By his account he said that after some days he started to experience mind-created visions and that he lost the notion of time. He said that the 49 days seemed to be, in the end, like twelve days.
That is pretty standard for isolation. If you're out of the normal day-night cycle, most people tend to drift round to a longer-than-24 hours circadian rhythm. A forend of mine did a number of experiments on this in various cave systems in Yorkshire in the 1960s, where he'd have light from lanterns he controlled, and food / water dumps would be left in the cave at irregular intervals (to remove circadian prompting). His body clock went up to something in excess of 30 hours.
Of course, since he had lanterns (OK, miner's light) to turn on, he wasn't experimenting on "resetting" his visual cortex, but on removing the circadian prompt. But relevant.
Anyone who has been a caver and has been waiting for several hours for the rest of the party to come back (or catch up), will have turned the lamp off to save the battery. (Of course, the wise troglodyte carries spare lights. but you still keep your system-level redundancy.) And the colours come and the patterns happen. and you hear the water getting louder and you wonder about whether it's raining up top. Some people freak. Most people turn the light back onto the low power setting.
The Turks you have met, and the Turks voting for Erdogan, are likely disjoint sets.
Very possibly true.
You have most likely met people from Istanbul, or the Western Coast. The people voting for Erdogan are mostly from rural Anatolia.
Having spent much of the last 6 months working in Turkey, I've been meeting a fair number of Turks from all over the country. While most of them have, in fact been quite nice and personable people (including the ones who really didn't want to be there), I couldn't draw a geographical line separating different factions. I suspect that it's more of a social class (caste) difference, since most of the Turks I was working with were degree-educated and middle-class (or aspirants).
If Turkey schisms into a civil war - a low but non-zero possibility - it's not going to be easily solved like regional wars (the Kurdish 3-way mess from 1920, for example), but is going to be a real brother-against-brother job. Very bloody.
mushrooms will probably get you there and they're not dangerous.
Some mushrooms are not dangerous (and are hallucinogenic). Others are dangerous (and hallucinogenic). And still others are dangerous (and are not hallucinogenic).
Generalising, it is not safe to rely upon generalisations about the safety of mushrooms.
There are bacteria and eukaryotes that have been found consuming plastic in the ocean.
Your purported support:
"The study is the first to document the biological communities living on the tiny particles of debris known as microplastics, and recorded many new types of microbe and invertebrate for the first time.
"Biological communities" living ON particles is one thing, similar to people living ON the coast ; people CONSUMING the coast is a different thing to people CONSUMING a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich.
And for reference, the Discovery channel is not a peer reviewed journal for publication of scientific reports. I'll grant that there is probably more science in the average hour of Discovery Channel than the average hour of... well things like the Italian film that my wife is occupying the TV with at the moment... but it's still pretty thin soup.
Following up from your link, the article seems to be a re-presentation of "Marine Plastic Pollution in Waters around Australia: Characteristics, Concentrations, and Pathways" Julia Reisser and 6 others, Published: November 27, 2013 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0080466 Abstract Plastics represent the vast majority of human-made debris present in the oceans. However, their characteristics, accumulation zones, and transport pathways remain poorly assessed. We characterised and estimated the concentration of marine plastics in waters around Australia using surface net tows, and inferred their potential pathways using particle-tracking models and real drifter trajectories. The 839 marine plastics recorded were predominantly small fragments (âoemicroplasticsâ, median length = 2.8 mm, mean length = 4.9 mm) resulting from the breakdown of larger objects made of polyethylene and polypropylene (e.g. packaging and fishing items). Mean sea surface plastic concentration was 4256.4 pieces kmâ'2, and after incorporating the effect of vertical wind mixing, this value increased to 8966.3 pieces kmâ'2. These plastics appear to be associated with a wide range of ocean currents that connect the sampled sites to their international and domestic sources, including populated areas of Australia's east coast. This study shows that plastic contamination levels in surface waters of Australia are similar to those in the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Maine, but considerably lower than those found in the subtropical gyres and Mediterranean Sea. Microplastics such as the ones described here have the potential to affect organisms ranging from megafauna to small fish and zooplankton.
Nothing there about organisms digesting plastics, though the original reportage from Discovery (sorry, it's not original - it's re-hashed from Agence France Presse, I think) does talk about the effects of organisms ingesting plastic particles, and I also pick up implications form Discovery's writers that the plastics then get caught up in the faeces of the organism, and the faecal pellets then sink to the sea bed, hopefully taking the plastic out of the system. Which might work, but if the pooh is re-eaten on the seabed, all bets are off.
Well, I don't see anything in that which goes beyond vague hints of mechanical erosion of plastic debris in the guts of marine organisms. Which is very definitely NOT digestion of the plastic in any chemical sense. (There is a mechanical sense used in the ore-processing industry where "digestion" includes mechanical reduction, but there is normally chemical digestion going on there as well.) I don't think you've made your case.
Second, this is carbon dating, and we are talking about drama involving a couple decades.
It is plain that between the actual science and the reporting, there is a weak link (or several), in the reporters.
TFS gives an age range, which if not qualified is probably as you say, a 95% confidence interval. That alone makes it a non-story, really. Their C.I. for the age of the parchment goes before the (nominal) date of birth of the purported author. Non-issue on the face of it, even before you bring up issues like palimpsests.
If I wanted to, and given a reasonable amount of funds, I could start to make parchment tomorrow which would, when prepared, give a carbon date of, say, 200AD. If you used similar techniques to prepare a suitable ink... I reckon we could have Mo's hand-written note that " Khadijah, I've discovered a really great con trick that'll get us all killed, or make us rich", with a solid RC date of 600-610 CE (calibrated). Between preparing the parchment, the ink, and finding a calligrapher who do the squiggly lines, I reckon we could possibly have the forgery ready for 2021. Are you game?
The technique for preparing the parchment would be to grow a lot of grain in a greenhouse using CO2 from coal manufacture, combined with natural ventilation. The coal-derived CO2 would dilute the natural C-14, as it has essentially no C-14. We want 1400 years of depletion, so that would be about 1/4 coal-derived CO2 to 3/4 natural ventilation. (We might need to filter for N-14 and nuclear-test derived nucleotides, so it might be easier to go with straight coal-derived CO2 and add a source of C-14.)
C-14 depleted grain in hand, we grow a small herd of C-14 depleted sheep or goats. We'd need to check they're genetically similar to ones in the area. Just buy some local goats and we can breed up our beasts.
How to make the ink... I'd have to do some more research. We might need to grow some C-14 depleted chickens to make C-14 depleted egg for a binder.
And I've got other things that I've got to do. Is the general plan clear? Are you up for it?
And just who do you think was feeding decades-old grain and straw to the sheep (or goat) that was peeled to make the parchment, in order to skew the carbon isotope signature of the parchment when Mo said "I've got this great idea, and I need a fresh sheet of goatskin to write it on!"
Actually, the Spanish Inquisition normally sent a messenger around to check what time would be convenient for them to come around and talk to you about allegations or charges that have been presented.
If you're a professor of Christian Theology, I imagine you're likely to believe in God.
Why?
We've had Archbishops of Canterbury (head goddy of the UK's state religion) who didn't believe in central tenets of their professed faith, so why should being an atheist disbar you from studying religion closely enough to become a professor at it.
I'm perfectly capable of doing the maths to become a professor of statistics (or so my statistics professor told me when trying to persuade me to join his department), and I'm perfectly capable of analysing and understanding the rules of a game of poker. The fact that I hardly ever play cards of any sort, and haven't played poker ever, and never would if there was money on the table is no barrier to understanding the game. (Understanding it's emotional appeal is a question for psychologists specialising in addiction.)
When you cite that Pew survey (which is repeated every year or two, and shows consistent trends), you should also note that amongst scientists of higher reputation (principally membership of invitation-only societies like the Royal Society and National Academy of Sciences ; but also filtering on having been awarded a Nobel Prize), then the proportion of atheists rises.
By the time you get to FsRS and Nobellists, the proportion of atheists is up around 90%, and increasing steadily with time.
Sorry, my mistake - it's one monomer, but the bugs in question can chow down on the raw monomer, but most of the material in the waste water is the dimer (two monomers joined head-to-tail, which obviously closes the loop and makes it impossible for the dimer to participate in the polymerisation reaction. There's a second enzyme in the system that can open up the dimer to form monomers, which the rest of the system can then digest. I don't know if this has been tested, but I'd suspect that the monomer-eating ability would have evolved first, because even if you supplied pure dimer, then it would have equilibrated to produce some monomer in solution, on which the bacterium could then feed. Adding the dimer-cracking ability - from some other hydrolysis enzyme - would make the system much more useful to the bacterium. Working the other way would, IMHO, be rather less likely. But I wouldn't stake more than a pint of beer on the question.
There are bacteria and eukaryotes that have been found consuming plastic in the ocean.
That's a pretty significant claim, for which I'd like to see a citation, because I think you're probably misunderstanding something of which I have heard.
In the mid-70s, bacteria cultured from a waste-water treatment plant at a nylon-manufacturing plant (in Japan, IIRC) were found to be able to metabolise the monomers that form nylon (two different 6-carbon chains with condensible radicals on the 1- and 6- atoms) from their relatively high concentrations in the waste water. They used the pre-nylon monomers for both energy production (the isotopically labelled carbon would be excreted as isotopically labelled CO2) and for incorporation into structural proteins, lipids etc. The mutation that allowed them to do this was a single nucleotide error which changed the reading frame on one sector of DNA, which allowed the monomers to be used as source material in their metabolic network, the rest of which continued to operate more-or-less unchanged.
That's the case I know to be true - I read up on it a decade or two ago, as the genetic work was a classic of the time. I have NOT heard of such bacteria being found in the general environment (because such monomers are pretty damned rare), and in any case cracking a condensed link in an established monomer is a very different job from grabbing a radical on one end of a short chain of aliphatic carbon.
I suspect that you've been reading articles a long way down the chain of "Chinese Whispers" from the original work.
Refs : Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1984 Apr; 81(8): 2421â"2425 "Birth of a unique enzyme from an alternative reading frame of the preexisted, internally repetitious coding sequence." S Ohno
Kinoshita S, Negoro S, Muramatsu M, Bisaria VS, Sawada S, Okada H. "6-Aminohexanoic acid cyclic dimer hydrolase. A new cyclic amide hydrolase produced by Achromobacter guttatus K174." Eur J Biochem. 1977 Nov 1;80(2):489â"495.
Kinoshita S, Terada T, Taniguchi T, Takene Y, Masuda S, Matsunaga N, Okada H. "Purification and characterization of 6-aminohexanoic-acid-oligomer hydrolase of Flavobacterium sp. K172." Eur J Biochem. 1981 Jun 1;116(3):547â"551. [PubMed]
I know that is is hackneyed to request Slashdotters to provide references to original sources, but that is the standard which is requested of real scientific and technical people, and I see no reason to lower to the "entertainment" industry's standards.
And of course, I remain open to the possibility that you've actually got some novel evidence. I haven't looked at this case in detail since before I got married.
People will no longer have to explain the two names over and over and over.
To be honest, at least within the mountaineering community, "Denali" has been the recognised name for decades, possibly going back into the mid-70s. I can't remember having to connect the names "Denali" and "Mt McKinley," and I only got into mountaineering in the late 70s
Why did Constantinople get the works? That's nobody's business but the Turks.
You need to revise your history. The Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453 and re-named it Istanbul in 1930 ; the city had the name Constantinople (for Constantine's Polis) from it's inauguration as capital of the Byzantine empire in 330. Before then it was Byzantium for a thousand or so years.
I need to find one of those jobs where you get paid for not working.
No, you need to find something that you're good enough at doing that you can complete sufficiently valuable work in a reasonable time. Clearly, your current work is not something that you're good at, and you need to do something more suited to your actual skills, not to what it says on your CV.
substituting hours for skill is never a good trade off.
I've been watching this sort of bullshit since Pons & Fleischmann. It really isn't worth the effort of following up on. Another new bullshit artist, another pile of obfuscated (or misunderstood, "not even wrong" physics, and onther bunch of people suckered by the bullshit.
Start with the power plant - just a few megawatts - on stilts in an empty field so we can see that there is nothing going in "behind the curtain" and there is an unmistakable amount of energy coming out. It's not difficult to ask for. It's not happened yet, and I don't think it's going to happen. At least, not from these bullshit artists.
Both the women in question are adults and both have said that they do not wish Assange to be prosecuted.
... which means precisely nothing.
IT may seem odd to your jurisdiction, but in Britain, prosecution is carried out by a branch of the state, who will frequently disregard the opinions of victims, particularly in sexual assault cases, because there have been far too many cases where a victim has been pressured to retract a complaint by the assailant, friends or family of the assailant, or for their own reasons.
Don't get me wrong - the Assange case stinks to high heavens of political interference. But this aspect of it is not strange. At least, to my knowledge of British laws and practices. I can't comment on Sweden's practices, but I wouldn't be in the least surprised about it form them.
I really would prefer to have constant connectivity while out there
If you're going to want "constant connectivity", then you're not going to be very "out there". If you're in North America (I don't think it's been mentioned ; I don't think it really matters) then you've got some reasonable sized areas of wilderness to play with, but here in Scotland, you only need to walk 5 to 10 miles (say, 1.5 - 3 hours, with breaks) to get out of cell phone service. That's easy to do.
Cell phone service is installed to make money from people using the service. If there aren't enough people using the service to make sufficient money, then the tower won't be installed (or the temporary testing unit won't be replaced with a permanent one. So if you've got cell phone service, then you're talking about being "out there effectively next to permanent housing, or a fairly busy road. Get onto a road which carries two or three cars each way per day and you're not going to have cell phone service for more than a few miles.
When I go hill walking (normally day tripping with the wife, but occasionally for several days on my own), I find I've normally lost service after an hour or so of walking, at which point I turn the phone off (why waste battery?) for the rest of the day. Occasionally I'll try sending a text message to a friend when I get to the summit - better lines of sight - but that remains pretty unlikely.
but as an American I have to say 13 or 14 centuries is a pretty damn long time to occupy a piece of land.
I am sure that there are many American "Indians" who would agree with you, and look back at their hundred-odd centuries of inhabiting the Americans before being kicked out by white-skinned Europeans.
This is an American site.
I thought that the American site is slashdot.us, and that this is the international site. There were no passport checks on entry.
Slashdot Mirror
That is pretty standard for isolation. If you're out of the normal day-night cycle, most people tend to drift round to a longer-than-24 hours circadian rhythm. A forend of mine did a number of experiments on this in various cave systems in Yorkshire in the 1960s, where he'd have light from lanterns he controlled, and food / water dumps would be left in the cave at irregular intervals (to remove circadian prompting). His body clock went up to something in excess of 30 hours.
Of course, since he had lanterns (OK, miner's light) to turn on, he wasn't experimenting on "resetting" his visual cortex, but on removing the circadian prompt. But relevant.
Anyone who has been a caver and has been waiting for several hours for the rest of the party to come back (or catch up), will have turned the lamp off to save the battery. (Of course, the wise troglodyte carries spare lights. but you still keep your system-level redundancy.) And the colours come and the patterns happen. and you hear the water getting louder and you wonder about whether it's raining up top. Some people freak. Most people turn the light back onto the low power setting.
... without turning all users into criminals.
I can't see what is wrong with this.
I agree. that's why I take the bus.
Very possibly true.
Having spent much of the last 6 months working in Turkey, I've been meeting a fair number of Turks from all over the country. While most of them have, in fact been quite nice and personable people (including the ones who really didn't want to be there), I couldn't draw a geographical line separating different factions. I suspect that it's more of a social class (caste) difference, since most of the Turks I was working with were degree-educated and middle-class (or aspirants).
If Turkey schisms into a civil war - a low but non-zero possibility - it's not going to be easily solved like regional wars (the Kurdish 3-way mess from 1920, for example), but is going to be a real brother-against-brother job. Very bloody.
... when it should have taken two or fewer posts.
Some mushrooms are not dangerous (and are hallucinogenic). Others are dangerous (and hallucinogenic). And still others are dangerous (and are not hallucinogenic).
Generalising, it is not safe to rely upon generalisations about the safety of mushrooms.
Your purported support :
"Biological communities" living ON particles is one thing, similar to people living ON the coast ; people CONSUMING the coast is a different thing to people CONSUMING a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich.
And for reference, the Discovery channel is not a peer reviewed journal for publication of scientific reports. I'll grant that there is probably more science in the average hour of Discovery Channel than the average hour of ... well things like the Italian film that my wife is occupying the TV with at the moment ... but it's still pretty thin soup.
Following up from your link, the article seems to be a re-presentation of "Marine Plastic Pollution in Waters around Australia: Characteristics, Concentrations, and Pathways" Julia Reisser and 6 others, Published: November 27, 2013 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0080466 Abstract Plastics represent the vast majority of human-made debris present in the oceans. However, their characteristics, accumulation zones, and transport pathways remain poorly assessed. We characterised and estimated the concentration of marine plastics in waters around Australia using surface net tows, and inferred their potential pathways using particle-tracking models and real drifter trajectories. The 839 marine plastics recorded were predominantly small fragments (âoemicroplasticsâ, median length = 2.8 mm, mean length = 4.9 mm) resulting from the breakdown of larger objects made of polyethylene and polypropylene (e.g. packaging and fishing items). Mean sea surface plastic concentration was 4256.4 pieces kmâ'2, and after incorporating the effect of vertical wind mixing, this value increased to 8966.3 pieces kmâ'2. These plastics appear to be associated with a wide range of ocean currents that connect the sampled sites to their international and domestic sources, including populated areas of Australia's east coast. This study shows that plastic contamination levels in surface waters of Australia are similar to those in the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Maine, but considerably lower than those found in the subtropical gyres and Mediterranean Sea. Microplastics such as the ones described here have the potential to affect organisms ranging from megafauna to small fish and zooplankton.
Nothing there about organisms digesting plastics, though the original reportage from Discovery (sorry, it's not original - it's re-hashed from Agence France Presse, I think) does talk about the effects of organisms ingesting plastic particles, and I also pick up implications form Discovery's writers that the plastics then get caught up in the faeces of the organism, and the faecal pellets then sink to the sea bed, hopefully taking the plastic out of the system. Which might work, but if the pooh is re-eaten on the seabed, all bets are off.
Well, I don't see anything in that which goes beyond vague hints of mechanical erosion of plastic debris in the guts of marine organisms. Which is very definitely NOT digestion of the plastic in any chemical sense. (There is a mechanical sense used in the ore-processing industry where "digestion" includes mechanical reduction, but there is normally chemical digestion going on there as well.) I don't think you've made your case.
It is plain that between the actual science and the reporting, there is a weak link (or several), in the reporters.
TFS gives an age range, which if not qualified is probably as you say, a 95% confidence interval. That alone makes it a non-story, really. Their C.I. for the age of the parchment goes before the (nominal) date of birth of the purported author. Non-issue on the face of it, even before you bring up issues like palimpsests.
If I wanted to, and given a reasonable amount of funds, I could start to make parchment tomorrow which would, when prepared, give a carbon date of, say, 200AD. If you used similar techniques to prepare a suitable ink ... I reckon we could have Mo's hand-written note that " Khadijah, I've discovered a really great con trick that'll get us all killed, or make us rich", with a solid RC date of 600-610 CE (calibrated). Between preparing the parchment, the ink, and finding a calligrapher who do the squiggly lines, I reckon we could possibly have the forgery ready for 2021. Are you game?
The technique for preparing the parchment would be to grow a lot of grain in a greenhouse using CO2 from coal manufacture, combined with natural ventilation. The coal-derived CO2 would dilute the natural C-14, as it has essentially no C-14. We want 1400 years of depletion, so that would be about 1/4 coal-derived CO2 to 3/4 natural ventilation. (We might need to filter for N-14 and nuclear-test derived nucleotides, so it might be easier to go with straight coal-derived CO2 and add a source of C-14.)
C-14 depleted grain in hand, we grow a small herd of C-14 depleted sheep or goats. We'd need to check they're genetically similar to ones in the area. Just buy some local goats and we can breed up our beasts.
How to make the ink ... I'd have to do some more research. We might need to grow some C-14 depleted chickens to make C-14 depleted egg for a binder.
And I've got other things that I've got to do. Is the general plan clear? Are you up for it?
"Palimpsest" is the term.
No it wouldn't. You've got the logic flipped.
... not since I last ran out of toilet paper.
(See post below for more on carbon dating.)
Actually, the Spanish Inquisition normally sent a messenger around to check what time would be convenient for them to come around and talk to you about allegations or charges that have been presented.
Why?
We've had Archbishops of Canterbury (head goddy of the UK's state religion) who didn't believe in central tenets of their professed faith, so why should being an atheist disbar you from studying religion closely enough to become a professor at it.
I'm perfectly capable of doing the maths to become a professor of statistics (or so my statistics professor told me when trying to persuade me to join his department), and I'm perfectly capable of analysing and understanding the rules of a game of poker. The fact that I hardly ever play cards of any sort, and haven't played poker ever, and never would if there was money on the table is no barrier to understanding the game. (Understanding it's emotional appeal is a question for psychologists specialising in addiction.)
By the time you get to FsRS and Nobellists, the proportion of atheists is up around 90%, and increasing steadily with time.
Sorry, my mistake - it's one monomer, but the bugs in question can chow down on the raw monomer, but most of the material in the waste water is the dimer (two monomers joined head-to-tail, which obviously closes the loop and makes it impossible for the dimer to participate in the polymerisation reaction. There's a second enzyme in the system that can open up the dimer to form monomers, which the rest of the system can then digest. I don't know if this has been tested, but I'd suspect that the monomer-eating ability would have evolved first, because even if you supplied pure dimer, then it would have equilibrated to produce some monomer in solution, on which the bacterium could then feed. Adding the dimer-cracking ability - from some other hydrolysis enzyme - would make the system much more useful to the bacterium. Working the other way would, IMHO, be rather less likely. But I wouldn't stake more than a pint of beer on the question.
That's a pretty significant claim, for which I'd like to see a citation, because I think you're probably misunderstanding something of which I have heard.
In the mid-70s, bacteria cultured from a waste-water treatment plant at a nylon-manufacturing plant (in Japan, IIRC) were found to be able to metabolise the monomers that form nylon (two different 6-carbon chains with condensible radicals on the 1- and 6- atoms) from their relatively high concentrations in the waste water. They used the pre-nylon monomers for both energy production (the isotopically labelled carbon would be excreted as isotopically labelled CO2) and for incorporation into structural proteins, lipids etc. The mutation that allowed them to do this was a single nucleotide error which changed the reading frame on one sector of DNA, which allowed the monomers to be used as source material in their metabolic network, the rest of which continued to operate more-or-less unchanged.
That's the case I know to be true - I read up on it a decade or two ago, as the genetic work was a classic of the time. I have NOT heard of such bacteria being found in the general environment (because such monomers are pretty damned rare), and in any case cracking a condensed link in an established monomer is a very different job from grabbing a radical on one end of a short chain of aliphatic carbon.
I suspect that you've been reading articles a long way down the chain of "Chinese Whispers" from the original work.
Oh look, even wikipedia agrees with me!
Refs : Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1984 Apr; 81(8): 2421â"2425 "Birth of a unique enzyme from an alternative reading frame of the preexisted, internally repetitious coding sequence." S Ohno
Kinoshita S, Negoro S, Muramatsu M, Bisaria VS, Sawada S, Okada H. "6-Aminohexanoic acid cyclic dimer hydrolase. A new cyclic amide hydrolase produced by Achromobacter guttatus K174." Eur J Biochem. 1977 Nov 1;80(2):489â"495.
Kinoshita S, Terada T, Taniguchi T, Takene Y, Masuda S, Matsunaga N, Okada H. "Purification and characterization of 6-aminohexanoic-acid-oligomer hydrolase of Flavobacterium sp. K172." Eur J Biochem. 1981 Jun 1;116(3):547â"551. [PubMed]
I know that is is hackneyed to request Slashdotters to provide references to original sources, but that is the standard which is requested of real scientific and technical people, and I see no reason to lower to the "entertainment" industry's standards.
And of course, I remain open to the possibility that you've actually got some novel evidence. I haven't looked at this case in detail since before I got married.
It's a cosmetic product. No good reason is possible. Just "Marketing said so".
'B'-ark material.
Few bird carcasses that I've met have been in a position to express "love" for anything.
To be honest, at least within the mountaineering community, "Denali" has been the recognised name for decades, possibly going back into the mid-70s. I can't remember having to connect the names "Denali" and "Mt McKinley," and I only got into mountaineering in the late 70s
You need to revise your history. The Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453 and re-named it Istanbul in 1930 ; the city had the name Constantinople (for Constantine's Polis) from it's inauguration as capital of the Byzantine empire in 330. Before then it was Byzantium for a thousand or so years.
No, you need to find something that you're good enough at doing that you can complete sufficiently valuable work in a reasonable time. Clearly, your current work is not something that you're good at, and you need to do something more suited to your actual skills, not to what it says on your CV.
substituting hours for skill is never a good trade off.
Then where are the money-making power plants?
I've been watching this sort of bullshit since Pons & Fleischmann. It really isn't worth the effort of following up on. Another new bullshit artist, another pile of obfuscated (or misunderstood, "not even wrong" physics, and onther bunch of people suckered by the bullshit.
Start with the power plant - just a few megawatts - on stilts in an empty field so we can see that there is nothing going in "behind the curtain" and there is an unmistakable amount of energy coming out. It's not difficult to ask for. It's not happened yet, and I don't think it's going to happen. At least, not from these bullshit artists.
... which means precisely nothing.
IT may seem odd to your jurisdiction, but in Britain, prosecution is carried out by a branch of the state, who will frequently disregard the opinions of victims, particularly in sexual assault cases, because there have been far too many cases where a victim has been pressured to retract a complaint by the assailant, friends or family of the assailant, or for their own reasons.
Don't get me wrong - the Assange case stinks to high heavens of political interference. But this aspect of it is not strange. At least, to my knowledge of British laws and practices. I can't comment on Sweden's practices, but I wouldn't be in the least surprised about it form them.
If you're going to want "constant connectivity", then you're not going to be very "out there". If you're in North America (I don't think it's been mentioned ; I don't think it really matters) then you've got some reasonable sized areas of wilderness to play with, but here in Scotland, you only need to walk 5 to 10 miles (say, 1.5 - 3 hours, with breaks) to get out of cell phone service. That's easy to do.
Cell phone service is installed to make money from people using the service. If there aren't enough people using the service to make sufficient money, then the tower won't be installed (or the temporary testing unit won't be replaced with a permanent one. So if you've got cell phone service, then you're talking about being "out there effectively next to permanent housing, or a fairly busy road. Get onto a road which carries two or three cars each way per day and you're not going to have cell phone service for more than a few miles.
When I go hill walking (normally day tripping with the wife, but occasionally for several days on my own), I find I've normally lost service after an hour or so of walking, at which point I turn the phone off (why waste battery?) for the rest of the day. Occasionally I'll try sending a text message to a friend when I get to the summit - better lines of sight - but that remains pretty unlikely.
Fix what? It is very convenient for politicians and allows businesses to make higher profits. What's the problem?
I am sure that there are many American "Indians" who would agree with you, and look back at their hundred-odd centuries of inhabiting the Americans before being kicked out by white-skinned Europeans.
I thought that the American site is slashdot.us, and that this is the international site. There were no passport checks on entry.