Pigeon

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• Commented on Pushing it back
  Buggre All This for a Larke......
• Commented on Pushing it back
  "It's not clear what you mean by "neutral hypothesis"" He means one that doesn't risk getting into palaeoracism, or providing material that can be twisted to support modern racism....
• Commented on Pushing it back
  No! I mentioned not finding printing press output. Didn't say anything about the presses themselves....
• Commented on Pushing it back
  "Even though the iron rusted away the pattern the iron was formed into remains. You don't find the knife, you find a knife shaped pattern of rust. You just gotta' know enough to look." Exactly. Even though the rust itself...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  The presses themselves, sure, they would make excellent relics, just as you say. But the output of them - paper with marks on it - not so much. You might find chicken bones where matey lost his packed lunch dropping...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  "A civilization forced to work with just stone and wood, vegetative and animal fibers, due to inherent lack of metals in its planetary crust." I always find these horribly unconvincing. Where are all the metals? There's shitloads of aluminium and...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  Of particular interest from a British (or Belgian) viewpoint is that the London Clay deposit is that age, ish (bit older, but never mind). And it preserves all sorts of things, rather well; you get a lot of fossils which...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  Oh, but it did. PHK was talking about the resistance to biodegradation of PVC, which is a covalently-bonded chlorine compound. Your attempted refutation was to cite the large amount of ionic chlorine in organic seawater. What we are trying to...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  It looks a bit to me as if it is having abnormal difficulty maintaining altitude; I would have tried to pick it up and see what kind of health it was in....
• Commented on Pushing it back
  "Birds would have more trouble, as it's a task made much easier by having multiple manipulators; they tend to top out at one beak and one grasping foot." They don't care. http://www.duskyswondersite.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/bird-Weaver-bird-building-nest.jpg (Also, from the same Bing search, I discover:...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  Where is all this radon coming from? I thought Denmark was about as sedimentary and unmineralised as you got. Is there a lost civilisation's uranium refinery underneath all those kilometres of ancient mud?...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  Cultures that like shiny things ought to leave traces that last a very long time. Gold remains uncombined over geological time, so it's easy to see it if there's any about just by looking, no chemistry required. Hence humans have...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  Ah, you need to read some more Neal Stephenson :) Ionic chlorine is as you describe, but organochlorine compounds - where chlorine is covalently bonded to carbon atoms - are often a bit too interesting for complex biochemical systems. The...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  "I can agree that concrete should last longer if we can find other materials to reinforce it with that aren't so subject to rust." Reinforcement of concrete by steel isn't solely a matter of mechanical interlocking, although that is some...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  Perhaps the word we are looking for is "squegging"? :)...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  Apparently they have found it now: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66850422...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  That "(because they would)" category contains other possibilities also. Never mind mobile phones; "British tabloid press hacking the minds of murdered children" is another application awaiting only the technology. It seems to be an accepted convention for everyone's Cthulhu to...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  "I went to a small high school, only 800 students. I didn't want to be friends with everyone, but I would have been happier if I hadn't been teased and bullied for not understanding subtext." I got teased and bullied...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  I'm just the same with that one. If I don't manage to emit the set response before I have time to think, I get hung up on the point that the question does actually mean something, and also on the...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  I'm not sure that "sacrificing oneself to save someone else" need necessarily conflict with your self-imposed guidelines. It's usually an act of high courage, and most fictional depictions of it I've read naturally tackle it in a manner that seems...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  "Back then, I wanted the superpower that most people had of being able to 'read the room' and understand other people, notice hints, read between the lines, etc. Being on the outside looking in wasn't much fun." I am getting...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  "Arrhenius back in the late 19th century showed how CO2 in the atmosphere trapped solar heat energy, it was not secret knowledge" Effectively, it was, though. It's a common assertion that since Arrhenius got that result in the 19th century,...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  I think we're talking about the same thing, but in different degrees of manifestation. There were several previous iterations of my post which I deleted before posting, because the attempt to talk about it on the personal scale (as you...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  The difference is between altering your views as a result of gaining knowledge which makes the alteration appropriate, and altering them because someone's fucked your head up whether it's appropriate or not. I don't think either of your two examples...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  I thought it was something to do with ants in the drains leading to the river Inn... Yes, that is exactly what I was wondering too. And which of the numerous competing archetypes would be dominant?...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  I don't know if you're unusual, but your point of view is certainly pretty much the opposite of mine. I have a violent aversion to anything of the kind, and I find one of the most disturbing thing about the...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  "nomography" One of our Gs is missing......
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  It does strike me that "Relativistic Nude Bikers In Riemann Space" would be quite a good band name. They could have track titles like "The Light Was Green, Officer", "Gravity Well Wall of Death Ride", and "No Simultaneity" (which has...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  "At that, I didn't have it as bad as a friend of mine. His wife didn't bother with whether there was actually any money in the account before SHE wrote checks. Caused HIM no end of trouble." There are Victorian...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  I'm pretty sure it's the same coalfield. The Atlantic happened and you got the other half of it :)...