Zane

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• Commented on London Bridge
  I am not, particularly, a monarchist, but I do think a constitutional monarchy is one useful way (but not the only, but other good examples are few) of a nation state separating a large chunk of the propensity of the...
• Commented on Books I will not write: BIGGLES!!
  You get most of the stuff you want an asteroid to provide for you (Hawai'i's rocks are iron-rich) Um, not really. Basalts are rather ferromagnesian, yes, but they're ferromagnesian silicates, which makes it rather a bastard to get the metals...
• Commented on Bad news day
  Tomas: Wasn't the chicxulub crater so paleontologically significant because of the geology where the area it hit was? Don't remember the specifics but I think on here, you or someone else said that the cretacious-paleogene mass extinction happened due...
• Commented on An update on the revolutionary experiment
  By motorway junction standards, it's a puny bridge - 2 lanes, 104m long - but it goes over a 70m gorge with complex and hostile geology (quickclay, which I understand is bad, but I don't understand why) Quick clays...
• Commented on Fossil fuels are dead (and here's why)
  However, unlike fracking, it doesn't involve toxic chemicals, just water. As Pigeon and Dave point out, it's not just water. Also, we use fracking to open up a geothermal reserve to exploitation in almost exactly the same way we use...
• Commented on Fossil fuels are dead (and here's why)
  As I recall it, one of the problems they have in Iceland with Geothermal is that the control valves become plated with electrum (silver/gold alloy). Not quite, but close. Doing geothermal power from active hydrothermal systems generally means you're not...
• Commented on Fossil fuels are dead (and here's why)
  Generally, I'd say it's probably more cost effective to just print multiple copies of the salient wiki or britannica [insert useful encyclopaedia/lifeboat document of choice here] articles on stabilised archival paper or vellum, and stash them in cold, dry cave...
• Commented on Fossil fuels are dead (and here's why)
  Now about that PETM carbon budget: where is the carbon that was moving around in the PETM and isn't around now? You're claiming there's around 4 peta-tonnes missing from the current surface carbon pools, and that sounds kind of weird....
• Commented on Fossil fuels are dead (and here's why)
  IMHO it will be a true miracle if we scrape through with merely Eemian. Heck, it will be miraculous if we scrape through with merely late Miocene. Geologically, mass extinction events are defined as loss of coral reefs from the...
• Commented on Fossil fuels are dead (and here's why)
  Generators can last a very long time - I remember visiting our oldest large hydro station here in NZ in the eighties - it was built in 1911, and commissioned in 1914, and then was still operating on the original...
• Commented on Fossil fuels are dead (and here's why)
  Baja California. It made a few people swallow their rusk - I remember our petroleum crew discussing it back when I was an undergrad. Basically, you need the pressure, the temperature, and the precursor materials, and you can cheat one...
• Commented on Fossil fuels are dead (and here's why)
  As for 30 million? My understanding was that it was more like 50-60 million, based on the youngest age of the North Sea oils. It varies - Some of the South China sea fields are pumping oil from source rocks...
• Commented on Fossil fuels are dead (and here's why)
  That's the lovely thing about the black sea - it's already got the methanotrophic stuff down there forming reefs and mats to eat the methane and fix it, and it seems effective at buffering new inputs, and the anoxic environment...
• Commented on Fossil fuels are dead (and here's why)
  The Med is too big to engineer, I think. But the black sea is already stratified, and already a carbon sink (Much as I don't want to bury carbon sludge over the bronze age shipwrecks down there with all their...
• Commented on Fossil fuels are dead (and here's why)
  I wonder if you could take the trees when they grew to a certain size, cut them down, cut them up and stuff them into the bottom of closed down coal mines We've done this before, at least twice for...
• Commented on Fossil fuels are dead (and here's why)
  Or did you just type 'equivalents of' where you meant 'punchers of?' Because that one happened in 2020, yeah... Nope, I meant things like this: Down here in Oceania, our hippies have been going of the deep end and going...
• Commented on Fossil fuels are dead (and here's why)
  Gah. 444: throw, not through....
• Commented on Fossil fuels are dead (and here's why)
  Given the rapidity over the course of the pandemic with which various populations of crystal nutters and whole food hippies have radicalised into crunchy-granola equivalents of neonazis, I am awaiting, to borrow a phrase from S.E. Mulholland (used in discussion...
• Commented on On inappropriate reactions to COVID19
  There are some stickers with anti vax propaganda appearing on lamp posts round where I live. (e.g "Imagine a disease so lethal you need a test to know you've got it"). They advertise some website called White Rose. We're getting...
• Commented on Books I Will Not Write #8: The Year of the Conspiracy
  Regarding old houses onto which you're either prevented, by price or regulation, from retrofitting double/triple glazing - How much gap is there in the window closure, because you may be able to do the quick and nasty fix that I've...
• Commented on Books I Will Not Write #8: The Year of the Conspiracy
  Re bicycle troops: They're a cheaper version of Mounted Infantry where you don't have to feed and water the horse, and like mounted infantry (except at Beersheba, just because), nobody's expecting them to go into combat mounted - barring ambush...
• Commented on "It'll all be over by Christmas" (Part 2)
  I'm assuming 20 miles/day for someone walking a string of packhorses, mostly through mountainous or semi-mountainous terrain. Yeah, I'd revise that down. I've spent a lot of time on foot, or on horseback, in the Patagonian Andes, doing 300...
• Commented on Roll the dice
  Mars: The big problem I can see for any colonisation, aside from distance, atmosphere, radiation and power, is that pretty much the whole regolith has ubiquitous perchlorates, at 0.5% to 1%. That's a big 'this whole planet is toxic to...
• Commented on I ain't dead
  You don't need a million tonnes, in a built up area, a few thousand kilos aerosolised would be plenty unpleasant for anyone in the way of the smoke plume. The main problem is the way it hoons through your nervous...
• Commented on I ain't dead
  Well, it's not like Texas where the zoning regulations allowed the building of a high school right next to an never-inspected ammonia fertiliser plant. Um, I've worked with HF, the stuff is absolutely terrifying as a direct contact poison and...
• Commented on I ain't dead
  Yeah, the ongoing surface storage of massive amounts of UF6 in large yards gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies, because many of the yards are within smoke plume distance (or even just in) densely populated areas, and if you were to...
• Commented on "It'll all be over by Christmas"
  but not under unreasonable conditions (as occurred when the Fukushima Daiichi complex took a nearly Mag 9 quake followed by a 9 metre tsunami, both of which exceeded the design requirements). Um, no, they fiddled the geotechnical investigation to ignore...
• Commented on Yet another novel I will no longer write
  It's funny, reading posts like this, after spending most of the past 20 years preferentially seeking out only linen, hemp, ramie and wool for clothing, because it's phenomenally more comfortable for me to wear than cotton and artificial fibres. I've...
• Commented on Yet another novel I will no longer write
  Greg: Yeah, we used to have a large industry processing phormium tenax/harakeke for fibre and canvas, back in the day when Royal Navy consumed immense tonnages of those commodities, as well as most of our old growth Kauri for masts....
• Commented on Yet another novel I will no longer write
  We've got them burning towers in NZ now - someone tried an arson attack on one of the main transmission towers in my region. They succeeded in munting the local free to air TV, and the local shortwave emergency radio...