Don't have a clue until one day, maybe 10 years later, BAM, your liver is gone.
You'd have to be spectacularly inattentive to your personal physical condition for that scenario to hold (which does happen, rarely). Most variants of hepatitis (I have several friends with several variants ; one is having a comparatively good third cycle of HepC treatment, which is really good news for other victims if this trial pans out as well as the case I'm watching) give you a lot of warning that you're unwell before your liver is damaged beyond the point of being any use at all.
Oh, and I don't know that the family of diseases have been diagnosed for long enough to have a good idea what the typical incubation period is - it's increasing at about 6 months per year of measurement - meaning that we haven't been detecting it for long enough yet to have worked through the demographic "hump" of the undiagnosed majority. Which is why hundreds of millions of pounds are being spent to treat people NOW so that we can get them out of the infected population before the feared real epidemic hits. (But that's "public health investment", or in American English, "communism".)
Less in the North Sea, because it's only 50 m deep on average so you don't get as much potential energy stored in the water.
what matters isn't the water depth, but the difference between the height (above an arbitrary point, e.g. the quayside at Newlyn) of the sea's level at the time you're storing/ generating energy and the level of water in your reservoir. What is called the "head" in a conventional hydroelectric scheme.
The steel used in oil storage tanks has a finite (and relatively short) lifetime in the sea because it rusts. You can manage this to a point, but it will eventually corrode beyond the point of economic repair. That is why the North Sea oil installations that are being decommissioned are the ones with steel legs and sub-structures, while the concrete-legged ones are generally remaining in use (I can't think of an example that's been taken out of service, in the UK).
That'll be the same problem with large-scale storage of energy as compressed air. Pressure vessels are under considerable stress, and need a lot of structural integrity maintenance. Which reminds me that my SCUBA diving bottles need re-certification in the middle of the coming year.
the bleeding, oozing legions covering their faces.
Someone take that reporter out and provide clue-by-four education. It's "lesions". [grumble, "spik inglish, boah!"]
Phenol to cause lesions such as are described? Well, if you spray your face with 10% phenol-in-water you'll get lesions like that (this used to be a standard technique in early "aseptic" operating theatre practice - see Lister's work in the 1850s ; and this is why better techniques were developed.) Hippuric acid... rings a bell, but I'd have to check... sounds like horse piss to me. Sure enough "found in the urine of horses and other herbivores." (Wikipedia).
You know... this being people complaining about water from private wells in an agricultural area... I'd be wondering how good the management of horse (and other herbivore) piss and shit has been on those farms for the last century or so. Aquifer contamination can take a LONG time to show up.
The last time I was doing drilling on an aquifer in Britain (the South Downs Chalk, feeding London in a few thousand years : if you watch the horses on the big bend at Goodwood racecourse, you can see the oil wells on the hillside opposite), we had no concerns - none what so ever - about contaminating the aquifer. Regulations were that we could only drill with drinking water and (precisely) nothing else (until we got to the point of casing off the aquifer, when we were allowed to cement the casing in place). Then we had to verify that the casing was "tight" with a 1800psi/ 10 minutes pressure test, witnessed by representatives from the water board and local council and local residents. My input as a geologist was to confirm (by cuttings examination and interpretation of geophysical logs) that we were beyond the bottom of the aquifer. Then - next section of the well was drilled with a water-based mud (pH 11 : (inert) barytes powder, potassium chloride, ice-cream thickening agents, soap ; I don't normally bother to wear gloves, unless the safety officer is watching), cased and cemented a couple of hundred feet above the expected reservoir (again, my call) to provide a second pressure barrier (3000psi/10 minutes test) before displacing the well to use oil-based mud for the horizontal reservoir section (which I steered - it was short, only 3000-odd ft) because this was not a well that needed fracking.
That is "standard practice" in the oilfield - it's highly optimised to cut costs and risks. There are people who will cut cost further by cutting corners. For example, a job I was asked to comment upon (and which I use as an example when I'm teaching my juniors pore pressure engineering) was when an Indonesian oil company saved the cost of the intermediate casing string. The result was the "Lusi" mud volcano, which is still erupting today. with hundreds injured (by scalding mud) and thousands displaced, roads and railway lines damaged and closed or relocated... I use it as an example of WHY we don't do that.
If there are wells in Pennsylvania which are constructed down to Indonesian standards and are leaking methane into aquifers as alleged, then I would suggest that America improve it's drilling regulation (and enforcement) to somewhere closer to the British and European model than the Indonesian model. But hey, that's your political problem.
hissing wells
? I haven't seen that allegation before. But, if that's methane leaking out of a fitting, then that is the drilling company's PROFIT going off into the atmosphere (never mind the potential hazard, think of the lost profit ! ) ; they want to know about that, yesterday, if not sooner. On the other hand, if it's a water-pumped seal (where you reduce the pressure across an active seal by
Unfortunately, since our brain work (as opposed to the finger work of typing reports) often involves pointing at graphical representations of data on the screen to say "this and this are significant" ; at which point finger comes in contact with screen, screen display jumps all over the place.
Touch-screen gets disabled. Always.
If Intel want to enforce touch screen hardware, I don't give a fuck. If they want to enforce it being enabled, they can go fuck themselves.
The chemicals pumped into the ground in fracking are well known. Because they are charged for - charged quite a lot of money for. The mud engineer who mixes up the fluids on site has to submit a daily chemical inventory to the client company for cost-control reasons, which are WAY more important (to the company) than any environmental regulations, which will have been assessed months before when planning the job and obtaining discharge permits ("Petroleum Operation Notification" PON15 and it's associated documents in the UK ; whatever alphabet soup is used in your jurisdiction). Proceeding without these documents in place is a criminal offence by the mud engineer and company man on site, in addition to any corporate responsibility.You may not know what the chemicals are in any depth, but that doesn't mean that nobody knows what goes into the injectant/ proppant mix.
In reality, most of what goes down the hole is water, followed by strong and relatively inert particles (which prop the induced fractures open) ; minor components are then surfactants (to get everything to mix together and stay mixed) and corrosion inhibitors (to keep the gas in the pipes where it's meant to be). As a major part of corrosion inhibition, the system's pH will be kept reasonably high - typically 10.5 to 11.5 - because that's the cheapest way to protect steel from corrosion (in some reservoirs - carbonate-rich ones - an "acid frac" may be desired ; that complicates matters, considerably).
There are plenty of perfectly good reasons to be concerned about fracking - carbon pollution of the atmosphere ; fucked-up cement jobs ; leaking casing ; falsified pressure tests ("pass the dinner plate!") ; illegal dumping of anything from diesel to engine oils to the contents of the shit pit. The actual chemistry of the materials pumped is relatively minor compared to ensuring that there is a robust, effective regulation framework around drilling operations. Which doesn't seem to be the case in America's oil industry (they still average one death a week) judging from the reports in the press. Having worked on land jobs all over the world, I can tell you that the quality of regulation and enforcement varies a lot. Getting that right is far more important than shitting bricks over these particular chemicals.
(There are chemicals to worry about. I've played my part in getting some of the nastier ones banned from Holland, then Norway, then the UK. And good riddance to the shit - I've still got the scars from the burns.)
Returning to the story... it sounds as if they've developed a new (and fairly complex) technique for achieving zonal isolation in an artificially fractured well. Big deal. Will it be cheaper than the conventional method of alternating perforating and fracking each zone? It's still going to require multiple trips, but you might be able to do it with a workover mast instead of a full drilling rig. I'll let bean counters worry about that.
Nope ; I couldn't see the video on YouTube. Poor connection here.
none of which invalidates that design of PRVs is "rocket science". The first PRV that I had to replace was a low-melting alloy in a pressure cooker - that probably went at about 130degC. Use of different metal slugs in essentially the same design is effective up to a dull red heat, when the brass housing becomes likely to melt. You just CHOOSE the CORRECT temperature for your alloys.
If you're concerned by different temperatures on different parts of the tank, you put multiple PRVs into the tank wall (or incorporate them into fill-up line connectors, take-off lines, pressure detection lines, or whatever makes your manufacturing costs OK. No-one cares if only one of the PRVs "goes".
It's not rocket science to arrange appropriate pressure relief (though it is a part of rocket science).
(If I was at one of my work places in the bush of Africa or the forests of Russia or the seas of East Asia, YouTube would likely have been blocked to the 100kbps line for off-duty use. Don't assume that a link that works for you will work for someone else.)
No one in their right mind would join the military for college credit.
That may well be true, but I've heard of US military recruiters using that line in recruiting talks, and I've seen people (two of my hall-mates when I was at uni) who have taken the military (to be precise - Officer Training Corps) shilling to fund themselves through college and then found that they actually had to go to war (Gulf War, Round 1 ; for Rick the airman) or had to pay back the tuition as well as go to war when they repeatedly failed their exams (Gulf War, Round 1 ; for Bob the Medic). The airman couldn't cut it as a pilot, but had to do something in aircraft maintenance - fair enough and unlikely to get shot at. The medic went to do nursing care in forward positions, and on his return wasn't released from his "reserves" obligations but was bankrupted by re-paying the military's grants that he'd accepted on the expectation of becoming a fully-qualified doctor.
Which didn't surprise me in the slightest. He'd known that it was coming for several years, since he failed his first year.
That said, the third guy I knew receiving an OTC grant did get through OK. But his family were all officers already, and his English degree must have been so helpful in shooting wogs.
I've been using a Huwaei tablet and a ZTE phone which came together as an upgrade bundle (with a 3G SIM for the tablet) nearly a year ago. Both working fine, despite both being dropped on multiple occasions.
Nothing wrong with these in terms of endurance. The tablet works AND fits in my jacket pocket, so gets infinitely more use than an iPad (or whatever the Samsung thing is called (Galaxy 10). Neither fit in my pocket ; neither got considered beyond that metric. The phone... is a phone. What more is there to say?
Don't worry ; there will soon be another atrocity along to overshadow the last one. There are things which the American gun-toting lunatic in the street can be relied upon for, and that's one of them.
Is anyone takeing bets on what the score card on the next atrocity will be, and when? I've never laid a bet in my life, but I might just look at the book on this to see if I can do a "gun merchant special" - i.e. make a quick buck out of an insane tragedy.
For a radiation contrast medium? Radium sulphate should be chemically almost identical to barium sulphate (as the Curies can attest with their strenuous efforts to separate the two). Though radium sulphate may have other, less desirable, properties. The main property that you want is the presence of a large amount of mass per unit volume to provide the X-ray absorption ; that in itself dictates a heavy metal positive ion coupled with as light a negative ion as you can get away with.
Being slightly more serious, the only other simple heavy metal salt which is sufficiently low solubility to be credible would probably be lead sulphate. But even that is probably too toxic, too cumulative and too likely to get mobilised into the metabolism. Caesium salts would probably be pretty biologically benign, but they're almost all significantly soluble in stomach conditions. And a touch on the expensive side. I don't recall mercury having any salts as insoluble and as refractory as barytes, and otherwise it's got as bad a biochemistry as lead.
No good options on the sixth row of the periodic table then. Next row up, you're losing significant degree of contrast on the X-rays - scattering is strongly coupled to nuclear mass. (Oh, horrors ; I'm trying to remember how the photoelectric factor "PEF" modifies the interpretation of oil exploration of neutron-porosity and density logs. But yeah, atomic mass is pretty much the biggest component to the correction calculations.) And the obvious candidate to look at here is strontium sulphate. Most of the chemical behaviours of barytes, biologically relatively benign (do not confuse with the effects of the strontium-90 isotope!), should certainly provide significant contrast in X-rays. And I can't see anything that would come close in desirability on row five. So I'd say that your best substitute may well be strontium sulphate.
Mind you... some of the tungstate-VI compounts might be worth a look too. But they're liable to chemical erosion followed by acute metal poisoning in the real world, so I'd be very chary of them. Pass me another guinea pig, this one is squeaking loudly and writhing in a good impersonation of agony.
Maybe adorn them with butterflies and stylized dinosaurs, too? What could possibly go wrong?
Less than with the original idea?
I have to agree with the early poster who described this as possibly the stupidest idea seen on Slashdot. And there have been some really stupid ideas presented before this one.
Could this substitution of bromine for iodine have been carried out to increase diseases and thus create more need for pharmaceutical drugs?
Up until that point you had me thinking... not wildly implausible. I know enough chemistry (more than the very large majority of people in the world) to find the asserted links between the biochemistry of bromine and iodine reasonably plausible. But once you get into the conspiracy theories - you just sound like an American wingnut lunatic.
Important question : is bromine more or less expensive than iodine? (I checked : KBr is about half the price of KI) Which might be a reason to attempt to substitute bromide for iodide. But who on earth is stupid enough to think that bromide can substitute for iodide in a biological system? I can't think of anyone who would get to the end of their 14+ chemistry course at school and think that is a valid substitution.
The presence of added iodide in flour goods is due to government regulation to attempt to reduce the incidence of goitre and cretinism. Are you implying that your government is so cretinous as to not have good chemists working for them, and to test (by covert consumer purchasing) for compliance with the regulations, and to also keep count of the number of cases as an indicator of whether the regulations are being effective. Do you seriously think that such a plan could have been carried out and no-one talked about it? Do you not think that the baked-goods company executives who meet their Illuminati co-conspirators, would produce special lines of iodised foods, for the Illuminati themselves. The story would leak.
What is it about American wingnuts? Do you have special lunatic-breeding farms (apart from the Deep South)?
... that mobile phones of any type contain radio transmitters, which have not as a design been tested and certified as safe to use with the detonators and explosives systems that are also regularly used at our sites, many employers in my business decline to allow people to come onto their sites with a smartphone, ham radio, or any other sort of radio transmitter. That's been the case for nearly 20 years now (the bans on ham radio and other unapproved radios are considerable older).
This isn't made any more difficult by there typically being no cellphone tower within several hundred miles of the locations. So the only use of smartphones is as alarm clocks, phone books and pocket computers. Some employers allow them out, as long as they're kept inside the Faraday cages which the office spaces and accommodation spaces constitute.
Can't live without your mobile... get a different job.
(Incidentally, the ability to receive an emergency call isn't going to get you home in less than several days. Live with it ; if you can't live with it, go work in a different business.)
Then that's some pretty atrocious design. Design of pressure-relief systems is not exactly rocket science, or new.
The worst case of failure of a pressure-relief system that I've been associated with killed 167 people, and the pressure relief system failed because it wasn't designed, installed, commissioned or enabled. Instead, the system relied on it being inconceivable that the human operators of the rest of the gas production and pipeline system would continue to pump gas into the middle of a raging fire, with several hundred people trapped in the middle of it. Of course, in the event, because no-one could get permission to shut down the rest of the production system, and no-one had the balls to make the decision on their own, then when there was a fire, the gas was continually pumped into the middle until the 24" and 36" gas risers blew.
Of course, we have better-designed systems now, which are not going to fail. Elgin gas leak, anyone?
Given that this is a site of "News for Nerds", any geek presenting a computing device to someone reading this should be expecting that before the wrapping is in the bin, it'll be being dissected, and before the coffee has finished being made, there will be a Linux distro being downloaded for the device, so that it's capabilities could be thoroughly investigated.
What the sheeple think.... someone else's problem.
The agency has no proof that electronic devices can harm a plane's avionics, but it still perpetuates such claims
But the proof of interference with avionics has been around for at least 3 years now, which is why you're required to stow your mobile phone into your hold baggage, turned off, before the pat-down and before you go for you flight briefing and issue, donning and inspection of your flight safety gear.
Or don't your civilian flight providers talk to the rest of the industry?
The real problem is that English needs to be reworked into a phonetic language.
No, the real problem is that people need to stop trying to treat English as a phonetic language. It's a mongrel hybrid ; it always has been, and probably always will be (at least, it will be until it bears as much resemblance to current English (or even A'merkin) as current English does to Old English).
Slashdot Mirror
Ask, IIRC, Woody Allen ("not dying").
You'd have to be spectacularly inattentive to your personal physical condition for that scenario to hold (which does happen, rarely). Most variants of hepatitis (I have several friends with several variants ; one is having a comparatively good third cycle of HepC treatment, which is really good news for other victims if this trial pans out as well as the case I'm watching) give you a lot of warning that you're unwell before your liver is damaged beyond the point of being any use at all.
Oh, and I don't know that the family of diseases have been diagnosed for long enough to have a good idea what the typical incubation period is - it's increasing at about 6 months per year of measurement - meaning that we haven't been detecting it for long enough yet to have worked through the demographic "hump" of the undiagnosed majority. Which is why hundreds of millions of pounds are being spent to treat people NOW so that we can get them out of the infected population before the feared real epidemic hits. (But that's "public health investment", or in American English, "communism".)
what matters isn't the water depth, but the difference between the height (above an arbitrary point, e.g. the quayside at Newlyn) of the sea's level at the time you're storing/ generating energy and the level of water in your reservoir. What is called the "head" in a conventional hydroelectric scheme.
The steel used in oil storage tanks has a finite (and relatively short) lifetime in the sea because it rusts. You can manage this to a point, but it will eventually corrode beyond the point of economic repair. That is why the North Sea oil installations that are being decommissioned are the ones with steel legs and sub-structures, while the concrete-legged ones are generally remaining in use (I can't think of an example that's been taken out of service, in the UK).
That'll be the same problem with large-scale storage of energy as compressed air. Pressure vessels are under considerable stress, and need a lot of structural integrity maintenance. Which reminds me that my SCUBA diving bottles need re-certification in the middle of the coming year.
Someone take that reporter out and provide clue-by-four education. It's "lesions". [grumble, "spik inglish, boah!"]
Phenol to cause lesions such as are described? Well, if you spray your face with 10% phenol-in-water you'll get lesions like that (this used to be a standard technique in early "aseptic" operating theatre practice - see Lister's work in the 1850s ; and this is why better techniques were developed.) Hippuric acid ... rings a bell, but I'd have to check ... sounds like horse piss to me. Sure enough "found in the urine of horses and other herbivores." (Wikipedia).
You know ... this being people complaining about water from private wells in an agricultural area ... I'd be wondering how good the management of horse (and other herbivore) piss and shit has been on those farms for the last century or so. Aquifer contamination can take a LONG time to show up.
The last time I was doing drilling on an aquifer in Britain (the South Downs Chalk, feeding London in a few thousand years : if you watch the horses on the big bend at Goodwood racecourse, you can see the oil wells on the hillside opposite), we had no concerns - none what so ever - about contaminating the aquifer. Regulations were that we could only drill with drinking water and (precisely) nothing else (until we got to the point of casing off the aquifer, when we were allowed to cement the casing in place). Then we had to verify that the casing was "tight" with a 1800psi/ 10 minutes pressure test, witnessed by representatives from the water board and local council and local residents. My input as a geologist was to confirm (by cuttings examination and interpretation of geophysical logs) that we were beyond the bottom of the aquifer. Then - next section of the well was drilled with a water-based mud (pH 11 : (inert) barytes powder, potassium chloride, ice-cream thickening agents, soap ; I don't normally bother to wear gloves, unless the safety officer is watching), cased and cemented a couple of hundred feet above the expected reservoir (again, my call) to provide a second pressure barrier (3000psi/10 minutes test) before displacing the well to use oil-based mud for the horizontal reservoir section (which I steered - it was short, only 3000-odd ft) because this was not a well that needed fracking.
That is "standard practice" in the oilfield - it's highly optimised to cut costs and risks. There are people who will cut cost further by cutting corners. For example, a job I was asked to comment upon (and which I use as an example when I'm teaching my juniors pore pressure engineering) was when an Indonesian oil company saved the cost of the intermediate casing string. The result was the "Lusi" mud volcano, which is still erupting today. with hundreds injured (by scalding mud) and thousands displaced, roads and railway lines damaged and closed or relocated ... I use it as an example of WHY we don't do that.
If there are wells in Pennsylvania which are constructed down to Indonesian standards and are leaking methane into aquifers as alleged, then I would suggest that America improve it's drilling regulation (and enforcement) to somewhere closer to the British and European model than the Indonesian model. But hey, that's your political problem.
? I haven't seen that allegation before. But, if that's methane leaking out of a fitting, then that is the drilling company's PROFIT going off into the atmosphere (never mind the potential hazard, think of the lost profit ! ) ; they want to know about that, yesterday, if not sooner. On the other hand, if it's a water-pumped seal (where you reduce the pressure across an active seal by
Unfortunately, since our brain work (as opposed to the finger work of typing reports) often involves pointing at graphical representations of data on the screen to say "this and this are significant" ; at which point finger comes in contact with screen, screen display jumps all over the place.
Touch-screen gets disabled. Always.
If Intel want to enforce touch screen hardware, I don't give a fuck. If they want to enforce it being enabled, they can go fuck themselves.
Water isn't a chemical?
(Hiya, Chill, not seen you for a while.)
The chemicals pumped into the ground in fracking are well known. Because they are charged for - charged quite a lot of money for. The mud engineer who mixes up the fluids on site has to submit a daily chemical inventory to the client company for cost-control reasons, which are WAY more important (to the company) than any environmental regulations, which will have been assessed months before when planning the job and obtaining discharge permits ("Petroleum Operation Notification" PON15 and it's associated documents in the UK ; whatever alphabet soup is used in your jurisdiction). Proceeding without these documents in place is a criminal offence by the mud engineer and company man on site, in addition to any corporate responsibility.You may not know what the chemicals are in any depth, but that doesn't mean that nobody knows what goes into the injectant/ proppant mix.
In reality, most of what goes down the hole is water, followed by strong and relatively inert particles (which prop the induced fractures open) ; minor components are then surfactants (to get everything to mix together and stay mixed) and corrosion inhibitors (to keep the gas in the pipes where it's meant to be). As a major part of corrosion inhibition, the system's pH will be kept reasonably high - typically 10.5 to 11.5 - because that's the cheapest way to protect steel from corrosion (in some reservoirs - carbonate-rich ones - an "acid frac" may be desired ; that complicates matters, considerably).
There are plenty of perfectly good reasons to be concerned about fracking - carbon pollution of the atmosphere ; fucked-up cement jobs ; leaking casing ; falsified pressure tests ("pass the dinner plate!") ; illegal dumping of anything from diesel to engine oils to the contents of the shit pit. The actual chemistry of the materials pumped is relatively minor compared to ensuring that there is a robust, effective regulation framework around drilling operations. Which doesn't seem to be the case in America's oil industry (they still average one death a week) judging from the reports in the press. Having worked on land jobs all over the world, I can tell you that the quality of regulation and enforcement varies a lot. Getting that right is far more important than shitting bricks over these particular chemicals.
(There are chemicals to worry about. I've played my part in getting some of the nastier ones banned from Holland, then Norway, then the UK. And good riddance to the shit - I've still got the scars from the burns.)
Returning to the story ... it sounds as if they've developed a new (and fairly complex) technique for achieving zonal isolation in an artificially fractured well. Big deal. Will it be cheaper than the conventional method of alternating perforating and fracking each zone? It's still going to require multiple trips, but you might be able to do it with a workover mast instead of a full drilling rig. I'll let bean counters worry about that.
none of which invalidates that design of PRVs is "rocket science". The first PRV that I had to replace was a low-melting alloy in a pressure cooker - that probably went at about 130degC. Use of different metal slugs in essentially the same design is effective up to a dull red heat, when the brass housing becomes likely to melt. You just CHOOSE the CORRECT temperature for your alloys.
If you're concerned by different temperatures on different parts of the tank, you put multiple PRVs into the tank wall (or incorporate them into fill-up line connectors, take-off lines, pressure detection lines, or whatever makes your manufacturing costs OK. No-one cares if only one of the PRVs "goes".
It's not rocket science to arrange appropriate pressure relief (though it is a part of rocket science).
(If I was at one of my work places in the bush of Africa or the forests of Russia or the seas of East Asia, YouTube would likely have been blocked to the 100kbps line for off-duty use. Don't assume that a link that works for you will work for someone else.)
That may well be true, but I've heard of US military recruiters using that line in recruiting talks, and I've seen people (two of my hall-mates when I was at uni) who have taken the military (to be precise - Officer Training Corps) shilling to fund themselves through college and then found that they actually had to go to war (Gulf War, Round 1 ; for Rick the airman) or had to pay back the tuition as well as go to war when they repeatedly failed their exams (Gulf War, Round 1 ; for Bob the Medic). The airman couldn't cut it as a pilot, but had to do something in aircraft maintenance - fair enough and unlikely to get shot at. The medic went to do nursing care in forward positions, and on his return wasn't released from his "reserves" obligations but was bankrupted by re-paying the military's grants that he'd accepted on the expectation of becoming a fully-qualified doctor.
Which didn't surprise me in the slightest. He'd known that it was coming for several years, since he failed his first year.
That said, the third guy I knew receiving an OTC grant did get through OK. But his family were all officers already, and his English degree must have been so helpful in shooting wogs.
Nothing wrong with these in terms of endurance. The tablet works AND fits in my jacket pocket, so gets infinitely more use than an iPad (or whatever the Samsung thing is called (Galaxy 10). Neither fit in my pocket ; neither got considered beyond that metric. The phone ... is a phone. What more is there to say?
Don't worry ; there will soon be another atrocity along to overshadow the last one. There are things which the American gun-toting lunatic in the street can be relied upon for, and that's one of them.
Is anyone takeing bets on what the score card on the next atrocity will be, and when? I've never laid a bet in my life, but I might just look at the book on this to see if I can do a "gun merchant special" - i.e. make a quick buck out of an insane tragedy.
Being slightly more serious, the only other simple heavy metal salt which is sufficiently low solubility to be credible would probably be lead sulphate. But even that is probably too toxic, too cumulative and too likely to get mobilised into the metabolism. Caesium salts would probably be pretty biologically benign, but they're almost all significantly soluble in stomach conditions. And a touch on the expensive side. I don't recall mercury having any salts as insoluble and as refractory as barytes, and otherwise it's got as bad a biochemistry as lead.
No good options on the sixth row of the periodic table then. Next row up, you're losing significant degree of contrast on the X-rays - scattering is strongly coupled to nuclear mass. (Oh, horrors ; I'm trying to remember how the photoelectric factor "PEF" modifies the interpretation of oil exploration of neutron-porosity and density logs. But yeah, atomic mass is pretty much the biggest component to the correction calculations.) And the obvious candidate to look at here is strontium sulphate. Most of the chemical behaviours of barytes, biologically relatively benign (do not confuse with the effects of the strontium-90 isotope!), should certainly provide significant contrast in X-rays. And I can't see anything that would come close in desirability on row five. So I'd say that your best substitute may well be strontium sulphate.
Mind you ... some of the tungstate-VI compounts might be worth a look too. But they're liable to chemical erosion followed by acute metal poisoning in the real world, so I'd be very chary of them. Pass me another guinea pig, this one is squeaking loudly and writhing in a good impersonation of agony.
I prefer my polar bear broiled, not poached.
Less than with the original idea?
I have to agree with the early poster who described this as possibly the stupidest idea seen on Slashdot. And there have been some really stupid ideas presented before this one.
Up until that point you had me thinking ... not wildly implausible. I know enough chemistry (more than the very large majority of people in the world) to find the asserted links between the biochemistry of bromine and iodine reasonably plausible. But once you get into the conspiracy theories - you just sound like an American wingnut lunatic.
Important question : is bromine more or less expensive than iodine? (I checked : KBr is about half the price of KI) Which might be a reason to attempt to substitute bromide for iodide. But who on earth is stupid enough to think that bromide can substitute for iodide in a biological system? I can't think of anyone who would get to the end of their 14+ chemistry course at school and think that is a valid substitution.
The presence of added iodide in flour goods is due to government regulation to attempt to reduce the incidence of goitre and cretinism. Are you implying that your government is so cretinous as to not have good chemists working for them, and to test (by covert consumer purchasing) for compliance with the regulations, and to also keep count of the number of cases as an indicator of whether the regulations are being effective. Do you seriously think that such a plan could have been carried out and no-one talked about it? Do you not think that the baked-goods company executives who meet their Illuminati co-conspirators, would produce special lines of iodised foods, for the Illuminati themselves. The story would leak.
What is it about American wingnuts? Do you have special lunatic-breeding farms (apart from the Deep South)?
This isn't made any more difficult by there typically being no cellphone tower within several hundred miles of the locations. So the only use of smartphones is as alarm clocks, phone books and pocket computers. Some employers allow them out, as long as they're kept inside the Faraday cages which the office spaces and accommodation spaces constitute.
Can't live without your mobile ... get a different job.
(Incidentally, the ability to receive an emergency call isn't going to get you home in less than several days. Live with it ; if you can't live with it, go work in a different business.)
Tiny problem with that is that people try to kill you in the process - both your own side (through incompetence) and the other side (through policy).
Which is not too different to trying to negotiate the sports twats at some colleges.
The worst case of failure of a pressure-relief system that I've been associated with killed 167 people, and the pressure relief system failed because it wasn't designed, installed, commissioned or enabled. Instead, the system relied on it being inconceivable that the human operators of the rest of the gas production and pipeline system would continue to pump gas into the middle of a raging fire, with several hundred people trapped in the middle of it. Of course, in the event, because no-one could get permission to shut down the rest of the production system, and no-one had the balls to make the decision on their own, then when there was a fire, the gas was continually pumped into the middle until the 24" and 36" gas risers blew.
Of course, we have better-designed systems now, which are not going to fail. Elgin gas leak, anyone?
Errr, why?
Given that this is a site of "News for Nerds", any geek presenting a computing device to someone reading this should be expecting that before the wrapping is in the bin, it'll be being dissected, and before the coffee has finished being made, there will be a Linux distro being downloaded for the device, so that it's capabilities could be thoroughly investigated.
What the sheeple think .... someone else's problem.
Sorry too, Pakistan ("ally" nation) ; Saudi Arabia, Oman, UAE, Kuwait (bankroll nations) ; Iraq (thorn in our side) ; Turkey, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan (more allies, clients or neutrals).
... or maybe it's the Mum trying to hide her porn collection from her kid, the OP?
Check out the Schengen Agreement. That's approximately the population of North (of Mexico) America with approximately one fewer border.
What is the point of going fast? You're not going to get anywhere other than the next traffic jam any the quicker.
But the proof of interference with avionics has been around for at least 3 years now, which is why you're required to stow your mobile phone into your hold baggage, turned off, before the pat-down and before you go for you flight briefing and issue, donning and inspection of your flight safety gear.
Or don't your civilian flight providers talk to the rest of the industry?
No, the real problem is that people need to stop trying to treat English as a phonetic language. It's a mongrel hybrid ; it always has been, and probably always will be (at least, it will be until it bears as much resemblance to current English (or even A'merkin) as current English does to Old English).
FTFY
Do you not think that the American upper class knows how to keep any vestige of hope from their down-trodden masses.