I mean the total universe, not just the observable universe.
The universe is 14b years old;
The portion of the universe which can be observed from our location in space time has a (almost) homogeneous state, the so called hydrogen re-combination event, about 13.7 Gyr ago. What happened outside that light cone is less certain, and there are hints in the WMAP data set (soon to be updated! Be excited, very excited!) that in some directions the events outside our light cone were not the same as in other directions.
If you're comparing the total and observable universes, you've got to walk the walk as well as talk the talk.
I haven't checked cosmogony recently, but I was really attracted by Turok and Steinhardt's ekpyrotic model, and I don't think that it's been shown impossible. Yet. Maybe with the release of the next tranche of WMAP data.
but there isn't really a sensible way to say that the black hole is there at all without invoking a set of physics that outright demands you think relatively
People were making self-consistent speculations about the physics of black holes before 1800. There weren't many of them, and they didn't spend much time (or ink) on it. But the idea does date back that far. Not as subtly as our GR and QM models, but it is an idea of considerable age.
The absolute speed limit (for particles with positive rest mass) is a consequence of special relativity.
Nope ; it's a consequence of Maxwell's laws of Electro-Magnetism. But most people didn't believe that part of Maxwell until (1) Fizeau and his experiments on the speed of light in different moving media, followed by (2) Lorentz's explanation of Fizeau's (and Michelson-Morley's) results in terms of contractions of space and/or time following motion with respect to the "luminiferous ether" ; then in 1905 (3) Einstein published his paper on "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" - in which he set out Special Relativity as a consequence of actually accepting Maxwell's predictions as being true.
Your cart and your horse are in the wrong temporal and/ or physical orientations with respect to each other, such that from the real worlds reference frame the cart is preceding the horse. I'm afraid that I don't have the maths to work out how they are oriented from your reference frame, or indeed if that is a reference frame which I can physically achieve.
The dichotomy between your words and your signature line is... wide.
What's the business case for spending $800 on a wheel to still ride an old bike if you can buy an all new shiny electric bike for less.
--
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
You might have a job finding an electric bike *new* for $800. £800 you should certainly manage, but $800? Then again, I'm considering whether to go up to £600 for my new bike, since my old junk is literally falling apart.
They made the mess; clean it up in their territory.
Always a good starting point for toxic waste discussions.
Why make it *more* mobile and *more* public - and *more* vulnerable
Considering that it is currently in a pretty vicious and mobile war zone, I can understand how a risk analysis of the situation would favour getting the bad stuff to a place of (relative) safety before attempting to do complex things with it.
And by the way, Assad should be Employee #1.
If you put a defeated Assad into a room with CW to be destroyed... what is to stop him from just opening the valves and making for an even worse containment and disposal problem? You really haven't thought this through, I hope.
Also, as an employee, he'd be relatively well protected. The designs for disposal systems look pretty well-engineered to prevent contact between employees and the CW. As you'd expect.
If you designed one safety system for Employee #1 and a different one for everyone else, then inevitably someone will screw up and apply Employee #1's procedures to Employee #N. And Employee #N will then be an innocent person hurt by your vindictiveness.
Does it still sound like a good idea? Conscience prickling a little bit?
If you want to have state-sponsored murder-by-CW-torture, call it that ; don't blame industrial accidents for your desire for retribution.
That is not the alternative which is under consideration. The alternative is to put it onto a vessel with some (relatively simple) chemical plant and take it to sea. At sea it is relatively easy to protect from invaders and relatively hard to get to. (Yes, I do spend my working life under threat of kidnap and piracy and take it very personally ; if you take those threats more personally, I'd be fascinated to know what your job is. I'm a geologist working in oil exploration in Africa.) On the vessel (type un-determined, as yet) the process plant will chemically break down the CW (most versions I've seen talk of hydrolysis, probably with an acid catalyst ; easy chemistry, though you do always have to be careful with hot, acidic solutions). you'll then have to separate out your by-products (which may well themselves be unpleasant, if not as bad as the original CW) and then return the un-reacted mess to the reaction chamber for another cycle. Lather ; rinse ; repeat.
You now have several times the original mass and volume of waste products, which may be ordinary toxic waste but won't be anything like as bad as the original CW. Maybe incinerate that (after testing for the presences of detectable CW material) ; or return it to shore for a conventional toxic waste clean-up.
This may sound like a lot of a palaver to you ; but it's pretty standard stuff for industrial chemistry. The main reason for doing it as close as possible to the origin (Syria) and as soon as possible is the political one of minimising the risk of the CW falling into the hands of undesirables. Those pesky self-proclaimed Freedom Fighters who outsiders see as Terr'ists.
I would have expected it to be better to build it somewhere dry, like an isolated desert.
Please list the dry, isolated deserts which are accessible overland from Syria and whose governments are willing to accept this stuff, and are politically stable enough to be worthy of consideration.
Turkey : occupied and with active internal dissidents who'd love the convoy to go 'boom'. Iraq : occupied and politically "you have got to be joking." Iran : occupied and politically "you have got to be joking ; and why the fuck would they help the west with a western problem (remember they have their own experience of being on the receiving end of CW attacks by Western ally S.Hussein." Saudi Arabia : hmmm, that's a possible - how are you going to get it there again? And what if their internal revolution goes off properly? Israel : occupied and probably unwelcoming to the idea (they've got their own CW ; they probably don't want someone else's disposal problems). Lebanon : occupied and struggling with it's own stability.
What did Sherlock say? Something about "eliminating the impossible" and "whatever remains". If they're seriously considering this route, then I deduce that the Saudis laughed in their face. And there's still the problem of getting the stuff from Syria to Saudi.
Nah, if it's going to be moved, then an appropriately escorted naval convoy is capable of out-doing credible terrorist acquisition threats. And the scale of chemical plant for processing it is within the scale of fitting onto a standard drilling rig (not a loose market ; but it's a market), which come with pre-vetted crews with the technical skills to handle this shit. (Trust me on this : I've worked offshore for nearly 30 years.) The emergency-response training for handling poison gas (hydrogen sulphide) leaks is thoroughly comparable to that for handling poison gas (CW) leaks from a controlled disposal plant.
It does sound a pretty worth-considering solution.
Instead of dumping the waste product of the desalination plant (highly-concentrated brine) somewhere,
Someone, several someones, seems to think that desalination plants produce highly concentrated brine. They don't. It's only a few percent more concentrated. Say that you take 2m^3 seawater (35) into your plant and discharge 1m^3 of fresh water (essentially 0) and 1m^3 of "concentrate", what is the solute concentration in the concentrate?
Answer : 70 Which is still not terribly concentrated.
One of the constraints on siting desalination plants is ensuring that the waste can be rapidly diluted and dispersed at the outfall.
Energetics are another issue. It would cost (about) the same to get a second half-m^3 out of that concentrate as to get that first m^3 out. So, is it more efficient to get that second half-m^3, or to get a full-m^3 for the same (energy) cost?
This sounds like the plans for your perpetual motion machine. Instead of publishing them, could you get back to me about my bridge-sale proposition. I want to make my sale before Big Oil has you beaten to death with the only working model of your PM machine.
The energy density of this system is crap, plus it has all the problems of water fouling and so maintenance will be a pain.
Valid points. Are you sure you intended to post as an AC?
IMO, we should focus our efforts on developing cheap organic photovoltaics, and then paving the desert with them.
If you've got large fresh-water (or even brackish water ; the system will work, but the energy density will be even crappier) rivers, then there's a good chance that you don't have lots of desert to pave.
Just because you're an American (well, talking about your deserts, you're not European ; though we do have plans for paving the Sahara with PV), doesn't mean that people were developing plans relevant to your country.
I think you've misunderstood the article. It's more like:
1. Let nature make a freshwater river for you.
2. Let it run down to the sea, where you capture and canalise it's flow.
And carry on from there.
Oh, and the energy isn't infinite ; it's going to be limited absolutely by the flow rate of the river and the salinity difference between the two water bodies. Which could be substantial (most people are so inconsiderate of the power of the sun to drive such things by evaporating water).
Sure, but we can put water wheels, turbines or something other than a dam up river a bit.
That's fine if you're an island nation - as Britain is (currently) and the US is (largely). But generally it can be more complex.
I can't think of a realistic example in Britain (the Anglo-Scottish border fairly closely follows a break of slope). But as I struggle to remember the details of my North American geography I think of the routine flooding in North Dakota (?) due to the low slope of the Red River (?). Say that the Canadians decided to exploit the power potential of that river (and I apologise if I've got a poor example - it's not a continent I've any reason to know the geography of) by backing it up on Canadian territory. So, who cares about the effects up-river? No reason for the Canadians to care.
And people wonder why we're called "filthy imperialist pig-dogs" by many of the rest of the world.
Or, choose a definition for a particular level of inbreeding to get concerned about and stop worrying about it.
There is an awful lot of ink spilt, and sometimes blood, over this with respect to human breeding, but livestock breeders have a lot of practice at using controlled inbreeding as a tool to increase the representation of a desired stock animal's genes in future generations, prior to expanding the stock. They tabulate levels of relatedness of interest to them, down to 1 part in 16 (6.25% common alleles). From which I guesstimate that 1 part in 32 relatedness is close enough to random for them to not be of interest for the breeders. So, if you tabulate your family trees back to the 5th generation and find no-more than two great-great-grandparents in common between the two people, it's unlikely to be a problem. If you go back to the next generation and find no more than 4 ggg-grandparents in the family tree, it's also not likely to be a problem. For more complex layouts of consanguinity, you'd have to calculate the summed probabilities yourself - and that's where people have messed up repeatedly in the past.
a testing company, like Underwriter's Labs is for physical goods
A single testing company, like UL? Now, don't get me wrong - I've every bit as much confidence in UL's certifications as I have in TUV's. Or Det Norske Veritas'. Or BASEEFA's. But in the real world, one certifying company is just not going to cut it. And it doesn't, as the above list of the certifying authorities (with whom I have had to deal with often enough to remember their names) suggests.
Actually, the situation isn't quite as bleak - for hardware - as 927 suggests. There are widely applicable standards organisations for many things (I can add IDEST to the above list!) which are fairly well established in those fields, and which consequently have troubles with people counterfeiting their trademarks to falsely claim approvals that they don't have. But it's not a single unitary authority. And I doubt that one code-tester agency "to rule them all and in the lightness bind them" would happen for software either. Several bodies... yes, but not one. Which is part of the jockying for position that Red Hat, Mandriva, Debian, Slackware and a few others are indulging in. (There's little point in differentiating amongst, for example, the Debian derivatives. At this level.)
Tough shit on the parents. THEY should have tied a knot in THEIR relevant tubes if THEY didn't have the wherewithall to properly look after THEIR choice until it was old enough to look after itself. And yes, that does mean that if they can't afford a sprog, they shouldn't breed.
(Yes, I do have enough money to do that. No, I don't have children and yes, I tied knots in the relevant tubes almost a decade before I met my wife, and no, she hasn't given up on persuading me to besprog with her. So don't worry, I will think of you and of stealing money from your pocket if I let her persuade me to untie.
"Never use a backpack for something heavy. If the weight shifts it will pull you off track. Use panniers instead and you can carry loads of heavy stuff without problems"
The positive advice towards panniers is certainly true, but the negative advice about backpacks is... in need of qualification.
Personal preferences differ, but I don't really have any concern about carrying 20 or even 25kilos in a back pack while cycling. Much more and it gets annoying, but the weight is not really a problem AS LONG AS you have a rucksack that fits well. That's more than enough for a normal week's shopping for one.
Sometimes I carry my tool kit (tyre-levers, spare tube, adjustable spanner ; pump ; allen keys ; dual-head screwdriver ; lock ; brake blocks) in my pannier and tote the pannier over my shoulder on the pump ; sometimes I put it in the rucksack. But I always have my tools. And lock.
A colleague who cycles everywhere (even in the snow - he's insane)
What's insane about that? The cagers are a little more dangerous than normal, but that's just because they STILL don't know how to behave on the road. As my Norwegian colleague was saying in the bar last night "There is no such thing as bad weather ; only bad clothing."
Some of us have to do it. When the boat's connection goes down (e.g. because bad weather misaligns us with the satellite for days on end), that's it ; no internet. Also no emails, or phone calls except through the ship-to-shore radio set. It's bliss!
In most places, in the English-speaking world a topless woman would be classified as "indecent exposure", except in cases of breast feeding.
FTFY.
Which is almost as stupid as being allowed to let a child carry on squawking in a public place without leaving to prevent it from annoying other people.
Excuse me, but I've just been discussing quantum reality in the bar. As I do, but I doubt you do.
Being original is what causes error. I'd rather be right.
As Douglas Adams' script told Peter Jones to say, "The secret is to keep banging the rocks together, guys!"
Enjoy your Paleolithic. say 'hello' to malnutrition, uncontrolled disease and death-by-becoming-dinner for me. I've had passing acquaintances with some of them, and don't want to deepen the relationship with any.
I'll... defer to your superior expertise on "rampant diarrhoea". Mostly because I really, REALLY don't want to find what that pair of words means =D
Come to work in Africa. It'll open up a whole new world of experiences to you.
Actually, a night in a Yorkshire pub drinking "Old Peculiar" (so named because the next day you feel very old. And quite peculiar.), followed by a day in a wetsuit in a very wet cave under cow-filled pastures... brings back particularly unpleasant memories. At least there was plenty of water in the river to wash off with, and the cows weren't prudish.
Slashdot Mirror
The portion of the universe which can be observed from our location in space time has a (almost) homogeneous state, the so called hydrogen re-combination event, about 13.7 Gyr ago. What happened outside that light cone is less certain, and there are hints in the WMAP data set (soon to be updated! Be excited, very excited!) that in some directions the events outside our light cone were not the same as in other directions.
If you're comparing the total and observable universes, you've got to walk the walk as well as talk the talk.
I haven't checked cosmogony recently, but I was really attracted by Turok and Steinhardt's ekpyrotic model, and I don't think that it's been shown impossible. Yet. Maybe with the release of the next tranche of WMAP data.
DON'T DO THAT!
Think about what happened to Georg Cantor as a result of thinking too seriously about infinity.
People were making self-consistent speculations about the physics of black holes before 1800. There weren't many of them, and they didn't spend much time (or ink) on it. But the idea does date back that far. Not as subtly as our GR and QM models, but it is an idea of considerable age.
Nope ; it's a consequence of Maxwell's laws of Electro-Magnetism. But most people didn't believe that part of Maxwell until (1) Fizeau and his experiments on the speed of light in different moving media, followed by (2) Lorentz's explanation of Fizeau's (and Michelson-Morley's) results in terms of contractions of space and/or time following motion with respect to the "luminiferous ether" ; then in 1905 (3) Einstein published his paper on "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" - in which he set out Special Relativity as a consequence of actually accepting Maxwell's predictions as being true.
Your cart and your horse are in the wrong temporal and/ or physical orientations with respect to each other, such that from the real worlds reference frame the cart is preceding the horse. I'm afraid that I don't have the maths to work out how they are oriented from your reference frame, or indeed if that is a reference frame which I can physically achieve.
You might have a job finding an electric bike *new* for $800. £800 you should certainly manage, but $800? Then again, I'm considering whether to go up to £600 for my new bike, since my old junk is literally falling apart.
That is such a high hurdle for their hardware to overcome.
Always a good starting point for toxic waste discussions.
Considering that it is currently in a pretty vicious and mobile war zone, I can understand how a risk analysis of the situation would favour getting the bad stuff to a place of (relative) safety before attempting to do complex things with it.
If you put a defeated Assad into a room with CW to be destroyed ... what is to stop him from just opening the valves and making for an even worse containment and disposal problem? You really haven't thought this through, I hope.
Also, as an employee, he'd be relatively well protected. The designs for disposal systems look pretty well-engineered to prevent contact between employees and the CW. As you'd expect.
If you designed one safety system for Employee #1 and a different one for everyone else, then inevitably someone will screw up and apply Employee #1's procedures to Employee #N. And Employee #N will then be an innocent person hurt by your vindictiveness.
Does it still sound like a good idea? Conscience prickling a little bit?
If you want to have state-sponsored murder-by-CW-torture, call it that ; don't blame industrial accidents for your desire for retribution.
That is not the alternative which is under consideration. The alternative is to put it onto a vessel with some (relatively simple) chemical plant and take it to sea. At sea it is relatively easy to protect from invaders and relatively hard to get to. (Yes, I do spend my working life under threat of kidnap and piracy and take it very personally ; if you take those threats more personally, I'd be fascinated to know what your job is. I'm a geologist working in oil exploration in Africa.) On the vessel (type un-determined, as yet) the process plant will chemically break down the CW (most versions I've seen talk of hydrolysis, probably with an acid catalyst ; easy chemistry, though you do always have to be careful with hot, acidic solutions). you'll then have to separate out your by-products (which may well themselves be unpleasant, if not as bad as the original CW) and then return the un-reacted mess to the reaction chamber for another cycle. Lather ; rinse ; repeat.
You now have several times the original mass and volume of waste products, which may be ordinary toxic waste but won't be anything like as bad as the original CW. Maybe incinerate that (after testing for the presences of detectable CW material) ; or return it to shore for a conventional toxic waste clean-up.
This may sound like a lot of a palaver to you ; but it's pretty standard stuff for industrial chemistry. The main reason for doing it as close as possible to the origin (Syria) and as soon as possible is the political one of minimising the risk of the CW falling into the hands of undesirables. Those pesky self-proclaimed Freedom Fighters who outsiders see as Terr'ists.
These are problems for breeders to worry about. Not normal people.
Please list the dry, isolated deserts which are accessible overland from Syria and whose governments are willing to accept this stuff, and are politically stable enough to be worthy of consideration.
Turkey : occupied and with active internal dissidents who'd love the convoy to go 'boom'. Iraq : occupied and politically "you have got to be joking." Iran : occupied and politically "you have got to be joking ; and why the fuck would they help the west with a western problem (remember they have their own experience of being on the receiving end of CW attacks by Western ally S.Hussein." Saudi Arabia : hmmm, that's a possible - how are you going to get it there again? And what if their internal revolution goes off properly? Israel : occupied and probably unwelcoming to the idea (they've got their own CW ; they probably don't want someone else's disposal problems). Lebanon : occupied and struggling with it's own stability.
What did Sherlock say? Something about "eliminating the impossible" and "whatever remains". If they're seriously considering this route, then I deduce that the Saudis laughed in their face. And there's still the problem of getting the stuff from Syria to Saudi.
Nah, if it's going to be moved, then an appropriately escorted naval convoy is capable of out-doing credible terrorist acquisition threats. And the scale of chemical plant for processing it is within the scale of fitting onto a standard drilling rig (not a loose market ; but it's a market), which come with pre-vetted crews with the technical skills to handle this shit. (Trust me on this : I've worked offshore for nearly 30 years.) The emergency-response training for handling poison gas (hydrogen sulphide) leaks is thoroughly comparable to that for handling poison gas (CW) leaks from a controlled disposal plant.
It does sound a pretty worth-considering solution.
Someone, several someones, seems to think that desalination plants produce highly concentrated brine. They don't. It's only a few percent more concentrated. Say that you take 2m^3 seawater (35) into your plant and discharge 1m^3 of fresh water (essentially 0) and 1m^3 of "concentrate", what is the solute concentration in the concentrate?
Answer : 70 Which is still not terribly concentrated.
One of the constraints on siting desalination plants is ensuring that the waste can be rapidly diluted and dispersed at the outfall.
Energetics are another issue. It would cost (about) the same to get a second half-m^3 out of that concentrate as to get that first m^3 out. So, is it more efficient to get that second half-m^3, or to get a full-m^3 for the same (energy) cost?
This sounds like the plans for your perpetual motion machine. Instead of publishing them, could you get back to me about my bridge-sale proposition. I want to make my sale before Big Oil has you beaten to death with the only working model of your PM machine.
No it doesn't ; it requires two fluids of differing concentration of a solute.
I think you need to go back to your sophomore year chemistry notes and revise osmosis.
Valid points. Are you sure you intended to post as an AC?
If you've got large fresh-water (or even brackish water ; the system will work, but the energy density will be even crappier) rivers, then there's a good chance that you don't have lots of desert to pave.
Just because you're an American (well, talking about your deserts, you're not European ; though we do have plans for paving the Sahara with PV), doesn't mean that people were developing plans relevant to your country.
I think you've misunderstood the article. It's more like:
And carry on from there.
Oh, and the energy isn't infinite ; it's going to be limited absolutely by the flow rate of the river and the salinity difference between the two water bodies. Which could be substantial (most people are so inconsiderate of the power of the sun to drive such things by evaporating water).
That's fine if you're an island nation - as Britain is (currently) and the US is (largely). But generally it can be more complex.
I can't think of a realistic example in Britain (the Anglo-Scottish border fairly closely follows a break of slope). But as I struggle to remember the details of my North American geography I think of the routine flooding in North Dakota (?) due to the low slope of the Red River (?). Say that the Canadians decided to exploit the power potential of that river (and I apologise if I've got a poor example - it's not a continent I've any reason to know the geography of) by backing it up on Canadian territory. So, who cares about the effects up-river? No reason for the Canadians to care.
And people wonder why we're called "filthy imperialist pig-dogs" by many of the rest of the world.
We're all inbred. Live with it.
Or, choose a definition for a particular level of inbreeding to get concerned about and stop worrying about it.
There is an awful lot of ink spilt, and sometimes blood, over this with respect to human breeding, but livestock breeders have a lot of practice at using controlled inbreeding as a tool to increase the representation of a desired stock animal's genes in future generations, prior to expanding the stock. They tabulate levels of relatedness of interest to them, down to 1 part in 16 (6.25% common alleles). From which I guesstimate that 1 part in 32 relatedness is close enough to random for them to not be of interest for the breeders. So, if you tabulate your family trees back to the 5th generation and find no-more than two great-great-grandparents in common between the two people, it's unlikely to be a problem. If you go back to the next generation and find no more than 4 ggg-grandparents in the family tree, it's also not likely to be a problem. For more complex layouts of consanguinity, you'd have to calculate the summed probabilities yourself - and that's where people have messed up repeatedly in the past.
A single testing company, like UL? Now, don't get me wrong - I've every bit as much confidence in UL's certifications as I have in TUV's. Or Det Norske Veritas'. Or BASEEFA's. But in the real world, one certifying company is just not going to cut it. And it doesn't, as the above list of the certifying authorities (with whom I have had to deal with often enough to remember their names) suggests.
There's an XKCD for that. xkcd.com/927/
Actually, the situation isn't quite as bleak - for hardware - as 927 suggests. There are widely applicable standards organisations for many things (I can add IDEST to the above list!) which are fairly well established in those fields, and which consequently have troubles with people counterfeiting their trademarks to falsely claim approvals that they don't have. But it's not a single unitary authority. And I doubt that one code-tester agency "to rule them all and in the lightness bind them" would happen for software either. Several bodies ... yes, but not one. Which is part of the jockying for position that Red Hat, Mandriva, Debian, Slackware and a few others are indulging in. (There's little point in differentiating amongst, for example, the Debian derivatives. At this level.)
(Yes, I do have enough money to do that. No, I don't have children and yes, I tied knots in the relevant tubes almost a decade before I met my wife, and no, she hasn't given up on persuading me to besprog with her. So don't worry, I will think of you and of stealing money from your pocket if I let her persuade me to untie.
The positive advice towards panniers is certainly true, but the negative advice about backpacks is ... in need of qualification.
Personal preferences differ, but I don't really have any concern about carrying 20 or even 25kilos in a back pack while cycling. Much more and it gets annoying, but the weight is not really a problem AS LONG AS you have a rucksack that fits well. That's more than enough for a normal week's shopping for one.
Sometimes I carry my tool kit (tyre-levers, spare tube, adjustable spanner ; pump ; allen keys ; dual-head screwdriver ; lock ; brake blocks) in my pannier and tote the pannier over my shoulder on the pump ; sometimes I put it in the rucksack. But I always have my tools. And lock.
What's insane about that? The cagers are a little more dangerous than normal, but that's just because they STILL don't know how to behave on the road. As my Norwegian colleague was saying in the bar last night "There is no such thing as bad weather ; only bad clothing."
Some of us have to do it. When the boat's connection goes down (e.g. because bad weather misaligns us with the satellite for days on end), that's it ; no internet. Also no emails, or phone calls except through the ship-to-shore radio set. It's bliss!
FTFY.
Which is almost as stupid as being allowed to let a child carry on squawking in a public place without leaving to prevent it from annoying other people.
The pros aren't asking for special treatment. Just for the control of reproduction (of images) rights that everyone else has.
Just because you don't use it, doesn't mean that it's not real.
As Douglas Adams' script told Peter Jones to say, "The secret is to keep banging the rocks together, guys!"
Enjoy your Paleolithic. say 'hello' to malnutrition, uncontrolled disease and death-by-becoming-dinner for me. I've had passing acquaintances with some of them, and don't want to deepen the relationship with any.
Come to work in Africa. It'll open up a whole new world of experiences to you.
Actually, a night in a Yorkshire pub drinking "Old Peculiar" (so named because the next day you feel very old. And quite peculiar.), followed by a day in a wetsuit in a very wet cave under cow-filled pastures ... brings back particularly unpleasant memories. At least there was plenty of water in the river to wash off with, and the cows weren't prudish.