Posts by Doctor Syntax 33022 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
Pre-1945 steel was used as shielding in low-level radiation counting set-ups. The Belfast carbon dating lab was lucky having a ship-yard just down the road to source second-hand steel plates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
I don't think the judgement actually comments on this (at least it didn't before my eyes glazed over) but the implication seems to be that they knew, or at least assumed, some dollar subs were already coming from the EU and the subsequent half dozen UK or EU subs might only be a subset of those.
I'm not sure why you got the downvotes as it is actually a good question.
AFAICS that wasn't a situation the court was asked to decide on so it didn't decide on it. The choice of currency was taken as an indication of trading in the EU (including the UK at the time). Presumably this was what the complainant argued. If they only accepted dollars there may have been other indications for the complainant to argue and the court to accept or reject as it considered appropriate.
If they only accepted USD and specifically said "Not available in the EU" or maybe USD and other non-EU currencies the situation might have been different but you'd need to see how a court ruled in those circumstances to be sure.
Case law grows by interpreting the legislation in relation to specific sets of circumstances.
"Bungler-In-Chief also messed up with the 'there won't be a border in the Irish sea' palaver, hoping to force the Republic out of the EU single market and back into the UK orbit. Yet, that's not happened."
I doubt such long term "planning" was involved. It was just a thing he needed to say at the time to those he was addressing. All his utterances are the same.
The Good Friday agreement was predicated on NI and the EU being in the single market, hence removing the need for a hard border. That's why NI has to remain in the single market for it to function. If NI is in the single market and the UK isn't then there has to be some form of customs border in the Irish Sea. No amount of flannelling can dispose of that set of consequences.
To be fair a different measurement technology can reduce the needed sample size. For instance back in the late '60s we were doing carbon dating by radiometry. We needed samples of several grammes. Subsequently mass-spec came along to enable a direct measurement of isotope ratios. Presented with the smallest sample we could work with they'd have to sub-sample it as it would have been too big to work with in its entirety.
In forensic science glass comparison depended on being able to measure the RI microscopic chips to precession orders of magnitude better than the manufacturers' QC labs were measuring bulk samples. By using various attachments we were able to get IR spectra from about 2mm of individual synthetic textile fibres whilst manufacturers' QA was using films about the thickness of photographic films. In that case our spectra were indeed of poorer quality (ye canna defy the laws of physics) and we couldn't see the halogenated monomers that were added as tracers - but when I left my colleagues were proposing to use SEM/XRF to see if they could pick them up another way.
The point is, of course, that for each analysis that sort of transformation requires a lot of development work. There isn't going to be a magic bullet that hits all the anions, cations, simple organic compounds and enzymes that blood analysis involves. Given the number of specialist companies working in this field and the hundreds of existing man-years of experience at all levels is shouldn't have been credible than someone with no background could come along and do what they couldn't. It simply takes disrupter theory too far.
"There was after all : a company, a working lab, a research and a product development division, and a product - albeit that it never worked."
I'm suddenly reminded of Feynman's words explaining cargo cults.
"I honestly believe that she set out to try to achieve what she wanted to achieve"
You also have to ask yourself, as she should have asked herself, whether she had the requisite background to achieve that.
In order to successfully direct the development effort to produce that sort of machine would need decades of experience in the field. In fact, that experience would be needed to decide whether it was even feasible. She didn't have that. So what was her role? I think the jury's answered that question.
"Juries are not that stupid and operate under strict instructions."
Juries are given a summing up by the judge and advice as to what the law is. When they get into the jury room their response to that is entirely their own.
1. changing the type from the equivalent of "int32_t" to "uint32_t" would solve the problem for several thousand years.
But they'd have lost the ability to handle BC dates.
2. Does everyone understand that by reserving four digits for an update counter *within a day*, Microsoft effectively said "our software is sooooo bad, we might actually have to post a thousand or more updates *in a single day*"?
It's the sort of conservative approach they should have taken in handling the date in the scanner.
Also back in the days of valves I was working on a PA amplifier. The anodes, at about 350 - 400V IIRC, of the output valves were on the top caps and somebody, for some reason, had cut and resoldered the lead to one of the caps without insulating the joint. Replacing the steel cover without switching off...
Here's one that is already starting to come true:
There'll be a public realisation that electricity supply, no matter how green, blue or whatever colour it's washed, is in danger of becoming a single point of failure. The trigger point for this is the withdrawal of POTS and the media are starting to notice. A few areas have undergone this just in time to have their power cut off by storm Arwen. "Use your mobile" doesn't appeal when there's no local coverage, the storm has also taken out the base stations or the power cut has outlasted the charge in the phone's battery.
If they want to get rid of private cars they'll need to get rid of the reasons for private cars. Because I grew up at a time when private cars were an extreme rarity I have some notion of the sorts of things that are going to be needed. Taking one small area as an example:
For one thing what's now a private house at the bottom of the hill is going to have to be converted back into the shop it once was or a substitute found.* The same applies to all the other former shops down the valley.
Next the remains of the local mill are going to have to be reconverted into businesses with a greater ratio of workers to floor space. Unlike many old mills the buildings are almost entirely still there but I don't think the businesses using them employ more than a small fraction of the staff who used to work there. Then there's the "brownfield site" down the valley which hasn't yet been demolished. That needs to be reassigned as a workspace. The sites of the mills further still down the valley are going to be a problem. Do the houses get demolished and new business premises built to replace them? Even that's not going to be enough to rebalance the population/jobs ratio to they way it was in the 1950s.
Public transport is also going to have to be restored to allow those who don't work in the villages to commute into the local town. But then the local town has lost jobs to the cities.
What about working at home? It's not going to be for everyone but if all the jobs that have been lost from mills can be replaced by forcing businesses to relocate to the old mills or their replacements, then working at home might possibly deal with the extra population that's now here. Because not only have the premises of old businesses, including farms, been converted to housing, but, being situated within driving distance of several urban centres, houses have been built on greenfield sites for commuters.
Net zero? Just a couple of words politicians have heard and keep repeating.
* Yes, I know about online ordering and deliveries. But back when there was a village shop there were also arrangements for ordering and delivery; maybe a little more cumbersome but they were there. There were also mobile shops - dad's cousin, for example, had a mobile greengrocery business. But the village shop within walking distance was essential.
The Beeb's carrying a report of one couple who seem to be having problems getting a notification. As is often the case the only remediation for the failed system seems to be to try the failed system again. Every automated system needs an effective, largely manual escalation system alongside it.
"Fact of the matter is unless such transport competes favourably with a car it cannot win."
The competition is largely in terms of time and/or general convenience rather than price. Living in High Wycombe and commuting into London by train took far too much of the time but looking at the traffic jams we passed was a clear indication that things could be worse.
Commuting to work at any other phase of my working life the absence of any direct public transport route made the car inevitable. In fact, simply getting to and from the train stations was a substantial part of the time of the London commute; the long waits while BR found enough working DMUs* to cobble together a train was another.
Deciding on the of method of commuting is inevitably a matter of choosing the least bad. The longer Covid runs the clearer it will become that big cities are an idea whose time has gone. Considerations of sustainability should lead to that conclusion anyway. The sunk cost fallacy is what keeps governments from accepting that.
* The only reasonable explanation for the complete lack of relationship between train times and timetable, reinforced by the age and state of the rolling stock.
Predicting the socio-economics of diseases isn't straight forward. The plague in the mid C14th reduced the population by 30-50% after a substantial decrease due to famine a generation or so earlier. Small population/labour force, lots of spare land. Wages rise, rents fall, feudalism collapses, the common man gets rich and the population burgeons again, right? No. For some time the Statute of Labourers effectively held down wages for some considerable time. Feudalism only ended gradually. Those predictions did eventually play out but slower than might have been reasonably expected.
The really odd thing is that the population, which is believed to have been growing quite fast at the end of the previous century, stabilised for several centuries. These things are hard to estimate before censuses so opinions differ as to how long it took the population to regain its 1300 level. People tended to marry later and have fewer children but it's not clear why.
A few days ago I got a text message encouraging me to get a booster. I had one several weeks ago which leads me to the conclusion that either:
1. This is specifically aimed at me to tell to get a second booster. I've not heard of that being more than a possibility for some time in the future so if that's the case I find it very puzzling.
2. This is specifically aimed at me but they've got their records in a twist. Again.
3. It's untargeted text spam in which case how do I recognise any similar but targeted messages aimed at me in the future?
Perhaps I should ring 119 to find out.
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