Hmm, hmm, "Fracking Setback in Poland Dims Hope for Less Russian Gas."
Why not "Frelling" or "Smegging" setback?
Because "fracking" comes from an abbreviation of tedious engineering terms in one field of research ("hydraulic fracturing" in drilling engineering), while "smegging" is an euphemism invented in a totally unrelated field (from "smegma", a medical term, in the field of entertainment).
I don't know if "frelling" is a technical term in drilling engineering, or a contraction of such ; if it is, I don't recognise it's derivation and would appreciate an explanation of how it's appropriate. If it's an euphemism from the entertainment industry, what the fuck has that to do with engineering terminology?
I have heard that there are fields in Europe which can be exploited with the new methods.
Absolutely there are. But more importantly, nobody, but nobody, absolutely nobody would go around fracking an existing field if they didn't need to. Spending several million dollars per well on a treatment that isn't necessary is called "wasting the investor's money" and is not efficient business.
On the other hand, there are undeveloped fields and prospects which may not be economically exploitable without fracking. I'm working on proposals for one such myself (if you want details, invest ; I'll pass you the lawyer's contact information because I don't deal with that end of the company operations myself.) However, even in that case, one designs the well on the basis of optimising the likelihood of economic production without fracking, and you only frack if your well test indicates that you need to.
The current approach though is new and was first put in use some point in the 90s with wide scale use in the US some point after 2000.
The current system which is changing the economics of shale gas (and shale oil) production is a combination of horizontal drilling (which was developed, slowly, through the late 1980s and early 1990s, but by the mid-1990s it was becoming routine. An important component of that was the development of a variety of "rotary steerable systems" which allowed changes in configuration of the bottom hole assembly without having to round trip the drill string. With that, the constraint on controlling the direction of a well was mainly lifted, and steering a well to (and beyond) the horizontal became economically feasible. By 1996 I was seeing wells inclined up as far as 125 degrees form the vertical.
it's a sensitive subject which splits population right in half.
More like a 80:20% split in my experience. Those who understand the technology (mostly by working in the oil drilling industry, or knowing people who work in the industry and caring to ask detailed questions) make up the 20% who are unconcerned by the question. The 80% who get their news from "Gas Land" and Greenpeace, are convinced that fracking will kill them and rape their dog.
In areas where there are fewer drilling specialists, then it's likely to be more like 90:10 or even higher. Which means that we've got a major re-education campaign to perform.
Isn't there an implication that the algorithm is provably fair to a rational being. The last time I interacted with them, human children did not appear (mostly) to be rational beings.
That would depend on whether your peak hours are the same as other peoples (not guaranteed). And the efficiency of solar cells is unlikely to be constant across different temperatures, so you'd need to check their specifications on whether they're more efficient in the cool of the morning, or the (relative) warmth of the afternoon. Even if that relative warmth is still in negative figures.
AIU the original question, a significant part of the power drain from the PV was expected to be for powering the server (regardless of whether the internet connection stayed up in a blackout).
The government can search any package it wants that is being imported into the country.
Which is pretty much true for any government in any part of the world. There are certain mutually-agreed exceptions, such as countries within the Schengen region not searching packages from other Schengen countries without prior evidence of a crime (e.g., sniffer bees drawing attention to the package), but generally it's the case that all mail into or out of a country is subject to search for contraband. Which includes paper money.
Read the section of the paper concerning detection efforts in mica. They don't see significant exposure of the specimens they examined (or which were examined in the 1990s, actually) to the particles they're looking for. They use that as one constraint on the mass of their putative particles.
Those mica specimens go back to around 500 million years. You can go back further, but the mass constraints change because thermal effects in the rocks slowly heal older crystal dislocations, erasing the record like on an old tape. By the time you're looking at crystal defects that would have melted the crystal itself, and so erased themselves on creation. There are structures that go back this far, but they don't preserve the traces of delicate events, just violent ones.
(1) Choose a good company ;
(2) Get hired by them ;
(3) Be good at your job ;
(4)...
(5) Profit or retirement.
It's been 23 years since my last job interview, which was conducted by the MD of the company and made me the first person on the payroll. We're probably pushing number 500 now.
I thought that Wikileaks got round the Visa/ Paypal chokepoint by a variety of means, all of which pre-dated Bitcoin becoming anything like common. (Speaks the man who has never had a Bitcoin transaction in his life.)
Same argument, different formulation : with one measurement, you have a datum ; with two measurements you have a disagreement ; with three, you have statistics.
And as I pointed out about 5 minutes ago in a different thread, GPS navigation isn't the be-all and end-all of navigation. It doesn't work underground. It doesn't work in buildings. It doesn't work if you've lost electrical power (which is one of the first things to go when trouble happens). And it depends on some foreigners not switching it off. Some of those problems can be addressed (build another GNS system ; carry spare batteries) but for many, knowing how to work without GPS (or any other GNS) is a damned good idea.
and long-haul sailors still needed to know celestial navigation,
Isn't celestial navigation still a required part of the master's curriculum? It certainly was the last time I paid the slightest attention to the subject, but that was about a decade ago.
Obviously, I keep a compass in my rucksack (and a second one in my raincoat) so I'm always at least able to maintain orientation in the mountains without a horizon, landscape or sky visible. Actually navigating my way out of trouble without a map and form a cold start would be harder, but certainly very do-able (you just map your way out, so that you can reverse your route if necessary).
GPS? I didn't replace mine when the burglars had it a dozen years ago. I believe there may be such technology in my telephone, but I've never felt the need to read that part of the manual.
How would not connecting the machines to the internet protect the trade secrets? all you'd need to do would be to go onto Linked-In (or oil-jobs.com, or any of a dozen other recruitment sites), and hire yourself a couple of experienced mud engineers, directional drillers, and possibly completion engineers. Recruit them, ask them questions, get them to train your staff... problem solved.
Total cost - fractions of a million dollars. Perfectly legal.
You might also need to hire equipment from the appropriate companies. Of course it'll disappear in transit somewhere, but that was known to happen anyway. It's what you expect when you deal with Chinese companies.
Goddamn, I can't wait for these things to become mandatory, to take all the fun out of driving and replace it with the seriousness appropriate for operating multi-tonne machines at high speeds near unprotected people.
Next thing you know, they'll be requiring people to prove their competence to operate such machines, and to re-prove it at regular intervals.
Many vessels these days include as part of their propulsion systems what are called "thruster pods" which hang below the keel of the vessel and can be rotated to provide vectored thrust (very much improved manoeuvrability in harbour ; that can improve turnaround times considerably, and get the vessel back into productive work) ; other designs mount essentially the same thrusters transversely in the bow and stern of the vessel to provide lateral motion capability. (Think of the repeatedly re-invented "easy parking system" that pops wheels out of front and back of the vehicle to allow it to be parked without to-and-fro ; consider the same manoeuvres on a quayside ; they can take hours, which is wasted time.)
These technologies are stable and mature. Yes, you do have to service the thruster pods at regular intervals (3 to 5 years) ; for this, you install them at the bottom of access shafts, with externally operated mechanical latching systems and power and sensor connections. That's one of the reasons they're interchangeable : a vessel can hold a spare pod, and change out for regular maintenance (or repairs) while under way at (say) 5/6th of regular power.
Oh, FYI, for even longer, most vessels have used prime movers to run large generators, which then power large electric motors for propulsion, pumping, cranes... using another electric motor for propulsion fits perfectly in that paradigm.
FYI, most of the area under discussion is within reach of open circuit air diving - under 40m deep. This is all eminently maintainable. We've been putting things onto the seabed and picking them back off for a couple of generations now, and weren't exactly inexperienced in such things before the oilfield came to the area - look at the construction methods used for the previous couple of centuries to build lighthouses.
Um, ammonium nitrate is an oxidizer, and can't explode in its own
False. Ammonium nitrate is perfectly capable of exploding on it's own. It does so better and more violently with a fuel to oxidise (diesel fuel for a fuel oil / fertilizer bomb ; aluminium powder for an Ammonal mix ; and there's another mix whose name I forget).
Since I haven't tried to separate ammonium nitrate from commercial fertilizer, I don't know what they add to the commercial mixes to render it non-explosive. I'd start, if I wanted to know, by looking for ammonium phosphate (because phosphorous is often a limiting- or near-limiting nutrient) and ammonium chloride (a fairly inert ion with a knack for breaking free-radical chain reactions and thereby suppressing flame ; other halides may well be more effective).
Because of the fertilizing effects of phosphate ion, simply reading the side of the bag will tell you about it's presence. They'd tout it as making the fertilizer "better", and not mention it's explosion suppression effects.
Well, you want to continue courting libel. Your problem.
Between all the name calling, I gather your point as expense of a medial trail being too expensive.
You mean a "medical" trial? ; I've never heard of a "medial" trial, though it is composed of bits of statistical terminology.
The point is not that a trial of thirty, forty, a hundred monkeys is too expensive, what I'm saying is that, literally, the resources to carry out a bigger trial do not exist. Or, to be more precise, the resources do not exist to carry out this trial and the 37 (made up number) other trials which are also evaluating potential Ebola resources at this moment, let alone the 373 (another made up number) other trials for which funding (and resource) grant applications were submitted, but not approved.
The availability of "resources" is often a severe constraint on carrying out research. If you want a 1000 minutes on the Hubble Space telescope to watch your neighbour sunbathing, good luck with that application. If you want a drilling rig that can take core samples from 2km below the seabed, in 5km of water depth, then you're on a 3-4 year waiting list, and have a hundred million dollars, shore base, work permits and regulatory approval ready to go, otherwise you're back to the back of the queue.
If you have a potential treatment for "Song-Mike Cancer" and you have only ten patients with the disease each year, then how are you going to conduct your trial in an ethically responsible way? Do you blind the trial fully, and wait six years before unblinding. That's the statistically clearest way of performing the trial. However, the people in years 2 through 6 of the trial are at increased risk of death if your treatment really is good, so your ethical purity over statistical ignorance puts twenty people needlessly at risk. Enjoy getting that one past your Ethics Oversight Committee, because you'd run a good chance of losing your license for proposing such a design. (Also, if your treatment is worse than the standard treatment, you put all 60 patients at increased risk.) What you do, in fact, is you design your trial with continuous monitoring of outcomes, and continuous re-assessment of the most-likely relative efficacy to give you the observed results. That way, you actually minimise the number of patients (your constrained resource) who you kill in the effort to assess your new treatment (against standard treatment).
After a year of working with me, my statistics lecturers thought I was good enough at statistics to invite me to change majors (along with 4 others out of an advanced class of about 120 ; there were another 300-odd on the regular statistics course), but I declined because I found it was too stressful dealing with the old trials which we studied in near real-time as weekly tutorials (without patient names, but everything else, formatted as "review meetings" for each trial). I declined. I know enough about statistics to know how little I know.
You sound so confident that I am sure that you haven't studied medical statistics.
(Sorry - I've assumed in the SongMike Cancer example above that you get 100% recruitment into the trial. That's a rocking-horse shit occurrence. Many people will opt for the standard treatment. Lengthen your trial appropriately.)
Oh, and you're the one who mentioned chimps. So, you still haven't read the paper. I'm not surprised.
Obviously the monkeys, after exposure in this trial, won;t be usable in either future Ebola work, or in many types of adenovirus work. So that'd be a significant degree of damage to their future income-earning potential for their owners.
If they're coming from multiple sources, then that does suggest that the availability of experimental animals is a real resource constraint, which again strengthens the case for using that resource as carefully as possible. Unlike "mikes.song", I do understand that you are not going to expand the supply of that resource overnight, even if you throw money at the question like it is going out of fashion.
Enjoy your death. It is going to happen, regardless of what I, or anyone else says, including you.
I'm pretty dubious about your claims on the prevalence or treatability of skin cancer. It's the only one I've had, but [shrug] that's a sample of one.
I do actually enjoy life, and I get paid well to travel extensively in order to hit rocks in the field with mallets ranging from a pocket chisel and a convenient rock, up to a $450million drilling rig. But waste my life frying on a beach - why the fuck would I be such a retard as to do that?
Beach restoration very rarely works on a timescale longer than a few years. Beaches are very dynamic environments, with sand flowing into them, along them and then off them. Most losses of beaches are not because (directly) of sea-level changes, but because the supply of sand has been interrupted somewhere upstream (and that can take decades to become visible, and decades to correct). whether that is because of dredging of the sand upstream for some industrial purpose, or re-alignment of a river (there are huge problems around the Mississippi delta, for example, because they're being sediment-starved because of the building of levees to protect New Orleans. Make a choice : New Orleans, or stable shore lines?), or changes in agricultural practice in the feeding rivers, or dams that trap the sand hundreds of kilometres from the coast.
That's why (shock, horror) government agencies try to insist upon environmental impact assessments of developments before they happen, and is also why business people who want to make those developments without paying the costs of the changes they make resist those regulations.
Actually, it's not just businesses that cause the problems. In the mid-1950s there were significant mileages of coastal defences built along parts of the East Coast of England and the coasts of the Low Countries, by governmental agencies, in response to a flood/ storm surge in 1953 which was comparable to the Katrina hurricane in New Orleans. Over the subsequent decades it has been realised that many of these schemes have been poorly designed (because rushed into construction, because "do something!") and are causing further erosion and often retreat of the sea front, because of changes to sediment movement. It took less than two decades to realise and understand the problems, but more than four decades to even partly repair the consequences. That's while also dealing with around 3.5mm/yr of isostatic sea-level rise and another ~2mm/year of eustatic (global) sea-level rise.
There are genuine and real issues in managing coastal change - and coasts are changing, all the time. Regardless of the arguments about the reality of global warming (as a geologist, we've no doubt that it's happening, and little doubt about the rates and medium-term consequences), in large parts of the world there is continuing isostatic re-adjustment to the melting of the glaciers, even out to around a thousand kilometres from the ice front, because the rock for the uplift of glaciated areas has to come from somewhere. Moving further from the glaciers, to for example the Mediterranean, the whole area is tectonically active enough to have many metres of vertical movement within recorded history (see, for example, Lyell, 1832-6 describing the "Temple of Seraphis" near Naples, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...). I don't know the geology of southern America well enough to know what;s happening there, but anywhere north of one or other Carolina you're going to be getting into isostatic effects.
Regardless of which, the premise of the author - that only beach sand matters and only beach sand is measured is pure bullshit. The amounts moved around for beach restoration and other cosmetic purposes is vanishingly small compared to the (mega-)tonnages used in the building industry as aggregate for making concrete. Just because people see it, doesn't mean that it's particularly important. Would you prefer to have no concrete, anywhere, and a nice beach?
Most people who do their "leisure" by lying on a beach do so because they believe the relentless advertising that tells them that is the only proper way to holiday.
Mindlessly following the diktats of the advertising industry is a clear sign of cretinous imbecility.
That is why you chose your genes for making the signature carefully. It's why you use surface (glyco-)proteins, the proteins which bind to and interact with the target cells, not the proteins that allow the virus to unload into the target cell, nor the ones that hijack the cell's ribosomal apparatus to create new copies of the virus, nor the ones that manufacture new viral particles. You leave all of those parts of the virus genome thoroughly alone. Which means that for a rational virus design, you need to have a fair idea of how the virus works. (Otherwise, you try various ways of killing or attenuating your virus. Which takes multiple rounds of safety and efficacy testing - say 6-8 months per round, if you're really rushing it.)
You know, I worry about dying every time I fly. But then again, I've had 5 major incidents in my 30 year career, though I've not yet had to swim home, and I have to go through crash training at 2-year intervals. Does that make general flying more dangerous? No.
Dealing with a virus like this is dangerous. Not dealing with a virus like this is dangerous. Not making a decision is dangerous. Enjoy.
Slashdot Mirror
Because "fracking" comes from an abbreviation of tedious engineering terms in one field of research ("hydraulic fracturing" in drilling engineering), while "smegging" is an euphemism invented in a totally unrelated field (from "smegma", a medical term, in the field of entertainment).
I don't know if "frelling" is a technical term in drilling engineering, or a contraction of such ; if it is, I don't recognise it's derivation and would appreciate an explanation of how it's appropriate. If it's an euphemism from the entertainment industry, what the fuck has that to do with engineering terminology?
Absolutely there are. But more importantly, nobody, but nobody, absolutely nobody would go around fracking an existing field if they didn't need to. Spending several million dollars per well on a treatment that isn't necessary is called "wasting the investor's money" and is not efficient business.
On the other hand, there are undeveloped fields and prospects which may not be economically exploitable without fracking. I'm working on proposals for one such myself (if you want details, invest ; I'll pass you the lawyer's contact information because I don't deal with that end of the company operations myself.) However, even in that case, one designs the well on the basis of optimising the likelihood of economic production without fracking, and you only frack if your well test indicates that you need to.
The current system which is changing the economics of shale gas (and shale oil) production is a combination of horizontal drilling (which was developed, slowly, through the late 1980s and early 1990s, but by the mid-1990s it was becoming routine. An important component of that was the development of a variety of "rotary steerable systems" which allowed changes in configuration of the bottom hole assembly without having to round trip the drill string. With that, the constraint on controlling the direction of a well was mainly lifted, and steering a well to (and beyond) the horizontal became economically feasible. By 1996 I was seeing wells inclined up as far as 125 degrees form the vertical.
... and I've got to go out. L8R
More like a 80:20% split in my experience. Those who understand the technology (mostly by working in the oil drilling industry, or knowing people who work in the industry and caring to ask detailed questions) make up the 20% who are unconcerned by the question. The 80% who get their news from "Gas Land" and Greenpeace, are convinced that fracking will kill them and rape their dog.
In areas where there are fewer drilling specialists, then it's likely to be more like 90:10 or even higher. Which means that we've got a major re-education campaign to perform.
Isn't there an implication that the algorithm is provably fair to a rational being. The last time I interacted with them, human children did not appear (mostly) to be rational beings.
AIU the original question, a significant part of the power drain from the PV was expected to be for powering the server (regardless of whether the internet connection stayed up in a blackout).
Which is pretty much true for any government in any part of the world. There are certain mutually-agreed exceptions, such as countries within the Schengen region not searching packages from other Schengen countries without prior evidence of a crime (e.g., sniffer bees drawing attention to the package), but generally it's the case that all mail into or out of a country is subject to search for contraband. Which includes paper money.
There's this thing called tax ...
Those mica specimens go back to around 500 million years. You can go back further, but the mass constraints change because thermal effects in the rocks slowly heal older crystal dislocations, erasing the record like on an old tape. By the time you're looking at crystal defects that would have melted the crystal itself, and so erased themselves on creation. There are structures that go back this far, but they don't preserve the traces of delicate events, just violent ones.
So, be a palaeontologist. We need more palaeontologists with tits like yours.
(2) Get hired by them ;
(3) Be good at your job ;
(4)
(5) Profit or retirement.
It's been 23 years since my last job interview, which was conducted by the MD of the company and made me the first person on the payroll. We're probably pushing number 500 now.
I thought that Wikileaks got round the Visa/ Paypal chokepoint by a variety of means, all of which pre-dated Bitcoin becoming anything like common. (Speaks the man who has never had a Bitcoin transaction in his life.)
"I wonder how they're levitating, since I live on the 30th floor."
And as I pointed out about 5 minutes ago in a different thread, GPS navigation isn't the be-all and end-all of navigation. It doesn't work underground. It doesn't work in buildings. It doesn't work if you've lost electrical power (which is one of the first things to go when trouble happens). And it depends on some foreigners not switching it off. Some of those problems can be addressed (build another GNS system ; carry spare batteries) but for many, knowing how to work without GPS (or any other GNS) is a damned good idea.
Isn't celestial navigation still a required part of the master's curriculum? It certainly was the last time I paid the slightest attention to the subject, but that was about a decade ago.
Obviously, I keep a compass in my rucksack (and a second one in my raincoat) so I'm always at least able to maintain orientation in the mountains without a horizon, landscape or sky visible. Actually navigating my way out of trouble without a map and form a cold start would be harder, but certainly very do-able (you just map your way out, so that you can reverse your route if necessary).
GPS? I didn't replace mine when the burglars had it a dozen years ago. I believe there may be such technology in my telephone, but I've never felt the need to read that part of the manual.
Total cost - fractions of a million dollars. Perfectly legal.
You might also need to hire equipment from the appropriate companies. Of course it'll disappear in transit somewhere, but that was known to happen anyway. It's what you expect when you deal with Chinese companies.
Next thing you know, they'll be requiring people to prove their competence to operate such machines, and to re-prove it at regular intervals.
These technologies are stable and mature. Yes, you do have to service the thruster pods at regular intervals (3 to 5 years) ; for this, you install them at the bottom of access shafts, with externally operated mechanical latching systems and power and sensor connections. That's one of the reasons they're interchangeable : a vessel can hold a spare pod, and change out for regular maintenance (or repairs) while under way at (say) 5/6th of regular power.
Oh, FYI, for even longer, most vessels have used prime movers to run large generators, which then power large electric motors for propulsion, pumping, cranes ... using another electric motor for propulsion fits perfectly in that paradigm.
FYI, most of the area under discussion is within reach of open circuit air diving - under 40m deep. This is all eminently maintainable. We've been putting things onto the seabed and picking them back off for a couple of generations now, and weren't exactly inexperienced in such things before the oilfield came to the area - look at the construction methods used for the previous couple of centuries to build lighthouses.
False. Ammonium nitrate is perfectly capable of exploding on it's own. It does so better and more violently with a fuel to oxidise (diesel fuel for a fuel oil / fertilizer bomb ; aluminium powder for an Ammonal mix ; and there's another mix whose name I forget).
Since I haven't tried to separate ammonium nitrate from commercial fertilizer, I don't know what they add to the commercial mixes to render it non-explosive. I'd start, if I wanted to know, by looking for ammonium phosphate (because phosphorous is often a limiting- or near-limiting nutrient) and ammonium chloride (a fairly inert ion with a knack for breaking free-radical chain reactions and thereby suppressing flame ; other halides may well be more effective).
Because of the fertilizing effects of phosphate ion, simply reading the side of the bag will tell you about it's presence. They'd tout it as making the fertilizer "better", and not mention it's explosion suppression effects.
Past the half-way mark. I'm not so sure you'd be past the 2/3 mark though.
It's a help, a significant help ; but there's still a significant amount of work to do.
Any particular reason?
You mean a "medical" trial? ; I've never heard of a "medial" trial, though it is composed of bits of statistical terminology.
The point is not that a trial of thirty, forty, a hundred monkeys is too expensive, what I'm saying is that, literally, the resources to carry out a bigger trial do not exist. Or, to be more precise, the resources do not exist to carry out this trial and the 37 (made up number) other trials which are also evaluating potential Ebola resources at this moment, let alone the 373 (another made up number) other trials for which funding (and resource) grant applications were submitted, but not approved.
The availability of "resources" is often a severe constraint on carrying out research. If you want a 1000 minutes on the Hubble Space telescope to watch your neighbour sunbathing, good luck with that application. If you want a drilling rig that can take core samples from 2km below the seabed, in 5km of water depth, then you're on a 3-4 year waiting list, and have a hundred million dollars, shore base, work permits and regulatory approval ready to go, otherwise you're back to the back of the queue.
If you have a potential treatment for "Song-Mike Cancer" and you have only ten patients with the disease each year, then how are you going to conduct your trial in an ethically responsible way? Do you blind the trial fully, and wait six years before unblinding. That's the statistically clearest way of performing the trial. However, the people in years 2 through 6 of the trial are at increased risk of death if your treatment really is good, so your ethical purity over statistical ignorance puts twenty people needlessly at risk. Enjoy getting that one past your Ethics Oversight Committee, because you'd run a good chance of losing your license for proposing such a design. (Also, if your treatment is worse than the standard treatment, you put all 60 patients at increased risk.) What you do, in fact, is you design your trial with continuous monitoring of outcomes, and continuous re-assessment of the most-likely relative efficacy to give you the observed results. That way, you actually minimise the number of patients (your constrained resource) who you kill in the effort to assess your new treatment (against standard treatment).
After a year of working with me, my statistics lecturers thought I was good enough at statistics to invite me to change majors (along with 4 others out of an advanced class of about 120 ; there were another 300-odd on the regular statistics course), but I declined because I found it was too stressful dealing with the old trials which we studied in near real-time as weekly tutorials (without patient names, but everything else, formatted as "review meetings" for each trial). I declined. I know enough about statistics to know how little I know.
You sound so confident that I am sure that you haven't studied medical statistics.
(Sorry - I've assumed in the SongMike Cancer example above that you get 100% recruitment into the trial. That's a rocking-horse shit occurrence. Many people will opt for the standard treatment. Lengthen your trial appropriately.)
Oh, and you're the one who mentioned chimps. So, you still haven't read the paper. I'm not surprised.
Obviously the monkeys, after exposure in this trial, won;t be usable in either future Ebola work, or in many types of adenovirus work. So that'd be a significant degree of damage to their future income-earning potential for their owners.
If they're coming from multiple sources, then that does suggest that the availability of experimental animals is a real resource constraint, which again strengthens the case for using that resource as carefully as possible. Unlike "mikes.song", I do understand that you are not going to expand the supply of that resource overnight, even if you throw money at the question like it is going out of fashion.
Enjoy your death. It is going to happen, regardless of what I, or anyone else says, including you.
I'm pretty dubious about your claims on the prevalence or treatability of skin cancer. It's the only one I've had, but [shrug] that's a sample of one.
I do actually enjoy life, and I get paid well to travel extensively in order to hit rocks in the field with mallets ranging from a pocket chisel and a convenient rock, up to a $450million drilling rig. But waste my life frying on a beach - why the fuck would I be such a retard as to do that?
That's why (shock, horror) government agencies try to insist upon environmental impact assessments of developments before they happen, and is also why business people who want to make those developments without paying the costs of the changes they make resist those regulations.
Actually, it's not just businesses that cause the problems. In the mid-1950s there were significant mileages of coastal defences built along parts of the East Coast of England and the coasts of the Low Countries, by governmental agencies, in response to a flood/ storm surge in 1953 which was comparable to the Katrina hurricane in New Orleans. Over the subsequent decades it has been realised that many of these schemes have been poorly designed (because rushed into construction, because "do something!") and are causing further erosion and often retreat of the sea front, because of changes to sediment movement. It took less than two decades to realise and understand the problems, but more than four decades to even partly repair the consequences. That's while also dealing with around 3.5mm/yr of isostatic sea-level rise and another ~2mm/year of eustatic (global) sea-level rise.
There are genuine and real issues in managing coastal change - and coasts are changing, all the time. Regardless of the arguments about the reality of global warming (as a geologist, we've no doubt that it's happening, and little doubt about the rates and medium-term consequences), in large parts of the world there is continuing isostatic re-adjustment to the melting of the glaciers, even out to around a thousand kilometres from the ice front, because the rock for the uplift of glaciated areas has to come from somewhere. Moving further from the glaciers, to for example the Mediterranean, the whole area is tectonically active enough to have many metres of vertical movement within recorded history (see, for example, Lyell, 1832-6 describing the "Temple of Seraphis" near Naples, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...). I don't know the geology of southern America well enough to know what;s happening there, but anywhere north of one or other Carolina you're going to be getting into isostatic effects.
Regardless of which, the premise of the author - that only beach sand matters and only beach sand is measured is pure bullshit. The amounts moved around for beach restoration and other cosmetic purposes is vanishingly small compared to the (mega-)tonnages used in the building industry as aggregate for making concrete. Just because people see it, doesn't mean that it's particularly important. Would you prefer to have no concrete, anywhere, and a nice beach?
Mindlessly following the diktats of the advertising industry is a clear sign of cretinous imbecility.
You know, I worry about dying every time I fly. But then again, I've had 5 major incidents in my 30 year career, though I've not yet had to swim home, and I have to go through crash training at 2-year intervals. Does that make general flying more dangerous? No.
Dealing with a virus like this is dangerous. Not dealing with a virus like this is dangerous. Not making a decision is dangerous. Enjoy.