08-15
Don't be so sure about that. When I first heard about the connection of D3 with the immune system, I asked a friend, who happens to be a cardiologist, about it. He said vitamin D prevents rickets, that's all. And an overdose produces arrhythmia, so be careful with the supplements. Indeed, that's the conventional wisdom found in text books.
According to the internet, a healthy immune system needs much higher levels of vitamin D than those necessary for a functioning calcium metabolism, and a D3 overdose is only bad if you have insufficient levels of vitamin K2. I don't know what to think about all of that. After all, my representative study with a sample size of one and no controls yielded no significant results.
Looking forward to statistics supporting your assertion.
So no, "natural immunity" is not treated any differently from "artificial immunity", and it absolutely is about getting out of a pandemic without too many people dying. By the way, there is no difference. Immunity is immunity.
You sound as if you live in a weird parallel universe where we don't stigmatise those people.
It's not difficult to find people who think along all or some of these lines: Obese people are ugly gluttons, drinkers are a danger to others and themselves and have no self control, extreme sports athletes are crazy, people who have children in their forties are inconsiderate and will get retard babies.
The reason we don't get worked up about those as much as about covidiots, is that the groups you mention don't endanger anyone else. The one exception is extreme sports (think drag racing, not wingsuit flying), and that's why we require those athletes to buy insurance.
Extraversion/Introversion is the first distinction of the Myers Briggs Type Indicator. I find it remarkable that exactly the people who get incensed at the MBTI "because everything is shades of gray and you can't sort people into neat 16 bins", are those who are at the very very end of at least two of the four scales.
> don't let over people tell you how to think and behave!
Ironic, isn't it?
But more importantly, "to seize" means to "take possession", doesn't it? And you need a license to possess a teletherapy machine, for the very good reason that the damn thing is dangerous. IGR had a license. The bureaucrats didn't. Neither did the new site owner, landlord, whatever you want to call them. They still took possession, by force.
Property rights are a set of rules. Nuclear safety regulations are a set of rules. These are not the same kind of rules, though. Not understanding the difference kills people. The court didn't understand the difference.
"Meanwhile, the ownership of the clinic's assets was being discussed in court, and the cobalt 60 teletherapy unit was moved to the new facilities and the cesium 137 teletherapy unit was abandoned in its original place due to being seized."
Sounds like the root cause was stupid bureaucrats, but that must of course not be admitted in public.
And in that context, everything makes sense.
In other words, with enough empathy and patience, a clueless rookie can grow into a clueless senior engineer!
Rachel usually makes more sense than that. That's why people are nitpicking implementation details.
Or maybe a relational DB is already overengineering. Using a hash table (some libdbm lookalike) to map (ip,helo,from,to) to (time) solves the problem, too, and doesn't have a low performance failure mode.
This doesn't change the major point about everyone having been a newbie at point, though.
Instead of worrying about the loss off coolant, the operators worried about the reactor "going solid", which is slang for "no steam bubble is left in the primary coolant circuit". This made sense on the small Navy reactors they were trained on, but on the large land based ones. Arguably, it never made sense to take a submarine engine and turn it into a power plant.
Nothing happened. The reactor just sat there peacefully doing nothing, because it was a fast neutron reactor, the EBR-2.
> they're more dangerous and still experimental
They were neither in 1986. But sure, let's build more "grid storage", which isn't even experimental.
This is not a study about (only) the effects of HFCS. Everything observed could equally be blamed palm oil, corn oil, cottonseed oil, lard, beef tallow, milk fat, fat in general, sodium, cholesterol, or lack of fiber. The only thing nothing can be blamed on is carbohydrates, including sucrose, because the control group received more of them. Oh, all all that in mice.
Frankly, I don't think anything can be learned from a study that varies so many variables at once.
What? The energy density of primordial fuels is six orders of magnitude higher!
One of these accidents happened in the Soviet Union, in a reactor type that could never be licensed in the US. The principal cause was operators ignoring safety regulations under political pressure. Do you really think, whether the US builds or doesn't build PWRs and BWRs would have impressed the SU one way or another?
The other accident happened in Japan. The principal cause was a rather extreme tsunami. What turned it from a minor mishap into a major accident was that modern politics invalidated the original safety concept. (The BWR's containment has to be vented before core damage occurs, but that was no longer politically acceptable in 2011.)
The lesson to learn from both accidents is that politicians have too much power and engineers have too little.
Absolutely. People will soon adapt to Renewables by heating their homes only in summer, when electricity is cheap, and not in winter, when it is expensive. They will also use electric lights more during the day, when electricity is plentiful, and not at night, when it is scarce. This isn't really new; after all, for millenia, people responded to droughts by simply eating less in the years with bad harvests, and they were happy, weren't they?
In a world powered by Renewables, electricity in worthless during summer days and priceless during winter nights. What a glorious future indeed!
Either way, it sounds as if a coal plant without the furnace wouldn't be able to compete with "conventional electricity". What is "conventional electricity" then? Open cycle gas turbines? Are they that much cheaper, even including fuel cost?
Was your input temperature too low? That would explain it. At low temperature differential, you have lower efficiency and need much bigger machinery for the same output.
That said, fusion has a chance to be competitive, because the temperature will be higher. (Obviously, the thermodynamic limit is in the billions of Kelvin, but a practical power conversion system will operate in the range of 500-1000 Celsius.) But for the foreseeable future, it won't be competitive.
How they got the operators to agree to the early shutdown is less clear. By offering a good deal, I guess. It's only taxpayer money, after all.
Why nobody set plans in motion to replace it? I don't know. My best guess is, because politicians are unbelievably stupid. They really don't know anything about electricity. They really don't get that excess electricity in Juli doesn't help you in cold, dark January. Annalena Baerbock stated publically: "The grid is all the battery we need." At that level of incompetence, who knows why anything happened.
Would you like to know why we didn't?
Because climate activists told us 20 years ago that
- [a nuclear power plant] takes 30 years or more to build one
- [a nuclear power plant] usually costs twice as planned
- [nuclear power is] way more expensive than renewables
- renewables can be deployed now
Then we (Germany) wasted 20 years building renewables, and now we are nowhere close to fulfilling our Kyoto commitment, and got the most expensive electricity anywhere in the world. Well done, climate activists!
Silicate minerals can do it in thousands of years, and much faster with some human assistance.
If I use PGP-encrypted mail, I have to trust that the receiver is not stupid. If I use Signal, I have to trust that Google is not evil. Hmm...