TheVat

Perhaps our self is a bit like the Ship of Theseus. Many parts change, are lost, are replaced, but there's a continuity we call "me."

Very shocking and saddening news from Japan today, a nation with the strictest gun control. The weapon is reported to be handmade. With a population of 125 million, Japan had only 10 gun-related criminal cases last year, resulting in one death and four injuries, according to police. Eight of those cases were gang-related. Tokyo had no gun incidents, injuries or deaths in the same year, although 61 guns were seized.

From Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic... https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/boris-johnson-resigns-brexit-conservative-party-failure/661514/ More important, Brexit, the solution to the problem Johnson and his supporters described, was based on a series of lies. The electorate was promised that departure from the EU would lead not only to fewer immigrants but to greater prosperity, more welfare spending, less crowded hospitals. Instead, six years after the vote, Britain is less prosperous and more unequal. Brexit reduced the U.K. GDP by at least 1.5 percent even before it took full effect; the U.K. has the highest inflation rate in the G7; small businesses, especially importers, have been crushed by Brexit-related red tape and supply-chain problems. Though committees have been set up to look for “benefits from Brexit,” few are available. Brexiteers instead crow about the British vaccine campaign or British support for Ukraine, both of which would have been perfectly compatible with EU membership. Of course, Brexit is not why Johnson has now resigned, or why his cabinet melted down, or why his popularity plunged. But it is an essential piece of the backstory. If British politics were a Faulkner novel, Brexit would be the long-ago tragedy that haunts all of the main characters, even if they hadn’t been born when it happened. Why did a story about a jolly drinking session his cabinet held during COVID lockdown do so much damage to Johnson? Partly because he was already suspected of dishonesty about Brexit, and “Partygate” reconfirmed the image of him as a liar. Why did his Conservative colleagues ultimately decide not to remove him as prime minister when they voted last month? Partly because Johnson is so closely associated with Brexit that a rejection of him looked like a rejection of Brexit, the policy that the party still claims as its greatest achievement. Why are Conservative and Labour politicians alike shocked by his admission that he met a former KGB officer, now a wealthy oligarch, at a private party in Italy while he was still foreign secretary, with no other officials present? Partly because the role of Russian money and influence in the Brexit campaign has never been fully explained.

I did follow it some, and recalled the grabby appointee had some sort of name like that (like a surgeon named Dr. Cutter). That Boris openly said what he should have kept to himself seems very like TFG here. Of course, with far more consequences than the TFG reaped, given that you still have a somewhat functional system of taking out the trash over there. Here the dumpster fills up with garbage, then it's set on fire for several years.

The clever OP title...reminded me of a sci-fi novel where they used that expression (where the name of something happens to express a quality of it) in regards to bad architecture. Apparently in architecture a "folly" means a building whose features are primarily ornamental, usually ridiculously extravagant. So when the author describes such a building that everyone agrees was a waste of taxpayers money, she calls it "folly by name, folly by nature."

BoJo always looked to me like a man who just climbed out of bed. I see all his problems with the optics of things as flowing from this original sin.

Maybe. I will deliver my vredict on that soon.

I live thirty miles from Deadwood, South Dakota and have rarely heard "perdict." That said, if you say "pree-dict" very fast and slur a bit, not taking time to get the "ee" out, it will sound sort of like "perdict.". So my guess is that it's not some sort of yearning for a rural folksy thing, but just haste and lack of that delicious British crispness. Incidentally, in actual cattle ranching regions, it's common to say "stockman" or "ranch hand" in lieu of "cowboy. "

I don't currently have the energy to reply to this. Or wrap it up neatly and put boson.

An extreme case are Janus words, which can mean their own opposite, or a quite contrary meaning. E.g. oversight, sanction, fast, cleave, dust. I find this charming (and easily dealt with by context). Due to good oversight, the project was a success. Due to an unfortunate oversight, the project failed.

Judging by your comment I can confidently conclude that you are immune to jokes. Surely you understand that an OP which asks "Could raw electricity be the missing food group?" is going to inspire some jesting. I would be shocked if it didn't. Please continue your experiments with electrical shocks, taking care of course to up the voltage and amperage very gradually. Consulting with a cardiologist beforehand might also be advisable, as stronger jolts could pose some risks. Also, be mindful that shining UV light in the human colon does not cure covid-19.

Plus one, more for the brave attempt than the result. With puns, an ounce of prevention is worth 4.45 newtons of cure.

I refuse to engage in a duel of wits with an unarmed man.

Except insofar as sizes of 500 to 1000 tons underscore the utter preposterousness of using an impromptu Panama Canal of mercury locks in an era when extracting a few ounces of mercury would have been an extraordinary feat of metallurgy. This is all a gedankenexperiment and quite a silly one.

-- Victor Frankenstein, in his seminal 1895 monograph, Methods of Electrovivification

I'll try tomorrow to get more deets.

With the Russian gas squeeze coming this winter, Berlin turns to a giant thermos... https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-technology-germany-berlin-trending-news-176229c8932869f45e553e615a6e9953 ...of coffee hot water. It will store off-peak wind and solar electricity production as heated water for use in home heating. Sometimes you have an abundance of electricity in the grids that you cannot use anymore, and then you need to turn off the wind turbines,” said Wielgoss. “Where we are standing we can take in this electricity.” The 50-million-euro ($52 million) facility will have a thermal capacity of 200 Megawatts — enough to meet much of Berlin’s hot water needs during the summer and about 10% of what it requires in the winter. The vast, insulated tank can keep water hot for up to 13 hours, helping bridge short periods when there’s little wind or sun. It will also be able to use other sources of heat — such as that extracted from wastewater, said Wielgoss. While it will be Europe’s biggest heat storage facility when it’s completed at the end of this year, an even bigger one is already being planned in the Netherlands. I found the thirteen hours figure a little surprising. With that much thermal mass, and the volume/surface ratio, and what I assume is excellent insulation, I would think it could stay pretty hot for longer than that. Anyway, "cool" idea.

Thanks. I think this makes sense. When you have the 100 ton boat floated with one ton of water, in a tight rigid container, it helps to consider the container itself. The boat does not "sense" any difference between the tight container and a vast pool of water of that depth. The displacement matters, not where that displaced water is, so long as the column is deep enough. And thanks for commiserations. Much better to have a divot than a bump. I'm going to fill it with water and see what I can float.

I just made something up on the density, for simple math. I will think about your explanation - am having minor surgery (basal cell carcinoma lopped off) in about an hour, so hope to have a clearer head after that. Not sure I entirely follow @sethoflagos equivalency between buoyant force and hydraulic pressure, either. Will also try to revisit that. Please, everyone, wear hats, slather sunblock, follow the "10 and 4" rule if you can.

Say Hg has an SG of 12, and the rock 2.0. You will need a ton of Hg to float a ton of rock, so you need at least one-sixth the volume of the rock in mercury, your flotation fluid. That is your minimum required volume of a fluid that's six times denser than rock. If your fluid had a SG of 4, then you would need fluid with half the volume of the rock, at minimum. All the close fitting container does is make it difficult to add enough fluid volume to float the rock. Your rock will bottom out.

I don't understand the resistance to Archimedes principle here. Pressure increases with depth below the surface of a liquid. Any object with a non-zero vertical depth will have different pressures on its top and bottom, with the pressure on the bottom being greater. This difference in pressure causes the upward buoyancy force. You need a lot of mercury to get that pressure differential to be sufficient. An object will displace its own weight of mercury, which means you need a ton of it. Listen to the guy who did an experiment at home.

A first year law student could poke holes in Ornato's credibility. Ornato was so pro-Trump that the president removed him from the Secret Service and made him his political adviser, then deputy chief of staff. Ornato helped orchestrate that infamous moment where riot police gassed peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters from in front of the White House so that Trump could have a photo op in front of a historic church. He also helped plan many Trump political rallies before later returning to the Secret Service. But what we really have are anonymous hacks feeding fantasy rumors to the Fox News bubble. They do this because they know how truly damning a lot of the testimony has been. Anything to sow seeds of doubt, and to repeat as often as possible.

I also wondered, as Phi did, if bringing in Cassidy was setting up some action by Garland. She had not only damning testimony but looks like she wandered off the set of The West Wing, yet not at all trying to put on a show or dramatize. And the allusion to attempts at witness tampering before her deposition - "they reminded me a couple of times that Trump does read transcripts..." - adds to her power as a sympathetic figure standing up to intimidation.

Throwing lunch against the wall? Attacking security staff and attempting to take the wheel of a limo to drive yourself to the riot? Suggesting turning off the magnetometer and letting people with guns join the crowd in order to maximize its size and make it more like your own personal coup army? And the most damning quote, imo: You know, I don’t even care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Very credible portrayal of Trump.

Definitely not helminth, given the size. Given the segmentation in the closer image, I have doubts about the uric acid crystals theory. If it's a fiber, I would lean towards something that got into the clothing and transferred to the outlet opening. It's not cotton, though. Might be worth checking micro images of mineral wool (fiberglass, in the US) or other sorts of batt insulation, if the donor was working around a building site, that kind of thing. Might be a help if @Qwerty2022 could update with a little more info on the pee source.