exchemist

OK so it’s yet another thinly disguised attempt to pour scorn on the change to a non-fossil fuel dependent society. What a tosser you are. There are plenty of high-performance and luxurious EVs, though naturally not built nearly as badly, as unsafe, or handling as diabolically as some of the dreadful American models you mention. Just go on any car maker’s website.

So what?

Yes, this was explained to us before as being something euphemistically termed a "vignette" ad. The idea is it intrudes into what you are trying to do, to force you to cancel it in order to get back to where you were. Bloody rude and irritating: a classic example of Cory Doctorow's concept of enshittification in action: https://doctorow.medium.com/my-mcluhan-lecture-on-enshittification-ea343342b9bc "We’re all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit."

That should not amaze you. You have not described the setup very clearly, especially the part concerning the “tether system”, which is where I think your analysis is in error. The capturing of these slugs and redirecting them will create an impulse on the spacecraft that will cancel the recoil due to the railguns (or coilguns - you are not consistent in your use of terms) and create a reaction that will move the spacecraft back again in the opposite direction. But one doesn’t really need to analyse each step since as @swansont points out, applying the principle of conservation of momentum to the whole system tells you there will be no net change in velocity once the cycle is complete. If you think this is wrong or misses the point then I suggest explaining in more detail how this “tether system” is meant to function and we can analyse that, as I feel sure this is where the mistake arises. This business about 20m and 1m is not explained at all - what’s going on?

Yes it isn’t that easy to follow, but the diagrams in Fig 6 help a lot. Take a look at those.

This is not about escarpments adjacent to a rift. It is about elevated plateaux that lie far inland from an opening ocean. If you look at the diagrams it may become clearer.

Can you describe closed loop pulse propulsion in words, perhaps with a diagram? Your description so far raises more questions than answers.

What an extraordinarily narrow-minded and ill-informed post. Do you not realise Einstein lived his whole life in Christian countries? What’s so special about the USA in that respect? And you think “Christian values “ are superior to Jewish values, when some of the most enlightened thinkers have been Jewish? As for being “saved”, do you really imagine Jews and Deists go to Hell? Doesn’t that strike you as a bit ridiculous? Einstein was far too intelligent to have believed anything so absurd. Here, by the way, is a brief account of Einstein’s final days: https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/the-final-days-of-albert-einstein It is clear from this there was no deathbed “conversion”.

It's quite a dense read, and I got stuck for a while because I had not realised the lithosphere is now thought to include rigid mantle that, when it gets old at least, is more dense than the asthenosphere it sits on. There are some good diagrams - and even some videos which I have not watched yet. One report I read suggested this is quite a radical and important piece of work. I have not worked out how this Rayleigh-Taylor instability arises. I looked that up and it seems to be when you have 2 liquid phases with the higher density one above the lower density one. But the "keel" that is peeled off is solid, so I don't quite get it. Unless it gets melted and then is unstable w.r.t. the asthenosphere underneath. I wonder if that's it.

From the clichéd pomposity of the final paragraph, I assume this has been written by a chatbot. 😄 But seriously, are you suggest a large scale ionisation of the cosmos? Electrons carry a charge, and have mass, so if there were free electrons in the intergalactic void we would expect to see some effects from that.

Ah, yes. Of course. As in H G Wells's short story, "Under the Knife". Perhaps you know it.

There is a recent paper that's been in the news a bit, from Thomas Gernon, a Prof. at Southampton, et al, which accounts for why there are uplifted plateaux several hundred km from the coast in a number of places, e.g. S Africa, Brazil, India. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07717-1 It's quite technical, but as I understand it, they propose, via modelling, that after rifting to form a new ocean, an unstable vortex of convection is set up in the asthenosphere due to something called Rayleigh-Taylor instability (a thing in fluid dynamics, apparently). This vortex moves away from the mid-ocean ridge under the continent and progressively delaminates the "keel" of lithosphere at the base of the tectonic plate. I gather the rigid upper mantle which forms the lower part of the lithosphere is actually denser than the asthenosphere it sits above (it is rigid because it has cooled, which also makes it denser), so tearing (or melting?) off this "keel" actually causes the lithosphere to tend to rise, isostatically. The delaminated material, plus the heat in the ascending side of the vortex can cause a breakthrough of volcanism, creating the Kimberlite pipes that are a curious feature in some of these places. The vortex makes its way under the continent over a period of several tens of millions of years, so these features start to arise quite a long time after the ocean opening event. I don't pretend I know a great deal about this subject but I thought it was interesting. I had not realised that our understanding of the lithosphere has moved on so much, and that tectonic plates are now thought to comprise not just crust but a substantial chunk of cooling, solid mantle beneath as well. As it cools, the density increases and eventually the whole thing becomes unstable, due to "floating" on asthenosphere that is less dense than it has become - which is a driver for subduction.

What's an OBE? To me it means the Order of the British Empire, which is something awarded by the King to suitably deserving people.

What do you mean by “know his life was a miracle.” ? This is begging the question, surely? It would have to be a miracle in the first place, in order for it to be something he could “know”, and you have not established that. Most people wouldn’t say their own lives were a miracle, nor even the lives of the most eminent thinkers. You are expecting him to “know” something most people would say is not true, aren’t you?

It will go down, i.e. the resistivity will go up, but it won't cease to conduct entirely. I would expect freezing of salt solutions usually to involve forming separate crystals of water and of the salt, because those are the most thermodynamically stable structures. Until that process is complete I imagine there could be pockets of concentrated salt solution that would support conduction. Once everything is solid, I would expect the conductivity to be determined by the rate at which charge carrying ions can migrate through the crystal structures. This won't be zero but it would I think be a lot harder than in solution, because it is likely to be determined mainly by crystal defects and inclusions of solute ions, which always happens to some degree. So the resistivity would go up considerably. But I don't have a reference for this, it's just what I would expect to happen. Maybe someone else knows more.

They were able to stop “vignette”, i.e. full page, ads that you have to cancel in order to get back to the page you were on. So it does appear admin has, or had, some means of control. But some months later they came back again, at which point I got sufficiently pissed off that I installed Adblock Plus, which suppresses them. So maybe the enshittifiers have found a way to overcome whatever admin did.

Oh, Mersea. That’s very different from the Thames estuary part I knew.

It doesn't sound right to me. Treatment seems to be improving all the time. But I don't have statistics on it at my fingertips.

No. Obviously his background was Jewish, but he was at most a sort of Deist. He seemed to take a similar view to Spinoza (also a Jew, incidentally) that the order in the cosmos (the "laws of nature", if you like) IS what we are referring to when we speak of "God". At any rate, he did not believe in the personal God of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, that interacts with humanity. I don't follow your third sentence. Why would consideration of what other ways the world could be made have implications for religious belief?

You are too kind. The pier in Saarfend? That's a long walk. I bought my first house in Standford-le-Hope, just up the river towards Tilbury, when I worked at Shell Haven refinery. That was 1981. I recall in the 1987 storm I was unable to use the railway line for 3 days because a whelk stall had been blown across the track at Southend. It seems to fit the vibe of the area. SE Essex is generally a bit of a dump, but one thing they had in Stanford-le-Hope was a good, traditional baker: very good bloomers and really excellent jam doughnuts with proper raspberry jam.

Half the middle class professionals in London are millionaires these days, myself included, thanks to the appreciation of house prices. And I'm not an..............oh, wait.....

You have to be a pretty special sort of dad to get rejected that dramatically. Being a narcissist probably gets you 3/4 of the way there though. But the guy is now a serious menace. He could end up getting X shut down in a number of countries at this rate. The UK is already looking again at its on-line protection legislation and calls to prosecute Musk for peddling false and malicious information are starting to appear. Not a great business move. But maybe he’s not in it for the business any more, but for his power to influence politics. Walz, one feels, is on the money talking about these people: weird and creepy is about right.

I doubt that, actually. The trans issue is being pumped like hell by its advocates - very aggressively and unpleasantly in some cases - but remains distinctly fringe and I think it will remain so. But I would certainly agree that breaking down sexual stereotypes must be healthy and liberating to people.

I agree. Bloody funny that, having shacked up with a woman with a weirdo name and given even more weirdo names to his kids, rather hinting at a weirdo lifestyle in other ways too, he then gets outweirded by his own son - and can't handle it! What a jerk.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that older people tend to be more racist. It is they who perceive the change in their communities from what they remember from when they were young, and are disturbed by it. And having had less exposure to people of different ethnicity, they tend to fear them more. Young people don’t have the same stake in the past.