It's right there in the summary, no need to RTFA. MONTHS. Considering the resources that companies like BP have,
So what? SOP is for the Operating Company (BP in this instance) to provide the boats between shorebase and rig, and since they were backloading mud at the time of the blowout coming to surface, clearly they were providing boat space. After all, they bloody well need the boats to get all the rest of the equipment to and from the rig. The summary describes testimony from a TransOcean employee, talking about TransOcean systems on a TransOcean rig. Blaming it on BP is like blaming the passenger in a taxi for the taxi having a bald spare tyre. Oh, sorry, I forgot - you're on Slashdot : writing about something you know nothing about is de rigeur.
Far, far more disturbing is having a cabin pressurisation system on override for months at a time. That's just a stupid thing to do.
(FWIW, I'm on a TransOcean rig at the moment, not that I work for either them or BP. But since TransOcean are one of the biggest companies in the MODU game, that's less than surprising.)
Order placed, shipping will take a few days ; either I'll own something moderately useful, plus have the pleasure of having shat in Steve JobBIE's capPOOccino. Or I'll have something not terribly useful that I can still sell as a collectors item on eBay when JobBIE finally gets flushed.
(For those who live outside the civilised world, "jobbie" is a Scots word for a turd. As in "Piss and Jobbie", Aberdeen's newspaper.
(While ordering, from a UK-based supplier, I saw a very worrying product called a Campinggaz Cat Heater. Why would you want to heat your cat by putting it on a gas burner? Why would you even want to take your cat camping? Bizarre! And iWonder what Apple's lawyers make of the "DryPod"? )
Sounds tempting ! Finds image intensifier. Has second thoughts, borrows mask and apron from welder's workshop. "Brace, brace, brace for impact!" [CLICK] Didn't even make my eyeballs itch. [DISAPPOINTED, returns gear to welder and bridge.]
Apparently the "vibra phone" feature has more uses than one imagines at first.
You mean... this wasn't the first thing that you thought of when you heard about vibrating phones? Man (or "person", "woman", "thing", "legal entity or entities" ; whatever floats your boat)! You are slow. Sloooooooooooooooooooow
(OK, maybe I did have the advantage of being introduced to the idea by Betty Boothroyd moaning about "things which vibrate" in MP's pockets in Parliament. That was... surreal. From a former dancing girl.)
The wife got me a SatNav last year, when we got a car. This wonderful device remains, to this day, utterly convinced that one of the rat-run roads about 25m from my front door can be driven down. To my certain knowledge, this road has been blocked off (to stop rat-running) for at least 17 years (according to my neighbours, more than 20 years). The company who put together this package of technologies were perfectly happy for me to submit a bug report, as long as I'd signed up for their "you can speed here" database for the next year. If I didn't buy access to their "there are no speed cameras here" database, then I wouldn't be able to correct their map. I know where most speed cameras are, and I also actually read the road ahead to work out what is a safe speed to drive at ; I have no need to buy into their corrupt and I'd hope illegal (conspiracy to assist the commission of a crime) database, except to improve the quality of their map database. Or maybe I'd just continue to laugh contemptuously at the in-town instructions of the "crack-deranged fucking useless idiot" in the box. Cynical? Moi? Mais oui! It would be nice if the machine had battery life and base maps sufficient for a decent 8 hour walk out in the country. But it doesn't. Before anyone asks : it's a Road Angel, and I can't even remember who provided the decades out-of-date base maps. It doesn't surprise me that the maps are so poor - Road Angel are based in South East England, and the faults that I care (slightly) about are in Scotland. Typical London-centric twattishness.
So you want people taking out a newspaper-sized map and trying to find where they are while driving?
No, you take the map out and study it before you leave on your trip, including planning your alternative routes. Then you memorise the appropriate data (writing notes with "ink on paper" technology - you may have heard of it) before you get into the car. Didn't they teach you anything in junior school?
Having a GPS tell people where to go is safer than the alternatives.
Err, I think that you mean a SatNav system ; GPS is one of the enabling technologies for SatNav systems, along with high-density memory, voice synthesis, touch screen displays, etc.
Sorry - mis-use of terminology is a pet hate of mine. I regard the particular SatNav which my wife got me for my birthday last year as a "crack-deranged psychopathic idiot", which doesn't in the least alter my regard for the technical achievement of GPS, GLONASS, touch screens, etc.
When I was younger and went hiking quite a lot, I'd save up the extra and buy the cloth maps at inch-to-the-mile scale from Ordinance Survey.
Very good they are too - I know that my father is still using maps that were printed in the 1950s. OK, there have been a few changes since - rarely some idiot has destroyed an important piece of woodland by driving a road through it, or some city has dumped a few tens of thousand citizens into some suburban argument for thermonuclear revocation of planning consent. But nothing significant has changed. BTW, the maps were printed on paper, then glued onto a linen backing. They do slightly discolour after around 20 years, but that's not sufficient to make them need changed. Wouldn't it be terrible if map companies actually needed to make a profit on their sales and so did away with long-lasting durable products in favour of ones that fall apart after a mere couple of decades, forcing people to buy replacement products.
I was going to post something obscene about sea cucumbers, fresh or "soiled"[footnote], then I noticed who you are and decided to make another attempt on the Tionisla Run instead. --
Jamesons of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains. And a Cobra MkIII. A pretty pathetic, front-mounted, jewellery-engraving laser. 3 tonnes of pre-packed, dehydrated slaves, some alien artefacts and a Thargoid Invasion fleet in a pear tree.
[footnote] If you don't get this, go and watch the Blues Brothers again! From the start.
I brought this up once in a class on science fiction, and after some discussion we came to the conclusion that Kim Stanley Robinson thought of *everything* you'd need to think of with interplanetary missions in the Mars trilogy.
Hmmm, smells dangerously like hubris to me ; I'd slip the old copper-plated boots and lightening-conductor hat on now. We know how the Gods react to hubristic humans. The guy who said "expect the unexpected" was making a serious point, not a joke. You and you class mates may not have thought of anything that KSR hadn't already covered, but that probably only reflects that both you and KSR have no practical experience of interplanetary manned colonisation efforts. Nor does anyone else, it's true, but that doesn't do anything to increase your species' store of practical experience. That ruthless neo-Fascist Borg Rumsfeld only sounded stupid and funny in his speech about "known knowns" and "unknown unknowns", but he was actually trying to make a serious point about the nature of knowledge. Epistemology?
That said, I have a guilty confession to make : I've had a 2nd-hand copy of one of the Rainbow Mars (Red Mars perhaps? I'm not even sure of the title!) sitting on my "to read" shelf for at least 2 years now, as my second ever KSR novel, after "Icehenge". I'll have to shift the book to the bedside cabinet and bump it up the list.
For instance, it's the LAW to equip all wells with a remote controllable shutoff valve if you want to drill in the north sea.
Citation please. To the actual legislation, not some random blog, or an article written by a journalist who is underqualified to lick stamps in a Citizens Advice Bureau.
(Bear in mind that I'm writing this on an oil rig in the North Sea, working in a business that I've worked in for over 20 years. So I do know what the laws around here are. Personally, I suspect that you're thinking of SSSVs, which are as closely related to remote operation of BOPs as an Akkadian goatskin raft is to a flight suit with integral life jacket. But you know what you're thinking of better than I do.)
And that's enough dealing with Gulf silliness for today. Thank fuck I don't work for BP and have to put up with this stuff (well-intentioned though much of it is) for a living. Or for Andanarko or whatever the 25% wholly-US-owned partner in the offending well was called.
We just need to tweak the rules of the game a little. A fair price has to be put on this kind of thing, so that oil companies will go broke if they screw up
... at which point, they'll stop being oil companies (by stopping exploration, drilling, production, processing and transportation) and try to recycle themselves into a less hazardous business instead.
And what are you going to run your SUV on after that?
I noticed a decade or so ago that Shell were studiously manoeuvring themselves away from being an "oil company" and into being an "energy comapny". Now, most of that was greenwash I'm sure, but despite working for Shell on many occasions, I've never confused them with being either idiots or cowboys.
Your volumetric estimates are not incorrect, just inappropriate. I read the article and envisaged this sort of machinery as being used to process the mix of oil and seawater collected by the various skimming options, so that the centrifuge discharges wet oily sludge (to be taken to shore for processing/ disposal) and large quantities of seawater which is much less contaminated with oil. Since the oil industry is already full of equipment for taking slightly oily water and cleaning it better (the UK requirement is to less than 50ppm / 0.005% v/v oil in water) prior to discharge over the side, then this is equipment possibly suitable for "front-ending" a spread of off-the-shelf hydrocyclones to process the spill debris.
So...the dispersants have made it impossible to clean up?
No. The use of dispersants has, maybe, made it harder to clean up. It was probably impossible to clean up to a pre-spill state about 3 femtoseconds after the blowout started, but the use of dispersants may have made it harder to approach "pristine".
But could this technology be used on the bloom clouds of oil near the well head that have not coagulated into various forms of sludge?
The same question also occurred to me as I read the article. I also read the article thinking "Yet Another Hydrocyclone!" Which is a very well established technology for cleaning up produced water from an oil well. So, there's kudos to this Costner guy for spotting an alternative use for a well-established technology, and then sustaining investment for an unfashionably long period. He's gone up in my estimate of his IQ from actor-normal (mildly retarded) to quite possibly population-average or above.
Better to spend peanuts now to buy the possibility then spend a fortune later to fight off a competitor you didn't see coming.
If you didn't "see it coming" in five years from now, then you either didn't know of it's existence today, or you made an error of judgment today, or you forgot tomorrow what you knew of today. In which cases you still deserve to die (in a corporate sense) for being incompetent. Sounds like this company/ idea has been around a while and Google have decided that their ideas/ technologies/ implementations are worth a good, close look at. Which, to be fair, is what the Evil Empire of Redmond are good at too. The interesting question really is whether Google will squash them, incorporate them in their behind-the-scenes work, or make their technologies and ideas publicly usable. Time, as they say, will tell.
This (TFA, not your comment) is the dumbest thing I've seen all week.
You've been having a good week.
Chickens and all other birds were evolved from dinasaurs. Dinasaurs laid eggs; dinasaur eggs have been found. The egg came millions of years before chickens evolved.
Eggs predate the dinosaurs ; they also predate the ancestors of the dinosaurs. Chickens (and other birds) are, of course, dinosaurs in any normal sense of the words "birds", "dinosaurs" and "are". The big step (well, that could be debated I suppose) was the development of a water-retaining, gas-permeable outer membrane around the relatively delicate amphibian egg. Whether that egg casing was mineralised (i.e. hard and brittle like most avian eggs) or unmineralised and leathery (like most eggs of non-avian reptiles) is moot. Probably there was a continuum with the degree of mineralisation varying considerably through time and taxons.
I've always said that it depends on whether you place your faith in evolution or creation.
You might say it, but that doesn't make it true. Where you (or me, or anyone else) place your faith doesn't alter one whit what is true. All the faith that you can possibly generate in the existence of a beneficent creator which intercedes in response to prayer isn't going to generate a temporary exemption to the law of gravity (or change any of the other fact), as you could easily demonstrate for yourself by carrying out the obvious experiment (please use a camera to record your experiment and make arrangements for the video to be published before you execute your experiment with yourself in the starring role). No matter where you place your faith, the evolution of the egg (even waterproof, land-laid eggs) long predates the evolution of any chicken or indeed of mineralised hard-shelled eggs in general. The popular conundrum simply isn't a conundrum.
... but Cherenkov radiation. [Checks] Definitely ; Cherenkov radiation is from the interaction of a particle and any medium it passes through ; bremsstrahlung radiation is from the interaction of a charged particle and the electromagnetic fields of other charged particles or an externally imposed field.
They [Anthropogenic Global Warming non-deniers] have graphs to prove these extinctions events didn't happen and they have all come to a consensus on it. What more do you need.
Given your evident attitude to the well-established science about anthropogenic global warming, I'm utterly un-astonished that you don't know (or are trying to conceal) the facts such as
study of events surrounding the Palaeocene-Eocene mass-extinction (discovered in the late 19th century) including
the discovery of the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (around 2000 - I had the ink-on-paper version of the paper land on my previous door mat)
the carbon isotope excursions that indicate the release of large amounts of methane,
the magnetostratigraphy which reveals the Milankovich cyclicities that provide the local relative dating,
the micropalaeontology that provides the absolute dating (and which I use several times each year to ensure that oil wells are efficiently positioned to exploit Palaeocene reservoirs).
But I'm sure that all of those fields of research are overweighed by your fear of facing the consequences of your, my, and our parent's burning of fossil fuels. Does that make you feel better, or do you want to put your head under a security blanket now?
Could it be caused by a solar event? Say, something like a Mini Nova where the sun undergoes a cyclical "hiccup".
I don't know of anything that would make this impossible. Which doesn't mean that it's true. Equally, I don't know of any astronomical evidence for any cyclical events in a (Sol-like) star's life with periods anything like this long. Which also doesn't mean that it's impossible. So, you're certainly in the area between "impossible" and "not impossible". And that is pretty much the best answer that you're going to get. If you do get any better answers, drop me a message with the journal name, volume number, page number and article title (a redundant cross-check datum).
which means it passed at least the smell test of some reviewers.
... whose purpose is to assess the described methodology ("Can I replicate this experiment from this description ; was the equipment used appropriately?"), not to agree with the conclusions presented. Unlike Slashdot, "I disagree" is something that they can put in their comments on the paper they review... and they would still be expected to discount their lack of agreement and answer the questions they've been asked : does the purported statistical "B" follow from the asserted data "A", and was the use of inverse mode on the Flange Sprocket Analyser ("C") valid when the Moon was in the Seventh House?
To sum it up, this article is probably sensationalist psuedoscience and there is nothing to see here.
Melott is a perfectly respectable palaeontologist ; Bambach I've read less of. But having RTFP, I don't find it hugely convincing, nor hugely badly presented. Without spending a few days at least on reading up the background and working the statistics myself, I remain unconvinced in either way. (Which in no way reflects on Melott, Bambach, or Torbjorn Larsson.) Executive summary : different workers can't agree on whether there is any significant periodicity to extinction events (that hasn't changed in the 25 years that I've been listening to this discussion) ; amongst those who think that there is a periodicity, there is only a weak majority putting the period at ~27Ma over those claiming ~11Ma or ~50Ma (another sign that the raw evidence isn't terribly strong).
Without even a good estimate of the periodicity (if there is one), then trying to work out the causative mechanism is resting a hypothesis on a house of cards built on a sand castle in the Bay of Fundy. Which might make an interesting spectator sport, but not a terribly successful career.
Slashdot Mirror
So what? SOP is for the Operating Company (BP in this instance) to provide the boats between shorebase and rig, and since they were backloading mud at the time of the blowout coming to surface, clearly they were providing boat space. After all, they bloody well need the boats to get all the rest of the equipment to and from the rig.
The summary describes testimony from a TransOcean employee, talking about TransOcean systems on a TransOcean rig. Blaming it on BP is like blaming the passenger in a taxi for the taxi having a bald spare tyre.
Oh, sorry, I forgot - you're on Slashdot : writing about something you know nothing about is de rigeur.
Far, far more disturbing is having a cabin pressurisation system on override for months at a time. That's just a stupid thing to do.
(FWIW, I'm on a TransOcean rig at the moment, not that I work for either them or BP. But since TransOcean are one of the biggest companies in the MODU game, that's less than surprising.)
Order placed, shipping will take a few days ; either I'll own something moderately useful, plus have the pleasure of having shat in Steve JobBIE's capPOOccino. Or I'll have something not terribly useful that I can still sell as a collectors item on eBay when JobBIE finally gets flushed.
(For those who live outside the civilised world, "jobbie" is a Scots word for a turd. As in "Piss and Jobbie", Aberdeen's newspaper.
(While ordering, from a UK-based supplier, I saw a very worrying product called a Campinggaz Cat Heater. Why would you want to heat your cat by putting it on a gas burner? Why would you even want to take your cat camping? Bizarre! And iWonder what Apple's lawyers make of the "DryPod"? )
Sounds tempting !
Finds image intensifier.
Has second thoughts, borrows mask and apron from welder's workshop.
"Brace, brace, brace for impact!"
[CLICK]
Didn't even make my eyeballs itch. [DISAPPOINTED, returns gear to welder and bridge.]
In the sense of "breath analyzer", yes ; but it'd have to look for a lot more than just plain old ethanol.
[SIGH] which is exactly what my baggage gets put through whenever I go to work.
You mean ... this wasn't the first thing that you thought of when you heard about vibrating phones?
Man (or "person", "woman", "thing", "legal entity or entities" ; whatever floats your boat)! You are slow. Sloooooooooooooooooooow
(OK, maybe I did have the advantage of being introduced to the idea by Betty Boothroyd moaning about "things which vibrate" in MP's pockets in Parliament. That was ... surreal. From a former dancing girl.)
The wife got me a SatNav last year, when we got a car.
This wonderful device remains, to this day, utterly convinced that one of the rat-run roads about 25m from my front door can be driven down. To my certain knowledge, this road has been blocked off (to stop rat-running) for at least 17 years (according to my neighbours, more than 20 years).
The company who put together this package of technologies were perfectly happy for me to submit a bug report, as long as I'd signed up for their "you can speed here" database for the next year. If I didn't buy access to their "there are no speed cameras here" database, then I wouldn't be able to correct their map.
I know where most speed cameras are, and I also actually read the road ahead to work out what is a safe speed to drive at ; I have no need to buy into their corrupt and I'd hope illegal (conspiracy to assist the commission of a crime) database, except to improve the quality of their map database. Or maybe I'd just continue to laugh contemptuously at the in-town instructions of the "crack-deranged fucking useless idiot" in the box.
Cynical? Moi? Mais oui!
It would be nice if the machine had battery life and base maps sufficient for a decent 8 hour walk out in the country. But it doesn't.
Before anyone asks : it's a Road Angel, and I can't even remember who provided the decades out-of-date base maps. It doesn't surprise me that the maps are so poor - Road Angel are based in South East England, and the faults that I care (slightly) about are in Scotland. Typical London-centric twattishness.
No, you take the map out and study it before you leave on your trip, including planning your alternative routes. Then you memorise the appropriate data (writing notes with "ink on paper" technology - you may have heard of it) before you get into the car. Didn't they teach you anything in junior school?
Err, I think that you mean a SatNav system ; GPS is one of the enabling technologies for SatNav systems, along with high-density memory, voice synthesis, touch screen displays, etc.
Sorry - mis-use of terminology is a pet hate of mine. I regard the particular SatNav which my wife got me for my birthday last year as a "crack-deranged psychopathic idiot", which doesn't in the least alter my regard for the technical achievement of GPS, GLONASS, touch screens, etc.
Very good they are too - I know that my father is still using maps that were printed in the 1950s. OK, there have been a few changes since - rarely some idiot has destroyed an important piece of woodland by driving a road through it, or some city has dumped a few tens of thousand citizens into some suburban argument for thermonuclear revocation of planning consent. But nothing significant has changed.
BTW, the maps were printed on paper, then glued onto a linen backing. They do slightly discolour after around 20 years, but that's not sufficient to make them need changed.
Wouldn't it be terrible if map companies actually needed to make a profit on their sales and so did away with long-lasting durable products in favour of ones that fall apart after a mere couple of decades, forcing people to buy replacement products.
An Optimus prime is a hand-pressurised paraffin cooking stove.
Kids today - get off my lawn!
I was going to post something obscene about sea cucumbers, fresh or "soiled"[footnote], then I noticed who you are and decided to make another attempt on the Tionisla Run instead.
--
Jamesons of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.
And a Cobra MkIII.
A pretty pathetic, front-mounted, jewellery-engraving laser.
3 tonnes of pre-packed, dehydrated slaves, some alien artefacts and a Thargoid Invasion fleet in a pear tree.
[footnote] If you don't get this, go and watch the Blues Brothers again! From the start.
Hmmm, smells dangerously like hubris to me ; I'd slip the old copper-plated boots and lightening-conductor hat on now. We know how the Gods react to hubristic humans.
The guy who said "expect the unexpected" was making a serious point, not a joke. You and you class mates may not have thought of anything that KSR hadn't already covered, but that probably only reflects that both you and KSR have no practical experience of interplanetary manned colonisation efforts. Nor does anyone else, it's true, but that doesn't do anything to increase your species' store of practical experience. That ruthless neo-Fascist Borg Rumsfeld only sounded stupid and funny in his speech about "known knowns" and "unknown unknowns", but he was actually trying to make a serious point about the nature of knowledge. Epistemology?
That said, I have a guilty confession to make : I've had a 2nd-hand copy of one of the Rainbow Mars (Red Mars perhaps? I'm not even sure of the title!) sitting on my "to read" shelf for at least 2 years now, as my second ever KSR novel, after "Icehenge". I'll have to shift the book to the bedside cabinet and bump it up the list.
Citation please. To the actual legislation, not some random blog, or an article written by a journalist who is underqualified to lick stamps in a Citizens Advice Bureau.
(Bear in mind that I'm writing this on an oil rig in the North Sea, working in a business that I've worked in for over 20 years. So I do know what the laws around here are. Personally, I suspect that you're thinking of SSSVs, which are as closely related to remote operation of BOPs as an Akkadian goatskin raft is to a flight suit with integral life jacket. But you know what you're thinking of better than I do.)
And that's enough dealing with Gulf silliness for today. Thank fuck I don't work for BP and have to put up with this stuff (well-intentioned though much of it is) for a living. Or for Andanarko or whatever the 25% wholly-US-owned partner in the offending well was called.
... at which point, they'll stop being oil companies (by stopping exploration, drilling, production, processing and transportation) and try to recycle themselves into a less hazardous business instead.
And what are you going to run your SUV on after that?
I noticed a decade or so ago that Shell were studiously manoeuvring themselves away from being an "oil company" and into being an "energy comapny". Now, most of that was greenwash I'm sure, but despite working for Shell on many occasions, I've never confused them with being either idiots or cowboys.
Your volumetric estimates are not incorrect, just inappropriate.
I read the article and envisaged this sort of machinery as being used to process the mix of oil and seawater collected by the various skimming options, so that the centrifuge discharges wet oily sludge (to be taken to shore for processing/ disposal) and large quantities of seawater which is much less contaminated with oil. Since the oil industry is already full of equipment for taking slightly oily water and cleaning it better (the UK requirement is to less than 50ppm / 0.005% v/v oil in water) prior to discharge over the side, then this is equipment possibly suitable for "front-ending" a spread of off-the-shelf hydrocyclones to process the spill debris.
No. The use of dispersants has, maybe, made it harder to clean up.
It was probably impossible to clean up to a pre-spill state about 3 femtoseconds after the blowout started, but the use of dispersants may have made it harder to approach "pristine".
The same question also occurred to me as I read the article.
I also read the article thinking "Yet Another Hydrocyclone!" Which is a very well established technology for cleaning up produced water from an oil well. So, there's kudos to this Costner guy for spotting an alternative use for a well-established technology, and then sustaining investment for an unfashionably long period. He's gone up in my estimate of his IQ from actor-normal (mildly retarded) to quite possibly population-average or above.
If you didn't "see it coming" in five years from now, then you either didn't know of it's existence today, or you made an error of judgment today, or you forgot tomorrow what you knew of today. In which cases you still deserve to die (in a corporate sense) for being incompetent.
Sounds like this company/ idea has been around a while and Google have decided that their ideas/ technologies/ implementations are worth a good, close look at. Which, to be fair, is what the Evil Empire of Redmond are good at too.
The interesting question really is whether Google will squash them, incorporate them in their behind-the-scenes work, or make their technologies and ideas publicly usable. Time, as they say, will tell.
You've been having a good week.
Eggs predate the dinosaurs ; they also predate the ancestors of the dinosaurs. Chickens (and other birds) are, of course, dinosaurs in any normal sense of the words "birds", "dinosaurs" and "are".
The big step (well, that could be debated I suppose) was the development of a water-retaining, gas-permeable outer membrane around the relatively delicate amphibian egg. Whether that egg casing was mineralised (i.e. hard and brittle like most avian eggs) or unmineralised and leathery (like most eggs of non-avian reptiles) is moot. Probably there was a continuum with the degree of mineralisation varying considerably through time and taxons.
You might say it, but that doesn't make it true.
Where you (or me, or anyone else) place your faith doesn't alter one whit what is true. All the faith that you can possibly generate in the existence of a beneficent creator which intercedes in response to prayer isn't going to generate a temporary exemption to the law of gravity (or change any of the other fact), as you could easily demonstrate for yourself by carrying out the obvious experiment (please use a camera to record your experiment and make arrangements for the video to be published before you execute your experiment with yourself in the starring role).
No matter where you place your faith, the evolution of the egg (even waterproof, land-laid eggs) long predates the evolution of any chicken or indeed of mineralised hard-shelled eggs in general. The popular conundrum simply isn't a conundrum.
... but Cherenkov radiation. [Checks] Definitely ; Cherenkov radiation is from the interaction of a particle and any medium it passes through ; bremsstrahlung radiation is from the interaction of a charged particle and the electromagnetic fields of other charged particles or an externally imposed field.
... Kiss of death. Now no-one will touch the machines.
Given your evident attitude to the well-established science about anthropogenic global warming, I'm utterly un-astonished that you don't know (or are trying to conceal) the facts such as
But I'm sure that all of those fields of research are overweighed by your fear of facing the consequences of your, my, and our parent's burning of fossil fuels. Does that make you feel better, or do you want to put your head under a security blanket now?
I don't know of anything that would make this impossible. Which doesn't mean that it's true.
Equally, I don't know of any astronomical evidence for any cyclical events in a (Sol-like) star's life with periods anything like this long. Which also doesn't mean that it's impossible.
So, you're certainly in the area between "impossible" and "not impossible". And that is pretty much the best answer that you're going to get. If you do get any better answers, drop me a message with the journal name, volume number, page number and article title (a redundant cross-check datum).
... whose purpose is to assess the described methodology ("Can I replicate this experiment from this description ; was the equipment used appropriately?"), not to agree with the conclusions presented. ... and they would still be expected to discount their lack of agreement and answer the questions they've been asked : does the purported statistical "B" follow from the asserted data "A", and was the use of inverse mode on the Flange Sprocket Analyser ("C") valid when the Moon was in the Seventh House?
Unlike Slashdot, "I disagree" is something that they can put in their comments on the paper they review
Melott is a perfectly respectable palaeontologist ; Bambach I've read less of. But having RTFP, I don't find it hugely convincing, nor hugely badly presented. Without spending a few days at least on reading up the background and working the statistics myself, I remain unconvinced in either way. (Which in no way reflects on Melott, Bambach, or Torbjorn Larsson.)
Executive summary : different workers can't agree on whether there is any significant periodicity to extinction events (that hasn't changed in the 25 years that I've been listening to this discussion) ; amongst those who think that there is a periodicity, there is only a weak majority putting the period at ~27Ma over those claiming ~11Ma or ~50Ma (another sign that the raw evidence isn't terribly strong).
Without even a good estimate of the periodicity (if there is one), then trying to work out the causative mechanism is resting a hypothesis on a house of cards built on a sand castle in the Bay of Fundy. Which might make an interesting spectator sport, but not a terribly successful career.