Posts by Spoobistle 196 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Jun 2011
I've got a W7 laptop, also kept for "software reasons", which had no Office suite - so I've just downloaded LibreOffice for that purpose!
Incidentally, a lot of Core2Duo machines have 4 DIMM slots, so will go up to 8 GB with 2G sticks. I don't think I've ever seen a 4G DDR2 stick, and I expect it would be worth more than the rest of the PC put together to someone who really needed it.
Skin and stray hairs are mostly keratin.
Gelatin is degraded collagen as you say but that is derived from connective tissue (the gristly bits you spit out if you find them in pies), boiled down because it's otherwise inedible.
Gelatin is mostly found in wibbly wobbly, gummy food products. I reckon the cosmonauts have been living off trifle and gummy bears and not washing up.
Icon for the underneath of the blinkenlights panels...
Unfortunately for your theory, actual real scientists are concluding that there is systemic bias in science. Look up the Royal Society of Chemistry's "Missing Elements" report. Some of it is due to bad people, some to bad systems, but you can't deny that "it is there", as Galileo might have said.
Viglen P90 with 16MB and a 1000 MB SCSI drive, for Slackware, then Debian 1.2.8 on about 30 floppies...
I thought the thing about static vs dynamic linking was as much to save RAM, as executables could share pages?
Kernel modules could help too - I built one without IDE, though at this remove I can't recall if it achieved anything more than being able to say I'd done it.
There are more practical reasons. This is a bit like saying "get 12% extra RAM by using those ECC bits".
Biology doesn't put methyl groups on DNA for prettyfication, it is a marker for a purpose (e.g. defence against pathogens, turning some genes on or off in response to environment... there is a whole field called epigenetics dealing with this). So if you use a biological system to process or reproduce this DNA, you'll have to be sure the data isn't erased or corrupted. At that point you might be better just redesigning the system from the ground up with non-natural bases etc.
Incidentally if you want to compare I'd say DNA is more like tape backup, as it not infrequently needs to be unwound from histones to be read. It's also more stable then you would think, because of the deoxy function which slows down non-biological degradation hugely. RNA, especially mRNA is more like RAM, it is used for working copies and has a much shorter biological lifetime.
Of course it is the sort of work that raises institutional profiles and gets good publicity, so can't blame the boffins for milking it a bit.
Coincidentally, I was watching the House of Lords Covid Vaccine Rollout committee (Parliament channel, last night).
Oxford vaccine boffins were being asked about their views on progress towards better planning for the next pandemic. Besides some rather tart opinions on various Government initiatives, they all agreed that the parlous state of UK funding (and high living costs) meant that talent is going to the US and Japan, not coming here.
This used to be a common problem with xenon arc lamps as well. First instruction in the S.O.P. "Turn on the lamp BEFORE starting the computer..."
Equipment designers have made progress in PSU arrangements over the last couple of decades, grizzled lab staff buyers roll their eyes if you have to explain why bits of your new Whizzo-XX+ have to be turned on in a strict order!
IIRC gold prices went up a lot at some point after the 70s, which prompted development of plating with a much thinner gold layer. That made recovery from more recent e-waste uneconomic. I guess now the economics have swung back with a higher gold price and also higher cost of non-recycling disposal.
Excir's contribution has been to develop a process avoiding cyanide, which is an environmental nightmare. However, from the limited descriptions I have seen it uses organic solvents and halogen acids, so not exactly nice. But TANSTAAFL, it's an inert metal so you've got to be brutal to get it out!
This could actually be quite significant. Sulfur deposits on earth occur near volcanos, from chemical processes, but also arise from microbial alteration of rocks. My geology isn't good enough to know if these can be distinguished but I'm sure boffins will be pondering the question!
From a previous Reg article. apparently 3 gyros have failed; the single gyro mode lets them keep 2 in reserve presumably extending the total lifetime of observations. The single gyro mode uses other instruments to make up for the lacking two, so I suppose must reduce the versatility and response time of the telescope. Best of a bad job.
In a local charity shop last week, I came across one of those Chinese-style cardboard packets, unusually heavy. On a closer look at the labelling, it proved to be a contraption of wheels, blades and apertures designed for stripping long bits of cable. Not having enough time for the hobbies I've got, I left it for someone else to take up cable stripping for fun and profit, but I did wonder who the target market was, and why it was languishing among the pottery labradors and microwave egg poachers.
E = E0 + (RT/vF) * ln((a(A)*a(Bv+)/(a(Av+)*a(B))) where E0 is standard EMF, R gas constant, F Faraday constant, v number of charges in the reaction and a() activities of reactants A and B.... according to Atkins.
So it's proportional to absolute temp (Kelvin), which gives us a drop to 78% going from +25 to -40C. I guess there's more loss than that due to electrolyte viscosity etc alluded to in previous posts.
> decent diesel generator in the EV's boot.
I'd fancy a trailer with sled and dogs...
Now there's a word I haven't seen for a while. In the olden days when chemists used burettes and washbottles and got jobs with the Water Board, they were taught about such things. Apparently soft water, as seen in areas fed from peat covered volcanic geology like western Scotland and north-west England, contains organic acids that do lift a bit of lead off the pipes so flushing is not a bad idea. In hard water areas (on chalky ground) the minerals tend to coat the inners of the pipe so there is less of a danger. In the cities of course, you got plenty of lead from the dust in the car exhausts anyway.
> run cold tap for a minute to flush the water from house lead pipes
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