Absolutely normal. For safety critical staff, the choices are 24/7/365 (which for senior supervisory staff is OK), or 12-12/7/365 (2 people on 12 hour shifts), or 8-8-8/7/365 (8 hour shifts). I've worked them all. I've worked them all in one week (crisis happens 24hr cover, sleep when you can ; additional personnel arrive and go to 8-8-8 while exhausted person recuperates ; crisis over, one person departs and remainder go onto 12-12 for remainder of their month or two on site).
This isn't rocket science, and it was well established in the Marine industries centuries ago - though they tend to go for really short shifts 4-4.
I hope they gave those folks a couple doses of Modafinil to keep them going.
Speaking as someone who has probably more than 25 years more experience of working 12 hour on-site shifts than you, I severely hope that they don't think about that. After all, there are hundreds of thousands of oil rig workers in the (logical, if not physical) proximity of Houston who have long experience of seeing people sacked for taking undeclared pharmaceuticals (prescription or not) to work with them.
If you can't do a 12-hour shift when you're living on site, then you shouldn't be doing the job. Simple as. And yes, this includes safety-critical work, like manning high pressure (20,000psi) pumps, mixing toxic chemicals by the tonne, carrying out laboratory analysis of explosive mixtures, and even preparing and deploying explosives. Absolutely normal work, in other words. And Houston is very familiar with it.
You do have your bags and pockets searched every time you go to work, no? Because that's what you get used to. And carrying medication which you do not declare to the site medic on arrival is a "you're fired, stop work, go to the departure lounge and wait for your transport home, you'll never work in this industry again" moment.
You get a headache and you forget about it in 4 seconds, and notice it every hour or so and don't bother getting a Tylenol because you have other shit to do.
You really have no experience of site work, do you? Going to get a "Tylenol" (wossat? Ibuprofen, heroi, paracetamol?) is going to take several hours. You've got to find the medic (in sick bay, or use the PA/ Radio system and wait for him to arrive), she or he takes a history, assesses your symptoms, does the paperwork and issues the medication, and instigates an investigation into why medication was prescribed. Repeat pills are normally dispensed as the same time as regular galley hours until the programme is complete.
Why would the parking lot be at double capacity. Haven't these people heard of car sharing? Agree on your buddy - who'll be most likely the closest colleague to your house, compare cars. Whichever is either most disposable, or most disinterested in flooding (*), and the two of you take that to work with a rig bag full of clothes, doss bag (**), and no-refrigeration food.
(*) eg, a working van with vinyl flooring and plastic seats, with a high fuel filler cap. Gets flooded a metre deep, drain out, hose out mud, start engine.
(**) sleeping bag. Sheet liner if it's likely to be a long stay. Depending on your bones, inflatable mattress too.
If you did your underground nuclear test within a few tens of km of a volcano, possibly.
Oddly, the US underground testing site is a lot more than tens of km from an active volcanic region. Not sure about the Chinese site(s), but I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. The DPRK site - a good hundred or more km from their nasty little pile of volcanic worries. (I looked it up a couple of years ago, and rapidy stopped worrying about it.) Israeli bombs... if they test (rumoured in the South Atlantic), they've not done it near the recent (few hundred thousand years or less) volcanics up int the Golan-Lebanon border areas. India - no volcanism worth worrying about. France likewise. Pakistan - they do their testing at the other end of the country from their minor volcanic regions (coincidentally, near the Indian border. Hmmm.) Who've I forgotten? Oh yes, Russia. With 1/6 of the land area of the globe, they've no need to go around rattling their few volcanoes either.
I'd be more worried about everyone going blind from ignoring eclipse observing guidelines. Oddly, I feel no need at all to replace my underpants.
Yes, I'm a geologist. FGS, though I've never seen a need to get Chartered.
How hard is it for nature to form pyramid shaped rocks with a square base?
Depends on how precisely you mean "pyramid-shaped", and "square base".
The easy case : if you're talking about minerals rather than rocks (many people are fuzzy on the distinction), then a cubic mineral with good {111} and {100} cleavages will beak easily into square-based pyramids. Half-octohedra if you like.
For rocks composed of many grains of (one-to-many) minerals interconnected in various ways... not so easy. You'd probably be looking for something with fairly regular jointing on two perpendicular axes. That's not difficult - this search link will give you a number of images of thin rock beds which have been fractured in this way, leading to a more-or-less square block structure.
To carve something on a base like that, with sides at an angle to give you a classical "half-octahedron" pyramid shape... I can't really see something that would necessarily give a weathering habit like that, but given the natural variability of rocks, I could believe it happening.
Do you have a photo of what's puzzling you?
There's always the possibility that what you're looking at is actually a fossil. Some suchians (pseudo- or ancestral- crocodile-a-likes) for example, have many ~square "scutes" with quite steep sides.
At earliest opportunity, deposit it in my friend's fire safe. He doesn't live far enough away to be geo-secure, but at least it's safe from fire.
RTFM on that "fire safe" to find out just how safe it is from fire. It's probably better than "sitting on the desk", but it's not necessarily going to survive even a house-not-destroying fire.
Thermal protection requires mass and insulation outside that mass. Both require volume. Volume requires money.
The problem is that many primary care doctors have been told that C. albicans (the common human strain) can not become resistant.
"Can not", or "has not" (with a silent but implicit "yet, that we know of")?
IANA-medic, but between creationist-bashing and simple interest in the mechanisms of evolution, I'm struggling to think of a chain of logic that could lead to a reasoned claim that "(any human-infecting organism) CAN NOT become resistant to (any treatment, be it chemical, biological)". If you kill off only one bacterium out of a quadrillion, leaving the rest to continue reproducing, you'll have some effect on the composition of the gene pool even if it is undetectably small. If you're killing off more (say, 30% of a population per generation), the you're clearly going to put a significant (novel) selection pressure on the population, which will evolve purely by the cull-reproduce-cull cycle, and it will evolve in the direction of resisting the selecting effect.
It's actually slightly scary that either an appropriately qualified biological scientist could make such a claim, and that trained physicians might actually believe it. I know that doctors aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer when it comes to genetics (in the same way that rocket scientists aren't necessarily up to speed on the materials science of why such-and-such an alloy has the properties they desire), but you do expect a university-educated degree of competence.
Which is moderately surprising - on the comparable East African Rift, there are quite a few stratovolcanoes.
Maybe that's an effect due to the volcanoes erupting under several kilometres of ice, when the water-to-steam interaction may well be constrained by the critical point of water (2km of ice brings you close).
Is the readership of Slashdot so poorly educated these days to need the importance of the critical point explained to them? I do hope not.
This is vastly (x10000 to higher) more likely to affect your home than these structures. Besides, they pre-date atom bombs. And most of them pre-date humans.
It is very well possible that geothermal activitie at the base of these ice sheets is responsible to the degradation of the ice sheet, no?
Geothermal activity under these ice sheets has been continuing for hundreds of times the duration of any human-written books (including books written by people who think their mushrooms are god). Any unusual changes noticeable in a century of observation are something that can be laid at the feet of human-induced biosphere changes.
(BTW, I make my living from the oil industry. You're probably more fucked than I am.)
Odd, I RTFA, and noticed not an iota of worry - perhaps you didn't.
Incidentally. Edinburgh is one of the best established universities in the UK (several centuries longer than that irritating rebellion in the penal colonies), and anyone who works there would need some years of poor work before being concerned over their jobs. It's not America, did you notice?
and increase the prevalence of transgenic disease over time, along with pregnancies that fail to come to term.
Big deal.
The average number of children/ womb on the planet is around 3 at the moment I note a small decrease in recent years, but it's still well above replacement levels. So that's about 27 months out of a reproductive potential of (45-15) years * 3/4 years/pregnancy around 22 pregnancies.
If baby manufacture (the classic "unskilled labour" job) falls to match supply with demand, there is a lot of room to increase production. If population is considered a serious problem, there are solutions available. Yeah, I could write that "Eutopia".
"This pregnancy is a bust. Here is your abortion pill and bucket. I've booked you for your next pregnancy scan in 4 months and failure to attend and take subsequent fertility treatment will result in detention and treatment. Here is your list of computed-compatible males within one hour travel. If you're not pregnant in 4 months and less than 20 of the people on this list have been contacted for a breeding opportunity, then you'll be detained for the meat rack. Have a nice day. There's the exit and here's your bucket. Please leave the waste in one of the trash recepticles marked 'Soylent Red'."
Different adult here. I've had a driving license for (counts) almost 29 years now. (Is that longer than a "millennial" could have been alive? I don't know the definition, and I don't think it's important to know 57 varieties of "youngster".) Sometimes I've lived in city centres ; sometimes I've lived out in the suburbs. I've owned cars for under half the time that I've had a driving license. Public transport and or push bike is just plain easier than the shit associated with running a car.
What makes you think that the Russians would let you in? What have you got to gie them? Apart from all your goods, all your ideas and work for the rest of your life, and anything else they care to take. And because you'd be an immigrant, you can bet that you'd feel the shitty end of the Trump Lesson.
Billions of people would still die even though there may be plenty of habitable land left on the planet.
And people wonder why I say that I'm likely to see gigadeaths before I die. (For scale, World War 2 was about 0.05 Gdeath. And to be precise, I'm talking about a gigadeath excess over gigabirths.)
I do accept that it's likely there will be gigadeaths after I die too, but I doubt I'll be in the first wave of large-scale deaths.
For this, you have pilots.
Every harbour I've worked in has required, for vessels above a certain size, that they marshal at a location outside the harbour, with sufficiently deep water (deeper than the harbour), and await a pilot boarding from a small boat. The pilot then guides the vessel's master into the harbour, being aware of where the sand banks are this week. If the boat has the most incredibly detailed high tech GPS system, they do exactly the same thing. If they have no GPS, they do exactly the same thing.
losing one station would just mean a rebalancing of the European grid
One of the three lines - the smallest in capacity - is to the island of Malta, which being an island is not significantly interconnected with the European grid. At this time most of their electricity they generate on-island by burning fossil fuels. And they don't have huge tracts of unused land to build a solar plant. Last time I was there - 8 years ago - there was a lot of rooftop solar.
The other two lines, to central Italy and Southern France would interconnect well into the grid.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't rocket science, and it was well established in the Marine industries centuries ago - though they tend to go for really short shifts 4-4.
Speaking as someone who has probably more than 25 years more experience of working 12 hour on-site shifts than you, I severely hope that they don't think about that. After all, there are hundreds of thousands of oil rig workers in the (logical, if not physical) proximity of Houston who have long experience of seeing people sacked for taking undeclared pharmaceuticals (prescription or not) to work with them.
If you can't do a 12-hour shift when you're living on site, then you shouldn't be doing the job. Simple as. And yes, this includes safety-critical work, like manning high pressure (20,000psi) pumps, mixing toxic chemicals by the tonne, carrying out laboratory analysis of explosive mixtures, and even preparing and deploying explosives. Absolutely normal work, in other words. And Houston is very familiar with it.
You do have your bags and pockets searched every time you go to work, no? Because that's what you get used to. And carrying medication which you do not declare to the site medic on arrival is a "you're fired, stop work, go to the departure lounge and wait for your transport home, you'll never work in this industry again" moment.
You really have no experience of site work, do you? Going to get a "Tylenol" (wossat? Ibuprofen, heroi, paracetamol?) is going to take several hours. You've got to find the medic (in sick bay, or use the PA/ Radio system and wait for him to arrive), she or he takes a history, assesses your symptoms, does the paperwork and issues the medication, and instigates an investigation into why medication was prescribed. Repeat pills are normally dispensed as the same time as regular galley hours until the programme is complete.
My bet is that the bomb is already there, in a shipping container somewhere quiet. It's not like it needs to be on the White House lawn,
(*) eg, a working van with vinyl flooring and plastic seats, with a high fuel filler cap. Gets flooded a metre deep, drain out, hose out mud, start engine.
(**) sleeping bag. Sheet liner if it's likely to be a long stay. Depending on your bones, inflatable mattress too.
I suspect your basic problem is listening to advertising-funded radio. Don't you have alternatives, such as subscription-funded radio?
Oddly, the US underground testing site is a lot more than tens of km from an active volcanic region. Not sure about the Chinese site(s), but I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. The DPRK site - a good hundred or more km from their nasty little pile of volcanic worries. (I looked it up a couple of years ago, and rapidy stopped worrying about it.) Israeli bombs ... if they test (rumoured in the South Atlantic), they've not done it near the recent (few hundred thousand years or less) volcanics up int the Golan-Lebanon border areas. India - no volcanism worth worrying about. France likewise. Pakistan - they do their testing at the other end of the country from their minor volcanic regions (coincidentally, near the Indian border. Hmmm.) Who've I forgotten? Oh yes, Russia. With 1/6 of the land area of the globe, they've no need to go around rattling their few volcanoes either.
I'd be more worried about everyone going blind from ignoring eclipse observing guidelines. Oddly, I feel no need at all to replace my underpants.
And Iceland.
Hey, it's Iceland. Cue Rei to come in complaining (quite rightly) about not being able to type the thorn in "ÃzorskastrÃÃin".
Depends on how precisely you mean "pyramid-shaped", and "square base".
The easy case : if you're talking about minerals rather than rocks (many people are fuzzy on the distinction), then a cubic mineral with good {111} and {100} cleavages will beak easily into square-based pyramids. Half-octohedra if you like.
For rocks composed of many grains of (one-to-many) minerals interconnected in various ways ... not so easy. You'd probably be looking for something with fairly regular jointing on two perpendicular axes. That's not difficult - this search link will give you a number of images of thin rock beds which have been fractured in this way, leading to a more-or-less square block structure.
To carve something on a base like that, with sides at an angle to give you a classical "half-octahedron" pyramid shape ... I can't really see something that would necessarily give a weathering habit like that, but given the natural variability of rocks, I could believe it happening.
Do you have a photo of what's puzzling you?
There's always the possibility that what you're looking at is actually a fossil. Some suchians (pseudo- or ancestral- crocodile-a-likes) for example, have many ~square "scutes" with quite steep sides.
That's a problem for people who choose to be represented in the next generation. Someone else's problem.
RTFM on that "fire safe" to find out just how safe it is from fire. It's probably better than "sitting on the desk", but it's not necessarily going to survive even a house-not-destroying fire.
Thermal protection requires mass and insulation outside that mass. Both require volume. Volume requires money.
For susceptible people (I'm married to one), it is deeply addictive.
"Can not", or "has not" (with a silent but implicit "yet, that we know of")?
IANA-medic, but between creationist-bashing and simple interest in the mechanisms of evolution, I'm struggling to think of a chain of logic that could lead to a reasoned claim that "(any human-infecting organism) CAN NOT become resistant to (any treatment, be it chemical, biological)". If you kill off only one bacterium out of a quadrillion, leaving the rest to continue reproducing, you'll have some effect on the composition of the gene pool even if it is undetectably small. If you're killing off more (say, 30% of a population per generation), the you're clearly going to put a significant (novel) selection pressure on the population, which will evolve purely by the cull-reproduce-cull cycle, and it will evolve in the direction of resisting the selecting effect.
It's actually slightly scary that either an appropriately qualified biological scientist could make such a claim, and that trained physicians might actually believe it. I know that doctors aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer when it comes to genetics (in the same way that rocket scientists aren't necessarily up to speed on the materials science of why such-and-such an alloy has the properties they desire), but you do expect a university-educated degree of competence.
Maybe that's an effect due to the volcanoes erupting under several kilometres of ice, when the water-to-steam interaction may well be constrained by the critical point of water (2km of ice brings you close).
Is the readership of Slashdot so poorly educated these days to need the importance of the critical point explained to them? I do hope not.
Read. Enjoy!
This is vastly (x10000 to higher) more likely to affect your home than these structures. Besides, they pre-date atom bombs. And most of them pre-date humans.
Geothermal activity under these ice sheets has been continuing for hundreds of times the duration of any human-written books (including books written by people who think their mushrooms are god). Any unusual changes noticeable in a century of observation are something that can be laid at the feet of human-induced biosphere changes.
(BTW, I make my living from the oil industry. You're probably more fucked than I am.)
Not untrue, but that's not a claim that the actual paper makes (it's journaist-ese).
This is a study of GPR and thru-ice radar results. Noone is claiming they're likely to erupt soon.
Incidentally. Edinburgh is one of the best established universities in the UK (several centuries longer than that irritating rebellion in the penal colonies), and anyone who works there would need some years of poor work before being concerned over their jobs. It's not America, did you notice?
Big deal.
The average number of children/ womb on the planet is around 3 at the moment I note a small decrease in recent years, but it's still well above replacement levels. So that's about 27 months out of a reproductive potential of (45-15) years * 3/4 years/pregnancy around 22 pregnancies.
If baby manufacture (the classic "unskilled labour" job) falls to match supply with demand, there is a lot of room to increase production. If population is considered a serious problem, there are solutions available. Yeah, I could write that "Eutopia".
Different adult here. I've had a driving license for (counts) almost 29 years now. (Is that longer than a "millennial" could have been alive? I don't know the definition, and I don't think it's important to know 57 varieties of "youngster".) Sometimes I've lived in city centres ; sometimes I've lived out in the suburbs. I've owned cars for under half the time that I've had a driving license. Public transport and or push bike is just plain easier than the shit associated with running a car.
What makes you think that the Russians would let you in? What have you got to gie them? Apart from all your goods, all your ideas and work for the rest of your life, and anything else they care to take. And because you'd be an immigrant, you can bet that you'd feel the shitty end of the Trump Lesson.
Not relevant. Not in the US.
And people wonder why I say that I'm likely to see gigadeaths before I die. (For scale, World War 2 was about 0.05 Gdeath. And to be precise, I'm talking about a gigadeath excess over gigabirths.)
I do accept that it's likely there will be gigadeaths after I die too, but I doubt I'll be in the first wave of large-scale deaths.
For this, you have pilots. Every harbour I've worked in has required, for vessels above a certain size, that they marshal at a location outside the harbour, with sufficiently deep water (deeper than the harbour), and await a pilot boarding from a small boat. The pilot then guides the vessel's master into the harbour, being aware of where the sand banks are this week. If the boat has the most incredibly detailed high tech GPS system, they do exactly the same thing. If they have no GPS, they do exactly the same thing.
One of the three lines - the smallest in capacity - is to the island of Malta, which being an island is not significantly interconnected with the European grid. At this time most of their electricity they generate on-island by burning fossil fuels. And they don't have huge tracts of unused land to build a solar plant. Last time I was there - 8 years ago - there was a lot of rooftop solar.
The other two lines, to central Italy and Southern France would interconnect well into the grid.