Posts by Pompous Git

Re: Fair Enough

@ Orv

Clergy/Religious professionals: 59.8

Accountants: 61.6

Teaching, education: 62.5

Medical doctors: 63.2

Machine operators, auxiliary technical occupations: 74.8

Architects, engineers: 75.7

Construction and building construction labourers: 148.3

Occupations in forestry: 148.6

Comparative mortality rates, by profession, in Switzerland (average = 100)

Firefighters not listed... I can remember when the Westgate Bridge fell down killing 35 construction workers. Here in Oz we have a lot of fires, but relatively few firemen die (usually in a bushfire) compared to construction-work where it's pretty much a weekly affair.

Re: Three functional errors

"In reality - and you need to pay attention to *real world* numbers our society. The functional work of the last 40 years was to increase the global wealth such that no people needed to live in poverty in order to sustain the wealth of a few. Do the numbers boys and girls. We hit that range of global wealth in the area of 2000 or 2005."

Well said that man!

Re: Fair Enough

"They don't run into burning buildings an pull people out of them either, maybe the firefighters earn it?"

A building site's a very hazardous environment. Nearly as hazardous as a farm even. Maybe people who work on building sites and farms deserve a little consideration, too.

Re: This is all very well, but........

"While I have some sympathy for the views expressed, people working in minimum / living / low wage jobs are supposed to save for retirement how exactly?"

Easy peasy! Just have a "job" on the side: drug-dealing, prostitution, burglary... There's an engineer in Tasmania who's also a sex worker and I also recall an art teacher in the 1970s.

Re: This is all very well, but........

"when they decide to spend money and not save for retirement should stop complaining about what they have to do later in life. Problem today is people want it all. To spend all their money now on living life, whilst still expecting others to fund their later life/retirement."

Well that's a crock of shit if ever I heard any. Mrs Git and I went without to purchase two investment properties so we would be less of a burden on the taxation system. So now we get sweet FA on the OAP. If we sell the properties, we have to spend all the capital before we get any pension at all. The income from the properties is barely enough to pay down the loans.

Re: When they came for the rockclimbers...

"What makes fat people pay more (they choose to eat moer) "

Not really. It's an excess of carbohydrates over fat and protein. Every farmer knows this and feeds luxury amounts of carbohydrates to animals being fattened for slaughter. If you just ate bacon and eggs with no potatoes, bread etc, you would discover that you would become a lot thinner.

Re: When they came for the rockclimbers...

"got chatting to the crew and they commented that they almost never get called out to climbers."

Had a friend back in the early 1970s who was into climbing mountains; specifically the Himalayas. He said that; climbers very rarely fall off mountains. He proved it by falling off one just the once.

Re: So... we should do the opposite...

"welfare is effectively a salary from other people (taxpayers) via the government. Why should people be paid a salary, yet not contribute and work in some manner"

Er... this OAP was a worker paying taxes for many years. Indeed, my earliest tax returns were entitled: "Taxation and Superannuation". My pension is being paid from my taxes, not "other people's". And it's a mere $AU85 per fortnight because assets. IOW I'm being penalised for attempting to reduce my burden on other taxpayers.

Re: "Now if the bacteria absorbs U235 preferentially things could get interesting....."

"Ah. The devolution of modern degrees. You just get nicely printed toilet paper and a debt certificate after 5 y of doing nothing at all (maybe getting schooled in the fine arts of politicial correctness)."

Well fuck you then! My nephew spent more than four years research for his PhD in Zoology when he was told that someone else had published a paper covering the same subject matter. His supervisor at CSIRO told him he had to start all over again from scratch since it was against the rules to submit work that wasn't original.

It's worth noting that preprints on ArXiv.org help prevent this sort of thing. Unfortunately, zoology is not one of the disciplines covered. And for those commentards wondering about the derogatory comments regarding the ArXiv, here's some editorial in Nature last year about a proposed overhaul.

Re: The usual baloney

"Is that you, Herr Fleishmann?"

Whoosh! Straight over my head:

Herr Fleishmann

Re: The usual baloney

"There's a reason that paper is on Arxiv.org. The bit about shellfish synthesising calcium to make their shells from nothing? I just cannot imagine it passing peer review."

Please quote where the paper says shellfish synthesise calcium from nothing. Do understand that when one substance is transmuted into another that it's not creation ex nihilo. FWIW papers on ArXiv are not peer reviewed, but they are filtered by the moderators. And there are criteria you must meet in order to become an author there.

Re: The usual baloney

"The whole "organic" thing started well enough but is now being exploited. It was a bad choice of label for food grown without artificial chemical pesticides, herbicides and polluting artificial fertiliser."

The term organic farming was coined by Lord Northbourne in his book Look to the Land (1939). He conceived of "the farm as organism," a holistic, ecologically balanced approach to farming. This was rapidly followed by Sir Albert Howard's An Agricultural Testament (1940) and Lady Eve Balfour's The Living Soil (1949).

While it's commonly believed that no "artificial" chemicals used in organic agriculture, this is not true. Copper sulphate, sodium silicate, potassium stearate, potassium permanganate, potassium sulphate, are all products of human industry and permitted when I was involved in the development of organic standards here in Australia.

"Though perfectly natural fertiliser can cause as much pollution, spread parasites, kill fish cause algae blooms etc. We need sustainable farming practices rather than "marketing virtue labels"."

If your "perfectly natural fertiliser" has deleterious effects on the environment then you cannot be certified organic under the rules. And yes, sustainable farming practises rather marketing virtue labels is a much better idea, but one that got me off-side with the greenie-weenies. So it goes...

Re: "Now if the bacteria absorbs U235 preferentially things could get interesting....."

"You're partly right. Most carbon is C12."

I've been racking my 66 yr old brain to recall a conversation from a decade or more ago and all I keep coming up with is "Ilya Prigogine". It wasn't the analysis end, but where in the organism you sample because different isotopes do alter chemical reactions. Hitherto I'd accepted what I was taught at Big School chemistry in 1969.

Re: The usual baloney

"Personally, I've always preferred organic food to inorganic. Salt and water are a very limiting diet."

Definitely with you there Doctor! My cardiologist insists I restrict both.

Re: The usual baloney

"So why did you quote the one you did ?"

Because it seems to indicate that observation can be supported by theory. Simples, really.

Re: The usual baloney

"Aren't you the polymath !"

So I'm told. I prefer dilettante. "...generally applied more or less depreciatively to one who interests himself in an art or science merely as a pastime and without serious aim or study ('a mere dilettante’)."

Downvote wasn't from me; I gave you an upvote. Even though you used an exclamation mark rather than the required question mark...

Re: The usual baloney

"Chemist: You've still got to find a way to prioritize what you read and attend especially these days when any dingbat can 'publish' on the internet somewhere."

Actually I don't. I'm a free agent and can do whatever I feel like. FWIW, any dingbat has always been able to publish. Immanuel Velikovsky and Erich von Daniken both were published before there was an Internet.

"Chemist: Having been involved in peer review and also having friends who are currently reviewers I can say that we did/do our best to maintain standards in the chemistry, medicinal chemistry and biomedical journals we contributed to."

Quoting from: Peer review: a flawed process at the heart of science and journals

"Peer review might also be useful for detecting errors or fraud. At the BMJ we did several studies where we inserted major errors into papers that we then sent to many reviewers.3,4 Nobody ever spotted all of the errors. Some reviewers did not spot any, and most reviewers spotted only about a quarter. Peer review sometimes picks up fraud by chance, but generally it is not a reliable method for detecting fraud"

"Chemist: One the other hand the e-pub in question cites highly dubious sources and is sponsored by its own author and as far as I can tell has never been published in a 'hard' journal. "

Have you actually read any of Prof Widom's sources? If not, how do you know they are dubious? Yes, he is listed as self-sponsored. I take it that you are playing on the ignorance of other commentards here. ArXiv is a pre-print service that's been around the Internet since long before the Web. Initially for physicists only, it has broadened to include mathematics, astronomy, computer science, quantitative biology, statistics, and quantitative finance. [Not, I note, chemists.] As you must be aware, having a paper published can take years since you cannot submit simultaneously to multiple journals.

Authors with an academic position and track record of peer reviewed publication, like Prof Widom are self-sponsored. Those without such qualification need to be sponsored in order to publish. Some of course like the mathematician Grigori Perelman can't be arsed going through the mill of peer review and who can blame them? As John Maddox noted when he received the Watson and Crick paper, passing it to their peers would have merely resulted in them being pipped to the post by Linus Pauling.

"In particular one good piece of hard evidence beats any number of mere opinions"

Not according to Einstein. "If the facts don't fit the theory change the facts." The things you can get away with when you are a gatekeeper!

Re: The usual baloney

"So you'd rather anyone could publish any crap, however unlikely/stupid/insane even if the gullible might/will take it all in."

My knee-jerk reaction to this is "No! Of course not!" But then on reflection when you consider that 80% of published scientific papers are crap... The fraction of the 20% that aren't crap and actually become part of the Received View will still be there.

Worth thinking about. A colleague went to an Acres gabfest, notorious for some pretty outlandish ideas. A friend of his also attended and asked said colleague WTF are you doing here? Friend said every new scientific idea is outlandish when first proposed. The most likely place to find the Next Big Thing is at a place where outlandish ideas are accepted.

BTW, the stupid and gullible take in anything you might publish and nothing is going to change that.

Re: This is ridiculous

"They're both uranium oxides with varying amount of bound oxygen, and bacteria can strip off extra oxygen atoms and excrete the remainder."

So they are still harvesting the binding energy of oxygen. There you go. I thought they were more like the bacteria that exploit the metalloids like arsenic and selenium. Thanks...

Re: The usual baloney

"Nature had been managing for millenia and humans had been using organic farming methods for many hundreds of years. The only thing that was necessary to prove was that organic farming could produce crops as good as more modern methods"

Sorry, but Nature doesn't engage in agriculture; Nature is quite indifferent to human needs, perhaps even especially economic ones. Agriculture is definitely an economic enterprise.

Then there's the issue of do your agricultural methods enhance natural systems, or do they negate them and create a need for Yet Another Technological Fix? This latter strikes a wall when there's no feasible new technological fix in the offing as has happened with anthelmintics (intestinal worm control chemicals in livestock). The organic alternative, pulped garlic and cider vinegar works well; very much quicker than anthelmintics in fact. But the questions arise: How do you administer it to many hundreds of livestock; it clogs a conventional drench gun? Will it too eventually cease to work against important intestinal worms as they become adapted?

This is apart from how we define organic agriculture. That's a huge can of worms, so to speak. The greeny weenies hate me because I'm not gung-ho anti-chemical and never have been. Not really the time, place or topic for discussing this so I'll leave it there.

Re: The usual baloney

Scientific Journals are ‘faith based’: is there science behind Peer review?

Re: The usual baloney

"At no time is "fusion" mentioned in the abstract - and that is the ONLY way to create uranium where it did not exist before."

Do you think that might be because the word fusion doesn't occur in the body of the paper? Nor does it anywhere mention, even in passing, the creation of uranium where it did not exist before. The paper discusses the formation of rolling-front uranium ore deposits. Previously they were assumed to be formed entirely by an inorganic process. The evidence presented strongly suggests that the deposits at the Wyoming site are biogenic.

Re: This is ridiculous

"If this were possible, even in "scientific" theory, then we would have had bacteria that produce gold from lead a long time ago."

You might want to read the paper. El Reg gave us the link. Here it is again:

Biogenic non-crystalline U^(IV) revealed as major component in uranium ore deposits

Biogenic: Produced by living organisms.

Re: The usual baloney

"You should check the citations of the material you quote."

Back at you. I have read Kervran's Biological Transmutations having been given a copy several decades ago. Nowhere in it does he make the claim "the calcium in chickens’ eggshells is created by a process of cold fusion". He does mention a number of biological processes where one element increases and another decreases. There is no presentation of how this occurs.

When I read it, because education, I dismissed it. Sure elements transmutate all the time, but only in the presence of energy levels too high for biological processes to supply. So far, so good as they say.

About a decade ago, I ran across an acquaintance I hadn't seen since 1970/71. Like me he had become bored every ten years and commenced a new career. One of them for him had been prawn farming in Queensland. I cannot recall how the topic came up, but he had his inputs and outputs analysed and discovered anomalies: reduced K and increased Ca.

The problem is the where does the energy come from? The paper I cited claims that the energy is available, but I am not competent to comment on the physics.

"Most biologists are unaware of Kervran’s theories"

Even though I have read his book, so am I. He doesn't provide much in the way of explanation. What he does give is the results of experiment. As I said earlier in the thread, this was much the situation in organic agriculture 30 years ago. We had the results of experiments showing that certain things occur, but no scientific explanation. These days not so much.

Re: Environmentalists

"Contaminated ground water > 10km away from me isn't a problem for me, it is for environmentalists 1000km away"

Australia's Great Artesian Basin "underlies approximately 22% of Australia—occupying more than 1.7 million square kilometres beneath the arid and semi-arid parts of Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia and the Northern Territory." Obviously you're not living over a major artesian basin.

Re: WTF is this article?

"So the bacteria "produce" uranium from uranium ore - in the same way that Alcor "produce" aluminium from bauxite"

No, aluminium from bauxite requires energy and rather a lot of it. The bacteria in question derive energy from the chemical transition. Allegedly...

Re: The usual baloney

"I can't smell hydrogen cyanide myself ( a issue for a chemist !) "

Worse is a chemist with a stutter! All those long names...

Re: The usual baloney

"I can only guess that your downvoter thought that you were agreeing with the AC's random ramblings about elements, protons and neutrons, which I highly doubt."

Actually I suspect that the rambling element in the original AC comment was somewhat tongue in cheek, but I could be wrong. I certainly didn't find it to be as mind-numbingly stupid as Faux Science Slayer for example.

Re: The usual baloney

"As a chemist I accept that all chemistry involves quantum effects and many enzymes probably utilize tunneling but I don't see chemical (& therefore) biological systems having nuclear effects"

Perhaps because you are a chemist and not a physicist?

Biological Nuclear Transmutations as a Source of Biophotons A. Widom, Physics Department, Northeastern University, Boston MA USA

Y. N. Srivastava, Physics Department & INFN, University of Perugia, Perugia Italy

S. Sivasubramanian, Nanoscale Technology and High Rate Manufacturing Research Center

Northeastern University, Boston MA USA.

"Many electrons dumping their individually smaller energies into a single high energy nuclear reaction may contribute to a nuclear transmutation process with plenty of available biophysical energy.

Due mainly to the lack of a clear and detailed biophysical theory of nuclear transmutations, the experimental data is considered by some to be controversial. The present lack of a biophysical theory of how the collective energy of many degrees of freedom is focused on a few nuclear transmutation events by no means reflects badly on the reliable experimental data which clearly indicates nuclear transmutations."

Thirty odd years ago, I was farming organically and simultaneously investigating what scientific evidence could be mustered to explain why organic farming technologies worked. At that time I was told by what might be called the old guard of agricultural scientists such systems could never work. But I was reporting my findings in a regular rural newspaper column and found myself addressing audiences of farmers and ag. scientists. Today much of that "impossible" stuff is considered quite mainstream. And I take great delight each time some old observation is explained at The Scientist. YMMV...

Re: rewrite textbooks?

"They think the world was created in 4004 BC, like wot Bishop Ussher worked out, so they think it's 6000 years old."

There are many dates for the creation: Clement of Alexandria (5592 BC), Julius Africanus (5501 BC), Eusebius (5228 BC), Jerome (5199 BC) Hippolytus of Rome (5500 BC), Theophilus of Antioch (5529 BC), Sulpicius Severus (5469 BC), Isidore of Seville (5336 BC), Panodorus of Alexandria (5493 BC), Maximus the Confessor (5493 BC), George Syncellus (5492 BC) and Gregory of Tours (5500 BC)... [pauses for breath] and I think the vast majority of wrong-thinking people are right. It's actually 7,000 ya. Give or take...

Re: The usual baloney

Jesus fucking Christ! Another downvote for referencing a reputable scientific publication. Where do you get your science from then? Christian Science Monitor or the Grauniad?

Re: "Now if the bacteria absorbs U235 preferentially things could get interesting....."

"Physicists will tell you that there's no chemical difference between how different isotopes behave chemically, which makes them very useful for radioisotope tracking of chemical pathways through the body."

Well they don't know much about biology then. Humans can smell the difference between the usual form of benzaldehyde and the deuterated variant for example. There's sufficient difference between C₁₃ and C₁₄ chemical activity in biological systems that you need to take this into account when sampling for carbon dating.

Re: The usual baloney

"This is either a troll or evidence of almost unbelievable stupidity."

Er...

Quantum biology

"Recent evidence suggests that a variety of organisms may harness some of the unique features of quantum mechanics to gain a biological advantage. These features go beyond trivial quantum effects and may include harnessing quantum coherence on physiologically important timescales. In this brief review we summarize the latest results for non-trivial quantum effects in photosynthetic light harvesting, avian magnetoreception and several other candidates for functional quantum biology. We present both the evidence for and arguments against there being a functional role for quantum coherence in these systems."

Re: "Well, if you believe the claims about nuclear explosions in Earth's past "

"Since all nuclear reactions rely on statistics while a natural nuclear reactor is very unlikely it is not impossible, and it was a very long time ago."

The Oklo reactors were also very slow, though surprisingly numerous. sixteen are known. 1.7 billion years is plenty of time for geological processes to have obliterated others.

Re: The usual baloney

"I have personally transmuted palladium into silver."

In 1964 I was told by one of my teachers, (King Edward VI Grammar School, Nuneaton) that transmutation of elements was complete and utter nonsense. Interestingly there's a lot of granite there and here in the backward colonies was taught that there's uranium transmuting to lead in it.

Re: 6699 is 69 wrapped in 69

"right up there near the top, alongside watery bacon, on the "friends don't let friends ..." listie."

I had to look it up! I'd never even heard of it.

Last weekend there was a report on the telly about a bloke in Stanthorpe who made a barrel of vinegar in his farm shed for fun 12 years ago. Today he's rolling in money. And still having fun!

High-tech vinegar a success story of the new bush 'gold rush'

It's seriously nice vinegar. I always grab a couple of bottles when I visit my friends in Tenterfield.

Re: The Deep Ones...

"Just as long as the Kraken is not awakened."

The Kraken has been released! On Australian TV even:

Release the Kraken!

Re: Axed Geoblocking

"So is Irish, the Gaels were not the original inhabitants of the island."

But I don't think the original inhabitants are complaining.

Re: Clever Chap, Einstein

"I take a lot of comfort from the knowledge that relativity and quantum mechanics still disagree. That's a good thing. It means that there's some other, even more monumental idea out there that fully explains both. "

Came in the mail a week ago. Haven't had time to read it yet...

Unification Accomplished: Einstein's dream realized in the Single Field Theory

Re: @Symon

"You say Newton, many people within the Christian faith said heretic, and it were only a select few who could stand up to that and still carry on their work (as good as possible of course).

Yet that oppression, that fanatic fear for science (or loss of power?) is what makes the 17th century hardly as great for science as these later times."

Oddly enough Newton wrote many, many more words about God than he did about physics. His religious writing was extremely heretical (he didn't believe in the Trinity for example). He fully expected to lose his post at Trinity when he refused to become an ordained priest, a requirement at that time. He didn't. How oppressive is that? Mostly his bizarre religious beliefs were ignored.

Re: If you can spray between the [weeds] crop plants

Having spent a few hours thinking about this (on and off) it looks like a solution in search of a problem. Most herbicide use on farms is pre-emergent, or along fence-lines and such where you can't cultivate. If the crop is sensitive to the herbicide you are using, then you'll be using a shielded ULV sprayer.