Posts by squigbobble

Re: petrochemicals -- just, not fossil fuels

"And we can burn as much of these as we like with impunity provided (a) we achieve clean burn, no nasty soot or carbon monoxide or hydrocarbon fragments"

This is practically impossible, there's no chance of controlling the mixture and flame propagation well enough to completely eliminate all of these in a piston engine, that's why catalytic convertors were mandated. You can minimise the undesirable carbon compounds by running a lean mixture but you make up for that by spewing out more NOx instead.

A fuel cell is the best bet for a clean hydrocarbon 'burn' because of the degree of control it gives you over the chemical reaction but then you'd get all the extraneous chemicals in affordable hydrocarbon fuels trying to poison or cack up the fuel cell.

Re: Optional

Just had the bizarre thought that it's so big even the light in the photon sphere will take about 15 days to orbit it...

Re: What's 3nders game?

OKcupid is free for all (so you can message people for free) with charges for premium features. Core demographic seems to be twentysomethings.

Re: I call shenanigans.

The glove went for 1p, lol. I always inflate the postage charges slightly to cover the eBay and PayPal fees when I'm doing a penny auction otherwise you can actually lose money on a sale.

Re: John Savard Watch the Funny Man!

To me, it looks like 'traditional black farming' is just Mugabe's cover story. He's deliberately crippled agriculture (usually, when the farms get taken over they're gifted to one of his cronies and asset-stripped) and the monetary system in order to keep the populace weak and create a dependence on his regime.

Food scarcity ensures that people spend much more of their efforts on acquiring their next meal and less on things that might be detrimental to the regime a la the Ministry of Plenty and (this is a pretty wild guess) imported food should be easier to control the distribution of than locally-grown stuff, ensuring that regions with more Mugabe supporters get fed better.

Hyperinflation can also be worked to an advantage. The moment a trillion-Zimbabwean Dollar note is printed it starts to lose buying power. The older that note is, the less you can buy with it. This means that the people closest to the mint (Mugabe's followers) are automatically wealthier than people further away from it, thus creating a dependence on the Mugabe Bunch.

Re: More power to them..

I think that's pretty much what the plan is.

Re: Economists solving the problems the last one caused

For bonus points, in BradMet the housing benefit cheques go straight to the landlord. That's how my housemate ended up paying rent (after he'd started a job) while his landlord was, unbeknown to him, simultaneously cashing his housing benefit cheques when BradMet comprehensively failed to stop his benefits after he told them he'd started a job. 3 times. Though he ignored my advice of telling them in writing by recorded delivery.

Out of him and the landlord, guess which one BradMet pursued for benefit fraud and demanded repayment from.

Re: SICKING, DISGUSTING WATCHING!

Full marks for creativity in your attempt to both inspire a reunion of another 90's group I want to forget and living out your sexual fantasy re. them.

Re: Depression kills.

It also gives you negative recall bias so you'll have difficulty remembering anything positive and your usual confirmation bias, combined with a depressed mood, will make you focus on anything negative and disregard positive things. It's not always as simple hearing nice things about yourself.

You can have everything and still not have your health, including your mental health.

Re: Not just bitcoin has value.

"...or a laughing stock"

Or, as they're known in cryptocurrency forums, shitcoins.

Re: "heptane-based fuel"

The best bit about that sketch was the petrol-cheese switch on the back of the robot :D

Patience

The cops will still be sifting through the cack on their puters before working out what to charge them with. There's limited resource and suspected terrorists (and probably fraudsters too) are further up the priority list.

"5 year plans"... ...Russian automobiles

Seems to be about how long they last, unless they're fibreglass. Though Lada Nivas keep rolling with horrendous tinworm, if autotrader is to be believed.

You can recycle energy as well

Manufacturing glass from raw materials is way more energy intensive than recycling it so by recycling glass you reduce the total energy required for manufacturing new glass things. In a sense, you're recycling the energy that was put into processing the raw materials into raw glass.

Paper recycling, however, is more about saving the trees.

Can't wait...

...to see how netmums reacts to the discovery that chip&PIN terminals create nonces.

Re: Getting as bad as motorcycle and car shows

I had a different misheard version:

Get up in de morning, making de breakfast,

So dat every mouth can be fed.

Oh,

Oh,

Me ears are alight, yeah.

Re: living a lie

It would be fair to assume that as soon as anything threatens the wealth of their estates they would become as self-serving as anyone else. However, they seem less likely to browbeat the country into military misadventures than anyone else that's been in No.10 recently.

asbestos plume of rickets

What a delightful name.

Re: Mumsnet: "By parents for parents"

"#PenisBeaker, how did I miss that?"

By good fortune/the Grace of God/Inshallah/his Noodley Appendage/$DEITY.

Re: An actual use for this

Yeah, nobody buys a GoPro for that. I was thinking along the lines of the cheaper, less branded crashcams that are knocking about. You could do this with a smaller mirror if the optics were completely custom made for it instead of it having to work with the existing GoPro optics but it's probably cheaper to use an ultra-wide angle lens and a second camera pointing in the opposite direction to the first.

Re: Helium is *very* hard to seal systems against

I'd rather have a hydrogen leak than some of the other propellants like hydrazine. At least it's effectively non-toxic (with a lower toxicity than oxygen) and disperses quickly, leak detection is probably a pain in the arse though.

Are SpaceX using LHe to cool the LO2 tanks?

Re: Just what are they droning on about?

Yes but it would be treachery for any Comrade of the People's Republic to use the decadent West's search tools.