Having just had the bathroom suite replaced, I've noticed that the new bath has a less slippery base than the old (20+ years) one.
Having had to help my mother caring for a very frail elderly relative a few years ago, the point wasn't surprising to me. Slippery bathroom surfaces probably kill hundreds of people each year (in the UK) and cost tens or hundreds of millions in hospitalization costs, care, sheltered housing for recuperation... Compared to which, the costs of powered lifting machinery to assist in and out of the bath is minor. (I'm much more dubious about the efficacy of "walk in" baths etc: making large waterproof seals effective on hinged doors is difficult ; keeping them effective is also hard.
"Shiny" is not always best.
BTW, well done "Torygraph" for reporting on a story that is several weeks old. Obviously you don't consider "shiny" to be important in your Sci-Tech reporting either.
a means of holding it up over the bed so I can read with my hands under the covers.
Err, your legs have been amputated? Prop yourself up with pillows as comfortable ; bend legs ; rest device on thighs. Works for me, in bed and in bath.
I'd love something which allows me to keep warm while reading
My tuppence.
The latter phrase strongly suggests you're a Brit, so the ludicrous suggestion of buying a heater to turn your sleeping area into an over-cooked "sweat lodge" (I believe that's the American term) can be rejected as... well, American. What your bedtime partner(s) think about it should be a consideration too.
Try a pair of pyjamas. Keeps the arms nicely warm. If you like a bit more freedom, I quite like a sleeping kimono, a short dressing gown.
Works for me. Then again, I've spent years waking up to ice on the inside of the windows in winter, and I'd lived in the present flat for 6 years before I extended the radiator system to provide heating in the bedrooms.
(1) they can fall down the submarine slopes. Just because the fluid they're falling through is inimical to your particular respiratory equipment, doesn't change the fundamentals of the situation.
(2) As with the generic model of a volcano (typically envisioned as a strato-volcano, though this is actually a parasite cone on the flanks of a hybrid of shield- and strato-volcano), rock as magma and fragments of pumice is being injected at a central point on the volcano, then falls away down the flanks with little regard for whether the highest point of the edifice is in water or air.
I'm going to correspondingly tell you to go do something anatomically impossible.
Oh, I find it's much more fun to suggest something that is anatomically possible, but contemplation of the act leaves the spammer with the uncomfortable desire to scrub his (or her) brain. In the small hours of the morning. Using wire wool. A mental equivalent of an "ear worm", but with expensive psychotherapy consequences.
Maybe this explains all those retards on the site who insist on sending me job offers?
Well, there is a setting that says what you're interested in... maybe you've selected the "I'm interested in job offers" button?
There is indeed such a setting, and when I signed up I set it to "no", and haven't moved it from there. Evidently many of the recruitment companies that do use the site make no reference at all to the expressed intentions of the people setting up their profiles there. Which is offensive - are they (the recruitment companies, not L-I) saying that my opinions in this matter matter less than their desire to make a profit by "recruiting" me? Of course they are.
I should really make the effort to put in a strongly worded complaint to L-I about every company that does this, and try to get the offender's accounts cancelled. But I can't be bothered. Well, not yet.
And the really annoying thing is - why on earth do people think that everyone is always in search of a better (or to be more precise, different) job? It took me 4 years and one change of employer to find a place where I'm comfortable, well paid, and interested by the work. That was almost 20 years ago, and I see no reason what so ever to move on in the remaining 25 years (or so) of my career).
Santorini, the volcanic island in the Aegean Sea allegedly responsible for the collapse of the Minoan civilisation in it's 1760BCE eruption, is grumbling on it's northern eruptive axis which runs through the submarine "Kolumbus" volcano.
That was one of the things that got me back into SCUBA - Kolumbus is (when last reported) only 60m below sea level, which is within the credible reach of recreational diving. (OK, you'd need to be on mixed gases, and probably on a CCR, but it's do-able!) I like the idea of meeting real live hot spring communities when diving.
although there was no chance of seeing something similar in the Mediterranean
As a geologist thinking about "interesting things to do" for next year's holiday, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the possibility. You'll have to (sorry!) keep your ear to the ground to find out where the interesting stuff is, but there are (more or less) continuously active volcanoes in the sea north of Sicily (loosely associated with Mt Etna ; but the geology there is complex!) where the possibility of new islands being created at any particular time is not zero. Small probability in any 2-week holiday, but not zero.
Incidentally, what are the chances they'll just end up with an atoll? Would this land rush be damp squib?
Zero. An atoll is made up of coral, not volcanic rock.
Jimmie Blue thinks the probability is (approaching) 1.0.
As a geologist, I'd say that the answer is not so simple. It's like breathing.
A coral reef is formed where the rate of accumulation of material from the growth of corals outpaces the (effective) loss of material due to subsidence of the edifice into the seabed (and the seabed rising very slightly to accommodate) ; however a volcano forms when the rate of accumulation of (volcanic) material exceeds the rate of loss to marine erosion moving material down the slope onto the seabed (raising the level of the seabed slightly ; sounds familiar?).
When the volcano reduces it's activity (which it is likely to do, witness the movement of the Hawaii chain over their hotspot ; the Canaries situation is less clear, because Africa seems to be moving much more slowly), growth of coral may be sufficient to keep pace with the subsidence of the volcanic edifice. But from my observation of the vigour of coral growth around Tenerife (not very vigorous), I rather suspect that in this specific case, the coral would be unable to build up into an atoll. I'd put the odds at around 1 in 4 (0.25), but that's little just an educated guess.
A few years ago Cumbre Vieja was in the news as a possible source of a mega-tsunami that would devastate the west coasts of Africa and Europe and the east coast of North America.
And from some of that satellite imagery in the photo gallery accompanying TFA, you can clearly see why : the concave collapse scar that makes up the NNE coast of the island ; the corresponding scar making up the SW side. The ESE side doesn't have a clear concave shape, but in the digital elevation models that give the topography in images 9 and 10 of the photo gallery you can see arcuate ridges in the landscape on that side. To me that reads "collapse scars" too.
IIRC, from notes on a volcanology course I attended on Tenerife earlier this year, there are clear signs of in excess of 20 major landslip events around the Canaries.
The problem is that the volcano is unstable,
ALL volcanoes are unstable, until they erode/ collapse to be level with their surrounding landscape. It's in the nature of being a pile of material with additional material being injected into the centre of the pile. Can you think of a counter-example of such a construction process that doesn't result in an unstable edifice? I can't, unless you look at the trivial case where the material viscosity is low enough that the edifice can't support itself and simply flows away.
it could collapse and dump 500 km^3 of rock into the ocean.
Which can be said for any volcano with a volume of more than 500 km^3 and which is in the ocean.
Please note that this doesn't necessarily mean that there has to be X (for any large X) km^3 of rock above the sea surface. An undersea collapse that relocates (say) 100km^3 of rock from (say) Lo'ihi seamount off the Hawaiian coast, to a position spread out on the seabed 50km away and several km deeper, will still *move* sufficient km^3 of water from one point to another to generate tsunami at the surface. You don't need to dump rock into the ocean.
(About 9000 years ago, something like 3500 km^3 of soft sediment relocated from the edge of the Norwegian continental shelf into the deep Atlantic ; the tsunami deposits have been found up to 30m AMSL in my area (which influences my house-buying options) and as far away as the Netherlands-Belgium-German border around 100km inland from the present coast. The "Storegga Slide" ; look it up.)
Why would you use LinkedIn for job hunting? The purpose of the website, if I remember correctly, is to keep you in contact with your professional peers and colleagues over the last X years of your career.
Maybe this explains all those retards on the site who insist on sending me job offers? Bunch of time-wasting fools.
My doctor is under written instructions to NOT send any of my medical records to the (planned) national system. As for the rest of the medical system... well nothing my dentist does *needs* to be on a national system, and my commercial vaccinations record is on good old ink and paper, and it's my responsibility to keep the records and make them available when necessary ; since the only likely people to need to access, for example, the status of my Yellow Fever vaccination are (practically by definition) the immigration authorities of foreign countries, again, I'm pretty dubious of the benefit-to-risk ratio of letting them read my medical records (even if my Yellow Fever vaccinations were in my medical records, which they're not).
Data going from specialists *to* my doctor... that's fine ; I assume it'll happen if there is ever a need. But what I do not want (and have explicitly requested) is that my doctor does not let that data leave their physical control. And if that means ink-on-paper, that's fine by me.
I was thinking to myself... there was a programme on BBC Radio 4 a few years ago about LEO and it's context, and I was wondering if there was a podcast of that. The dates you give would be about right for the (putative) podcast(s) to be derived from the same book. Do you know of it's existence?
[Update] My searching reveals the list goes from "A Brief History of Mathematics" to "A History of the Brain" without passing through "A Computer Called Leo". Unless you know of other lists.
How do we get rid of it? I couldn't find the options to remove it.:(
The option isn't in the standard options. what you need to do is submit several dozen stories (they don't necessarily need to have been accepted), contribute a few thousand comments, and keep your karma at "excellent" for a decade or so. Then you'll be offered an option : "As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable advertising. "
It might only take 5 years, and only "very good" karma, I'm not sure. It's so long since I saw advertising on Slashdot that I can't remember when it went away.
Zynga (/ËzÉÅÉÉ(TM)/) is a social network game developer located in San Francisco, United States.[3] The company develops browser-based games that work both stand-alone and as application widgets on social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace.
As of November 2011, Zynga's games on Facebook have over 200 million monthly active users.[4] Four of Zynga's games, CityVille, Texas HoldEm Poker, FarmVille,
Scenario assumes that the health service (1) exists (not true, AFAIK, in third-world countries like America ; true in first world countries like Britain and Tanzania) and (2) that it uses fingerprints for identification of users and correlation with medical records (which I have never heard proposed for the health service in Britain). There is an implicit assumption too that the health service would actually store full medical records for all users in a centrally accessible form - this has been proposed for the British system, but implementation is suffering severe technology challenge as well as user resistance (I've banned my doctor from storing my records on any computer system located outside their premises).
Interesting scenario ; shows up some serious questions, as good thought experiments should.
What do you think is going to be the lifespan of human civilisation? A few centuries?
People who write things down have inhabited Oklahoma for how long? 300 years? So this is the strongest earthquake in (say) 400 years?
If you seriously think that this quake has been brought into the attention span of humans by fracking, then you're implying that you also think that human civilisation in the area will be finished by about 2400 CE. Is that seriously what you're asserting? What are your reasons for holding this belief? (Note the implicit equation of "writing things down" with "civilisation". Being shaken back to a pre-literate state is not the same as becoming extinct.)
In other news, I just checked my email and the earthquake reports say:
Region: OKLAHOMA
Geographic coordinates: 35.537N, 96.746W
Magnitude: 5.6 Mw
Depth: 5 km
Universal Time (UTC): 6 Nov 2011 03:53:10
Time near the Epicenter: 5 Nov 2011 22:53:10
This explains some people's confusion over the time of the event - some people some places can't (or won't) read English.
Actually, on the basis of that, I'm just wondering if the same non-readers have checked the historical seismicity records, or just relied on regurgitating someone else's assertion.
Earthquakes are not unusual in Oklahoma, but they often are too small to be felt.
So, pretty normal then.
In 2009 the rate of seismicity continued to climb, with nearly 50 earthquakes recorded--many big enough to be felt. In 2010 this activity continued. The magnitude 4.7 and 5.6 earthquakes of November 5, 2011, are the largest events recorded during this period of increased seismicity. Additionally, the M5.6 quake is the largest quake to hit Oklahoma in modern times.
OK, so the "biggest quake" is the USGS's opinion too ; that's good enough for me. The intensifying series of quakes is interesting. (OK, I'm a geologist, but I do get out a lot! It's still interesting.)
The Meers fault located in south-central Oklahoma, about 100 km southwest of Oklahoma City, is the only fault identified in the state with evidence of surface-rupturing earthquakes in the last 3000 years (prior to historical settlement of the region). Paleoseismology studies have identified a temporal clustering of a least three earthquakes on this fault, two of which are dated (1200-2900 years before present) and the third is believed to be older in age.
Surface rupturing - cracks in the ground that swallow screaming Hollywood starlets - are only common in pretty substantial earthquakes. More substantial than the mid-5s that are being reported for this "strongest quake in historical times." So... within the last pretty short period, there have been stronger quakes in the region. Quelle surprise! Not.
An earthquake of magnitude 5.6 like the one that occurred yesterday east of Oklahoma City, are believed to be capable of striking anywhere in eastern North America at irregular intervals.
Queen Anne's dead. Tell us news, not history.
That increasing series of quakes is very interesting. Could we (sorry, "you", to the Americans in the audience) be building up to another New Madrid type earthquake? That would be valuable - there hasn't yet been a major intra-plate earthquake occur in the presence of a good seismological network. Here's hoping!
It sounds like we both have a realistic understanding of probability and risk assessment. But you're taking a different line to "Wyatt Earp", to whom I was originally responding. At which point it's getting confusing.
Slashdot Mirror
girl
The question changes considerably with the gender considered.
Are girls allowed to go to school in your home society? Or, for that matter, to have choices?
There are all sorts of unpleasant assumptions behind your comment.
Are you "ha ha", or "serious"?
Having just had the bathroom suite replaced, I've noticed that the new bath has a less slippery base than the old (20+ years) one.
Having had to help my mother caring for a very frail elderly relative a few years ago, the point wasn't surprising to me. Slippery bathroom surfaces probably kill hundreds of people each year (in the UK) and cost tens or hundreds of millions in hospitalization costs, care, sheltered housing for recuperation ... Compared to which, the costs of powered lifting machinery to assist in and out of the bath is minor. (I'm much more dubious about the efficacy of "walk in" baths etc: making large waterproof seals effective on hinged doors is difficult ; keeping them effective is also hard.
"Shiny" is not always best.
BTW, well done "Torygraph" for reporting on a story that is several weeks old. Obviously you don't consider "shiny" to be important in your Sci-Tech reporting either.
Err, your legs have been amputated? Prop yourself up with pillows as comfortable ; bend legs ; rest device on thighs. Works for me, in bed and in bath.
The latter phrase strongly suggests you're a Brit, so the ludicrous suggestion of buying a heater to turn your sleeping area into an over-cooked "sweat lodge" (I believe that's the American term) can be rejected as ... well, American. What your bedtime partner(s) think about it should be a consideration too.
Try a pair of pyjamas. Keeps the arms nicely warm. If you like a bit more freedom, I quite like a sleeping kimono, a short dressing gown.
Works for me.
Then again, I've spent years waking up to ice on the inside of the windows in winter, and I'd lived in the present flat for 6 years before I extended the radiator system to provide heating in the bedrooms.
(2) As with the generic model of a volcano (typically envisioned as a strato-volcano, though this is actually a parasite cone on the flanks of a hybrid of shield- and strato-volcano), rock as magma and fragments of pumice is being injected at a central point on the volcano, then falls away down the flanks with little regard for whether the highest point of the edifice is in water or air.
Oh, I find it's much more fun to suggest something that is anatomically possible, but contemplation of the act leaves the spammer with the uncomfortable desire to scrub his (or her) brain. In the small hours of the morning. Using wire wool. A mental equivalent of an "ear worm", but with expensive psychotherapy consequences.
There is indeed such a setting, and when I signed up I set it to "no", and haven't moved it from there. Evidently many of the recruitment companies that do use the site make no reference at all to the expressed intentions of the people setting up their profiles there. Which is offensive - are they (the recruitment companies, not L-I) saying that my opinions in this matter matter less than their desire to make a profit by "recruiting" me? Of course they are.
I should really make the effort to put in a strongly worded complaint to L-I about every company that does this, and try to get the offender's accounts cancelled. But I can't be bothered. Well, not yet.
And the really annoying thing is - why on earth do people think that everyone is always in search of a better (or to be more precise, different) job? It took me 4 years and one change of employer to find a place where I'm comfortable, well paid, and interested by the work. That was almost 20 years ago, and I see no reason what so ever to move on in the remaining 25 years (or so) of my career).
That was one of the things that got me back into SCUBA - Kolumbus is (when last reported) only 60m below sea level, which is within the credible reach of recreational diving. (OK, you'd need to be on mixed gases, and probably on a CCR, but it's do-able!) I like the idea of meeting real live hot spring communities when diving.
As a geologist thinking about "interesting things to do" for next year's holiday, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the possibility. You'll have to (sorry!) keep your ear to the ground to find out where the interesting stuff is, but there are (more or less) continuously active volcanoes in the sea north of Sicily (loosely associated with Mt Etna ; but the geology there is complex!) where the possibility of new islands being created at any particular time is not zero. Small probability in any 2-week holiday, but not zero.
Jimmie Blue thinks the probability is (approaching) 1.0.
As a geologist, I'd say that the answer is not so simple. It's like breathing.
A coral reef is formed where the rate of accumulation of material from the growth of corals outpaces the (effective) loss of material due to subsidence of the edifice into the seabed (and the seabed rising very slightly to accommodate) ; however a volcano forms when the rate of accumulation of (volcanic) material exceeds the rate of loss to marine erosion moving material down the slope onto the seabed (raising the level of the seabed slightly ; sounds familiar?).
When the volcano reduces it's activity (which it is likely to do, witness the movement of the Hawaii chain over their hotspot ; the Canaries situation is less clear, because Africa seems to be moving much more slowly), growth of coral may be sufficient to keep pace with the subsidence of the volcanic edifice. But from my observation of the vigour of coral growth around Tenerife (not very vigorous), I rather suspect that in this specific case, the coral would be unable to build up into an atoll. I'd put the odds at around 1 in 4 (0.25), but that's little just an educated guess.
No, because it happens relatively often and at reasonably predictable locations.
And from some of that satellite imagery in the photo gallery accompanying TFA, you can clearly see why : the concave collapse scar that makes up the NNE coast of the island ; the corresponding scar making up the SW side. The ESE side doesn't have a clear concave shape, but in the digital elevation models that give the topography in images 9 and 10 of the photo gallery you can see arcuate ridges in the landscape on that side. To me that reads "collapse scars" too.
IIRC, from notes on a volcanology course I attended on Tenerife earlier this year, there are clear signs of in excess of 20 major landslip events around the Canaries.
ALL volcanoes are unstable, until they erode/ collapse to be level with their surrounding landscape. It's in the nature of being a pile of material with additional material being injected into the centre of the pile. Can you think of a counter-example of such a construction process that doesn't result in an unstable edifice? I can't, unless you look at the trivial case where the material viscosity is low enough that the edifice can't support itself and simply flows away.
Which can be said for any volcano with a volume of more than 500 km^3 and which is in the ocean.
Please note that this doesn't necessarily mean that there has to be X (for any large X) km^3 of rock above the sea surface. An undersea collapse that relocates (say) 100km^3 of rock from (say) Lo'ihi seamount off the Hawaiian coast, to a position spread out on the seabed 50km away and several km deeper, will still *move* sufficient km^3 of water from one point to another to generate tsunami at the surface. You don't need to dump rock into the ocean.
(About 9000 years ago, something like 3500 km^3 of soft sediment relocated from the edge of the Norwegian continental shelf into the deep Atlantic ; the tsunami deposits have been found up to 30m AMSL in my area (which influences my house-buying options) and as far away as the Netherlands-Belgium-German border around 100km inland from the present coast. The "Storegga Slide" ; look it up.)
Maybe this explains all those retards on the site who insist on sending me job offers? Bunch of time-wasting fools.
That may or may not work, but I believe the intention of the site's managers is to encourage improvement of the standard of debate on the site.
Data going from specialists *to* my doctor ... that's fine ; I assume it'll happen if there is ever a need. But what I do not want (and have explicitly requested) is that my doctor does not let that data leave their physical control. And if that means ink-on-paper, that's fine by me.
[Update] My searching reveals the list goes from "A Brief History of Mathematics" to "A History of the Brain" without passing through "A Computer Called Leo". Unless you know of other lists.
Lyons were British. Tipping has never been a major part of British culture (instead relying on decent wages).
The option isn't in the standard options. what you need to do is submit several dozen stories (they don't necessarily need to have been accepted), contribute a few thousand comments, and keep your karma at "excellent" for a decade or so. Then you'll be offered an option : "As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable advertising. "
It might only take 5 years, and only "very good" karma, I'm not sure. It's so long since I saw advertising on Slashdot that I can't remember when it went away.
People who have no understanding that chemistry is more important than the pristine contents of their spell checker.
Ah, that piece of irritating shit.
Question answered.
Topic no longer of interest.
Interesting scenario ; shows up some serious questions, as good thought experiments should.
People who write things down have inhabited Oklahoma for how long? 300 years? So this is the strongest earthquake in (say) 400 years?
If you seriously think that this quake has been brought into the attention span of humans by fracking, then you're implying that you also think that human civilisation in the area will be finished by about 2400 CE. Is that seriously what you're asserting? What are your reasons for holding this belief?
(Note the implicit equation of "writing things down" with "civilisation". Being shaken back to a pre-literate state is not the same as becoming extinct.)
In other news, I just checked my email and the earthquake reports say :
This explains some people's confusion over the time of the event - some people some places can't (or won't) read English.
Actually, on the basis of that, I'm just wondering if the same non-readers have checked the historical seismicity records, or just relied on regurgitating someone else's assertion.
From the USGS information page,
So, pretty normal then.
OK, so the "biggest quake" is the USGS's opinion too ; that's good enough for me. The intensifying series of quakes is interesting. (OK, I'm a geologist, but I do get out a lot! It's still interesting.)
Surface rupturing - cracks in the ground that swallow screaming Hollywood starlets - are only common in pretty substantial earthquakes. More substantial than the mid-5s that are being reported for this "strongest quake in historical times." So ... within the last pretty short period, there have been stronger quakes in the region. Quelle surprise! Not.
Queen Anne's dead. Tell us news, not history.
That increasing series of quakes is very interesting. Could we (sorry, "you", to the Americans in the audience) be building up to another New Madrid type earthquake? That would be valuable - there hasn't yet been a major intra-plate earthquake occur in the presence of a good seismological network. Here's hoping!
FTFS, there is no implication in the summary that she was illegally downloading music.
It sounds like we both have a realistic understanding of probability and risk assessment. But you're taking a different line to "Wyatt Earp", to whom I was originally responding. At which point it's getting confusing.
This turkey tastes ... funny. What did you baste it with?