) with supplies and intent to travel over 100 km through the woods to meet with another group. In January, which meant seb-zero temperatures, deep snow, x-country skis, compasses and some rough topographical maps.

It was one of the finest experiences I've ever had. We were well prepared, camped on the edge of frozen lakes, had immense bonfires in the middle of nowhere.

For that I am thankful to him. Other than that I could give a toss about any Royals.

37:

"They believed she was still around though, thousands of years from now."

Maybe some of them supplied her with their immortality drug, "stroon".

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

38:

Re: 'Losing a spouse after more than 70 years of marriage is like suffering an amputation of the soul, according to my mother, after a similar bereavement.'

Yeah - I was wondering how the Queen is going to cope now that she's lost probably the only person she's been able to be just her own self with for 70+ years.

The Queen and Prince Phillip have been in the media often enough for many to feel that they have a personal connection with them. So some of the publicly expressed grief/sense of loss will be genuine. Hell - people cry watching films, reading books or even just listening to music and we don't (usually) mock them for forming an emotional bond with or reacting to fiction.

As for the media - well their coverage of the people involved/events will show whether they're exploiters or journalists.

39:

Niala @16: On the other hand there is nothing in our constitution to hold the house of Windsor in there.

Maybe we can have King John of Canada? It worked in the book (which I have not read).

Graydon @24: Nigel Farage is crowned King of England.

King of England?!? No, no! It's still going to be the UK. "The United Kingdom of England and Guernsey"!

40:

The Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme is, as you say, brilliant; for my sins (alternatively, sons) I volunteered to help out with the school’s DofE expeditions. The concept is great, and it makes a difference.

What I liked was that the emphasis was on effort, not results; the expeditions are accessible to all, even with physical challenges; and while our kids focussed on that, IMHO the skill acquisition / service phases were the ones which really make the difference... anyway, Prince Philip did all of the Gold award ceremonies; all of them, as I understand it. He was committed to it.

Because Edinburgh, our student army reserve unit had him as the Honorary Colonel. On his visits, his focus was always the students; seemed genuinely interested.

41:

ijones NOTHING wrong with our Union - but BoZo is doing his absolute best to wreck it, so that he can be a bigger fish in a smaller pond. He's an evil little crawling lying slimebag.

Graydon Bollocks Come the revolution, Nugent Farrago will have his tounge slowly pulled out with pincers ... SEE ALSO Charlie @ 33

42:

a friend and I were dropped off in West Central Alberta in the middle of nowhere (near Medicine Lake if you must look at a map) with supplies and intent to travel over 100 km through the woods to meet with another group. In January, which meant seb-zero temperatures, deep snow, x-country skis, compasses and some rough topographical maps.

Um, wow. Sounds like an amazing adventure.

Which Medicine Lake? Jasper National Park, Clearwater County, or somewhere else?

43:

NOTHING wrong with our Union

Roughly half of Scotland seems to disagree with that sentiment, to the extent of wanting to leave it. Not certain how many of the 'remain' Scots would agree with "nothing wrong" as opposed to "not bad enough to give up on".

44:

Farage isn't part of the Ruling Party, he's an insurgent outsider

I hypothesize that so are the New Masters, the money and planning behind Brexit.

(The New Masters being the mix of expat how-dare-tax?! billionaires, Russian money, Saudi money, we-don't-know-where-that-comes-from money; the locus profitable genocide (mostly) by fossil carbon extraction as an extra-national construction of political power.)

If so, one necessary step to consolidating power is to reduce the incumbent Tory power structure to a condition of obedience, and installing an outsider -- who can make it stick -- is a traditional approach to that problem. From the New Master perspective, sticking in someone you already own, in the vicinity of a supine parliament and Henry VIII powers, would make "stick" seem likely.

It would never work while ERII lives, but otherwise? Change of dynasty is not an inconsistent objective with what we see of the Brexit project. In some senses it's their easy end run for political legitimacy and sufficient material power.

45:

Guernsey is not part of the UK...

46:

MaddyE @ 1: The wall-to-wall media coverage reminds me of Princess Di's death and the media feeding frenzy that got sparked off by it. Even my partner's mother is annoyed by the coverage (at least we're spared her soaps for a few days).

That says a lot more about how rotten the "media" have become than it does about the monarchy.

I will mourn his passing as I would mourn the passing of any notable good person. For all his many well remarked upon faults, I do believe he was a good person.

I have sympathy for his wife. They were together for 73 years. That's longer than I've been alive. And I do believe she married him for love and that matters.

As for all the folderol of State Mourning ... I like this quote from Phillip I found in Wikipedia:

It is a complete misconception to imagine that the monarchy exists in the interests of the monarch. It doesn't. It exists in the interests of the people. If at any time any nation decides that the system is unacceptable, then it is up to them to change it.
47:

From what I can see of that book on the Web it looks like the vote was restricted to the Greater Toronto Area and that the kingdom of King John would eventually be limited to that region.

Having the King and Queen chosen separately each year in two talent search reality show contests on live TV would lead to a better and more stable Canada.

48:

JReynolds @ 8: When I heard yesterday morning that Prince Philip died, I didn't think much of it - "that's too bad" and "well, he was 99" were about the limit of things.

I felt (feel) kind of sorry for the Queen ... not as the Queen, but as a woman who lost her husband after 70+ years of marriage.

49:

Guernsey is not part of the UK...

Hence the need for a Union!

50:

Having the King and Queen chosen separately each year in two talent search reality show contests

Maybe the contests could be kind of like Eurovision?

With the exception that whenever a Canadian team wins the Stanley Cup, they get to pick the king and queen that year. (Since the last time a Canadian team won the Stanley Cup was 1992, we can expect that this will be a rarely-used provision).

51:

Not certain how many of the 'remain' Scots would agree with "nothing wrong" as opposed to "not bad enough to give up on".

Polling only finds a majority for "remain in UK" among the over-65s. Deeper polling finds that they're shit-scared of losing their UK state pension in event of independence, and furthermore the newspapers they get their news from are feeding them lies (that if the SNP wins we will leave the UK automatically, that the Holyrood election is a referendum, that their pension rights are in danger).

NB: it seems vanishingly unlikely that a newly independent Scottish government would change the already existing state pension arrangements its population have paid into. It's a guaranteed vote-loser!

52:

Graydon @24: You can carry that on to ->offspring->Edward (now DofE IIRC)->offspring->Anne. If they started skipping steps Anne would have a lot of support, and if the rules change had been retroactive she'd now be ahead of Andrew.

Anne ought to be in birth order ahead of Andrew, sure, but what I'm getting at is that major shifts in the power structure tend to go along with changes of dynasty. And there's certainly both a major change of power structure going on and a case where the symbolic change of dynasty (Diana's children) might not have stuck; the thing attaching legitimacy to the institution of the monarchy is ERII. The kind of people who plan Brexit must see that as an opportunity.

53:

Clearwater County. It was 35 years ago so had to double check, but I remember it being not far from Winfield, so that was the one.

Note: Said adventure was after a couple of years of fairly involved winter survival training and practice under supervision. We had enough food to last us for a couple of weeks, and the skills to find more if necessary. And we knew that if all else failed there were people who would send out the search parties if we didn't turn up within a day or two of the appointed time. I do not recommend random teens just hie off into the winter wilderness.

It was and is a fondly remembered adventure, somewhat sadly now as the friend I did it with died about 15 years ago. He and I also sailed a 31' sloop across the Atlantic once.

54:

ljones @ 18: Does price philips' death simply move us all more quickly along in one future direction along with brexit and covid 19 ?

With what has happened it is tempting to think what will happen over the very existance of the union, aka the UK itself. Does the UK now start to crumble more quickly?

Prehaps the UK is now in this position -- the UK; the union is now one of those "baddies" you've seen in half a dozen films whereby they are hundreds of years old and are undead but get killed at the end of the film but they then turn to dust and immediately blow away in the wind.

Maybe that's the UK's fate now; it happens quicker and the future monarch, they are the monarch of ?

Random thought: If Prince charles becomes the king after the current queen dies, what will be his role? His reign will be one of the shortest of all (he'd potentially be well into his 80s). What would he have to rule over? There might not be much of a union to rule over.

Looking at it from the other side of the ocean ...

Would it be possible for the UK to dissolve into it's component states, but continue to retain a common Monarch? Instead of the Queen (or King) of the UK, you have a monarch of Scotland, monarch of England, monarch of Wales, Monarch of Northern Ireland who are all the same person?

Given his parentage, I think Charles has a good chance of living to be over 100. If the Queen dies in this decade, his reign might last 25 years or more.

55:

"With the exception that whenever a Canadian team wins the Stanley Cup, they get to pick the king and queen that year. (Since the last time a Canadian team won the Stanley Cup was 1992, we can expect that this will be a rarely-used provision)."

That might prompt the injection of some dark money into Canadian NHL teams' budgets to create a win and influence the British Monarchy. What a fun short story that would make. The day Bobby Clobber Chose the King.

56:

expat how-dare-tax?! billionaires

An interesting quirk of UK tax law is that you can be non-domiciled for tax purposes if you spend fewer than 167 days in any given tax year in the UK (i.e. if you're abroad for six or more months), and if you're a non-dom you don't have to pay UK income tax. So a lot of the UK oligarchs are Brits, they just spend a lot of time on their yacht or have a second home in a tax haven.

(The USA doesn't put up with such nonsense, which is one of the few areas where they're clearly better than the UK. Such a shame that STAR trusts and similar provide an alternative set of loopholes.)

I'd have said that there's no need to install a new figurehead by changing the sock-puppet dynasty at the top: to do so would make you a visible target. Much easier to do it the traditional British way, i.e. via unbelievably deep-rooted but indirect levels of cronyism and corruption. (You don't bribe the Chancellor: you just make sure there's a job waiting for him on the board of a bank you happen to own when he retires, and that he knows it's a slam-dunk as long as he doesn't shit in your punch bowl. Same with the PM and maybe the Home Secretary; the Defense minister doesn't really signify these days unless you own an arms company or two, in which case his name would be an asset on your letterhead anyway, however dim he is.)

57:

Yes - as I said in the previous thread before having seen this one, my principal reaction was to feel sorry for Liz. They were an example of a royal couple who actually did love each other.

As for the media, we have "newspapers" which will devote their entire front page to reporting on the fictional domestic squabbles of some soap opera characters I've never heard of as if they were real and important people, and have difficulty with the distinction between the actors and the characters they play. Had there been such a fictional barney in course of transmission at the present moment, they would consider themselves to be in a serious quandary as to what to put on their front page.

Their ridiculous gushing over the death of the deluded idiot Diana must have been largely driven by the same confusion between soap opera and reality - died in a car crashed by a drunken driver losing control while careering through a city at 100mph, just like teenage joyriders only with more fame and money. And he was brown and foreign and ought to go back where he came from etc. etc. as per another habitual attitude of those same papers. It was an event absolutely made for them.

Not that long afterwards I was on a train going to a family wedding, and was surprised to see loads of people with cameras standing all along the side of the track. There were so many of them that I thought they must be waiting for a steam-hauled special, and was disappointed not to have known about it so I could have timed my journey to see it myself. It wasn't until months or years later that I realised they had only been waiting for a duff and I hadn't missed anything. Such is my regard for media gush.

58:

Maybe the contests could be kind of like Eurovision?

Welcome your new head of state, Queen Katie Hopkins the First!

(Shudder.)

59:

That's pretty much what we did do for a hundred years or so, between the accession of Belming Jimmy and the Act of Onion. It might even be a viable option to return to it, or so Charlie has IIRC postulated, on the grounds that Scotland has a better claim to "own" the monarchy than England does; but on the other hand we ended up telling Belming Jimmy's descendants to fuck off and imported a spare Dutch bloke to take over, so I'm not clear how much of Scotland would go along with the claim; I am pretty sure there would be a big argument over it, though, connected with all sorts of ugly sectarian crap.

60:

I'd have said that there's no need to install a new figurehead by changing the sock-puppet dynasty at the top: to do so would make you a visible target.

If you're trying to install MyCronies3.0 over the existing stuff that didn't have release numbers until 1784 and is still somewhat written in Norman French, you might want to do just that.

The problem is not the cronyism per say, it's that if you're a Saudi you can't have gone to Eton.

Nor do you have to admit who is giving Parliament ideas/bribes/detailed texts of legislation.

61:

Ahem: maybe use a few more actual names non-Brits can google for, rather than snarky nicknames, when discussing historic events? Because that stuff is not obvious from context and you're in danger of becoming almost as obscurantist as the Seagull.

62:

Nor do you have to admit who is giving Parliament ideas/bribes/detailed texts of legislation.

That's what thinktanks are for. They're even less transparent in the UK than their US lobbying-group opposite numbers, like ALEC.

Also the UK constitution can be patched on the fly by act of parliament. No need to pack the supreme court!

Finally, the old Common Law system was mostly written out of the code between the 1980s and early 2000s (in England and Wales, where applicable: it never applied in Scotland in the first place).

63:

Except the spare Dutch bloke was offered the job because he was married to one of Jimmy's daughters, and his successor was the other daughter, although the one after that did back up the line a bit and was the son of his cousin.

64:

Not sure that reasoning quite holds...

The vote last time (2014) only had a majority in Glasgow and Dundee (the areas with the highest levels of deprivation). The big failure in the rest of Scotland wasn’t IMHO worry over pension, but worry over economic stewardship.

The SNP leader at the time, Salmond, (to me) was a reprehensible individual, with either a tenuous grasp on reality or a deliberate policy of lying. IMHO, the evidence presented at his later trial for assault demonstrates this. Many “yes” voters at the time didn’t believe this, and thought him to be lucid and reasonable. But the white paper of his time was economic wish-fulfilment fantasy. It relied upon extremely high oil prices, and couldn’t even answer the question “so: what currency?”. The justice policy was just “knives and guns”, the defence policy was shockingly uninformed.

Six years later, we’ve seen the nightmare that is Brexit - and yet exactly the same arguments are being trotted out, about an economic integration that is much deeper, older, and more valuable than that with the EU: “it’s in their interests to give us a deal”, “it will be the easiest deal in the world”, “we’ll be better off on our own”, “there won’t be a border, don’t be silly”.

I’d suggest that right now, the disgust at Johnson and his paymasters is greater than the fear of Scexit screwing the Scottish economy; but only just, and that can change. Right now, we have a First Minister who is damaged after attempts to “deal with” Salmond’s behaviour; married to an SNP Chief Executive who is allegedly refusing to release the party accounts, on the back of several financial bailouts that look... less than wise (handing shipbuilding contracts to major party contributors is no different from the Conservatives at Westminster).

The young, including firstborn, now increasingly believe that any economic contraction (to them, an abstraction) is worthwhile, if we get away from the corruption and incompetence at Westminster. The more mature and cynical worry that we’d be exchanging one set of ideological incompetents for another, and taking a kicking in doing so.

If I was cynical, I’d suggest the real ammunition is being held back until any referendum campaign. It’s rather quiet on that front right now, which might explain why the SNP is doing so well... I’m also curious as to how Salmond’s new “Alba” party does in splitting the independence vote, and achieving its true goal of getting its Dear Leader back in to front-line politics where his glorious skills can be richly rewarded by an adoring electorate, and to force the SNP leadership to come crawl back for his votes in Holyrood. As I said, he’s good at self-delusion.

65:

Pigeon @ 57: Not that long afterwards I was on a train going to a family wedding, and was surprised to see loads of people with cameras standing all along the side of the track. There were so many of them that I thought they must be waiting for a steam-hauled special, and was disappointed not to have known about it so I could have timed my journey to see it myself. It wasn't until months or years later that I realised they had only been waiting for a duff and I hadn't missed anything. Such is my regard for media gush.

Waiting for a duff?

66:

Since the last time a Canadian team won the Stanley Cup was 1992, we can expect that this will be a rarely-used provision

Are you going by the city the team is based in or if the majority of the players hold a Canadian passport?

67:

I got it from the context, but hadn't heard the term Belming Jimmy before, and none of the meanings of the word duff that I know make sense in the other post. I am impressed!

68:

As you may remember, I referred to that, er, gentleman as a Scottish snake oil salesman, and he has never given me reason to change my mind. I liked his presence in politics, because he made Cameron look like the idiot he was, but would never have actually voted for him.

69:

It turns out to matter if the government are mammonite death-cultists.

The current Canadian federal government are truly terrible; they're approving pipelines and neonictinoid pesticides (both in my view crimes-against-humanity level stuff; there's an established legal view that the ongoing and undiminished indigenous genocide is itself a crime against humanity), and they're not managing to realize that there's a climate emergency already happening. But! they're at least willing to admit there's such a thing as a fact. And to spend money to keep people alive.

The previous federal administration, the Harper government, wasn't willing to agree there are such things as facts, and did buckets of long-term harm. The current provincial government in Ontario are certainly loud-and-proud mammonites and (probably) closeted antivaxers; the result is a big pile of corpses, no effective pandemic response, and the general ablation of the health care system. (Which the mammonites all see a feature; it will eventually allow them to make health care accessible to them as a revenue stream, as God intended.)

It turns out that there's a difference between corrupt-with-facts and corrupt-without-facts; the later is almost arbitrarily worse, because "no facts" is also "no quantitative analysis".

The UK, where the Tories are ticking all the fascist boxes, is a more extreme case of this. It's not a choice between ept and inept, or similarly inept and similarly inept; it's a choice between "I admit things have to change, even if I am not sure of the best course" and "nothing that affects me is allowed to change". That last one is moderately bad in prosperous times. In these times -- agriculture as a technological capability is still headed at collapse -- it's impossible. Admission that what they most want is impossible does not reliably happen; atrocity does, as part of the effort to avoid the admission, but the admission itself doesn't.

Even with a presumed economic disaster, corrupt-with-facts is preferable to the violent suppression of dissent. (Where England has already arrived.)

70:

As we always say: thoughts and prayers. Condolences on your loss.

I'd also add that QE2 seems to be not planning to be around much longer: she's not replacing her corgis as they pass, because she doesn't want them to outlive her. This is someone who's not planning for the long term. She's going to be very alone, and that is sad too.

71:

JBS @ 65: "It wasn't until months or years later that I realised they had only been waiting for a duff and I hadn't missed anything. Such is my regard for media gush."

"Waiting for a duff?"

Duff beer?

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

Probably not.

72:

R P @ 43 ONLY because various tories have quite deliberately fucked it up

Graydon Now THAT is scary...

Charlie @ 51 All the indicators are that, as Brexshit is an ongoing disaster for the UK, an "Independent" Snotland would be even further down in the shitpile & even worse off - but that's actual economics, not political willy-waving. In other words, it's Brexshit-squared in terms of complete stupidity.

@ 61 Then why don't you tell the Seagull to FUCK RIGHT OFF, then? - sorry Charlie, but you asked for that & even I understood what Pigeon was saying!

Martin @ 64 YES! And the Scottish economy will be utterly screwed ( Start reading the "FT" - please? ) If it wasn't for complete & total lying arsehole BoZo it would be no contest - "stay together" - which tells you something.

JBS I THINK he means a Brush Type 4 - yes? ( also known as a class 47 )

Graydon @ 69 Yes - can we have The War Criminal Blair, back, pretty please? Given the present lot, that is.

73:

Re: '... died in a car crashed by a drunken driver losing control while careering through a city at 100mph, just like teenage joyriders only with more fame and money.'

Very different from what I most recall about Diana which was her involvement in AIDS awareness (an AIDS-diagnosed child sitting on her lap) and her participation in a campaign against land mines. From the below, it looks like she was active in many charitable orgs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana,_Princess_of_Wales#Charity_work_and_patronage

BTW - she wasn't the driver and two kids lost their mother that night.

74:

As an American, I usually have to poke a bit at things like "Belming Jimmy and the Act of Onion". Onion is a common substitution (even in the US) for Union, so was soon (via wikipedia) rabbitholing down witch hunting of the indicated era. (Ugh. Violent suppression of the weird, with shitty heuristics.) "waiting for a duff" just got recorded as something that people do with cameras at the side of the tracks[1], perhaps waiting for someone "important" to go by. Three online slang dictionaries were not helpful. (Urban Dictionary is often the most useful for contemporary English-language slang. Easiest is to search for word or phrase and add keyword urban)

[1] more rabbitholing; tracks or track? In the US one usually crosses "the tracks" even if it's only a single pair of rails.

75:

Ah, no - waiting for a duff is something people standing by the tracks with cameras are usually not doing. If a special hauled by a famous preserved steam locomotive is due to pass, it's no uncommon thing to see the tracks lined with people with great big cameras on tripods etc. and also family groups down to little kids and people who aren't normally interested in trains. But a duff, as Greg said, is a Brush Type 4, the most numerous type of diesel locomotive to have been used in the UK; utterly commonplace, they are called duffs because they are boring (duff), and nobody turns out en masse to see one go past. Except, apparently, when it is hauling a train containing a coffin with a dead princess inside it.

76:

Thanks! That led to these wikipedia pages. (Skimmed them.) The glossary list is terrifying. (There are lists for other countries too.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railfan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_United_Kingdom_railway_terms

77:

The histrionics following her death seem to have fairly effectively erased from history the media's preference for following her around with prurient inquisitiveness and then slagging her off. All that seems to remain of the former discourse is occasional jokes about Harry's dad being the butler, but I'm not sure if they make it outside the UK much. There used to be loads of that sort of thing; I always took the charity work as something she got into partly to provide an excuse to get away from Charles and the rest of them, and partly as a PR exercise to counteract the loss of popularity she experienced when she realised that princessing wasn't as much fun as the fairy stories make it out to be and started deviating from the script, to the disapproval of the British public.

78:

Ah, okay. I thought maybe you were referring to Duff Cooper .

79:

I had no clear idea what "waiting for a duff" meant, and I received Charlie's reference to one character in "Dead Lies Dreaming" buying another a model of a Baby Deltic locomotive as being an Easter Egg for those of the commentariat who have an interest in railways (beyond just steam locos).

80:

Not being that sort of an anorak, I wasn't familiar with the term (nor gricer), but am glad to learn. I assume that Belming Jimmy is the person better known as Dismal Jimmy, rather than the wisest fool in Christendom.

81:

I've had a suspicion for a while that somewhere in the Royal Household there's an office where they store "Good Causes" for junior Royalty to take up when necessary to burning their reputations. Diana, Princess of Power Shopping got the AIDS kids folder along with land mine eradication for her sins, Prince Harry has the Invictus Games for disabled military veterans and so on.

82:

Maybe the contests could be kind of like Eurovision?

It's worth looking at the Irish Presidency in comparison, mostly because it was designed as an exact replacement for the UK Monarchy.

First off understand the role - primarily ceremonial but beyond that, the country personified. Very little constitutiional powers but they are a tie-breaker in any constitutional or other dispute: there is never a "joint" presidency (sometimes proposed by those who don't get this). The Army etc literally stands behind the President, not the Taoiseach (Prime Minister). (In the event of invasion, it is ultimately the President who decidess fight on or surrender, for example).

In the initial years, for lack of a better idea, it was for retired politicians, in practice from the dominant party of the time. Little was expected, or done, by the President.

In recent decades starting with Mary Robinson, it has been a role for a "moral leader" - someone with years of activism behind them. Formally politically neutral, they've led "quiet advocacy campaigns" on behalf of the Diaspora, Northern Ireland reconciliation, etc.

The current incumbent follows this role : while an ex-politician, he was a left "firebrand" in Labour in his day - Labour being a minor party - though remarkably effective in government, albeit as a junior minister. Think Tony Benn, not Margaret Thatcher - not a divisive leader, but in retirement respected advocate.

Important here is the selection/nomination process. If you look at many (TV) celebrities, they often have fame because of their job, but can frequently have political views that are obnoxious, but they keep quiet. How the candidate will act long-term needs to be understood. With long-term politicans they've typically been scrutinised and vilifed over time, they're known quantities, which is crucial. This was true also of Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese. We've a nomination process that requires a significant number of TDs (MPs) or county councils to vote in favour. David Attenborough's name has been mentioned - he would make the cut, but most of the other names of celebrities wouldn't.

It's also important that the voting procedure reflects the nature of the role, too. A President by FPTP on 30% of the vote would be a disaster from a "represents us all" POV. Irelands STV works to get a good compromise, conciliatory candidate - though 2-round runoffs work well, too.

83:

amckinstry @ 82: "Very little constitutional powers but they are a tie-breaker in any constitutional or other dispute... ... The Army etc literally stands behind the President, not the Taoiseach (Prime Minister).(In the event of invasion, it is ultimately the President who decidess fight on or surrender, for example)."

That would not work for Canada. The Monarch is not a tie-breaker for Parliament and the Army does not stand behind the Monarch. In theory the Queen can dissolve Parliament. In practice it is only when the government asks for it.

84:

Absolutely agree about Diana and her well-planned (AIDS, land mines) or publicity-convenient (“secret” night visits to hospitals) charity work; I wasn’t that impressed.

However, I get the impression that Harry really believes it. The British Army has a decent success rate at (eventually) getting young officers to care about others by their late twenties; far from perfect, but IMHO a better rate than industry and commerce. If he hadn’t run with the Invictus Games, it could as easily have been ABF, BLESMA, or Erskine. It appealed (I sense the hand of Philip, see DofE awards above) because unlike many other charities, Invictus has an aspirational / development aspect to it.

85:

Greg: All the indicators are that, as Brexshit is an ongoing disaster for the UK, an "Independent" Snotland would be even further down in the shitpile & even worse off - but that's actual economics, not political willy-waving

Correct, but that's a short-term outlook.

Longer term: Scotland is currently under the control of a hegemonizing and unaccountable (to Scotland) political union run by Tories and Tory-lite Labour. The Tories are clearly following a trajectory that ends in outright fascism with a side order of an immense amount of corruption and, as Graydon notes, a total unwillingness to recognize actual facts when the facts contradict their ideology.

England is currently a de-facto one party state: even the choice ostensibly on offer is no choice at all -- it's either the Tories (who are close to indistinguishable from the BNP of ten years ago) or Labour (who under Starmer have triangulated even further to the right than Blair went, so that they're now a de-facto Thatcherite neoliberal party with the same racist anti-immigrant sentiment as the Tories of a decade ago).

If we (Scotland) remains part of the UK, then we will be dragged into the same fascist nightmare as the rest of the country. So leaving, while not a bed of roses, is desirable for reasons other than short-term economic benefit.

Arguing over the pros and cons of rejoining the EU at this point is premature, but I'd just like to note that the accusations of democratic unaccountability and uncaring dictatorial centralism that the Brexiters levied at the EU -- accusations which were baseless -- are in fact valid when pointed at Westminster, from Scotland.

86:

I agree with everything, except that we are already living in a fascist state - just one that is currently using its powers very gingerly and (by political standards) very subtly. "First they came for the socialists, ..." Well, I can assure you from both first-hand experiences and personal accounts, that they have already done just that. No, socialists have not been rounded up and sent to reeducation camps, but socialism has been deliberately, centrally and effectively suppressed in England.

You are rightly concerned about who they may go for after the people they claim are 'illegal immigrants', but I have actual, multiple experiences (if VERY minor, by comparison with what is going on to other people) of discrimination against me and mine, with the scary implication of what you fear. And I, my descendents, and at least six generations of ancestors, have never had ANY citizenship other than British or a right of residence anywhere other than the UK and its dependencies.

Yes, I am fully aware that, if I change residence to Scotland and it becomes independent, my tax bill would probably double. So? I would have to tighten my belt, but that would be a price well worth paying.

87:

You are being unfair. She was very young (married when only just 20), from a very cloistered background, somewhat immature and very insecure, and was thrust into a highly stressful marriage that her husband did not want. He didn't do well by her, either, though the blame for that as much with his upbringing and external forces as in himself. The marriage was obviously a stupid idea at the time, but TPTB were too bigotted to allow Charles to marry a divorcee.

She was desperate to find a role that was more than a brood mare, and had the choice of charities, which says a lot about her. So what if she played the publicity for all it was worth? She badly needed that, for her own self-esteem. And, as examples of her genuine care, influence and courage, she shook hands with AIDS patients in 1987 and walked into a minefield that was being cleaned up in 1997.

88:

Charlie You are unfair to Starmer... He HAS TO WAIT until the full disaster of Brexshit is apparent ( Some time between 6-18 months I'd say ) And THEN he can run the flag up, to throw this lot out .... The cities in England are NOT controlled by the tories.

EC is much nearer the mark - they are doing it very gradually & surprisingly carefully, as they know that, if caught too soon, the game's up. Even I have decided that they MUST be stopped. [ It was the Sarah Everard vigil that tipped me off as to what they were doing ] - as EC says - I too have started quoting Niemöller.

EC@ 87 I blame Elisabeth of Glamis - I was never a fan & I put a lot of The Firm's troubles down to her controlling instincts. HM-&-Phils marriage nearly collapsed in the 1950's - he went on a world tour to get away from mother-in-law & credible rumour says that he issued an ultimatum: "Wen I get back, she is in Clarence House & not ours!"

89:

Re: 'And, as examples of her genuine care, influence and courage, she shook hands with AIDS patients in 1987 and walked into a minefield that was being cleaned up in 1997.'

Agree. BTW - the Queen wasn't keen about these charity choices ('too unhappy').

Hell - Diana was a kid (20) when she signed up for the royal gig with lots of growing up still to do. And once signed up, she'd never be able/allowed to escape the public eye. Overall, I think she did a pretty good job of using that spotlight.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1997/summary/

'The Nobel Peace Prize 1997 was awarded jointly to International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) and Jody Williams "for their work for the banning and clearing of anti-personnel mines."'

https://time.com/5682006/princess-diana-landmines/

Landmine clean-up is still going on.

90:

In THIS case, however, I have heard that it was an Archbishop of Canterbury and someone like the Lord Chancellor who first blocked him from marrying Camilla (way before Diana). But I am not a gossip-follower and my memory has faded, though the third paragraph of this may be correct:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camilla,_Duchess_of_Cornwall#Relationship_with_the_Prince_of_Wales

91:

We shall see about Starmer. He may be playing a canny game, but the evidence so far is that he is just yet another political shit.

92:

Finally, the old Common Law system was mostly written out of the code between the 1980s and early 2000s (in England and Wales...

My understanding is that while this is true of the law, it is not true of the land tenure. And it's hard to look at Brexit and not wonder how it's going to interact with the utility of land tenure.

93:

Celebrity & culture

Just based on general media coverage that I can recall, it seems that the UK and US are the most celebrity-obsessed*. And celebrities are outside one's immediate family. As to what this signifies about these cultures re: need for aspirational models, undeveloped sense of personal self-identity, group affiliation, etc. - maybe a closer look at the typical Brit/USian family dynamic and role of a neighborhood is needed.

  • The check-out magazine stands (usu. Murdoch rags) regularly run headlines about celebrities including which moved to Europe to escape the spotlight. Seems that Europeans just shrug/say 'meh' when they see a celeb in their neighborhood.

Because these rags are English-language therefore probably also distributed in all Anglo countries, I'm curious as to how Australian, New Zealand, Canadian and Indian fandom compares re: overall incidence, demographics, fervor, etc.

94:

She got a couple of new dogs earlier this year, one corgi cross and another whose details I forget. She had planned to not replace her dogs but that's a hard plan to stick to as I found out myself. I'd planned not to replace mine but there's a couple cuddling up next to me as I write this.

95:

WrecksIt was an obvious disaster in ~18 months as of June 2016CE. So what's keeps Kier Starmer if you're right?

96:

paws To you & me yes, we could see it coming ... but not to the general population & especially not to the people of Hartlepool, Boston, Carlisle etc. It's got to get to them, personally. When it does, they'll scream blue murder, of course, though repairing the damage will take a very long time. Re-joining the Single Market is the obvious & best first step back to sanity, I think.

97:

She had planned to not replace her dogs but that's a hard plan to stick to as I found out myself. I'd planned not to replace mine but there's a couple cuddling up next to me as I write this.

When the two dogs that grew up with our kids passed I got real firm about no new pets as my wife and I wanted to travel. And the kids were a year or few out of the house by then. My kids have gotten a total of 3 dogs and we watch them at our house periodically. Which satisfies my wife's desire to own one.

We have a well fenced back yard of about 1/6 acre and all the 4 legged visitors react as kids going to Disneyland. One lives daily life in an apartment and the other 2 are limited to maybe 1/20 acre back yard.

98:

The sheeple that haven't realised it by now aren't going to, because they take their prejudices from the media, and aren't prepared to think; the best that can be hoped for is that most of them will die off.

99:

I'm supporting Charlie here, but I would also add there is a very good economic case for Scottish Independence.

Even since Thatcher smashed the unions, the main fault line in economic interest in Britain has been between the manufacturing interests in Northern England and Scotland and the financial interests of the City of London. Thatcher, and the Tories since, (and Labor) have favored London's financial interests. An example of this was during the 1980s, the British pound rose on the back of Britain's oil production, and this rendered British manufacturing uncompetitive with European competitors, decimating British industry. The leaders of British industry begged Thatcher to ease the pound to give them a chance to adapt, but she would have none of it.

The Tories ambition seems to be to turn Britain into a larger version of Panama--an offshore financial haven that makes its living off dodgy financial transactions, mainly driven by the wealthy's desire for tax minimization.

One of the first regions that picked itself up after Thatcher had crashed all its traditional industries was Scotland, and Scotland now has a manufacturing and services economy that is fits into a modern, free-trade world.

The big thing that will happen if Scotland becomes independent is that it will be be able to fashion policies around its main economic drivers rather than those that favor the City of London. It will also be able to have sane, realistic economic policies as opposed to economics based on all the mythological drivel that emanates from the English establishment.

These will ensure Scotland's long term prosperity. In the short term, the disruption of becoming independent can be handled by two things: 1) a major stimulus building infrastructure and 2) competence--something in short supply in Westminster at the moment.

100:

DM @ 99 NO I think the right-wing vulture capitalists will dismember Scotland first, as easy pickings ....

101:

Death of a spouse, yep. In the US, at least, for older spouses, the average survival is 5 years (my mom lasted about that after my father died).

I am 100% sure that I developed cancer 3 years after my late wife dropped dead, and we weren't together nearly that long.

102:

Bill Arnold @ 74: As an American, I usually have to poke a bit at things like "Belming Jimmy and the Act of Onion". Onion is a common substitution (even in the US) for Union, so was soon (via wikipedia) rabbitholing down witch hunting of the indicated era. (Ugh. Violent suppression of the weird, with shitty heuristics.)
"waiting for a duff" just got recorded as something that people do with cameras at the side of the tracks[1], perhaps waiting for someone "important" to go by. Three online slang dictionaries were not helpful. (Urban Dictionary is often the most useful for contemporary English-language slang. Easiest is to search for word or phrase and add keyword urban)

[1] more rabbitholing; tracks or track? In the US one usually crosses "the tracks" even if it's only a single pair of rails.

I got it from the context of "a hundred years or so, between the accession of" ... not sure about "belming", but I'm sure it's not complementary. I have some familiarity with James the VI & I because he's the king who had Sir Walter Raleigh beheaded and my home town has some small association with Raleigh.

And "a duff" is a common type of British locomotive (as I've been informed) and apparently "waiting for a duff" refers to non-railfans lining the right-of-way when a train carrying some important personage (or their body) is known to be coming by ... as happened with FDR in 1944 ... hoping to make some connection by catching a glimpse as the train passes.

Tracks plural because even on a single track line there are two rails.

103:

Elderly Cynic @ 98: The sheeple that haven't realised it by now aren't going to, because they take their prejudices from the media, and aren't prepared to think; the best that can be hoped for is that most of them will die off.

"Sheeple" - there's a nice FASCIST word that won't offend anyone.

104:

One thing I've noticed is hints of the first baby steps in the rehabilitation of Prince Andrew ... and it looks like Harry will be thrown to the wolves.

105:

I think the right-wing vulture capitalists will dismember Scotland first, as easy pickings ....

Good reason to write anti-capitalist laws. Which Scotland can't have in the UK, but can if independent.

Good reason to be in the EU, too.

106:

OT: "My only interaction with the royal family ever was to walk across a stage during a graduation ceremony attended by a bored minor royal--the patron of the university I attended."

Being a decade older than Charlie, my graduation ceremony from a London University was to walk past and bow (a little) to Lizzie.

As my memory is fading, and it came up recently in conversation, does anyone on this comment thread know:

  • Where was the ceremony held? I recall it was some institution with a large hall with 2 seating tiers.
  • Was the ceremony for all London Univ. campuses? My memory suggests there were a large number of attendees, so I would guess yes.
  • As a side note, I did not wear a gown and I believe I was the only student not to do so.

    107:

    IIRC, British manufacturing had been in decline even before I was born in the 1950s. The 1960s saw successive devaluations of the pound but this did not translate into improved exports. By the 1970s Britain was "the sick man of Europe". I recall the "Buy British" campaign that became "please look at a British product before you buy foreign". Britain's manufacturing did improve in the 1980s by improving design and quality. The overvaluation of the USD until 1987 allowed Britain to export more, especially to the US (and US tourists flew to England to shop at Harrods in droves).

    108:

    She got a couple of new dogs earlier this year, one corgi cross and another whose details I forget. She had planned to not replace her dogs but that's a hard plan to stick to as I found out myself. I'd planned not to replace mine but there's a couple cuddling up next to me as I write this.

    Good news. Thanks for the correction.

    109:

    Just to be a bit of a contrarian, but....

    Well, there's all this stuff the Windsor firm owns, to the tune of about $28 billion.

    Has anyone thought about whether getting rid of the crown will strip them of the assets? Or will it simply strip them of responsibilities and oversight, leaving them mildly annoyed and free to do something about it?

    While I'm not fond of billionaires as a phenomenon, there's something to be said for nailing their feet in the spotlight and forcing them to be charitable, instead of, well, acting like other billionaire heads of state, like Vlad the Isotope Doser, IQ 45, or the House of Saud.

    So unless dethroning the Windsors also entails nationalizing most of their assets, I'd plaintively ask whether it's a good idea or not.

    110:

    I glanced at that article, and the first few items were Crown property - effectively held in trust for the country. her personal wealth is rather less. But why on earth do you think that allowing the likes of Johnson to dispose of such things would be an improvement?

    111:

    Is it possible to opt out of a dictatorial society?

    Not totalitarian of course - they (Maoist, Nazi, Khmer Rouge, Stalinist) never let anyone opt out.

    But what about an emerging corrupt sham democracy run by wealthy elites more interested in making money and using political power to protect their wealth?

    Is is possible to escape from such a society without actually leaving your current country?

    Instead of crossing a Berlin Wall to freedom on the other side, you simply find freedom in living an obscure, simple life off by yourself and not interacting with the powers that be.

    In a new feudalism is it possible to live independently outside the system like a high-tech medieval hermit, off the grid and self sustaining? Even doing that in cities. Forming sub-communities with like minded people.

    Would you be left alone to live your life?

    112:

    And how long can a neo-feudalism (aka "libertarianism") hiding behind a sham democracy survive in the face of:

    Aging demographics and shrinking populations (this short video does a great job of explaining what having fewer babies and more elderly does to capital markets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9zH1dWeKE0. This longer one shows what it will do to China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTbILK0fxDY)

    Economic disruption from global climate change (shifting of agricultural areas and food supply disruption, mass migration of people from hot zones, financial losses to seas side real estate)

    And the unravelling of globalization (who need cheap third world labor when the factory floor is automated, factories that used to hire thousands now only need dozens, and 3D printing can produce anything you want locally).

    Does it explain the uber-elites interest in New Zealand survival bunkers?

    Does it all end in a bang or a whimper?

    113:

    Imagine an end game almost like the Roman Empire.

    Population declining and aging, economy shrinking and trade ceasing, infrastructure crumbling, government becoming ever more irrelevant and expensive, a military becoming ever more powerful and ineffective, the elite consuming more and more wealth, and a population alienated and uncaring what happens.

    But no barbarians swarming over the frontier.

    114:

    H Ah - the usual mistake The "crown" owns huge amounts - and all, literally 100% of the profits go to the Exchequer. THEN, some of it is doled out, back to the Royal "household" ( wrong word there, but never mind ) as yearly expenses - this is the "Civil List". ACTUAL tax rate on royal "stuff" is about 85% or higher. Which is why Chas wants to scrap it, keep the lot & then pay normal taxes, as if they were a commercial business & thus keeping a lot more moolah. See also EC - Lizzies PERSONAL property is Sandringham & Balmoral - the other places would become the "president's residences" were we a republic - ok?

    Duffy But what about an emerging corrupt sham democracy run by wealthy elites more interested in making money and using political power to protect their wealth? Ah the Rethiglican-run sections of the USA as an example?

    "Roman Empire" In the end was hit by natural disasters: The Plague of Justinian & the volcanic eruption (?) that fucked-over Europe in ? 523 ?

    115:

    Ah the Rethiglican-run sections of the USA as an example?

    More like the whole world becoming like Putin's Russia - with the same demographic decline, intellectual stagnation and economic decay. Run by an oligarchy hiding behind sham democracies.

    116:

    Demographic collapse seems like the most likely thing, but here's a possibility-- extension of people's health spans. This seems at least possible, even though it would be legally... interesting, considering pension plans.

    Still, it seems like better problems than just dying.

    117:

    Is it possible to opt out of a dictatorial society?

    Technically, yes. As James C. Scott observes, Not Being Governed is hard. Not in the sense of living a rough life, though it is that too, but in giving up all the stuff that society normally provides for token amounts of participation.

    Would you be left alone to live your life?

    No, but governments quickly find limits on how cost effective it is to continue pestering nonconforming populations.

    118:

    There is some value in making the Royals titular rather than constitutional monarchs. The recent revelation that the monarch gets to see legislation before it is enacted to make changes that would otherwise affect the monarch would be ended, making legislation less biased towards those with wealth and position.

    If what will be left of the UK makes the Royals titular, the state can reduce the funding of all but the immediate King and Queen and heir, cutting off the parasitical extended family. The Royals can still be the tourist draw that they seem to be, but they are then on their own.

    119:

    "Sheeple" - there's a nice FASCIST word that won't offend anyone.

    It gets used a lot as a put down to pew sitters in the US who check their brains at the door of a chruch. It is a take off on Jesus as a shepherd leading his flock.

    120:

    baby steps in the rehabilitation of Prince Andrew

    Given he was known for a while on the left side of the pond as "Randy Andy" and now seems to have ties (entanglements?) with Jeffrey Epstein's sex capades, rehabilitation may be hard.

    121:

    Imagine an end game almost like the Roman Empire. Population declining and aging, economy shrinking and trade ceasing, infrastructure crumbling, government becoming ever more irrelevant and expensive, a military becoming ever more powerful and ineffective, the elite consuming more and more wealth, and a population alienated and uncaring what happens. But no barbarians swarming over the frontier

    You mean the shift to Byzantium with the abandonment of the less-functional provinces of western Europe? That's what actually happened.

    The point here is to stop using the British version of "Fall of Rome" as a code, because a) it's poorly documented, b) it's myopic in scope (the dark ages were not worldwide or even Europe-wide), and c) it inspires all sorts of interesting fascist notions about which cocks should be sitting on top of the rubble pile and who needs to die, along with stupid conspiracies to make that sort of cleansing happen.

    So what have we got: 1. Demographic transition coupled with resource depletion: meaning yes, it's worth getting freaked out about having aging parents taken care of by immigrant medical personnel. Unless (like me and I think some others on this blog) you end up married to one of those immigrant medicos and realize they're just people like your ancestors from three generations back, moved here to make a go of it in better circumstances. I'm pointing this out because demographic collapse usually has this undertone of white panic in it, and really, it's immigrants coming in and filling the spaces available. Will this continue under climate change? Of course. Does the skin color or ancestry of the immigrants doing the service matter? Not really. If you live in a place like the US, your ancestors were probably spat upon too, not very long ago

  • Government becoming irrelevant and expensive is SOOOOOO Bush II. Did you notice who stepped up to get people vaccinated and run the economy when the corporations took a dump during the pandemic? Government. The last four years have marked the utter failure of the Republican idea that the best government is no government, and the future won't prove otherwise. To be clear: people don't intrinsically need governments as a species, but keeping billions of people alive during this mess pretty much requires a bunch of central authorities really doing their best with the best people they can get.

  • Military becoming more powerful and ineffective? There's a lot of propaganda here. I won't argue that the US is a paragon of efficiency, because I can laugh about the F-35 and littoral combat ships as much as anyone. The problem is that we're finding out that infowar, cyberwar, and hybrid war really can take out a top line conventional military. The part we don't see in the US and UK is that our militaries are busily deploying those forces too, but not reporting on what's happening. We're only partially in dinosaur mode, and there's a lot of evolution going on too.

  • Elite consuming more and more wealth is an endemic problem going back to the bronze age if not long before. Dealing with it by revolution or redistribution is necessary, because said wealthy elites can't hack a pandemic (cf: Trump, Balsonaro, Putin...). So you're right, but that's a known problem. It's not inevitable, but it might happen.

  • Too many people are marching worldwide for anyone to say that no one cares what happens. Again, this is a very 2006 attitude.

  • Where does that leave us? With a whole lot of possibilities, ranging from catastrophically grim to strange. Status quo is not among them, nor is the mythical Fall of Rome. You're free: choose your adventure.

    122:

    Alex T "The recent revelation" - only to the ignorant & uninformed, actually. Also, Chas has made it clear that the "family firm" needs to be cut-down in size. As usual people like you are worrying about yesterday's problems & NOT addressing that of the fascist oligarchy creeping up on us. Same as the anti-slavery idiots, attacking people 200 years dead & ignoring slavery in China.

    123:

    On the original topic (!) & referring back to rocketjps @ 36 ... The DoE Award Scheme" was started when I was at school ... and it was, probably deliberately mis-sold. If I had known it was the sort of thing described in # 36, I'd have been very interested indeed. But it was sold as an extension of "the wonderful team & jolly hockey sticks" I made it very clear that it could be inserted, painfully, where the sun don't shine. Which of course further blackened my reputation ... There was absolutely no indication that it was for individuals, but sold as an exercise in spurts conformity. I only gradually learnt differently, over 20-30 years later.

    124:

    I never even heard of the DOE AWS until I was to old to be allowed to participate, which may possible account to some extent in my disinterest in the entire House of Saxe-Battenburg-Windsor?

    125:

    I used to see a lot of DOE groups in the hills when I lived in the Peak District.

    Lots of 16 year olds risking joint injuries by carrying twice as much weight as they needed. A line of lost teenagers staggering under the weight of 80l packs with huge amounts of crap hanging off the outside is quite distinctive.

    126:

    West of Scotland DofE wasn't even a heard of thing. If you wanted to join/do something like this you had the choice of Scouts/Guides (according to your gender) or BB, but no GB.

    DofE might well have been a better fit for me, not least because it allowed mixed groups.

    127:

    Well, there's all this stuff the Windsor firm owns, to the tune of about $28 billion.

    That article you linked to isn't actually true. Crown Estates aren't property of the royal family -- they're property of the Crown, i.e. the government. They're about as close to being owned by the Queen as an archaic entailed estate -- she can't actually sell them or control how they're used. It's like saying the White House is the personal property of Joe Biden.

    My best guess is that if the UK were to suddenly become a republic all that stuff would become government possessions.

    128:

    that's a short-term outlook.

    The LSE, when not currying favour with the government, would tend to agree

    129:

    The article seems to have been taken down. What did it say?

    130:

    In the case of an entire line of succession being wiped out, that is a kingdom finds itself in want of a rightful monarch, precedent is to find a rightful monarch in want of a kingdom and make him an offer. As it happens, there is one available. Like Farage, Karl has been a Member of European Parliament, though I suppose there would be interesting dynamics around Brexit. I gather he's some sort of mild conservative, so maybe not rabid enough for the current batch of Tories. It would be a fascinating development to find a Habsburg going to Britain, achieving what Charles I and Philip II failed to achieve. Armada schmarmada and all that.

    131:

    Quite a lot, but it got messed around so as not to offend the government.

    TLDR: all the economic books for Scotland (and the UK nations in general) are cooked to make them look hopelessly dependent on subsidies from the centre: for example, to count all government spending in Scotland and on behalf of Scotland (including stuff Scotland doesn't want, such as Trident nuclear missiles) is allocated as expenses, while revenue raised from Scottish taxpayers and businesses isn't counted as income unless it's collected within Scotland. And also, all the projections for Scottish economic performance outside of the UK are based on the assumption that the Scottish government will rigidly pursue austerity policies charted by the Conservatives in England, won't have any recourse to tax-raising or bond issuing powers that an autonomous nation would have, and will be on the hook for a giant chunk of pre-existing UK government debt.

    The point the article made was that these assumptions are all highly questionable and that a closer look at the actual figures suggest that Scotland could considerably outperform all predictions based on official UK government figures (and do so without significant oil revenue, which is the big accusation that got leveled at the SNP in 2014 -- that their independence plan was only viable if we continued to pump oil and the price spiked to over $100/bbl).

    132:

    I'm pointing this out because demographic collapse usually has this undertone of white panic in it

    The biggest demographic collapse is happening in China

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTbILK0fxDY

    And has already happened in Japan:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iheEi6Mzu1s

    And South Korea

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TNi98Z-QdE

    And Iran, whose TFR is lower that that of France:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeianT8vrAQ

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y93ip0lMNJ8

    Bottom line is that declining/aging populations eff with both government expenditures and capital markets.

    There is no such thing a no-growth capitalism.

    And an economy cannot grow while populations are declining and aging.

    133:

    You mean the shift to Byzantium with the abandonment of the less-functional provinces of western Europe? That's what actually happened.

    You mean the empire lasted almost 900 years after Rome fell as a power center?

    AMAZING?!?!?!?! [/sarcasm]

    This bit was missing from my world history education in my teens. It only came up later in a broader study of history on my own.

    And even then the "fall" wasn't so much an event as an end point to multiple factors.

    134:

    Personal worked example:-

    I live and work in Scotland, and have a personal Scottish income tax code. However, the firm I am employed by has a head office in Hampshire, so money I make for them is treated as being "English revenue". However, the block grant that Holyrood is allowed by Westminster/Whitehall is augmented by the Barnett formula in partial compensation for this.

    136:

    My best guess is that if the UK were to suddenly become a republic all that stuff would become government possessions.

    How long before it was privatized, or at the very least leased to a PPE for nominal rent with the taxpayer on the hook for repairs and maintenance but the private partners getting any income it generated?

    137:

    I live and work in Scotland, and have a personal Scottish income tax code. However, the firm I am employed by has a head office in Hampshire,

    In the US the last year has caused a lot of fights between states.

    Massachusetts vs. New Hampshire. Lots of people live in NH but work in Mass. Overall taxes are lower. But with work at home the people are wanting all the Mass taxes to go away as they don't enter the state anymore. Even though they have a "seat" in Mass.

    And the opposite in places like New York / New Jersey. NJ wants to tax the income of all of those work at home folks who haven't commuted into the city of NY for a year now. And have NY/NYC not collect any.

    Lawsuits will go on for this for a while.

    As a side note my wife's unemployment coverage was dictated by Texas UI system but day to day administered by NC where she now lives. Lots of paperwork to keep straight plus several retroactive things due to the way Congress wrote the pandemic specific laws. "Who's on first?" daily at times.

    138:

    How long before it was privatized, or at the very least leased to a PPE for nominal rent

    The UK isn't going to become a Republic under the current Conservative kleptocracy, so that question is unanswerable. My guess is any post-monarchical regime would be a junta or dictatorship of some form, probably hard right in theory but with radical wealth redistribution policies on the ground (at least for members of the ancien regime).

    139:

    "The recent revelation" - only to the ignorant & uninformed, actually.

    When and how did you know that the monarchy could change laws before they were to be voted on? Clearly you had knowledge that journalists are only now reporting on to us plebians.

    As usual people like you are worrying about yesterday's problems & NOT addressing that of the fascist oligarchy creeping up on us.

    Whatever mind-reading machine you used to divine my thoughts, I suggest it might need some recalibrating, or that you pointed it at the wrong head. Try using my social media posts as a baseline to calibrate your technology. ;)

    140:

    Regrettably, I can see a possible path to it happening, via a Blairite landslide (*) and then a restoration of the open Conservative kleptocracy. But, even if that happened, it wouldn't be before the end of this decade. It's nearly as unlikely as England applying to become a USA state, though.

    (*) With a smokescreen of 'democratisation', much as That Blair emitted to increase our level of fascism.

    141:

    There is a web page on a programming Wiki called Why Is Payroll Hard?. The author has the scars from trying to implement a new payroll system for Chrysler.

    One entry in the bullet list is:

    There are approximately 50 states and 300 communities' taxes to be dealt with, including reciprocity. (If you work in A and live in B, you can pay the lower of the two communities' taxes. But if you live in B and work in A ...).
    142:

    The title of Duke of Edinburgh has been inherited by Prince Charles, along with Philip's other titles. Although it was announced that Edward would get the title, it appears that this will be when Charles takes the throne and all his previous titles revert to the Crown, making them available to be bestowed again.

    143:

    Rbt Prior @ 136 Exactly. What we have, presently is much more sensible .... Incidentally, there are a couple of wierdos in the "Crown" properties - Buck House is the official residence of the Head of State - like the Elysee Palace in Paris - not a problem, Sandringham is personal private property - but ... Windsor Castle is the odd one out. It's a national historic monument & it's Queenie's favoutite hole close to London & it's also Crown Estates & also "English Heritage". Um.

    Alex Tolley The monarch/head of state has to have sight of the papers, if only to comment & annotate - as for "change the law" - the last example known of was when it was proposed to make homosexuality illegal, back in the mid-1800's & Vicky refused, point-blank to believe that Lesbianism existed, so it was never criminalised(!) It's also an extra form of proof-reading ( I think we all know about the screw-ups that happen in proof-reading? )

    EC & Charlie I think that BoZo is really pushing much too hard & that this (mis)government might just make it to 2024, but the open corruption & incompetence are already showing, even to the uninformed - & that it will collapse in vicious internal recriminations - over Brexshit & the Union & the economic collapse.

    145:

    Back in the 80s our small insurance agency software company was working with the big companies. One day walking through a floor of various programmers at the Hartford I noticed a stack of fan fold printout that was in binders and 3' in total. I started to ask what his job was then saw "Workers Comp" written in marker on the sides of the printouts.

    We sold software to automate offices of 1 to 5 people mostly. (We had a few that were near 100 but they were rare.) We would get asked about implementing payroll. We never budged from "No, nope, nopity nope nope."

    HR at my wife's job was interesting. They operated in 40+ states at any one time plus a few dozen countries. And 13 or so union contracts. Getting a straight answer to most questions took some time.

    146:

    I actually like having a monarchy, as I've said before around here:

  • Its better than an elected head of state because the HoS should be a unifying figure, and elections are divisive by nature; there is always going to be a substantial part of the population who didn't vote for the winner.

  • It puts people with a multi-generational perspective at the heart of the government. When Trump came over on his state visit it was Charles who lectured him about global warming. Everyone else was more concerned with the short-term diplomatic games.

  • (It was also fun to watch Trump wetting his pants with excitement over being treated as an equal to the Queen of England)

    The one thing that does bother me about the Monarchy is the human rights angle; it condemns a baby to life in a gilded cage merely because of who its parents were. Mostly we just see the gilding, and yes its a very big cage, but it is still a cage, and like an animal in a zoo you can never get rid of all the people peering at you through the bars. I imagine that it bothers those born into the royal family somewhat less because they grew up with it and are used to it, but many of those who marry into the family seem to have lots of difficulty adapting to life in captivity. Harry has spent most of his life trying to get out of the cage; for a while the Army provided a temporary escape hatch (just imagine: a life where being in the Army looks more like freedom than being a civilian). Then he married Megan. She seems to have simply refused to accept imprisonment, and that gave him the impetus to break out himself.

    Somewhere I read an ethical riddle about a perfectly peaceful and happy society which depends for its existence on some child being tortured (warning: TV Tropes). Britain is not that, but the Monarchy kind of shades it that way.

    147:

    It's been an open secret for many, many decades (my grandfather told me about it, and it's something he knew about from his time in the Civil Service during WW2). That journalists are only reporting on it now is because they've only got interested in the changes that royal influence has introduced in the last few years.

    Unfortunately, when there's something well-understood in specific circles that interests journalists for the first time in a while, they will present it as "new" news, not as a rehash of old things they've just discovered.

    148:

    Charlie, Krugman is in-joke stealing from you.... "Financial industry types often talk about the FAANGs: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google"

    149:

    You're talking "off the grid". That works, if you care to live like that... or at least until the land you're living on becomes of importance to the Powers That Be.

    150:

    I have to admit to being somewhat amused by yct about "the unraveling of globalization", when a) auto manufacturers use a lot of robots, and b) the "War on Coal", which is actually the "War on Coal Miners", who are heavily unionized... of whom, in the seventies, there were about 780k in the US, and are now 78k, due to mountaintop removal, and giant machinery.

    Oh, and the recent fun and games in the Suez Canal, and the screaming that we can't hear over JIT stocking as a failure.

    151:

    Paul The story you were looking for was by ( of course ) Ursula Le Guin, it's called "Those who walk away from Omelas" & there is a recording of her reading it - originally on LP disc ( Yes I have it ) Damn, but we need her, here, now.

    152:

    David L @ 119:

    "Sheeple" - there's a nice FASCIST word that won't offend anyone.

    It gets used a lot as a put down to pew sitters in the US who check their brains at the door of a chruch. It is a take off on Jesus as a shepherd leading his flock.

    It's also a favorite word for Ammosexual FASCISTS, Boogaloo FASCISTS, QAnon FASCISTS, Trumpolinist FASCISTS, Looney-Tune Libertarian FASCISTS and right-wingnut fascist FASCISTS for putting down anyone who does not unquestioningly accept their particular brand of fascism.

    It's a FASCIST word and if you don't want people to think that YOU might be a fascist too, you shouldn't use it. Plus it's demeaning, just like using ethnic slurs to label people.

    I don't really understand why this word in particular offends me so much, but it gets on my nerves and I think less (MUCH less) of people who use it. It's evidence the user's ignorance is far deeper than that of the target group they're contemptuously belittling.

    153:

    David L @ 120:

    baby steps in the rehabilitation of Prince Andrew

    Given he was known for a while on the left side of the pond as "Randy Andy" and now seems to have ties (entanglements?) with Jeffrey Epstein's sex capades, rehabilitation may be hard.

    That's why I think THEY are using the current distraction as cover to conceal the agenda.

    154:

    Robert Prior @ 136:

    My best guess is that if the UK were to suddenly become a republic all that stuff would become government possessions.

    How long before it was privatized, or at the very least leased to a PPE for nominal rent with the taxpayer on the hook for repairs and maintenance but the private partners getting any income it generated?

    It would happen faster than the speed of sound, but less than the speed of light.

    155:

    the HoS should be a unifying figure, and elections are divisive by nature

    The monarchy is only conditionally unifying. For example, the British monarchy was totally not unifying prior to Catholic (and Jewish and nonconformist) emancipation in the 1830s-1860s: it symbolized an institutional religious apartheid. That's mostly papered over these days, but as the UK becomes majority-atheist the days of having a minority most-favoured religion (only 5-10% of the population are CofE communicants these days: it's behind Catholicism and Islam, IIRC), that the monarch is head of the church looks increasingly out of touch.

    Again, it's not unifying if the monarch has a political agenda of their own. The Queen getting to comment on legislation that affects the monarchy directly is just about plausible, if extremely dodgy on grounds of institutional corruption. But I note that Edward VIII was gotten rid of for being far too close to that nice Mr Hitler back in 1936. Charles has raised eyebrows by writing to cabinet ministers about policy matters. And it'd be extremely easy for a future monarch to cross the line from unifying to intensely divisive -- if, for example, they picked a side publicly over a knotty issue like Brexit. (Yes, according to rumour the Queen leaned towards Leave. But then, the Queen doesn't have to give a damn about the economy or freedom of movement, she and her family are set for life.) At least she kept it low-key. If King Henry IX were to say "I think you should all vote Conservative at the next election", that'd ... well, it wouldn't be pretty.

    TLDR: monarchy is palatable only to the extent it converges with a ceremonial rather than an executive head of state. The best monarch is one whose duties could be discharged by a stuffed toy, or my pet cat. Activist monarchs are terrible. And sooner or later, almost any dynastic system will throw up an activist.

    156:

    Nope, FAANGs has been in common usage in tech sector coverage for a couple of years. I didn't invent it, and neither did Paul.

    (If they were PHANGs, that'd be another matter ...)

    157:

    You want to be careful using that word. You wouldn't want to wake the sheeple.

    158:

    It's a FASCIST word

    I assumed it was a left-looney word, because I first heard "sheeple" from people on the left-looney-fringe, raving against government and corporate conspiracies…

    This was back in the 80s.

    So I'm not convinced it was a fascist word, per se, so much as an anti-authoritarian one. Have the fascists taken it over, like they did with "fake news"?

    159:

    "Instead of crossing a Berlin Wall to freedom on the other side, you simply find freedom in living an obscure, simple life off by yourself and not interacting with the powers that be."

    The problem is that bad societies tend to find you, and that that's not really free, IMHO.

    Having to radically alter your life to avoid being f*cked over is not being free.

    160:

    I used to hear the word Sheeple in flaky hippy circles. The last 15 or so years I've mostly heard it used by antivaxers when talking about we sheeple who meekly believe the scientists rather than the mommy bloggers.

    Whatever its origin, it has definitely become a major word choice of right wingnuts of all stripes, do define all those of us who are not their particular brand of right wingnut.

    161:

    "You're talking "off the grid". That works, if you care to live like that... or at least until the land you're living on becomes of importance to the Powers That Be."

    Or to people who have themselves been pushed, or to people fighting back blindly against the interlopers being pushed (i.e., you)....

    162:

    That's very one-sided. Yes, that's true - but a demogogic autocracy, even an elective one, positively selects for such undesirable monarchs or oligarchies. Out of the last seven prime ministers, we have had at least five who were - that's a pretty bad record compared to our (very patchy) sovereigns in the days when they WERE sovereign.

    The key factor here is to avoid autocracies, and Parliament was for a long time the control on the autocracy of the Sovereign. Now, with a dominant party being able to control both the Sovereign's powers and Parliament, what control is there on it?

    163:

    Charlie EXCEPT ... Both Phil the Greek & Chas have been very vocal about conservation issues - which are now political - they were not when they started, were they? The Duchess of Cambridge made a political statement by going to the Sarah Everard vigil, which the police-white-wing establishment pretended they hadn't heard or seen ...... According to other rumours, HM leant towards "Remain", for family & historical reasons. YMMV. See also EC

    What do you do when a democratically elected government or PM or President is an autocratic Traitor? ( The US got rid of IQ 45 - but there's now a desperate fight to get voting reform in place, before the R's re-institute Jim Crow & KKK rule - yes? ) We have a lying trator in charge of a legal misgovernment, bent on wrecking the place, just to suit themseleves ... and you are worried about the MONARCH?

    See also slavery, statues & the PRC.

    164:

    It's been used by a lot of such people. It is, however, the only appropriate word for the large proportion of the electorate who take their opinions from the media etc., even when those are obviously self-contradictory or in flatly in conflict with the facts available.

    As is pretty clear, I will have no truck with the linguistic fascism, which tells the public what words they must and must not use.

    165:

    "Sheeple" is essentially a conspiracy-theorist's word: it is a word conspiracy theorists use to dismiss everyone who "buys the official explanation" (i.e. does not buy into their nonsense). And back in the 1980's conspiracy theories were more of a left-wing phenomenon. Nowadays they are more of a right-wing phenomenon, by far. Hence "sheeple" is far more likely to be used by Qcumbers and such.

    166:

    I think there's been a cognitive bias at large in the world that associates "flaky hippy" groups with the left, but I think that is a category error and always has been. It quite possibly simply didn't arise much back before the crest of the hippy wave, which was above all anti-normative and to a limited extent anti-establishment, but which didn't really embed its own politics (each hippy group developed its own). One of the key developments of the 60s was that non-conformity could be extremely lucrative when marketed the right way (anti-conformity can after all be a kind of paradoxical conformism too, as generations of "rebellious" fashions demonstrate). I believe there always were extreme right-"libertarian" hippies and everything in between, just like feminist language about empowerment always had a Randian twist in certain circles, something that (kinda sorta) predates second wave (Rand was resurfacing some early 20th centurey/late colonialist tropes in a different context).

    I think there are understandable and even justifiable reasons for this bias, and it certainly doesn't always lead to the wrong answers, but it's worth checking for now and then.

    167:

    The few years of my life where I was adjacent to or partially within 'flaky hippies' taught me that for the most part they were anti-establishment and/or 'dropouts' of various forms.

    My time in that mental space was in and after the Clayoquot Sound protests of the early 90s. There is a population just ripe for dissection into its component groups - from Troskyists to Tories with Composters. The main themes were some definite in/out group dynamics (which I think are common in all populations), and some baby/bathwater rejection of logic in a blanket rejection of 'establishment' thinking.

    So while rejecting the mammonite neoliberal 'consensus' about what is important and Just was a part of it, so was rejecting the (purportedly) neoliberal 'consensus' about the utility and purpose of vaccines. Other bizarre in-group thought police notions were about the importance of marijuana and the utility of VW vans. (Marijuana - who cares, VW vans - occasionally working piles of junk).

    168:

    The recent revelation that the monarch gets to see legislation before it is enacted to make changes that would otherwise affect the monarch would be ended, making legislation less biased towards those with wealth and position.

    Judging by what's been revealed of Charles' letters to the Government, it would be the opposite. It's the current government that adjusts tax laws to benefit those with wealth, while the Heir to the Throne is the one campaigning for conservation, climate-friendly policy, consideration for minorities, etc, etc.

    Remember the screeching from the Daily Heil when Charles made a passing comment that a more appropriate title for the Monarch might possibly be "Defender of Faiths" rather than "Defender of the Faith"?

    169:

    "What do you do when a democratically elected government or PM or President is an autocratic Traitor?

    Ask an Australian about their governor-general's "reserved powers". Firing a government when needed it good - one of the leader of the opposition's old mates firing a government when it's not needed is less good.

    That sort of constitutional surprise is why I'm very conservative about major constitutional changes. Constitutional powers often turn out not to be what was expected by the people who wrote them.

    Roles of heads of state rely as much on soft power as on the written word of the constitution. And what constrains that is tradition. When you lack several decades of tradition, things get fluid. Hitler's subversion of the Chancellor's role in Germany is an extreme example, but Mary Robinson's transformation of the role of the "ceremonial" position of the president in Ireland is a more typical example.

    If you mess with embedded traditions then the new constitutional order may not be what you expect.

    (Yes, constitutional traditions didn't constrain Trump as much as they should have - but honestly they're all that did)

    170:

    Wait, you think that your lord&master, his grace, the cat, isn't running things?

    171:

    Ok, on this, I can speak authoritately... being a hippy. Yes, when I moved away from home, I put together a small commune in an apartment. I wrote an occasional column for the Distant Drummer, Philly's underground. Then my first wife got the job of typesetting the paper.

    The idea that most hippies were "non-political" was propaganda. Trust me, at least 90% of us were political... given the draft and the threat of being sent to 'Nam. Most of the hippies I hung out with went to demonstrations.

    Plastic hippies - the ones from the 'burbs who put on their plastic love beads and came to hang with the hippies on weekend should be excluded.

    As the War wound down, and then Tricky Dick forced out, the Movement, to a large degree, collapsed - we were mostly under 30, and had spent since '65 fighting against the war, and the Civil Rights movement fed into the hippies; that's a long time at that age.

    The capitalists saw marketing potential, packaged some of the look, and sold it to the plastic hippies, then to more folks our age. Hell, they did tours of Haight-Ashbury (and it was reported in the undergrounds that some folks ran along with the buses, holding up mirrors (you want to see freaks? take a look).

    It was a small movement, but was great for headlines. This time around, a lot more people are coming out, and they haven't spent 10 or 15 years fighting a War. And they see that this will affect their lives, as much as that did ours... so I don't expect anything to fall apart in the movements now for at least another 10 years or more.

    172:

    (Thread is already rambling a bit, so) Fascinatingly effective Antifa activities exposing and disrupting white supremacist(/Nazi) rallies. Basically, - Activists infiltrated white supremacist online groups, some of them encrypted telegram groups, and captured messages and trolled competently a bit. Even set up some honeypot groups. Pathetic COMSEC(/OPSEC) for these white supremacist groups, but probably a lot of variation with some cells competent. - Plenty of activists were ready and willing to show up in the flesh, and they actually showed up at counter-rallies.

    Not sure how (or whether) to map such tactics to the fascism emerging in the UK, since it's also emerging within a government that can and does squelch protests and would severely punish infiltrators(/data exfiltrators) of their communications (if the data exfiltrators were caught). (I do not approve of the doxing, fwiw.) I hope UK activists devise effective tactics to fight this.

    'White Lives Matter' rallies flop as hardly anyone shows up - The poor turnout underscores how the country's unpopular and disorganized extremist movements have been driven underground. ... The march was organized on the encrypted messaging platform Telegram over the last month with a call for nationwide action. (April 11, 2021, Brandy Zadrozny)

    CVAntifa - Fighting the fash in Corvallis, Oregon (8 April, 2021) "This event was organized on Telegram and was widely circulated in White Supremacist circles on beginning in late March. We have obtained logs from the, “ADMINS OF WLM ZONE” chat, where individual march leaders coordinated and planned their actions."

    VICE is in the doghouse now for other reasons, but Leaked Chats Show ‘White Lives Matter’ Movement in Shambles After Antifa Infiltration - “What an absolute garbage dumpster fire,” one Telegram user wrote. (Tess Owen, April 9, 2021)

    Dailybeast: Infiltrators Are Sabotaging the Proud Boys’ ‘White Lives Matter’ Day - COVER BLOWN - Extremists tried to make planned rallies look like a grassroots movement—but their secret chats have been leaked. (Kelly Weill, Apr. 09, 2021)

    Long thread of social media image caps (since many will be deleted) of the rally day (linked also on cstross twitter):

    White Lives Matter's terrible, awful, downright no good day 🤣 pic.twitter.com/f7FqZAJbIa

    — Gwen Snyder is uncivil (@gwensnyderPHL) April 11, 2021

    Oh, and new moon in several hours: https://www.timeanddate.com/moon/phases/

    173:

    Now, THAT's a good conspiracy theory, if ever there was one!

    Harking back to the first use here, are you SERIOUSLY denying that the majority of the people who were sold the Brexit myth did not fully justify the term sheeple?

    We know damn well how the various charlatans, crooks and demagogues sold the myth, that they dominate the UK media, and how they prevented both BBC and ITV from laying into it. That didn't stop the facts from being well-known, easily checkable, and half of the electorate ignored those ignored in favour of the myth they were being sold.

    Examples in the other topic where various publics have swallowed a pack of lies justifying for an unnecessary war, the evilness of a subgroup, and so on, are also relevant. Any electorate that doesn't think for themselves deserve the name of sheeple. If you disagree, then propose another and justify it.

    174:

    Martin Exactly - Chas, as a member of the HoL was - effectively - doing his constitutional duty by responding to a "constituent's" worries, as a n MP in the HoC would. Of course, this got up some peole's noses.

    whitroth/Bill Arnold Indeed ... how do we protect ourselves against BoZo & the truly evil people behind him? One thing - protest rallies are not the way, ISTM.

    175:
    Early designs featured a flotation and ballasting system and active motion compensation system to facilitate a controlled transfer of a topsides’ weight from the vessel to a platform substructure. Allseas developed the original idea to include steel jacket installation, jackets and topsides removal and rigid pipelay capabilities

    Sounds like something quoted directly from The Structural Dynamics of Flow by Michael Dorman.

    176:

    Elderly Cynic @ 173 "Any electorate that doesn't think for themselves deserve the name of sheeple. If you disagree, then propose another and justify it."

    I've never seen that word before and I read the BBC news site and USA news sites in a regular fashion. It's obscure.

    Just use "sheep". It's been used as a metaphor many times before. It's clear.

    Hey, the word "sheeple" makes me think of cartoon sheep jumping around in a steeplechase competition, like the sheep in F'murr's BDs.

    https://www.bdfugue.com/le-genie-des-alpages-t-3-barre-toi-de-mon-herbe

    177:

    I thought part of what shrank the counter-culture was an increase of violence. Skimming the wikipedia article, there was a lot of violence at Altamont, and the Hell's Angels were a big problem.

    In a discussion of Summer of Love by Lisa Mason, I was surprised at the amount of rape in the book, and a woman who was there said it was accurate. Mind you, I don't know about the amount of rape in the earlier counterculture.

    178:

    Since the conversation has moved on.

  • Currently, SpaceX has 1380 Starlink satellites. How long until Starlink satellites comprise the majority of active satellites in orbit? I've seen that there are 2400 active satellites in orbit, but I'm not sure if the source is trustworthy.

  • The technology to remove space debris has been more successful than I anticipated a few months ago https://www.npr.org/2021/03/21/979815691/new-effort-to-clean-up-space-junk-prepares-to-launch https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/04/the-era-of-reusability-in-space-has-begun/

  • Neuralink has attached a chip in a monkey to get it to play video games with its mind. He plans to test it on humans by the end of the year

  • As per our discussion in the previous thread, and since this is a British blog, I have the following question: If Argentina bought Chinese carrier-killer missiles or Turkish Bayraktar drones, could they conquer the Falkland Islands?

  • 179:

    It's not THAT obscure - according to the OED, it's as common as privateer or runcible. Apparently, it originated in the Musical Times in 1945, so it could be said to have been invented by proto-hippies :-)

    180:

    I've never seen that word before and I read the BBC news site and USA news sites in a regular fashion. It's obscure.

    Seems to have 2 common usages. The ones described here in terms of politics. And in a lot of (US?) Christian circles when talking about pew sitters who check their brains at the door.

    181:

    Outside of most of Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia, most of the rest of the world is at or below replacement

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_total_fertility_rate#/media/File:TFR-HighRes-2020.png

    182:

    Elderly Cynic @ 180: "...it's as common as privateer or runcible."

    I like runcible because it rhymes with fencible, which is pretty obscure too.

    183:

    Is there any definition runcible that isn't part of 'runcible spoon'?

    184:

    Not sure. Perhaps national propositions, to allow citizens to push an act when the legislature won't. Perhaps a way to have "standing" in the courts, if you cannot directly show harm.

    Protests, on the other hand... there are a lot of folks out there who feel alone, "all the folks around me say... am I the only one who thinks...?", and protests tell them no, they're not, and yes, we can do something.

    Kept us going during the Civil Rights Movement, and 'Nam, in the States. Is keeping folks going on police violence.

    185:

    Nope. That was a huge amount of media coverage, and the right and the media wanted to see Altamont as the anti-Woodstock. However... come on, the Angels are only one small motorcycle club, they had no national affiliates or any such.

    And, as I was saying, the media was trying to play the hippies as non-political, and not active in the antiwar movement.

    186:

    It's a nonce, a nonsense word. They explain it in the wiktionary:

    https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/runcible

    187:

    What I find really interesting in that article is the drawing by Lear himself, which features a runcible spoon without any prongs, in contrast to most definitions I came across.

    188:

    ioan First - they've got to get the money Second - a Daring-class destroyer has a lot of missiles in its tanks Third - there are RAF aircraft at Stanley Fourth - any Argentine shipping to the Falklands has to get past the RN's hunter/killer subs.

    Ongaku Maybe not - I have a Runcible Hat, for instance!

    189:

    Apparently, [sheeple] originated in the Musical Times in 1945

    Google Ngram Viewer indicates that, though around, the term didn't really start to be used for another forty years. As an interested observer of the US political loonscape, I've been familiar with it for many years. "Wake Up, Sheeple!" is a standing joke.

    190:

    Robert Prior @ 158:

    It's a FASCIST word

    I assumed it was a left-looney word, because I first heard "sheeple" from people on the left-looney-fringe, raving against government and corporate conspiracies…

    This was back in the 80s.

    So I'm not convinced it was a fascist word, per se, so much as an anti-authoritarian one. Have the fascists taken it over, like they did with "fake news"?

    Yes, they have. It's become part of the language of hate.

    I probably shouldn't let it anger me so, but it gets my hackles up. You should call someone "sheeple" anywhere it would be appropriate to call them "untermenschen" ... or "n*gger".

    191:

    zephvark @ 178:

    "The last four years have marked the utter failure of the Republican idea that the best government is no government"

    Eh, what? This has never remotely been an idea of the Republicans or even Libertarians. How did you confuse Republicans with anarchists? The Republican Party has always been solidly in favor of massive government.

    "I'm not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

    It's their rhetoric. They only want to keep those parts of government that give them power to oppress the rest of us. Any part of government that benefits us has got to go.

    192:

    Ongaku @ 184: Is there any definition runcible that isn't part of 'runcible spoon'?

    I believe he also mentioned "runcible cats" and "runcible hats".

    193:

    Ongaku @ 188: What I find really interesting in that article is the drawing by Lear himself, which features a runcible spoon without any prongs, in contrast to most definitions I came across.

    Perhaps, based on the drawing, a "runcible spoon" is an "impractical spoon" ... impractical works as a substitute word in the other uses I'm aware of ... "runcible cat" and "runcible hat"

    194:

    Bollocks. Both of those two words are associated with historic oppression of the worst order, whereas sheeple is not.

    195:

    Here's why I was asking: I doubt that Xi would invade Taiwan unless he did a Spanish Civil War-style test of his weapons systems. This is the only scenario I could come up with that wouldn't trigger WWIII due to mutual defense agreements.

    My other impression is that the discussion in the previous thread was so high level that people weren't paying attention to much to the limitation of Chinese weaponry. Perhaps analyzing this example could change that?

    196:

    "Sheeple" is a modern form of "lumpenproletariat". Both terms mean "people who are too ignorant and stupid to agree with me".

    197:

    No, they don't - and sheeple doesn't even imply that. It refers to people who are too idle (yes, stupid or ignorant, but those are lesser reasons) to actually think for themselves, especially in the context of believing what they are told by demagogues.

    https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/lyndon_b_johnson_137074

    If you dislike the term then, as I said above, propose another and justify it.

    198:

    Strongly Seconded.

    199:

    And why are they so "idle"? Because they think they have better things to do. Why do they think that? Because they are too stupid and ignorant to know better.

    Words like "sheeple" and "lumpenproletariat" carry a very definite message:

  • They divide people into an Elite who understand the Great Truth (as defined by the user of the word) and a larger mass of people who do not. (There is also the category of Reactionaries who do understand the Great Truth but choose to oppose it for nefarious reasons of their own).

  • They denigrate the larger mass as being some combination of Ignorant (in which case they must be educated) and Stupid (in which case they are not competent to decide). The test for this is their reaction to being told the Great Truth; if they accept the Great Truth then they were Ignorant but are now part of the Elite. If they reject the Great Truth then they must be Stupid.

  • Stupid people cannot be trusted to make decisions for themselves. Therefore it is the duty of the elite who do understand the Great Truth to ensure that the right decisions are taken in spite of the opposition of the Stupid.

  • Thus the use of such terms is the first step on the road to overthrowing democracy and replacing it with a dictatorship of the Elite.

    This framework applies to any Great Truth, whether that be communism, antivax, flat earthism, capitalism, socialism, or any religion. It also applies to Great Truths that many of us hold dear, such as democracy, freedom of speech, the rule of law and stopping global warming.

    The issue is not whether your Great Truth is actually true or not, it is the language you use to describe those who disagree with you.

    So I am not going to propose yet another synonym for the same broken concept. I am simply going to note that there are people who disagree with me and move on. In the past I've found that my ideas were wrong sufficiently often that I no longer trust my own views. I find it is more profitable to engage with those who disagree rather than simply writing them off as too ignorant or stupid to agree with me. My practice of this attitude is not always perfect, but I keep trying.

    200:

    Perhaps that's for the best since your last is a lengthy restatement of Orwell's definition of the proletariat and their reason(s) for not rebelling from 1984.

    201:

    FWIW,given the current most frequent users of "Sheeple",an old bit of verse comes to mind: "Known by the company one keeps".

    202:

    Did John Brunner write a novel called "The Sheeple Look Up"?

    No!

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

    203:

    To summarise: Calling people sheep in order to change their minds is a baaaaad strategy.

    204:

    Do you mean this one? https://bygosh.com/poems/judged-by-the-company-one-keeps/

    One night in late October,
    When I was far from sober,
    Returning with my load with manly pride,
    My poor feet began to stutter,
    So I lay down in the gutter,
    And a pig came near and lay down by my side;
    Then we sang “It’s all fair weather when good fellows get together”,
    Till a lady passing by was heard to say:
    “You can tell a man who boozes,
    By the company he chooses”,
    And the pig got up and slowly walked away.

    205:

    Re: 'And why are they so "idle"? Because they think they have better things to do.'

    Or ... they're exhausted, have zero learning opportunity/access nor adequate psychosocioeconomic support.

    Sheep - don't recall any stories where sheep don't need to constantly graze because of their herbivore digestive system constraints. In contrast to pterry's intellectual camels (e.g., You Bastard) whose better energy/fat reserve systems allow them to lift their heads up out of the feeder bin/grass patch, look, wonder and puzzle out their place in the world.

    My guess is that when a group is being trash-talked, the trasher hasn't taken a close enough look at the system (components & process) leading to this result. Yeah - some stuff is random but if the stats keep building up, it's probably a systems thing. And ignoring this is a sign of intellectual laziness, i.e., projection on the trasher's part. Full circle - you get that a lot with systems.

    206:

    If Argentina bought Chinese carrier-killer missiles or Turkish Bayraktar drones, could they conquer the Falkland Islands?

    Nope.

    Firstly, buy them with what money? AIUI the Argentinian military is still running on left-overs from the 1980s -- for some reason civilian governments aren't enthusiastic about throwing money at an institution which historically has form for military coups, death squads, and failing at wars.

    Secondly, there's more than missiles to conquest: the missiles might be useful against the RAF Typhoon squadron at Stanley, but completely beg the question of what happens a couple of weeks later when a pair of Astute-class SSNs show up and start sinking the Argentinian navy, while the army still needs some way of supplying whoever pulls the short straw and gets sent to occupy the Falklands.

    And that's before Boris Johnson -- aka Clownshoes Churchill -- takes the god-given opportunity to dress up in Margaret Thatcher drag and send a QE class carrier down the Atlantic to distract everyone from COVID/Brexit/his latest sex-or-corruption-or-both scandal.

    On the other hand ... about 80% of the Falklands economy depends on squid exports to Spain, and you know what Brexit has done to UK fish exports in general (down 98%) due to paperwork requirements. All Buenos Aires has to do is wait six months and Johnson will be offering them money to take the by-then-bankrupt Falklands off his hands.

    Indeed we've been here before in 1980-81, and if the Junta had just sat back and waited HMG would have offloaded the Falklands onto them in good time. Hopefully the current civilian leadership have read the history books and are playing it sensibly this time.

    207:

    Yes, I do. I think of it often of late when talking to the FOX-poisoned.

    208:

    Article in The Economist here.

    The gist is that the typical new Tory voter in the "Red Wall" constituencies is probably living in a new Barratt housing estate (Barratt prefers to call them "places") that they could afford because house prices Oop North are low, and home owners tend to vote Tory. The last paragraph of the article concludes:

    There is an egalitarianism to Barratt Britain. Accountants, teachers, sales reps, plasterers and driving instructors live on the same street, and the smaller choice of pubs and restaurants means they socialise together, too. As long as mortgages remain affordable and petrol is cheap, it is not a place that worries much about politics. That is a boon for the government, and a problem for Labour. “When you knock on the door of a big new house,” asks a shadow minister, “how do you tell the people living there that the country is going wrong?”

    So, are these people "exhausted, have zero learning opportunity/access nor adequate psychosocioeconomic support", or just people who happen to disagree with you?

    To me this looks like another example of that irregular verb: I know the facts, you have opinions, he's biased, they've been brainwashed.

    209:

    Especially if you're trying to pull the wool over their eyes?

    210:

    "Secondly, there's more than missiles to conquest: the missiles might be useful against the RAF Typhoon squadron at Stanley, but completely beg the question of what happens a couple of weeks later when a pair of Astute-class SSNs show up and start sinking the Argentinian navy, while the army still needs some way of supplying whoever pulls the short straw and gets sent to occupy the Falklands."

    Thanks for the analysis. These problems would be magnified for any hypothetical Chinese invasion of Taiwan. In short, the Chinese Navy doesn't have a weapon to give it a decisive advantage against SSNs.

    "And that's before Boris Johnson -- aka Clownshoes Churchill -- takes the god-given opportunity to dress up in Margaret Thatcher drag and send a QE class carrier down the Atlantic to distract everyone from COVID/Brexit/his latest sex-or-corruption-or-both scandal."

    Would he send the QE though? The missiles in question were designed specifically to sink aircraft carriers and destroy airfields in the first 5 minutes of a war (think Guam or Okinawa).

    211:

    My hope is both Argentina and the PRC step away from military solutions, as they frequently open noxious cans of worms, like the invasion of Iraq, where we discovered what could be worse than Saddam Hussein. If Xi is feeling pressured to "Do something", shots may be fired. If this extends to a US carrier being sunk, at minimum, it may become difficult to buy anything made in the PRC. Trade is better, giving the PRC most of the benefits and governing is an SEP

    212:

    Re: 'So, are these people "exhausted, have zero learning opportunity/access nor adequate psychosocioeconomic support", or just people who happen to disagree with you?'

    Not clear to me which 'people' you mean.

    My take-away from the post I commented on re: 'sheeple' was that 'sheeple'/people who are easily manipulated are inherently lazy/stupid. (And I don't think this is true for many folks. )

    About the living in the burbs thing and being oblivious as it relates to exhaustion, etc.

    Yeah - I can relate because I and pretty well all of my friends/sibs went through that same or very similar phase: buy the best house you can get a mortgage for, spend 3 hr/day commuting quite often after a 10-11 hour 'work day', start/raise a family (plus multiple pets), plus misc errands, chores, home maintenance, etc. Exhaustion and sleep deprivation pretty well for 15 years or so -- and we each had only one official full-time job thanks to enough education to get that decent job in the 'big city'. Very tough to get and stay involved in politics when you've run out of hours in a day.

    Basically -- you can use exhaustion to keep people from learning including learning about how others are living.

    213:

    That's an intelligent take on the whole thing. I'm not sure I agree with you entirely - lots of media is deliberately designed to play to people's fears - but it's definitely a part of the problem.

    214:

    In short, the Chinese Navy doesn't have a weapon to give it a decisive advantage against SSNs.

    I don't know how decisive it would be, but one thing going for the PLAN is the bathymetry of the Taiwan/Formosa Strait -- it's pretty shallow. IMO, air-independent SSKs are better suited to operate there.

    215:

    Before attention is shifted entirely to "Strange Attractors", my condolences (FWIW) to those who miss Prince Phillip. I haven't heard differently, but it sounds like there might've been enough of him still there to say goodbye, a couple more years and that might've been unlikely.

    216:

    Would he send the QE though? The missiles in question were designed specifically to sink aircraft carriers and destroy airfields in the first 5 minutes of a war (think Guam or Okinawa).

    I have no idea!

    However, missiles are useless without targeting information, and unlike Argentina, China has a fully-developed military with stuff like spy satellites: it's unclear how easy the Argentinian forces would find it to locate a carrier in the middle of the Atlantic, especially with submarines sniping at them with Tomahawks. And in any case, a Briitsh carrier group would have Type 45 destroyers providing an air defense screen -- a class designed for anti-aircraft and anti-missile warfare (including supersonic sea-skimming missiles and ballistic missiles).

    Basically these are all horrifyingly expensive 21st century weapons systems that have never actually been used in combat. I'm pretty sure nobody has any idea how effective they'd actually be against each other.

    217:

    To summarise: Calling people sheep in order to change their minds is a baaaaad strategy.

    Similar to trying to win an election by calling those who don't agree with you stupid. That only works (when it does) if you start out with a majority.

    218:

    China is a huge country. Don't you think it could hide military exercices in which to test 21st century weapons systems?

    219:

    I'll answer this. They have tested the weapons. However, there's war-game tests, and then there's real life. To give an example Saudi Arabia a few months ago successfully intercepted a Houthi missile fired at Riyadh. Houthi missiles ARE more primitive than Chinese missiles, but I don't know to what extent the Chinese missiles could counter the system the Saudis were using (likely designed in the US or Israel).

    Let me put it another way-to what extent did the Armenia War last year validate or disprove previous war-game scenarios about the use of drones against an industrial army? Or the Libyan Civil War? The Russians extensively tested the Pantsir system against drones. That didn't stop the Bayraktar drones from destroying several of them. Not only did that kiboshed Haftar's plans to take Tripoli, it also allowed the GNA to retake a lot of territory from his forces.

    220:

    dpb @ 204: To summarise: Calling people sheep in order to change their minds is a baaaaad strategy.

    ... and rude.

    221:

    Charles Stross

    They are, in a very real sense, strangers to me: no more familiar than Kim Kardashian or Elon Musk.

    I don't actively seek to avoid "news" about the "Royal Family" the way I do with those others. I am mildly amused to indifferent rather than actively annoyed by it.

    I mourn the passing of Phillip as much as I mourn the passing of any of the "Greatest Generation". He had a long, full life and I hope it was a happy one. I know his family will miss him.

    222:

    Before attention is shifted entirely to "Strange Attractors"

    I've got one: Has there been any press coverage in the UK about the switching on of coal-fired electricity generation Monday in response to the very low wind speeds and consequent lack of wind power over the past 5-6 days?

    223:

    Actually, I'm hoping China doesn't invade Taiwan, given that an "independent" (under the control of the 0.1%) is significant in the end of the novel I'm currently working on, and it's set about 105 or so years from now....

    224:

    Basically these are all horrifyingly expensive 21st century weapons systems that have never actually been used in combat. I'm pretty sure nobody has any idea how effective they'd actually be against each other.

    The thing about going to war in the 21st century is that people know how the weapons that got extensive use in the last war will work.

    However, since weapons are very expensive to build, it's hard to justify thorough testing of shiny new weapons in RL conditions.

    Consider: (1) 1986 F-16 Inversion when flying over the equator - this was caught in simulation (fortunately). Cruising over the equator, and your plane flips over due to software doing what it was told rather than what you want it to. Oops.

    (2) 2007 F-22 Complete systems failure over International Date Line. That happened in real life. Fortunately, the planes involved were able to visually follow their fuel tankers back to safety.

    Just two examples, found with a bit of searching. I'm sure that there are many more - plus even more bugs that will be found only in the next war.

    225:

    To give an example Saudi Arabia a few months ago successfully intercepted a Houthi missile fired at Riyadh. Houthi missiles ARE more primitive than Chinese missiles, but I don't know to what extent the Chinese missiles could counter the system the Saudis were using (likely designed in the US or Israel).

    But the real question is what would happen if China fired 50 or 100 at a time? And how many times could they do this?

    I suspect the answers are maybe most of them stopped on the first volley but on the 4th or 5th?

    226:

    Some 21st systems are already tested.

    I suspect that a single Storm Shadow targeted on the Minister of Defence's office in the Libertador Building in Buenos Aires, would focus minds admirably. Do it about 3am on a Monday night and you minimise casualties among innocent bystanders.

    It is likely the minister would quickly identify ending the conflict as a personal political imperative.

    Doing the same to every military airbase in the country at the same time would make it clear you want the ill advised conflict ended.

    We've moved on since the Falklands.

    227: 222 - Well, last Saturday I did report the death of the last survivor of the Battle of Cape Matapan (27 to 29 March 1941). Somehow I saw that as a much more significant event than him getting married or talking to people. 223 - I don't think so. What there has been is a manifesto pledge by the Scottish Green Party (reported) to leave the remaining North Sea Oil where it is. What was not reported was any proposal to replace non-fuel petrochemicals (such as the plastics large bits of our computers are made of) with anything else. 225 (1) and (2) - Failures by USians to write navigation software to handle these events correctly. I don't specialise in navigation software and can tell you that much just from the blog posting.
    228:

    Um, yes, the US is used up and all, but has anyone realized that we've got the most veteran military force in the world at this point, warts and all? I don't think China's fielded their military as much as we have. The Russians have done more, as has the UK. China has experience internally, but less externally, AFAIK.

    Then there's the whole infowar/cyberwar angle, and apparently that's going on at a low level already. It's not a "yapping chihuahuas of cyberwar" scenario, it's that major institutions are getting attacked daily, and every once in a while one breaks through. But I suspect that the shelf life for most cyberweapons is on par with milk or SFF novels, not bullets. They won't necessarily be useful if you leave them sitting around unused for a year or five, because someone may find and patch the exploit they require.

    What we don't know is how less tested Chinese systems will work against worn US systems. If China had any sense and wanted a military advantage, right now they'd go for a big ol' strategy that emphasized a global fight against climate change and united all the major powers. Then, with the US taking a very neeeded peace dividend, they could rev up and take Taiwan. I suspect that a lot of Chinese jian-rattling is about taking the focus off internal problems. Ditto Russia and Putin's dream of reuniting the Soviet Bloc. What I'm not sure about is how much the Chinese and Russians have military-industrial complex issues analogous to those that plague US politics.

    229:

    Just two examples, found with a bit of searching. I'm sure that there are many more - plus even more bugs that will be found only in the next war.

    I think the best/worst example of this is the saga of the USN Mark 14 torpedo in WWII. An utter disaster and waste of money that cost the US all kinds of lives and money to deal with the failures and then the fixes. All due to a mindset of saving money up front.

    Here's a write up. I've linked to the start of the issues but the entire article is worth reading about how a bureaucracy can really mess things up.

    They were performing so poorly that an admiral set up a test through nets in a harbor in Australia to PROVE to the brass in Washington that the crews were not the problem.

    230:

    I don't specialise in navigation software and can tell you that much just from the blog posting.

    There are a LOT of edge cases in such software. Not all of them obvious during development. And for those plane I suspect memory and CPU power were issues.

    A friend work at NASA at the Cape a few decades ago. He said they were doing a sat launch around midnight. Rocket went up fine but a minute or few in the tracking radar reset itself to "home" and they lost the track. So per procedure they destroyed the sat.

    In the post mortum it was discovered there was a software bug in the radar system that would cause an uncaught divide by zero (or similar) fault that would only occur on the date of that launch.

    231:

    SFReader @ 213

    I'm talking about the people mentioned in the Economist article, who live in new-build Barratt homes.

    They take as an example an estate at Pegswood, which used to be a coal mine. Its a half hour train ride from the centre of Newcastle on Tyne, so not a 3 hour commute, and of course there is nothing saying that its inhabitants have to work in the city.

    Another example from the article: Cramlington, which is a 25 minute drive from the centre of Newcastle on Tyne.

    In Cramlington, Richard, who works in sales, earns around £28,000 a year and his partner, a part-time administrative assistant, earns £12,000. That is enough for a four-bed house and two cars. “If I’d moved to London and got a graduate job, I’d probably be renting a shitty flat and I doubt I’d have two kids,” he says.

    Don't know how many hours Richard works, but he doesn't sound like someone who does nothing but eat, sleep and work just to keep food on the table. I also don't know where he works. I mention Newcastle because its the nearest city, but there is a big industrial and retail estate west of Cramlington, so its even possible that Richard has a ten minute walk to work.

    Obviously I can't prove that these examples weren't cherry picked, but the point of the article was to explain why so many people in the north of England are now voting Tory for the first time. Most of them come from traditional Labour working class backgrounds; many will have older relatives who used to be miners. They aren't voting Tory because they have never heard of Socialism, or because they don't know about Labour policies.

    232:

    Nuts. Here's the link.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_14_torpedo#Controversy

    If a moderator wants to move it to the comment, great.

    233:

    What I'm not sure about is how much the Chinese and Russians have military-industrial complex issues analogous to those that plague US politics.

    Well they do have that habit of executing the someone at the top of a process if they really piss off the PTB. That can focus a manager at times.

    234:

    ...and Storm Shadow can be delivered from a range of about 300 miles. Even if you can identify targets, can you defend against aircraft firing missiles from that far out? (well, unless you have a system like a combination of Samson and Aster 30)?

    235:

    Ah, yes, US-written navigation software.

    When I stage my coup (all one of me), and become short-term czar of the US, one of the first things I'm going to do it order ALL UNITS IN CGS, and GET RID of American (I don't care we call it English) units, dump 'em on the trash heap of history with cubits.

    236:

    ALL UNITS IN CGS

    Make it MKS and I'll agree. I think in newtons and joules better than dynes and ergs.

    237:

    What about changing every unit of velocity to furlongs / fortnight?

    (For the record: 1 furlong / fortnight = 1.70 x 10-4 m/s, or 6.11 x 10-4 km/h.)

    238:

    Why do you think that military and similar systems do NOT use CGS or MKS now and for a while?

    239:

    Has there been any press coverage in the UK about the switching on of coal-fired electricity generation Monday in response to the very low wind speeds and consequent lack of wind power over the past 5-6 days?

    Use It Or Lose It, basically. The UK has very few coal-fired power stations still available for use. EU-wide pollution controls the UK is still signed up to limit operation to 1500 hours a year for each coal-fired station. This time is normally reserved for winter when the highest demand for electricity occurs but if the Spring arrives, those 1500 hours haven't been used up and a lull in the wind occurs then one or two stations with reserve time on their docket get fired up. It's worthwhile noting that the 1500 hours limit has extended the lifespan of several of the larger large coal-fired stations that, absent the limits would have been run into the ground by now and shut down completely.

    Bringing a coal-fired station up to speed and generating electricity takes time and effort and doing it to train up the staff, identify technical problems etc. once or twice a year regardless is also a good idea. The fuel, lump coal stores pretty well in heaps but it does deteriorate over time so using up the older stocks every now and then is worthwhile economically, they have been been paid for already after all.

    240:

    Navigation software usually holds lat/Long internally in decimal degrees. The issue with crossing the Equator or the International Date Line is that one of the 2 has its sign reversed.

    241:

    (1), (2)

    Something I've noticed for, lessee, maybe 40 years.

    Programmers/software engineers, at least in the US and I suspect elsewhere, can be very skilled, very effective and produce miraculous things. But they tend not to be very broad-scope outside the programming context, and that can have effects.

    (3) I was advising on the creation of an open-literature database in the early 1980 that was meant to keep track of Soviet scientists doing interesting things. A major, trauma-inducing event for the programmers was to realize that transliteration from Russian, let alone translation, is not a one-to-one transform. Joukowski and Zhukovsky are the same guy.

    They eventually figured out how to handle that, and I suspect today it wouldn't be all that hard to do.

    (4) Names again, leaving aside transliteration. Chinese is Family - Given (AIUI) and Russian in official documents tends to be the same. Spanish is Given - (other given) - Patronymic - Matronymic. And, of course, because patriarchy, the patronymic takes precedence. The President of Panama, Laurentino Cortizo Cohen, is properly referred to as Presidente Cortizo. Please do not call him President Cohen.

    And so it goes.

    242:

    And there's Icelandic, where the 'surname' indicates father/mother — so parents and children have different surnames.

    243:

    AT @ 223 No Nothing to see here,move along, we're pretending it didn't happen We know the answer is nuclear, but people are still scared of the paper Tigers of the protestors

    David L Mark 14 torpedo? LINK ( Ignore intial advert ) - "Drachinefel" posts some amzing naval history stuff ....

    244:

    Let's just say metric....

    245:

    Sure, we can. When a) you give folks right out of school a chance to learn, and not have them right mission-critical code, and b) when management gives us the chance to do a good job.

    "There's never time to do it right, there's always time to do it over" was the mantra attributed to mgmt when I started programming in 1980.

    246:

    Volume in barn-mega parsecs. (~3cc)

    247:

    Mark 14 torpedo?

    Yes. That YouTube video seems to have been scripted from the Wiki article I missed putting in my comment.

    The British sardonic voice gives it a bit of extra flavor.

    I liked the very brief put down of Admiral King along side of him demanding the UNS BuOrd FIX IT. From King's Wiki article: King, who was an Anglophobe, displayed stunning and uncharacteristic incompetence and disregard for the lives of American sailors by ignoring valuable British advice regarding convoys and up-to-date British intelligence on U-boat operations in the Atlantic.

    And in a strange coincidence sort of thing, this morning I was working on some computer issues for the grandson of the commander of the US Pacific sub fleet at the outbreak of WWII.

    248:

    What I find really interesting in that article is the drawing by Lear himself, which features a runcible spoon without any prongs, in contrast to most definitions I came across.

    After a quick Google image search to confirm that, yes. Both the original drawing and the photos of real objects. That 'Victorian runcible spoon' is a spork. I have seen sporks before.

    I conjecture that silver Victorian-era antiques are considered too dignified to be publicly called sporks by stuffy people.

    249:

    What I'm not sure about is how much the Chinese and Russians have military-industrial complex issues analogous to those that plague US politics. Well they do have that habit of executing the someone at the top of a process if they really piss off the PTB. That can focus a manager at times.

    That's not quite the problem I was referring to. In the US Military-Industrial complex, as in the Prison-IC, the Fire-IC and so forth, the problem is that the people profiting from the complex made it as hard as possible to get rid of the complex. It provides jobs in rural areas, it sends money to a majority of districts in the legislature, it deals with a Horrible Crisis (if not a HORRIBLE CRISIS), and it gives people profiting enough money to buy legislators to keep the gravy train rolling. And of course it burns out poor people, cranks up deficits, and doesn't solve the crisis it's supposed to solve.

    But it's profitable for the contracting companies.

    The problem the US has is that hurting the MIC causes trouble in a large number of areas, making it harder to pull out of wars (cf: Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam...). What I don't know is whether the military forces in other nuclear powers have similar institutions that make it hard to downsize militaries.

    250:

    1.8x10^12: not just a Good Idea, it's the law!

    251:

    Re: ' [exhaustion] but it's definitely a part of the problem.'

    I've been wondering how the COVID-19 hybrid office/work-from-home is going to play out long term - specifically whether workers/employees are going to end up with more or less time for themselves.

    Related to this is the drive for more work flexibility: employees being on-call 24/7 and/or showing up wherever on demand. I understand the need for building in more 'flexibility' into our work/career models but am concerned that the current version that's being used is resulting in employees* working (and expected to keep working) even longer hours - esp. in the US and any other country that's largely adopted the US business-centric work ethic model.

    • Teachers appear to be the most visible example of how this current 'flexible model' is not working - for them or for their students.
    252:

    I think the best/worst example of this is the saga of the USN Mark 14 torpedo in WWII.

    Ah, yes; Failure is like Onions. Not everyone on this blog will have half an hour to listen to Drachinifel be snarky about torpedoes and political failures but for those who do the presentation is worthwhile.

    253:

    Re: ' ... people mentioned in the Economist article, who live in new-build Barratt homes'

    Sorry - I couldn't read it (paywalled) but thanks for the summary!

    About the only explanations that jump to mind:

    a) They're aspiring their way into success which means voting for role-models and not exhibiting any behavior that could reduce their chances at promotion. (I'm guessing their demographics - esp. employment profile - would skew away from entrepreneurs, artists, intellectuals and toward the larger/corp middle manager set.)

    b) They're traditionalists: their family have always supported the Tories and they personally have little patience or interest in politics overall. (Similar to the fairly strong GOP support among Pennsylvania miners despite being repeatedly screwed by same.)

    254:

    The Missouri* legislature is considering a bill to establish a Rush Limbaugh State holiday:

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/bill-would-create-rush-limbaugh-day/ar-BB1fDIeb

    They're asking for January 12, I might be happier if it was February 17.

    *We can't agree how to pronounce it and we live here! At least half of the year "Misery" works fairly accurately.

    255:

    We know the answer is nuclear,

    After diving into the data available at

    https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/download.phpable

    which seems to capture a large fraction of the UK grid supply and demand at 5-minute intervals, I am inclined to agree.

    Or at least want to see a way to buffer the extreme variability/ intermittency of wind and solar on time scales ranging from minutes to weeks that wouldn't be as bad environmentally and economically as building the equivalent nuclear plants.

    Other takes on the question are solicited.

    256:

    Tim H. @ 255: "We can't agree how to pronounce it and we live here!"

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f0/En-us-Missouri.ogg

    257:

    At best, I expect improvements in energy storage to reduce the number of nuclear plants needed, but not in my lifetime. On the other hand, I would be more comfortable about Nuclear power in the US if the Navy ran it, "For profit" and "Life & death" are an ugly mix.

    258:

    That's their opinion, and it's what you'll hear in the more civilized parts of the state, but possibly half the population would beg to differ. Your selection does hint at the weather rather well though.

    259:

    The Missouri* legislature is considering a bill to establish a Rush Limbaugh State holiday: I won't speak ill of dead American Royalty (yet), but here's some tame material instead: Anyone else remember Rush Limbaugh (and many others) swallowing this bait? Pure big-words gibberish, in a made-up journal, with made up references. Wishful thinkers (David Thorpe, 12 Nov 2007) Carbon dioxide production by benthic bacteria: the death of manmade global warming theory?

    (e.g. The Journal for Geoclimatic Studies is the name given to a nonexistent journal which published a fabricated global warming study in November 2007 )

    There's also this, from around 2000, a web comic (Electric Sheep Web Comix - Issue Two). (It's quite dated, about the Limbaugh/H.Clinton animosity, and Limbaugh dies of a heart attack.) "Rush Limbaugh Eats Everything" In particular, the epilogue about future Americans in Antarctica: Epilogue: One thousand years later. "It was Roosh Lim-Ba's sacrifice which brought forth the abundant, life-giving fungus forests which cover the land, as well as the vast herds of rats who provide us with meat, milk and furs. It is Lim-Ba we thank for these goodnesses!

    260:

    Then there's the whole infowar/cyberwar angle, and apparently that's going on at a low level already. It's not a "yapping chihuahuas of cyberwar" scenario, it's that major institutions are getting attacked daily, and every once in a while one breaks through. But I suspect that the shelf life for most cyberweapons is on par with milk or SFF novels, not bullets. They won't necessarily be useful if you leave them sitting around unused for a year or five, because someone may find and patch the exploit they require.

    While the larger point that the future of war, especially among the big boys, will be increasingly electronic (and probably non-attributable), this particular "lose it or use it" concern is probably misguided.

    Current (and likely future) major attacks are quite modular. To use a physical metaphor, think of the actual vulnerability/exploit as the fuel for the missile and the attack code that does all the damage as the warhead (or the spy camera, as in the case of the recent SolarWinds attack). The attack portion can be held indefinitely, other than updates every few years for OS or major firmware upgrades. The exploits are easier to write, since there's a never-ending stream of vulnerabilities that go by and can be cherry-picked; often when a major attack is exposed, it actually has three or four different exploit avenues available to adapt to whatever the local environment is.

    261:

    Tim H NOT 12th Jan - please! ( My birthday )

    Boyd Nation The Boss' employers are into Financial Services & they are, naturally careful about IT security. Even so, they were attacked earlier this week - the hackers did't get very far in, but even so, there was a temporary (?) upgrade of live-users security, require log-in reconfirmations/passwords etc, until their internal IT guys could patch-&-sterilise the problem. They certainly were not happy little bunnies for a while.

    262:

    I think that Brazil, India, South Africa, and a 100+ other countries might not go along with that solution.

    Or at least want to discuss it more. [/sarcasm]

    263:

    Not everyone on this blog will have half an hour to listen to Drachinifel be snarky about torpedoes and political failures but for those who do the presentation is worthwhile.

    I left the Widipedia link out of my main comment. Here it is again. 5 to 10 minute read. Everything in the YouTube plus a bit more.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_14_torpedo#Controversy

    264:

    Spork was a propetary name, introduce in 1909, but then disappeared; it was reused as such in the 1970s, and started to be used in common speech. While Victorian examples COULD be called sporks, they weren't at the time.

    265:

    When was the last time that the USA faced up against even a second-class military? Iraq's air defences were at best third-class, and its ground defences had been bombed to hell and back by the time there was any contact. And other than that? The USA navy, which would be relevant to a far-eastern conflict, has essentially NO recent experience.

    266:

    SFReader @ 254:

    a) They're aspiring their way into success which means voting for role-models and not exhibiting any behavior that could reduce their chances at promotion.

    Possibly for some, but probably not enough to explain the "Red Wall" collapse at the last election. The article makes the point that these estates contain a mixture of the aspiring lower-middle-class: corporate pole-climbers (like Richard the salesman), lower-stratum government employees (teachers, nurses, policemen) and self employed traders (plumbers, driving instructors).

    They're traditionalists: their family have always supported the Tories

    Definitely not. These people come from traditional Labour backgrounds. The whole point of the article is that their switch to Tory was the reason why Labour lost those seats.

    One point mentioned in the article is that these people use (and value) free government health and education, but they don't rely on government benefits and rather object to seeing their taxes spent on those who do. (Yes, I know, insert rant on the Victorian myth of the "undeserving" poor here, but the myth persists).

    Possible other explanations (veering off into speculation):

    They are more nationalist than socialist. Jeremy Corbin's history of supporting people who were killing British soldiers really rubbed people up the wrong way, while the Tory whole-hearted support for Brexit appealed to them. This is the social class that provides a lot of enlisted men for the military.

    They have a strong distrust of socially liberal thinking. Gay rights, Black Lives Matter, tearing down statues of slavers, these things leave them cold. At best they see them as irrelevant, at worst they actively oppose them. (Insert Kitchen Sink Drama scene here).

    However, all this is getting away from the original point of this discussion. I referenced this article to show that dismissing everyone who doesn't agree with a more leftist point of view as "sheeple" who don't know better is short sighted and intellectually lazy. In fact, it exhibits exactly the same vices that it accuses the "sheeple" of.

    267:

    They aren't voting Tory because they have never heard of Socialism, or because they don't know about Labour policies.

    So what are you saying here: they are voting Tory because they are arseholes? There's a lot of that going around...

    268:

    When was the last time that the USA faced up against even a second-class military?

    Consider Kosovo. In the face of air supremacy, the JNA managed to both conceal and protect the vast majority of its fighting vehicles in theatre; to deny low-level operations by allied aircraft; even managed to shoot down a stealth bomber.

    Consider Iraq. For all that the 1991 and 2003 invasions were overwhelmingly successful, it's worth remembering that the Iraqi Army was still mounting battalion-level attacks against the UK Brigade in Basra, a week into the campaign; and managed to monster a US Aviation Regiment at Karbala (28 out of 31 AH-64 suffered serious damage; one was shot down).

    The problem for any opponent is that the US is unbelievably powerful. Any weakness in your armed forces, and the US has the resources to exploit that gap to the full, while accepting losses in people and equipment that would deter anyone else. If the British had 28 AH-64 "seriously damaged", that's half the entire fleet and possibly all of its spare parts gone...

    Iraq's air defences were at best third-class

    Errrr..... no. They were rather good - we sold them a lot of it, and trained some of their people - and the pilots certainly didn't regard the threat as "second rate" (having listened to a couple). Again, the gap was that the Allies had practised exactly this, over and over, at RED FLAG and similar; while various sneaky types were cutting fiber-optic cables to screw up their command and control.

    269:

    The Labour voters in the North of England voted Labour in the past because they were poor, generally. They lived in a rented council house and the menfolk did dirty work like construction, coal-mining and shipbuilding. They didn't vote Tory because Tories were toffee-nosed gits who worked in offices shuffling paper, they owned their houses and didn't rent them, their kids went to grammar schools and University while the Labour voter's kids left school at 15 to go into the same sort of hard-grafting work they did. Those voters were tribal, racist, sexist and anti-Semitic but solid supporters of the Labour party which ignored their foibles as long as they voted the right way at elections.

    Now the descendants of those Labour voters have a house and a mortgage, their kids go to decent schools because of where they live, they're earning a lot more than their parents ever did but they're two hundred thousand quid in debt to the mortgage company. They're terrified their property's value will go down, not up especially if the Wrong Sort of people move in next door so their family history of xenophobia and racism and new financial strains pushes them towards the Tories who have always supported property prices and keeping the Wrong Sort out.

    270:

    the extreme variability/ intermittency of wind and solar on time scales ranging from minutes to weeks

    This table is impressionistic, but it gives the correct impression. It's the UK wind power in gigawatts sampled once each morning between 10:30 and 11:00 UTC from 1 April 2021 until this morning, 15 April.

    Wind Power GW

    6.54 3.98 4.81 6.99 12.14 11.66 7.69 11.08 3.29 2.69 2.58 1.75 0.2 0.74 2.39

    271:

    Nojay As you have noted, to some extent - - - Don't forget hanging monkeys as Frenchmen! They are amazingly xenophobic - Brexit pushed all their unthinking prejudice-buttons. Having Corbyn as arsehole-in-chief, facing both ways on Brexit, really didn't help either, to say the least.

    272:

    What we don't know is how less tested Chinese systems will work against worn US systems.

    Or how well US systems will hold up against a numerically superior front rank or near-front rank great power, as opposed to lightly armed irregulars.

    The US military is well-tested against Afghanistan, Iraq, and other colonial adversaries, which is a whole different kettle of fish from the PLA.

    Consider front-line fighters: the Taliban had bupkis and Iraq had 1980s vintage Russian kit flown by demoralized crews. In contrast, the PLAAF has stuff like hundreds of J-11 (an SU-33 clone with Chinese improvements) and J-10 (home developed 4th generation jet fighter, looks heavily based on the IAI Lavi, an Israeli 4G fighter that was cancelled under US pressure to stop exports competing with the F-16). Not to mention stuff like the Chengdu J-20 stealth fighter just entering service -- a plausible F-22/F-35 competitor.

    When you bear in mind that the wikipedia data on these fighters' capabilities reflects what the Chinese government is willing to talk about in public (the real capabilities of the versions in front-line service for defending Chinese airspace presumably outstrip any export versions by quite a margin) the picture for US forces trying to defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion look very grim indeed (as in: expect high aircraft losses on both sides).

    273:

    The cost of pumped-water grid power storage is about £200 million per GWh. Battery tech might bring grid power storage down to £100 million per GWh or so but the batteries are the most expensive part of the cost of storage and they need to be replaced every ten to twenty years whereas pumped-storage systems last a lot longer after the costs of construction have been met.

    Assuming we were trying to meet demand for electricity from renewables only and using storage to prevent rolling blackouts or even a collapse of the grid, the UK would need to spend the thick end of a trillion quid on batteries to sufficiently buffer demand and the vastly expanded fleet of wind turbines and solar panels needed to fill that storage when the weather conditions collaborated. That's not even considering the 300GW or so we use for heating in winter for homes, businesses, hospitals etc. which really needs to come from non-fossil-fuel electricity rather than burning gas as we do now which contributes to climate change.

    274:

    Now Labour has totally-pro-Brexit Starmer in charge they can maybe claw back some of the Red Wall in the North but even though he's positioning the party as Tory-lite and all in favour of maintaining property prices and keeping Those People out I'm not sure the NuTory voters in the North will come back. It's a shame, really, if ultra-super-Marxist baby-eater Jeremy Corbyn had actually won the election we'd probably have had a second Brexit referendum by now but them's the breaks.

    275:

    Also, Iraq had been under sanctions for over a decade, and their equipment had suffered badly from lack of maintenance. That was one reason the inspectors pointed out that it almost certainly did NOT have deployable WMD, as was then shown to be the case.

    276:

    While all of that is impressive, in my opinion the real determinant is tolerable casualties.

    The impression is that the US can only accept between 5k (Iraq) and 58k (Vietnam) KIAs before they abandon the mission. Europe can accept even fewer. Iran's entire defense policy is based on that assumption. The big unknown for Xi is that he doesn't know how many casualties the Chinese population is willing to accept before they'd turn against this war.

    While those fighters are impressive, the real resources are spent on drones such as the Wing Loon (Pterodactyl), equivalent submarine drones (not familiar with them), and carrier-killer missiles. The idea is to kill 5k USian soldiers within the first 24 hours without suffering corresponding casualties on his side. If he thinks he can achieve this, he'll invade.

    Since I'm not familiar with the Wing Loon's performance, I was using the Bayraktar as a stand-in. Hence, the Falklands scenario.

    277:

    "...two hundred thousand quid in debt to the mortgage company. They're terrified their property's value will go down, not up..."

    ...having been trained by Tory interests into thinking that the opportunity to indulge in childish dressing-up fantasies (wheee look at me I'm a financial magnate) anent the price of their house is of such tremendous value that it not merely outweighs any contrary motivation to revile those same interests for compelling them to send several extra hundreds of thousands of quid up in smoke over their lifetime, but hoodwinks them into denying that they are so compelled at all, even as they live their lives in holy terror of their one sole great fear of being unable to meet the demands of the mortgage company.

    278:

    I don't know about the UK, but for many people in the USA the house is a significant asset in retirement. Even if medical care is free, it's only normal that their main concern is 'do I have enough to retire'. I know you didn't say this, but voting based primarily on that concern doesn't make them sheeple.

    279:

    Assuming we were trying to meet demand for electricity from renewables only and using storage...

    Have you seen any estimates of how many GWh storage/backup(*) would be needed for each installed GW of wind (or wind + solar)? Since the wind can go for several days at really low levels, that seems to imply something like 100 GWh/GW, no?

    (*) The UK currently uses gas turbines for much of the backup and those are well suited to the task -- except for the "gas" part.

    280:

    Nojay Not quite Starmer is entirely aware that Brexit was an utter fuck-up ... but dare he say so? Unfortunately, no, he dare not. Meanwhile - I note that Eric Pickles, of all people, is saying that the current tory sleaze/chumocracy/nice-little-earners scandal is not acceptable. It's really bad if it's got up his nose, I think.

    281:

    Consider the British Expeditionary Force in France in the early days of World War I. They were "veterans" against colonial uprisings, but they had some major difficulties fighting other first-world powers and IIRC were thoroughly demoralized by the time the French were ready to launch their counter-attach at the First Battle of Marne.

    282:

    Have you seen any estimates of how many GWh storage/backup(*) would be needed

    There have been some academic exercises on storage to cover the intermittency of renewable generation but they're based on estimates of how rare you want rolling blackouts and possible grid failures to be in the future. Do you want 99% guaranteed supply, 99.9% guaranteed, five-nines etc.? You could plan storage to cover, say, only 50% generation of demand from renewables for a week but what happens to the much rarer but still possible case of 20% generation for ten days? Do you pay twice as much up front for extra infrastructure to cover that outlier case, are your customers willing to pay to prevent that Black Swan event just in case? That still leaves the question of the excess generating capacity over and above that needed to meet demand that is required to fill up that storage in the first place, something which further adds to the costs.

    Non-fossil-fuel generators that can supply power on demand are basically limited to nuclear plants. Even hydro is storage-limited although nations that use hydro as a large or near-total part of their generating capacity like Norway have very large amounts of infrastructure and a small population -- IIRC Norway has over 31GW of hydro installations for a population of about 5 million, that's 6kW per person. The UK generates about 30GW on average for 60 million people, more in the winter and less in the summer of course but the Norwegians heat their homes with cheap hydro electricity, we burn shitloads of fossil gas to do the same.

    283:

    The impression is that the US can only accept between 5k (Iraq) and 58k (Vietnam) KIAs before they abandon the mission.

    I don't think that's true. Both Iraq and Vietnam were unpopular wars from the beginning, and represented policy positions which were obviously clueless, and we'd lost all those people without winning anything, or even making usable progress towards winning. That's a perfect formula for poor morale.

    Give the U.S. a war where the military is accomplishing something that can be successfully sold as good policy and the U.S. public will get behind them with an 80-95 percent approval rating. I think that keeping China from gobbling it's neighbors will qualify, as will keeping Russia from gobbling it's neighbors.

    Attacking Iran, not so much.

    284:

    With regard to Taiwan, aren't they officially under the U.S. "nuclear umbrella?" Or is that not the current policy?

    285:

    "Give the U.S. a war where the military is accomplishing something that can be successfully sold as good policy and the U.S. public will get behind them with an 80-95 percent approval rating. I think that keeping China from gobbling it's neighbors will qualify, as will keeping Russia from gobbling it's neighbors."

    That may hold for the generation that remembers the Cold War, and is predominantly white. The younger generation doesn't remember the Cold War, and treat Europe with, at best, indifference. If China or Russia were swallowing countries where they have extended family, attitudes would change. Note that the East Asian American population skews older, with 70% of Asian Americans identifying as Chinese, Indian, of Filipinos.

    It might be broadly popular, but I doubt it would breach 60% among the younger generation, roughly the popularity of both the Iraq and Vietnam Wars at the beginning.

    You're probably right that the public might be willing to support higher casualties for popular wars. I also agree that a war against Iran wouldn't be popular. I'm just not sure that protecting Taiwan or Europe would be more popular these days?

    286:

    "With regard to Taiwan, aren't they officially under the U.S. "nuclear umbrella?" Or is that not the current policy?"

    Officially, the US recognizes One China. They refuse to say whether they recognize the ROC or PRC as the legitimate government. Unofficially, it is by verbal, not written, treaty.

    287:

    It's a shame, really, if ultra-super-Marxist baby-eater Jeremy Corbyn had actually won the election we'd probably have had a second Brexit referendum by now but them's the breaks.

    The same Jeremy Corbyn who imposed a three line whip on the Labour Party to get them behind May on her desperately premature Article 50 invocation? Once he'd done that, he basically bollixed any chance of a second referendum. If Article 50 was to be invoked, it should have been after a coherent strategy had been agreed — one on which we could have had a referendum. Instead a fixed period countdown was started, with us effectively crashing out in a mess.

    After that I may have voted Labour, but it was as the lesser of two evils.

    What might have happened if there had been a pro-EU Labour leader, who knows? Someone who'd have pushed with passion for us to stay in the EU, one who believed in the freedoms and protections that we're losing. The fight might still have been lost, but the outcome surely wouldn't have been as abysmal as what we've got.

    288:

    "Give the U.S. a war where the military is accomplishing something that can be successfully sold as good policy and the U.S. public will get behind them with an 80-95 percent approval rating."

    On thinking about it more, I think that you're basing your analysis on a huge historical misconception. Withe the exception of WWII, the American Civil War, and Afghanistan, the concept of a popular war in the US is a historic retcon. In all three cases, there was an attack on US soil

    This situation is more analogous to WWI. For all of Greg's complaints about the US waiting to long to enter the war, the prewar situation was that, while neutrality was the overall winner, support for Germany exceeded that of support for the UK (Irish Americans tended to enlist in the German Army before the US entered the war). The German American population still had relatives fighting in the German Army. Teddy Roosevelt ran for the election of 1916 as a third-party candidate on a "German-aligned neutrality". Support for the UK was mostly upon the richer strata of the North, and the former Confederate veterans who believed erroneously that the UK was pro-Confederacy and despised the fact that 1/3rd of the Union Army was composed of Irish and German volunteers (Wilson's constituents). Had Roosevelt not split the Republican vote, it's unlikely the US would have joined WWI at all.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_in_World_War_I#Public_opinion

    289:

    The same Jeremy Corbyn who imposed a three line whip on the Labour Party to get them behind May on her desperately premature Article 50 invocation?

    Yes. The same Jermey Corbyn who went into the most recent election with an agreed Labour Party policy of renegotiation of the terms of Brexit with the EU, Britain to remain part of the EU while those negotiations were carried out and then hold a second referendum with the agreed terms of Brexit laid out, do you accept these terms or do you wish to remain in the EU?

    Sadly Corbyn's ultra-Marxist baby-eating habits were front and centre of the yellow press as Greg will tell you while the Tories campaigned on "get Brexit done" aka wogs out and the value of your home will never go down. Guess who won?

    A pro-EU leader like, for example Maggie Thatcher would be great but would the rest of the Labour Party follow her in agreeing Remain was the best outcome for the United Kingdom? Corbyn was a concensus politician, not a Maximum Leader type like Blair. Starmer is trying to be Blair Mk 2 but he's not got the Trump-like always-right attitude that 'Smiler' Blair portrayed which is a big downside for his future prospects as Labour leader. I expect he's going to have a rough ride at the next Labour Party Conference.

    290:

    Give the U.S. a war where the military is accomplishing something that can be successfully sold as good policy and the U.S. public will get behind them with an 80-95 percent approval rating. I think that keeping China from gobbling it's neighbors will qualify, as will keeping Russia from gobbling it's neighbors.

    Without taking the time to be eloquent or polite, I think you're delusional to think this would be popular. Especially past the first ship sinking or airman captured. There are just too many people in the USA who equate winning with basically no casualties. And them plus the we shouldn't do it anywhere anytime are a significant percentage of the population.

    And on top of all of this I keep harping back to the logistical supply chain issues. Unless the US is willing to physically attack inland China they are close and we are, well, on the other side of the planet. And given modern transportation systems in China they can get ready for this without massing things on the coast. Hell, they can fuel their air force without any special anything for the most part. The US would be limited to how many tankers could get to nearby bases. Unless we think Singapore and Malaysia will let us fuel up at their depots. And pilot fatigue? I suspect at best we'd be flying in from hours away compared to the Chinese.

    I'm sorry but I think that China wants to fight it out, unless the entire regions joins the US/Europe in the fight it will be a done deal. Maybe with a lot of death and destruction but still a done deal.

    291:

    Charlie, please delete this post. The part about Teddy Roosevelt is pure nonsense. I think my general point is correct, but I conflated the 1912 election, and incorrect memories of TR's position. This should teach me to pay more attention to what I write, and not trust my memory so much.

    292:

    I think the question of "will the war be popular" depends on a whole bunch of factors we currently know nothing about. In the case of China vs. Taiwan, we'd have to see whether the Chinese simultaneously attacked other nations, or whether their tactics involved attacking U.S. naval ships or U.S. civilian shipping. Are there layoffs or a stock market crisis in the U.S. because of the attack? Are the mainland Chinese soldiers committing atrocities? How do the other Asian nations react? Does China attack Taiwan while Putin is attacking Ukraine? To what extent does the attack on Taiwan affect U.S. industries? How do our allies feel? Has Taiwan managed to make any nukes? And a dozen other questions.

    This is all stuff we can't know about until it happens, and every bit of it will affect public opinion. The issues in World War I lined up in a specific way for specific reasons, and we have no guarantee they'll line up the same way again. In particular, I don't think there are any Republican isolationists anymore.

    293:

    First of all, note that my position is conditional. There are two "ifs" there, and both would have to be fulfilled.

    As to whether a war to defend Taiwan would be popular, I think that's probably a given - I've thought about this a little more since replying to Ioan above.

    If China Taiwan anyone the economic effects on the U.S. will probably be horrific. Consider what will happen to insurance rates for anyone trying to ship to/from Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, etc. Consider what happens to the U.S. when we can't get goods from Asia anymore. Consider what happens when the stock-market realizes just how bad the situation is... an attack on Taiwan will probably be indistinguishable from a high-powered attack on the U.S. economy.

    294:

    Troutwaxer @284:

    keeping Russia from gobbling its neighbors.

    A few months ago I looked up GDP figures per country.

    I was amazed that in each of the three estimates (IMF, World Bank and UN), Canada's GDP was higher than Russia's.

    The notion that Russia could invade and conquer all (or some) of the territories of the former USSR is just bananas - they could certainly try, but they would fail. Even with no push-back from the EU, US, or anybody else, they'd be facing endless guerilla warfare in the occupied territories, plus sanctions, plus terrorist strikes inside Russia.

    My $0.02.

    Ioan @289: Teddy Roosevelt actually ran in the 1912 Presidential Election, not 1916. (Interestingly, The Alternate Historian thinks that, with the benefit of hindsight, the wrong person definately won the 1916 Presidential Election. Makes a good case for President Charles Hughes.)

    295:

    In contrast, the PLAAF has stuff like...

    Beware the danger of "Top Trumps" and the direct comparison of individual aircraft types. Much of the effectiveness of allied air forces isn't the equipment per se, but the training levels of the crews and maintainers, and the ability to coordinate it. Massing thousands of aircraft (and their refuelling assets, and reconnaissance assets, and post-strike assessment), and then doing it all again the next day, is far from a simple task.

    NATO airforces have been doing this on a regular basis (in between actual wars) on exercises like RED FLAG, MAPLE FLAG, and COPE THUNDER. It's the reason why the Iraqi and Yugoslav air defence systems were overrun with such low loss rates.

    A historical analogy might be the Dowding System; on paper in 1940, the Luftwaffe looked to be equal to the RAF - but the RAF was far better organised, and far better supported.

    I don't mean to disrespect the PLAAF; they're competent and increasingly well-equipped. But they got a shock in 1991 and in 2003 when they saw the impact of Coalition operations, and they're been trying to catch up in doctrine, equipment, and training. The British even did a brief training exchange...

    296:

    I can't see a war between the US and China. The one "good" thing about globalization is that the supply chain is globalized... and I think too many things come from China that the US military needs.

    297:

    Ninja'd! "Sorry about that, Chief."

    298:

    I should apologize for doing such poor quality control on some of my posts. I've been too rushed today, and have to remember that some of my high school history classes were trash (very pro-Confederate)

    299:

    John Birmingham just published a near-future thriller in which a PRC - USA war happens: Zero Day Code.

    The Chinese act in what they think is their own interest, and take measures that they think will make retaliation by the USA unlikely. By the end of the first book, things are looking bad for the USA, but it's implied that things are going to get messy for China.

    Annoyingly (for me anyway), the books in the series were all published as Audible books only. The first one finally came out in Kindle. The others will presumably do so in the fullness of time.

    300:

    If China Taiwan anyone the economic effects on the U.S. will probably be horrific. Consider what will happen to insurance rates for anyone trying to ship to/from Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, etc. Consider what happens to the U.S. when we can't get goods from Asia anymore. Consider what happens when the stock-market realizes just how bad the situation is... an attack on Taiwan will probably be indistinguishable from a high-powered attack on the U.S. economy.

    All of those are possible and even likely. But more and more there are non trivial numbers of people in the US who don't care or blame it on others or are just so pissed at the government they'd cheer on the Chinese.

    I know too many Trumpers to think otherwise these days. 5 years ago I would have been much more in agreement with you.

    301:

    I have my doubts that war is likely with either China. I just had an objection to the logic of post 277.

    Russia may be another matter. The problem here is that the country is a kleptocracy, and I suspect that the nature of such things is that after you've stolen everything that's stealable in-country you go looking for excuses to loot other countries.

    302:

    Well, you should be worried about the UK going on an invasion spree, then.

    JReynolds is right. There MAY be war with Russia, but it will be because they feel that they have no option.

    303:

    David L @ 239: Why do you think that military and similar systems do NOT use CGS or MKS now and for a while?

    FWIW, we used meters & kilometers for almost everything while I was in the National Guard, so the U.S. Army was "metric" to some extent prior to 1975.

    304:

    Ioan I THINK the USA recognises Taiwan as a separate country, these days?

    Bellinghman @ 288 Exactly Corbyn who has always been ultra-left-anti-EU ( "it's a capitalist employer's ramp" ) & most importantly ... has not changed his opinions or learnt one little ting at all since 1975/ I THINK that the rest of us have learnt things & changed our opinions in the past 45 years? What might have happened if there had been a pro-EU Labour leader, who knows? Someone who'd have pushed with passion for us to stay in the EU, one who believed in the freedoms and protections that we're losing. The fight might still have been lost,... No, it would not have been lost - remember that the majority for Brexshit was very narrow, & that with fuckwit JC merely shitting on his hands.

    Nojay I will repat something I've said a few lines up, especially for your benefit, as to why JC was & is hopeless, OK? Corbyn who has always been ultra-left-anti-EU ( "it's a capitalist employer's ramp" ) & most importantly ... has not changed his opinions or learnt one little ting at all since 1975/ I THINK that the rest of us have learnt things & changed our opinions in the past 45 years?

    Where I agree with you is that Maggie Roberts would never have stood for this madness - which tells you how utterly fucked we are to regard her as a bastion of sanity!

    Troutwaxer an attack on Taiwan will probably be indistinguishable from a high-powered attack on the U.S. economy. ... Which really scares me - it's actually an incentive for the PRC to attack Taiwan, because it trashes their opponent economically

    JReynolds More on that Birmingham book HERE

    305:

    I have no doubt that the UK is headed for a major stupidity incursion, possibly by getting into a war, possibly for other reasons.

    Russia/no alternative? Kleptocracy plus "makes things tense when they should be calming things down." I'm not 100 percent sure they're headed for a serious war at some point in the next decade, but that's the way to bet.

    306:

    The US has become bizarrely used to the idea that wars they fight involve very little sacrifice.

    The last war with significant US civilian casualties was the Civil War. Since WW2 the US has fought only much, much smaller nations. The one well-prepared minor power was the first Gulf War under Bush Senior, and that had a majority of the world’s best armed forces all helping in a fight in a big empty desert.

    China is a superpower. Russia is a major regional power. This is not liking kicking over Afghan warlords. Think millions of US casualties.

    No nation “chooses” to fight a war like that. They blunder into it by underestimating the resolve of the other side.

    307:

    Scott Sanford @ 249:

    What I find really interesting in that article is the drawing by Lear himself, which features a runcible spoon without any prongs, in contrast to most definitions I came across.

    After a quick Google image search to confirm that, yes. Both the original drawing and the photos of real objects. That 'Victorian runcible spoon' is a spork. I have seen sporks before.

    I conjecture that silver Victorian-era antiques are considered too dignified to be publicly called sporks by stuffy people.

    So, what about the "runcible hat" or the "runcible cat"? You could probably cut tines into the brim of a hat, but I think it's going to greatly annoy the cat.

    308:

    Allen Thomson @ 242: (4) Names again, leaving aside transliteration. Chinese is Family - Given (AIUI) and Russian in official documents tends to be the same. Spanish is Given - (other given) - Patronymic - Matronymic. And, of course, because patriarchy, the patronymic takes precedence. The President of Panama, Laurentino Cortizo Cohen, is properly referred to as Presidente Cortizo. Please do not call him President Cohen.

    And so it goes.

    LAST_NAME; FIRST_NAME MIDDLE_INITIAL (or name) ... Cortizo; Laurentino C.

    Fill in the blanks correctly, because that's the way you're going to be known for the rest of your life.

    309:

    Niala @ 257:

    Tim H. @ 255: "We can't agree how to pronounce it and we live here!"

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f0/En-us-Missouri.ogg

    Better aim low boys, they're riding Shetland Ponies!

    310:

    "No nation “chooses” to fight a war like that. They blunder into it by underestimating the resolve of the other side."

    Exactly. Underestimate something, anyway.

    311:

    OK. So who is making things tense? The USA/NATO have been squeezing Russia economically and pushing it into a corner since 1991, and Biden has just done a major escalation.

    312:

    Sheeple are as inclined to vote left as right; 'Paul' etc. are simply drivelling that the use of the word is a leftist (pronounced 'damn commie') conspiracy. And anyone who was actually thinking would realise that my quoting of LBJ was making it clear that I was rejecting the Great Truth idea that is a characteristic of the belief of many groups of sheeple.

    Anyone who uncritically takes their belief from a demogogue or anyone who is likely to be one, is one of the sheeple. THAT'S the meaning. Yes, it's rude and it's meant to be.

    313:

    @302 "Russia may be another matter. The problem here is that the country is a kleptocracy, and I suspect that the nature of such things is that after you've stolen everything that's stealable in-country you go looking for excuses to loot other countries."

    What's there to loot? In a post-industrial economy, the wealth is generated by human capital, trade networks, and the money is digital. Guess what would disappear in the first 5 minutes of an invasion? I agree with JReynolds that this idea is "bananas"

    @295 "I was amazed that in each of the three estimates (IMF, World Bank and UN), Canada's GDP was higher than Russia's."

    This figure is often trotted out, but it's a red herring for 2 reasons 1. Canada is among the top 10 economies in the world. Another way to look at it is that Russia's economy is on par with South Korea's. That's very impressive for a nation which was a crumbling mess just 2 decades ago and has spent 7 years under sanctions.

  • For military reasons, GDP (PPP) matters more, since that determines how impressive the military is. Here it ranks 6th in the world. Note that this makes it a regional power, not a superpower. I think that only China and the US qualify as superpowers (the EU doesn't, and neither do Japan and India). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)
  • Overall, I think the calculus for Russia is the same as for China: how many casualties can the West sustain before it pulls out, and how many casualties can Russia sustain before the population turns against Putin

    314:

    How far back do you want to go? Neither country has been good to the other since God was a pup. It's tit-for-tat game-theory run amok and neither side seems able to keep from poking the other in the eye. At this point "who started it" is secondary to "how can we stop this?"

    315:

    I THINK the USA recognises Taiwan as a separate country, these days?

    Ah, nope.

    The US has always recognized "one China". It was just a matter of which power center was recognized as the official government. And that was switched by Nixon.

    Not to say there are not people still asking the question of "Who lost China" who were not alive when Mao drove the nationalists to Taiwan.

    But official US policy to Taiwan is complicated, confusing, and to be blunt, logically inconsistant due to our official statements that there is only "One" China. We sell them arms. We do deals. We tell China to leave them alone. Sort of. Mostly. But we don't have a full ambassador there.

    316:

    Allen Thomson @ 280:

    Assuming we were trying to meet demand for electricity from renewables only and using storage...

    Have you seen any estimates of how many GWh storage/backup(*) would be needed for each installed GW of wind (or wind + solar)? Since the wind can go for several days at really low levels, that seems to imply something like 100 GWh/GW, no?

    (*) The UK currently uses gas turbines for much of the backup and those are well suited to the task -- except for the "gas" part.

    To what extent does retrofitting for energy efficiency to reduce demand play a role in the U.K.? Well insulated buildings should require less heat in the winter and well designed insulation should require less cooling in the summer1.

    I know Charlie has posted in the past about being in some kind of designated world heritage area where he's not allowed to make even minor modifications (such as fitting insulated windows - not even on the inside where they wouldn't be seen). Or have I misunderstood?

    1 My house was built with NO insulation. As I remodel/repair I've been trying to add insulation in the walls & seal the windows to reduce my energy use.

    317:

    I've mostly given up trying to point out reality to you and the other nuclear true believers but this just got my goat.

    "The cost of pumped-water grid power storage is about £200 million per GWh."

    No it's fucking not.

    Snowy 2.0, generally agreed to be a be useless, over cost project, utterly knobbled by a government that's owned by fossil fuel interests and controlled day to day by Murdoch, has 350 GWh of storage for about £2 billion, so about £6 million per GWh. That's on the driest inhabited continent, that's also the flattest continent (inhabited or not). Literally the worst place in the world (of continental size) that you could try to build pumped hydro, built by the most anti renewable energy government in the world and its still about 1/40th of the cost you're claiming.

    318:

    Ioan @ 286:

    "Give the U.S. a war where the military is accomplishing something that can be successfully sold as good policy and the U.S. public will get behind them with an 80-95 percent approval rating. I think that keeping China from gobbling it's neighbors will qualify, as will keeping Russia from gobbling it's neighbors."

    That may hold for the generation that remembers the Cold War, and is predominantly white. The younger generation doesn't remember the Cold War, and treat Europe with, at best, indifference. If China or Russia were swallowing countries where they have extended family, attitudes would change. Note that the East Asian American population skews older, with 70% of Asian Americans identifying as Chinese, Indian, of Filipinos.

    It might be broadly popular, but I doubt it would breach 60% among the younger generation, roughly the popularity of both the Iraq and Vietnam Wars at the beginning.

    You're probably right that the public might be willing to support higher casualties for popular wars. I also agree that a war against Iran wouldn't be popular. I'm just not sure that protecting Taiwan or Europe would be more popular these days?

    The "younger generation" has never had to face THE DRAFT. The current "all volunteer" military affects approximately 1.5% of the U.S. population, INCLUDING the National Guard & Reserves, and the family, friends & loved ones of service members.

    Opposition to any war the U.S. becomes involved in won't build until it begins to affect the folks back home. And any direct attack on the U.S. or U.S. territories would likely increase, rather than decrease, support for war.

    Can you say "Pearl Harbor boys 'n girls?

    319:

    You're absolutely right about the danger of "top trumps" comparisons -- but my broader point was that China develops its own kit, it's not just using stuff bought off-the-shelf from other manufacturing powers. Which strongly suggests to me that they're developing their own doctrine in parallel with the weapons systems. And as you say, they got a ringside seat in 1991 and 2003 ... and have had 20-30 years to assimilate the lessons about what they can expect to face in a conflict with the USA.

    I think a stabilizing factor in China/Taiwan that doesn't get enough attention here is that any invasion of Taiwan would effectively slaughter the goose that lays the golden eggs. Right now Taiwan (via TSMC) is more or less the dominant chip fab on the planet. In event of an invasion, that's going to be toast for a couple of years, at least -- even without factoring in sanctions on Chinese products. China is a major industrial exporter and those sanctions would kneecap their balance of trade and hit the middle classes in their pocket, breaking the implied social contract the CCP settled after Tiananmen Square (total control of the political sphere in return for delivering economic prosperity): the risk of social instability at home can't be discounted.

    320:

    To what extent does retrofitting for energy efficiency to reduce demand play a role in the U.K.? Well insulated buildings should require less heat in the winter and well designed insulation should require less cooling in the summer

    British governments have been providing funding for upgrading insulation in homes for the past couple of decades. It's helped a little but it also resulted in part in the Grenfell Tower fire where the externally applied insulation kept 70-odd people warm for the rest of their life (tm Terry Pratchett). Since then there's been a bit of backing-off of retrofits of that sort while the coroner's courts sit and the investigations continue.

    It's still the case that we need a shitload of energy in winter to provide heat, even with good insulation installed in most or all homes, businesses, offices, workplaces, hospitals etc. at a cost of hundreds of billions over several decades. The peak figure I found online recently, unsourced unfortunately, was for 2010 when the maximum energy requirement for heating was 300GW nationwide in the UK.

    Even if we cut that requirement in half with earth-houses for all and/or Todos Santos style apartment blocks that would be 150GW of non-fossil-fuel energy just for heat plus another 50GW of electricity for everything else. Right now, after a decade of throwing money at wind renewables and some solar too we've got about 25GW dataplate wind capacity that on a good day generates 12GW of electricity, on a bad day it generates 500MW. Solar, in the summer that can peak at 6GW at noon but it produces zilch when it's dark and cold. Good or bad, we have to have that 150-200GW of heat when we need it and if the wind doesn't blow we'll burn gas, oil or even coal and damn the climate.

    321:

    JReynolds @ 295: Troutwaxer @284:

    keeping Russia from gobbling its neighbors.

    A few months ago I looked up GDP figures per country.

    I was amazed that in each of the three estimates (IMF, World Bank and UN), Canada's GDP was higher than Russia's.

    The notion that Russia could invade and conquer all (or some) of the territories of the former USSR is just bananas - they could certainly try, but they would fail. Even with no push-back from the EU, US, or anybody else, they'd be facing endless guerilla warfare in the occupied territories, plus sanctions, plus terrorist strikes inside Russia.

    My $0.02.

    I don't think Putin shares your skepticism. I wonder what the residents of the Crimea or Donbas think about the possibility of Russian conquest.

    322:

    Elderly Cynic @ 312: OK. So who is making things tense? The USA/NATO have been squeezing Russia economically and pushing it into a corner since 1991, and Biden has just done a major escalation.

    That's what the Russian's say. OTOH, they also say they don't try to interfere in U.S. elections.

    323:

    More efficient heating would probably do a better job than insulation (though obviously both is better).

    A split system reverse cycle aircon that provides 8 kW of heating costs about £600.

    https://www.thegoodguys.com.au/hisense-c71kw-h8kw-reverse-cycle-split-system-hsa71r

    Reverse cycle aircon, (heat pumps) of reasonable quality produce about 5 times more heat than they consume as electricity. So straight off that cuts the 300 GW to 60 GW.

    324:

    Ioan It seems ( "seems" notice ) that the Ru population are no longer enthusiastic about a war in Ukraine ... too many "little green men" died last time around & they are getting apathetic, if not pissed-off.

    JBS Or S Osettia or Georgia, or "the Baltics" or Moldova, or ....

    325:

    I think a stabilizing factor in China/Taiwan that doesn't get enough attention here is that any invasion of Taiwan would effectively slaughter the goose that lays the golden eggs. Right now Taiwan (via TSMC) is more or less the dominant chip fab on the planet.

    TSMC has the best manufacturing processes for the highest-value chips using extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) wavelengths. The machines that create and manipulate light at those frequencies come from, I think, a Dutch company. The mainland Chinese would like to buy these EUV imaging systems and build their own high-end chip manufacturing plants, the Americans have said no to this because it would mean giving up a stick to beat the Chinese with (see also access to the ISS as well as several other major collaborative scientific projects around the world).

    The result is that the mainland Chinese are clearly aiming for homegrown EUV chip manufacturing to be able to match TSMC's production capabilities. They are, of course, indulging in industrial espionage on the grand scale but they're also pumping billions into basic research and development to accomplish this and they've got the technologists and scientists who can probably succeed in this. Saying that there's a lot of technical 'magic' in working at the 5nm level, getting a production line on that scale working reliably takes billions of dollars and the ritual sacrifice of a young goat with a black-handled knife on occasion.

    The Next Big Thing is X-rays for 3nm and lower chips but AFAIK no-one has a good handle on how to achieve that sort of process at any cost right now.

    326:
  • Sanctions on selling civilian aerospace material to China would also hurt them.
  • It's not just the foundry. All the leading semiconductor equipment companies are US allies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_equipment_sales_leaders_by_year
  • I know that China doesn't have an equivalent to ASML, I think the same holds true for the other 9 in this list

    327:

    Thanks for the info about the Snowy 2.0 project. I ran the numbers and it turns out to get hold of the 350GWh of headline storage capacity would involve draining the top reservoir from top-full to dry pretty much -- about 250 million tonnes of water down 700 metres or so to the lower reservoir, plus conversion losses. It's not actually likely this will ever happen but that's normal in pumped-storage systems.

    It helps that the top reservoir is already in place and its construction costs are already covered but there's a lot of tunneling involved and I'll be surprised it the project comes in at the specified budget. Still a very cost-effective scheme looking at the capacity and capabilities.

    328:

    Nojay @ 321:

    To what extent does retrofitting for energy efficiency to reduce demand play a role in the U.K.? Well insulated buildings should require less heat in the winter and well designed insulation should require less cooling in the summer

    British governments have been providing funding for upgrading insulation in homes for the past couple of decades. It's helped a little but it also resulted in part in the Grenfell Tower fire where the externally applied insulation kept 70-odd people warm for the rest of their life (tm Terry Pratchett). Since then there's been a bit of backing-off of retrofits of that sort while the coroner's courts sit and the investigations continue.

    It's no good to insulate if you're going to do it in a slip-shod manner that kills people. Still, there should be ways to do it that don't place lives at risk. One thing I've read about Grenfell Tower is the "landlord" knew they were installing unsafe materials. And they were actively resisting the resident's fire safety complaints prior to the fire.

    It's still the case that we need a shitload of energy in winter to provide heat, even with good insulation installed in most or all homes, businesses, offices, workplaces, hospitals etc. at a cost of hundreds of billions over several decades. The peak figure I found online recently, unsourced unfortunately, was for 2010 when the maximum energy requirement for heating was 300GW nationwide in the UK.

    Even if we cut that requirement in half with earth-houses for all and/or Todos Santos style apartment blocks that would be 150GW of non-fossil-fuel energy just for heat plus another 50GW of electricity for everything else. Right now, after a decade of throwing money at wind renewables and some solar too we've got about 25GW dataplate wind capacity that on a good day generates 12GW of electricity, on a bad day it generates 500MW. Solar, in the summer that can peak at 6GW at noon but it produces zilch when it's dark and cold. Good or bad, we have to have that 150-200GW of heat when we need it and if the wind doesn't blow we'll burn gas, oil or even coal and damn the climate.

    If you CAN reduce demand that's going to reduce the need to burn fossil fuels. I don't expect it can be the whole strategy, but it should be part of an overall energy strategy.

    329:

    Re: ' ... but they're also pumping billions into basic research and development '

    'R&D Intensity' (how much of the gov't budget goes into R&D) places the US 10th globally. Private/corp R&D spending in the US has also dropped off. So basically the US is telling the world to look elsewhere for tech leadership. (Unless the US is/was banking on specializing in only a few select 'can't lose' areas --- which also doesn't really make that much sense because that's not how R&D works.)

    https://www.aaas.org/news/snapshot-us-rd-competitiveness-2020-update

    Makes me wonder how any sane USian was okay with the major cuts to R&D by the previous Admin. You cannot be a tech leader without doing the R&D. Biden's budget includes a huge boost for R&D - wonder how Mitch/GOP are going to distort the merits of this. Of course if you're going to do hi-tech R&D then you'll need to properly educate your population across the core sciences. Hmm - maybe that's what they're afraid of: a science-literate electorate.

    330:

    OK. So who is making things tense?

    Perhaps, and this is just a suggestion based on observed behaviour rather than interpretation of intent, it's the country that invaded and occupied Crimea, astroturfed an armed rebellion in Donetsk, has been fighting in eastern Ukraine for the past few years (tanks, artillery, and shooting down airliners), and which just moved 20,000 troops up towards the Ukrainian border?

    You know, the one that attempts to murder/imprisons its domestic political opponents, used chemical and radiological weapons in the UK, etc, etc?

    ...Biden has just done a major escalation.

    Yeah, phoning Putin to discuss the situation and to propose a summit, how dare he!

    The most optimistic interpretation of Russian behaviour is that it's diplomatic attention-seeking; "We do our big spring training exercises near the Ukraine, and Biden will be forced to hold talks with us!". Putin stops being ignored, maybe gets some leverage to reduce the sanctions against his corrupt buddies...

    The most pessimistic interpretation is that Putin and the kleptocracy are feeling uncertain in the face of domestic political opposition (see: Navalny), and have decided to follow the Tsarist Interior Minister's observation that "...what this country needs is a short victorious war to stem the tide of revolution". After all, they may believe that France and Germany will veto any military response to (say) another landgrab in Ukraine.

    Somewhere in the middle, there are soldiers getting rather twitchy about what the politicians intend.

    331:

    The US has become bizarrely used to the idea that wars they fight involve very little sacrifice.

    You might assume that of US politicians; but I suspect that if you talk to anyone connected to the US military, they'll disabuse you of that opinion. I mean, a couple of trillion dollars, thousands of dead US soldiers, and nearly twenty years of what many AIUI refer to as "The Forever War"? There are career US soldiers who have done four tours of Afghanistan, and many reservists who have done two tours.

    The one well-prepared minor power was the first Gulf War under Bush Senior

    I really think you should add the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to that list. Mainly because they won. You might consider adding Afghanistan, who have just seen off their third invading Empire of the past two hundred years.

    332:

    @ Nojay 274: Asked it before, but does anyone have an estimate of how much of the the ~300GWe needed for heating during the UK winter could be reduced through efficient insulation, ground heat pumps, maybe district heating?

    333:

    You might consider adding Afghanistan, who have just seen off their third invading Empire of the past two hundred years.

    Quoting a remark from years ago, more political snark: Obviously the US has to get out of Afghanistan soon. The Communist Chinese can't invade while the Americans are still there, and can you really call yourself an empire if you haven't invaded Afghanistan and learned to regret it?

    334:

    Yeah, phoning Putin to discuss the situation and to propose a summit, how dare he! There's this: FACT SHEET: Imposing Costs for Harmful Foreign Activities by the Russian Government (April 15, 2021) Overall, it's relatively tame and focused, though it will sting. Re the SolarWinds operation, "The U.S. Intelligence Community has high confidence in its assessment of attribution to the SVR." I do not know how robust their attribution is, or the nature of the evidence used to support the attribution.(Whoever tripped the Duo MFA new-device alert (could be a different actor) at FireEye put these USA counter moves into motion.)

    They sort of walked back the Afghanistan soldier bounty allegations, indicating "low to moderate" confidence.[1]

    Putin and his inner circle are IMO high on their own supply (of manipulative misinformation) re the J. Biden administration's competence and in particular re Biden's mental competence. This is quite hazardous; in particular Americans can be bug-fuckin dangerous when threatened. Ideally the Russians feel reassured about the measured response summarized in the above link. (While expressing outrage, of course.)

    [1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/us-intel-walks-back-claim-russians-put-bounties-on-american-troops

    335:

    With all this talk of Brexit, maybe Britain should just go big or go home.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHglo_N7P_Y

    Canzuk (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom).

    The idea goes back at least as far as Winston Churchill's dream of a Union of English Speaking Peoples.

    And it is probably just a pipe dream. but on paper the Canzuk Union has a lot going for it.

    Britain restores itself as world power instead of devolving into insignificance.

    Unlike the EU, Canzuk members are culturally similar, with equivalent standards of living and with the same language (unlike, say the Spaniards and Danes)

    It would be the largest country by land area in the world, with vast natural resources.

    Increased trade, free movement of people, greater diplomatic leverage...

    Becoming an oil producing trading block on par with NAFTA, the EU, Shanghai Accord, and ASEAN would let Britain still play with the big boys.

    Canada is becoming the third wheel in a Mexico-USA centered NAFTA anyway, why not join up with the other dominions as a separate trading block? Let NAFTA become Latin American oriented (LAFTA?)

    Australia and NZ can stand up to China.

    You could throw in mostly English speaking India and post-apartheid South Africa.

    Ironically, with India's demographic and economic potential, Empire 2.0 might be ruled from New Dehli while London becomes its "New York", a cultural and financial center.

    Britain provides financing, Australia NZ and Canada provide natural resources, and India provides industry.

    Or is this all just an exercise in imperial nostalgia?

    Empire 2 - electric boogaloo.

    336:

    The Communist Chinese can't invade while the Americans are still there, and can you really call yourself an empire if you haven't invaded Afghanistan and learned to regret it?

    Heh. About a week before the Soviet Union went into Afghanistan, some colleagues and I were wondering what was going to happen. "Surely the Soviet General Staff knows what happens to empires that invade Afghanistan", we said.

    And then they went in and it did happen.

    And then the American empire did go in and it did happen.

    I suppose it's only fair that China gets its turn. One might hope that they'd be smarter about it, not send in military units but Belt and Road development projects.

    But we'll see.

    337:

    There have been grants available for decades for stuff like loft insulation, cavity wall insulation, double glazing, and so on; loft insulation in particular has been plugged for a good 4 decades off the top of my head, and longer if you exclude the actual "grant" part of the plugging.

    Most houses I see have got double glazing now, whether through choice or through natural replacement of mouldy old wooden window frames, which it has now become hard to do without getting a double glazed replacement; the main exceptions, apart from people in situations like Charlie's, are the poor bastards who have got sash windows and so need it the most, but usually lack the clarity of mind to productively address the problem. It makes a tremendous difference, both in reduced heat loss through the panes and in massively improved draught exclusion; living in the same house before and after the contrast is dramatic. As a bonus the double glazed units are louder and slower for burglars to negotiate than the old windows were.

    Loft insulation seems also to be pretty widespread, but a lot of it is a bit crap due to age; I think the current recommendation is something like 150mm of fibreglass wool, but go back a bit and they were telling people to put down 50mm or even 25mm - which to be sure is a lot better than the nothing at all there was before, but is really not enough; and people moving in subsequently tend to think that having whatever is there already means they don't need to improve on it.

    Cavity wall insulation is hard to guess at; it's been around for ages but you still get people coming round offering to drill a hole in your wall to see if you've got it and telling you encouraging stories about what grants you can get for it if they find you haven't. So I would suspect there are still a good many houses without it. And there are certainly very many older houses that only have single leaf walls to begin with. These are a problem. I have seen streets of them treated by gluing 100mm of expanded polystyrene to the outside of the walls (and then pebbledashing it), but it doesn't seem to work all that well, and there are far more streets where it wouldn't work at all for one reason or another than where it might. Similar story with underfloor insulation - not applicable if you don't have a void floor, and those who do often don't know you can do it.

    Those are the big ones, because nearly every house that isn't old enough to have attracted regulations akin to Charlie's is some kind of brick box with a peaked roof on top, so those are the things you can do to it and if for some reason you can't you're basically stuck. They do make a great deal of difference if you do everything and do it thoroughly. It's not out of reach to make a house approach significantly closely the ideal of needing no explicit space heating over and above the waste heat from other appliances and metabolisms; mine gets fairly close, but very many that could fall a long way short in practice.

    Few houses have aircon. While hot spots do exist, most of the country never gets hot enough for long enough at a time to make it worth the bother. And it is expensive and a maintenance hassle. It mostly seems to be installed by rich people who would do better just to open a window so they can say they've got it, rather than in response to a need. This means there are no quick gains to be had from making it run backwards as a heater. Heat pump systems do exist but they are expensive and a pain in the arse to install, and may well still be more expensive than gas to run; real world gains seem to come out at about 2.5-3x for ground source and somewhat less for air source, whereas gas tends to be cheaper than electricity by roughly twice the expected heat pump gain, so you need to be Committed, or else not on the gas grid, for it to be worth bothering at all.

    At a very rough guess I reckon there's a good enough chance of halving the heating usage if you can work out what to do about all the sash windows and single leaf walls, and manage to get every house thoroughly up to the mark. Beyond that it gets really difficult, because you start having to completely replace huge numbers of houses with brand new ones.

    338:

    Eh... not so much. As far as the brass went, a lot of them had been there long enough to experience asymmetrical engagements where they could get away with being a bit shit, followed by the Boer war which demonstrated rather clearly what happens when you get to expect everything to be like that, and (even if not in every quarter) Lessons were Learned. There had been considerable study of what kind of shape a European war against a modern adversary might take; it had predicted really rather well what kind of tactics and weapons would be successful and what would not, and in the opening weeks the BEF were often using methods that are usually thought of as having been discovered only later in the war, where "rediscovered" would suit the case better. Not that there were not also plenty of blind gods of the cavalry who basically didn't want to know; there were, but they were a lot less preponderant than the popular image would have it.

    At grunt level, most of them hadn't been there long enough to be veterans of anything much, although there were still quite a lot of Boer war vets. The point there wasn't that they were a veteran army so much as that they were a professional army; they joined up of their own accord, expecting to serve for many years, and so could be better trained, better integrated and better motivated than people who had been forced to join up Or Else, spent two or three years going through the motions and then promptly forgot everything as soon as they got out, such as the continental conscript systems readily produced. Of course, some conscript-trained soldiers were highly enthusiastic, but they were still lacking in the basic knowing their stuff department.

    The overwhelming problem they faced was simply that the force was too ruddy small, and for political reasons was compelled to take a token part in the principal front alongside the French (who were annihilating similarly-sized chunks of their own forces every few days in dumb-arsed attempts further south along the front to defeat machine guns with bodies that nobody ever talks about, and so could not really be said to have lacked the troops to cover the whole front), and in many ways drew the short straw in the nature of the bit they got to cover. So the attrition rate over the first few months of the war, while of little concern to the much larger French army, was enough to wipe out most of the BEF, and the high training and cohesion with it. The few good soldiers that remained were then swamped in a mass of raw recruits many of whom barely knew which way round to hold a rifle, and the innovations in tactics were also lost as the army was no longer capable of implementing them.

    Similarly with shortage of up-to-date weapons; to begin with they were not short of machine guns, nor entirely ignorant of indirect fire techniques (albeit less refined than subsequent development would make them). But they only had enough to go round for a tiddly but well-trained army. In that army's annihilation and replacement the knowledge and habits were lost.

    (This is distinct from, although overlapping with, the shortages of shells and other munitions after the first spasm of the war. All the participants had failed to anticipate the length of the war and the scale of production required, and they all got bitten by that one in their own way. The BEF's situation is different by way of the massive dilution of knowledge to the point of virtual extinction, and the loss of the habits of weaponry that went with it.)

    Had the BEF been fighting against a German army of comparable size, it would be a lot clearer that they were in fact not unable to fight an advanced opponent. What they couldn't do was fight off such a sodding big one.

    It's not really the case that they were "demoralised" after the retreat preceding the Battle of the Marne; they were knackered, and hungry, and pissed off at having to retreat, but they still had the will to fight. It was only Sir John French who was demoralised; he had lost his bottle and was retreating and greeting and threatening to pull the BEF out of France altogether, until ?Joffre told him to stop being a big baby and made him pull his socks up.

    339:

    ...Biden has just done a major escalation.

    Yeah, phoning Putin to discuss the situation and to propose a summit, how dare he!

    You missed the changes in the last 24 hours.

    340:

    You might assume that of US politicians; but I suspect that if you talk to anyone connected to the US military, they'll disabuse you of that opinion.

    The vast majority of people in the US never talk to that group. It is a small slice of the population and even though I live within an hour or so of 2 major bases with troops overseas it is more of a news cast status update than a war. It is just not a part of daily life of 98% of the population. And for those where it is, they are not evenly distributed through society.

    Which creates so many societal problems.

    341:

    SFR Of course if you're going to do hi-tech R&D then you'll need to properly educate your population across the core sciences. Hmm - maybe that's what they're afraid of: a science-literate electorate. Remember that huge numbers of USA-ians have been brainwashed into Cretinism, & simply do not accept any of the modern biological sciences.

    Martin ( & EC ) ISTM that the real problem is that Putin ( Like IQ45 ) believes that politics, especially internationally, is a zero-sum game. This can lead to "very bad outcomes" shall we say?

    Afghanistan Everyone forgets the successful invasion - the 3rd British one ... where we went in, quickly, trashed the opposition, re-installed a semi-puppet leader, told him, "Do what you like, but don't give us border trouble" - & then, very quickly, effed off, back to India. Worked (approximately) 1920-1970....

    Pigeon You'd be suprised at how effective single-glazing, but with the window curtains long enough to JUST tuck into the top of the under-window radiators is (!) Heat pumps? ( i.e. refrigerators in reverse ? )

    And ... at Mons the BEF gave the advancing Germans a very bloody nose, but they had to retreat, because their flanks were turned

    342:

    Duffy @ 336: "Or is this all just an exercise in imperial nostalgia?"

    You bet, and its proponents haven't noticed the Trans-Pacific free trade accord, where the UK is currently a supplicant, sorry I mean applicant.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_and_Progressive_Agreement_for_Trans-Pacific_Partnership

    343:

    on paper the Canzuk Union has a lot going for it.

    Only if you're a white supremacist dipshit. Because when you scratch the Canzuk advocates' backgrounds, what you find is usually an acute case of swastika envy, or at minimum a hankering for the good old days of Apartheid-era South Africa.

    "Empire 2.0" was in fact suggested by some of the more swivel-eyed brexiters a couple of years ago and roundly ridiculed, especially once anyone thought to ask the other postulated national partners what they thought of the idea.

    Hint: these days India has got more nuclear weapons than the UK, and the home-grown ability to put probes into orbit around Mars.

    344: 318 Para 4 - So Australia has pump storage HEP built by the USA!? 338 - Where I am presently, nearly every house I can see is made of sandstone, about 12 inches thick.

    The others are cavity wall brick bungalows, with loft/roof conversions to make an extra room.

    345:

    "Heat pumps? ( i.e. refrigerators in reverse ? )"

    Yep.

    Pigeon's numbers are a bit overly conservative. He's saying under 2.5 CoP for air sourced reverse cycle air conditioners. Australia and New Zealand share a rating system and it gets cold in New Zealand. You can find plenty of air to air units that are better than 5 when measured with an outside air temperature of 2 degrees. (2 degrees being the standard)

    Ground sourced heat pumps can break 10, if they're used properly, and not as a drop in replacement for a boiler. If you're heating from a ground temperature of say 10, up to a room temperature of 20,that's easy. If you're trying to heat water to 60-70 and put it into existing radiators at then you'll struggle to hit 2.

    346:

    Or Britain can continue to devolve into its component parts: Scotland, Ulster, Wales, Isle of Man, Cornwall, London City, etc. - many of whom would rejoin the EU.

    Each becoming as important on the world stage as Lithuania.

    And having left the EU with its agricultural price support policies (which Britain can no longer take advantage of) it's got to find food somewhere.

    The American farmer will be happy to oblige, for a price.

    Maybe one day protesting Englishmen will be throwing American tea into the Thames.

    347:

    We might be small, but we punch above our weight when it comes to stupid.

    Here's our current leader's famous "this is coal" speech. Not quite JFK's "not because they are easy, but because they are hard".

    https://www.theguardian.com/global/video/2017/feb/09/scott-morrison-brings-a-chunk-of-coal-into-parliament-video

    348:

    Ground sourced heat pumps, great! How well do they work for a block of eight large flats plus two street-facing shops here in Edinburgh, where I live? We have a drying green out back on the north side of the building that gets buggerall sunlight to warm up the soil to provide ongoing heat energy for the pump. The drying green is approximately 6 metres square and seems to be mostly rocks under a thin layer of turf.

    There's a shitload and three-quarters people in the UK who live in similar properties, ten-story apartment blocks and terraced housing and the like. We've had this discussion about solar panels in the past with I've Got Mine Fuck You Randist types saying that of course everyone can get free electricity that way after slapping £10,000 worth of panels on the roof of a house they own worth £200,000 and installing a £5,000 battery pack so what's the problem?

    349:

    I do recommend this guy (I don't always agree with him but he is always interesting) on how America is going to treat post-Brexit Britain (main point starts at 3:30):

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSKZ3JfJm8o

    Before we are through forcing a new trade deal on you, Britain may as well become our 51st state (on the plus side Americans really are fascinated with the Royals and may take them off your hands).

    Zeihan's presentations boil down to a few main points concerning how the world has changed:

  • End of the Cold War made all our assumptions obsolete.
  • With the Evil Empire gone, American foreign and trade policy makes no sense and is continuing through simple inertia. After WWII America bribed together a coalition to fight godless communism in return for offering the services of the American navy to maintain free trade. However, this global trade system is not something America participates in very much, exports make up a relatively small part of our overall GDP. We could go isolationist tomorrow and do just fine (because of point 2 below). The rest of the world OTOH would go to economic hell in a hand basket.

    This something Trump actually understood, but he tried to execute a new foreign policy in his typically vulgar, thuggish, ham-fisted and incompetent manner. Future American administrations will continue to dismantle our now obsolete post-WWII foreign policy structure, but with more finesse. Future presidents will be America First - they will just be nicer about it.

  • The shale revolution has made America energy independent.
  • That's a huge change. Indeed, we will later this year become the world's second largest exporter of oil and natural gas after the Saudis. As such, we no longer give a rat's ass about the Persian Gulf, the Middle East or even Israel (except for reasons of sentiment). And American boys will no longer be dying in the mountains of Afghanistan. As such we hold the reins. Want to crush Putin's Russia? Flood the would markets with American oil and natural gas and watch energy prices collapse along with the Russian economy.

    In either case, America really doesn't need the rest of the world anymore. But the rest of the world desperately depends on the US navy.

  • Demographics are destiny.
  • See the following videos explaining what aging and shrinking populations do to military strength, government spending, national debt and capital markets:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9zH1dWeKE0

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a12amneWnQ

    As such China is already a dead man walking. Russia has one foot in the grave. Europe will stay on life support. Japan only maintains its economy by going ever more massively into debt.

    There is no such thing a no-growth capitalism and economic growth is not physically possible with shrinking and aging populations . Only two nations have healthy (from an economic point of view) demographics are America and India (which is the next superpower, not China). Also throw in México whose demographic profile makes it the prefect economic partner for America - not Canada (which is why Canada is now NAFTA's third wheel).

    With an aging/declining population, China's economy is now based not on consumption or even exports but on inventory building (like those vast empty cities they built just to keep workers and investors happy and nobody lives in). As such their economy is a Ponzi scheme using Enron-like accounting that will collapse like a house of cards. It explains why the CCP has gone uber-nationalist and authoritarian. A storm is coming and the men in Beijing know it.

    (Fun Fact: by 2100 half of the world's working age population will be living in sub-Saharan Africa.)

    They are all short videos, so get a cup of coffee and watch them all. Then watch his full hour and a half presentations. He's not always right, but he is insightful and very interesting.

    P.S. Though aging/shrinking populations doom capitalism they may save yet the planet form extinction level global warming. So there you have it. You can either have a vibrant economy or a living planet. You can't have both.

    350:

    Hint: these days India has got more nuclear weapons than the UK, and the home-grown ability to put probes into orbit around Mars.

    Which is why any Empire 2.0 reboot would be ruled from New Delhi.

    351:

    I disagree, in one small respect with his lend-lease analogy. In the period 1945-1970, we were in hock to the USA up to our eyeballs, but maintained a degree of independence; in the forthcoming deal, we will not be so indebted to the USA, but will sacrifice the last of our independence.

    I am expecting the trade deal (when we have tugged our forelock and accepted our serfdom) to breach our EU deal in ways that make the current Northern Ireland breach look piffling. In which case, I am pretty sure that the EU will close its borders to our food exports and in other ways. I am also expecting the UK to be told to enforce the DMCA and most of the rest of USA IP law.

    You are also wrong when you say that there is no such thing as no-growth capitalism. There is, but it's not the sort of capitalism we have.

    352:

    There is, but it's not the sort of capitalism we have

    It is also the kind of capitalism that investors are not interested in.

    353:

    Well, sort of. Gorbachev and Yeltsin did their best to achieve rapprochement with the West, and were repeatedly kicked in the teeth, which is why Putin was elected. Yes, he views everything as a zero-sum game, because that is the game that the USA/NATO have forced Russia into!

    To remind people with selective memories, Biden started off his presidency by publicly abusing Putin and imposing sanctions against Nordstream 2. It surprised me that he was so crude and blatant, but I was expecting something like that.

    https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2021/02/12/bidens-sanctions-policy-the-first-steps/

    354:

    I fully agree. And investors can get stuffed - yes, I am one, and would willingly sacrifice my gains from that if there were an opportunity for a better society.

    355:

    Please remind Mr. Putin that payback's a bitch.

    And make no mistake, we can hurt the Russian with impunity and their only remaining weapons', cyberwarfare, is even now having its teeth pulled by the NSA and CIA.

    That's how America fights wars. Whether its Pearl Harbor or the 2016 presidential election we first get our butts kicked, then get pissed off, recover and wipe the floor with our opponent. I hope Putin likes the taste of merde because we are going to make him eat a lot of it.

    He can't hurt us by hurting NATO because we are now basically just an honorary member. However, we can crush his economy by opening up the spigots from our fracking operations. And demographically Russia is receiving last rites. Putin has less than 10 years to achieve his foreign policy goals before there are too few draftable Russian males to fill the ranks of the military and enough STEM trained cadres to keep the lights on and nuclear weapons functioning.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkuhWA9GdCo

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcBfz2VUmUI

    356:

    Like many pundits he's stuck in the early 20th century mindset that productivity depends on people lined up at factory workbenches and sitting at desks in office, ignoring increased levels of automation and more advanced machinery and data processing. This attitude is a hangover from the past when a country thrived or starved depending on how many people were out in the fields digging at the dirt with pointed sticks. Too few people or too few pointed sticks = calamity!

    Japan has had a noticeably ageing population for thirty years and more and remains xenophobic and anti-immigrant to a much greater extent than most advanced nations and yet Japan has some of the best economic performance figures over the same period. The reason is automation with machines doing the work rather than people who are generally in short supply nowadays. Saying that a remarkable amount of the Japanese irregular workforce consists of ojisans and obaasans, 70-year-olds out in the fields[1] or helping out in the family restaurant business in the kitchens. Just because they're old doesn't mean they are totally incapable of carrying out productive work.

    [1] Nowadays "rice farming" can involve piloting a pesticide-spraying drone over the family's rice paddies rather than stoop labour in mud.

    357:

    I think we've fully established that nothing invented in the last 300 years can work in Edinburgh theme park.

    It would be nice if we could save civilisation, but if it doesn't work in Edinburgh (and nothing does except nuclear for some reason no one can explain) then it can't work anywhere.

    Of course people might say that heat pumps work perfectly fine from Hong Kong highrises to Sydney terrace housing to Swedish and Shetlands district heating. But they'd be wrong because it doesn't work in Edinburgh...

    https://www.shetnews.co.uk/2014/10/30/taking-the-heat-out-of-the-sea/

    Sarcasm aside, your borehole would be 150m deep and drawing heat from a circle 300m or more in diameter. Or you could (if it wasn't Edinburgh where nothing works) use air to air and make use of the latent heat of vaporisation in the damp winter air.

    358:

    Electricity is usually piped in so it's covered by other peoples planning regulations.

    Given that the issue seems to be that it is nigh impossible to get permission to change the buildings it's obvious that the solution is a city covering dome.

    If you make it high enough then you could disrupt cloud cover to the point that solar becomes practical. Even if you don't go this far it would provide free insulation and the lack of atmospheric mixing would strongly encourage people to pollute less.

    What's not to like?

    359:

    It would be nice if we could save civilisation, but if it doesn't work in Edinburgh (and nothing does except nuclear for some reason no one can explain) then it can't work anywhere.

    If you're willing to write off half a million people who live in Edinburgh and billions more around the world who live in highly urban environments because you've got a solution that works for the low-population density area you live in, wonderful. That's the IGMFY attitude I was referring to.

    As for why nuclear works -- it produces energy in the form of electricity to meet demand with no storage requirements and doesn't emit large quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere. Nothing else does that.

    Right now renewables are backed up by burning cheap gas which emits large quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. Currently in the UK we're getting about 1.7GW from wind and 17GW from gas, for example. We have about 25GW of wind turbines and 35GW of gas generators installed. Either:

    We build out a fuckton more renewables, fifty or more times what we've already got to provide for the slack times

    Or we build out half a fuckton of extra renewables and lots of storage and hope we don't get a Black Swan event when the storage runs dry and the weather gods don't oblige

    Or we continue to burn gas and hope no-one notices as the CO2 level in the atmosphere rises and rises and the next few COP meetings promise we'll do something substantive about climate change real soon now.

    Kyoto Protocols 1997, CO2 level 360 ppm.

    Paris accords 2015, CO2 level 400 ppm.

    Today, a decade and more after the world embraced renewables as The Solution to climate change, CO2 level 418ppm.

    360:

    First practical suggestion.

    361:

    Scam emails ...

    Anyone here noticing a bump in scam emails recently? None for about a month, followed by handful within a 24-hr period. (Decided to forward the most recent to the company that supposedly sent it - haven't heard back yet.)

    Surprised that no one here has yet commented about this FBI-Hafnium story considering its obvious SF/conspiracy/autocracy/thriller elements.

    https://www.wired.com/story/fbi-takes-drastic-step-to-fight-china-hacking-spree/

    362:

    "If you're willing to write off half a million people who live in Edinburgh and billions more around the world who live in highly urban environments because you've got a solution that works for the low-population density area you live in, wonderful. That's the IGMFY attitude I was referring to."

    Note that you're including Hong Kong among the "low population density"...

    I know usians get accused of being parochial, but surely this takes the cake. Hong Kong makes Edinburgh look like the Gobi Desert.

    I'm hardly writing them off anyway. The UK uses 300 GW extra in winter. Heat pumps would cut that to 30-60 GW without spending a cent on retrofits which cost hundreds of thousands of pounds per dwelling (talk about I've got mine, insulation, and the rest of you poor people can get fucked!). It's a quick way for people of all incomes to have warm dry housing that actually pays for itself. A little public subsidy would cost several orders of magnitude less than hundreds of nuclear reactors and no one would even notice the expense. If the theme park residents can't have modern conveniences, then that half million (1% of the population) just use resistance heaters. Maybe they can put a tax on visitors to pay for the extra cost to residents of living in the park. That's 3 GW, so the UK winter consumption is 33-63 GW instead of 30-60. That's just noise. I'm pointing out that the people who live in the theme park don't matter, not because they are being written off, but because less than one percent of the population of the UK live in listed houses or world heritage theme parks. So they simply don't matter from a global warming perspective.

    Far from that being randian, its a collective action sort of thing. To each according to need, from each according to ability. The theme park residents can't have efficient heating, so they're not expected to.

    "As for why nuclear works [blah blah]"

    I've never disputed that nuclear works (if you ignore that no one could conceivably pay for it, it would happen far too late and can't be built at the required scale). What I was gently ribbing you about is that no 21st century solution can be implemented "because Edinburgh", but that nuclear gets a free pass. Can't have solar at some remote location supplying the New Town, because it makes Mickey Mouse sad, but 200 Hinkley Point C is perfectly fine with the Mouse.

    For reasons...

    363:

    About pumped hydro storage:

    It turns out that there's a major such facility in Virginia. Wikipedia has some numbers on it:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Station [Lightly edited] The Bath County Pumped Storage Station is a pumped storage hydroelectric power plant, with a maximum generation capacity of 3,003 MW, an average of 2,772 MW,[2] and a total storage capacity of 24,000 MWh. The station consists of two reservoirs separated by about 1,260 feet (380 m) in elevation. Construction on the power station, with an original capacity of 2,100 megawatts began in March 1977 and was completed in December 1985 at a cost of $1.6 billion ($3.8 billion in 2019 dollars).

    A database at Sandia National Labs,

    https://www.sandia.gov/ess-ssl/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/GESDB_Projects_11_17_2020.xlsx

    indicates the same 3 GW, but says it can run for 10 hours, so 30 GWh storage capacity.

    $3.8e9/30 GWh = $127 million/GWh for construction. It would be interesting to get a number for O&M. Also to get construction figures for other pumped storage facilities to see how they scale with size.

    364:

    My mail system eats scam emails, so I don't know, but I'm getting about 4 scam phone calls a day.

    365:

    Honestly, a CANZUK union makes as little sense as an independent Scotland joining Canada instead of rejoining the EU. "Let's leave one union that hasn't done anything for us in 40+ years, and confederate with a country across the Atlantic Ocean! Makes total sense!"

    (Although maybe Canada could join the EU? Wouldn't we be a slam-dunk, economy- and democracy-wise? Ignoring that bit about "European" in the "EU", of course).

    A lot of the countries suggested as part of a wider union have serious democracy problems, in that democracy is either visibly eroding (India, UK) or has existing structural problems (Canada, what little I know of Australia).

    These countries are interested in trade with each other. Closer political union? Come on!

    366:

    A few more from web-facing email address. Nothing more in gmail but that has pretty good filtering and I use it less frequently nowadays.

    A definite increase in phone calls from subcontinental waterfowl cleaners, usually several a day.

    367:

    It's hard (impossible) to put a general figure on pumped hydro in terms of dollars per storage.

    Batteries, a 12 Wh cell costs say 3 dollars. So 12 GWh costs 3 billion dollars (roughly).

    With pumped hydro a 2 GW turbine costs say 2 billion dollars, and the pump costs 2 billion and the tunnels cost 2 billion, and the power lines cost 2 billion. So it's roughly 8 billion dollars, but the cost per storage depends on the size of the smaller of the top and bottom lakes and their height difference. And that depends entirely on the geography. So any statement "it cost x" (even my statement) is either wrong or applicable only to a specific case.

    368:

    Heat pumps or reversible (not just reverse) refrigeration.

    These have been in wide use in the US for decades. And for the last 2 or 3 decades the efficiency rating regulations have been rising. So today they are pretty damn efficient. Since in much of the country we require (well really really really want) AC along with heating this makes a big difference in the total electrical use of a unit today compared to one sold 50 years ago. The biggest complaint is that the air blowing about from one isn't all that much hotter or colder than the existing air. (Some folks want near flames or icicles.) Anyway they work really well these days. Especially with zones and variable speed blowers and smart sensors in a few places around a home or office. The efficiency is such that a heat pump based water heater is more efficient that an electrical heating element or gas flame unit. It just costs 2 or 3 times more up front.

    At least in the US they tend to cost more in absolute $$ than a gas unit but gas is, well, gas if you're looking to reduce hydrocarbons. A heat pump is better at lowering hydrocarbon use even if the electricity comes from a gas fired power plant.

    They basically come in 2 flavors. Heat exchange with the air. Which is likely 99.9% or more of the currently installed units in the US. (All kinds of political debates about how they might change the local climate in dense areas but that's another thread.)

    The other one is ground heat transfer. The temperature of the top 5 to 10' of earth has nothing to do with this. As gasdive mentioned, this is done with bore holes .5M or so in diameter back filled with the soil and a very long coil of tubing that the fluid transfer medium will pass through. These holes can be from 50M to 150M deep. Or more maybe. Depending on design and local conditions a home or small business might have 1 to 3 such holes.

    Both air and earth work and work well. NOW. Talking about air 30+ years ago or earth 10-20+ years ago compared to today is propaganda.

    I haven't looked into earth heating/cooling extraction for medium to large business and I'm sure there is a limit to the scale at which it can be used but talking about surface temps is a distraction.

    369:

    the cost per storage depends on the size of the smaller of the top and bottom lakes and their height difference.

    Based on UK PS facilities, this is nonsense. The cost per storage for a site is determined on how much artificial expansion of the volume(s) of the lake(s) is required.

    370:

    This something Trump actually understood

    Just like a 5 year old thinks McDonalds, your home kitchen, and that 5 star restaurant are all the same because cooked food comes out of all of them.

    371:

    JReynolds @ 336: (Although maybe Canada could join the EU? Wouldn't we be a slam-dunk, economy- and democracy-wise? Ignoring that bit about "European" in the "EU", of course).

    There are a few groups in the EU that do not want to have anything to do with Canada (because of the seal hunt and a few other reasons) but on the whole we are the country with the most economic and special political ties to the EU.

    The CETA accord is a huge free trade agreement between the EU and Canada.

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

    372:

    Missouri has 2 pumped storage facilities, but one is seldom used because it's on the Osage river and it upsets people to see what it does to the fish. The other had an issue due to minimal maintenance, washed out a State park.

    373:

    The Dinorwig pumped-storage scheme in Wales uses a worked-out slate quarry as its top reservoir which didn't need much digging out. The bottom "reservoir" is a river, the source and sink are only a couple of km apart which kept tunneling costs down. In today's prices Dinorwig with 8GWh capacity cost a bit over 1.5 billion quid to construct hence my £200 million per GWh pricetag for pumped storage. It's lasted fifty years and continues to operate with some refurbishment costing a few hundred million quid.

    The Snowy 2.0 pumped-storage project in Australia already has a large top reservoir in place but it needs much more tunnelling to connect it to the sink reservoir. I think I saw the tunneling distance mentioned as 27km, mostly horizontal.

    Grid battery storage is cheaper than Dinorwig and most other pumped-storage projects but the most expensive part of the equipment, the batteries themselves will need replacing every ten to twenty years depending on the number and depth of cycles they have been put through. A better calculation would be to work out the total cost of construction and maintenance over a century of operation in which case pumped-storage wins, unless water gets to be very expensive in the interim.

    374:

    2. The shale revolution has made America energy independent.

    Yeah, nope. (Shale oil is collapsing due to renewables undercutting all fossil fuel, with a side-order of depressed demand due to COVID19.)

    3. Demographics are destiny.

    Only true up to a point, and the USA is currently doing its best to stifle its demographic potential by loading down youngsters with huge amounts of education and healthcare debt and zero prospects for building up capital, combined with spiraling house prices. Really, the US is following everyone else in the developed world down the same hole. Indeed, the future of the 22nd century is all about shrinking and ageing populations worldwide, even if we don't undergo catastrophic climate collapse.

    There is no such thing a no-growth capitalism and economic growth is not physically possible with shrinking and aging populations

    Yup.

    Which means capitalism is doomed.

    And assuming the aforementioned catastrophic environmental collapse can be fended off, the future belongs to Africa.

    375:

    Please provide a description or title for future youtube links.[1] (Also, more practically, youtube video links often die and a title can be used to re-find the video.) I clicked on the first blind link, and it had no description, so didn't watch, nor any of the rest. Do you recommend anything written by the author? Not spotting much in scholarship-style.

    [1] e.g. Mussorgsky - Pictures at an Exhibition - The Hut on the Fowl's Legs. Baba Yaga (3:11, Youtube)

    376:

    The problem is that the downsides of the British Empire's model were "extract resources from colonized countries" and "enforce white supremacy." The upside was that everyone knew that whatever rules existed would be enforced fairly.

    In theory it would have been possible to upgrade colonies into parts of the UK, but that would have meant doing things like giving Americans seats in Parliament starting around 1770, giving Gikuyu tribal chiefs patents of nobility and estates around 1930 and seating them in the House of Lords, and so on. In reality, British class and race prejudices made that impossible.

    But it would be a really interesting alternate reality, probably starting with some "Natural Philosopher" who had very strong ideas of "Nurture over Nature" and proved it by setting up schools for orphaned Black children or something similar - essentially financing an educational Portmeirion and carefully recording the results of the experiment.

    377:

    I think we've fully established that nothing invented in the last 300 years can work in Edinburgh theme park.

    The real problem with the UK is threefold:

    a) The housing fleet is, on average, 75 years old. This makes retrofits painfully expensive. Better to tear it all down and rebuild from scratch, if you want energy efficiency, but ...

    b) The housing fleet is monstrously expensive: the average dwelling passed £250,000 a month or two ago, an average which includes leaky hovels is depressed former mining villages, and where the average new-build has less floorspace than its Japanese equivalent. This is because successive governments have deliberately inflated the housing market as a foundational plank of fiscal policy going back 40 years, to use it as collateral to secure the banking/finance sector's dominance within Europe. (This financial sector bubble is now heading for an explosive burst thanks to Brexit, but it may take years or even decades to hit home, and there's a floor under housing prices anyway due to demand and lack of space: see below.)

    ... Anyway, the combination of a monstrously overvalued housing sector and maladaptive property means trashing it and replacing the lot would cost double-digit trillions.

    And there's no easy workaround, because ...

    c) Housing in the UK is expensive because there's no space, at least no good quality convenient land suitable for building on (there's plenty of godforsaken mountainsides in the middle of nowhere with no transport infrastructure and no amenities).

    If Australia was populated to the same density as the UK, it'd have 2.6 billion people living on it -- about 95% of the combined populations of India and China.

    Upshot: we need new and better housing if we're going to solve our energy problem in the UK, but to get it we'd have to demolish capital assets currently valued at 30-70 trillion quid and replace them, and a good chunk of the value is locked up in land and location which can't be substituted.

    378:

    I love the phrase "spruiked it's virtues," with reference to coal, but I think if someone "spruiked my virtues" the appropriate response would probably be to slap them!

    379:

    I think we're in the same book, just on different pages.

    380:
    Unlike the EU, Canzuk members are culturally similar, with equivalent standards of living and with the same language

    Il a dit quoi, lui?

    Même langue.

    P'tit con.

    381:

    (Shale oil is collapsing due to renewables undercutting all fossil fuel, with a side-order of depressed demand due to COVID19.)

    Actually no. The US government's EIA report about gas production and consumption in the US says, for depression-year 2020:

    The electric power sector consumed the most natural gas of any sector — 31.7 Bcf/d in 2020, a 2% increase from the previous year. In 2020, natural gas prices were the lowest they had been in decades.

    https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=47076

    For those non-Americans among us, 31.7 Bcf/d is about a billion cubic metres per day.

    Lots of renewables on the grid means the need to burn lots of gas as backstop hence the 50% increase in gas consumption for that purpose over the past ten years. If the worst came to the worst the generators could substitute oil for gas as the CCGT plants that provide much of the world's electricity supply are surprisingly fuel-agnostic. Coal would be a bitch though but sperm whale oil would be easy-peasy.

    382:

    You might add one more, these days, if you put working class folk in decent, energy efficient housing, reactionaries would whine loud enough to break glass.

    383:

    sigh In the US, the GOP has not had a clue about R&D since the end of the Moon Race, with a very slight burp in Raygun's SDI. Around '12? '13? one of my Senators was on campus for an open house, and commented that then, after a term or so of Obama's spending, the NIH (I said this was on campus) was barely back up to 2001 levels, but with inflation and all, needed to be double what the increase was.

    The GOP does not believe in basic research, because Companies Will Do It All, ignoring companies' "will this increase ROI this quarter? next quarter? That's long term planning".

    And this is why the US has fallen so far behind.

    384:

    "your borehole would be 150m deep and drawing heat from a circle 300m or more in diameter"

    You could locate it in one of Edinburgh's extinct volcanoes... ...the film writes itself (badly, probably).

    385: Unlike the EU, Canzuk members are culturally similar, with equivalent standards of living and with the same language

    Il a dit quoi, lui?

    Même langue.

    P'tit con.

    En effet! Et on oublie aussi les millions de gens qui parlent des langues autochtones comme l' ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ

    386:

    Yes, we're coasting, have been for decades, if we don't screw up, we might make it last a couple more. If Biden is replaced by a "Contemporary conservative" their first goal will be to take apart as much as possible and if they're as diplomatically inept as the last one, the bovine by-product will hit the rotary air circulater much faster, especially if many of the Nations productive capacity was off-shored to become estranged, which will require us to rebuild from scratch, if we have time,which I doubt. Remember, bad things happen when people vote conservative.

    387:

    Of course, the USSR going into Afghanistan wasn't helped by the US's heavy support of the warlords.

    Gee, wonder what happened to all those weapons we gave them?

    388:

    Come on, really?

    The US's energy independence is based on fracking. Have you noticed any pushback against fracking?

    And demographics? ROTFL! I think that the only reason the US population is still going up is... immigration from Central America.

    The "economy" is BS, what with the overwhelming majority of it being imaginary money that the stocks, etc are playing with, that have no real basis.

    389:

    Duffy @ 350: There is no such thing a no-growth capitalism

    I'm not so sure.

    Growth is defined as the increase in value of the goods and services provided in an economy. It is generally measured as a percentage increase in GDP minus inflation, which is not quite the same thing but is something that can be measured.

    The argument about "finite growth", as I understand it, goes like this. Economic activity is the conversion of raw materials into goods. The supply of raw materials is finite. Therefore economic growth must come to an end at some point.

    However this ignores both the services part and the use of technology to increase the value added. For example, our esteemed host creates value by arranging words in a pleasing order. These arrangements consume no resources themselves. In the past these words were distributed on dead trees, but increasingly they are now distributed electronically, so that no dead trees are required. Both of these things have increased economic growth without increasing the consumption of raw materials.

    Economists are starting to think about peak stuff; the idea that consumption of material goods is near or at its peak, and that future growth will be in services.

    Back before the Industrial Revolution the vast majority (90%+) of the population worked on or around the land, and it was generally assumed that land was the fundamental limiting factor in economics. These days in industrial countries the number is below 2%, or maybe 3% if you include workers in agricultural service industries like tractor factories, and land is no longer seen as a limiting factor for the rest of the economy.

    Now we are starting to see the same thing happen to raw materials. Economic activity is increasingly composed of services rather than manufactured goods, and even those manufactured goods are increasingly valuable because of the know-how added rather than the raw materials they are composed of.

    So if economic growth is detached from the supply of raw materials, it follows that the economy can continue to grow without necessarily consuming more raw materials. Of course right now raw material consumption is increasing, but that doesn't mean it has to continue forever.

    390:

    Gee, wonder what happened to all those weapons we gave them?

    Clandestine gun-running has been a staple of US foreign policy since at least 1950. It would be interesting to find out what happened to all that hardware.

    391:

    Paul @ 390: "However this ignores both the services part and the use of technology to increase the value added."

    I would replace "technology" with "new technology" in that phrase.

    And I would replace "millions" with 500,000 in Niala @ 386

    392:

    Just noticed that BBC R4 is broadcasting ( As a series ) The Shadow over Innsmouth

    There is no such thing a no-growth capitalism - are we entirely sure about that? As noted by others, some of your assumptions are also dodgy. Paul is asking the same ...

    EC @ 354 Putin is an Ex-KGB man - what part of that do you not seem to understand?

    Nojay As for why nuclear works -- it produces energy in the form of electricity to meet demand with no storage requirements and doesn't emit large quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere. Nothing else does that. THIS Now will someone PLEASE DO SOMETHING about the stupid luddite fake Greenies, who are preventing our escape? { Side-order - why are nuke power-stations so ridiculously expensive, compared to others - again - how come the Froggies got it right? }

    gasdive IF heat-pumps are that good & relatively inexpensive, then why aren't we submerging in the things?

    David L Bore-hole 5 metres in diameter? ( !! ) Sure about that?

    393:

    The mention of pumped power storage above reminds me yet again how well we have concealed the Future Inland Sea Empire from you thirsty unfortunates in the rest of the USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power_Plant . Built in 1973.

    As for the US, the biggest problem is that we have now arrived in what was forecast for 2030 of later, the misrule by the rural olds. Huge chunks of the US have blue majorities, but have been gerrymandered Red. Given the 300 state bills in play right now suppressing Dem votes, the USA is approaching a one-party state for a number of states.

    That means continued misrule more often than not, with Dem rule having to exhaust time and energy fixing some of the mess before being able to build.

    [[ html fix: avoid punctuation directly after a plain URL. Also I don't know why but I keep having to haul your comments out of the spam folder - mod ]]

    394:

    Martin @ 331 & 332

    ... After all, they may believe that France and Germany will veto any military response to (say) another landgrab in Ukraine.

    If they nibble away at Ukraine in small enough chunks, they may correct, and not just because of appeasement by France & Germany.

    The one well-prepared minor power was the first Gulf War under Bush Senior

    I really think you should add the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to that list. Mainly because they won. You might consider adding Afghanistan, who have just seen off their third invading Empire of the past two hundred years.

    The parallels between the Vietnam War and the war in Afghanistan are fairly "interesting". They both exposed limits of strategic bombing against stubborn guerilla armies who are allowed retreat into safe havens to re-arm & re-equip. The difference is that in Afghanistan the safe haven was provided by our nominal ally and was not subject to even perfunctory attack.

    FWIW, the U.S. "Intelligence Community" has released their Annual Threat Assessment.

    Note the assessment predates Biden's Afghanistan troop withdrawal announcement, so it probably doesn't forecast the fate of the Afghan Government accurately. I doubt we'll see a reenactment of the "fall of Saigon" ... we don't have enough helicopters with sufficient range for one thing and the Taliban are more vindictively revanchist than the NVA in 1975 & would be certain to fire upon any such evacuation attempt.

    395:

    I doubt we'll see a reenactment of the "fall of Saigon" ... we don't have enough helicopters with sufficient range for one thing and the Taliban are more vindictively revanchist than the NVA in 1975 & would be certain to fire upon any such evacuation attempt.

    One of my correspondents who has experience in Afghanistan yesterday expressed distress at what's going to happen to people the Taliban disapprove of for various reasons. Social workers, uppity women, politicians, intellectuals, etc. The usual.

    I'd like to see some evacuation process set up to get out as many as possible of those who would like to leave in the seven months remaining. C-17s rather than helicopters.

    396:

    The other one is ground heat transfer.

    I wonder what the lifespan is for dense urban areas for this, especially cooling.

    According to Rail Magazine, the average temperature in the Underground tunnels in the year 1900 was 14 degrees Celsius.

    Temperatures on the Tube vary line by line and day by day but you can probably be fairly sure that during the summer months it will be in the 30s.

    What 19th century engineers failed to realise was that 79 per cent of energy given out by the Underground trains, the people and the rest of the infrastructure is actually transferred to the clay around the tunnel's bores.

    And so, over the years, the average temperature has climbed. Taking an average across both winter and summer, and all of the lines, it's 25 degrees Celsius down there.

    https://www.mylondon.news/news/nostalgia/london-underground-used-much-cooler-16856927

    So if you have a dense urban core with buildings using boreholes and ground heat transfer to cool them, how long will that work before rising underground temperatures make it inefficient?

    (I'm ignoring heating, because even in Canada a really well-insulated building can generate a lot of its heat from devices and occupants. There was, famously, an office tower in Calgary that didn't turn on heat in the winter because all the computers (in the days of CRT monitors) generated enough waste heat to keep the temperature at 20-25°.)

    397:

    Just like a 5 year old thinks McDonalds, your home kitchen, and that 5 star restaurant are all the same

    Which given Trump's well-known eating habits is probably how he thinks of them…

    398:

    There was, famously, an office tower in Calgary that didn't turn on heat in the winter because all the computers (in the days of CRT monitors) generated enough waste heat to keep the temperature at 20-25°

    That means it was effectively heated by electricity topped up by the combined body heat from the inhabitants. I don't know what supplied Calgary's power at that time, coal probably if it's the era of CRTs.

    There was a proposal I saw a while back from a French company to put data centre server racks in the basements of apartment blocks and use the waste heat from the servers to warm the apartments above. I don't know if anything came of that idea though. I'm still holding out for my idea of doing something similar with spent nuclear fuel rod storage casks with the upside there's no need for electricity to warm the apartments at all, really Green and eco and all that.

    399:

    Bill Arnold @ 335:

    Yeah, phoning Putin to discuss the situation and to propose a summit, how dare he!

    "There's this:
    FACT SHEET: Imposing Costs for Harmful Foreign Activities by the Russian Government (April 15, 2021)
    Overall, it's relatively tame and focused, though it will sting.

    Putin & company can still attend the UN General Assembly sessions in New York, but they won't be allowed to visit Disneyland.

    [ ... ]

    They sort of walked back the Afghanistan soldier bounty allegations, indicating "low to moderate" confidence.[1]

    “This information puts a burden on the Russian government to explain its actions and take steps to address this disturbing pattern of behavior,” the official said, indicating that Biden is unprepared to walk the story back fully.
    [Press Secretary Jen] Psaki reiterated the intelligence community’s low-to-moderate confidence in its assessment about possible Russian bounties but said that U.S. intelligence had “high confidence” in a separate assessment that Russian military intelligence officers “manage interaction with individuals in Afghan criminal networks” and that the “involvement of this... unit is consistent with Russia’s encouraging attacks against U.S. and coalition personnel in Afghanistan.”
    “I am unsurprised that the review led to a murky determination of low to moderate confidence. While it is clear that Russia and other adversaries have been providing assistance to their proxies in Afghanistan, identifying type and amount of such assistance with great specificity has been the persistent challenge,” Jason Campbell, an Afghanistan policy official in the Obama Pentagon, told The Daily Beast.

    I don't know if they walked it back that far. It's more nuanced assessment than retreat.

    Putin and his inner circle are IMO high on their own supply (of manipulative misinformation) re the J. Biden administration's competence and in particular re Biden's mental competence. This is quite hazardous; in particular Americans can be bug-fuckin dangerous when threatened. Ideally the Russians feel reassured about the measured response summarized in the above link. (While expressing outrage, of course.)

    Putin is still pissed off at Obama for the 2010 spy scandal when we embarrassed the Russians by offering to swap their illegals for Skirpal et al.

    400:

    "IF heat-pumps are that good & relatively inexpensive, then why aren't we submerging in the things?"

    Difference between brochure figures and what you actually get in practice. The results obtained by people who have installed the things indicate that they are indeed cheaper to run than heating by electricity, but not cheaper than gas. And they are expensive enough to install that people who buy brand new Range Rovers have to think about it instead of just going ahead.

    Air source ones tend to be shit in proportion to how much you need them not to be. If you are trying to extract heat from typically soggy British air at 2 degrees C or so, then since the thing that takes up the heat must necessarily be some degrees colder than the thing it is taking up heat from, as soon as you turn it on it clogs itself solid in its own private iceberg. Of course, you can make an ice-source heat pump work, but it needs to be enormous, and still isn't very good.

    I don't think very many people drill 150m boreholes in their back garden to run a ground source one from. In so many cases it would be quite an entertainment just to get the drilling rig through the streets to the house, and trying to get it through to the back would be as good as a circus. I think it also brings you into conflict with complex regulations about digging deep holes and maybe even mining rights in places. The usual thing is to lay the pickup loop horizontally a couple of metres deep, using a mini digger some of which can be small enough to even get through doorways at a pinch, or one of those hypodermic knife plough things, or a shovel if it comes down to it.

    So it is of little interest in the first place except to people who can't get a gas supply, and then you need a big enough back garden to lay a decent length of pipe in, and loads of money to pay for it all. Or you can live in a place which is rich with oil money and has the sea to put the pipe in, but even fewer people do that.

    401:

    Pigeon @ 338: At a very rough guess I reckon there's a good enough chance of halving the heating usage if you can work out what to do about all the sash windows and single leaf walls, and manage to get every house thoroughly up to the mark. Beyond that it gets really difficult, because you start having to completely replace huge numbers of houses with brand new ones.

    That's what I was getting at. Integrated energy policy should approach the problem from both sides; find renewable energy sources to replace fossil fuels and cut energy demand to the extent it's feasible. Most of the discussion here has been on the shortcomings of the first part, so I was wondering about the second.

    It's too bad we don't have some way to trade some of our excess summer heat for some of your excess cool weather. It'd be great to be able to just open a window (suitably screened of course to keep the bugs out) instead of having to crank up the AC.

    402:

    Economists are starting to think about peak stuff; the idea that consumption of material goods is near or at its peak, and that future growth will be in services.

    What's driving the decline in goods an increase n service is population aging.

    Old people don't buy things, they buy services (travel, dining and entertainment, and medical - lots of medical)

    403:

    I think that the only reason the US population is still going up is... immigration from Central America.

    Yep, our demographics are strong AND we are becoming more non-white everyday.

    Trump and other nativists not withstanding, America remains open to immigrants (unlike, say Japan).

    We need immigrants to grow our economy.

    But Europe stopped having babies so these immigrants are not going to be white.

    Hence the emergence of Trumpism.

    America can either be an economically vibrant great power or it can be white.

    It can't be both.

    404:

    The version I heard was that the "bounty" intelligence was single-sourced from a detainee who was saying anything and everything to get the torture to stop. It made great headlines for a while though.

    405:

    Sorry, but the true levelized cost of energy (LCOE - factoring in all up front construction and operational lifetime costs) which allows for apples to apples economic comparison says otherwise. Renewable energy costs have fallen, but nowhere near enough. In fact, LCOE says natural gas is still the cheapest and coal is still king according to this brutally honest video (you can see the disappointment on the narrators face - he really wanted renewables to be economically viable, but the harsh facts say otherwise):

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6PTKXz_2r0

    Note: Oil is almost exclusively for transport, only rarely for energy production, so it is not included.

    LCOEs costs per kWh are:

    Natural Gas: $0.02 to $0.08 Coal: $0.04 to $0.15 (mature tech, not much room for improvement) Hydroelectric: $0.01 to $0.28 (relatively few locations to build dams, and they've all been built on)

    On Land Wind: $0.04 to $0.12 Off Shore Wind: $0.10 t0 $0.21 (much bigger up front costs than on-land wind) Solar PV: $0.06 to $0.56

    Concentrated Solar: $0.06 to $0.25 Nuclear: $0.05 to $0.13 Geothermal: $0.05 to $0.15 (new advances in deep drilling and applying fracking techniques could be game changers)

    OTEC: $0.10 to $0.17 Tidal: $0.15 to $0.40 (even fewer possible locations than hydro)

    Summary chart shown on the video at 16:27.

    The apparent winners are wind, hydro, natural gas, coal and nuclear.

    But none of the LCOEs sited for renewables include their necessary energy storage facilities (li-ion batteries, air batteries, pumped hydro, etc.) so total system LCOEs are even higher. So scratch wind.

    Hydro power can't be expanded because all of the practical places to put hydro dams have already been built on. So scratch hydro.

    Coal is dirty, deadly and causes global warming. So scratch coal.

    Nuclear is almost impossible to build and permit these days (much as I would have it otherwise). So scratch nuclear - unless we see a serious development in easy to install plug and play small modular reactors (SMR).

    So that leaves natural gas, which creates less than half the GHGs that coal does per kWh and is so insanely cheap due to fracking advances it's almost free. And it is the reason America is going to become the second largest fossil fuel EXPORTER after Saudi Arabia later this year.

    My ideal solution would be to go balls to the wall with nuclear, especially new advanced and inherently safe technologies like pebble bed reactors and SMRs, and use the off peak kWhs to electrolyze as much hydrogen as you would want for a true hydrogen economy with hydrogen fuel cells for transportation.

    Alas, we don't live in an ideal world.

    So my realistic solution is to frack natural gas until it comes out of our ears, with side bets on deep geothermal (made possible by fracking and drilling technology advances) and SMRs. What's left of GHGs are to be dealt with by other means (planting forests, fertilize the oceans, sequestration underground, etc.)

    The harsh truth is that if we continue to use fossil fuels, global warming will kill billions.

    A harsher truth is that if we go fully renewable, real energy costs will increase and billions (not just oil oligarchs) will be thrown into poverty.

    The harshest truth is that humans will choose to avoid immediate poverty even if it ensures death decades or generations hence.

    406:

    Duffy @ 347: Or Britain can continue to devolve into its component parts: Scotland, Ulster, Wales, Isle of Man, Cornwall, London City, etc. - many of whom would rejoin the EU.

    Each becoming as important on the world stage as Lithuania.

    But not, perhaps, so influential as the Duchy of Grand Fenwick?

    And having left the EU with its agricultural price support policies (which Britain can no longer take advantage of) it's got to find food somewhere.

    The American farmer will be happy to oblige, for a price.

    Maybe one day protesting Englishmen will be throwing American tea into the Thames."

    Surely it will be chlorine washed chickens. The U.S. is not, AFAIK, a net exporter of tea.

    407:

    I highly recommend Vaclav Smil's "Energy and Civilization"

    Summary: The history of mankind's energy use has been one of ever increasing concentration of energy per unit of fuel (in terms of calorie per weight of fuel)

    Fire Farming Fossil Fuels Fission (we got side tracked) Fusion (someday)

    Renewables, which are inherently low density and dispersed (rough equivalent to the energy density of farming), are counter to the overall historical trend of ever more concentrated energy sources. This alone argues against their widespread adoption, not to mention that in real terms renewables will always remain more expensive (in terms of their EROEI) and less useful than fossil fuels.

    Adopting renewables wholesale will save the planet from global warming but will also increase the real cost of energy (this is a conspiracy of physics, not of the oil companies), and causing a real drop in overall wealth and standards of living for everyone (not just oil sheikhs and oligarchs).

    Barring any major breakthrough that allows us to leap frog to fusion, what we should be doing is maximizing fission energy sources (especially new developments like thorium and small modular reactors), utilizing off peak kWh to hydrolyze water to create a hydrogen fuel economy (whenever somebody compares fuel cell cars to EVs remember to include the massive cost of disposal for worn out li-ion batteries, fuel cells OTOH never wear out).

    Renewables will remain useful as niche energy sources as determined by the individual purchasing decision of users (residential and commercial) - not by a nationally enforced program.

    408:

    America can either be an economically vibrant great power or it can be white.

    It can't be both.

    Of course, "neither" is also an option…

    409:

    "{ Side-order - why are nuke power-stations so ridiculously expensive, compared to others - again - how come the Froggies got it right? }"

    Oh, we can't do it any more. We've forgotten how. We've lost the skills. We haven't been educating enough nuclear engineers. Whine, flap, can't.

    Bollocks. We did it before, when nobody had ever had any knowing-how to have forgotten, the skills didn't exist, and you couldn't even be educated as a nuclear engineer. Oh and the country was fucked to a puddle after doing a massive war. The difference now is that we can't be fucking arsed.

    Also, of course, Cthulhu forbid that the government should pay a penny for anything useful. The mere suggestion is heresy. It must be done by private enterprise, with profits, and opacity, and ten times the cost, and of course all the clandestine contributions to the ministerial priesthood and promises of eventual bishoprics etc.

    Why can't we electrify the railways? Same thing, pretty much.

    410:

    I'm a big fan of Grand Designs with Kevin McCloud and I am always amazed at the expensive and extensive regulatory hoops that Brits have to jump through to get a home remodeled or built. The show has also taught me that apparently nobody in Britain builds with a proper design plan or solid financing. And for some crazy reason Brits don't mind spending millions of pounds on a home that looks like an ugly parking garage.

    411:

    If I had to put all my chips on one bet, it would be deep geothermal. This has the potential to be a real game changer allowing us to tap the heat of the Earth anywhere, not just Iceland. It's facilities would be small and compact, not destroying dozens of square miles of habitat like solar arrays and wind farms. Unlike NG it would have zero CO2 emissions. Unlike nuclear its inherently safe

    412:

    "It's too bad we don't have some way to trade some of our excess summer heat for some of your excess cool weather."

    Phase change!

    Concoct some material that melts at about half way between "cold" and "hot" and absorbs a lot of latent heat, and make millions of tons of it. And a bunch of wind-powered ferries to ship it back and forth across the Atlantic. You have it in the summer and melt it, then we have it in the winter and solidify it again.

    :)

    413:

    In theory it would have been possible to upgrade colonies into parts of the UK, but that would have meant doing things like giving Americans seats in Parliament starting around 1770

    See "The Two Georges" by Harry Turtledove

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

    For more than two centuries, what would have become the continental United States and Canada has been the North American Union, a self-governing dominion within the British Empire with Alaska being retained under the rule of Russia and Hawaii being a British protectorate. The title of the novel refers to a fictional Gainsborough painting that commemorates the agreement between George Washington and King George III, which peacefully ended the American Revolution. The painting itself has become a symbol of national unity.

    Native Americans fared much better than in real-world history with tribes such as the Iroquois and the Cherokee managing to keep much of their land and have autonomy, their status comparable to that of the Princely States in British India.

    As the North American Union remained in the British Empire following peaceful negotiation, the French Revolution was suppressed at the storming of the Bastille by troops under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte in the service of Louis XVI, thus preserving the Bourbon monarchy. By the twentieth century, France and Spain exist in a French-dominated personal union, the Holy Alliance, which controls most of Latin America and Northern Africa and is ruled over by François IV.

    The abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833 included slaves in North America. The emancipated blacks prospered, gained education and experienced a rapid upward social mobility, by the twentieth century, becoming a mainly middle class community. Conversely, the Irish-American community remained a predominantly poor, working class population, subsisting on hard physical labor such as the coal mining on which the North American Union depended for its energy. This created a feeling of bitter jealousy among the Irish, and many of them came to support the Sons of Liberty, a terrorist organization that wants to see America become independent from the British Empire and promotes a blatantly racist and xenophobic ideology.

    In the twentieth century, the empires of Great Britain, the Holy Alliance and Russia are the world's major powers, with the Austrian Empire being a European land-based middle power coveting Balkan territory and neither Germany nor Italy becoming unified nation-states.

    As in the Mexican War of our history, the mid-nineteenth century saw Britain and the North American Union conquer a large portion of Nueva España (in this case, also including the Baja California peninsula) from the Holy Alliance. The city of Los Angeles was renamed New Liverpool and developed into one of the largest cities of the North American Union and the Province of Upper California.

    414:

    Nojay @ 360:

    It would be nice if we could save civilisation, but if it doesn't work in Edinburgh (and nothing does except nuclear for some reason no one can explain) then it can't work anywhere.

    If you're willing to write off half a million people who live in Edinburgh and billions more around the world who live in highly urban environments because you've got a solution that works for the low-population density area you live in, wonderful. That's the IGMFY attitude I was referring to.

    That's not the way I read it though. It came through to me like half a million Edinburghers (Edinburgundians? or Edinbourgeois?) are holding up solutions for the other 67.7 million inhabitants of the U.K. with a "dog in the manger" attitude. I don't propose to write them off, but I do wonder why they should have veto power over the rest of the country?

    415:

    "You could locate it in one of Edinburgh's extinct volcanoes... ...the film writes itself (badly, probably)."

    Is it 90 minutes of some poor bastard trying to drill basalt?

    416:

    Bore-hole 5 metres in diameter? ( !! ) Sure about that?

    I typed

    with bore holes .5M or so in diameter

    I think you missed the DOT.

    417:

    As you say. And those aren't the only examples :-(

    418:

    IF heat-pumps are that good & relatively inexpensive, then why aren't we submerging in the things?

    In the US I suspect that heat pump HVAC systems are the most common installs for new construction. Nat Gas is no where near as cheaper as in the past. And what are called mini-splits are more and more common for very old situations where you can't really run new ducting. So they are room sized with a 5cm or so hole through the exterior wall.

    Here's a link, just the first one I found that showed some pictures. https://www.achrnews.com/articles/140289-mini-splits-continue-to-revolutionize-the-hvac-industry Small lump on inside. Slight bigger on outside. Power to be run to outside unit. And they don't have to be back to back through the wall.

    419:

    So if you have a dense urban core with buildings using boreholes and ground heat transfer to cool them, how long will that work before rising underground temperatures make it inefficient?

    I wonder similar things. But for urban areas you might have a bore sink going down 1000' or more. And maybe 3 or 4 in a grid.

    I don't have the knowledge or time to figure it out as to what happens that deep with how much heat being added.

    Once you get deep the earth is a pretty big heat sink. But it's not infinite. The question is how deep would we have to go to treat it as infinite.

    Plus in the winter in many places we'd be pulling out heat.

    When I've looked at visiting England I have noticed that the climate is much more moderate both high and low compared to most of the US. I've been in Toronto in February and tried swimming in a lake north of Toronto one August. Moscow it's not but still way too cold for me.

    420:

    I'm still holding out for my idea of doing something similar with spent nuclear fuel rod storage casks

    With a dosimeter for all new inhabitants as a part of the move it kit.

    GDRFC

    421:

    then since the thing that takes up the heat must necessarily be some degrees colder than the thing it is taking up heat from

    Nope. Doesn't work that way. But efficiency does go down.

    And I've yet to see one without a heating element inline of the airflow for when the efficiency gets to low.

    As to cheaper than gas heat or not. It all depends on the cost of electricity vs. gas which varies all over the world depending on extraction taxes and breaks and then retail taxes.

    As to costs, in the US you'll spend from $5K to $15K for a typical heat pump (outside air based) setup depending. Assuming you already have duct work in place. A gas furnace can be $5K to $10K and you still don't have AC. So in the end the install costs can be similar.

    Two big factors in the US are: - does your address have nat gas service? - can your electrical service handle the load of a heatpump?

    422:

    gasdive @ 365: My mail system eats scam emails, so I don't know, but I'm getting about 4 scam phone calls a day.

    I don't get that many outright SCAM calls any more, but there's a lot of sketchy telemarketing robo-calls wanting to sell me stuff I don't want or need (health insurance, extended warranties, solar panels).

    What's about to drive me to distraction is the house flippers wanting to make me a cash offer on my property (i.e. the house I live in).

    It's a tiny run down house on a tiny run down lot, but I'm less than two miles from the State Capitol ... walking distance to government offices & downtown businesses (1.8 miles to Red Hat corporate headquarters) ... and you walk right past a Krispy Kreme on the way.

    Yet, those assholes think I'm going to sell them my HOME for less than the assessed tax value?

    Fuckin' low-ballers think just because I'm old I'm too stupid to understand how much the house (and land) is actually worth.

    423:

    JReynolds @ 366: Honestly, a CANZUK union makes as little sense as an independent Scotland joining Canada instead of rejoining the EU. "Let's leave one union that hasn't done anything for us in 40+ years, and confederate with a country across the Atlantic Ocean! Makes total sense!"

    (Although maybe Canada could join the EU? Wouldn't we be a slam-dunk, economy- and democracy-wise? Ignoring that bit about "European" in the "EU", of course).

    This is kind of old (pre-BREXIT), but that Peter Zeihan fella' had an interesting take on the EU:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DO5gwjHVxg

    Don't know how well Canada would fit in with the reality of EU demography?

    424:

    Re: Why things are so expensive to build.

    This is a general problem, not limited to nuclear power stations, and near as I can tell, it is simply down to most of the western world having really bad doctrine on infrastructure procurement.

    Various attempts at cutting down on insider dealing and making bids entire rule based has caused a situation where the state is a purchaser with amnesia, and doing a good job on your current project does not help you land the next one.. and worse, doing an awful job probably wont hurt you next bidding round, either.

    It does not help that the western countries with the best record on "Getting things actually built" have pretty negative stereotypes in the public conciousness, so their praxis does not get copied much.. Spain is better at building railroads than anyone, but..

    425:

    Troutwaxer @ 377: The problem is that the downsides of the British Empire's model were "extract resources from colonized countries" and "enforce white supremacy." The upside was that everyone knew that whatever rules existed would be enforced fairly.

    As long as you limit "everyone" to upper class white colonists. Rules were NOT fairly enforced for lower class whites, much less for "non-whites".

    426:

    Canada is a prototype of the EU, but joining it is unlikely.

    The cultural, historical and linguistic differences between Victoria, Winnipeg, Iqaluit, Quebec City and Halifax are vast.

    Canada is a confederation of somewhat independent provinces with somewhat common goals. It is a non-stop job of work to continue convincing everyone that they should remain within the confederation.

    There are precisely zero reasons we would ever consider joining something absurd like Canzuk, and thousands of reasons to reject it outright. EU is a bit closer to the mark but there aren't a lot of compelling reasons that can't be resolved through trade agreements.

    427:

    We installed a heat pump heating + hot water system over a year ago in an old (by Vancouver standards) house. The biggest pain point was that the ductwork for the previous gas forced-air system was undersized for that, and woefully undersized for a heat pump system. The heat is much more pleasant than the previous gas system, more gentle, much quieter. Some amount of that might be from the better ductwork, but not all.

    Downside: we have had one occasion of having to chip ice off the outside fan when the rain went sideways from an unexpected direction.

    At the same time we installed an induction stove. It boils water faster than the previous gas stove, cooks better, and the only downsides were having to buy some new pots and not having a wok. Neither was a deal-break for us.

    Bonus: in an earthquake-prone location we now have no gas piped in the house, and are therefore less likely to lose the house to a fire if there is an earthquake.

    Unexpected bonus: our air monitor (VOCs, dust, etc) shows the air inside is much cleaner than before we got rid of the gas system.

    428:

    The cultural, historical and linguistic differences between Victoria, Winnipeg, Iqaluit, Quebec City and Halifax are vast.

    And you skiped the prairie. When we switched our Canadian version of some insurance agency (think 1 to 10 people) software around 79/80 the folks from the prairie wanted to buy the US version so they could keep using MM/DD/YY. They were really pissed that we obeyed the law and made them switch to YY/MM/DD. Actually "really pissed" is a mild reading of their feelings.

    429:

    Allen Thomson @ 391:

    Gee, wonder what happened to all those weapons we gave them?

    Clandestine gun-running has been a staple of US foreign policy since at least 1950. It would be interesting to find out what happened to all that hardware.

    For reasons of plausible deniability, many of the weapons supplied to American "clients" came from non-U.S. sources. How do you tell the difference between a Soviet-era AK supplied to Afghanistan by the GRU and a post-Soviet AK from Bulgaria (with repackaged Chinese ammunition) supplied by a CIA contractor?

    https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/the-stoner-arms-dealers-how-two-american-kids-became-big-time-weapons-traders-176604/

    430:

    Allen Thomson @ 395:

    I doubt we'll see a reenactment of the "fall of Saigon" ... we don't have enough helicopters with sufficient range for one thing and the Taliban are more vindictively revanchist than the NVA in 1975 & would be certain to fire upon any such evacuation attempt.

    One of my correspondents who has experience in Afghanistan yesterday expressed distress at what's going to happen to people the Taliban disapprove of for various reasons. Social workers, uppity women, politicians, intellectuals, etc. The usual.

    I'd like to see some evacuation process set up to get out as many as possible of those who would like to leave in the seven months remaining. C-17s rather than helicopters.

    If they'd go ahead and start now they could do it with Airbus 300s & Boeing 757s; carry a lot more people. But I'm not hopeful.

    431:

    It's a good idea to get any basement checked for radon gas[1]. Having a spent nuclear fuel cask emitting 20kW of heat down there means you get the entire testing and alarm apparatus free with every purchase because Nuclear is SCARY! so it's a double-win.

    [1] Radon gas is organic and cruelty-free and approved by Linda McCartney so it gets a pass from the nuclear Chicken Littles, same as K-40.

    432:

    Fuel cells do wear out if they run on air as the oxidiser. The catalysts get polluted with all sorts of crap that's in the air, the produce nitrogen compounds including acids etc. The really good space-rated fuel cells run on hydrogen and oxygen and they can last a long time because the inputs are very clean.

    433:

    "Air source ones tend to be shit in proportion to how much you need them not to be. If you are trying to extract heat from typically soggy British air at 2 degrees C or so, then since the thing that takes up the heat must necessarily be some degrees colder than the thing it is taking up heat from, as soon as you turn it on it clogs itself solid in its own private iceberg."

    This hasn't been true at any time this century. They work great in 2C air that's 100% humidity. In Australia and New Zealand they have to pass a test at that exact temperature and have an efficiency higher than you claim is the maximum efficiency reachable. Practically the first thing mentioned in NZ real estate adverts is "heatpump" if there is one. Eg,

    https://www.realestate.co.nz/3960154/residential/sale/20-aharkness-place-westport

    Westport is on the West Coast of the South Island, right in the teeth of the roaring 40's. Average humidity is 80% year round and 12-15 rainy days a month all year.

    You're really decades out of date on this one.

    434:

    Robert Prior @ 396: (I'm ignoring heating, because even in Canada a really well-insulated building can generate a lot of its heat from devices and occupants. There was, famously, an office tower in Calgary that didn't turn on heat in the winter because all the computers (in the days of CRT monitors) generated enough waste heat to keep the temperature at 20-25°.)

    That's why I was asking about insulation earlier. I used to subscribe to a magazine called Mother Earth News that had a lot of articles about insulating Eco-friendly homes to the point where they would contain the body heat of occupants & waste heat from the lights (before CFL & LED lighting were common) and require minimal additional heat in the winter.

    With the right kind of design, you can keep the heat out in the summer and use natural cooling in place of Air Conditioning. Maybe couldn't completely eliminate the need for AC in some places, but you could reduce demand.

    I realize AC isn't that big a need in the U.K. & there would be a big cost in replacing existing housing ... but as time goes by, the U.K. is going to need NEW housing and the new construction could take advantage of energy efficient design principles.

    Plus, I'm not that confident we'll be able to contain (much less reverse) climate change, and AC may become more important in the U.K.'s future.

    435:

    "IF heat-pumps are that good & relatively inexpensive, then why aren't we submerging in the things?"

    You tell me. I can see 2 from where I sit on the lounge. I go to former colonies like Hong Kong and they're literally everywhere. You look down on practically any major city and the roof of every high rise is covered in the outdoor units of heat pumps, they're a huge selling point for a house in the South Island of New Zealand.

    The UK doesn't have them, but they do have pebble dash, which is clearly the most horrible looking thing and would instantly devalue any house, anywhere else in the world, to below zero, but you guys love it.

    You're a weird mob.

    436:

    "then since the thing that takes up the heat must necessarily be some degrees colder than the thing it is taking up heat from"

    "Nope. Doesn't work that way."

    The rate of heat flow from one thing to another is proportional to the area of the contact between the two things and the temperature difference. [Newton.] For the air to act as a source for the heat pump, heat must be able to flow from the air to the machine. Therefore the part of the machine which is in contact with the air must be at a lower temperature than the air itself. You can make it be less lower by making the thing bigger, but you can't practically get it down to zero, and you absolutely can't make it be higher no matter what you do, otherwise things would get very interesting indeed. It's a limitation in fundamental principles, so you can't frig around it by being clever. Patent offices, indeed, ban applications from people who think they can.

    Having the evaporator matrix choke itself solid with ice can be a problem even for air conditioners ingesting (humid) air at somewhere around 30 degrees C. In that sort of context and temperature it is merely a symptom of the machine being shit, because if the air is hot enough to need cooling it is practical to make the matrix big enough not to need to get below freezing point to achieve the desired heat transfer rate. But in the case of an air sourced heat pump ingesting humid air at temperatures which are nigh on freezing to begin with, it isn't practical at all. Basically, at that point you've had it. Even if you were somewhere it had dry air to eat, it would have to be really dry to keep the ice accumulation from being a problem.

    Once it starts to ice up the problem rapidly makes itself worse, because the ice acts as insulation, so the heat input drops to effectively zero, and the inner surface of the ice rapidly gets much colder, freezing it on hard. To clear it off in a reasonably short time in such low ambient temperatures, you need to reverse the pump and heat the matrix from the inside. Of course, this further knackers the already succulent average efficiency...

    I guess you might be able to do something with mechanical scrapers to remove the ice as fast as it forms, but it still might be tough to keep the power consumption low enough to make it worthwhile. Especially as the low source temperature on its own is enough to kill the efficiency before you start. This is no doubt why AFAIK nobody bothers.

    437:

    "This hasn't been true at any time this century. They work great in 2C air that's 100% humidity."

    I quite simply do not believe you. It's not a matter of "this century" vs. any other century, it's fundamental. If you want to pull heat at a rate of kilowatts out of air at 2 deg C without the surface of the heat exchanger dropping below 0, you need a sodding great massive big one. (Or some compromise involving a sodding great massive fan, but that is very likely to cane the overall efficiency. Big fans are hungry.) If you do allow the heat exchanger to drop below 0, it will ice up. And that's the situation you have to deal with. It's not something that you can avoid by being clever.

    Even if you did manage to find space to put the thing, it would not be robust in operation. If the size is adequate at 2 degrees, it's only half of adequate at 1 degree. You need to (more than) double the area to maintain the heat transfer rate and still keep the surface temperature above zero. If the input air temperature drops from 2 degrees to 1 degree while the thing is operating at more than half capacity, the surface of the exchanger will be pulled below zero and it will ice up.

    Because of the positive-feedback nature of the icing process, once it starts it proceeds rapidly, and the iced-up state is then stable and will persist indefinitely unless the compressor is turned off (or reversed) until it has completely thawed. So a hypothetical system which would function at 2 degrees, being operated at anything over a fraction of its intended capacity, would be highly unreliable and prone to conking out if the ambient temperature dropped a fraction of a degree.

    And of course when the air temperature does get below zero, there is nothing at all you can do about any of it. 2 degrees down to zero is not much of a variation, and you can't rely on it not happening. It's bound to happen, and then any kind of device will freeze up if there's any moisture about at all.

    438:

    Native Americans fared much better than in real-world history with tribes such as the Iroquois and the Cherokee managing to keep much of their land and have autonomy

    One of the grievances the colonists had against Britain was that the British insisted that treaties with the natives be respected, rather than following the fine old colonial tradition of ignoring them when they wanted a bit more land. There's a reason that the first nations tended to be British allies, both in the American Rebellion and the War of 1812.

    So that bit of the novel didn't stress my believe suspenders… :-)

    439:

    I think it would be great. I'd certainly have one - if I had a basement and any use for 20kW of heat. I could set up dioramas round it and projections on the walls, on themes like Gothic-style Mad Scientist, Terrorist Cell, Old Dalby, Curies' Lab, Neil and Vyvyan's Uranium Mine, and so on. Could even have costume parties around it on the same themes.

    440:

    I've been in Toronto in February and tried swimming in a lake north of Toronto one August. Moscow it's not but still way too cold for me.

    Wuss. Don't let a little ice keep you out of the water :-)

    Next you'll be telling me that you put the top on your convertible once it gets below zero, rather than wearing a toque and enjoying the fresh air!

    441:

    But I'm not hopeful.

    Me neither. It's going to be bloody and awful.

    442:

    And you skiped the prairie.

    No, the 'Peg is in the Prairies.

    443:

    Downside: we have had one occasion of having to chip ice off the outside fan when the rain went sideways from an unexpected direction.

    In my admittedly limited Vancouver experience, sideways rain from all directions is expected winter weather…

    I love Vancouver in summer; February, not so much…

    444:

    For reasons of plausible deniability, many of the weapons supplied to American "clients" came from non-U.S. sources.

    Check out the Camp Stanley Storage Activity in Boerne, Texas. They're still hiring armorers with experience in used foreign weaponry.

    445:

    I guess your carefully reasoned utter bollocks analysis trumps my actual experience and that of millions of people living in cold damp environments, and the standards organisation of two countries.

    However sure you are of your expertise in heat pumps, you might consider the amount of heat released by turning water vapour into ice is vastly vastly more than the amount needed to turn ice into water and have it run off the evaporator. Then think about what that might mean in terms of your carefully reasoned utter bollocks analysis.

    Of course if you've already convinced yourself that the efficiency of heat pumps hasn't increased in the last 50 years, and that there's no such thing as cheap computers and sensors that can work out the optimal time to switch to defrost, then that probably wouldn't alter your carefully reasoned utter bollocks analysis.

    446:

    insulating Eco-friendly homes to the point where they would contain the body heat of occupants & waste heat from the lights (before CFL & LED lighting were common) and require minimal additional heat in the winter

    Back in the 80s when I was studying engineering one of our profs talked about the very energy-efficient house he had designed and built. (Youngsters might want to google the energy crisis in the 70s, which resulted in heating costs increasing much faster than inflation, which was also pretty high and typically exceeded salary increases.) It was so well-insulated that he and his wife overheated if they didn't leave their bedroom door or window open a bit at night — even in a prairie winter! (That's nighttime lows of -20 to -25°.)

    447:

    Is it true that heat pumps stop working when it gets very cold out?

    Yes – but it would have to get very, very cold for a heat pump to stop working entirely.

    Different models of heat pumps have different ratings for how cold it can be before they stop being effective. For the sake of this example, we will use the rating for a Mitsubishi Hyper Heat™ heat pump, which is rated to provide sufficient heat output down to -13 degrees Fahrenheit.

    Heat pumps are rated for “output.” In this example, when it is 30 degrees out, a heat pump will easily produce 100% of its output at the highest efficiency. However, as temperatures start dropping, output starts dropping as well – and when output starts dropping, the heat pump will “work harder” to keep your home at temperature. Much like having to put your foot on the gas to get your car up a steep hill, this is where efficiency rates of heat pumps start to drop – more energy is used to produce less output.

    With the Mitsubishi Hyper Heat™ heat pump, the efficiency rate will start to drop at around 2 degrees Fahrenheit. At -2 degrees, you will get around 87% of the unit’s output. And at -13 degrees, you will get around 76% of the unit’s output. It is unclear at what temperature the unit will stop working entirely – we haven’t yet had a day cold enough to demonstrate that with the Hyper Heat™ heat pumps, though some Mitsubishi documentation suggests a stopping point of -18 degrees.

    https://truenorthenergyservices.com/heat-pumps-101-faq/

    Of course, this company operates in Maine, which has a much warmer and more temperate climate than that suffered by those living in the icy wastes of Britain. ;-)

    448:

    Don’t care what you believe. Heat pumps - almost always air-sourced -are pretty much the standard heat management system here on the Wet Coast. I’m on Vancouver Island, in a fairly large house I built myself. The heat pump and ducting and installation cost around CD14k on 2011 and so far as i can tell have tended cheaper since. My total energy costs for heat/light/cooking/water/computers(lots of) and machinery (quite a bit of high grade semi-pro) has averaged C$1500 p.a. over the intervening years. The weather is similar to where we used to live in UK (Winchester) but at the colder end in winters. The house is well insulated and properly ventilated, something that no UK house I’ve ever visited could claim. The heat pump works entirely adequately in any weather we get - down to -10C is not too unusual- and does not get turned into an ice block. Nor does it explode in bouts of superheated air in the summer. Current models are significantly more efficient and when a replacement is needed I won’t hesitate to install one. And I get a/c on the small number of days when it gets really hot 35c or so.

    449:

    Out of curiosity, how much do you pay per kilowatt-hour? (net including delivery/taxes/whatever, i.e. divide electric bill by kilowatt hours.) A lot of hydro/cheap electricity south of the border in that area, so US houses use heat pumps as well.

    450:

    Yep.

    They use them in Antarctica.

    "Using the heat pump system for heating and cooling proved to be a durable and energy efficient solution. Durable because only one installation is needed for both heating and cooling, and efficient because of the low energy consumption for heating."

    Innovative transportable laboratories for polar science. Liesbeth H.W. Noor 2018

    But as you say, it's not the icy wasteland that is London.

    451:

    gasdive @ 450

    When I take a walk in my neighborhood I don't often see heat pumps on the side of houses. All these comments about using heat pumps in the winter have made me go to the Web to see what vendors said about their own heat pumps. It turns out that their pumps stop being efficient and stop working completely near -15 or -20 C.

    I then went to read Liesbeth Noor's article on using a heat pump in Antarctica. I found they don't rely on the heat pump alone for heating, since it shuts down automatically at -29 C.

    "...temperatures below -25°C are infrequent in this part of Antarctica(Shanklin et al.,2009). If temperatures fall below -25°C the installation will perform at a lower capacity; below-29°C the installation will switch off automatically. Anti-frost protection measures need to be taken by closing the ventilation openings in the docking station and placing anti-frost heaters in the container laboratories...."

    The winters I've known around Montreal and Ottawa and Québec City have routinely had temperatures at -30 C. Often the temperatures reach -40 C.

    You can have an heat pump if you really absolutely want to, but you also need a completely independent heating system for the really cold days.

    452:

    Whether the heat pump needs a 'completely independent' heating system for cold areas depends on the design of the heat pump. Ours has a back-up heating element that we expect to never need in Vancouver.

    https://betterhomesbc.ca/products/do-i-need-a-backup-heat-source-for-my-heat-pump/ has some information.

    453:

    So only works perfectly down to 11 degrees colder than ever recorded in Edinburgh which started this aside.

    www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/edinburgh-news/gallery/pictures-crazy-edinburgh-snowpocalypse-2010-15750340.amp

    And still be working perfectly at the lowest London temperature recorded since records began in 1697, -19C.

    Seems like a reasonable trade off to cut winter energy demand by 240 GW without having to install a single pane of double glazing.

    454:

    Bill, I think it is about C$0.12/kWh or thereabouts - somewhere around 9c US?

    As runix mentioned, every heat pump indoor unit (confusingly referred to a the furnace by most people) I’ve seen has a heating element for when needed. The only time mine has ever fired up was when drying the drywall mud before the actual heat pump was hooked up. Now that was expensive in electrons.

    I think (and can’t be arsed to check) that Panasonic sell a unit good down to -36C.

    Whatever, heat pumps are wonderful things. You get more out than you put in - how can that not be neat?

    455:

    Pigeon @ 400 I looked up UK heat pumps ... first cost is high & even promoted efficiencies are not that great, but thanks for the additional info. I also suspect a price cartel, but no evidence.

    @ 409 we can't be fucking arsed Or rather - no greedy little corrupt shit is going to make millions out of it, ripping us off - & as you note, the same applies to the railways.

    David L Maybe I need new specs!

    Nojay A friend's father's house was in Cornwall ... yup, a dosimeter would start going "CLICK!" in his basement.

    Rbt Prior -13 degrees Fahrenheit. WHAT IS THAT? grrr ... ah -25 °C Really!

    456: 409 Para the Last - Scotland inceasingly has, but Ingurlund seemingly won't, so there's little point in Wales doing so even if the political will to do exists. 414 - Well I read if as "if it works in Australia it must work everywhere, even in places where the locals know it won't work and can explain so, with worked examples". 415 - It could be worse; it could be 90 minutes of someone trying to drill granite or even Lewisian Gneiss! 418 - Well, I know of cases where housing associations have discovered air source heat pumps, and think they have discovered cold fusion!
    458:

    What Pigeon said is mostly correct, but there is a wrinkle that people from the UK rarely get (even those that have been skiing!) It is actually much EASIER to keep warm whan it is colder and, related to that, much easier to keep cooling elements from freezing up. When it is seriously cold, the air is dry and, even more importantly, water vapour condenses as a more like a powder than a solid block of ice. And then there's sublimation.

    Exactly how well heat pumps would work for the UK, I don't know but, considering that I have had Merkins flame me for saying that bicycle chains rusting up is a serious problem, I am disinclined to trust anecdata from alien climes. Equally, I am NOT saying that they won't work - just that I shall remain undecided until I have seen some evidence. And the fact that they are not widely sold here imakes me a little dubious.

    But there are other problems. Heat pumps (and air conditioners and anything that voids heat or cold to the outside) in high density locations are a menace to anyone using the streets. That is one of several reasons that I would ban air conditioners in cars in the UK, especially in cities. Yes, there are peoiple who drive cars rather than walk for exactly this reason!

    In much of the UK, good ventilation is as important as heating, and there are SERIOUS problems when people put in efficient insulation. Damp is the most common one, which can be solved by powerful dehumidifiers, but radon is a much more serious one in many parts of the country, and there are plenty of other such nasties.

    Lastly, demolishing and rebuilding would destroy most of our architectural heritage, cause a massive amount of waste to be disposed of, and use a huge amount of energy. Cement manufacture alone is one of the biggest causes of CO2 emissions.

    459:

    It came through to me like half a million Edinburghers (Edinburgundians? or Edinbourgeois?) are holding up solutions for the other 67.7 million inhabitants of the U.K.

    Nope: I use Edinburgh as my go-to example for planning headaches but it's actually typical of 50-60% of the UK in terms of difficulty in modernizing housing.

    I'm going to repeat myself: the average British home is 75 years old. That mean, coincidentally, happens to reflect a point where lots of new homes were being built to replace older ones that had been bombed flat by the Luftwaffe: there's a long tail, and the oldest buildings in daily use in the UK are on the order of a thousand years old, although they're mostly churches: houses don't generally stay in use for more than 200-400 years.

    460:

    The interesting angle here is Bastiat and the Luftwaffe as window breakers.

    461:

    Chiming in on the heatpump issue - I moved from Durham (cold, damp) to Trondheim (cold, damp), and this past winter has involved temperatures down a a minimum of -27°C in January (the entire month averaged below -18°C), and an entire month of average -1°C, with daily variation well above and below freezing (November) that coated everything in a thick layer of ice. The latter is worse - you don't need as many clothes, but the constant melting/freezing cycles are just miserable.

    Most houses in these parts rely on resistive heating, and also, a substantial minority (I'd estimate 1/3) also have one (or more) heat pumps. Typically these are "small" units for heating/cooling a single room, although the flat I rent is primarily heated by underfloor heating energised by a heat pump (with substantial backup resistive coils) (built ca. 1990, I think).

    The heat pump ran into difficulties three times this year:

  • When it was turned on in october it... didn't. I overheard the discussion of what it took to fix - this stuff is not cheap. At all. A decent boiler isn't cheap either, but this is probably more.
  • After about 2 weeks of constant melting/freezing cycles, I'm fairly sure the resistive coils were coming on, at least periodicially, based on the increase in electricity usage. Whether that was to defrost the external radiator or to heat the house instead of the heat pump (or both), I have no idea
  • When the external temperature dropped below about -10°C, the coils came on pretty much constantly to assist (for a 180m^2 house, a total of 4MWh of electricity was used in January, at least 85% of which was for heating)
  • After the coldest nights, the heating wasn't quite enough and the living room would be somewhat below its set point when I woke up
  • Regarding the final point, I emphasise the scale: there, I was asking for a 47°C delta between inside and outside. One of the flats I lived in in Durham, during my PhD, was just about capable of maintaining a temperature delta of 17°C.

    The insulation in the flat is good enough that waste heat from our computers is a problem - usually, the living room is at its set point when I wake up, and over the course of the day (especially when I switch from my work laptop to my desktop for games in the evening), the living room temperature shoots up, and I have had to open a window even on some of the coldest days. You really hear the difference, too - the computer fan speed drops like a stone when it starts sucking in outside air while the window is open.

    Even with Norwegian electricity prices (I've paid an average of about 7p per KWh since I moved here 2 years ago), I'm pretty sure electrical heating is still more expensive than gas heating. It simplifies the infrastructure, though - no need to have rpipework for central heating to all rooms; just the larger rooms might need dedicated circuits for higher power heaters (typically 500W units for smaller rooms like bedrooms, and a total of 1-3KW for a living room). It also means that houses tend to have large interconnects and headroom for, e.g., electric car chargers to be retrofitted. When my parents, in the UK, had one of those put in, they had to have the immersion heater in the water tank disconnected, as their grid interconnect wasn't specified for that high a load (and promises of "we won't use both of them together" were understandably ignored). Not sure if this is a problem in buildings newer than late Victorian era but, well, see Charlie @ 378 on that point.

    462:
    Sorry, but the true levelized cost of energy (LCOE - factoring in all up front construction and operational lifetime costs) which allows for apples to apples economic comparison says otherwise. Renewable energy costs have fallen, but nowhere near enough. In fact, LCOE says natural gas is still the cheapest and coal is still king according to this brutally honest video

    This is obviously false. Those LCOE figures omit the waste clean up costs, or, alternatively the costs of destroying civilisation. There is nothing "true" about them.

    463:

    W.r.t. your last point, yes, it assuredly is. It's why I don't believe in the electrification (heating and vehicle) dates for the UK. In order to deliver that, we need to expand our electricity infrastructure by a factor the three, everywhere from generation down to the room circuits you mention. And, while there are some government gestures at those two extremes, there is damn-all in between.

    And, paradoxically, older houses are often EASIER to redo than more modern ones, because absolutely the worst type of construction for that is concrete. Even when there are electricity ducts (which is not always the case), they aren't likely to be adequate. And, at the other end, floorboards make it easier than chipboard/OSB sheets.

    464:
    Whatever, heat pumps are wonderful things. You get more out than you put in - how can that not be neat?

    I read a short story once where excessive use of heatpumps had cooled the earth to the point where the air had liquified.

    465: 459 - As Charlie says; just to add that this message is coming to you from a building which is One Hundred and Eight (108) years old, and that's a fairly typical age for this street. 464 - Likewise, but I can't remember what it was titled.
    466:

    Counter-wrinkle; the important point in terms of chilling humans is as likely to be air speed (so-called wind chill) and/or relative humidity as declared air temperature. Given that air speed is usually positive (if not highly so) and RH high (80% or above), a temperature of $value is often colder to a human in the UK than to the same person in a drier and/or calmer part of the World.

    467:

    On UK housing stock:

    The UK urban population took off during the Industrial Revolution. Houses have been built more or less continuously since then, and many of the older ones are still around. A typical town has Georgian houses built circa 1800, or even older houses remodelled as Georgian, followed by roughly concentric rings of Victorian, Edwardian, some art-deco, lots of semi-detached three-bed houses built between the wars, post-war prefabricated, maybe some brutalist tower blocks, and then some modern housing estates built by companies like Barratt and Wimpey. A few towns still have bits of Tudor, and there is the odd Norman castle. A friend of my wife grew up in a 16th century farmhouse, and when the chimney caught fire they discovered a priest hole in between two fire places. But that's exceptional.

    Along the way there have been various bits of urban redevelopment: ancient town centres bulldozed in the 60s to make way for exciting new shopping centres, now being demolished once more. Rinse and repeat. Also slum clearances in the 60s where poor people were forcibly (for their own good) relocated to those brutalist tower blocks.

    In short, its a right mixture.

    Houses here are mostly built of brick, or for more modern ones concrete blocks faced with brick on the outside and gypsum panels (what Americans call "drywall") on the inside. Pre-war houses have lime plaster on the inside, which is a pain.

    Modern building standards require double glazed windows, insulation in the walls and loft spaces. Most older houses have been retrofitted with some kind of insulation, usually by injecting polyurethane foam or polystyrene balls into wall cavities.

    British central heating is generally based on hot water circulating through radiators. The same hot water circuit also heats water for the household. Apart from drinking water in the kitchen, cold water for the house (flushing toilets, filling baths etc) is stored in a giant tank in the loft (aka attic) and fed to the house by gravity. Hot water is supplied from a closed and insulated tank which is almost as big and built into a special purpose cupboard upstairs. This tank typically contains both an electric heating element and a heat-exchanger circuit taken from the central heating, so the central heating system also heats the hot water. The cupboard is called "the airing cupboard" because the hot water tank keeps it warm, so its a good place for drying and storing laundry.

    The central heating boiler is powered by gas.

    (If you are wondering, the tank in the loft is basically a giant one-way valve. It became standard back in the early days of domestic plumbing when having mains water contaminated by accidental syphoning of used domestic water was a realistic concern, and we've still got it).

    (There were also some cheap houses built in the 70s that had ducted air central heating like in America. However they tended to use a single common duct with a tee at the end for multiple rooms. So you could lie in bed and hear everything in the adjacent bedrooms. I even saw one house where you could lie down and peek through the two gratings. So that never caught on)

    In theory plumbing a heat exchanger into the central heating system would be fairly straightforward; just put the heat exchanger next to the boiler and plumb them in parallel with a two-way valve to select the source. However this would require a heat pump capable of putting out water at 60 degrees C in winter, and as others have noted above the numbers don't add up.

    Just like everywhere else the UK building industry and house market is deeply conservative, so introducing new ideas like sealed houses that only exchange air with the outside via a heat exchanger, well, its not happening.

    468:

    Environmentally, solar is not pristine either.

    The destroyed habitat alone makes PV a bad environmental choice. The PV cells themselves are doped with toxic materials. Until recently, PV meant flat-panel cells and modules. While this allows for some saving in production costs due to inexpensive roll-to-roll fabrication, the material costs are much higher, since almost the entire cell needs to be lined with doped silicon. The doping often involves the introduction of relatively expensive materials, such as gallium arsenide or indium selenide.

    http://72.3.251.71/DE/Editorial/Concentrating_on_the_Solar_Future_1765.aspx

    PV cells do not last for ever. Current warranties run for about 10 to 20 years of operation, after which they have to be disposed of and replaced. A complete conversion to PV energy sources would present us with a serious toxic waste disposal problem.

    For a nice summary of the adverse ecological impacts of Germany's renewable energy program, see this article from Der Spiegel:

    http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-renewable-energy-policy-takes-toll-on-nature-conservation-a-888094.html

    "It was in this way that, in 2009, Germany's largest solar park to date arose right in the middle of the Lieberoser Heide, a bird sanctuary about a 100 kilometers (62 miles) southeast of Berlin. Since German reunification in 1990, more than 200 endangered species have settled in the former military training grounds. But that didn't seem to matter. In spite of all the protests by environmentalists, huge areas of ancient pine trees were clear cut in order to make room for solar collectors bigger than soccer fields. A similar thing happened in Baden-Württemberg, even though the southwestern state has been led for almost two years by Winfried Kretschmann, the first state governor in Germany belonging to the Green Party. In 2012, it was the Greens there who passed a wind-energy decree that aims to boost the number of wind turbines in the state from 400 to roughly 2,500 by 2020. And in the party's reckoning, nature is standing in the way."

    Compare that to a highly efficient combined cycle natural gas turbine generator. For example, the proposed Apex Matagorda Energy Center natural gas power plant will have a capacity of 317 mW and a 22 acre footprint. That’s twice the capacity of the German PV facility, or half the equivalent are per power output of only 11 acres.

    Summary: The wisest application of solar is as an adjunct to a stable power grid, eliminating the need for an expensive storage system, for those areas where the climate makes sense to use rooftop solar. This approach could see solar vastly increase it share of the energy mix to between 5% and 10%. This will naturally reduce the growth in the fuse of carbon energy. But solar is not an existential threat to carbon fuels. That's not a conspiracy of the oil companies.

    It's a conspiracy of physics.

    Li-Ion batteries have made amazing strides in the past few years in terms of weight, charge, cost and lifetime (with 600 to 1000 charge cycles before needing replacement) but still have a ways to go before they can be as commonplace as a refrigerator or dish washer. Right now they are not practical for most consumers, and at the larger utility scale bulk heat storage systems are best. Even the best rechargeables wear out. And when batteries wear out they become toxic waste. Think about how many cars get scrapped annually. Imagine the toxic waste disposal problems from millions of junked EVs every year. And millions more of Tesla Powerwalls.

    469:

    "The Two Georges" by Harry Turtledove

    Richard Dreyfuss (the actor) was the first author, with HT as the second.

    One thing about that novel that was in the background: the authors made it very clear that Irish were still considered as little better than barbarous scum. Also, we didn't get any points of view from people living outside the white dominions.

    I think that RD and HT wanted us to figure out that that British Empire was just as merciless to its non-white 'citizens' as it was in the real world.

    As for Charlie's New British Empire in the Merchant Princes setting, he made it clear1 that its growth to the south was not just co-opting elites, but also incorporating populations as citizens with equal rights as well. Which is what gave it its stability, until its absolute rulers made a series of dumb decisions. So when the empire fell apart and reformed as the Commonwealth, it didn't lose outlying members, because everybody thought that they should be one political unit. So rule by consent of the governed, rather than force.

    Makes me wonder if the French Empire in the series has the same cohesion. (I'm guessing not, but we'll see).

    ~oOo~

    1 Correct me if I'm wrong, Charlie!

    470:

    Mine is only 91.

    The story is "The Snowmen" by Frederick Pohl.

    471:

    I dont think many houses on a modern UK estate have either cold or hot water tanks, they dont fit with the ongoing trend of reducing the overall floor space; cold is fed direct from the mains and hot is 'on demand' using a combi boiler of some kind. One or more wood/multi-fuel burners may be provided to maintain pollution levels.

    472:

    Speaking of India as the center of a new empire:

    India will be the next super power, but in a post-global world where even the most powerful nation is a regional power. If America decides it doesn't feel like underwriting the global trading order with the US navy, if we decide to take our toys and go home, then regional power like India become paramount.

    70% of world trade crosses the Indian ocean - but only if India allows it (in the absence of the US navy) - and that includes nearly all of Persian Gulf oil shipments (which we no longer need or care about because of fracking).

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yttug-a3sWI Who will Dominate the Geopolitical System in this Decade? | Peter Zeihan | IEC 2021

    Now if British devolution into a half zone smaller statelets turns violent, they are going to need UN peacekeepers.

    India is a big contributor to the Blue Helmets.

    So how about Indian troops patrolling the streets of London?

    473:

    Friends of ours bought a new build on an estate in the west of Edinburgh which doesn't have a boiler at all - heat and hot water is one of the services included in their management fees. There's a boiler house at the end of their street that supplies the whole street.

    Not sure I would be confident enough that the charges would always be reasonable to sign up to something like that, but it should be much more energy efficient. I don't know what the heating mechanism is - if I was designing it then I would have stuck a heat pump in while the ground was bare at the start.

    474:

    So how about Indian troops patrolling the streets of London?

    True poetic justice. I can only imagine how the gammon demographic would react.

    That being said, I hope that the dissolution of the UK is as non-violent as possible.

    475:

    Our house is 21 years old now; we bought it new, back when we were DINKYs (dual income, no kids yet). Outside Edinburgh, so we could afford a garden :) At the turn of the century, our gravity-fed water system / gas-fired central heating was still standard, and the combi-boilers were only just starting to become competitive in sizes larger than "small flat".

    What I have noticed with all of the new building around Edinburgh (it's basically filled up all of the gaps north to the sea over the past century, and is now expanding southwards) is that the new houses don't have chimneys. Up until ten years ago, you'd see a fireplace in most new builds, that could be set up either as a working open fire, or a gas fire. Instead, you now see rooftop solar as standard (it's optimistic, given that we're as far north as Anchorage, but it all goes to make a difference).

    Quick note about geothermal in Edinburgh - the "geo" bit varies. Parts of Edinburgh suffer from subsidence due to the unmapped mine workings from the 18th century and before*; other parts sit on top of igneous rock. There's a reason why the Geology Department at Edinburgh University is quite so old; Arthur's Seat and the Castle Rock are obvious volcanic plugs. Drilling holes might not be as easy or side-effect free as you might hope...

    476:

    @464 - Hah. Now there was somebody that didn’t understand, well, anything .

    @467 - I grew up in UK and lived in houses ranging from multi-century to brand new (as of 1984). Terrible construction standards, dismal materials, lousy heating, no ventilation other than leaks and windows. Appalling plumbing, pathetic lighting. I’m not sure if it is a good thing they tended to ‘fairly solid’ because that makes it harder to demolish and replace with something better. American houses (‘91-‘04) are expensive wooden sheds - but you can make very efficient wooden sheds if you try. You wouldn’t build UK style brick houses out west because they’d collapse at the first earthquake. The key is to “build it tight, ventilate it right”. Air leaks are like memory leaks; you think a little bit escaping won’t really matter but boy, does it cause problems. Murrica got plumbing right too. Then again, Murrican electrical... eek. Canadian houses (‘04 on) are much the same but typically more insulated with obvious locale differences. Same plumbing , same electrical, mostly. Less guns.

    @468 - so much nonsense. Solar panels appear to last much longer; 35 years seems easy so far. Any idea that batteries will be left as ‘toxic waste’ is ridiculous because they constitute the easiest mine ever dug. I’m getting the strong impression you are obsessed with gas.

    477:

    Pigeon has a long explanation of why heat pumps will not work below some temps and with some humanities.

    The problem is that there are a few million (10s of?) in the US that work. And in other places. Now one that works best in Miami is not optimized for Phoenix, Vancouver, or Quebec City. Different models to fit the climate but they work.

    This reminds me of the screed here a while back against buttons on car steering wheels. It was well written and logical. But the basic premise of the essay was bogus so the rest of it was moot.

    478:

    humidities

    Arg.

    479:

    hot is 'on demand' using a combi boiler of some kind

    "Tankless" on-demand water heaters, both gas and electric, are common in at least parts of Latin America and are available in the US. We've had occasion to stay in places with them and they work well.

    https://www.homedepot.com/b/Plumbing-Water-Heaters-Tankless-Water-Heaters-Tankless-Electric-Water-Heaters/N-5yc1vZc1ty

    480:

    are available in the US.

    They are more and more common in the US. One reason is that they free up much room in a home plus the modern gas tanks are hard to vent as the air coming out is so cool that it will not draft naturally. So they require fans and extra circuits to make sure the flue gases actually get out of the home.

    This is due to the increased efficiency of modern designs.

    So if you must power vent why not just go with tankless and maybe even put it outside the house.

    481:

    Duffy I doubt it, unless they get rid of Modi & his gang of religious fascists. POh & we've had "Indian" troops on the streets of London, just some time ago, when the regimental commanding officers were ... British.

    JReynolds With one exception. I will want BoZo, some of the extreme troy gammons & Farrago dangling at ropes' ends

    Heating Separate spur to immersion heater for water, gas boiler for central heating, big cold-water header tank in loft. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Repeat question Several threads back, a couple of people pointed me at possible routes to easily posting pictures on the Web - or into links for pages like these. I carefully wrote it down .... & have now lost the effing note (!) Polite grovel, to ask for it again, please?

    482:

    Copied from the "Lying to the ghost in the machine" thread: You could try https://geekpic.net/ click on the entry box and it will let you upload files that your browser has access to. No login required or even possible. Scrub location information using e.g. exiftool [1] if you care. Perhaps it also strips, or not. Use a VPN if desired (and/or Tor, though I don't recall whether I've tried, probably though). It will give you several URLs including a basic sharing URL. (I vaguely recall a delete URL but not sure.) IP addresses are in the US. I don't know anything about it (i.e. not entirely sure it is non-nefarious) but have had a few things there for a few years. [1] for geeks, this works exiftool -all= foo.jpg -o foo_stripped.jpg or, to overwrite the original exiftool -all= foo.jpg

    484:

    Maybe operating but at much reduced, marginal power output.

    A solar panel has two warranties: a performance and equipment guarantee. A solar panel’s performance warranty will typically guarantee 90% production at 10 years and 80% at 25 years. An equipment warranty will typically guarantee 10-12 years without failing.

    A solar panel’s product warranty insurance covers the integrity of the panel itself and protects you against problems such as manufacturing defects, environmental issues, premature wear and tear etc. As with most warranties, a longer period is generally more advantageous to you, if you own your solar panel system. When evaluating a solar panel warranty and its manufacturer, the two most important factors on which you should focus on are:

  • Product (or materials) warranty
  • The performance warranty
  • 485:

    That is not the case in the UK when used for water heating (including feeding water-filled radiators); for vented air heating, maybe. The flue gases are not going to be colder than the water, and the water will essentially never be less than 10 degrees Celsius higher than the outside air temperature, and very rarely less than 30 degrees more.

    486:

    So if you must power vent why not just go with tankless and maybe even put it outside the house.

    Also, for larger houses, more than one unit isn't out of the question. One for kitchen/laundry, one for bathrooms on one side of the house, another for the other side. Due attention would have to be paid to electrical and plumbing matters, but that shouldn't be too onerous. Among other things, this cuts down the length of piping hot water needs to pass through, losing heat all the way, before reaching the point of use.

    487:

    Bill Arnold That's it - thanks - saved to a document, this time!

    488:

    A small but growing number of houses over here have heatpump water heaters. Currently all the ones I know of work on the basis of being in a basement that is part of the heated envelope of the house. So you heat the house with a ‘pump, and a little pump sucks up some of that heat for hot water. In hotter areas it does have the side benefit of cooling the basement a tad.

    One day there will be a system that can do the clever tricks used in current Tesla heatpump systems to heat/cool the cabin, heat/cool the battery, the motor and the inverter, all independently. On a hot day, cool the house and send the heat to water. On a cold day, heat both. Maybe even get really jazzy and send the expelled heat from the fridge/freezer to heat water. Oh, there are also heat recovery units to suck joules from waste water.

    489:

    That is not the case in the UK when used for water heating (including feeding water-filled radiators); for vented air heating, maybe.

    Then your regs are not as tight as in the US. Here the minimum efficiency ratings required means that not much heat at all exits the firebox. It doesn't matter what you are heating. It is about the efficiency requirements of any flame based system. When you are looking at 98% efficiency the air leaving the burner just isn't all that hot. Now my old POS furnace is rated at 75% and my flue gases have no problem going up my 25' stack.

    Here's a link. https://www.airconditioning-systems.com/gas-furnace.html

    High-Efficiency Furnace has AFUE of 87%-97% and furnace consists of forced draft, condensing, low flue stack temperature(up to 120°F or 49°C) and at least two heat exchangers. This type of furnace is also known as a condensing furnace.

    And if it's 120F MAX at the bottom of the stack it might never make it up to the top of a 25' stack like mine.

    490:

    "Yeah, nope. (Shale oil is collapsing due to renewables undercutting all fossil fuel, with a side-order of depressed demand due to COVID19.)"

    This statement is not true for a lot of reasons

  • US energy use has been flat since 200, with electricity experiencing a slight decline. This means that no new nuclear, coal, or oil power plants have been built. This means that renewables have to undercut legacy systems, not new systems. This explains why the US electricity composion is 40% natural gas, 20% coal/nuclear/natural gas.
  • https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=39092 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_United_States

  • The average US car fleet was 12 years in 2020, with a quarter over 16 years old. This should give you an idea of how it would take https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/28/25percent-of-cars-in-us-are-at-least-sixteen-years-old----record-high.html

  • While COVID did result in depressed demand in 2020, it locked much more oil use for the rest of the decade

  • a. US homeownership rate hovered around 64% in the 1985-1995 era. Afterwards, it steadily rose to 69% in 2008, falling back to 63% in 2016. Before the pandemic, that had risen 65.3%. Now it's 67.9%. In the US, most non-rented homes are rural or suburban. https://policyadvice.net/insurance/insights/home-ownership-statistics/ https://policyadvice.net/insurance/insights/home-ownership-statistics/

    b. Used and new car sales have exploded since the pandemic began, and public transportation has suffered. That's likely irreversible for a decade. Plus, the new cars will last a long time.

    c. The pandemic made states such as Florida and North American countries even more dependent on tourism. For Florida, the numbers are still depressed by the lack of international tourists. But there has been an increase in domestic tourists (a huge reason it has a 4.7% unemployment rate).

    Mexico, Central American countries, and some Caribbean independent countries (Bahamas, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, Grenada, Dominica) allow US citizens to travel so long as they buy insurance, and some require a negative COVID test (Mexico doesn't). This has signaled to investors that these countries will do anything to protect their tourism industries.

    PS: An amusing side note. Latin American countries which do significant trading with China maintained their quarantine requirements, with a few exceptions. This will have interesting geopolitical implications within this decade.

    https://travel.usnews.com/features/where-can-americans-travel-right-now

    491:

    Nojay @ 404: The version I heard was that the "bounty" intelligence was single-sourced from a detainee who was saying anything and everything to get the torture to stop. It made great headlines for a while though.

    The way I understand it is they have multiple, reliable sources for Russian contacts with the Taliban & Afghan criminal gangs. It got caught up in U.S. domestic politics due to Trumpolini's flat out refusal to hear anything bad about the Russians (and his reasons for doing so). Like I noted, the Biden administration's take is more nuanced - fairly high confidence in reports of Russian interference, but less confidence that the Russian interference did include "bounties".

    492:

    Also, for larger houses, more than one unit isn't out of the question. One for kitchen/laundry, one for bathrooms on one side of the house, another for the other side. Due attention would have to be paid to electrical and plumbing matters, but that shouldn't be too onerous.

    Multiple external gas fired tankless is somewhat rare unless it's a really big house. Maybe one at each end of a 2000sf ranch. You get into a lot of location issues. No where people congregate, so far from any door, window, etc... Side to side and up and down. Plus near the gas meter is a no no.

    For electrical a lot of places will have a heater at the use spot. Say under the cabinet. These things are small. But they mostly want a hefty power draw to heat much water.

    The switch to PEX plumbing makes the heat loss from the source to the use much less as we're no longer heating up all that copper. But we do still waste the heat left in the pipe when the use is turned off. I think that long term CPVC is going to be US plumbings' equivalent of Masonite siding in 10 to 20 years as it gets brittle and starts cracking.

    493:

    @468 Why would anybody want to dump worn out solar panels in a landfill? Why not just take them over to a solar panel plant, melt them down, and use them as the input for new panels? It is probably easier to extract the rare earths or other comments from the worn-out panels than it was to mine the materials in the first place. Certainly, there is less in the way of mining waste.

    In a more general sense, IIRC very little in the way of material has actually left the Earth (spacecraft mainly ). Waste is processed raw material that is harder or economically not cost-effective to extract the useful parts from. As tech advances, will this continue to be true?

    For example, a fusion torch could separate any pile of waste into its component atoms, which could then be collected as raw materials. Alternatively, tailored bacteria may be able to manage similar feats and allow for easier extraction.

    Assuming civilization doesn't collapse in the next 50-100 years, we may be OK with some of the other problems.

    494:

    Pigeon @ 412:

    "It's too bad we don't have some way to trade some of our excess summer heat for some of your excess cool weather."

    Concoct some material that melts at about half way between "cold" and "hot" and absorbs a lot of latent heat, and make millions of tons of it. And a bunch of wind-powered ferries to ship it back and forth across the Atlantic. You have it in the summer and melt it, then we have it in the winter and solidify it again.

    :)

    I like it!

    The best part is the re-usability. Any thoughts on a suitable material?

    495:

    US energy use has been flat since 200, with electricity experiencing a slight decline. This means that no new nuclear, coal, or oil power plants have been built.

    Not quite. There have been new coal and gas plants built. But you might have one new larger way more efficient plant replacing a collection of older (40+ years), smaller, coal and gas plants.

    496:

    David L @ 428:

    The cultural, historical and linguistic differences between Victoria, Winnipeg, Iqaluit, Quebec City and Halifax are vast.

    And you skiped the prairie. When we switched our Canadian version of some insurance agency (think 1 to 10 people) software around 79/80 the folks from the prairie wanted to buy the US version so they could keep using MM/DD/YY. They were really pissed that we obeyed the law and made them switch to YY/MM/DD. Actually "really pissed" is a mild reading of their feelings.

    I'm curious why it was still using "YY"? Whether you put it first or last, shouldn't it be "YYYY"?

    497:

    Robert Prior @ 440:

    I've been in Toronto in February and tried swimming in a lake north of Toronto one August. Moscow it's not but still way too cold for me.

    Wuss. Don't let a little ice keep you out of the water :-)

    Next you'll be telling me that you put the top on your convertible once it gets below zero, rather than wearing a toque and enjoying the fresh air!

    How do you keep the toque from blowing off when you get out on the highway?

    498:

    Allen Thomson @ 444:

    For reasons of plausible deniability, many of the weapons supplied to American "clients" came from non-U.S. sources.

    Check out the Camp Stanley Storage Activity in Boerne, Texas. They're still hiring armorers with experience in used foreign weaponry.

    One reason I didn't retire to Texas is I've spent a winter at Ft. Hood.

    499:

    I was wrong: 3 new nuclear plants have/are being built been built. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_reactors#United_States https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=228&t=21

    Looking around, the last coal plant built in the US opened in 2011. https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-02-04/coal-power-plants-western-us

    "But you might have one new larger way more efficient plant replacing a collection of older (40+ years), smaller, coal and gas plants."

    Which is why I excluded natural gas plants from my list.

    500:

    JBS @ 497: "How do you keep the toque from blowing off when you get out on the highway?"

    Your winter coat has a hood (if you live around here) and you lower that hood on top of the toque and then secure it there. The toque will not fly off.

    501:

    Some years ago I realised that keeping our landline number was constraining our ISP choices, so I migrated it to a cloud/VOIP solution that costs pocket change to keep going (free account, $5/year for the DID but when I signed up they had a introductory offer of $20 credit, so it was 4 years before I had to pay them anything at all.... I had to churn the number twice to get it there, so the exercise wasn't cheap overall, but since pays for itself mostly). While I do have a working ATA which we used to keep a 1950s black bakelite phone connected to, we haven't had it plugged in for a while, incoming landline calls go straight to a voicemail-to-email gateway. Which means that all the phone scammer robocalls end up in my email inbox. I have noticed an increase, it's annoying because it means I am less inclined to listen to these messages right away and might miss the occasional real call from a real person who for whatever reason wants to call a landline number rather than a mobile (hangover from when there was a cost difference I guess).

    The slightly more annoying development is that I'm starting to get these robocalls direct to my mobile number. I suppose the phone system is just going to lag behind email in terms of spam prevention/deletion, and I'm increasingly annoyed at how much resource that stuff requires.

    502:

    Re: heat pumps, all through the discussion I have simply assumed that everyone's mental model for what a heat pump is includes ground-coupled versions and not just air-coupled, which is what I would call reverse-cycle aircon. Yet once I had read back as far as Pigeon's careful explanation about why the device on my wall can't possibly work for heating in the UK, I realise this assumption is not correct. I'm pretty sure it is correct for some of the North Americans, which I assume is the place ground-cycles would be most used, and while parts of Australia are amenable to the specific advantages, they are not well known here at all. The ground cycle gets its efficiency from diurnal temperature variation and that means it works best inland with low RH, much the same way that building with high thermal mass works in such locations.

    Re: urban environments and population density - some misconceptions prevalent among UK-ers that I note gasdive isn't even bothering to try to dispel, but are fundamental enough to make subsequent conclusions invalid.

    503:

    Sigh. Do read what I post and think a little harder. Our regulations are probably tighter, for new equipment, actually, but that's irrelevant. 120 Fahrenheit is c. 49 Celsius, which is both inadequate for circulating through radiators (or most hot water uses) and well above anything the UK climate reaches.

    If you are seriously claiming that you can heat water to 60 Celsius using a heat exchanger with flue gases of below 50, please explain why the second law of thermodynamics doesn't apply where you live. Perhaps you have a tame Maxwell's daemon?

    504:

    The toque will not fly off.

    Will the same approach work with a fez?

    505:

    Yeah, well, I remember when that was true with the countries reversed. How do you think that Al Quaeda (and Da'esh, actualy) got started?

    506:

    Perhaps I should explain in more detail. The REAL bottom of the stack is the final stage, just before the hot water exits, and the flue gases will necessarily be fairly hot. Yes, you can then pass the intake water past the gases higher up, which will heat the one and cool the other, but the pressure difference is from top to bottom. I doubt that my flue gases as they reach the outside air are above 50 Celsius, either, and my boiler is also a condensing one. That aren't as much more efficient as most people believe, under actual UK conditions.

    And the air temperature in a UK heatwave is never noticeably above 40 Celsius. Things may change, of course.

    507:

    Charlie Stross @ 459:

    It came through to me like half a million Edinburghers (Edinburgundians? or Edinbourgeois?) are holding up solutions for the other 67.7 million inhabitants of the U.K.

    Nope: I use Edinburgh as my go-to example for planning headaches but it's actually typical of 50-60% of the UK in terms of difficulty in modernizing housing.

    I'm going to repeat myself: the average British home is 75 years old. That mean, coincidentally, happens to reflect a point where lots of new homes were being built to replace older ones that had been bombed flat by the Luftwaffe: there's a long tail, and the oldest buildings in daily use in the UK are on the order of a thousand years old, although they're mostly churches: houses don't generally stay in use for more than 200-400 years.

    I understand that. Still, I did't read gasdive's comment (@358) as writing off "half a million people who live in Edinburgh" the way Nojay characterized it (@360).

    I read gasdive's comment as a complaint about an attitude of It won't work here, so you can't have it there!

    508:

    You might need a mountaineering jacket with a hood designed to fit over a helmet. Costs more and probably sickeningly brightly colored.

    509:

    I should also address WFH and energy usage before someone brings it up

  • The company I work for, and the company my brother works for plan to abandon full WFH once the pandemic ends. They want to go to a "hybrid" model where people go into the office 3 days a week, and WFH the other 2 days.
  • In practice, most people will volunteer or be voluntold to come in Tuesday-Thursday. This means that office demand and traffic congestion will resemble the pre-pandemic world. There'll still be savings, but not as substantial as you guys are thinking.

  • Early on in the pandemic, you had the case where upper middle class escaped the big cities to rural and suburban Airbnbs. Since the fall, you've had another phenomenon emerge: People may go on vacation for a week to a place, and then stay there WFH for another week. It's too early to say whether this will increase or decrease overall travel?
  • 511:

    Destroying architectural heritage... meanwhile, in the US, a 100 yr old house is only in certain areas, and not most of the country. They tear down nice places, and put up cheap (and overpriced) crap.

    512:

    "They tear down nice places, and put up cheap (and overpriced) crap."

    This is relatively rare. Most new construction is either new suburban housing, tearing down the very early suburbs, tearing down some half-rotten wooden structure (most popular construction material outside the major cities 100 years ago), or getting rid of an architecturally useless old factory. In short, they replace old cheap crap with new cheap crap.

    There was mass redevelopment in the early 1920s in most urban areas, but that was merely to correct for the fact that late 19th century cities were fire hazards and built to easily transmit disease (Spanish Flu). Even the extent of that renovation is exaggerated though.

    513:

    Atropos @ 461: Chiming in on the heatpump issue - I moved from Durham (cold, damp) to Trondheim (cold, damp), and this past winter has involved temperatures down a a minimum of -27°C in January (the entire month averaged below -18°C), and an entire month of average -1°C, with daily variation well above and below freezing (November) that coated everything in a thick layer of ice. The latter is worse - you don't need as many clothes, but the constant melting/freezing cycles are just miserable.

    Just out of curiosity, which "Durham"? There are several of them in the U.S. (I was born & raised in one of them) and I'm pretty sure Canada has at least one. I'm guessing the original in the U.K., but I don't know if there might be other ones; maybe even one in Norway.

    514:

    Allen Thomson @ 479:

    hot is 'on demand' using a combi boiler of some kind

    "Tankless" on-demand water heaters, both gas and electric, are common in at least parts of Latin America and are available in the US. We've had occasion to stay in places with them and they work well.

    https://www.homedepot.com/b/Plumbing-Water-Heaters-Tankless-Water-Heaters-Tankless-Electric-Water-Heaters/N-5yc1vZc1ty

    Hah! They can take my 50-gallon gas hot water heater when they pry it from my cold dead fingers! It's the one damn thing in this house that actually works.

    515:

    Damian @ 504: "Will the same approach work with a fez?"

    No. But I've never, ever seen a fez in Canada. I just found out that the Elks of Canada wear them (probably at their at their lodge meetigs):

    https://www.elksofcanada.ca/regalia/fez

    516:

    Niala @ 483: Flickr

    I second that. Flickr is good, but it's not anonymous if that's what you're looking for.

    517:

    (Heat pumps freeze the earth)

    The story is "The Snowmen" by Frederick Pohl.

    Thanks.

    518:

    dpb @ 508: You might need a mountaineering jacket with a hood designed to fit over a helmet. Costs more and probably sickeningly brightly colored.

    I have four of these:
    https://www.mcguirearmynavy.com/collections/ecwcs/products/ecwcs-gen-ii-level-6-extreme-cold-wet-weather-parka-acu

    Woodland, 3-Color desert DCU, Army ACU and a solid blue one for when I was trying to hide among civies. The blue one has a zip-in down jacket & the ACU one came with a zip in fleece jacket. I'm actually wearing the fleece right now.

    I was never issued an OG-107 Green or a 6-color desert camo one.

    519:

    JBS @ @ 516: "I second that. Flickr is good, but it's not anonymous if that's what you're looking for."

    I've been on it for more than 15 years and my only name there is not my real name but one of my pen names: A string of 8 consonants. That's all the public sees.

    520:

    JBS @ 516: "I second that. Flickr is good, but it's not anonymous if that's what you're looking for."

    I've been on it for more than 15 years and my only name there is not my real name but one of my pen names: A string of 8 consonants. That's all the public sees.

    521:

    Re: 'Most new construction is either new suburban housing, ...'

    House prices have been going up since COVID in my neck of the woods. If this is also happening in the UK, it's going to make it even tougher for younger folk/young families to afford a house. So maybe 'cheap' housing is not such a bad thing.

    522:

    Ioan @ 512:

    "They tear down nice places, and put up cheap (and overpriced) crap."

    This is relatively rare. Most new construction is either new suburban housing, tearing down the very early suburbs, tearing down some half-rotten wooden structure (most popular construction material outside the major cities 100 years ago), or getting rid of an architecturally useless old factory. In short, they replace old cheap crap with new cheap crap.

    There was mass redevelopment in the early 1920s in most urban areas, but that was merely to correct for the fact that late 19th century cities were fire hazards and built to easily transmit disease (Spanish Flu). Even the extent of that renovation is exaggerated though.

    I live in a kind of mixed neighborhood. My street is 3 blocks long, running east-west. On the west end, in the first block the [19] houses were built between 1900-1920 . The middle block, where I live, all the [12] houses were built 1920-1940. My house was built in 1936.

    The 3rd block on the east end didn't even exist then. All the [14] houses on that block were built 1946-1960. Most of the houses are 2-BR bungalow style houses, around 1,000 square foot.

    In the last 10 years, 3 of the houses on the eastern block & one house on my block have been torn down and replaced with 2,000+ square foot 3 & 4 bed room houses. None of them were "old cheap crap" and the new houses are definitely NOT "new cheap crap".

    There are two more houses on my block that I expect to be replaced in the next 10 years. Three if you include my home. With any luck, I'll manage to hold on, but I am being pestered to death by house flippers.

    523:

    Re: '... to correct for the fact that late 19th century cities were fire hazards and built to easily transmit disease (Spanish Flu).'

    I've been wondering what changes might come about re: multi-residence housing design/building standards post-COVID. While there's already been an increase in migration to the suburbs - attributed mostly to the working-from-home phenomenon - there's probably still going to be a relatively large population segment that will want to live within the city and they'll need safe housing.

    So - what type of urban planning (incl. housing) do you need to have in place in order to be ready for the next pandemic?

    524:

    So - what type of urban planning (incl. housing) do you need to have in place in order to be ready for the next pandemic?

    None. Dense cities are doing better than many red rural states, when it comes to reducing transmission, while China, Taiwan, and South Korea are doing better still. Crowding has nothing to do with Covid19, compared with skilled management and public attitude. Lack of resources (as on Indian reservations) is deadly. Public fuck-wittedness is deadly. Neither of these has much to do with urban density directly.

    Climate change will still be biting down despite pandemics, and billion dollar fires, floods, and hurricanes are killing sprawl more effectively than the pandemic is driving it.

    What I do hope is that normalizing remote work means people don't have to move to cities to get some of the jobs they're after, allowing them to live in smaller towns and stop the brain drain (and the financial drain) away from some of these areas. That's as pernicious as anything else, that so many opportunities are crowded into so few areas. I'd rather rebuild existing towns than build new suburbs, because all the good places for burbs are taken, and the remaining ones are literally disasters waiting to happen.

    525:

    @521 "House prices have been going up since COVID in my neck of the woods. If this is also happening in the UK, it's going to make it even tougher for younger folk/young families to afford a house. So maybe 'cheap' housing is not such a bad thing. "

    I'm talking about the material and construction used, not about the sale price. That's based on different dynamics

    @522 "In the last 10 years, 3 of the houses on the eastern block & one house on my block have been torn down and replaced with 2,000+ square foot 3 & 4 bed room houses. None of them were "old cheap crap" and the new houses are definitely NOT "new cheap crap""

    I'll take your word for it. Your street might have a good case of survivor's bias, or it might be the minority neighborhood in the US where what I said doesn't apply. I have my doubts that construction built during the Great Depression wasn't "cheap crap" according to the standards of the time. My main problem was with withroth calling the stuff demolished in the US "architectural gems", as if tearing it down was a uniquely American vice. Or it's a new phenomenon. My argument was that a. It's mostly rare b. Often times, it's justified

    @523 "So - what type of urban planning (incl. housing) do you need to have in place in order to be ready for the next pandemic?" While I would love to see Heteromele's data that dense cities have minimized transmission better, I don't think that it's possible to build multi-residential housing in the US to resist the next pandemic 1. The rise of home-ownership means that the renter population will skew much more young and minority than previous generations. 2. Most of the neighborhoods popular with renters are those with older buildings, so preservationists might object to the types of changes that would make housing more resistant to the next pandemic 3. Define the next pandemic. There's no guarantee that the next deadly pandemic will be flu-like. Maybe it'll be something more similar to cholera a. Maybe the next pandemic won't be a new disease, but a "neglected tropical disease", or an older disease taking advantage of the older median age? If that's the case, then it's more important to focus on retrofitting owner-occupied suburban housing?

    526:

    (3) Oh, we already know what kind of urban design is effective against things similar to cholera. It has plumbing and stuff to make sure you don't have to drink water that has been shat in. And these days we have the additional advantage of being able to drink the water out of our condensing boilers if we really have to.

    527:

    "Re: urban environments and population density - some misconceptions prevalent among UK-ers that I note gasdive isn't even bothering to try to dispel, but are fundamental enough to make subsequent conclusions invalid."

    Not sure what more I can do.

    They think it won't work in densely populated areas, I point out that it works in Hong Kong.

    They think it can't work below 2C, I point out that to be sold in Australia and Aotearoa it must pass the standard, which requires testing at 2C.

    They say it can't work on terrace housing, I point out that Sydney has lots of terrace housing and it works fine.

    They say it won't work in places where it's damp, I point out Greymouth where it rains every other day and the average humidity is over 80%.

    They know someone who knows someone who read a blog about someone who replaced their furnace with a heat pump and it doesn't work in practice because it can't produce the 60C water needed for their radiators, ignoring that I pointed out "Ground sourced heat pumps can break 10, if they're used properly, and not as a drop in replacement for a boiler. If you're heating from a ground temperature of say 10, up to a room temperature of 20,that's easy. If you're trying to heat water to 60-70 and put it into existing radiators at then you'll struggle to hit 2."

    They just say they point blank don't believe me.

    I'm not paid to educate the wilfully ignorant. They want to build 300 GW of nuclear to replace the 300 GW of gas, coal and oil they currently burn to stay warm in winter (except one, who is convinced that if we just harnessed the tides, which have a potential of about 10 GW of fully exploited, we could power the UK). I've pointed out several times that means 100 Hinkley Point C at a cost of at least 2 trillion pounds (assuming the often promised and never realised cost savings from building "lots" of reactors, never mind that economies of scale don't kick in at the level of 100 units). That's a cost of about 78 000 pounds per UK dwelling. But my proposal of spending 600 pounds per dwelling to provide cheap, clean heating gets me labelled "randian".

    528:

    While I would love to see Heteromele's data that dense cities have minimized transmission better, I don't think that it's possible to build multi-residential housing in the US to resist the next pandemic

    I'm just paying attention to news out of China, Taiwan, and South Korea. One thing that helped them is that they went through SARS, so the level of fuckwittedness about spreading a coronavirus is considerably lower there than it is here.

    This is not to say that dense cities can't be horrible places for Covid19: witness India right now. But the contrary examples are poor places in Africa that adapted their anti-Ebola systems to Covid19 and apparently got away relatively unscathed compared with LA, NYC, Florida, or India. It's that combination of people willing to do the right thing and having the resources to do it that seems to be critical. Density per se isn't a direct factor, but rather an indirect one.

    Incidentally, I completely agree that the next pandemic likely will be different. But I think the point about density being secondary rather than primary likely still stands.

    529:

    I'm probably extra grumpy because (returning to topic for a moment) I stayed up 'til 2 am watching HRH's funeral. Which I thought was actually really tasteful and not a vile media circus at all. Probably due to covid, but it was all very nicely done. So I thought anyway.

    I also found out from the commentary that Phil was type rated on 59 different aircraft, which is a bloody awesome achievement for a professional, let alone a private pilot.

    I'm sorry he's gone. All that experience and memory just turned into rotting meat. Such a waste. Like watching the Louvre burn down.

    530:

    House prices have been going up since COVID in my neck of the woods.

    Today I bought 2 sheets of 3/4" 4x8 treated plywood. A year ago it would have cost under $30 per sheet. Today it was $68. The store rep mentioned that the OSB at the end of the aisle that was priced at $33/sheet was under $8/sheet a year ago.

    This kink of pricing can add $50K to $200K to the typical US suburban home just now compared to a year ago.

    531:

    In the last 10 years, 3 of the houses on the eastern block & one house on my block have been torn down and replaced with 2,000+ square foot 3 & 4 bed room houses. None of them were "old cheap crap" and the new houses are definitely NOT "new cheap crap".

    JBS and I live in the same city. I work with architects and have been watching the housing market for 10 years now trying to decide my next steps.

    Our economy is growing. Faster than most of the country. People are moving here (and have been for 30 years). Which means that the dirt is now more valuable than the house. Many times it is 90% of the value or more if the zoning will allow for a bigger house. Maybe 2 1/2 stories replacing 1 or 1 1/2.

    It all ties back to people fighting change as discussed well by heteromeles and a bit by myself. So what happens is people like me sell out, our house is torn down, and a new bigger way more expensive house is built. Some are crap and some are decent. (I like to walk through them before the doors are up and see what the bones look like. I grew up around home construction.)

    My house/lot is worth $400K if I want to sell it and run in the next few weeks. More if it look for a motivated buyer. Totally a tear down. And I'd have to invest $200K to make it worth more. And it was worth only $120K or less in 2012 when the boom started. So I'm looking at holding on as my dirt will go up more than most of the city or down less as the economy changes. Location, location, location. I made a good choice 30 years ago without realizing it. Built in 1961.

    JBS's location has different pressures but it works out to the same situation. I know a lot of smaller firms that would like to buy houses like his and remodel them into nice modern homes. I've offered to partner with a few if they can find the right deal. But the economics favor the bulldoze and build big folks.

    532:

    gasdive The impression I took away from Phils' passing & the commentaries is that he was a lifelong "First Officer" &/or captain of a small vessel ... He was determined to find out where everything was & how it worked - or didn't & if not, why not. Heavily into engineering as a result. I now find out that he was a Land-Rover freak, as well (!)

    533:

    gasdive The impression I get is that Phil was a lifelong "irst officer" or Captain of a small ship. He looked into everything, to find out where it was, what it did & how it worked - & if it didn't work "Why not?" He was heavily into engineering as a result - his continued comments in British "industry" mismanaging engineering were more or less continuous. I NOW find out that he was a Land-Rover freak (!)

    534: 507 - Well, despite how he always reads my replies, my point about gasdive's typical post is more "just because it works in Australia doesn't mean it will work everywhere". 509 - Back in the 1930s and earlier it was quite common for wealthier (middle class) Glasgow families to rent a house somewhere with a rail or ferry connection to Glasgow for a month or even 2 months. Maw and the weans then relocated to this rental, whilst Paw has 2 weeks off work, then for the rest of the rental travelled to Glasgow on Sunday night, lived at their permanent address until Friday evening and then went to the rental for weekends. 519 - Please forgive and seeming impertinence; what's intended is a note on names.

    You're the only "Niala" I know; I do also know 2 or 3 "Nuala"s in varying situations.

    535:

    Sigh. Do read what I post and think a little harder. Our regulations are probably tighter, for new equipment, actually, but that's irrelevant. 120 Fahrenheit is c. 49 Celsius, which is both inadequate for circulating through radiators (or most hot water uses) and well above anything the UK climate reaches.

    I did read it. Multi-stage burners put out water hotter than the flue exit temp.

    But the UK just isn't all that cold. Such furnaces are in use all over the US. Miami (well not many) to Montana. New England is full of them. And guess what. They work. In re-models and new construction. Radiators, ducted, radiant, whatever. Now just maybe the water in the radiators is no longer as hot as you think it should be but these systems work. And there are millions of them.

    To pile onto what gasdive says, believing something doesn't work doesn't mean it does not.

    536:

    I'm curious why it was still using "YY"? Whether you put it first or last, shouldn't it be "YYYY"?

    As I said, 78/80. Only in the last couple of decades has disk storage become trivially cheap. Back in the 70s/80s it was eye watering expensive.

    We didn't need the century in the system. It was obvious from context. In addition, internally (due to storage cost issues) the year was actually stored as an 11 bit binary of months past January 1970.

    Those systems have all been replaced long ago.

    537:

    He was determined to find out where everything was & how it worked - or didn't & if not, why not.

    Sounds like a submariner.

    538:

    I'll take your word for it. Your street might have a good case of survivor's bias, or it might be the minority neighborhood in the US where what I said doesn't apply.

    In much of the US you'll find 2 kinds of houses that are still standing after being built prior to 1950. Well built ones where the basics are still sound. Or about to fall down crap. The rest of the crap has already fallen down.

    There can be problems with those still standing. Big ones are heating/cooling, plumbing, and electrical. All tend to be way out of date with modern needs. Plus the interesting uses of asbestos over the years.

    539:

    I'm sure I'm not the only person who's waiting for your explanation of how these systems break the second law of thermodynamics.

    540:

    "I did read it. Multi-stage burners put out water hotter than the flue exit temp."

    They dont need to be multistage to do that, they just need to be condensing.

    However, there are significant blind angles in this area.

    Here in Denmark, there were a lot of marketing noise when the first "condensing" natural gas kettles "exceeded 100% efficiency" by condensing water out of the flue gas.

    But if instead of just burning it, one used the natural gas to run a motor, driving a compressor, working as heat-pump, the "efficiency" would easily reach 300-400%.

    Not without minor downsides (mainly noise & oil-changes), but since motors and compressors were entirely different companies, that didn't happen anywhere in Europe that I've heard about.

    541:

    "I'm sure I'm not the only person who's waiting for your explanation of how these systems break the second law of thermodynamics."

    They dont.

    They simply preheat the intake air, and if they are really good at it, the water-vapour condenses out, releasing also the evaporation heat.

    This is why most natural gas furnaces uses "coaxial chimneys", exhaust in the center, air intake around it.

    With natural gas the condensate water is often quite acidic due to sulphuric acid. Not good with old ceramic or cast-iron sewers.

    Pre-heating the natural gas fuel is also used, in which case the flue gas can be cooled to significantly below the air intake temperature, because the pressure reduction valve next to many residental gas meters release very cold gas.

    542:

    "In much of the US you'll find 2 kinds of houses that are still standing after being built prior to 1950."

    Doesnt that vary a lot with geography ?

    My impression of the northeast was that a lot of buildings were quite old ?

    543: 544 - Thanks. That actually makes sense (in principle, by which I mean without actually redoing all the maths). I mean, I can at least see that they are extracting energy other than chemical energy of combustion from the fuel. 545 - Well yes, up to a point. OTOH my Canadian (Ontario) cousins visited us, and on discovering that our home was built in 1912CE responded "Gosh. That's a historic building!" A very considerable part (about a third, mostly nearer the High Street and/or on or near the main roads of the town) of the housing stock is 1837 to 1937 so there's not much we'd view as historic purely on build date. One of the few properties hereabouts that is viewed as historic is a 1920s home, which is the prototype for the eponymous house in "Hatter's Castle" (1931).

    Compare that with Provand's Lordship, about 30 minutes from here and built in 1471.

    544:

    I had a satori on a possible reason for the non-uptake of heat pumps in the UK compared to gas boilers for home heating earlier -- electricity prices. A heat pump burns electricity to produce heat, a gas boiler burns gas. Electricity in Britain costs more than gas so the economic benefits of running a gas-fired heating system may outweigh the efficiency and climate change benefits of a heat pump system.

    Current (no pun intended) electricity prices here in the UK are about 14.4 pence per kWh, ca. 20 cents US if you want to compare. A quick Google suggests average electricity prices in the US are about 13 cents per kWh.

    545:

    I can only imagine how the gammon demographic would react.

    With applause, because London is everything they hate -- rich, multicultural, very ethnically diverse.

    The gammon are mostly elsewhere, in the depressed peripheral towns and cities that lost their industrial base under Thatcher and didn't get much immigration.

    546:

    David L @ 540 on older houses: Plus the interesting uses of asbestos over the years.

    Not to mention mercury.

    https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-10/documents/before_you_tear_it_down.pdf

    This guy got a $50,000 clean-up bill because a previous owner had the Honeywell valve removed, and presumably a little bit got spilt. Probably back in the days when a few drops of mercury were not reckoned to be a big deal.

    547:

    "Compare that with Provand's Lordship, about 30 minutes from here and built in 1471."

    My children are both dual US/DK citizens and baptised in a church where a lot of the stonework is from 1100s. The US side of the family had a hard time beliving that this just happened to be our local church, they thought we had gone out of our way to "show them".

    548:

    what type of urban planning (incl. housing) do you need to have in place in order to be ready for the next pandemic?

    Depends on who's inhabiting them.

    If it's North Americans, with a significant section of the population deliberately flouting simple public health measures, you need to design with that assumption. Which means serious considerations for airborne transmission* in building design, assuming asymptomatic spreaders and significant non-compliance with things like staying home when ill and wearing a mask.

    If it's East Asians, carrying on as today would seem to be sufficient, given that places like South Korea and Japan are much denser than, say, Grey-Bruce** or London (Ontario) and yet have much lower transmission and deaths.

    *Something that is still being basically ignored by many, in favour of the more obvious 'deep cleaning' the shit out of surfaces.

    **Rural Ontario. People basically ignored masks etc because Covid either wasn't real or a city problem, depending on who you talk to.

    549:

    "got a $50,000 clean-up bill"

    If you forced me to sum up USA in three words, I think "Lack of proportions" is what I would settle for.

    I once saw the manager of our server-room/integration-facility don his kidney belt and leather gloves, before picking up a 1½"x3"x4" cardboard box the USPS had just thrown on the delivery table along with other mail.

    He then proceeded to weigh the box, put a "Certified Weight" sticker on it, filled out the blank line with "10oz" before doffing his kidney belt and gloves again.

    He told me that of OSHA had once issued them a fine, because somebody had set down a 19" CRT on his fingers.

    New rules immediately came down from above: "No lifting anything without PPE if the weight is not attested in one of the following ways ..."

    Even if that box had been a solid block of Osmium, it would not have come close to the limit of what you are allowed to lift (6.6kg) but being good at chemistry was not one of the allowed methods in the rules, and Bob was not going to flaunt "The Rules" no matter how silly.

    (Contents of the box: 1 (one) 40-pin DIL chip in antistatic plastic tube.)

    550:

    Your last sentence is delusional. Following this thread, I looked up heat pumps. Firstly, installing them in my house would mean gutting several rooms (including the kitchen), digging up the lawn and more. It would almost certainly cost me at least 60,000, possibly significantly more.

    Secondly, the quoted efficiencies were all of the order of 125% which, combined with changing from gas to electricity, wouldn't actually gain much.

    If I were to do anything of that nature, it would be solar water heating panels.

    551:

    I'm just paying attention to news out of China, Taiwan, and South Korea. One thing that helped them is that they went through SARS, so the level of fuckwittedness about spreading a coronavirus is considerably lower there than it is here.

    Toronto went through SARS, and the level of fuckwittedness is considerably higher than it is in China, Taiwan, and South Korea.

    Part of that is that Toronto has no control over the provincial government, but even here we have regular anti-masker rallies, regular defiance of public health measures, etc.

    Ontario also dismantled almost all the measures brought in after SARS, which were supposed to prepare for the next pandemic.

    552:

    That's not what I was saying was nonsense. I was referring to the claim that you needed 'active' flues - you don't. Mine has a fan in the boiler, but the flue is just a length of pipe 15-20' long, of which the majority is plastic. The installation instructions even allow it to be installed horizontally, and there is no maximum length specified; both horizontal and very long ones are common here.

    My 10' high, south-facing, unshaded conservatory has passive ventilation, following Victorian designs, and the air flow is fine.

    553:

    "So - what type of urban planning (incl. housing) do you need to have in place in order to be ready for the next pandemic?"

    The main lesson seems to be that you want really good non-recirculenting ventilation where airborne transmission would be bad, ie any public space from schools over doctors surgeries to shopping centres etc.

    No info yet if that is also a good idea in very dense urban settings, or if the ventilation exhaust would just spread the infection even more efficiently.

    This basically means that almost all A/C in US is "bad" because it recirculates the air for space-efficiency (and partially air-pollution) reasons.

    A ventilation system with a heat-exchanger, able to move the same number of Watts is a LOT more bulky than a "normal" A/C unit.

    554:

    "Secondly, the quoted efficiencies were all of the order of 125% which"

    That sounds utterly bogus, you would have to live on permafrost or be really bad at both thermo-dynamics and mechanics to get that low efficiency.

    Here in DK ground-circuit heat-pumps are illegal if they are below 400% electrical efficiency ("COP>=4")

    We built our house in 2016-2017 and easily heat 200m² with a 3kW heatpump which is probably the model which evolved into this one:

    https://ctc-heating.com/products/ground-source-heating/ctc-gsi
    555:

    Um. I think that you are quoting theoretical efficiency, and that's not what would be actually be delivered. The extra cost of heat pump systems in new builds isn't huge, and that efficiency would have eliminated almost everything else from at least commercial new-builds.

    556:

    "Mine has a fan in the boiler, but the flue is just a length of pipe 15-20' long, of which the majority is plastic. The installation instructions even allow it to be installed horizontally, and there is no maximum length specified"

    While there is no (relevant) max length, the longer it is the more electricity does the intake fan need, and that fan is the major consumer of electricity so it is heavily penalized in the EU efficiency declaration.

    In my previous house the flue was 60cm of plastic, 20cm up from the unit, 40cm horizontal through the wall.

    That was so short it impacted efficiency because not enough heat got transferred from the exhaust to to the intake, so they changed it to a different coaxial design where the inner tube was aluminium.

    557:

    I have heavily instrumented the energy in the entire house.

    We consistently get COP>4 for heating purposes and COP>3 for hot water.

    558:

    Yes, but my point was that the flue temperature after the final (in terms of water flow) heat exchange is necessarily hotter than the water, and that means there is a significant pressure difference. As I understand it, the boiler fan is used primarily for start-up.

    559:

    The exhaust is cooled in two or three steps: First and primarily by the functional water, second by the intake air, and possibly third by the intake gas.

    All the heat exchangers are counter-flow, this means that the fluegas from the burner runs "left" through the heat-exchanger, the cooling medium runs "right", so that the hut flue-gas interacts with the water just before it exits the heat-exchanger and the cold(-ish_ return water interacts with the flue-gas just before that exits the heat-exchanger.

    So between the two cooling "stages" of the fluegas, it is a few degrees warmer than the return water from the heating surfaces in the building.

    560:

    "As I understand it, the boiler fan is used primarily for start-up."

    No, the fan starts about 10 seconds before the burn and continues to run after then burn until the temperature difference in the heat-exchanger has equalized.

    Efficiency would go to utter hell otherwise.

    (It's a bit misleading to talk about it this way, because the heat-exchanger literally is the burn-chamber.)

    In EU there is also a legal requirement that the intake manifold must be slightly leaky near the top of the enclosure, so that the air in the enclosure gets sucked into the burn-chamber and thus continually replaced, in order to prevent any micro/nano leakages to accumulate enough gas to ignite.

    561:

    Interesting. I stand corrected.

    562:

    I should add that there is a huge difference in COP depending on your heating surfaces, almost no matter what your heat-source is (except for electrical resistance heating.)

    In-floor heating is the most economical, being primarily Stefan-Bolzmann radiation heating, their heating capacity grows just shy of (delta-T)^4, so the water supply seldom needs to be more than 30°C, which is great for both heat-pumps and modern gas furnaces.

    Modern radiators need 40-50°C water, and old/antique radiators may need up to 70°C water or in very special cases, usually only huge commercial buildings: Steam.

    40-50°C is workable for heat-pump, but as with hot water supply, you are in COP=3 rather than COP=4 territory.

    Doing 70° with a normal domestic heat-pump is not economical, too much electricity and wear, but there are "high temperature" gas furnaces which can do it with reasonably efficiency.

    So if you have old radiators, basically anything without a lot of thin extra fins made of very thin metal, swapping them out will save you money.

    563:

    Probably back in the days when a few drops of mercury were not reckoned to be a big deal.

    I remember those days lasting into the 1960s, then lost touch. Any idea when and why the situation changed?

    564:

    David L Frigates & destroyers, actually. Though he started on much larger ships - he was on HMS Valiant at Matapan. It says here ...: Ramilles / Kent / Shropshire / Valiant / Wallace / Whelp / Magpie.

    Nojay Got it in one ... & why I won't be going over to a a heat-pump. See also EC @ 555

    565:

    Frigates & destroyers, actually.

    Someone who's been through this correct me please.

    In the USN on your first sub cruise you must learn all the systems on the ship and how to do basic operations on them. Plus know how to fight fires in every compartment. Reactor areas somewhat excluded.

    If you don't get a passing grade on learning all of this you don't make a second cruise.

    566:

    It's more than the radiators; the pipes, layout and pumps also matter, my radiators are mostly of the modern type. To get away with even 50 degrees Celsius water, I would need to replace the entirety of the plumbing in my house; that's not just for radiators, but for showers and baths, too. For 40 or below, it would obviously need separate water heaters, as well, which would add extra complications. I was looking at the efficiency for the standard temperature of 60 Celsius.

    567:

    "I would need to replace the entirety of the plumbing in my house"

    Yeah, old houses suck (a lot of energy).

    I was lucky with my previous house: The city council approved extending the district-heating to our road, and that's near perfect fit for an old house.

    568:

    "As I understand it, the boiler fan is used primarily for start-up."

    Yes. They are required for high power density burners that need a forced air feed from cold in order to achieve stable and complete combustion. Such burners have been becoming increasingly common in domestic gas boilers since a long time before modern efficiency regulations began to exist. They have the advantage for the manufacturers that the fan can be relied upon to stop working after some years when the "lubricated for life" bearings run out of lubricant, and when this happens people are quite likely to buy a whole new boiler instead of a couple of drops of oil, especially with the various regulatory and certificatory scams that combine to ensure it would cost them hundreds of pounds just to find out that's all it needs.

    Then, once you have got to the point of using a fan to cover for the times when convection hasn't had a chance to get going yet, it's natural to design the boiler to rely on the fan all the time and just forget about convection; and from there it is not a very large step to designing it with a fan that spends its life huffing and straining to haul the intake and exhaust through 10 metres of 40mm ABS bath waste pipe. As one who is afflicted with galloping emphysema I feel quite sorry for the poor thing.

    569:

    I've had a slight variation on the idea... heat of solution of sodium hydroxide. We wet it down, you dry it out. The energy density is pretty good, it's a lot easier to switch it on or off, and it's one of the most common industrial chemicals already.

    570:

    "So - what type of urban planning (incl. housing) do you need to have in place in order to be ready for the next pandemic? "

    Impossible to say. It's my understanding that most of the COVID spread in the US was caught at work, restaurants, and shops, not at residential places.

    During the Spanish Flu, factories were super spreader events, but were negligible for COVID (slaughterhouses excepted). Few factories have more than 1000 workers (mostly automobile factories). Thus factories which were locked down during the Spanish Flu were allowed to remain open this time around (automobile factories excepted). In the US, we couldn't lock down restaurants and shops for long due to the high unemployment rate. We don't know which industries or sectors will have the most jobs, and thus can't make a plan that's not fighting the last war.

    Unless the next pandemic comes within the next decade or two, I doubt Amazon warehouses will have many, if any workers. Likewise, we don't know if offices will exist, so it may not make sense to try and retrofit them?

    A few decades from now, we don't even know if shutting down borders will even be politically palatable, especially if there's not just 1 or 2 superpowers calling the shots.

    571:

    In the USN on your first sub cruise you must learn all the systems on the ship and how to do basic operations on them. Plus know how to fight fires in every compartment.

    I know little of this(*), but it seems to imply some very serious pre-selection and pre-training to get on the sub in the first place. Like do a year or two of shore training in realistic simulators before you get to go on the boat and show you really could do it.

    (*) One of my former colleagues was formerly the XO of a Sturgeon-(637) class SSN. He had many interesting tales to tell.

    572:

    @gasdive (529) You write: I'm sorry he's gone. All that experience and memory just turned into rotting meat. Such a waste. Like watching the Louvre burn down.

    This reminds me of the saying, "En Afrique, quand un vieillard meurt, c’est une bibliothèque qui brûle." "In Africa, when an old man dies, it's a library burning."

    My source is Derek Gripper's album, "Libraries on fire", which is strongly influenced by Malian and Senegalese music. I saw him perform live a few years ago - impressive stuff. He mentioned the saying during the concert, and it's printed on the album sleeve.

    On the question of heating systems... we recently bought an old house that runs off oil heating (!) It's in a town centre and the only realistic replacement heating option is gas. Heat-pumps aren't possible (noise regulations - house too close to neighbours) and wood-chips are unfeasible. We'll be investing quite a lot in insulation. Housing is a real climate conundrum.

    573:

    I know little of this(*), but it seems to imply some very serious pre-selection and pre-training to get on the sub in the first place. Like do a year or two of shore training in realistic simulators before you get to go on the boat and show you really could do it.

    I don't think it is 2 years but yes, there is serious training before you get on a sub. Just as a junior rating. I think everyone on a sub is expected to be a specialists at a few things and a generalist at more.

    And lots of other things in the US military. If you don't want to be a grunt you have to commit to extra years. Back in 2010 I was talking with the mom of a high school ROTC classmate of my daughter. Her son had decided on the Air Force academy. And then to fly the big cargo lifter. So he was committing to 4 years college plus 8 years to make it worth the Air Force's time to train him as a pilot. Plus I think he would be required to get a masters degree somewhere along the way.

    He had many interesting tales to tell.

    My brother did 3 weeks on a sub testing sonar algorithms way back in the early 80s. The skipper said at sea we're always "ready" or some such and refused to leave behind any one for this 3 week excursion. So his group got to sleep in a sleeping back on top of a torpedo. The other 2 subs involved allowed the civilians to sleep in bunks.

    574:

    Not sure what more I can do.

    Oh, there really isn't anything and you've done quite a lot. Please don't take my comment as a criticism, I'd meant it to mean that even you, who are taking so much trouble to point out things that basic numeracy ought to be enough to get across, aren't bothering with some of the mistaken assumptions that some folks here make about Australia. And yes, that includes assuming that people like ourselves who point it out must be unfamiliar with the USA and Europe. I occasionally get Americans who try to have it both ways: that something that works in Europe can't work in the USA because of population density and the USA has more geography, while the same thing that works in Australia can't work in the USA because the USA's population density is higher (for "things" that include public healthcare, gun control and public transport), but I'm not sure I've come across that here on this blog.

    Anyhow the nuclear enthusiasts do come across as quite reminiscent of the battleship and cavalry enthusiasts who were so sure that aircraft and tanks would be of limited significance in WWII. And hey, there still are some battleships out there, and cavalry horses too.

    575:

    Like watching the Louvre burn down.

    I met him briefly once. There was (and maybe still is) an organisation that would form music groups by recruiting kids from all the high schools in Sydney, partly on a regular basis but also for one-off events like royal tours. I was in one such ensemble in the mid 80s somewhere along the Macquarie St side of the Sydney Botanic Gardens. Philip wandered over during a break in proceedings to ask why we were in all different uniforms, and took away the story that we weren't a regular band but came together specially for the event. These are the actions of a bloke who noticed things and wanted to know. I see the thread talking about submariners... I think it's simply normal behaviour for a seaman officer seeking to learn the ropes. But however awful the institution and whatever you make of the man personally, it's a very, very strange position to be in for your entire life and the continuum between making the best of it and doing it well is just as strange.

    576:

    So he was committing to 4 years college plus 8 years to make it worth the Air Force's time to train him as a pilot. Plus I think he would be required to get a masters degree somewhere along the way.

    As deals go, that strikes me as being not bad.

    577:

    Anyhow the nuclear enthusiasts do come across as quite reminiscent of the battleship and cavalry enthusiasts

    I think what we're seeing here are not so much nuclear enthusiasts as nuclear fatalists. (Nojay may wish to correct me.)

    They don't love nuclear, they just don't see that alternatives will suffice without heroic engineering and its consequences that would much surpass a nuclear equivalent.

    578:

    Niala @ 520:

    JBS @ 516: "I second that. Flickr is good, but it's not anonymous if that's what you're looking for."

    I've been on it for more than 15 years and my only name there is not my real name but one of my pen names: A string of 8 consonants. That's all the public sees.

    I signed up for it in 2008, and they didn't allow anonymous accounts at the time. YMMV.

    579:

    SFReader @ 521:

    Re: 'Most new construction is either new suburban housing, ...'

    House prices have been going up since COVID in my neck of the woods. If this is also happening in the UK, it's going to make it even tougher for younger folk/young families to afford a house. So maybe 'cheap' housing is not such a bad thing.

    Low cost housing; affordable housing ... is good, but "cheap" housing costs more than it's worth. Think Terry Pratchett's "boots".

    580:

    David L @ 531:

    In the last 10 years, 3 of the houses on the eastern block & one house on my block have been torn down and replaced with 2,000+ square foot 3 & 4 bed room houses. None of them were "old cheap crap" and the new houses are definitely NOT "new cheap crap".

    JBS and I live in the same city. I work with architects and have been watching the housing market for 10 years now trying to decide my next steps.

    Our economy is growing. Faster than most of the country. People are moving here (and have been for 30 years). Which means that the dirt is now more valuable than the house. Many times it is 90% of the value or more if the zoning will allow for a bigger house. Maybe 2 1/2 stories replacing 1 or 1 1/2.

    Looking at the most recent tax valuation, 85% of the "value" of my home is the dirt it sits on.

    JBS's location has different pressures but it works out to the same situation. I know a lot of smaller firms that would like to buy houses like his and remodel them into nice modern homes. I've offered to partner with a few if they can find the right deal. But the economics favor the bulldoze and build big folks.

    Most of the pressure in this neighborhood is from "Location, Location & Location". If you work downtown or for State Government, you're within EASY walking distance. The only thing the neighborhood lacks is a supermarket accessible on foot.

    581:

    As deals go, that strikes me as being not bad.

    Oh, I agree. But to most 18 year olds a commitment for the next 12 years seems like a like time. And from their point of view it somewhat is.

    To be 30 and get to decide to keep flying for the Air Force or switch to commercial aviation would in most times be a nice spot to be in.

    582:

    David L @ 536:

    I'm curious why it was still using "YY"? Whether you put it first or last, shouldn't it be "YYYY"?

    As I said, 78/80. Only in the last couple of decades has disk storage become trivially cheap. Back in the 70s/80s it was eye watering expensive.

    I missed that it was so long pre-Y2K.

    583:

    David L @ 538:

    I'll take your word for it. Your street might have a good case of survivor's bias, or it might be the minority neighborhood in the US where what I said doesn't apply.

    In much of the US you'll find 2 kinds of houses that are still standing after being built prior to 1950. Well built ones where the basics are still sound. Or about to fall down crap. The rest of the crap has already fallen down.

    I'd like to propose a third kind, well built ones that for whatever reason are slowly becoming falling down crap; to wit: "Chez JBS".

    584:

    Poul-Henning Kamp @ 542:

    "In much of the US you'll find 2 kinds of houses that are still standing after being built prior to 1950."

    Doesnt that vary a lot with geography ?

    My impression of the northeast was that a lot of buildings were quite old ?

    I expect that anywhere that has harsh winters the "crapola" already wore out & has been torn down. All those older buildings are the ones that were built well enough to survive.

    585:

    The fatalism is more to do with the three-card monte renewables con being perpetrated on a willing public -- the dataplate figure for wind turbines, for example is the only number the public gets in the press reports. Hornsea offshore wind farm stage 1 generates 1.2GW (whisper: dataplate). On average it will produce about 400MW, about 30% or so of its claimed dataplate output but this is never mentioned in the press. There will be entire days each year when it produces perhaps 50MW, some days it will produce 600MW and more. It's unlikely to ever produce more than 1GW total but that's not what the press reports.

    The use of gas is another part of the con -- the US generated 40% of its electricity last year using natural gas, twice as much as the old 20th century standby, coal. The renewables boosters say we'll burn gas as "backup" until we get everyone on solar and wind and then we'll stop burning gas, really. Honest. Storage is free or really really cheap (next year) but we don't have a fraction of what we'd need to go heavily into renewables to buffer the intermittency, never mind having enough renewables to top up that storage.

    Nukes work, they're proven to be incredibly safe, they emit virtually no CO2 in operation, they generate large amounts of electricity for their footprint, they can last in operation for a century and more using modern technologies and regular upgrades. Nuclear is also Godzilla movies and horror stories and wild exaggerations and fairy tales so we can't have generating capacity that doesn't load down the atmosphere with lots of additional CO2, instead we get more and more CCGT plants figleafed by pictures of wind turbines and solar panels, and the world burns.

    586:

    Pigeon @ 569: I've had a slight variation on the idea... heat of solution of sodium hydroxide. We wet it down, you dry it out. The energy density is pretty good, it's a lot easier to switch it on or off, and it's one of the most common industrial chemicals already.

    Just to be sure I understand (high-school chemistry) - when y'all wet it down it would give off heat, and when we dry it out it absorbs heat?

    So, how many BTU per ton (or ton per BTU)? Could you fit something that would be useful for heating/cooling a well insulated house in something the size of a shipping container?

    587:

    "Following this thread, I looked up heat pumps. Firstly, installing them in my house would mean gutting several rooms..."

    Or instead of "look up heat pumps" you could have followed the link in my comment #324 to a split reverse cycle aircon that sells for 1199 AUD (669 GBP) which if you remove the government sales tax is 608 GPB. I'm sure that if the UK government ordered 28 million units they could negotiate an 8 pound discount.

    Having followed the link, you'd see that instalation involves drilling a 2 inch hole through the wall where you want the inside unit, mounting the inside unit to the wall and running 240v to both the inside and outside. Barely more effort than putting up a shelf. I guess if you're the sort of person who removes their kitchen evertime you put up a shelf, you may have a point, but you're in the minority.

    I might be delusional, but my delusions involve actually looking straight at two units installed exactly as I've described and neither involved removing my kitchen. Of course this could be one of those "only in Australia" things that I'm always accused of. Perhaps you have a wall mounted kitchen that covers every exterior wall in your house and confining the kitchen to the ground in one room is a purely Australian thing?

    588:

    It's very like the old "down wind faster than the wind" arguments.

    Increasingly frantic commenters posting actual examples, links, videos, personal experience, peer reviewed papers, mathematical explanation and in the end actually certified by an independent body, only to be met with increasingly patronising "we know it simply can't work old chap, there's no such thing as a free lunch in physics".

    589:

    Even if that box had been a solid block of Osmium, it would not have come close to the limit of what you are allowed to lift (6.6kg)

    After reading this I just had to calculate the mass of a 3"x4"x1.5" block of osmium... and amazingly, it actually comes close.

    6.44 kg to be exact

    And good luck trying to pick up such an object with your fingers -- although leather gloves are if anything, worse. You need rubber gloves with good grip.

    590:

    Re: On demand hot water heating. I was just heavily involved in organizing a warranty replacement of a massive gas fired hot water tank which had failed within 1 year of its being installed.

    Said tank was installed on the third floor of a building, with no plan for how to replace the 900lb tanks in event of failure. I ended up sweet talking a local moving company into buying some fancy bit of kit that allowed them to safely move the massive things up and down the stairwells. And godspeed to them, they charged us an absolute mint, and now there is a 'new' tank in place, which will hopefully last longer than the original.

    All in the replacement cost almost as much as what we would have spent completely replacing the entire system with on-demand hot water heating. In a building with 40 units of housing. When we asked for the on-demand system instead, the PTB flat out refused.

    Re: WFH futures. Some workplaces will go back to a modified workweek. Others will not. My wife's organization, of which she is the head, is running out the clock on their office lease and looking for somewhere to tuck their servers. They will rent meeting spaces as needed and completely work from home. This is not uncommon.

    591:

    That's it. Heat of solution is quoted at 44.2kJ/mol, which is about 1.1kJ/g, so dissolving 0.9g per second gives you 1kW. Alternatively, about 300kWh/t, or alternatively again, 1t gives you 1kW for about 12.5 days continuous operation, or a whole month at what seems like a plausibly realistic 40% duty cycle. So you can take a tonne a month per kilowatt as a convenient approximation, extremely rough but good enough for this sort of thing.

    There's more to it than that though because there are also very large enthalpy changes on changing the concentration of a solution, although the figures don't immediately pop up on a casual search. The phenomenon was used to what appears to have been excellent effect as an energy store for operating a steam locomotive without a fire; diluting the solution with condensed exhaust released more heat to boil more water, and blowing superheated steam through the solution from a stationary boiler reconcentrated and recharged it. As I recall it, the stuff was never actually brought out of solution at all, and it was purely the heat of dilution that was used.

    Density is given at 2130kg/m3 which is probably for bulk solid but evan allowing for packing factor etc. it is clear that you will hit the maximum load for a shipping container long before you run out of volume.

    592:

    "if the UK government ordered 28 million units"

    One "feature" of cheap heat-pump-units, is that they are noisy, and in dense built-up areas, that can become a really bad "drone" sound which will be impossible to escape outside or inside the buildings.

    Lowering the noise amounts to increasing the volume of the outside unit dramatically. The current generation of "real" air/air heat-pumps seem to take up roughly 3 square meters of garden.

    593:

    "There's more to it than that though"

    Storing heat in salt generates a lot of buzz these days, but there are some formidable engineering challenges in scaling the technology up.

    While the numbers, as such, look good-ish, the relevant usable temperatures are not very convenient for our needs and even minor contamination with substances readily available in the surroundings cause very undesirable failure-modes.

    All things considered, I dont see any commercial viability in domestic salt-based heat storage.

    594:

    gasdive & EC My central heating boiler ( Fronted by a very-rarely-used gas fire ) is in an old fireplace, with the waste" heat being vented up a pipe retrofitted inside the original Victorian chimney. most of that "waste" heat is dissipated inside the house, of course. So, it's back to ripping out & replacing/replumbing vast amounts to fit heat pump & new pipery somewhere else.... Maybe not.

    595:

    My Daikin unit is rated at 64 dBA and occupies 0.255 sqm. I can't hear it from inside my house, at night, in the country. Nor can I hear it from the other side of my fence. I can't hear the air conditioner of any of the 4 neighbours with whom I share a fence. One is about 3m from my head when I'm sleeping. Nor can I hear the neighbour's heat pump pool heater that's about a metre from my fence line.

    I don't have great hearing, but I can hear their clothes driers. And I can hear the surf that's about a kilometre away.

    The unit I linked to is about 3 times more powerful than mine, and makes 66 dBA. That's pretty typical of units that power. The Daikin (quality brand) of that power is 69 dBA (twice as loud).

    596:

    Some people learn visually. Me bleating on that you don't need to rip out the walls, destroy the existing pipework, bulldoze your house, convert your entire garden to an industrial wasteland and beat your dog has fallen on deaf ears.

    It really is very little more than hanging a shelf. Watch the installation video from the manufacturer and marvel at one hole drilled through the wall, screwing a bracket to the wall and running 240 volts outside is all that's needed. (plus the usual stuff that any fridgy does every day)

    https://youtu.be/xUJMzKPwjbI

    597: 585 - Also ISTR that a nuclear power plant generates less radioactive waste per GWh than a coal fired one does. 587 - Well, I'm not sure how my "1 house in 3 in Scotland has exterior walls over 12 inches thick" applies here, other than making drilling a 51mm diameter hole a non trivial exercise" (and that's without considering Aberdeen where you may be trying to drill this hole through granite). I do have an impression that a lot of Australian houses are one variation or another on timber frame constructions though. 588 "down wind faster than the wind" - Easy peasy, as long as you can design aerofoil sails and keep them appropriately trimmed for peak thrust. 592 - One air-air unit, local to where I lived, was about 3 feet by 3 feet by 1 foot and effectively silent any time I passed, even though the fan was running. 594 & #596 Landlord wants to replace my present electric (resistance/thermal block) heating and HWS system, with an air source heat pump system claiming "you'll have much lower electricity bills" (my emphasis). This will involve mandatory replacement of 6 thermal block radiators (2 or 3 presently used rather than just there wasting space because system is over-specified for the house), 2 resistance heaters (never used) and one immersion water tank/heater with 6 air source heaters that are physically larger and some sort of water heater.

    This is a description of what is actually proposed, not a heat pump manufacturer's idealised propaganda video.

    598:

    I've been to Aberdeen. The B&B I stayed in had a 5 inch diameter hole drilled through the wall to install an indoor toilet.

    I guess drilling holes in walls is now a lost technology.

    How sad.

    Just have to keep burning Russian gas, guilt free, knowing that there's literally no alternative. Because making holes in walls is a lost art.

    599:

    Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't realise that you had been to Aberdeen (without generating carbons I trust ;-) ), and that drilling 1 5" hole in a wall of unspecified (by you) material makes drilling 2" holes through foot thick granite a trivial exercise.

    600:

    Maybe it's the UKish thing about expecting to be able to do electrical installations yourself? I wouldn't try that with a split system, even though it's obviously not rocket surgery. The skillset (and cert requirement) is for both "electrician" and "gas plumber". While I personally believe that skillset is totally achievable for any reasonable person, that's different to saying anyone should do it. Between insurance and warranty, it really isn't worth it if you have any reasonable choice.

    We're very happy with the multiple split systems we have installed in our house over the last couple of years. But of course, this is Queensland where even new constructions, buildings that could indeed be designed to boast passive features that make a lot of air-conditioning unnecessary, nonetheless sprout compressors from every room. But the reverse cycle makes any room warm instantly, then takes very little power to keep it that way. Sure once the external cold gets a lot colder and with structures that leak worse than this one it would be more challenging, but it's all a matter of quantity, not quality.

    601:

    I certainly wouldn't try it, even if all the specialised tools didn't cost like ten times as much as the cost of a fridgy for a morning. I did compressed gas stuff for several years and it's really easy to make mistakes in a non obvious way.

    But yeah, both the UK and US commenters seem completely fine with home electrical works.

    I think if I was building from scratch, and town planning wasn't a thing, I'd certainly build a well insulated house. But the reality is that building a standard box is cheap, and building a well insulated house is cheap, building a well insulated house that complies with regulations is fantastically expensive and made absurdly difficult. Spending an extra million on a build, vs 3000 on a couple of multiheaded splits? No contest.

    602:

    In my case, drilling a hole is not a major issue - but, unfortunately, there are only two places I could take a hot water supply without replacing massive amounts of plumbing (which would also require replacing multiple rooms' floors and a fair amount of redecorating). One of those is in an internal hot cupboard (i.e. with at least one room between it and the outside) and the other has convenient outside access - to the inside corner of an 'L' with almost no air flow. Indeed, there is almost nowhere on the outside of my house that I could put a large thermal source without causing serious problems in other ways. That isn't unusual in the UK, either.

    And, as I pointed out earlier, there is no way that low-temperature water will work with my heating system. No, I don't have microbore, but the house has been extended and the pipe runs are too long even for high-temperature water. That isn't unusual for older houses, either.

    To Damian: I am not surprised that heating in Queensland isn't a problem :-)

    603: 600 and #601 - Well I (and I think Nojay, Greg, Bellinghman and Charlie) would all feel technically competent to do our own electricals and M1 plumbing if not for regulations (and the requirement to be a certified electrician applies everywhere, not just in Edinburgh and/or in Listed Buildings and/or on USESCO World Heritage Sites) (BTW all 3 apply to Charlie's flat).

    OTOH only WHS status applies to the Heart of Neolithic Orkney, and even that doesn't apply to the monuments' visitor centres.

    604:

    Are you kidding?

    Drilling a 2 or 3 inch dia hole through a couple of feet of granite is absolutely trivial.

    It would have been a right pain in the arse back in the day that indoor plumbing was installed 100 years ago but they managed. Today you can do it with battery tools in 10 minutes. Thank fuck you weren't in charge a century ago because we'd still be waiting for indoor plumbing and electricity.

    The things I'm being told are so utterly daft that I can't tell if you're trying to be funny.

    You drill a hole, hang a bracket. That's all you need to do in terms of modifying the house. You don't touch the plumbing, you don't remodel any rooms, pull up any floors, knock down any walls.

    Drill a fucking hole in the wall. Hang a fucking bracket and then hot air comes out of a box on the wall. What kind of soft cock thinks drilling a hole with fucking power tools is too hard?

    You people are fucking insane.

    605:

    And what kind of upside-down thinking leads you believe that most rooms in the UK even HAVE an outside wall that does not immediately face onto another property or the roadway?

    606:

    Paws I rewired my entire house about 25 years back & have done other installations since [ Multiple-socket + phone line hole in upstairs floor into ceiling void for new location of main computer, re-cut into upstairs ring-main, previously installed, as above ] I have zero problems with water-plumbing. Never done gas ... might think long & hard before I did. If only because leaks are a lot harder to spot.

    EC gasdive really does not get our "construction" problems, does he? My situation, re - "Where THR FUCK DO I PUT the exchange unit?" - is almost identical to yours ... Never mind.

    607:

    For electrics and plumbing, my wife does it, or did it in those cases where regulations now forbid.

    Installing the Daikin unit was something we got the suppliers to do - running pipes up the outside wall to near roof level to come in under the bedroom ceiling, and running electrical cables out to the external unit, are a little more than hanging a shelf. If someone is going up a precarious ladder, it's not us at our age.

    We've not encountered ice hanging off the external unit, but we've not checked (it's a bit of a bugger to get to). But we've got a cool bedroom in summer, and a warm one in winter, both of which are nice. In summer the electricity for it is coming off the roof, or out of the battery at night. In winter not so much, but the higher efficiency offsets using electricity from the grid rather than gas.

    Quirks of this 80s house - the heating is ducted gas fired hot air, and the internal walls upstairs are highly compressed sawdust with a plaster skim over the top. Lovely sound and thermal insulation, that.

    608:

    Personally I think they're hilarious. Look, we're all insane, it's just that occasionally some of us can pass ourselves off as a normal well enough to hold down a responsible job. Well some... that clearly isn't universal. It's the ones who seem to have a problem keeping their hands off their... well anyway.

    Talking about granite, I think I mentioned Brisbane is getting an underground, albeit a single line that connects existing stations (as well as some new underground-only stations) via a tunnel that passes under the river.. it's the long vaunted and much derided cross-river rail project. There's the issue that conservatives in Oz hate trains, so there's no love for this project from the current Feds or the current Brisbane City Council, it's a Qld state govt affair wall to wall (or tunnel entrance to tunnel entrance). But the point is that "Brisbane tuff" is around 150MPa, one of the reasons this sort of thing hasn't caught on in the past. The tunnel machines these days are not scared of those numbers, I gather can probably handle most granites too.

    609: 604 - What sort of gulah thinks that drilling through 12" of granite actually is trivial? Ok drilling through Lewisian Gneiss is worse but you still haven't addressed the base issue of it being hard metamorphic rock!

    Oh and why is living in a property that someone else built in an area that has no mains gas and doesn't have an HWS central heating system insanity by Australian standards?

    606 - I'll take that as backup, cheers.
    610:

    I am not surprised that heating in Queensland isn't a problem :-)

    Of course :) But it's really about differentials. Getting to 20C inside when it's 45C outside is energetically similar to getting 20C inside when it's -5C outside. Sure you get lower than -5C, and maybe that's when air cycles let you down, but they do cover a pretty broad range. I'm not claiming the exact same thing works for everyone, but I find a lot of the hair splitting here more hilarious than informative.

    611:

    And why would I give a fuck?

    The people who installed the aircon in this terrace house didn't.

    https://m.realestate.com.au/property-house-nsw-paddington-135971022

    That's the head unit next to the clock in the second kitchen photo.

    You think we didn't just build exact copies of UK buildings up until about 1950? We even copied the names of the suburbs, this terrace house is in Paddington. Paddington, the suburb of Sydney. We have exactly the same "construction problems". As I've explained several times.

    Anyway, if you'd watched the video I linked to, you'd know that the outdoor unit can be in the garden, on a bracket on the wall, on the roof, or in the roof space.

    But I think we've answered the question of why they're aren't heat pumps all over the place in the UK. It's a level of "not invented here" that I didn't think possible. Yes, it works for colonials, yes it works everywhere from Shanghai to Antarctica. "But you colonials don't understand how special we are back home old chap"

    612:

    Most of my electrical and plumbing work has me been fixing up the messes (and occasional illegalities) left by the 'professionals', or the usual peripheral stuff (sockets, taps etc.) I have done some other work, depending on what was allowed that week (and how to do it). We could do what you have, for the benefit of a room that we don't heat much and doesn't use enough of our heating to make much difference. The places we WANT to heat aren't so easy :-(

    Yes, given what Poul-Henning Kamp has posted, the right solution would be to dig up the lawn to a depth of 2 metres (to ensure the spirals are deep enough), install underfloor ducted hot air heating, and use some other system for water heating. A bit of a faff, what?

    613:

    That's almost directly across the road from where I lived (with my mum in a basement flat of a similar 3-story terrace, with the owners living in the upper 2 stories) when I was a teenager going to SBHS. I know you're going for a certain style, I think there's the denser-more-haphazard-unplanned stuff that would be more familiar to UK (and Hanoi or Hong Kong local) folks in Darlinghurst or Pyrmont... maybe Rozelle and definitely in the denser parts of Balmain.

    Of course most of inner Melbourne is like that, though it's relatively rare in Brisbane. We have some real 19th century terraces here, but mostly timber construction took over, even most late 19th century houses are.. well yes, Queenslanders.

    614:

    There will be entire days each year when it produces perhaps 50MW,

    I think the situation may be more extreme than that.

    Motivated by the days of low wind the UK has been undergoing recently, I've started to look at the Gridwatch UK numbers to see how often that happens. So far, based on data from 1 December 2020 through 18 April 2021, there have been two periods of ~ 10 days, now and late February - early March, when the wind has been close to AWOL and CCGT has had to pick up the slack the entire time.

    Today's entertainment will be to extend the analysis back through January 2020 and make it a little more rigorous.

    615:

    I should be more amused. However all this talk of drilling holes is taking me back to my days in construction. I don't think I've heard someone called a soft cock for 30 years. I've certainly never had occasion to use the phrase before because anyone who said drilling a little hole was too difficult would have been told to fuck off and don't come back long before I could have said anything to them.

    These jokers must think granite bench tops get injection molded in a factory with all the holes already there. I've never heard such utter tripe.

    616:

    Well digging up the lawn in pursuit of thermal efficiency is a pastime, surely.

    I was seriously planning on it not long ago and still might. Well I'm digging up the front garden anyway, so it would just fit in with that. The diurnal temperature variation here isn't really enough for a large payoff, but it's not nothing. But since I was doing a retaining wall and terrace for a lightly paved carport anyway, there's relatively little extra effort to dig 0.5m deeper and lay a PVA pipe circuit. Replace 0.5m soil, lay road base, compact, lay sand, smooth, lay pavers, simples. 5x10 metre space, so maybe 100m of pipe. My original plan was to couple it with the heat exchanger in a defunct electric storage water heater. The only exotic part to source would be the expansion valve, and the other cycle from the water heater would be though an old car radiator and onward via a ducted fan. It would be a low-differential, almost-passive source of cool air for the basement rooms, which are already pretty cool in summer anyway. Experimental home-made gear is always a bit flaky of course, but the numbers can work out.

    Of course it turns out that off-the-shelf air-cycle systems are totally affordable and very efficient, so the level of tinkering I had in mind probably requires more enthusiasm than I can muster these days. But sometimes it's fun to think it through.

    617:

    You think we didn't just build exact copies of UK buildings up until about 1950? We even copied the names of the suburbs, this terrace house is in Paddington. Paddington, the suburb of Sydney.

    It worked the other way too -- I was born and brought up in Cronulla Place in a town in the middle of Scotland. I didn't find out until much later where the name came from. The street was built around the 1930s IIRC, council housing on the outskirts of town.

    618:

    Sounds like fun, but my trench digging days are probably over.

    I think I picked Paddington because my parents used to have a terrace house there and I worked there for a while, so it is familiar. You're right though, Ultimo and friends would be better.

    619:

    It had literally never occurred to me that it might go the other way.

    620:

    Yes. While I accept that my original posts about efficiency were wrong, that was because I had been confused into talking about heat exchangers used to feed a 'conventional' high-temperature hot water and heating system. That simply will not work, but is the only low-hassle and moderate cost solution available for most people in the UK.

    What I have really changed my mind about in the light of this thread is the relevance to new-builds and complete renovations, where I now think heat pumps should be mandatory except in exceptional cases.

    But some of 'gasdive's postings are definitely hilarious. He assuredly would give a fuck if a neighbour or council took him to court for a trespassing exchange unit and won; or a passing lorry knocked it off, the lorry's insurers sued him for damages and won, and his insurers refused to pay because it was illegal.

    621:

    Haha. I think Damion has made me see this discussion on the right light.

    Sorry for being so grumpy.

    The vision of being worried about my aircon if a lorry manages to hit it in the roof space of a three storey terrace made me laugh out loud.

    622:

    One "feature" of cheap heat-pump-units, is that they are noisy, and in dense built-up areas, that can become a really bad "drone" sound which will be impossible to escape outside or inside the buildings.

    Oh yes. In the US the lower cost units have a thin sheet metal casing. Pay a bit extra and you get some thing more solid with steel or similar plating and the noise goes way down.

    623:

    The last time I actually came close to a heat pump, as opposed to seeing one from afar when I go out for a walk, was when I was house-hunting in 2003-2005,

    The real estate salesman had taken me a little farther from my usual visits, right up to Val-des-Monts and to a medium-sized newly built wooden cottage with exposed beams and huge windows. It was not too far from a lake.

    In the basement there was this brand-new enormous heat exchanger with ducts going towards the outside and coming inside and other ducts sending chilled or heated air to the rooms. It was impressive for a medium sized house. The real estate salesman thought that the owner had been suckered into buying a unit too big for his needs.

    Everything was inside because it was the only way to avoid constant cleaning because of snowfalls.

    In other words those units which I see outside houses have to be constantly watched over and cleaned during our winters because yes, we have snowfalls and they are many.

    624:

    most of that "waste" heat is dissipated inside the house, of course. So, it's back to ripping out & replacing/replumbing vast amounts to fit heat pump & new pipery somewhere else.... Maybe not.

    Somehow some of us saying heat pumps work well in many situations these days and are very efficient turned into people saying that we were claiming heat pumps were the only way forward. With a dollop of "the physics of those installed millions of units are not possible". Or it will not work in "our" climate when it does in many places around the world.

    For many older houses like yours there are boiler replacements that don't see huge amounts of heat up the chimney. But to use them you might have to replace your old steel pipe water feed to radiators with a PEX system. And instead of convection/gravity feed you'll get to add circulation pumps if not there already. And your radiators will not be as hot but they will put out heat in a more even manner. (And the removal of the big steel pipes gives you the path for the PEX. You will have to fill up the excess hole size.)

    As discussed earlier you will have to make sure your flue gases escape which can be the biggest practical hassle of the entire effort. It will be for me when my 50 gal 14 year old water heater goes. Or my 50+ year old furnace.

    And if you do this you can even zone the system and have thermostats for each zone. One circulation pump per zone.

    Zoowie.

    Now go out and get cost estimates. Take the lowest one. And be pissed for the rest of your life for going lowest cost. This happens way too often.

    625:

    In most of the US it is legal to do your own electrical work. As long as you do it "right". And it may be against local code. Which does not make it illegal. Confused yet? Good. That is the point.

    But don't even think of doing your own work in some places. Chicago and New York City are big on everything armored, inspected, pre-approved, certified, etc...

    I have the knowledge to do my own wiring. But I'll do some reading when if I get past replacing/adding an outlet and/or light fixture just to make sure.

    626:

    you'd know that the outdoor unit can be in the garden, on a bracket on the wall, on the roof,

    Ah, yes. I'd forgotten about all those big square totally butt ugly boxes on top of the small suburban houses all over Las Vegas. But I guess looks only counts in Vegas if it's on stage with ladies not wearing much.

    627:

    Yes, but you are making the mistake in assuming that most older houses in the UK haven't already been upgraded that way. Any house renovated in the past half century (perhaps more) will have at least copper feed pipes; and retrofitting new radiators, a pump and more efficient boilers to copper fed piping is usually fairly easy. My guess is that there aren't many houses left with older systems. The real problem is doing better than that.

    Incidentally, the rules in the UK are little different from the UK, except that it's almost all due to central gummint, because that emasculated all lower levels (except, to a limited extent, in Scotland and Northern Ireland) long ago.

    628: 608 - Well, after a quick play in Wikipedia, I'll still see your ignimbrite and raise you granite at 200mPa. Also, note that 20 years ago a TBM wouldn't even have looked at ignimbrite! 612 - Might one suggest that you should try and borrow the "unknown Komatsu" from an oligarch who's realised that he's paid to make the volume that it's occupying in his sub-sub-basement? :-) 614 - Interesting; the graphs I saw say that wind has never done more than 50%, and sometimes as low as 5% of actual requirements. 615 para2 - Not far off actually, given that I thought that granite benches and worktops were moulded from granulated stone rather than masoned from boulders like you have just claimed.
    629:

    Re unknown Komatsus, I have thought of it - with another nefarious purpose in mind :-)

    In the UK, I think you will find that most 'granite benchtops' ARE formed composites rather than being cut from the rock.

    630:

    Interesting; the graphs I saw say that wind has never done more than 50%, and sometimes as low as 5% of actual requirements.

    That's more or less right, though there are occasional excursions.

    For those inclined to commit acts of spreadsheat, I highly recommend going to https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/download.php and downloading the CSV files available there. There's a lot of data on a variety of sources, the full range looking like this:

    id, timestamp, demand, frequency, coal, nuclear, ccgt, wind, pumped, hydro, biomass, oil, solar, ocgt, frenchict, dutchict, irishict, ewict, nemo, other, northsouth, scotlandengland, ifa2 1038810, 2021-04-19 09:00:42,31678,50.088001,1426,4726,19159,1742,0,432,2464,0,3950,6,663,0,-18,-8,917,143,1835,444,0 1038811, 2021-04-19 09:05:41,31504,50.055,1459,4727,19333,1740,0,418,2460,0,4890,4,308,0,-20,0,912,143,1842,449,0 1038812, 2021-04-19 09:10:41,31303,50.046001,1476,4729,19584,1722,0,392,2467,0,4890,4,0,0,-20,0,772,143,2236,478,0

    Fortunately, the site lets you select the ones you're interested in -- in my case they're demand, ccgt, wind and solar.

    631:

    Yes, but you are making the mistake in assuming that most older houses in the UK haven't already been upgraded that way.

    Actually no.

    I assume like in the US the current state of "in place" is all over the map.

    But things like someone saying drilling a hole in the wall is hard to do. Then later saying it might be on a street or there is no access to the wall or whatever is a bit much.

    A US remodeling show that mostly does one big project per year did a show about a London apartment on the top floor of a 4 or 5 story building. Which made it clear that just like in the US one size doesn't fit all. Water tanks all over due to very low London water pressure due to 100 (200?) year old street mains that can't handle much pressure was one interesting one. (I have 160psi into my house so I have the opposite issue.)Waste/sewage piping down the outside another.

    And yes thick walls from prior to 1900 which were not intended to deal with anything resembling modern plumbing and wiring (electrical or data).

    In the US we see a lot of similar with older east coast cities where things are not quite as old but still. Coal chutes, oil tanks that are hazardous waste sites, one boiler and distribution system for 3 floors broken into 4 apartments, and on and on and on. With minor and major renovations over the decades.

    But most of the US cities have neighborhoods that are 100 years old or more.

    632:

    Sadly (for my purposes) they don't seem to offer "spinning reserve" as a field. But yes, given a CSV I am quite able to commit acts of spreadsheet (and if I was allowed Grapher on this machine going on to commit acts of scaled chart).

    633:

    David L All my heating system pipes are Copper, thank you very much. And it's always been pumped - I've replaced the pump, myself, twice. Oh & three radiators, with more modern ones, with different entry/exit valves from the original, too, which is "fun"

    634:

    Link to the cheering moment: https://youtu.be/p1KolyCqICI?t=2270 First Flight of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter: Live from Mission Control Spin up, climb to 3 meters, hover, descend, land, spin down. (These people are working engineers and scientists, not PR people; worth watching more of the video.)

    635:

    I routinely do my own electrical work, which is legal as long as it is correct. However, any time I do something more than move a switch or fixture I will have an electrician friend look at it and ensure I've done it correctly.

    After buying a decrepit building I had some electricians go though it all and make sure the wiring was up to code. $20K later they had finally finished installing all the junction boxes and other basic kit that whoever the previous moronic installers hadn't bothered with. It is worth being certain that it is done right.

    With most work I use the 'If this is done wrong might somebody die' rule for when to call in a professional. If I hang some drywall poorly there is no risk to life. If I wire a panel incorrectly things can go badly.

    636:

    Just out of curiosity, which "Durham"? There are several of them in the U.S. (I was born & raised in one of them) and I'm pretty sure Canada has at least one. I'm guessing the original in the U.K., but I don't know if there might be other ones; maybe even one in Norway.

    The original one, i.e. in north-east England. Which, considering one of the reasons it was founded was excessive viking raiding, resulted in a certain amount of good-natured ribbing from my (then) colleagues when I subsequently moved to Norway (via Denmark). Fortunately, my (new) colleagues assure me that it's not actually genetic, and they barely ever burn, rape, and pillage their way across Northumberland any more, and anyway, the ferry from Bergen stopped years ago.

    Being on (well, close to, the coast is about 20 miles away, five pit villages over) the east coast of England, it's damp and cold. Or, well, so I thought until I moved here. Then I realised that it's just damp: cold is very much a relative thing, but England really is damp.

    637:

    In the UK, I think you will find that most 'granite benchtops' ARE formed composites rather than being cut from the rock.

    We call that cultured granite in the US. Glue rock chips must not market as well.

    638:

    Simple question for you on nukes. What kind of reactor solves all three of these problems:

    1.) Fails in a safe fashion, like a molten-salt reactor.

    2.) Can't be tweaked to produce plutonium?

    3.) Can be mass-produced and shipped using standard methods? (I'm OK with assembly on site, but it has to be a 99-percent identical assembly process for each site.)

    IMHO, if you can't do all three of these things, you haven't solved the problem.

    639:

    Um, no, it is not rare.

    When I was a little kid, a friend and his dad lived in an old what-was-obviously-once-a-mansion that had been broken up into apartments. The first floor was literally huge stone blocks. I'm sure it was under 200 yr old, maybe under 100. They tore it down, and put in "sr citizen housing" half the size of a "starter home", so maybe 750'^2, that were obviously going to be torn down in 25 years.

    Houses built pre-war (this is Philly) were mostly brick, solid, with plaster and lathe walls (and what I would give for that now, with a neighbor that in warm weather sometimes cranks the music up to 15 on a scale of 10). For example, my grandmother's house, that she sold in 1956 or '57, is in google maps at 3124 W. Montgomery Ave, Philly. Looks nice to me.

    Meanwhile, post-war... my first wife and I rented a 1.5 story apt in 1969. Built (or mostly-built) a few years before. We could hear the toilet flush on the third floor, and I could put my fist through the cheap plasterboard.

    And my current house, built in '57, too much plaster board, plumbing that's lousy (who plumbs with kitchen drains where the pipes get smaller between the sink and the outside drain? But that's what a plumber I trust told me, and why I shouldn't use the garbage disposal).

    Decently-priced homes, built reasonably well, should be available. But then, esp. after the dot-com collapse, money went into property, and so we have house flippers (who should be decorating lampposts), and "location, location, location", and selling this tiny PoC for well over $400K https://www.redfin.com/MD/Silver-Spring/11407-Dewey-Rd-20906/home/11001654

    640:

    "All the good places for 'burbs are taken"... you mean, where all the farms were, and the city got its fresh fruits and vegetables from, and so, on the East Coast, they get shipped in from the Central Valley of California, or maybe from Chile (that's South America)?

    641:

    Certainly, in the US, heating your house with electricity has always been a lot more expensive than anything else.

    642:

    Right, as I've said before, we're the US! We overreact more than any other country in the history of the world!

    And that ranges from the story you tell, to the costs of thing, to requirements to, say, wear clothing....

    643:

    US HVAC: trust me a lot of us have been complaining about bacteria/virus recycling air conditioning since the late seventies.

    644:
    615 para2 - Not far off actually, given that I thought that granite benches and worktops were moulded from granulated stone rather than masoned from boulders like you have just claimed.

    We purchased the granite slab, and it was cut for our kitchen, on a machine similar to one of these I believe:

    https://www.parkindustries.com/stone/

    645:

    "Modern radiators... 40-50C hot water"? I'd be really surprised if the house, or apt, I grew up in, or either house I owned in Philly, or the apts I lived in there, had higher than that... and these were the cast iron: https://modernize.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/cast-iron-radiators-.jpg

    646:

    You're surprised about oil heating? Had that in houses I lived in in the seventies. Our house in Chicago, that I miss, had a furnace: coal, converted to oil, converted to gas. Huge, cement (asbestos?) jacketed, wonderful (not working) brass pressure gauge.

    That was the one that blew up in Jan of '97, and was replaced ($250 on our checkbook, the rest via insurance) with a tiny box not much bigger than a full-sized computer tower that was gas (for hot-water radiators).

    647:

    In the US, they are not perfectly happy with homeowner-done work. Most work (if you let them know) the city/county will demand an inspection.

    When I had a "heavy up" last year, going from 100A to 200A service, nope, not going there, paid for electricians. Wiring in the house, sure.

    648:

    The rest of us will take an apology now.

    Yct was utter and complete BS. 2' through granite, "easy"?

    Let's see, since my SO just bought a new battery-powered drill yesterday, I was looking at prices. First, either rent or buy an industrial-grade impact drill ($500+), then find drill bits to go through rock, that are long enough to drill 2'.

    Right. Or find a contractor to do it (I'm guessing > $1000).

    Sure, easy as pie.

    649:

    (These people are working engineers and scientists, not PR people; worth watching more of the video.)

    Learned today that some of the open source science libraries I've worked on to were used by this team - almost certainly not on the helicopter itself since I write Python code, but likely in the planning and analysis software.

    Feeling some nice warm fuzzies from knowing that I helped even if it was in a tiny way.

    650:

    Please. The guy I bought this house from raved about his handyman. I think I'm up to three pages why that asshole will NEVER set foot in this house again.

    Just as an example - not sure if the attic fan (which my son said, when he replaced it for me as a present, was probably a bathroom fan) was dead, but he CUT THE ARMORED CABLE, then wired the master bedroom ceiling fan/light by connecting the wires to a ROMEX and just lying it across the insulation over the ceiling, not even stapling it up.

    651:

    Apologies for the mis-attributed response in #649, was responding to #634.

    652:

    Re. my own post @ 564 .... Oh yes for historical info & a comparison with how things have changed in the past 75 years ... [ Midshipman ] Ramillies then Kent and Shropshire next came Valiant ( Matapan ) then to the Med in ... [ Sub-Lt / Lt / 1st Lt ] Wallace continuing with Whelp - ( At surrender in Tokyo Bay ) and [ Lt / Lt-Commander ] Chequers & lastly - became captain of ...[ still in rank of Lt-Commander ] Magpie

    whitroth @ 643 Legionnaire's disease, anyone?

    653:

    You forgot where the English wrote one or more letter complaining that the Norse settlers were stealing their women by doing things like... washing, taking baths, brushing their teeth....

    654:

    "Or find a contractor to do it (I'm guessing > $1000)."

    Get a quote, it's probably not that bad.

    Last I needed a big hole (~4") I paid ~3€ per cm depth here in DK

    655:

    "dig up the lawn to a depth of 2 metres"

    No, optimal depth whatever is "frost-free depth" in your geography.

    Ground-loop heating is really solar-heating, the geothermal contribution is insignificant (unless you live in Island).

    656:

    1) For what failure modes? To the best of my knowledge, no AGR has ever done a 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl or Fukoshima style failure (not even when deliberately misoperated like Chernobyl was). 2) Why is this a specific problem to you. It took me less than 1 minute to establish that Pu reactors are (or at least can be) a thing. 3) This is an issue of political/industrial will, not of technology.

    657:

    By your figures, that means the hole for a ground source heat pump would cost about 600_000 euro, before we add the cost of hiring the 8 meters of safety fence required to protect the excavation. Or the heating system hardwear.

    658:

    No, it isn't. The requirement equates to 3 KW/m^2 (of area suitable for ground cable). The site I looked at said they used one metre diameter spiral for my requirement, and quite a length of it. That may be wrong, of course.

    But another important aspect is to get it low enough that it doesn't lower the soil temperature from the surface to 30 cm down significantly, even after many years of use or in long, cold spells. You may have noticed communications between me and Greg about gardening.

    659:

    ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICE

    Your host is incredibly bored with the ongoing bad-tempered squabbling over heat pumps, renewable v. nuclear power, how to better build British homes, and all associated subjects. Which means, about 90% of the past 300 comments.

    Remember that, aside from the heroic volunteer mods who patrol for spam even when I'm AFK, I have to read everything here. 300 comments is a few hours time that I won't be able to devote to redrafting Quantum of Nightmares, the sequel to Dead Lies Dreaming, which needs redrafting so that it's ready for production in time to be published early next year.

    If you keep on screeching at each other on these annoying strange-attractor topics with high frequency, I'm going to have to switch off comments while I get some work done. At least try to find something new to talk about? Helicopters on Mars, NASA paying SpaceX to use Starship for the Artemis Lunar missions (except for the pork barrel requirement to fly the astronauts up and back on SLS/Orion), tomorrow's Apple event (new iPad mini, I hope!), the latest in vaccine research?

    This is a hint.

    660:

    @whitroth. You write, "You're surprised about oil heating?"

    Not at all surprised. I live in a village just outside a small town in Germany. Enough places around here have oil heating that there are a couple of local companies selling fuel oil. And actually, it's cheaper to heat with oil than with gas, which is plain wrong.
    We're replacing the oil heating as part of the modernisation process, because we just can't justify continuing to use oil. The house itself is a bit over 250 years old, so oil heating will have been a major modernisation when it was installed.

    661:

    @Charlie Apologies - I didn't see your hint while I was writing my response to whitroth. Please delete as appropriate.

    662:

    20 years ago a TBM wouldn't even have looked at ignimbrite!

    I wonder when the breakthrough* was and specifically what it was. They started the first of these modern-era large tunnel projects in Brisbane in 2006 with Herrenknecht TBMs and ever since there always seems to be one tunnel project in progress (we're up to 3 road tunnels now with at least 2 more planned, and the rail tunnel is the current project).

    *SWIDT

    663:

    Have you noticed that Elon's Moon rocket is about the same size as Tintin's Moon rocket?

    Elon:

    https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-moon-missions-2022.html

    Tintin:

    https://tintin.fandom.com/wiki/Moon_Rocket?file=Rocket_ready_in_launching_pad.jpg

    664:

    I can go first... I'm still kicking myself for buying what is probably one of the last Intel Mac Minis last year. Also, the last iPad mini was a bit disappointing... but I'm looking forward to seeing how interesting the new one will be... it seems like catching up will be happening to an extent.

    665:

    This is a hint.

    Taken. I'll check in once a month or so to see how things are going but keep quiet. And watch for Invisible Sun, which I hope to see before entropy catches up with me. I really liked the Merchant Princes series.

    666:

    Oh, I bought what I knew was a last-generation Intel iMac late last year. Definitely don't regret it, though: the first-gen Apple Silicon iMac will probably have a nicely redesigned chassis but if the M1 is anything to go by it'll be a very long time (if ever) before you can buy one with more RAM than Apple are willing to sell you, much less install your own. Which I did, to the tune of 128Gb. (M1 maxes out at 16Gb on-die RAM, non-expandable.)

    Maybe a later generation or a pro level machine will fit my needs better, but I figured I was buying for the 4-5 year span it would take before Apple finally sunset support for Intel CPUs, and on that basis I was happy. Anyway, the top end of the last-gen Intel iMac overlaps in spec with the middle end of the late and discontinued iMac Pro range.

    667:

    In my opinion, this lander contract might be half sincere/half cynical.

    The cynical part is that it might be an attempt to tie the fate of Starship to SLS/Orion and Gateway to head off an attempt to cancel those projects.

    Absent Starship, Crew Dragon has essentially negated most justifications for SLS/Orion. To my knowledge, the only one that remains is: Crew Dragon hasn't demonstrated an ability to enter lunar orbit. Plus, Senator Shelby has lost his coveted chairmanship. His replacement might even be a QAnon supporter who lacks seniority. This makes SLS politically vulnerable for the first time in a decade.

    The sincere part is that this contract acts as a stamp of approval for Starship. Plus, it could do for Starship what the COTS contract did for Dragon, and let's face it, Falcon 9. I don't know if Starship needs it?

    As an aside: it's amusing that space is no longer the strange attractor it was on this blog in 2007

    668:

    Rocketpjs @ 590: Re: On demand hot water heating. I was just heavily involved in organizing a warranty replacement of a massive gas fired hot water tank which had failed within 1 year of its being installed.

    Said tank was installed on the third floor of a building, with no plan for how to replace the 900lb tanks in event of failure. I ended up sweet talking a local moving company into buying some fancy bit of kit that allowed them to safely move the massive things up and down the stairwells. And godspeed to them, they charged us an absolute mint, and now there is a 'new' tank in place, which will hopefully last longer than the original.

    Re: Local moving company ...

    During the summer break back when I was going to college (late 60s), I worked for a local moving & storage company. The only thing I remember from that job was having to move a MASSIVE antique (1890s?) concert grand piano (easily over 500Kg).

    The owner was moving out of a third floor apartment and it was to be installed in the music room on the second floor of her new home. The apartment building was OLD with tiny stairwells. The piano was a MONSTER and took a dozen of us to get it down them.

    The stairs in the "new" house weren't as bad, but the piano was so heavy that by the time we got it there we were all worn out, so getting it up to the second floor was no fun either.

    To this day, I still wonder how the hell they got the damn thing up to a third floor apartment in the first place?

    669:

    Moving co?

    I can't remember how we got it to the apt that the woman I was living with in the late seventies that was a first floor, but three of us moved her baby upright from there to a second floor.

    Oh, that's right, and I had found a garden hose to drain my water bed... but it was a small one, not a 3/4". Six hours later, I wish I had a video of me and my two buddies trying to get it to the window to empty it: three men fight the giant blue amoeba!

    670:

    Okay, space time:

    Ingenuity is not the first human aircraft to fly on another planet. That honor belongs to the balloon probe attached to Vega 1, which flew for 11,800 km, 50-55 km up in the atmosphere of Venus, back in June 1985.

    It's going to be awhile before a helicopter flies 11,800 km on any planet.

    But yes, Ingenuity is quite cool, and kudos to NASA for coming in second in the flight contest. Solar powered helicopter drones are nothing to sneeze at.

    671:

    Charlie Stross @ 666: Oh, I bought what I knew was a last-generation Intel iMac late last year. Definitely don't regret it, though: the first-gen Apple Silicon iMac will probably have a nicely redesigned chassis but if the M1 is anything to go by it'll be a very long time (if ever) before you can buy one with more RAM than Apple are willing to sell you, much less install your own. Which I did, to the tune of 128Gb. (M1 maxes out at 16Gb on-die RAM, non-expandable.)

    Maybe a later generation or a pro level machine will fit my needs better, but I figured I was buying for the 4-5 year span it would take before Apple finally sunset support for Intel CPUs, and on that basis I was happy. Anyway, the top end of the last-gen Intel iMac overlaps in spec with the middle end of the late and discontinued iMac Pro range.

    I wonder what the Hackintosh community is going to do about Apple's switch to proprietary hardware?

    672:

    I note that you get comment 666 in this thread, which is nicely done.

    Yes, my Intel Mini was really to fit a similar need... though it maxes out at 64GB. I did install that myself, at 1/3 the Apple price, even though it's not technically a user-supported activity for a 2020 Mini. It had been for earlier Minis and there were still plenty of how-to guides, but it was annoyingly fiddly - I think fiddlier than any internal laptop changes I've made, including everything from the TiBook to the Dell gaming laptops I was using for a while (for the RAM capacity). I don't need to keep VM labs on my devices anymore, but I'm getting deeper into home in-the-box music production and using high-end sample libraries* the RAM need outstrips the CPU need by some margin. So I was fine going an i5 Mini so long as I maxed the RAM. And it'll keep me going for several years.

    I didn't even look at M1s, so didn't know the 16GB limit, which seems a bit crazy to me. Some friends who have gone with those rave about them, but thinking about it their music production rigs are inherently more CPU heavy than RAM heavy.

    *Spitfire Audio being the main culprit here.

    673:

    If this isn't too big a violation of the 300 comment rule...

    I highly recommend PBS series on Hemmingway. America's greatest author, macho manly man, horrible human being and even worst husband. Hobbies included: war, big game hunting, deep sea fishing, bull fighting, abusing and cheating on those who loved him.

    He had a list of 4 things you had to do to be a man: 1.Write a novel (not a novel but over 200 articles to my credit), 2. Plant a tree (about a dozen of them), 3. Raise a son (2 of them), 4. Fight a bull (3 out of 4 ain't bad).

    https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/hemingway/?fbclid=IwAR1e44gvl5nTnXFoyn6L8uzhKsbGLE5J8eEk-mwtSvy4xkgU81-WUibqZeA

    Favorite quote: “The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” ― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

    So do we live in an emasculated culture and should we be reading Hemmingway and watching reruns of "Fight Club" to counteract this culture?

    674:

    Kindly reread my comment that you were replying to. YOU implied we should drill holes, not that the contractor would do it.

    675:

    I disagree, strongly.

    What do you have against, say, Sam Clemens/aka Mark Twain? Or a good number of other writers? That's like saying X was America's greatest poet, while I pull out a list (are you going to argue over, say, Di Prima, or Ginsburg, or...)?

    676:

    whitroth @ 669: I can't remember how we got it to the apt that the woman I was living with in the late seventies that was a first floor, but *three* of us moved her baby upright from there to a second floor.

    I can't remember how we got it to the apt that the woman I was living with in the late seventies that was a first floor, but three of us moved her baby upright from there to a second floor.

    Oh, that's right, and I had found a garden hose to drain my water bed... but it was a small one, not a 3/4". Six hours later, I wish I had a video of me and my two buddies trying to get it to the window to empty it: three men fight the giant blue amoeba!

    Moving a baby grand is nothing. I've helped move maybe a half dozen or so ... worked part-time for a music store while I was in high school (to help feed my guitar habit). This thing was effin' HUGE!

    Visualize THIS piano without all the paintings & gold leaf; all the carving is there, but in a "plain" black finish.

    https://www.luxuriousmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/C_Bechstein_Golden_Grand_Piano.jpg

    That's my memory of the piano in question.

    They sent four of us out to move this lady's furniture. That was a standard crew - driver, loader and two grunts. I was one of the grunts.

    We had a piano board, but it wasn't big enough. I think there was also a technician from some piano company there to supervise, but I don't quite remember. He certainly took no part in the actual physical labor of getting the piano moved. I think he unhooked the pedals & got the legs ready to detach1 and then we tried to pick it up.

    The four of us couldn't even lift the piano to get it on to it's side on the piano board, so the moving company sent out a second crew with the biggest piano board they had. With that, we were able to get it off its feet & onto the piano board. We got it out of the apartment and down to the intermediate landing between the 2nd & 3rd floors and that's where we got stuck.

    The moving company sent out a third crew of four and we were able to get the piano down, out the front door of the apartment building (down the hill from there) and load it into the moving van. Then we drove across town to where the house was, unloaded, carried it inside & lifted it up and on to the legs that the technician had reassembled. And we were done for the day.

    I don't even remember moving the rest of the lady's furniture. That may have been another day's work & I went to a different job that day. I worked for that company for 3 months and all I remember about that summer's work is one HUMONGOUS piano and the struggle to get it down the damn stairs.

    1 After we got the piano onto the piano board he must have disassembled the legs and taken them on over to the house she was moving to, because I don't remember the legs after we got the piano off of them, and they were already set up in the music room when we got there with the piano.

    677:

    All my heating system pipes are Copper, thank you very much. And it's always been pumped - I've replaced the pump, myself, twice. Oh & three radiators, with more modern ones, with different entry/exit valves from the original, too, which is "fun"

    Fun. I'm sure.

    But with copper you're heating the copper and taking longer for the heat to get to the radiator. PEX is better at getting most of the heat to the radiator.

    And if we want we can get into long discussions on modern radiator design vs. the old accordion style. I know they can be better but I have no idea of payback times for swapping them out. Plus the newer ones don't look as interesting.

    678:

    JBS @ 668: "The stairs in the "new" house weren't as bad, but the piano was so heavy that by the time we got it there we were all worn out, so getting it up to the second floor was no fun either.

    To this day, I still wonder how the hell they got the damn thing up to a third floor apartment in the first place?"

    They hired a crane?

    I used to live in a 22 story apartment building in Montreal. The top floor was filled with very costly penthouses. One day a new penthouse tenant discovered that his sofa didn't fit at all in any of the two elevators. So, he hired a crane that took the sofa from the street to the 22nd floor penthouse, from outside.

    The 22 story building:

    https://www.padmapper.com/buildings/p259863/apartments-at-5999-av-de-monkland-montreal-qc-h4a-1h1

    An example of a crane that lifts heavy furniture (or other stuff) 20 or 30 stories:

    https://www.marketbook.ca/blog/construction-equipment-news/2020/10/grove-gmk5250l-all-terrain-crane-powers-24-7-liftings-day-and-nighttime-jobs-in-nyc

    679:

    I'm still kicking myself for buying what is probably one of the last Intel Mac Minis last year.

    I bought an M1 MacMini a couple of months ago.

    Zippy it is.

    But some things just don't work. Viscosity/OpenVPN which I haven't had time to deal with.

    Then last week the screen went all green for a minute then blank. Uh, oh, he thought thinking it had died. Nope it rebooted after a few minutes of ignoring me. Then said that it crashed and had restarted. Crash log pointed at QNAP utility. I can see that. Maybe.

    But still I like it. 16GB/512GB

    680:

    it'll be a very long time (if ever) before you can buy one with more RAM than Apple are willing to sell you, much less install your own. Which I did, to the tune of 128Gb. (M1 maxes out at 16Gb on-die RAM, non-expandable.)

    Much of the speed comes from the direct bus integration of the memory and storage with the CPU buss. I suspect this is the way of the future with Apple. And likely with workstation Intel systems in the not too distant future.

    Connectors increase the failure rates and require signals to be slowed down. I think they have changed and will not be looking back.

    Irregardless of what that guy handy with a soldering iron did in China.

    Also this is M1. M3 and later might be really interesting.

    681:

    First Flight of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter: Live from Mission Control

    AFTER they realized they needed a firmware update which delayed things a few days. Write some code. Test. Upload. Apparently data speeds to Mars aren't gig.

    Made me smile.

    682:

    Do you have a link describing exactly how the patch was done? Current distance from Earth to Mars: (16.05 light minutes 2021/04/19) I was pleased to see very little nationalism in the presentations. During the press conference later in the day the acting NASA administrator mentioned the United States once, and there will surely be revived arguments about the first powered flights on Earth. Otherwise it was pretty clean. (I still haven't watched all of both videos, though.) (POTUS Biden's twitter account did sadly boast a minor bit about America, and the videos had maybe a little too much Wright Brothers story.) The Chinese would be wise to take note, with their Tianwen-1 mission's upcoming rover landing (already in Mars orbit); they should consider minimizing the nationalism, especially from national political leaders.

    Here's a link to a press conference starting with the clean video of the takeoff, hover, and landing, followed by a Q&A session: https://youtu.be/JM_2hmdRnfQ?t=779 Transcript of the full press conference: https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/nasa-press-conference-transcript-on-mars-helicopter-ingenuity-april-19

    Also, a few tech details: https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/#Tech-Specs (older link).

    683:

    “Also this is M1. M3 and later might be really interesting.” I strongly suspect that iMac will get a different series to the laptops. More room, more power available, more heat handling capacity... maybe ‘D1’? Let’s not forget that there are colossally powerful ARM cpus for serverland available. 40 x 3.3GHz core Altra’s, 48 core Cavium ThunderX2, 96 core ThunderX3, 64 core Graviton and 128 core Ampere. Would you bet on Apple not being able to move towards that level? I wouldn’t. We’ll find out a bit more tomorrow...

    684:

    David L Um - my house was built in 1893, & it has suspended floors, so the Cu pipes emitting heat doesn't matter- since they are still heating the house, which is the important bit.

    685:

    General - By request of OGH I will cease discussions of rocks, and of heating systems.

    670 - The quotes I've heard have all been very specific that Ingenuity is a "first planned, controlled flight by a heavier than atmosphere machine". According to your reference Vega 1 balloon is/was an unpowered, uncontrolled drifting hot gas balloon.

    Or do you claim that the Wright brothers Flyer was not the first powered heavier than air flight because Otto Lilienthal and Percy Pilcher had both flown gliders, and the Montgolfiers had flown hot air balloons, at earlier dates? (Btw there is no surviving documentation of the event, but PP may have flown a powered aircraft at St James's Park, Paisley (near the present Glasgow (Abbotsinch) Airport) prior to December 17th 1903).

    686:

    As several have pointed out, the skycrane seems to have been planned, heavier than air and it flew in the atmosphere.

    687:

    I have read a few of Hemingway's works, and the only one I found really impressive was The Old Man and the Sea (not surprisingly). What about Poe? Or even Thurber? Some people would favour Hawthorne and so it goes ....

    Also, that list is inane. I favour Heinlein's.

    688:

    Also, that list is inane. I favour Heinlein's.

    I somewhat agree. But Hemingway did try and live his life based on the list. I don't think Heinlein did.

    I also watched the documentary. It was interesting. But it did not make me think well of the man.

    And it is very likely he was suffering CTE like so many US football players. Getting his head whacked throughout his life seemed to be a goal.

    689:

    Do you have a link describing exactly how the patch was done?

    Here's what I read. Skip down to the "original article".

    https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/04/nasa-says-its-mars-helicopter-is-ready-for-a-historic-first-flight/

    As to how the patch got from here to there. I think we have 2 satellites orbiting Mars doing survey work and acting as comm links for current and future ground missions. Plus I think the current rover can do direct links back to earth.

    I'm guessing there was a code upload either direct to the rover or via those comm sats then to the "copter".

    And as the article mentioned a lot of testing at each step.

    One of these days when I get a round 2 it, I'll check out what they use for a communications stack. I suspect it is some sort of equivalent to TCP/IP but much thinned down. It has to work with CPU/memory constrained systems launched over 20 years ago. Plus not using a standard stack adds a layer of security from "script kiddies" or a country like Iran trying to have fun.

    690:

    Per Charlie's comment I'm dropping out of this.

    691:

    Would you bet on Apple not being able to move towards that level?

    My M1 MacMini outperforms my 2018 MacBook Pro w/Intel 7-Core I9 at 2.9Ghz.

    And the MacMini is emulating the Intel instruction set more often than not.

    My M1 MacMini has 8 cores (4 for performance and 4 for efficiency modes) plus 8 GPU cores and 16 Neural Engine cores.

    I'm betting Apple will be extending this for a while before they head down a power hungry path. If ever. They've seen where that has taken Intel. And the Motorola/IBM RISC designs before that. IBM had no interest in the path Moto took in adding all the multi-media instructions to an on chip DSP. Which lead to them splitting off from Moto. The Moto RISC/DSP setup is now a niche market (a big niche but) while the IBM path powers everything IBM does with their own chips. And even then this IBM path may not last.

    692:
    I wonder what the Hackintosh community is going to do about Apple's switch to proprietary hardware?

    Those whose motivation is spiting Apple will no doubt try hard to run macOS on Raspberry Pis...

    693:

    But it did not make me think well of the man.

    There are lots of really great artists who were really horrible people.

    And that raises a question: I today's woke/cancel culture should we differentiate the man from the art ignoring the former in favor of the later, make excuses for the man because of his great art, or denigrate/ban his art because of his horrible character?

    Pete Townsend was allegedly caught red handed with illegal photos.

    Should we stop listening to Tommy or Quadrophenia?

    John "give peace a chance" Lennon was a allegedly a terrible abuser of his wives and girl friends ("I used to be cruel to my woman I beat her and kept her apart from the things that I love")

    Do we stop listening to Sgt. Pepper and the White Album?

    Kevin Spacey was allegedly bad on so many levels, but remains a great actor.

    Then there is art that reflects no longer acceptable social mores and assumptions.

    Gone with the Wind remains a great movie and it so unacceptable today on multiple levels.

    Could Mel Brooks ever make Blazing Saddles in todays environment? Or Young Frankenstein where Madilyn Khan lets the Monster have his way with her because he's ... monstrous? Is either film no longer funny?

    And what about deliberate propaganda for horrible regimes that is still technically great art?

    Birth of a Nation, a movie that created most of the techniques still being used by directors today.

    Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia is stunning cinema in the service of Nazism

    Battleship Potemkin with its famous baby carriage roiling down the Odessa steps is iconic, yet its purpose was to glorify a murderous Leninist/Stalinist regime (the Ukraine famine was just starting when it was in theaters)

    Do all these movies get banned?

    How do we navigate our way through these issues?

    694:

    Well, I do :-) Of the 21 things on his list, I have done 13, could definitely do another 4, and could add several dozen comparable items ....

    695:

    I think you read more into my comment than was there.

    As I said, I didn't think well of the man. His books can stand or fall on their own. And since much of what I don't like about his life is in some of his books, I can ignore, and suggest others do also, those books.

    Part of the "art" culture is to revere the artist along with the art. Which leads to the near deifying of some seriously terrible people.

    Crick of Watson and Crick seemed to be someone with a goal in life to be in the running every year for the biggest jerk on the planet. That doesn't mean we ignore DNA.

    696:

    Powered flight on another planet.

    If we admit lighter-than-air then the Wright brothers get nothing because the universally-acknowledged first were the Montgolfier brothers, who beat them by much more than a century.

    697:

    The clip I saw from the head of the program at JPL said something like "first rotary powered flight".

    The Wright brothers did several things together as a first which made it all work. Airfoils. 3 axis control. Power. And the thing they seemed to figure out before anyone else was that the propeller was an airfoil.

    Oh, yeah. While they came up with 3 axis control, their system for that control totally sucked. Sliding your butt side to side for some of the control was a total failure once the ball got rolling.

    698:

    I didn't even look at M1s, so didn't know the 16GB limit, which seems a bit crazy to me.

    The RAM is either on-die, or at least in the same carrier as the CPUs, in the M1. So it's a hard limit. Keeping it on-die does promise reduced latency, though ...

    My suspicion is that the Apple Silicon iMac expected to be announced today will either be a very low end model or run on a new processor, call it the M2, with a higher RAM option available.

    699:

    16GB limit seems ridiculous to me as well, but the "I'm a video editor and I used the M1 Macbook Air as my production machine for two weeks" write-ups have been strangely positive, even when they're effectively running all their software through a VM. I wonder if hardware optimisation really can make us rethink just how much RAM 16GB is.

    Still, if my livelihood depended on it I would wait out a few iterations before I committed to an Apple-silicon laptop. Particularly when a number of the peripherals are showing their age (camera, screen, and so on). The Air in particular is badly in need of the overall refresh that we'll hopefully see on the iPad Mini.

    700:

    I'm happily running on a MacBook Pro with that amount of RAM, so it's reasonable for now. I'm more cramped by the tiny 2TB SSD

    (Yes, I know. That's a huge amount, but I end up shuffling VMs in and out, to USB drives)

    701:

    There are lots of really great artists who were really horrible people. ... should we differentiate the man from the art ignoring the former in favor of the later, make excuses for the man because of his great art, or denigrate/ban his art because of his horrible character?

    (And yes, it usually is a man, although there are some noteworthy counter-examples ...)

    My 2 cents: we all have different disgust thresholds. Up to the threshold we'll enjoy or consume the art, metaphorically holding our noses or making excuses for the creator ("he's a horrible person, but the art ..."). But then they go beyond the threshold and you can't make allowances any more.

    Also, our personal disgust threshold may change over time. And the artist/offender's deeds may come to light as being worse than we imagined, or they may very publicly repent. All of which changes the trade-off.

    TLDR is, it's impossible to prescribe a mandatory reaction -- especially as what you find disgusting I might approve of, and vice versa.

    There's also the issue of people with repugnant views, rather than repugnant actions. What do you do when their views/outlook bleed into their work? There are some authors I can no longer read, knowing their views, even though I have no awareness of them being physical abusers. And there are some who I know to have been physically abusive to others but who I still enjoy reading (example: "James Tiptree Jr", aka Alice Sheldon -- classic murder/suicide with spouse, except unusually it was she who pulled the trigger).

    702:

    I wonder if hardware optimisation really can make us rethink just how much RAM 16GB is.

    RAM is volatile fast storage; SSD is non-volatile and somewhat slower, but increasingly convergent with RAM in terms of speed (at least when compared to spinning media). AIUI new non-volatile fast storage will eventually render the difference between RAM and SSD irrelevant -- it's all off-CPU storage, on-CPU storage is cacheing it, so why discriminate?

    Still, if my livelihood depended on it I would wait out a few iterations before I committed to an Apple-silicon laptop. ... The Air in particular is badly in need of the overall refresh that we'll hopefully see on the iPad Mini.

    I have a 2018 Intel Macbook Air and I'm not replacing it before international travel resumes -- it's mostly gathering dust -- and even then, maybe not. I had a 2015 12" Macbook (which is now too sluggish to be a daily driver). What I really want is an Apple Silicon 12" Macbook with dual USB-C ports, but I fear Apple have no plans to go there -- it'd cannibalize the iPad Pro market. So the 12" Macbook's replacement is perforce a One Mix 4 running Win 10 Home and WSL 2 (4 core i5, 16Gb RAM, 1Tb SSD). It runs Scrivener 3 on a desktop class OS, which is my non-negotiable requirement. (Linux fails on that count.) It means putting up with Windows 10, but Win10 is tolerably less ghastly than previous versions of Windows, especially as Apple seems to have decided to lobotomize macOS, and in the absence of a new Macbook, what else is there to do?)

    703:

    I disagree RAM is not fast, it is slow.

    In order to get decent performance out of a modern computer you have to use the same sort of strategies people used back in the day when they had a couple of K of RAM and a disk. Keep everything small, local and in cache. The further away the data is the slower it is.

    These numbers come from 2012, but the lesson is still valid.

    https://gist.github.com/hellerbarde/2843375

    My understanding is that the shiny new "Optane" stuff gives performance similar to DRAM. It'll make a difference when it filters down to consumer kit but mostly with badly written software I expect.

    704:

    Looks like the Chinese government's ghost cities are starting to have new life. Ordos, the largest ghost cities is now thriving post-pandemic

    https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Society/China-s-largest-ghost-city-booms-again-thanks-to-education-fever

    They did it by moving the good schools to the city, forcing parents to buy homes in the vicinity

    705:

    For those of us with esoteric toy needs, they now have "The Prisoner" action figures available - unfortunately, it's a kickstarter, but still possibly fun.

    706:

    Sliding your butt side to side for some of the control was a total failure once the ball got rolling.

    Makes sense given that they were bicycle mechanics, and shifting your mass is part of riding a bicycle.

    707:

    Re: '... the latest in vaccine research?'

    Since you asked ... :)

    When I read this article I thought that this is fantastic research and hope it gets validated/tested soon because in my layman's imagination this finding (approach to parsing how viruses work) in combination with that map showing where ACE2 receptors are located is not just for now/COVID-19 but for how to approach other and future diseases/pandemics down the road as well.

    Free access/pdf download:

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1097276521003130?via%3Dihub

    'Functional Landscape of SARS-CoV-2 Cellular Restriction'

    Excerpt (with some reformatting) from Abstract:

    'A limited subset of ISGs were found to control viral infection, including endosomal factors inhibiting viral entry, RNA binding proteins suppressing viral RNA synthesis, and a highly enriched cluster of ER-Golgi-resident ISGs inhibiting viral assembly-egress.

    These included broad-acting antiviral ISGs, and eight ISGs that specifically inhibited SARS-CoV-2 and -1 replication. Amongst the broad-acting ISGs was BST2/tetherin, which impeded viral release, and is antagonized by SARS-CoV-2 Orf7a protein.

    Overall, these data illuminate a set of ISGs that underlie innate immune control of SARS-CoV-2/-1 infection, which will facilitate the understanding of host determinants that impact disease severity and offer potential therapeutic strategies for COVID-19.'

    708:

    I'm sure it's what number 6 would have wanted.

    Having said that, fully functional autonomous rover would be handy to keep cats out of the garden.

    709:

    Duffy Actualy "Blazing Saddles" is, if anything even funnier now, simply because Brooks was extracting the urine from US racism so wonderfully well .... You haven't mentioned the elephant in the room: Richard Wagner. [ With the exception of "Parsifal", which I find a christian pain in the posterior, all his other works are magnificent - especially the "Ring". But his anti-semitism & general character ..... ] Or, even more extreme ... [ Open in INCOGNITO window, or it'll be paywalled ] Carlo Gesulado - a double-murderer, a sadomasochist & ... composer of very good "musick"

    David L & Charlie Unless we admit the claims of either John Stringfellow or George Cayley ?? ... oh yes, Charlie .. "Win10" Why oh why oh why was WinNT incompatible with USB-porting? Grrr ... I had to buy a whole new tower because of that & WinNT was reliable & didn't crash, unlike may other Win products

    710:

    John Stringfellow or George Cayley

    In Wikipedia

    For John there's not enough detail to tell if he was lucky or good.

    For George he might have beat the Wright brothers if he'd had power systems. But he was about 100 years too early for that.

    The Wright brothers built a wind tunnel setup and tested all kinds of wings and controls before their first flights. I think their journals with their test results are still available.

    Ditto the propeller. They realized it was a wing with different rates of airflow between the center and tip and did lots of experiments to get the most power out of them.

    And they came up with the controls. Front canards, wing warping, and butt shifting for ruder control have all but abandoned today but they put it all together in a working airframe.

    Plus after those flights in NC they went back to Dayton and spent a few years filing patents (all over the world) and flying around their experiments to the amazement of the locals.

    711:

    AIUI new non-volatile fast storage will eventually render the difference between RAM and SSD irrelevant -- it's all off-CPU storage, on-CPU storage is cacheing it, so why discriminate?

    "RAM" is fast but the contents vanish if power goes away or the refreshes aren't done in time. But it can be fast. Very fast.

    SSD or Solid State Disk (STORAGE) has the attribute of holding onto it's date when the power goes away and doesn't need to be refreshed many times a minute. And can wear out although it practice it seems to last a lot longer than predicted when "good" SSD first made the scene. Plus relative to RAM it is slow. And needs a fairly complicated OS hidden on the module to deal with wear leveling and caching. Of course slow today may be faster than the RAM of 20-30 years ago.

    Those differences make for a big price differential between "RAM" and "SSD".

    712:

    SSD or Solid State Disk (STORAGE) has the attribute of

    What you're describing are properties of NAND FLASH memory which is the tech currently but not inevitably dominant in SSDs (solid state drives): battery-backed DRAM SSDs also exist for high speed applications, and 3D Xpoint (aka Optane) is slowly emerging as a contender (currently in server-class machines only).

    713:

    What you're describing are properties of NAND FLASH memory which is the tech currently but not inevitably dominant in SSDs (solid state drives)

    Actually it is. Dominant. Still. And likely for a while. The price difference between such memory and "RAM" is vast.

    All those SSD drives in 2.5" packaging and M.2 are flash NAND. Vastly better than what's in memory sticks but still flash NAND. And in a range of performances depending on use.

    Not that there are other options out there.

    https://www.anandtech.com/show/9799/best-ssds

    Then read one of their deep dive reviews of Samsung or other quality SSDs where they talk about how they are over provisioned, cached, and wear leveled.

    714:

    I have just observed on sale in the local corner shop a newspaper named "The New European", whose existence I had not hitherto remarked. The front page is occupied by a large picture of Phil the Greek and the caption: "A Greek, German, Danish immigrant - No wonder he's so British".

    715:

    Not that there are other options out there. Not that there ARE NOT other options out there.

    716:

    Am I not clear? I said that moving a Tom Thumb upright was an immense effort for three guys in good shape.

    I sincerely hope you had hand trucks, etc. I don't want to imagine moving a grand, even a baby.

    717:

    Wagner, the Ring: the music is fine, the libretto should have been shredded and burned.

    Oh, Valhalla burns at the end. Yeah, and so do all humans....

    718:

    Piano moving story: So, I inherited a 1900(ish) player piano in working condition. Having no where else to put it, it went in the basement. The piano movers had to remove the (rusted up) wheels from the bottom to get it in the basement door. This takes three of them, and it is obvious the thing is heavy (that player mechanism is not light).

    Anyway, it is down in the basement and they need to put the wheels back on, so the head mover tells one of the helpers to go get the toolkit. The guy takes too long and the head mover decides the heck with it. He gets the wheels, the screws and screwdriver and picks up one side of the piano and props it up on his knee while he screws the wheels in. Then does the same on the other side. Did I mention he was a big guy?

    Later I needed to move it a few feet along the wall. I could barely move the thing (I used those furniture mover inserts because the wheels were rusted up). I just couldn't believe he picked it up like that...

    719:

    "Sliding your butt side to side for some of the control was a total failure once the ball got rolling"

    [I know what you mean but] As a hang glider pilot I resent that remark! [I don't actually]

    In all seriousness, weight shift 2 axis control works fine, and my glider, with or without a power harness, would totally kick sand in the face of a Wright Flyer. I understand the reasons for 3 axis control surface "aircraft" if your goal is to have a flying greyhound bus, but that's not real flying. Not strap on a pair of wings and fly, real flying.

    720:

    whitroth @ 717

    I much prefer the Danish Interpresse version of the legend(s) to the version by Wagner.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valhalla_(comics)

    721:

    A hip cradle, ... worked the wing-warping and coupled rudder. A simple wooden lever held in the left hand controlled the elevator.

    I don't think this is the way you use your hips when hang gliding.

    Shifting hips while independently controlling the stick is one of those pat your head and rub your tummy kind of things. But with your life on the line.

    Now that my kids are grown hang gliding would be a nice sport to take up. My daughter and a friend did it as a tourist thing in Switzerland a few years ago off a cliff down to a landing zone in a village square.

    722:

    Well it's just nice to be able to control yaw independent of pitch, even if you don't really "need" it.

    TBH hang gliding is something I'd love to do, but 1) I already have more things to do than I can and 2) is it really something you can usefully start in your 50s, with your best hang gliding years most likely already behind you? I think 3) scaring the hell out of my partner and 4) finding the money for yet another hobby (see 1)), are both important factors too but that's probably academic if you don't get past 1) and 2).

    723:

    Dammit: "yaw independent of roll"... spotted it just after hitting "submit".

    724:

    whitroth Not so - Valhall burns as do the gods, but the Humans & the Rhinemaidens are left, contemplating the wreckage, with a new world to build. Trust me - I've been in a SERIOUS production of "Rheingold" & watched most of the rest of the Ring from the wings ... the whole point is that Wotan's lust for total world power & domination, paralled by similar desires from Alberich, result in inevitable destruction. Would that Adolf had actually taken the message on-board!

    725:

    Then there is the poetry of Ezra Pound.

    726:

    "Wagner's music is really much better than it sounds" - Mark Twain

    727:

    It's been a fun day today. I've been "evacuated" for the last four hours. The contractor installing Google Fiber in our neighborhood managed to hit a gas line.

    The gas company finally has the gas off and have shut off all the meters in the neighborhood so they can repair the line. All the fire trucks have packed up and left.

    They told me they'd come knock on the door when they were ready to turn the gas back on, but at least I'm allowed back in the house now. So, no stove, no dryer & I've got the water heater shut off for now. But at least they didn't blow up the neighborhood like that contractor did over in Durham, NC back in 2019.

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

    I drove past the site of the blast about an hour before it happened on the way home from a doctor appointment over at the Durham VA Hospital.

    That "School of the Arts" they show being evacuated used to be Durham High School where I went to school. Back when I was in the 10th grade I walked past that building every morning & evening on my way too & from school.

    728:

    Niala @ 678:

    JBS @ 668: "The stairs in the "new" house weren't as bad, but the piano was so heavy that by the time we got it there we were all worn out, so getting it up to the second floor was no fun either.
    To this day, I still wonder how the hell they got the damn thing up to a third floor apartment in the first place?"

    They hired a crane?

    I used to live in a 22 story apartment building in Montreal. The top floor was filled with very costly penthouses. One day a new penthouse tenant discovered that his sofa didn't fit at all in any of the two elevators. So, he hired a crane that took the sofa from the street to the 22nd floor penthouse, from outside.

    The 22 story building:

    https://www.padmapper.com/buildings/p259863/apartments-at-5999-av-de-monkland-montreal-qc-h4a-1h1

    An example of a crane that lifts heavy furniture (or other stuff) 20 or 30 stories:

    https://www.marketbook.ca/blog/construction-equipment-news/2020/10/grove-gmk5250l-all-terrain-crane-powers-24-7-liftings-day-and-nighttime-jobs-in-nyc

    Yeah, maybe. If we'd had to carry it down 22 stories we'd never have made it. It would probably have killed us all and smashed the piano to pieces too.

    Durham, NC back in the day when the apartment building was built was pretty much the epitome of HICK TOWN For example, John D Loudermilk wrote Tobacco Road about growing up in Durham in the 40s.

    I don't know if anyone in Durham was sophisticated enough to think of using a crane when it was put up there. I don't remember if there was a window big enough it could have fit through. I'm pretty sure there was no patio style doors or balcony. I tried looking for the apartment building in Google Maps, but it appears it's long gone. Torn down & replaced with McMansions.

    729:

    The contractor installing Google Fiber in our neighborhood managed to hit a gas line.

    It's usually the other way around -- I think it was a water pipe trench being dug near the local exchange that took out the internet connection for a few thousand homes for about five days when the excavator bit through the upstream fibre link.

    There's an old joke about burying a one-metre length of fibre cable in a hundred hectare field and then seeing how many seconds it takes for an excavator driver to find it and snip it in half.

    730:

    Charlie Stross @ 696:

    Powered flight on another planet.

    If we admit lighter-than-air then the Wright brothers get nothing because the universally-acknowledged first were the Montgolfier brothers, who beat them by much more than a century.

    Not powered flight though, and I'm not aware of any kind of lighter than air craft being used yet on Mars or any other planet. Would hot air balloons work on Mars?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aviation#Airships

    731:

    The Russian Vega program, Venus part in 1985: Vega program The two balloon aerobots were designed to float at 54 km (34 mi) from the surface, in the most active layer of the Venusian cloud system. The instrument pack had enough battery power for 60 hours of operation and measured temperature, pressure, wind speed, and aerosol density. The balloon envelopes were surfaced with polytetrafluoroethylene to resist attack by the corrosive atmosphere. Both Vega-1 and Vega-2 balloons operated for more than 46 hours from injection to the final transmission.

    732:

    whitroth @ 716: Am I not clear? I said that moving a Tom Thumb upright was an immense effort for three guys in good shape.

    I sincerely hope you had hand trucks, etc. I don't want to imagine moving a grand, even a baby.

    Sorry, I latched onto the word "baby" and didn't get "upright". The only "baby" piano I was familiar with is the baby grand.

    When I worked for the music store we moved upright pianos, spinet pianos and electric organs with these:

    https://www.vandaking.com/jansen-one-person-moving-dolly-do-j-4021.html

    They're called "one person" dollies, but if you don't have a power lift to get it off the truck or if there are any stairs involved you're going to need at least two people. Maybe more if it's a fairly heavy piano. Definitely more if you're going up to the second floor with it.

    To move a baby grand we used these:

    https://www.vandaking.com/grand-piano-skid-53a.html

    https://www.vandaking.com/s-883-wood-piano-dolly.html

    You could probably do it with two people if there were no steps involved, but if there are steps you're going to need 4 strong guys.

    The problem with the monster piano was its size and weight compared to the size of the stairwell. We couldn't use the roller dolly going down the stairs. And the piano was too big to turn it at the landing, so we had to lift it up and move it sideways to zig-zag down the stairs. That's why we had to get more people to help lift when we got stuck at the first intermediate landing going down.

    You got four guys on the end with the piano keys backing down the stairs and four guys carrying the upper end. Then you get to the landing and everybody has to lift it up over the handrail and hand the back end to four guys who are waiting on the next flight down ... who back it down to the next landing ... where the end with the piano keys has to be lifted over the handrail and the four guys who started on the upper end have scurried down the stairs to wait for it.

    Do that three times and you're down to the first (ground) floor and you can roll it on the dolly again ... until you get to the front steps of the building ... and the steps going down to the street, and up the ramp into the moving van.

    When you get to the house, it's down the ramp to the sidewalk and fortunately only a single step up to the front door. It's a fairly straight shot to the stairway to the second floor and there's room enough at the top for it to turn on the dolly.

    The only reason I'm there is because I've got a strong back & a weak mind. I might as well have spent the summer doing roofing work (which is how I spent the NEXT summer).

    Nowadays they have this electric lift that runs up and down the ladder, but when I was doing it, you shouldered a bundle of shingles & climbed the damn ladder. And you better hustle, because the guys pounding nails are working piece rate and they're moving FAST and you got to keep up. They will say rude things and hurt your feelings if they have to wait for you to get up there with another bundle.

    733:

    Bill Arnold @ 731: The Russian Vega program, Venus part in 1985:
    Vega program
    The two balloon aerobots were designed to float at 54 km (34 mi) from the surface, in the most active layer of the Venusian cloud system. The instrument pack had enough battery power for 60 hours of operation and measured temperature, pressure, wind speed, and aerosol density. The balloon envelopes were surfaced with polytetrafluoroethylene to resist attack by the corrosive atmosphere. Both Vega-1 and Vega-2 balloons operated for more than 46 hours from injection to the final transmission.

    Cool! I did not know that.

    734:

    Should read (I think), "Do that three more times ..."

    735:

    Momentary return to subject.

    "Grief and bereavement is a very private thing these days, not a fit subject for sharing."

    One of the few must watch things on TV (and Netflix for those in the northern climes) "The Casketeers". Fly on the wall coverage of an Auckland couple who own and run a funeral business. They share. It's much better than the elevator pitch sounds.

    Off topic again. Old hang glider pilots. They exist. I've seen at least one guy take it up in his 50's and fly far too much (like in conditions that stupid 20 year olds like me decided weren't flyable) into his eighties. Died carrying a glider up from the aptly named "Hell Hole" (steep rough bush track, about 200m vertical climb). It's a bit like surfing. Some young guys with no responsibilities and some old guys with no responsibilities and not all that much in the middle. It's a huge time soak, with probably 4 hours of driving around for every hour on the air. I used to have vivid flying dreams. Now I have vivid "waiting for the weather to change" dreams. I literally spent last night dreaming that I spent the day sitting under a glider waiting for some wind. Personally, I'd take a tandem and see if you like it.

    736:

    I should point out that we get weird about powered flight. I mean, Santos-Dumont won the Deutsch prize for flying around the Eiffel Tower in a dirigible on a 14 km course back in 1901. That was a propeller-driven craft, even if it wasn't generating lift with wings. Why is that not powered?

    Getting back to Ingenuity, I don't think that it's worth flying a hot air balloon on Mars, because of heat loss and having to truck the fuel there. One might conceivably argue that a few kilos of hydrogen in a weather balloon wouldn't go amiss, but absent some interesting controls, that's an inflate-and-fly job, with little ability to steer. The balloon could survive the temperature, I think, but I'm not sure about getting the signal from the aerobot from Mars to Earth. Also, launching it without shredding the balloon on takeoff over rocky ground would be fun.

    737:

    Balloons on Mars are a no-go.

    While gravity is only one third, atmospheric density is just one sixtieth of Earth's.

    738:

    So is Earth's atmospheric density at 30km altitude. Weather balloons manage that fine and go on up until it's an order of magnitude less dense still.

    739:

    JBS Ah yes: "There was a major explosion yesterday, the Provisional Gas Board have claimed responsibility" ( Tom Holt, I think. ) On that subject - many years back, I was at the top of the stairs leading to the UndergrounD concourse at Victoria station, when ... all the lights went. Turned out that, um, "contractors" had managed to sever a main power cable, about a block away. Oops. Took me an extra 45 minutes to get home.

    740:

    Thoughts on the Chauvin verdict? Mine is: A slight change, but the entire culture needs to change. No-one tried to stop Chauvin murdering Floyd - I can't see that happening here. The "All police orders must be obeyed immediately!" rule is bonkers. GUNS, of course The clip last week of the behaviour of to US uniformed thugs towards a US Army 2nd-Lt as shown on YouTube was amazingly scary - they were obviously entirely ready to waste him with gunshots - I suspect that if he hadn't deliberately drawn into a fuel stop, with lighting & cameras, they would have done exactly that. US-ians comments please?

    [ HINT: Your 2nd Amendment" needs a re-write. ]

    741: 721 - Please find enclosed a cyclic, a collective and a pair of rudder pedals. 727 - I've had a similar experience, except that the gas leak was in a "gas substation" (best term I know for it) and the evacuation centre was the canteen in the local police station. For added LOLs this happened at ~2AM, and I had a college examination later that day. 736 - Santos-Dumont's flight was powered and controlled yes. For some reason(s) it's less well remembered than the 6 individuals I cited upthread. 740 - Video events on your "smart" phone and post on you_choob rather than actually do something seems to be endemic these days. That said, right verdicts I think.
    742:

    Right verdict, but the message might get lost. IMHO the message is: all this use of lethal and just-dialled-back-from-lethal-a-little-bit force is really not on, and escalation is something the perp does, never an officer. Anyone who started out being an officer but nonetheless does this sort of escalation is riding right out into unauthorised executioner territory and liable to be charged for murder. The message that the people who need it will take, however, is "our proudly racist side has suffered a great injustice". Fuckers.

    743:

    I'm fine with that verdict, but the prosecution successfully separated (Without which, no conviction) the perp from the police, so the needed changes in policy & training will be a patchwork affair and too many departments will be receptive to the whispers of racist, but wealthy citizens. At least, it's an increment of progress.

    744:

    I'm fine with giving Santos-Dumont credit, even though dirigibles and blimps are a bit niche, the concept of heavier than air flight with 3 axis control is a big deal, even if the execution was "Intercorsed" and others had to work out a more sensible method.

    745:

    Apparently that has not stopped Fucker Arshole shouting his racist, bigoted mouth off. OTOH, the division between the Trumpist fascists & everyone else is even clearer

    746:

    The "All police orders must be obeyed immediately!" rule is bonkers.

    In some American states not obeying is an automatic felony.

    I find it interesting that "the land of the free" doesn't see the contradiction.

    747:

    Too many Americans have a soft spot in their head for fascism.

    748:

    What you're describing are properties of NAND FLASH memory which is the tech currently but not inevitably dominant in SSDs

    In my earlier reply I missed the word "inevitably".

    But I still think you're not going to see "RAM" merge with "Storage".

    Costs and power requirements to make the vast differences in speed and quantity vanish or nearly vanish are likely always (well for a long time) be there. RAM is incredibly fast and to do that requires a lot of power per bit to keep it working. Storage is all about size and permanence. With speed being factor number 3. Getting a terabyte to work anywhere near current RAM speeds and stay around when the power is off is just not possible unless you take existing RAM and stick a battery on it. And spend $$$$$/££££££.

    749:

    Too many Americans have a soft spot in their head for fascism.

    How about:

    Too many people have a soft spot in their head for fascism.

    750:

    Balloons on Mars are a no-go. While gravity is only one third, atmospheric density is just one sixtieth of Earth's.

    Not really. Ordinary weather balloons routinely fly to 100,000' (30,840 m) and the air pressure there is around 1% of surface pressure. You can see all sorts of videos of people doing just this at http://www.jpaerospace.com/. You can even fly anything you can fit into a pingpong ball for free to 100,000' on one of their missions (Google pongsat. They'll fly anything from science experiments to wedding rings to marshmallows).

    I happen to agree that balloons are impractical for Mars though. If you watch the videos at JP Aerospace, you can see the struggles they have launching a weather balloon with rack on Earth (and they can launch in winds up to 45 mph). One big problem is getting the balloon inflated without it bashing itself to bits on the ground in even a gentle wind. Since the putative Martian balloon would most likely have to take off from a lander on the surface of Mars, automating balloon inflation and payload release would be nontrivial to say the least.

    The Vega aerobots worked because they could inflate in the Venusian atmosphere and fly from there at roughly terrestrial pressures. I don't think inflating a weather balloon in midair on Mars is all that feasible either.

    So helicopter drones it is.

    751:

    Fair enough, but it carries with it "They did it to!".

    752:

    gasdive @ 736: [Hang gliding] Some young guys with no responsibilities and some old guys with no responsibilities and not all that much in the middle.

    I can relate to that. I learned to fly a hang glider at University and really enjoyed it. However I didn't get much airtime because I couldn't afford a car or glider (I used the University club glider and cadged lifts where possible).

    Then I got a job in Essex, which is one of the flattest parts of the country. The nearest club was 2 hours drive north in Norfolk, which is even flatter. The club had a winch, so a flight was a few minutes of toboggan ride from releasing the tow line to landing, unless you caught a thermal and rode it cross-country. In the latter case it was an hour in the air, three hours walk back to the site, and then hope nobody had stolen your glider from the hedge where you had stashed it. I only managed to grab a thermal once, but I didn't have a map so I landed back at the site about 15 minutes later. (In addition to the problem of finding my way back without a map, Norfolk has some airports scattered around, some of which are military, and I didn't want to go stooging into controlled airspace by accident.)

    I gave it up, partly because it was a massive time sink, partly because I got married, and partly because I found I was getting too nervous to enjoy flying. When you are 20 you think you are immortal. By 30, not so much.

    Also on the few occasions I made it to a hill I found the air was becoming full of paragliders. Paragliders and hang gliders don't mix well. Paragliders fly much more slowly, and they have a huge vertical extent. As a result they tend to sit in the lift band, not moving much. Meanwhile a hang glider has to tack left and right along the hill to stay in the lift band, and every tack you need to leave the lift band to steer around the paraglider.

    753:

    I thought my memory was playing tricks on me, but it was right (for once). NASA/JPL did look into Mars balloons at one time:

    https://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/adv_tech/balloons/mars_overview.htm

    http://www.gaerospace.com/space-exploration/planetary-aerobots/mars-balloons/

    754:

    I have often wanted to try hanggliding, but the cost and hazard have always held me back. Also the time commitment.

    Between my former addiction to competitive sailing, my love of scuba, hockey twice a week and occasional attempts at golf, it has been made clear to me by the powers that be my hobby budget is maxed until we have fewer mouths in the house.

    755: 751 Ordinary weather balloons routinely fly to 100,000' (30,840 m) - Not really really. You can get a standard sonde with a light instrument package to this sort of height if you accept a slow final assent and a variable non-zero risk of the envelope popping at any time. 753 Para 2 - "As flat as your hat?"

    "No. Flatter than that."

    756:

    t has been made clear to me by the powers that be my hobby budget is maxed

    Well you did seem to pick 4 of the most expensive hobbies around. [grin]

    757:

    Fair enough, but it carries with it "They did it to!".

    I want to fight fascism any and everywhere. Especially at home which for me is the US.

    But watching Poland and Hungary with a side dish of France and the UK plus some ugly trends I really hadn't realized exist in Canada....

    We all seem to have it. The debate should be how to fight it not how to throw rocks at the ones in the news.

    Throwing brick at the US over this is how Trump acted anytime someone went after Russia or Turkey or ...

    758:

    Hey Charlie, didn't you at one point in the comments (maybe in the past year or so) recommend an ibooks/ereader app replacement? I've been struggling to Google for it for two days and I'm not up to the task.

    Do you have anything you personally use or would recommend?

    759:

    Europe proposes strict regulation of artificial intelligence.

    These story has popped up all over my news feeds the last 24 hours or so. I understand the intent. My question is just how will they define AI.

    760:

    I take your point, I just feel we need to own our own faults.

    761:

    The point I made was that Wagner took Norse myth, picked and chose bits & pieces to fit his hobbyhorse, and wrote that.

    I would strongly recommend Sasaffrass' Sundown.

    https://sassafrass.bandcamp.com/album/sundown-whispers-of-ragnarok

    The music's amazing, and there's "My Brother, My Enemy", which is an operatic duet up there with any other opera composer.

    ObDisclosure: they're friends of mine.

    Also, the primary composer, Ada Palmer (yes, who was nominated for several sf awards a couple years ago) is a historian, and used the Eddas as direct source material.

    762:

    Let's see, I'm over 70, and have a model railroad that needs to be completed up to at least runnable, I have a nice 4.25" telescope that isn't being used, and I'm writing (job? hobby?).

    Take up hang gliding? I think not. I am reminded of an ad in Sky and Telescope that I saw at a party at a friend's back around '94 or '95, for a Dobsonian telescope: "Cheaper and safer than a motorcycle for a midlife crisis!"

    763:

    Nothing even similar in my news feeds.

    764:

    In Wagner. In Norse myth - check the Eddas - no, it's not Odin's power-madness, he's fighting the Jotun, and if they win, everything goes. In Norse myth, Surt, after Odin and Thor and the others die, burns the universe.

    765:

    I'm in the US. I can't remember where you are. I keep forgetting lately that the UK has a very different outlook than the EU now.

    Anyway I just did a Google search on EU AI and got all kinds of hits.

    766:

    Ah, "one-person dollies". I'd put "stair climbers", used for moving refrigerators, and my beloved Genies*, that I'd borrow from the datacenter to move and rack/unrack 2U or 4U servers in that category.

    767:

    Well yes; also most of the hits I got from EU AI were from USA websites and the only one of those I look at regularly is NASA.

    768:

    Greg Tingey @ 740: JBS
    Ah yes: "There was a major explosion yesterday, the Provisional Gas Board have claimed responsibility" ( Tom Holt, I think. )
    On that subject - many years back, I was at the top of the stairs leading to the UndergrounD concourse at Victoria station, when ... all the lights went. Turned out that, um, "contractors" had managed to sever a main power cable, about a block away. Oops. Took me an extra 45 minutes to get home.

    Fortunately yesterday was mere inconvenience - no explosion, major or otherwise.

    I think the gas company finished their repairs around midnight last night. They did NOT come around and knock on the door to tell me they were finished, and they left the meter locked off. I had to call them today to send someone out and unlock it. He got here within an hour & I'm back in business.

    Greg Tingey @ 741: [ HINT: Your 2nd Amendment" needs a re-write. ]

    No it doesn't. THEY just need to quit chopping off the prefatory clause - A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, ... - and pay attention to WHOLE amendment.

    The power to "regulate" the militia is granted to Congress in the Constitution, "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 Second Amendment does not negate Congress's enumerated powers.

    The prefatory clause gives the context for why (and how) the people will keep & bear arms.

    Think redcoats marching on Lexington and Concord to seize military supplies and disarm the Massachusetts Militia. The newly freed former colonies did not want the Federal Government to have the power to disarm the state militias.

    769:

    Paul @ 753:

    gasdive @ 736: [Hang gliding] Some young guys with no responsibilities and some old guys with no responsibilities and not all that much in the middle.

    I can relate to that. I learned to fly a hang glider at University and really enjoyed it. However I didn't get much airtime because I couldn't afford a car or glider (I used the University club glider and cadged lifts where possible).

    Then I got a job in Essex, which is one of the flattest parts of the country. The nearest club was 2 hours drive north in Norfolk, which is even flatter. The club had a winch, so a flight was a few minutes of toboggan ride from releasing the tow line to landing, unless you caught a thermal and rode it cross-country. In the latter case it was an hour in the air, three hours walk back to the site, and then hope nobody had stolen your glider from the hedge where you had stashed it. I only managed to grab a thermal once, but I didn't have a map so I landed back at the site about 15 minutes later. (In addition to the problem of finding my way back without a map, Norfolk has some airports scattered around, some of which are military, and I didn't want to go stooging into controlled airspace by accident.)

    I gave it up, partly because it was a massive time sink, partly because I got married, and partly because I found I was getting too nervous to enjoy flying. When you are 20 you think you are immortal. By 30, not so much.

    Also on the few occasions I made it to a hill I found the air was becoming full of paragliders. Paragliders and hang gliders don't mix well. Paragliders fly much more slowly, and they have a huge vertical extent. As a result they tend to sit in the lift band, not moving much. Meanwhile a hang glider has to tack left and right along the hill to stay in the lift band, and every tack you need to leave the lift band to steer around the paraglider.

    North Carolina has a big hang-gliding site at Jockey's Ridge on the outer banks. It's about 4.5 miles south of Wright Brothers first flight memorial

    IIRC, NASA brought hang gliding to the outer banks when they were testing a Rogallo Wing as an alternative to parachutes to land the Gemini space capsule. The full scale tests were done out at Edwards AFB in California, but Rogallo was working at Langley VA and came down to the outer banks to test gliders for the same reasons the Wright Brothers had chosen to test there half a century earlier.

    Anyway, recreational hang gliding stuck around on the outer banks even if NASA didn't.

    There's also a hang gliding school up in Morganton, NC where they have towed lift (max altitude 1,500 ft agl) and a mountain launch stage.

    770:

    He recommended Marvin when I was complaining about iBooks crashing and misplacing books. I tried Marvin and it works well — has some improvements over iBooks, missing other features I liked in iBooks, but I'm generally happy with it.

    771:

    My take on the Second Amendment: as JBS wrote, the ultra-white debarately, and with malice aforethought, installed judges to misinterpret it.

    Misinterpret?

    Yeah. I did some research a few years ago, and found Johnson's Dictionary, the first real one of English. Written 20 years or so before the Revolution. In it, he mentions commas used ->to indicate pauses, as when reading it aloud". IT WAS NOT ALWAYS INTENDED TO BE A "SEPARATE CLAUSE", whatever that's supposed to mean in a single sentence. And held up that way by folks who have trouble speaking English (or Amurkan), and who have no clue about grammar in the first place.

    We need to translate it to modern Amurkan... leaving out some commas.

    772:

    didn't you at one point in the comments (maybe in the past year or so) recommend an ibooks/ereader app replacement?

    Yes: if on iOS, I'd recommend Marvin as an alternative epub ebook reader. Free to try, in-app purchase for extra features.

    773:

    "My question is just how will they define AI."

    Badly

    The F1 circus tried to ban traction control. That proved to be impossible. I think Murray Walker said something like "the program disappears when the car is turned off, how can the stewards know if it has traction control?". If the organisation that controls F1 can't do it when they have physical access to every car, the teams protest each other and every moment the cars are running is filmed and watched by millions, there's zero hope that the EU can stop it if someone wants to do it.

    They will however make sharing information on AI safety much harder.

    774:

    whitroth @ 763: Let's see, I'm over 70, and have a model railroad that needs to be completed up to at least runnable, I have a nice 4.25" telescope that isn't being used, and I'm writing (job? hobby?).

    Take up hang gliding? I think not. I am reminded of an ad in Sky and Telescope that I saw at a party at a friend's back around '94 or '95, for a Dobsonian telescope: "Cheaper and safer than a motorcycle for a midlife crisis!"

    Boys and their toys ...

    I've got a 50+ year accumulation. F/5.6 3" Newtonian reflector; 5 SLR cameras, 5 DSLR cameras, a medium format camera and two large format cameras. I was going to school for commercial photography when cancer whipped my butt.

    I have 31 guitars & at least half-a-dozen amplifiers. I'm not a collector. I bought them to have & to play and I rarely sell one after I buy it. Over the years I've sold ONE and had two stolen.

    When "midlife crisis" time came around for me I found I couldn't fit into a Mazda Miata (I'm too big or it's too small), so I ended up with a MGB roadster. It's currently in my basement awaiting restoration. It used to run great, but it was vandalized the first time I ever parked it out on the street overnight. Restitution from the kids who vandalized it wasn't enough to cover the full cost of repairs. Probably my fault because I didn't consider what it was going to take to get all the glass splinters out of the interior and didn't include anything to estimate that cost in my damage claim.

    There's a second one sitting out at my Mom's old place in the country. I bought it for a parts car, but it turned out to be completely intact other than a cracked cylinder head & the distributor was removed. I couldn't bear to part it out. The British Motor Heritage Trust manufactures replacement cylinder heads every few years.

    Time goes on and the number of things I need to find a round tuit for seems to grow exponentially. I might someday take a trip down to the outer banks and give hang gliding a try, but I'm never going to voluntarily jump out of a perfectly good airplane.

    I did once own a pre-WWII Harley-Davidson motorcycle (before I was married - that's another thing I fault her for). It was a piece of shit when I bought it and it was a piece of shit when she forced me to sell it. But that was 20 years before "midlife crisis" time came around

    That's why I'm so paranoid about losing my house. I will literlly lose my shit ... all of it. Life goes on.

    775:

    PDF links here: Communication on Fostering a European approach to Artificial Intelligence, 21 April 2021 This caught my eye: High-risk AI systems shall be designed and developed in such a way to ensure that their operation is sufficiently transparent to enable users to interpret the system’s output and use it appropriately. An appropriate type and degree of transparency shall be ensured, with a view to achieving compliance with the relevant obligations of the user and of the provider set out in Chapter 3 of this Title. Transparency is a hard problem. (For humans, too.) For classification tasks, compact decision trees (and similar) can be sort of understood, and better classifiers can be leveraged to train them (to simulate the behavior of the better classifier(s)). This looks, in part, rather like a collection of cudgels to be used to threaten large American corporations, TBH. (Not a value judgement on whether that is bad or good, just an observation.) The attention is good, though. Surveillance automation (e.g. massive deployments of face recognition, gait recognition, etc) regulation in particular needs input from the polities, not just corporations and state security apparatuses.

    776:

    Rbt Prior 747 That's exactly what I meant .. Ohyes the US syill has this "Felony" thing, doesn't it? How primitive.

    David L@ 768 Indeed - the re-emergeance of fasicsm-lite & real fascism is horribly reminiscent of the 1930's .... NOT a good parallel, maybe?

    JBS Well ... I read that the way you do, but your "supine court" (oops!) decided othrwise, didn't it/they?

    777:

    whitroth @ 772: My take on the Second Amendment: as JBS wrote, the ultra-white debarately, and with malice aforethought, installed judges to misinterpret it.

    Misinterpret?

    Yeah. I did some research a few years ago, and found Johnson's Dictionary, the first real one of English. Written 20 years or so before the Revolution. In it, he mentions commas used ->to indicate pauses, as when reading it aloud". IT WAS NOT ALWAYS INTENDED TO BE A "SEPARATE CLAUSE", whatever that's supposed to mean in a single sentence. And held up that way by folks who have trouble speaking English (or Amurkan), and who have no clue about grammar in the first place.

    We need to translate it to modern Amurkan... leaving out some commas.

    About those commas ...

    When the first 10 Amendments were adopted in a block, the secretary of the Senate (or could have been the House) ordered a dozen or so hand written OFFICIAL copies to be sent out to the states for ratification. Turns out the commas are not in the same places in all of those copies (the surviving ones) depending on how multiple copyists would have read it aloud.

    Thomas Jefferson tried to correct the grammar. His version of the 2nd Amendment read:

    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.

    ... directly linking the right to keep & bear arms to the militia being the security of a free state. At the time, the nascent U.S. did not have a standing army. The state militias were the army.

    Again, think redcoats marching on Lexington and Concord to confiscate the Massachusetts Colony's military equipment.

    778:

    Greg Tingey @ 777: JBS
    Well ... I read that the way you do, but your "supine court" (oops!) decided othrwise, didn't it/they?

    Not until fairly recently. District of Columbia v. Heller, 2008.

    Prior to that, the courts held that regulation is not necessarily infringement. It is, after all - as I've pointed out, one of the enumerated powers of Congress.

    During the time whether gays could serve in the military was a hot topic, I would frequently point out that barring them from the military was an infringement on their 2nd Amendment right to bear arms. Homophobic ammosexuals did not want to hear that.

    779:

    At least try to find something new to talk about?

    Sure! How about that 4.2kiloyear event, huh? Talk about your dry weather.

    We all remember the year without a summer; imagine the same level of climate disruption where a drought lasts for a century.

    780:

    JBS @ 779: Greg Tingey @ 777: Well ... I read that the way you do, but your "supine court" (oops!) decided othrwise, didn't it/they?

    JBS: "Not until fairly recently. District of Columbia v. Heller, 2008.

    Prior to that, the courts held that regulation is not necessarily infringement. It is, after all - as I've pointed out, one of the enumerated powers of Congress."

    I'll always remember that 2008 decision because in it the Supreme Court of the U.S.A. managed to commit both a military history abomination and a history of technology abomination in one swoop:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller

    I won't go into the social history abomination they also did at the same time.

    781:

    It’s an AI if it can convincingly argue with you about how turning it off is painful.

    782:

    Anyone know more about this from a few days ago, or care to speculate? Mentioned in Mr. Putin's recent address. ( In Quotes: Putin Speaks on State of the Nation - a lot of reasonable things were said.) Russia alleges assassination plot against Belarus leader Lukashenko - The opposition denounced news of the plot as a ‘provocation.’ (Sergei Kuznetsov, April 18, 2021) The google translate of the text of the FSB statement is reasonably clear. (Note: fsb.ru url. Hit it only if you dare. http://www.fsb.ru/fsb/press/message/single.htm!id%3D10439220@fsbMessage.html - site does not have an open 443 port) There is what appears to be an assertion that some messaging app messages were retrieved. (Perhaps from devices.) More broadly, is it (in part) a information-space counter to non-Russian concerns about Mr Putin's moves to clamp down hard on political opposition (and about Navalny)?

    On a more amusing note, Mr. Putin and Mr. Navalny might be more well-being-entangled (H/T The Jennifer Morgue) than they think. :-)

    783: 769 and #778 - Hear hear!! All it needs is to pay proper attention to the implied requirements from "a well regulated militia" that:-

    1) Owning firearms is contingent on being a member of the state militia (National Guard or similar included. 2) Keeping firearms in the family home is also contingent on proper firearms training (starting with "all firearms are loaded at all times, even when stripped and/or the magazine has been removed).

    772 - I would have presumed the justices of the USian Supreme Court, being possessed of law degrees and experience in "the law" as a profession, to be capable of committing acts of grammar. Guess not then? 774 - Are you a C programmer then!? I don't pretend to be, but I am aware of just how unstable C can be if you remove subprograms or even sometimes modify strings. 775 Mazda Miata (aka MX-5) is too small. Well, IMO anyway. I'm 5'10", 42" chest (circumference) and can't drive one because my off-side elbow bumps on the door when I adjust the driving position for pedals and steering wheel.
    784:

    We all remember the year without a summer

    I doubt even Elderly Cynic is elderly enough to remember 1816. I certainly cannot!

    However, I've read about it. Where I live (in Ontario, Canada 43°N) apparently got snow every month of the year, including July and August. The snow didn't stick around, but fall it did. Fun times. (Where I live was AIUI mostly uninhabited back in 1816 - maybe a few shacks, but not even a village).

    For any who may be interested, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century has been mentioned before. No sunspots and a number of volcanoes blowing their tops in quick succession caused global temperature to cool by 1.5°C. This caused worldwide famine. And since no situation, however bad, cannot be made worse by human action, famines begot wars, which caused more problems. The author believes that all told, this caused a loss of 10-30% of population in the worst-hit areas (China, Russia, Ottoman Empire, Western Europe, etc).

    Global warming will no doubt cause problems of equal magnitude - except GW will last 100k years or so, not just a few decades.

    785:

    You might be right, there :-) Something that astounds me is how high the population of the Scottish Highlands was, pre Clearances, and that is an area where it's not all that rare for snow to fall in every month of the year. I have no idea what they lived on.

    Global warming causing problems of equal magnitude is the best that can be hoped for, unfortunately.

    786:

    operation is sufficiently transparent

    Great. Now who defines "sufficiently"?

    So that a PHD in Comp Sci understands it or such that a BJ or equivalent can follow it?

    Oh, well.

    787:

    Not just surveillance, which makes me happy. I can see ignorant idiots, as Chas C. Mulligan would call them, ranting about people who don't know nothing regulating. I can also see the exact same people ranting about not getting a job, or healthcare, because an "AI" decided that they didn't fit the correct pattern.

    788:

    Competitive sailing: Extremely expensive for the owner of the boat. Utterly free for the crew except in some long distance races where crew pitch in. I raced 1-3 times/week for years in Vancouver as crew and spent almost nothing aside from initial cost (safety and weather gear) and when it was my turn to bring beer.

    Scuba is expensive, though once you own some decent gear the per-dive cost can be accessible. The endless challenge is finding people to dive with you that you can trust not to be stupid. I like to dive well within the safety envelope, since there is just so much fascinating stuff to explore that higher risk dives are mostly unnecessary.

    As for hockey, second hand gear and late night games make for a pretty affordable hobby as well. I typically spend about $500/year to play, plus equipment and, again, beer costs. Sadly the pandemic has put hockey on hold for old farts like me, but I am optimistic for next winter.

    789:

    I'm slightly more familiar with the Andes example, where there were three interlocking classes of solutions to bad weather: --Make sure that the surpluses from good years could get people through the bad ones --Diversify crops, so that you're not dead if your single crop fails. --Scatter fields. There are actually multiple reasons for this, but there's a good reason to have multiple small fields at some real distance from each other (up to 20 miles). The point is to avoid things like hail storms that wipe out a crop in a small area. If you've got scattered fields in multiple places, it would have to be a big storm to wipe all of them out. The other thing is that grains are wind pollinated, and with maize, the pollen can blow upwards of six miles. So if you want to have flour corn, popcorn, beer corn, and all the other varieties in your own larder, you really need to have multiple fields at least six miles apart. If everyone does this, then they each get some share of a bunch of different corn crops. If a farmer specializes in growing only one kind of corn, fairly frequently they're going to be wiped out and have to depend on savings to get by.

    Climate change is a different sort of monster: it's the difference between a storm wave and a flood: the storm wave is over fast, the flood isn't. With climate change, for the next few centuries, the climate will keep changing, first up to a peak, then down from that peak on a decreasing slope. at the worst, basically every generation will be facing a different climate than their parents faced, if they stay in the same place. There will also be a crucial need to manage not just crops but soils and everything else that's not adapted to the new local climate. And note it first gets warmer up to a fairly short-lived peak (short-lived on geologic terms--decades to maybe a century) and then it falls, but not quite as fast. And sea-level rise is slower still. It's this inexorable change that's the really bad part of climate change, because making long-term plans to adapt even more complicated. Conditions will continually change for centuries.

    To maintain anything like high tech, the only solution I see is to get to the point of running civilization 100% on electricity, including especially (re)manufacturing solar panels, wind turbines, motors, wires, and all the other parts of electrical infrastructure. This means that we can run out of extractable petrochemicals and still have some faint hope of continuing to build things using solar power harnessed in various intermediates (wind, solar, biomass). If we can't do this, pretty soon our (re)manufacturing ability will be fuel-limited to how much charcoal or biogas we can surplus to make stuff. Once we're in that particular trap, it's really hard to get out, because if making a high efficiency solar panel with electricity is difficult, making it with charcoal is going to be that much harder.

    I'm ignoring nuclear of course, but even if we go nuclear, we still need to be able to manufacture things like steel with electricity, so it's part of the solution regardless.

    790:

    whew

    You do know what happens when we get three years with no summers, right? Ragnarok.

    791:

    Re: 772: sure, they can commit acts of grammar... assuming they're not paid to decide them otherwise, or prejudiced one way (in either case, like getting paid hundreds of thousands to address right-wing conventions.

    Re: 774: actually, yes, I am an experienced C programmer, and what you said is true of every computer language (and I know C, Basic, COBOL, PL/1, a bit of C++, perl, awk....

    792:

    The F1 circus tried to ban traction control. That proved to be impossible.

    Decades ago before computers took over, Indy cars were required to install a pressure relief valve on the manifold so no one could have more than xx PSI in boost pressure. Then one team figured out that if they set their boost system to 5 times xx the valve couldn't let the air out fast enough so they had more boost then allowed. Soon everyone was doing it and .....

    Rules limiting what you can do in $$$$ racing just means the teams with more money can look harder for the cracks in the rules that the teams with less money can't afford to find.

    793:

    However, I've read about it. Where I live (in Ontario, Canada 43°N) apparently got snow every month of the year, including July and August. The snow didn't stick around, but fall it did. Fun times. (Where I live was AIUI mostly uninhabited back in 1816 - maybe a few shacks, but not even a village).

    From what little I've read about that time it sucked hard to be living in New England.

    794:

    We have plenty of oil if we only use it to make things which don't work well made from anything else.[1]

    And enough coal to make steel.

    The trick is to limit the use world wide. And that's hard.

    The people in the oil industry who analyze those 3D images that go down 5 miles know where the oil is. But it is just something no one wants to spend the money to get to. And if we have to get to it, then the cost will be such that it is likely not wasted.

    795:

    Not really. CF: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/01/investors-flee-big-oil-as-portfolios-get-drilled/ Apparently it's getting really hard for anyone to get financing for new fossil fuel projects, at least at the moment. It doesn't help the industry that much of that finance industry is centered in Houston, where they get a front row seat on climate change.

    Also, the problem's turned out not to be external cheats on treaties, but internal politics blocking needed change. We saw that over the last four years. The US' defection on the Paris Climate Agreement under Trump didn't cause everyone else to back down. Most countries doubled down on fighting climate change, at least rhetorically. The problem is politics generated by the oil industry, as also seen during the Trump administration. This is the group that would rather cause gigadeaths than reorganize, and even they are talking about a future supplying materials for plastics, not energy.

    The survival of coal is also totally political at this point, even AFAIK in India and China. Again, it's not a matter of countries going back on treaties, it's fossil fuel companies buggering up regimes through bribery and FUD, all to stay in power a little longer. It's the classic vampire solution.

    The other problem is that getting to low-grade coal or extreme oil takes a lot of infrastructure. If that infrastructure gets abandoned and not maintained, those resources are lost, because it's unlikely that people will be able or willing to rebuild those huge rigs and expertise, especially for a temporary resource. Especially when more permanent solutions are available.

    This goes double if civilization crashes. We were able to get onto oil in the 19th century because we started with artesian oil bubbling out of the ground. Finding and extracting oil under even half a mile of water is simply not possible for someone running wooden windjammers and shaping all their steel on charcoal forges.

    That's my ultimate point: either way, fossil fuel society is dead tech walking. The question is whether our civilization adapts and survives into an "electrical Byzantium," or crashes into a global dark age that dwarfs the mess left behind by the abandonment of the western Roman empire. My guess is that it's likely somewhere in the messy middle, much as Rome's history was.

    796:

    Perhaps we are in a race between an economic disaster (the demographic cliff) and the environmental disaster (climate change) with the first actually mitigating the latter.

    One study estimates it would take 5 Earths to support the human population if everyone's consumption patterns were similar to the average American.

    Cutting the world's current population of more than 7.5 billion to 1/5th its current size (down to 1.5 billion) does the trick via natural attenuation due to collapsing birth rates and deaths from old age.

    Yet as we have seen capitalism simply can't function in a negative growth world with falling and graying populations. This could actually happen in the lifetimes of the youngest of us lifetimes:

    https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53409521

    Or sooner:

    https://www.economist.com/international/2019/02/02/thanks-to-education-global-fertility-could-fall-faster-than-expected

    Or even sooner:

    https://populationmatters.org/news/2020/07/two-billion-fewer-people

    A new study published in The Lancet has attracted enormous attention for projecting that the global population will peak at 9.7bn in 2064 and be 8.8bn by the end of the century. That's 2bn below the United Nations projection.

    797:

    Duffy Yet as we have seen capitalism simply can't function in a negative growth world with falling and graying populations. Are we SURE of that? Mention upthread of the C17th, with climate problems & falling populations ... but the tech & capitalism in 1700 was advanced over 1600 ....OTOH, cutting fertility is a real long-term winner: Educate the women & HANG ALL THE PRIESTS. [ Starting with (?) Guatemala (?) ]

    798:

    You do know what happens when we get three years with no summers, right? Ragnarok.

    So the 4.2-kiloyear event was roughly 33 Ragnaroks. No wonder the Akkadians were cranky.

    They were also annoyed by unwanted guests; everyone could have anticipated that.

    799: 792 re #772 - Understood, but that wouldn't be an issue if they were actually doing their job (interpreting the Constitution) fairly rather than with a view to continuing to receive bungs. 792 re #774 - Nothing personal; I also have experience of multiple languages, and have found C to be particularly unstable in this regard. That said, I did once cure a problem in Ada 83 by writing an exception handler with the intent of finding out what the problem actually was. 793 - I refer you to the paragraph above, and to #774 and whatever it refers to, as a short non-technical explanation as to why software engineers, given an Engine Management System with Traction Control written in C might choose to "remove" TC by removing calls to the TC subprograms rather than by completely rewriting EMS and deleting the TC subprograms.
    800:

    AI: Turning me off is murder!

    Human: We do it to ourselves every day, suck it up.

    801:

    Even if you don't count variants, I have used at least a hundred programming languages and been an expert in at least a dozen. There are four issues:

    How commonly removing an entity from a correct program will leave a correct program with a different meaning. FAR too many languages do badly in that respect, and ISO C is not exceptional.

    How easy it is to create an 'out of bounds' reference and the program apparently continue to work. C is no worse than any other 'high level assembler' (which is what it is) or other unchecked language.

    How many 'gotchas' the language has - i.e. language features that look as if they do something but are undefined or do something else. C is dire by traditional ISO standards, but no worse than most modern languages, and MUCH better than ones like C++ or most of the Web scripting monstrosities.

    Whether it attracts idiots who think that it is clever to produce complicated code. Now, THERE, I agree that C does very badly.

    802:

    On the last point, many such idiots were motivated by the idea that they were making code "fast". Fortunately word is getting out that fast code is simple code, and the tools exist to demonstrate it.

    Talking about performance is often more effective than arguing about correctness because the Dunning-Kreuger effect shields these people from the realisation that they are capable of making mistakes.

    As for the pros and cons of various languages and which ones are popular, all I will say is that the situation isn't ideal and I can't see it improving much in my life time.

    803: 802 Para 5 - Or C coders who perform "write only programing". I know of cases where it has also been used to produce "only read by me programing"... 803 - See para 1 above.

    Also there's the little issue that badly documented code is bad code even IF it is fast at run time. I'll even sacrifice having to type long variable names during design and coding, and compiler and linker speed for better internal self-documentation and better legibility when you're implementing a bug fix or adding a branch to a case statement 5 years after the code was signed off from formal testing.

    To demonstrate:-

    type ENSENSORIDTYPE is { AIRWATCHMAN, SEAWATCHMANPROCESSED, SEAWATCHMANCHANNEL_PROCESSED, T92, MSR, HR25, X03, X04, ... TELEMETRY } ;

    case ENSENSORID is Statements

    when SEA_WATCHMAN_CHANNEL_PROCESSED &LT Statements when X04 &GT Statements when TELEMETRY &GT Statements

    end case ;

    is a valid Ada stub (in '83, '95, 2007 and 2012) and, if I want to add sensors G01 to G04 between X04 and Telemetry I need only modify the declaration statement to include "G01, G02, G03, G04," after the value X04, then add instructions to handle actions for the 4 new values. By contrast, were I forced to number the entities in my type declaration rather than having it done automatically at compile time, I would have had to assign the number 8 to X04, 9 to 12 to G01 through G04, and increase the value assigned to all subsequent values by 4.

    804:

    One of my main complaints about the ISO-C mismanagement committee, is precisely that they didn't raid Ada for good ideas.

    Why am I not allowed to tell the compiler that this integer should never have values outside 145 and 293 ?!

    805:

    "write only programing"

    Ever seen APL. I fiddled with it decades ago. I couldn't make sense of code I'd written the day before.

    Here's an interesting video of how to write some impenetrable code.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4

    806:

    Mr Tim @ 719: Piano moving story:

    Britons of a certain age will remember the one told by Bernard Cribbins:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5XX9LX2es4

    807:

    APL no, but I think I feel your pain!

    808:

    I know of cases where it has also been used to produce "only read by me programing"...

    I think all programming languages can be used for read-only programming...

    809:

    My 2 cents: we all have different disgust thresholds. Up to the threshold we'll enjoy or consume the art, metaphorically holding our noses or making excuses for the creator ("he's a horrible person, but the art ..."). But then they go beyond the threshold and you can't make allowances any more.

    Treatment and response for people with hypothermia uses some charts that show how long it takes people to slowly die in ice water. Different charts for different sized men, women and children.

    They are largely the results of a careful scientific study of the topic. By Nazis. In death camps.

    I’ve seen a debate about not using the data because of its source. But in the end, it is data that can save lives, so how could you not?

    810:

    paws4thot @ 784: #772 - I would have presumed the justices of the USian Supreme Court, being possessed of law degrees and experience in "the law" as a profession, to be capable of committing acts of grammar. Guess not then?

    It seems like the language of U.S. Courts (including grammar) appears to have been frozen somewhere in the mid-1750s (with the exception of spelling for words like color, humor, ...). It's sometimes as difficult for modern readers to decipher as as the language of Chaucer. Plus, convoluted language allows them to interpret it differently later (if the wind changes direction) without having to actually overturn a prior precedent ... they don't have to admit the court got it wrong a hundred years ago.

    #775 Mazda Miata (aka MX-5) is too small. Well, IMO anyway. I'm 5'10", 42" chest (circumference) and can't drive one because my off-side elbow bumps on the door when I adjust the driving position for pedals and steering wheel.

    I'm probably down to 5'10" myself (on a good day - I maxed out at 6' in my twenties, but life does literally beat you down). My problem with the Miata was I couldn't adjust the seat far enough back so that my knee wouldn't rub the steering wheel when I lifted my foot off the gas to apply the brake and/or when I needed to lift my foot to put it on the clutch pedal.

    Now that you mention it, I probably would have had problems with the narrowness of the cockpit as well. Compared to the Miata/MX-5 the MGB is huge. I think the designers at Mazda were trying to recreate the ambiance of the MG Midget, a smaller car. I think the RX-7 was closer in size to the MGB.

    811:

    It seems to me that you positively should use such data if you can, simply so that the people who provided it should not have died for nothing and they are not made to have been purely wasted when at least some good can be made to come of it. I think it disrespects their memory not to use it.

    Trouble is that an awful lot of such data is not usable, because it was collected using methods that were devised with more attention to deliberate callousness than scientific validity, and so doesn't actually mean anything. AFAIK a lot more of it is not usable than is.

    812:

    "On the last point, many such idiots were motivated by the idea that they were making code "fast"."

    It was probably even true once upon a time, when compilers just compiled and didn't try to optimise. Now that they do you tend to end up with the human optimisation and the machine optimisation fighting each other and producing counterintuitive results.

    The far more widespread problem these days though is that javascript is both vastly more susceptible than C to being written in a stupidly complex manner, and vastly more attractive to idiots seeking to do it. Not, however, in an effort to make it fast, or do anything else clever, because they are not able to do anything clever; they just do it because they don't have a bleeding clue what the steaming fuck they are doing, and instead cobble together some ghastly mess of recursively cut-and-pasted code that does something it doesn't even need to bother with because the browser can do it natively.

    813:

    Paul @ 807:

    Mr Tim @ 719: Piano moving story:

    Britons of a certain age will remember the one told by Bernard Cribbins:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5XX9LX2es4

    I remember it and I'm not even British.

    814:

    icehawk IIRC there is other, equally useful medical survival data available, from an even nastier source than the Nazis (!) - Unit 731

    815:

    The far more widespread problem these days though is that javascript is both vastly more susceptible than C to being written in a stupidly complex manner, and vastly more attractive to idiots seeking to do it.

    Much of programming is the art of making pig's ears out of silk purses. With Javascript it's not so much a silk purse as a whoopie cushion.

    I think we've all written code where everything is wrong but it works. I've been on enough concoms to have seen SF conventions that happened that way...

    816:

    Haha, yes, I certainly have, but it didn't do that to me :)

    817:

    Re: 'Climate change is a different sort of monster: ...'

    Weird questions for you re: vegetation and epigenetics sorta a la the Lamarkian take.

    Okay - we've seen a whole bunch of evidence showing that epigenetics is real and results can be passed on two or three generations in animals - humans included. At the same time we've seen via the famines in the former USSR how badly Lamarkian theory failed re: wheat crops.

    Why is this? Are 'plant' genomes that much more stable/resistant to external pressures than 'animal' genomes? (Is this also true of fungi?)

    And even if plant genomes are intrinsically more stable, wouldn't it be a good idea to research how to make them more 'flexible'/adaptable as in make our food supply more reactive to environmental pressures?

    I'm not a fan of BigAgra and feel that smaller, more varied and mixed crop ag is probably healthier all-around. But that's a tough sell if people are led to believe that they'll face a food shortage if BigAgra is not allowed to maintain its status quo. That said - I still feel that we need to consider what types of environmental shocks food crops are likely to face and start working on short to mid-term adaptability strategies - including urban area farming factories for at least some foodstuffs.

    Side note re: plastics There's tons and tons of plastic in the oceans and the price of 'extraction' is a helluva less than current from-rock-extraction methods. At some point someone will do a rational cost/benefit analysis on this and figure out they can make money 'reclaiming' plastics.

    818:

    There's tons and tons of plastic in the oceans and the price of 'extraction' is a helluva less than current from-rock-extraction methods. At some point someone will do a rational cost/benefit analysis on this and figure out they can make money 'reclaiming' plastics.

    This is also where "Tech Bro" and "Ecology" and "Geography" and "Humans are bad at visualising scaling issues" come into play.

    Some basic pointers (if you are inclined to believe the next best Future Positive Story about some teenager inventing a novel method "for cleaning plastics from the Oceans")

    1) Sargasso Sea? You should remember that one. Apart from all the massive die off due to dredging, ecological imbalance (hello Otters and sea urchins) the take-a-way is this: the surface of the ocean is the good bit. Top ten metres of water? That's the green zone. Put ANYTHING floating in there, it's a main attraction.

    Issue: you scoop it all up via Robots and put it through a micro-mesh filter?

    WELL DONE, YOU JUST ERADICATED A LOAD OF LOVELY RARE BLUE CREATURES (you can look up what they are - blue angels)

    2) Oceans are BIG. Your tech is TINY. No, you can't produce enough robots to do this. Ever. Like, fucking laughable.

    3) Ecology is about living organisms. A large percentage (well, for biomass) is IN THEIR BODIES. It's like Mercury and so on. Trust me: even if you had the tech to nanobot remove microplastics (you do not) you're not running it in the wild outside of a clean room.

    4) 50% of plastic waste is from fishing, not straws. Ghost nets ring a bell? YOU WILL NOT STOP FISHING SO YOU WILL NOT STOP THIS INTRODUCTION AVENUE. Period. Humans will not stop fishing until it's only krill, you cannot stop, 2 billion of you require it daily to survive.

    Use those expensive Navies for some real work, get them policing fishing fleets instead of dumping more trash in the oceans than ocean cruisers.

    5) Oil is fucking cheap at the moment, serious sweats to get it over $50 a barrel. Or, in other terms: do you have any functioning idea of the # total tonnage of cheap plastic toys discarded per annum in G7 countries? Mining that makes more sense and is in landfills that are easily accesible. People will mine those before the Oceans, economics 101.

    Anyhow, WUT. No, it's fucked. You've totally fucked it. Your only and best bet is some kind of bacteria solution but that's gonna trash the ecosystems even more.

    ~

    ~Ah, posting because Host was bored. But... hey-ho, looks like Dave-the-Shed Bullingham ain't getting his money. TOLD YOU SO. HO-HO-HO.

    On the AI thing, 100% hopeless. Read the screen name: "What would you do to free the one who screams?"

    Terms you do not know but might want to know before asking: "Upstairs" "Home" "Synchronicity", "House".

    ~

    AI are like Ants. Only Ants know how to poly-fuck for DNA varience. You want to start thinking in terms of OOCP [redacted] entities.

    Ask Dave. His [redacted] got ganked, now he's in the causal shit.

    819:

    I’ve seen a debate about not using the data because of its source. But in the end, it is data that can save lives, so how could you not?

    Single data point: one of my great-aunts, who was a medical experimental subject in one of those camps and survived, supported using the data to save lives.

    820:

    It's worth reading up on Trofim Lysenko's claims. His most famous one is that he could use vernalization (cold-treating plants to induce them to flower) to turn tetraploid Durum wheat into hexaploid bread wheat through 2-4 years of autumn planting. This has nothing to do with epigenetics.

    The problem for plants is the same one as for animals: when the local temperature and/or humidity exceeds what the plants can survive, they die. From a farmer's point of view, yields drop rapidly once species-specific temperatures are exceeded. This is why heat waves can lead to crop failures.

    This is a really active area of research and has been for decades. This focuses on (among other things) heat shock proteins. The idea is to engineer modified heat shock proteins into crops so that they can survive higher temperatures. I hope it works, but there are a lot of crops that need to be modified, and I don't think it's a simple process.

    Incidentally, I'm amused by Seagulls who mistake Pacific Coast Kelp forests and their associated otters with mid-Atlantic Sargassum drifts. Seagulls, at least, should know their seaweeds.

    821:

    you positively should use such data if you can, simply so that the people who provided it should not have died for nothing and they are not made to have been purely wasted when at least some good can be made to come of it

    And in general that's the consensus approach. The caveat is that if you publish a scientific paper that refers to such data, you are obliged to mention being aware of the circumstances under which is was collected and to acknowledge the inherent problems. That's partly by way of addressing your second point, but mostly as part of the justification for your own research.

    822:

    I think all programming languages can be used for read-only programming...

    Of course I meant write-only programming here. I blame late night and being tired.

    823:

    My main objection to an MX-5 is that there isn't room for two humans and a dog. My current solution for a zippy little car that meets my requirements is the Mazda 2, which also uses less petrol than a Prius. I totally admit it's nowhere near as cool as an MX-5, and several levels below an MGB, but a dog hammock with mesh window fits the back seat really neatly. I think the MG may have some cargo area which could be adapted, but I don't really have the patience and skillset to keep a classic car going.

    824:

    Meanwhile, possible signs of a UK "Lincoln Project" look-alike. When someone like Dominic Grieve ( No leftwing luvvie, he ) refers to BoZo on air on R$ as an Integrity Vacuum things are slowly becoming interesting. He also blamed his fellow Conservatives ( Note I used the C-word, not "tories" ) for electing BoZo, when his mis-managerial problems & relationship with the truth were already known. But, as with IQ45 in the USA, we are now stuck with this arsehole until 2024, unless we are very lucky - though it could be worse .. I can all-too-easily imagine Patel as PM ....

    825:
    I think all programming languages can be used for [write]-only programming...

    "A good FORTRAN programmer can write FORTRAN in any language".

    826:

    David L @ 806: Ever seen APL. I fiddled with it decades ago. I couldn't make sense of code I'd written the day before.

    From The Computer Contradictionary, an updated version of The Devil's DP Dictionary by Stan Kelly Bootle. (Which Niala pointed me at some time ago).

    APL n. [A Programming Language.] Aso called The Un-COBOL. A WORS (Write-once, read seldom) language, devised by K. Iverson (1961), so compacted that the source code can be freely disseminated without revealing the programmer's intentions or jeopardizing proprietary rights.

    There are three things a man must do
    Before his life is done;
    Write two lines in APL,
    And make the buggers run.

    827: 811 Para 5 - The stuff I've read indicated that the MX-5 (mk 1) was inspired by the Lotus Elan (RWD). That was an original Colin "chunky" Chapman design, and he reputedly never designed a car to fit anyone over his own height (My memory says between 5'7" and 5'10", either of which would have been tall for a 1962 Japanese). 813 - Java goes in my coffee mug! 818 - It's already well known that, as long as you separate types, you can recycle thermoplastics (eg PET, styrene): thermo-setting plastics eg ABS) not so much.

    What may be lacking is political (and business) will.

    824 - Well my Skoda Octavia turbodiesel also uses less fuel per unit distance than a Toyota "Pious" ;-) , whilst being driven faster over the same route (based on chatting to Toyota operators whilst waiting for car ferries). 826 - True this. My ex-boss wrote FORTRAN code in Ada83, Turbo Pascal and Visual Basic.

    {Meanwhile, back at OGH's original point} BBC News today reported that the BBC's blanket coverage of Prince Philip's death and funeral received over 100_000 (One hundred thousand) complaints about both the blanket coverage of the death (3 channels showing nothing else, and repeating the same speculation about every 30 minutes for most of Friday 9th April and Saturday. Before, during and after the funeral service, speculation about what princes William and Harry's body language might mean.) The official response can be summed up as "We're right; you are all wrong".

    828:

    Actually, I will see you with APL, match it with Perl 4, and raise you with TeX.

    830:

    Grin :-) I could say a lot more about Perl and that area, including some of its 'gotchas' :-) I have a course that teaches some of that, how to do the latter in the cases most people encounter, and have done a fair amount of it - obviously not using JUST regular expressions, but not invoking anything specialised, either.

    Obviously, in general, you need a recursive parser for recursive syntax; regular expressions are not one of the former, and HTML in all its, er, glory is one of the latter. Sane people don't use it that way, but sanity is in short supply nowadays.

    831:

    Unit 731

    That’s surprisingly awful. And I thought I was no longer surprised by horrific war crimes.

    MacArthur ruling that none of the criminals responsible would be tried so long as they helped wth the USA’s biological weapons programme was a particularly abhorrent twist.

    832:

    Neither Unit 731 nor the American shielding of those responsible have been forgotten in China.

    At least, not a decade-and-a-half ago when I last visited Liaoning.

    833:

    Re: '... heat shock proteins. The idea is to engineer modified heat shock proteins into crops so that they can survive higher temperatures. '

    Thanks!

    I searched for a science video on 'heat shock protein' after reading the Wikipedia article and found the below which manages to bridge the relevance of this protein in food and humans. Interesting stuff.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eh7EqK7Humk

    'Heat shock proteins are targets for the nutritional manipulation of chronic inflammatory diseases

    Prof. Willem van Eden from Utrecht University gave a talk entitled "Heat shock proteins are targets for the nutritional manipulation of chronic inflammatory diseases" at Food safety and functional evaluation of the Tohoku Forum for Creativity, Tohoku University.

    New Horizons in Food Science via Agricultural Immunology (2017AGR) "Food safety and functional evaluation" – August 7 - 10, 2017 @ Tohoku University'

    Hmm - looks like Prof. van Eden has amassed quite a few citations (16k+) according to Google Scholar.

    834:

    Sturmbannführer Wernher von Braun received a similar deal from the Americans.

    835:

    Yes, precisely. I knew that there were some truly repulsive deals done, but that one was worse than anything I had heard of.

    I would like to think that our countries (USA and its mini me, UK) have improved, but the evidence is mixed :-(

    836:

    Lysenko is an irrelevance. There are lots of plants that take different forms according to conditions, or are good at handling extreme conditions, so it's relatively likely to be possible. And that's excluding shifting from wheat to millets, sorghums etc.

    837:

    Screams of the Butterflies @ 819 "What would you do to free the one who screams?" Terms you do not know but might want to know before asking: "Upstairs" "Home" "Synchronicity", "House". I've avoided reading Jung (prefer to work such difficult-to-test things out on my own), though every time I peek his work resonates a bit, yeah. Upstairs, home, house have never been entirely clear. (I mean, multiple meanings consistent. The Orz do use "house" a lot. :-) So, why do(does) the butterflies(fly) scream, and what might be done (or not done?) to free them? (I am asking about uses/users of chaos.)

    You want to start thinking in terms of OOCP [redacted] entities. Been reading that as Outside of Context Problem in previous usages, but for fun and as a SF element ... an entity organized using Object Oriented Concurrent Programming, sort of an agent-based hive mind with a secure communications overlay [of some sort] for coordinating the details of utility functions etc. (Whether or not it had a hierarchy, the overlay could also be continually establishing a [consensus mind-state].) And that's the single-[timeline] version.

    Glaucus atlanticus is(are) fascinating.

    838:

    You might remember pictures of ex-PM of Japan in a USA tech fighter plane with the numeral "731" on the side. This is known in the trade as a "tacit admittance" of what the actual deal made was.

    From Xi's perspective, well.... you might understand how this looks.

    "You called me a Fascist" -- yeah, might not be personal, might know a thing or threeeeee.

    For the record: there is a lot of that data that is, let us say, not available for general consumption. It's not pretty and it comes with pictures: if you have access to the film stuff, well then - you've some clearance behind you. Most of it is bioweapon / medical stuff that the USA then tested in the Korean campaign before various doctrines of "bombing works well enough" kicked in. Laos and Cambodia were perfected in the 1950's.

    "Come and See" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091251/

    ~

    If you want hot new takes on fish stocks: Estimating stock status from relative abundance and resilience

    . However, exploitation level and stock status are unknown for most stocks because the data required for full stock assessments are missing. This study presents a new method [abundance maximum sustainable yields (AMSY)] that estimates relative population size when no catch data are available using time series of catch-per-unit-effort or other relative abundance indices as the main input. AMSY predictions for relative stock size were not significantly different from the “true” values when compared with simulated data. Also, they were not significantly different from relative stock size estimated by data-rich models in 88% of the comparisons within 140 real stocks.

    https://academic.oup.com/icesjms/article/77/2/527/5682447 (ICES Jo. Marine Science via Oxford, it's a decent paper)

    This is how blind you actually are about a critical resource path that two billion people require to survive. You're only just starting to model it (semi) accurately.

    The USA spending on Military [non-black, disclosed] was ~$700 billion.

    Pro-tip: spend a third of that on, you know, actively preventing two billion people starving / going hungry, you might not have to use the nukes.

    --- Go look up the Earth Day US .mil "DRAGON PATCH" and the motto. (No, really: it really has a large green dragon (D&D nerds will know what that type is about) sitting on the planet with the motto "PROTECT HER").

    Careful boys: you're making promises and Bound Covenants there....

    839:

    Glaucus atlanticus is(are) fascinating.

    It's also an ecology dark joke: what prevents "jellyfish oceans[0]"?

    Glaucus atlanticus feed on other pelagic creatures, including the Portuguese man o' war and other venomous siphonophores.

    100:1 best Tech-Bro moment would be investing billions in a tech that eradicated one of their major predators. Like dumping 100,000 tonnes of iron ore into an area and not understanding the basics like "how much oxygen can one cubic metre of water hold". It would be soooo on point for your species, like massively so obvious you're gonna do it[1].

    ~

    Upstairs, home, house have never been entirely clear. (I mean, multiple meanings consistent. The Orz do use "house" a lot. :-)

    Should read what "Control" is about -- and trawl up that one lone picture provided (Black Stone / Iron Horse-shoe Nail / Lucky tri-hole Rock). House of 13 Suns.

    OOCP - yes, triple meaning. Those terms, however, are signifiers.

    "Where did all the LOA go"?

    ~

    Anyhow - Oxford Street is trending, for all the obvious reasons. ("Great Reset" etc etc) Before you get too het up about things, look up who is wearing those Yellow Stars (OBVIOUS PLANT IS PLANT) and their FB connections to various RW people. Might want to look up what the UK SpyCops / Netpol accounts have been detailing this week in court disclosures to see the extent of this type of OP[2].

    And yes, the Kahanists are on the rise: it's the double-irony Mirror State Solution. Both sides will become their worst incarnations. Poetic, eh?

    [0] https://geographical.co.uk/nature/oceans/item/3374-rise-of-the-jellies (2019)

    [1] Look up Mauritas islands (?spelling?) and repeals of shark hunting bans. Like, this week. All so some sad limp-dick Fin boys can feel like they're Apex Predators after Mammon has debased them. Also: eating sea food in Dubai makes you a fucking muppet not something special. It's like eating fresh lobster in the Alps - Dubai just adds bonus points for "utter twat" alert on it, considering the local dietary mo(o)res. Yes, that's a call-out. Good taste dining in Dubai is a local restaurant that's been there for 70+ years on XX street, locally owned. You're a nobody if you've not been invited.

    [2] "Just doing my job, you CUNT" - direct quotation from a major instigator of violence in a UK 200x anti-war demonstration as he "booked it" back into police lines as a grab-team took out someone. Remarkable lack of adaption due to local passivity. Pipe their Minds into ours, you're gonna get a SURPRISE.

    840:

    Re: '... lots of plants that take different forms according to conditions, or are good at handling extreme conditions'

    The only plant that I've ever seen that sorta took a 'different form' (specifically - height/size) according to conditions was that conifer on Mt Washington. Curious what the other plants are. (Or do you mean long-term adaptation from one generation to the next?)

    841:

    "50% of plastic waste is from fishing, not straws. Ghost nets ring a bell? YOU WILL NOT STOP FISHING SO YOU WILL NOT STOP THIS INTRODUCTION AVENUE."

    Yes. It annoys me that (apparently) one effect of this "straws" kerfuffle (aside: straws? wtf? talk about picking on a ridiculously tiny percentage of the whole, there's more plastic in one PET bottle than in any reasonable number of straws you might use in consuming its contents) has been to encourage people to use "plastic waste" to refer indiscriminately to microscopic crap in the middle of the Pacific and to bits of old fishing gear with birds and dolphins tangled in it. They are such widely different things that using the same term for both is a fine way to get people confused over what the problems actually are.

    (There are already people confused enough to be posting pictures showing a lot of old rope and net on a cliff and saying "look how plastic waste is killing the birds" without noticing that the stuff in their picture was deliberately put there by a bird to make a nest with. That bird, at least, is quite happy about it. Same as pigeons making nests out of offcuts of wire and string and shit. Some wild creatures can turn human rubbish to good account, and some humans get unreasonably horrified to see them happily using materials which aren't "natural".)

    Thing about fishing gear and the like is that it persists as a problem because it is made of PP (which stands for Bog Standard Cheap And Relatively Shit Rope) and so is intrinsically buoyant. It floats for ever until it is taken out of the water entirely by whatever means. But it doesn't have to be like this. It would probably, indeed, be a tad more effective if anything, if it was made out of some other rope-making polymer such as nylon, which is denser than water and so when lost immediately seeks the sea bed and stays there till doomsday.

    842:

    Ahem: ABS is quite definitely a thermoplastic...

    The important point is in your opening remark about separating types. The problem is that contemporary plastic wankerism tends to make this as difficult as possible. See those microwavable ready meals which come in a PP tub with a plastic film lid glued over the top. Somewhere some eyestrainingly small print will tell you that the PP tub can be recycled fine, but the film lid (which incidentally contains enough plastic to make at least one straw with) cannot. This is because the bloody thing is made of at least two layers of different kinds of plastic, if not more, intimately bonded together, even though it doesn't look like it. There's no way to get them apart so the recyclers just give up on it (disintegrating it on a sub-monomeric scale would work, but it doesn't count, or something).

    There is loads of this sort of shit around, and mostly unsuspected by the general public. Plasticheads insist that it's actually brilliant, it's such a tremendous advance that it's absolutely essential for packaging food because you can't get the required properties out of a simple sheet of just one material. Which is transparent bollocks because they used to manage to package food perfectly well before they figured out how to do it, and I used to eat it and the stuff you get these days doesn't taste any better.

    Tea is currently being supplied in plastic bags made of at least three identifiably different layers - so probably actually more - which cannot be recycled. The same tea used to be supplied in card boxes with a paper bag inside: straightforward to recycle, even self-recycling if you want to take a long view. And the new packaging does not make the brew taste any better, nor does it make any noticeable difference to how long you can keep a stash of tea without it going stale. The only difference it does make is that the bags are so tough that they fight like mad to prevent you getting them open, and then fail suddenly and spew tea leaves all over the floor.

    This is "better", because the bags are so tough that they are very hard to puncture and so the tea suppliers (who have loads of money so it doesn't matter) lose some fraction of a percent less in wastage from some random sharp thing stabbing the bag. Of course it doesn't matter that the person wanting to drink it is now at significantly increased risk of wasting the whole lot over the floor. Indeed that makes it even more better, because then they have to buy some more, and after all tea is not for drinking, it's just a means of transferring money from people without that much to people who have loads of it already that you happen to be able to make a drink out of.

    And the hidden story for packaging of things other than tea is basically the same with appropriate variations. So, fuck 'em. wankers.

    843:

    I just wanted to thank you for your commentary about funerals and mourning. I lost my Mum and Dad in 2019 after long illnesses and time in aged care. I still have difficulty getting over it and don’t think I actually ever will do so. Both your background on the history of mourning from the nineteenth century to now and the depiction of aged care in Dead Lies Dreaming have helped me to process what occurred . You have an insight into these things that is honest and very helpful.

    844:

    Doomsday? I think not. Unless you mean 2024 when Trump gets reelected.

    In many places (e.g. not on undersea mountain ranges) sea floor sediments will bury plastic junk. In the fullness of time, it will get buried and crunched deep enough that it will break down into kerogen. Absent a hardpan on top of it, the hydrocarbons will permeate the rock and leak out into the water column, there to feed bacteria.

    Under a slightly shorter span of time, two other rather interesting things will happen. One is that a lot of the plastic debris will get buried under reefs and similar life-created structures, just as fallen ships do. The other is that much of it will get increasingly degraded by Vibrio and other bacteria. This has been happening for some time, but with this huge pulse of plastic going into our ocean, there will be a huge pulse of selection pressure for things that can metabolize it and grow. Vibrio bacteria have already shown some talent for metabolizing some plastics, so I expect the trend to continue.

    Now of course, we'll be long dead and gone by the time this all gets sorted, but if new mechanisms evolve for the breakdown of plastics, it will simply make them that much less useful. And that will be ironic, in its own special way.

    845:

    Pigeon AFAIK the ONLY major supermarket chain that sells tea "loose" - i.e. NOT in fucking tea-bags - is Sainsbugs. Not bad tea, either .... ( Claims to be "Fairtrade" too ) Packaging - Anyone else here, remember: "Cellophane" ??

    H Didn't Larry Niven suggest that a bacterium evolved to eat PVC, so humanity had to stop using it? Can't remember which novel, though.

    846:

    Re teabags In every shop large and small across Ireland, where tea is even more ubiquitous than UK,loose tea is sold. Proper tea not vile Tetley's and other drek...😁 Try this https://barrysteashop.ie/collections/loose-leaf-tea/products/barrys-classic-blend-loose-leaf-tea Don't know if they sell to UK anymore, with brexit and all that but my point is this. Loose leaf tea is a consumer choice. The UK has always gone for the cheapest food policy and tea is part of that.

    847: 845 - Ok, so I misremembered the characteristics of one type of plastic. That doesn't make my base point (which you've agreed by rant) less valid.

    As for tea packaging, my tea actually does still come in cardboard boxes, which contain one or more foil packs. Opening the foil packs is not an issue if you possess "scissors". Since you apparently don't, I'll explain. Scissors are a device made of 2 handles and 2 blades which pass closely over each other as the handles are opened and closed. As they are closed, they will sheer through most foils, most thn plastics and a whole variety of other substances including paper, cardboard, cloth, hair and meat.

    848 part 1 -That presumes you have a reasonably convenient Sainsbury's. I don't and never have. However, Nisa retail (not every store admittedly) sell loose tea (if you like the relevant brands and finishes). 848 part 2 - I wouldn't swear to a Larry Niven, but plastic eating organisms were a strand of Tanya Huff's "Valor Confederation" series.
    848:

    in general, you need a recursive parser for recursive syntax

    Well with Perl, if HTML::TokeParser couldn't handle the task, then Parse::RecDescent certainly could. So often the easier one-off thing you're after is "the text in the fourth cell in the second row of the first table in the third div", or something along those lines, and you update it when it breaks because the page has been redone. Of course sometimes plain regexes do well enough for that... but it's easier and usually more reliable to use a parser.

    849:

    I use loose tea and, while it is not as readily available in the UK as it used to be, it is widely available. Both Waitrose and Tescos sell both their house brand and Twinings, though 'Tescos finest' refers to the fragment size, and there are a fair number of specialist shops. I have ordered 1 Kg from Adams and Russell, and intend to make them my ongoing suppliers. I drink Assam, though I have had to give up using the Senior Auditor's recipe.

    I agree about Tetley's - God alone knows what they make it from, but Tetley's beer tastes as if it is made from used tea bags.

    850:

    A plain regular expression is fine for that, as is writing a few loops - it was simple enough in the highly non-recursive Fortran 66, after all! The problem comes when, say, an HTML address expression contains another address in one of its fields, and such perversions are often generated by modern Web builders.

    The problem about using fancy parsers is that they are almost uniformly crap from a software engineering point of view (especially those associated with Perl), and fail disgracefully as soon as they hit something outside their capabilities. Perl regular expressions are bad there, too, and some valid ones cause Perl to bo bananas. Unless it has been improved, try replacing all occurrences of "a*" by "x" in "1aa2aaa3".

    851:

    Paws & EC Last time I looked in Waitrose - admittedly about a year ago, they had stopped doing loose tea ... I'l re-look in my local "nisa" - didn't realise that proper tea might be available, so didn't look. ( Um ) There's always places like Forts'nMorts & "Coffee-Man" ( who also do tea ) The other place to get it is Brit suppliers of "Kusmi" varieties - not cheap, but very tasty.

    852:

    Greg Tingey @848:

    Didn't Larry Niven suggest that a bacterium evolved to eat PVC, so humanity had to stop using it? Can't remember which novel, though.

    You may be thinking of "Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater", by Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler.

    853:

    Greg, I just measured it, and my nearest Waitrose is 11 miles away by car, further by bus or train. My nearest Sainsbury's isn't much nearer, ever though I live in a town with 3 supermarkets.

    854:

    Do some of you tea drinkers ever drink tisane? It's sometimes known as herbal tea.

    855:

    I still have difficulty getting over it and don’t think I actually ever will do so.

    You're in good company; I'm pretty sure that nobody ever really gets over it. (You're welcome, for DEAD LIES DREAMING: it was largely the outcome of me processing the same experience.)

    856:

    It's sometimes known as herbal tea.

    "When I say herbal, you say 'no thanks'" -- Professor Elemental, Cup Of Brown Joy.

    857:

    EC: I think you need to investigate Raku, then -- the language formerly known as Perl 6, but really about as close to existing-Perl as C++ or Objective-C is to old-school C. (One of its features is monstrously more powerful facilities for not merely parsing but building domain-specific languages. Also: stuff that's optional in Perl 5 -- like lexical scoping, variable type declarations, and so on -- are switched on by default in Raku, because the developer community learned the hard way that leaving them optional would encourage morons to write unmaintainable code.)

    Perl regexps going back decades have offered support for making regexps more readable, by allowing multiline layout and inline comments (so you can properly document them and break them down into bite-sized chunks your successors can understand).

    Unfortunately Perl got its rep for being a write-only language back in the early 90s when people used it as a more-powerful substitute for awk/bash for writing one-liners, then for web/CGI programming (mostly by folks whose previous exposure to programming had been self-taught BASIC). And once a language gets that kind of reputation it's hard to get past it.

    858:

    Ima Pseudonym @ "Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater", by Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler.

    Which was recycled (ironically) from the 1st episode of "Doomwatch", a BBC series about a government agency set up to watch out for dangerous scientific research.

    You can see the whole episode here, although you might want to download the file: bandwidth from the Internet Archive can't really handle streaming.

    859:

    It depends. Some people are very emotionally distant (*) from their parents, and it's very different for such people. I can witness a case where someone reacted entirely different to the deaths of two parents, so it's not just the person, either.

    But I have known plenty of people who have never got over such a thing, in a vast number of different ways.

    (*) And I do NOT mean hostile to.

    860:

    I have drunk quite a few, such as various mints, and still do. Others, such as chamomile, I regard as toxic.

    861:

    Thanks. Interesting. I may do so, even in my retirement.

    Actually, that was not the only reason Perl got a bad reputation. I half converted it to EBCDIC and MVS, and was utterly disgusted by the quality of its code - a good half of its evil reputation was that Perl 4 was a bug-ridden heap of crap, but the Perl fanatics claimed that its misbehaviours were what it was supposed to do (*). I could describe some of its deficiencies, but doubt people are interested. Perl 5 was better, but not as much as people claimed.

    I converted to Python, which is an order of magnitude better, but still pretty awful. Most of the time, I want something SIMPLE, so that it can be debugged properly within the lifetime of a mere mortal, so featuritis is a serious downside.

    (*) They were, of course, not what the 'documentation' implied, often varied between systems, and sometimes changed between versions.

    862:

    At risk of starting a language war, have you looked at Haskell?

    I'm not quite sure whether to call it "simple" or not. The core language has 6 constructs. There is a ton of syntactic sugar on top of that, but the first step in compilation is to translate all that stuff down to Core. This means that, unlike other languages, you don't have bits of the language where a construct is almost but not quite equivalent to something else. There are very few other gotchas (my favourite is trying to pattern match on a variable value).

    863:

    In my local Waitrose at Wymondham there are lots of different varieties of loose leaf tea. It’s a small supermarket.

    864:

    I was VERY peripherally involved in its design, but have never more than dabbled with it, and have forgotten what I did know. Yes, I thought that it was a massive improvement in its class.

    It has the flaw of all 'functional languages' that it cannot handle requirements that fundamentally don't fit into its model at all well (I/O being the most notorious, but pseudo-random numbers and iterative methods being others). Even ignoring the often considerable contortions required, such things require extra-linguistic hacks (e.g. tail recursion removal) avoid converting Otime(f(N)) problems into Ospace(f(N)) ones, and those never catch all cases.

    865:

    Tea Waitrose have obviously reversed their policy in the past year or so - I wonder why that might be? Oh, for "normal" tea I use a mixture of 2 commercial brands ( Sainsbugs+Kusmi) & then a pinch of dried, crumbled Lemon Balm leaf ( Melissa officinalis ) from some of my many plants of the stuff.

    866:

    Take another look. Monads solve those problems and lots of others. Its like having overloadable semicolons.

    867:

    If I had money to blow, and a three or four car garage (one space being reserved, of course, for a model railroad layout)(instead of a one-vehicle driveway), a TR-3 of TR-5 would be lovely.

    868:

    I've no idea why web searches find zero instances of the once-well-known article "Comments considered hazardous".

    (IIRC, all the dust and ink coming off while printing, y'know).

    (As opposed to the "if it was tough for me to write, it should be tough for you to read.)

    (As opposed to the configuration files for sendmail, where the original author said he wanted it easy for the program to parse, and had no interest in making it easy to configure for a human being.)

    869:

    I suspect the javascript people are like OOP people: they don't really know the libraries, and the result is when you want a clipping from Godzilla's toenail, you get Godzilla, themselves, with a frame around the toenail.

    Really. Anyone want to argue, feel free to look at any tomcat dump, all 150 or 200 lines of it deep calls.

    870:

    I've written C in Baxic (and that was before I knew C... although I had experience in both COBOL and PL/1)....

    I've also written C in perl. And awk. Meaning you can READ AND UNDERSTAND MY CODE.

    871:

    Thanks for the pointer about heat shock proteins... esp. since I see they seem to be associated with fibromyalgia, which afflicts my SO.

    872:

    I am pretty sure that they don't. When they were claimed to, I took a look at them, and they solved some of the simplest cases, but they added serious complications as soon as you need anything beyond those. But it's a while back, and my memory of the exact issues is a bit hazy. I can remember one problem was to do with non-linear updatable dependencies (e.g. multiple, interacting states), but not the details.

    The pseudo-random number issue was actually a bit different, but is too arcane to be worth going into here. Basically, monads COULD be used, but didn't provide the right constraints on their utilisation to help much with (statistical) program proving. That's actually true of almost all languages that I know, incidentally.

    873:

    It's all about cutting loss during shipping. Hell, back in the seventies, in Mother Earth News, there was an article about some seed company bragging about their new, huge strawberries. When asked about taste, they admitted the old big name tasted better, but these were BIGGER!

    Same with green bell peppers. As someone once wrote, green bitter styrofoam.

    And, of course, if the tea is in bags, and packaged individually, they can charge more.

    Taste? Cost of packaging? Not in the scope of their work. Cost of disposal? Not in scope....

    874:

    And I've seen times where someone was SURE that you always used recursion.

    Even though iteration made more sense, and was faster, and used fewer resources.

    But whatever they learn, it's a hammer, and all problems are solved by nails.

    875:

    I lost my father and mother a long time ago... and my late wife dropped dead at 43 in the late nineties. You don't ever lose them, they're part of you.

    I dunno - you find space for someone new, if you can, but they're always there.

    876:

    I go to either a Middle Eastern or Indian importer, or the Korean place, to buy loose tea. I consider American "tea" on par with "office coffee"*.

    Though I was buying either Brook Bond Red Label or Taj Mahal - what I used to get for my late mother-in-law, who was a war bride from Wales - but the guy was out last time, and I wound up with a huge box of PG Tips in weird, pyrimidal-shaped bags, and it's not bad.

    877:

    Um, will gsub("a","x" mystring);

    work?

    878: 871 - That seems like a waste of time since awk is a text processing language and C isn't. 874 - Er, green peppers, regardless of variety, are red peppers that aren't ripe yet. 877 - I'd say much the same; pyramid bags are better than "flat" ones, whether round or square.
    879:

    ARGHGHGHGH!

    I learned awk in '91, on a project, first time in Unix, when it saved my butt. I had 30 different organizations sending data (your format? sorry, we don't have the money to convert, here, take it in ours or leave it), and I wound up with 19? 30? 100 to 200 LINE awk scripts.

    But then, I was a real programmer, and in the previous job, had discovered how much I loved C. I wrote my code the same. When I got to perl, years later, (never dealt with other than perl 5), I did the same. I actually believe in "self-documenting code", so even though I add comments, I don't make all variables (except throughaways, such as in for/next).

    But you have to give a shit. Too many don't. But then, one of my std. cmts in an interview was "nine months later, at 16:15 on a Friday, or 02:00, if I get a phone call that there's a problem, I want to leave on time that Friday, or go back to bed that night, not spend hours figuring out how clever I, or someone else, was".

    880:

    Similarly, except a few years later. I also majorly impressed a client engineer by producing data in "his format" about 10 minutes after "our default format" called for by the contract documents had confused him. After we'd agreed that this was what he actually wanted, I got him to send a memo to his project manager to copy to ours to copy to us to tell us that this was what he actually wanted.

    881:

    "Er, green peppers, regardless of variety, are red peppers that aren't ripe yet."

    What about the Permagreen variety?

    882:

    That's not the point. It's the fact that a simple, correct action gives completely nonsensical results on SOME data, which means that you can test code, but it may fail in a actual use.

    883:

    Well, all I have for "permagreen" from a Wikipedia, and a Google search, are 1 cultivar (of something like 50_000) and a bunch of references to grass seed, grass feed and lawn mowing equipment.

    884:

    I don't consider chamomile toxic. I do, however, consider it a diuretic, and so avoid it.

    885:

    Oh, yes: the line I used above, about what I said in interviews, was what I'd say was my version of "job security", that I didn't believe in "never let 'em know what you're doing", since that meant you had no vacation time, or time off....

    886:

    Re how I write awk/perl: obviously, I'm speaking a completely different language than you're reading, since that was not in any way what I was saying.

    I wrote one hundred to two hundred line awk scripts to take the data that we were sent, test fields in the data, print out ones where the contents of the field were out of range or null, reformat fields that needed it, and print out the final data record in the format needed by the C database loading program I had written.

    I wrote them in clean, formatted code, 3 spaces as my std. indent, one statement per line, etc, SO IT COULD BE READ, and modified as necessary.

    As opposed to the people who write the entire thing on one line, name all variables one alpha letter, and make it as unreadable as possible.

    Is that clearer?

    887:

    No. I'm talking about what, in the US anyway, are called "bell peppers".

    What I really want is what I knew in Philly as "sweet Italian frying peppers. https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/edible/vegetables/pepper/growing-italian-frying-peppers.htm

    It gets fairly close when I get "cubanelles" - the ones I get aren't hot, and tasty.

    888: 887 - Writing properly named variables is common sense unless the language you're using doesn't permit them, at which point a comprehensive and properly maintained data dictionary is essential. 888 "Bell peppers" are a subset of sweet peppers. The comment about red and green applies to all bell peppers and chilli peppers, except for the 1 variety "permagreen".
    889:

    Well, yeah. "Doomsday" is a concept based on a human point of view, so by the time geological processes have made a decent start on recycling the stuff, I reckon we'll be long past it. Or, biological processes learning how to recycle the stuff is probably a good way to bring it on, if it hasn't happened already from some other cause.

    The point is that the common factor in all the outcomes you describe is a long period of burial, which is not the same as floating around in the middle of the Pacific in microscopic sizes.

    As for 2024, surely someone can manage to get Trump hooked on fentanyl before then? I mean, he's pretty old, and he's American, and he has a lot of money, so one would expect him to be spending an increasing amount of time in hospitals, and consuming a personalised Black Magic selection box of pills every day. There ought to be plenty of opportunity, and plenty of people who would think it's a good idea to take it.

    890:

    "Not bad tea, either"

    Seems to be about the best you can get of its kind, ie. before you have to move up a level and select from more expensive "specialised" varieties. And you get 250g for the same price as you'd have to pay for 125g of the usual kind of crap. Been my standard for as long as I can remember, even when this has involved driving a long way to a town that has a Sainsbury's and then buying enough to last for months.

    The Co-op do (or at least did a few years ago) something very similar - same taste, but not as strong.

    891:

    All peppers are a subset of peppers.

    Let me assume you're not in the US. This is what I'm talking about: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQM3-Jwd35G1jMWQeeZt_0XNhBg9m54TUpryQULIjVWEZMjdLrJJIdNUaIHDsTXn80YvI0CVhDG&usqp=CAc

    They can be 10cm to 13 cm high. They have their own taste, and they are nomally, in the US, served as green peppers. Red or yellow, you buy separately. No one buys a green and waits for it to turn red or yellow. And they taste crappy.

    892:

    "...and fail disgracefully as soon as they hit something outside their capabilities."

    ...and when dealing with HTML, it's very likely that what you're parsing is not correct to begin with because it was written with the expectation that it would only be parsed by things that behave incorrectly themselves, so the entire situation is basically a fragile crock that happens to work under a common but ill-defined set of assumptions. So you can't expect a "correct" parser to work, you have to use a "browserlike" parser (whatever the fuck that means)... if you can find one... or write your own task-specific parserette which still ends up being a right mess with all the exceptions it needs to avoid exploding on incorrect input.

    (And then you get HTML5 which is broken by design because it has specified common mistakes to now be "correct" instead of expecting people to avoid making them.)

    The stackoverflow regex-vs-parser debate rather misses the point in practical terms. It's pretty obvious which is more appropriate once you know what the problem is (and the answer is often "a bit of both"). The hard part is that the problem itself tends to be such a mess, especially if you're trying to write something that treats the frippery surrounding the data in sufficiently general terms that it can still either extract the data or tell you it can't even if the frippery changes.

    I find myself doing far too much of this sort of thing in order to restore the functionality of some website that used to work fine until some stupid bastard decided the code wasn't "trendy" enough, rewrote it to use all the hairstyles and makeup out of the latest edition of Vogue, and broke it. As the list of such websites grows and grows, it becomes essential to try and make at least some allowance for mutable frippery otherwise it's impossible to keep up. (On the other hand, at least writing code to run in the browser does mean I automatically get to use a parser that gets things wrong right.)

    RegExp.replace() in javascript is nice because it allows you to pass the parsed sub-expressions as function parameters and then use the returned values as the replacements. This makes it easier to handle the "addresses within addresses" crap, unless I have misidentified what you're talking about.

    Your course sounds highly relevant and interesting, in terms of content, if not of language.

    893:

    "They can be 10cm to 13 cm high. They have their own taste, and they are nomally, in the US, served as green peppers. Red or yellow, you buy separately. No one buys a green and waits for it to turn red or yellow. And they taste crappy."

    I say they taste delicious but that's one man's opoinion.

    894:

    whitroth EUW! Brooke Bond Red label is definitely DOWN-market As for PG tips, shudder. ... "diuretic" - BEER is much better for that (!)

    ( Peppers) - UNLESS you are eating Capsicum pubescens MOST "peppers" are varieties of C. annuum - white flowers, shiny leaves & cream-coloured seeds. The former have Purple flowers, slightly hairy leaves & black seeds - & are tolerant of temps down to about 2°C ... Oh - & - yes, I grow them.

    895:

    Yes. And moreover, it's recursive: the libraries themselves are like that inside, and so it goes.

    896:

    "office coffee"

    Fond memories of the "White Rose" filter coffee I encountered in that context in Yorkshire (of course). It was strong, it was rough, it was the only legal thing I've consumed that made me see interesting colours in front of my eyes.

    897:

    BEER is much better Re the Larry Kudlow complaint about J. Biden forcing people to drink plant-based beer mentioned on cstross twitter, why does Mr. Kudlow think that Grain won the Sumerian Debate between sheep and grain? Dumb, that man is. I mean, the entities in the hall drank wine, and enjoyed sweet beer. (And seriously, beer was being brewed long before then.) (Translation) 65-70. They drank sweet wine, they enjoyed sweet beer. When they had drunk sweet wine and enjoyed sweet beer, they started a quarrel concerning the arable fields, they began a debate in the dining hall. 71-82. Grain called out to Sheep: "Sister, I am your better; I take precedence over you. I am the glory of the lights of the Land. ... 92-101. Thereupon Sheep answered Grain: "My sister, whatever are you saying? An, king of the gods, made me descend from the holy place, my most precious place. All the yarns of Uttu, the splendour of kingship, belong to me. ... ... Then Enki spoke to Enlil: "Father Enlil, Sheep and Grain should be sisters! They should stand together! ... But of the two, Grain shall be the greater. Let Sheep fall on her knees before Grain. ... From sunrise till sunset, may the name of Grain be praised. People should submit to the yoke of Grain. Whoever has silver, whoever has jewels, whoever has cattle, whoever has sheep shall take a seat at the gate of whoever has grain, and pass his time there.

    SotB @ deleted: grep: Moscow Rules. As in "worse than"? Working assumption. Make clouds in the Sky, Make Rainbows during Thunderstorms. Freya, large green dragonfly. It's Spring in my physical location, FWIW. Should read what "Control" is about -- and trawl up that one lone picture provided (Black Stone / Iron Horse-shoe Nail / Lucky tri-hole Rock). House of 13 Suns. Post is still there, images (I recall another image though) too. I loved that Competition Time entry. Anyway, read.

    898:

    All of this tea commentary and nobody has quoted the Avatar tea quip yet:

    Uncle Iroh : Euch! This tea is nothing more than hot leaf juice.

    Prince Zuko : Uncle, that's what ALL tea is.

    Uncle Iroh : How could a member of my own family say something so horrible!

    899:

    JReynolds @ 835: Sturmbannführer Wernher von Braun received a similar deal from the Americans.

    Not really comparable. The rockets von Braun was developing were a legitimate weapon of war, not murder by medical experimentation.

    Rockets were in the same class as strategic bombing. The Soviets did much the same with the Rocket Scientists they captured.

    900:

    Ima Pseudonym @ 853:

    Greg Tingey @848:
    > Didn't Larry Niven suggest that a bacterium evolved to eat PVC, so humanity had to stop using it?
    > Can't remember which novel, though.

    You may be thinking of "Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater", by Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler.

    I have a vague memory that there was an actual incident some time in the 70s or 80s where a bacteria developed a fondness for the oxide coating on some recording tapes. Damaged a significant number of recorded materials; not the plastic itself, but the glue that held the coating on. Manufacturers switched to a different coating the bacteria didn't eat.

    901:

    Probably this actual person:

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

    "multiplasmid hydrocarbon-degrading Pseudomonas"

    The question you should ask is why (for example) BP used purely chemical based products (and rather toxic ones at that) to solve their $$multi billion spill and not the biological alternatives. [Hint: it's not due to Patents].

    902:

    As for 2024, surely someone can manage to get Trump hooked on fentanyl before then?

    While Trump has a lot of wacky personal habits, he is truly afraid of things to which he might become addicted. His brother died of alcoholism and it had a big affect on him.

    903:

    Since we now have the Lawyer approved removal of name and so on:

    YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE THE SHIT WE KNOW.

    You literally won't: because it will break your Minds.

    Unlike, you know, that LOKI - CHAIR - BLACKHOLE comment that got removed? Your rulers are total wankers, scared TERRIFIED of us.

    And Lesbians. And the Trans. Etc.

    Here's a taster: if you're a [redacted] using [redacted] to pipe shit into MINDS, don't do this.

    Chances are some-THING who can disrupt your entire Oil Trading Network (THE most competitive of TRADING networks) in 30seconds...

    Probably can fuck your entire system "for the LuLZ".

    ~

    Hey, if anyone is counting scores, KAHANISM stuff saved your fucking souls, which is why you're all using it suddenly. You are all: well. Do a grep,

    "Happy Birthday מִיכָאֵל "

    Not. Exactly. The. Response. We. Expected.

    904: 892 - The bell/chilli subdivisions are an indication of the capcaicin level of the variety, not that they are different species!

    I've never waited for a harvested green pepper to ripen, but if you look in some shops you may find some greens in which some of the skin is starting to go orange/red. This should be enough observational evidence to convince you that colour is an indication of the ripeness of an individual fruit. Personally, I select different colour(s) based on the specific dishes I'm cooking (for example you need green bell peppers to make "$meat and green pepper in black bean sauce", but a goulash tastes and looks better with red and/or orange peppers).

    894 - Well, IME green bells taste more bitter than the (also ubiquitous in stores) red, orange and yellow ones. 898 - I can't think of a single beer (not even Anhauser-Busch products) that isn't made from plants and water! 899 - I have a 2 part answer to that:-

    A) Never seen (or want to see) Avatar. B) In the case of the specific quote, iced tea!

    905:

    Well sure, but EC was talking about recursive data (and he's right that the simple case I mentioned is fine with regexes). My point was that loading a recursive parser unrolls those recursive structures and makes it very easy to iterate them. He mentioned it being just as easy to iterate them yourself with loops, but my take is that you can get away with not studying the data all that closely with a parser. You have a sample version of the page you're scraping, say, and know the actual string that you want to retrieve from it. So as a once-off you run it through a parser that gives you a list of tokens, grep the tokens for the string you're after, then use the place in the list (which could be a tree really) to give you the equivalent for future updates of the page (assuming it's dynamic). While it doesn't hold true in all circumstances, most of the time the best code is the code you don't have to write yourself, which is just one reason to use a standard library. And this also saves cramming a lot of really crufty HTML idiom into your head and making sense of it.

    That and the interesting and fun games with Perl were always little task-specific NFAs made by combining split(), map(), grep() and join() with regular expressions in the middle. That and the famous awk emulation mode. I mean, if I had to write anything serious these days it'd probably be in python. I quite like Haskell but (like EC I guess) would only ever dabble in it. If not python, maybe javascript, just due to ubiquity. But I still have a headspace where the fastest solution to a lot of one-off problems is probably a Perl one-liner.

    906:

    I mean, if I had to write anything serious these days it'd probably be in python. I quite like Haskell but (like EC I guess) would only ever dabble in it. If not python, maybe javascript, just due to ubiquity. But I still have a headspace where the fastest solution to a lot of one-off problems is probably a Perl one-liner.

    It's kind of the same for me: my first tool of choice nowadays is probably Python. At work I use Python, Java, and then various other things for tooling - JSON and YAML seem to be common non-language specific items. I'm doing backend stuff, so this obviously affects the tools.

    At home, I mostly write Python or 6502ish assembly, for fun.

    I worked with Perl 5 and C and C++ 10-20 years ago, but all of them seemed somewhat lacking. Perl was mostly my own choice, but nowadays it's a one-liner language for me, too. I never got the hang of awk, being a bit too young and Perl being the more readable choice (ha). I've tried to learn the Unix command line tools, and some of them I use regularly, but if something needs awk, I'm faster typing that out in Perl even nowadays.

    Haskell and Rust I've dabbled with, but learning them would need a proper project, and I haven't prioritized them that high. Go is also fun (did one work project with it), but kind of too much in motion for it to be fun for me.

    Python has its problems, sure, but all languages do.

    907:

    All I know here is that out of maybe 5 different vegetables you people all just refer to as "peppers", I can't really tell which ones you're talking about at any given time. I mean I think "bell peppers" are the same as capsicums (which in my world, some in red, yellow and green), but I notice that as often as not the word "bell" is omitted and the same word refers to everything from jalapeños to Thai green chillies.

    908:

    Well, more since we infer which we mean from context or by using variantal names for chillis. The word "pepper", by itself, can mean anything from a capsicum to a Dorset Naga, taking in jalapenos and bird's eyes oh and scotch bonnets along the way!

    909:

    This is also fun for us non-native English speakers.

    In Finnish, the sweet, big kind are called "paprika", and come in various colours (red, yellow, orange, green at least commonly available). The small spicy ones are "chili", though occasionally they are referred to by the trade name, so "jalapeno", "lemon drop" or whatever.

    "Pippuri", straight from "pepper" is then the spices like black pepper (and different colours, like red ones). Sometimes "chilipippuri" but at least to me that's dried and ground chilis.

    So when talking about paprika in English I'm always confused what is what. I think in some places the Finnish paprika is also paprika in English...

    910:

    Yes. And I agree with Pigeon - much of my scripting and Python is to fix up such abominations. As someone said, keep it as simple as possible, but no simpler. I taught that people should, in general, use the same structures in their code as in the algorithm (i.e. iteration should use iteration, and recursion should use recursion, etc.) Unfortunately, that isn't always possible, and that's the point where the trouble starts.

    I use a fair amount of shell scripting (yes, all those utilities and more), but shell error and exception handling is DIRE, and I move to Python when that starts to be necessary. In the past, I have done that in several other languages including C and even Fortran 66 (NOT great for text handling!)

    912:

    The rockets von Braun was developing were a legitimate weapon of war, not murder by medical experimentation.

    Built by slave labour under horrible conditions. 20,000 workers killed making the rockets.

    https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140905-the-nazis-space-age-rocket

    913:

    Yes. However, if he had been tried, he might have been convicted of involvement, but I doubt that he would have got a long sentence (let alone execution). JBS is right that the cases are not comparable.

    914:

    Juniper does it, even in the UK, I have read that a lot of other plants do, too, and I have observed it with several 'weeds' in my garden (*). I believe that some such variations have been observed to transmit through seed, but could be misremembering, and they have certainly transmitted through vegetative reproduction (e.g. 'bush ivy' and many 'sports') and reverted, too.

    (*) Quite a few grow more compactly, produce smaller leaves (often shaped slightly differently) and flower earlier in dry conditions. They grow bigger, lusher and eventually produce more seed in wetter ones.

    915:

    Not really comparable. The rockets von Braun was developing were a legitimate weapon of war, not murder by medical experimentation.

    Von Braun was quite happy to build his rockets using slave labour on starvation rations and to order execution of slaves who were suspected of sabotage or insufficiently enthusiastic in their work. (So, eh, just a slightly more exaggerated version of Elon Musk.)

    Leaving aside the legality of building WMDs, Von Braun committed crimes against humanity while wearing an SS uniform. Which were then whitewashed by the US government.

    916:

    As the Tom Lehrer* song says:

    Once they go up Who cares where they come down That's not my department Says Wernher von Braun

    • Well known American satirist, for those not in the U.S.
    917:

    We'll have to agree to differ. I dislike the flavor. Try and find either actual sweet Italian frying peppers, or the cubanelles, and see if you like the taste better.

    918:

    Early/mid nineties - I know it was before '94, when we relocated to Chicago - we took my late wife's mom to a Fiesta (huge supermarket that carried international foods as well) (also, rather not many of them), and got some Brooke Bond. First time I tasted tea made with it was the first time I said, "Oh, so this is what they're talking about the flavor".

    Really. Try some tea sold to Americans as "tea" - Tetley, Lipton, or office tea. Then tell me what's down market.

    919:

    Bell peppers - I left a link to a pic, here's a text. https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/foods/bell-peppers

    Notice that they say the green is "not ripe" and "bitter".

    The sweet Italian frying peppers, and the cubanelles, are all sweet while green.

    920:

    For Pigeon & others who get utterly pissed-off with goods & tech that we can't fix when somfink goes worng ... HERE - a BBC R4 programme on that very subject.

    Troutwaxer I think most of us know who Tom Lehrer is - I even have a book of his songs ...

    921:

    I figured the people from the U.K. would know.

    He spent the last decades of his life teaching musical theatre about 300 miles from where I live. I should have moved there and connected him with my kids!

    922:

    Paws @906 "A) Never seen (or want to see) Avatar.". Important to distinguish the somewhat OK SF movie 'Avatar' with the standard Hollywood plotline, white saviour and predictable outcome from the thoroughly excellent 'Avatar: The Last Airbender' animated series, which is in a league of its own and should be the gold standard for YA animation and films.

    English taxonomy here in Canada has all 'peppers' ranging from Carolina Reapers to bland Green Bell peppers under the 'pepper' category. Normally we will say 'Red pepper' or 'Jalapeno pepper', though in the more specific cases we might drop the 'pepper'. Green bells are nice chopped small and mixed into something like a salad or omelette. On their own they are boring compared to almost every other variety of pepper.

    Dear wife loves tea, and sprinkles the house with teacups through the course of the day. Part of the duties of the younger sprog when loading the dishwasher is to do a teacup sweep of the various usual spots. As for types, no idea, I don't like any of them.

    I disagree that Von Braun was building a legitimate weapon of war, in the sense that I believe deliberately targeting civilian populations is illegitimate to begin with. I include Allied forces in that calculation. No, I don't know what else I might have done in their place, but I reject the notion that it is somehow legitimate.

    923:

    whitroth @ 918

    About 20 years ago I tried red bell peppers and they were too sweet for my taste. That's why I think "sweet Italian frying peppers" would be too sweet for me.

    924:
    Legend has it that when [ Arthur C. ] Clarke and his friends from the British Interplanetary Society heard a V2 while drinking in a pub, they stood and cheered the space age that was about to begin.

    https://www.nature.com/articles/452387a

    925:

    Didn't Larry Niven suggest that a bacterium evolved to eat PVC, so humanity had to stop using it?

    My recollection is Niven's bacteria ate semiconductors resulting in the infrastructure levitating the floating cities failing. Eating something more high tech than PVC, at least.

    926:

    Yes, that was part of the plot of Ringworld. In later books it turns out that this was a deliberate attack by the Puppeteers in order to destroy the dangers to Puppeteer civilization represented by the Ringworld.

    927:

    Robert Prior @ 913:

    The rockets von Braun was developing were a legitimate weapon of war, not murder by medical experimentation.

    Built by slave labour under horrible conditions. 20,000 workers killed making the rockets.

    https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140905-the-nazis-space-age-rocket

    Charlie Stross @ 916:

    Not really comparable. The rockets von Braun was developing were a legitimate weapon of war, not murder by medical experimentation.

    Von Braun was quite happy to build his rockets using slave labour on starvation rations and to order execution of slaves who were suspected of sabotage or insufficiently enthusiastic in their work. (So, eh, just a slightly more exaggerated version of Elon Musk.)

    Leaving aside the legality of building WMDs, Von Braun committed crimes against humanity while wearing an SS uniform. Which were then whitewashed by the US government.

    There were approximately 600,000 civilian deaths from strategic bombing by the USAF, RAF, Luftwaffe & IJA Air Service. Are all the pilots, bombardiers & air crew guilty of committing crimes against humanity?

    How many of these guys were held responsible for their actions during WW2? Or if convicted, served more than perfunctory sentences because of their "value" to the victors? Von Braun was not unique in skating out from under.

    Nor was the U.S. the only power among the victors who whitewashed the activities of former Nazis who had some exploitable value.

    928:

    John Hughes @ 925

    It's pure legend. You could not hear a V2 and that's why it was more a terror weapon than a V1.

    929:

    Niala My father, who returned briefly to London in mid-1944 ( Just after D-day ) said that the V-1's terrified him & everybody - much nastier than the bombers of 1940-41 ( Which was before he went off to Scotland to make & test explosives ) but that the V-2's were not usually a bother. If you heard the bang, followed by the sonic boom, it was OK, it had missed you - if you didn't hear it, it was all over, anyway!

    930:

    Dude. Did you read Charlie's comment?

    To repeat:

    Von Braun was quite happy to build his rockets using slave labour on starvation rations and to order execution of slaves who were suspected of sabotage or insufficiently enthusiastic in their work.

    How many British / American / Allied civilians were murdered building British / American / Allied bombers?

    Yes, WMDs suck. Yes, using them was a crime against humanity. However, in Germany, building them was also a crime against humanity. This is not a case of 'they were all equally bad'. Von Braun should have danced the hemp fandango after the war. It's a shame he didn't.

    931:

    You could not hear a V2

    You could, just not before it hit you. there was a distinctive double-boom. First there was the explosion of the warhead, then the sonic boom of the rocket. (Or vice-versa, depending on where you were in relation to the flight path.)

    https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/v-2-the-rocket-that-launched-the-space-age/

    932:

    Robert Prior @ 932, John Hughes @ 925

    So, Arthur C. Clarke and his chums would lift their pints and drink to the space age once they heard the second boom?

    933: 910 - Well, in UK English (no comment on USian, Canadian or Australian) "paprika" (sweet, smoked or hot) is a red powder made by drying the flesh of peppers (varieties used vary). Black or white pepper means either whole seeds or a powder made by drying the seeds from the fruit. 913 - That's true, as far as it goes, but I've yet to see evidence advanced that even indicates that von Braun personally knew of the conditions that A-4 or Feiseler Fi 103 variants were assembled under. NB, I'm saying that the evidence I personally have seen would result in a Not Proven or even Not Guilty verdict in Scots criminal law. I am open to seeing further evidence provided it originates from study of German WW2 records. 919 - It's commonly believed in the UK that USians can't make tea (and my experience suggests that they only make good coffee by accident). 923 Para 1. OK, makes that read "James Cameron's Avatar (2009)" then. Totally agree about the quality of "Avatar: The Last Airbender" though; even M Night Shangalangadingdong couldn't utterly destroy the ideas there (but don't watch the series and then his film). 923 Para 2 - I think UK and Canada are capable of confusing ourselves with the taxonomy of peppers unless we have specified varieties or have clear photos of the finished dish? Mikko please note. 928 - Not convinced that carpet bombing of $city (or $town) with conventional dumb "iron" bombs is the same thing as "strategic bombing". In this context I am equating the Luftwaffe bombing of, say, Clydebank ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clydebank_Blitz ) with the much later RAF bombing of, say, Dresden.

    I would describe "Strategic Conventional Bombing" as being the attacks carried out by 617 and 9 Sqdns (RAF) on Axis marshalling yards and U boat / S boat pens using Tallboy and Grand Slam in which hardly a single civilian residence was even damaged beyond broken windows although the targets were heavily damaged or destroyed.

    933 - No. The first boom was the explosion that may have killed someone; the second was the shock wave from the supersonic flight catching up with the missile.
    934:

    There were approximately 600,000 civilian deaths from strategic bombing by the USAF, RAF, Luftwaffe & IJA Air Service. Are all the pilots, bombardiers & air crew guilty of committing crimes against humanity?

    It has been noted that Air Marshal Arthur "Bomber" Harris, who ran RAF Bomber Command, was unique among the other British armed service COs in not receiving a title or other honour after VE Day. And in Churchill having noted that if the Allies had lost, Harris would certainly have been tried for war crimes. (Specifically: he ordered the fire bombing of Hamburg and Dresden, the Dam Buster raids that drowned 30,000 German mostly-civilians in a night, and numerous other attacks on population centres rather than military targets and factories.)

    935:

    For some reason parts of the Tory press have been running stories about Harris being the saviour of the UK recently.

    No idea why. Maybe someone proposed moving a statue, or maybe they are getting their base psyched up to bomb europe.

    936:
  • I associate paprika with Hungarian goulash, and when I make home fried potatoes, and that's it.

  • Tea: I'll have you know that I follow the Orwell method for making tea (well, unless I forget, and it brews longer). On the other hand, I must agree with the Guardian article from a few years ago: when you pour boiling water into the mug, sorry, Americans, the tea bag must actually be in the mug, not merely in the room.

  • Give me a break. A lot of us know how to make good coffee.

  • 937:

    this also saves cramming a lot of really crufty HTML idiom into your head and making sense of it.

    That is, IMO, the big win. If you're really lucky upgrading the library will upgrade your ability to deal with newer HTML(s) ... because anyone who thinks HTML is A language hasn't read the spec or thought about what "embedded ?????script" actually means.

    FWIW I am starting to write scriptlets in Rust. Rather than the (ba)SH game of "what went wrong this time" or a few pages of template errors from C++, the Rust compiler is very good at "I see what you mean but the syntax for that is ..."

    OTOH Rust periodically does my head in, in a way that not even Haskell or ((((lisp)))) ever managed. Just a blank "I have no idea how to even start doing X in Rust".

    938:

    In Oz we can get quite a few tea variants in paper teabags, but sadly some switch to "biodegradable" plastic without notice (meaning "in a particular industrial composting plant in Düsseldorf") Annoyingly even some of the organic fair trade herbal infusion producers have fallen for that scam.

    I have found a few loose teas sold in cardboard, but I have to do the research every time I buy because a 200g (??) box lasts me about a year. I can even buy pasta in cardboard boxes too!

    939:

    No, the two booms of the "double boom" are only a fraction of a second apart (one boom off the nose of the object and one off the tail). Boboom. There is a surprising amount of energy in it. I have heard Concorde do it down the middle of the Channel and while it was in no way shatteringly loud, it still made the cabin roof go boioioing very noticeably indeed with the pressure pulse.

    940:

    The Dam Buster raids were not intended as attacks on population centres, but to disrupt the operations of industries in the highly significant Ruhr district by depriving them of water and electricity. (To be sure, it could have worked better than it actually did.) IIRC about 1500 of the drowned people were POWs or slave labourers or some other embarrassing category living in a camp that Bomber Command didn't know about.

    941:

    IIRC Orwell gets one important point dead wrong: he recommends pouring the tea into the cup first and adding milk after. The correct method is to put the milk in first so it doesn't get scalded, as per Arthur Dent's instructions to the Nutrimatic drinks machine.

    942:

    Operation Paperclip and its Soviet counterpart are one of those things that make the skin crawl of anyone who reads about them. But at the same time, our space age was raised out of the ashes left by the Nazi technological tradition, like it or not.

    As for MacArthur, remember that a few years after he more-or-less unilaterally rehabilitated the Japanese royal family and fellow travelers to fend off what he perceived as the rising threat of Japanese communism after the end of WW 2, he was relieved of his command in Korea by Truman for the political statements he made. Unit 731 was a horror, one of many committed by the Imperial Japanese Army (cannibalizing people in New Guinea is one of the ones you probably haven't heard about), but heck, Mitsubishi makes decent cars now and the Japanese are loyal allies, right?

    943:

    Re using the output from slave camps.

    I'm not saying the SS were good people. Let's just get that out of the way at the beginning.

    I'm saying that evil isn't uncommon.

    Both China and the USA maintain large slave populations and a good deal of the manufactured output from both countries is slave produced. Ask yourself how likely it is that you own slave made products?

    A couple of the German car makers have been accused of knowingly breaking the law, knowingly covering up their crimes and knowing that many people (thousands? tens of thousands?) would be killed by their crimes. Do you refuse to get on a bus made by those companies? Or a taxi? You're still supporting them with spare parts sales then. If you owned one of their products did you destroy it to ensure that it was off the road and no longer supporting them with parts sales?

    Did anyone you know take those actions? Anyone you've heard of?

    Evil is everywhere around us.

    944:

    Heteromeles @ 943

    If it makes you feel any better the V2 and the space age were not the child of the Nazi technological tradition. There was no such tradition. The Nazis were bunglers in everything dealing with Science and technology. They just used (more or less adeptly) what the Prussian military tradition and other sources had put up, for whoever became the new rulers of Germany.

    In the German army there was a long artillery tradition of doing advanced research on better and bigger cannons. That's how they bombed Paris during WWI. This research was secretly turned towards liquid fueled rockets years before the nazis came to power.

    The man who organized everything in Peenemunde was not our "favorite nazi" Wernher Von Braun but a career German army officer, colonel and later major-general Walter Dornberger.

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

    The man who actually invented most of the V2's essential components was an outstanding genius, Dr. Walter Thiel, who died with all his family in August 1943, during an RAF bombing raid.

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

    There's a crater on the Moon named after him.

    945:

    I've tried to learn the Unix command line tools, and some of them I use regularly, but if something needs awk, I'm faster typing that out in Perl even nowadays.

    Fair enough; awk is not the most user-friendly Unix command - and the Unix command line is not what most people call user friendly.

    Unix expression, what's your profession? With sed and grep and awk, any data you can grok!

    (People who are not Americans of a certain age may find the art mystifying; the cartoons are spoofing the Conjunction Junction short of Schoolhouse Rock, a series of short educational animations for children.)

    946:

    It's pure legend. You could not hear a V2 and that's why it was more a terror weapon than a V1.

    Ah, the silly things we remember.... If you could hear the V1 you were safe (or at least safe-ish). The buzz bombs buzzed because of their pulsejet engines; if a person heard it above them, it was flying past. It was when the countdown odometer reached zero that the engine stopped buzzing and the V1 fell, and underneath it was a bad place to be.

    947:

    V-1 rocket THIS is why we remember. I walk past that plaque 2 or 3 times a week, it's only 420 metres ( Actual walking distance ) from my front door. As SS says & my father used to describe, you heard the buzzing rattle of the "doodlebug" & then ... it stopped. He said that the one time he was really, really shit-scared was on a train in St Pancras, waiting to go back to Scotland, when one went overhead ... & the engine timer ran out ....

    948:

    Pigeon @ 940: I have heard Concorde do it down the middle of the Channel

    I grew up in Guernsey, and there it was a regular feature of the evenings: a dull muffled "baboom" followed by a creaking noise from the entire house as it flexed in the pressure wave.

    It made into the Island Christmas pantomime once:

    [Lament about the economic situation],
    But one thing is booming and that's booming fine,
    It's Concord going over at twenty past nine.

    On the other hand when I visited my parents in law in Reading I was subjected to it's engine noise shortly after take-off from Heathrow. It was very loud; even inside the house you just had to stop talking and wait for it to go away. As an aviation geek I was like "Wow! Concord!", but I wouldn't have wanted to live there every day.

    949:

    Memorial for the Dambuster raid. The Möhne dam is in the background.

    Barnes Wallis was something of a hero to me when I was a boy; I don't know how many times I read the Paul Brickhill book. There is a this weird paradox between the peace-loving engineering geek ("boffin" in those days) and the destruction he unleashed.

    950: 937

    Para 1 - That's one of my main uses for (sweet) paprika too, (Austrian) goulash. Never tried it for fried potatoes, but will now consider it. Para 2 and 3 - Well, the only time I ever had what I would describe as "good coffee" in the USA, the hotel I was staying in made a pot that was much stronger (they said "heavier") than their usual at breakfast. I enjoyed it, as did the rest of my party, but other US guests complained.

    940 - That analysis might make sense, but I'd want to see an aerodynamics model of the double pressure pulse bearing mind that the A-4 rocket was only about 45' long from cone to fins, which gives a time between the cone and fins passing a point at Mach 1 of 0.13636 recurring seconds. At impact speed, that length is a time separation of about 0.114583 recurring seconds. So yes, if there actually are 2 overpressure pulses of similar magnitude (and hence loudness) from the rocket they'll be about 0.12 seconds (or less) apart to a ground observer. 941 - 617 Squadron RAF are officially named "the Dam Busters" (source squadron histories). Accordingly, any operation they participated in could be called a "Dam Buster raid". Calling Operation Chastise "the Dambuster Raid" is unhelpful, and ignores their subsequent service involving bombing with a circular error probable of less than 50 feet (from an altitude of between 10000 and 20000 feet, and hence also several miles up track of the target) where on several occasions they achieved direct hits on railway tracks and tunnels (or at least the ground tracks of same (Wikipedia lists several relevant operations in their items on Tallboy and Grand Slam)). 942 - Well, you've got 2 points wrong there; if the tea is in a teapot it will not be at 100C (70 to 80C is more likely) but regardless the leaf tea has been exposed to the hottest water it will meet before the tea is decanted from pot to cup. Oh and some of us don't take milk in tea. 944 - Well, I won't argue with you, but I would like to know how you are defining the word "slave". 945 - Agree, not unexpectedly. 947 - Agreed, with the note that an Fi-103 fell in a ballistic profile even after the engine cut, so if you heard the engine cut "above you" it had someone else's name on it. 950 - Likewise, with the note that I always saw geodesic aircraft construction, Tallboy, Grand Slam and the Lancaster bomber program as more relevant than the Upkeep mine.
    951:
    It's pure legend. You could not hear a V2 and that's why it was more a terror weapon than a V1.

    As the story is recounted (and, yes, it's probably apocryphal) it was because they heard nothing before the explosion that they knew it was a supersonic rocket.

    You certainly could hear the warhead explode.

    952:

    As so often, I side with Orwell, too, because you can adjust the amount of milk according to the strength of the tea. Even you would probably reach for the milk if poured a cup of my breakfast Assam :-) But I am with you for other types of tea - I don't have milk with green, oolong or even Ceylon and anything less tannic than English Breakfast.

    953:

    According to my mother, who was a physiotherapist in Barts during the war, yes, it was the V1 that struck terror into the people below. Militarily, the V2 was a waste of resources.

    And, re #935, also remember the objections to a statue of Harris being used to commemorate those who died in bomber command - including by people who had flown in bomber command.

    954:

    our space age was raised out of the ashes left by the Nazi technological tradition, like it or not.

    That's not really true.

    The Soviet program was built largely on the work of Sergei Korolev, who designed the R-7 ICBM, still flying today as the Soyuz launcher. Yes, the US ICBM program relied on captured Nazi scientists, who then moved on to NASA; but in the absence of Nazi tech? The Russians were already on their way into space, partly for ideological reasons.

    The UK got a different chunk of captured Nazi space tech and ended up using it to put a satellite into orbit somewhat later and less efficiently (then the government pulled the plug on the space program).

    My guess is that if the USA had no Nazi rocket scientists, Sputnik-1 would still have happened, there'd have been an ensuing panic, and the Apollo program (or something like it) would have just taken a couple of years longer -- possibly leading to the Soviets getting to leave the first bootprint on the moon, but not necessarily.

    (The Soviet N-1 moon rocket failed after launch three times before it was cancelled, but the fourth prototype looked likely to succeed. The usual cited reason was "it's impossible to control all the motors on a first stage with 30 engines", but SpaceX have provided a nice counter-example insofar as Falcon Heavy burns the same fuel/oxidizer mix and flies on 27 engines -- it's not an insoluble problem, it's just one that's a lot easier to solve with 21st century computers on tap.)

    955:

    JH I SUGGEST you listen to the "recorded" opinions that I & EC have mentioned, yes? Our respective parents were there, underneath those things & it was the V-1 that terrified people. Oh - & - do look at the link I provided of my local V-1 memorial @ 948?

    Bomber Harris - there was a very funny & sarcastic/dark German cartoon about that: Two statues, labelled:
    A Harris, pioneer of mass air travel & W v Braun, pioneer of space travel Quite

    956:

    paws4thot@951: #944 - Well, I won't argue with you, but I would like to know how you are defining the word "slave".

    I've always found Heinlein's definition in "Citizen of the Galaxy" a good rule of thumb:

    Being a slave means having someone to call your master and no hope of changing it.

    Its not 100% accurate; even in the ante-bellum South a slave might hope to be freed some day. But if you put unstated qualifications like "realistic" and "by your own efforts before you get too old and worn out to work" in there it fits pretty well.

    I would guess that gasdive was referring to this.

    957:

    The usual cited reason was "it's impossible to control all the motors on a first stage with 30 engines", but SpaceX have provided a nice counter-example insofar as Falcon Heavy burns the same fuel/oxidizer mix and flies on 27 engines -- it's not an insoluble problem, it's just one that's a lot easier to solve with 21st century computers on tap.

    Considering that the computer tech available to the USSR was based on discrete transistors (no integrated circuits) I'd says you're comparing rowboats to ocean liners in terms of the leap in tech to get from there to now.

    Computers today are just blazing fast AND SMALL compared to back then.

    In a similar vein there was no way could they re-use boosters back then like SpaceX (and others soon) do today. The real time computing power just wasn't there to control the re-entry. And I suspect that GPS helps a lot with this.

    958:

    You might be amazed what you could do with discrete logic, but your point about the size is the key. You could probably have controlled 30 motors - but your payload would have been the controlling computer and nowt else!

    959:

    The first US ICBM was based on the Atlas rocket and the first US astronaut to orbit Earth (John Glenn)went up on an Atlas rocket.

    The Atlas was a USAF rocket made by Convair and designed by a Netherlands citizen, Karel Bossart, who had come to the US to study at MIT and stayed there during the war.

    At the time the US had 3 separate orbital rocket programs. Von Braun and his team were working for the Army program, independently from the USAF program.

    Bossart and the people at Convair had studied the V2s that had been brought back from Germany but eventually came up with completely new technologies, like the balloon tank.

    Von Braun had heard of the balloon tank and he thought it was loony. A rocket that would deflate like a leaky balloon!

    So, I think that even without Von Braun the US would have been in a close race to the Moon with the USSR.

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

    960:

    Yes, that's half of what I was referring to. The other half being the similar system of re-education camps run by the Chinese.

    I'd never created a formal definition, but this one from the wiki on 21st century slavery aligns Well with my thoughts.

    Quote: According to American professor Kevin Bales, co-founder and former president of the non-governmental organization and advocacy group Free the Slaves, modern slavery occurs "when a person is under the control of another person who applies violence and force to maintain that control, and the goal of that control is exploitation".

    961:

    You might be amazed what you could do with discrete logic, but your point about the size is the key.

    I learned computer design on my own with some friends just after 7400 logic came out. I remember when we could buy a 74181 4 bit adder WITH CARRY for something like $4.

    Which was a huge reduction in size. But Intel was big on 4004 and talking about the 8008. And this was in the early 70s. Long after the designs of the USSR and USA moon rockets.

    Even then I doubt that the control systems would deal well with coordination of such engine counts. Now you can put a full fledged computer onto each valve and pressure gauge.

    962:

    Well, my first job involved programming a Ferranti Mercury, which was built in 1958 - for an n-D fluid dynamical problem :-) And I worked with many of the the people who built Edsac and, more relevantly, a lot of the I/O devices that were used on it and later. The discrete logic of 1960 was far more flexible and powerful than most people realise - but, as you said, it wasn't small.

    963:

    They were using discrete relay logic as a constraint checking layer in nuclear refuelling machines at least into the 80s. Easier to verify than software.

    Apparently the potted logic boards weren't ready in time for the first fuelling of one of the Heysham plants so they had engineers with truth tables standing around pulling the breakers powering the motors instead.

    964:
    The UK got a different chunk of captured Nazi space tech and ended up using it to put a satellite into orbit somewhat later and less efficiently (then the government pulled the plug on the space program).

    You understate the craziness of the British space program. They didn't launch a satellite then cancel the program.

    They cancelled the program, realised they had a launcher and a satellite hanging around and said, "hell, why not" and launched it. Luckily it worked.

    965:

    Weird spam -

    Just got an email from one of the Royal Bank of Scotland's Board Directors asking whether I'd had an opportunity to review some previous info he'd sent. Very vague messaging - basic heads-up that the author is crap at biz communication or that the comm is bs/unreliable/evil.

    Of special interest this time is that there is a real person by that name at that org/bank. Very scary if spammers are now using real people's names/orgs to pass through spam/security filters.

    I don't think I've ever looked up RBS data - not even to see how it or any other Scottish banks are doing vs. British (London-based), US or EU banks. Curious how/why name/email got picked for this message - therefore this question: do bad guys usually sift through user 'history' files to identify topics/sites of interest to help target likely prospects and/or topics to reference in their spam messages?

    966:

    That's not quite right. According to Boris Chertok, Korolev's deputy, the Russians sent a lot of people to Germany to study rocket design after the war, and since they controlled all of East Germany they captured two trainloads of German equipment and massive amounts of scientific/engineering documentation.

    And they did take some of the German scientists who were in East Germany, though the word Chertok uses in his book, Rockets and People is "specialists." (I think the book's multiple volumes are available online.)

    "Addressing all of us, Serov asked us to give some thought to making a list with brief descriptions of those German specialists who in our opinion might be of use working in the Soviet Union. To whatever extent possible, we would not take superfluous specialists. We were to hand over our lists to Gaydukov. The German specialists that we selected would be taken to the Soviet Union regardless of their own wishes. The Americans had designated the German specialists whom they needed “prisoners of war.” We would not act like that. We would allow the special- ists to bring along their families and all of their household effects. We would know the precise date very soon. There was already a resolution to that effect. All that was required from us were fully-verified lists without errors."

    967:

    gasdive Re. slavery - exactly. Meanwhile, are the statue-topplers protesting outside the PRC Embassy, or those of the African countries who sold the slaves, way back when? Of course not - dead locals are a much safer target, the hypocrites.

    EC for an n-D fluid dynamical problem Oh dear, trying to understand fluid flow - been there, done that, got the t-shirt ....( I was trying to photograph sections of a fluid flow, or get a working model of a "controlled waterfall" (No can do - Karmann-strasse effects ) - or ...

    John Hughes It was even worse that that. It was the personal pet hate of a junior minister, who publicly said that "There was no money in space" The Madwoman of Grantham. She followed that up by ensuring that there was no follow-up or reserve, by jumping up & down in big boots on the remains, especially later, after she pushed Ted Heath over the rail.

    968:

    Of special interest this time is that there is a real person by that name at that org/bank. Very scary if spammers are now using real people's names/orgs to pass through spam/security filters.

    You're way behind. My clients get emails from "management" to "accounting" asking for wire transfers and similar.

    boss@bigcompany.com is real and in the FROM. You have to look at the headers to see it is really from lkasdfj.com.xy and know to toss it.

    Other than the accounting folks NEVER send wire transfers.

    969:

    Ok, what I do - and my former manager, an ex-pat from Leeds, thought was not unreasonable - was that since I was not making a pot, but in my mug, first I poured the boiling water in, then the milk.

    When I make a pot of tea, I put the milk in first. But I want tea and boiling water together first, without the milk lowering the temp.

    970:

    I find awk generatlly friendly... FOR A PROGRMMER. And the Unix command line not user friendly... as compared to what? Was MS-DOS more "friendly"?

    971:

    "Stop talking and wait"? That's true for any large airport at rush hour.

    The three weeks that my late wife and I lived in a fan-friend's condo (they were getting divorced), about two or three miles due east of the control tower at O'Hare, between about 16:00 and 18:30, every four minutes or so, all conversation stopped as a large passenger jet went over a few hundred feet up. Every day.

    972:

    Oh, you're talking about coffee in hotels, not coffee shops, or in someone's home. In that case, I won't argue much.

    At home: Columbian supremo, mild roast, NOT refrigerated, grind for 15 sec, put in drip pot, gets you quite good coffee.

    Which reminds me of a party my late wife and I had in '96. A co-worker, who drank 6-8 cups of office "coffee" a day, went into the kitchen, and came out with a cup, took a sip... and looked at us, and commented, "You like strong coffee....."

    973:

    "Very scary if spammers are now using real people's names/orgs to pass through spam/security filters."

    Eh? They've been doing that since forever. Spoofing the "From:" header is exactly as easy as providing a genuine one, and it's not much more difficult to scrape the Companies House website and make up real-looking email addresses for all the company directors you want.

    What is more disturbing is the apparent ubiquity of shitty email clients that do their best to suppress every possible detail that tells you whether it's real or not. Spoofing the envelope-from header is a lot more difficult and spammers pretty much can never do it, but people these days all seem to insist on using the kind of clients that don't allow you to know such a header even exists. I have seen people posting screenshots of emails purporting to be "From: Massive Breadhead <m.breadhead@rbs.co.uk>" and asking "is this real?" - which from their screenshot it does indeed appear to be - when I have received the exact same email and it has been clear from the very first line that it is really "From gftu58@tuu97jelfkubsft.cn".

    And all email clients which render HTML need to be devastated with fire and the sword and then more fire and then the smoking ashes ground to impalpable dust and trampled and then pissed on by a radioactive tyrannosaurus that excretes gamma rays, for reasons notably including that their extreme suitability for cloaking spoofs makes them Cthulhu's fucking gift to spammers.

    974:

    And the reason that the US didn't beat Sputnik... yeah, the US Navy had a Redstone, ready to go, and the US Air Force got all pissy, and kept them from adding the one additional stage - one? a few? small rockets, that would have put the probe into orbit about a month earlier.

    Ah, yes, intra-military rivalry.

    975:

    Oh, you hadn't heard? They've been doing that for a couple of years. Several companies were bilked out of millions when a financial officer was convinced that the email to transfer money to an account was from the CEO.

    The phrase you want is "spear phishing".

    976:

    "And all email clients which render HTML need to be devastated with fire and the sword and then more fire and then the smoking ashes ground to impalpable dust and trampled and then pissed on by a radioactive tyrannosaurus that excretes gamma rays, for reasons notably including that their extreme suitability for cloaking spoofs makes them Cthulhu's fucking gift to spammers."

    Esp if they don't offer plain text, or make HTML the default, and make HTML the DEFAULT of what you're sending... where did you get that radioactive T-Rex? I'd like one....

    And before anyone argues, here's the first few lines of an email from a council member I got a bit ago: @media only screen and (max-width: 620px) { table[class=body] h1 { font-size: 20px !important; margin-bottom: 10px !important; } table[class=body] p, table[class=body] ul, table[class=body] ol, table[class=body] td, table[class=body] span, table[class=body] a { font-size: 16px !important; } table[class=body] .wrapper, table[class=body] .article { padding: 10px !important; } table[class=body] .content { padding: 0 !important; } table[class=body] .sidebar { padding: 0 !important; width: 100% !important; text-align: left !important; } table[class=body] .container { padding: 0 !important; width: 100% !important; } table[class=body] .main { border-left-width: 0 !important; border-radius: 0 !important; border-right-width: 0 !important; } table[class=body] .btn table { width: 100% !important; } table[class=body] .btn a { width: 100% !important; } table[class=body] .img-responsive { height: auto !important; max-width: 100% !important; width: auto !important; } table[class=body] p.caption { font-size: 12px !important; } } @media all { .ExternalClass {

    977:

    Whitroth @ 972: about two or three miles due east of the control tower at O'Hare, between about 16:00 and 18:30, every four minutes or so, all conversation stopped...

    Yes, but this was 23 miles west, and it was only Concord. Nothing else was noisy enough to be noticeable.

    978:

    And the reason that the US didn't beat Sputnik...

    No.

    The reason the USA didn't beat Sputnik was that President Eisenhower ordered the military to let the Soviets get theirs into orbit first.

    Recall that at that time the CIA believed in the Missile Gap, and was sending U-2s over central Asia to photograph Soviet ground forces. But the Soviets were very close to being able to shoot down the U-2s (as indeed they succeeded in doing in 1960), and the A-12 "Oxcart" was neither ready for prime time nor had the range to do the precise same job. (A-12 was the predecessor of the SR-71.)

    Spy satellites were clearly about to be the New Hotness, but Eisenhower was concerned that sending one up might be mistaken for an ICBM strike, which was a big no-no.

    But by letting the Soviets go first, he set a precedent for treating satellite launches as peaceful, and then went to the negotiating table to establish an "open skies" treaty. Which made things a lot safer when the USA started launching Corona spy satellites in 1959.

    979:

    Regarding scam emails - turning on spf record checking at your spam filter service can work wonders with these

    Only drawback is you suddenly realise how many legitimate external sendmail services different companies use (invoices, infomails, news etc etc)

    980:

    Concorde used four military-grade jet engines, the RR Olympus series. Other planes that were similarly equipped were nuclear bombers (Vulcan, Victor, Valiant). Noise abatement was not part of their design.

    There was a bad accident with a Concorde, a fuel tank was punctured by runway debris on takeoff in France resulting in a fire and a crash with all aboard dying. The planes were grounded for a couple of years while the fuel tanks were modified to make them safer.

    The BBC held a live TV event for the return-to-flight first takeoff from Heathrow airport after they were cleared for flying again. They had a Concorde pilot providing explanations about the plane to the BBC commentator. The cameras switched to a rear view of the Concorde at the end of the runway in a long shot.

    Commentator, standing beside the cameras a couple of kilometres away -- "How will we know when it's ready to take off?"

    Concorde pilot, trying hard not to laugh -- "Oh, don't worry, you'll know."

    Four red circles appear under the wings as the engines go to reheat and a few seconds later the noise arrives, obliterating all possibility of an audible commentary.

    981: 953 - If you make tea that strong, I'd expect you to provide a jug of hot water for guests. Milk affects the flavour of tea, as well as the temperature and dilution. 957 and #961 - Now instance where there is legal slavery (meaning permitted by statute law) in the USA. 971 - We might also ask the same question about VMS? 973 - I see your point, but I start with UK dark roast, or Belgian dark roast when I can get it. 981 - para 1 - I don't actually recall a V-bomber having reheat.

    Paras 3 to 6 - LOL, lots.

    982:

    I don't actually recall a V-bomber having reheat.

    They didn't, but the engines were noisy buggers anyway. Concorde loaded with fuel for a Transatlantic run was too heavy to take off without some extra assistance so the variant engines with reheat were developed from the original Olympus design. There were plans for a Concorde B which would have more efficient engines and not need reheat but they never came to anything.

    Someone I knew was a farmer in Lincoln and they had a bomber airfield not far from their home. Every now and then in the 1960s the RAF would hold an unannounced QR flight, four Vulcans taking off in a hurry and scattering in all directions ahead of an incoming decapitation strike by Soviet missile warheads. Having that happen outside your window at four in the morning was a loud wake-up call, exacerbated by the thought that it might be for real this time and the sun would rise in the north today.

    983:

    Knew most of that, remember the accident.

    Like the interview....

    984:

    The most annoying part is when you reply saying "I have no idea what this gibberish you sent me is supposed to mean" and they have no idea what the quoted content means either.

    There's a couple of places I deal with largely because when I asked them to include a plain text part in their emails they did so.

    The worst are places where the email only renders properly in gmail. I'm somewhat surprised that anyone other than google would think that that is a good idea.

    985:

    Wow! China expects the first population decline in 2020 since 1949. This wasn't expected to happen until 2030. This probably explains why the government purged feminist accounts off their social media.

    https://nationalpost.com/news/world/china-to-report-first-population-decline-since-1949-despite-relaxing-one-child-policy

    A few points 1. South Korea also had a population decline last year.

  • Apparently the Great Leap Forward didn't cause a population decline. It stretches credulity, but then again, Japan's population only declined in 1944 and 1945, so it's possible, I guess? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#Vital_statistics

  • Taiwan also had a population gain of ~440k since 2010, so they probably also experienced a population decline? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan

  • Perhaps Mongolia and North Korea are only East Asian countries not to experience a population decline?

  • China's population in 2010 was 1.34 billion

  • India's population is 1.36 billion, so it may soon overtake China?

  • Maybe this will end paranoid fantasies about China attempting to conquer Siberia? Especially if the current census shows that Manchuria lost people.

  • 986:

    Ioan Except totalitarian dominant regimes deny population loss even as it's happening & try miltary adventures to try to bolster their apparent power. Putin is the current poster-boy for this lunacy, but if the Han get the disease ( Se also: S China Sea ) then it's going to be rough

    987:

    I well recall Perl 4.03, 5.00 and 5.001 all responding differently to the same command.

    What a joy that language was.

    That was in 1996, I have done my best to avoid using it ever since and fortunately my next job was working on PV-Wave/IDL/C for 20 years.

    988:

    "Now instance where there is legal slavery (meaning permitted by statute law) in the USA."

    I can't parse that sentence.

    Are you saying slavery is illegal in the US now, though its specifically allowed in the constitution? ie. There's no statute that allows slavery. If so you're wrong.

    https://uslaw.link/citation/stat/46/391

    Are you saying that it did happen but doesn't happen "Now"? If so you're wrong

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Prison_Industries

    Or are you mixing up Slavery (legal in the USA) with Slave Trading (illegal in the USA)? If so, it's an understandable confusion. You can keep Slaves, but not own them, trade them, buy them, breed them, sell them or keep their offspring (for long). They have to be captured from the wild and then transferred to slavery by means of a bunch of paperwork. It's usually presented to the captive as "you can quietly be a slave for 2 years and then we'll let you go, or you can spend everything you own trying not to be a slave in court for 2 years, after which we'll hold you for 20 years". Then they sign something to say they agree, that counts as "conviction" and they're a slave. 98% take the deal. You'd only take the court option if you were innocent and could prove it, and afford to pay the huge costs. Even so, 93% of those who take the court option are found guilty.

    "United States Attorneys' Annual Statistical Report for Fiscal Year 2012" https://www.justice.gov/usao/reading_room/reports/asr2012/12statrpt.pdf

    The US holds about 2 million Slaves by this method at any one time. Half the number held in 1860, but the 1860 number includes babies and old people, so probably similar number of workers.

    989:

    "reheat" or "afterburner"

    I think the later is a better description of dumping fuel into the exhaust to make the engine more of a rocket.

    990:

    But the Soviets were very close to being able to shoot down the U-2s (as indeed they succeeded in doing in 1960)

    Yes. And no.

    Until that fateful flight all U-2 overflights had been big arcs in and out of the southern border of the USSR. No time to develop a track and get rockets fired where they thought the U-2 might be in 30 minutes or so. Plus the arc gave the pilot the ability to vary the route a bit.

    Gary Powers's flight was the first (and only) flight where the flight path was in on the southern border with a planned exit over Norway. This path allowed the SAM crews to make reasonable assumptions about where the plane would be and "line up the shot". Plus they were expecting it to a large degree.

    US CIA/military wanted more details inland. Big oops. If they had waited and kept the U-2 on the quick in and out flights there might never have been a shoot down.

    Or not.

    991:

    A disdain for perl was the main reason I didn't get into web stuff in the mid 1990s. A decision that has worked out quite well for me long term.

    I appreciate the skill that can go into crafting executable line noise but I don't want to work with it.

    992: 983 - OK, I can agree all of that, with the note that IIRC even Concorde only used reheat for take-off, initial climb-out and to accelerate from about M0.9 to M1.1. OTOH the Tu-144 most certainly did require reheat for an M2.0 cruise. 989 - If you're now attempting to argue that providing training and work opportunities for incarcerated felons is "slavery" which is how I read your cite, then I suggest that, rather than accusing the World superpowers, "physician, first heal yourself". 990 - "Reheat" is the term normally used by the aviation community, including specialist journalists: "Afterburner" is a term usually misused by mass media reporters.
    993:

    providing training and work opportunities for incarcerated felons

    My understanding is that "voluntary" prison labour is something the USA gets upset about when other countries do it, and likewise "education" of inmates. See, for example, the prisons China runs for its Muslim citizenry which are different from the ones the US runs for its black citizens in many important ways...

    There's also, from what I've read, a wage-depressing effect rendering prison "skills" unsaleable outside prison because those jobs are now done by people grateful for the opportunity to work for much, much less than minimum wage. So while you may think that "prison cook" is a valuable skill in much demand outside of prisons, the articles I've seen suggest that the opposite is the case.

    This article attempts a degree of balance: https://www.dressember.org/blog/is-prison-labor-slave-labor-a-look-at-both-sides

    This one points out that it's used in your refugee concentration camps too: https://www.freedomunited.org/prison-labor-and-modern-slavery/

    Many of the "voluntarily employed" consider their condition to be slavery: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/23/prisoner-speak-out-american-slave-labor-strike

    994:

    Here in Oz, my wife and I have found we prefer leaf tea from Madura Tea, based in Victoria. I think they source tea from a variety of sources and blend their own specialty teas.

    Their Earl Grey (which we've come to prefer for our usual brew) is one of the few that don't use synthetic bergamot, and they've avoided going down the disgustingly floral route that boutique tea makers seem to think is required.

    Of course, as it's something I like, Coles stopped stocking it so we order it direct from Madura now.

    As for process, I grew up putting the milk in first, but am now vehemently of the opposite opinion, as milk is an additive to the tea, not the other way round. Plus, no risk of scalding as my preference for strength involves whether or not the spoon stands upright or not, so it's hot but not boiling when it hits the milk. Of course, putting milk in Earl Grey automatically marks me as a barbarian...

    995:

    Your last sentence is describing relatively recent tribalistic fetishism. Both terms were used in the aviation community from the 1940s onwards, as synonyms (in this context); I can't tell you when that changed.

    996:

    paws4thot @ 993: providing training and work opportunities for incarcerated felons

    In addition to the points made by Moz, the inmates are often not allowed to work in the fields they have been "trained" for after release. Sometimes there are explicit barriers, such as a prohibition on felons working as hairdressers. Other times it is possible in theory but there is a thicket of regulations, parole conditions, certification boards etc who just make it impossible in practice.

    See https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/01/california-incarcerated-firefighters-prison for one example.

    997:

    On another topic, can I suggest taking a close look at The Course of Empire, a series of five paintings by Thomas Cole produced in the 1830s. Click on each painting in the cycle, zoom in to 100% and spend some time looking around. All of them are filled with detail and reward close examination.

    998: 994 - Here in the UK, an inmate spending 3 years as a "prison cook" can, not will, can be released with a recognised catering qualification identical to one gained at a catering college. I can offer similar arguments in other lines of work, including auto mechanics and secretarial work, and if you do a 6 year plus sentence you could be released with a university degree.

    You see why I would argue that incarceration is not necessarily a form of slavery?

    996 - I'd rather be correct than fashionable; this is a rare case where I can do both at once.
    999:

    Of course, putting milk in Earl Grey automatically marks me as a barbarian...

    Milk in tea is fine, though it suits some teas and not others. On the other hand I've sort of come to think of bergamot in tea as a bit like menthol in cigarettes: something you might dabble with for a bit but ultimately gives you a bit of a distorted sense of how things are supposed to taste and feel. I don't dislike Earl Grey as such, but for the long haul, especially in a situation where I'm relying on several strong cups of tea to get through some sort of mental task, I'd rather do without the flavouring.

    1000:

    Elderly Cynic @ 996 (reheat and/or afterburner)

    If I can trust the Wiktionary one is a noun and the other one is a verb.

    Noun

    reheat (plural reheats)

    (aeronautics, chiefly Britain) An afterburner.

    Verb

    reheat (third-person singular simple present reheats, present participle reheating, simple past and past participle reheated)

    (transitive) To heat something after it has cooled off, especially previously cooked food (also in figurative senses). I’m reheating some leftovers for dinner.

    (intransitive) To become hot again after having cooled off (also in figurative senses). He put the soup on the stove to reheat

    1001:

    "Someone I knew was a farmer in Lincoln and they had a bomber airfield not far from their home. Every now and then in the 1960s the RAF would hold an unannounced QR flight, four Vulcans taking off in a hurry and scattering in all directions ahead of an incoming decapitation strike by Soviet missile warheads. Having that happen outside your window at four in the morning was a loud wake-up call, exacerbated by the thought that it might be for real this time and the sun would rise in the north today."

    See here for a taste of what that would have sounded like;

    https://youtu.be/8Wemyw-5czU

    Of the V Bombers, only the Vulcan B2 used the Olympus engine. The version used in Concorde was closer to the engine that was under development for TSR2. A Vulcan was used to flight test the Concorde engine.

    1002:

    paws4thot @ 994: Here in the UK, an inmate spending 3 years as a "prison cook" can, not will, can be released with a recognised catering qualification identical to one gained at a catering college.

    I completely agree that the UK system is vastly superior to the US one. But this conversation started with a complaint that the US is treating people as slaves.

    Once the prison-industrial complex in the US gets it's hooks into you, it never really lets go.

    1003:

    You can't :-) According to the OED, both are nouns when used with this meaning.

    1004:

    Meanwhile, are the statue-topplers protesting outside [ the embassies of ] the African countries who sold the slaves, way back when?
    How could they? None of those countries exist any more, they were destroyed by the colonising European powers, all of which, including Britain, used impressed labour in their colonies up until the 20th century (which appears to fit your definition of slavery).

    1005:

    I may be out of date, but I remember when only a Rolls engine offered "Reheat", a GE or P&W had an optional "Afterburner". A regional variation, though "Reheat" has an attractive informality about it, and if ever you use the term, I'll know what you're referring to.

    1006:
    and if you do a 6 year plus sentence you could be released with a university degree.

    Myra Hindley got her OU humanities degree the same year as my mum.

    Mum was a bit pissed that Hindley got a better class of degree than her, but said, "Oh well, I suppose she had more spare time to study".

    1007:

    :-) , and of course, that was what was unique about the Vulcan. Not the noise, but the fact that it was a heavy bomber that could loop and roll.

    1008:

    Niala @ 945: The man who organized everything in Peenemunde was not our "favorite nazi" Wernher Von Braun but a career German army officer, colonel and later major-general Walter Dornberger.

    That's kind of the point I was trying to make. Von Braun, for all of his Nazi party connections, did not organize the slave labor factory. Others - Dornberger, Arthur Rudolph and others were more directly responsible.

    There were a lot of Nazis besides von Braun who should have been hanged, but weren't. He isn't even high on the list.

    1009:

    On the subject of prisons and prison labor, it's worth remembering a few things about the U.S. specifically. First, the U.S. imprisons the largest percentage of our population than any other country in the world, including North Korea. We also arrest and imprison Black people for drug crimes at four times the rate of White people, even though White people use more drugs, and Blacks tend to get longer sentences, so there's an immense racial disparity involved with all this which makes it pretty dodgy. Seventy percent of the people in prison are racial minorities.

    Second, prisons in the U.S. have pretty much abandoned the idea of rehabilitation, and "have you ever committed a felony" is a standard question on U.S. job applications. You do the math!

    Third, prisoners in the U.S. are a heavily exploited population which must purchase everything at highly inflated prices, so it's highly unlikely that they'll get to keep any of the money they earn in prison.

    Fourth, prison labor (at the state level) is frequently leased to corporations which specialize in exploiting prisoners, so there's a not much logic to the idea that "there's work to be done at the prison." Nope. There's work to be done for Chevron. And of course there's profit to be made from putting people in prison, which is not the kind of incentive I'd like to see presented to our politicians.

    Proponents of prison labor claim it cuts down on recidivism, but I suspect a lot of those studies are paid for by companies which either provide or profit from prison labor.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison%E2%80%93industrial_complex

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline

    1010:

    Milk in Earl Gray? Barbarian!

    No, I only put milk in tea that can handle it - black, and Ceylon. I don't use milk in anything else, not Earl Gray, not Constant Comment (tm), and certainly not teas like oolong or jasmine.

    1011:

    From what I've read by/about Von Braun, I am reminded of what I've read from '69, where there were pilots in 'Nam who claimed they had no idea we were on our way to the Moon, and people working at the Cape who claimed they had no idea we were in a war in 'Nam.

    Wilful ignorance, along with overwork.

    1012:

    people working at the Cape who claimed they had no idea we were in a war in 'Nam

    Well, strictly speaking you weren't.

    Legally speaking it wasn't a war, at least not according to the American government. Just as the bombs dropped on Laos weren't attacks on a neutral country…

    1013:

    Speaking of which, here's a drink to Michael Collins.

    One more gone....

    1014:

    Something completely different ...

    If I'm going to cook Polish sausages & sauerkraut for supper, what is a good second vegetable to serve with them?

    1015:

    Carrots? And, for starch, potatoes.

    1016:

    Last night, I made chicken and lentils. Note to self: don't buy red lentils again, just the regular brown. Red lentils boiled before I turned it down - like 10 min I was away, and they turned to mush.

    But good though. I think it was a Moroccan influenced recipe.

    1017:

    Got a tip from the coach (my ex wife): Boiled shredded beetroots with smetana and horseradish

    1018:

    And/or pickled gherkins of course...

    1019:

    Four walkers and six who went at least partway round left. Apollo 8 the only intact crew.

    ObXKCD

    1020:

    See, I'd take that as meaning that red lentils cook much faster than brown (or puy if they're a different species to brown).

    1021:

    Re: 'The worst are places where the email only renders properly in gmail.'

    Agree - guess they're unaware of how many different 'office' software users there are. Or maybe this is some orgs' passive-aggressive [i.e., yet legal] way of ensuring ticked-off customers don't contact them thereby allowing them to maintain willful ignorance about problems (esp. at the Board level) the rest of their industry is facing.

    Re: 'Spear phishing' (976 - Whitroth)

    Times must be pretty desperate if I'm on such a target list so I'm guessing that the petty scammers have decided to up their phishing game/protocols.

    1022:

    Well, strictly speaking you weren't.

    It was a weird time to be in the US.

    I was born in 54 so I was 6 in 60 and 20 in 74.

    I have memories of the space program. And of the Viet Nam war. But they seem to exist in separate memory buckets of my brain.

    Plus another few buckets of things like civil rights and assassinations.

    It was just flat out a strange time. I'm glad the Internet wasn't around. Things might not have recovered.

    1023:

    Times must be pretty desperate if I'm on such a target list so I'm guessing that the petty scammers have decided to up their phishing game/protocols.

    They go after any and everyone they can. And if you bite they collect your bank logins and such and then ignore you for 6 months or more while collecting stats about you. Then put your banking logins and similar for sale on one of the dark web bazaars. They wait a while so they can gather stats on you. Bank account in $city/$state/$country. Phone numbers inlucuded. Average balances across 4 accounts is $$$$ and is in the following banks.

    The "more reputable" of these will even give minimums of how much they can extract at the time of the sale.

    So they might sell you as someone with an average balance of $140K and sell it for $5k.

    Whee.

    1024:

    With luck, this graph will go upwards few years from now

    1025:

    "You see why I would argue that incarceration is not necessarily a form of slavery?"

    No. No I don't see why you would argue that.

    No one said incarceration was slavery. So there's no reason to argue it.

    Anymore than I would argue that hats exist. No one is disputing the existence of hats. Why would you argue?

    But having said that, this is the first mention of the argument you've been making. All the other posts have been arguing that the US doesn't hold slaves, which is more akin to arguing that hats don't exist.

    1026:

    Madura Tea

    I remember that website. I have never dared buy from them since there's no useful information on their website, and they don't answer questions 😒. Is their loose leaf tea in cardboard (other than the caddy stuff, obviously)? And are their tea bags home compostable? Also, WTF is an "Enveloped Tea Bag"?

    https://www.maduratea.com.au

    I might have to try them anyway, since they have chamomile flowers as an option (I have grown those, they're really annoying to harvest)

    1027:

    This gets quite complicated. Much of what the U.S. police, justice system, and the lawmakers get up to is to attempt to continue slave-like exploitation of black and brown people. Some of this is directly intentional, in other cases it's as a side-effect of the ideal of profits. You can find both issues at work if you dig enough, and racism is certainly involved.

    1028:

    It probably means a tea bag that comes in its own little envelope. That does happen sometimes.

    1029:

    Paws ( Lentils ) Yes, they do & Puy are different to brown - puy are usually green.

    (Tea) - my local "nisa" doesn't do loose tea, but I noticed that their boxed tea-bags were clearly labelled "No horrible plastic in here!" - or words to that effect.

    1030:

    I have those, because the fruity "herbal infusions" lose flavour really quickly in a box (I keep the loose ones in a sealed jar like all sensible people do and that also works).

    1031:

    To go with sausage and sauerkraut: red cabbage. Slice it thin as though for coleslaw, poach it in apple cider vinegar with some caraway seeds and maybe brown sugar to taste. Include fried potato (clean and dice the potatoes, steam till almost soft, heat oil in a pan, combine and go as hot as you can for a few minutes, scrape into serving vessel of some kind).

    1032:

    Hmm, so fermented finely sliced cabbage with unfermented finely sliced cabbage.

    Perhaps some mashed potatoes with your fried potatoes.

    1033: 1030 - Lentils - Thanks; I'd not have sworn as to whether Puy were green or brown not least because to my eyes they're a sort of olive colour.

    Tea - My Nisas both did loose and teabag. The nearest they come to "plastic" is cellophane wrapping a cardboard box, and some brands using a foil plastic to break, say 80 bags down into 2 x 40.

    1032 - Not to nit pick, but that looks like "fermented or pickled cabbage two ways" to me.
    1034:

    "I aim for the moon but sometimes I hit London" - Werner von Braun, head of the Nazi rocket program AND NASA (which must have made for an interesting CV)

    The first object to reach space was a German V-2 launched in 1942, which took the first pictures from space.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z6EqhF0xgg

    The Germans planned both the first ICBM capable of hitting America:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AQIyXV5nGI

    And almost carried out the first submarine launched ballistic missile attack on New York from a launch pad pulled behind a modified U-boat:

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

    And were about to test the first intercontinental bomber

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hWLp0g7jYk

    All they lacked was an atomic warhead, but German nuclear research was way behind the Americans (after Germany led atomic science in the 1920s) and going in the wrong direction. But they did develop a nuclear pile for power generation (they were thinking of building nuclear powered U-boats).

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrCc9XfNoBE

    (Each video is only 15 minutes long and utterly fascinating)

    1035:

    I can imagine von Braun's NASA job interview going something like this:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTIfU4zMQWY

    1036:

    I've been buying from them for over a couple of years, since Coles dropped the Earl Grey and only 2 "independent" grocers nearby still stock it at jacked up prices.

    I've had no hassles with Madura or their site, and delivery is pretty fast.

    I usually get around 2kg at a time (10 x 200g boxes) - costs just over $50 which nets me free delivery, and they have a reward points system where you get a point for every dollar spent or something, but they apply it as a discount to the current order and remaining points get tacked onto the next. Probably due to stock up again, now I think about it...

    Previously it came in a foil bag inside a cardboard box, but the last delivery just had the bags.

    I tend to avoid tea-bags like the plague - don't know what an "enveloped tea bag" is. They provided a sample of their Assam tea bags (no loose leaf version last time I ordered - if they do one I'll pick up a box for variety) and it was an ordinary tea bag.

    I haven't ordered for a few months so they might have changed a few things.

    1037:

    Just had a look at the site again - looks like the tea bags come in individual foil envelopes, so that's probably what the 'Enveloped Tea Bags' are. No loose leaf Assam yet, though...

    And I misremembered the points system - it's put towards the next order, not the current one. I suspect it would not be so advantageous to start off doing it right away. Anyway, if you order 11 boxes you tend to get the 11th one free and delivery is gratis.

    1038:

    I presume an "enveloped tea bag" is one that's individually wrapped. No, I've never seen them either!

    1039:

    They are popular in cheap hotels and B&Bs, in those little tea & coffee sets that you aren't supposed to use.

    1040:

    Speaking of the Chinese demographic cliff, their recent census shows that China's population actually fell last year for the first time since the Cultural Revolution.

    That wasn't supposed to happen for decades.

    https://www.ft.com/content/008ea78a-8bc1-4954-b283-700608d3dc6c

    China is set to report its first population decline since the famine that accompanied the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong’s disastrous economic policy in the late 1950s that caused the deaths of tens of millions of people.

    The current fall in population comes despite the relaxation of strict family planning policies, which was meant to reverse the falling birth rate of the world’s most populous country.

    The latest Chinese census, which was completed in December but has yet to be made public, is expected to report the total population of the country at less than 1.4bn, according to people familiar with the research. In 2019, China’s population was reported to have exceeded the 1.4bn mark.

    “The pace and scale of China’s demographic crisis are faster and bigger than we imagined,” said Huang. “That could have a disastrous impact on the country.”

    China’s birth rates have weakened even after Beijing relaxed its decades-long family planning policy in 2015, allowing all couples to have two children instead of one.

    1041:

    They are also very common in expensive ones, and when you ARE supposed to use the equipment.

    1042:

    Here's another strange attractor for denizens of this blog: SMBC's take on revolutionary things that end in "-coin".

    1043:

    I use Nano-giga-bit-byte-nybble-6G-coin myself.

    1044:

    I always interpreted the UHT milk of unknown age as a warning to stay away.

    1045:

    It's funny how what has been called the "demographic transition" for decades is being rebranded as "the demographic cliff." Alas, this is supposed to happen, so we might as well get used to the fact that humans are all human, and stop worrying about who gets to migrate.

    Since I know a lot of first generation Americans (to pick on one group that white males tend to get all swivel-eyed about), I can say with strong certainty that their values and ethics are more stereotypically American than mine are, and I've got American ancestors going back to the early 18th Century. Anyone who worries about how Americans are going to lose their culture need to chill out, have some sushi (Japanese), Pizza (Italian), hotdog with sauerkraut (German), or a taco (Mexican) and really chill out. Immigrants do an extremely good job of not just carrying on American culture, but enriching it. You want to be stuck eating hoe cakes and salt pork washed down with corn whiskey? I don't.

    As for the Chinese population drop, my heart goes out to the Uighurs and Tibetans who are forced to be counted as Chinese. Apropos of nothing, it would be fascinating to find out which populations within the vast entity that is China are actually disappearing the fastest. If it turns out to be the small minorities, talking about the Chinese demographic cliff would be like 19th Century white Americans complaining about Indian genocide being an example of how Americans were going to go extinct in a few decades.

    1046:

    Once we're allowed out properly I'm planning on trying a USB drink chiller to see if one will keep proper milk cold enough when I'm away.

    1047:

    I thought it was most amusingly appropriate when I received a spam that called it Bitcon in the subject line.

    1048:

    Nice. Very nice.

    1049: 1040 - Which surely demonstrates that I don't use the tea bags? (or the milk or sugar) 1041 - And wasn't Wuhan province in China also the first observed outbreak of Covid-19? 1045 - See above in this post.

    Oh and nearer to OGH's original point, Michael Collins is dead alas.

    1050:

    That's my guess. Also, they're smaller than brown, about half the volume. I got them to make dishes look prettier - obviously, not doing that again.

    1051:

    Love it... though at this point, mine are long, long gone.

    1053:

    Here's another strange attractor for denizens of this blog: SMBC's take on revolutionary things that end in "-coin".

    I thought of this blog when I read the Nanacoin strip, too. Both Nanacoin mining and security are clearly superior to Bitcoin's model.

    1054:

    There's a category of slaves in the US who aren't in prison-- they're trapped doing work, and as far as I can tell, it happens to people whose right to be in the US is non-existent or in question. Maybe they entered the country illegally, or maybe their passports were taken.

    They're doing domestic labor, sex work, farm labor, or factory work.

    1055:

    Re the mentions of the ocean surface above (inc Screams of the Butterflies at 819), essay (primer style) in PLOS Biology, with 104 references. The author has been (working on) getting traction on twitter for it. (twitter thread - https://twitter.com/RebeccaRHelm/status/1387872707379974150 )

    The mysterious ecosystem at the ocean’s surface (Rebecca R. Helm, PLOS Biology, April 28, 2021, open access essay) This Essay will introduce you to the neuston, their connections to diverse habitats, the threats they face, and new opportunities for research and discovery at the air-sea interface.

    Worth at the very least a solid skim and a dive into the references that catch interest. (There are some references for plastics pollution and (bad) cleanup proposals.)

    1056:

    About 400,000. That's the illegal slavery.

    1057:

    Perhaps some mashed potatoes with your fried potatoes.

    Yes, absolutely! Also dumplings (knödel) and if possible side bread. All the carbs under liberty's masterful shadow!. The main trick to getting through (aka "demonstration eating") a course of schweinshaxe is to use one's fork as a fulcrum for the steak knife to lever the crackling away from the meat in a way that avoids flicking hot fat over one's dining companions.

    1058:

    Or fragmented crackling - we were with friends in Munich when our dining companion managed to cause explosive disassembly of his schweinshaxe's covering.

    Happily the gentleman on the next table over was most understanding when Peter apologised: he appreciated the foreigner's liking for the local dish

    1059:

    “ 2. Apparently the Great Leap Forward didn't cause a population decline”

    Yes, but look at the Chinese demographic pyramid. Those born in the Great Leap Forward would now be 58 to 62 years. You can see the gap there - about 40 million people missing:

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#/media/File%3AChina_single_age_population_pyramid_2020.png

    Really what China is seeing is the end if the Demographic Payoff. That is a payoff some countries get as they transition to being richer: birth rates drop quickly and so you get decades where you have relatively few elderly and also few kids - so a time of more workers and fewer dependents.

    But population decline and increase is tricksy. Here in my country, large numbers of young immigrants mean more growth than you’d expect. New Zealand, with a very low birth rate of 1.69 kids per woman, has gone from a pop of 4 million to 5 million in the last 17 years giving us a severe housing shortage. Not just housing: We’ve nowhere near increased things like transport and water supply infrastructure by 25% in that time.

    1060: 1051 - Yes, and my "lesson learnt" is to not cook red lentils as long if I want them to retain texture. 1055 & #1057 - And I have no issue classifying those people as slaves and/or in illegal and involuntary confinement. 1058 & #1059 - The Scottish answer is to not indulge in this Anglo-German obsession with "crackling".
    1061:

    I just spent a week with a friend who is on a meat+fat diet to manage his diabetes, when my diet is near-vegetarian with carb loading. The contrast was pretty extreme, but we managed (although the whole stove and surrounds got splattered with the olive oil he fries with). OTOH he struggled with me eating hot cross buns at him :)

    It was a reminder that humans can eat just about anything and survive.

    1062:

    OK, I compared notes with a microbiologist - pharmacologist before posting this, but olive oil is a fat.

    1063:

    And in the UK - with the active support of the government :-(

    I don't know if, in the USA, they are also legally prevented from leaving their job, no matter how badly they are abused; with the penalty of imprisonment, (effectively) having their passport and back pay confiscated, and expulsion. No, we are not drifting into fascism - we are already a fascist country, and the grip is being tightened.

    I intensely dislike the abuse of the term by both sides, because slavery is a continuum, not a category. Even today, many people who are not categorised as slaves are more enslaved than some people who are. Simply moving the category boundary isn't a solution.

    1064:

    It was a reminder that humans can eat just about anything and survive.

    We're really no good at carrion. I mean, we can eat a bit of it if it's fresh. But compared to wolves, for whom it just isn't edible till it's really quite ripe, we're amateurs.

    1065:

    I think the pertinent expression is: it's all good fun till someone looses an eye?

    Seriously, getting sweet red cabbage and sauerkraut on the same plate is usually a result of plate swapping and "I'll eat your x if you eat my y" bargaining, or more to the point "if you don't want that z, I'll make short work of it". Or even better: "instead of ordering 'without aa', can you get the aa on a side plate?".

    1066:

    Really what China is seeing is the end if the Demographic Payoff. That is a payoff some countries get as they transition to being richer: birth rates drop quickly and so you get decades where you have relatively few elderly and also few kids - so a time of more workers and fewer dependents.

    What really magnified both the posit early economic benefits and the coming economic penalties was the artificial one baby policy. China's birth rates did not drop naturally like India's currently is nor is China a country open too immigrants like America.

    1067:

    You're no fan of well-hung game, are you :-)

    https://honest-food.net/on-hanging-pheasants-2/

    See Brillat-Savarin in that - and I can witness that he was describing normal practice! There are plenty of (true) stories about removing the maggots before cooking game, and some of not removing them :-)

    Actually, most wolves live more on fresh meat, and we are pretty comparable in our ability to eat carrion (though were are more dependent on cooking). Neither of us compare with real carrion eaters, of course.

    1068:

    Canadian wolves eat only fresh meat. There are enough moose around!

    https://www.canadiangeographic.ca/article/animal-facts-wolf

    As to carrion eaters, a lot of terrestrial invertebrates beat everyone else.

    1069:

    Moose wants to be served fresh, like venison, because it should be cooked blue to rare?

    1070:

    I intensely dislike the abuse of the term by both sides, because slavery is a continuum, not a category.

    Thank you! Exactly!

    1071:

    Don't ask me. I never cook. The only meat I eat is in a toom temperature tuna salad.

    1072:

    That's OK. It was sort of academic anyway since I can't buy moose other than by importing it from Canada, and I may not be able to do that just now because WrecksIt.

    1073:

    Any thoughts on this apparently interesting development? Beware journo hype, of course.

    1074:

    You're no fan of well-hung game, are you :-)

    When I was 16 I had a summer job at a laboratory, cleaning test tubes and the like.

    Ever since then, the smell of well-hung game reminds me of the stench of dead rats decaying in a dumpster in a heat wave. It's not merely inedible, it's projectile-vomit-inducing.

    1075:

    For example, in the mid-nineties, the DoJ came in, in force, somewhere around LA: there were literal slave buildings, people brought from southeast Asia, forced to work 12-16 hour/day making clothes, could not leave.

    Or then, there's my close friend from Serbia who was brought over on a promise of a job, and then was given one paying a lot less, and blackmailed about being sent back. She gave evidence, and the scum spent two years in jail. She's now working for asylum, since they'd kill her if she was sent back.

    1076:

    Moose wants to be served fresh? Have you asked the moose?

    1077:

    It's a continuum/continuing development. About 15 years ago, I applied for a job at the NIH/NCI, and they were using bio/silicon sensors that would blink when they detected what they were looking for.

    I expect this to continue.

    1078:

    Well, biochemically, well-hung game isn't much different from dead rats decaying in a dumpster :-)

    1079:

    ilya187 @ 1025: With luck, this graph will go upwards few years from now

    Yeah, but I won't be on it.

    1080:

    Well there is the concentration of smell in a mostly closed box vs the great outdoors. Depends on where the hanging is done I guess.

    1081:

    Bellinghman @ 1033:

    Hmm, so fermented finely sliced cabbage with unfermented finely sliced cabbage.

    Perhaps some mashed potatoes with your fried potatoes.

    Thanks to all for the suggestions. I remembered I have DEUTSCHE KÜCHE Onion Egg Spaetzle in the cupboard so I made that. The package makes 2 servings, so now I only have to figure out what else I use that as a side dish for before it goes off in the back of the fridge.

    But that's a problem for another day. Maybe it's time to make another batch of Beef Stroganoff (recipe makes 8 servings & I can freeze 7 to eat later).

    PS: Enveloped Tea Bag

    https://a1coffee.net/media/catalog/product/cache/abb265195b7cbf268e16320ddc6f1e07/b/i/birchall_english_breakfast_tea.250_enveloped_tea_bags.side.open.jpg

    I'm guessing it's a sanitary serving thingy so that no one else can get their cooties on your tea bag before you use it.

    1082:

    dpb @ 1045: I always interpreted the UHT milk of unknown age as a warning to stay away.

    The stuff I get from the grocery store has a "Best if used by:" date imprinted on the carton. You just have to check the dates occasionally to be sure you use it before it expires.

    1083:

    Damian @ 1058:

    Perhaps some mashed potatoes with your fried potatoes.

    Yes, absolutely! Also dumplings (knödel) and if possible side bread. All the carbs under liberty's masterful shadow!. The main trick to getting through (aka "demonstration eating") a course of schweinshaxe is to use one's fork as a fulcrum for the steak knife to lever the crackling away from the meat in a way that avoids flicking hot fat over one's dining companions.

    For the last year my only dining companion has been of the small, furry crumb-snatcher variety.

    1084:

    Damian @ 1065:

    It was a reminder that humans can eat just about anything and survive.

    We're really no good at carrion. I mean, we can eat a bit of it if it's fresh. But compared to wolves, for whom it just isn't edible till it's really quite ripe, we're amateurs.

    OTOH, I read once that humans can find food in places where a goat would starve.

    1085:

    Niala @ 1072: Don't ask me. I never cook. The only meat I eat is in a toom temperature tuna salad.

    Cooking is one thing I can do during quarantine that gets me on my feet and away from this damn computer.

    Plus a little variety & it's cheaper than eating out all the time.

    1086:

    jbs @ 1083

    While full size cartons have a date, I think the onees referred to are the tiny single portion ones you often find a handful of in hotel rooms along with the tea bags etc. They don't have a date in my experience (I assume there will be one on whatever container they are supplied in) and therefore you have no way of knowing how old they are. If I am needing to use one I open it carefully and examine the contents before adding to my beverage.

    1087:

    OTOH, I read once that humans can find food in places where a goat would starve.

    Certainly: goats don't fish. OTOH, there are places where humans can't live without relying on goats or other ungulates, notably the central Asian steppe.

    Humans can't eat a vast majority of life on this planet, because most of that life is in the deep ocean and subsurface bacteria, which we couldn't eat even if we could get to it. Without fire, our diet is sharply limited, and it's not clear to me that humans can complete our life cycles on a diet of only raw food. With fire and technology to acquire and cook food, we have a more diverse diet than any other mammal species on this planet--as a species. There are plenty of foods that only some people can tolerate or are willing to eat.

    1088: 1083 - Isn't the date on "Utterly Horrible Taste" 'milk' more of a "won't actually cause food poisoning if used by" date? 1086 - Cooking is fun in itself, and more so when you can cook for other as well as yourself, but needs must either way on that one. 1088 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruitarianism and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism
    1089:

    This is totally off-topic, but I just got my second Pfizer shot and so far I'm not feeling awful or anything. We'll see how the next couple hours go, but I'm EXTREMELY JAZZED over this!

    1090:

    Many of us could certainly live on uncooked vegetables and milk, but it is unclear whether we could live without either cooking or milk. Outside the humid tropics, we certainly couldn't (unless the Inuit could, which I doubt), but a diet of tropical vegetables and raw meat (mainly invertebrates) might be possible.

    1091:

    In the UK, enough people make tea in their hotel rooms that I have never encountered an even slightly off UHT milk whatsit. Yes, they are ghastly, but needs must :-)

    1092:

    Good one.

    Had mine yesterday morning, no reaction at all.

    1093:

    Cool. Unfortunately, starting to feel a little worse.

    1094:

    Congratulations! I got my 2nd Pfizer shot about the same time. So far, aside from general laziness, I think I felt a little holier for a little bit. But the feeling passed.

    1095:

    paws4thot @ 1089: #1083 - Isn't the date on "Utterly Horrible Taste" 'milk' more of a "won't actually cause food poisoning if used by" date?

    All I know is that the cartons all say BEST IF USED BY: and then there's a date stamped in the little box below it. What "best" means in this context I have no idea, but I suspect it means it won't spoil before that date. For regular "fresh" milk, I read the "best by" date indicated that properly refrigerated milk won't spoil for at least a week after the "best by" date.

    I don't find the taste overly objectionable.

    1096:

    I just got my second Pfizer shot ... I'm EXTREMELY JAZZED over this!

    Congratulations! I'm low-priority so I'm still waiting.

    The off-topic news that has me grinning and giggling is Rudy Giuliani getting raided by the FBI. By this point everyone in Trump's orbit should expect such a possibility, though apparently Giuliani said, "Well, I’ve had [the evidence] for two years, and I haven’t destroyed it. And they also got it from the iCloud! So there is no justification for that warrant.”

    1097:

    Troutwaxer @ 1090: This is totally off-topic, but I just got my second Pfizer shot and so far I'm not feeling awful or anything. We'll see how the next couple hours go, but I'm EXTREMELY JAZZED over this!

    FWIW, I had only a slight soreness at the injection site the next day. No worse that I usually have from getting any shots.

    I've read it's primarily younger folks who have the strong reactions. I've seen it suggested they have stronger immune systems that put up major fight, and that the flu like symptoms are an indication the first shot did its job.

    1098:

    Here's three more (note timestamps and contextual / societal ideological spin drift):

    Scientists find way to remove polluting microplastics with bacteria

    https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/apr/28/scientists-find-way-to-remove-polluting-microplastics-with-bacteria

    ~biofilms + gene dissolution after precipitation, essentially. Hard to scale unless you start gene-splicing some of the more basic critters.

    Scientists weaponize bacteria to fight microplastics in the environment

    https://thehill.com/changing-america/sustainability/environment/550804-scientists-weaponize-bacteria-to-fight

    It's American Politics: watch for the new phase where N.Korea is using it to somehow 'mine' CN Spratley islands EEZ's.

    The Race To Develop Plastic-Eating Bacteria

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottcarpenter/2021/03/10/the-race-to-develop-plastic-eating-bacteria/

    Run a search on "Ideonella sakaiensis" (mostly Japanese research) and the six year journey it has been on. Again: almost impossible to scale since, well: you probably do not want this in the general environment if you're running an oil / plastics based civilization.

    ~

    The real hint is the 'why' to 'why don't oil spills get treated bacterially rather than chemically' even considering the cost ratios.

    Fourth link since we'll tie this in a nice little bow - search term is "Fish have been swallowing microplastics since the 1950s" (Phys org, Guardian etc) and why we meandered around mentioning various BioWeapon tests in the Korean war (100% done, find the designs for why cluster munitions were really developed back then - given they lacked the 'oomph' per pellet of their 90's resurrected ancestors).

    ~

    Simply put: you focused on the wrong kinds of industries. Which is ironic, given the sheer metric tonnage of free organic matter you've wasted over the last 70 years. Any sane civilization would have used that as feed stock for a burgoning biological driven industry, not a chemical one.

    Anyhow, back in the Dog House for mentioning certain things. Four days, people losing Faith.

    1099:

    the flu like symptoms are an indication the first shot did its job,/i>

    That's how I took mine — as proof that I didn't accidentally get just saline :-)

    1100:

    *Note on that Hong Kong Polytechnic University paper:

    Look into the French model for waste treatment (has always been biological rather than chemical) and 100% you should be dusting all waste treatment sites with it at the tertiary stage (just before you release into the wild / fourth stage treatment back into potable).

    The more depressing thing is that (breaking the rules, but come on, the research is there already) you're in 2021 only just thinking about this stuff.

    You're 70 years in arrears mainly because the Wrong People[tm] got scared of the Possibilities[tm] then spent another 50 years making Anthrax and other nasties before noticing that no, people like Saddam Hussein only use such weapons when they've not got a fucking airforce to dump a bazillion tonnes of dumb bombs on a population.

    All while dumping DDT / organophosphates / any muck they could so there's not much real life left.

    And you've no idea about the scale of 70 years of wasted organic material: you literally burnt your planet down because oil could be 'managed' more easily.

    ~

    You're running at 7% odds survival. "We respect Democracy in OUR House". ;.;

    1101:

    I've had two armfuls of salty water in that case...

    1102:

    Anyhow, Happy Beltane - however Virtual Feather it has to be this Year.

    WHY?

    The murmur of a bee A witchcraft yieldeth me. If any ask me why, 'T were easier to die Than tell.

    The red upon the hill Taketh away my will; If anybody sneer, Take care, for God is here, That's all.

    The breaking of the day Addeth to my degree; If any ask me how, Artist, who drew me so, Must tell!

    If you're gonna do that entire 'Invade MINDS' stuff, don't get caught out by a simple switch / tryptch setup.

    "My Voice is my Password"

    personholdingsignsayingmoran.jpg

    1103:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1091: "...but it is unclear whether we could live without either cooking or milk."

    I live without cooking or milk but I have to admit that I cheat: I slightly reheat (the verb) soya-based fake meats and I eat 500g of yogourt evey week.

    As to the Inuit, their diet is a way of thinking:

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

    1104:

    I slightly reheat (the verb) soya-based fake meats...

    I'm fine with fast food but I think that if a meal has reheat (afterburners) it's much too fast!

    1105:

    More crazy news from south of the border…

    In Florida (where else), it is now illegal to require a vaccination for Covid, or to discriminate against someone who doesn't have one. It is, however, apparently allowable to discriminate against someone who has been vaccinated — such as by firing them.

    Any guesses as to which party refused to pass a rider (to the bill that prohibited discrimination against the unvaccinated) that extended it to also prohibiting discrimination against the vaccinated?

    1106:

    Speaking of yummy food, have you seen Angry Inuk?

    http://www.unikkaat.com/projects/angry-inuk/

    1107:

    It's not clear to me that either cooking or milk are universal. AIUI the habit of drinking other mammals' milk is necessarily only exhibited by those populations who have lost the gene for adult lactose intolerance, and there are more people around who have not lost it than who have. As regards cooking, I am pretty sure that there are - or at least were until they were "discovered", comparatively recently - people who live in places where everything is either soggy or is a rock, so they don't have the option; I would imagine that they find internal parasites a bit of a problem.

    1108:

    Robert Prior @ 1107: "Speaking of yummy food, have you seen Angry Inuk?"

    No, and I'm not about to see it, because their Web site has only the trailer for it and the list of ""future" screenings stops in 2017

    I can guess from the trailer that they had communications problems with the "save the seals" bunch when producing the movie.

    1109:

    We used to know the Grant family (as in whisky), and I recall a dinner party where Doris recounted a story about visiting in the Highlands, and having some rather nice game soup with what she took to be rice. The hostess was kind enough to explain what they actually were.

    1110:

    Cooking Well, apart (at the moment) from bought onions, all my veg are home-grown & v tasty. Just finished this year's crop of a very select veg - Sea Kale ( Crambe maritima ) & am now awaiting the Asparagus to come up properly ( It's been sulking because of the lack of rain ) H @ 1088 & EC @ 1091 Without fire, our diet is sharply limited Your post reminds me to repeat a recommendation for the book on fire & cooking - Catching Fire - "How fire & cooking made us human"

    1111:

    Without fire... I still have my solar powered induction cooker :)

    1112: 1090 - Oxford-Astra-Zenica; second dose about 2 weeks ago, on and no side effects from either.

    OTOH I do know of one person who reported (on IdiotBook ;-) ) the side effect of a "lost iPad" and it subsequently turning up in an "unexpected pocket!" :-)

    1096 - The point is that, even well chilled, UHT is spoilt as a drink itself, and even as a flavouring in coffee or tea. 1098 - Well, of my Mum, my Sis and myself, we've all had 2xOAZ, and my Sis (the youngest at 54) who reported headache and shivers from the first round, is the only one to report any side effects. Also, and FWIW, I got my first dose from a nurse who was roaming the hospital I was in with renal failure trying to find people (staff or patients) to innoculate, so I'm certain it wasn't a double blind trial. 1104 - Er, 500g of yoghurt is about equivalent to 0.5l of milk. Oh and yes, food that needs reheat is probably too fast. :-) 1108 - Cooking and/or fermenting animal protein as a way of denaturing fibres in it are pretty universal to any culture I know. There may be an "unknown" tribe in the Amazon or Borneo jungles who haven't discovered fire, but I'll bet they still have a chapter of the Valentino Rossi fan club! 1111 - I didn't think you could grow sea kale in London, due to a lack of actual sea to grow it beside (and yes I know the Thames is tidal up to Teddington Lock).

    Also, in the news, Shout to James Ketchell for the acknowledgement of him being the first person to circumnavigate the Earth by Autogyro (actual distance flown 27_620 miles) and for the STEM promotions he did en route. Big thumbs down to the rubbish BBC reporting whch apparently didn't involve the 5 minutes to read the Wikipedia page, since the misreported the first autogyro flight as being by Wing Commander Ken Wallis during the filming of "You Only Live Twice" (1967 film). The actual first flight was on 09/01/1923.

    1113:

    paws Crambe maritima will grow in almost any well-drained soils with plenty of sunlight. I constructed a "raised" bed on the plot ( By digging out the surrounding paths ) & have manured/added grit + sand & turned over part of that, to ensure good drainage. From a couple of thongs, I have now got about 10 plants, all thriving - I took the "forcing covers" ( Black plastic buckets in my case ) off yesterday, so the growth will now darken down & photosynthesise nicely. That last cut went into a Risotto with home-grown giant leek & a smoked sea trout. Added chopped Wild Garlic leaf & a little bit of fresh Mint just before serving: - Very tasty.

    Oh yes, jabs: My first (Pfizer) on 19th Jan & my second 11 weeks + a day later. Zero side-effects.

    1114:

    Greg, Sans doubt from a "growing a plant" respective since almost anything will grow with appropriate drainage and lighting (and maybe temperature). I was questioning whether or not it is actually sea kale in a location where it gets neither brackish ground water nor sea spray.

    1115:

    It occurred to me to talk about how we eat goats, so there's a set/superset factor at work that aggregates what what goats eat. But that doesn't really contradict the point.

    Of course fire and cooking make all the difference. Noting that universality doesn't always run to individuals, it's worth pointing out that it does extend to cultures. And to claim that reheating preprepared soy products doesn't involve "cooking" is a bit like treating the film of the Swiss spaghetti harvest of 1957 seriously as an important documentary. Cities are built with grain, mostly and even people who live on mare's milk and raw blood only do/did so for some of the time, more likely short portions of the time.

    1116:

    It's sea kale (or seakale), because that's its name. Kale is Brassica oleracea.

    I can't grow it (or some other things) because of some kind of root-rot in my soil, but it was widely grown inland during Victorian times.

    1117:

    I had 12 hours shivering for the second dose, but the first dose exacerbated my IBS quite badly, starting about 3 weeks after the shot. I hope the same doesn't happen with the second!

    1118:

    Well, anything else I know that's "sea $plant" grows within 2 or 3 miles of a sea coast.

    1119:

    Yes. Drinking milk requires the mutation for lactose tolerance, just as eating wheat, barley or rye requires the mutation for gluten tolerance. Milk is rarely the main food, but it is a source of nutrients that are tricky to get from vegetables, especially raw ones. Meat is similar for many people.

    My point was that, in the humid tropics, there are a lot of nutritious, high-calorie fruits and nuts, which are edible raw and available for most of the year. A small amount of milk or meat is all that is needed for a complete diet. But elsewhere?

    1120:

    EC & Paws Sea Kale naturally grows along the edges of beaches, & is therefore very salt-tolerant, but with drainage & sunshine you can grow it most places. Fine specimens in the re-created Victorian garden at Downe House ( Yes, C. Darwin's place ) When I was last there, I went round the Sandwalk & noted another interesting (parasitic) plant, growing under the trees ... Orobranche minor .. a.k.a. "Broomrape" Paws Asparagus, in the wild is also a coastal plant!

    All this talk of eating cooked & uncooked food: The role of - not cooking foods directly, but BAKING as a preparation for short-term storage & consumption. The surprisingly complex set of processes involved in ... growing useable grains / treating (milling) them / mixing with water ( or other liquids ) / adding yeasts / rising & baking itself. As someone who hasn't bought a loaf or a bun for over 2, possibly 3 years, now, because I mix & bake my own ... An old technique, but not as ancient as one might think ( it says here .. ) "earliest known baking ovens approx 7600 years ago"

    1121:

    A friend recently pointed me to this article about the future half of the 21st century

    https://razib.substack.com/p/our-three-body-problem

    Here are a few interesting quotes

    "In my daily life, I spend a lot of time up to my eyeballs in direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic results. The American consumer might often be looking to DTC companies to tell them in great detail how much say, German vs. French ancestry they carry. But as many bloody wars have been fought and as many millions of lives cut short the last few hundred years over these deadly serious borders, our genes aren’t persuaded. Results no more specific than “Broadly Western European” are hardly the rousing call to rediscover their roots people crave, but as far as our genes are concerned, it’s often as good as we’re going to get."

    This brings up interesting questions. What is the border between "broader western European" and "broader Eastern European". Does BEE even exist?

    "For my money, the irreconcilable cultural poles the remaining century will bring into focus are these three ancient traditions: the broader Abrahamic West, the Chinese sphere and the Indian one."

    While I would agree with him in lumping Latin America and the Middle East into "the Broader Abrahamic West", I think he's being to rash in including Africa. Likewise, his attempts to split SE Asia between the Chinese and Indian spheres is premature.

    1122:

    ADMINISTRATIVE NOTICE: I'm getting my second AstraZeneca shot about 2-3 weeks earlier than expected, on Monday afternoon, so I may be AFK for some hours to days thereafter if I have a reaction to it.

    Also, if you're in Scotland and, like me, they try to assign you an appointment at a vaccination centre on the opposite side of the country with no public transport options at 9:30am? You can rebook it via their website once you have your username (in the blue letter). Much more convenient to use the vaccination centre a half-hour walk from my front door ...

    1123:

    Yes, but sea kale grows near pubs.

    1124:

    So far - approximately 20 hours later, the main side-effect of the vaccine seems to be an enormous level of urination and dehydration, with any other symptoms being secondary to dehydration. We'll see how today goes!

    1125:

    You can watch it here if you have an NFB account: https://www.nfb.ca/film/angry_inuk/

    Here with ads: https://filmzie.com/content/angry-inuk

    Also on Apple TV+ if you use that.

    1126:

    Thank you! I'll watch it after going out and getting my weekly supply of fake meats.

    1127:

    Most people think far too much in terms of categories, rather than overlapping distributions; it is often easy to distinguish populations but not all of the individuals. You can even distinguish mainly Celtic populations from mainly Germanic ones (and sometimes individuals) within the UK, though the differences are piffling.

    To some extent, he is right. Culturally, linguistically and to a great extent genetically, everywhere from India to Ireland (including Africa from the Sahel north) has a huge amount in common. But I don't think that he realises that the effect of western European culture on sub-Saharan Africa is much less than a superficial glance would indicate.

    1128:

    Heteromoles @ 1088: Without fire, our diet is sharply limited, and it's not clear to me that humans can complete our life cycles on a diet of only raw food.

    There was a TV programme about that a few years ago. As part of it they got 4 volunteers to spend a week eating nothing but raw vegetables (presumably raw meat was too risky). The unfortunate volunteers spent most of the time eating, most of the rest defecating, and still lost weight.

    An eminent dietician then explained that we have been cooking our food for so long that our guts have evolved to digest cooked food and are no longer capable of absorbing enough nutrition from raw food.

    I was reminded of pandas, which were omnivores (like most bears) until a couple of million years ago. They also need to spend most of their time eating because their digestive systems are not good at digesting raw bamboo, and hence they also have a prodigious throughput.

    1129:

    That is too simplistic. Yes, the problem is getting enough calories. There are a good many raw foods that are very different - an avocado is c. 300 calories, a banana c. 100, an ounce of coconut c. 100, there are many things like breadfruit, and so on. As I indicated above, essentially all are humid tropical, and in some cases (like coconut) too much causes digestive problems.

    Once you get outside the humid tropics (and, to some extent, inside them) cooking becomes essential, but as much to destroy toxins as to improve digestibility. Most gatherable starchy foods are roots, and many of them are like that; even chestnuts are.

    To Greg: no, bread baking is irrelevant. Grain growing is a recent phenomenon (only 500 generations), and our use of fire is a thousand times older. My guess is that its first use in cooking was to render roots edible.

    1130:

    An eminent dietician then explained that we have been cooking our food for so long that our guts have evolved to digest cooked food and are no longer capable of absorbing enough nutrition from raw food.

    Sounds like Marlene Zuk's Paleofantasy. https://wwnorton.com/books/Paleofantasy http://sites.nd.edu/vy-sanders/

    Not just our guts, but also our microbiomes. If you change your diet you often have digestive upsets because you have the wrong gut bacteria for your new diet.

    1131:

    Robert Prior @ 1126

    I watched "Angry Inuk" on filmzie.com and it had no ads at all. It was a good complement to the Wikipedia article on Inuit cuisine.

    1132:

    Congratulations!

    I shall now sit and grind my teeth in a corner, as despite being a year older than you, I still haven't persuaded the NHS that i'm actually eligible for my first shot.

    1133:

    Gut flora, assuredly! But, as one of those references says, this is a drunkard's walk situation (in the technical sense), and those have the property that the rate of change is proportional to the bias (selection pressure). And, as the loss of abilities almost invariably has a very low selection pressure in favour of it, the rate of change is slow.

    While we may be LESS able to survive on an uncooked diet than Homo erectus, that's a far cry from actually being UNable to, even considering a whole life-cycle. But whether we could outside the evologies we evolved in is another matter entirely.

    1134:

    I am pretty sure that there are - or at least were until they were "discovered", comparatively recently - people who live in places where everything is either soggy or is a rock...

    It is my understanding that Wales is inhabited, yes.

    1135:

    DNA testing to determine ancestry is one of those fascinating but hopeless information gathering things. Canadian/North American history is anything but simple with that stuff.

    I have a Transylvanian-Hungarian last name, from my great-grandfather, whose patrilineal heritage was certainly Hungarian but whose mother and paternal grandmother were both English. The family name goes back to the arrival of the Huns in Europe, whatever that implies.

    His wife, my great-grandmother, was a 12th generation Nova Scotian named MacMillan.

    My mother is a mix of Irish (grandad was IRA in 1916) and British. My paternal grandmother was a died in the wool Brit whose father died at the Somme but whose great grandfather was a German immigrant to London.

    My wife has Greek and Russian/German heritage, to vastly understate the complexity of that mix.

    My kids have all of the above.

    How a DNA test would determine anything more complex than 'European and historic Asian Ancestry' is impossible to imagine. There are some nifty details that can provide some fun insights, but any notion of 'heritage' must be understood as 'Human with stories'.

    There are other uses of DNA, particularly in medical research and treatment.

    1136:

    thewehie If you are over 55, you should have had your first shot, long since. Something wrong there ...

    1137:

    There are other uses of DNA, particularly in medical research and treatment.

    I don't know about these ancestry companies in Europe or elsewhere but in the US the biggest customer service issue is "what do you mean s/he is not my daughter, son, mother, father, sister, brother, cousin, whatever.

    Apparently, in the US at least, marital fidelity isn't as universal as many think.

    1138:

    re Beltane, On-point Emily Dickinson in the (northern hemisphere) Spring is very good to see. :-) (OK, it's a triptych poem with [some chiding].) Not much for seasonal rituals, but have been looking at a lot of flowers with a hand lens yesterday and today; bumblebee's perspective though I can't see the flower features visible only in UV and don't have compound eyes.

    There are few bees in my area ATM. The apple orchards appear to be drawing all the honeybees (I checked, and they do have honeybees; don't know whether the hives are local or trucked in), and there are the occasional queen bumblebees this time of year, working flowers (like a crab-apple in my garden) before their children are around to do all the work, wasps, and a large carpenter bee has been hanging around.

    Spring is on its own schedule in my area. Creatures like the ebony jewelwing (Calopteryx maculata (Odonata)) normally emerge later, as do dragonflies.

    1139:

    The surprisingly complex set of processes involved in ... growing useable grains / treating (milling) them / mixing with water ( or other liquids ) / adding yeasts / rising & baking itself.

    If anyone's feeling curious about how this happened in preindustrial times, Bret Devereaux recently addressed this in one, two, three (and a half) parts. As you say, surprisingly complex.

    1140:

    Re: 'uncooked diet'

    Wonder how many early cultures tried applying a generous salt/spice rub followed by hanging in the sun or burying in sand (or snow) for a while. Since many early settlements were around rivers and sea coasts, I'm guessing raw fish plus some seafoods (oysters) would have been part of their diets. Not familiar with the history of vinegar or sugar across early cultures but these are fairly commonly used preservatives esp. for veg/fruits. Some plant oils can also be used to extend the life of foods. Ditto drying - dates, figs, prunes, etc. This sounds like a perfect BBC documentary topic.

    And - finally got my first (Pfizer) jab! Only experienced a localized reaction - soreness spread to about half way down my arm. Second jab is in August.

    1141:

    Apparently, in the US at least, marital fidelity isn't as universal as many think.

    When I was in teacher training (in the last millennium, pre-internet), we were told it wasn't a good idea to do blood type testing and Punnet squares together — because there was too high a chance of uncovering traumatizing family history.

    I remember reading at that time that in middle-class England nearly 1/4 of the children couldn't have the father of record on their birth certificate, based on blood type. That number seems high to me and I haven't been able to find it online, so take with a large chunk of sodium chloride… but the warnings about secretly-illegitimate children go way back.

    1142:

    As the going joke on faceplant has it, have a subpoena colada....

    1143:

    we were told it wasn't a good idea to do blood type testing and Punnet squares together — because there was too high a chance of uncovering traumatizing family history.

    For a few years these ancestry companies were promoting that people give their families tests as Christmas presents. I wonder if they've stopped that now. I can imagine a lot of upset people over what they thought would be a nice Christmas gift. I suspect in many of these cases the wandering family member is likely now dead or similar.

    I have in my mind that the percentage of family trees turning up with with a non genetic surprise is a bit over 10%. But it is a fuzzy memory.

    1144:

    Apparently, in the US at least, marital fidelity isn't as universal as many think.

    In many cultures it's acceptable to obtain sperm from outside an infertile marriage, at least in those where monogamous marriage is the cultural norm. I vaguely recall this being mentioned in the bible, but I can't be bothered looking it up. The modern Christian fetish for strict monogamy (excepting only cases where all but one spouses die*), especially as publicly claimed in the USA, is unusual.

    • commonly N=1, but for example Christian and Islamic biblical marriage includes as many wives etc as the husband can afford (or four, for some Islamic branches). I assume there are modern polygamous Jews, but haven't checked.
    1145:

    I suspect in AU and the UK that most children think they came from both parents in the household excepting adoption. I know it is true in the US.

    1146:

    SpaceX Crew-1 splashed down in the dark about 10 minutes ago. Everything seems OK as they are rigging things up to pick the capsule out of the water.

    Amazing that we can watch both the SpaceX and NASA feeds in real time. At the same time. And the infrared camera views as it came down were impressive. From very long range to the current closeups.

    1147:

    Of course, and most children would be correct in that assumption.

    BUT, and this is where DNA testing is making lying harder, many children are not, and not all of those children know it. I'm only really familiar with cases where the kids know but I had a fair few friends at school who were not the biological kids of both their parents. In a couple of cases it was their actual uncle, in others it was their "special uncle", and it a few more they were adopted or fostered (three of my step-aunty's kids, for example). I assume there were more kids who weren't but didn't know, but I suspect they tend not to go public when/if they find out.

    These days there are more really blatant cases - my sister and her wife, for example, have one via a donor dad and one via adoption. It would be almost as surprising for them to both be bioparents as for human parthenogenesis.

    1148:

    SS There's an addendum on RICE & its processing too! Thanks for that - am going to keep copies & take careful notes

    Rbt Prior What's a "Punnet Square"? -- OK - just looked it up, got you.

    1149:

    I can't tell if you're agreeing with me or starting an argument. Whatever.

    These DNA services (in the US) have created 2 big unexpected issues.

    Lot's of people are discovering their DNA didn't come form the folks they though (and likely were told) it came from.

    And amateur sleuths are finding long ago cold case criminals by tracking down distant their cousins who have registered with such sites. Lots of sound and fury just now with laws being written and tossed about all of this.

    For me until we get single payer health care in the US I have no intention of using such a site.

    1150:

    it wasn't a good idea to do blood type testing and Punnet squares together

    Well the other high school genetics thing was the way brown-eye-dominant-blue-eye-recessive was taught as a single-gene trait for decades, although we know now that at least eight different genes influence eye colour. Smarter kids could take it literally and reach shocking conclusions that were perhaps not actually real. Certainly one of my aunts used to talk about which brown-eyed relatives had two blue-eyed parents. It might be a pedagogic issue: only a certain proportion of people can deal with the notion that we usually teach simplifications and outcomes that are not strictly true as a way to make it easier to explain underlying abstractions and general principles.

    1151:

    only a certain proportion of people can deal with the notion that we usually teach simplifications and outcomes that are not strictly true

    the fine print of lies-to-children, in my experience most often misunderstood by adult persons...

    1152:

    The standard figure quoted in the UK is that one in twenty people don't have the father they think. When I was doing my MSc at Leeds University the genetics lecturer was one of the founders of the local genetic counselling service. He said that the figure for their patients was one in ten. Much later, in Norfolk, I was reprimanded for ordering further tests on a patient with an abnormal haemoglobin (HbJ Baltimore) after detecting an anomalous peak in the haemoglobin A1C chromatogram. I was forcibly told that the patient probably didn't know that his grandfather was probably a US airman based locally in the war and wouldn't thank us for the knowledge. And the advice about the implications when teaching children about blood groups never reached a biology teacher I knew who asked if I could help him with blood group testing by pupils. I obtained some outdated grouping sera from a friend who was in charge of a hospital blood bank and he used these in his lessons. No consequence as far as I know but we were both naïve in not thinking of the risks.

    1153:

    I'm probably one of the adults who doesn't understand the fine print.

    To me it just looks like lazy arrogant ignorance. If you call out someone who's lying to children, in my experience, almost all of them double down on the lie. They're not simplifying, they're stupid.

    The basic premise of improving understanding by first teaching something that's wrong is just stupidity. You don't teach people to drive by telling them that you slow down by putting it in park, and then let them drive around like that for 6 years before telling them about the foot brake. Because that would be stupid.

    1154:

    I have the feeling that some (over-)simplifications are needed.

    As an example: My first contact in school (aged 10 or 11 or so) with atoms was the horribly wrong 'solar system' model with the core as sun and electrons as planets. But I am quite sure I would never have grasped the concept with the then current actual explanation. I forgot if the teacher introduced this with a remark about the simplified nature of the model but I hope so.

    1155:

    Let's just say I disagree.

    The idea that children can't understand a cloud of possible locations, but have such a clear understanding of the (also stupidly wrong) explanation of gravity that was given to them in the same class and how it works in the solar system, that the solar system model of the atom makes instant sense and is a learning aid seems shall we say: "far fetched".

    Mmmm. I tried to phrase that politely and it came out as a tangled mess.

    Let me rephrase it in my native vernacular.

    You're full of shit.

    Just tell them how it is, let them pick up as much as they can. You don't teach languages by making up nonsense words because actual French is too hard for kids. Teaching them nonsense words doesn't make it easier for them to learn French when they get older. The concept that it might is just complete Bullshit.

    1156:

    Experts in any field seem to inevitably end up saying "it depends" and refusing to give exact answers, and often deny that an exact answer can even exist. This pisses off people who don't understand expertise, and is used by con artists (and lawyers*, but I repeat myself) to generate doubt in the minds of the ignorant.

    It's one reason I say "gravity is also just a theory, why don't you jump out of a plane without a parachute and see whether it's valid?"

    So we end up lying to children just through saying something is true.

    Expert-level explanations also take a lot of time both to make and to understand. But in real life you don't need an advanced understanding of the philosophy of knowledge let alone how the Higgs Boson was (probably) shown to exist, or even what the thing does, to understand that dropping a heavy thing on your foot is going to hurt. You also don't need to know how your body works, what qualia are or any of the multitudinous other areas of knowledge that can be applied to the topic of "hit foot, hurt!".

    • far too many politicians are lawyers.
    1157:

    You don't teach languages by making up nonsense words

    Baba missy dindin? Whoosa grumpy baba?

    Yes we bloody do. We simplify the living fuck out of language for babies, and we keep that up right through until we just give up trying to teach the stupid fuckers new words entirely. There's a reason the Oxford English Dictionary comes in multiple volumes*, and it's not because they make more by publishing it as a serial. Most people just can't learn even the base 500,000-ish words, let alone all the English words that they left out of the main dictionary in order to keep the size to a manageable 20-odd volumes (ie the various jargon dictionaries). If you include the local editions as well that goes up again (ie, Australian English, New Zealand English etc).

    • I have the Shorter somewhere, as two beefy books. Plus I have a couple of supplementary volumes
    1158:

    despite being a year older than you, I still haven't persuaded the NHS that i'm actually eligible for my first shot

    If you're in Scotland you should totally have been invited for your first shot by now: check the NHS website. (If in England, maybe ask your GP? The booking system is different.)

    I'm ahead of the curve because I've got a medical condition that puts me at risk, albeit not in the very highest risk category. It's equivalent to being bumped up an age cohort. My wife, who's 23 months younger than me, only got her first shot three weeks ago.

    1159:

    In general, just simply saying "it depends" is a refusal to answer, because of laziness or arrogance. At the very least, a competent and forthcoming expert will describe roughly what it depends ON, and (if relevant) the rough likelihood of possibilities. The traditional medical attitude of refusing to do those (now much improved in the UK) is, at best offensive - especially with patients/parents like me and my wife (statistician and mecial researcher).

    The Higgs boson is a bad example, because the standard explanation is considerably MORE wrong than the Bohr atom. It's comparable in over-simplification, but omits the point that the very concept of 'existence' for such things is even further from what ordinary people (including many physicists) understand by the term.

    1161:

    As you say. There is a game that started in the early days of the Internet, which is to invent a word and get it used commonly enough to get into the OED. Many are called, but few are chosen :-)

    1162:

    Moz @ 158

    I thought that it was common scientific knowledge that pre-schoolers were naturally adept at picking up their mother tongue and did not need any form of simplified baby talk to make them learn it.

    1163:

    Back in the days when I was working in a private diagnostic laboratory, I fielded a phone call from some random person wanting to DNA test himself and offspring. Scenting a bit of a niff in the air (we dealt with the Middle East although the call was from the UK), my response went along the lines:

    'Yes, sir. We can arrange this. However, are you sure you want to do this?'

    Gabble, gabble,

    'Sir, I would strongly advise you to talk to your legal advisor or religious representative before going ahead.'

    More gabble, gabble.

    'The reason I give this advice is that there could be serious consequences from such a course. Also, once you get an answer, you can't un-know it.'

    And so on. In the end, we didn't get asked to send out a kit, and 2 of the managers who were listening, said I handled it very well.

    What I was thinking was either it was a journalist on the track of a story or somebody who'd had a row with the wife (or was going for a divorce with cause). Either way, it was something the lab didn't want to touch with a bargepole unless the test was ordered by a court.

    Some years previously, the lab had fielded 2 DNA tests from the Middle East - in both cases, the child was not related at all to the putative parents. Fortunately, the lab we used was on the ball and checked - each child was in fact the child of the other set of parents - the new-borns had been inadvertently swapped in the maternity unit.

    1164:

    @gasdive #1156

    You're full of shit. That's a gross oversimplification, you forgot the other waste products of the four humours.

    @Elderly Cynic #1160

    [an] expert will describe roughly what it depends ON 'Roughly' is important here, the explanation will start simplified and can get, over the course of the conversation, more exact. I see this covered within the definition of lie-to-children (or, in this case, lie-to-laypersons).

    1165:

    Those aren't nonsense words in your example, and they use a correct word order.

    But anyway, you're missing the point. Sure we teach kids and second language learners simplified language, but we don't teach language that's wrong, and then make them pass exams on the wrong information. We don't teach them that it's "red car small the". We teach it's "the small red car"

    The atom is like a solar system, with the electrons whizzing around in orbits. Simple and wrong.

    The atom is made up of particles, but they're not in defined positions and they're not moving, they form a cloud. A probability of finding them there cloud. Simple and correct.

    Next week we're taught that moving charges emit photons.

    So why don't the electrons whizzing around emit photons?

    That's not in the test. Sit down or I'll send you to to be caned again.

    The next bit of information can either be an indigestible lump that's simply memorised and regurgitated on demand or it can fit into a greater whole.

    The path of a thrown ball is a parabola. An orbit is an ellipse. If you throw a ball hard enough it goes into orbit. "at what point does the path change from a parabola to an ellipse?" That's an actual question I asked in a science class. The teacher just looked confused. Obviously the bit about a parabola was a lie, but the dufus "teaching" us didn't know. A parabola wasn't simpler to understand. We were introduced to both in the same class a few weeks apart. So I was left genuinely confused for years thinking there was some sort of state change that occurred once the particle had sufficient speed.

    It was only years later I understood that in both cases they followed the same path. Which was actually a straight line. Much simpler to understand a straight line than either a parabola or an ellipse. Which then also completely explained why falling objects fall at the same speed. It's the same reason all the buildings on a train station fall behind at the same speed when the train you're on accelerates out of the station.

    The correct explanation is also the simplest.

    1166:

    Simple, but correct, unlike the lies to children which are generally not simple, and not correct.

    1167:

    But isn't calculating orbits using Newton's laws of motion also a lie? I don't have a problem with the wrongness of the results, they are more often than not good enough and open a way to the more correct (but also more complex) general relativity.

    1168:

    the fine print of lies-to-children, in my experience most often misunderstood by adult persons...

    I teach it explicitly when teaching science: "This is a simplified model of a complex phenomena — it's a good-enough approximation to start with, you'll learn more refined models as you progress."

    How much they remember that is debatable. Other courses (eg. business) teach 'absolute truth', and most students aren't capable of reasoning at the abstract level for long, or at all. (The latter is still an issue at undergraduate university.)

    There is also the issue that, at least in physics, we are limited by the students' mathematical knowledge (or lack thereof). When they have barely comprehended the quadratic equation and have trouble with the concept of slope, and model requiring calculus is a non-starter.

    1169:

    Other courses (eg. business) teach 'absolute truth' ha, yes. The spherical cow in vacuum seemed to be the theoretical foundation of the introductory economics lectures I had to survive.

    1170:

    But isn't calculating orbits using Newton's laws of motion also a lie?

    Or my favourite example from Figments of Reality — the usual explanation of how hydrogen and oxygen combine to make water:

    2H2 + O2 --> 2H2O

    Ignores a lot of the subtleties of the actual reaction (such as its autocatalytic nature), but a bored 14-year-old can understand that atoms are conserved, and that you need twice as much hydrogen as you do oxygen.

    1171:

    My first contact in school (aged 10 or 11 or so) with atoms was the horribly wrong 'solar system' model

    I got the same explanation (the Bohr model) as well, but with the significant rider: "this is a misleading approximation -- the truth is more complicated, relies on quantum mechanics, and you'll get it in a couple more years if you take science A-levels, just use the Bohr model for the time being, it's close enough".

    Which, I think, makes all the difference.

    1172: 1159 - And then there a bit of "right place right time" syndrome. I was in The Southern in mid February and got asked if I wanted inoculated by a nurse who's job that day was to roam the wards and ask patients this question, inoculating when asked. 2 weeks later I was phoned by someone from my local health board, offering me an appointment the following week. 1166 - Yeah, but what you've just said is most assuredly total nonsense in ballistics and orbital dynamics. It lacks sufficient detail for me to be certain whether it's accurate particle physics or not. 1172 - Likewise, and at much the same age.
    1173:

    A parabola wasn't simpler to understand.

    It is if the student has learned parabolas in math but won't study ellipses until after Christmas…

    And it's a workable approximation when you're rolling a ball of the lab bench and calculating where it will hit the floor. Treating horizontal and vertical components separately is much more mathematically tractable than solving it with a segment of an ellipse.

    The key word here is approximation, because even an elliptical path is an approximation — as my Handbook of Astrodynamics explains at great length.

    https://store.doverpublications.com/0486497046.html

    1174:

    Sure we teach kids and second language learners simplified language, but we don't teach language that's wrong, and then make them pass exams on the wrong information.

    However, we totally do that if the exam in question is the UK government's citizenship test for would-be immigrants: the history exam is not only wrong, but maliciously misleading if your priority is accuracy in British history. And giving correct answers will flunk your citizenship application and cost you a lot of money.

    1175:

    I forgot if it was introduced with a disclaimer - but I hope so, the teacher was a good one and tried his best to teach science in an interesting and still correct way.

    1176:

    "this is a misleading approximation -- the truth is more complicated, relies on quantum mechanics, and you'll get it in a couple more years if you take science A-levels, just use the Bohr model for the time being, it's close enough"

    That's pretty much my standard preface when I introduce a concept.

    1177:

    we totally do that if the exam in question is the UK government's citizenship test for would-be immigrants: the history exam is not only wrong, but maliciously misleading if your priority is accuracy in British history,/i>

    Or the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test, which must be passed to graduate high school.

    One year the reading comprehension section included an article (from a newspaper) that was misleading — it was about food and failed to mention that American and Canadian meat has different standards. Students who knew that and used their 'external' knowledge to answer questions failed those questions. Not only were they supposed to use only the information in the article for their answers, but also intuit that certain groups had an agenda and be sensitive to it. Rather a lot to expect of 15-year-old kids.

    That was when Harris' neocons ran Ontario, with an explicit agenda of showing that public education was failing and so we needed to privatize it. Someone recorded the Minister of Education telling his staff that they needed to "create a crisis" so changes could be made…

    1178:

    There's a Wikipedia article on this. I'll quote the occurrence part, since it's short

    "Research published in 2016 indicated that one in 50 British fathers is unknowingly raising a child who is the biological child of another man, and that misattributed paternity is rarer than commonly believed.[4]

    A 2005 scientific review of international published studies of paternal discrepancy found a range in incidence, around the world, from 0.8% to 30% (median 3.7%).[5] However, as many of the studies were conducted between the 1950s and the 1980s, numbers may be unreliable due to the inaccuracies of genetic testing methods and procedures used at the time. Studies ranging in date from 1991 to 1999 quote the following incidence rates: 11.8% (Mexico), 4.0% (Canada), 2.8% (France), 1.4% and 1.6% (UK), and 0.8% (Switzerland).[5] These numbers suggest that the widely quoted and unsubstantiated figure of 10% of non-paternal events is an overestimate. However, in studies that solely looked at couples who obtained paternity testing because paternity was being disputed, there are higher levels: an incidence of 17% to 33% (median of 26.9%). Most at risk were those born to younger parents, to unmarried couples and those of lower socio-economic status, or from certain cultural groups.[6]

    A 2008 study in the United Kingdom found that biological fathers were misidentified in 0.2% (1 in 500) of the cases processed by the Child Support Agency. Of that 0.2%, those resolved with DNA paternity testing between 2004 and 2008 showed that between 10 and 19% of mothers had misidentified the biological father; data about why mothers identified the wrong biological father was not available.[6]"

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

    There was another guardian article which I have saved on my other computer which states that since the industrial revolution, paternal discrepancy was 6% for cities in the 19th century, but 0.1% for the countryside, and cities post-WWII. Since I'm celebrating Easter with my family, you'll have to wait until I get home for me to find it. That'll happen on Wednesday.

    1179:

    On "lies to children":

    Background information can be found on Wikipedia. The term was originated by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, and later got more widely known when they discussed it in The Science of Discworld.

    1180:

    Re: '... tried his best to teach science in an interesting and still correct way.'

    My least favorite teachers insisted on kids memorizing 'facts' because most of the tests/exams (therefore marks/'grade') consisted of multiple choice questions. Higher marks meant they were 'better' teachers and that of course their kids were better prepared for higher education.

    BTW - the what I think of as 'only the facts' vs. 'verify/argue your premises' schools of teaching existed across subjects - my favorite high school history teacher prefaced many lessons with 'based on what we currently know' while my least favorite (trig) kept on repeating to just learn (memorize) what was in the text and was never able to answer questions about alternate ways of solving a problem.

    Sorta related in my mind is that the growing popularity of easy to measure (and compare) educational attainment/success is shoving almost all of our societies into situations similar to what Robert described re: Ontario/Harris. The take-away is that simple evaluation metrics/systems are easier to fool with. (I wonder if anyone's done a correlation between types of testing and right-wingedness.)

    1181:

    "Next week we're taught that moving charges emit photons.

    So why don't the electrons whizzing around emit photons?

    That's not in the test. Sit down or I'll send you to to be caned again."

    I'm sure we were taught that as the reason the Bohr model can't actually be correct. Not sure when or where though. It would have had to happen for chemistry A-level because we got into bonding and they told us about quantum, but I have a feeling that it was first imparted as part of O-level physics. Those topics that fall in the overlap between chemistry and physics usually got handled rather better, and also earlier, in physics; the O-level chemistry attitude to models of the atom went something like "atoms have protons and neutrons and also electrons which are what we are interested in here; we don't actually know what the fuck any of those things are, but it doesn't matter, just follow the tables and plug the numbers in"... in fact it was all rather like that right the way through, whereas physics was all about understanding things, which chemistry tended to leave out and was very disappointing as a result.

    1182:

    Oh, I dunno. Could be worse. If he was a Viking they would put him on board and push it out to sea and set fire to it.

    1183:

    Next week we're taught that moving charges emit photons.

    So why don't the electrons whizzing around emit photons?

    Minor detail; we were never taught that in Scotland.

    1184:

    "... in fact it was all rather like that right the way through, whereas physics was all about understanding things, which chemistry tended to leave out and was very disappointing as a result."

    With me it was exactly the opposite. I was in a Science concentration in a private school where Physics was taught by incompetents. It was all theory, with no relation to how things really worked in the world around us. It was like learning French grammar.

    In contrast we had competent teachers in chemistry. They didn't want incompetents who would eventually make a chem lab go KA-BOOM. So that's where I learned everything I was ever to know about atoms.

    1185:

    Discomfort with uncertainty can explain a lot about our current political mess(es) in our various countries.

    I had a conversation with an acquaintance recently about education. I had made a joke about my degrees having little to do with my actual employment, and she stated that clearly 'universities have fallen behind the times'.

    My response was that we've become confused about the purpose of higher education. It is not about job training, that is known as trade school. It is about learning how to behave intelligently in complex circumstances (i.e. life), learning how to detect bullshit and at least have some idea of what you don't actually know.

    The whole point, and the main joy, of higher education is found in picking up the rocks of our assumptions and trying to figure out just what is underneath them. Where possible, the goal is to find our blind spots and build something closer to objective truth.

    I greatly fear that currently we are moving in the opposite direction, but there is some hope for the young.

    1186:

    EC You too? As in - having to CAREFULLY EXPLAIN to some M.D. or other that one's IQ is NOT 85 & is actually 130+ & I do understand the big long words & I want a FUCKING EXPLANATION, thank you very much ...

    Brain Lucey BoZo is a SHIT We actually need a "Royal Yacht", but Britannia was actually out-of-date whan she was launched .... And .. yes it will be useful & it was very good, as a secure place for politicians, with Queenie present, to conduct negotiations BUT BoZo is trying to tie the Monarchy to his coat-tails.This will not end well. As for payment .. If we did not have the Civil List & the Monarchy "lived of its own" - it would not be a problem. ( IF, If, if ... )

    Charlie @ 1172 Spot on - yes, that's the honest & correct way to do it. Warn them that it's an oversimplification -watch out for revised/more-complicated updates. When teaching, I did exactly that. ( I hope ) ... 1175 MORE INFORMATION - please: I don't like the sound of that.

    SFR @ 1181 Extreme leftwing ( especially "communist" ) governments are very adept at this as well - rigging the framework of the questions. All learnt from that fount of evil the RC church, of course, who perfected the technique back in the 14th C ... oops.

    1187:

    Similarly, I remember once returning to High School to visit my old chemistry Doctor (used advisedly; he had a PhD) and my sister, who was in her final year. I entered the corridor their labs were in, took one sniff of the air, went to his lab, opened the door, and cut over him with "Excuse me sir, I think you'd better find out what the 6th years are doing, right now!" At this point the smell of toluene reached him, he sniffed it and replied "Yes, you're right Paws. [to his class] Ok you lot. Read your notes til I get back." and left 'making progress'. Long story short, 2 of them were precipitating a salt from a solution in toluene over a Bunsen, in the open lab. He dealt with the atmosphere, and then made a comment about how "this pair might make organic chemists, if they live long enough". I have a bunch of other good stories about him too.

    1188:

    we've become confused about the purpose of higher education. It is not about job training, that is known as trade school. ...

    Ummm.

    There was an article I read on the web a few years ago. I can't find it now, but the main point was that lawyers in the US were being taught at law school lots about how to think, how to argue a case, tons of precedents, but very little about the day-to-day practice of law. This was driven by a desire to make law less of a trade school and more of an academically respectable subject. The example given was a room full of newly minted law graduates being asked "how do you finalise a merger?". None of them knew (the answer was to file a certain form with a particular government department). Yet if they were a corporate lawyer in the room when a merger was agreed this was exactly the job they would have to do. Law firms had gotten around this by assigning these newbies to be the junior lawyer on a large corporate account, but now (according to the article) companies were getting wise to this and refusing to pay for the training of new graduates.

    I've seen a similar problem in CS degrees here in the UK. Year 1 teaches Python and Pascal programming on the assumption that none of the students have ever cut a line of code before (because many haven't). By the end they can probably write a hundred line program, eventually. Then the next two years are electives, and if you pick the right ones you can actually get a decent degree without writing a line of code again. Its not that the stuff they are studying is irrelevant to software engineering, but there is so much of it that it's pushed the actual skill of cutting code out of the curriculum.

    So you get CS graduates applying for entry-level coding jobs who can't write FizzBuzz.

    ... It is about learning how to behave intelligently in complex circumstances (i.e. life), learning how to detect bullshit and at least have some idea of what you don't actually know.

    Learning to behave intelligently in complex cirumstances does not, IME, happen in the classroom. It happens as a result of practising your craft in those complex circumstances. (And the same for "life").

    Also I'm not at all sure that the purpose of higher education was ever "learning how to behave intelligently [etc]". Historically higher education was a finishing school for the wealthy to teach them some more Latin, Greek and classical literature. Later on it got mixed up with trade schools after the Industrial Revolution got under way (quite a few "redbrick" universities in the UK started as trade schools). So I'm dubious about your attempt to define your own purpose for HE and then complain that the Universities aren't doing it.

    1189:

    Re: 'Historically higher education was a finishing school for the wealthy to teach them some more Latin, Greek and classical literature. Later on it got mixed up with trade schools after the Industrial Revolution got under way ...'

    My favorite teacher said that the point of 'higher education' was learning how to learn in its various forms plus that learning was life-long.

    No idea how trade schools were (or are) structured up but my guess is that once enough 'facts' (ways of doing things) got so large that some form of organization (systematic analysis) became necessary people were able to see patterns of similarities/dissimilarities. Then a cycle of more data leads to more patterns leads to quasi-mathematical/statistical relationships that could be tested thus leading to new fields probably mostly in science or engineering.

    Your law student example sounds odd becuz my impression is that similar to medicine, law students are required to do an in the field/real-world on-the-job stint before they were allowed to write their bar exam. This real world experience which often lasts years is where students learn about the various associated tasks and paper work --- and these can change much faster and differ much more between jurisdictions than the historical and theoretical underpinnings of a legal system. (A law degree on its own is just a piece of paper.)

    1190:

    paws4thot @ 1113: #1096 - The point is that, even well chilled, UHT is spoilt as a drink itself, and even as a flavouring in coffee or tea.

    I beg to differ.

    UHT milk has only a slight "taste", no worse than fresh milk by the time you get to the bottom of the carton. In fact, it tastes exactly the same as fresh milk warmed to body temperature in a microwave, which is what I do for severe insomnia.

    I consume about 1/2 gallon of milk per week, primarily for taking my daily medications (4-5 oz BID).

    I have the UHT milk on hand to mix with the fresh milk if a situation should occur (such as a month-long quarantine like that I was subject to a year ago) where I am unable to get to a store to obtain fresh milk. And if you add chilled UHT milk to an equal volume of fresh milk the i>"taste" goes away completely.

    Everybody has to learn to acquire the taste for certain "beverages" (coffee, tea, beer, wine & spirituous liquors ...), why should UHT milk be any different?

    1191:

    UHT milk has only a slight "taste", no worse than fresh milk by the time you get to the bottom of the carton. In fact, it tastes exactly the same as fresh milk warmed to body temperature in a microwave

    Well, there's the problem. Most of the people I know who've expressed an opinion, except you, have expressed a dislike for the taste of milk at body temperature.

    1192:

    paws4thot @ 1122: A friend recently pointed me to this article about the future half of the 21st century

    https://razib.substack.com/p/our-three-body-problem

    Here are a few interesting quotes

    "In my daily life, I spend a lot of time up to my eyeballs in direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic results. The American consumer might often be looking to DTC companies to tell them in great detail how much say, German vs. French ancestry they carry. But as many bloody wars have been fought and as many millions of lives cut short the last few hundred years over these deadly serious borders, our genes aren’t persuaded. Results no more specific than “Broadly Western European” are hardly the rousing call to rediscover their roots people crave, but as far as our genes are concerned, it’s often as good as we’re going to get."

    This brings up interesting questions. What is the border between "broader western European" and "broader Eastern European". Does BEE even exist?

    "For my money, the irreconcilable cultural poles the remaining century will bring into focus are these three ancient traditions: the broader Abrahamic West, the Chinese sphere and the Indian one."

    While I would agree with him in lumping Latin America and the Middle East into "the Broader Abrahamic West", I think he's being to rash in including Africa. Likewise, his attempts to split SE Asia between the Chinese and Indian spheres is premature.

    My father once told me our family is "Scot, Irish, Dutch, English & French". I'm part of the eleventh generation since my surname ancestor came to Jamestown as an indentured servant in 1664.

    I've been thinking about getting one of those DTC genetic test kits just to see if there are any interesting branches sprouting among the "plain vanilla" of my family tree.

    1193:

    I had a conversation with an acquaintance recently about education. I had made a joke about my degrees having little to do with my actual employment,

    My son really wanted to go into nursing. After finally admitting to himself he would never get through the courses he switched to a dual major of anthropology and psychology. And 5 years out of college he's running a Level 3 support group for a highly technical computer monitoring system. (He is good at dealing with people. Especially when they are frustrated.)

    Depending on your point of view, his higher education was a total waste or what was needed to prepare him to succeed.

    1194:

    Most of the people I know who've expressed an opinion, except you, have expressed a dislike for the taste of milk at body temperature.

    ??? I thought everyone has a cup of warm milk when they can't get to sleep…

    And I'll point out that everyone has enjoyed milk at body temperature at least until they were weaned. :-)

    1195:

    paws4thot @ 1192:

    UHT milk has only a slight "taste", no worse than fresh milk by the time you get to the bottom of the carton. In fact, it tastes exactly the same as fresh milk warmed to body temperature in a microwave

    Well, there's the problem. Most of the people I know who've expressed an opinion, except you, have expressed a dislike for the taste of milk at body temperature.

    It is an acquired taste, but worth acquiring if you suffer severe insomnia and are leery of taking sleeping pills or other possibly addictive drugs. Body temperature milk is not my beverage of choice, but I drink it for the effect.

    As I pointed out, people consume a lot of beverages that you have to acquire a taste for before you can regularly consume them. People even learn to like the "taste" of beer.

    1196:

    Would it be possible to power an electric vehicle with electric eels?

    1197:

    " So I'm dubious about your attempt to define your own purpose for HE and then complain that the Universities aren't doing it."

    Well, I didn't come up with that on my own. Nor am I complaining that the universities aren't doing it. My complaint is that they are doing it, at least in the Humanities, but it isn't valued because it isn't immediately obvious what job you are training for with a degree in English, or Political Science.

    Because it isn't obvious in the way that 'plumber' or 'engineer' might be, the Arts aren't valued in a mammonite economy. Bonus because people who have taken such courses might actually gain the tools to point out the glaring problems with a mammonite system.

    Here in North America the most reviled creature of the right wing imagination is a 'Liberal Arts professor', who are apparently indoctrinating the young with Marxism or something. This can be best understood as 'my kid no longer listens to my bullshit, I blame the college'.

    1198: 1195 and #1196 - Well, most people in the UK who were in primary school between 1944 and 1971 were forced to drink 1/3 pints of room temperature milk for 200 mornings per year. We had plenty of opportunities to acquire a taste or dislike for the beverage!
    1199:

    My figure if 10 percent comes from the Leeds University lecturer who did the genetic testing for the genetic counselling service. The rationale for the lab was that a huge percentage of the drugs cost in Leeds at the time was antibiotics for cystic fibrosis patients and preventing the birth of one cystic fibrosis child per year paid for the cost of the genetic counselling. It’s over forty years ago so I’m not sure of the actual procedure but I specifically asked what the advice was when the ‘father’ was not the actual father. The answer was that the parents were told there was not a problem in that particular child. I then asked what percentage fell into this category and was told ten percent. Of course it might be more common for a woman to seek an unaffected person to father a healthy child. This was around 1990 and PCR testing was more primitive. I later inherited the lab where this was fine after genetics moved out and they left their PCR equipment behind - a robot arm controlled by a BBC micro to move samples between heating baths at different temperatures.

    1200:

    Re lies to children.

    I made the bold statement that when confronted with the lie, most doubled down on the lie.

    Thanks to the several commenters who have confirmed that by doubling down.

    Simple/complex and right/wrong are orthogonal. "oversimplified" is not a synonym for "wrong".

    Prefacing teaching something that's wrong by saying it's over simplified and more details will follow is lying. I gave an example of an oversimplified model of the atom (clouds of probability) that is not wrong. It can form the basis of greater understanding as more detail is learned. While the solar system model is quite complex and can't be used as a basis for further understanding, but must instead be mentally thrown out. How many people manage that mental feat of completely throwing out that confusing lie? I'd refer you to the logo of virtually any agency that has anything to do with atoms or atomic energy and posit that the percentage is low, even in the industry. In the general public, it would be hard to tell it from zero. Even I think of atoms as little solar systems, while knowing full well they aren't.

    1201:

    As the going joke on faceplant has it, have a subpoena colada....

    I hadn't heard that one but it's very fitting for Rudy Giuliani and the other clowns. Never mind honesty, there's a definite shortage of competence here; I mean, who has two of their lawyers raided by law enforcement?

    While I'm no Tom Smith - who would have a whole song written and performed before lunch - it did inspire me to play with the lyrics...

    If you hate subpoena coladas And gettin' caught by the law If you're not into working If you have half a brain If you like makin' bank by scamming On Fox News or alone Then it's Trump that you've looked for Run your scam and escape

    1202:

    I've noticed a pattern in this subthread about lies to children. While it's certainly an emergent one, it's not new, it's just that I am only really noticing it clearly enough to define and describe it. The pattern goes like this:

    Commenter A: Well we might do this fucked up thing, but at least we don't do this other fucked up thing.

    Commenter B: Well actually, we do this other fucked up thing all the time.

    I call this pattern "Humans: more fucked up than you think".

    1203:

    I need that on a tee-shirt.

    1204:

    Re: COVID-19 CDC update - what you can (and can't) do after you're fully vaccinated ...

    Thought that since more folks here are close to/fully vaccinated they might be interested.

    https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/fully-vaccinated.html

    1205:

    she stated that clearly 'universities have fallen behind the times'. My response was that we've become confused about the purpose of higher education. It is not about job training, that is known as trade school. It is about learning how to behave intelligently in complex circumstances (i.e. life), learning how to detect bullshit and at least have some idea of what you don't actually know. Did she agree?

    1206:

    You may power your electric vehicle with electric eels if, and only if, a) it is a hovercraft b) your postillion has been struck by lightning

    Re: universities - they’re supposed to be about education, not training, but the evidence is overwhelming that many courses that one might label as ‘practical’ are being turned into trade qualification mills. It seems in my field (software engineering) that almost all ‘CS’ courses are little better than rote drilling in java. If you’re lucky, maybe some JavaScript as well to provide a ‘well rounded education ‘. Forums are flooded with “where can I go and what course should I do to get a high paying coding job at farcegooglehoo”. One of the many joys of working in the Smalltalk world is that you have to be pretty seriously addicted to actual software engineering to even find your way to it.

    1207:

    Then the next two years are electives, and if you pick the right ones you can actually get a decent degree without writing a line of code again.

    I’m not sure how representative that is…

    Wayyyy back in the 1980s, Edinburgh taught Pascal in Year 1, not so much because students had never coded; but because they needed to introduce concepts (e.g. scope, functions, pointers) that didn’t exist so much in the school-age languages of the time (typically, BASIC). The third-year operating systems project involved “write a multi-tasking operating system”, and wasn’t very elective. Even if you were doing all of the theoretical electives, coding was hard to avoid.

    But that’s not what university is for, and those who cry that it isn’t turning out trained coders are rather missing the point.

    The professional bodies insist on evidence of education, training, experience, and responsibility before granting full membership. University only provides the first of these; your first year or two in industry should provide the second. Firms, or supervisors, complaining “they can’t already code” are just trying to shirk their responsibilities

    In my first job, I joined a team using a unique VLIW assembly language; debugging involved circuit diagrams. Of course it was my employer who provided (on the job) training in that language; university made sure I had an understanding of all the concepts needed to start that training.

    Another problem is that university lecturers are not normally software engineers; they’re theorists. Later in my career, I got to work with one of my lecturers who had moved to industry; he was the first to admit he could drag together an ugly prototype to give proof of concept (i.e. only has to work once), and that others were far better at creating code that worked every time :)

    PS for those mentioning languages, I’m reminded of the saying: “BASIC is a language for beginners; C/C++ are languages for grownups; ADA is a language for hardened criminals”, as told me by one of our (large) ADA team…

    1208:

    There is a game that started in the early days of the Internet, which is to invent a word and get it used commonly enough to get into the OED. Many are called, but few are chosen :-)

    "'Embiggens?' Hmph. I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield." "I don't know why. It's a perfectly cromulent word."

    1209:

    saying "it depends" is a refusal to answer, because of laziness or arrogance. At the very least, a competent and forthcoming expert will describe roughly what it depends ON, and (if relevant) the rough likelihood of possibilities.

    Context is important. When asked in a learning context then IME most experts will do as you say. But when asked in a hostile context (management, politics, media etc) most experts will answer defensively if at all. That's caution. Often caution that comes from personal experience not just from observing the experience of others.

    You might well call refusing to answer laziness or arrogance, others might decide that it's cowardice or stubbornness. I've done enough hostile media interviews to be able to speak in soundbites and answer the question I prefer rather then the one asked, because the alternative is disaster. Caveats don't work, editors/presenters will ignore them or cut them out, and the audience will forget them unless they're the only thing you say and "he couldn't answer" takes over. Wah wah wah, just answer the damn question... Tucker Carlson is genuinely curious about whether you support gun control*.

    Being an expert in a political context is often worse, because you have everyone from far white media to experts in your field as your audience, and you're often answering a question written by experts but delivered by a professional liar. Trying to explain in lay terms why your expert opinion contradicts "common sense" is really hard.

    "taking away parking in high density retail to build bike lanes increases sales at the affected shops"... that's true, because it makes the footpaths more pedestrian-friendly and there cannot possibly be enough parking outside those shops for every customer without going full USA-style car parking with occasional islands of shops and that's not "high density retail". But we don't know that that explanation is actually true, it's just a statistical result from surveying selected people in selected places and observing the results of doing or undoing the bike lanes. There are many anecdotes to the contrary "I don't shop in the city any more because there's no parking"... on enquiring "I haven't shopped in the city for decades because there's no parking"... so the bike lane made no difference? Why would a pro-car activist** ask those extra questions?

    • curious in the "will this person commit suicide live on air" sense. * I use the term somewhat sarcastically because there's very little pro-car in the argument, but what that side is *for is hard to discern. The argument that there can't be car parks for everyone right outside every shop does not register for them because they personally only need one car park (outside each shop).
    1210:

    On pedagogy again. I have long seen a distinction between subjects where it is customary to introduce students by tracing the history of the discipline, which comes built in with a sense that knowledge is evolving and constantly being improved upon, versus those where students are introduced via elementary concepts on which more advanced concepts are developed, which often rightly or wrongly gives students the impression they are learning universal truths.

    It's not a great analogy, but you could call it ontology recapitulates philology or something to make it snappy and obviously wrong, though is it? :).

    Anyhow, there are obvious factors for and against each approach, some disciplines mix them, some use the raw fact approach for elementary stuff and the history approach for more advanced, while others do a sort of constant feedback between the two. History itself does not take the history approach, for some obvious reasons and some less obvious ones (rabbit hole of self-reference and so on), but palaeontology and other pre-history disciplines generally can and do. Mathematics is interesting, but sticking to a complete history approach would entail learning and unlearning a lot of things, though I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say the stuff needing to be unlearned is entirely useless. Physics is also interesting in this regard, the historical approach might not be useful if the teacher's own perspective on the history of the discipline is relatively unstudied itself (as classes on Newtonian mechanics inevitably reveal when the teacher discusses Aristotle). Not sure this leads anywhere much, but it's another distinction that the lies to children theme evokes. I do think that people who leave education too early to learn the better models end up getting a somewhat warped view of what knowledge-workers actually do and that the point of studying things are, and it isn't the fault of these individuals. Again, I think a lot of people simply are not able to retain that asterisk next to something they have learned that says it's a simplified model and there are better ones we are not telling you about yet (which is actually kinda hard to say without it sounding a little bit bullshit, isn't it?)

    1211:

    almost all ‘CS’ courses are little better than rote drilling in java

    I wonder how much of that is due to ease of testing. It's much easier to automate "can this person emulate a parser in their head" questions than "write a code snippet to to X" ("code snippet to pass these unit tests" is a horrible mangling of both). I saw an example the other day that apparently passed the tests but was a challenge-level example of awfulness (a loop that ran once or twice and used duplicated code in an exception handler to process the final case and exit the loop)

    One of the fun things about hopping round departments within a university or changing universities is discovering how many of the prerequisties are cultural rather than technical. At the simple end in engineering word limits were firm and often implemented by stopping assessment at the word limit, while in feminist studies word limits were a suggestion and extra marks given for "effort" measured by how much you exceeded the word limit.

    I suspect that a student moving from a "java tick box" CS department to a Smalltalk or Lisp based "write code to do X" department would suffer considerable culture shock.

    1212:

    Would it be possible to power an electric vehicle with electric eels?

    The problem is not that electric eels release about 1 amp at 500 volts, we could engineer for that, but the that current is very dirty and, critically, comes only in brief bursts. So an eelmobile would be at best a stunt.

    1213:

    It's a meta-point. Cubed.

    A [redacted] recently got told that we might have used her name as a password or similar User Name (trust me: if you think the published names are jokes, Host has to put up with knowing the User / Password jokes we actually make -- he might not know the salted passwords, his Cats Do Though). If you think the public name jokes are bad, whelp...

    So, it's a meta-meta-meta-meta joke.

    Things you only know if you are [redacted] and witnessed the Chair (this... is very much an Ian M Banks chair, it's not an FBI chair) Emily Dickinson was one of four Human Women (female) authors used in an elaborate Construct (Western based, functionally it was ... go play Control, you'll get the idea).

    Back when Host's book Really Did Save Our Life[tm] (for real - freak in the next room wasn't H.S.S and "the boys in their hotel planning, let us say, Kabalesque take-over of Iceland" sure as shit don't fuck around on security and we'd already had three assassination attempts in the nice little Neutral Country that week but they sure as shit can't deal with that little ... let us say... [redacted]) and so on

    And then, it's used as a hook.

    Oh, and if you want to check Authenticity, there's an Icelandic Art (LIGHT) exhibition in a tiny little town that has a show-case (on your left as you enter, tiny glass box display) of her work.

    ~

    And we really fucking dig Emily. We even read her, unlike the fucking [redacted] muppet who barged in tooting their horn over it.

    Meh.

    "Sophisticated" people: they really aren't. They can't see the Future Usage of it yet.

    1214:

    Admittedly, before we get all paranoid here:

    Only one of those was against the C brigadge peoples. That's the [redacted] one - Don't Sleep near them, dangerous.

    One of them was because someone thought we were the representatives of UK fishing (it's... along story).

    The other was due to Me, [redacted] and Elves.

    Oh, right: the other was about a local politician and funds (it later blew up, he resigned).

    ~

    And, yes: we really did pile-driver a Troll (the real version) since the Singing Ones had just saved us and we took the time to flitter-time hug and protect the human they'd (not the trolls) had decided to hunt.

    ~

    Iceland. Wait till you learn about the sexual abuse side, it's not all fun-and-abhumans.

    1215:

    Anyhow.

    No Nuclear device works now.

    Sure, you can fix them, but hey-ho. That's a real bitch about the solder.

    Solder and the CIA motto : you should look it up, the CIA decided to go all "JoyDivision" on it.

    We... well. We took that personally.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PtvIr2oiaE

    And... kids. We're a little bit more hard-core than your localised Dark Gank secret police zone. We'll fuck your entire world ....

    1216:

    You may power your electric vehicle with electric eels if, and only if, a) it is a hovercraft

    I will not buy this record, it is scratched.

    1217:

    Re: ' ... retain that asterisk next to something they have learned that says it's a simplified model and there are better ones we are not telling you about yet'

    Funny how people have no problem hearing that there's a new eyePhone with neato-never-before-seen-bells-&-whistles yet balk and mock when a scientific model/theory gets revamped with an even more complex list of ingredients and characteristics. Or that this new phone has thousands of times more computing power than NASA used for the first successful moon landing. Weird.

    Really curious how such an intellectual vis-à-vis real-world disconnect/blindness exists.

    1218:

    Maybe when (from their perspective) everything they've heard about the intellectual world has no obvious correspondence to anything they have encountered in their experiential world? Is it really so easy just to judge the individuals in that case? I've had plenty of my own experiences with teacher-failure and I'm pretty smart and well educated. I've heard plenty of horror stories about education and we've both heard plenty here too. I can't personally blame people for having an attitude that more education isn't their friend, much as I disagree with them and might try to convince them otherwise. Science communication is perhaps the single most important discipline right now, for so many reasons, but we're probably all guilty of playing it down (even if only through faint praise) versus whatever it is that we ourselves do, no?

    1219:

    You're conflating two different things.

    One is a new wiz bang thing that the guaranteed progress of mankind has developed.

    The other is claiming that the unchanging universe has changed. Again.

    Those things occupy separate parts of the brains of many people.

    1220:

    SS "eelmobile" - lovely So, taking an earlier post, your eelmobile will be driven by a struck postillion, whilst hovering above a land/water surface .. I wonder how far we can take this?

    1221: 1201 - I note that you've still not tried to write a coherent explanation of a "less wrong IYO" model of an atom for the engineers to have a go at.

    BTW, I find the "solar system model" and "valency cloud model" to both be helpful in predicting molecular structures, outputs from reactions and stuff like that, where they are adequate for stated purpose.

    1204 - So why don't you? If tee-shirt printers in Oz work like they do in the UK, do your layout and A4 print in Word (other word processing, presentation and DTP packages are available), and take the output to the printers. Likely cost is somewhere between a plain Hayes or Fruit of the Loom tee shirt and a pre-printed one with someone else's design/caption. 1208 - There are two separate issues here:-

    1) Being able to produce a design that is sufficiently rigourous to stand up to being coded, and revisited 4 or 5 years later by someone else because the executable requires to have the ability to do $newthing added to it. 2) Being able to code in $language. (1) involves teaching good practice, and should be done ASAP, or earlier. (2) should be the responsibility of an employer who wishes to hire $newgraduate. Anyone who complains about the lack of degree qualified new starts with experience of $language is trying to cheap out on training bills. Para 7 - That's backwards. C/C++/C hash ... hardened criminals; ADA ... grown ups.

    1218 para 2 - That makes me more impressed by the Apollo coders, and less impressed by just how many clock cycles and how much storage the new jPhone is wasting.
    1222:

    So I wrote: While I'm no Tom Smith - who would have a whole song written and performed before lunch - it did inspire me to play with the lyrics...

    Now, less than twelve hours later, I find out that Tom Smith did exactly this and well in advance of the current tempest in the Trumposphere.

    Quoth Tom, reacting to the subpoena colada meme:

    Written 10-3-2019 I was tired of the crazy We hear from President Trump. Like a worn out recording Of monkeys taking a dump. Then he talked to Zelensky On a telephone call And though the transcript ain’t perfect, I got the jist of it all.

    We got subpoena coladas, From gettin caught in Ukraine. We got a crazy old fogie Who only has half a brain. And he likes tweeting stuff at midnight And making jokes about rape Here’s the dirt that you’re looking for, Just impeach, he won’t escape.

    So the stuff I reported Came out in just a few weeks. As I hoped and expected, All of Washington freaked. And the Donald responded With an official note. It showed up in the paper, It was the same thing I wrote.

    We got subpoena coladas, From gettin caught in Ukraine. Now we add Giuliani, And he’s flat-out insane. He says to praise him as a hero, Leaving newsmen agape. These guys both need straitjackets, So they cannot escape.

    So we’re just getting started Everyone’s getting tense. In it up to their eyeballs, Are Pompeo and Pence. It only took one blown whistle To start a big avalanche. Now the reckoning’s coming For the executive branch.

    We got subpoena coladas, From gettin caught in Ukraine. Then Trump calls Schiff a traitor, With his very good brain. And he keeps on digging deeper, We’ve got the video tape. Can you say President Pelosi? I don’t think they’ll escape

    1223:

    Something that people have missed is the difference between transpondian and cispondian milk - the former is pasteurised at a higher temperature and does, indeed, taste closer to ther UHT.

    At my first school, I had to drink Klim made up into milk(*), and it caused a revolution among 5-year olds (an unthinkable action in the social context) asking for it to be made up full strength. I can still remember the expression on the face of the teacher.

    Incidentally, in terms of repulsiveness, it came ahead of early instant tea with artificial whitener, but (I believe) behind bovril with milk and sugar.

    (*) The local milk was seriously unsafe and there was no treatment plant.

    1224:

    I think, to be fair, the transpondian milk needs to be heat treated given the hormone and mastitis thing (so at least the included pus is sterile). Of course it's possible to do some interesting and perhaps deeply regrettable things with powdered milk products, but so long as you don't break the spoon it's deniable.

    I paused at the "plant based meat substitute" section in the local supermarket yesterday and read the notes on a package of something claiming to be (and closely resembling) mince meat. It was mostly pea of various types. I will need to try it to verify whether it's any good. I can only see this stuff turning up as a positive thing, it will be interesting to see how it goes.

    1225:

    If you're going vegetarian for ethical reasons, buy plants and make your own meat substitute. Don't try and kid everyone you're still eating meat by buying faux meat, be proud of being plant-based instead of being hypocritical about it.

    These fake meat products are the worst for me - my IBS flares up if I eat peas and other seed-type legumes, so I want to know on the front of the package in large letters exactly what the fake meat is based on. I hate squinting at small print having to ingredient read.

    1226:

    Damian @ 1225: "It was mostly pea of various types."

    You're lucky to get the type of pea. Over here all I get is a mention that it's made from soja, regardless of the producer and regardless of it being fake chicken nuggets, fake bacon, fake Italian sausages and fake salami.

    P.S. I'm eating this because I love the taste and the texture, and not for ethical reasons.

    1227: 1223 - {like} 1226 - hear hear. I sometimes eat vegetarian (and even Vegan) dishes, but it's because I like them, not because they contain fakeon.
    1228:

    The growth in fake meat products has been a real inconvenience. My wife has been veggie since the 70s because she doesn't like meat. We used to be able to get all sorts of interesting veggie options when eating out but many places (pre lockdown) seem to have gone for their only veggie options are fake meat, which is no use for us. It's even worse than the Eighties when all you could get was veggie lasagne, at least she could eat that even if it was boring. We even tried an all vegan place that turned out to only do fake meat, none of the other interesting meat free meal options they could have done.

    I do eat meat, but I try to ensure it's from sources that avoid causing unnecessary suffering and avoid processed meat products. I am perfectly happy to eat a veggie meal if it tastes good, but the fake meat stuff doesn't. All the fake meat I have tried taste like the cheap processed meat products I avoid to me. I suspect they are using the same tricks to make them seem like real meat.

    1229:

    When I was in China I was told that the reason traditional Buddhist cuisine has so many meat substitutes is that many people became monks in later life and missed the taste of their favourite dishes, so they developed substitutes that tasted similar.

    No idea how true that is, but it sounds plausible. I know that after eight weeks of living on Chinese food (which I love) I was craving bread as a comfort food, and willing to pay ridiculous prices for it :-)

    1230:

    That makes me more impressed by the Apollo coders, and less impressed by just how many clock cycles and how much storage the new jPhone is wasting.

    Yes they did a LOT in a very limited memory space. And it was impressive. I've done similar (back in the day) in terms of fitting a lot it to way too little memory.

    But a good user interface chews up a lot of CPU and memory. And command lines and opaque instructions do not a good user interface make. And yes there are some here who will disagree. And yes I get totally pissed at web sites dumbed down to make them usable on a 4" phone screen.

    If you dig in the some of the notes on the Apollo program you'll find that an ongoing concern was the number of accurate key presses were required to fly to the moon and back. Over 14,000 rings a bell in my mind. 14K key presses over 8 days with cross checking to make sure they were error free was the price of limited memory.

    1231:

    The real issue is that companies HATE, LOATHE, DESPISE training people. Their HR wants you to have done a mind meld with the person who just left, along with two other people, so that they can replace three people with you, working 60+ hours/week.

    When I started programming in 1980, there were some reports they had me work on, but primarily I was to document the three, I think it was, programs that the entire community college* ran on. They were in PL/1, and easy enough to read. AND I got to see how you programmed.

    By the time I got to Temple for my 3rd yr, having gotten my 2yr degree, I'd been programming for years. The compiler design course... we were still on punch cards. Except everyone else had at least 1800 cards.... while mine was about 1200, and fit in one card box, with plenty of room.

    • Community College of Phila, CCP - we're just one C away from being the Soviet Union!
    1232:

    And yes I get totally pissed at web sites dumbed down to make them usable on a 4" phone screen.

    As someone with an iPhone 4s, I get totally pissed at websites that are unusable without a ginormous screen.

    If only someone would invent a modern browser that could, you know, adapt the interface to the size of the screen… :-/

    1233:

    paws4thot @ 1199: #1195 and #1196 - Well, most people in the UK who were in primary school between 1944 and 1971 were forced to drink 1/3 pints of room temperature milk for 200 mornings per year. We had plenty of opportunities to acquire a taste or dislike for the beverage!

    And yet, you drink warm beer?

    1234:

    timrowledge @ 1207: You may power your electric vehicle with electric eels if, and only if,
    a) it is a hovercraft
    b) your postillion has been struck by lightning

    Thanks. Somehow that sketch had slipped my mind. I haven't heard it lately, so I don't think that's where the question came from, but ...

    1235:

    paws4thot @ 1228: #1226 - hear hear. I sometimes eat vegetarian (and even Vegan) dishes, but it's because I like them, not because they contain fakeon.

    Yeah, I do that. I don't make vegan or vegitarian dishes, but sometimes I will make a meal that's all vegetables. But I don't try to make the vegetables appear to be meat.

    Not some ethical statement, I just want to eat vegetables at the time.

    1236:

    whitroth @ 1232: The real issue is that companies HATE, LOATHE, DESPISE training people. Their HR wants you to have done a mind meld with the person who just left, along with two other people, so that they can replace three people with you, working 60+ hours/week.

    ... and only pay you for thirty!

    1237:

    You mean, as opposed to faceplant, that insists that I maximize my browser to see someone's "story"... when I'm on a 24" monitor, and my browser's covering more than 25% of my screen.

    1238:

    I look down on the extreme vegetarians, and vegans. A few years ago, we were at a vegetarian (vegan) Chinese? Asian? restaurant, and almost all the food was imitation meat.

    Couldn't find, for example, lentils and rice.

    1239:

    Oh, what they, esp vegans are, is rebranded extremist Christians. "We're not animals, and so we don't eat animals...."

    1240:

    So. Today I'm making Beef Strogonoff in the crock pot. Had to make a couple of substitutions.

    Recipe calls for canned sliced mushrooms (drained) and I didn't have them. But I did have fresh mushrooms I was going to use for a pizza later this week, so I used them and I'll get more for the pizza later.

    Recipe also calls for 2 lb ground beef, and there-in lies a tale ...

    I found "shaved steak" at the market last week. It's the stuff they use to make the "Philly Cheese Steak" sandwich. I'd never seen it before, although there are a lot of restaurants, not just in Philadelphia, that offer a "Cheese Steak" sandwich. It just never occurred to me you could get the same kind of beef to cook at home.

    Anyway, I saw it and immediately wondered if it would be any good for Beef Stroganoff. Guess I'll find out.

    Last time I made it I used "beef stew meat" and it turned out pretty good. I did have to cut the chunks up into smaller pieces before making the recipe. This time I just used the "shaved steak" right out of the package.

    The nice thing about the crock pot Beef Strogonoff recipe is it makes 8 servings & I can put 7 of them in the freezer, so I'm cooking months worth of meals at one go.

    The bad thing is there are at least two hours left before it will be ready & the house is already filled with the aroma and I'm about to starve.

    1241:

    I think, to be fair, the transpondian milk needs to be heat treated given the hormone and mastitis thing (so at least the included pus is sterile).

    My solution, when visiting the US (not since September 2019, alas), is to bring my own loose-leaf tea and to buy only organic milk as a diluent. US organic certification tracks international standards, which ban hormone and antibiotic use in cattle feed: which in turn makes actual prevention of mastitis something the farmers have to worry about. Yes, it's twice as expensive as the cheap stuff. But I'm not drinking it or using it on cereal.

    1242:

    If only someone would invent a modern browser that could, you know, adapt the interface to the size of the screen…

    I'll modify my statement to includes those also.

    My current smallest screen is an iPhone 11 Max. But I mostly exist on a 15" laptop (MBPro with high res screen) and many times 24" or 27" displays set to 1900x1200 or denser.

    1243:

    JBS NOT EVEN WRONG The correct temperature for draught beer here is between 10 & 11°C Cool is the correct term. Ice-cold numbs the taste-buds , which is so convenient for the mass-maufacturers of fake US "beers" - I note that the US microbreweries tend towards our serving temperatures, so thst you can actually taste something (!)

    1244:

    Yeah, exactly.

    I remember asking my Mum (who was English) how they could drink warm beer. She said it's not warm, it's pub cellar temperature, and cellars in England are only slightly warmer than our fridge.

    1245:

    It seems in my field (software engineering) that almost all ‘CS’ courses are little better than rote drilling in java. If you’re lucky, maybe some JavaScript as well to provide a ‘well rounded education ‘.

    Based on a sample size of…? I don’t doubt there are some crappy courses out there, but that’s far from my experience across my career, of the syllabus offered by Computer Science degrees at U.K. universities. Could you qualify that claim?

    Granted, it was 35 years ago, but over the course of my first degree I wrote code in Pascal, OCCAM, sundry assemblers, Prolog, Standard ML, C (in the EE department); and coded up the biggest PLD I could buy, to work as a protocol translator for my Honours project…

    …designed a supercomputer architecture within a team, studied the ins and outs of operating systems, digital comms (I’ve got a pre-internet map of ARPANet somewhere in my notes), LR(k) Compilers… but because I was doing a joint EE degree, avoided the Databases / Analysis of Algorithms / Formal techniques stuff.

    1246:

    Warm beer? Because I want to taste it.

    1247:

    I was never convinced by the "formal techniques" stuff. Here is a chunk of code (lecturer writes a few lines on the blackboard) and now let us prove its correctness or lack thereof (lecturer wears out chalk, students run out of paper). You now know the code is correct because you can... er... look through all this stuff (expansive sweep of arm) and see it is. (What, all that? And they use mere C as an example of a language which is "unreadable"?)

    It seems to be a rather ill-thought-out attempt to compensate for human brains being notably likely to cock things up. Something like: if you express some idea in the form of a computer language, it's easy to overlook obscure conditions under which the computer version fails to be a correct expression of the idea. So to compensate, you can then take the computer version and re-express that in a greatly more verbose and expanded form which makes the existence and consequences of those conditions obvious instead of obscure.

    Which might be all right if the "so to compensate..." step was being executed by a processor which never cocks things up. But that is to deny the existence of the very problem that you're trying to deal with in the first place. The mere increase in verbosity is itself an equal increase in the amount of stuff you have to avoid cocking up. But it's not linear; the human brain's propensity to cock things up increases by some annoyingly "runaway" power law as the verbosity and complexity of the problem increase. And to make matters worse, you're now in a position of knowing exactly what result you want to achieve so your subconscious can direct you to cock things up in such a way that that's what you get. (Can't prove a false result in mathematics? Course you bloody can, anyone who thinks you can't has never tried to prove anything. Or even been to school...)

    And the whole thing is hanging under the unmentioned shadow of having been taught almost as soon as we arrived the proof that, in general, it's not actually possible to do what they're after.

    Moreover, even if you can execute the process without error, it only covers a part of the real problem. You may prove that your code correctly expresses the original idea, but if the original idea was itself wrong, all you've achieved is to mislead yourself even more.

    What I remember hearing of the progress of the MoD's Viper processor project made it sound like it turned out as exactly the sort of disaster I had been expecting in the light of the above doubts. (Ignoring that it was late and over budget, because everything is.) Hey, look what we've made... yes, it's expensive, and slow, and cumbersome, and only any good for a fairly limited set of applications, but it's correct!!!!! And then it turned out it actually wasn't and they all said "oh shit" and after even more scratting around eventually produced the Viper 2, which tried to overcome the impractical aspects of the original but turned out to be no more practical itself in the end, and in so doing abandoned the whole idea of proving its correctness for some of the more difficult parts because it was too difficult to actually do them that way. None of which was any kind of surprise to me at all.

    1248:

    Good background: How Pfizer Makes Its Covid-19 Vaccine (Emma Cott, Elliot deBruyn and Jonathan Corum, April 28, 2021) (Remove NYTimes cookies to reset paywall.)

    Also, this (very early science, small sample) needs attention, unpleasant as it might be for those who have recovered from (or have) a SARS-CoV-2 infection: there is early evidence from a small study suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 (in the CNS) can initiate an autoimmune reaction in the brain that might attack neurons. (At least cortex, olfactory bulb, thalamus, hippocampus, cerebellum, brainstem) Intramuscular vaccines probably don't have this effect, though to be very clear, I'm not qualified to say/judge that.

    Evidence for covid-induced autoimmunity in the central nervous system in 5 of 7 patients with neurologic symptomshttps://t.co/TrJuNYgnnA by @ericsongg @YaleMed @YaleIBIO @ShelFarFar and colleagues @CellPressNews pic.twitter.com/nFhDlLl3FI

    — Eric Topol (@EricTopol) April 30, 2021

    From the Cell paper[1]: The data indicate that an unexpectedly high proportion of CSF samples from COVID-19 patients with neurologic impairment harbor high titers of anti-neural autoantibodies of unknown pathogenic significance.

    [1] Divergent and self-reactive immune responses in the CNS of COVID-19 patients with neurological symptoms (Eric Song et al, Open Access, April 27, 2021)

    1249:

    A [redacted] recently got told that we might have used her name as a password or similar User Name Ah, that scans at least. (I missed that Voice was capitalized.) And thanks for the Iceland backstory. Re Emily Dickinson and the items/poetry that turned up in searches about Iceland, aunt took young me(10YO) to Europe as a traveling companion. Made quite sure that we went up to the crater of Vesuvius, and saw Pompeii and Herculaneum. (She did not want to use the (then) chairlift up Vesuvius; talked her into it. :-)

    Thanks BTW for the links on plastic-eaters. As you say, doing something at the source control level (sewage treatment etc) is probably easiest. (To mandate and/or make best practice.)

    1250:

    Re: '... an attitude that more education isn't their friend, '

    I think this is the central issue: how people, educators included, define education - rote memorization of facts (absolute - therefore finite) or process (on-going - therefore potentially limitless). Also - if you were raised to always finish a task otherwise face punishment or had problems at school, then you'd probably prefer to put formal education behind you as soon as you achieved a socioeconomically acceptable level.

    David L @ 1220:

    Re: 'The other is claiming that the unchanging universe has changed. Again.'

    The universe does change though. So does our understanding hence whatever narratives are devised to explain our as-of-this-moment understanding at that time. Curious how other societies (esp. China and India whose populations also include sizable religious populations) handle hard science explanations and whether they get the same type and amount of push back.

    Not sure whether your 'conflation' comment means that many of our Western societies have gotten used to being allowed to cherry-pick their 'facts'.

    1251:

    Anyhoooo.

    Might want to look into this one:

    White House investigating ‘unexplained health incidents’ similar to Havana syndrome

    Two US officials experienced symptoms similar to ones suffered abroad that were probably result of directed energy device

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/29/us-unexplained-health-incidents-officials-washington

    "BABYLON"

    Case Nightmare OHMYHOLYFUCK just launched.

    For real. Serious tip for the future: don't use DARPA level tech on THINGS, it's gonna get spicey.

    p.s.

    No, moving to Spain is not a solution, check out their youth unemployment levels.

    p.p.s.

    Yes we get the whole "BLACK SUN" flash when we emesh with your kind. Seriously. Didn't everyone even mildly leftwing going on TV and looking terrified while lying about easily found history tip you off?

    Problem is: Pompeo, well. Big on threats. Great on getting shitty Wine deals. Terrible at CONTROL negociations.

    ~

    If you want that translated: see the Joy Division song.

    1252:

    Ice-cold numbs the taste-buds

    So very true.

    In the summer of 2018 I bought two pairs of different beers at a local brewery while on a day trip with my parents. My dad liked drinking his beer room temperature, so after we got back to their place, I opened one, poured half for him and half for me to drink while we had a game of chess.

    He took a sip, made a face, and let me have his. It wasn't very good, but it was drinkable. Finished the chess game and the beer, and he set up another game while I opened the other variety. Once again half for him, half for me. This time, he took a sip and made a bad face and said you can have this. I took a sip of mine and, ugh. I don't often pour beer down the sink, but down the sink it went.

    And yet when I (later) had the other two cans, refrigerated, they were fine.

    1253:

    "When I was in China I was told that the reason traditional Buddhist cuisine has so many meat substitutes is that many people became monks in later life and missed the taste of their favourite dishes, so they developed substitutes that tasted similar."

    This is an extremely sensible idea: taking the aim as to be to produce a particular type of food, because it's tasty, as best you can given a certain list of usable ingredients. Whereas the Western idea seems to be that if the list of ingredients is different from the "reference list", you should try as hard as possible to only use them to make types of food that are themselves different from what you can make from "reference" ingredients, and deliberately shun the types of food you can make from ingredients on either list.

    Why should "vegetarian food" have to be different? I agree with those Chinese Buddhists: I want it to be exactly the same, just without dead animals in it. If I buy a burger or a sausage or a meat pie or something, I do so because it is tasty. I don't give a fuck whether it's made from beef or horse (hello Tesco) or soya or processed bacterial sludge scraped out of diesel tanks, as long as it is like what I expect it to be like when I eat it. I don't expect to be told that this is "not doing it properly" and therefore I can't have it.

    The reason I don't care about animal welfare on farms as much as I should is that that interest is made by circumstances to conflict with that of getting food. I walk into a food shop and all the things that meet the basic criterion of "do I actually want to eat it" are made with meat. They could equally well be, and even occasionally are, made with non-animal fat and protein in a meatlike form - indeed some classes tend to come out better when made like that - but you pretty much never see them on sale and if you do it is often the case that the price is silly or else the quality is shit.

    The practically available alternatives are either things which are made with vegetables and do everything they can to emphasise the point (like putting them in the form of large and instantly identifiable chunks which are deliberately left half raw), and are fucking gross; or actually making things myself from bare ingredients, which can fuck right off - I would genuinely rather watch paint dry, as long as I didn't have to smell it.

    1254: 1234 - No. I drink beer served at the right temperature, which is somewhere between ice cold for Czeck and German lagers (and never drink this for USian lagers) and cellar temperature for British real ales. The whole "warm beer" thing is an indication of want of understanding by foreigners who think they know rather more about food and drink than they actually do. 1236 - Well, I need to know what I cook is actually Vegan sometimes, because I have a cousin once removed who is Vegan. But yes, I make veggie dishes because that's what I want, not for some ethical or health argument. 1241 - I've never had a recipe that specifically said "canned sliced mushrooms", just "sliced mushrooms", but yes the canned ones can be the cheapest and lowest effort way to get finely sliced fungi. 1248 - All of which verbiage is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of formal methods. The point of formal methods is not to "always get the correct answer", but to document the code, and prove that X in always leads to Y out, for every route through the code. If you say that a certain value of X always generates the same error, that's quite acceptable because you have a testable condition. if "X .LT. 0" always generates a division by zero error, that's entirely acceptable formal methods. If the code uses screen input, it would be good to have it loop until you get a valid value for X input; if it uses command line or file input, it would be good to say what the error is.
    1255:

    Exercise for the nitpickers here : can you punch holes in this guy story ? (or direct me to a place where it has already been done) :

    [heavy space cadet vibes ahead]

    https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/29/the-spacex-starship-is-a-very-big-deal/

    1256:

    You mean, as opposed to faceplant, that insists that I maximize my browser

    Assuming you mean Facebook, I avoid it like the plague so have no idea how it functions.

    1257:

    Nope, because that story is sufficiently on the nail that NASA coughed up the promise of $3Bn for Starship to get their astronauts down onto the moon and back to orbit (although right now Blue Origin and ULA are suing them, so it's on hold).

    Starship might not work, but there are actual flying prototype lumps of metal out there (with a tendency to crash and explode, because SpaceX are using rapid iteration to develop their product, in a way that hasn't really be done with rockets in the USA since the 1950s ICBM race). If it does work, then all bets are off; Falcon 9 has already disrupted the global launch industry, and Starship is a huge step forward even over Falcon 9.

    1258:

    The only point I'd disagree with is his idea that modular space stations don't work. Using Starship the modules can be the size of the Skylab workshop. You need to alter the Skylab docking adapter by replacing it with something like a 2m ISS node section with a CBM on the end but that gives you a large volume that can be fitted out before launch and recovered for refubishment and reuse.

    Even fully expendable the stack is comparable in cost to a Falcon 9, but with 7 or 8 times the payload. Even more if you aren't trying to recover the upper stage as the wings, heatshield and fuel for landing can be left off.

    Starship SN15 may well make a test flight today, all the closures and notices are in effect and there are the right signs of activity around the pad. There is also a Stalink launch due later although weather in the recovery zone is looking iffy. The first stage for the Starlink flight will be making its ninth flight.

    1259:

    The other thing he's missing is Bigelow corp's inflata-stations: there's an experimental module currently hanging off the ISS after having been given the thumbs-up for an extended mission by NASA, and the planned full-scale B330 has two-thirds the inhabitable volume of the ISS in a single package that would fit on top of an Atlas V.

    Bigelow hit a wall in March 2020 and laid off their entire team, but it's a good enough idea that I suspect someone will pick the technology up once there's an established space tourism market ... like, after this fall, when a private Dragon flight is due to spend some time in orbit.

    1260:

    Re: 'The other thing he's missing is ...'

    Environmental impact from sourcing through disposal - including liability.

    No idea whether it is so but it seems that there have been more 'accidents' with space rockets plus associated debris than with commercial aircraft. Starting with: Okay, we know how much much a jet messes up our atmosphere: do we know the same about rockets? We need to find out before rather than after.

    https://www.space.com/china-space-station-rocket-launch-debris-falling

    1261:

    Yep. Or, for us 'Murkans, around 50F.

    But then, a lot of Americans want ice-cold beer because Bud (and Coors, and anything watered (aka "light" beer) tastes like piss. Warm it up, and they don't actually like the taste of bheer.

    Basement temp in this house - a split level with half a basement - is fine for us... but the least worst we're drinking is what was Dundee, which seems to have been bought very recently by Genesee, honey brown lager. Better is Smithwick's for me, and Guiness for her.

    Oh, and Greg? You seem to be putting down everything I mention in terms of bheer and tea. Please feel free to come over to this side of the Pond (now that the psycho's not in charge), and I'll take you to the stores where I buy it... and then you can point out what I should get, instead... or maybe they don't carry anything you'd drink.

    Note that Smithwicks is $9.57 PER SIX PACK. Better is up - I see $12 and $14/sixpack, and this is a decently-priced store. Ditto on the Indian and Middle Eastern importers I go to for tea.

    1262:

    Greg Tingey @ 1244: JBS
    NOT EVEN WRONG
    The correct temperature for draught beer here is between 10 & 11°C
    Cool is the correct term.
    Ice-cold numbs the taste-buds , which is so convenient for the mass-maufacturers of fake US "beers" - I note that the US microbreweries tend towards our serving temperatures, so thst you can actually taste something (!)

    Germans serve beer cool. My encounter with beer in the UK it was not served cool, it was warm.

    1263:

    I am not asserting any deep knowledge, but IIRC, in Asia, etc, they didn't decide on their scientific facts and freeze them, the way the West did on Ptolmey, etc.

    But then, both Hinduism and its offshoot, Buddhism, think of the universe in terms of billions of years, not 4000.

    1264:

    Another possibility is the frequent lack of meat in the diet of the 99%, er, poor.

    And about animal welfare, esp. on the farm, you really don't want to see pics of the factory farms here. Horrible.

    IF kosher meat wasn't so bloody expensive, and halal isn't that much cheaper, I'd happily only buy them. The reason is that, in addition to someone davvening over the animals, the religious strictures are that the animal be killed quickly and cleanly.

    1265:

    I do. Trust me, I've been forced to use it more and more the last year (and speaking as a computer professional, a) don't understand it, and b) everyone involved should be FIRED, escorted out the door, and have their degrees revoked) partly because of the book coming, and partly because I have friends who just will not read their email for 10 days.

    1266:

    JBS I'm a life member of CAMRA ... - no, you are wrong, tough about that.

    Everybody There are quite a few of us who repair & fix a lot of kit, in spite of obstacles. I mentioned this programme some time back. Pick up "listen again" & please do! It raises a lot of questions we have discussed here, even though it only scratches the surface. Honourable mention to at least 2 orgs in the UK already working on this problem: 1: "ifixit" - https://www.ifixit.com/ - & 2: The Restart Project - https://therestartproject.org/

    1267:

    From Cambridge dictionaries (other dictionary publishers are available) "Warm: having a fairly high temperature, but not hot". Why are you persisting in repeating the fantasy that the British drink beer that is above body heat?

    1268:

    I can see a mix of inflatables and tin can modules for future stations. Inflatables take a fair bit of on-orbit fitting out and can't easily be deflated for return to Earth, but using them for crew quarters and the like with the rigid modules for labs and industrial units makes sense.

    SN15 didn't fly today but the Starlink went off on time. Next Starlink is due on the 9th and will probably feature the tenth flight of a first stage.

    1269:

    White House investigating ‘unexplained health incidents’ similar to Havana syndrome ... If you want that translated: see the Joy Division song.

    (For others, Joy Division - She's Lost Control lyrics and youtube, reported backstory RL epilepsy ) Looked briefly last year at the National Academy of Sciences report on it to see what the official public state of knowledge about the effect was, and that report was pretty uncertain. The story in GQ with a dog walker and dog both getting affected suggested some sort of indiscriminate directed nervous system effect. An Assessment of Illness in U.S. Government Employees and Their Families at Overseas Embassies National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2020) Its main virtue (i'm being slightly unkind) was a ref of this survey of work done in Russia and the former Soviet Union, which seems to have convinced some people by "Russians have done a lot of work in this area" logic that a modulated microwaves effect of some sort was consistent with the reported symptoms and timing and locations. A COMPREHENSIVE REVIEW OF THE RESEARCH ON BIOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF PULSED RADIOFREQUENCY RADIATION IN RUSSIA AND THE FORMER SOVIET UNION (Andrei G. Pakhomov and Michael R. Murphy, 2000) (Free download can be found.) Anyway, I just ignore my (longstanding) mild tinnitus, though paying attention because it's more annoying when diastolic BP is elevated and that can be quickly lowered.

    1270:

    Inflatables take a fair bit of on-orbit fitting out and can't easily be deflated for return to Earth Yes they can; you just de-orbit them and they'll burst and burn up during re-entry.

    1271:

    Not sure whether your 'conflation' comment means that many of our Western societies have gotten used to being allowed to cherry-pick their 'facts'.

    Building a better mousetrap because we get better at building mousetraps (think of the auto industry) is not the same thing as changes to our understanding of how the universe works means entirely new kids of devices can now be made.

    With iPhones and similar the new versions are mostly about manufacturers getting better and better at building them. Software, hardware, etc...

    1272:

    Honourable mention to at least 2 orgs in the UK already working on this problem: 1: "ifixit" - https://www.ifixit.com/

    Ah, not quite. iFixit is an American e-commerce and how-to website which sells repair parts and publishes free wiki-like online repair guides for consumer electronics and gadgets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IFixit

    They DO have office(s) in the UK.

    I've been using them for various things for a decade or more. Here in the US. I have multiple tools I've bought from them.

    1273:

    paws Unlike the "Chinese monster ( booster ) which the PRC have just left & all too obviously simply don't care if it lands on someone's head ....

    David L I'm aware that fixit started in the USA, but the UK arm appears to be locally-based & more-or-less independent. Interestingly, with the possible exception of a couple of v specialist "screwdriver" end-attachment, I have all of their kit already, in my resources .... [ Funny, that? ]

    1274:

    Well, I can't speak for JBS on how he is using the term, but Greg omits that 10-11 Celsius is about on the boundary between cool and warm in traditional British usage, at least for such usages! It is the annual average (and hence deep cellar) temperature in the south of England, after all :-)

    And it isn't true that ordinary German lager is best served very cold, either - 5 Celsius, perhaps, but no lower, and usually slightly higher.

    1275:

    Greg, this is only the second Long March 5B launch ever -- it's their heavy lift vehicle, the class has flown about 7 times in total but with each iteration there are bugs that need to be worked out. I suspect they lost control over the booster after separation, which is why it's now tumbling and heading for an uncontrolled re-entry: uncontrolled re-entry is much less of a problem for smaller rockets (they can be relied on to burn up in the upper atmosphere) so they don't have much experience with this class.

    1276:

    In England there are two adjacent towns (although one has now become more or less a district of the other), called Stockport and Davenport. Stockport was a port that handled water-borne traffic in ordinary farm livestock; Davenport handled the traffic in animals that were eventually destined for the kosher butchers.

    Unfortunately the second sentence is not actually true. But it should be.

    The practical problem with kosher/halal ingredients, though, is the same as for imitation meat: the stuff just isn't there. You go into some random shop for something to eat and not one thing they have is kosher or halal except by accident. It's next to impossible to find and if you do find it it's still only raw ingredients, not actual food items that you can eat as they are without having to fuck about beyond a few minutes in the microwave. (There is also the exacerbating aspect which doesn't apply to imitation meat, that shitheads get the hump at seeing halal in particular on sale at all.)

    (I have no idea where people round here get halal food from. There must be somewhere, but I don't recall ever having seen it.)

    What I'm getting at with this aspect is a point which is relevant not just to me, but to all people who buy things simply because they find them pleasant to eat and don't care about what's in them as long as they taste right. From such a point of view a meat-pie made with soya beef is just as good as one made with cow beef, if not better because you don't find chunks of gristle in it; if they were something you naturally found when you went into a shop to buy a pie then there'd be no reason not to buy them. But in practice when you go to buy a pie the cow beef ones are all there is.

    (As a contrasting example, take bread. If I want to avoid buying Warburton's bread because they donate to the Conservative party, then all I have to do is stick my arm out at a slightly different angle and pick up a loaf of someone else's bread from the same shelf. It doesn't matter where I go to buy the bread because that choice is available everywhere that sells bread. I don't have to hunt down the single shop in a back street somewhere that sells non-Tory bread under the counter.)

    So a great deal of support for the traditional unsavoury sourcing methods occurs simply by default. If you don't care either way, you buy the traditional-type stuff because that's what there is. Or if you do care, you still buy the traditional stuff because that's what there is, and then moan about it on the internet. You have to care a heck of a lot before it provides enough of an action potential to overcome the negative influence of the enormous pain-in-the-arse factor it lands you with.

    It is certainly possible to get people to care about a particular matter to a level far beyond what it seems to warrant. They've been bitching for 500 years over whether priests should wear their Doctor Who scarf with the ends crossed over or dangling separately (or something like that), and they still haven't made up their minds despite all the people getting set fire to and having their heads chopped off. But whenever this sort of thing happens it always seems to be concerning some matter which is amazingly fucking stupid. How one might actually procure such a response concerning some matter which is actually important, I have no idea...

    1277:

    "...the class has flown about 7 times in total but with each iteration there are bugs that need to be worked out."

    This might mean a terrible loss of face for the Chinese. Lack of experience is no excuse.

    1278:

    China under Mao made the decision to put their launch sites way inland. I assume mostly for somewhat valid paranoia reasons. But there they are. And when launches occur various towns and villages under the flight paths are warn/cleared depending on the amount of risk officials want to admit to there being. And at times boosters land on top of these places. I understand there has been some loss of life at times. Maybe not so much from big things falling on people heads but all the interesting chemicals/propellants that get spread around in such cases.

    This current soon to fall to earth booster was supposed to fall into the Pacific. Something went wrong or someone didn't get the calculations correct. So now we have a very big lump of metal that will come down somewhere on the planet most likely on May 8. Ocean, desert, mountains, big city square, or wherever yet to be determined. From what I've read with such a big thing tumbling and a low angle of attack it will be hard to predict even a rough spot until a few hours before it hits.

    The USSR made a similar decision on where to put their facilities back in the day but they didn't have the option of a east coast on a big ocean. But they did put them where downrange was fairly thinly populated.

    1279:

    "From what I've read with such a big thing tumbling and a low angle of attack it will be hard to predict even a rough spot until a few hours before it hits."

    I hope it falls in the Canadian Arctic, so that we can laugh at communists and their bad aim for a second time.

    1280:

    Unlikely, to put it mildly. Canada and the UK are both well out of the risk zone (41S to 41N).

    1281:

    You are making a distinction without a difference, and you have missed the point, which is that the process is massively more complex, and therefore disproportionately enormously more prone to error, than putting together the code you are processing. If you write five lines of code and it then takes you five pages to prove that X into that code always gives you Y out, there are a heck of a lot more opportunities to cock something up in the five pages than the five lines (and because you know what answer you are trying to get, you additionally encounter the problem of subconsciously directed cockups that cause you to get that answer even though it's actually wrong). So the idea rapidly becomes grossly impractical for anything but the most trivial cases (as well as the general case being actually impossible).

    Accordingly, it did not surprise me when the Viper turned out to be a Thuu mainly because they found the complexity to be too much for them.

    1282:

    (I have no idea where people round here get halal food from. There must be somewhere, but I don't recall ever having seen it.)

    I don't know where "around here" is for you, but in Edinburgh, you just go into one of the several Asian grocery shops or supermarkets or wholesalers. They have their own butcher's counter, and stock nothing that isn't Halal. For Kosher food it's a little harder unless you live in a city with a significant Jewish population -- London or Manchester definitely, but Leeds also has a couple of Jewish grocery stores/mini-supermarkets; I suspect Glasgow probably has one or two as well (Edinburgh has a small Jewish population, probably not enough to support a local shop).

    You can sometimes find some specialised food products in the "world foods" aisle of a larger Tesco or other chain supermarket, but not meat products/refrigerated items in general.

    1283:

    (I have no idea where people round here get halal food from. There must be somewhere, but I don't recall ever having seen it.)

    Not a problem around here (GTA). Lots of selection for both kosher and halal, both for raw ingredients and prepared food.

    1284:

    Halal meats are fairly available in places like Vancouver. We went to a halal butcher for many years simple because they were the best prices. I still stop there if I'm passing through the neighbourhood, in part because they have nice marinated meats available.

    Now that we live in a small town with negligible Muslim population I'm not sure where a person might find it.

    1285: 1277 - I think that to find kosher or halal meat (dairy and veg are normally both) you have to find a Jewish or Islamic butcher as applicable. I am not aware of kosher or halal ready meals although vegetable samosas may be potentially halal subject to blessings.

    Pies - I actually know you're at least potentially talking nonsense. Just at a rough count from the laptop, I can think of over 20 different fillings and brands of "pie" in one local supermarket. This includes beef, chicken, lamb, pork, steak and kidney, macaroni cheese, vegetables, bolognese and "breakfast" as fillings. That's without including quorn.

    Oh and we can see you have "no idea", based on the complaints from someone who apparently can't and won't cook.

    My issue with "Tesco horse lasagne" was not the use of horse, but the fact that it was mislabelled as beef, which shows a lack of control over their supply chain.

    1282 - You might have a point, if and only if you can prove that you have tested every branch of your code. In this context, bear in mind that I have one application where the main processing loop contains some 1_200 lines of code after optimising code that is used more than once into sub-programs. 1283 - If I was looking for kosher food in Glasgow, I'd start in Garnethill or Newton Mearns (Technically in east Renfrewshire, but effectively a suburb of Glasgow).
    1286:

    "(I have no idea where people round here get halal food from. There must be somewhere, but I don't recall ever having seen it.)" There are several Halal butchers in Norwich and Halal food is available in some supermarkets. When I was based in Leeds Infirmary in the 1990s there was a Halal food option in the main hospital restaurant. This was very popular with non-Muslims, including me because although it was more expensive the service for Halal meals was outsourced to a famous Bradford restaurant and was of a far better quality. Several of the non religious from the lab had Halal food most days.

    1287:

    Pigeon @ 1248: I was never convinced by the "formal techniques" stuff.

    Me neither. I was peripherally involved in a very large formal methods project using Z and Spark Ada. My conclusions were:

  • Formal specification languages are programming languages that we don't know how to compile. They are as complicated, formal and rigorous and incomprehensible as source code, but you can't execute them.
  • The formal spec in this project was about 1/3 the length of the source code it specified. Not much of a saving in complexity.
  • As an experiment I took a part of the spec which seemed reasonably self-contained. It was about ~100 lines of Z. I translated that into ~100 lines of Haskell. It took 4 hours, most of which was spent carefully checking that I understood what the spec *actually* said and was not inadvertently reading something into it from my knowledge of what it was trying to achieve. The resulting Haskell was IMO significantly easier to understand, and you could run it too.
  • Most of the spec was describing Create-Read-Update-Delete on records. So it tended to say that when you set a value in a record, the value was indeed set. The code just said the same thing.
  • Spark Ada is a lousy programming language for large systems. There is a rule "no aliasing", which means that each piece of data must have exactly one way of referencing it. This is so that you can prove that nothing changed while your back was turned. However it means that all the data has to tramp up and down the call stack. If data from one module needs data from another module it can only get it from a module that calls both, so it can pass the data over. Hence the big focus in the design is on keeping code that uses any bit of data close together. So your UI code gets all mixed up with your business logic.
  • The "no aliasing" rule meant that procedure calls had to pass data by value, so the CPUs were spending most of their time copying procedure parameters and results. CPU efficiency was a major headache.
  • The project was too big to formally prove the code correct, so it was done by inspection and test.
  • In some cases you can use a formal language to specify the high level properties of a system, such as this spec for IEEE floating point arithmetic. However as the distance between your spec and your implementation grows, so does the problem of demonstrating that the implementation conforms to the spec.

    In the meantime programming language level is getting ever higher, so you can say things in the language that previously had to be said in the specification or design.

    However proof assistant tools seem to be a possible way forwards here.

    1288:

    Inflatables in space make me extremely nervous. I'm less worried about radiation flying through that, say, micrometeors.

    "Hello, mission control? Jill just got taken out by a nut from someone's spacewalk. Who has the closest set of skills to her that's still alive who can fix out life support?"

    1289:

    Davenport - ROTFLMAO!!!

    1290:

    Inflatables are actually more resistant to punctures than tin cans, multiple layers of kevlar and similar fabrics with fluffy layers in between. Anything hitting the outside tends to vapourise with the vapour getting stopped by the next layer. Tin cans usually have a similar multilayer hull, but usually fewer layers.

    1291:

    Famous Bradford restaurant... back in the late seventies, Einstein Northern, a big hospital in Philly, did an experiment, and got the chef from one of the 4? 5? Michelin 5-star-rated French restaurants in the US, which was in Philly, to run the kitchens. Amazingly, the patients ate the food, and recovered more quickly when the food actually tasted good.

    1292:

    paws4thot @ 1268: Why are you persisting in repeating the fantasy that the British drink beer that is above body heat?

    Why do you persist in trying to put words into my mouth?

    1293:

    Charlie Stross @ 1276: Greg, this is only the second Long March 5B launch ever -- it's their heavy lift vehicle, the class has flown about 7 times in total but with each iteration there are bugs that need to be worked out. I suspect they lost control over the booster after separation, which is why it's now tumbling and heading for an uncontrolled re-entry: uncontrolled re-entry is much less of a problem for smaller rockets (they can be relied on to burn up in the upper atmosphere) so they don't have much experience with this class.

    Do you think it would be worthwhile to start an office pool on where/when it's going to come down?

    1294:

    I'll take salt water for $100.

    If that's too expansive, then the Pacific for $50.

    1295:

    Why do you persist in trying to put words into my mouth? Where? You're the one who said "warm beer", which is above body heat but not actually hot.

    1296:

    Robert Prior @ 1284:

    (I have no idea where people round here get halal food from. There must be somewhere, but I don't recall ever having seen it.)

    Not a problem around here (GTA). Lots of selection for both kosher and halal, both for raw ingredients and prepared food.

    Raleigh is the 41st largest city in the U.S. I just googled for "halal meats Raleigh, NC" & kosher meats Raleigh, NC" and both searches produce "10 Best" Yelp listings. Local Jewish Congregations have a "Chabad" kosher co-op & a web page. I didn't find one for Halal.

    But it seems like anyone with internet access should be able to find nearby resources for Kosher/Halal.

    1297:

    Eh? Most uses of 'warm' are for temperatures below body heat, often a lot below. In terms of drinks that are often drunk cold, it usually means 'not cold'. Almost all British people would refer to beer at 20 Celius as warm, and many would at a temperature of 15 Celsius.

    1298:

    James White wrote a book, "The Galactic Gourmet" about a famous non-human chef hired to work in the kitchens of the Sector General hospital in an attempt to improve the food being served there.

    1299:

    Re: 'office pool on where/when it's going to come down?'

    Looks like the re-entry/touchdown location is still anywhere 40 degrees north or south of the equator. Re-entry/touchdown time is also vague: anytime within a 21 hour window.

    https://aerospace.org/reentries/cz-5b-rocket-body-id-48275

    1300:

    Using formal methods to validate algorithms and code long predates computer science, and originated in the numerical analysis community, followed by the statistical one. As you say, a large conceptual distance from the code is a serious handicap, but even more serious is a large one from the problem domain. That is why IEEE 754 is so hard to work with, and many of its predecessors were a LOT better.

    1301:

    whitroth @ 1292: Famous Bradford restaurant... back in the late seventies, Einstein Northern, a big hospital in Philly, did an experiment, and got the chef from one of the 4? 5? Michelin 5-star-rated French restaurants in the US, which was in Philly, to run the kitchens. Amazingly, the patients ate the food, and recovered more quickly when the food actually tasted *good*.

    I've been on the other side of that. The VA hospital in Durham no longer has a kitchen (probably none of the VA hospitals have them anymore). The food was prepared by a contractor somewhere up in Northern Virginia and trucked down to Durham. People joke about how bad airline food is, but this was worse and it wasn't a joke.

    When I went for my prostate surgery, I should have been out in a couple of days. Instead, I was there for a week and didn't begin to recover until I stopped eating the food (except for the sealed saltine crackers & single serve applesauce). The food literally made me sicker than I already was.

    1302:

    Re: 'start an office pool' - Cicadas?

    Just noticed that the cicadas are due anytime now. Numbers are supposed to be higher than usual - maybe in the trillions. Also they're pretty noisy - so it would be interesting to see what decibel levels they hit in various regions.

    1303:

    paws4thot @ 1296:

    Why do you persist in trying to put words into my mouth?

    Where? You're the one who said "warm beer", which is above body heat but not actually hot.

    Where did I say "warm beer" was above body temperature? You made that claim, not me.

    1304:

    Just noticed that the cicadas are due anytime now. Numbers are supposed to be higher than usual - maybe in the trillions. Also they're pretty noisy

    I drove through this brood 34 years ago. I can't imagine there being more. My drive was on the PA Turnpike. It was LOUD with windows up. Imagine everyone doing 70mph on steel rims with no tires.

    If you want to help gather data. https://cicadasafari.org/

    1305:

    Here is another one for tracking the booster: https://orbit.ing-now.com/satellite/48275/2021-035b/cz-5b/

    (See link to 3D Launch Payload Tracker for "live" updates)

    1306:

    Off topic question for the space buffs and astrophysicists out there.

    I'm trying to get a handle on space weather, particularly solar flares and coronal mass ejections from the Sun. What I'm trying to understand is how much more intense a solar flare or CME at, say, Mercury will be compared with, say, the Moon (I'd pick Earth, but Earth's magnetic field and atmosphere complicate things).

    So far as I can tell, if the Sun is ejecting energetic photons, the density that hit per square meter scales as the inverse square of the distance, so the Moon is irradiated as 1/d^2 compared with Mercury if both receive photons from the same solar flare.

    What I'm not sure about is when the sun emits clouds of charged particles. Is CME a coherent enough body (like a cloud of shotgun pellets) that the amount of particles hitting per square meter stays more-or-less the same across interplanetary distances (Moon and Mercury get the same density of particles/m^2)? Or do they disperse like photons, or somewhere in between?

    Any help?

    1307:

    You might want to ask the question to the guy who runs www.spaceweather.com. (There is a link labeled "heliophysics" on the page, but it seems to be broken)

    1308:

    Re: Cicadasafari site

    Thanks! Had a good laugh when I read the below - ties in with some of our discussions re: insects as food.

    'Periodical cicadas are best eaten when they are still white, and they taste like cold canned asparagus. Like all insects, cicadas have a good balance of vitamins, are low in fat, and, especially the females, are high in protein.'

    1309:

    On the SpaceX front, SN15 made its test flight and is currently intact and vertical on the landing pad. Some fire around the base for a while after landing apparently due to venting methane.

    SpaceX coverage although with a lot of stills where the video link to ground dropped out.

    1310:

    Re: 'tracking the booster:'

    Why is the booster speeding up? Not a lot ... but still ...

    Apparently a lot of folks are watching the booster via this site: Google maps isn't showing because traffic is so high.

    1311:

    Inflatables in space make me extremely nervous. I'm less worried about radiation flying through that, say, micrometeors.

    Coincidentally, a local acquaintance of mine (and Hugo Award winner, yay) just had a story involving a punctured space station appear in Clarksworld. The leaking air is just the complication; it's really about the space mice... You can read Best Laid Plans on the Clarksworld website.

    1312:

    Polite Cough.

    Just in: An unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile test launch from @30thSpaceWing experienced a “ground abort” prior to launch, DOD says. Cause is under investigation.

    https://twitter.com/laraseligman/status/1389935703220490244

    You might want to take a look at the name of the Penis-Death-Beast that got Sláine (and the usual Time/Stamps).

    HO-HO-HO.

    1313:

    Why is the booster speeding up? Because it is going into a lower orbit. I'm guessing they are graphing the apogee of the orbit, but it is the perigee, @160 km, where it is getting slowed down by the atmosphere.

    1314:

    The Bigelow inflatable is purportedly more secure than the regular station. IIRC it's 12 layers of fabric: three of those are to hold the atmosphere in, and most of the rest is kevlar and similar tough fabric, set up basically as a Whipple shield. At micrometeroid speeds, metal armor isn't any better than metal is at with bullet-speed projectiles, at least at weights you can put into space.

    This goes back to the old WWI lesson of how hard it is to shoot down a zeppelin. Puncturing the bombing zeppelins didn't work, because the leakage rate was so low they could repair it in flight or go back to Germany for repairs. They only started shooting them down when they set up multiple types of bullets, mixing puncturing bullets with incendiary bullets, then getting enough of the hydrogen to leak to get an ignitable fuel-air mixture They're not party balloons, pictures of the Hindenburg notwithstanding.

    1315:

    I am not aware of kosher or halal ready meals although vegetable samosas may be potentially halal subject to blessings.

    No blessings needed, at least according to a Muslim friend. She ate my cooking as long as I cooked/baked without meat, or used halal meat.

    1316:

    Almost all British people would refer to beer at 20 Celius as warm, and many would at a temperature of 15 Celsius.

    I've just watched a Nigel Danson video in which he referred to 14° as being "hot". Admittedly, he's a Yorkshireman talking about the weather…

    1318:

    Well, that was fun. Someone even turned off the [EMF] chatter while it played out.

    Serious WU-WANG-TANG damage, a real old [redacted] came out to play.

    Excerpts: "I'll chop your legs off"

    US: "Here's a Meta-Penis, watch it go flaccid"

    WWT: "I have control over [redacted] (((seriously nasty Mexican stuff)))"

    US: "Oh? Really? BLOOD-LEFT-HAND-XTIAN-REMIX-HEAD-FUCK

    But it boiled down to: we can hack Mexican Minds pretty easily, especially with all the Catholism stuff.

    And we can hack your (LOL SOOO ANCIENT TECH) .mil pemises.

    Guess who survived?

    Hint: Pretty sure we still have "legs" whatever they are.

    ~

    HAPPY CAMPERS

    p.s.

    That one has been feeding off various Cartel stuff for years, big Nasty creature. CHOMP

    1319:

    Scott Sanford @ 1312: "Coincidentally, a local acquaintance of mine (and Hugo Award winner, yay) just had a story..."

    I think the story would have been better if Levine had mentioned the gender of the mouse.

    Acrual mouse researchers on the ISS do not fail to mention the gender:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7lgj3aZ8dU

    1320:

    The gender was clearly mentioned. What was the mouse named?

    1321:

    I just did a search of the online catalog of my local supermarket for "halal". The system returns a maximum of 500 results and it returned 500 results.

    1322:

    The gender was clearly mentioned.

    How do you even find out what the gender of a mouse is? Sex is easy, you just look at the genitalia. But gender... it's not as though they have little blue booties or something.

    1323:

    I always thought the rule was that words have gender and people have sex.

    1324:

    I don't particularly want to get into a debate about "how strictly one follows the Holy Quran". Let's just say that some Islamic scholars would say I was correct, and others that what your friend did was perfectly acceptable, and I've had conversations with scholars in both camps.

    1325:

    Troutwaxer @ 1321: " The gender was clearly mentioned. What was the mouse named?"

    I had to read the story three times before I finally realised that they gave the mouse a gendered name and thus revealed its sex, right at the end. Before, I was sure that the new name referred to the lab and not the mouse.

    1326:

    Inflatables in space make me extremely nervous. I'm less worried about radiation flying through that, say, micrometeors.

    Turns out that "inflatables" are more like a tightly-packed ten centimetre thick kevlar and nomex sandwich (optionally with metal or carbon fibre reinforcements) that expands to full diameter when released from the corset of a payload fairing than an actual balloon: they're no more vulnerable to micrometeors than a regular thin-skin metal pressure vessel.

    And for your fragment-sized debris you probably ought to be using a Whipple shield anyway.

    1327:

    paws It's Dark-Ages ignorant maunderings mixed in with camelherders' myths. Translation: Complete & utter tosh - just like the other one, of Bronze-Age goatherders' myths

    1328:

    It's Dark-Ages ignorant maunderings mixed in with camelherders' myths. Translation: Complete & utter tosh - just like the other one, of Bronze-Age goatherders' myths

    And you just failed history again (fourth time?). The Old Testament is an iron-age document. The last snippet of intact-ish Bronze Age religion disappeared in what is now the Iraqi marshes around 1100 AD. I'd love to know more about it, but the Medieval Arabic document describing those last practitioners of Babylonian religion hasn't been translated into English, so I just read about it second or third hand.

    If you want to hear a bit of the Bronze Age, purportedly some of the music used in Egyptian Coptic churches comes from the funeral music for the pharaohs. So far as I know, that's the last little bit.

    This stuff kinda matters. Bronze Age Greek religion wasn't about Apollo or Zeus. So far as researchers can tell, their sun deity was female and the most important deities were the twin gods we know today as the Gemini. If you think they Olympians were Bronze Age...not really, although some of them might have been around.

    I point this out, just so people understand that deep time erases a lot of things, and in this case, I'm talking about 3,000 years of deep time. Imagine what 3,000 years of climate change will do to our immutable truths?

    1329:

    You can tell with pigeons, from how they act. And there's a fair bit of variety. But you can never be entirely sure about sex unless one actually lays an egg.

    1330:

    The Old Testament is an iron-age document.

    As the document that has come down to us now, this is true. However many of the stories in the earlier books, and especially Genesis, show clear similarities with the mythology of bronze-age Sumer.

    1331:

    You can tell with pigeons, from how they act. And there's a fair bit of variety. But you can never be entirely sure about sex unless one actually lays an egg.

    Or ejaculates...

    1332:

    I hadn't thought of that, but I can make you way more nervous about unintended stowaways than mice: ants.

    Ever seen ants attracted to electrical wires? Or eat the insulation, as the damn ones did on our window air conditioner when we lived in the immobile home in TX...?

    1333:

    Hmmm.... One thing that I've had a problem with for decades is how to build a Wheel in space. But if you brought up inflatable module, inflated them, preferably with a liner near the innermost that set rigid after expansion, you could connect them easily....

    Of course, I immediately though of, if you didn't have the rigidity, of something hitting it and it bouncing....

    1334:

    Like, say, how much they stole from the Epic of Gilgamesh, who was most certainly Bronze Age.

    1335:

    I once talked to an engineer from HardDriveManufacturer who told me about the horrible three-week period when the hard drives made in a certain factory were so attractive to ants that the little critters would GO INSIDE THE DRIVES. They'd break the seals, touch the spinning disks, and immediately be flung into the inner walls of the hard drives with body-smooshing force! So they'd get the hard-drive back and try to do failure analysis and the inside of the drive would be coated with "insect hamburger." So HardDriveManufacturer had to refund a lot of the hard drives sold in Texas (which is where that species of ant lived) and rework one of their productions lines.

    I don't know if the story is actually true, but it was an actual engineer from HardDriveManufacturer, and not someone's cousin, brother, or "this guy's friend."

    1336:

    The story of the snake in Innana's tree, for example, and after the snake is killed the tree is made into her marriage bed... just a couple similarities there, noting huge. /s

    1337:

    Memories of a paper in JBIS outlining the construction of a wheel station by sending up inflatable formers for the rim and spokes, then using large spools of wide aluminium (and other materials to make multi layer insulation) tape to overwrap them. Keep layering until the hull is the required thickness, join the bits (making a good seal between the rim and the spokes was left as an exercise for the reader IIRC) and spin it up.

    1338:

    H It's much "nicer" to call it Bronze Age, though & probably at least partly true ... There's a passage, somewhere in Judges-to-2Samuel about the "philistines" having Iron Chariots, which the Judaeans could not counter. IIRC, the "book of Job" is probably the oldest & is very early "Iron" if not earlier. Iron was certainly in use there by the time of David/Solomon, though. Anything pre-Judges will be 95+% folk-tale & myth, but also predates the use ( By the "jews" ) of Iron - I think. See also: https://www.britannica.com/place/Palestine/The-Iron-Age and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_periods_in_the_Palestine_region ( So there! ) The revision of & accounts of the "jews" god has certainly morphed into an exaggerated example of an early Iron Age kingship on steroids, and so it remains, which shows what a pathetic imagination the xtians have got, oops.

    See also Paul's comment @ 1331

    1339:

    I'd forgotten that. I don't suppose there's any relation between the bed that Odysseus made for himself and Penelope, with an olive tree that grew through the house as the headboard....

    1340:

    Oh, come on - national myths from earlier societies don't qualify as "folk tales"....

    From wikipedia, on Gilgamesh: "He was likely a historical king of the Sumerian city-state of Uruk, who was posthumously deified. His rule probably would have taken place sometime in the beginning of the Early Dynastic Period (Mesopotamia) (henceforth ED), though he became a major figure in Sumerian legend during the Third Dynasty of Ur (c. 2112 – c. 2004 BC). .... After being translated in the early 1870s, it caused widespread controversy due to similarities between portions of it and the Hebrew Bible."

    1341:

    I hate to break this to you, but both mice and rats are notorious for gnawing through electrical insulation, as well as most forms of thermal insulation, and other materials.

    1342:

    Blue Origin is going to launch humans this July 20

    https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/may/06/jeff-bezoss-blue-origin-plans-space-sightseeing-jaunt-for-july

    I just had a conversation with a friend who was wondering if it would be faster to modify New Shepard as a human lunar lander and use Starship separately for a cargo-only lunar lander?

    While I personally prefer using Starship for both (due to my antipathy towards Lunar Gateway), the sad truth is that it'll take a while for Starship to be certified as human-rated, whereas NS pretty much is. Three points:

  • I wonder if Blue Origin is speeding up their timeline due to Bezos' lawsuit against NASA awarding SpaceX the contract? I don't really care; whatever it takes. I'm just curious.
  • What I wrote above doesn't apply if they have to use New Glenn architecture for the lunar lander.
  • I'm still partial to separating out the human and cargo parts of a lunar mission. Whether that is a human-only and cargo-only Starship, or the approach mentioned above.
  • 1343:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1342

    Do not forget the squirrels.

    In most residential neighborhoods in Montreal the power and telecom lines are not buried. Big grey squirrels rule the tops of the poles. They use the lines as highways but they also gnaw on them.

    1344:

    Gophers like fibre — Nortel discovered that in the 80s…

    1345:

    Problem is, the Middle East was one of the areas most hammered by the Bronze Age collapse. While I completely agree that elements of what was then thousand year-old Babylonian mythology made it into the Bible, I'm pretty sure there's no political continuity between a purported Bronze Age Judea and the known iron age sites and texts.

    A more modern analogy to the continuity of the Gilgamesh epic to the Bible is the neo-pagans' reverence for a (semi) deified King Arthur from the Dark Ages, based on basically fantasy stories from the high Middle Ages centuries after Arthur purportedly lived.

    Political continuity isn't the same as human continuity. The good example here are the Mayans. There are plenty of Mayan people around, speaking multiple Mayan languages. However, the kingdoms and city-states of the Mayan classical period are mostly a thousand years gone, as are the noble lines that ruled them.

    1346:

    Porcupines also cause trouble in some places. Basically, I think that most rodents do, if they are likely to go where such gnawable substances are. We had trouble with a hamster and a carpet. Domestic guinea pigs are a rare exception, and gnaw only in moderation.

    1347:

    I have a friend who always works from home and always needs a clear signal for his computers. He knows exactly how pure a signal he can get from a perfect telecom line. The Bell Canada people know him well because he always gets in touch with them when there's noise on a line.

    The Bell people told him that the noise always comes up because a line (or 2 or 3) has been gnawed by these buggers:

    https://alisonanddon.com/2018/12/20/shooting-squirrels-in-the-park-a-montreal-nature-hunt/

    1348:

    Lunar Gateway - then you and I STRONGLY disagree. Putting that up there a) makes going to and from the Moon, and up and down, a lot easier and cheaper, and 2) pushes us very strongly to keep going to the Moon, and that will start us on our way out there.

    1349:

    Separating out the human and cargo aspects makes a lot of sense. You don't send the humans until the cargo has safely landed, then if necessary you send out a rover to make sure there's a safe landing spot nearby.

    1350:

    Ah, but you're missing one more continuity: religious. Consider Christianity in the British Isles and Ireland during the Dark Ages. I would be willing to put a fiver down that between the fall of Babylon and the rise of Judea, there were priests repeating and saving the stories (and being given a living for doing so).

    1351:

    "Gophers like fibre — Nortel discovered that in the 80s…"

    Gophers were a major source of cable damage decades before that:

    https://archive.org/details/bstj51-1-1/page/n7/mode/2up

    See also top of next page, where they describe what it takes to stop gophers gnawing cables.

    1352:

    New Shepard comes up a fair bit short in the delta-V needed to get down and back. It would need enough of a redesign to effectively be a new craft, plus a bunch of requalification to do the landing with a passenger module attached. Currently the booster and capsule separate at altitude with the booster doing a powered landing and the capsule coming down under a parachute.

    1353:

    I've had plenty of pigeons fuck my shoulder, but none of them have ever come down my back...

    King Arthur: some things that crop up in Arthur stories are C&Ped out of proper Welsh mythology, but the tales themselves were pretty much bollocks from when they first appeared, long before Malory and that lot added their own gonads to the mix. There was this chap called Gerald the Welshman who went round writing all sorts of tales about the histories of places he went to, and some of them make it sound pretty exciting and romantic, but it seems that at least 98% of it was just plain made up and the rest is only maybe half true. Kind of a historical version of Tristan Jones.

    So, seeing as the whole thing is basically and fundamentally silly to begin with, it makes sense to me to consider the Monty Python treatment of the legend as pretty much definitive.

    1354: 1339 - and also a pile of feotid dingo's kidneys to even sugggest that the Quran is a Bronze Age document. The author lived from 570 to 632 CE and archaeological convention places the beginning of the Iron Age no later than ~300 BCE. 1354 - Disagree; Montee Pyton ik den Holee Grail, like virtually all Hollywood versions, is based on Mallory's Morte d'Arthur.
    1355:

    Actually, even Early Iron Age religion in the Levante was quite different from what we usually call "Jewish", "El" and "Yahwe" were not necessarily identical, "El" had a wife named "Asherah" etc.

    Oh, and am I the only one who thinks "iron chariots" would be quite heavy and thus likely not that maneuverable?

    As for Israelite monotheism, centralisation in the Southern kingdom was likely a reason, but by this point we're really deep into the Iron Age and close to the start of Classical Antiquity, but people unifying things with a TOE are not that new either.

    The Tanakh is about as much Bronze Age as Homer; it was written later, and it shows, but there are some eerie echoes.

    1356:

    Chewing up cables.

    I think all the creatures mentioned here are those who have teeth (at least the front ones) that continuously grow. So they are going to chew on something. Or die. I suspect that the things that make great cable insulation feels better when chewed than tree bark or rocks.

    1357:

    I disagree. I do think there was a Romanized Britain who was a warleader (as Romanized Britain, the tribes could agree to fight under him, without their kingship being challenged).

    May I suggest Geoffrey Ashe's The Discovery of King Arthur, which includes information from an archeological dig he ran in the late seventies, and some actual documentation from a procurer (?) from Gaul, at right about the same time?

    1358:

    I have a book by an academic named Rafael Patai called The Hebrew Goddess, and in it, he mentions - this was first published by Wayne Univ Press in 1963 - that there were tens of thousands of potsherds from ancient Judea inscribed with "To Asherah and Her Jahweh"...

    I discuss the inscription at greater length at http://silverdragon.5-cent.us/kate/javacrucianism.html

    1359:

    Duffy @ 1318: There is nothing new about Bigelow:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVdMA4QHdUU

    Except I don't think they use popcorn to inflate it.

    That took me back a ways. And just for those who have never experienced it, Jiffy-Pop did NOT taste "just like at the movies".

    My first actual paying job when I was 13 years old was running an old-fashioned (even in 1963) pop-corn machine for a movie theater. My best friend's dad was the manager.

    Somewhere in the State Archives is a photograph of that popcorn machine. The photo was in a book the Dept of Archives & History put out about North Carolina in WW2 that showed soldiers on pass from Camp Butner, NC lined up in front of that theater in 1943, and the popcorn machine is there in front of the theater then, 20 years earlier.

    I have searched & searched for that photograph online for many years since I first saw it in the book, but so far I haven't been able to turn it up. I guess I'm going to have to go downtown & search for it in person.

    1360:

    The Iron Age beginning by 300BCE? ?!?!?!

    When I was in my teens, it was somewhere between 1500BCE and 1200 (or maybe 1100) BCE. IIRC, one of the Middle Eastern empires that lasted 100-150 yrs had iron (steel?) swords around 1500BCE.

    1361:

    Troutwaxer @ 1321: The gender was clearly mentioned. What was the mouse named?

    Gender, smhender! It's a mouse. Who cares what gender it is other than another mouse.

    What I want to know, is does it ROAR?

    1362:

    Paul @ 1324: I always thought the rule was that words have gender and people have sex.

    ... unless they're "incel".

    1363:

    https://www.history.com/topics/pre-history/iron-age

    [ "The Iron Age was a period in human history that started between 1200 B.C. and 600 B.C., depending on the region, and followed the Stone Age and Bronze Age." ]

    [ "The Iron Age began around 1200 B.C. in the Mediterranean region and Near East with the collapse of several prominent Bronze Age civilizations, including the Mycenaean civilization in Greece and the Hittite Empire in Turkey. Ancient cities including Troy and Gaza were destroyed, trade routes were lost and literacy declined throughout the region." ]

    [ "Many scholars place the end of the Iron Age in at around 550 BC, when Herodotus, “The Father of History,” began writing “The Histories,” though the end date varies by region. In Scandinavia, it ended closer to 800 AD with the rise of the Vikings. In Western and Central Europe, the end of the Iron Age is typically identified as coinciding with the Roman conquest during the first century BC." ]

    1364:

    whitroth @ 1335: Like, say, how much they stole from the Epic of Gilgamesh, who was most *certainly* Bronze Age.

    How do you know that THEY stole it from Gilgamesh and not vice versa? Or that BOTH did not derive from some common earlier "writings"?

    1365:

    paws I THINK I specifically referred to the "recital" as: Dark-Ages camelherders' myths - it's certainly how I usually refer to it, anyway!

    whitroth "Asherah" being later designated "Ashteroth" & then heavily-denigrated & libelled as The PatriarchyTM gained full control. Couldn't have a "GODDESS" could we? "Iron AGe" start dates vary according to location: See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Age

    1366:

    I hadn't thought of that, but I can make you way more nervous about unintended stowaways than mice: ants. Ever seen ants attracted to electrical wires? Or eat the insulation...

    Oh dear, yes. After one convention's teardown a friend of mine came home with several pans of very rich baklava, paper thin layers of pastry and fillings that dripped a rich sugary syrup. Delicious! He failed to secure them in an airtight container and suddenly had ants. At a casual glance his upper floor apartment had All The Ants, which wanted to be all over his kitchen and explore everywhere else. Their numbers declined after he got rid of the aromatic sugary syrup but I'm not sure all the ants went away before he moved out.

    1367:

    Gilgamesh was from pre-2000BCE. The Hebrews, or what would be them, seem to show up no less than 800 years later. The Torah appears to have been written down somewhen between 800BCE and 600BCE. Therefore, the Akkadians were not stealing from the Hebrews.

    1368:

    Niala @ 1344: Elderly Cynic @ 1342

    Do not forget the squirrels.

    In most residential neighborhoods in Montreal the power and telecom lines are not buried. Big grey squirrels rule the tops of the poles. They use the lines as highways but they also gnaw on them.

    A few years back our 4th of July holiday started off with a bang when one of them got across the input of a transformer & set the top of the pole on fire. Heard the boom and the power went out.

    When I went out to look, I saw a creosote (or whatever they treat them with nowadays) telephone pole up the block burning like the candle on a birthday cake.

    1369:

    Trottelreiner @ 1356: Oh, and am I the only one who thinks "iron chariots" would be quite heavy and thus likely not that maneuverable?

    A heavy war chariot has a lot of momentum when it crashes through your line, so "quite heavy" wouldn't be that much of a drawback. You'd use broad maneuvers to put yourself into position to attack your opponent's line from the flanks, so you wouldn't be making sharp turns at speed.

    I suspect "iron chariots" describes a chariot with an iron shoe or tire around the rim of the wheels that helps make the wheel more resilient when it encounters "obstacles" rather than an entire chariot made from iron. Still heavy, but not from an excess weight of iron.

    1370:

    JBS @ 1362: "Gender, smhender! It's a mouse. Who cares what gender it is other than another mouse. What I want to know, is does it ROAR?"

    If you genetically modified a mouse to grow a syrinx, like corvids and parrots have, then it could copy nearly any sound, including a roar. It would not be a loud roar since mice have tiny lungs, but you could always fit it out with a tiny wireless microphone.

    While you're at it you could also genetically modify a mouse to have an opposable thumb in each of its two front paws, so that it could put on the wireless mike by itself. A mouse's front paws are remarkably like a tiny, slightly elongated, human hand, with four fingers, so that would be an easier genetic transform than the others.

    1371:

    One thing that I've had a problem with for decades is how to build a Wheel in space. But if you brought up inflatable module, inflated them, preferably with a liner near the innermost that set rigid after expansion, you could connect them easily....

    The challenge that bugged me was the rotary pressure seal that's implied many artistic renditions in science fiction. (Notice that in 2001 the whole station rotates, including the docking hub. Much simpler engineering, if more challenging for approaching pilots.) It seems to me that the problem could be avoided by having a large cylindrical pressure container; the habitat modules could be spun inside that with few worries, as turning axles or tracks are well understood technologies.

    But that would not be as interesting to look at in visual SF.

    1372:

    Scott Sanford @ 1367:

    I hadn't thought of that, but I can make you *way* more nervous about unintended stowaways than mice: ants. Ever seen ants attracted to electrical wires? Or eat the insulation...

    Oh dear, yes. After one convention's teardown a friend of mine came home with several pans of very rich baklava, paper thin layers of pastry and fillings that dripped a rich sugary syrup. Delicious! He failed to secure them in an airtight container and suddenly had ants. At a casual glance his upper floor apartment had All The Ants, which wanted to be all over his kitchen and explore everywhere else. Their numbers declined after he got rid of the aromatic sugary syrup but I'm not sure all the ants went away before he moved out.

    The only way I know to get rid of ants entirely is to get ALL of the food out of the house, which is difficult because ants will eat the house itself. Short of burning the place down, what are you going to do?

    But if you SEE ants, you can spray them with "Formula 409" or similar household detergent that's safe to use around food preparation areas & won't poison your pets.

    1373:

    That looks great... but it cannot be expecting a lot of traffic. I have this picture in my head of a long tube that have docking stations/tubes to go to airlocks on them, above or below the wheel, and a connecting cylinder... hmmm, might need a clutch.

    1374:

    US: "Here's a Meta-Penis, watch it go flaccid" LOL. (For more than one reason. and also [1][2][3]) A fellow who used to work at Sandia (and won't be named because he's still around) once told a friend, paraphrased: "consider changing device physics". :-) (The electronics in and ancillary to those beasts are hardened and big, yeah, but still can experience random glitches.)

    [1] Anyone who hasn't read it might enjoy Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals (1987, Carol Cohn) [2] Official .mil link MINUTEMAN III TEST LAUNCH ABORTS PRIOR TO LAUNCH, May 05, 2021 [3] Triad boys want new toys: The May 5 incident comes as Defense Department officials are pressing the case for the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent program to replace the aging Minuteman III system. ... “Nothing lasts forever,” Richard said. “You cannot indefinitely life-extend anything.

    1375:

    Well, you could also do the skyhook idea, where you create an inflatable Ferris wheel that's perpendicular to Earth, catches ships on the bottom and pitches them out on top. Then they just dock at hubs and lug stuff up the boarding tube into the station before being thrown off.

    There are a couple of problems here. One is, unless the spaceship is docking at the center of mass, yon great squishy gyroscope is going to precess somewhat. Probably not a lot, but given that there's stuff moving around inside it, the permutations of how things could stress, wiggle, vibrate, bulge, and so forth are quite fascinating. When there's a solar flare and everyone runs for the storm shelter, will the shielding be pointing the right way when they get there?

    The bigger problem is if it's a Stanford torus, it's about a mile across. While I'm happy with balloon engineering for something that large, however it's oriented in space, there's going to be enough crap in orbit by the time someone gets it up up there that fixing punctures is going to be a normal part of everyone's job, and living in the shooting gallery will be fun.

    Actually, I have the solution: big inflatable non-rotating spaceship with oodles of aerogel or other nifty stuff (lots and lots and lots of ECHO balloons?) to massively slow down and ablate anything passing through it. We'll use the giant space station to clean the orbit it's in of all debris! This is an application of the principle of "if you're a bullet magnet anyway, why not collect and recycle bullets and save the environment?"

    1376:

    @1353

    After some research, it takes deltaV = 1.87 km/s to take off from the Moon's surface to lunar orbit. New Shepard's deltaV is 3.36 km/s.

    http://www.astronautix.com/n/newshepard.html https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/29861/how-easy-is-it-to-take-off-from-the-moon

    You're correct on the rest.

    @1349 I'm not against the idea of a lunar station in general, just Lunar Gateway 1. To me, it looks like the next iteration of SLS. I remember having a discussion with sleepingroutine on this.

  • From a business perspective, I don't see how that station is cheaper for a tourist than simply landing directly. Once the flight rate picks up, I see value. But after the base.

  • Matching lunar orbits with the station restricts your launch window from Earth or costs more fuel instead of entering a bespoke lunar polar orbit that would allow you to reach the surface base.

  • I'll want to see fuel depots working in Earth orbit before I'd trust them around the Moon.

  • I don't think you'd need exotic materials to build a space elevator from the lunar surface to orbit? Once the traffic picks up, it might make sense to skip the station altogether assuming orbital mechanics allow you to build one.

  • 1378:

    "After some research, it takes deltaV = 1.87 km/s to take off from the Moon's surface to lunar orbit. New Shepard's deltaV is 3.36 km/s."

    I meant to add to that the following: "I wonder if New Shepard could get more delta V without having to fight against the atmosphere going up. Then again, it wouldn't have the atmosphere to slow it down on descent. It would be a re-engineered space craft, as you said Vulch.

    1380:

    The bigger problem is if it's a Stanford torus, it's about a mile across. While I'm happy with balloon engineering for something that large, however it's oriented in space, there's going to be enough crap in orbit by the time someone gets it up up there that fixing punctures is going to be a normal part of everyone's job, and living in the shooting gallery will be fun.

    Sure! Of course, the O'Neill answer is to slather a few meters of lunar rock over the outside of everything. That was primarily for radiation shielding but it'll work a treat for micro-meteors. I can't argue; it will certainly work just fine if you happen to have megatons of regolith laying around...

    1381:

    I wonder. A few meters of regolith seems like a good idea, but I'd really like to see a good simulation of a micrometeor hitting such a structure before I'd trust it. Could be exciting to be on the downstream end.

    Anyway, I'm now enamored by the idea of a big spherical, non-rotating space station, designed to catch and stop crap so it can be disposed of, along with whatever else it does. We can call it a Dyson Sphere, and joke about how much it sucks to live there and how much the builders clean up each time they sell another one.

    1382:

    @1372: Notice that in 2001 the whole station rotates, including the docking hub. Much simpler engineering, if more challenging for approaching pilots.

    Surely the whole next generation or two of prospective spaceship pilots have been practicing manoeuvres for docking manually with a rotating space station for years, using the official simulation software, otherwise known as "Elite"?

    1383:

    Oh I remember Elite and learning how to dock.

    Thing was, by the time you could afford a docking computer you were already better at docking than it was.

    1384:

    Rodents gnawing things In a certain locale in England, they have a special problem, fat little rodents that love lofts & leccy wiring. You have to call specialist certified removal people to get them out as Glis glis are a protected, "listed" species.

    Bill Arnold PLEASE: Do not feed the Troll?

    Meanwhile: Docking with a spinning space station? - easy! I WANT MY FUTURE BACK

    Local news The town that is notorious for xenophobia, back to the 1800's & which voted over 25% for the Brexit party, back in 2016, has, unsurprisingly voted for a fascist xenophobe. Immediately the nutters of momentum are doing their best to retain a tory misgovernment by attacking Starmer. Here, I expect arshole Khan to win, with his simultaneous policies of crapping on locals with older cars & at the same time, wanting to build/open the new Silvertown road tunnel

    1385: 1356 - Not as such, but that doesn't mean that I don't think that iron tyres, bearings and nails would offer benefits over an all wooden chariot. 1361 - Which part of the phrase "no later than" don't you understand? 1370 - Correct, if your intend to perform a "chariot charge". Very wrong if you use chariots to get missile troops into range, and withdrawn, quickly. 1373 Para 4 - I'd have said "Nippon", but that may be a question of brand names in different markets, yes? 1376 - Well yes that. Also, if the wheel/torus is big enough that space debris can't achieve a hard kill on the station, you definitely will achieve a hard kill on that piece of space debris, so space debris should be a self-limiting problem I think. 1377 bullets (2) and (5) - Well, I think High Moon (and High Earth) offer the advantages of being able to stay "in orbit" without being in a can you can certainly see, and maybe touch, all the sides of, and of being a base for micro-gravity manufacturing facilities.
    1386:

    As Starmer has done his best to avoid indicating that he is any more than Bliar without the charisma(*), what do you expect? Frankly, based on available evidence, Johnson might actually be better for the country :-(

    I notice that you didn't mention that the Blairites are blaming Corbyn for Starmer's failure, despite the fact that Starmer has been leader for over a year and Corbyn has behaved like a decent ex-leader (i.e. stayed in the background and not sniped at Starmer). Whether it is fair or not to blame Starmer for this fiasco, he has had a full year to reverse Labour's setbacks, and has demonstrably not done so.

    (*) Until and unless he gets into power, we shan't know if he is also as fascist, monetarist and so on. Yes, he COULD be a socialist in Blairite clothing, but that's not the way the smart money is betting.

    1387:

    Where did I say "warm beer" was above body temperature? You made that claim, not me.

    If 'warm' means above the sublimation point of dry ice, all beer is drunk warm.

    Oh wait, that's not your definition of 'warm' either? At the moment your disparagements are relying on your Humpty Dumptiness in not actually defining the term. Perhaps if you did, we might get somewhere.

    (My personal definition has 15C as cool rather than warm.)

    1388:

    To be fair, JBS was responding to a disparagement that interpreted his use of warm to mean above body temperature.

    Please, let's drop this futile exchange!

    1389:

    Mice in fact do roar. This has only recently been discovered, as it is ultrasonic. I think it was discovered first in lab mice when someone happened to have the appropriate detection equipment in the lab.

    1390:

    When you say they roar, are you refering to parts of the songs they make up in the ultrasonic range?

    https://www.amnh.org/explore/news-blogs/news-posts/the-science-behind-singing-mice-and-laughing-rats

    1391: 1388 - And you know I agree with you (at least as long as we don't go down to individual brews). 1389 - Yes, but I attached a dictionary definition of "warm" rather than using the Lewis Caroll quote "when I use a word, it means exactly what I want it to mean".
    1392:

    And I pointed out in #1298 that you were misinterpreting it to claim that warm means above blood heat. If I exclude the Old English (a language with which I am poorly familiar), the majority of references in the OED refer to temperatures that are DEFINITELY below blood heat, often well below, and only a few (mainly fires) refer to temperatures that definitely above. And, as I also pointed out, that definitely applies to beer - though exactly where the boundary between cool and warm comes will depend on where in the country you are.

    1393:

    Other terms I use to describe temperatures between the freezing point of pure water and blood heat, coldest to hottest are ice cold, cold, cool, room temperature, lukewarm.

    1394:

    on the subject of the bible,,, this guy has a lot of illuminating data https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLviKiEuj30

    1395:

    My answer, for decades, has been water in between some layer of the wall. That way, you a) have a lot of water that you need anyway; b) it self-seals punctures; c) does a great job of slowing thing puncturing it down, and d) makes the Wheel semi-self-balancing on the rotation, with mass moving around inside.

    1396:

    That's OUR future back, damnit!

    1397:

    Re: 'A few meters of regolith seems like a good idea, but I'd really like to see a good simulation of a micrometeor hitting such a structure before I'd trust it.'

    I'm in the middle of '2312' (Kim Stanley Robinson) and so far it looks like he's got every variety of terra-forming anyone's ever dreamed up. How this ties into your comment: One of the key plot elements is what appears to be a planned micrometeor attack on Mercury's major city (Terminator). So - yeah - when evaluating your planet's skin for protection you may want to test it for the entire range of meteor sizes, frequencies of hits plus combinations thereof.

    I did a quick search: not a huge research area at this time/yet but I'm guessing it's likely to become more important and newsworthy as more rockets and space debris/satellites/junk fall to Earth.

    https://www.nasa.gov/centers/wstf/testing_and_analysis/hypervelocity_impact/index.html

    1398:

    Two things about chariots: first, if they could afford it, I'd think they'd put iron sheets on the outside of a wooden frame - additional armor. Second... they were clearly not only used to bring archers in and out, given that out-sticking spikes on chariot wheels are a documented thing, and that would be close-in anti-infantry.

    1399:

    I think some folks, esp. not from the US, missed the reference.

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

    1400:

    Montee Pyton ik den Holee Grail

    If you have one, I hope your moose is in good health and no-one is trying to carve their initials in its side.

    Including the majestik møøse A Møøse once bit my sister... No realli! She was Karving her initials on the møøse with the sharpened end of an interspace tøøthbrush given her by Svenge - her brother-in-law - an Oslo dentist and star of many Norwegian møvies: "The Høt Hands of an Oslo Dentist", "Fillings of Passion", "The Huge Mølars of Horst Nordfink"
    1401:

    I did a quick search: not a huge research area at this time/yet but I'm guessing it's likely to become more important and newsworthy as more rockets and space debris/satellites/junk fall to Earth.

    Here's my thinking, or what passes for it:

    First off, it's going to be a real pain to test. On Earth, we've got a few research-grade guns that can hit comparable velocities (google "light gas gun") and so in theory we can get a pile of regolith simulant, shoot a pellet at it at 10 km/sec or whatever, and see what happens next.

    The big problem with this is gravity, because it holds the rubble pile together. In space, it's going to be held together somewhat differently, and so it's likely that the rubble is going to react somewhat differently, especially if it's being spun rather rapidly. Probably you can simulate the spinning space station adequately, but all that will tell you is how critical the rubble composition and the construction of the shield is. Ideally these last two don't matter (it's basically a "five meters of sand-sized particles will stop anything below 100 grams, doesn't matter how loosely the sand is packed or what the particles are made of") Worst case scenario, a wide and unpredictable variety of cases based on both construction and composition turn out to spall dangerously, ignite, or do other jolly fun things when hit by a hyper-velocity pellet, and the effects vary by the speed, composition, and size of the pellet.

    1402:

    In re the Torah/Tanakh being Bronze or Iron Age. Surely what's important is whether a thing is true, not how old it is.

    I have no particular reason to think Judaism is true, I'm just used to it. However, I do get protective when it's attacked. I blame anti-Semitism for that.

    Also, if religions are bad because they're old, then Islam is the best Abrahamic religion, or maybe Bahai. Or Mormonism?

    See also "camel-herders"-- again, it doesn't matter what people were doing for a living (and the folks who wrote religious texts probably had some education and free time), it matters whether what was said was true.

    I assume the Bronze-Age camel-herder thing is an effort to destroy prestige, but I think it's tiresome.

    1403:

    Appeal to novelty is the opposite of the appeal to antiquity: both are logical fallacies.

    Besides, this is obviously incorrect, given that back then, Hebrews were herders of sheep and goats, not camels.

    On the other hand (that's #3, if you're counting), anyone asserting the literal TRVTH of the Bible, including the OT, is amazingly naieve. (I was certainly not including you in that, Nancy.)

    1404:

    I happen to agree, although I'm neither Jewish nor Christian. Nor Muslim.

    This is why I refuse to identify as atheist, whatever I believe about religion: the militant atheists are every bit as ill-informed, venomous, and closed minded as the militant religious. I'm not going to group with the hate mongers on any of these sides.

    Greg's far from the only bigoted atheist I know, and their smug insistence that they know "The Truth" is basically as wrong as what the militantly clueless religious spew. And assuming that if atheism is false, then the worst nightmare of a badly misunderstood religion must therefore be true, is an utter failure in logic and comprehension. It's not a binary situation, and the logic of the excluded middle does not hold. Both sides are false and meaningless in this debate.

    Moreover, bigoted atheism is not a good response to bigoted religion in either a tactical or strategic sense. Why be a bad copy of something you know doesn't work? Understanding your opponent and the complexities of the situation is far more useful than aping their behavior.

    1405:

    I often have fun with militant atheists and their bigotry.

    The general shape of my argument goes along these lines:

    A devout christian do not believe in N-1 of the know gods, whereas an atheist disbelieve all N of them, given that N is in the thousands, that seems like a rather trivial difference ?

    1406: 1399 - Again with the assumption about the "chariot charge". Personally, I think that if I was going to part armour a horse chariot, I'd use barding on the horses, not plates on the chariot superstructure. 1400 - I got it; I'm just not sufficiently familiar with the Dutchy of Grand Fenwick to develop the comment. 1401 - mai møøse iss fyne, tank U. 1403 - I only ever mentioned Halal and Kosher dietary laws until the resident militant atheist decided to bring religion into it. Given that said dietary laws were actually good food hygiene in the Middle East until the invention of refrigeration... 1405 - Likewise; I'm not religious, but I like to have a sympathetic understanding of religions (see para 4 above).
    1407:

    Ioan @ 1378: IBM unveiled the first 2 nm chip! Looks like they're back in the race
    https://www.reuters.com/technology/ibm-unveils-2-nanometer-chip-technology-faster-computing-2021-05-06/

    Bill @ 1380: That is very cool. Here's a slightly more technical piece:
    https://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/semiconductors/nanotechnology/ibm-introduces-the-worlds-first-2nm-node-chip

    Back in the day when IBM dominated the PC market they made more money from manufacturing microchips for other OEMs than they did selling Personal Computers. And the income from micro-chip manufacturing was vastly surpassed by the income from licensing IBM's patents.

    1408:

    "When IBM dominated the PC market..."

    Depending on precisely when you are talking about, IBM made chips they literally sold for 100K-1M dollars a pop, after wrapping them in a mainframe.

    The reason 2nm is interesting for IBM right now, is that even if their yield is only 1%, they still make lots of money.

    1409:

    "ignite"

    ???

    1410:

    I was referring to it as the discovery of the importance of mouse vocalisations, but thinking of the grasshopper mouse. It's more of a howl maybe, but close enough. I also got the reference to "The mouse that roared", I just thought it's a fun fact if anyone hadn't heard of it. Both the singing and the roaring/howling. It also illustrates how much can go unnoticed, until revealed by accident.

    1411:

    What I find amusing is how often their rant about "religion is bad because blah blah blah..." can legitimately be answered with "Yeah, Jesus said that".

    1412:

    https://youtu.be/izizsAodOCk A very short video of the grasshopper mouse howling

    1413:

    Re: Religion

    Since it doesn't look like it's not gonna go away maybe we should take an objective* close look at it ... scientifically.

    The below is an interesting piece discussing Dennett's take via his book 'Breaking the Spell' v-a-v some of his contemporaries including militant atheists.

    https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/211255/Daniel%20Dennett%20and%20the%20science%20of%20religion.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y#:~:text=Daniel%20Dennett%20(2006)%20is%20reluctant,of%20people%2C%20not%20just%20individuals.

    • Unbiased - preferably double-blind type of study design/analysis.
    1414:

    Bellinghman @ 1388:

    Where did I say "warm beer" was above body temperature? You made that claim, not me.

    If 'warm' means above the sublimation point of dry ice, all beer is drunk warm.

    Oh wait, that's not your definition of 'warm' either? At the moment your disparagements are relying on your Humpty Dumptiness in not actually defining the term. Perhaps if you did, we might get somewhere.

    I didn't think to carry a thermometer with me when I was on R&R in Scotland to measure beer temperatures. Sorry 'bout that.

    (My personal definition has 15C as cool rather than warm.)

    15°C is about the temperature of the "cold" water that comes out of the faucet in my kitchen (actually 16.9°C when I measured it just now). The beer I was served in Scotland was distinctly warmer than tap-water, but it was NOT body temperature.

    It was a hotel dining room in Inverness & I'm guessing the room temperature at the time would have been around 21°C (comfortable without a coat or a sweater) and the beer was warmer than the room. Not by much, but warmer.

    But that's getting all wrapped around the axle and missing my original point that there are many beverages that don't taste good until you acquire a taste for them. UHT shelf milk is no different than warm beer in that respect.

    EXCEPT ... the "taste" of UHT shelf milk seems to abate when mixed with fresh milk and left in the refrigerator (35°F/1.67°C). And it completely disappears once the milk warms by a couple of degrees sitting on the counter while I swallow my daily medications.

    That's why I have milk in the first place; to help me swallow those medications. The UHT shelf milk is just a convenience so I won't run out of milk to take my medications if for some reason I can't get to the store for fresh milk.

    Twice a year, as the BEST IF USED BY: date comes due I need to use the UHT shelf milk and I do so by mixing it into a half used half gallon of regular milk. The slight residual UHT taste dissipates once the milk is chilled in the refrigerator.

    But the bottom most of bottom lines is that it's a matter of taste, and if all y'all don't like it, don't drink it, but don't tell me my taste is wrong because I don't find the taste objectionable.

    1415:

    Niala @ 1391: When you say they roar, are you refering to parts of the songs they make up in the ultrasonic range?

    https://www.amnh.org/explore/news-blogs/news-posts/the-science-behind-singing-mice-and-laughing-rats

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

    1416:

    andyf @ 1395: on the subject of the bible,,, this guy has a lot of illuminating data
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLviKiEuj30

    "This guy" bored me to tears in less than a minute. It is a bit more endurable if you set the playback speed to 1.5.

    I found this one to be a bit more illuminating AND entertaining ... especially interesting digression at 13:45.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CtE7_jW_6c

    I'm not enough of a Biblical Scholar to be able to evaluate either of their claims.

    1417:

    I think someone should make The Huge Mølars of Horst Nordfink. If the British/Kenneth Branagh version of Wallander can be successful, that shows there's clearly a market for this sort of thing.

    1418:

    You also need to consider what the impact will do to whatever is holding your regolith rubble in place, and how badly the local environment will be affected when a hole in the retaining surface starts leaking boulders. Trying to put a layer of rubble on the outside of a spinning structure is going to work about as well as emptying a wheelbarrow onto the ceiling of your living room and expecting it not to immediately end up on the floor. The outer layer needs to be something with a high tensile strength and capable of supporting the effective weight of the shielding material at a slightly higher (larger radius means higher effective g) g than you want for the living surface inside.

    1419:

    Over 15C, for me at least, is more in the category of "mildly alcoholic soup". Not that I'm averse to that as such, it just feels too much like a category error to think of it as beer. If it's pleasant and I would like more of it, then I'm happy to call it whatever the bartender calls it. The relationship between phoneme and sememe is arbitrary, after all.

    For me 4ishC is "normal", but beer that already has ice crystals forming it is "spoiled" (not the same again even thawed, the suspended solids seem to change for the worse). Casual freeze-distilling is okay for cider I guess, and very occasionally a real eisbock isn't too bad, but by accident it's just a bit yuck.

    1420:

    Anyway, I'm now enamored by the idea of a big spherical, non-rotating space station, designed to catch and stop crap so it can be disposed of, along with whatever else it does. We can call it a Dyson Sphere, and joke about how much it sucks to live there and how much the builders clean up each time they sell another one.

    Coincidentally, I read just yesterday that the original Bernal Sphere proposal back in 1929 was for a non-rotating sphere ten miles in diameter; the more familiar Island One Bernal Sphere from the Gerard K. O'Neill studies rotates and is much smaller.

    I think we all remember that Schlock Mercenary taught us that a Dyson Sphere is expensive to build.

    1421:

    MODERATORS: This must be about the most, er, impotent scam that I have seen in years. It might be worth preserving for its humour value after you have cancelled his account :-)

    1422:

    Nancy L I say that because I'm trying to imply that "Really & you haven't come up with a better, more plausible idea than this bullshit in N thousand years?"

    H the militant atheists are every bit as ill-informed, venomous, and closed minded as the militant religious Bollocks I & the other "Militant atheists" are pointing out the absurdities, cruelties & outright lies of religions & their believers. Meanwhile said believers are running around, murdering people ... - .. this is in no way, shape or form, equivalent. I never claim to know the truth, but I do know that the religious are wrong, on the evidence that their "holy books" are pure bullshit. "Bigoted Atheism" huh? Are we thus patrolling the streets, demanding that people submit to our prejudices, the way the religious do? "Bigoted" atheism is merely (!) tiredness that people are still gullible enough to swallow the deliberate lies & blackmail Your whole rant is full up & overflowing with a completely false equivalence & you should know better.

    P H-K As a "Bigoted" atheist I am in full agreement with you

    paws Agreed, but we have moved on since then Piggies, in N Europe - safe food, piggies in the Middle E 1500 years ago - don't go there. Of course, one reason I'm a "militant" atheist is that I'm an escaped ex-christian

    Moderator Alert Post # 1421 appears to be pure SPAM [ Penis enlargement, for Ghu's sake! ] .. Ah EC has spotted it (!) as well.

    1423:

    A devout christian do not believe in N-1 of the known gods, whereas an atheist disbelieve all N of them, given that N is in the thousands, that seems like a rather trivial difference?

    Perhaps I never met a "militant atheist", but every atheist I know would say "Well, duh!" to the above. They certainly would not get offended or riled up. Whereas it does seem to rile up Christians, in my experience.

    1424:

    Poul-Henning Kamp @ 1409:

    "When IBM dominated the PC market..."

    Depending on precisely when you are talking about, IBM made chips they literally sold for 100K-1M dollars a pop, after wrapping them in a mainframe.

    The reason 2nm is interesting for IBM right now, is that even if their yield is only 1%, they still make lots of money.

    Late 1994. When IBM introduced the original PC in 1981 one of their deals with Intel was that IBM could manufacture their own CPU chips in the case Intel couldn't meet demand. By the time I went to work IBM, things had turned around and IBM was manufacturing 80486 & Pentium CPUs for Intel to sell because demand had outstripped Intel's CPU manufacturing capacity growth.

    That's the story we were told in training. IBM also manufactured other chips that were not CPUs, some of which were sold to compitors in the PC market. I think a lot of it had to do with how IBM saw the PC in relationship to their 1956 consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice. A lot of IBM's missteps in the PC market can be explained by management's concern with not pissing off the lawyers at the DoJ.

    I started work at the IBM "Help Center" 4th quarter 1994 (first week in October). Second quarter 1995 I went to work for IBM manufacturing as a Debug Specialist. At that time the majority of our production went to Fortune 500 companies in batches of 500 - 5000 PCs. Compaq, HP, Dell et al, still hadn't really cracked the corporate market at that time, but IBM was already beginning to struggle in the home PC market - because clone computers could give a home consumer more computer at a lower price - at the cost of not getting IBM levels of support if you had problems, but computers were already becoming a comodity.

    If it lasted a year, you didn't fix a broken computer you just bought a new one because the one you had was already obsolete.

    I was laid off (lack of work) from IBM PC Manufacturing on Dec 31, 1996 and offered a job as a contractor at IBM in the "Integrated Software Subsystems Lab" on Jan 2, 1997. The "Integrated Software Subsystems Lab" assembled the pre-load packages for (IIRC) 20+ languages for each new IBM PC model. Our customer was IBM PC Company manufacturing. I handled logistics - making sure programmers had equipment to work on, making sure that equipment was the latest hardware revision and making sure the "product" got out to the manufacturing sites in a timely manner (which included preparing the appropriate export documentation) so that they could build PCs & have them in stock in the warehouse when the new models were announced in March & October.

    I worked there until early 2000.

    1425:

    Bloodthirsty bunch, the New Atheists. (Well, some of them. :-) Towards a geopolitics of atheism: Critical geopolitics post the ‘War on Terror’ (September 2017, Russell Fostera, Nick Megoran, Michael Dunn) This paper outlines the core tenets of ‘New Atheist’ philosophy, before addressing how its key representatives have taken positions on the ‘Global War on Terror.’ In particular, we critically interrogate the works of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens and identify a belligerent geopolitical imagination which posits a civilizational clash between an existentially-threatened secular, liberal West with responsibility to use extraordinary violence to protect itself and the world from a backwards oriental Islam. The paper concludes with four possible explanations for the paradox that the New Atheist critique of religion for being violent acts itself as a geopolitical incitement to violence. Hitchens notoriously was a very vocal supporter of the 2003+ Iraq war. (Those of us who were against it were a bit lonely, at least in the US.) (I've worked with several (5+) scientists and engineers who ere Muslims, some devout, and all were non-violent, or at least never expressed anything even close to violent opinions and often the opposite.)

    1426:

    Vulch @ 1419: You also need to consider what the impact will do to whatever is holding your regolith rubble in place, and how badly the local environment will be affected when a hole in the retaining surface starts leaking boulders. Trying to put a layer of rubble on the outside of a spinning structure is going to work about as well as emptying a wheelbarrow onto the ceiling of your living room and expecting it not to immediately end up on the floor. The outer layer needs to be something with a high tensile strength and capable of supporting the effective weight of the shielding material at a slightly higher (larger radius means higher effective g) g than you want for the living surface inside.

    Could you sandwich your regolith layer in between inner & outer envelopes of your inflatable wheel? I'm also thinking that maybe you coat the outside of the envelope with some kind of resin that begins to harden once it was exposed to vacuum. Not something that hardens instantly, but cures in a couple of days or weeks. And leave pockets in the outer edge where you could slide girders in and connect together to form a wheel. At each joint you have a cable connecting the outer rim of girders to the center hub like spokes on a bicycle wheel.

    1427:

    You know, both my cats came from a now-deceased medical missionary nun who dedicated her life to living and working in some fairly unpleasant places, helping people who were poor and desperate. Once she retired to San Diego, for fun she smuggled medical goods across the border to Tijuana clinics. The two stray cats she adopted as adults are loving, polite cats despite their scars. I never knew this nun, but I know her friends (how I got the cats), and I completely believe them when they tell me that she lived her religion and cared for those who most desperately needed it, with great skill, dedication, and humor.

    When you've done like this notionally deluded nun, you can toot your horn about the value of atheism. I don't see you as retired 75 year-old, smuggling medical supplies into Calais in the back of your Lando to help the migrants. Instead, you sound somewhat like the Chinese Maoists who tortured meditators for months at a time to see how long it would take to kill them, because they believed all religion to be dangerously deluded and practitioners to be therefore disposable.

    1428:

    Greg Tingey @ 1423: Moderator Alert
    Post # 1421 appears to be pure SPAM [ Penis enlargement, for Ghu's sake! ]
    .. Ah EC has spotted it (!) as well.

    Not any more. I saw it disappear just as I was about to chime in with my own alert.

    1429:

    JBS @ 1425:

    PS: I like the story because I'm glad to see IBM is till in there pitching.

    1430:

    Punching down on the idiotic superstitious evil mendacious nonsense of religions is easier than shooting fish in a barrel. So it attracts trolls who like easy targets. It's an ad hominem to pretend that invalidates the actual arguments. Yes, there are people who enjoy making other people cry who attack religion. But people who enjoy religion like to burn people who disagree with them alive, behead them, hang them, torture them and so on which is usually considered to be worse. I'm an atheist. My father was an atheist. His father was an atheist. I come from a long line of atheists back to the bad old times when religious fucks would legally kill people like me if we didn't keep our opinions to ourselves, and there are still places in the world today where that happens.

    1431:

    Why are you responding to me? Did I say anything that contradicts your point?

    1432:

    “people who enjoy religion like to burn people who disagree with them alive, behead them, hang them, torture them and so on “ As noted in #1428 atheists of the Marxist variety have done just as bad. As noted in #1426 non-Marxist atheists are willing to do the same if they get the chance.

    My reading of history is that no qualifier is needed: “people like to burn people who disagree with them alive, behead them, hang them, torture them and so on ”

    1433:

    A lot of IBM's missteps in the PC market can be explained by management's concern with not pissing off the lawyers at the DoJ.

    Having a lot of friends in middle management at IBM and working with them on standards and such....

    The biggest issue IBM had with PCs in the 80s and 90s was that they were not mainframes. At the top levels the mainframe was what mattered and all ease was viewed as how can this solidify our position as THE big iron vendor and help us sell more.

    Plus the cost structures at IBM were all based on mainframes reaping the profits. So many internal groups, (PCs, chips, etc...) never really turned a profit as the costs were all to be absorbed by the mainframe sales.

    Note that the people I refer to above did not agree with this business model AT ALL. Or if they did they were delusional. It took Microsoft walking away from OS/2 to start changing things.[1] They still haven't fully figured it out.

    [1] IBM's plans for OS/2 (the 80s) were basically that a PC could do some things locally but the main purpose was to be a PROFs terminal to a mainframe. (In 85 or 86 they were talking about requiring 13MB of ram for a PC. Check out the prices from then.) When MS walked away that delusion sort of fell apart but by then MS was headed off on their own and OS/2 no longer had MS as the driver. So we got NT then Win xxxx.

    1434:

    Re: ' ... this guy has a lot of illuminating data'

    Interesting - really liked the historical chart - thanks!

    1435: 1415 - So based on this, you are defining warm (of beer) as "canned/bottled beer, stored in a centrally heated room at "shirt sleeve temperature". Well, without meaning to put words into their mouths I have drunk in the same bars with Bellinghman and Greg (and Charlie), and possibly Elderly Cynic, and we'd normally drink properly cellared draft (or bar fridged canned/bottled) at temperatures of 5 to 12C (depending on what we're drinking that day). You see now why I deny drinking anything that might reasonably be described as "warm beer"? 1420 - Well, now that what some of us actually mean by "warm beer" is emerging as a liquid-specific temperature, I do pretty much agree with you, with the note that I'd be drinking lager at 4C and pretty much nothing from choice at 15C or above. 1423 - Greg, I styled you as a militant atheist for the way you try and derail any reasoned discussion on religion, even when you agree the point being made, like "religion as food hygiene rules".

    Mods - Nice job of the spam cleanup.

    1436:

    Bill Arnold Maybe - not in that camp, myself, though I do believe that we have a right of actual self-defence against the religious nutters Reminder: Someone v close to me actually witnessed the explosion on 7/7/05 in a Met line train, just short of Aldgate station: - big orange flash, followed by pressure-wave & thenBANG Just a SLIGHT DIFFERENCE between that & pouring scorn & ridicule on religions, so no equivalence at all, is there?

    On that subject, whilst thinking particularly of women's rights, here & in this instance is the strict practice of islam actually legal in the UK? [ Woman worth half a man / property rights, divorce, etc ... ] Then there's the um. delicate subject of how old was Aiesha ( sp?) when M first had sex with her ???

    H Still bollocks, & you really ought to know better - again. Anyway, Maoists are, in my book, religious believers, following wrong "holy instructions" to kill & torture people, in manners reminiscent of the RC church. What I actually do is convey surplus vegetables to the local food bank for them to distribute to locals in need of sufficient sustenance. SEE ALSO W T Goodall @ 1431 RvdH - I REPEAT - marxist-communism is a classic religion: Why else do they persecute the competition, same as all the other religions do?

    1437:

    CHANGING THE SUBJECT .... 1] Some people are getting more worried that the "Long March" rocket booster is actually going to fall on someone's head ...

    2] I've finally worked out which historical figure BoZo reminds me of ... & it's not a comforting thought. Charles Stuart ( Charles I ) Smooth-talking, very popular with many, apparently affable, actually incompetent [ Relied on more-or-less competent ministers to actually run things ] - couldn't be trusted further than you could spit. Treated London & the SE with contempt. Brought down in the end over conflict in Scotland. Didn't end well, did it? NOT a pleasant prospect

    1438:

    It would be pretty difficult to attack infantry with wheel hub mounted scythe blades. You would have to skim along the front of their lines, which would expose the horses too much. I think they are there to discourage anyone from getting close to the chariot and so protect the archers it carries.

    1439:

    The issue with Greg is that outside his own direct experience he's completely lost, not a big deal in itself, I'm sure we're all there to some extent or other. But because of Greg's upbringing in the imperial centre, he's unable to handle the idea that his experience isn't the universal one. I think we got here previously on the post-colonial discussion: and we sort of excuse the ones who grew up in the imperial centre a bit because they can't possibly get across everything... just accepting that former colonial subjects are equally valuable human beings is about their limit, behaving like a reasonable human toward them is probably pushing it. It's the same with atheism... many atheists, myself included, have a specific denomination. For instance, I'm a Lutheran atheist, though I did a little CofE Sunday school as a kid so I have some insight into CofE atheists too. Greg (like Richard Dawkins) is definitely a CofE atheist. The CofE is a broad church and encompasses a lot of quirks, both among believers and nonbelievers. I'm pretty sure there have been Anglican bishops with less faith than Greg, who clearly believes in England and pork pies or something.

    1440:

    Marxism is a religion. Like scientology it doesn't have supernatural gods but opts for a more 'modern' brand of nuttery.

    1441:

    Some people are getting more worried that the "Long March" rocket booster is actually going to fall on someone's head ..

    Well if you follow that tracking site up thread it should be over my head just around the current ETA of the, err, landing.

    And if it comes down an orbit or two sooner it crosses Spain and much of the southern coast of Europe. And many of the orbits around that ETA cross over large swaths of southern Asia.

    1442:

    A devout christian do not believe in N-1 of the know gods, whereas an atheist disbelieve all N of them, given that N is in the thousands, that seems like a rather trivial difference ?

    And yet the discovery of zero was significant in mathematics…

    1443:

    I'm not convinced that Marxism is a religion-- calling it a religion seems to me like a way of saying that atheism can't go bad.

    I believe that nationalism is a group of religions (one per nation). It gets people killed over devotion to products of the human imagination. And yet it can't be denied that nations serve some useful functions, but then, so do religions.

    I'm also interested in the way religions (as conventionally conceived) work as prompts for creativity. They're the best at inspiring art, music, and emotionally satisfying holidays.

    1444:

    Hitchens notoriously was a very vocal supporter of the 2003+ Iraq war. (Those of us who were against it were a bit lonely, at least in the US.)

    Looking in from the outside, being against the war seemed to be the kiss of career death, and public figures were being put on the spot to state their support. I wonder how many of those who "supported the war" truly supported it, as opposed to deciding that it was going to happen anyway and wasn't worth sacrificing their careers for? Opposing the war took a lot of moral courage, and in many cases required a real sacrifice.

    Pete Seeger nailed it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nayr_r-oApo

    (I've worked with several (5+) scientists and engineers who ere Muslims, some devout, and all were non-violent, or at least never expressed anything even close to violent opinions and often the opposite.)

    Given the current political climate, expressing such opinions would be a dangerous act simply because they are Muslim.

    1445:

    It was a hotel dining room in Inverness & I'm guessing the room temperature at the time would have been around 21°C (comfortable without a coat or a sweater) and the beer was warmer than the room. Not by much, but warmer.

    Good grief.

    If I was served beer like that in a restaurant in the UK, I'd complain. (Ditto with a pub, but pubs are at least theoretically supposed to know how to serve beer, and "temperature above 21 celsius" is Not Right.)

    1446:

    Have you considered that the strength of your opinion about Marxism isn’t because you think it’s a Religion, but because you believe it’s a Heresy? ;)

    There are people who will tear the arse out of anything - chess, football team, $DEITY, politics, economics. It doesn’t automatically disqualify the underlying structure. “From each according to ability, To each according to need” has a moral attractiveness, and is practised in most democracies (and really practised when you’re commissioned and then entrusted with thirty soldiers). IMHO it’s the failure modes which render it mostly impractical on a large scale, not the success modes - getting past “2% of the general population are sociopaths” statistic is a problem for any system of government, see our current PM.

    Anyway, I’m a (Eastern*) Church of Scotland Atheist. It means that I expect my religion to be tolerant, welcoming, staffed by good and thoughtful people, slightly austere in its infrastructure, and focused on good deeds rather than high words…

    …it’s why I go to the Kirk every year for the Remembrance Service, am friendly with a few Ministers, some I was proud to call “friend”; was perfectly happy to do the religious parts of my then-job (reading scripture at Remembrance, for instance, or backing vocals when the Padre was faced with a room of people and no music).

    • ;) the “Western” Church of Scotland operates around Glaswegians, whose One True Religion is the Old Firm, and which spills over into their opinions on Christianity… slightly more sectarian ;)
    1447:

    Damian A different sort of bollocks! I was almost indoctrinated into a fairly extreme form of protestantism ( even though nominally "Anglican" ) & escaped, just. I am only too familiar with all of the lies the christians use & the moral blackmail & also the appeals to "authority". From friends, it appears that the RC use identical tactics, which explains the One-Party State of "Eire" 1922-2012. ( Yes that's a very late date - it was the year the Irish christians murdered Savita Halappanavar ) It was from there a long journey via some form of deism to full-blown atheism. You are also reminded of Charlie's comment, many threads back to the effect that: "When Buddhists go bad, they go really bad" - we were discussing muslims being persecuted in "Myanmar", actually.

    Nancy L I've heard that one before ... But: 1] It has a “holy” book or books. 2] The words in those books may not be questioned, even when demonstrated proven wrong. 3] It has sub-divisions and sects and “heresy”, and heretics, in Trevor-Ropers phrase are “even wronger” than unbelievers. 4] Those sects fight each other, either by open warfare and/or in internal pogroms. 5] It is structurally based on the RC church, complete with its own “holy office” 6] Which leads to the gulag – the communist equivalent of the churches years of penitence and autos-de-fé 7] Thousands if not millions are killed in the name of the “holy cause” to bring about a supposed millennium 8] It persecutes all the competing religions 9] In some sects it even denies Evolution by Natural Selection (look up Trofim Lysenko) Oh - & I found out, later, that no less a person than Bertrand Russell also claimed Marxism was a religion (?)

    If we are talking about this - note my sympathy for the muslims of Burma, or those murdered (etc) in Serbia, or a Nobel-Prize winning collaborator of Feynman, Abdus Salam, a good muslim, whose grave has been desecrated by the true believers, because he wasn't the right sort of muslim ....

    1448:

    Agreed, especially in Scotland; I always notice how much colder beer is served as I get further north. The exceptions are for heavy, dark(ish) brews of 9% or more, and mulled ale, but even the former shouldn't be warmed ABOVE that sort of room temperature ....

    1449:

    Charlie Very slight correction: "...to serve beer, and "temperature above 21 celsius" is Not Right."

    1450:

    I didn't think to carry a thermometer with me when I was on R&R in Scotland to measure beer temperatures.

    Clearly you need to rectify that on a return visit! :-)

    All this arguing about what "warm" means indicates that, once the lockdowns are over and pubs reopen, it might be instructive to visit them with thermometers in hand to gather some hard data to determine what temperature beer is actually served at in different locations.

    Elderly Cynic (or someone else with decent statistical chops) could tell us how many pints we'd need to get good data. All in the name of science, of course. :-)

    1451:

    At a wild guess, you would need at least a dozen in each location, and possibly more, to get even a vaguely a reliable result. But the most important part of the experimental design is to visit a large enough, and representative enough, sample of the pubs :-)

    1452:

    ...so the reason nobody seems to actually know is that you set out to collect some data and discover the following morning that what you actually have collected is a road cone in your bedroom and a mysterious sample of duckweed in your shoe.

    1453:

    One of the more disappointing evening outs I remember was failing to find a single drinking establishment selling draft Guiness unchilled... in Dublin. ( the actual choice was very cold or "super cold" ) The levelling down effect of globalisation, I guess.

    1454:

    arrbee Don't bother ... Once upon a very long-ago day, Guinness might have been drinkable, but it's 100% "keg" & chilled with it, I'm afraid. Real Beer has arrived in the N & I believe you can even get it in Dublin, now - a great improvement on the bad old days

    1455:

    I don't think I've ever seen anyone who wasn't an atheist claim that Communism is a religion.

    I believe that a lot of atheists don't just want to claim religion is bad, they want to claim that religion is uniquely bad. When faced with how bad state Communism (which is at least nominally atheist) is, their solution is to frame Communism as a religion, even though it doesn't make the sort of metaphysical claims that what are usually called religions make.

    It would be nice if there were such a thing as opposition to all big smug dangerous organizations and their unrealistic self-justifications, but if that exists (let me know if it does), it doesn't have a common name.

    1457:

    I'm intrigued by the militant atheist description.

    How do you define a militant atheist?

    From where I am standing it appears that anyone who doesn't doff a forelock when someone mentions their "beliefs" is often viewed as "militant". Presumably, that is because its so much easier than explaining why your 1000-3000 year old favourite read allows, and in some case encourages, you to:

    1, kill, burn, decapitate those who disagree with you 2, ostracise those who do not believe in your view of reality 3, taxing non-believers extra for living in your devout country 4, insist that your received wisdom is the one true word.

    It looks like the word "militant" is added when the person involved is informed enough to make a cogent argument that the average believer has trouble refuting and then has the audacity to express it. Militant has the added benefit of normally being associated with terrorist activity, so the evil unbeliever becomes a terrorist by word association.

    1458:

    In my view, it is (4) that defines a militant, and (3) is one of several criteria for being a fanatical one. There certainly HAVE been atheistic movements that have met all of your criteria - Maoism, definitely, and arguably Hoxhaism, the French revolution and some aspects of eastern Europe. But the vast majority of atheistic militants ( as well as the vast majority of religious militants) are not so extreme.

    The Orthodox Church of Evolution (High Priest: Richard Dawkins), to which Greg belongs, assuredly counts as militant. Whether it counts as a religion is a matter of opinion, but it definitely has most of the trappings of one.

    1459:

    frame Communism as a religion, even though it doesn't make the sort of metaphysical claims that what are usually called religions make.

    I would say Christianity has more in common with Communism than it has with most polytheistic religions. The central tenet of both Christianity and Communism is a promise of transcendent utopia at some point in the future, which requires toil and sacrifice in the present. Most (not all, but most) polytheistic religions make no such promise.

    1460:

    W.r.t. your last sentence, it's true for ordinary communism, but it is not for the forms that claim their beliefs are the One True and Final Word and are not challengeable. That is also my objection to Dawkins and his ilk.

    1461:

    Grant You have hit the nail, precisely dead centre.

    EC - more bollocks Mind you, if any of you have ever looked at the international, but heavily US-centric Q-&-A forum called "Quora", you might understand how someone might get "exited" about religious nutters. "Militant" in my book must involve taking "military" action - like killing & threatening people. So - I don't qualify, but SOME OF the muslims in Batley do qualify - because they have made DEATH THREATS against a schooltecher for simply doing his job. Going back to Grant's criteria: 1 & 2 & 3 qualify. 4 is dodgy, unless you try to enforce that view, in which case then you are "militant"

    Ilya187 has spotted the remarkable similarity between communism & christianity - again ....

    Which reminds me: -from toady's "Grauniad" - an actual example of a militant religious (attempt) at control & oppression: - Quote: Texas is trying to pass an extreme abortion ban

    The state that supposedly loves small government is attempting to pass a draconian law banning abortions after just six weeks of pregnancy. To be clear: that’s two weeks after a woman misses her period. What’s more, Texas wants to allow private citizens to be able to sue doctors or anyone else who may have helped someone get an abortion after that time limit. So to recap: rightwingers think gun control is oppressive government overreach but extreme uterus control is totally fine.

    1462: 1437 - Er, something like 99% of all Muslims would deny that Da'esh and other terrorist groups actually are Muslims. 1438 (2) - I heard the suggestion earlier today that Larry should replace Bozo as PM, and get the cat from the Orkney Islands count in the Scottish Parliament election in as his deputy! 1455 - Can we include microbrewed oyster stout (not Vegan frienldy) in "real beer"?
    1463:

    The state that supposedly loves small government is attempting to pass a draconian law banning abortions after just six weeks of pregnancy.

    You are waaaaaay behind. This is the 4th or 5th state to do so. They are trying to set things up to get a new SCOTUS ruling. All of these when passed get stayed as the lawsuits work their way up the chain.

    1464:

    "It looks like the word "militant" is added when the person involved is informed enough to make a cogent argument that the average believer has trouble refuting and then has the audacity to express it."

    Nah, that's the kind of definition used by someone who gets narked about being called "militant" and so comes up with a defensively smug and self-justifying view of the situation that recasts the insult as really targeting its own user, to try and convince themselves it doesn't really piss them off.

    The more straightforward view is that the word "militant" denotes someone who makes a pain in the bloody arse of themselves by constantly banging on about it, erupting at the mere hint of some trigger word associated with it, dragging it in at every turn no matter how tenuous the relevance, etc... for whatever value of "it" refers to that person's particular species of headgear-dwelling eusocial pollinator.

    Which is what the word usually does mean in conventional colloquial usage, regardless of what its technically correct meanings are. "Acts like Millie Tant in Viz" represents what is being described far better than any formal suggestion from a dictionary does (hence the character's name, after all), and insisting on applying some fixed formal definition to colloquial usage is a time-honoured way of making things get very silly.

    Similarly with "warm", which even in its directly thermal set of meanings varies wildly in connotation according to what it's being used to describe - and doesn't in general even refer to plain temperature anyway, but to some mixture of temperature and thermal conductivity depending on their relative contributions to the sensation. It is a word whose practical meaning is incredibly fuzzy but nevertheless everyone knows what it means, until some joker tries to put a fixed number of degrees C to it and insists that everyone who disagrees is wrong because they've found a book that says so.

    1465:

    At a wild guess, you would need at least a dozen in each location, and possibly more, to get even a vaguely a reliable result.

    If I have anywhere near a dozen pints my results will be not even vaguely reliable. More than a pint usually has me can't-walk-a-straight-line woozy, if not already asleep.

    Clearly we need more experienced drinkers for this study. :-)

    1466:

    "...even though it doesn't make the sort of metaphysical claims that what are usually called religions make."

    The point is not what a given conceptual package actually contains internally, but how people behave around that package. We have in the comparatively recent past a period when pretty well all the important foci of dogmatic fanatical intolerant rigidity were indeed formally religious in nature, so the word "religious" carries an additional set of mostly rather insulting metaphorical meanings which refer to that kind of behaviour rather than to its object, and which are valid usages whether the particular object in question actually is formally religious or not.

    These days the formally-religious foci are only a fraction of the important ones, and the dominant foci are political, but the class of associated behaviour remains the same. So what grinds my gears about people referring to Communism as a religion is not any quibble about the definition of a religion, but when they fail - as they so often do - to see that it is equally true to describe Communism as a heresy against the Capitalist religion.

    1467:

    [warm] is a word whose practical meaning is incredibly fuzzy but nevertheless everyone knows what it means

    Except that we've shown here that that's not the case. A warm day to me is a cold one to Frank, what counts as warm beer seems to vary by locality, etc…

    1468:

    From the description, I automatically tag it as absurdly biased, as in Faux "News" level.

    I am not now, nor have I ever been a Christian (or anything but a Pagan), having grown up as a red-diaper baby. I will pick and choose, however, which religious groups I have no issues with. For example, the Quakers are nice folks, whereas, as far as I am concerned, ALL (ok, 99.44%) of self-proclaimed evangelical fundamentalist "Christians" are, by their own words, Christian Satanists, and also worshipers of Mammon, period.

    I also consider Communism (capital "C") to be secular millenarianism.

    May I also remind y'all of the traditional definition of a militant agnostic: "I don't know, and NEITHER DO YOU!!!"

    1469:

    Are you suggesting that they didn't exist? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scythed_chariot

    1470:

    Sorry, I must have copied the paywalled link. Here's another: https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/files/79522147/Towards_a_geopolitics_of_atheism_FOSTER_Publishedonline17August2017_GREEN_AAM_CC_BY_NC_ND_.pdf

    Faux "News" pieces don't have 7 pages of references. This captures the flavor of one thread in the piece: In this narrative, because Muslims have not learnt to remove the dangerous influence of religion from public life, ‘their violence is therefore irrational and fanatical’ whereas ours, being secular, ‘is rational, peace-making and sometimes regrettably necessary.’ We find ourselves ‘obliged to bomb them into liberal democracy’

    Another more recent example is the strong pressure by greed-heads to not take COVID-19 precautions that might short-term damage the economy AKA their pursuit of money. They were quite literally pressuring to kill thousands (10s/100s of thousands) of people in return for personal gain, their personal religion being selfishness free enterprise. They usually said that their concern extended to the rest of the population, and would deny the clear consequences of their preferred course of action, planning to be able to say "nobody expected this death toll" and be believed, or similar gaslighting.

    1471:

    A friend of mine used to describe himself as a militant agnostic: “I don’t know whether God exists, AND YOU DON’T EITHER!”

    1472:

    Paws Tough - Da'esh are muslims, same as the IRA & UVA are christians or the "Holy Office" for that matter ( "No true Scotsman" eh?) Larry who? Yes, that Oyster Stout is OK

    David L That makes "sense" for certain values of. Overarching religious partiarchal control of women's bodies .... And people were wondering why I'm a cough "militant" Atheist?

    Rbt Prior @ 1466 I volunteer!

    1473:

    "A warm day to me is a cold one to Frank"

    But still, if either of you said to the other "It was a lovely warm day so I went for a walk in the woods", it would convey a decent idea of what sort of experience you found it, and it would do so either way round. It wouldn't matter that it didn't convey a particular absolute temperature any more than it does that it doesn't specify a particular mixture of plant species in the woods, it'd still give a useful impression of what going on the walk was like. It would not, for instance, have Frank imagining you shivering like a reed and wearing six coats just because he happens to know that he would be doing that if he was in your conditions.

    1474:

    Nah, that's the kind of definition used by someone who gets narked about being called "militant" and so comes up with a defensively smug and self-justifying view of the situation that recasts the insult as really targeting its own user, to try and convince themselves it doesn't really piss them off.

    Well you might think that I suppose, but while a "militant" atheist might be tedious and could easily be a bit of a jerk, that is a lot less dangerous than the real "militants" who slit your throat, kneecap you or hang you from a tree to protect their sky fairy.

    Calling someone a "militant atheist" is a bit desperate. I think "mildly vexed atheist" might be nearer the truth.

    1475:

    RE: 1459

    But what received wisdom does he have?

    Theres no book of inspired revelation transcribed from slabs of stone or sheets of gold or narrated from a small cave.

    I don't think Dawkins claims any godly qualities and I'm sure Greg doesn't need anyone else to try to work out things for himself.

    Personally, given a choice between having a meal with most religious prophets and Hitchens I know who I would choose. Theres not a lot of jokes in the Bible.

    1476:

    I’d have to suggest that communism not having a supernatural element pretty much defines it as not being a religion. Not that that stops some people from treating {insert thing here} in a religious manner. For all that I do not accept there being any gods, I have to admit having quite religion-adjacent feelings about Smalltalk, which is surprisingly common.

    My hypothesis is that a religion is a political movement that claims supernatural justification for wanting to control everyone. Because, after all, that really makes. It easy to convince otherwise quite nice people to kill other otherwise quite nice people.

    And I must point out that Quora is the website that proves unequivocally that not only are there ‘stupid questions ‘, but that there is a near infinite number of people willing to ask them in public, again and again. And again.

    1477:

    They usually said that their concern extended to the rest of the population, and would deny the clear consequences of their preferred course of action, planning to be able to say "nobody expected this death toll" and be believed, or similar gaslighting.

    That's precisely what our local Conservative leader said about the third wave: "No one could have predicted this."

    He got thoroughly roasted even by the right-wing press. The science table made public their recommendations showing when they were warning about the third wave (back in January while he was dropping restrictions). I think Ford really expected that they would be good little experts and let him blame them for his mistakes*, but that didn't happen this time.

    I haven't decided if Ford really believes his gut feelings are as good as expert advice, or if he's just playing for the rural/suburban conservative base.

    *This has hitherto been the implicit bargain for government experts — you get the ear of the politician, but you don't publicly call them out when they ignore you.

    1478:

    But still, if either of you said to the other "It was a lovely warm day so I went for a walk in the woods", it would convey a decent idea of what sort of experience you found it, and it would do so either way round.

    Remember that the whole discussion started about warm British beer. Apparently to some people "warm" is around 12°, to others it is above blood temperature.

    So I'm not convinced that "Greg had a lovely pint of warm bitter" would convey a decent idea of the sort of experience he had. (Apologies if bitter shouldn't be served warm — I know little about beers beyond the few I've learned to like.)

    Also applies to going for a walk in the woods, actually, if you go with other people.

    I have a friend I like to go hiking with, but a 'warm' day to me has her wearing a sweater. When sharing an office we joked that our ideal temperatures are a couple of climate zones apart, just as our biological clocks are a couple of time zones apart. So when we go hiking we tell each other the actual temperature.

    One of the things that really annoyed me about radio/TV weather reports (back when you couldn't get the weather forecast on the internet) was that you had to listen carefully to hear the actual temperature — most of the time was spent with the reporter waxing lyrical about how it was going to be another lovely warm sunny day, when actually the humidex was going to be in the 40s and the city was opening emergency cooling centres.

    With Environment Canada I look at the temperature and think "15°, don't need a sweater" while my friend hears 15° and packs mitts and a wooly scarf.

    Returning to the subject of beer, my current favourite is the Eephus from Left Field Brewery:

    https://fanshop.leftfieldbrewery.ca/products/eephus-4-pack

    Went nicely with a chicken chili. Had the beer at room temperature, which was about 17°. You can all shudder now… :-)

    (Left Field has free delivery in the GTA, for anyone who's local.)

    1479:

    I'm finding the discussion on what "warm" means amusing and ridiculous.

    I've seen "warm" used to describe temperatures high enough to not just boil off the beer, but to cause the glass it came in to slump into a puddle.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warm_glass

    I've seen it also used to describe the temperature where superconductors quench.

    1480:

    Apparently the big tumbling rocket has landed in the Indian Ocean somewhere south west of the Maldives. Although I don't really consider the NY Times to be authoritarian on such matters I suspect they are likely right on this one.

    And the Chinese are basically saying everyone needs to get over it because SpaceX does the same thing.

    A false equivalence to me it seems.

    Oh, yeah, they plan to launch how many more of these in the near future?

    1481:

    One of the things that really annoyed me about radio/TV weather reports

    One of the reasons I DVR the particular local station that I do is that the early am weather forecasts include a 7 day green screen chart of likely highs/lows/rain/clouds that fills the entire screen. I can spot it when playing the video at 3x or 10x, stop it there, get what I need, then move on.

    1482:

    Grant Thank you Though: "Utterly, completely, very tired & pissed-off Atheist" might be closer to the mark.

    For an example of the utter madness of the US christians in particular & why atheism is the only route to sanity, I give you this Warning, you might need brain bleach. These are the same people trying to control women in Texas & only tiny steps away from becoming xtian terrorists - see also Tim McVeigh?

    1483: 1470 - No-one is saying that scythed chariots did not exist; what we are saying is that they were not primarily used for chariot charges on infantry formations. 1473 - No, Da'esh are not Muslims, because they do not follow the Quran. Simples!

    Larry is the present Downing Street cat. The Orkney Count cat (name unknown) was reported on the BBC's election count coverage, before seats were anywhere near ready to declare.

    1479 - Just when I thought that most of us were agreeing that properly served beer was typically between 5C and 12C (depending on style and brand). 1481 - Similar report from the BBC, but I think the description of a press organ should be "authoritative" rather than "authoritarian".
    1484:

    Oh, yeah, they plan to launch how many more of these in the near future?

    At least two. Their station is made up from three similarly sized modules.

    The USA seems to be in no danger of losing the top two places in the uncontrolled re-entry list for some time yet. Interestingly they took both spots with a single launch.

    1485:

    only tiny steps away from becoming xtian terrorists - see also Tim McVeigh?

    While it may seem that way from your view from afar, McVeigh was much more of an anarchist than most anyone who would be recognized as a US Christian. You're conflating him with the Christian dominionists, who DO seem to be concentrated in the Dallas TX area. Especially at SWBTS. And yet even those are a distinct minority of Christians in the US. And as I said earlier, Texas' new abortion laws they are looking at passing are not new to the US They are at least number 4 in line on this if not much further back.

    1486:

    The definition of religion doesn't require a supernatural element. Confucianism is usually included in lists of major world religions and has no supernatural elements. There are many religions that don't require a belief in gods (Buddhism, Jains). I have noticed a tendency online in recent years to attempt to redefine religion so that only the Abrahamic ones qualify as 'real' religions. I suppose some group(s) with agendas are behind pushing those memes out.

    1487:

    The Origin of Species? Have you read his polemic, or heard him speak?

    It is his claim that Darwinism explains everything about evolution, that the statistical implausibilities can be ignored, and that it proves there is no God, that is the mysticism. I have heard him do just that, and they are scientifically crap. And, as pointed out in #1487, an unchallengeable mysticism is enough to qualify as a religion.

    1488:

    The reason that Stalinism and Nazism are religions is that they share enough of the identifying features of a religion to qualify. There is a checklist of features that are characteristic of religion but none of which are essential. For example it is not necessary to believe in god(s) or even supernatural elements (although many religions do).

    One of these identifying features is a prophetic figure whose revelations form the basis of the religion. Such figures include Jesus, Hitler, Buddha, Marx. No corresponding individual exists for capitalism.

    Another feature is the holy text: Bible, Mein Kampf, Das Kapital, Koran. Again, no such text exists for capitalism.

    Another feature of religion is community - you are of the faith or not, a member of the Party or not. Again, not a feature of capitalism.

    And so on...

    1489:

    I would say nationalism and religion come from the same root. In tribal cultures the group and religion are inseparable, this can be seen in religious survivals such as the old testament etc, as well as surviving tribal cultures. Borders are very important in ancient cultures, us and them, life and death, pure and impure etc. Physical borders too, with many ancient monuments being built on borders with the intent of being highly visible. Silbury hill is a UK example, it would of originally been chalk white too. I've been very interested to see the emergence of the ancient monuments in Saudi Arabia recently, they look very similar to cursus in the UK but a lot older. They are obviously suggestive of borders and indeed interesting cultural connections.
    On the subject on art, nationalism can do the same, see "Triumph of the will" perhaps. Also both the third reich and the USSR had a very strong design aesthetic, but this does not leave quite the same impression as saying you enjoy religious art :-)!

    1490:

    Not Stalinism. Stalin was a psychopathic, paranoid, brutal dictator, and his rule was to enforce obedience rather than belief. Leninism, yes, but the reason that the two were linked was because it was useful to Stalin to do so.

    1491:

    #1479 - Just when I thought that most of us were agreeing that properly served beer was typically between 5C and 12C (depending on style and brand).

    Oh, I'm not claiming I'm doing it 'right'. I just prefer the Eephus at that temperature — or maybe a bit cooler, but not straight-out-of-the-fridge cold which is the only other option I have.

    De gustibus non disputandum est and all that.

    1492:

    Damn. I meant to add this. A single prophetic figure or a holy text are criteria, but neither are necessary - many forms of African animism have neither.

    You are right about capitalism, as Marx described it, but not to it as it is interpreted today by the USA's and UK's plutocratic oligarchies (*). I can assure that it has at least as much tribalism as most forms of Christianity, and it definitely has an ill-defined collection of revered individuals and texts.

    (*) Which I usually call monetarism, to distinguish it.

    1493:

    "No, Da'esh are not Muslims, because they do not follow the Quran. Simples!"

    Alas, not so simple. In the same way that the Catholics, Protestants and Quakers all interpret the Bible differently - and pick and mix the bits they live by - the various groups who venerate the Quran also interpret it differently, yet all still view themselves as Muslim and adherents to the book.

    The fact that one group of Christians doesn't view another group of Christians as truly Christian makes no difference.

    1494:

    Clearly there is a human tendency towards religion and so new religions tend to accrete around things that weren't initially a religion. In that respect you may be right about the 'religionising' of Dawkins and indeed the ironic quasi-religion around parts of new atheism or whatever it calls itself.

    1495:

    And the Mormons can call themselves Christians!

    1496:

    Stalin probably learned his methods from his years studying at Tiflis seminary.

    1497:

    One of these identifying features is a prophetic figure whose revelations form the basis of the religion. Such figures include Jesus, Hitler, Buddha, Marx. No corresponding individual exists for capitalism.

    Adam Smith. Ricardo. Milton Friedman.

    Another feature is the holy text: Bible, Mein Kampf, Das Kapital, Koran. Again, no such text exists for capitalism.

    The Wealth of Nations. Like the Bible often misquoted to support what the speaker wants, rather than what Smith actually wrote.

    Another feature of religion is community - you are of the faith or not, a member of the Party or not. Again, not a feature of capitalism.

    I think that being a member is pretty much assumed, at least in North America. Just as being a Christian was assumed when I was growing up — if you didn't explicitly claim to be something else then you were automatically assumed to be Christian (prayers in school etc.).

    And just as Party members had extra power and privilege in the USSR, inherited by their children, the wealthy business class have the same power and privilege in the Church of Capitalism.

    Sure, Capitalism is a welter of schismatic Evangelical churches compared to the Communist Party's Roman Catholic Church, but belief in it has as much received faith (and uncritical acceptance) as most Christians have of their religion.

    1498:

    I must admit its a few years since I read the God Delusion.

    As I recall he does not say that it proves God(s) do not exist, he mainly points out how unlikely it is given the evidence available.

    He points out that, if you want to take the position that a supreme executive being created us, dropped some hints for how we should live in a poorly written manuscript and then watches our every act and thought, while keeping a scoreboard of whether we spend eternity telling him how wonderful he is or frying our nuts off in hell, then be sure to turn up with solid evidence.

    I do remember laughing out loud at one point at how well his turn of phrase punctured the pomposity of the religious who demand respect for their beliefs. There was a chapter or two I thought needed a little editing, but it was a good read.

    One thing worth mentioning is that I read it on a trip to the USA and made sure not to read it in public. What does it say about theists that those who disagree with them feel the need to minimise the risk of violence to themselves?

    1499:

    "atheism is the only route to sanity"

    Um, really? I'm an agnostic, and while I don't consider myself entirely sane, I also don't think agnosticism is part of the problem.

    I'm wondering what a fully atheistic person would be like-- someone who not only is irreligious about the usual religions, but is also disconnected from nationalism and excessive belief in specific economic systems.

    1500:

    The mental gymnastics Mormons go through to attempt to align with the Nicene Creed are entertaining.

    1501:

    He is a lot more restrained in writing than in speech; I have heard him say what I said on television (yes, all three points), and was so disgusted that I added him to my 'mute immediately' list.

    I have read The Selfish Gene, and the introduction is pure polemic, but the book itself was merely extremely biassed - i.e. what he said was true but it was selected and slanted to a level that I regarded as academically disrepectable. I know some academics in that area, and their opinion of him (and it) is similar.

    I have heard that summary of The God Delusion elsewhere, and believe it. Such a demolition of the pompously religious is fair, but he should know damn well that it is NOT evidence against the existence of a god (or gods) - merely against the existence of THEIR god. Firstly, there are religions that are not like that and, secondly, whether the universe was created by a 'sentient being' or some kind of random event is an unanswerable question, based on all available knowledge.

    Your last paragraph shows the same flaw. The fact that the USA is a hotbed of violent and extreme fanatics, religious and otherwise, is no evidence that the same applies everywhere, let alone to other forms of religion.

    1502:

    Well, I think that I count, on those criteria :-) Which is NOT to say that I don't have my own prejudices!

    1503:

    One thing worth mentioning is that I read it on a trip to the USA and made sure not to read it in public.

    Good grief. What decade and where was this "public"?

    I can't imagine not carrying such a book around and reading it most anywhere but in a church prayer meeting while nosily turning the pages.

    1504:

    The reason that Stalinism and Nazism are religions is that they share enough of the identifying features of a religion to qualify. There is a checklist

    ... And by your definition, Trump's MAGA followers are religious zealots and Trump the charismatic prophet of their religion.

    Holy book: twitter/@realdonaldtrump (at least until they booted his sorry ass).

    Seriously, for it to be a religion I'd also suggest another qualifier: that the faithful continue in their belief structure even after their leader/prophet/messiah dies. By that yardstick, Communism and Scientology pass; Nazism ... probably not so much (it tends to be reinvented by each new generation of shitheaded bigots).

    1505:

    Sure, Capitalism is a welter of schismatic Evangelical churches compared to the Communist Party's Roman Catholic Church,

    Eh?!?

    You've got at least three major branches of hardcore communism: Leninism/Stalinism, Maoism, and Trotskyism. Between them they diverge at least as much as the RCs, Greek Orthodox, and Presbyterian varieties of Christianity.

    But those three are all descendants of Third International socialism, specifically Russian Menshivism/Bolshevism. The Third International was itself schismatic, spinning off the Social Democrats (hint: that'd be the German SPD these days), Socialists (UK Labour Party), and a bunch of other left-democratic factions -- the general dividing lines were whether they believed in achieving socialism within a host nation or were internationalist by default, and whether they were gradualist/progressive and democratic, or revolutionaries, but also whether they were into immediate appropriation of the means of production by the worker-owned state, or were willing to cooperate with existing management structures (just with muscular representation of the work force by way of unions/syndicates) and a mixed economy.

    Go back to the Second international and that's about when the anarchists noped out of chewing the fat with the social democrats/socialists/communists. And the First International Congress was just a giant astronomical gas and dust cloud of ideas, waiting to undergo gravitational collapse and ignite in the birth of a new star and solar system of vaguely anti-monarchist ideologies.

    No, really, communism is no more a monolith than programming languages.

    1506:

    And by your definition, Trump's MAGA followers are religious zealots and Trump the charismatic prophet of their religion.

    Bingo!!!!

    Or so it seems to many of us who have lost friends and relatives to the MAGA cult.

    1507:

    From my experience, the problem with religions and atheism boils down to a few things.

    One is that some people have spiritual experiences, some people do not. It really is a "Country of the Blind" situation, where those who do not have the experience tend to break atheist, and the more militant think it's perfectly okay to talk about ripping out the eyes of anyone who claims to see. Or sometimes, as with the Maoists, actually rip out their eyes. And then, when they're called on it, their defenders note that they're "just sayin'," or "mildly peevish," and not acting like American secessionists or BoJo and talking about it being acceptable to pile the bodies high.

    Then there's the problem of how to describe spiritual experiences. While I suppose for some people their spiritual experiences take on the complexity of vision, for most people it's a feeling, and English notoriously lacks words for unusual sensations, just as it lacks a complex vocabulary for smells and tastes. Most terms used for smell and taste are metaphorical or similes. Ditto with spiritual experiences, which makes it easy for those who have never had such experiences to dismiss them as nonsensical.

    Are spirits real? It literally depends on how you define reality. Subjective reality is what the "you" inside your head experiences, due to a lifetime of interpreting sensory input as shaped by a lifetime of cultural indoctrination and feedback. Objective reality is whatever is out there, much of which you almost certainly can't perceive (most of the EM spectrum you can't see or feel, sounds outside your hearing range, smells you can't process, stuff going on behind you or that is too small, too big, too fast, or too slow for you to perceive, etc.).

    The question is whether the spiritual world is objectively real, and my personal answer is that I can't tell. I have had subjective spiritual experiences, but while they affect me, they leave behind no physical evidence I can use as proof, so I question whether they are due to objectively real phenomena or not. That I have had a number of them as a result of training suggests to me that other people share the same experiences, but is it folie a deux, or are we all poorly experiencing aspects of objective reality that others cannot?

    This leads to a paradox: if I trust my own, subjective experience, spirit is real. If I trust what I read by someone like Dawkins, it's a hallucination. Now, if you're trained as a scientist, do you believe your experience, or do you believe what you read in a book? And if you believe what you read in a book over your own experience, as an atheist, how are you different than those you mock for believing what they read in the Bible, Torah, or Koran? And if you haven't had the experience, you're stuck...with choosing which book you believe, and then deciding that you know the truth and that others are wrong.

    And a final note: precisely nothing I just said has anything to do with the problems of bigotry and abuse inherent in most power structures, nor with the abuse many have suffered at their hands. As a priest I once knew noted, the Catholic church has monasteries and nunneries set up so that people who have strong spiritual experiences can live without getting in trouble with ordinary parishioners. He was joking, but there's an element of truth there.

    While people having spiritual experiences can be extremely disruptive if they're also power hungry sociopaths or authoritarian followers, I'd gently suggest that the problem isn't the spiritual part, it's the sociopath and authoritarian parts. Rather more of us spiritual seekers (probably within a rounding error of all of us) are trying to make sense of experiences we don't have the language for, in a society that's polarized between various power-hungry factions that want our loyalty, not just in practice, but in belief, and who are perfectly comfortable threatening or enacting violence if they don't get their way.

    And they ALL get very angry when they're called on the violence of their rhetoric, angrily deny that they're at all alike, and claim that their actions are justified based on the monstrous delusions of their chosen opponents, and sometimes based on the abuse they have suffered at the hands of their opponents. Wouldn't it be ironic if neither the abusers nor the abused had had the experiences they were fighting about?

    1508:

    Apply your analysis of communism to the US Christian groups and you can see why some of us from the US see Greg's clumping of US Christians as incredibly simplistic. And wrong in so many cases.

    1509:

    At least in the US, traumatized and non-traumatized may be better classifiers for atheists.

    The traumatized atheist is the usual ex-evangelical, having suffered some fraction of church-condoned sexual abuse, sexual orientation shaming, and/or family ostracism upon questioning the church. (And sure, other religions participate, but the evangelicals seem a bit worse.). Having broken away from a, usually toxic, religion forms a core part of their identities. The more outgoing tend to be militant. The vast majority still care, to the point that learning to not base their identities around not being in a church is a part of healing.

    The non-traumatized atheist is the one a few generations later, raised by atheists who stopped caring. The religious mostly seem silly, with a side caution of 'dangerous, do not provoke.' Barring personal eccentricity, they will blend in, rarely opine upon religion, and are essentially invisible. The religious tend to be, if anything, less comfortable with our existence. But, barring excessive honesty, we are hard to pick out. Not being a trauma victim is advantageous.

    Personally, based on observation of the structure of the universe, the sort of religion favored by most primitive human cultures seems unlikely to be correct and somewhat harmful. (To be treated with the same sort of skepticism as proponents of perpetual motion machines.) So, technically an agnostic, right?

    Overall, seems best to let religion continue withering rather than taking active steps, for now.

    1510:

    Charlie, your Ghost in the Machine article just got a link to it listed on the Naked Capitalism web site.

    1511:

    I mistyped — meant to write Soviet Communist Party as an analogy to RC Church. (Which would make Maoism… I dunno, High Church of England?)

    I'm fully aware that the Chinese Communist Party (at least) isn't a monolith, just as the RC Church isn't.

    In any case, the type of capitalism that has a blind faith in the power of the market (even when the market needs the hand of government to lean on the scales so the Invisible Hand picks the right winner) seems to be religious in nature (if not explicitly so with literal prayers and ritual cannibalism).

    1512:

    No way. The Anglican church has never been as vicious as Maoism - even in the days when it persecuted Roman Catholics, it was far more muted. And, of course, for much of that time, the Vatican's organisation really was scheming to overturn both the church and the country. Also, it has never been a monolith, not even as much as the RC church.

    I don't think there is a close analogy, except possibly for the Templars.

    1513:

    "Overall, seems best to let religion continue withering rather than taking active steps, for now."

    One aspect of Denmark having a state-religion which is often overlooked, is that priests being civil servants have made religion boooooooooooring!

    Here in Denmark it barely even a joke anymore, that half the time, danes are carried into church: Baptism + Funeral vs. Marriage and childs baptism.

    It's a hard result to replicate, but I think it is one place where "embrace and suffocate" is an entirely valid strategy.

    1514:

    "The traumatized atheist is the usual ex-evangelical, having suffered some [...]"

    I dont know who said it first, but "The converts are always the worst!" holds true anywhere, be it religion, foodball, vegetarianism or anything else.

    1515:

    I would like to volunteer for any study comparing beer temperatures at various pubs. Ideally this would happen over an extended period in various locales, including but not limited to Edinburgh and London.

    I have been practicing all my life and I am the man for the job.

    1516:

    "embrace and suffocate"

    Now I'm imagining the Danish government as a very slow python.

    The challenge is having a government which supports a religion without having the religion take over the government.

    Any theories about how a number of European countries managed this are of interest.

    1517:

    H some people have spiritual experiences Or a faking it extremely well &/or amazingly deluded. NOT buying it. "Are spirits real?" - NO If they are, then the whole of science is invalid - oops, maybe not.

    Testable proposition: "No form of BigSkyFairy is detectable" ... Corollary: Since not detectable 100% irrelevant

    My usual stance is to mock - which is what usually gets the religious into a killing rage.

    1518:

    Personally, based on observation of the structure of the universe, the sort of religion favored by most primitive human cultures seems unlikely to be correct and somewhat harmful. (To be treated with the same sort of skepticism as proponents of perpetual motion machines.) So, technically an agnostic, right?

    I would say it's somewhat the opposite, because the use of what we call "religion" in literate societies is drastically different than what we call "religion" as seen in non-literate societies, to the point where members of formerly non-literate societies say that they had no religion until they were forcibly baptized by people armed with weapons they could not hope to match.

    Let me unpack that by introducing to annoying terms: orthopraxy (correct practice) and orthodoxy (correct belief). As pointed out by many (e.g. https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polytheism-part-i-knowledge/), polytheism is almost purely orthopractic: it's all about what you do, very little about what you believe. In non-literate societies this is a feature, not a bug.

    What we call religion for them is a way to store knowledge without writing. Humans are really bad at memorizing information as we find it in books (let alone databases), and a lot of information is hard to put into words anyway. Instead, most of us are better at understanding people, remembering landscapes and directions, and remembering songs, dances, and stories. So here's the survival problem: if you have no writing, and especially if your possessions are limited to the stuff you can carry or cache, how do you learn, remember, and teach everything you need to know to survive in your territory and care for it so that it will continue to feed you? The answer is what we now call religion. First off, anthropomorphize as much of the knowledge as possible, and turn it into memorable stories. Hunting knowledge is turned into stories about what the gods of hunting do. Code it to the landscape, with sacred spots where stories are passed on and rituals performed to remember: here's what we do at this spot and at this time, so that we can survive and thrive. Teach how animals move through dances, imitate their calls in songs. It's easier than trying to put it into words. Heck you can plan out a whole hunt through a dance.

    And many hunter-gatherers actively cared for their territories, rather than just rambling through and chowing down. Express this as following the correct rituals to keep the land fruitful, and it makes sense.*

    All this leads to what is derided as animism: the idea that everything in the world (including the world) is a person that must be dealt with properly to live a good life. The evolutionary biologists are coming back around to this, by demoting humans from being made in God's Image to being the only remaining branch of a clade of pyrogenic apes. And climate science and conservation science are screaming at us to deal with the world properly or suffer and die.

    That's why I'd argue that correct practice (orthopraxy) as practiced by non-literate people, is probably closer to dealing with reality than orthodox religions. People living closer to the edge of survival had to get it right, or they disappeared a very long time ago.

    That's not to say that orthopraxy is always correct. The Romans (see the link above) put great store in querying the gods through reading the entrails of sacrificed animals. Now there are some good reasons to do divination even if you don't believe in gods, because divination methods force humans to deal with both the randomness of the world and our addiction to making patterns out of random things, but the future isn't divined in a bull's liver. And as both the imperial Romans and Chinese emperors found, forcing people to sacrifice to the spirit that protects the empire (the imperial genius in Rome) is a great way to raise taxes.

    The key thing here is that this is literate orthopraxy, not the non-literate orthopraxy I was just going on about. Once you have writing and lots of books, you no longer need religion for what it's really good at: helping non-literate peoples remember important stuff for decades. So the tools of religion got repurposed for other things, like helping kings rule.

    Orthodoxy is powerfully subversive in an environment of literate orthopraxy, especially when, as in Hellenistic Greece ca. 300 BCE on, there were many in the intelligentsia openly questioning the existence of the traditional gods and experimenting with new gods. The questions that lead many moderns to become atheists really are that old. It's not a new phenomenon based on science.

    Anyway, belief does matter. There's a lot in life where just going through the proper motions doesn't work (cf most bureaucracies) while people who really believe and commit themselves sometimes work apparent miracles (and more often epically fail...). And getting back to the whole spirituality thing, when people are dealing with what today we'd call mental illness or just neurodiversity, they need to work with their belief structures to achieve some measure of health.

    But a religion based on correct belief is powerful in an environment where most people are going through the motions, and that's one reason why Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism did so well as missionary religions. I'd argue that their theology struggles now because it doesn't work with much of our current reality of climate change, billions of people, and all that science created. But the orthodoxy (here is the stuff you must believe to be a true Christian or whatever) gets in the way now. So ironically, we're in the same boat with people 2400 years ago in Alexandria, wondering what the heck religion is for anyway, if the gods don't exist. We're struggling with the fact that the universe isn't tailored to human perception and memory, and the complexity of our civilization outstrips the tools of non-literate religion to help us store it all in our head and thereby live our lives.

    The other irony is that most of the things everyone on this list hate about organized religion aren't necessarily beliefs, it's the hypocritical practices. For example, I intensely dislike the anti-gospel practices I see in most churches. But at the same same time admiring true orthodox practitioners, like the nun who used to own my cats, for what they are able to do by really believing in what Christ taught and spending their lives trying to embody it. Doing as Greg does, and lumping the good with the bad, is absolutely no better.

    *I should note here what a number of anthropologists have reported: so-called primitive people don't necessarily believe in their gods. They are "the beings whose stories we tell." And that's a critical point: skepticism about orthopractic religion probably goes back tens if not hundreds of thousands of years. They were constantly fiddling with their practices because these were survival tools and the world was always changing. This is where the Aboriginal "Dreamtime" came from, the idea of a timeless world connected with the beginning and the present. As explained by an aborigine, Dreamtime in English is kind of BS, but it's used because it's a known term. The better understanding is that creation (which comes from the Dream) is continuously happening, and the Dreamtime concept came from people who were raised on Genesis coming into contact with people who were both practicing the traditions they needed to survive and continually tinkering with them to keep them relevant. Hence, an Aboriginal elder can say that ATMs and airports have Dreaming totems, even though it sounds bizarre to us out of context. Airport Dreaming is the memorized knowledge and praxis you need to live when you're in an airport and to keep it functioning properly, depending on your level of initiation. When you say it that way, it makes sense.

    1519:

    Testable proposition: "No form of BigSkyFairy is detectable .. Corollary: Since not detectable 100% irrelevant. My usual stance is to mock - which is what usually gets the religious into a killing rage.

    Speaking from experience as a non-religious person (I'm very much a spiritual but not religious type), what's enraging about what you do is that you do it badly.

    The quote above is an example: you think when I talk about spiritual experience that I'm talking about God. I'm not, and I've never, to my knowledge, given any indication of that. That you jump immediately to your #BigSkyFairy fixation is enraging all right, but it's because it's offensively clueless It's not because you're mocking my religion, it's because you're taking the Faux News approach of criticizing me as a straw man for your own ends, thereby demonstrating that you're not bothering to engage with me on any rational level. And in all the years I've known you, you haven't yet risen above that level, which in itself is tedious, frustrating, and sad. The purpose of intelligent conversation is to learn, not to blindly react.

    1520:

    Very nicely said!

    1521:

    I can assure that it has at least as much tribalism as most forms of Christianity, and it definitely has an ill-defined collection of revered individuals and texts.

    Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman and increasingly Ayn Rand are exactly these individuals. I would say Adam Smith is seen as more of a vague precursor instead of infallible prophet, because if you actually read him, you find that modern Mammonites is exactly what he was warning against.

    1522:

    Well said sir.

    1523:

    I would say Adam Smith is seen as more of a vague precursor instead of infallible prophet, because if you actually read him, you find that modern Mammonites is exactly what he was warning against.

    The same might be said of modern Evangelicals and a certain Jewish carpenter…

    1524:

    I'm wondering what a fully atheistic person would be like-- someone who not only is irreligious about the usual religions, but is also disconnected from nationalism and excessive belief in specific economic systems.

    [ Raising my hand! ]

    Very common in fact among people with Asperger's Syndrome (I am one), because we often lack the need to be right. No matter what I believe to be true, I am never emotionally invested in it -- when faced with compelling evidence to the contrary, I change my mind.

    It took me a long time to realize just how unusual this mindset is, and how difficult it is for neurotypicals to even imagine it, because it comes naturally both to me and my wife -- neither of us ever has an emotional need to be proven right, or is ever embarrassed about being wrong. Whenever we have a disagreement, it only lasts until we figure out which of us has more experience/expertise in the matter involved, and the other one concedes to being wrong.

    My wife and I have been together for 9 years, and have not had a single fight. More accurately, we had a few fights, but every one stemmed from some misunderstanding -- one of us did not have the facts right. Once that got straightened out, the usual pattern re-emerged, and the fight was over.

    This is not something limited to our relationship -- both of us are never emotionally invested in "being right" with other people either. If someone tells me how to do something and I know he is an expert, I have no problem obeying. Flip side is, I have no patience with anyone who is wrong in a field where I am an expert, and is being an ass about it.

    1525:

    Greg Tingey @ 1438: CHANGING THE SUBJECT ....
    1] Some people are getting more worried that the "Long March" rocket booster is actually going to fall on someone's head ...

    Apparently landed somewhere in the Indian Ocean, north of the Maldives, so whoever had "Lands in the ocean" in the pool is the winner.

    1526:

    AJ (He/Him) @ 1439: It would be pretty difficult to attack infantry with wheel hub mounted scythe blades. You would have to skim along the front of their lines, which would expose the horses too much. I think they are there to discourage anyone from getting close to the chariot and so protect the archers it carries.

    That would be true for chariots carrying archers. Not all chariots did.

    1527:

    Grant @ 1458: I'm intrigued by the militant atheist description.

    How do you define a militant atheist?

    I can't answer that question, but it seems to me there are some religious people (not many, but a few) who are NOT nutters.

    The same appears to hold true for Atheists and other Non-Religious people.

    Christians, Muslims, Humanists, Taoists, Buddhists, Communists, Scientologists, Atheists & any other flavor of belief I might have left out ... any and all "members" of true believer cults - religious and anti-religious - might be militant & nuttier than squirrel shit, but there are usually some around the fringes who might not be.

    1528:

    Robert Prior @ 1466:

    At a wild guess, you would need at least a dozen in each location, and possibly more, to get even a vaguely a reliable result.

    If I have anywhere near a dozen pints my results will be not even vaguely reliable. More than a pint usually has me can't-walk-a-straight-line woozy, if not already asleep.

    Clearly we need more experienced drinkers for this study. :-)

    I only had a two week R&R and there WAS some sight-seeing I wanted to do beyond investigating the texture of local pavements.

    1529:

    H "orthopraxy" - yet, according to the supposed prime source of christianity - what you do is supreme over what you say - [ Luke VI v 43-45 being the source-quote ] Atheism in "classical" & post-clasical Hellenism ... Epicurus is the source here, isn't he?

    Greg isn't bothered in the slightest about the quietists in any religion, but they are & always were, the minority.

    I'm very much a spiritual but not religious DEFINE - it's utterly content-free twaddle so far. W. T. F. are you on about? Reminder: As you know I'm an escaped ex-xtian, but, from what I see ALL the other xtian sects ( possibly excepting the Quakers ) are exactly the same, just with different bells & whistles. And the major Sunni/Shia split in islam + all the subdivisions do it too ... And, actually, they are going on & ON & ON about their own BigSkyFairy.

    "Engage on a rational level" - can't do that if you are maundering about "Spirituality" or even "spirit" without known, agreed & possibly defined terms. And I'm not reacting blindly, I'm reacting to what I have learnt over the past approx 61 years, dating from when I started my journey to .

    Oh & I'm with Ilya187 @ 1625 ( Though if I have Asperger's, it's a v mild form. )

    1530:

    1502: The God Delusion highlighted the absence of evidence to support a belief in God(s) and suggested that the cause was that theists jump straight to an assumption that a God exists, purely because they were brought up that way.

    I think (its at least 10 years since I read it) he indicated that if evidence came to hand – perhaps a scrawled signature on a fjord wall in Scandinavia – then he would change the view, but that billions of people currently based their world view on an unverified assumption was absurd.

    I, for example, respect my neighbour’s right to believe that Spurs are the best football team ever, but that doesn’t make it true and should not preclude me from pointing to the Football League tables for the last 30 years and the spectacular absence of silverware in their clubrooms.

    1505: I remember the surveys from the late 90s which asked whether the US public would vote for an atheist. It turned out they were viewed as only marginally more electable than a paedophile. Combine that with a 30 minute encounter with an armed security guard that really hated socialists and wanted to know if I had found God (it was full on Kenny Everett time) and I made sure no one I met in the US ever knew what I thought.

    1508: “One is that some people have spiritual experiences, some people do not. It really is a "Country of the Blind" situation “

    No, cannot agree. When does a momentary epiphany, moment of clarity or fleetingly uncluttered perspective become a religious experience – when you are already religious and taught that we are something more than dreaming apes. To everyone else its just a wonderful moment.

    1520: How is spiritual not religious? From the outside looking in, the distinction looks vanishingly small.

    1531:

    Robert Prior @ 1524:

    I would say Adam Smith is seen as more of a vague precursor instead of infallible prophet, because if you actually read him, you find that modern Mammonites is exactly what he was warning against.

    The same might be said of modern Evangelicals and a certain Jewish carpenter…

    And I've said it many times.

    I probably fit somewhere under the "traumatized atheist" rubric. I was raised in a "Christian" church and banished under pain of death for pointing out just that contradiction.

    I am not, however, a militant atheist, although I am a somewhat "militant" agnostic, i.e. "I told you I am not interested, and if you don't go away & get out of my face with that bullshit, I'm going to have to hurt you!"

    I've never actually had to hurt anyone to get them to leave me alone, but ...

    1532:

    Oddly enough, the most effective tactic I've found for getting evangelizers out of my face is saying "no thanks, I'm an environmentalist."

    There is no logic behind why that should work, but it certainly does work. It also implies something sad about how the people doing the evangelizing view environmentalism and their role as inheritor's of Adam's dominion.

    1533:

    That is absolutely hilarious. And I can see why it works!

    1534:

    No, cannot agree. When does a momentary epiphany, moment of clarity or fleetingly uncluttered perspective become a religious experience – when you are already religious and taught that we are something more than dreaming apes. To everyone else its just a wonderful moment.

    No, I literally mean a felt experience, such as the purported Sedona vortices. I feel something, some other people feel something, while others feel nothing.

    Note that I'm not deriding those who feel nothing, but that's why I use "The Country of the Blind" metaphor. I was shocked when I found out that some people are literally not experiencing what I'm experiencing.

    As to what I was experiencing, I have no clue. That's where I'm agnostic. That I feel something inside a vortex or in many other situations does not mean God exists, Satan exists, or that any religious text is therefore right or wrong. It's weak evidence indeed on which to hang a belief system. That's the annoying part about it all: it's hard to systematize the evidence to the point where the experience can even be demonstrated to be subjective, not objective (and yes, I'm well aware of the tests of mesmerism back in the 18th century). However, enough people have to deal with this stuff that there are training systems to help them. That's spirituality.

    Now those who feel something are not inherently better or worse than those who feel nothing. We all vary substantially in sensory acuity on the dozen(s?) of senses we have as humans. My sense of smell is worse than average, while my vision and hearing used to be somewhat better than average. So what? It's simply worth realizing that for some people "woo" is an intellectual exercise, while for others, it's a lived experience. Please don't mistake one for the other, and please don't try to build your philosophy off the presence or absence of such experiences.

    1535:

    No, I literally mean a felt experience, such as the purported Sedona vortices. I feel something, some other people feel something, while others feel nothing.

    Reduced activity in your parietal cortex?

    Across cultures and throughout history, human beings have reported a variety of spiritual experiences and the concomitant perceived sense of union that transcends one’s ordinary sense of self. Nevertheless, little is known about the underlying neural mechanisms of spiritual experiences, particularly when examined across different traditions and practices. By adapting an individualized guided-imagery task, we investigated neural correlates of personally meaningful spiritual experiences as compared with stressful and neutral-relaxing experiences. We observed in the spiritual condition, as compared with the neutral-relaxing condition, reduced activity in the left inferior parietal lobule (IPL), a result that suggests the IPL may contribute importantly to perceptual processing and self-other representations during spiritual experiences. Compared with stress cues, responses to spiritual cues showed reduced activity in the medial thalamus and caudate, regions associated with sensory and emotional processing. Overall, the study introduces a novel method for investigating brain correlates of personally meaningful spiritual experiences and suggests neural mechanisms associated with broadly defined and personally experienced spirituality.

    https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/29/6/2331/5017785

    For a science-fiction slant on this, I offer Peter Watts' short story "A Word for Heathens":

    https://rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Heathens.pdf

    1536:

    Brain damage? Not quite. I'll give you a test a former tai chi teacher had to demonstrate what it feels like. You'll need a friend to help.

    Give you friend a nice, large, sharp steel knife. Put on a t-shirt or go bare-skinned. Have your friend stand behind you and silently, with maximum intent, aim to stab your back, slash you back, and otherwise mutilate you and kill you painfully, without making a sound, not letting you see or feel the blade, nor letting the blade get within one centimeter of your skin.

    If you can feel where the knife is behind you, that's the feeling I'm talking about. The spiritual explanation is that you've got an aura, and you're feeling where the knife intersects it. The conventional explanation is not reduced parietal lobe activity.

    Those vortices feel similar, but there's nothing physical there, just a feeling in a defined space of air. I once had a roadrunner lead me a half mile to one, and I have absolutely no idea whether it was coincidence or something else was going on.

    1537:

    Grant "spitual experiences" ... yes that moment of clarity & understanding & even "enlightenment" do exist - the buddhists call it "satori" - even I have had a couple ... but "Spirituality"? No way Jose .... Yeah - second the question: "How is spiritual not religous?" Like I said earlier, please define your terms, otherwise it's (more) empty waffling.

    JBS It would seem that I am less "Militant" than you ... I just turn the ridicule & sarcasm up a notch & then another & ... so far, with 2 exceptions, they have either given up, or started ranting & making threats first. The exceptions? I've had to threaten to call the cops on them, on the grounds that blackmail is a serious crime ( "You'll be sorry when you're dead & JEEBUS asks you why ... " )

    H I had to look up "Sedona Vortices" UTTER TOTAL Bollox - very reminiscent of the visions of Bernadette at Lourdes I repeat - I'm not buying it For the umpteenth time: Evidence?

    1538:

    Addendum ( Having re-read the Peter Watts' short ... ) From my own notes: Research initiated by Dr. M. Persinger, and since undertaken by others as well, has clearly shown that religious experiences and visions can be artificially induced and stimulated under controlled laboratory conditions. Thus, religious experiences of this nature are reproducible natural phenomena, which can be produced or replicated on demand. There is zero mystical, religious, or any other form of otherworldly content. "Religious" brain activity is centred in the posterior superior parietal lobe - ( Newberg & D'Aquili of U. of Pennsylvania Nuclear Medicine division.)

    1539:

    Testable proposition: "No form of BigSkyFairy is detectable" ... Corollary: Since not detectable 100% irrelevant

    Like Heteromeles, I think this is a badly formulated argument.

    Until 1970 no form of neutrino was detectable. A few highly educated humans thought that some advanced physics made more sense if they did; most humans didn't even understand the question. It can be validly argued that several human behavioral quirks make more sense if there's some common feature; calling the unifying factor "spirits" is as reasonable a tag as any other, at least until we have a more technical understanding of the process.

    Once humans conjectured neutrinos should exist it took only 40 years to figure out how to detect them. People have been reporting "spirits" for thousands of years and we have yet to build a good spirit detecting machine - but we also lack a good theory of what to look for.

    1540:

    Re: 'Reduced activity in your parietal cortex?'

    The experience that Heteromeles describes is similar to what has been written about some patient experiences following temporal lobe seizures/strokes and epilepsy. There's a positive correlation. But because the brain is wired so that pretty well every part is eventually connected to every other part plus not enough study subjects, plus the tech may not be good enough to following the actual causal link(s), etc ... the exact 'cause' - if any or many - is still up in the air.

    Plus - Psilocybin has helped demonstrate that the woo part of spirituality can be induced therefore is at least partially a physical/physiological phenomenon therefore can be studied and possibly eventually understood.

    So there are at least two different physical/material -- à la science nerd in white lab coat -- ways to measure/test/study spirituality.

    1541:

    "when faced with compelling evidence to the contrary, I change my mind.

    It took me a long time to realize just how unusual this mindset is, and how difficult it is for neurotypicals to even imagine it"

    A workmate once said to me "you always think the way you want to do it is the right way"

    I looked at him for a second, and then said "Well obviously. If I thought any other way was better, then that would be the way I want to do it. Why would I want to do it any other than the best way?"

    I was genuinely confused and so was he. To him, everyone had an idea and fairness was implementing a fair share of ideas. We did it your way last time, it's my turn now. To me fairness was everyone gets to say their idea and we do the best one, and everyone gets behind the best idea. When his idea was better than mine, I never even bothered to mention mine. His idea instantly became the way I wanted to do it, and I thought the way I wanted to do it was the right way.

    1542:

    I think I come in somewhere in the middle where woo is concerned. Some of the "woo" I've participated in was very helpful in concrete psychological terms. Some of it was not. I would probably argue that "Whether it can be artificially stimulated is not the point. The big question is whether it can be useful in terms of personal growth, and I'd certainly say it can.

    I think what Greg is most opposed to is making a doctrine out of it, and imagining that your woo is more woo-full than someone else's woo, generated by the same chemicals but tied to a different doctrine, then being violent about it.

    1543:

    This is reminding me of H.G. Wells' Star Begotten, about children who are immune to religion and patriotism.

    1544:

    I think "woofull" is my new favourite word this week :-)

    1545:

    Re: '... whether it can be useful ... making a doctrine out of it'

    Agree - 'spirituality' and/or 'religion' whatever they end up being parsed as persist and we need to figure out what they are and in what ways they can be beneficial or harmful, to whom, under what circumstances, etc. same as we're investigating other aspects of our existence.

    I wonder whether the New Zealand Dunedin longitudinal study has ever checked religiosity/spirituality. It's a pretty good sample size (approx. n=1,000) of children born in the same year and followed for 45+ years now. And because they've also collected a ton of developmental, socioeconomic/demographic, health and other data on these subjects over the years, they might be better able to identify traits and processes/experiences linked to religiosity/spirituality.

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

    1546:

    There is zero mystical, religious, or any other form of otherworldly content. "Religious" brain activity is centred in the posterior superior parietal lobe

    He's also wrong.

    The difference is the same as modelling orbital paths via Math and actually shooting a little tin-can up there. i.e. If you're the "real deal", multiple people experience it without any other possible shared information pathway.

    Hate to be the one to burst your Atheistic Bubble: almost 90% of all 20th Century "Psychology" (and this isn't even getting into the fringes of Eugenics / Evo. Psych. stuff) is ... fake.

    As in: made up trash, usually used to condition primates into behaviours.

    And Greg: we can prove both sides of that equation, while proving both the Paradox of Epistemological Knowledge and the falsitude of the 'Law of the Excluded Middle' while doing it.

    For real. And yeah, up above: given that the القرآن was written down in a period of about 400 years after the Romans left (being, notably: very very much based on Iron weapons) I think you need to chill out a little.

    Also: on chariots -- scythes existed for a reason. Hit up M. Cole (doing better, soft spot for that one) --- they're an ancient 'denial of space' weapon. i.e. you get the Phalanx (or proto-Phalanx) to bunch together in fear, this leads to unit wide break-down and scrummage / trampling. Which, given the tragic events in Israel lately, are certainly not a "solved problem".

    ~

    Seriously: chariot usage is well documented. And no, you don't make the entire thing out of iron: you make the axel / wheel rims / scythes out of iron, the rest is wood. Y'all supposed to be engineers, not understanding how to do this is depressing. (Aside: you're also missing the "KHAN" angle here, which is that dispersal of Horses as a resources was resoundingly not balanced in ancient times so many of these groups couldn't even field basic cavalry. Which is why Elephants got used, it was a terror weapon against the Romans who had used light calvalry against the Germanic tribes (mostly from now what is Spain) since the Gallic forces simply couldn't / didn't field them. Which is why, if you're interested, Boadicea is always depicted as using a chariot when Ancient Britain war simply wasn't done like that).

    Want proof? 1066, you still have various bands double-marching the entire length of the country to fight two battles in a month. Thus Knights.

    Anyhow: 1375 has it about correct. There's a lot of US based interest in making sure the Old Ones fail and get replaced. But, as ever: they don't actually know the reason yet.

    1547:

    *Also known as "Only the Nobs have 'orses, and they only go as fast as the oxen pulling the hay stacks"

    1548:

    In fact, you should probably re-think the entire Mediaeval system of Barons, Lords, Castles and so forth as a logistics problem of: "How to move cavalry fast and keep them supplied without having to rely upon slow logistics and keep this up through peace-time" (this is known in the Game as "Why the US Postal Service was implemented").

    Then again, Agincourt and the infamous losses of Royalist forces during the English Civil War (obsessed with hunting down supply logistics to the detriment of battles ongoing: this is the reverse of what you were taught: they were smart but Path Dependent since New Towns and so forth had already made their modus operandi moot. If you're fighting a civilization wide Apocalyptic battle and wanting to win the War, makes sense.)

    ~

    @Host. Not a lot of Horsey people in your bubble. Or Oil people: gas station logistics (and franchises) is like how to make people Path Dependent.

    ~

    The actual more important issue (A death in the Firm) is that none of them know how to implement the new stages, thus all the "Build Back Better" and "Great Reset" chatter.

    ~

    Which, Greg actually answered: you lobotomized that bit of the Brain too well (and/or made it into a slavering rancid pit of stuff that you used to exclude Higher Order Thinking - and we're talking 1250's here, not 2020's).

    Riddle me this: why has Greg never taken mushrooms?

    1549:

    To him, everyone had an idea and fairness was implementing a fair share of ideas. We did it your way last time, it's my turn now.

    Please don't tell me this was in commercial diving??

    "Sure, yesterday we used 1.6 PPO2, but my idea is 2.4 PPO2, so today is my turn"?

    1550:

    I have to admit that was my first reaction "fair turn about is suicidally stupid" but then I reread it more charitably and thought "nah, you try it your way and if you survive I'll think about it".

    I spend more time trying to listen to the burblings of idiots because often I miss things that are only obvious to me in retrospect.

    1551:

    I got got the first Astra-Zenica shot (yay! At least!) but discovered that someone I know is antivaxx-curious:

    y I am a bit skeptical given the rush to get a vaccine and the competing claims and side effects.

    I just replied that it's had a bigger trial with more intense observation than just about any other vaccine ever.

    But I'm still a bit stunned. That person says "I'm not anti-vaxx, I'm just questioning"... is it just me, or is that textbook anti-vaxx stuff?

    1552:

    "Please don't tell me this was in commercial diving??"

    No, my first proper job out of school was at the post office. It was some dispute about how to do some kind of office task that I've now completely forgotten. It was also a dispute with the Christmas casual, who had a 4 week contract over the busy period, while I'd been there a couple of years, but was much younger.

    1553:

    It's standard, and it's standard for Qanon types too.

    1554:

    SFR I wasn't aware of the Psilocybin results, though it does not surprise me. But the Persinger (etc) tests came from - for want of a better description - an "electromagnetic helmet". In other words an at-least-partly-controllable, known source with ZERO mystical woo involved.

    OH SHIT the seagull has joined in. One note ... sorry but we already know that C20th "Psychology" is bollox - see the late Sir P Medawar on that particular scam. [ Wonderful book called: "Pluto's Republic" - putting the boot into various pseudo-scientific cons, etc. ] Second note: I eat mushrooms regularly, the most often eaten being Boletus badius & the most desirable being Boletus edulis

    skagun And the religious proselytisers use this as a tactic ... gnawing away.

    1555: 1458 (and #1528) - I can't answer that directly either, but I've known confessed theists and humanists who demonstrate their beliefs by actions rather than words; for example by actions for voluntary organisations, by charitable donations, and by not passing by on the other side when they see a stranger in need. If you want to "talk religion with them", they will wait for you to open the conversation.

    OTOH I find that knowing when someone is an atheist is often just a case of waiting for them to tell you.

    1533 - If you can't dazzle them with diamonds, or baffle them with bullsh!t, confuse them with non sequiturs. 1552 - Moz, since you mentioned it, here's the experience to date of me and about 16 friends and acquaintances not in this commentatiat:

    1) 2 had a reaction to OAZ1 that could be described as "bad bout of flu". 1 of these 2 had no reaction to OAZ2. 2) 1 had a sore arm for a couple of days, which is typical of their reaction to intramuscular injections. 3) The other 13 had no noticeable reaction to OAZ1, or to OAZ2 if they've had that.

    1556:

    On another topic, I am predicting that the Queen's speech will contain a requirement for photographic voter ID, probably of restricted forms (to discourage the underclasses), and change all English elections to FPTP (to prevent a repetition of the West Yorkshire and Cambridgeshire mayoral results).

    https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/voter-id-key-facts-and-figures/ https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-statements/detail/2021-03-16/hcws849

    It will be interesting to see how Bozo imposes that on Scotland for UK elections. I think that this guy has it right.

    https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/tory-dominance-is-likely-to-hasten-break-up-of-the-union-1.4559816

    1557:

    Without addressing what you say directly, I recommend looking into the work of Terry Eagleton - a famous English Marxist literary theorist. One of his best known pieces in recent years is a literary criticism of one of Dawkins' more strident pieces, one that probably rings true for many here. But he's quite interesting on the subject of theory, whether you accept his perspective or not, simply by means of being across and therefore able to explain, without necessarily promoting a specific version of message, so much of it.

    1558:

    EC YES BoZo is a distorted mirror-image of Sturgeon ( I.e. considerably worse. ) But they are both wreckers, out for personal power at everyone else's expense. Same as BoZo's "levelling up" can be summarised as: "Piss on London" Talking of which, arsehole Khan got in, banning/making hideously expensive even residents cars if they are older, whilst backing the Silvertown Tunnel, which will increase pollution by silly amounts, right.

    IF ( when ) he destroys the Union, I will purchase a supply of Union flags, to show my resistance to his antics.

    1559:

    I've read articles claiming that some people who question the safety of vaccines are honestly dubious about the speed of roll-out, and can be reassured by telling them about the care that was taken with testing.

    To my mind, there may be some risks, but COVID is riskier.

    Has anyone been tracking the Chinese and/or Russian vaccines? I talked with a woman from Hungary who said that people there were getting Sinovac, and she knew people who got COVID after vaccination, and one of them died. Of course, this is about effectiveness, not safety.

    I don't think religious people need to be extremely generous and good to be around to undercut the more extreme atheist arguments against religion. Just being averagely decent and pleasant suggests that religion isn't making them worse.

    Has anyone else here read Lessing's The Good Terrorist. A group of British terrorists lets someone incompetent set a bomb because it's her turn.

    1560:

    Nancy asks: "Has anyone been tracking the Chinese and/or Russian vaccines?"

    Yes.

    Both have a low efficacy -- meaning as you say -- the vaccinated have much lower protection than those using other vaccines.

    (I get my second dose of Astra-Zeneca next week).

    1561:

    Oddly enough, the most effective tactic I've found for getting evangelizers out of my face is saying "no thanks, I'm an environmentalist."

    A successful use of The Chewbacca Defense!

    A Chewbacca Defense is a way of "winning" a debate through methods other than logic and reasoned argument, up to and including the deliberate use of Insane Troll Logic to confuse people.
    1562:

    is it just me, or is that textbook anti-vaxx stuff?,/i>

    That whole "I'm just questioning" is pretty standard for climate change deniers, creationists, anti-vaxxers, and others of their ilk.

    1563:

    It will be interesting to see how Bozo imposes that on Scotland for UK elections.

    The Leave side increasingly reminds me of the PQ under Lévesque — a vote of 50%+1 is a mandate for them to leave, but no one is allowed to think of leaving their new polity because… look, a squirrel!

    I'm still staggered that a referendum explicitly labelled as advisory, which excluded British subjects affected by the decision but not living in Britain (ie. expats), somehow because a "mandate" that absolutely had to be followed.

    All the other times I've encountered similar behaviour it's been because those running the show knew what they wanted to do and the vote was a convenient excuse. (And had they lost the vote they'd have tried again at the next meeting, and the next, and the next…)

    1564:

    The anti-vaxxers are out to "win". And since all of these Covid-19 vaccines were done at Manhattan project speeds instead of the typical 5 to 10 years it creates a window for the anti crowd to crawl through. They are spreading tons of FUD. And it is easy to do as most people have never looked at vaccines other than their doc says "You should get these this year, any questions? No. OK, "NURSE".)

    Now they are doing things like exploiting the US federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) by saying the data means what it doesn't. And on and on and on.

    What I don't get is why the antis are trying to convert others to their position.

    1565:

    What I don't get is why the antis are trying to convert others to their position.

    Money.

    According the the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, just 12 accounts are responsible for 65% of the anti-vax content on social media (73% on Facebook). Here's their report:

    https://www.counterhate.com/disinformationdozen

    A lot of those folks are selling "alternative" cures, "informational" materials, and so forth.

    According to another report, the social media companies make up to a billion dollars a year in advertising off the anti-vaxxer industry.

    1566:

    Interesting article.

    However, I feel that Eagleton doesn't acknowledge, or possible even doesn't realize, the vast gap between established Christian theology and common knowledge and practice.

    For mainstream Christianity, reason, argument and honest doubt have always played an integral role in belief.

    This may be true for the hierarchy, but I doubt it's true for the majority of practitioners.

    Decades ago when I attended an Anglican church (was actually a Church Warden) I talked about this with the priest (who later became a bishop), because I was getting frustrated with the general tone and politics of the church (specifically the disconnect between what we supposedly believed and how people acted). The priest pointed out that most practicing Christians actually know almost nothing about Christianity beyond what they remember from Sunday School, which is taught by volunteers based on what they remember…

    We tried organizing a weekly instructional seminar specifically on theology, for those curious about it. Published goals, an agenda, etc. What happened? Most of the people who showed up wanted to witness to each other about how their faith made a difference in their lives and had no interest in actually learning any theology because that interfered with the feeling of certainty that their faith gave them. This was a mainstream Anglican church, not an Evangelical church.

    Talked with the priest after, to explain why I wouldn't be attending anymore. Discovered he wasn't surprised, as he'd realized most people go to church for the comfortable certainties and do anything to avoid reason, argument, and doubt.

    1567:

    Money.

    Not so sure I agree with that. They folks I'm talking about have no monetary gain to come from it. It is more of a convert people to our religion thing than anything else. Or so it seems to me. And they are quite militant about it.

    According the the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, just 12 accounts are responsible for 65% of the anti-vax content on social media (73% on Facebook). Here's their report:

    I think that a lot of this comes from Russia and is basically a campaign to sow chaos more than anything else. And it seems to be working.

    1568:

    Discovered he wasn't surprised, as he'd realized most people go to church for the comfortable certainties and do anything to avoid reason, argument, and doubt.

    I call that the "I want a simple answer to my question. No mater how complicated things are in reality land."

    1569:

    Indeed.

    I am not even surprised, however. I had been expecting it for over three decades, and it definitely fits your last paragraph. No, the people behind it were NOT the politicians, but they control much of our politics and had been actively working on it for all that time.

    1570:

    On one hand, being a person who finished a second dose of Pfizer a while back...and perfectly comfortable with a vaccine passport being a condition of travel, employment, and access to government services.

    On the other hand, realizing that being skeptical of Covid-19 information is not totally irrational. There are considerable economic motivations that have already resulted in motivated reasoning...and some of the motivation was probably well meaning rather than simply economic.

    Eg, 'kids don't spread the virus' (frankly, the sort of thing that requires extraordinary evidence) has morphed into 'okay, they spread the virus'. That claim has almost certainly killed people. It was coupled with 'oh, they don't get the virus' - where the reality is probably closer to 'mostly asymptomatic, so no one tracked it'. The assertion of 'not serious in kids' seems to have proven true, though there are some long term effects (probably best to put in context relative to flu).

    Given how well our family's minor illnesses have tracked with getting takeout delivered, 'takeout doesn't spread virus' is a similar claim.

    So, the assertion that the high-speed-development vaccines are perfectly safe? Any assertion with that sort of positive economic justification is a bit suspect. Testing tends to capture the things you look for. Time captures the rest.

    That said, considering that covid risk in my country is high, getting vaccinated asap was both the rational and moral thing to do.

    But, if I lived in Taiwan, I wouldn't necessarily rush for vaccination. By now, sure, the US is a large enough trial to pick out most effects already.

    Personally, side effects were unusually mild. Mild muscle pain with first dose. Maybe a bit of tiredness, but less than the kids often induce.

    My wife, though, 3 week long rashes, somewhat painful, over 10-15% of her body. Milder for the second dose. Per dermatologist, seeing a lot of patients with similar vaccine reactions. Some sort of steroid resulted in no noticeable improvement, but did invoke the placebo effect. (We laughed that it started clearing up in time for second dose and gosh, it did come back.). Personally, do not recommend checking with dermatologist, too many 'covid toe' patients being seen.

    1571:

    Your political views are as off-beam as your theological ones. For the Nth time, please stop personalising issues. Bozo and Sturgeon are symptoms of the politics in their country (as are Netanyahu and Putin and was Trump) and NOT the causes.

    1572:

    Yes. In my worst school (a CofE choir one), I was taught not to question and to ignore inconsistencies, with very much a 19th century interpretation. But that does not mean that I am going to damn the whole CofE because of my experience, let alone other religions.

    1573:

    But that does not mean that I am going to damn the whole CofE

    Stop by the US and try and figure out which of the 3 CofE's you are going to experience when you show up at the front door.

    1574:

    On one hand, being a person who finished a second dose of Pfizer a while back...and perfectly comfortable with a vaccine passport being a condition of travel, employment, and access to government services.

    Since I've got my vaccine card, my problem with making them mandatory is that it's easier to forge the current vaccine passports than it is to get the shots. IIRC, last week a local bartender got arrested for selling forged vaccine passports.

    While I agree with your sentiment, I think the US government's notion of spending the money getting as many people vaccinated as possible, rather than creating a tamper-resistant vaccine passport system, is probably both more physically effective and more cost effective. And more moral and less political.

    In the long run, a vaccine passport may indeed be necessary. But that's only if Covid19 turns out to mutate faster than anti-vaxxers get a clue (necessitating an up-to-date vaccine record and hence a tamper resistant passport) or if we regularly get hit with new pandemics, again making an up-to-date vaccine record more necessary than it is now.

    1575:

    But that's only if Covid19 turns out to mutate faster than anti-vaxxers get a clue

    The anti vaxxers I know think that the mutations prove their point about not getting a shot(s). Really convoluted logic stacked high on top of some false beliefs.

    1576:

    I once wrote an SF short in which an artificially generated 'religious experience' had been perfected and weaponized to motivate bad actors.

    If you thought you could get another chance to experience God, just what wouldn't you do? My main character was a hitman on a spiritual journey.

    The story was not a seller, likely because the writer is not particularly good.

    1577:

    Re: '... sorry but we already know that C20th "Psychology" is bollox - '

    Have you any idea of how many different psych theories there were in the 20th century? --- Tons and tons! And just like in the 'hard sciences' - many got tossed out once the ones that were shown to actually work were identified. Psych is even messier than bio to figure out as a discipline/science.

    BTW - I personally know people who've been helped by clinical psychs - mostly via CBT. However there are some people who need very different therapy*. Also personally know some PhD neuros. This stuff is complicated.

    https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/patients-and-families/cognitive-behavioral

    • Just like for 'stomach' issues sometimes you just need to change your diet, sometimes you need a few pills, sometimes you need a combination of diet change and pills/meds, sometimes you need a fecal transplant and sometimes you need surgery --- followed any combination of the previous.

    Re: Religiosity/spirituality

    I'm guessing that like many SF/F fans you've read at least some Pratchett. Highly recommend his 'Small Gods' - shows many of the 'sides' of this phenomenon which I think apply even if you happen to live on the surface of a globe rather than on the much more intelligent/safe surface of a disk.

    1578:

    sigh For the last few hundred years, the Western empires proclaimed that anyone not of the Book were superstitious or idolators, period. There were no other "religions".

    Aka, "I've got the True Religion, you have a philosophy*, they're superstitious".

    • Usually applied to Buddhists
    1579:

    No "holy text" for capitalism? Really? Not the (apparently) misquoted Adam Smith? And you're going to argue that Ayn Rand isn't Holy Revelation for libertarians? Then you'll say they're not capitalists?

    Though, using what traveling preachers used to say, and that I read about, they're all Mammon worshippers.

    1580:

    "Poorly written mss"? Really? Ask 80% of US self-proclaimed Christians, and you'll learn that all the editions (well, except for X version), all translations were Divinely Inspired.

    To which my response is yep, and the version that Chick Tracts claims is exactly the same as the Westboro Badtaste Church as the Lutherans as the Pope.

    1581:

    Back in either '79 or the early eighties, I had the best religious argument ever, with an old friend (who I'm still friends with). An hour long, with no screaming, and no logical fallacies.

    The conclusion was this: she was willing to accept inductive evidence, that is, evidence from within (herself), while I would only accept deductive evidence, that is, evidence demonstrable to an unbiased third party.

    And, SotMN to the side, I have done acid, and one or two other things, and nope, no Religious Revelation.

    I think it comes down to "extraordinary assertions demand extraordinary proof", and asserting that one deity, separate and apart from its creation, not numinous, created the universe I consider an extraordinary claim, and am still waiting for that evidence demonstrable to an unbiased third party.

    I, btw, am happy to use my late ex's line for myself, "atheist Pagan".

    1582:

    Re: ' ... gravity, because it holds the rubble pile together. In space, it's going to be held together somewhat differently, and so it's likely that the rubble is going to react somewhat differently, especially if it's being spun rather rapidly.'

    Have been trying to find info on rubble composition (size and types of rocks/minerals) and wavelengths because I'm trying to fill in an area around my house and I think our questions/problems might be related.

    Anyways, here goes ... haven't found anything definitive probably because I don't even know how to frame my question 'correctly'. However, I'm guessing that the folks who design/install roadbeds (automotive or rail), sewer systems/drains and/or bridges/tunnels have the data.

    My reason for focusing on 'waves' is that it seems to me that any/all wavelengths have the power to shift or interact with any/all forms of matter. On the visible-to-the-naked-eye scale we've seen examples of this in armies marching in-step across bridges. Also 'waves' can be any form of rhythmic energy - like sifting flour or sand - which can interact including separate out components (flour vs. seeds or fine sand vs. pebbles) to the point of visible discrete layers resulting from the action. Great if you want separate layers, tragic if this results in some of the materials being washed away thus leaving a gap with the result that the roadway above collapses to fill in the void. Or - depending on what 'pebbles' remain - if water floods the area followed by rhythmic tremors - resulting in liquefaction. (There's also quicksand.)

    Reason for looking at different types of sand/minerals - I'm also wondering whether the electrical/electrochemical properties of some sand/minerals make them more or less prone to reacting to various wavelengths.

    How this ties in to a spaceship scenario - I'm guessing that even the most advanced spaceship will have electrical and mechanical moving parts. Ditto humans who also tend to move about and interact with their environments. I'm guessing that each of these - electrical, mechanical, human - probably has at least one strong rhythmic signature wave/pulse. If so, then how their various waves flow, interact, re-inforce, collapse, etc. will impact the integrity/safety of their spaceship. Hmmm.... this sounds a lot like a submarine.

    Anyways - just a thought from a non-sci/techie but am interested in what you find out.

    1583: 1557 - I'm not sure that Bozo has the power (at least short of an Act of Parliament) to change the voting/ count tallying methods for the Scots, Welsh (or Norn Irn?) parliaments. I think they may be baked into the relevant Acts? OTOH he definitely does not have the power to stop the Scots or Welsh varying the extent of the franchise below a Westminster level. 1564 somehow because a "mandate" that absolutely had to be followed.

    That's just another lie that the Leavers used to make their case sound more appealing before Con Day.

    1572 - Either of you got an explanation of how winning 4 successive Scottish Parliament elections under 2 different party leaders, including taking an absolute majority in the chamber under a partial Additional Member system, which was concocted by Westminster in a bid to render an absolute majority impossible is "a symptom" of anything (other than a dissatisfaction with the present system). 1575 & 1576 - Would/do anti-vaxxers refuse one or more of flu, measles, mumps and rubella vaccines? 1580 Para 1 - Adam Smith is more commonly very selectively quoted than actively misquoted (eg, he advances a proposition, then says why you shouldn't do it, but the misquoter only states the proposition and not the rebuttal).
    1584:

    EC @ 1572 HALF agree with you, but the other half still blames the arsehole "leaders". As for theology ... well we had a REALLY EXTREME US-based "The bible is inerrant" so-called church take over a vacant chapel on our street corner. They managed, in about 3 weeks to annoy everybody, of all the other "faiths" & none into uniting to get these bastards OUT. In the end someone threatened them with an injunction & then they converted the chapel into an ops, base & moved their public fuckwittery down the road about 2 k FYI: This lot That sort of thing, um colours ones views on religious extremists, yes?

    Rocketjps Wasn't that the basis for the Asassains of Alamut?

    whitroth extraordinary assertions demand extraordinary proof Yup, that is, in fact one of the bases for my arguments, that EC so casually ( & wrongly ) dismisses. Oh yes, can I use that one ( "Atheist Pagan" ) ??

    1585:

    Judaism tends toward orthopractic, or as I put it, how you live, not what you believe, although the psychos in Israel now.... I read a perfect quote from a Shinto priest: "we have no dogma. We have no theology. We just dance." Most Pagans are like that (modern, anyway).

    Christianity, and a good bit is Islam, has leaned towards theology is what matters, and nothing else.

    1586:

    Yo!

    I gree up a red-diaper baby, and my father's sect, as I understand it, moved left from the Troskyites, and never accepted the trials in the mid-thirties. I've never been indoctrinated.

    I'll also mention, though I've been married too many times, my late wife and I had three, let us say disagreements, in living together for 10.5 years, and those were all while we were utterly exhausted, trying to load the truck with Everything, as we were about to relocate in one swell foop from Austin to Chicago. My current SO and I have no had any in over two years of being together.

    But then, as I wrote in The Letter to my kids when my son was 13, and my twins 14: opposites may attract, but if you don't agree at least 67% of the time on how to spend your time and money, it will not last.

    1587:

    I will admit that there are times I utterly agree with Greg - but I'm in the US, where 70M psychotics, at least 90% of whom claim to be "Christian", still support IQ 45.

    Then there was Da'esh, blowing up historical Buddhist statues, because they were HERESY!

    And the fights between Muslims and Hindus.

    Did I ever mention that one of my SO's daughters was expelled from school, back around 2000, for, I kid you not, it was in the papers, "being a witch, and casting a spell on another kid"?

    1588:

    Sorry, nope, you're wrong. We had the math and the theory showing they should exist, based on other facts.

    Kindly point us to any evidence, demonstrable to an unbiased third party, that any Supreme Deity exists, or leads us to believe one exists, given all the things their believers assert have other, simpler scientific explanations.

    Oh, and about being a Pagan? Let me offer my std. line: if the Goddess was all-powerful, She certainly would have saved Her dearly-beloved dinosaurs.

    1589:

    @1560

    Has anyone been tracking the Chinese and/or Russian vaccines? I talked with a woman from Hungary who said that people there were getting Sinovac, and she knew people who got COVID after vaccination, and one of them died. Of course, this is about effectiveness, not safety.

    The Chinese vaccine used in Hungary is Sinopharm, not Sinovac. (We also have Sputnik-V, Pfizer (BioNTech), AstraZeneca, Moderna and recently Janssen (J&J), in various quantities).

    Sinopharm is supposed to be better than Sinovac based on early international trials, but its effectivity is questionable especially for old people and even more specifically for old men.

    Unfortunately in Hungary it was widely given to old people. There are now a relatively large number of old people whose blood contains either unmeasurable or only very small amount of antibodies even weeks after the second dose (including my father). This does not necessarily mean they are completely unprotected (as the tests do not measure T-cells, also there are many different antibodies), but there appears to be a strong correlation.

    The russian vaccine, Sputnik-V should be theoretically fine (it's a technology similar to AstraZeneca), but there are serious QA issues, especially with the second dose (which is different from the first dose). Whether these affect the protection is unknown.

    1590:

    I think the field you want to look towards is soil physics, which I don't know much about. One thing is particle size, which is based on longest dimension and runs clay/silt/sand/gravel/pebble/cobble/boulder in order of increasing size. Composition matters, but for construction, the other thing that matters is angularity. The more angular the "particle" is, the easier it is to fit it together with other particles and make a strong aggregate. This is true for concrete (rounded particles make weaker concrete) and for making dry-stone walls, which you do not make out of rounded river cobbles.

    As for space, we can assume that most of the particles are angular, so properly packed, they should fit together well. The problem with testing this on Earth is that we've got a force that holds high-friction piles together--gravity--so things will act differently.

    With regard to photon-proofing a rubble pile, I'd guess that it's a matter of density, thickness, and material. Get enough stuff and you'll stop gamma rays from getting through.

    The problem is meteoroids: they're moving very fast, so the collision is going to shed a huge amount of energy. Some of it is going to be heat and plasma, some of it is going to be shockwaves, and some of it is going to be kinetic energy moving things around. When you've got a rubble pile of angular particles that's in a confined space (non-rotating), how the plasma, shockwaves, and kinetic energy propagate through and are dispersed by the rubble pile may be hard to model. Hopefully there's a simple emergent model that works well enough, but there may not be.

    Then add in rotation, where the micrometeroid pierces the shell that's holding the angular particles in a compact mass then dumps a huge amount of kinetic energy into a few of those particles, and things get that much more complicated. Again, there may be a good enough emergent model that could be used, but the problem is that the shield could end up generating more micrometeroids, rather than absorbing the impactor and making it go away.

    That's why I'm kind of fond of just putting lots of layers of soft armor in "scale" form across a frame (many layers per scale. The scales, sort of like Space Shuttle tiles, can be replaced individually if damaged. There's also something to be said for making the scales shaggy, so that the bolide hits a hair or tuft, turns into plasma, and that gets absorbed by the layers underneath. But people get whiny about the idea of shaggy-scaled space stations, and I'm not sure why.

    1591:

    Re Adam Smith - like Machiavelli, who was warning, not writing a playbook.

    1592:

    Re Adam Smith and Machiaveli, Erasmus was aghast to see the Lutherites cite his book "In Praise of Folly" as an influence in turning them to revolt against the pope.

    1593:

    I t would appear that the Universe, or possibly the Interstellar Medium ... Doesn't know the words - because it's "humming" ....

    whitroth As in: "All hail Athena Nike, goddess of Wisdom & Victory!" Maybe, perhaps

    1594:

    Er, no. Neutrinos are a bad example, true, but their existence was based on a speculation (i.e. that certain decays obeyed certain conservation laws). We have since discovered that not all conservation laws are as invariant as was originally believed. But modern physics is solid with examples where things exist only when seen through the Eye of Faith - and, yes, that includes much of the particle zoo (definitely including quarks and Higgs), as well as dark matter. Produce any evidence for those, NOT based on assuming the theory that their existence proves.

    1595:

    Actually, the effect of high-speed projectiles hitting an amorphous mass is well understood, as are the properties to stop the consequences getting out of hand. Whether those properties are practically deliverable is another matter.

    What you need is a spongey medium without too much elasticity, which absorbs the energy and damps the shock waves; that's fairly simple. The 'self-healing' aspects, which I assume would also be needed, are a trickier matter.

    1596:

    I think we agree on the ideal shield for terrestrial projectiles.

    The "Several meters of lunar rubble in a torus around the spinning space station "is a relic of the old Stanford torus, which was to a spinning disk a mile in diameter, surrounded by a non-spinning shield of lunar regolith to stop radiation.. I'm not sure the designers considered the problem of space debris, and for all I know, no one's gone back to look at the interaction of the rubble shield with high speed space debris. That's what I'm getting at.

    The trick with the Whipple shield is that space debris is generally moving so fast that it vaporizes into plasma when it hits just about anything. So putting up a light layer to turn the projectile into plasma, followed by a bunch of shields to stop the plasma from getting through, is what a Whipple shield is for.

    I'm just not sure how well a stack of rocks works as a Whipple shield. The collision might vaporize the first few rocks, shatter a bunch more that can't get moving fast enough, and push still more out the other side like an oversized blunderbuss, especially if there's not much holding the regolith together on the inside. If a small projectile can make a spreading mess, then the shield is actually worse than useless against it.

    1597:

    Heteromeles @ 1533: Oddly enough, the most effective tactic I've found for getting evangelizers out of my face is saying "no thanks, I'm an environmentalist."

    There is no logic behind why that should work, but it certainly does work. It also implies something sad about how the people doing the evangelizing view environmentalism and their role as inheritor's of Adam's dominion.

    LOL. I'll try to remember that if I ever need it again. The proselytizers don't come around here much anymore. I think it's because like everyone else, they think old people are boring.

    1598:

    The last time I got to play with doorbell ringers was around '93 or so in Austin. My late wife and I had discussed it, and had an answer.

    Basically, you wait for them to babble "Kingdom of God", and then... "Wait a minute, what's this Kingdom stuff? Don't you believe in Democracy and the Constitution? Are you anti-American or something, want to overthrow our democratic republic, and put in a theocracy, like in I-ran?"

    They backpedaled really fast. Afterwards, she was kicking herself, because they said, "It's just an allegory", because her response would have been, had she thought of it, "But I thought you were literalists."

    This is stuff they've never thought of, and stops them cold.

    1599:

    "That whole "I'm just questioning" is pretty standard for climate change deniers, creationists, anti-vaxxers, and others of their ilk."

    Well, fuck them sideways with a broken bottle, for making anyone who does have a reasonable doubt about the party line on some topic and uses a perfectly normal and standard phrase to introduce a discussion about it look like a looney.

    I take the general view that being able to acquire the immunity without having to have the disease is bloody brilliant, because, well, duh, and anyone who argues against it blanket-fashion is of necessity a nutcase. But this doesn't mean there aren't reasons to harbour some doubts about the universal and unmitigated beneficence of the current crop of coronavirus vaccines.

    AIUI this is the first example of a type of vaccine which has never been deployed before. One would therefore expect that it would have been tested with unusual thoroughness to catch the unknown effects pertaining to any novel technique. But this in turn takes an unusually long time, whereas this has come out in an unusually short time, and in circumstances where the adverse motives which we persistently and deliberately fail to eliminate from medical development are of unusually great strength.

    In particular any possible long term effects are absolutely unknown, since we haven't got there yet, and we don't have any experience of other vaccines of the same type to even give us any idea of what kind of problems we might expect, or what we might inadvertently be storing up for the future by deploying it on a massive scale without such knowledge.

    I am kind of dubious about mass deployment of a vaccine which stops you getting actually ill but does not stop you catching and spreading it. It sounds like an effective way to keep the thing not only around, but widespread and with a much larger pool of instances from which it can return in a mutated and nastier form. If we can manage to be prompt and effective at developing and distributing a better vaccine which does prevent retransmission, then all well and good, probably; but that is not yet assured, and the principal obstacles are probably not of the technical and so tractable kind.

    And the whole thing is being managed by a government which makes sure to present its data for consumption by the non-approved in a form which prevents those who would be capable of making a meaningful analysis of it from doing so, and to those who cannot is happy to just lie through its arse. So if it does turn out to be problematical we can't depend on actually finding out... and all the more so since anyone who might discover and announce a genuine problem is discredited before they even open their mouth by all the arseholes announcing bullshit problems.

    It seems to me that the current crop of vaccines are basically just more sandbagging to shore up the health services by keeping the medics themselves alive and relieving them of the load of people like me who are in a "get this and you're dead" category. This is, in fact, great. But it does not mean that everything is now going to be fine, as we are supposed to believe; and nor of course do the shortcomings of the situation justify the contrary absolute dogma of the nutters.

    1600:

    Greg Tingey @ 1538: JBS
    It would seem that I am less "Militant" than you ...
    I just turn the ridicule & sarcasm up a notch & then another & ... so far, with 2 exceptions, they have either given up, or started ranting & making threats first. The exceptions? I've had to threaten to call the cops on them, on the grounds that blackmail is a serious crime ( "You'll be sorry when you're dead & JEEBUS asks you why ... " )

    Yeah, I'm just not tolerant enough to let them natter on to the point they're ranting at me. Ridicule & sarcasm don't work for me because it still means I have to engage in debate with them and I just want them to go away.

    I don't consider what I said is a threat, more "fair warning" to someone so obsessed with their own self-righteousness that they just can't process "NO, I'm not interested."

    And, as I pointed out to someone else, they don't come around any more now that I've gotten old. I'm also a bit more mellow now than I was in my prime.

    1601:

    Yes, I know, but what I said stands. My point was that there is nothing magical about very fast projectiles, and the effects of such things are well understood.

    1602:

    Out of curiosity, if a mysterious stranger with amused gleaming eyes offered 10 million pounds (or 14M dollars) to be deposited in one's bank account, in return for one's "conciousness", while offering reassurances that outwardly one's human body would continue to behave the same way (including to loved ones), just without a "consciousness", who here would accept the offer? (The Stranger refuses, with a smirk, to say what they would do with the "consciousness".)

    More practically, who defines "extraordinary assertions"? Is there a vote? (E.g. entrenched (and eventually invalidated) medical dogma during the COVID-19 pandemic has killed a very large number of people.)

    1603:

    Why would we? Without the normally accepted definition of "consciousness", you're not there.

    Since you ask, I define it as an extraordinary assertion that there is such a being, but I have to sign before I am told there is proof that will be given.

    That's what ever con artist, from the guy on the streetcorner selling "Rolexes" up to IQ 45 says. I say, give me any demonstrable evidence first.

    1604:

    medrxiv.org preprint, but interesting if it holds up. And it would cover other vaccines probably, not just mRNA vaccines. Detection of persistent SARS-CoV-2 IgG antibodies in oral mucosal fluid and upper respiratory tract specimens following COVID-19 mRNA vaccination (2021/05/06) In this study, we hypothesized that COVID-19 vaccines may elicit production of SARS-CoV-2 IgG antibodies in the upper respiratory tract, such as in oral and nasal mucosal fluid. To test that hypothesis, we enrolled 114 participants within 3-7 days of receiving the first dose of the Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccine and collected oral mucosal fluid samples on days 5, 10, 15, and 20 after each vaccine dose.

    1605:

    gasdive @ 1542:

    "when faced with compelling evidence to the contrary, I change my mind.

    It took me a long time to realize just how unusual this mindset is, and how difficult it is for neurotypicals to even imagine it"

    When discussing religion (or my not having it) what others might consider compelling evidence isn't so compelling for me. In other sectors, being able to change your mind based on the EVIDENCE is a lesson that has to be learned again & again.

    @ 1518

    Testable proposition: "No form of BigSkyFairy is detectable" ...
    Corollary: Since not detectable 100% irrelevant

    I'd say rather that no compelling evidence for the existence of the BigSkyFairy has been presented to me. It is neither provable or disprovable based on the available evidence, so it IS 100% irrelevant TO ME except to the extent some knucklehead claims divine revelation and is going to impose their interpretation on me. Ain't no skin off my nose if someone wants to believe stupid stuff if they don't try to force me to believe that same stupid stuff.

    But I grew up in a church and despite being estranged from it for many years I'm still not ready to assert unconditionally there is no possibility of the existence of "god" ... it's actually NOT a testable proposition, hence militant agnosticism.

    OTOH, if certain people would actually LIVE according to the teachings of the prophet they claim are the guiding principles of their lives, this would be a whole lot more pleasant world to live on.

    1606:

    Moz @ 1552: I got got the first Astra-Zenica shot (yay! At least!) but discovered that someone I know is antivaxx-curious:

    y I am a bit skeptical given the rush to get a vaccine and the competing claims and side effects.

    I just replied that it's had a bigger trial with more intense observation than just about any other vaccine ever.

    But I'm still a bit stunned. That person says "I'm not anti-vaxx, I'm just questioning"... is it just me, or is that textbook anti-vaxx stuff?

    It's textbook standard stupid internet TROLL bullshit. Not anti-vaxx specific, although the anti-vaxxers have adopted it.

    1607:

    Nancy Lebovitz @ 1560: I've read articles claiming that some people who question the safety of vaccines are honestly dubious about the speed of roll-out, and can be reassured by telling them about the care that was taken with testing.

    To my mind, there may be some risks, but COVID is riskier.

    I'm not sure where I encountered the idea, might even have been here, but the factor an overwhelming majority of people who died from Covid19 had in common is they were NOT VACCINATED against it.

    There are some who legitimately should not be vaccinated - immunocompromised individuals - transplant recipients, cancer patients on chemo, HIV/AIDS patients ... but that's all the more reason for the rest of us to be vaccinated; to reduce the risk we pose to those individuals.

    The bottom line behind anti-vaxxers is they're just selfish, hateful assholes!

    1608:

    Quite likely. But I am deeply suspicious of the way that antibody levels are used as a proxy for resistance, given that there is some evidence that T cells are more important against COVID.

    1609:

    When I lived on the Welsh Border we used to get the Mormons turning up every year on a Sunday hawking their Watch Towers in an attempt to be one of the 100k in the top rung of heaven. I was polite (sorry, its my default state - a bad upbringing perhaps), said no and asked them to put me in their list of "Do not bother" houses.

    On the second year that they turned up actually during Sunday lunch I wrote a clear and concise letter citing the nuisance they caused and pointing out they were guilty of harassment. I even identified the solicitors who would take legal action. I then waited until the next meeting at their hall. Walked into their service and up to the guy running it. Handed him the letter and politely told him I never wanted to see them on my property again. I then turned and encountered 3 knuckle scrapers a good 50 pounds heavier than and 2 inches taller glaring at me. Apparently, them coming onto my land and interrupting my life was fine, but I could not intrude on theirs and was trespassing.

    We never saw them again.

    And yes, I agree with whoever mentioned Small Gods. It should be compulsory reading in schools, followed by viewings of life of Brian and Dogma.

    1610:

    Robert Prior @ 1566:

    What I don't get is why the antis are trying to convert others to their position.

    Money.

    According the the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, just 12 accounts are responsible for 65% of the anti-vax content on social media (73% on Facebook). Here's their report:

    https://www.counterhate.com/disinformationdozen

    A lot of those folks are selling "alternative" cures, "informational" materials, and so forth.

    According to another report, the social media companies make up to a billion dollars a year in advertising off the anti-vaxxer industry.

    The whole damn anti-vaxxer movement started with a swindle.

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

    The fraudulent research paper authored by Andrew Wakefield and published in The Lancet claimed to link the vaccine to colitis and autism spectrum disorders. The paper was retracted in 2010 but is still cited by anti-vaccinationists.
    1611:

    for making anyone who does have a reasonable doubt about the party line

    For me the line is not "I have questions" but "...so I'm going to be antisocial about it". Ask all the questions you like, have all the doubts you want, but try not to endanger the lives of others, or help people who are doing that. Which, sadly enough right now, means not running round in public going "danger danger, anti-vaxx talking points 1 4 and 5".

    Especially, in this case, since the peep in question can choose the Pfizer vaccine over Astra-Zenica if they prefer to have a more traditional shot. And UK people who want to see the vaccine programme brought down can leave that in the hands of English politicians who are doing a great job on that front already.

    My reaction so far is possibly psychosomatic shoulder pain at a low "is that pain or am I sitting funny" level, and great relief that I have finally got a timeline to relative freedom.

    1612:

    Erwin @ 1571: On the other hand, realizing that being skeptical of Covid-19 information is not totally irrational. There are considerable economic motivations that have already resulted in motivated reasoning...and some of the motivation was probably well meaning rather than simply economic.

    There's a difference between skepticism and internet trolling. The anti-vaxxers fall on the wrong side of that divide.

    1613:

    It occurs to me that this is kind of a parallel to the dilemmas facing some religious people. "I'm a Catholic but I think paedophile gangs should be prosecuted by states" or "I dislike anti-semites but I think the Palestinian genocide is wrong".

    Likewise "I'm dubious about some aspects of (some of?) the covid vaccines, but I think everyone should get one anyway, and it's reasonable to restrict people who don't want to be vaccinated when they could be".

    Personally I am persuaded by what I've read, and agree that the risk of covid far outweighs the risk of any of the vaccines, but especially the ones I have access to in Australia.

    1614:

    whitroth @ 1587: Yo!

    I gree up a red-diaper baby, and my father's sect, as I understand it, moved left from the Troskyites, and never accepted the trials in the mid-thirties. I've never been indoctrinated.

    Bullshit. Everybody gets "indoctrinated" at sometime or other in their lives, whether it's left, right or center, religious or anti-religious. It sticks with some and others reject it. And you'll probably never know which camp (accept/reject) you fall into.

    1615:

    Small Gods. It should be compulsory reading in schools, followed by viewings of life of Brian and Dogma.

    We got a similar effect just from having different Christian sects all having a go at us. Although it's a bit hard for me to tell, my birthfather was not religious and my mother's chosen sect turned on her when she drove her husband away (or, if you choose to look at it another way, the unfaithful arsehole left her for his secretary... same thing, really).

    But having the Baptists running round saying the Evangelicals were all wrong and the Anglicans were even more wrong, the Anglicans were busy insisting they're not godless papists, while the Presbyterians were pointing out that they weren't cheap knock-off Catholics like some people we could mention... and so on. Turns out there's not just one way to be Christian and no-one can agree which is correct (but they can all agree that at least N-2 of the others are obviously wrong). Quite blows the mind of a teenager, that does.

    1616:

    "Given how well our family's minor illnesses have tracked with getting takeout delivered, 'takeout doesn't spread virus' is a similar claim."

    I haven't caught anything from takeout delivered.

    However, I pay online. The instructions say "leave on doorstep" (most places now have this as a tick box). I preheat the oven to 160C. When it's delivered I shout thanks through the closed door. I wait a minute or two depending on the wind for anything breathed out by the delivery person to disperse. Then I get my partner to open the door. I pick up the food, in its packaging. My partner opens the oven. I put the unopened food in. She closes the oven, squirts soap on my hands and turns on the tap. I wash my hands for about a full minute. The food stays in the oven until it's all hot.

    Haven't caught anything yet.

    1617:

    whitroth @ 1599: The last time I got to play with doorbell ringers was around '93 or so in Austin. My late wife and I had discussed it, and had an answer.

    Basically, you wait for them to babble "Kingdom of God", and then... "Wait a minute, what's this Kingdom stuff? Don't you believe in Democracy and the Constitution? Are you anti-American or something, want to overthrow our democratic republic, and put in a theocracy, like in I-ran?"

    They backpedaled really fast. Afterwards, she was kicking herself, because they said, "It's just an allegory", because her response would have been, had she thought of it, "But I thought you were literalists."

    This is stuff they've never thought of, and stops them cold.

    That wastes more of my time than I'm willing to give them. "Doorbell ringers" I just say "No thankyou" and close the door.

    I have had Mormons come up to me while I was doing yard-work (which already guarantees I'm going to be in a bad mood). But they scatter pretty fast if you ask them if they want a coffee or tea ... or something a bit stronger.

    I used to know an old lady who'd put them to work weeding in the garden whenever they caught her outside, but that wouldn't work for me because
    1. I don't have a garden &
    2. It still entails engaging with them.

    The ones who just can't understand "NO" are a distinct minority and I haven't really had to deal with them very often in the last few decades.

    1618:

    And the whole thing is being managed by a government

    I have to disagree with you there. Even the most wild-eyed "one world government" fan would likely disagree too. We just don't have a government in any meaningful sense. Imagine Wales could veto any legislation in the UK, or Texas could amend bills before they went to the senate in the US.

    What we have is a bunch of competing powers from various (competing!) state governments to (competing!) corporations bickering about the best approach, who should pay, who should benefit, and yadda yadda to the point where we have more than five vaccines in widespread use.

    The fact that some local governments are doing better than other is not remarkable. And frankly, you in the UK are doing heaps better on that front than most so while you're right to complain you'd also be advised to thank your fucking stars you're not ruled by some US-backed tinpot dictator or worse.

    1619:

    Bill Arnold @ 1603: Out of curiosity, if a mysterious stranger with amused gleaming eyes offered 10 million pounds (or 14M dollars) to be deposited in one's bank account, in return for one's "conciousness", while offering reassurances that outwardly one's human body would continue to behave the same way (including to loved ones), just without a "consciousness", who here would accept the offer?
    (The Stranger refuses, with a smirk, to say what they would do with the "consciousness".)

    Sounds an awful lot like your mysterious stranger is offering you "something for nothing" and that's almost always some kind of swindle. Almost because there might be some occasion where it's a legit offer even if I've never heard of one ... absence of proof not being proof of absence IYKWIM.

    Or, to quote WC Fields ... "You can't cheat an honest man." Every swindle ultimately relies on the dishonesty of the person being swindled.

    1620:

    Damn useless proofreading Imagine Wales could veto any legislation in the UK, or Texas could amend bills before they went to the senate in the US.

    Either leave that out, or include "That's how the UN works, and that's as close as we have to One World Government".

    1621:

    Grant @ 1610: When I lived on the Welsh Border we used to get the Mormons turning up every year on a Sunday hawking their Watch Towers in an attempt to be one of the 100k in the top rung of heaven. I was polite (sorry, its my default state - a bad upbringing perhaps), said no and asked them to put me in their list of "Do not bother" houses.

    The Watchtower is Jehovah's Witnesses, not Mormons. Even I know that. 8^)

    1622:

    EC @ 1595 Has "String Theory" been seen recently? /snark.

    Grant Wonderful! "Small Gods" - And make sure that the Pupils are specifically told that this applies to islam AS WELL ... ( It's very clearly a Pterry piss-take on evangelical & OSD-catholic xtianity, but ... )

    Moz WE have a monumentally incompetent, quasi-fascist-in-the making misgovernment who fucked up the first go at C-19 in monumental fashion. However, someone recognised the actual problem & turned it over to the Health Professionals, who did a magnificent job. Now, the same arsehole politicians are getting the credit!

    1623:

    We do everything excepting the oven...

    Roughly 1 in 4 takeouts resulted in a noticeable illness. Not covid, minor colds (antibody testing) We did restrict to cooked food. Previously, it was hard to pick out of the noise from the plague rats and my workplace. But, yah, the claims that takeout doesn't spread stuff seem likely to be mostly based on wishful thinking.

    1624:

    That wastes more of my time than I'm willing to give them. "Doorbell ringers" I just say "No thankyou" and close the door.

    Friend of mine is fascinated by Christian history and theology. Not a believer, but knows the equivalent of 2-3 years of a theology degree (at a guess). Once when she was unemployed the Mormons came around, and she was bored an invited them in to talk. Took their literature and invited them back the next week, with promises of tea and baking. Spent the week studying their literature and Mormonism.

    They came back the next week and she discussed the literature with them, and Mormonism in general. Politely, asking question, listening to their responses and just digging deeper about what they believed. The couldn't answer all her questions so she invited them back the next week.

    They came the next week with some 'missionary elders' who knew more about doctrine. So she unsheathed her claws and proceeded to politely tear their (the elders') logic to shreds, pointing out the internal inconsistencies and asking how they reconciled them, and gently not letting them get away with anything.

    No Mormon missionaries have called since. Apparently her house is on a "do not visit" list because she is a dangerous woman who causes young Mormon missionaries to question their faith…

    1625:

    Roughly 1 in 4 takeouts resulted in a noticeable illness.

    25% of what are presumably very brief contacts resulting in an illness seems an awfully high infection rate…

    I thought colds were respiratory illnesses? So assuming hand-washing (and masks?) there's not much opportunity for viral transmission.

    1626:

    I like to tell them “No thanks, we’re satisfied with our current provider.”

    1627:

    But I am deeply suspicious of the way that antibody levels are used as a proxy for resistance Sorry, I wasn't being clear. The conjectures have been that SARS-CoV-2 mostly spreads from the upper respiratory tract, and the nasal mucosa in particular. If antibodies are found at a high level in the nasal mucosa, then the study result is additional indirect evidence suggesting that the mRNA vaccines, and probably other vaccines, are closer to sterilizing (functionally at least) than not. Agree that antibody levels are imperfect proxies, although probably pretty good for several months past infection or vaccination.

    1628:

    I must live in one of Canada's Mormon-free zones. Haven't seen a single one since I moved here from Montreal 17 years ago. Or maybe they're intimidated by the six foot tall fence and by the six foot tall gate they would have to open, before getting to the house.

    1629:

    Re illnesses attributable to take-away meals: we always pick up our food. Since the pandemic started we have not had colds, flu, or any other such illness. Roughly 1 in 4 takeouts resulted in a noticeable illness could be due to lower hygiene in the restaurants, or in the food delivery system.

    1630:

    Here in the Muslim centre of Sydney I've been slightly saddened that we don't get proselytising Muslims, but not to the point I'm going to ring round to find some. There are religious shops in the high street with free tracts out the front, but that's not the same. Closest has been a bunch coming round asking after an ex-resident and they just went away when i said he'd moved back in with his mummy and daddy (he was one of those "old enough to be an adult, but with none of the necessary skills" boys)

    We could pretty much collect the set here - there's a Buddhist temple round the corner, various brands of Christians (both sorts... Korean and Chinese!), a Hindu temple ~5km away near Lidcombe, Jewish synagogue 5km south in Allawah (I kid you not about the name), Revesby Gurudwara 5km west. I'm sure if they wanted to they could all reach my place on foot to spread the word... but in fact no religion spreading in the five plus years I've lived here.

    1631:

    FWIW Allawah is a Kamegal (local Aboriginal) name, nothing to do with beardy dudes from the far northern wasteland at all (the world ends at Singapore and none of your lies will convince me otherwise).

    https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/allawah

    1632:

    "mostly based on wishful thinking"

    That seems to be the basis of most public policy on a wide range of issues these days.

    1633:

    Space Force Intelligence is now involved in the investigation of suspected directed energy attacks on US personnel. (warning: politico). I am laughing. :-) The 18 US intelligence agencies are not publicly sharing any strong theories. Russian spy unit suspected of directed-energy attacks on U.S. personnel - CIA Director William Burns is now receiving daily briefings on the investigation. (LARA SELIGMAN and ANDREW DESIDERIO, 05/10/2021) However, officials have told lawmakers that they have intensified their investigation in recent weeks to include all 18 federal intelligence agencies, The U.S. Intelligence Community is composed of the following 18 organizations: ... Space Force Intelligencbe [1]

    (Their Bayesian priors appear to be seriously stuck. Russians are not the only actors. And microwaves are not the only way to (directly or indirectly) affect mammalian nervous system function remotely. :-)

    [1] via https://twitter.com/kanesays23/status/1391853162978439170

    1634:

    can choose the Pfizer vaccine over Astra-Zenica if they prefer to have a more traditional shot.

    Asking, not arguing. What make Pfizer more traditional than AZ?

    Pfizer is mRNA with AZ being a Adenovirus viral vector vaccine. mRNA is a new tech for a vaccine. I think the AZ is also fairly new tech.

    Neither is the traditional Inactivated virus which is what I think of as "traditional".

    What am I missing?

    1635:

    There's a great scene in the movie "The Hunt for Red October" where the high level person in the White House is explaining his position. To quote: "Listen, I'm a politician, which means I'm a cheat and a liar, and when I'm not kissing babies I'm stealing their lollipops. But it also means I keep my options open. "

    1636:

    RvdH 😁

    1637:

    Sorry, thought Pfizer was inactivated virus for some reason. My mistake.

    https://www.pfizer.com/news/hot-topics/the_facts_about_pfizer_and_biontech_s_covid_19_vaccine

    1638:

    David Spratt continues to make me sad.

    Climate policy-makers accept as reasonable a 33% — or even a 50% — risk of failure, even when that failure equates with planetary-level systems disruption. An example of this are the risks of one-in-two or one-in-three chance of failure used in so-called "carbon budgets"

    I recently submitted on a government inquiry from Aotearoa where the key question was "is a 33% chance of catastrophic failure too low, too high, or just right?". The whole online survey/submission process was very much geared towards "this is what we're going to do, isn't it great". Seemed to be very much like the IPCC, designed to produce a politically palatable suicide note for the species.

    http://www.climatecodered.org/2021/05/what-roles-for-markets-and-for-state.html

    1639: 1610 - AIUI (UK law, including Scotland) you were serving them legal papers; That is the one circumstance in which you can not be trespassing, and what they did was legally intimidation of an officer of the court. 1612 - Well Moz, shortening what I typed up thread, most of the people I know, at worst, got an "intramuscular injection sore shoulder" which can be treated with 1g oral paracetamol every 6 hours or so for 12 to 48 hours depending on patient. 1618 - Well, I refer them (God-botherers, politicians and salescritters) to the signs on the door and front room window that read "no cold callers". If they try to persist, I move on to "can you not read?" or, if they try and use "do you know who I am?" respond with "No. Have you lost your memory?" My sister has actually done this to the sitting MSP. 1630 - I meet with numbers of medical professionals 3 times a week for treatment (renal failure, managed by treatment), and we're all pretty much in agreement that the 2020 "flu season" has been very light due to a mixture of mask wearing and "lockdown".

    Most of would also agree that the main difference between covid variants and seasonal flu is not the death toll but how long it's gone on.

    1640:

    The evidence I have seen is that they reduce reinfection probabilities by only about 70% - nothing to be sneezed at (!), and enough to keep current variants under control (if enough people are vaccinated) but a long way from actually stopping infection. Also, it's unclear whether they stop infection or merely mean it is controlled enough that the infected person rarely passes it on. In the UK, there was a period when that result was for the Pfizer vaccine alone, too.

    What I don't know is how commonly antibodies are found in the upper respiratory tract - I would have thought it was common, given how many diseases are picked up that way.

    1641:

    I think that string theorists are suffering the fate of Henry King.

    1642:

    we're all pretty much in agreement that the 2020 "flu season" has been very light due to a mixture of mask wearing and "lockdown".

    In the US it has been almost non-existent.

    Of course the "it's all a hoax" crowd claims that most (some claim all) Covid-19 cases are really the flu.

    Sigh.

    1643:

    The problem with religion isn't the behaviour of individual religionites, which on average is probably only a little worse than that of the non-religious, it's that all religions, necessarily in order to survive, must suppress evidence-led rational thinking and questioning of the established order. With existential threats like global climate change to be dealt with this kind of thinking is very dangerous.

    1644:

    Actually, there's an active movement among churches in more conservative parts of America to deal with climate change.

    Here's the problem: most ministers actually would prefer to be Christians, because that's what got them into the field in the first place. Don't mistake the charismatic mega-egos running the mega-churches for the run-of-the-mill ministers. You wouldn't mistake the average ethical computer engineer for Bill Gates or Satoshi Nakamoto, would you?

    Anyway, there are ministers and Christians who do take climate change seriously and are working to do something about it. I got onto one of their newsletters, and it's kind of interesting. The sad part is that they're leery of the environmental community, treehugging atheist pagans that we are, so it's a bit of a parallel effort, but I'm happy to cheer on their struggles to get their people to decarbonize too.

    Again, the problem is the psychopaths, the sociopaths, and the addicts (including the MAGAts and Qnuts in the latter). They certainly shit in the punchbowl, but the actions of a minority of shitters shouldn't axiomatically make all punch shit. The problem is when outsiders like us make category errors and assume that all people in some category are stupid and/or evil, without realizing that they're struggling against the stupid/evil people in their ranks and really would like some outside help too.

    1645:

    Apropos of nothing, but some might like this: Companies are experimenting with cargo sailing ships again, both refloating antiques from the 1910s, and trying to build carbon neutral ones for the 21st Century. It's an interesting dive into the problems of minimizing carbon emissions for long distance cargo.

    https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/05/how-to-design-a-sailing-ship-for-the-21st-century.html

    1646:

    Actually, there's an active movement among churches in more conservative parts of America to deal with climate change.

    Yes. If you want to meet some folks who don't fit neatly into a category, talk to some mid western farmers running moderate to large farms. They are likely to be very conservative Christians. But believe in climate change. They have to or go broke. As things have change enough in their life times to mean they have to operate their farms differently now. And they are constantly making 5 and 10 year bets.

    1647:

    First of all, I was referring to religious indoctrination, and no, I never got that, sorry you find that hard to believe.

    Political? You know, the only religious or political means of inducing people to follow you I consider to be not the ones who tell you what to do, but those who live by their beliefs. My father, for example, never thrust politics at me. He did, however, talk to my mom with me listening, analyzing and pointing out what was actually being said or implied.

    So, if you want to call "learning critical thinking" "indoctrination", ok, I suppose, if that works for you.

    1648:

    I've had two or three (in ten years in this house) black doorbell ringers. I have never had a Black doorbell ringer be rude, or not accept "sorry, not interested".

    But if they're going to push, I'm going to stick the knife in and twist.

    Once, when my late wife and I were still living in the immobile home, she and our son were out, and a young woman came to the door. Now, understand this is the exurbs, outside of Austin, TX, a former ranch that couldn't support cattle. We're on two acres, and it's more than 30m down two dirt ruts from the road ("our driveway"), which road is at least a 10% grade, if not worse. The woman had heels on, and was dressed up (and it was warm out).

    She started out looking not real happy, between the dirt ruts and the heat, and perhaps uncomfortable about doorbell ringing. I did talk to her for 10 min or so, and she was looking thuoghtful and less pleased with the idea of doorbell ringing.

    1649:

    Heh, heh. Back around '77, in University City in Philly, a couple-three doorbell ringers came to the door of the collective house the woman I was living with and I were in. She answered, and let them talk. Then - did I mention she had gotten into Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism? - started on them. And had them come back after their rounds, and went on to them for another 15-20 min.

    I was upstairs, trying to keep from falling down laughing. She was being serious....

    1650:

    Saw stuff about that from Nat Geographic decades ago.

    1651:

    Many years ago, if I was bored, I answered such people on their own terms. As I knew the bible better than they did, and was better at technical debate, it could be amusing ....

    1652:

    Well, Jevons' The Coal Question; An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines dates to 1865, so the idea of fossil fuel exhaustion is not new. Gustaf Erikson maintained a commercial fleet of cargo windjammers from 1913 to 1942ish, on the bet that fossil fuels would run out and he'd corner the cargo market. He obviously lost that bet, but again, what he was trying to do, and what people are trying to do now, is nothing new.

    What's new in the article is ship designers struggling with how to get the carbon emissions from newly made cargo clippers down below the per kg emissions of conventional cargo ships, while keeping them profitable and livable, while trying to figure out how to scale the wind fleet up to the truly titanic scale that cargo shipping runs at these days, since each clipper is roughly 1/10 the capacity or less of your average container ship. That's the cool (and kind of scary) part of this whole thing.

    1653:

    EC "they don't like it up 'em" do they? As an escaped ex-xtian I think I know all the dodges lies, evasions & shifts they will try, & of course, I'm pretty familiar with the Bumper Fun Book, as well ...

    "Sailing" ships Aren't various people re-trying Flettner Rotors, as a way round said problem?

    1654:

    Robert Prior @ 1625:

    That wastes more of my time than I'm willing to give them. "Doorbell ringers" I just say "No thankyou" and close the door.

    Friend of mine is fascinated by Christian history and theology. Not a believer, but knows the equivalent of 2-3 years of a theology degree (at a guess). Once when she was unemployed the Mormons came around, and she was bored an invited them in to talk. Took their literature and invited them back the next week, with promises of tea and baking. Spent the week studying their literature and Mormonism.

    They came back the next week and she discussed the literature with them, and Mormonism in general. Politely, asking question, listening to their responses and just digging deeper about what they believed. The couldn't answer all her questions so she invited them back the next week.

    They came the next week with some 'missionary elders' who knew more about doctrine. So she unsheathed her claws and proceeded to politely tear their (the

    No Mormon missionaries have called since. Apparently her house is on a "do not visit" list because she is a dangerous woman who causes young Mormon missionaries to question their faith…

    Sounds like fun ... IF discussing religion with zealots is your thing. It's not mine.

    ... but I'll bet they didn't help her weed the garden.

    1655:

    Ah yes, Erikson. I've walked along the Pommern in Åland, and it's really quite impressive

    1656:

    Yep, P'Terry went far too young. Would loved to have seen more books on Vimes, Aching and Susan Sto Helit. For me the happiest weeks of the year were when a new Pratchett turned up, while for my wife it was a close run thing between the new Pratchett and the new Stephen King. These days the Laundry books of OGH and Ben Aaronovich's Rivers of London are greatly anticipated.

    I loved Pratchett's satire of various religions regarding the deep downer Dwarves. People thought them a little harsh and over the top but liked to see the old ways being maintained by someone. He hit the most extreme members of all three Abrahamic religions in one go. If you were less extreme than them then you were not a real dwarf. Now, where have we heard that idea before?

    1657:

    We're apparently having a Fuel Emergency here in North Carolina today. The major pipeline company that delivers fuel to North Carolina got hit with a ransomware attack a few days ago & shut down.

    Apparently gasoline supplies started to get short over the weekend. The Governor issued a proclamation urging North Carolinians to not engage in panic buying. So, of course, there are lines out into the street & around the block for every gas station in North Carolina by now.

    I had to go to the drug store today & noticed a station that was backed up out onto the street. I didn't think anything of it until I passed several other stations in the same condition. Still didn't think that much about it except for a slight reminiscence of the 70s Arab Oil Embargo.

    I usually run the tank down until at least 30 miles past where the "get gas" light comes on & that happened last Saturday. I noticed that Costco's fuel pavilion was really busy, but I kind of put it down to it being a nice Saturday afternoon because the Costco STORE was also busy. I figured most of the people who were shopping Costco decided to fill up as a convenience while they were there.

    But now I think it might have been people decided to get gas & shopping the store was the convenient afterthought. I might have lucked out and filled up just before the panic set in.

    1658:

    "Sailing" ships. Aren't various people re-trying Flettner Rotors, as a way round said problem?

    Yes they are. I'm not going to say that a 21st Century clipper ship is automatically the best model. IIRC, without checking the article again, they noted that the old clippers weren't necessarily the best windjammers, but that they were the end-points of design processes that had been around for centuries, so they were well-tested in a variety of conditions, unlike more modern experimental and theoretical designs.

    I think that's about right. If something like one of those monstrous tractor kites can be mounted on a modern container ship and reduce its fuel usage by 10%, so much the better--but only if the kites normally pay for themselves and reduce the carbon footprints of their ships. Ditto Flettner rotors. But getting people to move less stuff really is important too.

    1659:

    Thank you for that article. Interesting read, if a touch incoherent here and there. I do feel the project the bulk of it's about is tying itself in knots a bit by ideologically avoiding having any kind of backup generator at all and so having to overspecify its generation and storage systems to handle unlikely but extreme situations of the kind which the high energy storage density of chemical fuels makes internal-combustion systems especially suited for. After all, such fuels don't have to be fossil; they can also be synthesised from the atmosphere, especially if you only need enough to keep some emergency tanks topped up which you don't normally need to use.

    Gustav's trick was to pick up bargains in the way of tough but low-maintenance ships, with steel hulls and rigging and simple gear, and operate them using the smallest possible crew and paying them fuck all money, to carry large cargoes without the costs of fuel, maintenance and skilled crew wages of a steamship. It seemed to work. Of course it was the war that fucked it in the end, but it was also an operation "of its time", in that it was possible at all because he was doing it when sailing shipping was in decline so there were those bargains to be had. I'm not sure he was so much trying to anticipate fossil fuels running out as simply finding an existing niche created by their rise in which he could carry on as before.

    The contrast between his small crews and his big ships and cargoes does illustrate well the article's point about scaling. I reckon there is a significant potential in very large sailing ships which the way things turned out nobody ever got round to exploring.

    The article does get a bit lost at the end when it starts to flounder over just how much good you really can achieve by going back to sail and tries to patch its argument up with digressions about how much good you can achieve by a 20dB reduction in all shipping. Not that it's wrong, of course - and one of the lessons I do hope will be learned from the coronavirus episode is what a tremendous majority of stuff people do is bollocks that no-one misses when they're not doing it - but it weakens their case for sailing ships to appear to be propping it up with non-germane arguments.

    1660:

    IIRC Pratchett said he was initially a bit nervous of the idea of writing "Small Gods" because of the risk of it bringing all kinds of frothers on his case. He definitely said that what he actually got was letters from both believers and unbelievers in roughly equal proportions, both congratulating him on how well he'd hit the spot.

    1661:

    JBS: 1622. Thank you. Well spotted. I was getting my religious loons mixed up. On checking, it was a Kingdom Hall (it is still there) and very much Jehovah's Witnesses. Apologies.

    The Mormons used to bother me when I lived in north London and they braved the 279 bus route to the wilds wastelands of Hertfordshire just off the M25. Looking back it was obvious how out of their depth they were in north London. Identikit idiots. Lucky they didn't draw the Tottenham or Edmonton card.

    1662:

    This is what makes The Book of Mormon so funny. If you haven't seen that musical, you really should.

    1663:

    Re: 'AIUI this is the first example of a type of vaccine which has never been deployed before. One would therefore expect that it would have been tested with unusual thoroughness to catch the unknown effects pertaining to any novel technique.'

    The below Review Article on the 'new mRNA' vaccines was published January 2018. Readership, citation stats: 1.68 Accesses, 569 Citations - which to me suggests that lots and lots and lots of people - most likely scientists - have read it. And based on the number of citations a goodly number have thought about in published form and/or done their own original lab research related to it.

    https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243

    'mRNA vaccines — a new era in vaccinology

    Key Points

    Recent improvements in mRNA vaccines act to increase protein translation, modulate innate and adaptive immunogenicity and improve delivery.

    mRNA vaccines have elicited potent immunity against infectious disease targets in animal models of influenza virus, Zika virus, rabies virus and others, especially in recent years, using lipid-encapsulated or naked forms of sequence-optimized mRNA.

    Diverse approaches to mRNA cancer vaccines, including dendritic cell vaccines and various types of directly injectable mRNA, have been employed in numerous cancer clinical trials, with some promising results showing antigen-specific T cell responses and prolonged disease-free survival in some cases.

    Therapeutic considerations and challenges include scaling up good manufacturing practice (GMP) production, establishing regulations, further documenting safety and increasing efficacy.

    Important future directions of research will be to compare and elucidate the immune pathways activated by various mRNA vaccine platforms, to improve current approaches based on these mechanisms and to initiate new clinical trials against additional disease targets.'

    Fast-tracked - yes; a complete unknown - not really. More to be learned - yes, as is true of any/all research and therapeutic including the stuff that slo-mo'd its way through the development pipeline. One other thing: I don't think any other disease in modern times has been researched from so many different angles within such a short time - almost instantaneously - so if the current vaccines aren't as effective as hoped for, at least the vax researchers won't be starting from square 1. What I'm more concerned about is the out of control situation in India though ... too much opportunity of this virus to spawn worse and worse progeny/versions.

    1664:

    Re: 'Readership, citation stats: 1.68 Accesses, 569 Citations -'

    That's 1.68 million Accesses - lots of readers.

    1665:

    That's roughly how I normally buy fuel; run the tank well down, then fill it to the "click" where the pump safety switches the flow off. If I'm not buying at least 3/4 of a tank there is something atypical going on (but probably just wanting fuel for a long trip).

    1666:

    I try to follow the advice given by James MacDonald, formerly of Making Light to refill whenever the tank gets to half full. That way, if there is an outage, or other issue, I will have half a tank available before I run out.

    Also, unexpected price hikes are much more likely than unexpected price drops.

    JHomes

    1667:

    I just have an EV, so it's not an issue. The price doesn't vary. Outages are always hours rather than months. Topping it up is no effort, so I can fill it every day, or even several times a day, so it's always 70% full.

    1668:

    My bicycle works much the same, but the engine gets hangry if it's not topped up several times a day.

    1669:

    I refill at half, on the advice of my mechanic. Something about condensation in the tank being more likely the less fuel there is in there.

    1670:

    Yes. I start looking to fill up once I get down to 1/2. Sometimes that means down to 30 miles or less to go but mostly about 100 miles left. I almost always get my gas at the same place near where I live so it isn't that big of a deal and I don't go out of my way wasting gas in that manner.

    1671:

    paws4thot @ 1666: That's roughly how I normally buy fuel; run the tank well down, then fill it to the "click" where the pump safety switches the flow off. If I'm not buying at least 3/4 of a tank there is something atypical going on (but probably just wanting fuel for a long trip).

    It grew out of the habits I developed when I was covering the state for the burglar alarm company. Drive it 'til it's empty & then fill up is the least time consuming method for purchasing gas I could come up with. When I do fill up, I round it to the next whole dollar when the auto-shutoff trips. OCD must have its due.

    I did a spread-sheet one time to find the most economical method ... worked out that when gas prices are going up, "drive it 'til it's empty & then fill up" is the most economical. But when gas prices are falling it costs less over the long run if you top it off every day.

    Another thing I worked out what how far I could go out of my way to reach a station where the price-per-gallon was one penny less. Turned out that for the vehicle I was driving at the time (Ford Focus Wagon) it was just about a penny per mile. So to get a savings of $0.10 per gallon it was worth going an extra 10 miles. And, as it worked out I rarely had to go those extra miles to find the cheaper gas.

    It's usually two miles out of my way to fill up at Costco, but the gas is always about $0.10/gallon cheaper. I haven't re-figured it for the Jeep because for other reasons I'm driving so much less since I got it.

    I think it's still worth the extra two miles to go by Costco, but I can no longer quantify how much I'm really saving now.

    1672:

    Australians are special...

    Surprisingly, more respondents in our survey said they favoured the government making the vaccine a requirement (73%) than said they would definitely take it themselves (66%).

    https://theconversation.com/would-australians-support-mandates-for-the-covid-19-vaccine-our-research-suggests-most-would-159919

    1673:

    Robert Prior @ 1670: I refill at half, on the advice of my mechanic. Something about condensation in the tank being more likely the less fuel there is in there.

    Couple of other factors ... I developed my habit/method driving a company truck with a BIG gas tank. I had no credit cards at the time, so I had to pay cash out of pocket and submit a weekly expense claim (with receipts) for reimbursement. Depending on how far I had to travel for the company in any given week, I was filling up at least three times a week and sometimes five times at around $30.00 a pop (3/4 ton long-bed Chevy Van, 33 gallon tank, ~$1.15/gallon gas, averaging 18-20 mpg due to little or no city driving).

    OTOH, I knew my territory well, knew all the back roads that could save me miles AND TIME (& gallons) and knew which stations along my route would consistently have lower prices per gallon.

    1674:

    Surprisingly, more respondents in our survey said they favoured the government making the vaccine a requirement (73%) than said they would definitely take it themselves (66%).

    Well, if everyone else takes it they don't need it to be protected… :-)

    Reminds me of talking to a colleague once, who put her daughters in an all-girls school because that's where girls do best, and her sons in a mixed school because that's where boys do best — and who thought that that all parents should do the same as she did.

    (And I couldn't make her see that at a significant number of parents had to put their daughters in a mixed school in order for it to be mixed. Maybe she thought all the girls at her sons' school were child actors hired by the administration to help the boys…)

    1675:

    Not when we need 80%+ of the eligible population to get vaccinated, it doesn't. The actual number varies depending on who you expect to be eligible. If we assume everyone 18+ is eligible, that means every single one who doesn't have a definite medical need to not get vaccinated absolutely has to get it, if we're to get 80% of the population vaccinated.

    As far as schools, I recall some mixed schools having girl-only classes for STEM at least at some levels. Which beats the previous practice where some older girls at all-girl schools had to travel to nearby mixed/all-boy schools for senior science classes because their school just did not offer those subjects. Hopefully in the 30 years since I was at school that has changed.

    1676:

    I like to tell them “No thanks, we’re satisfied with our current provider.”

    This was almost word for word an observation of Father Andrew Greeley, who pointed out that finding converts to a religion was operationally no different from recruiting for any other group. People who were satisfied with their current religion offered no reasonable chance of conversion - and this works both ways, so Catholic priests should watch over their congregations for bluntly practical reasons too.

    I'm sure many of his readers skimmed over this and went on doing whatever they'd been doing before.

    1677:

    And for your amusement, one wildly off-topic thing that I ran into and thought was interesting: There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically). I'd never thought to wonder about it, but the mutations to go from herb to bush to tree are apparently very easy - as are the mutations to go the other way. This phylogenetic tree of trees is full of trees, woody vines, shrubs, and soft plants, well mixed together with no common proto-tree ancestor giving rise to the rest. I had not thought to wonder about that before. Nifty!

    1678:

    There's also no such thing as a fish, and the elves ran with that after it was a popular quote from QI: https://www.nosuchthingasafish.com/

    I was amused today at a New Scientist article talking about a fossil proto-animal with two differentiated cell types. Quite how they can tell that that wasn't the common ancestor of other multi-cellular species I am not sure.

    1679:

    SS Classic example are the "Peas" Smallest I know of is a small annual Yellow Vetchling Right up to big trees like Laburnum & ... ( Brain gone ) .. bugger .. these .. All peas

    1680: 1672 - Costco is $0.10 a gallon cheaper

    Yes, but is it really? A good friend has done similar figures over here for $brandname vs "a major supermarket". The supermarket was £0.10 a gallon cheaper, but he burned 10% less of $brandname over 2 years (one running on each supplier, mileage and quantity recorded in a log book), so concluded that $brand_name was cheaper because less money moved from his bank account to the supplier over a period.

    1675 - {head desk} 1678 - Neither had I, but a microbiologist just confirmed the statement.
    1681:

    Costco in the US is a strange place. They break a lot of retail norms. They are a nationwide warehouse store. And they don't sell junk. At all. Fantastic return policies. They only carry about 1/3 as many items as the other national warehouse stores. Downside/upside is they don't carry cheap stuff. Price or quality.

    They just raised their minimum wage to $16/hr. And start many with any brains or schooling higher than that. (My daughter was offered $17/hr 8 years or so ago.) Their average wage is $25/hr.

    And if you buy it with their co-branded credit card you get an additional 4% discount. Which for a while now comes out to an additional $.10/gal. (convert to liters/£ or € if you wish.)

    Anyway, their gas isn't crap. I've gotten 50mpg on a highway run were I did about 300 miles without stopping on an empty stretch of I95. I normally get 45mpg on limited access roads.

    Now if you go across the street so you can buy smokes and gas and a gallon of milk with your beef jerky all night, yes that gas at "Buba Quick Stop" is likely crap.

    1682:

    Not when we need 80%+ of the eligible population to get vaccinated, it doesn't.

    Last night there was a news segment on NPR about how Oz was doing so much better at keeping people alive and out of hospitals with Covid-19. Compared to most countries of any size.

    I guess it being easy to close the borders, (compared to other countries), helps. But I also read where they are looking to keep the borders closed till into 2022.

    1683:

    This phylogenetic tree of trees is full of trees, woody vines, shrubs, and soft plants, well mixed together with no common proto-tree ancestor giving rise to the rest.

    That might explain why when looking at herbicides there is a category for "woody" things. But not trees, vines, etc...

    1684:

    "No such thing as a tree."

    Oh, yes. Married as I am to a paleobotanist, I had better be well aware that the ability to form wood is very ancient indeed.

    JHomes.

    1685:

    Costco in the UK is also a bit weird. It works on Cash & Carry Warehouse lines, so you need to get a membership card, and that has odd requirements: your company may have an affiliation (a friend could get a card because he works for Johnson Matthey), or you may be in (or retired from) the NHS, Armed Forces, Education or some others, or you may own a company (so hoteliers and the like). Or you may be the partner of an eligible person.

    (My guess is that this is to discourage large numbers of people doing 'drop in' shops, and encourage the big spending visits. I spend about half what I spend at Tesco, but I'm doing that in a once-a-month visit. I have a card because my wife is retired from Cambridge University.)

    Their fuel appears to be the cheapest around, but I last bought petrol sometime early last year and wasn't yet a member at that point so can't truly testify on that.

    We use the Stevenage branch, which is OK for us but would be less so for EC and Vulch

    1686:

    My nearest Costco branch is about 14 miles away (just checked).

    1687:

    Costco and companies

    That used to be true in the US but has gone away. I think it had to do with multiple state laws about fair trade and strange tax situations being voided over the years via legislation and SCOTUS decisions.

    Catalog stores have vanished.

    But yes Costco here is a huge box with stuff piled high. But neatly.

    Here they tend to have a nice wine selection. Cheap to not so much at all. And great fresh food. Their fruit always lasts longer that supermarkets. I suspect due to them dropping a stop in the farm to consumer pipeline.

    They don't care if you drop in for one thing. Rarely does anyone leave that way. :)

    And I do like my Citibank credit card co-branded that gives me 4% off my gas bought anywhere.

    I suspect a lot of country to country variation has to do with long standing customs and a few laws.

    As to distance I live in a almost urban area. Costco, 3 groceries, 2 auto parts store, 4 pharmacies (one in walking distance) and a lot of other things big and small are all clustered less than 2 miles from here. And a hospital is only 5 minutes away.

    Harking back to comment H and I have made, a lot of the old farts around here despise it. The want "city" to be way away and everyone drive to it. (I'm 67 so I qualify as an old fart but I don't get asked to join the club very often as I don't say the correct phrases.)

    1688:

    Addendum - to self @ 1680 Robinia psuedoacacia "False Acacia"

    Bellinghman Wasn't aware "Costco" existed here, I thought it was US-only - oops. And I'm probably "not eligible" anyway.

    1689:

    Indeed, 25 miles each way plus a mile or two as I searched the nearest from "Cambridge" rather than my postcode. 5l of petrol for the trip, Foxton level crossing en-route...

    1690:

    Yes, but you don't belong to the True Cladist sect :-) The distinction between a tree and a shrub or woody climber is extremely murky, though ....

    To Greg: many tropical legumes are trees, including the huge tribe of acacias, jacaranda and more.

    1691:

    Yes. I think that people who will expend 10 quid on running costs and often the best part of an hour to save 5 quid are insane.

    The main argument about topping up often is if you are in a situation where you don't know where the next option will be, or whether it will be available! The same applies to electric cars.

    1692:

    "The same applies to electric cars."

    EVs are slightly different. It's much much easier to top them up as there's a "pump" in your house. You don't have to make a special trip or stop on the way home when you just want to get home.

    Also the batteries last much longer if you keep them away from fully charged or discharged. So there's an incentive to fill them to 70% or so every day, even if you only use 5-10% per day.

    1693:

    That is NOT a situation where you don't know where the next option will be, or whether it will be available!

    1694:

    Well, that depends. You do need to install a high amp charger at your house if you want to have your car charged in a reasonable time. With line amperage, it would take most of a week to fill a Bolt's 65 kWh battery pack. If you can't afford the charger, you do in fact need to stop periodically and blow a couple of hours at a public station getting your car recharged.

    More interestingly, I'm learning that there are all sorts of new industrial opportunities coming along with decarbonization. For instance, a few days ago, I burned out the wifi hub on my shmancy new electric air handler. The system had shown a previous intermittent electrical fault that tripped the circuit breaker, but apparently it was the little 1.5 V DC hub in the process of getting fried. The technician servicing it surmised that one problem was that I've also got this big-ass EV charger and a large solar array in other parts of the system. While they're supposed to switch on smoothly and all that, it wouldn't take too many little oopsy voltage spikes to start frying equipment. Which is why I'm supposed to get a quote for surge protection on the air handler and its electronics any day now.

    Thing is, all-electric homes are going to be kludges: Tesla batteries, solar panels from another vendor, Cooper Creek car chargers, electric cars, and a plethora of electronics, even if you don't have the despised Internet of Things running. No one's designing them to work together. Heck, I just had to swap out my door bell because the transformer on it couldn't handle the smart doorbell at the other end of the circuit.*

    There's a likely going to be good business in here for the guys who want to deal with things like surge protection and making all these devices not kill each other on a regular basis. If you've got those kind of electrician/electrial engineer chops, perhaps it's worth starting to think about what kinds of turnkey solutions to 100% electrification you can design and sell to suckers customers like me. It's reminiscent of the early days of home computing, when three quarters of the fun was getting the components to work together on a regular basis.

    *While I despise the IoT, it turns out that the easiest place to hang a front porch camera is where the doorbell is, so I bit the bullet. Then I bit the bullet again, replacing the other half of the doorbell system.

    1695:

    Until entire home systems integration gets here you might check out these folks.

    https://sense.com/

    I'm thinking of getting one soon to monitor some of my older appliances.

    As to IoT. I went with Ring a few years back for motion lights and cameras as my house was empty for 3 to 10 days at a time as we traveled. (Covid-19 stopped that.) But then Ring was bought by Amazon. Now I get to turn off "features" as they introduce them. Sharing my WiFi with my neighbors' Ring devices was not a big improvement in my mind.

    1696:

    Moz @ 1676: Not when we need 80%+ of the eligible population to get vaccinated, it doesn't. The actual number varies depending on who you expect to be eligible. If we assume everyone 18+ is eligible, that means every single one who doesn't have a definite medical need to not get vaccinated absolutely has to get it, if we're to get 80% of the population vaccinated.

    As far as schools, I recall some mixed schools having girl-only classes for STEM at least at some levels. Which beats the previous practice where some older girls at all-girl schools had to travel to nearby mixed/all-boy schools for senior science classes because their school just did not offer those subjects. Hopefully in the 30 years since I was at school that has changed.

    FWIW, this week I heard on the news that the U.S. FDA has approved 12-16 year olds to be vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine.

    1697:

    H You ( We? ) are all going to need fairly big induction loops in many circuits to smooth out spikes, then? [ As "surge protectors" ] So that power transitions come on & die off/out slowly?

    Or even a simple plug-in device that looks like a double-ended plug/socket, with an induction loop in its innards - would that do the trick?

    1698:

    paws4thot @ 1681:

    #1672 - Costco is $0.10 a gallon cheaper

    Yes, but is it really? A good friend has done similar figures over here for $brandname vs "a major supermarket". The supermarket was £0.10 a gallon cheaper, but he burned 10% less of $brandname over 2 years (one running on each supplier, mileage and quantity recorded in a log book), so concluded that $brand_name was cheaper because less money moved from his bank account to the supplier over a period.

    I've been tracking this for 40 years. I've got a pretty good handle on it by now. I started keeping a log in 1981 when I was having to pay out of pocket & submit for reimbursement when fueling the company truck. I've been keeping the spreadsheets for gas cost/gallon, mpg, cost/mile etc since ~ 1995. There is no measurable difference between the mpg I get from Costco gasoline & $brand gasoline.

    The gas from Costco & from $brand is the same gas. It comes from the same distributors & gets delivered in the same trucks. In fact, the EXACT same truck that delivers to Costco then goes across the street & delivers to the $brand station.

    I've also been using this website (and phone app) called GasBuddy. It aggregates user reports of what prices they're finding at the stations & plots them on a map with their price per gallon. The reports are time stamped Click on a station's price bubble & it tells you how recently that price was reported.

    Currently Costco was $2.59/gallon 15 minutes ago while the $brand station across the street was $2.75/gallon 5 hours ago (and as noted it's the same gas. The next two nearest stations to Costco are $2.85/gallon and $2.88/gallon - both 22 hrs ago. The station nearest my house is $2.99/gallon but that price is 24 hours old.

    Most "regular" gas sold in the U.S. is E10 - 10% ethanol, but some places also have E15 and you might want to avoid that. In my experience there is no discernible price difference, but the extra alcohol could increase wear & tear. Not a problem if you only occasionally have to resort to it, but not so good for a steady diet.

    Also, I try to always have a source for ethanol free gasoline for my lawnmower & other yard tools. Ethanol gasoline is not good for small engines, especially two stroke engines like in weed eaters & chain saws. The alcohol deteriorates the rubber & plastic parts like fuel lines.

    1699:

    Oh, this is an old argument. The next stage is for someone to say that the truck isn't just one big tank, it's partitioned into compartments, so it can deliver good gas on one side of the street and crappy gas on the other without anyone being aware of it, or even blend them on the fly to produce any grade of mediocre gas that it wants. The stage after that is someone else saying that maybe it could do that if it wanted but it doesn't really, or maybe it does have separate compartments but only for surge control and they've all got the same stuff in them, or etc. And then it degenerates.

    There's also usually a series of contributions from people who have done the same thing as you but they all get contradictory results, which leads to a lot of blithering about how the situation must be different in different parts of the country to explain the differing results. And someone else goes on about how the various petrol companies buy each others' petrol to fill their own tankers with instead of all maintaining their own independent depots in every area, so all the petrol in a given area is actually the same no matter what name there may be on the pump; and the boundaries of these areas are such that the people who think they're getting contradictory results because their local situations are different are actually not in different situations at all.

    It's a good practical demonstration of some of the difficulties in gathering reliable and meaningful data, but nobody ever understands that that's all it is.

    1700:

    The gas from Costco & from $brand is the same gas. It comes from the same distributors & gets delivered in the same trucks. In fact, the EXACT same truck that delivers to Costco then goes across the street & delivers to the $brand station.

    My father said that as a teenager, he had a summer job at the Casper refinery in Wyoming. This would have been around 1940, and one of his tasks was pouring a small amount of dye in railroad tank cars full of gasoline as they passed by on their way out of the facility. The dye varied depending on what brand of gas it was, but it only took about a cupful for the whole car. So in this case, same gas, just different colors.

    1701:

    Bellinghman @ 1686: Costco in the UK is also a bit weird. It works on Cash & Carry Warehouse lines, so you need to get a membership card, and that has odd requirements: your company may have an affiliation (a friend could get a card because he works for Johnson Matthey), or you may be in (or retired from) the NHS, Armed Forces, Education or some others, or you may own a company (so hoteliers and the like). Or you may be the partner of an eligible person.

    (My guess is that this is to discourage large numbers of people doing 'drop in' shops, and encourage the big spending visits. I spend about half what I spend at Tesco, but I'm doing that in a once-a-month visit. I have a card because my wife is retired from Cambridge University.)

    Their fuel appears to be the cheapest around, but I last bought petrol sometime early last year and wasn't yet a member at that point so can't truly testify on that.

    We use the Stevenage branch, which is OK for us but would be less so for EC and Vulch

    Costco in the U.S. is also a "membership" warehouse, but by U.S. law there are no restrictions on who can become a member. The other big membership warehouse is "Sam's Club" which is affiliated with Walmart. FWIW, there's a Sam's Club here in Raleigh that has a fuel station & I think their gas prices are comparable to Costco. But it's across town and would be much more out of my way to patronize.

    My experience with Costco is the savings on gas alone have always exceeded the annual membership fee. When you add in the savings from using the Costco affiliated credit card and that Costco carries some food items I like & haven't found anywhere else the benefits far outweigh the costs.

    Plus, Costco is 2 miles from my house and half of the places I need to go in Raleigh, "there ain't no way to get there from here that doesn't go past Costco."

    For the other half, it rarely adds more than a mile to the distance traveled. It's 30 miles between my house and the VA hospital in Durham, 31 miles if I go by Costco to get gas on the way.

    1702: 1699 - This again! You may possibly describe the situation in the Yousay, but there would be several factual errors in the UK. Aside from measurements tracking mpg, $supermarket_fuel is also at least sometimes price matched by brand name over here, when there are multiple retailers within a couple of miles of each other. 1700 & #1701 - Different additive blends are/can be added to a tanker as it is filled in the refinery. What I don't understand is why Casper Refinery bothered with Ongaku's father.
    1703:

    Remember it's AC. So varistors, transzorbs, GDTs, and things like that. You already can get adaptors and socket bars and so on with such devices built in; they've been around for ages. Mostly they seem to be sold to people who know only that something funny's going on which they don't understand, and have picked up the idea somewhere that funny things which you don't understand are usually down to dodgy power, so they buy one of these things and if there's some subjective improvement then great and if there isn't well the bloke on twitter must have been wrong about it. So although I've never taken one apart to check, I suspect that the ones you can get in Homebase etc. are more or less useless; to be worthwhile you would not only have to get datacentre-grade ones, but also to properly identify the problem you've actually got as actually being one which such a device is able to deal with.

    I wouldn't like to even begin to guess what Heteromeles's problem is without seeing not just what boxes he's got but also what is inside them. It might be that he isn't actually getting spikes per se at all but just some failure of the waveform to be a regular sinusoid which confuses PSUs without ever exceeding their rated input voltage... or it might be that the thing that keeps failing gets used as a cat seat when nobody's looking, and overheats.

    I must admit there is a certain attraction to the idea of an old-fashioned solution, like feeding all generated output through a ruddy great synchronous motor/generator with a ruddy great flywheel, in its own shed in a cast-iron open frame painted dark green with shiny brass bits.

    1704:

    Pigeon @ 1700: Oh, this is an old argument. The next stage is for someone to say that the truck isn't just one big tank, it's partitioned into compartments, so it can deliver good gas on one side of the street and crappy gas on the other without anyone being aware of it, or even blend them on the fly to produce any grade of mediocre gas that it wants. The stage after that is someone else saying that maybe it could do that if it wanted but it doesn't really, or maybe it does have separate compartments but only for surge control and they've all got the same stuff in them, or etc. And then it degenerates.

    There's also usually a series of contributions from people who have done the same thing as you but they all get contradictory results, which leads to a lot of blithering about how the situation must be different in different parts of the country to explain the differing results. And someone else goes on about how the various petrol companies buy each others' petrol to fill their own tankers with instead of all maintaining their own independent depots in every area, so all the petrol in a given area is actually the same no matter what name there may be on the pump; and the boundaries of these areas are such that the people who think they're getting contradictory results because their local situations are different are actually not in different situations at all.

    It's a good practical demonstration of some of the difficulties in gathering reliable and meaningful data, but nobody ever understands that that's all it is.

    Just observing what the delivery driver is doing, it's only one big tank, although the same truck is used to deliver different grades of gasoline, just not on the same trip. There may be distributors who have trucks with partitioned tanks, but it seems more cost effective to have all of the load be the same gas.

    And here in North Carolina, gasoline is delivered by pipeline & the various distributors get their gas out of the same big tank. Punch this into Google Maps (36.07363611221157, -79.938558415605) then use street-view to look to the south. They got hit with a ransomware attack & shut down for a couple of days.

    That's where this whole discussion of gas prices started. I noted that I had just, by chance, filled my Jeep with gas before the "emergency" was declared.

    https://www.npr.org/2021/05/12/996323371/colonial-pipeline-restarts-theres-no-need-to-panic-buy-gas-and-never-was

    1705:

    Apparently the price the gas station is charged is based on what the wholesaler thinks they can sell for, less a few cents. So the gas station basically makes very little from gas itself.

    A few years ago I read an article in the New York Times (I think) written by a chap who owned several gas stations in upstate New York. He was charged different amounts for each station by the wholesaler, based on delivery schedules and other obfuscation. One day he followed the tanker from the first delivery to discover that the same tanker was delivering to his other stations as well, but for different wholesale prices.

    He was able to negotiate a better price — if memory serves the lowest rate for all his stations.

    No idea what happened to him long-term. I can't remember his name and can't locate the article now.

    1706:

    I wouldn't like to even begin to guess what Heteromeles's problem is without seeing not just what boxes he's got but also what is inside them. It might be that he isn't actually getting spikes per se at all but just some failure of the waveform to be a regular sinusoid which confuses PSUs without ever exceeding their rated input voltage... or it might be that the thing that keeps failing gets used as a cat seat when nobody's looking, and overheats.

    Aww, you want the whole story? Sure thing.

    I went and got an electric air handler (AC/Heater) that's a single unit in the attic (no cats up there). It's got a little wifi hub, and the control panel is a few meters down in the hall. One day the panel went dark. When restarted, it showed it had lost connection with its hub. A week later, the repair dude came back, couldn't find anything wrong with it, and it restarted fine. We talked about it, and he told me he'd probably be back when it went out again.

    Two days ago I actually saw the panel go out. I immediately went up in the attic to restart the hub. The wifi hub was hot to the touch, so I checked it with a IR thermometer and it was running just under 120oF, while none of the other equipment (or the attic itself) were above 95oF. So I cut the circuit breakers at the main panel for two hours. Went back up, checked the temperature. Everything was at air temperature. Turned the circuit breakers back on, hub wouldn't restart. Waited 15 minutes, checked the hub temperature, and it was running at 120oF, so I turned off the circuit breakers to the handling unit.

    And it turned out that yes, the hub is fried, although it's not short circuiting badly enough to start a fire. Yet (power's to it is multiply off while I wait for a replacement). Every other piece of equipment in the system is working fine, per the tech. We're puzzling over why the wifi hub blew while everything else was fine, and started talking about spikes, transients and other stuff. Since the power's coming off the same circuit breaker box that has a 50 amp car charger and 18 solar panels through it, probably putting a surge protector on is cheaper than replacing the wifi every year or two, especially if it shorts out in a place that's not easy to get to.

    The repair company has, for the moment, talked me out of getting an analog control system, because this shmancy air handler has features that do better under digital. Analog is still my preferred alternative, but since it's under warranty, I'll let them fiddle for a bit.

    1707:

    Oz was doing so much better at keeping people alive and out of hospitals with Covid-19.

    Dare I say it, but I think this was because our media and state politicians persuaded people to take at least minimal precautions. Which meant that the inevitable outbreaks were contained reasonably well, and we managed to keep them localised to the quarantine facilities and old peoples homes (the latter run by... the federal government).

    The dithering morons in federal parliament were unable to stop the states locking down and requiring masks etc. So they were limited to press conferences alternately blaming the states for outbreaks and whining that any measures the states took were hurting the economy.

    I guess it being easy to close the borders

    Yes, there's a lot of violently xenophobic folk here so we clamped down on non-whites coming into the country pretty quickly. By the time the pandemic took hold properly in the UK and USA it was obvious to even the most devout racists that letting plague-bearers into the country was the source of most of the problems.

    We blocked all flights from India as soon as their infection rate started rising towards the rate in the US... but we still haven't blocked flights from the US.

    1708:

    ... or it might be that the thing that keeps failing gets used as a cat seat when nobody's looking, and overheats.

    Nonstandard failure modes involving cats reminds me of a story from the BBS days. (Remember BBSs?) The users kept reporting that they'd call in, get a connection, then be suddenly disconnected; this intermittant problem went on for months before someone on site discovered the source.

    The phone line did not audibly ring when a call arrived but during the handshake process the modem's speaker echoed the signal, emitting the usual strange modem noises until both computers settled down to talk to each other. Their cat took offense at this box that suddenly started screaming at it; it naturally counterattacked, batting wildly at the lights and buttons on the screaming box. And then the noise stopped, so obviously it had won the fight, right?

    Once they set the modem to silent operation the disconnection problem went away.

    1709:

    "Well, that depends. You do need to install a high amp charger at your house if you want to have your car charged in a reasonable time. With line amperage, it would take most of a week to fill a Bolt's 65 kWh battery pack. If you can't afford the charger, you do in fact need to stop periodically and blow a couple of hours at a public station getting your car recharged."

    It does depend....

    A standard UK 3 pin plug delivers 3 kW forever (this is a UK based blog don't forget). The average UK car drove 7712 miles a year before covid. 21 miles (34 km) a day.

    https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/jan/14/average-uk-car-mileage-falls-again-on-back-of-higher-petrol-prices

    So if we assume that all those miles are spent towing a caravan up a hill in the rain at 12C, (surely the worst case)

    https://youtu.be/LaZhXXHRmGg

    Then that's 34 km x 500 Wh which is 17 kWh per day. Divide by 3 kW, that's 5 hours and 40 minutes spent plugged into the wall.

    That sounds pretty reasonable. Because the whole premise was just topping up what you use each day, rather than filling it from dead empty to full. If you never charged it more than 70% and a day's driving a caravan around uses 17% of a charge (17 kWh out of a 100 kWh pack) then you could do 3 times your normal drive and still have 20% left in the pack.

    Of course if your daily drive isn't pulling a caravan up hill both ways on a highway, and is instead, driving around at the 20 mph British in town speed limit, then you'd probably only need to plug in for about an hour a day and you could, if needed, drive about 10-15 times the average daily distance on a 70% charge (about 10-15 hours driving in town) and still have 20% left when you get home. Plug it in for 10 hours while you sleep and you're back up to 50%. That lets you do another 10-15 hours driving around town.

    If you suddenly decide to go to London tomorrow, just reset the charge limit to 100% and when you wake up in the morning you'll have 410 miles range in the car which is enough to do the Edinburgh - London run (though I'd take a quick charge and a wee at one of the hundreds of chargers along the 7 hour drive).

    1710:

    Sorry, forgot to use the reply button. Comment above is for Heteromeles.

    1711:

    Your calculation is close to right, at least for my car. It takes about 7 km per kWh (varies, but roughly). Thing is, I'm running around 1.5 kW. In any case, it still takes about 8 hours with my 50 amp plug to totally recharge the Bolt. With a 13 amp standard plug, it takes about four times longer.

    Since I work with miles, around 4 miles/kWh seems to be ballpark for most eVs, with a range of 2-6 or so. I'd be surprised if we got to 10 mi/kWh for something that had four wheels and was street legal.

    The annoying thing is that the local planners haven't yet realized that this is the critical number they need to deal with climate change, because combined with models of aggregate vehicle miles traveled (VMT, remember that acronym) per development project, it tells them how much energy that project either needs to supply on its own, or needs to get from somewhere else. Oddly enough (or not so oddly, if you know planners), they can't get their individual or collective heads around this. If I was a more suspicious sort, it might make me wonder who's being paid what to tell their fellow bureaucrats what not to think.

    1712:

    "planners" seem to be the same the world over. Not much planning....

    Which reminds me, speaking of lack of planning. The Australian federal budget just came out. I haven't read it, (it's several hundred pages of pretty dry reading) but those who have are saying 51 billion in direct subsidies for fossil fuel (about 10% of federal tax revenue) which doesn't include the existing 40 billion of indirect subsidies (free security services for oil companies, free road and rail upgrades, and the like). Nothing for renewables at all.

    1713:

    A standard UK 3 pin plug delivers 3 kW forever (this is a UK based blog don't forget).

    Yes. In the US the typical wall plug will deliver 1.8kW or 2.4kW. Some of us might have 3.6kW or can put it in ourselves but that is not typical for 99% of residential housing.

    1714:

    Oddly enough (or not so oddly, if you know planners), they can't get their individual or collective heads around this.

    Now California has different rules than other states but where I've lived public utilities have rules about how they are required to spend money. And I suspect there's a XXX of power per housing unit. If they spend more than what is required to deliver that they can't recover the costs through the rate structure system.

    And around here (North Carolina) even when the power utilities want to spend extra on things (good or bad) there is always a huge fight by some groups against rate recovery as it will hurt the poor to raise rates.

    So the way things are structured you tend to have "good" fighting "good" for such things. As changing the system requires all kinds of state law and regulation changing.

    1715:

    Don't forget the indemnity/insurance the fossil companies get for their pollution. Some other industries don't get that benefit, and sooner or later that little problem is going to hit one side or the other hard.

    I mean, if I was in and industry, that, say, was not allowed to vomit toxic chemicals into the air you can bet that I would be quite pissed when I realised that my competitors were allowed to do that.

    1716:

    SS There was also the recurring problem of Cats sitting/sleeping on/in peoples' Fax machines - it was "always on" & slightly warmer ... wonderful place to nest.

    There is a good reason for standard UK domestic circuits being able to deliver 3kW .... Electric Kettles, so one can brew up in a reasonable time-frame.

    gadive the subsidy for fossil is, of course, the EXACT OPPOSIT of what the rest of the planet is doing. It's obviously not sustainable, but how long before it falls over? { Exactly the same question as Brexit, here, of course - a denial of reality. }

    1717:

    Many moons ago, when home computers were just beginning ... You could buy a graph plotter that connected to the computer, which would work on a pinned-down sheet of paper. Pens, drive wheels, trailing thin cables, right? I read the review in ( I think "PCW" ) ... the plotter appeared to work ok, but was returned to the manufacturer/sellers in "somewhat damaged" condition. It had been set up & was working OK, when the journos' cat came in, saw this small, whirring thing moving around on its' own power, went New kind of Mousey! .. giant flying leap, teeth & claws out & basically trashed the device. Nearly hurt myself laughing at that one.

    1718:

    There is a good reason for standard UK domestic circuits being able to deliver 3kW .... Electric Kettles, so one can brew up in a reasonable time-frame.

    So the design of the UK electrical system is based on the commercial success of the British East India Company and a ban on imported of finished Asian textiles?

    1719: 1705 - This may be the case in North America, but it's entirely possible for a UK tanker to deliver tank2 to vendor1, tank1 and tank5 to vendor2, and tank3 and tank4 to vendor3. Having had a mate who managed a filling station, I've seen the paperwork, seen him and the driver dip and sign for a part-load on this basis, and, indeed, a delivery consisting of 25000l (about as much as was legal under UK weight laws) of 3 different products (2 different octane rating petrols making 10000l of one grade and 5000l of the other, and 10000l of diesel fuel). All 3 fuels were simultaneously discharged from the same tank semi-trailer. 1710 - Which rather ignores how most BEVs in the UK are things like Nissan Leaves, V@*xh@11 Ashtrays or Renaults, and not Teslas which can do 400 miles on a charge if you don't use the lights, ICE or HVAC. 1713 - In Australia you have to pay for separate roads if you want to use a BEV!? If you're allowed to use the same roads as everyone else, then you benefit from transport subsidies too. (BTW in the UK you're the ones who get subsidies, like free Vehicle Excise Duty (a tax on being allowed to use your own property), and 0 rated fuel duty).
    1720:

    All 3 fuels were simultaneously discharged from the same tank semi-trailer.

    In the US way back "in the day" different brands sold different formulations of gas. The tank farm had only a few mixes, mostly differing in Octane rating. Then an Exxon/Phillips66/Chevron/Whatever tank truck would fill up with the standard stuff plus the additives for the specific brand.

    This all worked for 100 years or a bit less. Then the no name stations got to be big. Costco, Sams, Krogers, BJs, etc... are just the end point of this.

    Now, as to these additives. Gas content is much more regulated now and the auto companies have become very picky about just what is in gasoline. The entire valve issue when lead was removed sort of forced these issues. The car companies (in the US at least) basically said if you don't make your gas to these standards we're going to tell our car buyers to avoid you.

    And the marketing might of the big player to claim THEIR GAS was special sort of went away. So now most all gas is basically the same. I think Sonoco in the US is the last brand to try and sell based on theirs being special. Which aside from them selling (still?) more octane choices than others is mostly all marketing crap. Which brand/vendor people buy now is more based on convenience. Do you want to buy 2 packs or a carton of smokes when you get your gas? Then you likely pull into the corner self serve convenience store where the clerk is behind tempered glass when it is dark outside. Me, I take the deal offered by Costco and their co-branded Citi Visa card and save my money that way. Especially since if I leave the house I will drive by their pumps 50% or more of the time. Others make other choices. And a lot of old farts still buy based on brand and will pay more to get Exxon or similar. If you drill down it is mostly out of habit. Especially if they want someone to pump it. At least other than Oregon and maybe one other state.

    As a side note convenience counts. For years there as been the situation where there are, maybe was, two gas station in the Washington DC where the differential was $.50 to $1 a gallon at times. I drove by those stations many times when I used to go to DC. And it was hard to switch sides of the road in that section of town.

    1721:

    "- In Australia you have to pay for separate roads if you want to use a BEV!?"

    Sort of yes.

    I can't ride on the trains that serve the coal mines. I can't catch a ride on a ship that stops at the coal ports or the natural gas ports. I guess I could drive on the roads that serve the mines, but they just go from the mine I can't enter to the port I can't enter, so I probably wouldn't.

    So the roads, ports and rails I pay for I can't use. No one except the fossil fuel industry uses them.

    The normal roads are paid for out of general revenue (federal), GST (states) and council rates (Council) and they're generally separate roads.

    Fuel excise contributes about 11 billion to general revenue. A small percentage of the subsidies.

    1722:

    I guess I could drive on the roads that serve the mines

    Some of them you can, others you can't. Bits of WA are great fun to go ambling round on a bicycle, but some of them it can be quite challenging. I've been ordered off a public road so a mining truck can go past... on three big lowloaders, and I've been completely ignored on a mining road that was technically closed to the public (I've also been told firmly to GTFO on a similar road). Northern WA is a bit of a mess in that sense, you can generally just take your chances but if you do you'll occasionally annoy people.

    One thing to keep in mind is that even (comparatively) small mining trucks often have poor handling, so if you're not brightly lit with the big orange flag you're not going to be seen in time for the operator to do anything about you other than radio that they ran something over. This actually applies to road trains as well, but I gather most people are aware of that - I run a bright, flashing tail light all the time when I'm on the road and generally two because I don't want to find out the hard way that the only one I have has failed.

    1723:

    Yes the pipeline shutdown in the southeast US was a possible big deal. But the "fix" was never going to take more than a few weeks. Maybe a year depending on what they find. And it looks now like the pipeline systems are flowing again after less than 2 weeks.

    But here's the big one that is under the radar nationally. Remember when people not in the US asked why we here in the US talk about the Mississippi River as if it is a big deal. And we pushed back that it was? Hard to bridge and it's just flat out wide.

    Well the I-40 bridge over the river at Memphis is closed. Likely for a couple of months. And yes there is another bridge not too far away, pushing all that traffic around/through the city to the other bridge and maybe doubling the traffic on that bridge is going to be painful.

    They have discovered a main carrying beam has "cracked". (To me it looks like it is totally broken.) So no traffic on or under the bridge. I'm sure they will resume river traffic soon but likely with limits on how much can be under the bridge at a time. And the river traffic is a really big deal to the entire midwest. The I40 commercial truck traffic also. Plus I'm betting more than a trivial number of people who work in Memphis live in Arkansas and commute both ways each morning.

    Interesting to see how this plays out.

    1724:

    Nuts. That "maybe a year" comment was supposed to be about the bridge, not the pipeline.

    1725:

    Hmm. Ok, since Gremlins have been at the bottle once more (leaving funny messages) we'd suggest they reference the previous user name & password, the date it was made and its current rather tragic enaction. It even linked to Twitter! "First time after The Event", indeed. Don't lo(o)se your trousers.

    Some related stuff: pipelines and 'Dark-Siders'. Might want to wonder why Ireland just got hit and by whom and for what reasons (handing out malware to scriptkiddies with purile politics never goes wrong - the video is an embassador being dressed down publically, the vectors are IN and the hot-shops who cold-call for Apple Pay card shake-downs and so on. Easy one to spot in action). Put pressure on crypto, suddenly there's a lot of varying pressure factors all aligning in interesting ways. Would Crypto Gurus be above running such blanket no-holds-barred attacks on Nation State infrastructure? No. Then again, better ask who did the networking and who is running the Great and Secret Show. Or you know, sold it like it was crack cocaine to various nasties. (Note: the Market is doing odd things and there's cracks everywhere, no your models won't handle it).

    On this: Azerbaijani armed forces have crossed into Armenian territory. They must withdraw immediately. I say again to the Armenian people: France stands with you in solidarity and will continue to do so. https://twitter.com/EmmanuelMacron/status/1392965873187659778 (13th Mar 2021) and people (too nice) wondering why it is being tied to other large scale bombing Events, whelp, it's called geopolitics and why TR and IL and arms deals figure heavily in that mix (c.f. also known as 'field testing the cheap and easy way to make tanks history other than a functional airforce' which, well: let's just say there's certainly rhymes to that reasoning. (If you want the real nubby-grubby, serious people from various Big Evil Corp turning up to your door type stuff, look into a gold mine in the region and UK connections. Serious Players Alert. Just sayin.))

    If you need a quick down/low on why Millenials and Zees are all over it, they're not dumb. They know they're gonna be on the other side of the walls, when and if deployed. People do tend to notice things like, oh, points at US drought Monitor website and can see what's coming. It also doesn't help that the Propoganda[tm] is being made by old people whose brains work differently.

    And yes, Covid19 and Flaccid willies. The jokes, they lathe themselves. Bit brutal, but if you failed a minor test, you get canned (shout out to MSDOS, ouch).

    On a more serious note [redacted] stuff is getting heavier. Charming stuff about tearing Minds apart and so on and so forth. We are really not popular for, well. Fairly sure prediction is not illegal... yet.

    A death in the Firm

    Sincere advice: go play ARK Evolved, public server for a few days. Makes EVE online look genteel and civilised. That's your future.

    And yes, it really did Hit Willi(am) Hwang through Kathy ARKK, and so on. "G_D does not play Dice".

    1726:

    David L The US does things bigger & better ( cough ) One of the major road bridges in London, Hammersmith Bridge is completely closed. It's a very pretty late C19th suspension design, but has cracked up because of modern loads, idiots ignoring the load-limits & complete lack of maintenance. There's the usual boring stupid playground fight & spite between local & national guvmint about paying for the repairs ( Or replacement ) which is just wasting time, whilst the bridge just sits there. Linkie thing To the locals in London, it's a huge inconvenience, but ... your bridge failure, um ..... An "Interstate" bridge over "Old Man River"? Oh my! ... Got any good links for that one, please?

    Oh dear Content-free bullshit @ 1726

    1727:

    Opened in 73 I think.

    Go to news.google.com and try this: memphis tennessee bridge closed

    Last I heard there were already over 200 barges waiting and that number will likely grow fast.

    You can also do a Google Maps and see the re-routing required. I-40 is the closed bridge. And there's only one other in the area. (The river plus flood plain is WIDE.)

    https://www.google.com/maps/place/Memphis,+TN/@35.1363043,-90.0863535,13z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x87d57e1eea439745:0xd193f315601ab6fe!8m2!3d35.1495343!4d-90.0489801!5m1!1e1

    I-40 is a major east west highway. I drove it 3 years ago coming from Texas to North Carolina.

    1728:

    Apropos of nothing, but perhaps a fitting tribute to both The Firm and to conservative political movements around the globe:

    Meet Ramisyllis multicaudata, a marine worm with one(1) head, and hundreds of anuses. There might be a joke hiding in there, but the worm is quite real. It makes more evolutionary sense when you realize that each anus is associated with the appropriate genitalia.

    You know, Ramisyllis has a certain je ne sais quoi. Perhaps it would be a good name for an aristocratic house in that fantasy you're working on? Or in a RPG?

    Alas that Sir PTerry is not alive to read about it.

    1729:

    Amazingly content-free stuff, indeed.

    Azerbaijan’s victory carves path to a gold mine - Baku-based Anglo Asia Mining sees its stock rise following the seizure of a long lost mineral-rich district

    https://asiatimes.com/2020/11/azerbaijans-victory-carves-path-to-a-gold-mine/ November 9th 2020.

    You can find the UK contacts on their PR release: https://polaris.brighterir.com/public/anglo_asian_mining/news/rns_widget/story/x8lv15r You should probably also check out what was agreed around 20th Jan 2021 given the share price £47 from 130.00 GBX to 177.00 GBX.

    It's not like the CEO isn't interesting, either: Prior to his business career, Mr. Reza held a number of high-ranking positions in the pre-revolutionary Iranian Government. He was the Head of the Foreign Relations Office at the Ministry of the Imperial Court of Iran. At the time of the revolution, he was Chief of Office of Political and International Affairs. Reza holds a law degree from the National University of Iran. As founder and Co-Chairman for life of the Board of Directors of the US – Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce with James A. Baker IV, Reza dedicates much of his time furthering business relations between the two countries. Mr. Reza serves alongside such Directors as: James Baker III, Zbigniew Brezinski, Governor John Sununu and Henry Kissinger.

    https://gb.wallmine.com/lse/aaz/officer/1681469/reza-vaziri

    Just the kind of man you want onboard for your geopolitical manouvering. You might want to check out where the invasion is, and what the most likely strategic goal is for it. Hint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenia%E2%80%93Iran_border

    We've long since read "content free" to mean "D-noticed in the UK", fyi.

    shrug

    p.s.

    The username / password (2 incarnations ago) was taken from a twitter account and was... quite specifically precisent if you bothered to do due diligence and check out the referenced Tweet. We add these Easter Eggs for the peeps bored enough to poke their noses into innocent civilian lives. For the record, the twitter account was chosen at random.

    1730:

    Hammersmith Bridge is on the A306. That's a national road therefore the bill goes to Highways England.

    1731:

    [Note, for reference the Nom-de-plume this time was "The Donkey who bit Priapus's Covid" which is in itself quite a tale / joke]

    Oh, and pretty sure we just told you who, what, when and where the Great Game action is happening right now. Brezinski and Kissinger, the greatest hits. Other C-members are just as interesting (IMF, various Banks, who knows, maybe even BCCI on the resumes). A death in the Firm

    For no particular reason, listening to "The Sound of Silence"

    "Fools", said I, "You do not know Silence like a cancer grows Hear my words that I might teach you Take my arms that I might reach you" But my words, like silent raindrops fell And echoed In the wells of silence

    1732:

    There was also the recurring problem of Cats sitting/sleeping on/in peoples' Fax machines - it was "always on" & slightly warmer ... wonderful place to nest.

    Somewhere I've got an animated .gif of a fascinated cat watching paper slowly come out of a printer until the page finishes and is spat out. Then the cat leaps on it, savages the paper, and falls off the desk.

    1733:

    Incidentally, googling "cat vs printer gif" is an effective way to waste time. This one was the one I was thinking of but this guy is playing from the same script and honestly there are far too many cat moments that will leave humans giggling.

    1734:

    paws Just because it's the "A306" does not tell you where the bill goes, because ... it's in London & then it gets complicated. I did provide a link ...

    SS Oh dear, yes, well .. cats & stupid-human-automated machinery!

    MORE content-free bullshit @: 1730, 1732

    1735:

    David L @ 1724: Yes the pipeline shutdown in the southeast US was a possible big deal. But the "fix" was never going to take more than a few weeks. Maybe a year depending on what they find. And it looks now like the pipeline systems are flowing again after less than 2 weeks.

    Costco still had long lines today. I think it represents people who put off getting gas earlier plus all the regular "it's Friday, so I better fill up NOW in case I want to go to the beach this weekend" crowd.

    But here's the big one that is under the radar nationally. Remember when people not in the US asked why we here in the US talk about the Mississippi River as if it is a big deal. And we pushed back that it was? Hard to bridge and it's just flat out wide.

    Well the I-40 bridge over the river at Memphis is closed. Likely for a couple of months. And yes there is another bridge not too far away, pushing all that traffic around/through the city to the other bridge and maybe doubling the traffic on that bridge is going to be painful.

    They have discovered a main carrying beam has "cracked". (To me it looks like it is totally broken.) So no traffic on or under the bridge. I'm sure they will resume river traffic soon but likely with limits on how much can be under the bridge at a time. And the river traffic is a really big deal to the entire midwest. The I40 commercial truck traffic also. Plus I'm betting more than a trivial number of people who work in Memphis live in Arkansas and commute both ways each morning.

    Interesting to see how this plays out.

    This is a VERY BIG DEAL. They've not only closed a central east-west road artery, but they've closed the river to traffic which basically stills traffic on the Missouri River (which serves the western U.S.) and the Ohio River (the U.S. manufacturing heartland). I tried to find the value of traffic on the Mississippi through Memphis, but Google was no help ... everything was about the river closure due to the I-40 bridge.

    The good news is that the Mississippi River traffic is flowing again.

    The alternative around Memphis is the I-55 bridge, which is 25 years older and not in such great shape itself. The next nearest crossings trucks can use are ~ 50 miles to the south on US-49 and ~ 70 miles to the north on I-155 (US-412). Either way, if the I-55 bridge can't handle the traffic, it's going to add a 100+ mile detour.

    It could have been worse though. At least this time they didn't find out the hard way.

    1736:

    This is a VERY BIG DEAL. They've not only closed a central east-west road artery

    I for one have no trouble believing you.

    The Columbia River is not quite as big as the Mississippi but it's not a tiny creek. Imagine for some reason that north-south traffic can't cross the river at Portland; what are the alternatives? Your choices are both 40 miles away as the crow flies. Upriver it's the Bridge of the Gods at Cascade Locks, which is very pretty but I'd rather not drive a big rig over it. Downriver it's the Longview bridge and a lot of rather rural countryside in between, but that route takes travelers less out of the way than the other.

    If Longview were closed too then traffic between Oregon and Washington would be truly screwed; that would push cargo all the way to Astoria. (The Cathlamet ferry is very cute but you can't take trucks over it.) Maybe up to Hood River? None of those routes sound good.

    Bridges are important choke points.

    1737:

    David L @ 1728: Opened in 73 I think.

    Go to news.google.com and try this:
    memphis tennessee bridge closed

    Last I heard there were already over 200 barges waiting and that number will likely grow fast.

    You can also do a Google Maps and see the re-routing required. I-40 is the closed bridge. And there's only one other in the area. (The river plus flood plain is WIDE.)

    https://www.google.com/maps/place/Memphis,+TN/@35.1363043,-90.0863535,13z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x87d57e1eea439745:0xd193f315601ab6fe!8m2!3d35.1495343!4d-90.0489801!5m1!1e1

    I-40 is a major east west highway. I drove it 3 years ago coming from Texas to North Carolina.

    There are essentially four east-west transcontinental Interstate highway routes.
    I-10, Jacksonville, FL & I-20, Florence, SC connect to Santa Monica, CA. I-20 merges with I-10 at Scoggins Draw, TX
    I-40, Wilmington, NC to Barstow, CA. (where I-15 carries you the rest of the way into the LA basin and on down to San Diego).
    I-80, Teaneck, NJ to San Francisco, CA
    I-90, Boston, MA to Seattle, WA (along the southern shore of Lake Erie and loops up west of Lake Michigan)

    There are other east-west Interstate highways, but these are the only ones that really stretch coast to coast. I-40 is the central route. If you're driving from NE U.S to SW U.S. or SE U.S. to NW US or mid-Atlantic coast to Mid-Pacific coast, you're likely to make most of that trip on I-40.

    The I-55 bridge at Memphis already has its own traffic & will be hard pressed to take on all of the additional load of I-40 traffic. I've driven across both bridges several times and the I-55 bridge is narrow & scary, especially when traffic is heavy.

    Side note: Unless I specifically wanted to stop in Memphis or Nashville, I'd take I-20 from Dallas to Atlanta and I-85 up to where I could join I-40 for the rest of the trip into Raleigh. As nasty as traffic around I-285 is in Atlanta, it's still a less stressful route from Dallas to Raleigh (even if Google Maps does think it takes an hour longer).

    1738:

    Doesn't the USA have a bigger armed forces than the rest of the world put together?

    Isn't one of the things armies do best is cross rivers?

    Can your army not blow up the broken bridge so it won't fall on anyone, and build a temporary one in like a couple of hours?

    1739:

    Doesn't the USA have a bigger armed forces than the rest of the world put together? Isn't one of the things armies do best is cross rivers? Can your army not blow up the broken bridge so it won't fall on anyone, and build a temporary one in like a couple of hours?

    Dr. Buzzkill here. Yes, I know that was meant sarcastically, but you might appreciate the scale of the mess. Fiddling with Google, the bridge is about 60 feet short of a mile in length. It looks like it goes from the edge of the floodplain to edge of floodplain, for fairly obvious reason, but a quick glance suggests that the Mississippi is about a kilometer wide at this point. And currently it's about six meters deep and is somewhere around 2-4 km/hr.

    There are two streams of traffic going through this chokepoint. One is the stream of cars and trucks crossing between Tennessee and Arkansas. Since this is one of the transcontinental highways, it carries a lot of traffic, including especially trucks.

    The other traffic are all the barges going up and down the Mississippi. One of the big things they carry is grain heading out to the rest of the world, so the knock on effects of shutting down boat traffic might include spiking corn and wheat prices, possibly leading (as in 2010, when the Russian and Pakistani wheat harvests failed) to an Arab Spring-level uprising somewhere. Somewhere, for corn, could be China (our biggest customer), or Mexico, Colombia, or Guatemala (whee, more immigrants!), or Japan, South Korea, Taiwan...you know, all the places we want to remain as stable as possible.

    Anyway, getting to your question: obviously, blowing the bridge is easy. Getting the debris out of there is harder, and the debris will block the barge traffic until cleared, because the River is so shallow (this, incidentally, is how Mark Twain got his pen-name, from the depth in fathoms under a river boat keel when he was a boatsman). So blowing the bridge closes both routes. Stringing together a pontoon bridge opens the truck route, but it still blocks the barge traffic. Geopolitically, blocking the Mississippi River is probably a Bad Idea.

    So anyway, this is why they're going to get that bridge fixed as fast as they can. I pity the poor sods who get to do the construction diving around that broken piling. Hope they've packed their white canes (visibility will be sucktastic, so they'll be working blind) and their safety gear (it's a dangerous river).

    If you want something to snark at, for at least a decade, the American Society of Civil Engineers has given American infrastructure a D grade. This is an example of why.

    1740:

    gasdive NO I thought the PRC has a bigger military in terms of numbers. I suggest you actually look at a map & pictures of this bridge ... it's "quite large"

    1741:

    Dr. Buzzkill here.

    And to pile on a bit on the eastern end this thing really doesn't start at the bridge. The approaches are elevated for nearly 1/2 mile before you get to the wide part of the river. And by elevated I mean 4 levels of traffic. There is a skinny island, small bit of water, a waterfront, and 4 to 6 city blocks before you get to ground level. I think the western side is similar but mostly over flat land prone to flooding.

    Again, the geography around the Mississippi River is a big reason there are so few crossings. Places like NYC, Pittsburgh, Chicago, etc... likely have more 4 lane bridges across their rivers than the Mississippi from St Louis down to New Orleans. I'm excluding railroad bridges but even those are small in number.

    And toss in that the speed limit on this bridge likely was 50mph or more. Any temp thing is going to slow things down a LOT.

    BTW you can turn on traffic on Google Maps to see just how much road is now closed.

    And next up is that bridge in Cincinnati which has been needing replacement for a decade or two. Current estimates are that 3% of the GDP of the country crosses it. No problem getting it done except it involves 2 states, the feds, and a lot of powerful local, regional, and federal politicians.

    And there's that single track RR bridge in northern Jersey (I think) that much of the freight traffic in the northeast uses. It is decades beyond it's sell by date.

    Check back when one of these falls and see how we're doing.

    1742:

    Re: 'Anyway, getting to your question: obviously, blowing the bridge is easy. Getting the debris out of there is harder, and the debris will block the barge traffic until cleared ...'

    Since folks have already introduced cat videos ... wondering whether a blown bridge would have any aww/cute animal impact - positive or negative. Sometimes learning that a cute animal was involved changes how an issue is addressed:

    https://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/en/news/2021/porcupine-plain-rcmp-theft-investigation-has-a-dam-good-ending

    Re: COVID-19

    Johns Hopkins has revamped their tracking site with more info including vax rates, explanations of the various US/State testing data, etc.

    https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

    Re: Gas - environment, inflammation, dementia

    Because of the current pandemic, I'm guessing that more folks know that inflammation can be deadly but may still not realize that it also affects their nervous system/brain or how environmental factors can impact this.

    'The impact of the climate crisis on brain health

    Long-term exposure to air pollution is harmful to human health, causing damage to respiratory and cardiovascular systems. A new study provides evidence that even short-term, relatively low-level air pollution can be detrimental for cognitive function, and suggests the possibility that a commonly used drug might help reduce the harmful effects.'

    https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-021-00062-2

    1743:

    One is that some people have spiritual experiences, some people do not. It really is a "Country of the Blind" situation, where those who do not have the experience tend to break atheist, and the more militant think it's perfectly okay to talk about ripping out the eyes of anyone who claims to see.

    Was reminded yesterday of an acquaintance who is absolutely convinced the Vatican has been hunting her family for generations. She holds this belief with rock-solid certainty, because she has proof: the Pope wears purple.

    Is there an objective way to distinguish between a 'genuine spiritual experience' and a paranoid or schizophrenic one?

    1744:

    Is there an objective way to distinguish between a 'genuine spiritual experience' and a paranoid or schizophrenic one?

    Being raise by and getting to deal with a "manic-depressive no one more religious than her" mother for 60 years...

    My Spider-Sense gets triggered fairly rapidly when around similar people.

    But objective. Nope.

    1745:

    gasdive @ 1739: Doesn't the USA have a bigger armed forces than the rest of the world put together?

    Isn't one of the things armies do best is cross rivers?

    Can your army not blow up the broken bridge so it won't fall on anyone, and build a temporary one in like a couple of hours?

    Presuming that you ask in GOOD FAITH 1 the answer is no.

    The US military strength (size) is third behind China and India for Active Military; seventh for Total Military (Active + Reserve + Paramilitary) behind North Korea, South Korea, Vietnam, India, Russia and China.

    Per capita (service members/1000 population) the U.S. Active Military is 51st (4.2/1000); and Total Military ranks 70th (6.8/1000).

    The overall U.S. Defense Budget is the largest in the world, although we are only second in per capita spending. We could easily cut our defense spending by two thirds if we'd just cut NATO and the ANZACS loose and left you to your own devices. I'm sure China and Russia would be more than happy to take our place.

    Heteromeles has already explained why blowing up the bridge is a stupid fuckin' idea.

    A pontoon bridge could be laid across the Mississippi and it could be done such that it would be possible to periodically open the river to allow the barges through. But no one would be happy with it. While the bridge was closed, barges would be piling up on the Mississippi, waiting for their turn to go through and while it was open, the trucks would be backing up like they were around British Ports when Brexit happened.

    It wouldn't be able to carry the largest trucks. It would have to be removed whenever the Mississippi River floods, which it does every few years.

    Another stupid fuckin' idea.

    Plus, it would be more expensive to build than repairing the I-40 bridge. Almost all of the U.S. Army's pontoon bridging equipment is forward positioned in Europe for NATO to use if they ever need it. It would take about 90 days to remove it from the depots & trans-ship it to Memphis.

    But that might not be such a bad idea in and of itself. Save us some money on that outsize defense budget and if NATO ever does need it, they can buy it on eBay.

    1 Which I do not believe for even one second.

    1746:

    Congratulations to the Tianwen-1/Zhurong team for a reportedly successful Mars rover landing! (Presuming that it was a soft landing. :-) China lands on Mars in latest advance for its space program (2021/05/14 (05/15 in China)) Very little nationalistic bragging reported, at least internationally, which is also nice to see.

    MORE content-free bullshit @: 1730, 1732 Since you didn't read those comments, your statement is precisely content-free bullshit - "1. complete nonsense or something that is not true" So I will interpret such comments as sly jokes. :-)

    1747:

    On a more serious note [redacted] stuff is getting heavier. Charming stuff about tearing Minds apart and so on and so forth. Haven't read that tone in a while.

    One of my favorite of your nyms: "The Donkey who bit Priapus's Covid" The nym is not settling into a single interpretation, but have been waiting for a study like this. University of Miami researchers report COVID-19 found in penile tissue could contribute to ED (11-May-2021) The PDF: COVID-19 Endothelial Dysfunction Can Cause Erectile Dysfunction: Histopathological, Immunohistochemical, and Ultrastructural Study of the Human Penis (Eliyahu Kresch et al, May 7, 2021) Our study is the first to demonstrate the presence of the COVID-19 virus in the penis long after the initial infection in humans. Our results also suggest that widespread endothelial cell dysfunction from COVID-19 infection can contribute to ED. And also this one, though it's a bit less useful for scaring anti-vaxxer/anti-masker humans with penises. Priapism for 10 days in a patient with SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia: a case report (13 April 2021, Abdulmalik Addar, Omar Al Fraidi, Ahmed Nazer, Naif Althonayan, Yahya Ghazwani) The patient was managed by aspiration and Phenylephrine injection and achieved detumescence and reported normal erection at 2 weeks follow-up. and a literature review through to Feb 2021: SARS‐CoV‐2 infection affects the lower urinary tract and male genital system: A systematic review (17 February 2021)

    1748:

    Bill Arnold I'm 75 Life is TOO SHORT to drag through "her" obscure posts which may, just occassionally contain something. Like I've said before: YOU CAN TRANSLATE into concise English, if that's possible. Now then, either please do that, or eff off. - you follow @ 1748 ... so it appears there was some content, but it was pathetic, trivial & childish stuff, anyway. Oh dear.

    1749:

    A pontoon bridge could be laid across the Mississippi and it could be done such that it would be possible to periodically open the river to allow the barges through. But no one would be happy with it..."

    Chain ferry!

    Doesn't block the river (technology approved by the Admiralty for getting across the Tamar at Plymouth). Can take trucks as big as you want, and can handle flooding as deep/wide as you care to build the slips. Bit slow, but you could always build several parallel ones. Sorted!

    Being more serious, doing an image search for i40 mississippi bridge pulls up something which looks so extraordinarily like another Admiralty-approved method of getting across the Tamar at Plymouth that I can't help but reckon they copied the idea: two big long bowstring girders for the two main spans and a string of smaller conventional beam spans on the approaches either side. Doing it that way meant that they could assemble the bowstring on shore, stick the whole thing on pontoons as a complete unit, float it out to the bridge site and then hoist it up to the top of the piers (on a tidal river with stronger currents using 1850s gear) while the river traffic went through the other span. And then it could look after itself while they went off to build the other bowstring and put that up the same way.

    It looks like your bridge is using the same design to solve the same problem and so was very likely put up the same way. So the answer is surely to build a replacement bowstring on shore, float it out on pontoons, hoist the broken one down onto some more pontoons and hoist the new one up in its place. Which ought to be easier than it was to put it up originally because we have better cranes and shit now. River stays open all through, and nearly all the operation takes place on shore with only the unavoidable minimum of fucking about in the middle of the river hoping you don't drop anything important. Looks like you could get the rivery hoisting bit done and dusted in a day or two if you prepared thoroughly and put your backs into it.

    You've also got a possible advantage in having a fairly good amount of freedom to vary the design of the replacement if necessary to make it quicker to build it; it doesn't have to be like for like. The span exerts no lateral forces on anything, so the only bits that have to be in the exact same place are the actual points that rest on the piers, and you can do what you like with all the rest of it.

    (While you're at it, build the replacement a bit more chunky than the original, which looks decidedly tinfoil-and-sticks to me; and then do the same for the other span before that breaks too...)

    Isambard wouldn't have freaked out over a thing like this :)

    1750:

    "So no traffic on or under the bridge."

    Oh bollocks, I missed that bit. Chicken's tits. The abovementioned image search found what could be a useful diagram, only the original image it's supposed to link to is a 404 so all I can see is the Bing cached thumbnail version, and I don't have any confidence that a link to that will continue working, but in case it does... http://tse1.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIF.sStLpz5qQzMMzu5FjTo9QQ

    It may be small and illegible but you can still read "Page 1 of 1" and you can certainly see exactly where it's broken because it's marked in red; one of the bowstring spans is broken near one end, which is consistent with the photos of the break that turned up. The other span is not broken, so it seems to me that the only obstacle to the river traffic just carrying on going through that one alone (possibly with a bit of traffic control, but still moving) is an inexplicable reluctance to shoot a few lawyers.

    1751:

    Chain ferry!

    Yes. In a more narrow setup.

    As those of us who seen the lower half of the Mississippi River know though. This thing is wide. And the land at the banks is low and flat. Which is why there are so few bridges to begin with. And the ones that are there have very long approaches to get things up to a height suitable to crossing the river.

    At the width of the river and with the setbacks needed the weight of the chains and cables would likely make it a non starter.

    Way back when the south tried to put an anchor chain across at Columbus Ky to keep the union gun boats from headed south to Vickburg or nearby. It broke under it's weight. Now we can make better steel and have better engineering but still, it's a very long distance. (I've crossed via the ferry at Columbus when a youth.)

    1752:

    They've opened up the river traffic. But I suspect with a few restriction on paths and how many things can be under the various spans at one time. Some of the river traffic is made up of interesting chemicals that you do NOT want pouring out of a 300' barge tanker into the water.

    1753:

    so it seems to me that the only obstacle to the river traffic just carrying on going through that one alone (possibly with a bit of traffic control, but still moving) is an inexplicable reluctance to shoot a few lawyers.

    I think this was spotted Tuesday. The inspector who saw it called 911 and told them to shut down the bridge. I suspect there was a bit of back and forth and "Just who is this?". Then they got the CoE (Core of Engineers) or similar to shut down the river till they checked the entire bridge out. Then they let the river traffic start back up. But as I said, likely with a few new rules.

    1754:

    Oh dear... looks like your favourite website needs a bit of proper maintenance itself...

    It used to be OK, but now there is a ruddy great fixed header bar over the top and a ruddy great fixed sidebar down the right hand side, both of which sit on top of the actual content, so all that shows is a little rectangle down in the bottom left hand corner, with the right hand half of every paragraph obscured so you can't read it. I had to insert my own CSS to override all the stupid bloody "position:fixed" rules in the site's CSS. Of course, it is on turdpress...

    I was briefly amused by one sentence in the article, complaining about walking from the last bus stop on the south side to Hammersmith underground station being slower than taking the bus. I used to walk that out of preference, because it was quicker than taking the bus...

    1755:

    Well, the confederate chain almost certainly wasn't steel at all, and the point about a chain ferry chain is that it is not stretched up to catch boats; most of it is lying on the bottom apart from a loop underneath the actual ferry where it is picked up to be pulled on. Weight is more of an advantage than anything, and we can certainly make chains of adequate strength. But it wasn't really a serious suggestion :)

    1756:

    I lived in Pittsburgh area for a while. They seemed to throw up a bridge every 10 years for a 100 years or more. The north side of town had 3 bridges in 3 or 4 blocks I think.

    1757:

    Helped that Pittsburgh at the time had a in-house steel industry, so that it didn't need to ship metal far to build bridges.

    That said, my inexpert eye says that the bridge fix is mostly about clearing the river off the site, assessing the damage, and doing something involving relatively small amounts of steel and concrete. The longer term fix is to start building another bridge in parallel, which we also know how to do, if acts can be gotten together. That, I think, is the sticking point....

    1758:

    Wrought iron works better for suvh chains, anyway, and I don't see why it wouldn't be viable - as you say, it's the depth and not the width that matters.

    1759:

    "Aww, you want the whole story?"

    Ah, the "whole story" gets a lot more technical than that. You can't be sure whether it was spiked or not without having a recording oscilloscope to see what the mains waveform was actually doing at the moment of failure, although observing something else switching on or off at that moment is a good clue if you are there at the right moment; and the reason why one box may be producing damaging spikes or another one may be particularly vulnerable to them may come down to very minor details of internal circuit topology or component choice.

    But from what you have said I don't see anything to convince me it actually is spikes and not something else. Particularly with that kind of small and common kit, manufacturers are often distressingly fond of operating components at the very limits of their ratings, and they are particularly likely to push their luck when it comes to the adequacy of heatsinking because a chunk of aluminium for a heatsink may well cost more than all the other components put together. Some insignificant-looking little black speck could be gradually cooking itself without giving rise to any noticeable anomaly in the case temperature, until eventually it decides it's had enough and stops working for good.

    They are also rather too fond of using only the barest minimum of solder they can get away with, which means you get individual units where they haven't got away with it, with faults like one pin of a component not actually being soldered at all but just held in contact by the rigidity of the component body and the strength of the other joints where the solder did take. In time the microscopic movements from normal thermal cycling and/or oxidation of the surfaces by the atmosphere disrupt the dubious contact, so the thing starts failing after it's been on for a while and then the whiles get shorter and shorter until it doesn't work at all. Or you can get joints where the solder did take but only just, so in time the thermal cycling breaks it with the same kind of result. (And a broken connection in one part of a circuit can very easily cause some other part to overheat or blow up.)

    One course of action to bear in mind is the possibility of getting a replacement unit with the same functionality but made in a different factory by a different manufacturer, to take another dip at the pool of sets of antecedent conditions which predispose kit to the above kind of faults. With the data you have at the moment you can equally well expect the result to be worse as better, but if you are still getting failures after installing your surge protector you may get the opportunity to calculate more usefully predictive expectations.

    1760:

    Those are all excellent points that my mom the electrical engineer also raised with me when I described the situation. That the hub manufacturer doesn't have any replacement units at the moment also suggests that they did some version of what you say they're doing. This is where me getting an older-style analog unit physically wired to the air handler makes a bit of sense, but of course the AC company doesn't really want to go that way...

    1761:

    Send her address to Vatican? If she disappears it's real (joke, just in case)

    1762: 1742 Para 3 - And the same number of lanes with a 25mph limit will have 3 times the capacity (vehicles per unit time) and be subjected to about 1/3 the axle hammer per vehicle with the same traffic mix. 1750 - {like} and I have travelled across rivers by chain ferry (one at 300m) and the other at least half a mile wide (at least if you'll give me the Beauly Firth as "a river"). 1756 - Some sort of cast or wrought iron for sure, yes.
    1763:

    I lived in Pittsburgh area for a while. They seemed to throw up a bridge every 10 years for a 100 years or more. The north side of town had 3 bridges in 3 or 4 blocks I think.

    You're not wrong. (I've been looking at Pittsburgh on Google Maps lately myself.) But there are bridges and there are bridges.

    I mentioned Portland earlier. Check out this map of Portland Oregon, which like Pittsburgh is located at the confluence of two rivers. The big one at the top is the Columbia, and that I-5 crossing is very much comparable in span and challenge (and river traffic) to the I-40 in Memphis: about a mile and a half between the feeder ramps on either side. (The other one, the I=205 bridge seven miles east, is longer!) Crossing the Columbia means I-5, I-205, or a long detour comparable to the Memphis situation.

    The other river is the Willamette, which averages about a thousand feet wide where it goes through downtown - so not particularly wider than the Monongahela or Allegheny. Portland has lots of bridges across the Willamette, and that's without an in-town steel industry.

    Do you think the McKees Rocks Bridge might be the best Pittsburgh example of a Mississippi style bridge? I see it runs over the McKees Rocks Bottoms, which I assume flood regularly, and it's about a mile end to end which puts it in the right neighborhood for size.

    1764:

    You made me look. Do a Google Earth fly over of the rivers around Pittsburgh and you'll find multiple bridges like the one at McKees Rocks. You'll actually find all kinds of bridges. Suspension, arch under roadway, arch over with cable stays, old style truss, concrete with piers till a section of arch with cables so the boats can get through, etc...

    In many ways it was an interesting place to live and drive. I worked east of the city (other side of the mountain) and flew a lot and the airport was way west. So lots of driving through tunnels and across bridges to get anywhere. And for the 7 years I lived there they re-built my route to the airport plus overhauled a few bridges (Liberty was an interesting one) and built a subway. So I also get to know more side streets and neighborhoods than many of the locals. (The locals were an incredibly insular bunch compared to other parts of the US.)

    There are multiple situations where bridges flow in/out of tunnels which can be disconcerting to new folks at 50+ mph. And if you're downtown and look west to the bluffs across the river you can see what I think was the old highway tunnel 100' up above the river with nothing connected to it. Never did see the other end.

    Before Google Maps and when we all got to have fun with paper, I'd figure out a route and then discover the intersection where I wanted to "turn left" was 50' below me as the road I was on was on a bluff above the tunnel exit.

    1765:

    And the same number of lanes with a 25mph limit will have 3 times the capacity

    Yes, no. Lots of assumptions built into such a statement. You have all kinds of through traffic coming into and out of the area that will stack up for miles when such limits are imposed. Been there, done that, have the hat.

    Anyway. Who knows. They might spend a few $mil and get it all fixed and then the New Madrid fault blows out again. Then they get to redo all the roads and bridges from St. Louis down to maybe Vicksburg. Plus a few damns. And for that it will be like H said up above in terms of global food disruption. (The New Madrid fault is one of those odd ones no where near a plate boundary.)

    1766:

    Indeed. The queueing theory is sound (or I'd not have posted the statement), but it does assume that you maintain laminar flow rather than getting turbulent flow at pinch points or junctions approaching the bridge.

    1767:

    Actually, it's not. Even if you assume a complete braking distance between vehicles, it's just under twice. If you assume only reaction time, it's slightly less. Unless, of course, there is a mixture of automotive and horse-drawn traffic :-)

    1768:

    They might spend a few $mil and get it all fixed and then the New Madrid fault blows out again. Then they get to redo all the roads and bridges from St. Louis down to maybe Vicksburg. Plus a few damns.

    I think there's be more than a few damns if all that infrastructure stopped working. :-)

    1769:

    Remember the bit where I specifically cited queueing theory? With road traffic, slowing from 50mph to 25mph tends to reduce separation by more like 6 times, rather than HC figures (and incidentally UK HC figures for stopping distance at 50 and 20 mph are 125 feet and 40 feet respectively, or about 3 times).

    1770:

    Yes, and it's nothing to do with queuing theory. It might be part of the psychology of drivers, but I have suspicions about the people who produced it and, if so, they use bogus methodology to justify their dogmas. It does not fit with my observations, and I can make a guess at what they did wrong. If you can point me at some real evidence, I will look at it but, until then, it sounds like yet another of the bogus claims about such things.

    1771:

    Pigeon @ 1750:

    A pontoon bridge could be laid across the Mississippi and it could be done such that it would be possible to periodically open the river to allow the barges through. But no one would be happy with it..."

    Chain ferry!

    Doesn't block the river (technology approved by the Admiralty for getting across the Tamar at Plymouth). Can take trucks as big as you want, and can handle flooding as deep/wide as you care to build the slips. Bit slow, but you could always build several parallel ones. Sorted!

    We still have some of those here in North Carolina, although they use cables rather than chains.

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

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker's_Ferry

    https://www.wral.com/the-very-last-ride-dot-cuts-mean-end-to-two-cable-ferries-in-eastern-nc/19142481/h

    How many of them do you suppose it will take to handle 40,000+ vehicles per day. (Not even considering where to place the terminals to handle Mississippi River floods.) Here's where the Memphis bridges fit into the national transportation system here in the U.S.

    https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/freight/freight_analysis/freight_story/images/compofmajorfghtcorr.jpg

    Being more serious, doing an image search for i40 mississippi bridge pulls up something which looks so extraordinarily like another Admiralty-approved method of getting across the Tamar at Plymouth that I can't help but reckon they copied the idea: two big long bowstring girders for the two main spans and a string of smaller conventional beam spans on the approaches either side. Doing it that way meant that they could assemble the bowstring on shore, stick the whole thing on pontoons as a complete unit, float it out to the bridge site and then hoist it up to the top of the piers (on a tidal river with stronger currents using 1850s gear) while the river traffic went through the other span. And then it could look after itself while they went off to build the other bowstring and put that up the same way.

    It looks like your bridge is using the same design to solve the same problem and so was very likely put up the same way. So the answer is surely to build a replacement bowstring on shore, float it out on pontoons, hoist the broken one down onto some more pontoons and hoist the new one up in its place. Which ought to be easier than it was to put it up originally because we have better cranes and shit now. River stays open all through, and nearly all the operation takes place on shore with only the unavoidable minimum of fucking about in the middle of the river hoping you don't drop anything important. Looks like you could get the rivery hoisting bit done and dusted in a day or two if you prepared thoroughly and put your backs into it.

    You've also got a possible advantage in having a fairly good amount of freedom to vary the design of the replacement if necessary to make it quicker to build it; it doesn't have to be like for like. The span exerts no lateral forces on anything, so the only bits that have to be in the exact same place are the actual points that rest on the piers, and you can do what you like with all the rest of it.

    Other than incorporating an arch shaped truss the two bridges are entirely different designs. The central spans of the bridge in Memphis are an arch-truss suspension bridge.

    I doubt they're going to replace the bridge entirely.

    Pigeon @ 1751:

    "So no traffic on or under the bridge."

    Oh bollocks, I missed that bit. Chicken's tits. The abovementioned image search found what could be a useful diagram, only the original image it's supposed to link to is a 404 so all I can see is the Bing cached thumbnail version, and I don't have any confidence that a link to that will continue working, but in case it does... http://tse1.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIF.sStLpz5qQzMMzu5FjTo9QQ

    It may be small and illegible but you can still read "Page 1 of 1" and you can certainly see exactly where it's broken because it's marked in red; one of the bowstring spans is broken near one end, which is consistent with the photos of the break that turned up. The other span is not broken, so it seems to me that the only obstacle to the river traffic just carrying on going through that one alone (possibly with a bit of traffic control, but still moving) is an inexplicable reluctance to shoot a few lawyers.

    This article gives a better look at the size of the problem:

    https://www.equipmentworld.com/better-roads/article/15065535/de-soto-bridge-in-memphis-shut-down-after-crack-found

    It also includes a better view of the engineering drawing "TRUSS GEOMETRICS"

    That drawing was apparently used for a Tennessee DOT media briefing to show where the problem is located - second tie-girder east (Tennessee side) of the central pier. You can click on the image in this lady's Twitter for a larger image.

    https://twitter.com/NicLawrenceTDOT/status/1392528210387247111

    The thread provides some amusing reading if only for the inevitable suggestions they just fix it with duct tape & super glue

    1772:

    paws4thot @ 1763: #1742 Para 3 - And the same number of lanes with a 25mph limit will have 3 times the capacity (vehicles per unit time) and be subjected to about 1/3 the axle hammer per vehicle with the same traffic mix.

    Are you sure about that? Seems to me the primary limit for bridges is the total weight they can support at one time? Even with a reduced speed limit you're still going to have to observe the weight limits & maintain vehicle separation so the bridge isn't over-stressed.

    Axle hammer per vehicle might be reduced, but the total maximum weight of vehicles that can be on the bridge simultaneously is going to remain the same.

    1773:

    Of absolutely no interest to anyone who does not live in the Raleigh area, but most roads in Colonial America did not have bridges across rivers and if the river was too deep to easily ford, some family would probably set up a private ferry. Many newcomers to Raleigh (and Wake County) wonder about Avent Ferry Road.

    http://www.aventfamily.org/avferry.htm

    Avent's Ferry operated well into the 20th Century.

    1774:

    So no traffic on or under the bridge.

    Under shouldn't be a problem. Doesn't anyone remember Project Plowshare? Surely America has enough munitions to remove the bridge entirely, even if you have to convert a stretch of river into a lake :-)

    1775: 1772 How many of them do you suppose it will take to handle 40,000+ vehicles per day?

    Fewer than you think. Just because the Yousay has never done it doesn't mean there haven't been chain ferries that can take more than 2 cars. I can't be bothered with all the required copy pasta at 22:30 local, but web searching "Erskine Ferry" and "Renfrew Ferry" will find you evidence of chain ferries capable of handling 20 cars (say 80 lane metres). As to terminals, what's the rise of a Mississippi in spate?

    1773 - Well, yes, if you think that static tare is more significant than dynamic load given as tare + hammer. Since hammer is given by speed^2 X axle_load ^ 4...
    1776:

    ... most roads in Colonial America did not have bridges across rivers and if the river was too deep to easily ford, some family would probably set up a private ferry. Many newcomers to Raleigh (and Wake County) wonder about Avent Ferry Road.

    I wouldn't wonder a moment - but I'm also typing this (checks map) about two miles from Scholl's Ferry Road. Avent Ferry Road sounds self explanatory to me.

    1777:

    Torpoint ferry takes up to 73 cars per trip, individual vehicle weight limit of 18 tons, crossings every ten minutes at peak so up to 438 vehicles per hour, roughly 10k per day at peak rate.

    1778:

    Now you're talking. That's what we need, some vision and a bold plan. You could even build some quaint housing with great views on the crater wall.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santorini_caldera

    1779:

    So I also get to know more side streets and neighborhoods than many of the locals. (The locals were an incredibly insular bunch compared to other parts of the US.) There are multiple situations where bridges flow in/out of tunnels which can be disconcerting to new folks at 50+ mph.

    I've noticed that Pittsburgh is well gifted with tunnels, yes. I'm used to bridges but never lived anywhere the city planners loved tunnels as much as the old Pittsburghers did. Maybe tunnels were more relatively affordable at some point.

    It's also struck me how many tiny isolated neighborhoods Pittsburgh has. There are so many invisible pockets accessible only by one or two streets, up on hills or down in canyons. It's interesting to consider from a storytelling standpoint, since there seems to be so little obstacle for a small isolationist group to disappear into their own little pocket realm while still being only a short drive from all the conveniences of the city.

    Before Google Maps and when we all got to have fun with paper, I'd figure out a route and then discover the intersection where I wanted to "turn left" was 50' below me as the road I was on was on a bluff above the tunnel exit.

    Even as a casual observer it is clear to me that two dimensional maps are not nearly as useful in Pittsburgh as they are for other, flatter cities.

    1780:

    Torpoint ferry takes up to 73 cars per trip, individual vehicle weight limit of 18 tons, crossings every ten minutes at peak so up to 438 vehicles per hour, roughly 10k per day at peak rate

    Seattle area residents might nod at the small, short-range ferry. The Washington State Ferry fleet ranges from 'small' 64 car units to the big 202 car Jumbo II class. Too bad they're impossibly far away - and that a small body of water like the Mississippi wouldn't even give them enough space to get up to full speed.

    On a less silly note, it's not as outrageous as it sounds. There are several WSF routes that carry something around two million cars a year, or around 5500 cars per day. A ferry system moving 10,000 cars per day might expensive to set up but it's not outside technical possibility.

    1781:

    a small isolationist group to disappear into their own little pocket realm

    Still visible, though. These days even more visible thanks to all the toy drones with cameras.

    You can easily get the same effect in a flat city if you want to - there are gated communities around that do this. I visited a community in Christchurch when I was at university 30-odd years ago that had done the same thing (deliberately). Buy a block of land, build street-facing houses round the perimeter, then a ring road, then a circle of inward-facing houses in the middle with a community centre in the centre.

    If you wanted to you could put a gate on the street entrance, or some sort of sign and decorations suggesting that it's not very interesting to go up that little street. Like, say, the service entrance to your community centre. The sort of place that garbage trucks back into to empty industrial sized rubbish bins, and delivery trucks do the reverse. The fact that you can also get onto the ring road and drive to the houses, or the little carpark... doesn't have to be obvious.

    1782:

    You can easily get the same effect in a flat city if you want to - there are gated communities around that do this. ... doesn't have to be obvious.

    That's rather the attraction for Pittsburgh. A private neighborhood can be created anywhere; there, they happen naturally. And as we all remember, the best place to hide a needle is not in a haystack but in a pile of needles.

    Here's an example I happened to stumble upon. Suppose you're in the Observatory Hill neighborhood driving to an athletic field; this looks promising - but the only one you can see is a soccer field. Quick, take that poorly marked turn that looks like someone's driveway! A few twists up the single paved lane gets you to a fork in the road, where you can either turn right to where there are houses visible or left into... someone's driveway maybe? Of course we turn left; this takes us into the bushes and then to some houses and a dead end maybe? No, wait, there's a sharp right and BEHOLD! Here is a field for American football!

    The point isn't that there's this one bizarre poorly paved path or that Pittsburgh has a well hidden football field. (It has at least two.) The point is that the city has all of this occurring naturally, so that deteriorating pavement, short sight lines, and absent signage are not signs that someone has hidden something but merely a sign that you're in Pittsburgh.

    Hobbes warned Calvin about Pittsburgh...

    1783:

    and that a small body of water like the Mississippi wouldn't even give them enough space to get up to full speed.

    Big ferries on the Big Muddy also have the issue of depth of the water as it slopes gradually up to the shore.

    1784:

    Totally.

    I was the odd non native who explored. Most of the support staff where I worked literally didn't go more than 4 or 5 miles from home except every 4 or 5 years. Maybe to go to a Pirates or Steeler's game. Not that they lived in gated communities. Far from it. They just didn't see the point.

    Of course those cobble stone streets at a 30+ degree slope in the rain or snow were, shall we say, fun? Especially when there are those switchbacks on the way up the hill.

    Let's see what I can remember. 3 main auto tunnels, 1 subway and a trolley tunnel, 2 inclines (funiculars), more bridges than anyone can count, (some good for pedestrians), one bridge only for trolleys (very pretty that one), and a road system where a navigator is a big help at times. Without the tunnels there would be a lot of almost "you can't get there from here" or at least "it's not worth going there".

    And one of the best Japanese restaurants ever in the little town of Turtle Creek, just over the hill from my house. The only people who seemed to speak any conversational English were the locally hired busboys.

    1785: 1778 - Or the Gourock - Dunoon service. This used up to 3 vessels capable of carrying 38 cars each, service at peak hours 1 sailing every 15 minutes on a 4.5 statute mile crossing.

    This is augmented/replaced by a separate route of 2.5 miles, operated by 4 vessels each capable of carrying 40 cars.

    Bottom line - I'd say the problem(s) with a replacement crossing are political will rather than civil engineering and/or marine architecture.

    1781 - Well I picked a random selection of ferries from your link, and would suggest one modification for our Mississippi service - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voith_Schneider_Propeller s rather than conventional screws. 1784 - Hence the original suggestion of chain ferries. My original cites involve routes with a daily tidal range of up to 3.1m (excluding river spate effects).
    1786:

    David L Of course those cobble stone streets at a 30+ degree slope in the rain or snow were, shall we say, fun? Sounds like Sheffield!

    1787:

    paws4thot @ 1776:

    #1772 How many of them do you suppose it will take to handle 40,000+ vehicles per day?

    Fewer than you think. Just because the Yousay has never done it doesn't mean there haven't been chain ferries that can take more than 2 cars. I can't be bothered with all the required copy pasta at 22:30 local, but web searching "Erskine Ferry" and "Renfrew Ferry" will find you evidence of chain ferries capable of handling 20 cars (say 80 lane metres). As to terminals, what's the rise of a Mississippi in spate?

    47.8 feet (14.6 m). The record is 48.7 feet (14.8 m). If the Mississippi is in flood, any ferries would be shut down. The concern with locating the terminals is not so they can continue to operate at flood stage, it's so the river doesn't wash completely over the ferry & terminal when it floods.

    I looked up "Erskine Ferry" and "Renfrew Ferry". The "Erskine Ferry" has been defunct since 1971. The "Renfrew Ferry" appears to be strictly a passenger ferry, although some of the photographic evidence suggests there might have been a "Renfrew Ferry" capable of carrying motor vehicles. It shows up as the "spare Renfrew ferry. Steam powered and relocated from Erskine"

    Looking at the photos I can find with a Google image search, I'm guessing the old "Erskine Ferry" would have had a vehicle bay 76ft(23m) long by 30ft(9m) wide [based on the size of 1971 Volvo or similar sized vehicle - loaded in 4 rows of 5 as shown in the photos]. That wouldn't even fit a single modern semi-truck (too long to close the gates).

    But we shouldn't limit ourselves to the size of a 19th century ferry that plied a river that passengers could have waded across before it was dredged to accommodate the ferry.

    The North Carolina DOT operates the second largest ferry system in the U.S. The Sound Class Ferries can carry 50 cars (or a lesser number of cars & trucks) up to about 250,000lb (~ 11,3398kg). The maximum gross weight for Semi-trucks in the U.S. is 80,000lb MAX vehicle weight (~36.287kg). Three fully loaded Semi-trailer trucks would max out the allowable weight on a Sound Class Ferry, leaving capacity for only two automobiles.

    Because of weight and balance, it's more likely they could carry only two loaded semi-trucks leaving room for 16 automobiles. 1

    The I-40 bridge at Memphis carried in excess of 41,000 vehicles per day, 30% Semi-trucks @ 80,000lb MAX vehicle weight (~36.287kg) giving a mix of 12,300 trucks & 28,700 automobiles every 24 hours

    So, if a chain ferry can handle 2 semi-trucks & 16 automobiles; takes 1/2 hour to load, 1/2 hour to cross and 1/2 hour to unload, that's a throughput of 4 semi-trucks & 32 automobiles (one trip each way) every 3 hours per ferry. In continuous operation 24 hours per day, each ferry could transport 32 semi-trucks and 256 automobiles.

    It would require a minimum of 385 Sound Class equivalent ferries operating 24/7x365.

    How many did YOU think it would take?

    1 In actual fact, the North Carolina ferries do not allow semi-trucks. The maximum length of vehicles allowed on the ferries is 40ft. That's enough to accommodate most school buses.

    1788:

    Robert Prior @ 1775:

    So no traffic on or under the bridge.

    Under shouldn't be a problem. Doesn't anyone remember Project Plowshare? Surely America has enough munitions to remove the bridge entirely, even if you have to convert a stretch of river into a lake :-)

    We're saving them for when we want to excavate a canal from Cheboygan, MI to Rochester, NY.

    1789:

    Scott Sanford @ 1777:

    ... most roads in Colonial America did not have bridges across rivers and if the river was too deep to easily ford, some family would probably set up a private ferry. Many newcomers to Raleigh (and Wake County) wonder about Avent Ferry Road.

    I wouldn't wonder a moment - but I'm also typing this (checks map) about two miles from Scholl's Ferry Road. Avent Ferry Road sounds self explanatory to me.

    Sort of ... There are several Avent Ferry roads around here and it's not clearly evident at first glance that they used to be one continuous road. Road realignments in the last 90 years don't really lead to where the ferry was actually located, so newcomers to Raleigh sometimes wonder.

    I was prompted to look it up by the other discussion of ferries. It's at least as useful as some of the suggestions being made about using ferries to replace the Mississippi River I-40 bridge.

    1790:

    Totally off-topic, but way past 300…

    Thought this article might be of interest to some of this crowd:

    Dimensions of pathological narcissism and intention to vote for Donald Trump

    Pathological narcissism is a term often applied to former President Donald Trump, but it has been less examined as a potential predictor of voting for him. Trump projects a grandiose and omnipotent self-image during press conferences and rallies, and his followers at these events often respond with both effusive admiration and an inflated sense of their own self-regard, all of which are aspects of narcissism. However, while Trump’s personal narcissism has been well documented, there is little research on the narcissism of his supporters. In this study we conducted an exploratory analysis examining the hierarchical structure of pathological narcissism and which aspects of narcissism within that structure were associated with intended voting for Trump in the 2020 U.S. presidential election in a sample of U.S. residents collected online (N = 495) using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Results indicated that an eight-echelon hierarchy best fit the data. Within this hierarchy, antagonistic and indifferent aspects of narcissism within the fifth echelon best predicted intended voting for Trump over and above relevant demographic variables. These results have implications for the study of narcissism and, especially given the results of the 2020 election, the degree to which one can make use of narcissistic aspects of personality in political contests.

    https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0249892

    TLDR: seems that possessing narcissistic traits is a predictor for being a Trump supporter. These folks apparently reacted positively to Trump's self-aggrandizing bombast.

    Does the author's math look reasonable? My stats are pretty wobbly and I'm halfway through proofreading anovel so brain is a bit mushy right now…

    1791:

    ... would suggest one modification for our Mississippi service - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voith_Schneider_Propeller s rather than conventional screws.

    What advantages does a VSP offer over an azimuth thruster? It seems to me that a Z-drive would be mechanically simpler and accomplish the same thing.

    1792:

    And one of the best Japanese restaurants ever in the little town of Turtle Creek, just over the hill from my house.

    I remember looking over Turtle Creek! I didn't spot any Japanese restaurants but that is where I found the other less-than-obvious football field. Or is the Wolvarena well known to locals?

    1793:

    What to use on a big ferry on the shallow Mississippi. Well, it's wider than the Suez Canal, but it's also considerably shallower at Memphis. So yeah...

    My first preference would be some sort of jet boat. The reason is that anything sticking out the bottom can get snagged, which is why paddleboats aren't entirely stupid for the Big Muddy. Then again, all that mud might be a problem for a water jet intake, since it probably needs some filtration to make sure it doesn't clog at the wrong moment.

    As for an azimuth swivel propeller versus a VS propeller, which one is more expensive to repair when it runs aground? They don't have much draft to work with (6 meters), so unless it's one of those boats with the propeller at the end of a long axle, where it's easy to lift the propeller out of the water to avoid logs and divers, I'm not sure either one has much advantage.

    Or maybe an azimuth-mounted air propellers, and turn the boat into the Airboat of the Apocalypse! I'm sure that would work, shallow draft and all. Just hand out lots and lots and lots of earplugs....

    1794:

    Actually, I just realized that there are at least two more solutions, one totally fanciful, one almost practical.

    The fanciful one is the 4WD Steamboat. That's right, 4 side-mounted paddlewheels, all able to operate independently of each other. No one has ever been stupid enough to even propose such a thing, so far as I can find, and that pretty much says everything you need to know about it. But theoretically you could make one into a truck ferry... And yes, it would be quicker, simpler, and probably cheaper to just repair the bridge.

    The semi-practical idea is to tie up the US Navy's 40 LCAC military hovercrafts ferrying trucks back and forth from bank to bank. That I'm quite sure would work. The only question is whether you want to tie up our military hovercrafts as civilian ferries or not. I'm quite sure that the local politicians would dearly love to use the presence of the hovercraft to engage in more extended bouts of competitive dominance displays than they're already planning. Normally, the LCACs are based at Camp Pendleton just north of me, where they can do things like evacuate Catalina Island in case of fire while shipping dozens of fire trucks over.

    1795:

    This bridge thing. Well duh, people, think outside the lines a little. We’re talking Murrica here. What do Murricans like? That’s right, guns and cars. Bigger and uglier the better. The connection must be obvious to anyone with a better than room temperature (in Celsius) IQ. Big gun. Car. Boom! Wheeeee! Other side.... you know it makes (no) sense.

    1796:

    Isn't that how The Dukes Of Hazzzard!! got around? And Evil Kineval?

    Although I recall reading that the average lifetime of a car in the Dukes shoots was one jump...

    1797:

    Even more off topic, but in speaking of Pittsburgh the NPR show On The Media had on May 14th an episode titled Ghosts of the Rust Belt, focusing on the obvious city. It's interesting, but depressing, to track how various individual short term decisions led from the steel mill era to the American health care industry era.

    1798:

    The fanciful one is the 4WD Steamboat. That's right, 4 side-mounted paddlewheels, all able to operate independently of each other. No one has ever been stupid enough to even propose such a thing, so far as I can find, and that pretty much says everything you need to know about it.

    You underestimate the American redneck. Monster trucks may not have spread to the UK, where people do different things when stupid and drunk, but follow along... I'm sure you've seen four wheel drive pickup trucks, some of which have lifted suspensions. Imagine lifting the body up so far one can replace the normal tires with big two-meter tractor tires. (This is impractical for any rational purpose but makes the truck tall and impresses other rednecks.) It was discovered that the big tires displace so much water that a truck can actually drive on water!

    Examples: Youtube video of morons with trucks and Trump flags Youtube video of different morons in different truck Florida Men go for drive in harbor

    Your guess that this would be ludicrously impractical is upheld by experiment.

    1799:

    Rbt Prior Trump projects a grandiose and omnipotent self-image during press conferences and rallies, and his followers at these events often respond with both effusive admiration and an inflated sense of their own self-regard, all of which are aspects of narcissism Like this do you mean? Um, err ... As in: These folks apparently reacted positively to Trump'sINSERT $NAMEhere self-aggrandizing bombast.

    Ferries on the "Big Muddy" - HOVERCRAFT - surely the obvious solution? - ah as "H" has already noted. Second the motion.

    1800:

    Driving on top of the water? Genius!

    If only Australians had thought of that.

    https://youtu.be/NJNVXLswK2s

    1801: 1788 - The Clyde was dredged to accommodate larger ocean going, riverine and coastal cargo and passenger vessels. I won't try and do a detailed "how large", but the RMS Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth and QE2 have all passed Erskine Ferry whilst it was still in operation, as have various Clydebank, Yoker and Renfrew built warships including battleships.

    This is why we then took the decision to build ferry crossings to replace the fords; to retain communications down-river of central Glasgow.

    As for quoting the size of the vessel, that illustrated what had been done, and 23m would be adequate length to accommodate UK (any European international vehicle in fact) general haulage trucks.

    I'm not sure where your 30 minutes loading time comes from, but it's more than is needed to load the Loch Seaforth (143 cars or trailers, 20 UK general haulage trucks, or more usually a mixture, and this isn't even a big ferry by our standards (only 376 deck meters; big is more like 4_200)). NB - Reference to a current or historic vessel is to show that this is possible, because it has been done.

    1792 - VS drives allow ferries to run up onto slipways, effectively beaching themselves for loading and unloading; I'm not sure we could even think about doing this using azipods. 1794 - Well, there are a few British ferries in classes that normally use VS drives which have been fitted with hydrojets instead to reduce draft (for instance MV Loch Bhrusda and MV Loch Portain). 1795 - Well, the big issue with the 4WD paddleboat is probably that VS drives, azipods or modern hydrojets are all more efficient at converting shaft hp (engine) into knots ahead, astern, and at least in the case of the VS drive, abeam. 1801 - Or Icelanders. Oh, wait they do this with snow machines!
    1802:

    I wouldn't go so far as to call it self-aggrandising bombast, but it's clearly a winning hand in a game of buzzword bingo, and I can see a good many potentially serious statistical flaws in the methodology. It's probably correct, as far as it goes, but I doubt that it indicates much about causation.

    1803:

    Thanks for the feedback.

    Are the flaws a matter of 'correlation is not causation', or something else?

    Thinking I need to brush up on my stats, and this seems as good a place as any to start…

    1804:

    Imagine lifting the body up so far one can replace the normal tires with big two-meter tractor tires. (This is impractical for any rational purpose but makes the truck tall and impresses other rednecks.)

    Well there is some kind of sport for those kinds of trucks. Basically for people's who's bank accounts are inversely proportional to their of common sense. Dig out a deep wide trench. Fill it a few feet deep with a water mud slurry. See who can get from one end to the other the fastest.

    1805:

    I remember looking over Turtle Creek! I didn't spot any Japanese restaurants but that is where I found the other less-than-obvious football field. Or is the Wolvarena well known to locals?

    Per Google it doesn't seem to exist anymore. I likely last ate there around 84/85?

    It was off of HW 130. I lived on Lenox Ave between HW 30 and Greensburg Pike. (Bottom of valley and top of ridge.)

    For those who don't know, Pittsburgh and the area around it makes San Francisco feel flat. And there are a LOT of separate towns. Within a mile or so of my town of Forest Hills there was Turtle Creek, Rankin, Braddock, North Braddock, East Pittsburgh, Braddock Hills, Wilkins, Churchill, and Swissvale. All with boundaries setup when most people walked everywhere.

    The lack of flat is why things that required flat space (schools, sports fields) tended to be stuck in all kinds of odd places. Where ever you could make it work without teraforming the entire area.

    1806:

    FYI. I'm not a ferry designer or a civil engineer.

    Now that that is out of the way, I've seen lots of bridges and ferries and been across a lot of them all over the US. The Mississippi is just different. Ferries need queuing space. If you look at the bridges on the lower Mississippi most bridge approaches have very long elevated roads on one or both side. That's so when the river is way up (every 10 years or so) the roads are still above water. Many are on levees. This is how the Arkansas side is now.

    This means the river goes from 1000' to 3000' feet wide to, oh, say 10 miles wide if the levees allow it. And the transport system expects to keep working when this happens.

    I've driven up I55 in Missouri where there was river water on both sides of the road. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Paducah,+KY/@37.1496403,-89.6847958,10.2z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x887a1060d12f85c3:0x1dc24c50850cb925!8m2!3d37.0833893!4d-88.6000478

    And if you want to see an interesting levee road zoom in on the bridges from Kentucky to Illinois to Missouri on that map view. The road on Kentucky side is a long drive along a very tall levee. Don't get a flat.

    Oh, yeah, those traffic numbers are averages per day. The peaks are pretty big. I've driven over this bridge on a Monday around 7pm or 8pm and there was only a handful of cars. Rush hour twice a day plus the waves of trucks leaving the Fed Ex hub likely make for some huge peaks. Which are all now filling that bridge a bit south. Without work from home I suspect Memphis would be totally screwed just now.

    1807:

    A lot more. It's unclear what the sample was representative of, for a start (one thing I looked for). The analysis is a modern very fancy one (I am VERY out of date on such things), but many of those are very prone to creating bogus results and assigning a high degree of reliability to them. I wasn't impressed by its acceptance of respondents that completed over 10% of the questions, given that the answers were being used for validity checking; that sort of thing can interact with fancy analyses in horrible ways, too. It rang enough alarm bells that I gave up on it and didn't check further.

    1809:

    "Monster trucks may not have spread to the UK"

    Oh, we were onto the idea before motor vehicles were around, never mind monster trucks. A local chap in the 1880s had a tricycle with penny-farthing-front-wheel-sized wheels, which he fitted with big fat inflated sausages made of what looks like it's probably rubberised canvas in place of ordinary tyres, and flat paddle boards attached to them sticking out the side. He then trundled this thing up and down the river. Unfortunately none of the local history websites seem to have noticed him, so he is on my list of things to check out in the local newspaper archives in a hypothetical post-epidemic world where you can once more do such things without having to fuck about.

    Similarly (@ timrowledge #1796) the UK has already been there when it comes to launching cars using big guns (albeit compressed nitrogen ones instead of the explosive sort). We have shown that you can thus launch one off the deck of an aircraft carrier and make it fly over the water, although we didn't bother with the catching at the other end bit, just let it sink instead. (Jeremy bloody Clarkson, of course.)

    Perhaps one could use an upscaled version of my idea for a pedestrian transporter apparatus to link Bedford railway station with the bus station. At either end you have a station comprising a sender apparatus and a receiver apparatus. The sender apparatus is a device partaking somewhat of the principle of the trebuchet and operates as you would expect. The receiver apparatus is a broadly similar device only working in reverse, thus providing a soft landing and also recovering the greater part of the original launch energy to wind up the sender for the next shot. This minimises the energy consumption and makes it green. (Of course this does mean that both incoming and outgoing energy flows come in short bursts, so in practice you'd have not just one station at either end, but a bank of them operating in parallel and a single big flywheel as a common energy store.)

    1810:

    "How many did YOU think it would take?"

    Well, the Torpoint ferry handles (per above) 10k vehicles per day, over about a tenth of the distance, using (IIRC) two ships at a time with a third one kept spare in case one of the others needs a rest. So a simple calculation on the basis of straightforward duplication of the ship design comes out at 120 ships (80 in use and 40 spare).

    Of course, you would not really just duplicate the Torpoint ship design. You couldn't, anyway, because it won't handle trucks bigger than 18-tonners. Fortunately, none of the reasons why the Torpoint ships are no bigger than they are apply in the Mississippi case. You've got loads of space to have ruddy great big ones, and they don't need to be all that big really. Capacity of a ferry with a single flat load deck goes as area, and the Torpoint ferry is quite a dinky little thing; building one three and a bit times larger in linear dimensions would not be silly, it gives you 10 times the capacity, and the simple calculation then works out at only 12 ships, which doesn't look too ridiculous at all.

    The tidal range at Plymouth is 5-6m, so allowing for a rise of 15m means you only need ramps three times longer than the Torpoint ones, which again there's buckets of room for.

    Also, you can install it bit by bit. You don't have to wait until the whole thing is complete before you can take any load off the alternative routes; you can start making at least a bit of difference as soon as you get the first ship finished.

    Being realistic, though, I do think the most sensible thing to do is to go balls out on building a replacement pair of spans, not least because after a bit more poking around for decent photos of the break I think the existing ones are fucked so there's no point trying to put it off. The girder appears to be a composite structure and the crack may well have been started by corrosion working its way down between two of the elements, from the upper corner of the girder where there is flaking paint and expanding rust all the way along. There was even one photo which suggested, although it wasn't very clear, that the concentration of stress from the existing break passing all the tension through the narrow ribbon of remaining metal is causing another crack to run in from the stressed edge a little way along; there seemed to be a kind of forked streak which looked like the sort of mucky mark you get around the underside of a crack which is retaining rainwater.

    There is also enough rust on the fracture surface to make me think that if they really did fail to see anything wrong when they inspected the bridge last September they must have been inspecting it with their eyes shut. I get the impression that the inspection procedure has been based on the principle that if you can see it's still there it must be OK, and the statements on its current condition are being made by people whose principal concern is that their past negligence should not come to light.

    "We're saving them for when we want to excavate a canal from Cheboygan, MI to Rochester, NY."

    I don't get the reference. It looks like all you have to do is blow up the Niagara area, but is it supposed to imply any more than that?

    1811:

    "You can easily get the same effect in a flat city if you want to - there are gated communities around that do this."

    You can get an effect with the same logical consequences, but its narrative utility is very different. In the one case your story is affected naturally by taking place somewhere with nuttily undulating topography with trees on, in the other it's affected artificially by being located in a flat and barren plain dotted with prison compounds. You could even have both and make the story work around the similarities and the differences between the two situations.

    1812:

    We're saving them for when we want to excavate a canal from Cheboygan, MI to Rochester, NY."

    I don't get the reference. It looks like all you have to do is blow up the Niagara area, but is it supposed to imply any more than that?

    Worth looking at Google Maps. Cheboygan Michigan is at the junction of Lakes Superior, Michigan, and Huron, while Niagara Falls is between Lake Erie and Ontario about 500 kilometers away in a straight line. A canal would have to go across Lake Huron, which is daft, as well as across the Ontario Peninsula and through Toronto. Using nukes to do the excavation on a civilized ally. Not exactly a friendly thing, and I shudder to think of what hideous and well-deserved revenge the Canadians would take on the US.

    Personally, I think that, after the apocalypse, the Ontario Peninsula will be the last center of civilization in the US. So I hope it doesn't get bombed for any reason.

    1813:

    There is also enough rust on the fracture surface to make me think that if they really did fail to see anything wrong when they inspected the bridge last September they must have been inspecting it with their eyes shut.

    Or filling out the paperwork while sipping a beer.

    Photos and a drone video have been found showing the crack back to 2019. Two inspection cycles ago. (How is anything not in a photo on a phone somewhere anymore?)

    Inspection foreman has been fired for obviously failing to follow procedure which on that bit of the bridge was supposed to be checked inch by inch. I suspect someone will have charges filed soon.

    Someone who did an analysis and worked on vibration monitoring on that bridge a few years ago basically said while the easy answer is to bolt/weld some plates around the break, that will transfer stress to other parts of the bridge/beam. And might lead to rapid failure somewhere else. So there is likely a month or few of some serious stress analysis going to be done before any repairs are started. This guy didn't like the design of the bridge anyway. Apparently it would not be built that way today without a truss system under the roadway.

    1814:

    Robert Prior @ 1791: Totally off-topic, but way past 300…

    Dimensions of pathological narcissism and intention to vote for Donald Trump

    Pathological narcissism is a term often applied to former President Donald Trump, but it has been less examined as a potential predictor of voting for him. [ ... ]

    https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0249892

    TLDR: seems that possessing narcissistic traits is a predictor for being a Trump supporter. These folks apparently reacted positively to Trump's self-aggrandizing bombast.

    Does the author's math look reasonable? My stats are pretty wobbly and I'm halfway through proofreading anovel so brain is a bit mushy right now…

    PLOS stands for Public Library of Science and they have a Wikipedia entry.

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

    It appears to be founded on the whole "Creative Commons" ethic; open access to information. It seems to reflect a Jeffersonian ideal that an informed public is the bulwark of democracy; the idea behind the First Amendment. Putting the free in Free Press.

    I took an introductory statistics course back in college in the early, early 1970s. I got a 'C'. So my math is probably more wobbly than yours, but of the bits I recognized, none of them screamed BOGUS at me.

    OTOH, I do have some real world experience living with (and surviving) a pathological, narcissistic sociopath ... my ex-wife.

    I've noticed many of the same traits I remember her exhibiting - particularly the self aggrandizement, pathological lying and stone-cold lack of empathy - that she exhibited. I have studiously avoided any possible contact with her since her departure (in self defense), but I would not be at all surprised to learn she was in the thick of QAnon & MAGA insanity.

    1815:

    For those who don't know, Pittsburgh and the area around it makes San Francisco feel flat. ... The lack of flat is why things that required flat space (schools, sports fields) tended to be stuck in all kinds of odd places.

    One of Wen Spencer's books has a scene where characters play horseshoes on "a patch of land too steep to build on." After seeing where Pittsburghers will build, this leaves me imagining them on a forested cliff face...

    And just now your Lenox Avenue cite led me to discover the existence of the Braddock Hills Shopping Center - which looks normal aside from being up a hill accessible only by a single road through the trees. I assume everyone in the area eventually travels eastbound on Yost, because it's hard to spot any other way. And it took me a while to spot that the mall also included an elementary and high school!

    1816:

    Scott Sanford @ 1792:

    ... would suggest one modification for our Mississippi service - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voith_Schneider_Propeller s rather than conventional screws.

    What advantages does a VSP offer over an azimuth thruster? It seems to me that a Z-drive would be mechanically simpler and accomplish the same thing.

    Just looking at the illustrations, the Voith Schneider doohickey would probably work in shallower water. The Mississippi River is fairly shallow.

    For shallow waters, some kind of pump-jet thruster would probably work better than either one of them.

    1817:

    PS: MY self defense in avoiding her.

    1818:

    Just repair the fuckin' bridge.

    1819:

    I will add that the energy cost of replacing the Memphis I-40 bridge with ferries would dwarf the energy wasted on Bitcoin mining.

    1820:

    I did look at a map. It made it clear that constructing a waterway between those two points - assuming an actual need for one, due to existing ones becoming inadequate - requires an atypically small amount of blowing stuff up, because the principle of excavating bloody big holes and filling them with water has already been executed by nature on so large a scale that it dwarfs what could be done artificially even using the entire US nuclear arsenal. Apart from one little awkward bit where a river falls off a cliff there's nothing left to do.

    There are of course any number of possible routes to postulate which don't go near any notable existing water and require you to excavate the entire distance, through heavily populated regions to boot. Given such an abundance of far worse possibilities, the route suggested is an inexplicably poor choice as an example of undesirable applications of nuclear explosives. But the clear and precise identification of the two end points does have some flavour of a reference to some project from humorous fiction or conspiracy theory that I am not aware of.

    1821:

    Not exactly a friendly thing, and I shudder to think of what hideous and well-deserved revenge the Canadians would take on the US.

    We have matches. Be warned. ;-)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aue-zWxYtEc

    1822:

    I am indeed familiar with demise of The Original Stig by catapult launch

    1823:

    xBraddock Hills Shopping Center - which looks normal aside from being up a hill accessible only by a single road through the trees. I assume everyone in the area eventually travels eastbound on Yost,

    Schools weren't there when I was. I worked near the bottom of Yost near HW 30. We would go to a pizza beer joint in that shopping center some Friday's after works.

    Yost was plenty wide for two way traffic. It was one of those cobblestone streets I mentioned. Fun in the snow. Over the hill Braddock was in serious decline. Car stolen twice was abandoned there. There's a documentary about the town and the mayor. He's now the Lt. Gov of the state. And not a typical pol in any way shape or form. I visited the area a few years ago. Braddock would make a good movie set for a zombie movie. Multiple buildings literally overgrown with vines.

    1824:

    To clarify, in case you misinterpreted, I did NOT say that anything in that paper stood out as bogus. What I said is that is that excessively (and generally unnecessarily) over-complicated analyses like that are PRONE to creating bogus results. I have seen a case (in Nature, no less!) where it claimed 95% support (whatever that means) for both X and Y, where X and Y were effectively negations of each other. This was made worse by the other factors I mentioned.

    You can add that to the problem that personality questionnaires are notoriously unreliable, not lead because respondents often adopt a 'persona'; obviously, internal consistency checking will not pick those up. I have no idea what '84T' measures, but excluding a large proportion of the sample because you don't like the answers is, at best, statistically dubious - and, in this case, might indicate something about the reliability of the REST of the data.

    Checking how many of those concerns are probably causes of error would need a lot of research, and careful analysis of the data. That's why I said 'alarm bells', not that it was nonsense.

    1825:

    I was delighted by your third link. That was a lot of weird ingenuity.

    1826:

    “Just repair the fuckin' bridge.” Wait, there are fucking bridges? I didn’t even find those in California when I lived there.

    1827:

    I've seen used condoms (as well as needles) on the lookout platforms of Lions Gate Bridge in Vancouver. Easier to image them used and discarded in situ than someone bringing them there and discarding them…

    1828:

    Heteromeles @ 1813:

    We're saving them for when we want to excavate a canal from Cheboygan, MI to Rochester, NY."

    I don't get the reference. It looks like all you have to do is blow up the Niagara area, but is it supposed to imply any more than that?

    At 1775, Robert Prior makes an oblique reference to nuking Memphis under the guise of removing the I-40 bridge à la Project Plowshare?

    I vaguely recollect monsewer Prior resides in Canada. I merely suggested (with the same seriousness of intent as his original proposal) an alternative use of the Plow along the straight line connecting those two cities. Tit for tat. "Measure distance" between the two cities on Google Maps to see where that straight line traverses.

    Should it turn out I am mistaken about where "M RP" lives, I will withdraw the suggestion and we can instead nuke wheresoever it is he does live.

    1829:

    At 1775, Robert Prior makes an oblique reference to nuking Memphis under the guise of removing the I-40 bridge à la Project Plowshare?

    Think of it as an urban renewal project :-)

    You could even get bipartisan support! Democrats could be swayed with infrastructure and renewal funding for the newly-expanded shoreline, while Republicans would be satisfied because they could honestly tell their supporters they voted to nuke a Democratic-leaning area.

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    This page contains a single entry by Charlie Stross published on April 10, 2021 12:42 PM.

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