* Posts by Chemist

2677 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Mar 2010

Firefox decade: Microsoft's IE humbled by a dogged upstart. Native next?

Chemist

Re: Forgetting something Mr Chemist?

You haven't got an ftp client ?!!!

Chemist

Re: Firefox is the most stable on Android

"Never buying their under-supported crap again."

Not bothering with troll- you are just a (AC) liar

Chemist

"Well if you are running Linux, you are used to patching and compiling your own kernels, as well as spending hours on a command line fixing dodgy software.So you repeated browser crashes (once a day for FF is not uncommon) probably go unnoticed."

a) not compiled anything for years !

b) Use the command line a lot - just not needed

c) You are a trol*

c) You are illiterate! (BTW)

Chemist

"Constant crashes on Android here as well. Just like on the PC, FF on Android is not fit for purpose."

Oh, an AC with a 'valid' opinion. What possible reason could you have for being that ?. No, thought not

Chemist

" without IE, what would you use to download your browser with?"

Konqueror or wget or ftp or ........

Chemist

"native beats Firefox because ff crashes constantly"

Well me and mine use FF ALL the time day in/day out and if it crashes it's noteworthy - maybe 2-3 times a year.

Mind that's running all machines (6) under Linux

BBC clamps down on illicit iPlayer watchers

Chemist

Re: Get_iplayer still working here

Radio downloads working OK now

Virgin 'spaceship' pilot 'unlocked tailbooms' going through sound barrier

Chemist

Re: "Wealthy customers have signed up in large numbers to see a black sky "

"You seem to have forgotten the recent deaths in the Himalayas ......"

What's that got to do with it. He didn't say climb a dangerous mountain and for that matter the stars against a black sky were magnificent only a mile from Salcombe with our boat tied to its pontoon.

Snapper's decisions: Whatever happened to real photography?

Chemist

Re: Total light?

@ Steven Jones

I certainly can confirm that my 550D ( love it as I do) isn't a match for my full-frame 6D esp. in noise performance even though the pixel count is ~ the same. Shooting a starry sky, for example, I was seeing far, far more stars without any noise artifacts.

(BTW though some of the finest slides I've ever seen where 21/4 inch Hasselblad photos)

FATTIES: Boffins say their miracle sunshine skin cream 'prevents obesity'

Chemist

Re: Bioavailability

" Bioavailability

What you swallow is not what you absorb. Quite a few of the unhealthy foods have high bioavaliability while the healthy ones have lower bioavailability."

I suspect you don't know what bioavailability means. Hint: it's not just the proportion of material absorbed.

Chemist

"nitric oxide last week - it helps open blood vessels to prevent high blood pressure"

It's used for a number of control mechanisms in the body. AFAIK (it's mostly not my fields of expertise), there are 3 main mechanisms. One form of the enzyme eNOS (Nitric oxide synthetase ) is activated in blood vessels, I assume under some control, and converts the amino-acid arginine into nitric oxide (+citrulline) . This relaxes the blood vessels. Another NOS, iNOS generates NO by the same mechanism to generate an inflammatory reaction as part of the response to infection etc.

I think, also, that nitrates/nitrites in the diet can generate a background level of NO which may help blood vessel control.

Synthetic nitrites are used to produce a rapid rise in NO levels to alleviate angina symptoms.

But its nature - it modifies the activity of lots of proteins and has a number of recorded effects ( on insulin & airways for example) may mean there are plenty of unknown functions (good & bad)

Chemist

Re: Miracle!

"During the first 10 minutes or so of exercise the body burns carbs as fuel, from 10-60 minutes the body turns to burning fat. Normally from 60 minutes + the body will switch to burning muscle as fuel since proteins burn slower and it's slow energy you need."

I think you'll find that this is not correct.

A fit, well-fed individual will have ~~1300 cals of stored carbohydrate, mostly as glycogen, At the start of exercise this will be mobilized to the muscles. On it's own it will provide enough energy for ~~2hrs cycling, however fat mobilization/metabolism which is slower, starts to contribute from relatively early on and becomes significant well before carbohydrate is exhausted. As most people have plenty of fat (maybe 160000 cals) provided the exercise is of a lower order than 'flat-out' fat can provide energy for a long time. Catabolism of protein is a response to starvation in the main, although anyone seriously trying to lose weight by just dieting (i.e.starvation) should try to maintain whole-body muscle fitness by exercise.

Men who sleep with lots of women lessen risk of prostate cancer

Chemist

Re: a study from Canadian health researchers

Re :a study from Canadian health researchers

AFAIK the correlation between frequency of ejaculation and prostate cancer is already well-known.

Voyager 1 now EIGHTEEN LIGHT HOURS from home

Chemist

Re: Time dilation

"A constant 1g acceleration would get you to near "

But to get that constant acceleration the energy requirement increase rapidly as ->c

e.g rel. kinetic energy for 1 tonne at 0.9c & 0.999c compared with 'convention' kinetic energy

0.9 ~2E20 J ~3.6E19 J

0.999 ~2E21 J ~4.5E19 J

So an order of mag. increase of total energy required to go 0.9c -> 0.999c

Happy 2nd birthday, Windows 8 and Surface: Anatomy of a disaster

Chemist

Re: Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory...

"Last time I tried Linux and attempted to install Firefox I first had to find an installer for the distribution I was using."

Strange that as I've installed OpenSUSE for years (and years) and Firefox was included as one of the default browsers - no need to specifically install at all - that's part of the ease of use of a full-featured distro. Even installing a program that isn't in the distro is often a 1-click job

COMET 67P is basically TRAILING a HORRIFIC STENCH through space

Chemist

Re: Hydrogen Sulphide doesn't stink

"Really pure Hydrogen Sulphide is almost as odour-free as hydrogen cyanide."

Do you have a ref. for that ? AFAIK pure hydrogen sulphide is detectable by its smell at ~ 1ppm but at higher concentrations the smell is less or indeed undetectable. I've personally experienced this as walking into a lab full of people I could smell hydrogen sulphide (initially) when the entire room full of staff told me they had smelt it 'a few minutes earlier' but it was 'OK' now. I got them all out into the corridor, tested the air ( with a draeger tube) and the concentration was ~100ppm. A leaking rubber tube was the the cause even though the kit was in a good fume-cupboard.

It's even GRIMMER up North after MEGA SKY BROADBAND OUTAGE

Chemist

Re: Well..

"Saas Fee. Dullest ski holiday i've ever been on. (FYI)"

Well I don't ski but I do walk/climb. If I did ski I could do it at the moment - many of the main ski teams are here including Japanese. The Swiss team has >18 minibuses.

I can't see the runs at the moment as there is some cloud ( it snowed last night down to ~3000m )

http://www.saas-fee.ch/en/aktuell/Webcam_Mittelallalin

Chemist

Well..

I live in the a very nice part of 'the north' surrounded by many of the areas you attempt to mention although I'm in Saas-Fee, Switzerland at the moment. Certainly my broadband connection is working at home as I've just looked at a directory on my server using fish://

Microsoft, Docker bid to bring Linux-y containers to Windows: What YOU need to know

Chemist

Re: It's sounding a bit vague

"Yes, I feel they're at the stage of: "Oh, I want one of those!""

or even " "Oh, I want you to think we've got one of those!""

Scientists skeptical of Lockheed Martin's truck-sized fusion reactor breakthrough boast

Chemist

Re: Clean ?????

"You need a process that creates helium-6 for it to be clean,"

Would you care to elaborate on this ?

AFAIK He-6 has a 1/2 life of <1 sec and decays by both beta and alpha emission.

He-4 is stable and the extra neutron released to form it is the one required to make more Tritium

Chemist

Re: Patents

"Isn't half life affected by relativistic effects?"

Sorry, don't understand the context ?

Tritium has a half-life of ~12 years, it's often incorporated into drugs/ligands for studying biological mechanisms and these have a useful working life.

If you send it up to close to the speed of light it's 1/2 life will increase to multiples of 12 years depending on the velocity but I don't know what that's got to do with this topic.

Kill off SSL 3.0 NOW: HTTPS savaged by vicious POODLE

Chemist

Re: smug

"Poodletest doesn't get it right with Firefox - it is vulnerable."

It does now - it's been updated.

Also "So in short: Firefox is less likely to downgrade to SSLv3 if the server follows best practices on cipher selection, even if SSLv3 is still supported."

Chemist

From ISC

Their current page for this includes links to test sites

For clients it's https://www.poodletest.com/ (Javascript needs to be enabled)

FYI OpenSUSE 13.1 Firefox ESR not vulnerable, SeaMonkey (2.29) not vulnerable, Konqueror (4.10.1) vulnerable

Lies, damn pies and obesity statistics: We're NOT a nation of fatties

Chemist

Re: Hunter gatherer much

"Hunter gatherer much "

Summarizing what I've researched about this aspect of diet/behaviour :

Humans still have the basic physiology of hunter-gatherers from 10000+ years ago. It's estimated ( from the nearest we have to hunter gatherers today) that they expended ~~1400 cals average in physical activity every day as well as having a relatively low-calorie diet especially low in simple sugars.

Our metabolism, although wonderfully adaptable, still probably reflects this.

Chemist

Re: Don't forget...

Not to mention the parts of the country fed by direct rainwater supplies. Also many of the contaminants people worry about (e.g. growth hormone) don't get absorbed orally.

Chemist

@V_Eight

"When quizzing the biologist she said that the calories burned maintaining body temp at the cellular level are next to nothing. Perhaps 100 a day."

I've no idea of the actual figure but AFAIK the bulk of heat generated in the body is the result of exothermic chemical reactions during metabolism - indeed this is why exercise makes you hot as glucose/fats are oxidized at an elevated rate to produce the high-energy phosphates that power muscles. Indeed any fat/glucose not consumed will be converted into storage forms such as lipid stores or muscle & liver glycogen. If the glycogen stores are full the excess glucose will be converted to fat.

BTW It may be obvious but burning 1kg of fat or glucose out in the open air generates the same amount of heat as metabolising it does.

There is some evidence that (some ?) humans have a brown fat that can short circuit the usual metabolic process and generate heat 'on demand' under hormonal or nervous system control. This is separate from the other thermogenic technique of shivering to generate an increased thermal input.

Chemist

"My doctor told me my blood pressure and other problems were exacerbated by my weight "

When I started to lose weight my blood pressure was 170/95 and I was determined to avoid medication if possible (ironic since a colleague and I developed the manufacturing route to one of the world's first $1Billion/year drugs for hypertension)

By the time I'd lost 15kg my blood pressure was 155/85 and by my target of 80kg it was 125/80. (Researching the literature in this area has led me to the conclusion that our heterogeneous human population has a very wide spread of BP/weight responses and it looks like I was one of the lucky ones)

Chemist

"Exercise is a good thing but as a way of losing weight it's problematic, we are very efficient at converting food to work and muscle."

No it's absolutely equivalent to dieting the difficulty is doing enough of it to lose a large amount quickly. As I mention earlier I lost 35kg by keeping my intake ~2300 cals and upping my exercise to quite a large amount - not possible for everyone I know. I now measure all exercise in calories which not only keeps the arithmetic simple but concentrates the mind wonderfully when about to eat almost anything - this meal needs 15 miles of walking to be calorie neutral.

BTW if we were very good at converting food to work and muscle a lot of people would be star weightlifters. What we are good at doing is storing excess energy as fat. Dieting depletes all body stores : glycogen, fat and lean tissue/muscle. That's another good reason not to lose weight just by dieting.

Chemist

Re: And now my turn,

"I'll know more after a week,"

Well done to get started.

A few points. A week is a very short time, body weight can change day to day quite a lot, in my case easily swamping a weeks loss. When I was losing 2-3 kg a week it didn't matter but at lower rates it's easy to be fooled and so disheartened. Best is to plot your weight every day at the same time/scales/position of scales. and then apply an exponential moving average to the plot. This tends to give an indicator of trend. Also when you first cut calories esp. dramatically several confounding trends occur such as fluid loss or retention and esp. a lowering of basal metabolic rate. You may feel cold. Regular exercise should help to boost/maintain your metabolic rate.

For breakfast and lunch I tended to stick to foods where the calories were easy to measure/estimate (cereal/milk, crispbreads/jam fruit).

Problem with most expenditure over basal is measuring/estimating it. You could use a pedometer but even the recommended 30mins brisk walking is only likely to be ~200 cals/day. 1 flight of stairs is only likely to be ~3 cals .

Good luck

Chemist

Re: As a fatter person

"sequestered in your adipocytes become unavailable for doing anything. "

Sorry fat makes an important contribution to exercise calories especial endurance. The reason for having adipocytes in any case is to be a longer-term store of energy. There'd be no point if the energy couldn't be used.

Chemist

Re: lies , damn lies, and who are all the pies?

"keeping your brain alive burns a big chunk of the 2500kCals/day"

Actually about 200-300 cals/day . There are many sources of ref. but this one should do :

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thinking-hard-calories/

Chemist

Re: Bollocks

"So am I a statistic"

It doesn't matter ( from just a weight point of view not other health issues) what you eat/drink - count the calories (honestly) in what you eat/drink and if they are over approx 2500 a day and probably quite a bit less if you have a sedentary job then you'll gain weight

Chemist

Re: A personal experience

"According to the BMI stuff, that still leaves me about a stone 'overweight'. I disagree."

As others have pointed out BMI is, at best, a 'rough' guide to individuals. It should act as a check - if it suggests you are overweight then look at other measures such as waist size or better still body-fat percentage - this is the real target - a fit individual should have plenty of muscle and a relatively small amount of fat. Unfortunately this is the hardest parameter to measure - most easy measures are poor surrogates for MRI scans.

Chemist

Re: OK I admit it

"thought about publishing the data somewhere? "

Oh, it's almost all available if you have good access to the the biomedical literature. The only thing I really struggled with is the value for height gain as there seems to be a wide range in the literature. My final value of 100 cals/100m gain+loss and matches my actual loss rather well.

Another interesting on-line source , esp to an IT audience, is a document by John Walker one of the Autocad founders although he lost weight mostly by calorie reduction.

The Hacker's Diet

How to lose weight and hair through stress and poor nutrition

By John Walker

http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/

Unfortunately I'd worked out my routine and lost a lot of weight before I found this.

"coming in from a 2.5km run and eating 3 slices of toast and honey - vastly more calories than I have theoretically burned."

You can't treat it like that. You need to know at the minimum how many calories/day will keep your weight steady. Is the toast etc in addition to that basal calorie level. There really is no magic in this for most people long term unless you are one of the 'lucky' ones with lots of brown fat (assuming it really exists/works in humans) or some metabolic issue ( malabsorption of fats for example)

Chemist

OK I admit it

In 1997 I weighed 115kg @ 1.8m tall. I decided that enough was enough especially as mountain climbing was getting rather hard

I curtailed my diet to ~2300 cals per day (estimate) and began increasing my exercise. Now not everyone can do it but I live in hilly country and I worked in the country so by walking and eventually running before breakfast, walking at lunch and in the evenings I managed to exercise the equivalent of 500-2000 cals per day. It took 4 years losing some every spring/summer & gaining some over winter.

I still have the spreadsheets going back to then and I carried on until I reached ~80kg which I've maintained ever since.

The equation was actually simple (Estimated calories consumed minus required calorie intake for neutral weight gain minus exercise calories)/8000 = weight loss per day in kg.

The hard part was estimating intake, working out neutral calories for me and estimating various forms of exercise although most (running, cycling ) are available. The hard one in fact was hill walking which I do a lot. My best estimate was 60 cals/km + 100 cals per 100 metres ascent+descent. This may not be all strictly accurate but my weight loss tracked my equation almost perfectly sometimes spookily so.

The 8000 in the equation is cals/kg of fat BTW. The above equation needs to be adjusted for body weight as lowering weight decreases the numerical effects of exercise - if you want to lose 3kg it matters not but in my case it was 35kg or ~40% of my final weight. I still have no feedback when I overeat I have to rely on estimates and scales but now it's become second nature and I can keep my weight ± 2kg.

I have no pride in what I did I'm very sorry it was necessary but I think the message is for most ( probably nearly all people) too many calories need to be compensated for by starvation or preferably exercise. Many people I've discovered have the same lack of feedback to excessive intake and many people have a wildly optimistic view of the effects of exercise. ( a small Mars bar is equivalent to 3-4 miles of walking, sadly a pint needs 2 miles of walking )

Another way of looking at it ; 100 cals extra/less exercise/food every day is equivalent to losing/gaining 4.5kg in a year. That easily goes to explain this 'epidemic'

I've got a new Linux box, how does it work... WOAH, only asking :-/

Chemist

"Bottom line is, by the time you get to recompiling your kernel to suit the hardware and get things going, Linux is an amazing platform for getting the most out"

You really expect that most people with any knowledge of Linux would believe this ?

I've not compiled a kernel for probably 15 years and I use Linux (OpenSUSE) all the time on all my machines.

Installs also automatically get the resolution of the monitors correct, even my TV plugged in as a second monitor is recognized.

Researchers: Trolls have dark tetrad of personality defects

Chemist

"Not an IT department with a confusing name."

Correct, mea culpa - I read IS as IT !

Still stand by the post on that basis though

Chemist

"who does that?"

Well I can't tell you as they always post AC. But on many occasions they've claimed to be an IT director, or responsible for 25000 desktops or some such guff. The language is a dead giveaway, the phrases/claims almost always identical and repeated ad nauseam. I think Trevor probably knows who I mean.

Chemist

"than being out there and running an IS unit or similar?"

Or more likely, in the case of one of 'our' more prolific trolls, pretending to.

Internet Explorer stars in monster October Patch Tuesday

Chemist

"like the ability to turn off javascript,"

Really ??. What they've done is remove the option in Preferences - it's still an option on the about:config page that's used for masses of possible configuration changes

Re-light my diode: Trio of boffins scoop physics Nobel for BLUE LEDs

Chemist

"Did Marie Curie, just go oh look what's this funny metal, I'll call it Plutomium. No."

Bit pedantic I know, but it's Polonium ( and later Radium)

Bored hackers flick Shellshock button to OFF as payloads shrink

Chemist

Re: likewise

"f you think it's FUD to point out that bad things can happen when a simple to exploit vulnerability can get you a remote shell"

I don't think that's FUD. But as you gave no evidence about method it's your claim to be able to do it that is the FUD

Chemist

Re: likewise

"Reasonably straight forward, as long as you can find yourself a privilege escalation hole. I've demo'd exploits that allowed me to root boxes, using shellshock as the entry point. There was no misconfiguration on the systems, just other bugs which became exploitable once you were able to run code on the box"

Ooh, let's all believe the AC - no evidence given - trust him after all he's an AC

These were your own boxes I hope or are you going to turn yourself in ? Perhaps that's why you are AC.

If they were your boxes, or indeed any others, how do we know they were correctly configured ? Or is it all the wishful FUDing of an AC ?

Vanished blog posts? Enterprise gaps? Welcome to Windows 10

Chemist

Re: Bah!

"It will be a hassle because I use many, many, many, applications every day that do not appear as yet to have Linux versions"

So it's not a hassle - its an impossibility is what you should have said - if you can't manage without a certain program or programs you're stuffed.

Somehow I seem to have to have missed the need for anything I can't find for Linux, sure I've had to adjust but given all the scientific software I've used was generally written for Unix/Linux and that all my other interests ( photography, still and video, programming, electronics) can be well satisfied by programs available for Linux (plus all the usual requirements of browsers/e-mail clients/spreadsheets etc).

If you have a specific need (Autocad) for example then you have no real option, I guess.

Chemist

Re: Bah!

"I think this is the inflection point that makes Linux worth the hassle."

What hassle ? ( i7 laptop, CeleronM laptop, Atom netbook, dual-core Atom fileserver, dual core AMD desktop, dual Core Intel desktop) That's my current line-up in a LONG list back to 1995. All current machines using OpenSUSE 13.1

Researchers bypass Redmond's EMET, again

Chemist

"Yawn. Lots of assertions...."

You're generous ! Seems more like his usual bowel movements.

Supercomputers: The Next Generation – Cray puts burst buffer tech, Intel Haswell inside

Chemist
Happy

Re: I want one in my basement

"I want one in my basement - to calculate how to win the lottery...."

You have an algorithm ?

What's a Chromebook good for? How about running PHOTOSHOP?

Chemist

Re: @Chemist

"Why would you need an ARM version of Darktable?"

I was covering the general case - anyway someone might already have an ARM-based on

Chemist

"What an idiotic comment, of course your requirements mean this situation isn't ideal for you."

Who is it ideal for ? . Most people don't edit their photos much anyway- certainly not so as to need Photoshop and its costs. On the other hand many people with a DSLR have big files in huge archives AND do develop from raw images - so an on-line editor is not ideal for them either.

Typically on a 3 week trip I will take 200-600 photos ( ~~15GB) and 5GB of HD video clips. Even the network at home struggles a bit with that during editing.

BTW I'd put a Linux distro on the chromebook and use Darktable for editing (if an ARM version is available)

Microsoft on the Threshold of a new name for Windows next week

Chemist

Re: Next Windows name is.........

"(and believe me, I' have tried so many times)"

The considered opinion of an AC and for what good reason ?