Yes, there was Roman Empire, but there was Mongol Empire too, remember? Wandals in Rome, were they more intelligent than romans? Give me a break...
Were the Vandals ("Wandals") more intelligent, on average, than the Romans? Almost certainly not. Maybe not as well educated, but that is a very different question.
However, it is well known (and well documented) that Darwin was a racist who believed that these were lower species of humans that must be exterminated! Today's spin doctors, however, want this issue of Darwin's racism to go away.
Darwin was very much a man of his time ; in that time there was a very clear hierarchical conception of differing classes of animal life, and different "races" within humankind.
How many know today that Darwin's original title to Origin of the Species was On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life? You can read it, here. [gutenberg.org]
"Race" is used here in the technical sense ; more recent terminology would be more like "Variety", or "Sub-Species". And no doubt you'll interpret "sub-species" as meaning "lower importance species" rather than what it actually means as "a group of interbreeding organisms with distinct physical differences between this group and other groups with whom they can breed as well". You are reading deliberate racism into that title which is not there.
Note that OTOoS deals very little with humans - at the time it would have been too politically explosive. In the context of discussing the breeding of different varieties of domestic animals and plants, "race" was a perfectly appropriate term to use in the 1850s. Darwin didn't publish the extension of his ideas to cover humans until the late 1860s and 1870s.
On the other hand, he didn't believe in slavery, which is good.
That's understating his personal opposition considerably. "Revulsion" would be an appropriate term to describe some of the reactions he describes in his journals (read "Voyage of The Beagle", also at Gutenberg). He came from a family with a multi-generation history of fighting against the mistreatment of man by man, and in this respect he fits better with his family's behaviours than the attitudes prevalent in most of his society.
Neanderthals were encountered by modern humans in Europe, and so Europeans should have more genetic distance from other peoples if we had bred with them.
Problem with this first-level argument : a very large part of the indigenous population(s) of Europe were replaced by migration from the East in the centuries Before Common Era (or whatever other euphemism for "BC" you want). The latter parts of this population movement were recorded by the Romans ; the earlier parts were seemingly the origins of the Hellenes (the "Sea Peoples" etc) and possibly the Etruscans, Latins and aroundabouts. An earlier part of the same migration, or an earlier E-to-W migration may have been the spread of the "Beaker" Culture, which was probably repated to the spread of copper or bronze metallurgy. Probably preceding that was an E-to-W migration across Europe replacing the previous cultures and language groups with the Indo-european blandness that makes up the whole continent since.
Those were events in less than 10,000 years ; the 15,000 years between the Indo-European migration and the extinction of the Neanderthals probably had other events. Getting a clear genetic signal through such layers of migration is likely to be a struggle. (I'm not saying it is impossible - but these issues have got to be addressed in any serious consideration of your idea.)
Finding cut marks on a human bone does not automatically lead to the conclusion that cannibalism had taken place. Many cultures (both relatively recent and old) engaged in a form of ancester worship that involved stripping the flesh off of the remains of the deceased and the displaying of the bones.
Correct (with minor linguistic caveats - the precise names used vary from language to language, but the translation in to English is generally recognisably similar to "bushmeat").
African tribes are often driven to hunt it, due to famine.
It's just a simple business in some number of partly-urbanised areas, being cheaper to go hunting in the forests than to go and grow a cow ; in the forests it has always been a part of the diet ; work-gangs doing, for example, road maintenance or felling work frequently use "bushmeat" to supplement what supplies they get from their bosses, if anything. Famine is not, by any means, the only reason for eating it.
Having said that, I've tucked into more than a few bowls of rabbit stew, snared or shot within a couple of miles of the international airport here in the UK. Which is logically indistinguishable from "bushmeat". I was a veggie when we hit the deer and I had to put it down and butcher it, so I've not eaten that particular variety of British "bushmeat" myself. But I have eaten the same meat brought in the supermarket.
It's though that HIV may have transferred to humans via undercooked chimpanzee.
Not really : the HIV (or SIV) viri are generally too delicate to survive long outside the body, so by the time that the meat is cool (dpending on butchery techniques, an hour or less), the virus is dead anyway. (Caveats on what "dead" means in an organism without an active metabolism ; incapable of continuing it's life cycle.) The main purported route of transmission from "bushmeat" into humans is through getting blood from an SIV-infected monkey into open cuts on the hunter as part of the catch-kill-butcher process. Since, in many parts of Africa, the "bushmeat" trade is of, at best, dubious legality, getting detailed evidence on this point is hard.
Note that the more recent work on the genetics of HIV suggests that it has been circulating and differentiating in the human species for between 50 and 100 years, which implies an original zoonotic jump (I've forgotten the proper term - "zoonosis" is a disease that has entered and spreads in humans from an original life in another species) between the World Wars, or plausibly during WW2. It's not a terribly new disease. Ebola appears to be newer.
The only 1 million years plus dna that anyone has been able to extract came from some amber. And even in this case, it is still strongly debated as to whether the DNA was simply contamination.
I've not wasted much attention on the futile discussion between people and American (closet) creationists on this page. That's a WOMBAT. But I did notice this claim of yours.
At least one worker claims to have extracted intact genomes from rock samples of circa 254 million years old. More specifically, but cleaving intact crystals of salt from (IIRC) a Texas underground salt mine he has been able to obtain cultures of viable bacteria which he couldn't obtain by washing the surfaces of the same crystals, collecting tools, processing chemicals etc.
I haven't seen much follow up on the work - haven't particularly cared to follow up on it - which suggests that the bacteriology community weren't convinced by his claims. As a rock-sniffer rather than a bacteriologist, I couldn't see any obvious holes in his procedures, but that's why I'm not a bacteriologist.
Well, if it's confirmed, that would be a full bacterial genome (allegedly) surviving for a bloody long time. But it also seems like an outlier to the rest of the work in the field, which makes it... well... as Sagan says - 2extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
It has often been said that change is the only constant in the 21st Century.
I've never heard that applied specifically to the 21st century.
There are probably a million and one ways that this has been expressed. The way that sticks in my mind puts the blame on Solomon : he's bored being the brainy guy in the throne room, so decides to give some of the Grand Vizers, Lord High Muckamucks and High Heidjuns some brain exercise. He asks them to go away and come up with a factual statement which will always be true. Snipping various wrong answers put in to increase the story's tension, they eventually cook up "this too shall pass".
I've no idea how old the story is, but the style makes me think this one goes back to Victorian times at least. Literature buffs can probably put another century on it.
I just want my wife's breast cancer _gone_... it's been 3 years now, post diagnosis.
Assuming that your wife's breast cancer is the consequence of one of these patented genes... then surely you should be able to sue the owner of those genes for the harm that they've caused to your wife (and incidentally, your own mental anguish etc).
Get a million people to sign up for the consequent mass case ("class action" in some countries - depends where you are if you can do this)... and watch the patents being dropped faster than something being dropped very, very fast.
OK, it's a "ha ha" response - but it's "ha ha, serious". If these companies are asserting ownership of these genes, then surely they are simultaneously asserting their ownership of the consequences of "their" genes. viz: your wife's cancer.
About 15 years ago, when England's piped water services were being sold off, the new water companies started to sue people who put the rain water from their roofs into barrels and then used it to water their gardens. Their assertion was that it was "their" water from the moment that it ceased to be in the sky. Which got quite a long way in court, until the judge in his summing up of the case questioned the company's barrister carefully on this point of the consequences of that ownership when, for example, the water owned by the water company flooded someone's house, or drowned someone's child. The barrister caught onto the direction that the "clarification" was going, hastily had a conference with his water company clients, and they dropped the case. OK - it's a recollection of a case in a neighbouring country so I only got the reports second-hand months later and never cared too deeply (why should I care about decisions in a country I don't live in and don't intend to return to?). But it would be an interesting line for someone to take.
Usual caveats : IANAL ; YMMV ; Cheques not valid without a cheque card ; E&OE ; Henry VI (Part 2) Act IV, Scene II
It is also the opinion of every whisky connoisseur (other than you)
I've never claimed to be a connoisseur. I do appreciate a whisky and I do know which ones I'd cross the road for and which I wouldn't. But I've never claimed to have more than a slight knowledge of the subject.
The aging process requires the migration of the alcohol thru the pores of the wooden cask so that it will dissolve flavor compounds from the charred interior of the cask.
The distillers may indeed have a specific usage of the word "age" ; I'm using it in it's normal meaning of "get older", or even "progress through time in a forwards direction". And of course whisky both changes it's age (chronological) and flavour and composition if stored in inert vessels. The aldehydes oxidise, higher alcohols esterify with any carboxylic acids that are around and all sorts of other reactions are going on. Most of them are slow reactions. Putting the raw spirit in wooden casks flavoured with other wines or distillates just puts more, different chemicals into the mix. I approached running a still from the perspective of being a young chemist with a brother-in-law who made lots of different fruit wines - when a batch turned out bad, it would go into the still, and from there straight into 2-litre polyethelyene terephthalate bottles (coke or other generic plastic drinks bottles) or occasionally I'd use a couple of PTFE-lined bottles I'd got which originally contained hydrofluoric acid. A couple of months in the cellar (or if that was full, in the darkroom) et voilá, something for mixing back with the better wines to make fortified wines. And very nice they were, too. Without those couple of months and you still have noticeable conjoiners, which are why even hardened piss-heads generally don't touch the "white whisky" that comes warm from the still. It tastes quite disgusting. When I moved away from home for university, I forgot about 4 bottles of the "mountain dew" down in the cellar and they rested there for over 2 years. I took three of them back up to University for the delectation of the Gaelic Society (Drinking Sub-Section I.E. The Whole Lot) party, which resulted me being elected by universal acclaim to the Society's post of "Science Officer". Which was quite an achievement for a sassenach without a word of the Gaelic and not even being a member of the Society.
Another year later the last bottle was broached, and was still improving. The position of "Science Officer" remains mine, unchallenged.
(By the way, I don't recall any of the Gaelic Society considering themselves as "whisky connoisseurs" either - despite most of them having a quite considerable breadth and depth of experience of the amber nectar. Which reminds me to dig out Fionnlaigh's phone number, 'cos I know that he's still in town.)
Incidentally, not all distilleries use "flamed" casks as you describe. A fair number do, but it's by no means universal.
Macallan - popular enough it's true, but to be honest I'd generally take one of the "Glens" if I were given a choice. A -Morangie, a -Fiddich, or a -Farclas in approximate increasing order of preference. But still top of the list, for me, is Talisker. 100-proof, 12 or 15 year. Hard to find, so to be grabbed when it appears. Islay malts - you take them, I'll leave them. I'd rather have another pint. Or if you insist on a spirit, a double voddy an' coke.
... I'd keep the Talisker 12yo for another 3 or 4 years because it improves quite noticeably in those last couple of years.
Unless you have the whisky stored in its cask, it will taste exactly the same as the day it left the distillery. Whisky doesn't age in glass.
How many years did you run your still for? and how many litres of the dew of the mountainside did you collect? Answers on websites need to be calibrated against reality.
Their doctors all traced it back to drug interactions between antibiotics in the -cycline family (minocycline, tetracycline, etc.) and their low-dose oral contraceptive pills.
That is a much more constrained statement than was made previously. It's also much more credible, since it has less room to be wrong. I couldn't be bothered with Googling it myself, since it's not a topic of interest to me. I was sterilised, without issue, over 15 years ago. My wife doesn't take the pill because she doesn't need to.
I hope sexually active readers hear this and protect themselves.
"Hope", yes you can feel free to "hope" that. But I wouldn't expect that, and expectations are what you have to decide policy on ("expectation" in the statistical sense).
Most won't pay attention, or remember your "hope" it at the appropriate moment. People are like that. Gigadeaths are going to be the consequence (World War II managed around 0.05 Gdeath).
(I use "gigadeath" with the "giga-" being conventional, and the "-death" being an excess of human deaths over births during a time interval ; the time interval I consider is between now and when the Earth has a human population that is sustainable on a hundred-generation timescale.)
Also, be aware that female birth control pills fail for the entire month if the woman takes any kind of antibiotic that month.
FEMALE BIRTH CONTROL PILLS FAIL FOR THE ENTIRE MONTH IF THE WOMAN TAKES ANY KIND OF ANTIBIOTIC THAT MONTH.
(Original poster's emphasis) Interesting rumour. I'm slightly interested to know what your basis for this assertion is (but not interested enough to bother to follow it up myself). References please - to the formal journal articles of preference, but I'd doubt you've got anything better than website blurb or popular press.
The reason that I doubt that you've got formal references is the imprecision of your language.
"MONTH" - meaning calendar month, or financial month, or the 4-week period you pay your rent in. Or, just possibly you mean "menstrual cycle"? If that's what you mean, why don't you say so?
"FAIL FOR THE ENTIRE MONTH"... this implies time travel. you seem to say that taking an antibiotic on the 31st of the month would render the woman fertile 30 days beforehand. Ah - you're looking at contraceptive pills based on the endochronic properties of triply-re-sublimated thiotimolene? Oh, I understand. Dr. Asimov was a helluva biochemist (Asimov, I. 1974, 'The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimolene', The Early Asimov 3, Astounding Science Fiction, March, 1948.)!
"ANY KIND OF ANTIBIOTIC" - well, know enough to know that there are numerous significantly different mechanisms of action of different antibiotics, and many different details. So that's a pretty wide claim for action on a relatively small number of molecules. Which leads me to suspect that you're being a bit loose in your use of the term "ANTIBIOTIC". I'll take it at face value - an anti-biotic (loose meaning, hyphenated to clarify the etymology) is a substance that is against ("anti-") life ("-biotic"). So, by "ANY KIND OF ANTIBIOTIC", you must mean "any substance which is capable of acting against living things". Paracelsius pointed out that "All things are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dose permits something not to be poisonous.", and this has largely been substantiated. Look, for example, at that notorious industrial chemical DHMO : well known as a poison (it has been used at some point by all victims of asbestosis, high-velocity lead poisoning, and cancer), in low doses it appears to be an effective agent for killing swine flu virus (I got a leaflet from the government through the door today telling me this) therefore it is an "anti-biotic" twice over !
Therefore, following the logical outcomes of your claim, all women who use DHMO at least once, at any point in a month, will have their "BIRTH CONTROL PILL" fail.
Do you include the birth control pills that are not taken orally, or as suppositories, or as pessiaries, but are effective when applied intra-genually ("between the knees" roughly ; IANA Latin Scholar). That's another big claim - I was not aware that intra-genual contraceptive pills were susceptible to any chemical influence other than moderate doses of oral ethanol.
Even if it has no side effects and if men are able to accept the stigma of being temporarily infertile, I expect that women won't trust this treatment.
That's been my number-one suspicion about all forms of male contraception ever since I started to hear about them in the early 1980s. And, to be fair, it has always been a component of reportage of such attempts.
This is why I would carry a copy of my "your vasectomy has been successful" letter from the birth control company alongside my then-current AIDS (-absence-of) certificate when I was going on the trap. I hate fucking rubbers, and those two items of reassurance seemed necessary to get some hole. (Past tense - refers to before I got married ; the AIDS certificate is a necessity for entry by un-married men to some of the countries I work in ; you don't need an argument with the border police at 03:00, and you really don't want to have to re-take the test in-country. So you keep it up-to-date! Or you stay in your home countries.)
With the pill or condoms, women are either controlling the birth control themselves, or can verify its use on-the-spot.
Assuming that there is a sufficiently-even distribution of power within the relationship... yes. Without that... well that's one of the large reasons that certain African societies are showing as high as 30% infection rates with HIV. An interesting, if inadvertent, experiment on the influence of social mores on survival.
Anyway, I agree that many women wouldn't trust men to take their shots sufficiently regularly without considerable coercion. I'm sure that you could do it in several ways :
(a skin-living bacterium which turns brilliant blue in the presence of an inappropriate ("I'm fertile") ratio of various fertility-related male chemicals, for example?
Or would it be conceptually simpler to do it as a microscopic (well, RFID-tag size ; a couple of cubic mm or a "rice grain") machine which is implanted at [age, discussed below] and which marks the bearer as "fertile" very visibly, so that the police can easily pick them up when they do an unlicensed-mother hunt.
[age of treatment] : always going to be controversial, with the "my daughter doesn't even think about sex" group in one corner and the under-age pregnancy rates standing as mute facts in the other corner. We've got such a debate simmering in my country at the moment over immunisation against HPV, which medical procedure needs to be done on a population-wide basis and to be complete across a cohort before any significant number start having sex. Which reminds me to check if the daughter got her shots in the voluntary "catch-up" programme.
and if men are able to accept the stigma of being temporarily infertile,
There is a stigma in being infertile (temporarily or permanently)?
I must have not been in school on the day that we got taught that one. I always thought that there was a stigma attached to inflicting death thoughtlessly on people who you don't know and who haven't done you any harm.
There are stupid people in my country who think it's too much work to switch to metric.
This...... ^^^^^^ should provide you adequate reason for eliminating these people (or rendering them economically unviable, which amounts to the same thing). If you don't destroy the stupid (or enable them to destroy themselves), then all the efforts that you put into encouraging gay marriage and restricting civil liberties, or whatever else it is that you want to do, will be washed away in a sea of dribbling idiocy. Haven't you read "The Handmaid's Tale" and seen the future that awaits you when the morons leave their church-managed shelters and are allowed to take control?
The first computer I ever saw in person and worked on was a TRS-80 model III. I was in the 7th grade and my junior high school had a lab with a bunch of them. I can remember playing games that looked very similar to the video. This was 1982,
I remember my first computing class, in 1979, at secondary school when I was 14.
To start with, the class was after-hours. This was because we were "overspill" from the main class. The "proper" class had been severely oversubscribed, being the first time in the country that a state comprehensive school had run such a course for the 15+ exams. It was so oversubscribed that the headmaster (~= "principal" Am.Eng.) took about a dozen of us off the class saying "you're the first people we expect to send to university, in 4 years, and you'll be able to do this when you get to university. Nothing much could change in 4 years."
The teacher (recently retired from industry to become a teacher) didn't believe this, which is why he ran the after-school classes.
You saw a computer? Wow! I didn't see one until my first winter vacation from university, when I discovered that my dad had got one (a "BBC", driving the TV). At school, we submitted our BASIC code on pre-printed forms and would get the results of the run, on paper tape, back from the college the next week. At university, we used 300baud ink-on-paper teletype terminals to communicate with the Honeywell 66/80 "mainframe". Which made mapping the Collossal Cave relatively easy. Second year was harder, as the university had upgraded to "glass teletypes" of some sort in the second-year labs. The third-year labs had a computer of their own - IIRC a PDP - but I left computing at the end of second year to continue my studies elsewhere for the final 2 years.
By the time that I was graduating, the university had moved on to using the same sort of BBC, with a monitor, as the terminal-of-choice into the network. But since I didn't have an account in my third year, I had no idea how to use it and could only FTFM then RTFM. It had a text-mode word processor, and I eventually booked an hour on the daisy-wheel printer on the other campus to print my thesis on. Noisy bloody beast!
Where's that script for "the four Yorkshireman"? Ah, here, approximately. "and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah."
I'm not an osteologist, but with even a very small amount of research I'd not have problems in identifying a poor fake of a tiger bone. Either the external shape would be wrong, or the internal structure would be wrong. (I'm not bull-shitting about this - exercises in this "identification of parts" are a routine and necessary part of palaeontology courses, and I still have to practice it often enough to know that I can push up my competence in a matter of days.)
Powdered bone, horn, etc... different matter. Which I suspect is why the price of intact bones is considerably higher than the powered material, it being easier to prove what they are...
oops, "prove". I forgot the bread proving in the oven... "proven beyond all reasonable doubt" now, but it looks likely to bake off nicely. I'll find out in about 40 minutes.
Where were we? I think that the market is probably already adapted to the presence of large amounts of fake material. Now, producing fake tiger DNA to muddy the trail further... there may be some (new) mileage in that. But you'd skate close to the edge of legitimising the trail in tiger bollocks etc. If you've developed bacteria strain to produce DNA that passes as tiger DNA, then you're not far from persuading the bacteria to produce, for example, tiger testosterone. There are linguistically-challenged doubly-incontinent autistic orangutans who could successfully run the advertising campaign for that.
Equally, if someone were to take current trends in theraputic skin cloning (for burns victims, etc) a bit further, being able to run a vat of culture medium to produce 3m-wide rolls of genuine tiger skin, as long as you want... well I could see myself buying a roll of that to wallpaper the bedroom ceiling.
I see your straw men got you modded insightful. I'm afraid mine will just get me set on fire.
Yep, it sure will. Be a good little martyr-to-be and climb up on top of the pile of faggots. I'll just pass the starting torch to this convenient agglomeration of Aboriginal animists, Bhuddists and FreeThinkers.
Oh dear. Settle down and make yourself comfortable ; we have a problem with your torture and agonising death. You see, unlike Christians (mono-theists more generally), this bunch of other religions don't have a strong tradition of burning heretics. I'm sorry, but your martyrdom has been unavoidably delayed by other people refusing to descend to your level.
Please accept our apologies and I'll try to whip up a slavering crowd as soon as possible. Could you recommend some good churches to get them from?
The movie is a second or third-level derivative. Look at the original short story by IIRC Harry Harrison (entitled "Roommates" according to Wikipedia, though I'm quite sure that I read it under the next title) ; some years later Harrison expanded the short story into a novel and called it "Make Room!, Make Room!" ; I'm not clear on whether the novel formed the basis for the screenplay, or whether both were developed in parallel (this is about the time that "2001" underwent a similar trajectory from short story to novel and film). The themes of overpopulation and mass starvation are much clearer in the printed versions, either of them (I don't recommend one over the other ; their relationship is obvious, but they are different ; either is good and you don't lose anything by reading both).
If the only food supply is people, how long can a society last?
It is very clear in the print versions that "SoyLent Green" is a relative luxury, compared to the more common (but lower nutritional value) "SoyLent Yellow". I always took the impression that the "SoyLent" part was a "hard tack"-like base, to which various flavourings, texture modifiers and/or nutritional supplements were added to make the various different colour varieties. The nutritional paucity of the average dole diet, un-supplemented by begged/stolen/brought supplements is attested throughout the written versions, such as a sideline on Kwashiorkor (a protein deficiency disease) which the film cuts to little more than a brief comment on peanut butter.
The story also has explicit, though minor, plot elements of "meat-leggers" (illegal traders in real meat); I don't recall them getting an airing at all in the film. Again, there are evidently other sources of nutrition than people ; they're just a protein supplement.
A human body would feed you for maybe one week. Then what do you use to survive?
Eat enough people and you'll have enough room (the novel is "Make Room!, Make Room!" ; that's in the closest that English has to the Imperative case!) to plant crops. Remember to dig your shit into the soil for fertiliser. Also, remember to plant the rest of the corpses somewhere that the worms can "etten you up" (to misquote the traditional song of "Ilkley Moor"). That's another way of recycling proteins and minerals. It puts an entirely different light on "Duck Soup".
Part of Harrison's theme is that even without overt external war and patent disease, society has broken down purely because of it's refusal to face important facts. Which is as important a point today as it was when I was only a glint in my un-sterilised father's eye.
That's all right - I'm not in the military, and the only person who I know who is stupid enough to have signed away his morality that way I never had much respect for beforehand. Beat away. (I do have a tiny amount of sympathy for the several people who got fucked in various ways by the military, but they were "told so" while they still had the chance to back out. "I told you so!" has to be said.)
I can do country posturing too!
Yeah, I've seen that picture too. Dubya is pretty limber to bend his spine like that. Amazing that there's no shit in his hair afterwards.
(Honestly, I prefer metric, but there are way to many people in this country proud of being dumb to ever hope to switch)
That's a self-fulfilling prophecy. I recall the same self-fulfilling prophecy as a child. These days, we're making progress ; metric is common for most purposes (litres having replaced gallons at the petrol pump around a decade ago, for example ; in my current car-free period, so I didn't notice exactly when). The biggest hold-out is that road signs are still done in statute miles, and that's something that we're (we = metric enthusiasts) are working on. Once we've got the last few of the "metric martyrs" strung up on the gibbet at Tyburn, we'll have dragged the country kicking and screaming into the 18th century. They already go into the pillory on those increasingly rare occasions that they raise their heads into public sight, so we're making progress.
Stupidity carries the punishment it always has : Death. Preferably before reproduction.
On a more mature topic, do you know the flight distance where unit of mortality per unit of distance is the same for both driving and flying?
No. And I'm not enough of a statistician to attempt to work it out. It's one of those awkward questions where you could spend a month on just defining the question. For example - driving is (allegedly) a door-to-door type of journey, while no-one seriously considers making flying a "door-to-door" experience [footnote]. So, most air journeys involve a non-trivial amount of car transport too. How do you account for that? A second complication - people have a risk of death at any time, and air journeys are typically of shorter duration than road journeys ; so one's mortality rates should be adjusted to reflect this. Quite how is not plain.
There is an old lie that "you can prove anything with statistics" ; it's not true. However, with a statistically naive audience it is easy to confuse them enough to think that you've proved something. You can even confuse yourself about having proven something.
[Note : the people designing flying cars, for example, seem to assume that you can put take-off and landing strips on every tower-block accommodation, sufficient for all inhabitants, plus the parking, and not have to train all the drivers to a high standard in air-traffic control procedures ; this is not being serious. Perhaps we could encourage the metric martyrs (above) to act as test drivers to establish exactly what the mortality rate is amongst under-trained drivers of flying cars. Can I watch, from the ground, using a telescope pointing near the horizon?]
a fleck of cork could probably be tested to see how old it is. While the age of the cork doesn't guarantee the age of the whiskey, it might be an indication. Hard to say though.
The age of the cork would put a lower bound on the age of the bottling process. The most-recent bottling couldn't have taken place before the cork was formed. However the original bottling could have taken place earlier, and then the cork repaired later, following damage of some sort.
But a 1950 cork in an 1850 bottle would raise almost as many questions as a 30A.D. image on a 1460±20A.D. piece of linen.
A friend from the States put that drink's name to me a couple of years ago, so the next time I was in one of the minor whisky bars in town (only about 350 different whiskys, compared to the 400+ of the serious players and the 20~30 of a normal run-of-the-mill bar) I asked if they'd got it. After all, it's from the other side of the ocean, trying to get into the country where the type of drink was invented.
Tried it ; perfectly respectable taste and nose but nothing spectacular. Not particularly to my taste, but I can see people taking a liking to it. I wouldn't swap a quarter-gill of Glen Farclas, Morangie, or many other for a quarter-gill of Woodford ; I would swap a quarter bottle of Bells or Teachers for a quarter-gill of Woodford ; I'll keep the Talisker, and I'd keep the Talisker 12yo for another 3 or 4 years because it improves quite noticeably in those last couple of years.
Most people who taste some of these super-old bottles, and who know their whiskies, reckon that after the first 25 to 30 years, they all start going downhill. At which point they're fit for selling to idiots with more money than sense, and no idea what to do with their taste buds.
I can't remember the name of it, but I read about an island somewhere off the coast of Africa.
I was reading my copy of "The Geology of Spain" (ISBN:1-86239-110-6) a couple of weeks ago in preparation for a holiday to Mallorca and I got distracted by the section on the "Islas Canarias" (Spain's island province off the NW coast of Africa). As of 1998 (Geological Magazine, v135, p591) there are some 15 slide deposits identified around the islands of the group, and at least 3 slides from La Palma itself. Of course, not all of these were oriented to propagate well across the Atlantic - some would have "merely" obliterated anyone on the adjacent coasts of Iberia and Africa. (It is taken as a given that the extermination of people in New York and the American Georgia is less important than the extermination of other people.
It's a giant chunk of rock that's split in such a way that its eventual collapse into the ocean is near certain.
See above data - if it's happened in excess of a dozen times in the past, it's pretty likely to happen again in the future. On the other hand, it probably only happens every one or two million years, and maybe every 4 million years pointed at [Africa]|[America] (delete as appropriate). So, it's not that much different a threat level than, for example, a bolide-induced tsunami on the same coasts.
Film at eleven. If you took due diligence about living more than a few metres above sea level and a few kilometers inland.
I wonder - how to "ball-park" a run-up estimate? Assume an impacting wave of 1km high by 1km trough-to-trough. That's going to give you a cross-section of approximately a square kilometer of water to dispose of on your coast. I'm at an elevation of 80m (=0.08km), and I'm approximately 5km from the coast. So, that accounts for 5*0.08 = 0.4km.sq, or about a half of the water to be disposed of. So, in theory I could have something to worry about from this (in practice, I know the offshore seabed profile couldn't transmit a km-scale wave for over a hundred kilometers out to sea, so I find myself less than concerned). Do the same sort of calculations for yourself, and see if you've got a lot to worry about, or a little to worry about. Probably a little, unless you've been stupid enough to live on the seafront.
Slashdot Mirror
"I won't let another man past my lips!"
I don't know what happened to him. He used to be a regular anthropopagi.
One meaning is for the Latin, one is for the Greek ; I can't remember which is which.
I'm sure that it keeps the LGBT Terminology Committee up at nights.
Were the Vandals ("Wandals") more intelligent, on average, than the Romans? Almost certainly not. Maybe not as well educated, but that is a very different question.
Darwin was very much a man of his time ; in that time there was a very clear hierarchical conception of differing classes of animal life, and different "races" within humankind.
"Race" is used here in the technical sense ; more recent terminology would be more like "Variety", or "Sub-Species". And no doubt you'll interpret "sub-species" as meaning "lower importance species" rather than what it actually means as "a group of interbreeding organisms with distinct physical differences between this group and other groups with whom they can breed as well". You are reading deliberate racism into that title which is not there.
Note that OTOoS deals very little with humans - at the time it would have been too politically explosive. In the context of discussing the breeding of different varieties of domestic animals and plants, "race" was a perfectly appropriate term to use in the 1850s. Darwin didn't publish the extension of his ideas to cover humans until the late 1860s and 1870s.
That's understating his personal opposition considerably. "Revulsion" would be an appropriate term to describe some of the reactions he describes in his journals (read "Voyage of The Beagle", also at Gutenberg). He came from a family with a multi-generation history of fighting against the mistreatment of man by man, and in this respect he fits better with his family's behaviours than the attitudes prevalent in most of his society.
That begs the question of what people talked about on SlashDot before America was founded. ...
Oh, hang on
Problem with this first-level argument : a very large part of the indigenous population(s) of Europe were replaced by migration from the East in the centuries Before Common Era (or whatever other euphemism for "BC" you want). The latter parts of this population movement were recorded by the Romans ; the earlier parts were seemingly the origins of the Hellenes (the "Sea Peoples" etc) and possibly the Etruscans, Latins and aroundabouts. An earlier part of the same migration, or an earlier E-to-W migration may have been the spread of the "Beaker" Culture, which was probably repated to the spread of copper or bronze metallurgy. Probably preceding that was an E-to-W migration across Europe replacing the previous cultures and language groups with the Indo-european blandness that makes up the whole continent since.
Those were events in less than 10,000 years ; the 15,000 years between the Indo-European migration and the extinction of the Neanderthals probably had other events. Getting a clear genetic signal through such layers of migration is likely to be a struggle. (I'm not saying it is impossible - but these issues have got to be addressed in any serious consideration of your idea.)
Exactly the point I was planning on making, but I decided to RTFP (Paper) first. It's at http://www.isita-org.com/jass/Contents/2009%20vol87/PDF/On-Line_bassa/JASs2009_06_RamirezRozi.pdf if you're interested ; I'd expect from reading the cited newspaper article that at least one of the authors has made this point too.
Correct (with minor linguistic caveats - the precise names used vary from language to language, but the translation in to English is generally recognisably similar to "bushmeat").
It's just a simple business in some number of partly-urbanised areas, being cheaper to go hunting in the forests than to go and grow a cow ; in the forests it has always been a part of the diet ; work-gangs doing, for example, road maintenance or felling work frequently use "bushmeat" to supplement what supplies they get from their bosses, if anything. Famine is not, by any means, the only reason for eating it.
Having said that, I've tucked into more than a few bowls of rabbit stew, snared or shot within a couple of miles of the international airport here in the UK. Which is logically indistinguishable from "bushmeat". I was a veggie when we hit the deer and I had to put it down and butcher it, so I've not eaten that particular variety of British "bushmeat" myself. But I have eaten the same meat brought in the supermarket.
Not really : the HIV (or SIV) viri are generally too delicate to survive long outside the body, so by the time that the meat is cool (dpending on butchery techniques, an hour or less), the virus is dead anyway. (Caveats on what "dead" means in an organism without an active metabolism ; incapable of continuing it's life cycle.) The main purported route of transmission from "bushmeat" into humans is through getting blood from an SIV-infected monkey into open cuts on the hunter as part of the catch-kill-butcher process. Since, in many parts of Africa, the "bushmeat" trade is of, at best, dubious legality, getting detailed evidence on this point is hard.
Note that the more recent work on the genetics of HIV suggests that it has been circulating and differentiating in the human species for between 50 and 100 years, which implies an original zoonotic jump (I've forgotten the proper term - "zoonosis" is a disease that has entered and spreads in humans from an original life in another species) between the World Wars, or plausibly during WW2. It's not a terribly new disease. Ebola appears to be newer.
I've not wasted much attention on the futile discussion between people and American (closet) creationists on this page. That's a WOMBAT. But I did notice this claim of yours.
At least one worker claims to have extracted intact genomes from rock samples of circa 254 million years old. More specifically, but cleaving intact crystals of salt from (IIRC) a Texas underground salt mine he has been able to obtain cultures of viable bacteria which he couldn't obtain by washing the surfaces of the same crystals, collecting tools, processing chemicals etc.
I haven't seen much follow up on the work - haven't particularly cared to follow up on it - which suggests that the bacteriology community weren't convinced by his claims. As a rock-sniffer rather than a bacteriologist, I couldn't see any obvious holes in his procedures, but that's why I'm not a bacteriologist.
Well, if it's confirmed, that would be a full bacterial genome (allegedly) surviving for a bloody long time. But it also seems like an outlier to the rest of the work in the field, which makes it ... well ... as Sagan says - 2extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
There are probably a million and one ways that this has been expressed. The way that sticks in my mind puts the blame on Solomon : he's bored being the brainy guy in the throne room, so decides to give some of the Grand Vizers, Lord High Muckamucks and High Heidjuns some brain exercise. He asks them to go away and come up with a factual statement which will always be true. Snipping various wrong answers put in to increase the story's tension, they eventually cook up "this too shall pass".
I've no idea how old the story is, but the style makes me think this one goes back to Victorian times at least. Literature buffs can probably put another century on it.
Assuming that your wife's breast cancer is the consequence of one of these patented genes ... then surely you should be able to sue the owner of those genes for the harm that they've caused to your wife (and incidentally, your own mental anguish etc).
Get a million people to sign up for the consequent mass case ("class action" in some countries - depends where you are if you can do this) ... and watch the patents being dropped faster than something being dropped very, very fast.
OK, it's a "ha ha" response - but it's "ha ha, serious". If these companies are asserting ownership of these genes, then surely they are simultaneously asserting their ownership of the consequences of "their" genes. viz: your wife's cancer.
About 15 years ago, when England's piped water services were being sold off, the new water companies started to sue people who put the rain water from their roofs into barrels and then used it to water their gardens. Their assertion was that it was "their" water from the moment that it ceased to be in the sky. Which got quite a long way in court, until the judge in his summing up of the case questioned the company's barrister carefully on this point of the consequences of that ownership when, for example, the water owned by the water company flooded someone's house, or drowned someone's child. The barrister caught onto the direction that the "clarification" was going, hastily had a conference with his water company clients, and they dropped the case.
OK - it's a recollection of a case in a neighbouring country so I only got the reports second-hand months later and never cared too deeply (why should I care about decisions in a country I don't live in and don't intend to return to?). But it would be an interesting line for someone to take.
Usual caveats : IANAL ; YMMV ; Cheques not valid without a cheque card ; E&OE ; Henry VI (Part 2) Act IV, Scene II
I've never claimed to be a connoisseur. I do appreciate a whisky and I do know which ones I'd cross the road for and which I wouldn't. But I've never claimed to have more than a slight knowledge of the subject.
The distillers may indeed have a specific usage of the word "age" ; I'm using it in it's normal meaning of "get older", or even "progress through time in a forwards direction". And of course whisky both changes it's age (chronological) and flavour and composition if stored in inert vessels. The aldehydes oxidise, higher alcohols esterify with any carboxylic acids that are around and all sorts of other reactions are going on. Most of them are slow reactions. Putting the raw spirit in wooden casks flavoured with other wines or distillates just puts more, different chemicals into the mix.
I approached running a still from the perspective of being a young chemist with a brother-in-law who made lots of different fruit wines - when a batch turned out bad, it would go into the still, and from there straight into 2-litre polyethelyene terephthalate bottles (coke or other generic plastic drinks bottles) or occasionally I'd use a couple of PTFE-lined bottles I'd got which originally contained hydrofluoric acid. A couple of months in the cellar (or if that was full, in the darkroom) et voilá, something for mixing back with the better wines to make fortified wines. And very nice they were, too.
Without those couple of months and you still have noticeable conjoiners, which are why even hardened piss-heads generally don't touch the "white whisky" that comes warm from the still. It tastes quite disgusting.
When I moved away from home for university, I forgot about 4 bottles of the "mountain dew" down in the cellar and they rested there for over 2 years. I took three of them back up to University for the delectation of the Gaelic Society (Drinking Sub-Section I.E. The Whole Lot) party, which resulted me being elected by universal acclaim to the Society's post of "Science Officer". Which was quite an achievement for a sassenach without a word of the Gaelic and not even being a member of the Society.
Another year later the last bottle was broached, and was still improving. The position of "Science Officer" remains mine, unchallenged.
(By the way, I don't recall any of the Gaelic Society considering themselves as "whisky connoisseurs" either - despite most of them having a quite considerable breadth and depth of experience of the amber nectar. Which reminds me to dig out Fionnlaigh's phone number, 'cos I know that he's still in town.)
Incidentally, not all distilleries use "flamed" casks as you describe. A fair number do, but it's by no means universal.
Macallan - popular enough it's true, but to be honest I'd generally take one of the "Glens" if I were given a choice. A -Morangie, a -Fiddich, or a -Farclas in approximate increasing order of preference. But still top of the list, for me, is Talisker. 100-proof, 12 or 15 year. Hard to find, so to be grabbed when it appears.
Islay malts - you take them, I'll leave them. I'd rather have another pint. Or if you insist on a spirit, a double voddy an' coke.
Unless you have the whisky stored in its cask, it will taste exactly the same as the day it left the distillery. Whisky doesn't age in glass.
How many years did you run your still for? and how many litres of the dew of the mountainside did you collect?
Answers on websites need to be calibrated against reality.
That is a much more constrained statement than was made previously. It's also much more credible, since it has less room to be wrong.
I couldn't be bothered with Googling it myself, since it's not a topic of interest to me. I was sterilised, without issue, over 15 years ago. My wife doesn't take the pill because she doesn't need to.
"Hope", yes you can feel free to "hope" that. But I wouldn't expect that, and expectations are what you have to decide policy on ("expectation" in the statistical sense).
Most won't pay attention, or remember your "hope" it at the appropriate moment. People are like that. Gigadeaths are going to be the consequence (World War II managed around 0.05 Gdeath).
(I use "gigadeath" with the "giga-" being conventional, and the "-death" being an excess of human deaths over births during a time interval ; the time interval I consider is between now and when the Earth has a human population that is sustainable on a hundred-generation timescale.)
(Original poster's emphasis)
Interesting rumour. I'm slightly interested to know what your basis for this assertion is (but not interested enough to bother to follow it up myself). References please - to the formal journal articles of preference, but I'd doubt you've got anything better than website blurb or popular press.
The reason that I doubt that you've got formal references is the imprecision of your language.
Therefore, following the logical outcomes of your claim, all women who use DHMO at least once, at any point in a month, will have their "BIRTH CONTROL PILL" fail.
Do you include the birth control pills that are not taken orally, or as suppositories, or as pessiaries, but are effective when applied intra-genually ("between the knees" roughly ; IANA Latin Scholar). That's another big claim - I was not aware that intra-genual contraceptive pills were susceptible to any chemical influence other than moderate doses of oral ethanol.
So, where are your references for this claim?
That's been my number-one suspicion about all forms of male contraception ever since I started to hear about them in the early 1980s. And, to be fair, it has always been a component of reportage of such attempts.
This is why I would carry a copy of my "your vasectomy has been successful" letter from the birth control company alongside my then-current AIDS (-absence-of) certificate when I was going on the trap. I hate fucking rubbers, and those two items of reassurance seemed necessary to get some hole. (Past tense - refers to before I got married ; the AIDS certificate is a necessity for entry by un-married men to some of the countries I work in ; you don't need an argument with the border police at 03:00, and you really don't want to have to re-take the test in-country. So you keep it up-to-date! Or you stay in your home countries.)
Assuming that there is a sufficiently-even distribution of power within the relationship ... yes. Without that ... well that's one of the large reasons that certain African societies are showing as high as 30% infection rates with HIV. An interesting, if inadvertent, experiment on the influence of social mores on survival.
Anyway, I agree that many women wouldn't trust men to take their shots sufficiently regularly without considerable coercion. I'm sure that you could do it in several ways :
[age of treatment] : always going to be controversial, with the "my daughter doesn't even think about sex" group in one corner and the under-age pregnancy rates standing as mute facts in the other corner. We've got such a debate simmering in my country at the moment over immunisation against HPV, which medical procedure needs to be done on a population-wide basis and to be complete across a cohort before any significant number start having sex. Which reminds me to check if the daughter got her shots in the voluntary "catch-up" programme.
There is a stigma in being infertile (temporarily or permanently)?
I must have not been in school on the day that we got taught that one. I always thought that there was a stigma attached to inflicting death thoughtlessly on people who you don't know and who haven't done you any harm.
This ...... ^^^^^^
should provide you adequate reason for eliminating these people (or rendering them economically unviable, which amounts to the same thing).
If you don't destroy the stupid (or enable them to destroy themselves), then all the efforts that you put into encouraging gay marriage and restricting civil liberties, or whatever else it is that you want to do, will be washed away in a sea of dribbling idiocy.
Haven't you read "The Handmaid's Tale" and seen the future that awaits you when the morons leave their church-managed shelters and are allowed to take control?
I remember my first computing class, in 1979, at secondary school when I was 14.
To start with, the class was after-hours. This was because we were "overspill" from the main class. The "proper" class had been severely oversubscribed, being the first time in the country that a state comprehensive school had run such a course for the 15+ exams. It was so oversubscribed that the headmaster (~= "principal" Am.Eng.) took about a dozen of us off the class saying "you're the first people we expect to send to university, in 4 years, and you'll be able to do this when you get to university. Nothing much could change in 4 years."
The teacher (recently retired from industry to become a teacher) didn't believe this, which is why he ran the after-school classes.
You saw a computer? Wow! I didn't see one until my first winter vacation from university, when I discovered that my dad had got one (a "BBC", driving the TV). At school, we submitted our BASIC code on pre-printed forms and would get the results of the run, on paper tape, back from the college the next week. At university, we used 300baud ink-on-paper teletype terminals to communicate with the Honeywell 66/80 "mainframe". Which made mapping the Collossal Cave relatively easy. Second year was harder, as the university had upgraded to "glass teletypes" of some sort in the second-year labs. The third-year labs had a computer of their own - IIRC a PDP - but I left computing at the end of second year to continue my studies elsewhere for the final 2 years.
By the time that I was graduating, the university had moved on to using the same sort of BBC, with a monitor, as the terminal-of-choice into the network. But since I didn't have an account in my third year, I had no idea how to use it and could only FTFM then RTFM. It had a text-mode word processor, and I eventually booked an hour on the daisy-wheel printer on the other campus to print my thesis on. Noisy bloody beast!
Where's that script for "the four Yorkshireman"? Ah, here, approximately. "and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah."
s/fake tiger bones/fake powdered tiger bones/ ...
s/rhinoceros horns/powdered rhinoceros horns/
etc
I'm not an osteologist, but with even a very small amount of research I'd not have problems in identifying a poor fake of a tiger bone. Either the external shape would be wrong, or the internal structure would be wrong. (I'm not bull-shitting about this - exercises in this "identification of parts" are a routine and necessary part of palaeontology courses, and I still have to practice it often enough to know that I can push up my competence in a matter of days.)
Powdered bone, horn, etc ... different matter. Which I suspect is why the price of intact bones is considerably higher than the powered material, it being easier to prove what they are ...
oops, "prove". I forgot the bread proving in the oven ... "proven beyond all reasonable doubt" now, but it looks likely to bake off nicely. I'll find out in about 40 minutes.
Where were we? I think that the market is probably already adapted to the presence of large amounts of fake material. Now, producing fake tiger DNA to muddy the trail further ... there may be some (new) mileage in that. But you'd skate close to the edge of legitimising the trail in tiger bollocks etc. If you've developed bacteria strain to produce DNA that passes as tiger DNA, then you're not far from persuading the bacteria to produce, for example, tiger testosterone. There are linguistically-challenged doubly-incontinent autistic orangutans who could successfully run the advertising campaign for that.
Equally, if someone were to take current trends in theraputic skin cloning (for burns victims, etc) a bit further, being able to run a vat of culture medium to produce 3m-wide rolls of genuine tiger skin, as long as you want ... well I could see myself buying a roll of that to wallpaper the bedroom ceiling.
Yep, it sure will. Be a good little martyr-to-be and climb up on top of the pile of faggots. I'll just pass the starting torch to this convenient agglomeration of Aboriginal animists, Bhuddists and FreeThinkers.
Oh dear. Settle down and make yourself comfortable ; we have a problem with your torture and agonising death. You see, unlike Christians (mono-theists more generally), this bunch of other religions don't have a strong tradition of burning heretics. I'm sorry, but your martyrdom has been unavoidably delayed by other people refusing to descend to your level.
Please accept our apologies and I'll try to whip up a slavering crowd as soon as possible. Could you recommend some good churches to get them from?
The movie is a second or third-level derivative. Look at the original short story by IIRC Harry Harrison (entitled "Roommates" according to Wikipedia, though I'm quite sure that I read it under the next title) ; some years later Harrison expanded the short story into a novel and called it "Make Room!, Make Room!" ; I'm not clear on whether the novel formed the basis for the screenplay, or whether both were developed in parallel (this is about the time that "2001" underwent a similar trajectory from short story to novel and film).
The themes of overpopulation and mass starvation are much clearer in the printed versions, either of them (I don't recommend one over the other ; their relationship is obvious, but they are different ; either is good and you don't lose anything by reading both).
It is very clear in the print versions that "SoyLent Green" is a relative luxury, compared to the more common (but lower nutritional value) "SoyLent Yellow". I always took the impression that the "SoyLent" part was a "hard tack"-like base, to which various flavourings, texture modifiers and/or nutritional supplements were added to make the various different colour varieties. The nutritional paucity of the average dole diet, un-supplemented by begged/stolen/brought supplements is attested throughout the written versions, such as a sideline on Kwashiorkor (a protein deficiency disease) which the film cuts to little more than a brief comment on peanut butter.
The story also has explicit, though minor, plot elements of "meat-leggers" (illegal traders in real meat); I don't recall them getting an airing at all in the film. Again, there are evidently other sources of nutrition than people ; they're just a protein supplement.
Eat enough people and you'll have enough room (the novel is "Make Room!, Make Room!" ; that's in the closest that English has to the Imperative case!) to plant crops. Remember to dig your shit into the soil for fertiliser. Also, remember to plant the rest of the corpses somewhere that the worms can "etten you up" (to misquote the traditional song of "Ilkley Moor"). That's another way of recycling proteins and minerals. It puts an entirely different light on "Duck Soup".
Part of Harrison's theme is that even without overt external war and patent disease, society has broken down purely because of it's refusal to face important facts. Which is as important a point today as it was when I was only a glint in my un-sterilised father's eye.
That's all right - I'm not in the military, and the only person who I know who is stupid enough to have signed away his morality that way I never had much respect for beforehand. Beat away.
(I do have a tiny amount of sympathy for the several people who got fucked in various ways by the military, but they were "told so" while they still had the chance to back out. "I told you so!" has to be said.)
Yeah, I've seen that picture too. Dubya is pretty limber to bend his spine like that. Amazing that there's no shit in his hair afterwards.
That's a self-fulfilling prophecy. I recall the same self-fulfilling prophecy as a child. These days, we're making progress ; metric is common for most purposes (litres having replaced gallons at the petrol pump around a decade ago, for example ; in my current car-free period, so I didn't notice exactly when). The biggest hold-out is that road signs are still done in statute miles, and that's something that we're (we = metric enthusiasts) are working on. Once we've got the last few of the "metric martyrs" strung up on the gibbet at Tyburn, we'll have dragged the country kicking and screaming into the 18th century. They already go into the pillory on those increasingly rare occasions that they raise their heads into public sight, so we're making progress.
Stupidity carries the punishment it always has : Death. Preferably before reproduction.
No.
And I'm not enough of a statistician to attempt to work it out. It's one of those awkward questions where you could spend a month on just defining the question. For example - driving is (allegedly) a door-to-door type of journey, while no-one seriously considers making flying a "door-to-door" experience [footnote]. So, most air journeys involve a non-trivial amount of car transport too. How do you account for that? A second complication - people have a risk of death at any time, and air journeys are typically of shorter duration than road journeys ; so one's mortality rates should be adjusted to reflect this. Quite how is not plain.
There is an old lie that "you can prove anything with statistics" ; it's not true. However, with a statistically naive audience it is easy to confuse them enough to think that you've proved something. You can even confuse yourself about having proven something.
[Note : the people designing flying cars, for example, seem to assume that you can put take-off and landing strips on every tower-block accommodation, sufficient for all inhabitants, plus the parking, and not have to train all the drivers to a high standard in air-traffic control procedures ; this is not being serious. Perhaps we could encourage the metric martyrs (above) to act as test drivers to establish exactly what the mortality rate is amongst under-trained drivers of flying cars. Can I watch, from the ground, using a telescope pointing near the horizon?]
The age of the cork would put a lower bound on the age of the bottling process. The most-recent bottling couldn't have taken place before the cork was formed. However the original bottling could have taken place earlier, and then the cork repaired later, following damage of some sort.
But a 1950 cork in an 1850 bottle would raise almost as many questions as a 30A.D. image on a 1460±20A.D. piece of linen.
A friend from the States put that drink's name to me a couple of years ago, so the next time I was in one of the minor whisky bars in town (only about 350 different whiskys, compared to the 400+ of the serious players and the 20~30 of a normal run-of-the-mill bar) I asked if they'd got it. After all, it's from the other side of the ocean, trying to get into the country where the type of drink was invented.
Tried it ; perfectly respectable taste and nose but nothing spectacular. Not particularly to my taste, but I can see people taking a liking to it. I wouldn't swap a quarter-gill of Glen Farclas, Morangie, or many other for a quarter-gill of Woodford ; I would swap a quarter bottle of Bells or Teachers for a quarter-gill of Woodford ; I'll keep the Talisker, and I'd keep the Talisker 12yo for another 3 or 4 years because it improves quite noticeably in those last couple of years.
Most people who taste some of these super-old bottles, and who know their whiskies, reckon that after the first 25 to 30 years, they all start going downhill. At which point they're fit for selling to idiots with more money than sense, and no idea what to do with their taste buds.
I was reading my copy of "The Geology of Spain" (ISBN:1-86239-110-6) a couple of weeks ago in preparation for a holiday to Mallorca and I got distracted by the section on the "Islas Canarias" (Spain's island province off the NW coast of Africa). As of 1998 (Geological Magazine, v135, p591) there are some 15 slide deposits identified around the islands of the group, and at least 3 slides from La Palma itself. Of course, not all of these were oriented to propagate well across the Atlantic - some would have "merely" obliterated anyone on the adjacent coasts of Iberia and Africa. (It is taken as a given that the extermination of people in New York and the American Georgia is less important than the extermination of other people.
See above data - if it's happened in excess of a dozen times in the past, it's pretty likely to happen again in the future. On the other hand, it probably only happens every one or two million years, and maybe every 4 million years pointed at [Africa]|[America] (delete as appropriate). So, it's not that much different a threat level than, for example, a bolide-induced tsunami on the same coasts.
Film at eleven. If you took due diligence about living more than a few metres above sea level and a few kilometers inland.
I wonder - how to "ball-park" a run-up estimate? Assume an impacting wave of 1km high by 1km trough-to-trough. That's going to give you a cross-section of approximately a square kilometer of water to dispose of on your coast. I'm at an elevation of 80m (=0.08km), and I'm approximately 5km from the coast. So, that accounts for 5*0.08 = 0.4km.sq, or about a half of the water to be disposed of. So, in theory I could have something to worry about from this (in practice, I know the offshore seabed profile couldn't transmit a km-scale wave for over a hundred kilometers out to sea, so I find myself less than concerned). Do the same sort of calculations for yourself, and see if you've got a lot to worry about, or a little to worry about. Probably a little, unless you've been stupid enough to live on the seafront.