Posts by Graham Dawson

Re: YDP

One fun little details is that you can draw a line of longitude around the earth, up the coast of chile and the eastern united states, over the arctic and down across china to australia, and find devastation and megafuna extinctions everywhere you look in a broad swathe either side of it. Australia is scarred by impact sits similar to the elongated cratering and soot layer that marks the boundary of the clovis artefacts, but it doesn't really appear elsewhere in the world. Megafauna in the Americas - particular South America - was driven to extinction, as was megafuna in east asia and australasia, whilst megafauna in central and southern asia, africa and - to a lesser extent - europe were left intact.

There's no generally accepted hypothesis for why this would be so, but it's an interesting detail.

Australian aboriginal myths tell of a day of great devastation, of fire from the sky and great floods, that could possibly be associated with known tsunami and unusual crater-like formations on Australia's south coast.

It might be possible that some impactor sung around the earth at close to 90 degrees to the equator, broke up as it did so, and dropped a bunch of meteorites along that path.

Maybe.

Re: TB4 is kindof Fake.

Round the back.

Re: What utter rubbish!

Not just a different race; they're from an entirely different planet!

Re: Loaded words replaced by euphemisms

All they wanted was police reform.

Re: If you keep poking the pig with a stick

They aren't being targeted by this legislation.

Re: I thought Windows tiles were a brilliant UI

I agree.

It was shite on desktop, but the few times I had to interact with a windows phone, it was surprisingly intuitive.

We do.

Typo, like I said upthread.

You can. It's functionally identical to the introduction of concepts by the introduction of words. Orange is a good example: the colour "orange" didn't exist as a separate thing until relatively recently. It was "red-yellow", or "red", or "yellow", not orange. The idea of a separate sheaf of colours called "orange" only turned up with that word being adopted into English.

Orwell's argument was that the removal of a word from the language would require circumlocution to express the same concept that was previously expressed with that single word. Circumlocution reduces the impact of an argument and makes its expression more difficult.

Orwell's further argument was that words would be removed progressively, or redefined in negative relationship to other words. By reducing the language sufficiently, with the removal or redefinition of enough words, even circumlocution would become impossible, as thoughts could only be expressed within a restrictive framework.

Animal Farm is a much better examination of the problem anyway. 1984 explored the state-imposed redefinition of language in a setting that was born largely from Orwell's experiences in the Spanish civil war and solidified by his experiences at the BBC, in which such manipulation of language and history by those in authority was the norm. Animal Farm explored the progressive redefinition of language by vested interests who sought power over society, enforced by social shaming and propaganda.

Re: For those who learn only one side of the history

He said similar after the war and was planning to send freed slaves back to Africa.

context is racist now

And why not? It's already lived up to the general stereotype by digging a hole and then doing nothing for months.

Jet fuel doesn't spontaneously recombust hours after being extinguished, in an otherwise safe environment. Lithium cells have been known to do that.

Re: Fingers crossed for Saturday

These aren't space suits, they're flight suits. They provide emergency protection in the case of decompression.

Re: "the potential benefits outweigh the risks"

Google docs and sheets override the default search behaviour to implement their own in-app searches.

Re: So...

>Andrew Wakefield

You know what really grinds my gears about that man? There is some anecdotal linkage between measles causing gut perforation and some types of ASD, but because of wakefield's utter bollocks, nobody in their right mind would dare to even touch the idea, so there's not going to be any meaningful research into it (either to confirm or rule out the hypothesis) for probably decades.

That's the real damage caused by quacks and "campaigns": they make whole areas of research so radioactive that few dare follow up, and anyone who does even moderately related research is pilloried as just another nutcase, no matter what they set out to test.

Re: ....does not require the infrastructure needed by vertically launched rockets

The fish might be a bad idea.

Caffeine is a diuretic, and so (mildly) are some other compounds in tea. The link itself is postulated and assumes poor hydration alongside copious tea consumption, but tea is hydrating on average, so tenuous would certainly cover it.

Is that where Towser lives?

Ed, no!

Re: Not quite Windows

You served a drink?

Re: Cloud is a joke

They're a fancy, self-contained chroot and that's basically it. Convenience always comes in cans.

Re: Electric planes?

Of course, on rereading, you were talking about flying a plane without fuel, which is a stupid argument on its face. Of course a plane can't fly without fuel. Fuel is a necessary part of the plane, but flight distances (and reserve fuel) are calculated on the back of the mass reduction from fuel expenditure. Fuel is a significant proportion of the mass of a fully laden plane, as yoir own otherwise meaningless diagram attests, but that mass is expectex to reduce over the course of the flight, extending its range significantly.

Battery mass doesn't reduce as its energy is extracted, reducing the effective range of the plane as it has to continue to haul dead weight. This isn't a theoretical exercise either; this is well understood physics. Even with your mythical super batteries with their theoretical specific energy and a mass comparable to kerosene, an electric and will not have the same range as a comparable jet turbine plane, entirely because of that battery mass - a good third of the entire mass of the plane - remaining in place.

That remaining mass of empty batteries also means the cargo capacity has to be reduced, so that the plane can land safely, so on top of the reduced range, you have reduced carrying capacity.

Electric planes aren't viable. Simple as that.

Re: Stupid millennials

The latter is something up with which I shall not put.

Re: Same property?

I heard you could make it big if you got in on the ground floor, but I just don't want to take part in the same old rat race.

It wasn't fair! He finally had time!

Oh wait, different apocalypse.

Re: Bring back win98 UI

You could at least turn off the XP ui and get it looking approximately the same as win2k.

Re: Not just 'rural' connections

On the other hand, I can also get service from Mr Branson's provider, rather than a US state.

Re: Titanic thinking

There were plans, as a matter of fact. The UK government developed detailed plans for dealing with a pandemic. The only problem is that they planned for a flu pandemic, which would have behaved rather differently to this one, so much of the early response - once the pandemic was known - has been inadequate to the problem at hand.

I was going to edit, but I missed the deadline. Several of the trials you mentioned are less about if the drug works than they are about why it works. The mechanism by which it reduces viral load is poorly understood.