Are you new here or something? Posting reasoned arguments on the basis of something that you actually know something about is definitely NOT the Slashdot Way. I should know - I'm an industrial scientist who never bothered to go down the Higher and Deeper Pile route, who's doing quite comfortably, thank you.
Gee, thanks ; you've contaminated me with your memes now!
That's about the size of the British royal family, who've been successfully lobbying to avoid the country becoming a republic again for 3.5 centuries now. "Small" doens't mean "ineffectual".
According to my travel medication consultant (an ex-NHS doctor), they get between 10% and 20% of people who they put onto Larium reporting mental side effects, and in such cases strongly recommend the patient to immediately switch from Larium to one of the others. This of course is possible because to obtain adequate protection form Larium, you need to be taking it for several WEEKS before entering a malarial zone. So, if you know which country you're going to that far in advance, Lariam is an option. If you don't know until a couple of days before you're required to be on site... it's not an option. (Which is why I get to keep a month or so of Malarone in my fridge and can collect more from the travel medics at the drop of a phone call.)
Within my business, Lariam has a terrible reputation for sending people psychotic in the field... for as long as I've known people who use it.
So... you and your wife tolerate Lariam well? For couples, the probability range I give above would suggest that between 64% and 81% of couples who use the drug will have your experience. Our anecdotes are not incompatible. I don't know how many people you routinely deal with who're using Lariam, but my anecdote is based on several dozen personal discussions over 20-odd years, and the comments of a travel medication consultant with experience of hundreds if not thousands of patients.
Incidentally, I'm told that Lariam is around 1/3 to 1/4 of the net cost of Malarone, which would explain it's continued existence in the pharmacopoeia. It's no use of course if you don't know when you're going to need someone to more accurately than a couple of weeks. When saving one day of person hire saves $1000-1500, then the price differential of Malarone over Lariam becomes negligible.
Malarone isn't without problems - it gives me the shits, to the extent of having filled out a "yellow card" . But I'll stick with that over the (unknown) to me hazards of Lariam. Or Doxy-whotsit, the third common alternative. If it works, don't fuck with it.
Returning to the substantive point... giving Lariam to people with guns? Sounds worrying to me. I've now got something interesting to talk to my military-medic relative next time I see him.
'natural state' is meaningless, humans are part of nature.
Probably more to the point is that there are very few, possibly no, environments on the planet that have not been significantly affected by humans. So to determine what the natural state of any particular environment is, may well be impossible (sense of "impossible", not sense of "very difficult").
The global taste for fossil fuels, especially liquid fossil fuels is truly enormous and growing (think China and India who are attempting to get to US per capita energy expenditures).
Actually, I think that what they're attempting to do is achieve Western/ First World levels of living standards. As a consequence of that, they are very likely to increase their per capita energy consumption, but you'd have to search long and hard to find a third-world person who actually gave a real shit about their energy consumption, compared to the huge shit that they give about their standard of living.
Concerning the origin of the Moon... well considering that I studied geology as an distinct subject at O-level (16yo), AO-level (17yo normally, but I took the exam at 16yo with after-hours tuition) and A-level (18yo), I was taught precisely nothing in class.
One of the text books that we could choose mentioned that all the theories then in consideration (Pacific basin ; thrown off through spin ; capture) had serious problems, but the least severe problems were for capture, because the excess kinetic energy and angular momentum could be disposed of by ejecting a third body from the system. The same text looked forward to enlightenment when the Apollo rocks were analysed. Which is almost what happened.
The several other text books simply didn't consider the problem.
When I was at university, I didn't pay a huge amount of attention to planetary science - it wasn't a part of the curriculum - though I did pick up hints of the development of the GI hypothesis from the weekly thump of journals on coffee-room tables.
However, now you require two planetary bodies to occupy the same orbital zone for long enough for them to form without colliding, and yet to collide later on.
Remembering that this all happened fairly fast - a few million years at most - so you're not really looking long enough to determine if anything in a "stable" orbit. Both protoplanets (Earth and "Theia") are rapidly accreting at the time ; either one's mass changing is going to affect where the Lagrange points in it's gravity field are. (Well, it and the Sun. And everything else in the solar system. And anything passing. Oh, and don't forget that Jupiter and the other gas giants were probably migrating inwards at the time.)
It was a highly dynamic and, literally, chaotic system. Which is why it's difficult to study.
So basically the prevailing theory before the big impact theory?
There wasn't really one. The "spun off from Earth" theory was known to be unworkable because of the angular momentum considerations - where has it all gone? The "Pacific basin is a scar from the Moon's formation" theory (just a special case of the "spun off" theory, really) never worked volumetrically, never worked for angular momentum, and when the lunar samples started coming back from the Russian probes, didn't work compositionally either. When plate tectonics (sea floor spreading) also showed that the Pacific Basin is younger than our oldest records of tidal cycles in sediments, nobody batted an eyelid.
The Giant Impact hypothesis is pretty much the only seriously thought through theory for the origin of the Moon. (And, it should also be said, a mechanism to explain the double planet Pluto-Charon, the 98 and 177 degree rotation axis inclinations of Uranus and Venus, and the presence of high numbers of double asteroids and KBOs) Before the GI hypothesis, there wasn't a well-thought through theory to explain the origin of the Moon.
Not caring sufficiently about American domestic politics to RTFA, but in TFS and in a lot of the comments I've scanned there is an implicit equation of "drilling" and "production of oil", which error seems to be confusing many people.
Some wells that you drill are for producing oil from. Some are for producing gas from. Some are for injecting water (or gases ) back into the reservoirs to boost pressures downhole and improve the production rates of other wells. Some wells are for appraising potential reservoirs which turn out to be uneconomic at less than (say) a sustained $150/bbl. Many oil reserves are not actually very suitable for production of transport fuel, or are more suitable for producing diesel than for producing petroleum. And some wells are drilled purely to replace other wells that are going off production because they've got some mechanical problem.
Even if you look at just the first factor mentioned above, the drilling of gas wells, you could have huge numbers of gas wells drilled in the US and absolutely zero increase in oil production resulting from that drilling. How much reduction in oil demand by fuel displacement (replacing heating oil with heating gas, for example)... that is something I'll leave to American-interested energy-economists. I just find the damned stuff ; I don't care who sells it or what they do with it, because I've got my pay check by that point.
Oh, incidentally - fuel prices at the roadside are not the only figure to pay attention to. There are lots of other forms of hydrocarbon-based energy that you pay for too - heating oil for home, work or school ; gas ("natural", not "gasoline") as I mentioned above ; bunker oil shipping Chinese goods to your malls ; the energy that goes into the fertilizers for your cheap foods ; the un-taxed (I don't see that lasting much longer!) aviation fuel that propels you on vacation... and many of these are also in competition with your car's engine for the liquid hydrocarbons that come out of the ground.
But why am I wasting my fingertips typing this ? - most people want to complain, not actually understand the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
US Govt. spies on and murders it's allies ... strike back to be expected.
Are you new here or something? Posting reasoned arguments on the basis of something that you actually know something about is definitely NOT the Slashdot Way. I should know - I'm an industrial scientist who never bothered to go down the Higher and Deeper Pile route, who's doing quite comfortably, thank you.
Gee, thanks ; you've contaminated me with your memes now!
Is replication across continents sufficient? Or do I just have a larger list of potential catastrophes than you do?
I'm sure that the California branch of the KKK will not let that happen.
Don't worry about that. When you need gravity turned off, God will do it for you.
Fancy skydiving this weekend? I've packed a chute for you.
Only as long as you don't enjoy it.
Oh, you do?
Tough.
Isn't this exactly the reason for the sub judice laws?
Or does America not have sub judice laws?
They go out of business.
I fail to see the dysfunction.
Go. In the words of Yolanda (?) in Pulp Fiction, execute their muttha-fucking asses. Frag 'em. Got the general idea?
64 Not 64k.
That's about the size of the British royal family, who've been successfully lobbying to avoid the country becoming a republic again for 3.5 centuries now. "Small" doens't mean "ineffectual".
Didn't you leave out at least one three-month period of burial in soft peat?
The economic cost of the rumour of mercury on it's own would be ... substantial.
Within my business, Lariam has a terrible reputation for sending people psychotic in the field ... for as long as I've known people who use it.
So ... you and your wife tolerate Lariam well? For couples, the probability range I give above would suggest that between 64% and 81% of couples who use the drug will have your experience. Our anecdotes are not incompatible. I don't know how many people you routinely deal with who're using Lariam, but my anecdote is based on several dozen personal discussions over 20-odd years, and the comments of a travel medication consultant with experience of hundreds if not thousands of patients.
Incidentally, I'm told that Lariam is around 1/3 to 1/4 of the net cost of Malarone, which would explain it's continued existence in the pharmacopoeia. It's no use of course if you don't know when you're going to need someone to more accurately than a couple of weeks. When saving one day of person hire saves $1000-1500, then the price differential of Malarone over Lariam becomes negligible.
Malarone isn't without problems - it gives me the shits, to the extent of having filled out a "yellow card" . But I'll stick with that over the (unknown) to me hazards of Lariam. Or Doxy-whotsit, the third common alternative. If it works, don't fuck with it.
Returning to the substantive point ... giving Lariam to people with guns? Sounds worrying to me. I've now got something interesting to talk to my military-medic relative next time I see him.
Probably more to the point is that there are very few, possibly no, environments on the planet that have not been significantly affected by humans. So to determine what the natural state of any particular environment is, may well be impossible (sense of "impossible", not sense of "very difficult").
Actually, I think that what they're attempting to do is achieve Western/ First World levels of living standards. As a consequence of that, they are very likely to increase their per capita energy consumption, but you'd have to search long and hard to find a third-world person who actually gave a real shit about their energy consumption, compared to the huge shit that they give about their standard of living.
One of the text books that we could choose mentioned that all the theories then in consideration (Pacific basin ; thrown off through spin ; capture) had serious problems, but the least severe problems were for capture, because the excess kinetic energy and angular momentum could be disposed of by ejecting a third body from the system. The same text looked forward to enlightenment when the Apollo rocks were analysed. Which is almost what happened.
The several other text books simply didn't consider the problem.
When I was at university, I didn't pay a huge amount of attention to planetary science - it wasn't a part of the curriculum - though I did pick up hints of the development of the GI hypothesis from the weekly thump of journals on coffee-room tables.
Remembering that this all happened fairly fast - a few million years at most - so you're not really looking long enough to determine if anything in a "stable" orbit. Both protoplanets (Earth and "Theia") are rapidly accreting at the time ; either one's mass changing is going to affect where the Lagrange points in it's gravity field are. (Well, it and the Sun. And everything else in the solar system. And anything passing. Oh, and don't forget that Jupiter and the other gas giants were probably migrating inwards at the time.)
It was a highly dynamic and, literally, chaotic system. Which is why it's difficult to study.
There wasn't really one. The "spun off from Earth" theory was known to be unworkable because of the angular momentum considerations - where has it all gone? The "Pacific basin is a scar from the Moon's formation" theory (just a special case of the "spun off" theory, really) never worked volumetrically, never worked for angular momentum, and when the lunar samples started coming back from the Russian probes, didn't work compositionally either. When plate tectonics (sea floor spreading) also showed that the Pacific Basin is younger than our oldest records of tidal cycles in sediments, nobody batted an eyelid.
The Giant Impact hypothesis is pretty much the only seriously thought through theory for the origin of the Moon. (And, it should also be said, a mechanism to explain the double planet Pluto-Charon, the 98 and 177 degree rotation axis inclinations of Uranus and Venus, and the presence of high numbers of double asteroids and KBOs) Before the GI hypothesis, there wasn't a well-thought through theory to explain the origin of the Moon.
That's pretty good. For an American. (Apologies if you're not.)
Puppeteers
Oh, hang on ... the fag hands you your fag? Sounds good to me.
Some wells that you drill are for producing oil from. Some are for producing gas from. Some are for injecting water (or gases ) back into the reservoirs to boost pressures downhole and improve the production rates of other wells. Some wells are for appraising potential reservoirs which turn out to be uneconomic at less than (say) a sustained $150/bbl. Many oil reserves are not actually very suitable for production of transport fuel, or are more suitable for producing diesel than for producing petroleum. And some wells are drilled purely to replace other wells that are going off production because they've got some mechanical problem.
Even if you look at just the first factor mentioned above, the drilling of gas wells, you could have huge numbers of gas wells drilled in the US and absolutely zero increase in oil production resulting from that drilling. How much reduction in oil demand by fuel displacement (replacing heating oil with heating gas, for example) ... that is something I'll leave to American-interested energy-economists. I just find the damned stuff ; I don't care who sells it or what they do with it, because I've got my pay check by that point.
Oh, incidentally - fuel prices at the roadside are not the only figure to pay attention to. There are lots of other forms of hydrocarbon-based energy that you pay for too - heating oil for home, work or school ; gas ("natural", not "gasoline") as I mentioned above ; bunker oil shipping Chinese goods to your malls ; the energy that goes into the fertilizers for your cheap foods ; the un-taxed (I don't see that lasting much longer!) aviation fuel that propels you on vacation ... and many of these are also in competition with your car's engine for the liquid hydrocarbons that come out of the ground.
But why am I wasting my fingertips typing this ? - most people want to complain, not actually understand the problem.
I thought these had been discussed back then.
Back to the god-squaddie baiting!