generally speaking epoch points are selected to be at some point in the past, for a variety of reasons. Just consider computer date epochs - virtually all of them count from years or decades before the software was developed, and many start from a point thousands of years in the past.
Particularly relevant to the Antikythera Mechanism is the date system that astronomers use : the Julian Date, whose zero point is at mid-day January 01 4713 BCE. This software standard was introduced in 1583, though the definition of "year" was taken from work attributed to Julius Caesar in 46BC. Which is a citation separation time that is going to take some beating. I suppose that it would be just about plausible for modern biological work to cite Aristotle, for nearly 2400 years of separation, but it would probably be a little forced.
As I recall modern simulation resets the epoch every few decades to compensate for cumulative errors,
My copy of "Uranometria (North)" is plotted to epoch 2000.0 (i.e. midnight, Jan 1st 2000), but my tabulated copy of the Bright Star Catalogue (which covers most of Uranometria's plates - I found it in a second-hand bookshop, IIRC) was done to epoch 1950.0. The difference is because stars do move - slowly (proper motion, e.g. Barnard's Star does 10 seconds of arc per year), but also reflection nebulae do change (slowly), things like planetary nebulae expand (the Crab Nebula is only 960 years old and is 420 seconds of arc across, so in that 50 year epoch it should have widened by about 25 seconds of arc.
I know the lawyers have a legal term for this kind of bad faith, but I've no idea what it is right now.
Barratry seems to be the general term, but the Scottish legal system has a fairly excoriating term of someone being recognised as a "vexatious litigant". The last time that was used (about 2005, as far as I remember) the person determined by the court (not by application by the defendants in one of the lawsuits) to be a vexatious litigant was ordered, by the court, to submit no further suits to the legal system for several years after the judgement was handed down. Not "no further suits related to this matter", but "no further suits" with no qualification on that.
No, there wasn't a line of appeal. That was the end if the line.
Perhaps they should just be licensed, with things like customer service, fleet cleanliness, and driver's performance of knowledge of the city routes evaluated to decide who gets them.
The current model of taxi licensing (at least in this country ; yours may differ).
They could also just give them to whoever wants them and let the market decide which company survives.
The model that Uber want to introduce.
I used to think Uber might be a good idea. I'm much less convinced now that I've done more research into the subject.
the taxi arriving as a tiny Yaris when you specifically asked for a large car because you have luggage, etc.
I don't know which country you're in, but in this country specific vehicles are licensed to be used as a taxi, and that vehicle has to have it's annual condition inspection every six months, and the vehicle must be large enough to take 4 passengers with a certain amount (I think about 20kilos each) of luggage each. No 'ifs', no 'buts' and no 'maybes'. Also, if the registering company runs more than one taxi at a time (i.e., is anything more than a sole-trader company with one employee), then at least one in four of their taxis must be large enough to carry a wheelchair user, in their wheelchair, with appropriate ramps for entry and lashing points to secure the passenger and wheelchair. So, if you run one vehicle with three drivers (working 8/8/8*365) then every fourth vehicle which you register as a taxi must be wheelchair-size. (In practice, locally, that means a customised Fiat Ducato van; I don't think any other local dealers have made a thing of customising other vehicles appropriately. But other cities mat have a different range of local specialists.)
Even if you could rent, what's wrong with financing a home via mortgage? At least then you are building equity
IF AND ONLY IF the market continues increasing. When the bubble bursts, you're fucked (so am I, by the way, but I recognise it).
Remember the bit which is required by law in all advertising concerning investments : "the value of investments mat go down as well as up"? Despite this being legally required language for any advert of an investment product to the general public (in this country), specifically to make this precise point to all people reading that advert, almost everyone who reads such adverts does not believe it. DESPITE the experience of 2008, 1993, 1984, and 1927 (just to list the ones within living history and my history), people still do not believe it.
People on average do not think - for any randomly selected group of more than a few dozen people.
although we did have to learn the major points of Catholic doctrine (which has turned out to be useful)
Er, for what is it useful? Apart from scoring points over delusional religious people? Which is a waste of time anyway, because they're delusional religious people and will brook no disagreement with their articles of faith.
I suspect (but am willing to be corrected, by a Dutch speaker. Or even a Frieslander.) that the etymology is more like "bestuurder" = "be-" + "-stuurder", with "-stuurder" being a cognate of the English "Strider" - a person who strides, or who travels long distances. (Yes, you do recognise it from Tolkein ; JRRT was a scholar of Old and middle English, whose Germanic roots are even more obvious than those of Modern English). So a "bestuurder" is someone who "be-strides"... the world like a Colossus. (I'm channelling some piece of poetry I've forgotten the source of. Sounds Byronian, or Romantic?)
My 10 (euro-)cents. With a degree of proficiency in two non-native languages, and exposure to 4 others on a regular basis, I spend a lot of time trying to get the gist of the other side(s) of a meeting.
What to you is unreadable bullcrap is, to the author, perfectly legible.
The only time there's a problem is when the scribbler gives you the scrawl and says "build it". Then it's your problem to communicate with your Boss. If you can't do that, then you've already got a big problem, handwriting be damned.
I have to deal with reading the scrawl of novices on data sheets (we write long-hand next to the microscope, because there isn't space for a laptop, and oily, fume-laden labs with chemicals available for spilling are not good places for laptops. Or tablets, if you want a buzz word ; same issues.) every working day of the year, and the novice changes every month. It doesn't take long to learn someone else's scrawl. Even my (BCH/MD grade) scrawl isn't too bad after a day or so for the novices.
Also, I once knew how to calculate a square root by hand. How many today ever learned how to do that, nevermind remember how to do it?
Well, I would hope everyone who learns anything much beyond basic arithmetic. The Newton-Raphson method of successive approximations to roots of a polynomial is one of the first useful applications that you get out of learning calculus, and I'd expect pretty much anyone who learns calculus to learn the method and apply it.
As for forgetting - well you might need to exercise the brain cell for several minutes to get back all the details into working memory. But that's the point of doing 30-odd exercises in a new method : to push the memory of the process into long term memory. N-R : (1) - make a guess ; (2) at your guess, evaluate the value and slope of the polynomial ; (3) revise your guess using that slope ; (4) go to (1) unless change from previous estimate is below the precision you want. OK, you then need to apply some common sense to making that first guess, be aware of inflexion points and other complicating factors. But the process is clear and laid out in front of me, ready to pick up my pencil and get cracking.
I haven't applied the technique for 20-odd years, so it takes a couple of minutes for my brain cell to return an answer from long-term storage. But I do have confidence in my brain cell returning a sensible answer.
Incidentally - my phone book is where it always lives - under the coffee table in the living room ; my Filofax (stuffed with phone numbers, snail addresses, email addresses, Skype addresses) in my work-bag beside me, with a pencil. Log tables, I haven't been able to find a set despite looking for years (but my longhand maths is decent ; I can live without log tables. Trigonometric identities can get you around a lot of need for trig tables.) Zombie electronic apocalypse (what the fuck is this obsession with zombies?) can come on. you see, it's barely 3 months since I last had to switch my phone off, remove it's battery, seal it into a bag, and leave locked into a cabinet it at the security check-in before going to work. I also carry an alarm clock.
In the last year I've seen 15 passive acoustic transponders dropped onto the seabed in kilometer+ water depths, and all recovered. OK ; that's in better conditions than this, but IF they can find the strewn field of debris (a definite IF, but that's the object of the exercise) then the location and retrieval of the FDR and CVR is a better than evens chance.
Putting a flotilla of sonar search boats and a relevant ROV support vessel out is going to run at around 3-4 million AU$ per day, so it pays to do what you can to reduce the search area beforehand.
What are the possible outcomes? The least important would be "pilot goes mad and does something to kill everyone else on board, then crashes the plane when it runs out of fuel" ; we already know that people go mad or commit suicide in political ways. But there's no evidence of madness, and committing suicide without publicising the political element is just pointless, so I think that's a low-likelihood outcome.
Which leaves a range of technical errors. And they are important questions to try to answer. Probably billion-dollar value questions. Which is what seems to be gearing up.
And no, I don't think it is "obsessing", nor pointless. For what it's worth, one of my classmates from uni lost three colleagues on that flight, and there were a number of other oilfield people on board, so there's a fair chance that acquaintances were on board.
For decades, while wearing my "I am a geologist" tee shirt, I have been proposing a particular shale (OK, claystone : shale without marked fissility) formation as the ideal location for a high-level nuclear waste store.
The arguments that the low mobility of water within shale ("claystone", "mudrock" ; all mean essentially the same thing) formations makes them good for isolating and immobilising all sorts of nasty materials are old, old, old arguments. And they are perfectly sound arguments, given that you need to examine a particular proposed site for natural fractures, be careful to not induce fractures during the cutting and drilling processes, etc, etc.
The particular shale formation I've been proposing for the UK's repository is the "London Clay", which underlies the whole of that city. There are abundant other potentially suitable formations, but the London Clay has one important advantages : if the repository leaks, the first people to die will be the politicians in charge.
More specifically, I'd have the entrance to the repository pass *through* the seat of government. Literally (not figuratively) I'd leave the politicians in charge "in the hot seat".
I don't know the geology of America well enough to say if there is a suitable rock formation in the vicinity of Washington. But the important principle of ensuring that the politicians will be the first to die if they fuck up is a strong point.
For cars - no show stoppers. But you can have it in any colour you want as long as it's Brilliant White.
Srsly. Any other colour (OK, I'll exclude pastel whites ; say anything with an albedo of less than 90% or so) would absorb more light/ heat than this tailored IR radiator can emit to space.
And I imagine less harmful than hydraulic fracking.
The important word there is "imagine". If you'd had to deal with the morass of environmental requirements to be fulfilled in Scotland before you get a license to drill (even if you do not have any desire to frack), you'd know that you're not going to get away with polluting anything. Plus, for the directors and investors in a polluting industry, you're exposed to unlimited liability for cleaning up pollution you produce. that's "unlimited" as in "not limited" : your bank accounts go to pay for the clean up. then your pension and any investments. Then your half of the marital house (assuming you own a house ; assuming you're married. Then the shirt on your back.
Believe me - you pay attention to your procedures for verifying casing and wellbore integrity, and for cost reasons you never fracture any further than you absolutely have to, so your fractures don't get within a couple of kilometres of the surface. But hey, why should I let reality intrude into your imaginings - I doubt you'll ever have to actually deal with the questions you try to raise.
Ok, how do you start upgrading? Oh yeah, you decommission the old one!
I'll bow to your extensive industrial site experience, but in my experience, unless you're on a very space-constrained site, you start building the new plant before you transfer production and then start the tear-down of the old plant. If that means that you need to move the office staff off site (seen it ; been employed carrying document boxes and loading desks into lorries ; keeps me out of the pub and the cash is tax-free), then demolish the offices to make room for the new plant, then transfer production (maintaining production to existing contracts - a fucking important point), then tear down the old plant, then build new offices and move office staff back from their (rented) temporary space.
But it's also true that nuclear plants are rarely tightly constrained for operating space.
there are very few examples of a nuclear site being successfully fully cleaned
One of the few examples being, errr, in Scotland. Dounreay, if you don''t know the place.
(OK, the decommissioning is not finished there, but it is well down the road to being finished.)
Would I buy a house on the old site? Probably not, but that's because it's in the arse-end of Caithness (to quote a Thursonian friend of many years), not because it's on a nuclear site. Hell, I could probably do with the reduction in radiation counts that I'd get from moving to live on Dounreay. The background radiation there is lower than at home (same Thursonian source, who did Physics in 1st year and was gob-smacked by the background radiation levels when he came to university).
Scotland is producing more from nuclear energy combined than all the fossil fuel based sources combined
FTFY
For what it's worth, I live in Scotland, though not anywhere near either of the two nuclear plants. I wouldn't object to one being sited near my home though.
Does that include those of us who use an 800x600 rack mount screen on a rack mount computer for which a larger monitor is (1) not available and (2) physically wouldn't fit due to the dimensions of the rack (set in the 1930s)?
YOU might be used to using computers on desktops, or servers in faceless masses down in a server room. But no small number are embedded in industrial control systems. Hell - most of our machines don't have a mouse because there's no flat space to put a mouse on, and there won't be because you'd have to mount/ dismount the mouse surface to get from the workspace's doorway to the sample examination microscope.
RFID, chips, cards, etc. have the SAME "problem" as IP addresses: they don't identify the PERSON, they just identify the identification. If someone else is holding the identification, all bets are off.
OK, that's a valid point.
(1) This is a working environment where people are already wearing all-encompassing clothing, so there are no issues about requiring someone to wear another item of clothing/ equipment.
(2) So... put the RFID (or equivalent, I'll use "RFID*" to cover all such technologies) onto a wrist/ neck/ waist band, or shoulder holster or some other contraption which it is physically impossible to remove. (Minor caveats for first aid treatment, but in such cases you'd almost always start treatment by getting the IP (Injured Person) out of the controlled zone, so "Meh".)
(3) As part of that process, the security guard / team leader/ whatever verifies ID (company badge, user-name/password, whatever ; and these are likely to be regular teams so Mark-1 Eyeball is likely to be as good as anything) and that it matches the RFID*... sign off paperwork, job done.
(4) People enter controlled zone, setting off proximity sensors as they enter, as they perform decontamination, go through into fully controlled zone, sign off hand-over notes... and get on with their jobs.
For what it's worth, when I turn up at the heliport to go to my work, I am always searched - pockets and baggage - for mobile phones, cameras, tools, drugs (including prescription ones)... we don't consider it an invasion of personal privacy or shit like that. It is simply the way that this business has always been
Fixing problems generally entails finding out what the fuck the original problem was in the first place. That is still a complete unknown in this case, and that is (rightly) very worrying to the entire aviation industry.
I don't know about you, but whenever one of the types of aircraft in which I fly regularly goes down, I make efforts to keep track of the investigation of root causes as well as airworthiness directives etc that come out because of it. Then again, I get thrown in to a sinking mockup of an aircraft every few years to remind me that I'm liable to die in the process of getting to work, so I might pay a slightly higher attention to keeping my arse alive than you do.
if you are in America, you are probably using code that both those companies developed in the late 90s since BT and Sky sent engineers to California to develop a lot of your set top box menu software and on demand services.
Worse - if you're using the Internet, then significant chunks of the code and practices would have been developed at the UK's GPO (General Post Office), which became BT on privatisation in the mid-80s. Through the 1970s the GPO was intensely interested in the technologies needed to replace it's direct-connected telephone system with a more efficient packet-switched network, and as a state monopoly it could invest with the multi-decade payback time that is so problematical to profit-driven corporations. Look through the first couple of thousand RFCs that define "the Internet" (as well as anything does) and you'll see work by GPO staff, and associated large amounts from places like UMIST.
The short version of the history of the Internet is that "it was developed by DARPA" ; the longer, less inaccurate version is that "it was developed by DARPA and many other groups and organisations working in approximate concert". One of the largest non-American "others" was the GPO.
hexane won't have been used, nor any other chemical
Not even water?
Everything but everything that you can touch, feel, smell or taste is a chemical. Could you please elaborate on what you mean by "chemical" versus the (implied) non-chemicals that you get in organic food.
[While you're trying to reply, please note that in my earlier years I've dome minor specialisms in both soil science (directly relevant to the question of what "organic" means, as well as what soil is) and food chemistry (as in "what is a chemical"). Please try to make effective arguments.]
Slashdot Mirror
Before the fusion experts get at it, you need the diving experts to go here to find it.
Particularly relevant to the Antikythera Mechanism is the date system that astronomers use : the Julian Date, whose zero point is at mid-day January 01 4713 BCE. This software standard was introduced in 1583, though the definition of "year" was taken from work attributed to Julius Caesar in 46BC. Which is a citation separation time that is going to take some beating. I suppose that it would be just about plausible for modern biological work to cite Aristotle, for nearly 2400 years of separation, but it would probably be a little forced.
My copy of "Uranometria (North)" is plotted to epoch 2000.0 (i.e. midnight, Jan 1st 2000), but my tabulated copy of the Bright Star Catalogue (which covers most of Uranometria's plates - I found it in a second-hand bookshop, IIRC) was done to epoch 1950.0. The difference is because stars do move - slowly (proper motion, e.g. Barnard's Star does 10 seconds of arc per year), but also reflection nebulae do change (slowly), things like planetary nebulae expand (the Crab Nebula is only 960 years old and is 420 seconds of arc across, so in that 50 year epoch it should have widened by about 25 seconds of arc.
Barratry seems to be the general term, but the Scottish legal system has a fairly excoriating term of someone being recognised as a "vexatious litigant". The last time that was used (about 2005, as far as I remember) the person determined by the court (not by application by the defendants in one of the lawsuits) to be a vexatious litigant was ordered, by the court, to submit no further suits to the legal system for several years after the judgement was handed down. Not "no further suits related to this matter", but "no further suits" with no qualification on that.
No, there wasn't a line of appeal. That was the end if the line.
The current model of taxi licensing (at least in this country ; yours may differ).
The model that Uber want to introduce.
I used to think Uber might be a good idea. I'm much less convinced now that I've done more research into the subject.
I don't know which country you're in, but in this country specific vehicles are licensed to be used as a taxi, and that vehicle has to have it's annual condition inspection every six months, and the vehicle must be large enough to take 4 passengers with a certain amount (I think about 20kilos each) of luggage each. No 'ifs', no 'buts' and no 'maybes'. Also, if the registering company runs more than one taxi at a time (i.e., is anything more than a sole-trader company with one employee), then at least one in four of their taxis must be large enough to carry a wheelchair user, in their wheelchair, with appropriate ramps for entry and lashing points to secure the passenger and wheelchair. So, if you run one vehicle with three drivers (working 8/8/8*365) then every fourth vehicle which you register as a taxi must be wheelchair-size. (In practice, locally, that means a customised Fiat Ducato van; I don't think any other local dealers have made a thing of customising other vehicles appropriately. But other cities mat have a different range of local specialists.)
IF AND ONLY IF the market continues increasing. When the bubble bursts, you're fucked (so am I, by the way, but I recognise it).
Remember the bit which is required by law in all advertising concerning investments : "the value of investments mat go down as well as up"? Despite this being legally required language for any advert of an investment product to the general public (in this country), specifically to make this precise point to all people reading that advert, almost everyone who reads such adverts does not believe it. DESPITE the experience of 2008, 1993, 1984, and 1927 (just to list the ones within living history and my history), people still do not believe it.
People on average do not think - for any randomly selected group of more than a few dozen people.
Er, for what is it useful? Apart from scoring points over delusional religious people? Which is a waste of time anyway, because they're delusional religious people and will brook no disagreement with their articles of faith.
I read that as "they are leased from private people/ corporations who have purchased them [from the city, if at several removes]".
My 10 (euro-)cents. With a degree of proficiency in two non-native languages, and exposure to 4 others on a regular basis, I spend a lot of time trying to get the gist of the other side(s) of a meeting.
The only time there's a problem is when the scribbler gives you the scrawl and says "build it". Then it's your problem to communicate with your Boss. If you can't do that, then you've already got a big problem, handwriting be damned.
I have to deal with reading the scrawl of novices on data sheets (we write long-hand next to the microscope, because there isn't space for a laptop, and oily, fume-laden labs with chemicals available for spilling are not good places for laptops. Or tablets, if you want a buzz word ; same issues.) every working day of the year, and the novice changes every month. It doesn't take long to learn someone else's scrawl. Even my (BCH/MD grade) scrawl isn't too bad after a day or so for the novices.
Well, I would hope everyone who learns anything much beyond basic arithmetic. The Newton-Raphson method of successive approximations to roots of a polynomial is one of the first useful applications that you get out of learning calculus, and I'd expect pretty much anyone who learns calculus to learn the method and apply it.
As for forgetting - well you might need to exercise the brain cell for several minutes to get back all the details into working memory. But that's the point of doing 30-odd exercises in a new method : to push the memory of the process into long term memory. N-R : (1) - make a guess ; (2) at your guess, evaluate the value and slope of the polynomial ; (3) revise your guess using that slope ; (4) go to (1) unless change from previous estimate is below the precision you want. OK, you then need to apply some common sense to making that first guess, be aware of inflexion points and other complicating factors. But the process is clear and laid out in front of me, ready to pick up my pencil and get cracking.
I haven't applied the technique for 20-odd years, so it takes a couple of minutes for my brain cell to return an answer from long-term storage. But I do have confidence in my brain cell returning a sensible answer.
Incidentally - my phone book is where it always lives - under the coffee table in the living room ; my Filofax (stuffed with phone numbers, snail addresses, email addresses, Skype addresses) in my work-bag beside me, with a pencil. Log tables, I haven't been able to find a set despite looking for years (but my longhand maths is decent ; I can live without log tables. Trigonometric identities can get you around a lot of need for trig tables.) Zombie electronic apocalypse (what the fuck is this obsession with zombies?) can come on. you see, it's barely 3 months since I last had to switch my phone off, remove it's battery, seal it into a bag, and leave locked into a cabinet it at the security check-in before going to work. I also carry an alarm clock.
Then the fucking commercial and food industries should try using technical terms to mean what they mean, not what they want them to mean.
In the last year I've seen 15 passive acoustic transponders dropped onto the seabed in kilometer+ water depths, and all recovered. OK ; that's in better conditions than this, but IF they can find the strewn field of debris (a definite IF, but that's the object of the exercise) then the location and retrieval of the FDR and CVR is a better than evens chance.
Putting a flotilla of sonar search boats and a relevant ROV support vessel out is going to run at around 3-4 million AU$ per day, so it pays to do what you can to reduce the search area beforehand.
What are the possible outcomes? The least important would be "pilot goes mad and does something to kill everyone else on board, then crashes the plane when it runs out of fuel" ; we already know that people go mad or commit suicide in political ways. But there's no evidence of madness, and committing suicide without publicising the political element is just pointless, so I think that's a low-likelihood outcome.
Which leaves a range of technical errors. And they are important questions to try to answer. Probably billion-dollar value questions. Which is what seems to be gearing up.
And no, I don't think it is "obsessing", nor pointless. For what it's worth, one of my classmates from uni lost three colleagues on that flight, and there were a number of other oilfield people on board, so there's a fair chance that acquaintances were on board.
For decades, while wearing my "I am a geologist" tee shirt, I have been proposing a particular shale (OK, claystone : shale without marked fissility) formation as the ideal location for a high-level nuclear waste store.
The arguments that the low mobility of water within shale ("claystone", "mudrock" ; all mean essentially the same thing) formations makes them good for isolating and immobilising all sorts of nasty materials are old, old, old arguments. And they are perfectly sound arguments, given that you need to examine a particular proposed site for natural fractures, be careful to not induce fractures during the cutting and drilling processes, etc, etc.
The particular shale formation I've been proposing for the UK's repository is the "London Clay", which underlies the whole of that city. There are abundant other potentially suitable formations, but the London Clay has one important advantages : if the repository leaks, the first people to die will be the politicians in charge.
More specifically, I'd have the entrance to the repository pass *through* the seat of government. Literally (not figuratively) I'd leave the politicians in charge "in the hot seat".
I don't know the geology of America well enough to say if there is a suitable rock formation in the vicinity of Washington. But the important principle of ensuring that the politicians will be the first to die if they fuck up is a strong point.
Srsly. Any other colour (OK, I'll exclude pastel whites ; say anything with an albedo of less than 90% or so) would absorb more light/ heat than this tailored IR radiator can emit to space.
The important word there is "imagine". If you'd had to deal with the morass of environmental requirements to be fulfilled in Scotland before you get a license to drill (even if you do not have any desire to frack), you'd know that you're not going to get away with polluting anything. Plus, for the directors and investors in a polluting industry, you're exposed to unlimited liability for cleaning up pollution you produce. that's "unlimited" as in "not limited" : your bank accounts go to pay for the clean up. then your pension and any investments. Then your half of the marital house (assuming you own a house ; assuming you're married. Then the shirt on your back.
Believe me - you pay attention to your procedures for verifying casing and wellbore integrity, and for cost reasons you never fracture any further than you absolutely have to, so your fractures don't get within a couple of kilometres of the surface. But hey, why should I let reality intrude into your imaginings - I doubt you'll ever have to actually deal with the questions you try to raise.
I'll bow to your extensive industrial site experience, but in my experience, unless you're on a very space-constrained site, you start building the new plant before you transfer production and then start the tear-down of the old plant. If that means that you need to move the office staff off site (seen it ; been employed carrying document boxes and loading desks into lorries ; keeps me out of the pub and the cash is tax-free), then demolish the offices to make room for the new plant, then transfer production (maintaining production to existing contracts - a fucking important point), then tear down the old plant, then build new offices and move office staff back from their (rented) temporary space.
But it's also true that nuclear plants are rarely tightly constrained for operating space.
One of the few examples being, errr, in Scotland. Dounreay, if you don''t know the place.
(OK, the decommissioning is not finished there, but it is well down the road to being finished.)
Would I buy a house on the old site? Probably not, but that's because it's in the arse-end of Caithness (to quote a Thursonian friend of many years), not because it's on a nuclear site. Hell, I could probably do with the reduction in radiation counts that I'd get from moving to live on Dounreay. The background radiation there is lower than at home (same Thursonian source, who did Physics in 1st year and was gob-smacked by the background radiation levels when he came to university).
FTFY
For what it's worth, I live in Scotland, though not anywhere near either of the two nuclear plants. I wouldn't object to one being sited near my home though.
YOU might be used to using computers on desktops, or servers in faceless masses down in a server room. But no small number are embedded in industrial control systems. Hell - most of our machines don't have a mouse because there's no flat space to put a mouse on, and there won't be because you'd have to mount/ dismount the mouse surface to get from the workspace's doorway to the sample examination microscope.
OK, that's a valid point.
(1) This is a working environment where people are already wearing all-encompassing clothing, so there are no issues about requiring someone to wear another item of clothing/ equipment. ... put the RFID (or equivalent, I'll use "RFID*" to cover all such technologies) onto a wrist/ neck/ waist band, or shoulder holster or some other contraption which it is physically impossible to remove. (Minor caveats for first aid treatment, but in such cases you'd almost always start treatment by getting the IP (Injured Person) out of the controlled zone, so "Meh".)
... sign off paperwork, job done.
... and get on with their jobs.
(2) So
(3) As part of that process, the security guard / team leader/ whatever verifies ID (company badge, user-name/password, whatever ; and these are likely to be regular teams so Mark-1 Eyeball is likely to be as good as anything) and that it matches the RFID*
(4) People enter controlled zone, setting off proximity sensors as they enter, as they perform decontamination, go through into fully controlled zone, sign off hand-over notes
For what it's worth, when I turn up at the heliport to go to my work, I am always searched - pockets and baggage - for mobile phones, cameras, tools, drugs (including prescription ones) ... we don't consider it an invasion of personal privacy or shit like that. It is simply the way that this business has always been
I don't know about you, but whenever one of the types of aircraft in which I fly regularly goes down, I make efforts to keep track of the investigation of root causes as well as airworthiness directives etc that come out because of it. Then again, I get thrown in to a sinking mockup of an aircraft every few years to remind me that I'm liable to die in the process of getting to work, so I might pay a slightly higher attention to keeping my arse alive than you do.
There were unicorn turds in the deal too. Apple always want their pound of unicorn turd.
Worse - if you're using the Internet, then significant chunks of the code and practices would have been developed at the UK's GPO (General Post Office), which became BT on privatisation in the mid-80s. Through the 1970s the GPO was intensely interested in the technologies needed to replace it's direct-connected telephone system with a more efficient packet-switched network, and as a state monopoly it could invest with the multi-decade payback time that is so problematical to profit-driven corporations. Look through the first couple of thousand RFCs that define "the Internet" (as well as anything does) and you'll see work by GPO staff, and associated large amounts from places like UMIST.
The short version of the history of the Internet is that "it was developed by DARPA" ; the longer, less inaccurate version is that "it was developed by DARPA and many other groups and organisations working in approximate concert". One of the largest non-American "others" was the GPO.
Not even water?
Everything but everything that you can touch, feel, smell or taste is a chemical. Could you please elaborate on what you mean by "chemical" versus the (implied) non-chemicals that you get in organic food.
[While you're trying to reply, please note that in my earlier years I've dome minor specialisms in both soil science (directly relevant to the question of what "organic" means, as well as what soil is) and food chemistry (as in "what is a chemical"). Please try to make effective arguments.]