Posts by Loyal Commenter 5761 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jul 2010
That's about as likely as Britain "ruling the waves."
There's this little country overseas you may have heard of, where they have a large population of increasingly well educated scientists ready to do the research we don't have the resources, workforce, or funding to do. You may have heard of it, "China". See also: "India".
You might also have noticed that the US is also no longer exactly world-leading in scientific thinking, preferring to make its laws based on religious fundamentalism. They are no longer on the ascendant, and have not been for some time, and certainly do not view us as an equal partner in anything, preferring to become increasingly insular. They don't do partnerships, they do acquisition.
There is also the fact of economies of scale. For instance, with critical regulatory and safety agencies like EURATOM, paying in a fraction of the cost was always going to cost less than paying for an entire replacement regulatory agency (which will end up having to follow the same rules anyway). This is still true even if we were paying disproportionately more than some other countries (i.e. more than 1/28th of the cost).
The bit that the brexiters miss is that this money wasn't just "given to" the EU, it was used to pay for things, some of which we may no longer need, but most of which we do, and which we now have to pay for in their entirety ourselves.
The subtlety of such argument, however, is lost on people who rant about "getting are cuntry back".
It's horrifying to think someone this awful could well be the next prime minister
It's horrifying to know that someone this awful will be the next prime minister. The other candidate is just as horrific, just in slightly different ways. It's like being asked to choose between eating a bowl of shit and a bowl of red-hot gravel. Except, of course, that the choice isn't yours, it's someone else's racist granny's.
I moved to another European country before the EU was created, there was paperwork but it was not difficult.
Do you think, that just maybe, the hoops one might have to jump through to do the same now may have changed in the intervening 30+ years?
For instance, it is a fact that ten years ago, I could have moved to Portugal and got a job there, settled down, etc. with little or no paperwork, visas, or additional expenses to deal with. I cannot do this today. In fact, those British citizens who have Portuguese residency are now actually finding that, even though they *should* still have freedom of movement within the EU, do not, due to a lack of impetus on the part of the Portuguese to provide them with the requisite paperwork.
No, we agreed to have an opinion poll on it that was explicitly non-binding, then the Tories changed the rules half way through, and some bloke said "we'll implement whatever is decided," and incidentally also said "I'll see this through to the end" and quit the day after the referendum when it didn't go the way he was expecting, due largely to his utter incompetence, which biased the campaigning heavily in the opposite direction.
The referendum was fundamentally flawed in several ways, and the only reason it wasn't struck down completely was because the elections watchdog couldn't do so exactly because it was non-binding and there was nothing to strike down.
It suited a whole bunch of very dodgy politicians to act like it was a mandate though, although it was very far from being so. Oddly enough, all the things they promised wouldn't happen have now happened or are now happening, such as all those promises that we'd definitely not leave the Common Market or Customs Union. Meanwhile, those who were worried that their ill-gotten gains in tax havens might be got at by incoming EU regulations are sunning themselves safely.
There's still some useful idiots round here who think that they won something with that referendum. Perhaps they did, but if that's the case then they're either one of those very rich oligarchs who are currently responsible for growing inflation, or being paid very well by one of them. It was a superb piece of divide-and-conquer by the ultra-rich hard right who are currently getting their wet dream of an unregulated low wage high inequality asset-stripper's paradise at everybody else's expense. "Taking back control" indeed, but for whom, and from whom?
Also known as Whataboutery, Bullshit, and the Dismal Science.
If we had some more politicians with degrees that have a foundation in reality or formal logic, such as the physical sciences, medicine, or mathematics, we might not be in such a mess.
But then you'd have to ask what sort of doctor goes into politics to earn less than they (deservedly) would as a GP or consultant, and you do kind of come to the conclusion that they might not be a very good doctor...
The same logic applies to other fields, such as law, Suella.
To be fair, nuking things *does* make them radioactive, in the sense that hitting things with nuclear radiation (or high energy EM radiation such as gamma rays) does, as you would get from exploding a nuclear bomb, or putting them in a nuclear reactor or particle accelerator.
A microwave doesn't "nuke" things, though, although this doesn't help by people colloquially referring to heating things with microwaves as "nuking" them. It uses much less energetic EM radiation to cause molecules to vibrate and heat up, in the same way putting something in the sun would, although, ironically, the UV radiation in sunlight is more likely to cause chemical damage to your food.
Your friend is probably suffering from a misunderstanding of what "radiation" is, and the difference between nuclear radiation, EM radiation, and radioactivity, probably lumping them together, as many lay-people do. I'm certain you know the difference, but I'm also certain that it's not worth your time to try to explain these things to him, it'll just be white noise, like when I try to explain a complex programming problem to my wife. She doesn't care, and why should she?
Ironically, sunlight contains very little microwave radiation, because the atmosphere is so good at absorbing it before it reaches the surface. The atmosphere is less good at stopping the harmful shorter-wavelength UV radiation (especially after ozone depletion), and cosmic X-rays and gamma-rays that can have very high energies and could cause atoms in the atmosphere to become radioactive, or be split into various nasty daughter isotopes.
The problem with trying to filter out water peaks is that if there is a significant amount of water in your sample, the hydrogen atoms in that water couple to pretty much everything else in the sample (including itself) due to hydrogen bonding. A tall single peak to filter out isn't the problem, it's the fact that that peak is broad and messy as well, and the signals you are interested in get lost in the noise.
Incidentally, small amounts of moisture in NMR solvents are generally useful, as the water peak is used for calibration. Small amounts (PPM scale) give a sharp peak, I don't think large amounts will.
Your real problems are then going to start with the fact that marmite contains a lot of other spin-active nuclei, sodium (3/2 spin) and chlorine (also 3/2 spin and two different spin-active isotopes in a 3:1 ratio) and probably traces of others, such as phosphorus.
Sure, you'll be able to get a spectrum from marmite, and you might even be able to assign some of the bigger peaks to specific elements in it, although they'll be a whole mess of multiple peaks from coupling. You won't get the sort of nice spectrum you'd get from a pure sample of something in D2O or deuterated dichloromethane.
If you wanted to have a play around with desktop machine analysing what's in your marmite, you'd probably have more fun with a desktop mass spectrometer, maybe linked up to a chromatograph. Desktop HPLC-MS was definitely a thing 20+ years ago, I suspect it has been nicely refined by now. It's a long time since I worked as a chemist, so I wouldn't know.
60 MHz is going to give you really shitty resolution, and bear in mind that NMR is only sensitive to atoms that have non-zero spin, in a medium that has zero spin (hence the use of deuterated solvents). The NMR spectrum of marmite would be one fucking massive hydrogen peak swamping anything else, from the water content (and marmite is hygroscopic).
The machines I was trained to use, back when I was a student in the '90s operated at 300, and 440 MHz (the 440 one was the "high res" super-expensive jobby we weren't allowed to touch). I expect those machines are obsolete by now, apparently modern ones operate at around 800 MHz.
A 60 MHz machine is still going to need a noticeable magnetic field though. I'm left wondering how they manage that on a desktop sized device with no cryogenic cooling. The machines I used needed primary liquid helium, and secondary liquid nitrogen cooling.
Edit - It seems the answer to that question is "neodymium". A 1.4T permanent magnet is quite an impressive feat. Just don't put your keys down next to it, because unlike with a superconducting magnet, which can be quenched (expensively, and your name will be mud), you won't be getting them back.
With those pulsed ones, when they went off, did you find yourself suddenly sitting upright, and then relaxing again?
Maybe I just spent too long around NMR spectrometers when I was a student. Although, with those, the magnetic field was steady, and it was the radio waves that were pulsed...
Hardly surprising, when one is the current going into the magnet, and the other is the field generated by that current, and they are on different scales (there are two Y axes). Unless something is in the act of going horribly wrong, you would expect the magnetic field to be proportional to the current, because the power is proportional to that current (P=VI).
It's shifted up, because the whole shebang is sheathed in a superconducting magnet with a constant field of 11T, so when the current is 0A, the field is 11T.
I just read the same article as you. Did you skip over the paragraph that said exactly that?
According to author and activist Cory Doctorow, organizations that undertake legal enforcement for open source licensing issues are now aware of John Deere's alleged non-compliance.
In Bristol, you variously end up with no county (technically wrong), Bristol as the city and the county (technically correct, but redundant in an address), Avon as the county (hasn't existed since 1996), or a neighbouring county, such as, variously, Somerset, North Somerset, Gloucestershire, or South Gloucestershire, all of which are wrong.
Normally when filling badly designed forms that require a county, I put Bristol in as the county, and the area of Bristol I live in as the town. If the county is a drop-down and doesn't include Bristol, you may find it does include Avon, even though that county hasn't existed since before web-forms were really a thing.
Go figure.
I have friends in a village in Leicestershire and yet their postal town is in Derbyshire - that is terribly confusing as well.
The post codes for Bedford, the county town of Bedfordshire, all have Milton Keynes out-codes (MK). Milton Keynes is in Buckinghamshire, and actually quite a way from Bedford.
Luton, on the other hand, the other large town in Bedfordshire, has its own postcode out-code (LU).
Of course, Bedford is a shit-hole and deserves no recognition, and I can say that, having had the misfortune of spending my formative years there.
The flip side of this is that some of our testers would raise a defect report for a bug in the software if their smoke alarm went off in their kitchen. An innate inability to eliminate the obvious, and determine whether the problem they are facing is actually a bug or not leads to a certain degree of frustration on the part of us devs.
Presumably, it's kept just above criticality by slowly feeding in the fuel component of the salt, so stop adding fuel, and the neutron flux falls until the mixture is no longer critical. No, it's not just "turning it off" like a switch, but do you think a coal-fired plant can just be turned off either?
It does raise the question, "why fluorides?"
Fluorine chemistry is generally pretty nasty, due to fluorine being the most electronegative element and thus having a propensity to grab electrons off things that are normally considered inert (such as xenon).
I suspect the reasons here are due to the exact physical properties of those salts (melting point, heat capacity, and so on), but I am left wondering why they don't choose to use less "nasty" salts such as those of other halogens (chlorides, bromides and iodides).
Of course, this could also have something to do with the nuclear properties of fluorine - I don't have a great deal of background knowledge of nuclear physics, but is fluorine more tolerant to having extra neutrons thrown at it for example?
edit - A quick google suggests that the stable isotope of fluorine is 19F, so if this were to capture a neutron, you'd get 20F, which decays quickly via beta emission (a fast electron) to stable 20Ne. Since salts are conductive, that electron is easily dealt with, and presumably the neon just diffuses out and can be siphoned off. I'm guessing you won't be getting any fission products from fluorine, but if you do, I'm also guessing that being light elements, their isotopes will be either very short-lived, or stable and easily dealt with too. I suppose salts of heavier elements would be more likely to produce all sorts of daughter 'topes.
longer term we need to find a way to deal with radioactive waste safely
Isn't that exactly what thorium bed reactors do? Feed highly radioactive isotopes in as part of the fuel mix, get "inert" ones out + some power.
The real problem is how to deal with medium level waste (tools used to handle fuel, for example) and low level waste (lots of lightly contaminated disposable gloves, and so on). The volumes of these far outweigh the spent fuel from conventional reactors.
The designs of current reactors are an inheritance from the fact that they were originally intended only to produce power as a side-effect, and TPTB were more interested in breeding plutonium.
I wonder whether the radioactivity of the uranium fluoride component is enough to heat the salt mixture to its melting point? By the sounds of it, it's a mixture of a bunch of salts, and not a single one, which chemically speaking will lower the melting point, as long as those salts are miscible (otherwise you'll get one or more of them precipitating out at their respective meting points).
As a rule of thumb, a mixture of two compounds will melt at a lower temperature than either individually, because the entropy of the (disordered) molten mixture will be much higher than that of a (highly ordered) co-crystalline phase.
If these things aren't molten to start with, I'm guessing the start-up procedure would be to heat the reactor vessel to above their melting point, melt the salts separately, and pour them in. I suspect the reactor vessel would have a big old heating element in its base for this purpose.
The problem here is that JavaScript, an untyped scripting language, is copying stuff from C, a strongly typed compiled language.
TBH, the idea of using 0 = false, and any non-zero-value = true should have set alarm bells ringing in the first place. Two meanings (true/false) should equate to two values (1/0) and be stored in a type that is represented by one bit.
JavaScript took this moment of insanity, thought "hey, this is neat" and went on to say "what if we...", so we have a situation where an empty string is "false", the string containing the word false is "true", and the number 0 is false... usually... unless it's the result of an arithmetic calculation that has a floating point rounding error in it, and your value you thought was 0 is actually 0.000000000000043 or something like that.
At some point the various people who were all coming up with their own slightly different JavaScript interpretations should have stopped, and said, "hey guys, I think we might have fucked up here".
We have enums for that; we define "this" as 0, "that" as 1, "the other" as 2, and lo-and-behold, if we decide we need a fourth value, we can add it to the enum. Just make sure you are using the same enum everywhere, not defining it multiple times, eh?
Nullable types have their uses too. A nullable bool can have values of true, false, and "fucked if I know". If you start relying on that third value to mean something specific other than unknown then you're in trouble. IMHO the closest to the correct implementation of a null value is in SQL, where a null value for a nulalble bool does not equal true, it does not equal false, and it also does not equal another null value. Languages where a null value is treated as false (JavaScript, I'm looking at you), or, even worse, as true, are just wrong.
The problems arise, of course, where one person uses null to mean "unknown", and another uses it to mean "not chosen", or "not defined" which are (subtly) semantically different.
In most cases, you will not be worried about the storage size of a boolean (or nullable boolean) vs the size of a machine word, so there really is no reason (usually) not to use an enum in any code that doesn't generate and consume that value straight away, where the purpose of that nullability should be apparent, because we all write well-crafted code, right?
This highlights the difference between a programmer, a developer, and a software engineer.
A programmer writes some lines of code that give the desired result.
A developer writes some lines of code that give the desired result, and can be understood by someone else.
A software engineer does the above, but also writes the other 90% of the code to sanitise the inputs and handle error conditions.
As for code efficiency? Well, Donald Knuth himself wrote that, "premature optimization is the root of all programming evil". Whilst we should be aiming to avoid egregious resource waste, we shouldn't be looking to make efficiency gains where the bottlenecks aren't. There's no point making your code super CPU-efficient if what it is doing is disk-bound, for example. At the same time, the habit some developers seem to have for pulling in hundreds of JavaScript libraries to solve a simple problem is a bit of a red flag...
You are Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper AICMFP.
The fact that they were making very successful farces based on the consequences of your sort of arguments in the 1960s might highlight a flaw or two in your otherwise excellent plans...
Being a signatory to the NPT brings all sorts of benefits other than the obvious one of not having to handle and maintain nuclear warheads. I suggest you read up on the "demon core" for an example of how nasty they can be.
For example, if they were to withdraw from the NPT, they would immediately stop getting assistance with their domestic nuclear power programme. They would almost certainly get embargoes on certain technologies associated with such, as well as the raw materials.
Politically, it'd be a really stupid move as well, as it would estrange them from the US, which would directly lead to them being MORE likely to get attacked by The North.
Interesting claim. I googled it, and apparently the SNCF is subsidised to the extent of about €200 per person per annum, which is considerably less alarming sounding than €1000 per household. Most people I know don't live in households of five people, and I seriously doubt that the average household size in France is 5 either.
Of course, if you commute anywhere by train in the UK, you are directly subsidising shareholders of the train companies by a hell of a lot more than about £168 per year. Some single journey tickets will set you back more than that, so where is the balance going? There's a discrepancy there of orders of magnitude.
That's *because* of cars - the cars are the problem, not the solution.
No, it's because public transport has been privatised, so it is run "for profit". It's pure right-wing neoliberal economics, as is evidenced by the plentiful and affordable public transport in countries that haven't veered to the right, as opposed to those which have.
For example, visit pretty much any medium-sized city in mainland Europe, and you'll likely see a metro system. How many UK cities have one of those? Last time I checked, it was four. Even Naples, a notoriously poverty-stricken and corrupt city, has a decent metro system. People don't have to drive.
Visit smaller towns and villages in places like rural Greece, and you'll find cheap and comfortable regular coaches and buses. In many European countries, trains are frequent and affordable too. If I remember rightly, a return ticket from Naples station to Ercolano, for example, was a couple of euros.
What we are suffering from in this country, on the other hand, is decades of underinvestment, and a continued selling-off of "the family silver" so that governments can make a quick buck to lower taxes and stay in power. Some people get very rich in the process, everyone else gets poorer.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
