Poul-Henning Kamp

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• Commented on Pushing it back
  »But is that what Denmark and England might expect from global warming?« Pretty much. Air holds supralinearly more water vapour as temperature rises and for many biological processes it is the absolute (as in g/m³) rather than relative (%RH) humidity...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  »This is one of the reasons I built a timber-frame house« Did you study climate model outputs for your local geography first ? "Hot(er)&Humid(er)" is not at good outlook for wood as a construction material, and one really needs to...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  »Er, chlorine makes up much of your body and is utterly necessary for your life to continue, in common with all other living things.« Absolutely, and that is precisely why nothing wants to have 30% of it in their diet,...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  »Radon vented above roof level? Presumably thats actively pumped then because radon is much denser than air. Is that right?« No, it is just a passive pressure equalization thing: Wind blowing past the hood on the roof creates enough under-pressure...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  The radon production per cubic meter depends only on the number of uranium atoms, a glacier grinding a rock to gravel or clay sized particles will not change that. In terms of radon per square meter clay is often worse...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  »over a 1-100MY period the microplastics will mostly vanish from the fossil record« PVC is about 30% Chlorine by weight, and so far nobody has shown the least inclined to eat that. It cannot entirely be ruled out that it...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  »people thinking of making recycleable buildings« We had a sharp focus on sustainability when we built our house, and because I ran a blog on the danish engineering associations newspaper, I was able to get in touch with a lot...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  »The material problem, as I understand it, is that cement and concrete require "sharp" sand« Theoretically speaking, "concrete" is high compression strength particles held in contact with some kind of glue, and portland cement + geology is just one kind...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  »We use steel for rebar because it's fairly inexpensive. But, I think there are other materials that wouldn't be subject to rusting away like steel does that might make better reinforcement. « There are a lot fewer than you imagine....
• Commented on Pushing it back
  »What made "everybody" think that such kitchen middens were impossible?« All branches of science teach certain dogma, "neutrinos have no mass", "We are never going to find any food from the stone age", "Fish feels no pain" and so on....
• Commented on Pushing it back
  »They aren't going to weather away any time soon.« 100ky isn't "soon" for limestone, very few chissel marks would be left by then....
• Commented on Pushing it back
  »Can't see why coastal kitchen middens should be rare in Denmark« Nobody have said they are. I said they were "unexpected", because in 1848, when the first one was found, everybody would have told you that it would be physically...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  One of the unexpected finds from stone age settlements in Denmark were "kitchen middens" which were essentially huge piles of oyster shells, but a 100% vegetarian culture or one far from the coast would leave nothing like that. Another thing...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  »Making vacuum tube electronics is one thing, but making them with million year MTBFs is...challenging. « I would say that it is physically impossible. The closest we have come are probably the "6P12" vacuum tubes designed for the first transatlantic...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  »Okay, here's the math.« I wouldn't trust any our our cosmology to apply to the Laundryverse, and least of our measurements on this universe and rickety theorizing that follows about how the universe was packed in it's original shipping carton....
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  »So I should probably re-read as much Penrose as my brain can handle« In the Laundryverse it is surely not accidental that the famous aperiodic "Penrose" tiling has a five-fold rotational symmetry....
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  »CASE NIGHTMARE-class civilizations with billions of human-class minds aren't grass. They're much rarer, both in earth's history (parallel earths) and out in Fermi Paradox land« Sorry, does not follow: The Elder Gods is sufficient to explain away the postulated "Fermi...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  »Any other options? (Exorcism not being feasible.)« Is Pete convinced about that ?...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  All things I cannot imagine that the person Angelton were before Teapot happened to him, would not try to leave a helpful note to his eventual successor in the job. I would look in places like the mandatory "Annual Civil...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  »Would have been just as effective if Putin had his minions act while Prigozhin was in Africa or after he returned to Belarus.« There's one aspect here which I'm not sure how works: Prigozhin was a member of the same...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  According to my prof in such matters, many years ago: The absolute worst case would have been a glancing blow across one of the poles: That would have removed a LOT of water from the biosphere and directly and indirectly...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  »Half-agree: "the West" fucked-up after the CCCP's implosion, no doubt about it« May I cordially remind you that at the time, CCCP had god knows how many nuclear weapons ready to go, in a rapid alert network nobody in the...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  Re: MilSF I made the mistake of picking up the book "Hunt for Red October" and having read it, I have nothing but the deepest admiration for the people who made such a good movie out of such a terrible...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  »but novels consisting purely of comedy ... no, not so much: don't think I can actually do that.« Comedy requires a solid background to be funny against, and of the top of my head I can't recall a single novel...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  »On the Federal side, Jack Smith is pushing for an early trial date - Jan 2, 2024 (Jan 6 is a Saturday) - in DC and is saying the trial can be completed before the Super Tuesday Primary.« I have...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  »is the un normally keen on areas of countries which don't want to be part of the country they're in any more voting to leave and set up shop elsewhere?« There is one precedent for these kinds of problems which...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  »even if the "superconducting" part was as easy as "semiconducting" is.« That is actually one of the most interesting bits of the theoretical analyses on the new material: Depending on which Pb atom you substitute with Cu, you either get...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  »There's a fuck-tonne of phosphate-bearing rock« ... and most of them suffer from a comparatively high uranium content. During the cold war, mining phosphates with a side-stream of uranium was very profitable. In Florida the spoilstacks from phosphate mining causes...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  As Colin Powell asked when the wall fell: What do you do, when you have lost your best enemy ?...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  »It's worth contemplating the idea that NATO wants to use Ukraine to "pull a Vietnam war" on Russia« Are you confusing NATO with the weapons industry ?...