Posts by Scroticus Canis 855 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Aug 2012
Y chromosomes do not change much if at all from one generation to the next and are actually very stable. This fact has been used in several genetic studies tracing ancestry via the male lines and has shown some 8% percent of the Asiatic males have the same Y chromosome as Genghis Khan; apparently the males in his family (before and after him) put it about a bit.
Bit of a fallacious argument implying the genetic intelligence ability is only linked to the X chromosome; Down's Syndrome is normally caused by a single damaged chromosome at position 21 not 23. The degree of this affliction is dependant upon the degree of damage. If two damaged 21s are combined the foetus is normally not viable. Of course you may not agree that Down's Syndrome is "intelligence-related".
The fact that two X chromosomes are available does not mean they have co-effective roles in a tissue's gene expression as the non-used X is coiled as the Bar Body and can't be transcribed by mRNA. Also female expression of the X chromosome is chimeric in that one organ (liver say) may use one X while another organ (lungs) uses the other X, not possible for males.
I always thought that the average Reg commentard was brighter than average but given the number of votes supporting the AGW hypothesis (and the loaded poll question) I must be wrong.
The AWG models have failed to predict the current stable period or even get the preceding temperature rises to fit properly and as such are suspect. If one wants to use science as the argument for a hypothesis to become a theory then you can't ignore the scientific principle without joining the ranks of Scientology or its equivalent.
.. how unusual. Who would have thought that would happen? Doh!
Leaving out the primary body, we have something 18 times bigger than Earth or something "significantly smaller than our planet". Got to love that degree of accuracy. How did they rule out all the intermediate sizes.
Didn't they get enough spectroscopic data to distinguish between a star or planet as the primary body?
Can't believe that this merits being published or even an El reg article.
Barberton is a few hundred klicks east of Pretoria, so would be around there. A hundred or so klicks west of Pretoria is where most of the platinum mines are and their metals came from a meteor strike as well; that rock though probably broke up as there are scattered deposits of PGMs up to Zimbobwe land. Might have been part of this bad boy though.
Doubtful that any subduction took place around this part of South Africa as it's underlaid with kratons (or cratons for the new spelling) which don't subduct being several hundred klicks deep into the mantle and are part of the original crust not the johnny-come-lately sedimentary stuff.
Is it beer time already?
Plenty of carbon in the atmosphere mate, it's called soot. Bush fires, cooking fires, diesel engines, coal fired industry, etc... Best capture system found so far are lungs, though it's not really reusable!
As an aside - Last time I did some work in a well known brand of soft drink factory (think Bolivian marching powder) in Lagos their CO2 for fizzing the glop was obtained by burning diesel and capturing it from the flue.
Er, gravity? The matter flying apart has mass and it is not all spread out completely uniformly. Everything with mass attracts other mass (gravity), eventually the gravitic attraction overcomes the kinetics of flying apart.
The denser more massive bits more so than the diffuse less massive bits. The dense bits collapsed to form galaxies. The galaxies then attract other galaxies nearby to form clusters, clusters attract other clusters to form super clusters.
So the galaxies in clusters are not flying away from each other but are slowly falling towards each other in various orbital trajectories. Some collide and merge in the process but all within the cluster will eventually merge into one super galaxy.
Leaves a lot of empty space between the super clusters which is where the expansion of space-time is still happening. Clear as mud?
@frank ly - no, as normal hydrogen would require an anti-matter photographic plate detector to produce the annihilation event that produces the tracks. How would you mount, scan or otherwise handle such a plate without the whole lab going bye-bye as per the icon?
The today's date makes me suspicious of the authenticity of this story. Also question of how do you accelerate an uncharged anti-hydrogen atom or molecule ?
Well I never could understand the Swedish chef on the Muppet Show either.
So what do you use for a temperature scale in Sweden, Fahrenheit still? The UK mostly uses Centigrade except for a few really old die-hards. Thought the 'merkins were the only Fahrenheit hold-outs.
"catechin and epicatechin – large polyphenolic polymers – are poorly digested in the stomach, the microbes take over in the colon: the fibre is fermented" - so would it be better used as a suppository?
"* A palm berry" - was this some early hybrid PDA? ¿IT angle?
Sorry couldn't help it, gettin' me coat...
Just reverting back to the good old days from before post codes. While waiting for an operator friend of mine at a GPO site in London to finish a batch run (before going for drinks) I asked him what he was running. The reply was "updating the country name and address file" (GPO's) from the latest data (9 track tapes) purchased from non other than Readers Digest.
Remember the annoying copies of that, that used to arrive in the mail expecting you to pay for unsolicited crap?
No, much, much smaller than a galaxy cluster. From nearly bugger all (proton size) to about the size of a decent grapefruit. Note that the BB had already expanded to proton size before inflation kicked in; the expansion from nowt to proton took nearly three times as long as inflation lasted.
The CMB shows that there are warmer and colder regions (still all bloody close to 0K) mixed together but this temperature motteling is uniform in all directions. Inflation smoothed it out to be so. Average CMB temperature is equivalent to 2.7K IIRC.
True but - GRAVITY WAVES IN SPAAAAAAACE would!
Anyway, why is everybody just talking about the Big Bang this is about Inflation after the BB.
The skewed polarization of the CMB by gravity waves is a prediction from one of the Inflation Hypothesis models. The observation matches that prediction and thus is a 'smoking gun' for both inflation and gravity waves.
Another box ticked for Relativity, wasn't Einstein a clever chap.
Basically as you move from left to right on a standard model diagram the particles mass/energy increases which is why you normally only see Up and Down quarks in matter in the 'normal environment'.
The heavier quarks and neutrinos are only found where there is high environmental energy; stellar cores, thermo-nuke blasts, accelerators, etc.. and rapidly decay to lower energy form particles once out of that environment.
Quantum mechanics allows morphing in either direction so give a light electron-neutrino enough energy and it can morph into a heavier muon-neutrino flavour, more still and it can morph into the heavier still tau-neutrino. As the heavier neutrinos lose energy (moving through the earth in this case) they morph back to lower mass/energy forms. The energy/mass changes accommodate the extra energy as the C limit cant be exceeded.
That's the very simplified explanation which my mind likes and is basically how it works; the full catastrophe quantum mechanical maths just makes my head hurt.
Beer icon because I now need one - heading to the fridge.
Both gas and liquids are fluids. Think you are referring to the use of hydraulics.
Obvious that the use of compressed gas is only suitable for the demonstration phase of this idea and it's to save on the complexity of having a pump/actuator and a larger energy source, valves don't use as much.
They're obviously also going to need to sort buoyancy and attitude control for any 'real use' situation.
Oh dear, so wrong Vulch! Plenty of eight track reel to reel recorders, made for adding tracks at different muso sessions, also had 16 track tapes for the bigger users. One eight track machine I always lusted after was the Revox 8 Track Simul-Sync which was real Hi-Fi back in the day, also had three different tape speeds for how much quality/dynamic range one desired. Hi-tech stuff back in the 70s & 80s.
The yoof of today just don't know their history.
On the IT side cut my teeth on the old ICL System 4, J1700 opsys stuff with 800bpi 9 track tape decks. A Leo III with it's gently humming valves was also in that machine room. In the 90s the ICL S39 kit was by far the best big-iron mainframes on the market and VME the best most configurable opsys about.
ICL failed due to crap (if ethical) marketing. ICL's product launches were done locally and had a few drinks and sarnies afterwards while the competition's (nameless for legal reasons) were done in exotic places with free client travel, accommodation and entertainment (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).
If you overwrite the entire file's disk allocation with random garbage (8 times is good) and then do the same for each iteration of your backups where the file was ever stored you can then say the file is deleted. Otherwise it's just hard to get to.
Got to agree with DropBear on that one.
Think you will find Herods were kings in ancient Judea (four of them) and don't have a department store in London!
There is however a Harrod's department store in the west end of London which sells some fine (if overpriced) merchandise.
Given the biblical nature of your name I am surprised at you confusing ancient Jerusalem and modern London.
Since we all knew about Echelon over twenty years ago why are we now so surprised it's been upgraded to keep up with the times? Snowdon's 'revelations' should come as no surprise to anyone capable of coherent though but just an indication at how crap the NSA is/has become in vetting staff.
Given the infrastructure the NSA and GCHQ have they have no need to spy on their own citizens as they can spy on each others according to their mandates and then just make the data available to their 'special relationship' friends. Very dubious ethics and morality from our own perspectives but probably legal (in a bendable sort of way) within their respective countries.
(Sherlock for the phrase that springs to mind)
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