Posts by Peter Ashby
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Ben if we burn even a fraction of the known coal reserves we are going to hell in a handcart unless you fancy the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet that is.
Then there is the shortage of uranium, the quality ore that is making nuclear even dodgier.
There is NO suitable energy technology that can even possibly support our lifestyle on anything but the long-term radar. We cannot afford to burn the fossil fuels we know about and can economically exploit without crossing various tipping points that will take eons to come back if they ever do. The ONLY choice we have is to curb our lifestyles. We only have one planet and at the moment we are using it at far too fast a rate. This is a quantifiable fact.
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Thanks for the update Tom. New Scientist did an article on it a few months back. Apparently there is a coal fired power plant in the US (Arizona??) that is piping its CO2 output through water to fertilise algae growth. The idea being that you capture the CO2, though this would be temporary until the biofuel is burnt of course, but you would at least get some extra bang from that fossil CO2. So they are not the only company/setup out there doing biofuel from algae. Their specific thing is doing it on sewerage. Which is a bit like the above power station, only with our food since it will be the leftover carbon etc from that which will be put to use.
I really like the idea, I just don't know how much, potentially you can get out of a typical city's sewerage system. With oil prices going the way they are, if I was in charge of sewerage disposal somewhere I would be looking at this. Get your treatment problems helped and make money out of it. Where is the downside?
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Speaking of biofuels, anyone know how the trials of the algae grown on seweraged derived biofuels went? that was all over a while back but nothing since.
I'd like to see some numbers of the sort of how much of the transport needs of a city of say 100,000 people can be met from algae grown on its sewerage and then turned into biodiesel/ethanol?
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It is my understanding that in 18thC England at least the staying pale bit was indeed practiced, especially amongst the aristocracy and the rising middle classes. The fainting spells that women of the era were famously prone to was not just tight corsets, it was because they were almost certainly VitD deficient through insufficient sunlight exposure and that they were spectacularly unfit.
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The pointless cut to live reporter standing pointlessly outside is a universal thing. We bitch about it here in the UK. Especially for some poor sod who for reasons unknown has to be interviewed outside in a howling gale throwing solid stuff in his face while Artics rumble along a few feet behind (seen recently).
Does nobody have a nice space, you know with sofas and a pot plant any more?
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I'm on board as one of the writers, so I'm interested to know if people thought it struck the right balance between being substantive but still just a little irrelevant?
Hmmm, did you mean *irreverent* by any chance Craig? or was that just a Freudian slip? If the latter, Rus you have a fifth columnist on the writing team.
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I would also add that a herb garden is a minimum. Ours is in a large wooden planter box I made and is wonderful. In season of course. If you plant mint, but it in a plastic pot and sink the pot in the herb garden leaving 1cm or so of rim above the earth. Mint spreads like crazy if you let it.
I second that tarragon is dead easy to grow, though remember where it is if you are digging in the winter as it dies back. I'm also surprised nobody has mentioned the wonderful wild thyme that grows on the hills above Alexandra. When we were in Dunedin we brought a plant back and put it in next to one I had grown from seed. Over a season or two the Alex plant gradually greened up and looked like the resident, also the taste leavened out. Another thing about herbs, they thrive on neglect.
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I note in the Herald article:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10500398Investor 'Big Sam of Maketu' lost $532k he had *borrowed on his mortgage* his house had previously been unmortgaged and he doesn't now how he will afford to service his new mortgage.
Sorry, no sympathy, for private people to borrow to invest is just mad. Greed is not good.
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"that fry doco is awesome
i think it's being re aired on prime soon
or UK TeeVee?"I haven't seen it traillered if it is going to be repeated here. I shall keep an eye out though.
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While my respect for Ben Goldacre is large his SSRI piece did rather miss the point and the discussion for it on badscience.net was very lively.
Yes, serotonin has complex actions in the brain, but that does not in and of itself mean that SSRIs don't, in part, work via the serotonin pathway. Bear in mind that cells are not inert when it comes to reacting to something and the effect of an SSRI might be to cause the cell to produce more molecules to mop up serotonin, or there may be a feedback loop which lowers serotonin levels.
In addition there are animal studies which show that SSRIs recruit new nerve cells from the stem cell population and it may be the time this takes that underlies the long time period before full effects are seen when on SSRIs.
So yes, it might be good to take simplistic stories the drug companies tell with a grain of salt, but that does not mean the chemical imbalance story is all bollocks, only that it is not simple. Also bear in mind that the mechanism of action is a different question to 'does the drug work'. We had no idea that extract of willow bark has its analgesic and anti-inflammatory effects by modulating prostaglindins when we first started evaluating aspirin. And see the story on Lithium therapy from that perspective too.