peter w

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• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  I recall eavesdropping on an oldish gentleman in Maun, Botswana, describing a near miss. He was driving on a back road, turned a tight corner and slammed on the brakes, just missing the very young elephant calf in the middle...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  The same architect (not even the same company, literally the same guy). Apparently 'learning from your mistakes' is no longer a thing. On the plus side at least there aren't two of them....
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  They spoke Old Norse. Basically Icelandic....
• Commented on Same bullshit, new tin
  A dental benchtop autoclave will run at about an hour and hold equipment from two to three cases. Full scale medical autoclaves might hold 6-12 surgical sets depending on size and will take c55 minutes (at 135C in the UK)...
• Commented on Same bullshit, new tin
  Current hospital autoclaves have a door which only closes when the door button is continuously held down. For service engineers there is a safety override which locks the door open with a single key- anyone working inside locks the door,...
• Commented on The coming storm
  In the context of "England and Wales", it's worth noting that the church of Wales was formally disestablished in the C19th. Lloyd George's nationalist Liberals extracted a few concessions from the mainstream Liberal government in exchange for their support and...
• Commented on The coming storm
  The ocean salts are fairly chemically homogenous (concentration varies a lot composition not so much) so no problem transferring salt, for example to keep the AMOC running, (Kim Stanley Robinson does this somewhere I think). Any 'wrong' microbes or phytoplankton...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Season of Skulls
  Re: gradual sea level rise v sporadic flooding as a source of flood myths, surely its obvious that one gives rise to the other depending on local topography. As the sea rises gradually it reaches the point at which it...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  I think crabs are it, the tree octopus needing high humidity and an absence of its specialised predator to really thrive. Maybe an echinoderm (heavy duty climbing starfish, tree urchin? ). My favourite possibility would be mangrove crabs, which reverse...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  Sea plants for fibre: I think sea grasses are about it, possibly drifting coconut husks ( Unless your chosen organism can climb out to gather) .Algae tend not to have easily extractible fibres in the same way vascular plants do....
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  Re:Narnia, wonder how far back the laundry was aware of its existence? I remember Turing's slightly odd obsession with the queen from snow white-might be interesting to put him in a room with Jadis and see what happens. Also occurs...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  If you had read Kim Newman's "Bloody Red Baron" you would know that Bigglesworth was flying occult missions for the secret state back when he was piloting Camels in the RFC. Wrong universe, but still......
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  "Hans, are we the baddies?"...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  Hmm. Seems wildly unethical for an animal like a cephalopod. I dont think that would be permitted in the EU. I'm frankly surprised a review board signed off on it....
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  sadly, that approach got used a lot in Africa in the 70's and 80's. The consequences were not happy ones, to put it mildly....
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  in the UK, specifically Scotland, most of the kit will go to a Central Decontamination Unit either attached to a hospital, run by the NHS as a specialist entity, or operated by a private sector provider. Over the last couple...