Posts by Pompous Git 3087 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Sep 2014
And parsnips are phototoxic, so are best harvested in the dark.
Photosensitivity can result from touching or eating other plants, including celery, dill, fennel, fig, lime, parsley, arnica, artichoke, chrysanthemum, dandelion, lettuce, endive, marigold, and sunflower. Oh nose; the truth has finally been exposed! Nothing's safe any more!!!!
A tuber is a storage organ formed from a stem.
And that contradicts what I wrote? How?
See: The tropical tuber crops: yams, cassava, sweet potato, and cocoyams. by C Onwueme
I think you will find that they are tubers formed from roots. As are the tubers that Mrs Git grows many beautiful flowers from.
The problem appears to be that blokes with stupid beards seem to thrive on the stuff.
And your evidence for the low IQ of his beard is? My reading of the picture is that he's trying very hard to get into the pants of the YL to his left. Precisely what I would have been doing at his age. So what if he's munching rabbit food. No doubt he's also planning on a nice pork vindaloo* afterwards when he needs to recoup his strength.
* Or a deep-fried Mars Bar if he's from Glasgow.
The US has similar restrictions, too. I think it's more due to the "unknown" nature of human leftovers that warrants the ban: in particular for animals destined for human consumption. Basically, if you don't know what the animal's eating, you could be contaminating it (and some of these contaminants can bioaccumulate, meaning they stay in the animal for a long time), making it unsafe for consumption,
Frankly, that's bollocks. There's no way I'm going to feed my family and friends food of an "unknown" nature. If it's toxic to pigs, then it would have already poisoned me and mine. Here in Australia there are strict food laws so I doubt whether produce from the local supermarket is going to poison me and mine either.
Likely you are too young to remember what happened in Michigan in 1973:
Ten to twenty 50-pound bags of PBB made it to the now-defunct Michigan Farm Bureau Services operation in place of NutriMaster. It was mixed into cattle feed and purchased by farmers throughout Michigan.Within days, cows began growing gaunt and weak. Their hooves grew to ghastly proportions. Abscesses developed, and their hides went thick and elephant-like.
"It didn't make sense," said Dr. Alpha (Doc) Clark, a veterinarian who served many of the region's farmers and still operates a low-slung clinic outside McBain, east of Cadillac. "It was like there wasn't a damned thing we could do."
It took more than nine months for the state to zero in on the cause, even as frustrated farmers watched their herds wither away. Once PBB was identified, the state quarantined more than 500 farms, meaning those farmers could no longer sell their cattle or their milk.
Bills mounted. Angry protests occurred across the state. And countless cattle were shot by their owners.
Lorraine Cameron, a state environmental epidemiologist, said the contamination was devastating.
"The Michigan dairy industry nearly went under," she said.
Eventually, more than 30,000 cows were forced into kill chutes near two state-sponsored burial pits, given lethal injections and buried. They joined with 1.5 million chickens and thousands of pigs, sheep and rabbits. Some of the animals had directly ingested the PBB; others were indirectly contaminated, having consumed food partly made with animal renderings from those directly contaminated.
Chances are these days any processed stock food purchase will include stuff from China where contamination with illegal substances such as clenbuterol (a steroid), banned antibiotics and banned insecticides is rife. Shipments received in Australia of food for humans is regularly destroyed because of this issue. How much more likely is it that these banned substances are in commercial livestock feed?
The grass will fix the CO2 and the NOx will be rained out of the atmosphere into the ground & taken up by the grass. It's not strictly a closed system unless you put a big glass box over your house, lawn and camel but it's balanced.
Actually, it's not closed. You forgot the chemical energy in the manure you have converted to thermal energy. In the ordinary course of events, animal manure is buried by dung beetles and manure worms and it is subsequently converted to humus by a variety of fungi, bacteria and actinomycetes.
Humus is a colloid. That is, like clay, it carries negative electrical charges that hold onto the cationic nutrients: Ca, Mg, K, NH4 and so on. This prevents those nutrients from leaching due to rainfall or irrigation. As well, humus is a sponge for water; a 1% increase in soil humus results in a 4% increase in stored soil water. Further, humus preserves a soil structure that allows more rainfall and irrigation water to penetrate the soil, rather than run off carrying topsoil and nutrients away.
This is something most greenie-weenie (vegetarian/vegan) advocates of organic farming ignore: the essential role that animal manure plays in soil fertility. Zimbabwean environmentalist Allan Savory organised the killing of 40,000 elephants in the 1970s to halt desertification. As any farmer could have told him, the reverse happened. Humus levels in the soil fell and the topsoil blew away. Pity about the elephants.
See: Humic, Fulvic and Microbial Balance: Organic Soil Conditioning : An Agricultural Text and Reference Book by William R Jackson 1993.
Sorry, but they're not roots, they're stems. Those eyes? They're buds which you find on stems, not roots.
Technically true, but it would be too confusing to refer to spuds as stems, since potato plants have stems that aren't spuds. So we call them spuds, or tubers if we went to agricultural college.
Check out Catching Fire. Aside from the main hypothesis, the author cites a few controlled environment experiments on people that proved all people will eventually starve to death on a completely raw diet of anything.
More pointedly raw foodies become infertile; the women stop menstruating and the men stop producing sperm. Good thing, too!
Heartily recommend Catching Fire BTW. It's a great read.
Are there any long term studies regarding growing, harvesting, and consumption of tomatoes, given they are related to nightshade ?
Tomatoes are a rich source of lycopene, a carotenoid known to play an important role in human health. The Git's ageing prostate gland benefits greatly from lycopene and saw palmetto. Tomatoes, eggplants, capsicums, chili peppers and potatoes are also members of the nightshade family. They have been grown for hundreds of years in the West and thousands in their native habitat. Apart from capsicain burns from careless ahndling of chilies, internal haemorraging from eating raw potatoes and solanine poisoning from eating greened potatoes I've never heard of any problems. They all contain nicotinic acid since tobacco is also a close relative, but don't tell the do-gooderesses or they will be calling for an immediate ban on them.
Then you can burn their manure to heat your house, lowering greenhouse gas usage all round.
Turning camel manure into CO2 and NOx doesn't seem to be an entirely rational approach to reducing GHGs. How about composting the manure and feeding the grass with that. More grass, more camels, less pollution.
I'm pretty sure it's been scientifically proven by no less an authority than Reg Commentards
There's no such thing as "scientific proof", only falsification. Mathematics and logic is where you find proofs.
Frankly there's nothing quite so satisfying as the Italian version of bacon and eggs: bacon, eggs, pasta and cream (Carbonara). What the Git and Mrs Git had for dinner yesterday in fact.
Oddly enough those cukes tasted just fine. Mostly I grow old fashioned varieties for the very reasons you cite. My favourite tomatoes are Amish Paste for example. But, it's not necessarily the case that modern varieties are relatively tasteless. The tomato breeders assure me that they will shortly have tomato varieties that are as tough as buggery so they will transport well, but also have all the flavour of Grosse Lisse, or Rouge de Marmande. I'm not holding my breath though...
Back in the 1970s for a few months I worked as a food and drink waiter. Almost all of the lettuce on the plates remained uneaten and ended up as pig swill. These days it's illegal here in Australia to feed pigs with uneaten food from restaurants, or even your own kitchen table. So I imagine most of it now goes to landfill...
No-one seems to have mentioned that the article stresses that the costs are *per calorie*.
And the calorific yield depends on whether the food is cooked, or raw and what other foods are eaten. For example you will obtain more calories from eating wheat and beans together than by eating them in separate meals. So while eating raw celery requires more calories to digest than are obtained if its raw, this isn't necessarily true for cooked celery.
The threat to humanity posed by the T is yet to be determined. Got be up there with celery, though.
Most modern celery varieties have been bred to be high in psoralens, a chemical manufactured by celery to deter insect pests. This results in a very nasty rash for many farm workers harvesting the crop. To date I have never heard of occupational exposure to tomatoes being a concern.
I'd have thought the T of the BLT would have been as bad as cucumbers.
Tomatoes are considerably higher in solids than cucumbers. Last summer I grew a modern commercial hybrid cucumber for the first time. It was producing 2 to 3 300 mm long cukes per day for many weeks, far more than SWMBO and I could eat and at least twice the weight of fruit than the tomato plants. So I traded the excess with the local cafe for what are called "Big Breakfasts": bacon, eggs, toast, sausages, mushrooms and a slice of tomato.
Not evil, J J Carter, just stupid. Really, really fucking stupid. Are you incapable of understanding that having all of your mobile data allowance and all of your remaining FW allowance used up to push seven redundant copies of W10 is annoying? In the extreme. Being shaped to 256 Kb/s when you're used to 10 Gb/s means not just no streaming video, but even Internet radio becomes unusable.
Yes, MS can do this and having done so seven times seems almost certain to repeat the stupidity. The only rational solution is to jump ship and I'm glad I did. So I'm grateful to MS which is about as far from calling MS et alia "evil" as can be.
I'm also grateful that I was one of the first MS Certified Professionals on the planet (before the Certs became bastardised) and one of the first to receive MS Cert training via the Internet. But none of this means I have to put up with stupidity on any scale. Bob Heinlein once wrote: "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity". Sadly, in MS's case I did, but never again.
Weird things will break and most users do not have the skills to fix them over time.
True, but even though I certainly possess the requisite skills, I have better things to do with my time. I'm actually quite grateful to MS for forcing me to change my OS of choice to Linux Mint.
That's more than my sister's download cap and for my father, who lives in a semi-rural area and can only get ADSL1, it would not breach his cap but it would take WEEKS and slow his connection to a crawl. My partner travels and uses a tethered phone for access while away and if this downloaded while using that connection, that would be a ridiculous extra charge.
My experience with DLing W10 was that MS weren't consuming much bandwidth/hr which is why I was so surprised when my mobile data was all used up. Stealthy bastards. I still can't understand why a single, voluntary DL should be followed up by pushing seven more copies that served no purpose other than to really fucking piss me off!
Funny, I've had a tuner for a few years now:
There's a small difference between "exists" and "available" for purchase. Affordability also comes into this. Mwave are selling Leadtek WinFast PxPVR2200 PCI-E for $AU1,309.98 for example. That's rather more than a Philips 40" UHD monitor costs (~$AU1,000)! In the event, the device I purchased (Hauppauge MINISTICKUSB) cost $AU64.38. Fingers crossed...
it has become clear that Windows users aren't being offered the upgrade, so much as having it rammed down their throats.
More like rammed up our arses without lubricant!
Happy face 'cos I finally found a DVB TV tuner for the HTPC that will work with Linux. Hopefully it will arrive before Xmas...
not so much byzantine as an outright tribute to MC Escher
Well that's a relief then. While I am fond of Escher's work and possess many reproductions of his works, I do remember muttering the word "Byzantine" during that long ago briefing while munching on a truly delicious samosa. I wasn't involved in the server-side of things and later asked my partner why he had suggested I come along. "In the hope that you could make sense of it all," was his reply. Sadly we both remained perplexed and basically crossed our fingers and hoped that we were doing the best for our clients. Glad I'm out of it frankly...
I find MS licensing to be very clear and explicit
Things must have changed over the years then. I vividly recall a MS briefing on server licence changes given by Tech Pacific many years ago. Must have been immediately prior to the release of Win2k. The woman giving the presentation managed to confuse most of us I think. But the samosas and coffee were very good as usual. Even better was her handing out free copies of CorelDRAW! 8 as I hadn't upgraded from ver. 7 yet.
Ignorance... Read up on Hare/Clark an even more complicated system than is used in Australian Federal elections. Apart from Ireland, only Tasmania uses it AFAICT. It works to enable minor parties and independents to gain representation in parliament, much to the disgust of Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber...
I was actually going for paper and pencil...
Which generates a remarkable amount of horse trading between scrutineers as to what counts as a valid vote and what doesn't. Usually quite civilised banter I might add. It's clear to me that most commentards in this thread have never scrutineered. No machine could replace a dedicated, experienced scrutineer determined to garner the most possible votes favourable to the party he/she represents.
The need for speed is so as to get the result in a timely manner, which can be important for parliamentary elections because there is no legislative activity possible between the dissolution of the old parliament and the forming of the new one.
The hiatus also means that the pollies aren't fucking things up for the rest of us ;-)
Counting is generally completed very quickly at each polling station, unless it's close, in which case everything gets recounted more than the usual 2-3 times.Incidents of ballot tampering are effectively non-existent.
Unless you consider the horse trading between scrutineers as "ballot tampering".
"I'll let you count that vote as valid if you let me count this one as valid..."
There's nowt like a good scrute on election night I always say ;-)
Seriously brah, you need to keep up with this stuff because being more progressive gets you more puss.
Dunno about progressive, but back in the mid-70s I used to share a flat with a homosexual bloke called, improbably enough, Bruce. He was funnier than 99% of the stand-up comics I've seen on TV. There wasn't a situation that he couldn't wring a laugh out of.
Funnier still were all the women who assumed I must have been a homo as well. I was converted every weekend :-) The old bed flute did get a workout! Happy times...
Over the last 40 years or so, there has been a very successful anti-smoking campaign in Australia.
From 1991 to 2013 percentage of the population that smokes declined from 24.3% to 12.8%. [Source: Australian Institute of Health and Welfare].
The last two decades have also seen most public places become smoke-free: pubs, clubs, restaurants, cafes, sporting venues, workplaces, concert venues etc. Thus the opportunity for non-smokers to inhale "second-hand smoke" has almost disappeared.
At the same time, the tar content of cigarettes has also declined. In 1969 53% of cigarettes sold were in the 19-24 mg range. The most popular brand, Viscount, were 40 mg. By 1991, 85% were in the 1-12 mg range and no Australian manufactured cigarettes exceeded 18 mg. [Source: Commonwealth Department of Health].
Further downward pressure on the mortality statistics for lung cancer comes from improved oncology. “Overall, 5-year relative survival has improved markedly from 41% for males diagnosed in 1982-1986 to 58% for those diagnosed in 1998-2004. [Source: Australian Institute of Health and Welfare].
"mortality rates have fallen by around 13% in men and 6% in women over the last decade". [Source: Government Department of Health and Ageing]
So what effect has this marked reduction in exposure to tobacco tar had on mortality from lung cancer?
1969 32 deaths per 100,000
2011 32 deaths per 100,000
[Source Australian Institute of Health and Welfare]
Downvote away...
Why should we expect a linear relationship? That seems quite crazy actually. Because eventually it means that I will have a more than 100% chance of getting lung cancer.
Cartoon example:
There are 1,000,000 smokers in the country.
The rate of death from lung cancer is 1%.
Therefore there are 10,000 lung cancer deaths.
Tobacco consumption increases by 50%.
There are now 1,500,000 smokers.
If the rate of death from lung cancer remains constant, we should expect to see 15,000 lung cancer deaths.
We don't. Instead we see a greater number implying either that over time tobacco becomes ever more potent, or that some other factor is in play.
Individual smokers do not consume "a potentially infinite quantity" of tobacco. That is logically impossible.
FWIW, the average cigarette has decreased in both nicotine and tar content over the years. It's an odd substance that becomes more toxic when you consume less of it.
I hope you edited it better than the editor of the book I read recently where semiconductor holes were confused with positrons.
A technical book usually has many editors. The original MS was several thousand pages and unreadable by a layman. I highlighted what should be focussed on to generate a readable book; that is what should be omitted. The original MS (that I still possess) contained most of the contents of the following:
Disturbances in the blood due to driving
http://www.medical-hypotheses.com/article/0306-9877(82)90026-3/abstract
Heart disease, cancer and vehicle travel
http://www.medical-hypotheses.com/article/0306-9877(79)90012-4/abstract
Male, female heart disease-relationship with vehicle travel
http://www.medical-hypotheses.com/article/0306-9877(79)90104-X/abstract
Cerebrovascular disease, ischaemic heart disease, and the stress of vehicle travel
http://www.medical-hypotheses.com/article/0306-9877(89)90093-5/abstract
Ischaemic heart disease, and vehicle travel
http://www.medical-hypotheses.com/article/0306-9877(87)90061-2/abstract
Diseases of malfunction of body mechanisms. (Heart disease, diabetes, cancer etc.) risk by occupation, and correlation, male and female, with vehicle travel
http://www.medical-hypotheses.com/article/0306-9877(83)90087-7/abstract
Cancer: A statistical relationship with road accident deaths and driving
http://www.medical-hypotheses.com/article/0306-9877(94)90057-4/abstract
Leukaemia, a close association with vehicle travel
http://www.medical-hypotheses.com/article/0306-9877(91)90264-Y/abstract
Cancer deaths due to all causes, its relationship with vehicle travel in Australia, Japan and European countries
http://www.medical-hypotheses.com/article/0306-9877(91)90263-X/abstract
The prediction of lung cancer in Australia 1939–1981
http://www.medical-hypotheses.com/article/0306-9877(86)90035-6/abstract
Lung cancer, the motor vehicle and its subtle influence on body functions
http://www.medical-hypotheses.com/article/0306-9877(89)90151-5/abstract
Cancer of the lymphatic system and leukaemia a correlation with vehicle accidents
http://www.medical-hypotheses.com/article/0306-9877(82)90165-7/abstract
As well, I looked at some of the data myself:
http://www.maths.utas.edu.au/DHStat/Data/CancPet.html
Here you will see that a 10% increase in the population of smokers does not result in a 10% increase in lung cancer deaths. The amount of increase depends on when it occurred in time. The increase in lung cancer deaths was readily predicted by knowing the increase in petrol consumption, as was the rate of ischaemic heart disease.
Further, the rate of these diseases where driving did not occur was zero. In the 35 years that data was available for Risdon Prison, the number of prisoners dying from these diseases was zero. New Guinea Highlanders who remain in the highlands where there are no motor cars also have a zero rate of incidence. Two years after moving to Port Moresby, the rate of these diseases is the same as the general population. This could not be attributed to dietary change; I checked. Trappist monks do not suffer from ischaemic heart disease.
The tl;dr is that you are quite wrong
Not really. I was asked to fact check a very long MS. I read all of Robinson's papers and several he referred to. I discussed some of the data with a statistician working with the Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics since I was not a statistician. He confirmed that Robinson's statistical analyses were kosher. I also discussed it with a medical practitioner whose response was "But everybody already knows this". Not me obviously! Consequently, I recommended publication. I did what I was paid to do. All later editing/proofreading was either done by the publisher or someone he hired.
I do accept responsibility for the typo in "While causation is not proof of causation, lack of correlation indicates lack of causation" where clearly I meant to type "While causation is not proof of correlation". My bad.
Didn't the Tobacco Companies say similar things when they tried to bury reports that cigarettes caused cancer...?
Odd thing is that there's no linear relationship between lung cancer and tobacco consumption. There is however a linear relationship between ischaemic heart disease/lung cancer and amount of vehicular travel.
While Mr Robinson does not discount such things as diet, exercise and smoking as contributory factors to disease, he says that the mathematical relationship cannot be shown between these factors and illnesses as it can between travel and the ailments.For instance, between 1920-1972, lung cancer in Australia increased by 2810 per cent, which is about the same (2840 per cent) rate of increase in petrol consumption for the period.
But tobacco consumption in that period increased only by 69 per cent.
See: http://www.mercurynie.com.au/mathguys/articles/1991/910611a1.htm
While causation is not proof of causation, lack of correlation indicates lack of causation. IOW a genuine causal link between tobacco consumption and lung cancer has never been established. This does not mean tobacco is not a contributing factor. As Meyer said at the time, tobacco has a small multiplying effect.
Disclaimer: I proofread and edited Meyer's original MS prior to publication. The book was a flop in the marketplace largely because people hate being told that doing something they love (driving) is really bad for their health. So it goes...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
