Then I'd argue you're a moron. Aluminum is what is commonly known as a basic element. It's not a compound of anything, it isn't created in a lab, it's dug up out of the earth. (emphasis mine)
As pure aluminum, right? In fact, you can just pull Reynold's Wrap right out of the ground, can't you? It's not found as something called bauxite, which is actually aluminum hydroxide AL(OH)3. You know, just by adding a few OH groups, I can magically turn a thing into something else with COMPLETELY different chemical properties... that's called CHEMISTRY.
Before you call people "moron", it would be good to a) learn to read and b) check your facts. METALLIC ALUMINUM IS NOT A NATURALLY OCCURRING SUBSTANCE, IT HAS TO BE MANUFACTURED BY REDUCING IT FROM ITS OXIDIZED STATE, WHICH IS HOW IT IS FOUND IN NATURE. Have a nice day.
Oh I acknowledge that. All rocket fuels are expensive to make, store and ship. This one looks reasonably (and relatively) cheap. However the "environmentally friendly" comment in TFA is what I didn't like. It's like saying "environmentally friendly cigarettes". Rocket fuel (of any type) does not qualify for the "environmentally friendly" label, even if this is the "friendliest" one...
However I don't get how TFA considers this fuel as "environmentally friendly". Firstly one of the byproducts is aluminum hydroxide which, apart from helping us with our stomach ulcers, may be linked to brain disease - but I don't really care about that - the amount generated from a few rocket launches won't kill us all. But I argue that aluminum is not a naturally occurring substance - it has to be manufactured, and aluminum manufacture is the most energy intensive process around. So don't come to me with "environmentally friendly rocket fuel" when god knows how many tonnes of CO2 were dumped in the atmosphere to make the energy to refine that bauxite.
Still, if it works, it's better than "other" fuels that have extreme storage or environmental implications. Good for them.
That's entirely true. Every single one of those thousands of climate scientists who have been speaking out for decades on the issue have been paid off/coerced by the New World Order Illuminati lizard-men in order to advance their socialist tax-collecting agenda. And we never went to the moon. And George Bush planned the 9/11 attacks. And Princess Diana was murdered by the Duke of Edinburgh.
Did I say that?
However, the popularity of this topic began with "An Inconvenient Truth". Now which leading scientist is behind that project? Oh no WAIT - it's the "father of the internet", Al Gore - a politician.
Now any number of scientist have any number of reason to push their own green/socialist agendas, under the name of "global warming". It's human nature to shout louder when your favorite team scores a goal. They're not all working together, but the ones who were pulling in that direction anyway are now pulling harder.
However just the fact that whenever I try to make a logical argument, my only counter is "it's that way because scientists/smarter people than you say it is", and/or "what you say isn't true so there" underlines for me that people aren't willing to think (hey, where did all the CO2 to make the crude oil that's underground come from in the first place? Did it appear there by magic? Oh no wait, it was fixed from the atmosphere by microorganisms...hence it WAS in the atmosphere at some point - ALL of it), it's easier to bleat like sheep.
If you fail to see what's happening, and how when people take a different position (I don't deny climate change at all. I just don't think it's the end of the world, and I doubt it's all man-made) are ridiculed, and you fail to see that the times this has happened in history have usually involved a big lie on the part of Caesar, the Fuhrer, or the G20, well, have a nice life and pay your taxes.
Well then I'm a crank with a doctorate and a 165 IQ. If I sound like I think everyone's an idiot, it's because at least half the population is on the "other" side of the gauss curve, and there's a good 25% more that aren't exactly brilliant.
If you don't feel suspicious when suddenly an agenda is being forced down people's throats, you're entitled to your opinion. I prefer to believe the much simpler answer that government is trying to manipulate the masses into believing in the new "carbon economy" (and its applicable new form of taxation) than a man-made runaway greenhouse effect - after all, if burning fossil fuels is the problem, it's a self limiting one, isn't it? The oil isn't going to last forever. In fact some say we're at or near peak oil RIGHT NOW.
You can argue about synthetic fossil fuels made from corn, etc - but all that corn is going to take CO2 from the atmosphere. So there IS an upper limit.
Say for argument's sake I buy into this argument. If it has taken all of history to get us to this point, and coincidentally we're at or near our maximum production, then our impact in the future is not going to take us much further away than today's levels, since we'll be diminishing our output. So what's to worry?
But I don't buy the argument. We've reached these levels before mankind was even civilized. OK we may go a little higher this time, but it's certainly not the end of the world. One day soon the oil will be gone. Our demand for it keeps increasing every year. It's not going to take many years to blow through the "other half" of the oil.
But sure, label me as a crackpot. Myself I refrain from personal attacks - they're not really constructive.
Sure, it was supposed to be a lot cheaper, but...doesn't it work?
Oh it works.
Now exactly how useful has it been, compared to say - Ariane...
Yes there's the much touted ability to be able to "repair/refuel satellites in orbit". Care to work out the costs of all shuttle missions, versus the number of missions that were actually used for this purpose, and compare that very large number to just junking the satellites and launching new ones (with overall technological upgrades)? Has the shuttle been more successful at re-stocking/re-supplying the ISS than the far cheaper Soyuz?
Perhaps the best use of the shuttle was the ability to not disclose its military cargo - military missions were treated as just "military missions", but unlike a conventional rocket launch you have no idea what was launched, how big it was, and how much fuel it had (ie which orbit it was placed in - what if a satellite was launched on one mission and a booster added on a second mission? Ouch! Unlike a conventional launch where you know what the max payload of the rocket is, you could now have a satellite that could literally be anywhere!). But military missions for the shuttle ended long ago.
While the concept of a re-usable space plane is a neat idea, in my opinion it has bled NASA dry, destroyed all its credibility, and diverted funds away from researching other more cost effective methods of sending payloads into orbit.
The question is, if the world is warming at the moment... then is this due to man-made causes
Non sequitur. Please prove the accuracy of this statement before continuing.
I have stated this before, and yet no one seems to listen to a reasonable argument. Half of the planet is heated by the sun all the time. The other half - the night side, radiates heat away. In order to maintain a stable temperature, the heat radiated away must be the same as the heat absorbed. If the radiation is less, temperatures will rise. If it is more, temperatures will fall.
Yes?
Now, the sun provides approximately 1000 Watts (Joules per second) of energy per square meter. This is an average figure - it's closer to 1400 near the equator on a sunny day, and less at the poles where the angle of incidence is not perpendicular. But 1000 Watts is a reasonable average. Now, the surface area of the earth is roughly 5.10 x 10^8 sq. km, or about 5.10x10^14 sq meters. At 1000 W per square meter, that's 2.5 x 10^17 Watts (half the surface) of energy, ALL THE TIME. Still the Earth is managing to get rid of pretty much that amount on the night side, because temperatures are relatively stable.
I realize that the above large number will soon be dwarfed by the US deficit. But bearing in mind that the volumetric heat capacity of air is 1297 J/m3 (this is the amount of energy required to heat one cubic meter of air by one degree), just imagine that to heat a 1m high column of the earth's atmosphere by one degree you need 5.10 x 10^14 x 1297 = 6.6 x 10^17 Joules of energy - almost triple what is produced by SUNLIGHT every single second of every day. Please bear in mind that the atmosphere is almost 60km high, not 1m high.
Now considering the VAST amounts of energy involved, any sane individual would not leap at the conclusion that "mankind" is responsible for the release of this vast amount of energy in the atmosphere. As for CO2 - please, we have not reached record high CO2 levels. CO2 levels TRAIL temperature increases (note the graph is read from right to left). And any scientist worth his salt knows that the MAIN greenhouse gas is WATER VAPOR, not CO2. Well, if you heat the planet, of course you're going to evaporate more water into the atmosphere, which keeps the planet warmer. However the water vapor wasn't the CAUSE of the heating. It's merely acting as an insulator. If you remove the heat, the atmosphere cools, water condenses, and you're back to the beginning.
Considering the huge amounts of energy involved, the complete inability of mankind to produce even a small fraction of that energy even if we wanted to, the minimal REAL impact that CO2 (the alleged "culprit") has on the greenhouse effect when compared to water vapor or even methane, and the fact that the martian polar caps are also receding, and atmospheric phenomena on Jupiter is recently increasing, it's much more reasonable to conclude that our solar system is receiving more radiation, either from the sun or nearby stars, for whatever as yet unknown reason.
While I agree that any attempts to control our waste and reduce our impact on the environment is a wise course of action, this must be done for the right reasons. Not through a politico-religious frenzy of lies, deceit and of course, taxation. After all, that's what anthropogenic climate change is all about - an excuse to push a new form of taxation on industry and eventually the population in general. Make sure you don't exceed your maximum quota of 16 breaths per minute, citizen, or you'll have to pay a fine.
Its about time we have a decent solution instead of 15 mins of washing, where are the scientists on this one, 15 mins * few times a day * 1000000 surgens at their salary levels = billions of dollars wasted time.
There's a problem with your accounting: you're forgetting to offset this by the cost of millions of infected patients staying longer at the hospital, the antibiotics used, and the inevitable fatalities.
The standard infection rate for most wounds is around 10% in nature. Aseptic procedure (hand washing, sterile equipment, etc) has brought this down to under 1%. So tack on a week or so in the hospital (plus the fatalities) for 9% of all surgeries performed in the world, then compare it to hand washing.
Not to mention the ethical side. We wash our hands because it's part of our "do no harm" credo.
being able to fairly safely eat a sandwich with your hands?
You have your own blend of bacteria, and shouldn't have trouble with a sandwich even if you haven't washed your hands. After all, those Peyer's patches should count for something in identifying and producing antibodies for your home blend of bacteria.
The trouble is when a) someone prepares your sandwich without washing their hands, thus inoculating you with strange bacteria and b) when you touch other people, things other people have touched, or bodily fluids from other people. I say people but some rare (nowadays) diseases can be acquired from animals. Of course you can get sick by eating food that hasn't been prepared properly and has acquired pathogens from the environment, too - then no amount of hand washing on your or the cook's part will help you with say the Potato-Mayonnaise-S. aureus salad, good old undercooked-eggs-and Salmonella typhi salad, or the famous Not-Quite-Canned-Preserves-with-Botulinum toxin...
Most courses that teach hygiene, in and outside of medical school, recommend washing your hands approximately the duration of the "Happy Birthday" (c) song - about 30 seconds with regular soap for "everyday hand washing". For minor surgery, about 3 minutes per hand including the wrists, scrubbing the hands and under the nails, and for major surgery 15 minutes per hand and forearm up to the elbow, with a scrubbing brush. Do remember to wash between your fingers. But remember, you will rarely make yourself sick (unless you have some auto-immune problem). It's other people/things that make you sick.
So how long until we see bacteria resistant to this device?
About 20 years after we see bacteria resistant to current gamma ray and UV sterilization techniques. Don't hold your breath. Sterilize means no bacteria or spores survive. Do you think they chose 12 seconds "at random" or because "it sounds cool"? No, 12 seconds is the time (with a probably safety margin built in) at which cultures have shown repeatedly that all bacteria are dead.
I doubt the hospital is going to spring for an x million dollar machine at every nurse's station just so that most nurses can pretend to use it, like most of them pretend to wash their hands nowadays. Don't throw out the soap just yet.
The same thing that happens to them when you wash with antibacterial soap.
One of the most overrated products in the world. Everyone thinks they're getting "anti-bacterial" protection.
If you want "clean hands" while washing with antibacterial soap, make sure you do like we surgeons and wash each hand for 15 minutes. Even then you'll have critters living in your sweat glands... but your bacterial count will be very very low. For the regular "less time than it takes to sing the the birthday song" hand washing, anti-bacterial soap offers virtually no advantage over regular soap.
Now hands up who spends 30 mins washing their hands every time they touch something.
If it's germ free and not large enough to be visible, does it matter?
It does if you're a surgeon. There's something called the foreign body response, and we've seen it happen even with particles of the STERILE talc they line some surgical gloves with to make them easier to put on. Problems aren't only caused by bacteria. Depending on the person's immune response, virtually anything can cause a life-threatening reaction to normally "inert" things like nylon suture or titanium rods/sutures. Things like dirt and human hair are more likely to provoke a reaction.
So was phenol, for that matter. If it kills bacteria in 12 seconds, it's "not nice stuff". Oh yeah maybe the keratin on your skin will prevent it from penetrating. What if it gets in your sweat glands. What if your skin has a lesion, and the keratin is interrupted...
This one gets filed in the "call me when we've been using it safely for 20 years" category. Until then I will stick to soap and water.
Wouldn't using encryption be "circumventing a copyright protection mechanism".. oh, UK, sorry.
Wouldn't trying to crack my encryption be "circumventing a copyright protection mechanism"? After all you can't know what's in the packet until you "open" the packet.
Hmmm? The result sets are independent of each other. Just like the probability of throwing a die and saying that "6" is the "wrong" number, you have a 1/6 chance of getting it "wrong" EACH TIME you throw the dice. It doesn't matter how often you've thrown it before, this time, your chance is 1/6. And next time, you chance is 1/6. This is why people lose money in casinos. The dice don't have to listen to you, they don't HAVE to eventually give the number you want, etc.
and off the beaten path i.e. a small town. Keep a low profile
I'm trying to figure this out. How exactly are you going to "keep a low profile" in a small town, where virtually everyone knows everyone else? You'll always be "that stranger". IMO a large city is better for anonymity.
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Then I'd argue you're a moron. Aluminum is what is commonly known as a basic element. It's not a compound of anything, it isn't created in a lab, it's dug up out of the earth. (emphasis mine)
As pure aluminum, right? In fact, you can just pull Reynold's Wrap right out of the ground, can't you? It's not found as something called bauxite, which is actually aluminum hydroxide AL(OH)3. You know, just by adding a few OH groups, I can magically turn a thing into something else with COMPLETELY different chemical properties... that's called CHEMISTRY.
Before you call people "moron", it would be good to a) learn to read and b) check your facts. METALLIC ALUMINUM IS NOT A NATURALLY OCCURRING SUBSTANCE, IT HAS TO BE MANUFACTURED BY REDUCING IT FROM ITS OXIDIZED STATE, WHICH IS HOW IT IS FOUND IN NATURE. Have a nice day.
Oh I acknowledge that. All rocket fuels are expensive to make, store and ship. This one looks reasonably (and relatively) cheap. However the "environmentally friendly" comment in TFA is what I didn't like. It's like saying "environmentally friendly cigarettes". Rocket fuel (of any type) does not qualify for the "environmentally friendly" label, even if this is the "friendliest" one...
Alice? Who the f**k is Alice?
One of Umbrella Corporation's secret projects. And I wouldn't mess with her...
Non volatile? It is extremely volatile, just hard to light.
It's not hard to light. Just ram it with an aircraft carrier and it will burn fine.
Hmm. One _could_ make solid fuel with rice flour and potassium chlorate or a similar oxidizer...
Hell, you can turn a grain silo into a rocket with just one match...
A better article on the engine here.
However I don't get how TFA considers this fuel as "environmentally friendly". Firstly one of the byproducts is aluminum hydroxide which, apart from helping us with our stomach ulcers, may be linked to brain disease - but I don't really care about that - the amount generated from a few rocket launches won't kill us all. But I argue that aluminum is not a naturally occurring substance - it has to be manufactured, and aluminum manufacture is the most energy intensive process around. So don't come to me with "environmentally friendly rocket fuel" when god knows how many tonnes of CO2 were dumped in the atmosphere to make the energy to refine that bauxite.
Still, if it works, it's better than "other" fuels that have extreme storage or environmental implications. Good for them.
Where did he suggest not washing his hands as an alternative?
How about Its about time we have a decent solution instead of 15 mins of washing... surgens at their salary levels = billions of dollars wasted time.
Learn to read. He equates hand washing with billions of dollars of "wasted time".
That's entirely true. Every single one of those thousands of climate scientists who have been speaking out for decades on the issue have been paid off/coerced by the New World Order Illuminati lizard-men in order to advance their socialist tax-collecting agenda. And we never went to the moon. And George Bush planned the 9/11 attacks. And Princess Diana was murdered by the Duke of Edinburgh.
Did I say that?
However, the popularity of this topic began with "An Inconvenient Truth". Now which leading scientist is behind that project? Oh no WAIT - it's the "father of the internet", Al Gore - a politician.
Now any number of scientist have any number of reason to push their own green/socialist agendas, under the name of "global warming". It's human nature to shout louder when your favorite team scores a goal. They're not all working together, but the ones who were pulling in that direction anyway are now pulling harder.
However just the fact that whenever I try to make a logical argument, my only counter is "it's that way because scientists/smarter people than you say it is", and/or "what you say isn't true so there" underlines for me that people aren't willing to think (hey, where did all the CO2 to make the crude oil that's underground come from in the first place? Did it appear there by magic? Oh no wait, it was fixed from the atmosphere by microorganisms...hence it WAS in the atmosphere at some point - ALL of it), it's easier to bleat like sheep.
If you fail to see what's happening, and how when people take a different position (I don't deny climate change at all. I just don't think it's the end of the world, and I doubt it's all man-made) are ridiculed, and you fail to see that the times this has happened in history have usually involved a big lie on the part of Caesar, the Fuhrer, or the G20, well, have a nice life and pay your taxes.
Well then I'm a crank with a doctorate and a 165 IQ. If I sound like I think everyone's an idiot, it's because at least half the population is on the "other" side of the gauss curve, and there's a good 25% more that aren't exactly brilliant.
If you don't feel suspicious when suddenly an agenda is being forced down people's throats, you're entitled to your opinion. I prefer to believe the much simpler answer that government is trying to manipulate the masses into believing in the new "carbon economy" (and its applicable new form of taxation) than a man-made runaway greenhouse effect - after all, if burning fossil fuels is the problem, it's a self limiting one, isn't it? The oil isn't going to last forever. In fact some say we're at or near peak oil RIGHT NOW.
You can argue about synthetic fossil fuels made from corn, etc - but all that corn is going to take CO2 from the atmosphere. So there IS an upper limit.
Say for argument's sake I buy into this argument. If it has taken all of history to get us to this point, and coincidentally we're at or near our maximum production, then our impact in the future is not going to take us much further away than today's levels, since we'll be diminishing our output. So what's to worry?
But I don't buy the argument. We've reached these levels before mankind was even civilized. OK we may go a little higher this time, but it's certainly not the end of the world. One day soon the oil will be gone. Our demand for it keeps increasing every year. It's not going to take many years to blow through the "other half" of the oil.
But sure, label me as a crackpot. Myself I refrain from personal attacks - they're not really constructive.
Sure, it was supposed to be a lot cheaper, but...doesn't it work?
Oh it works.
Now exactly how useful has it been, compared to say - Ariane...
Yes there's the much touted ability to be able to "repair/refuel satellites in orbit". Care to work out the costs of all shuttle missions, versus the number of missions that were actually used for this purpose, and compare that very large number to just junking the satellites and launching new ones (with overall technological upgrades)? Has the shuttle been more successful at re-stocking/re-supplying the ISS than the far cheaper Soyuz?
Perhaps the best use of the shuttle was the ability to not disclose its military cargo - military missions were treated as just "military missions", but unlike a conventional rocket launch you have no idea what was launched, how big it was, and how much fuel it had (ie which orbit it was placed in - what if a satellite was launched on one mission and a booster added on a second mission? Ouch! Unlike a conventional launch where you know what the max payload of the rocket is, you could now have a satellite that could literally be anywhere!). But military missions for the shuttle ended long ago.
While the concept of a re-usable space plane is a neat idea, in my opinion it has bled NASA dry, destroyed all its credibility, and diverted funds away from researching other more cost effective methods of sending payloads into orbit.
The question is, if the world is warming at the moment ... then is this due to man-made causes
Non sequitur. Please prove the accuracy of this statement before continuing.
I have stated this before, and yet no one seems to listen to a reasonable argument. Half of the planet is heated by the sun all the time. The other half - the night side, radiates heat away. In order to maintain a stable temperature, the heat radiated away must be the same as the heat absorbed. If the radiation is less, temperatures will rise. If it is more, temperatures will fall.
Yes?
Now, the sun provides approximately 1000 Watts (Joules per second) of energy per square meter. This is an average figure - it's closer to 1400 near the equator on a sunny day, and less at the poles where the angle of incidence is not perpendicular. But 1000 Watts is a reasonable average. Now, the surface area of the earth is roughly 5.10 x 10^8 sq. km, or about 5.10x10^14 sq meters. At 1000 W per square meter, that's 2.5 x 10^17 Watts (half the surface) of energy, ALL THE TIME. Still the Earth is managing to get rid of pretty much that amount on the night side, because temperatures are relatively stable.
I realize that the above large number will soon be dwarfed by the US deficit. But bearing in mind that the volumetric heat capacity of air is 1297 J/m3 (this is the amount of energy required to heat one cubic meter of air by one degree), just imagine that to heat a 1m high column of the earth's atmosphere by one degree you need 5.10 x 10^14 x 1297 = 6.6 x 10^17 Joules of energy - almost triple what is produced by SUNLIGHT every single second of every day. Please bear in mind that the atmosphere is almost 60km high, not 1m high.
Now considering the VAST amounts of energy involved, any sane individual would not leap at the conclusion that "mankind" is responsible for the release of this vast amount of energy in the atmosphere. As for CO2 - please, we have not reached record high CO2 levels. CO2 levels TRAIL temperature increases (note the graph is read from right to left). And any scientist worth his salt knows that the MAIN greenhouse gas is WATER VAPOR, not CO2. Well, if you heat the planet, of course you're going to evaporate more water into the atmosphere, which keeps the planet warmer. However the water vapor wasn't the CAUSE of the heating. It's merely acting as an insulator. If you remove the heat, the atmosphere cools, water condenses, and you're back to the beginning.
Considering the huge amounts of energy involved, the complete inability of mankind to produce even a small fraction of that energy even if we wanted to, the minimal REAL impact that CO2 (the alleged "culprit") has on the greenhouse effect when compared to water vapor or even methane, and the fact that the martian polar caps are also receding, and atmospheric phenomena on Jupiter is recently increasing, it's much more reasonable to conclude that our solar system is receiving more radiation, either from the sun or nearby stars, for whatever as yet unknown reason.
While I agree that any attempts to control our waste and reduce our impact on the environment is a wise course of action, this must be done for the right reasons. Not through a politico-religious frenzy of lies, deceit and of course, taxation. After all, that's what anthropogenic climate change is all about - an excuse to push a new form of taxation on industry and eventually the population in general. Make sure you don't exceed your maximum quota of 16 breaths per minute, citizen, or you'll have to pay a fine.
That particular failure mode is directly attributable to the questionable decision to mount the orbiter to the side of the stack, rather than on top:
Um, how else would it use its engines, if it wasn't at the side?
Perhaps it was a questionable decision. But then again exactly how many more boosters would you need per launch to get it into orbit?
Its about time we have a decent solution instead of 15 mins of washing, where are the scientists on this one, 15 mins * few times a day * 1000000 surgens at their salary levels = billions of dollars wasted time.
There's a problem with your accounting: you're forgetting to offset this by the cost of millions of infected patients staying longer at the hospital, the antibiotics used, and the inevitable fatalities.
The standard infection rate for most wounds is around 10% in nature. Aseptic procedure (hand washing, sterile equipment, etc) has brought this down to under 1%. So tack on a week or so in the hospital (plus the fatalities) for 9% of all surgeries performed in the world, then compare it to hand washing.
Not to mention the ethical side. We wash our hands because it's part of our "do no harm" credo.
This would certainly widen the belt for what we consider to be the "habitable" range, in our search for habitable exoplanets.
being able to fairly safely eat a sandwich with your hands?
You have your own blend of bacteria, and shouldn't have trouble with a sandwich even if you haven't washed your hands. After all, those Peyer's patches should count for something in identifying and producing antibodies for your home blend of bacteria.
The trouble is when a) someone prepares your sandwich without washing their hands, thus inoculating you with strange bacteria and b) when you touch other people, things other people have touched, or bodily fluids from other people. I say people but some rare (nowadays) diseases can be acquired from animals. Of course you can get sick by eating food that hasn't been prepared properly and has acquired pathogens from the environment, too - then no amount of hand washing on your or the cook's part will help you with say the Potato-Mayonnaise-S. aureus salad, good old undercooked-eggs-and Salmonella typhi salad, or the famous Not-Quite-Canned-Preserves-with-Botulinum toxin...
Most courses that teach hygiene, in and outside of medical school, recommend washing your hands approximately the duration of the "Happy Birthday" (c) song - about 30 seconds with regular soap for "everyday hand washing". For minor surgery, about 3 minutes per hand including the wrists, scrubbing the hands and under the nails, and for major surgery 15 minutes per hand and forearm up to the elbow, with a scrubbing brush. Do remember to wash between your fingers. But remember, you will rarely make yourself sick (unless you have some auto-immune problem). It's other people/things that make you sick.
So how long until we see bacteria resistant to this device?
About 20 years after we see bacteria resistant to current gamma ray and UV sterilization techniques. Don't hold your breath. Sterilize means no bacteria or spores survive. Do you think they chose 12 seconds "at random" or because "it sounds cool"? No, 12 seconds is the time (with a probably safety margin built in) at which cultures have shown repeatedly that all bacteria are dead.
I doubt the hospital is going to spring for an x million dollar machine at every nurse's station just so that most nurses can pretend to use it, like most of them pretend to wash their hands nowadays. Don't throw out the soap just yet.
The same thing that happens to them when you wash with antibacterial soap.
One of the most overrated products in the world. Everyone thinks they're getting "anti-bacterial" protection.
If you want "clean hands" while washing with antibacterial soap, make sure you do like we surgeons and wash each hand for 15 minutes. Even then you'll have critters living in your sweat glands... but your bacterial count will be very very low. For the regular "less time than it takes to sing the the birthday song" hand washing, anti-bacterial soap offers virtually no advantage over regular soap.
Now hands up who spends 30 mins washing their hands every time they touch something.
If it's germ free and not large enough to be visible, does it matter?
It does if you're a surgeon. There's something called the foreign body response, and we've seen it happen even with particles of the STERILE talc they line some surgical gloves with to make them easier to put on. Problems aren't only caused by bacteria. Depending on the person's immune response, virtually anything can cause a life-threatening reaction to normally "inert" things like nylon suture or titanium rods/sutures. Things like dirt and human hair are more likely to provoke a reaction.
So was phenol, for that matter. If it kills bacteria in 12 seconds, it's "not nice stuff". Oh yeah maybe the keratin on your skin will prevent it from penetrating. What if it gets in your sweat glands. What if your skin has a lesion, and the keratin is interrupted...
This one gets filed in the "call me when we've been using it safely for 20 years" category. Until then I will stick to soap and water.
Wouldn't using encryption be "circumventing a copyright protection mechanism" .. oh, UK, sorry.
Wouldn't trying to crack my encryption be "circumventing a copyright protection mechanism"? After all you can't know what's in the packet until you "open" the packet.
learn to google?
Hmmm? The result sets are independent of each other. Just like the probability of throwing a die and saying that "6" is the "wrong" number, you have a 1/6 chance of getting it "wrong" EACH TIME you throw the dice. It doesn't matter how often you've thrown it before, this time, your chance is 1/6. And next time, you chance is 1/6. This is why people lose money in casinos. The dice don't have to listen to you, they don't HAVE to eventually give the number you want, etc.
Screw the cats.... I want to know about puppies.
and off the beaten path i.e. a small town. Keep a low profile
I'm trying to figure this out. How exactly are you going to "keep a low profile" in a small town, where virtually everyone knows everyone else? You'll always be "that stranger". IMO a large city is better for anonymity.