Posts by Loyal Commenter

Re: MRI?

If they're not, then the induced current from RF from an MRI into something designed to work with an induced current from RF is going to cook it very quickly.

Re: Why didn't he just hack...

Probably the same one that Trump uses to publicly tell the world that he's the fittest and healthiest man who has ever lived.

Re: Why didn't he just hack...

You are completely wrong about Ivermectin not normally being prescribed to humans. Billions of doses have been prescribed over decades with a remarkably few side effects.

I think the operative words there are "have been". Go to your GP in the UK with something like intestinal worms, for which ivermectin could be a treatment, and it's not what you will be prescribed. You'll probably get mebendazole.

That's not to say ivermectin is not a useful drug, or that it won't work, but it is not generally prescribed. Ivermectin is a pretty broad-spectrum drug, meaning it can treat quite a wide variety of conditions, from fungal skin infections, to intestinal parasites, but you're far more likely to get prescribed something specific to your ailment, because it's likely to be cheaper and more effective. Ivermectin tends to get used when the doctor doesn't really know exactly what is wrong with you, and is used more commonly in animals (and in developing countries where diagnostic testing is less available) for exactly this reason.

Re: Why didn't he just hack...

It's the equivalent to walking down the aisle at Tesco and mocking anyone buying Ready Brek because they are eating horse food.

It's really not. If anything, it's the equivalent of mocking people who are putting ready Brek down their pants because they think it'll cure their gonorrhoea. Quite frankly, such people are fair game, because we've got to the point where they won't listen to sense, so we might as well try mockery.

Oh, and if you think Joe Rogan was talking anything other than bollocks if he was taking an antiparasitic agent for anything other than a parasitic infection (and ivermectin is actually usually not prescribed to humans, for $reasons), and you think this was bona-fide because a doctor was involved, might I gently remind you that Harold Shipman was a doctor, as was H. H. Crippen, and also Josef Mengele.

Re: dutch transhumanist

If "transhumanism" means welding yourself to your contactless credit-card, then I, for one, am out.

Upvoted for using the messiah's* full name.

*In his eyes, and those of his twitterati

Re: Why didn't he just hack...

If you are upset by someone referring to porage* oats as horse food, I shall make sure that I always refer to them as such from now on, safe in the knowledge that somewhere, some humourless toss-pot would be really upset by it. Get a grip, man, it's perfectly fine to de-worm horses with an anti-parasitic agent and refer to it as such. I'm sure the discoverers of ivermectin don't care.

*porrage, porridge, etc.

Re: Why didn't he just hack...

I have a couple of boxes of the stuff on a shelf.

It's for the hamster, if he gets mites, not for fucking COVID, although we have to recognise just how good a medicine it is as a general anti-parasitic agent.

Re: Wind and solar

...and the population of the city I live in is around 470k, hence my comment. I think it's fair to call Bristol a medium-sized city, at least in UK terms; it's the 14th largest city in the country. A small city would be somewhere like Wells, with 12k residents.

Re: Mountains of coal ash

Bioavailability depends on what compounds you are talking about.

For instance, take mercury. As long as you don't breathe the vapour in, you can happily slosh the stuff about with your hands with little risk of heavy-metal poisoning. Spilll one drop of dimethylmercury on your gloved hand though, and you're going to die in a horrible and painful manner.

So, yes, plutonium itself might not be very bioavailable. But how about plutonium hexafluoride, or hexamethylplutonium, or plutonium chelated by something like EDTA? I seriously doubt that much work has been done on the organometallic chemistry of this element, for obvious reasons, and, on balance, I think it should probably stay that way.

Re: Wind and solar

But plenty of space to drill a hole. Geothermal works very well in Iceland, providing pretty much all of their power (and a fair amount of domestic heating). It should be a no-brainer anywhere where there's easily accessible heat under the ground.

Granted, the population of Japan is a mite higher than that of Iceland (more people live in the medium-sized city I live in, than the whole of Iceland)

Re: Wind and solar @AC

They do seem to be an interesting technology, not least because in essence they are very simple, and easily scaleable ("just" add more tanks). The electrolytes in them might not be the nicest things to have around, and spills might be a risk, but unlike conventional batteries, they are much less likely to catch fire, unless those electrolytes are chosen REALLY badly.

Re: Wind and solar

And that’s without getting into other human activities and structures – including buildings, roads and domestic cats.

Coincidentally, I was watching one of the local cats just yesterday evening, trying to catch bats. I think the bats were actually taunting the cat, because they were swooping down right over its head, and there was no way it was going to be able to jump up and catch one, despite repeatedly trying.

Bats are intelligent animals, are very manoeuvrable, and have very sophisticated sonar. They fly very low round here, in a large-ish city (frequently down to about waist level), and I've never seen one killed by a car, the motion of which is much less predictable than that of a wind turbine's blades. The idea that they might fly into the path of the blades and get killed, on a regular basis, doesn't sound credible to me.

Re: Human failures, not Nuclear

...and the reason why all modern reactor designs have secondary containment (the only thing separating the Chernobyl reactor from the outside world was the roof).

"According to a YouTube channel I frequent" is the modern equivalent of "Dave down the pub says..."

Re: Wind and solar @AC

As has been pointed out, molten salt batteries may provide some answers, but current generations appear to be reliant on solar concentrators to keep them molten. If they solidify, I understand that they're very difficult to get back into operation.

I remember reading some time ago about "flow batteries," which are basically two big tanks of chemicals in different oxidation states with a redox reaction between the two consuming or producing electricity depending on which what the flow is going. I don't know how far this technology has got though.

Re: Wind and solar

Windmills kill birds and bats and parachutists and cause sleep disturbances in humans.

IIRC, there are pretty strict rules about how close to houses these things are allowed to be built, so if I hear anyone claiming that their sleep is disturbed by a windmill which is at least 500m away from their bedroom window, I invite them to try living in ANY settlement near other human beings.

Re: Wind and solar

The problem wasn't the quake, it was the tsunami, and the fact that that was higher than the sea walls that were built to protect against tsunamis. Pretty much nothing works properly when an ocean decides to flow through it at short notice.

On this theme, I hope Japan have twigged that it is probably better to build new reactors near the East/North coast, rather than the West/South one, so they at least have them pointing away from one of the world's biggest and most active subduction zones.

Re: Wind and solar

I'm pretty sure the Japanese government are capable of holding more than one idea in their heads at a time. If only ours could.

Wind turbines take time to build and assemble, meanwhile they have a bunch of nuclear plants which just need a once-over* safety check and refuelling.

*Yes, I'm sure it's a bit more complicated than this, but you get my point.

Re: Mountains of coal ash

Not to nit-pick, but if plutonium was "forever," it'd be pretty useless for making bombs. Arguably, tens of thousands of years is a long time, but it's not "forever".

Oh, and if you have any significant amount of plutonium in your reactor waste, it's because your reactor was designed to produce it, and you're probably not a signatory to the NPT.

The point about the chemical toxicity is a good one, though. As with most heavy metals, you don't want to be ingesting it, or its chemical compounds in any way, they don't tend to play nicely with biological processes.

Re: Mountains of coal ash

From your comment, I assume that you are therefore happy to have the spoil from a coal-fired plant in *your* garden? I wouldn't eat those big juicy tomatoes that grow so well in that ash if I were you, unless you're looking to get heavy metal poisoning...

Re: Excellent news

Yup, it's totally the fault of communism, and nothing whatsoever to do with the nature of human greed, which is why our current system of increasingly stratified capitalism is such a utopia, right? Right? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?

The argument that "we shouldn't do this because bad people might cut corners" is not an argument for not doing something, it is an argument for regulating things properly, so that corruption can't take hold. Meanwhile, we live in a country where regulation is a dirty word, and, in totally unrelated news, corruption runs rife.

Re: From Mssrs Pratchett & Gaimain

I've got no problem with that. Presumably your electric kettle has to run off a different circuit to your other appliances though, and does not run on 110V? I know that the US uses a lower voltage than the most of the rest of the world for domestic circuits (most other countries typically use 250V) for historical reasons, so there's probably a fair impedance (pun intended) to change, but it does seem to make things unnecessarily more complicated.

I also own a non-electric kettle, which gets used on a gas camping stove on the allotment - we don't have any electricity of any voltage there...

Re: From Mssrs Pratchett & Gaimain

But where's the fun profit in that ?

There, FTFY

Re: From Mssrs Pratchett & Gaimain

Nowadays, if you're paid badly and rely on universal credit to survive, then this arrangement will royally fuck you up, because the DSS in their infinite wisdom will decide that you have earned above the threshold in that month, cancel your benefits and demand a repayment.

Of course the government could fix this by setting a proper minimum wage, rather than subsidising exploitative employers via our taxes, but since they are the exploiters in many cases, they won't.

Re: From Mssrs Pratchett & Gaimain

I suspect "packing" is one of those useful abstractions like "spin" and "colour" that don't translate exactly to the underlying quantum thing they kind-of represent, in the same way that we draw little circles around pictures of berry-like nuclei to represent electron orbitals (and use the word orbital, which implies an orbit). Meanwhile, the actual orbitals are probability density distribution fields which are quantised via the Schrödinger equation, making pretty shapes like circles or hourglasses, and the actual electron could be literally anywhere, and that's before we even get into hybrid orbitals...

Re: From Mssrs Pratchett & Gaimain

There are quite a few of us who consider her, and her role, to be archaic. Of course, the problem comes when you start thinking about what or who you would have as head of state instead, even though the role has been pretty much entirely ceremonial for the past couple of centuries. One thing you can say about her is that at least she's not a populist...

Re: From Mssrs Pratchett & Gaimain

An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it.

This isn't strictly correct either, since you used the word exactly.

An amount of ¹²C weighing the same amount has exactly ¹/₁₂ of a mole (because a mole is defined that way). Even if you have isotopically pure ¹H, one mole of that is not exactly one gram, it is a little more, at 1.00794 g.

This is something to do with "quantum" (my degrees are in chemistry and not physics, so don't ask me to explain it, but it probably has something to do with rest masses and the energy levels of electrons).

Re: From Mssrs Pratchett & Gaimain

Yeah, I reckoned as much, the lunar month being close enough to 28 days (plus one extra, call it a feast day).

Of course, the calendar months we have don't really line up with the lunar months (with there being 13-ish in a year), and this is even before the Romans fucked about with them and stuck some extras in.

Yeah, I got bullied out of my first job after Uni for doing that. Turns out my supervisor's ego far outweighed her ability as a programmer, and what I thought was an innocent and helpful suggestion was taken as a cue to systemically poison the workplace for me, and undermine my credibility.

Still, the bright side of that was getting a month's garden leave and getting rid of a 2-hour commute by bus to a toxic dump of a seaside town (see if you can guess which one), the timing of which meant that they were getting an extra half an hour's work from me every day.

Re: From Mssrs Pratchett & Gaimain

There's a reason all these units (which IIRC date back to the ancient Sumerians) are based on 12, not ten, and this is that 12 is divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6, which is a bit more useful than dividing something by half or into 5.

We still have 24 hours in a day (12 x 2) 60 minutes in an hour (12 x 5), 60 seconds in a minute, 360 degrees in a circle (12 x 6 x 5), divided into 60 minutes, divided into 60 seconds, and so on, because the measurement of things like time*, and angles dates back to prehistory.

*I'm not sure why we have 7 days in a week, but it's probably something to do with trying to make the solar day line up with the lunar month.

Re: From Mssrs Pratchett & Gaimain

My favourite is when I hear our transpondian cousins refer to their own peculiar brand of customary units as "British units", although there are significant differences between these and actual British Imperial units, such as the volume of a pint.

At least the BTU is an actual British unit, albeit an archaic one, like a groat.

Re: Of course, Britain went decimal shortly afterwards!

They are, indeed, but not using guinea coins.

edit - and I don't know about livestock* auctions, but good luck finding an auction house that only charges 5% commission, and only to the seller!

*I'm sure I'll annoy some horsey people by referring to horses as livestock, as if they were cattle or sheep, but there we go, they are delicious.

Re: From Mssrs Pratchett & Gaimain

A Calorie is not an SI unit though. The amount of heat energy required to heat water is 4.186 Joules per Kelvin per gram. Which is still relatively easy to remember and use, because 4.2 KJ per kilo (or litre) is just one number to have to know.

Anyway, Americans don't heat up water using easily-measured electrical energy, because kettles melt their wiring, because they got the voltage all wrong. This is why they still use "stove-top" kettles like it's the 1890s.

Re: Of course, Britain went decimal shortly afterwards!

inventing a new set of unfamiliar coins rather than re-purposing and retaining the old coin shapes, sizes and materials

Until the new 5p and 10p coins were introduced (in 1992), the old shilling and florin coins were interchangeable with the 5p and 10p coin, and this was still the case until they were withdrawn completely in 1993, so this is not strictly true.

The old half-crown, penny, ha'penny and florin coins didn't fit neatly into the new system, so they were withdrawn with decimalisation in 1971.

Apparently a crown is still legal tender, and worth 25p (ones minted since decimalisation are worth £5), although you'd be a fool to try and spend one at its face value. A guinea is no longer legal tender, but would have a face value of £1.05 if it were.

Re: £sd

and ounces "oz" from onza

Re: Memory is a weird thing!

Being a barsteward

Re: Photos via MMS

...they also didn't explain why they thought MMS is the "right" way to do it, when WhatsApp exists, and is (theoretically) more secure, not less, (allegedly) having end-to-end encryption, and is free, rather than 50p a message (or more), sometimes to both sender and recipient.

Re: You are doing it wrong.

...and the hedgehog can never be buggered at all...

RIP Pterry

Re: "Wait for the 30-second ad for some crappy game to finish playing"

Believe me, that is not too much information. If I was giving you too much information, I'd probably be banned from using a computer...

Re: "Wait for the 30-second ad for some crappy game to finish playing"

They hide it away (because they want you to pay), but you can get "hearts" back by practising lessons you've already done, or by voluntarily watching an ad...