Seriously, I worked with some blind people in college and they would just use a credit/debit card for everything.
They're not free; they incur a charge of 2.5 to 5% per transaction (varies by CC company and transaction value). Check out the all too-common signs in small shops warning you that CC/DC transactions (sometimes below a certain value) will incur those charges on the bill, not swallowed by the trader.
That makes "magic plastic" a suitable solution for rich blind people.
Now, I know that you're talking about college students, and I suspect that you actually mean rich college students (since most countries prevent the poor from getting as good an education as the rich, by one means or several), but the article in question was about blind people, not some sub-set of "people" discriminated in favour of by measurement of wallet thickness.
Anyway, must go to work. Stopping off at the corner shop for a packet of cigarette papers (22p) and a newspaper (35p), which I'll pay for with cash, because the corner shop doesn't accept credit card payments of less than £10. Then I'll get on the bus (£3 for a day ticket), which doesn't have a credit card reader. If I used the bus every day, a £50 monthly ticket might be worthwhile, but with an average £30 monthly bus bill (for which I need receipts anyway) it isn't worthwhile.
What sedimentological structures should I expect to see? Lets see - firstly, by definition I'm talking about a depositional environment, not an erosional one, so I'm talking about a clastic deposit. (Could one survive long enough to get into a carbonate- or evaporite-depositing environment? Pretty dubious, but hard to say it's theoretically impossible.) We'd get large scale disruption of bedding, up to a considerable number of metres into the bed deposit. Would the introduced mass survive in place? No, it could move off again, or melt in situ. As it melted, the introduced portion would have relative insulation from the (relatively) warm water, so it'd remain solid while the parts of the berg in free water would melt faster. But the berg would be pulled up and out of the sediment by bouyancy (possibly pumped tidally), so we'd see some sort of suction structures distorting the already-distorted bedding. Maybe doubled-over folding? The final tear-away scar would have a different structure of slumping into an open scar, perhaps combined with fluidisation. Hmmm, I'll have to keep my eyes peeled for that sort of thing if I'm ever looking into an excavated marine boulder clay again. Not something I'm likely to see in core.
Sorry, geologist thinking out loud. Nothing to see here. Move along now.
Now what are those fossils in the new Yusuf Islam ("Cat Stevens") video? Can't get a good look - Spriggina? Or anonymous ammonites?
Of course I'm not a baby that wants general anesthetic and NO2 either.
Removing wisdom teeth is fucking dental surgery, if I wanted that sort of thing done without proper anesthetic, I would've stayed in Russia.
I think the operative word in the GP post was "AND". But nonetheless, if you want your wisdom teeth pulled without proper anaesthetic, I can give you the address of a UK dentist who can do it for you. He actually gives you just enough to get you asleep and quiet before he climbs on and starts pulling ; then it's a lottery how many he gets out before you punch his lights out. He got 3 of mine, and I had to go back a month later for #4.
That's the efficiency of the NHS for you. Save a penny on the gases, spend a hundred quid on a second full surgery session.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that the only news sources in Britain are the Beeb, the Daily Flail and the Torygraph. Ever try the Grauniad? The Indescribablyboring? The Scum? Daily Spurt? Piss'n'Jobbie? Glasgow AxGang's Herald? or the Edinburgh-based "You'll have had your tea then" Scotsman? (Just listing the papers that I'll read in an average month. Oh, don't forget the Teuchter's Courier.) One way of keeping your news balanced is to keep a chip on every shoulder - I also read the Torygraph regularly. Normally I pinch the Boss's copy in preference to paying for the reprehensible rag. Someone else pointed out that the Torygraph's fear and loathing of the Beeb has declined since Conrad Black sold up and was taken to court ; may be true - I don't read it often enough to really notice. Anyway, to the points at hand - the BBC is not particularly "anti-Israel" as the Flail and Torygraph claim ; they're no more "anti-Israel" than many other news sources who don't fawn helplessly to the grandchildren of a much sinned-against population, who have become terrible sinners themselves. That's the big irony of the entire Palestinian-Israeli situation. If it weren't such a tragedy, it'd be a comedy. Of errors.
Do you have links to the BBC denying that the leaked meeting happened or that they are not trying to prevent the report from becoming public? Of course not, you'd rather just attack the messenger and hope that no one notices your arguments have absolutely no substance except to portray your own prejudices.
Leaked meeting? Prevent report? OIC, you've obviously mistaken me for someone who gives a fuck what's claimed in the Torygraph. And in any case, if the Beeb are being alleged to have an anti-Israeli bias, then they're doing a peculiarly bad job of it with so many reports of the effects of terrorist attacks in Israel, on both sides of the walls, and in all communities. Compared to what I see in the rest of the Press, the Beeb are pretty even-handed. What lawyers for another newspaper say doesn't really intrerest me - I'll take it as meaning that employing lawyers has become cheaper than employing investigative journalists. Or possibly, the Torygraph can't get decent investigative journalists to work for them.
I'll have to admit that the Torygraph does have a halfway decent crossword.
I would just like people not to put blind faith in any one news agency to tell them the unbiased truth.
my emphasis Oh, I get it. You're one of these "observational comedians". Ha. Ha. Don't give up the day job. Then again, don't go around expecting other people to have as restricted a view of the world as you have.
Great post on oil drilling but your economics is flawed. [SNIP] We give them dollars and they give us stuff.
It's posible that my economics are flawed ; I take my economics from my line manager, who's degree is in "Economics with Geology", whereas I did "Geology and Mineralogy" (different universities, BTW; possibly different countries; if I cared, I'd find out). That may be why he's the poor schmuck stuck facing the same computer in the same office every day, while I get to travel the world and have helicopter engines fail on me over strange seas (or wade through shark-infested water when crew-changing by boat. At night.) As I understand it, America on average is buying goods from China and paying with promissory notes against dollars. Which of course would be useless for China to buy oil with from major producers who trade their oil in Euros. Which is where it gets really murky :
The tender [for mid-war Iraqi oil; the war isn't over and has probably only just begun], for which bids are due by June 10, switches the transaction back to dollars -- the international currency of oil sales - despite the greenback's recent fall in value. Saddam Hussein in 2000 insisted Iraq's oil be sold for euros, a political move, but one that improved Iraq's recent earnings thanks to the rise in the value of the euro against the dollar. in See also Carol Hoyos and Kevin Morrison, "Iraq returns to the international oil market," Financial Times, June 5, 2003 and Faisal Islam, "Iraq nets handsome profit by dumping dollar for euro," Guardian, February 16, 2003
What makes the IOB [IRAN OIL BOURSE] the subject of such interest by the American government? According to rumors, which first vaulted the issue into the spotlight, the financial exchange in the aforementioned bourse will trade for oil in euros instead of the U.S. dollar. Iran's Oil Bourse: A Threat to the U.S. Economy?
In 2005-2006, The Tehran government has a developed a plan to begin competing with New York's NYMEX and London's IPE with respect to international oil trades - using a euro-denominated international oil-trading mechanism. This means that without some form of US intervention, the euro is going to establish a firm foothold in the international oil trade. Given U.S. debt levels and the stated neoconservative project for U.S. global domination, Tehran's objective constitutes an obvious encroachment on U.S. dollar supremacy in the international oil market. The Real Reasons Why Iran is the Next Target: The Emerging Euro-denominated International Oil Marker
Since the Boss cares more about global economic forces than I do, I tune out around this point. Next time I meet my college friend 'Stef' who was last heard of drilling in a flak jacket near Mosul, I'll see what he thinks of putting his life on the line for a foreign currency. I'll ask his wife and children too - see what they think of the propsect of losing husband/ father to support a foreign government's economic woes.
I've heard that it can last indefinitely if you just leave it buried in the ground.
Gasoline? As in, a refined mixture of C-7, C-8, C-9, C-10 branched and unbranched hydrocarbons with various oxygenated additives (ethyl alcohol, ethers, esters), detergents, dyes and other hoojum? It's possible that it'll be stable in the ground for a while, but has anyone ever done the experiment? I think not. Perhaps you're under the misapprehension that what comes out of an oil well is gasoline? It's not - it's "crude oil", or "petroleum", which is a considerably more complex mixture. Which itself isn't particularly stable - there are bacteria that'll eat it, given a supply of water and a terminal electron acceptor such as sulphate ion.
Remember the spike in gasoline prices in some countries over the last year? That was aparrently mostly due to a combination of market nerves and the damage to a significant part of refinery capacity in the US in hurricanes (several) and some industrial accidents. Oil supply wasn't really a problem, it was mostly the refinery problems.
Speaking as someone who deploys those newer and better technologies (I specialise in extended reach and horizontal drilling, much of which uses advanced sand management, expandable screening and/ or electrical submersible pumps, drilled with minimally invasive drilling fluids, tight control of equivalent circulating density and high-precision geological optimisation of well placement), what restricts the impact of those "newer and better technologies" are 2-fold: - many reservoirs have poor to crap permeability characteristics, which reduces maximum (let alone optimum) flow rates, and severely impacts the economics of projects. That's inherent to the rock that the oil is in, and is only improved as the square root (approximately) of the pressure differential that you put across the reservior. At best. - most new discoveries are small. A couple of hundred million barrels in place, maybe 40~60 million produceable. That's 5 to 8 days of consumption at todays rates. Which means that you can't justify the cost of pipelines and infrastructure to produce the stuff.
Look at, if you care, the "Last Great Hope" oil province of the late 1990's - the Falklands province. Review it's history - a significant war fought over it's control delayed exploration drilling for a decade and a half. There's a basin, source rocks (second best in the world), and reservoirs of moderate quality; tectonics and timing of thermal events within the tectonics are good for producing accumulations, and indeed accumulations have been found. But they're not big enough to justify building the necessary platform-based infrastructure, and the distance to shore is too long to flow the oil in a pipeline (we're back to the back-pressure as anything flows ; it all adds up from the valve at the surface separator all the way back through the pipes to the reservoir-completion interface). Net result - a "stranded" oil province. OK - that's one province I've had a professional interest in. Oddly enough, that's a common set of problems. Same goes for the potential stuff in the Arctic outside Alaska : no route to market, and building the necessary railway lines and pipelines across Siberian tundra is a 20-year project (don't suggest using the - - (sorry for my spelling, my atrocious Russian is getting rusty) line - it's stuffed to capacity already (as anyone who's used it would know) and it doesn't get within 2Mm of the necessary areas.) with a very uncertain prospect of success at the end.
Some of the biggest components of the "anticipated reserves" part of the future oil extrapolations are based on finding whole provinces with similar productivity to their geological counterparts elsewhere in the world. But there is no (zero, nil, zilch) well control on a lot of these anticipations. It's an easy mistake to make - I tried to get involved in the Falklands drilling campaign (first job application I'd written for 4 years), on that basis. Thought there was a big potential. Busted after the second well (of 6 in the campaign). East Greenland is "booked" as a huge gas province, extrapolating from the geological and thermal history of the Norwegian coast; zero well control. Laptev sea is "booked" as a light oil and gas province; one well and only 14000km of seismic. East Siberian-Chukchi Seas similarly booked; zero wells and 7000km. Sea of Okhotsk, several pinprick wells with no discoveries on the best prospects from the very limited seismic. Sea of Japan I haven't received data on, yet; some political difficulties over exploration. Sea of Bohai has proven prospects, but similar political difficulties.
You can look at models of reserves projected, but you've got to read the definitions of "proven", "likely" etc that go for the different classes of "reserve". As Shell discovered publicly a couple of years ago (and everyone else knew privately), a reserve isn't a reserve until it's been drilled, tested and produced. And e
(http://eastcoastwisdom.blogspot.com/) BBC has about as much journalistic integrity as Entertainment Tonight,
I have a suspiscion that the East Coast you refer to in your blog title doesn't refer to the area between Dungeness and Flamburgh Head. (Look them up in an atlas.)
their own admission [dailymail.co.uk]
Ah, the second most fascist national paper in England. And a remarkably anti-(anything not further right than Generalissimo Franco) paper by international standards. Popularly known as the Daily Flail, for their obsession with reintroducing whipping for school kids and adults.
information act request [telegraph.co.uk]
And the most fascist national paper in England. The "Torygraph", as it is popularly known, from an old Irish word for "bandit".
You certainly manage to find the small sectors of UK opinion that would support your prejudices. Perhaps you'd also like to peruse a UK political party's website too, so you can balance your opinions?
for the release of their own internal review of their Middle East coverage; most suspect because it implies that they have been highly biased against Israel.
"highly biased" meaning, I assume, "not swallowing the corporate propoganda of the Israeli government hook, line and sinker". Yep, right, got your level. Part of the problem, not part of the solution.
How the hell do you "heckle" a movie? What? The movie gets flustered somehow? Is that the goal?
The goal is for your heckle to reach up into the projectionist's booth and tickle them just as they're loading the next reel, causing a loud clang, a spinning sound, the "shhhssshhhhhssshhhsshhh" of much unwinding celluloid and a quiet "Oh shit."
Watching movies on DVD just loses a certain something.
(BTW, until the recent chopped-up showing of the movies on satellite in Britain, I'd only ever seen Star Wars 1 (which is episode 4), in the movies, on it's original release. I wasn't particularly impressed then, and I'm still not particularly impressed. An important question is - do I put the recordings onto disc for the wife and daughter, or not bother. Probably "not bother" will be the answer.
A propos other people's salacious comments - the wife just thought they were "silly boys bang-bang movies". Less sexy than Jimmy Bond.)
Why, as in why did the editors think this was worthy of condemning electrons to potential-drop hell? And as in why did the KFC marketing 'droids think that this would do something worthwhile for their corporate masters. When did I last subject myself to a KFC? Probably not in the last decade or two. Do I feel motivated to rush out and partake of small bits of bony chicken drenched in greasy batter? Uh, no.
Maybe finally we can put a stake through the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Flash-only sites.
Don't forget to cut the head off and stuff the mouth with whole bulbs of garlic too. Can't be too careful. And burn the bones to ashes. Melt the ashes to glass. Send the glass to the Vatican's factory for "Everlasting" vials of holy water..........
a book published in 1985 and long-since out of print.
Not particularly relevant. I've got an application in at the moment to be a contestant in next years "Mastermind" (BBC program, look it up if you need to) where one of my "specialist subjects" will rely considerably on 4 or 5 books that have been out of print since the early 1920s. Doesn't change the fact that it's a perfectly reasonable "specialist subject", perfectly researchable, perfectly questionable ("quizzable"? "examinable"!).
because there was only ONE book ever published on the subject
Ah, now that is much more significant. But still not in itself damning. There probably aren't that many books devoted solely to the specialist subject I'm thinking of either, but it'll be covered by chapters or even whole sections in more wide-scoped books around that intellectual arena.
Not that I know much about psychology, but surely the appropriate course of action is not "speedy" deletion, but for someone who does know their psychology to take the article apart and link it up to more conventional articles on psychology, pointing out where it contradicts better established work. Then you potentially get into the old "edit wars" thing, but there are established rules for that sort of thing. And while Wikipedia doesn't particularly want to be the locus of debate, there sure is a lot of it going on.
Lasers are probably our best shot at stopping these missles
Except that defense against nuclear missiles upsets the nuclear balance of power. I wouldn't trust any nuke-armed contry with such an advantage.
Reluctant though I am to suggest that Dubya is anything other than a thoroughly corrupt dribbling retard of a sock-puppet, in this case the people who fist him and write his speeches do seem to have grasped the shocking, terrible, evil fact that... - even IF one created an ( extremely effective && almost fail-safe && affordable && maintainable ) laser system for shooting down incoming nuclear missiles, THEN - it wouldn't do much to protect the Motherland (sorry, that's Russia; try "Fatherland" , nope - Germany. What is it that the Merkins call the "patria" in their "Dulche et decorum est, pro patria mori" ?) against a non-missile bomb. For example, a 2-ton (mass, not yield) nuke in the hold of a boat smuggling another 3 tons of cocaine and Heroin® into the harbour of a major city ; set up the triggering so that it blows 5 minutes after the air pressure inside the container is released, and label it "Fresh figs - product of Israel - keep refrigerated.", just to stir up more trouble.
Missile defense systems, if they work, are effective ways of encouraging people to deliver unwelcome equipment using non-missile techniques.
Newsflash, the Germans put up a wall between east and west parts of an originally united country. Mexico is not and never was part of the U.S.A.
To make your simile more apt, you should remember that while the Berlin Wall and the German sections of the "Iron Curtain" were physically built (mostly) by Germans, the orders came from the occupying powers in a country which didn't even have a border with either Sector of Germany. Logically therefore, the orders for the construction of the "Fajita Curtain" are coming from either Nunavut or Guatemala, one or other of which has recently invaded and controlled the US.
The construction of the Berlin Wall parallels (somewhat loosely) the construction of the Israeli wall for which I can't think of a thoroughly insulting name (yet). The construction of the "Fajita Curtain" probably more closely resembles the construction of the "Great Wall of China". Come to think of it, both were constructed piecemeal over several periods, under different administrations, so there's another similarity. And, of course, the "Great Wall of China" never kept out an invasion - the invaders either went round it, or bribed the gate guards. Hey, this is turning out to be a parallel with predictive powers!
Perfectly reasonable rant against multinationals in gereral, but there are some oddities in your viewpoint :
when all you want is normal freedom to shop anywhere the internet reaches.
What is this "normal freedom"? Did it exist when the bulk of the laws (in your country) concerning cartel pricing schemes etc were produced? Of course not. The inadequacy or inappropriateness of the laws in your country are mostly a reflection of the massive changes over the last couple of decades in customer's ability to move their purchasing around. That the companies use the legal environment they inhabit to the maximum they can to increase their profits is what they (as companies and as senior managers) exist for. If you were a shareholder (or your pension fund was a shareholder, which is quite likely) you'd be baying for the blood of corporate executives who didn't go to the limits of the law to maximise your shareholding's profits or dividends. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
By all means campaign for changes in the relevant legislation ; but expect that the corporations will then devote time and effort to maximising their profits under your revised legal system. And be very careful of the Law Of Unintended Consequences.
Sony should have been broken up (that division) and whomever signed off on that inclusion of the rootkit (no matter how many pointy headed "bosses" that was, all of them up the food chain) should have gone to jail, but instad, a little toy fine. Blatant example of the laws and "justice" departments being paid off stooges for the elite globalist corporate fascists.
I have a tiny sneaking suspiscion that you'd either find a credible (as in, "unable to disprove on the balance of probabilities", let alone "beyond reasonable doubt") evidence set that either showed the high-heidjuns (PHBs) to have never signed of on an apparently insignificant technical decision over which DRM to deploy, or you'd find that the decision (of which DRM to use) had been delegated to a division of Sony operating under the laws of a country where such rootkits would not actually be illegal. Which would absolve the high-heidjuns of personal responsibility, since they delegated the job to someone who thought the solution chosen was legal.
It's those pesky teams of corporate lawyers again, nastily making sure that what they do is actually legal. As for whether it's moral or not - see previous discussion of profit margins.
Now, whether Sony as a business actually suffers at the court of Profit Margins is up to you to determine. Maybe enough people would refuse to buy Sony music again that the high-heidjuns in question do get the sack. Maybe not. That's for millions of people to decide. Personally, I'd not buy Sony musinc on this basis, but since I don't buy (or steal) music in any case, that's hardly going to sodomise Sony's bottom line, is it?
The simplest test to perform is write your own name in (don't use something stupid like donald duck,. that WILL get your entire ballot tossed) for some position that has a pol running unopposed, see if your "vote" shows up in the final detailed tallies.
Interesting. Creative. Only applies to American elections (unless there's someone else who uses a similar multi-ballot-at-once system, which I don't think there is), but it's a good way to "use the system" against itself. I'll have to keep my eyes open to that possibility if it ever arises in a political system I find myself in.
Does that mean that you'll be along to the AberLUG meeting on Sunday? I'm almost certain to still be offshore.... [reviews logging program]. Delete "almost".
I guess I can't complain too much about Americans not knowing what's going on in the UK if I didn't realise there was still a major problem over in NI
Compared to fifteen years ago, or even 10 years ago, it's a lot quieter. there are still plenty of people around with guns and bad attitudes, but they've mostly lost their political posturing and are pretty exposed for the criminals they are. There's also a small proportion of psychopaths too. But it does seem to be calming down. The related religious bigotry over here in sunny <G> Scotland seems to be slowly declining too. There's even moves afoot to try to increase the amount of cross-(social &/or religious)-border schooling, which is recognised as a death-knell for professional bigotry on both sides. Grounds for optimism, but not grounds for complacency.
Clearly this was done by North Korean agents. We'll be invading in fifteen minutes.
Why? They don't have any oil!
Wrong. To the west of DPR Korea there is appreciable proved and developed oil in China's Bohai Sea, and there is good evidence for the plays to continue to the east into Korean waters (e.g. the Peng Lai prospect). The East Sea, up to and into Japanese waters is also considered prospective, and considering the Japanese thirst for oil, surprisingly under-explored. Well, considering the relations between the two states, not surprising.
Investigate the near friends and family. Statistically they're the most likely people to be grabbing kids for nefarious activities. Most children who get hurt, get hurt by people close to them - parents, uncles and aunts, sometimes out to grandparents and cousins. Rarely strangers.
Yeah, unlikely situation, but something worth thinking about,
Oh, I do hope that contradiction in terms is used for rhetorical effect. But somehow, I doubt that it is.
Northern Ireland? What other parts of the UK have this 'internal war',
Wasn't exactly hard to work it out, was it? "Internal war" seemed more appropriate than "civil war" because the divisions were (are, still) between people on the basis of their family history and (to a lesser degree) religious opinions, rather than political affiliation, as in the case of the civil war of the 1600s. Unlike the 1600s, the conflict in Ireland in general, and Northern Ireland in particular, has had very little of the "brother against brother" conflicts. Most often it's been neighbour against neighbour, or one end of the street against the other end of the street. The relativly small number of cross-(social)-border friendships is still a marker of concern, but as differences between the communities are (slowly) eroding, there is some hope of the violence completely dieing away within a couple of generations more. Unlike the Middle East. No sign of rapprochement between the various communities there, just more of the oh-so-successful "peace" walls.
i think they'll get this worked out the day after the peace process is succesful in the middle east -- which is highly rumored to coincide with the release of duke nukem forever.
Oh, I wouldn't be so pessimistic. I used to be quite pessimistic about getting the UK's internal war solved, particularly after it had been going on for 15 odd years, but for the last 20 years since then, that war has been dieing away as people have found something resembling hope. And as people on both sides of the civil war have found that they've something to lose by continuing the war, and something to gain by stopping the war. Another couple of decades and the UK may have grounds to claim that that internal war is effectively over. Say, 35 years after the first glimmerings of hope appeared. On that basis, with the continuing downward spirals in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq... we might hope for something resembling peace in the Middle East somewhere around 50 years from now. Unless someone does something silly like propping up the Saudi government when it's on the verge of crumbling into all-out civil war. Or invading another country in the region. Surely Duke Nukem Forever will be released in less than 50 years?
the charges (if any are filed) will be "conspiracy to knowingly present a false and fictitious claim upon or against the United States, or any department or agency thereof in violation of USC 18 (secs. 2, 371, 1036, 1343, 2318) and USC 49 (secs. 46314 and 46316) and 49 CFR (secs. 1540.103 and 1540.105)" (edited for brevity).
I may be missing something, but I thought that the boarding-pass generator was targetted against the paperwork of [YetAnother] private company, an airline. Not against the United States as a country, or it's government or an agency or department thereof. Or has the US government privatised the airline industry overnight, and the rest of the world haven't cared?
I suppose it's possible that all boarding passes in the US are issued by some centralised authority, on pre-printed forms. A week in advance of the flight they refer to. Or maybe not.
Next time I'll be sure to limit my cheap "nobody remembers the 1970s" jokes
There are "nobody remembers the 1970s" jokes? Wow, how derivative. I hope your stock were really, really cheap, so that the financial investment you made in them doesn't hurt your pension too badly when you flush them down the pan.
I remember when you could make the full-form "1960s" joke : "No one who claims to remember the 1960s took enough drugs at the time." The joke got a bit politically incorrect when the taxman started to catch up with some of those drugged up people and force them back on the road to pay their back taxes. Can't have people making fun of such upright citizen taxpayers.
Slashdot Mirror
They're not free; they incur a charge of 2.5 to 5% per transaction (varies by CC company and transaction value). Check out the all too-common signs in small shops warning you that CC/DC transactions (sometimes below a certain value) will incur those charges on the bill, not swallowed by the trader.
That makes "magic plastic" a suitable solution for rich blind people.
Now, I know that you're talking about college students, and I suspect that you actually mean rich college students (since most countries prevent the poor from getting as good an education as the rich, by one means or several), but the article in question was about blind people, not some sub-set of "people" discriminated in favour of by measurement of wallet thickness.
Anyway, must go to work. Stopping off at the corner shop for a packet of cigarette papers (22p) and a newspaper (35p), which I'll pay for with cash, because the corner shop doesn't accept credit card payments of less than £10. Then I'll get on the bus (£3 for a day ticket), which doesn't have a credit card reader. If I used the bus every day, a £50 monthly ticket might be worthwhile, but with an average £30 monthly bus bill (for which I need receipts anyway) it isn't worthwhile.
What sedimentological structures should I expect to see?
Lets see - firstly, by definition I'm talking about a depositional environment, not an erosional one, so I'm talking about a clastic deposit. (Could one survive long enough to get into a carbonate- or evaporite-depositing environment? Pretty dubious, but hard to say it's theoretically impossible.) We'd get large scale disruption of bedding, up to a considerable number of metres into the bed deposit. Would the introduced mass survive in place? No, it could move off again, or melt in situ. As it melted, the introduced portion would have relative insulation from the (relatively) warm water, so it'd remain solid while the parts of the berg in free water would melt faster. But the berg would be pulled up and out of the sediment by bouyancy (possibly pumped tidally), so we'd see some sort of suction structures distorting the already-distorted bedding. Maybe doubled-over folding? The final tear-away scar would have a different structure of slumping into an open scar, perhaps combined with fluidisation.
Hmmm, I'll have to keep my eyes peeled for that sort of thing if I'm ever looking into an excavated marine boulder clay again. Not something I'm likely to see in core.
Sorry, geologist thinking out loud. Nothing to see here. Move along now.
Now what are those fossils in the new Yusuf Islam ("Cat Stevens") video? Can't get a good look - Spriggina? Or anonymous ammonites?
I think the operative word in the GP post was "AND". But nonetheless, if you want your wisdom teeth pulled without proper anaesthetic, I can give you the address of a UK dentist who can do it for you. He actually gives you just enough to get you asleep and quiet before he climbs on and starts pulling ; then it's a lottery how many he gets out before you punch his lights out. He got 3 of mine, and I had to go back a month later for #4.
That's the efficiency of the NHS for you. Save a penny on the gases, spend a hundred quid on a second full surgery session.
One way of keeping your news balanced is to keep a chip on every shoulder - I also read the Torygraph regularly. Normally I pinch the Boss's copy in preference to paying for the reprehensible rag.
Someone else pointed out that the Torygraph's fear and loathing of the Beeb has declined since Conrad Black sold up and was taken to court ; may be true - I don't read it often enough to really notice.
Anyway, to the points at hand - the BBC is not particularly "anti-Israel" as the Flail and Torygraph claim ; they're no more "anti-Israel" than many other news sources who don't fawn helplessly to the grandchildren of a much sinned-against population, who have become terrible sinners themselves. That's the big irony of the entire Palestinian-Israeli situation. If it weren't such a tragedy, it'd be a comedy. Of errors.
Leaked meeting? Prevent report? OIC, you've obviously mistaken me for someone who gives a fuck what's claimed in the Torygraph. And in any case, if the Beeb are being alleged to have an anti-Israeli bias, then they're doing a peculiarly bad job of it with so many reports of the effects of terrorist attacks in Israel, on both sides of the walls, and in all communities. Compared to what I see in the rest of the Press, the Beeb are pretty even-handed. What lawyers for another newspaper say doesn't really intrerest me - I'll take it as meaning that employing lawyers has become cheaper than employing investigative journalists. Or possibly, the Torygraph can't get decent investigative journalists to work for them.
I'll have to admit that the Torygraph does have a halfway decent crossword.
my emphasis Oh, I get it. You're one of these "observational comedians". Ha. Ha. Don't give up the day job. Then again, don't go around expecting other people to have as restricted a view of the world as you have.
It's posible that my economics are flawed ; I take my economics from my line manager, who's degree is in "Economics with Geology", whereas I did "Geology and Mineralogy" (different universities, BTW; possibly different countries; if I cared, I'd find out). That may be why he's the poor schmuck stuck facing the same computer in the same office every day, while I get to travel the world and have helicopter engines fail on me over strange seas (or wade through shark-infested water when crew-changing by boat. At night.)
As I understand it, America on average is buying goods from China and paying with promissory notes against dollars. Which of course would be useless for China to buy oil with from major producers who trade their oil in Euros. Which is where it gets really murky :
Since the Boss cares more about global economic forces than I do, I tune out around this point. Next time I meet my college friend 'Stef' who was last heard of drilling in a flak jacket near Mosul, I'll see what he thinks of putting his life on the line for a foreign currency. I'll ask his wife and children too - see what they think of the propsect of losing husband/ father to support a foreign government's economic woes.
Gasoline? As in, a refined mixture of C-7, C-8, C-9, C-10 branched and unbranched hydrocarbons with various oxygenated additives (ethyl alcohol, ethers, esters), detergents, dyes and other hoojum? It's possible that it'll be stable in the ground for a while, but has anyone ever done the experiment? I think not.
Perhaps you're under the misapprehension that what comes out of an oil well is gasoline? It's not - it's "crude oil", or "petroleum", which is a considerably more complex mixture. Which itself isn't particularly stable - there are bacteria that'll eat it, given a supply of water and a terminal electron acceptor such as sulphate ion.
Remember the spike in gasoline prices in some countries over the last year? That was aparrently mostly due to a combination of market nerves and the damage to a significant part of refinery capacity in the US in hurricanes (several) and some industrial accidents. Oil supply wasn't really a problem, it was mostly the refinery problems.
Speaking as someone who deploys those newer and better technologies (I specialise in extended reach and horizontal drilling, much of which uses advanced sand management, expandable screening and/ or electrical submersible pumps, drilled with minimally invasive drilling fluids, tight control of equivalent circulating density and high-precision geological optimisation of well placement), what restricts the impact of those "newer and better technologies" are 2-fold:
- many reservoirs have poor to crap permeability characteristics, which reduces maximum (let alone optimum) flow rates, and severely impacts the economics of projects. That's inherent to the rock that the oil is in, and is only improved as the square root (approximately) of the pressure differential that you put across the reservior. At best.
- most new discoveries are small. A couple of hundred million barrels in place, maybe 40~60 million produceable. That's 5 to 8 days of consumption at todays rates. Which means that you can't justify the cost of pipelines and infrastructure to produce the stuff.
Look at, if you care, the "Last Great Hope" oil province of the late 1990's - the Falklands province. Review it's history - a significant war fought over it's control delayed exploration drilling for a decade and a half. There's a basin, source rocks (second best in the world), and reservoirs of moderate quality; tectonics and timing of thermal events within the tectonics are good for producing accumulations, and indeed accumulations have been found. But they're not big enough to justify building the necessary platform-based infrastructure, and the distance to shore is too long to flow the oil in a pipeline (we're back to the back-pressure as anything flows ; it all adds up from the valve at the surface separator all the way back through the pipes to the reservoir-completion interface). Net result - a "stranded" oil province. OK - that's one province I've had a professional interest in. Oddly enough, that's a common set of problems. Same goes for the potential stuff in the Arctic outside Alaska : no route to market, and building the necessary railway lines and pipelines across Siberian tundra is a 20-year project (don't suggest using the - - (sorry for my spelling, my atrocious Russian is getting rusty) line - it's stuffed to capacity already (as anyone who's used it would know) and it doesn't get within 2Mm of the necessary areas.) with a very uncertain prospect of success at the end.
Some of the biggest components of the "anticipated reserves" part of the future oil extrapolations are based on finding whole provinces with similar productivity to their geological counterparts elsewhere in the world. But there is no (zero, nil, zilch) well control on a lot of these anticipations. It's an easy mistake to make - I tried to get involved in the Falklands drilling campaign (first job application I'd written for 4 years), on that basis. Thought there was a big potential. Busted after the second well (of 6 in the campaign). East Greenland is "booked" as a huge gas province, extrapolating from the geological and thermal history of the Norwegian coast; zero well control. Laptev sea is "booked" as a light oil and gas province; one well and only 14000km of seismic. East Siberian-Chukchi Seas similarly booked; zero wells and 7000km. Sea of Okhotsk, several pinprick wells with no discoveries on the best prospects from the very limited seismic. Sea of Japan I haven't received data on, yet; some political difficulties over exploration. Sea of Bohai has proven prospects, but similar political difficulties.
You can look at models of reserves projected, but you've got to read the definitions of "proven", "likely" etc that go for the different classes of "reserve". As Shell discovered publicly a couple of years ago (and everyone else knew privately), a reserve isn't a reserve until it's been drilled, tested and produced. And e
I have a suspiscion that the East Coast you refer to in your blog title doesn't refer to the area between Dungeness and Flamburgh Head. (Look them up in an atlas.)
Ah, the second most fascist national paper in England. And a remarkably anti-(anything not further right than Generalissimo Franco) paper by international standards. Popularly known as the Daily Flail, for their obsession with reintroducing whipping for school kids and adults.
And the most fascist national paper in England. The "Torygraph", as it is popularly known, from an old Irish word for "bandit".
You certainly manage to find the small sectors of UK opinion that would support your prejudices. Perhaps you'd also like to peruse a UK political party's website too, so you can balance your opinions?
"highly biased" meaning, I assume, "not swallowing the corporate propoganda of the Israeli government hook, line and sinker". Yep, right, got your level. Part of the problem, not part of the solution.
The goal is for your heckle to reach up into the projectionist's booth and tickle them just as they're loading the next reel, causing a loud clang, a spinning sound, the "shhhssshhhhhssshhhsshhh" of much unwinding celluloid and a quiet "Oh shit."
Watching movies on DVD just loses a certain something.
(BTW, until the recent chopped-up showing of the movies on satellite in Britain, I'd only ever seen Star Wars 1 (which is episode 4), in the movies, on it's original release. I wasn't particularly impressed then, and I'm still not particularly impressed. An important question is - do I put the recordings onto disc for the wife and daughter, or not bother. Probably "not bother" will be the answer.
A propos other people's salacious comments - the wife just thought they were "silly boys bang-bang movies". Less sexy than Jimmy Bond.)
Why, as in why did the editors think this was worthy of condemning electrons to potential-drop hell? And as in why did the KFC marketing 'droids think that this would do something worthwhile for their corporate masters.
When did I last subject myself to a KFC? Probably not in the last decade or two. Do I feel motivated to rush out and partake of small bits of bony chicken drenched in greasy batter? Uh, no.
Don't forget to cut the head off and stuff the mouth with whole bulbs of garlic too. Can't be too careful.
And burn the bones to ashes.
Melt the ashes to glass.
Send the glass to the Vatican's factory for "Everlasting" vials of holy water.
Not particularly relevant.
I've got an application in at the moment to be a contestant in next years "Mastermind" (BBC program, look it up if you need to) where one of my "specialist subjects" will rely considerably on 4 or 5 books that have been out of print since the early 1920s. Doesn't change the fact that it's a perfectly reasonable "specialist subject", perfectly researchable, perfectly questionable ("quizzable"? "examinable"!).
Ah, now that is much more significant. But still not in itself damning. There probably aren't that many books devoted solely to the specialist subject I'm thinking of either, but it'll be covered by chapters or even whole sections in more wide-scoped books around that intellectual arena.
Not that I know much about psychology, but surely the appropriate course of action is not "speedy" deletion, but for someone who does know their psychology to take the article apart and link it up to more conventional articles on psychology, pointing out where it contradicts better established work. Then you potentially get into the old "edit wars" thing, but there are established rules for that sort of thing. And while Wikipedia doesn't particularly want to be the locus of debate, there sure is a lot of it going on.
Reluctant though I am to suggest that Dubya is anything other than a thoroughly corrupt dribbling retard of a sock-puppet, in this case the people who fist him and write his speeches do seem to have grasped the shocking, terrible, evil fact that
- even IF one created an ( extremely effective && almost fail-safe && affordable && maintainable ) laser system for shooting down incoming nuclear missiles, THEN
- it wouldn't do much to protect the Motherland (sorry, that's Russia; try "Fatherland" , nope - Germany. What is it that the Merkins call the "patria" in their "Dulche et decorum est, pro patria mori" ?) against a non-missile bomb. For example, a 2-ton (mass, not yield) nuke in the hold of a boat smuggling another 3 tons of cocaine and Heroin® into the harbour of a major city ; set up the triggering so that it blows 5 minutes after the air pressure inside the container is released, and label it "Fresh figs - product of Israel - keep refrigerated.", just to stir up more trouble.
Missile defense systems, if they work, are effective ways of encouraging people to deliver unwelcome equipment using non-missile techniques.
To make your simile more apt, you should remember that while the Berlin Wall and the German sections of the "Iron Curtain" were physically built (mostly) by Germans, the orders came from the occupying powers in a country which didn't even have a border with either Sector of Germany. Logically therefore, the orders for the construction of the "Fajita Curtain" are coming from either Nunavut or Guatemala, one or other of which has recently invaded and controlled the US.
The construction of the Berlin Wall parallels (somewhat loosely) the construction of the Israeli wall for which I can't think of a thoroughly insulting name (yet). The construction of the "Fajita Curtain" probably more closely resembles the construction of the "Great Wall of China". Come to think of it, both were constructed piecemeal over several periods, under different administrations, so there's another similarity. And, of course, the "Great Wall of China" never kept out an invasion - the invaders either went round it, or bribed the gate guards. Hey, this is turning out to be a parallel with predictive powers!
What is this "normal freedom"? Did it exist when the bulk of the laws (in your country) concerning cartel pricing schemes etc were produced? Of course not. The inadequacy or inappropriateness of the laws in your country are mostly a reflection of the massive changes over the last couple of decades in customer's ability to move their purchasing around. That the companies use the legal environment they inhabit to the maximum they can to increase their profits is what they (as companies and as senior managers) exist for. If you were a shareholder (or your pension fund was a shareholder, which is quite likely) you'd be baying for the blood of corporate executives who didn't go to the limits of the law to maximise your shareholding's profits or dividends. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
By all means campaign for changes in the relevant legislation ; but expect that the corporations will then devote time and effort to maximising their profits under your revised legal system. And be very careful of the Law Of Unintended Consequences.
I have a tiny sneaking suspiscion that you'd either find a credible (as in, "unable to disprove on the balance of probabilities", let alone "beyond reasonable doubt") evidence set that either showed the high-heidjuns (PHBs) to have never signed of on an apparently insignificant technical decision over which DRM to deploy, or you'd find that the decision (of which DRM to use) had been delegated to a division of Sony operating under the laws of a country where such rootkits would not actually be illegal. Which would absolve the high-heidjuns of personal responsibility, since they delegated the job to someone who thought the solution chosen was legal.
It's those pesky teams of corporate lawyers again, nastily making sure that what they do is actually legal. As for whether it's moral or not - see previous discussion of profit margins.
Now, whether Sony as a business actually suffers at the court of Profit Margins is up to you to determine. Maybe enough people would refuse to buy Sony music again that the high-heidjuns in question do get the sack. Maybe not. That's for millions of people to decide. Personally, I'd not buy Sony musinc on this basis, but since I don't buy (or steal) music in any case, that's hardly going to sodomise Sony's bottom line, is it?
Interesting. Creative. Only applies to American elections (unless there's someone else who uses a similar multi-ballot-at-once system, which I don't think there is), but it's a good way to "use the system" against itself. I'll have to keep my eyes open to that possibility if it ever arises in a political system I find myself in.
Aww bugger, forgot the closing /blockquote tags.
Compared to fifteen years ago, or even 10 years ago, it's a lot quieter. there are still plenty of people around with guns and bad attitudes, but they've mostly lost their political posturing and are pretty exposed for the criminals they are. There's also a small proportion of psychopaths too. But it does seem to be calming down. The related religious bigotry over here in sunny <G> Scotland seems to be slowly declining too. There's even moves afoot to try to increase the amount of cross-(social &/or religious)-border schooling, which is recognised as a death-knell for professional bigotry on both sides. Grounds for optimism, but not grounds for complacency.
Wrong.
To the west of DPR Korea there is appreciable proved and developed oil in China's Bohai Sea, and there is good evidence for the plays to continue to the east into Korean waters (e.g. the Peng Lai prospect).
The East Sea, up to and into Japanese waters is also considered prospective, and considering the Japanese thirst for oil, surprisingly under-explored. Well, considering the relations between the two states, not surprising.
Investigate the near friends and family. Statistically they're the most likely people to be grabbing kids for nefarious activities. Most children who get hurt, get hurt by people close to them - parents, uncles and aunts, sometimes out to grandparents and cousins. Rarely strangers.
Oh, I do hope that contradiction in terms is used for rhetorical effect. But somehow, I doubt that it is.
Wasn't exactly hard to work it out, was it?
"Internal war" seemed more appropriate than "civil war" because the divisions were (are, still) between people on the basis of their family history and (to a lesser degree) religious opinions, rather than political affiliation, as in the case of the civil war of the 1600s. Unlike the 1600s, the conflict in Ireland in general, and Northern Ireland in particular, has had very little of the "brother against brother" conflicts. Most often it's been neighbour against neighbour, or one end of the street against the other end of the street. The relativly small number of cross-(social)-border friendships is still a marker of concern, but as differences between the communities are (slowly) eroding, there is some hope of the violence completely dieing away within a couple of generations more.
Unlike the Middle East. No sign of rapprochement between the various communities there, just more of the oh-so-successful "peace" walls.
Oh, I wouldn't be so pessimistic. I used to be quite pessimistic about getting the UK's internal war solved, particularly after it had been going on for 15 odd years, but for the last 20 years since then, that war has been dieing away as people have found something resembling hope. And as people on both sides of the civil war have found that they've something to lose by continuing the war, and something to gain by stopping the war. Another couple of decades and the UK may have grounds to claim that that internal war is effectively over. Say, 35 years after the first glimmerings of hope appeared.
On that basis, with the continuing downward spirals in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq
Surely Duke Nukem Forever will be released in less than 50 years?
I may be missing something, but I thought that the boarding-pass generator was targetted against the paperwork of [YetAnother] private company, an airline. Not against the United States as a country, or it's government or an agency or department thereof. Or has the US government privatised the airline industry overnight, and the rest of the world haven't cared?
I suppose it's possible that all boarding passes in the US are issued by some centralised authority, on pre-printed forms. A week in advance of the flight they refer to. Or maybe not.
There are "nobody remembers the 1970s" jokes? Wow, how derivative. I hope your stock were really, really cheap, so that the financial investment you made in them doesn't hurt your pension too badly when you flush them down the pan.
I remember when you could make the full-form "1960s" joke : "No one who claims to remember the 1960s took enough drugs at the time." The joke got a bit politically incorrect when the taxman started to catch up with some of those drugged up people and force them back on the road to pay their back taxes. Can't have people making fun of such upright citizen taxpayers.