They really need to get their heads out of the sand.
They really needed to get their heads out of the sand when this was first being raised as a problem in the late 1970s (I was there ; I was bringing it to people's attention ; people didn't want to know). So they needed to get the drug proposals into the chemistry lab in the late 1980s, and into the regulatory and testing pipeline in the late 1990s for delivery in the current period.
It isn't going to be helpful to your dad to know that governments and people were warned of this problem in good time, but chose to ignore it. But we did try to raise the alarm.
Also, our antibiotics are either exclusively or mostly of natural origin,
The families (base molecules) of antibiotics are of natural origin, but drug companies do do a lot of work on modifying base molecules to do things like reducing side effects, changing solubility (injection antibiotic, or oral), trying to make several variants which will affect different bacterial families. While there are reason to complain about "Big Pharma", their chemistry and drug-development departments do a lot of work under the surface. Including, particularly, finding versions of base molecules which can be made in good yield at as low a cost as possible. So while the base molecular structures come from natural sources (I think that is still exclusively true), what finally goes into the tablets (syringes, sprays) is a lot different from any natural product.
No, 75 years of bacterial evolution happened in 75 years. That's probably around 1e6 generations
That would be ~ 2400 seconds/ generation or 40 minutes. About half of the maximum generation time recorded for any bacterium. But most bacteria would have spent most of their lives in sub-optimal conditions - the Staphylococcus family are, for example, typically soil bacteria, which also like to ive on nice warm mammalian skin, and occasionally infect wounds with devastating consequences. It's hard to estimate the number of generations actually involved, but even at 1/month, that would still be around 300 times more generations of humans in the same time period. Your point stands, but your numbers may be a bit over-enthusiastic.
You don't need large generation counts. Pretty much all breeds of dogs, cattle, sheep (...) only date back to the Middle Ages, for some 400-700 years of precision breeding over several hundred generations. And much of the "progress" in that breeding really took place this side of "Farmer George" (George 3) in the 1750s who made "scientific farming" into a bit of a snobbish entertainment.
does average commuter need such engine horsepower?
They don't. The last car purchase where I even looked at the horsepower figures, i was a touch over half the horsepower cited as median a decade ago, and it was the most powerful engine I've owned, by about 30%, while reducing the cylinder count by one and the (urban cycle) fuel consumption by about 30% on my previous car. You know what, it works fine.
But then, I don't have fears about the size of my hands, my penis, or my attractiveness to the opposite sex. So I don't need a big engine to make up for my fears in those directions.
The first suicide bombing was by Hezbollah (Shia) against the US army Barracks in Lebanon.
Fuck no. There were hundreds of them in the Malvinas, Ulster, Oman, Suez, Malaysia, Korean and Second wars for certain, but we just called them "heroic deaths", not "suicide bombing".
So do you think, roads, power, sewage, water etc should all be in private hands with access to them charged at whatever rate the owner sets?
Hmm, we tried that over here in Britain with toll-pike roads, though the charges were regulated. Later on, with these things called canals. The toll-pike roads were pretty much taken in to public ownership by the 1820s, the canals in pieces in the 1870s-90s. That's about the time that cities started investing big-style in building sewers and water supply systems. They're still, effectively, publicly owned (with a Thatcherite surface gloss of privatisation which fools no one).
This from a country that brought you Adam Smith and the "Dismal Science" that is economics. I think you were having some sort of revolution at the time, so might not have been paying attention.
Not "insoluble", but "unsolved".
With the arguable exception of Finland, no country I'm aware of has implemented a deliberately designed long-term strategy for handling and storing long-half-life high level waste. NIMBYism has shot down every other half-way serious attempt at building a long-term solution, from Yucca Mountain to Drigg.
In August 2016, in a remote corner of Siberian tundra called the Yamal Peninsula
(My emphasis.)
It's not particularly remote. The Yamal peninsula is just NE of the northern end of the Ural mountains, which are traditionally taken as the eastern border of Europe. And with the region's warming over the last few (and next many) decades, it's goign to get less remote.
It is not clear why their actions were so ineffective.
Here's a guess: germ warfare is actually more difficult than people who haven't tried to do it would guess. There's a very good reason that British scientists in WW2 had to carry out experiments to learn how to successfully weaponise anthrax.
the 1918 flu (the one that killed a huge percentage of the earth's population) in order to get samples of the virus to study.
Ummm, 20 to 30 million (I forget the exact numbers) with a global population of a bit more than a billion. A couple of percent. It may have been the biggest killer in recent history - possibly since the Black Death - but "huge" is probably an overstatement.
I think you might be conflating two stories. Around 2000 an expedition in search of the lost "Franklin" expedition to find the North West Passage (Atlantic to Pacific across Northern Canada) Exhumed a couple of bodies of sailors who died in the expedition's first winter - about 1820 IIRC. (the expedition met a whaling boat next spring and sent back copies of it's charts, logs and reports with them, which is how the rest of the world knew about the graves.) They took samples from the bodies, but were looking for evidence of lead poisoning, not bacterial nasties. (Still fully sterile, contained samples. Anthropologists know that they need to protect themselves from the grave contents, as well as protecting the body from their contamination.)
About the same time, over in Svalbard, someone found sealed ampoules of specimens taken by a doctor treating victims of the 1918 flu pandemic. One of these was opened, that flu strain sequenced, and the results published. I think in Nature - I remember reading the paper.
I don't know what became of it since though. In that case though it wasn't burried or unearthed by melting -
Stored in a glass ampoule in a hospital store room and forgotten for decades. It's probably in a lab somewhere now - hopefully a high-security lab. But we know that one, and there are antibodies for it "on the shelf". The 1918 strain isn't a big threat now - we know how to manage it. (Not that it was ever an existential threat to the species - a couple of percent death toll only, see above.)
they just became accessible again thanks to more advanced modern technologies for traversing the frozen wastes.
No new technologies - just detailed records-examining, and a decision taken to examine the question. Then some funding.
What about drill collars? They are much heavier than 10 pipes (300 feet of pipe)...
Typo. I should have typed "3000 ft." But it is that long since I saw (or cared much) about the practice that my memory may be fading.
Yes, weight of pipe in the string is the critical point. (Or it was when you had drillers who were allowed to do such things. Decades ago, or 5 years in Korea.) But by the time you get into the collars there isn't enough weight to the string to keep it locked in the slips.
Why isn't it allowed any more? Simple - if the pipe spins in the slips, then the dies leave grooves in the neck of the pipe, just below the tool joint. And that has been traced as the root cause of nearly half of side-wall washouts. I've had to write that report myself - microscopic photographs of the torn-off end of pipe after you've pulled he string, with the wash clearly originating in a band of circumferential die-marks. Make the photographs, write the report, and fax it (email, more recently) off to the client office onshore - typically before the drill crew have finished making up the overshot assembly. (Which coincidentally means the on-shift driller and toolpusher are too busy to put a lean on me to cover up the evidence. And of course, once the photos have gone in, there's no point in "accidentally" losing the torn ends of the pipe before shipping them back to shore.
You'll have gathered that I'm hired by oil companies, not drilling companies. Though I've covered enough driller's ass over the years. Like providing records that there was no washout preceding a twist off, just a week before that driller was due to attend his competence exams, where the mantra is "twist-offs are always preceded by a washout".
Another factor to bear in mind is whether the pipe is actually owned by the drilling company, the oil company, or hired from a pipe supply company. Pipe companies for sure don't like their pipe being spun in the slips, and when the pipe comes back to the yard they always inspect every joint for evidence of it. (I used to know a pipe inspector.)
Oh, sorry, you mentioned drill collars. Didn't your drill floor practice require use of a safety clamp ("dog collar" in North Sea English parlance ; I never did figure out what the Korean, Azeri or Russian equivalent was) on every slick (not externally upset) tool joint.
that driller was crazy. Once, he got caught doing it by the toolpusher who ordered him to quit doing
You can tell why one guy is a toolpusher and the other merely a driller.
I was quite happy about that because if the backup cable tying the tong to the A-leg broke, we would have ended up with a flying tong revolving on the floor and killing everything in its path.
Dangerous places, drill floors. As you 'pusher obviously appreciated.
But, isn't your maintenance and replacement schedule for the backup lines adequate? It was never my business to do the paperwork on that - toolpusher's job - but I've used enough heavy tool store rooms as temporary sample stores to know that all of the lines stored down there go through the same colour coding and inspection and replacement regime as any other loaded equipment. Hell, at least once I've had to shift my stuff out of the store to make room for the inspector to get at the tools in the store.
I've never spun a chain. It was banned a couple of years after I started working the rigs, but by then I'd long since got over the fascination of large powerful machinery to recognise drill floors as dirty, noisy and extremely dangerous places. But the number of drillers and toolpushers you'd see in the old days missing one or two joints from their index or middle fingers was noticeably high. When explaining why the spinning chain was being banned and replaced with a pipe spinner hanging on one of the tugger lines, these people would point at their missing digits and say "I lost that to a spinning chain." Frenchy and Stretch on the Highlander, I'm thinking of you in particular in pre-shift safety briefings.
Einstein never worked a drill floor - did you know? If he'd ever seen a drill crew disappear when a stand of pipe slipped out of the elevators, he'd never have come up with that silly idea that nothing can move faster than light.
Drill floors are nasty dangerous places. Avoid when at all possible. Which for me, is now down to witnessing wireline tool checks, collecting the sidewall cores, and catching conventional core (with breathing apparatus when necessary, and always when cracking the top of the barrel). Oh, and occasionally watching the torque gauge when coming to pick a horizontal casing point.
Not in Britain, Norway, Tanzania, Abu Dhabi, Russia, Korea, Holland or Canada. Or Benin, Gabon or Turkey. Where are you typing?
Oh, I forgot Azerbaijan. And Ireland.
I suppose you would be able to use the entire Asteroid Belt. That would get you around a 0.5% increase in Mars' mass. Or the Galilean satellites of Jupiter for about a 60% mass increase, though you'd have to move them around twice as far and would run a high chance of actually completely disrupting Mars in the process of delivery.
I agree that Mars is a snare and a delusion. Just live inside asteroids and put up with the fact that you have no option but to maintain your environment.
I had a crazy driller once. Instead of using 2 tongs to break the joint between pipes while pulling out, he'd only use one combined with the torque of the rotary table. God, we broke all records with regards to efficiently pulling out.
Breaking out with the rotary motor only works if you've got more than about 300ft of pipe in the hole. Above that, you'll spin the slips on the pipe or on the bushing - neither of which is good for the pipe or the bushing. On the pipe you'll increase the likelihood of washing out or twisting off just below the tool joint. On the bushing - well, you don't want to have to free pipe stuck in a worn bushing.
Sure you'll have high pulling speeds. Until you count the lost holes with full LWD strings in them complete with sources. Break out the pink cement. You don't do that too often before your rig gets run off the field.
The opposite side of the ame coin is that you see far more roughnecks these days who can count to ten with their hands only.
(For those who don't know, the "spinning chain" technique cost an awful lot of people several joints off the tips of their fingers. That's why "iron roughnecks" - machines for torquing up and breaking out pipe connections - were invented.)
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They really needed to get their heads out of the sand when this was first being raised as a problem in the late 1970s (I was there ; I was bringing it to people's attention ; people didn't want to know). So they needed to get the drug proposals into the chemistry lab in the late 1980s, and into the regulatory and testing pipeline in the late 1990s for delivery in the current period.
It isn't going to be helpful to your dad to know that governments and people were warned of this problem in good time, but chose to ignore it. But we did try to raise the alarm.
The families (base molecules) of antibiotics are of natural origin, but drug companies do do a lot of work on modifying base molecules to do things like reducing side effects, changing solubility (injection antibiotic, or oral), trying to make several variants which will affect different bacterial families. While there are reason to complain about "Big Pharma", their chemistry and drug-development departments do a lot of work under the surface. Including, particularly, finding versions of base molecules which can be made in good yield at as low a cost as possible. So while the base molecular structures come from natural sources (I think that is still exclusively true), what finally goes into the tablets (syringes, sprays) is a lot different from any natural product.
That would be ~ 2400 seconds/ generation or 40 minutes. About half of the maximum generation time recorded for any bacterium. But most bacteria would have spent most of their lives in sub-optimal conditions - the Staphylococcus family are, for example, typically soil bacteria, which also like to ive on nice warm mammalian skin, and occasionally infect wounds with devastating consequences. It's hard to estimate the number of generations actually involved, but even at 1/month, that would still be around 300 times more generations of humans in the same time period. Your point stands, but your numbers may be a bit over-enthusiastic.
You don't need large generation counts. Pretty much all breeds of dogs, cattle, sheep (...) only date back to the Middle Ages, for some 400-700 years of precision breeding over several hundred generations. And much of the "progress" in that breeding really took place this side of "Farmer George" (George 3) in the 1750s who made "scientific farming" into a bit of a snobbish entertainment.
They don't. The last car purchase where I even looked at the horsepower figures, i was a touch over half the horsepower cited as median a decade ago, and it was the most powerful engine I've owned, by about 30%, while reducing the cylinder count by one and the (urban cycle) fuel consumption by about 30% on my previous car. You know what, it works fine.
But then, I don't have fears about the size of my hands, my penis, or my attractiveness to the opposite sex. So I don't need a big engine to make up for my fears in those directions.
Don't they teach the sketching of curves, identification of axis crossing and inflexion point, etc as part of basic maths any more?
Fuck no. There were hundreds of them in the Malvinas, Ulster, Oman, Suez, Malaysia, Korean and Second wars for certain, but we just called them "heroic deaths", not "suicide bombing".
Hmm, we tried that over here in Britain with toll-pike roads, though the charges were regulated. Later on, with these things called canals. The toll-pike roads were pretty much taken in to public ownership by the 1820s, the canals in pieces in the 1870s-90s. That's about the time that cities started investing big-style in building sewers and water supply systems. They're still, effectively, publicly owned (with a Thatcherite surface gloss of privatisation which fools no one).
This from a country that brought you Adam Smith and the "Dismal Science" that is economics. I think you were having some sort of revolution at the time, so might not have been paying attention.
[Blush]
... would be an interesting thing to see. From a distance. Several AU would be a good start, I think.
I think you mean "liquid fluoride". A bit of a difference.
Not "insoluble", but "unsolved". With the arguable exception of Finland, no country I'm aware of has implemented a deliberately designed long-term strategy for handling and storing long-half-life high level waste. NIMBYism has shot down every other half-way serious attempt at building a long-term solution, from Yucca Mountain to Drigg.
You've got me wondering what the French do now.
(My emphasis.)
It's not particularly remote. The Yamal peninsula is just NE of the northern end of the Ural mountains, which are traditionally taken as the eastern border of Europe. And with the region's warming over the last few (and next many) decades, it's goign to get less remote.
Here's a guess: germ warfare is actually more difficult than people who haven't tried to do it would guess. There's a very good reason that British scientists in WW2 had to carry out experiments to learn how to successfully weaponise anthrax.
Ummm, 20 to 30 million (I forget the exact numbers) with a global population of a bit more than a billion. A couple of percent. It may have been the biggest killer in recent history - possibly since the Black Death - but "huge" is probably an overstatement.
I think you might be conflating two stories. Around 2000 an expedition in search of the lost "Franklin" expedition to find the North West Passage (Atlantic to Pacific across Northern Canada) Exhumed a couple of bodies of sailors who died in the expedition's first winter - about 1820 IIRC. (the expedition met a whaling boat next spring and sent back copies of it's charts, logs and reports with them, which is how the rest of the world knew about the graves.) They took samples from the bodies, but were looking for evidence of lead poisoning, not bacterial nasties. (Still fully sterile, contained samples. Anthropologists know that they need to protect themselves from the grave contents, as well as protecting the body from their contamination.)
About the same time, over in Svalbard, someone found sealed ampoules of specimens taken by a doctor treating victims of the 1918 flu pandemic. One of these was opened, that flu strain sequenced, and the results published. I think in Nature - I remember reading the paper.
Stored in a glass ampoule in a hospital store room and forgotten for decades. It's probably in a lab somewhere now - hopefully a high-security lab. But we know that one, and there are antibodies for it "on the shelf". The 1918 strain isn't a big threat now - we know how to manage it. (Not that it was ever an existential threat to the species - a couple of percent death toll only, see above.)
No new technologies - just detailed records-examining, and a decision taken to examine the question. Then some funding.
Typo. I should have typed "3000 ft." But it is that long since I saw (or cared much) about the practice that my memory may be fading.
Yes, weight of pipe in the string is the critical point. (Or it was when you had drillers who were allowed to do such things. Decades ago, or 5 years in Korea.) But by the time you get into the collars there isn't enough weight to the string to keep it locked in the slips.
Why isn't it allowed any more? Simple - if the pipe spins in the slips, then the dies leave grooves in the neck of the pipe, just below the tool joint. And that has been traced as the root cause of nearly half of side-wall washouts. I've had to write that report myself - microscopic photographs of the torn-off end of pipe after you've pulled he string, with the wash clearly originating in a band of circumferential die-marks. Make the photographs, write the report, and fax it (email, more recently) off to the client office onshore - typically before the drill crew have finished making up the overshot assembly. (Which coincidentally means the on-shift driller and toolpusher are too busy to put a lean on me to cover up the evidence. And of course, once the photos have gone in, there's no point in "accidentally" losing the torn ends of the pipe before shipping them back to shore.
You'll have gathered that I'm hired by oil companies, not drilling companies. Though I've covered enough driller's ass over the years. Like providing records that there was no washout preceding a twist off, just a week before that driller was due to attend his competence exams, where the mantra is "twist-offs are always preceded by a washout".
Another factor to bear in mind is whether the pipe is actually owned by the drilling company, the oil company, or hired from a pipe supply company. Pipe companies for sure don't like their pipe being spun in the slips, and when the pipe comes back to the yard they always inspect every joint for evidence of it. (I used to know a pipe inspector.)
Oh, sorry, you mentioned drill collars. Didn't your drill floor practice require use of a safety clamp ("dog collar" in North Sea English parlance ; I never did figure out what the Korean, Azeri or Russian equivalent was) on every slick (not externally upset) tool joint.
You can tell why one guy is a toolpusher and the other merely a driller.
Dangerous places, drill floors. As you 'pusher obviously appreciated.
But, isn't your maintenance and replacement schedule for the backup lines adequate? It was never my business to do the paperwork on that - toolpusher's job - but I've used enough heavy tool store rooms as temporary sample stores to know that all of the lines stored down there go through the same colour coding and inspection and replacement regime as any other loaded equipment. Hell, at least once I've had to shift my stuff out of the store to make room for the inspector to get at the tools in the store.
Einstein never worked a drill floor - did you know? If he'd ever seen a drill crew disappear when a stand of pipe slipped out of the elevators, he'd never have come up with that silly idea that nothing can move faster than light.
Drill floors are nasty dangerous places. Avoid when at all possible. Which for me, is now down to witnessing wireline tool checks, collecting the sidewall cores, and catching conventional core (with breathing apparatus when necessary, and always when cracking the top of the barrel). Oh, and occasionally watching the torque gauge when coming to pick a horizontal casing point.
Not in Britain, Norway, Tanzania, Abu Dhabi, Russia, Korea, Holland or Canada. Or Benin, Gabon or Turkey. Where are you typing? Oh, I forgot Azerbaijan. And Ireland.
But most people are fucking idiots - and we''ve known that for milennnia.
What makes you think that you know that?
Using mass from where?
I suppose you would be able to use the entire Asteroid Belt. That would get you around a 0.5% increase in Mars' mass. Or the Galilean satellites of Jupiter for about a 60% mass increase, though you'd have to move them around twice as far and would run a high chance of actually completely disrupting Mars in the process of delivery.
I agree that Mars is a snare and a delusion. Just live inside asteroids and put up with the fact that you have no option but to maintain your environment.
Still no idea what, if anything, it does or did, or what anyone would use it for.
My first suspicion too.
If it works, don't fuck with it.
If its not connected to the internet, glue up the USB ports, cut the floppy controller cable, and don't worry about it.
Breaking out with the rotary motor only works if you've got more than about 300ft of pipe in the hole. Above that, you'll spin the slips on the pipe or on the bushing - neither of which is good for the pipe or the bushing. On the pipe you'll increase the likelihood of washing out or twisting off just below the tool joint. On the bushing - well, you don't want to have to free pipe stuck in a worn bushing.
Sure you'll have high pulling speeds. Until you count the lost holes with full LWD strings in them complete with sources. Break out the pink cement. You don't do that too often before your rig gets run off the field.
(For those who don't know, the "spinning chain" technique cost an awful lot of people several joints off the tips of their fingers. That's why "iron roughnecks" - machines for torquing up and breaking out pipe connections - were invented.)
If you don't want the fair rent laws to apply to your house, don't rent your house out. You fucktard.